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I tried to make this comment 888,888. But I missed the timing. It’s 888,889.
We are approaching a million comments here.
Nope, you missed. This is 888,889.
Apparently all this time SSC was just a skin for 4chan.
Better luck next time!
:shakes fist:
How do you see the comment number, by the way?
I also haven’t figured out how to link to a comment.
Trying putting your mouse over the comment date/time.
Justin Amash would be the first libertarian US Senator.
Given that he’ll be the only one running with national recognition who isn’t in the pandemic high risk group, do you think they can break 5% this time if he runs?
(personally, I hope so)
I doubt it. 2016 was probably the best case scenario for the LP and they only got like 4%. Maybe Amash is a somewhat better/more famous candidate than Gary Johnson, but I’m not certain that’s true.
Also it’s not a foregone conclusion that Amash will receive the LP nomination. He probably will but various other contenders have been campaigning for some time, and some prominent libertarian personalities have been holding party sign-up drives specifically to get people to support Jacob Hornberger. The LP nomination is very much an insider deal with delegates and not primaries, so it’s pretty hard to predict.
True. He just announced it yesterday and a lot of libertarians are already writing about how pissed off they are that he waited til now. And there’s a large group that is still mad they went with Gary last time, preferring an ideologically purer candidate.
The biggest hope here is that this time around both of the front runners are showing signs of mental degradation. These may be the most confusing televised debates ever aired for a US presidential election in history.
The Libertarian party will almost certainly do better with a demonstrably-electable moderate libertarian than with an ideological purist, and if they’re not smart enough to get with that program then it’s time to split the party into the relevant one and the whining-idiot one.
But the bit where they’re considering going with a guy who didn’t even enter the race until the tail end of primary season, that does look bad. It’s an open admission that they select their candidates in smoke-filled rooms, disregarding what the voters have to say on the subject. The lesson of 1968 is, you don’t win elections that way. Even if, being libertarians, the smoke is mostly cannabis.
Since they weren’t going to win anyway, I expect it won’t hurt them too much and that going with Amash is probably the best move. But what is driving Amash’s move now, that he couldn’t have known three or six months ago?
Straightforward from here:
1. Biden steps down due to the Tara Reade accusations.
2. This shames Trump into stepping down due to his own allegations.
3. President Amash
The Biden sexual assault allegations and Trumps falling poll numbers, maybe? And there’s the wildcard factor of the pandemic. That one alone might have swayed the balance.
Trump’s numbers are oscillating around the same 40% mark they always have (and always will). And Biden being a dirty old man is not a new thing, as is the bit where the Democratic party is not going to even marginally abandon him over that.
And who is that supposed to be? Amash? Is he obviously more “demonstrably-electable” than the multi-term Republican governor from a purple state who had all the right “economically conservative, socially liberal” positions? The guy who got 4% against the two most hated mainstream candidates of all time?
If you’re running as a libertarian, you have already conceded that you are not electable and are not going to win and are not even close to being able to win. There’s no sense in diluting the message for palatability – you’re already unpalatable to the vast majority of the voter base.
But the good news here is that Amash actually is pretty pure. Policy wise I’m not sure there are too many things he and Hornberger (who was the favorite before Amash announced) would actually disagree on.
Well… yeah. But they already admit this. The libertarian party does not have primaries. There are no “voters” as such. The state conventions (open to all registered members) elect delegates (and from what I’ve been told, in all but the biggest states, it’s less of an “election” and more “if you want to be a delegate, you can be one”) and then the delegates meet at the national convention and vote for the nominee.
A few states do conduct non-binding “straw polls” but these are not primaries in any real sense.
From my watching, it was Trump’s behavior during the daily briefings that pushed Amash.
You can debate whether or not those briefings really gave anyone any new information.
It would if Amash was going to come out as strongly anti-shutdown. But there’s no indication he’s willing to do that.
And even the obscure, ideologically pure guys currently leading the LP presidential nominee race are terrified of saying anything on that, because “the shutdowns are pretty popular.” At least that’s the excuse people keep making when I go in libertarian facebook groups and shout “WHY ARENT ANY OF THESE PEOPLE OUT THERE IN PUBLIC PROTESTING THE SHUTDOWNS???”
The thing is, the federal government’s early involvement in the pandemic response was actively harmful–they delayed the availability of testing for about two months, during which we had community spread of the virus and could possibly have gotten out in front of it, and they repeatedly tried to make that one lady in Washington State stop finding out that there was community spread. We continue to have dumbass regulations making it more difficult or impossible for breweries to make and sell hand sanitizer, and feds seizing shipments of PPE for murky reasons. This is all a really great story for Amash to tell if he wants to make a case for libertarianism.
The lockdowns are a less clear case. As John Schilling has said, they made sense with the assumption that the authorities were going to buy time to take other actions, and I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that they have done that[1]. But quarantine and closing down public events in time of a disease outbreak are actually pretty standard, traditional powers of the government. Someone like Amash (who is very into the literal constitution and traditional limits on government) may just think that this is within the purview of the government, even if he thinks it’s often been done poorly.
Also, I suspect the lockdowns have at least sometimes been a useful excuse for everyone to do what they needed to do anyway. Movie theaters with 10% of their seats sold are going to close either way, but maybe the lockdown gives them an excuse and a story to tell their creditors and employers.
[1] By now, OSHA or CDC should have extensive guidance for safety protocols for reopened businesses out in draft and being commented on by the public, we should be flooding the world with masks and face shields and hand sanitizer, we should be ramping up for massive testing, experimental vaccines should be getting ready to do challenge trials, and there should be hundreds of thousands of people being trained to do contact tracing. I’m not seeing evidence of that happening, but I hope I’m wrong.
This.
Personally, I’d be very tempted to vote for Amash if he gets the Libertarian Party nomination, but his stance on abortion is a potential deal-breaker for me. He’s consistently described himself as “pro-life” and voted against federal funding for abortion (on the basis of pro-life arguments rather than fiscal ones), and I’m incredibly worried about what kind of people he’d appoint to the Supreme Court. I’ve seen a lot of libertarians asking him to ‘clarify’ his position, which seems to be a coded way of saying “here’s the deal, just change your position to pro-choice now and we’ll completely forget about your bad track record on this issue.”
Still, he has solidly libertarian positions on fiscal and civil issues, and I’m cautiously optimistic about his stance on LGBT rights: He supported the Defense of Marriage Act back in 2010, but he changed his mind and backed the repeal of DOMA in 2013. He maintains that he only supported DOMA out of support for states’ rights and wasn’t aware of the law’s full implications and ramifications at the time; in 2018, he said that he considered his support for DOMA to be the biggest mistake of his political career. So basically, he’s no better or worse than Biden, who had a similar heel-face turn on gay marriage around exactly the same time. Amash also voted “Present” on the House resolution to condemn Trump’s transgender military ban; he was not among the five Republicans who joined Democrats in denouncing Trump’s decision, but he didn’t vote against the bill like the vast majority of Republicans did.
I should clarify – my demand that LP candidates denounce the shutdowns is less “because that’s what I believe should happen” and more “because I think it would be a very smart political move.”
There are a lot of people out there right now who are *very* angry about the shutdowns. No, not a majority (or even close to it). But those who oppose them seem to oppose them a lot, COVID in general will likely be the defining issue of the November election… and right now both candidates support shutdowns.
I personally know many lifelong Republicans who are furious at Trump, at Republican governors, and absolutely anybody who is promoting shutdowns right now.
To do some quick high-level math, over 20M Americans have already become unemployed because of the shutdowns (and this number will surely grow). If the LP ran an anti-shutdown candidate and got even 1/4 of those people to vote for them, that would already be more votes than Gary Johnson had in 2016, even assuming those are the only votes they get…
I thought that it was meant as “maybe both Trump and Biden will die”.
@matkoniecz
That and more. Shifting data, mortality, public opinion. We’re in relatively untraveled waters here. Could be something we have yet to anticipate.
Article is about an attempted presidential run and he’s currently a congressman.
I’m more worried about him losing his seat in the house despite his relative popularity, now that he’s broken with the Republican party.
Sorry, in the house, yes. Still would be the first.
That is probably a factor in him considering whether to run. He may feel like he’s got nothing to lose.
Amash broke with the Republicans a while ago[1], and has been an Independent.
His re-election chances have been dim for a while.[2] From what
I remember my relatives in Michigan saying, by the time he left his party he was looking likely to lose Republican primary before he left the party.
[1] I thought it was forever ago, but only 9 months. Still, from the beforetimes.
[2] https://reason.com/2019/12/27/key-election-forecaster-switches-justin-amashs-house-seat-to-lean-republican-in-2020/
Gary Johnson ran a very watered down campaign. I’m not sure if the reason is that those are really his views or that he thought the unpopularity of the major party candidates made this an opportunity for the LP to actually get a significant number of votes and didn’t want to blow it by admitting to unpopular views.
If Amash gets the nomination, the question will be whether he does the same thing for the same reason. I have heard him speak once and was positively impressed, but I don’t know much beyond that.
Question for folks here who think the lockdowns are just postponing the inevitable and we should just reopen.
Is that still your view if it turns out economists are right, and having the virus run wild actually is even more destructive to the economy than the lockdowns are?
If I understand the position right, it’s that since the virus starts spreading again whenever we reopen, and we can’t stay locked down until there’s a vaccine, it’s silly not to just reopen now. Is that accurate?
What I’m stuck on is, if a world where we’re open and the virus is spreading causes even more economic damage than an 18 month lockdown, why can’t we lock down until there’s a vaccine? It will be terrible in lots of ways, but what is the basis for saying it’s worse than the alternative?
The problem here is knowing what world we’re living in.
If it is indeed a world where lifting lockdowns is worse in terms of life outcomes than staying locked down, then staying locked down is the correct choice. If not, it isn’t.
Unfortunately we cannot know this in advance.
COVID-19 is not a completely unknown quantity at this point. We have had a number of sizeable outbreaks in different countries, so we can make some guesses as to what is likely and isn’t.
The lockdowns also aren’t a completely unknown quantity, given that many countries have locked down to a greater or lesser extent. We have at least some idea of what the pain points are.
At this point it becomes a matter of picking your poison.
I mean, I agree with all of this, except that the consensus among experts seems to be that one of those two worlds is the one we live in and the other isn’t.
Maybe all the experts are full of it – this is a novel situation so that wouldn’t be super surprising even if you normally have a high opinion of experts – but in the absence of a better source of information, how else do you pick?
In a novel situation, the approach I find most fruitful is to see what the data is telling you as it evolves over time.
Which experts? Macro economist ‘experts’ have a terrible track record of predictions going into a crisis, find me one who had a good record of prediction from 2007-2012 and I will give their opinion a strong weight but virtually everyone making predictions in that time frame had a record riddled with massive mistakes, and they are more or less the same individuals and organizations making predictions now.
I’m a little more willing to trust the experts than some other commenters. If someone did a survey asking directly whether the total cost of an 18 month lockdown (as measured by QALY loss + economic damage) is worse than letting the virus run wild (assuming, say, an 0.4% IFR and that wearing masks and cancelling large events is enough to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed), and a representative sample of leading economists overwhelmingly agreed that the epidemic was worse, I would update my opinion. But I think that’s highly unlikely.
Is anyone making policy arguing that? I thought that even the lowest bounds of the antibody testing contradicted that.
Gavin Newsome said on Twitter yesterday that concerts, sporting events, and conventions would not return to California until “therapeutics have been developed.”
This sounds like a plan to continue lockdowns until a cure or vaccine has been developed.
@Matt M
Concerts, sporting events, and conventions are massive gatherings of people, which is to say probably the highest risk activity in ordinary life for viral transmission.
Do you consider literally any restrictions on activity to constitute a lockdown? If so that’s a non-standard use of the term, to my understanding. If not, you seem to be extrapolating substantially beyond what was said.
Do you consider a resumption of most normal activity with restrictions on the highest-risk activities to be an unreasonable course of action?
I would consider a permanent and indefinite ban on music, sports, and professional gatherings to be an unreasonable course of action, yes. Even though these activities are high risk for virus transmission.
I think most of the economists are still relying on assumptions that re-opening would lead to a massive increase in cases, everywhere at once, which would then overwhelm hospital capacity, leading to excess deaths. This was the original fear that prompted the original meaning of “flatten the curve.” As far as I can tell, this is the only scenario in which perpetual lockdowns could possibly do less economic damage than “open up and go for herd immunity.”
Like, it’s pretty much impossible that a barber shop would get less business in a scenario where they are allowed to open, but customers avoid them because they are scared of the virus than in a scenario where the government says “you have to stay closed, nobody can come to your business, even if they aren’t scared.”
So pretty much the only way you could see “more damage” from re-opening than from lockdowns is by seeing more deaths, which will only happen in the “hospitals overwhelmed” scenario. As far as I can tell, most people seem to no longer believe that’s a serious risk in most locations (note that the government is actively dismantling emergency field hospitals it built in Seattle, Houston, and other places – the Navy medical ships are leaving, etc.)
But…the economy being closed won’t cause deaths. The barber does not need to die because he is closed. The government can provide for him. Suicides may rise, but I find hard to believe the extra suicides will go way above-the-vietnam-war deathcount.
I think the case for “extended lockdowns will be worse” is very thin.
Exactly how long do you think the federal government can run $4-5 trillion annual deficits?
Honestly? a few years.
Even if so, not wise to take all the slack out of the system at once.
It will keep on working just fine until the day it stops. That day will probably be a memorable one.
Seeing how close we can get to financial disaster is like seeing how close we can get to our health system being overwhelmed.
You can’t just say “oh, that’s happening now. Well, let us change course, and it shall stop happening.”
The economy being closed will ABSOLUTELY cause deaths. And not just suicides. There are lots of things that will be affected by such long-term closures.
This doesn’t mean that it isn’t the right answer to lock down, but this is naively optimistic at best.
AFAIK life expectancy actually rose during the Great Depression.You may argue that this will be different, but I think the priors are against your case.
It won’t? Why would you think that? Do you think that modern medicine exists without the supporting structure of the broad economy?
Unless the government is out there growing grains, milling flour and baking bread – it cannot.
The government can give him money, but that’s only useful if there’s something that money can buy, which depends on the economy actually functioning to some extent.
Besides, the barber is just the tip of the iceberg. I work in accounting. My job isn’t threatened. Except that if enough barbershops close they’ll stop paying my company to do their books, so I’ll be out on the dole.
If non-essential businesses are closed, that barber isn’t spending his gov-bucks on anything else either, so the people who own/work in those places are now in trouble. Which has knock-on effects all throughout the system.
It is happening right now. You can watch it in real time.
You may think you can solve this by throwing even more money at the problem, but that only works as long as someone grows the grain, mills the flour, bakes the bread, sells the bread.
The government needs to act to keep essential industries going.
Even Trump is declaring pork production as essential, and while I’d like this kind of policy to be created predictively instead of reactively, this is a step in the right direction. It needs to be accompanied for more testing for these workers, but we will probably move in that direction. China did this! It’s not a crazy notion.
Sorry, I realize I left out an important clarification in my above post.
I’m ruling out, from the start, the notion that lockdowns can/should be maintained until a vaccine is developed.
I am assuming that herd immunity is the only way out of this, meaning that the only relevant question is one of timing. In a binary sense, our options are basically “Get herd immunity quickly and end the lockdowns quickly” or “Get herd immunity slowly and maintain the lockdowns for much longer.”
In that sense, Option 2 is preferable only to the extent that it results in less overall deaths because in Option 1, the hospitals would become overwhelmed and people will die who otherwise might have been saved.
But both options assume the same amount of people get infected on net, in the long run.
In that sense, lockdowns are only worth doing if they are successfully pushing your hospital capacity down to 100% or lower, when otherwise it would have been over 100%. But given that right now, in the vast majority of the country, hospital capacity is well below 100%, the lockdowns currently in place are causing us to incur a cost without a corresponding benefit. Any spare capacity in the hospital system in any place with a lockdown can be thought of as a giant waste of resources.
It is also worth doing if new treatment appearing in near future will be better than currently available.
But I am skeptical about new treatment that would be so effective that it justifies until it will happen.
First time I see someone arguing we should adjust contagion until hospitals ride the thin line of being overwhelmed.
That’s literally what “flatten the curve” meant for the first month they were telling us it was the strategy we were pursuing.
While technically true, everyone who was asking to flatten the curve would have preferred to not reach the limit at all if possible.
This is not really flatten the curve but…rise the curve?
I mean, you may argue that the economy being closed will cause more deaths or not, but you are literally asking that states that are controlling the infection intentionally _kill_ more people. That’s the predictable outcome of your proposal.
If you can flatten the curve for long enough to matter, it’s probably also possible to hammer the curve so that R drops below 1 and the disease stops spreading.
Failing to lower the highway speed limit to 25 is literally killing people.
Literally. Literally literally.
That is ridiculous. There are already first deaths from starvation in India, caused by lockdown. It is low number, and USA has bigger reserves but sufficiently long lockdown will cause collapse of critical supply chains including food production.
Even with direct food production active sooner or later for example farm machinery needs to be repaired/replaced.
(BTW, over 50 deaths in India were attributed to closure of alcohol shops – https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/the-human-cost-of-indias-coronavirus-lockdown-deaths-by-hunger-starvation-suicide-and-more-1.1586956637547 )
—-
Also, economic damage will make harder to avoid next serious shock (whatever it will be).
Anecdotally, I know two people who found out they were physically dependent on alcohol after the lockdown went into effect. One carefully and slowly detoxed (is that the right word?) with what he had on hand. The other did not. Thankfully, for her, they kept the liquor stores open. I’m worried about her, but it would be difficult for most people to lower their drinking in a time of stress such as this.
This is one completely neglected aspect of the lock downs. The % of the economy that is ‘essential’ is in proportion to the length of the lockdown. If we need a 1 day lockdown then to prevent a bunch of deaths we need to keep hospitals staffed and electricity and water running. Extend it out a few days and you have to start making food deliveries, extend it further and you need to open up the the longer portions of the supply chains and food production. Eventually you will have folded almost the whole economy back into play and the lockdown won’t be effectively slowing the spread. If you are talking 18 months then you had better start opening schools pretty soon as you don’t want a shortage of Doctors/Nurses as people who would have been recently qualified are pushed a year+ back. You definitely don’t want to do this when your medical staff are being disproportionately hit by the virus while also working the most stressful period in their lives.
These are good points but they only reinforce the idea that the lockdowns should be stricter early on. Other countries are already recovering because they acted early.
This is statement ranges from completely untrue or plausible depending on what you mean by “re-open”.
Currently, most places in the US have an R(t) modestly below 1 (0.75 to 1.1 captures most every state). In places where there aren’t many cases, that’s fine. There are few, and they’ll die out quickly if that’s where the transmission rate stays. In places where there are more cases, it’ll take longer but still not a big deal.
Depending on what gets opened up and how much people actually start going out and doing things, those values will most likely peak over 1.0. Perhaps this will be offset by higher temperatures, but that’s a guess. If lots of things open up and people are eager to re-engage with the economy, they’ll shoot well above 1.
If things get back above 1, that means cases are growing exponentially. If you start from a small group and only have a R(t) modestly above 1, it grows exponentially but with long doubling times. If that’s all you do, then you’re screwed in 3 months instead of three weeks, but you’re still screwed.
I don’t think anything above is remotely controversial. You can open up some things in some places, but you should still be careful and closely monitor the rates of new infections at the local level. If left unchecked, local medical resources will still get overwhelmed. Nothing we’ve learned since February has changed any of this.
How is this Rt calculated? Do the really low values for NY really make sense given antibody testing showing 1/5th of NYC residents have had the virus?
This matters because if the true values are +1 from the old values, then we’re already above the threshold and seeing exponential growth, just a slower one.
The assumption I get from “1/5th of NYC has already had it” is that we would expect NYC to go through what it’s already gone through about 3 more times before we have herd immunity.
There’s a decent argument that “the most vulnerable people, who weren’t obeying social distancing, have already caught it.” But then the other 80% are still going to continue being careful, which means avoiding a lot of participation in the economy.
R(t) calculations are explained at the link above.
I think they’re completely reasonable. They’re measuring the rate of transmission, not the base total. So the only assumption you make when you discover your base rate is different is that the delta (percentage-wise) has been relatively constant over the duration.
The link above notes that when they began accounting for testings totals and positive rates, the local R(t) estimates generally went down a tick.
None of this shows that hospital capacity will be overwhelmed. Of course if R(t) is above 1, the number of cases will grow exponentially at first, but it will eventually reach a limit set by population size. Since the hospitals were not overwhelmed in New York City even though around 10% of the population was probably infected near the peak, I don’t agree that we will be as “screwed” as you seem to think. Obviously many people will die, but I don’t think the death rate will be worse than it would be if we spread the cases over many months instead.
What assumption are you making about lethality? If you believe the result of antibody tests it’s something like .1%, which means that going all the way to herd immunity only results in about 200,000 deaths, perhaps two million infections serious enough to require hospitalization. If people continue to do a good deal of social distancing, with many old people self-quarantining until the virus is close to extinct, fewer than that.
The U.S. hospital system has about a million staffed beds, so spreading most of that out over three months shouldn’t overwhelm it.
It is not binary, and we are not in ‘lock down’, and presenting it as such prevents the proper disucssion.
Lockdown is what happened in parts of China- everyone is ordered to stay indoors with government’s trying to meet the most basic needs (ie food delivered to doors by military personal, and hospitals open but you have to get permission to go to the hospital), what we have is called lock down but is far more partial and fragmented than that. The adult discussion is do we have a mandate from a higher goverment level that decides things or do we have behavioral changes made by individuals, and where in that range do we fall. You could have mandates for the whole country, or state by state, or locality by locality. You could have minimum national standards, and then have localities implement their own higher standards if they chose, or have a national policy about cross border travel and then have local policies for the rest, etc, etc, etc, and framing it as ‘lock down vs nothing’ avoids all the actual issues involved except for a simplistic ‘liberty vs tyranny’ angle.
The broader view is not one vs the other, it is a comparison of scenarios. The way that you have phrased it here implies that lockdowns will work to stop the virus, but that isn’t a given you can very easily have the lockdown damage and then the virus damage when you reopen, and that has the potential to be much, much worse than either would have been on their own.
The basic ignorance behind ‘flatten the curve’* is that it assumes we have a static or rising ability ability to deal with the virus and that means that we can just spread out infections over time and get better or the same results at worst. This is economically illiterate, our ability to contend with the virus depends on our ability to produce goods and services which is taking a major hit right now, and also with whatever other crisis we have to deal with. This sets up the worst case scenario where an attempt to come out of lock down leads to a resurgence of the virus simultaneous with a massive economic hit as the reopen fails to invigorate the economy.
*as it was presented to the public
Please don’t ask loaded questions like that.
This world is simply not plausible, given what we know about the virus.
I’m pretty sure the economists don’t think this
Very serious question. Why would you assume we could? What historical evidence would suggest that we can close a large chunk of the economy and just wait it out without severe issues on reopening? What theoretical evidence? Status quo bias exists for a reason, you don’t just assume that you can do something radical to the system and assume it won’t be so bad.
It’s also entirely possible that the date at which a successful vaccine will be developed is never.
Saying “we should lockdown until a vaccine is developed” is basically saying “I’m comfortable with the idea that life might continue on like this forever.”
I can not conceive of a possible path where rona operating as we now think it operates causes anywhere near that much economic damage by running rampant (once and by rampant I mean as fast as possible without systematic overwhelming of hospitals) as an 18 month lockdown would. In the spirit of fermi calculations or it is better to pull numbers out of the air than one’s decision, let us do math with plausible numbers. Let us say we get herd immunity at 70% of the population. I have a hard time buying Rona as having a working age fatality rate of higher than .5. So we would lose .35 of the working age population. That is less than how many people retire every two months(100/(65-22)/6=.38 ) and given assorted people moving for family reasons etc, let us guess that is about the undesired employee loss of a random normal month.
In terms of sick employees; some where between most and the vast majority of the working age population (which seem closest to prisoners as a population in terms of populations that we have data on) would be totally asymptomatic. The best data suggests that 93% of this group would be asymptomatic. That seems a bit high so let us say 10% of the working age population gets sufficient symptoms that they stay home for a week. And 5% stay home or a ta hospital for a month. We spread these infections over a 3 month period. Having roughly 5% of ones workforce out for a few months and permanently lose .35% would not be great for a company but that strikes me as about as bad as 1 to 2 weeks of lockdown. Now having cautious consumers again is not great, but cautious consumers are way better than no consumers. Further if we get social buy in or at least resignation to everyone getting infected especially once people has been infected, there is no reason for consumers to be particularly cautious. Also a month or three of consumer caution only directly impacts a smallish range of businesses. Factories making goods do not care if the public orders them online.
These numbers would have to be massively wrong for this being less than an order of magnitude less damaging economically than an 18 month shutdown and my guess would be that it would be closer to two orders of magnitude less damaging economically.
If having the virus run wild is actually more destructive to the economy(*) than the lockdowns are, then yes, that would change my recommendation substantially. But that’s independent of whether or not “the economists are right”, and your argument is not improved by trying to smuggle in argument by authority like that.
I don’t think it is plausible that we are living in that world. I also don’t think that there is anywhere near a consensus among economists that we are. I think most of the economists recommending that we continue the lockdowns, envision them being continued for a few more months, not for a year or more. And I think that any economists who are recommending a year of lockdowns, are operating from an unrealistic model of the virus’s spread and lethality under non-lockdown conditions, in which case they are not in fact arguing from a position of authority because that’s not an economic question.
The most commonly heard economic argument in favor of lockdowns is that people are still so scared of the virus that even if we lift the lockdowns they won’t go back to working and spending. There’s certainly some truth to that, but even so lockdowns are strictly worse than not-lockdowns in simple economic terms. And the more true it is that the not-lockdown case would still see everybody hiding out at home, the less difference the lockdowns make in terms of disease propagation.
The less common but more valid argument is that, absent the lockdowns, the disease will kill a lot of people and that’s economically destructive. Which is qualitatively true, but numbers matter. COVID-19 has a lethality of <1% among the working-age population, mostly skewed towards the higher end of that population. Even assuming that the lockdowns result in nobody being infected and the no-lockdown case results in everybody being affected, and that working-age mortality is a full 1%, that comes to maybe 0.15 GDP worth of lost productivity, spread over decades. We're currently seeing I think a 20-30% decrease in productivity, despite some very expensive government interventions. Six months or so of lockdown would cause as much economic harm up front, as an unchecked epidemic would over a generation.
And both the "lockdowns result in nobody being infected" and "no lockdowns result in everybody being infected" assumptions are gross exaggerations. People are being infected under the current lockdown regime, and that's only going to get worse as compliance falls off. And the alternative to the current lockdown regime isn't Italy-in-February, it's voluntary social distancing plus tailored government actions plus better treatment plus this isn't Italy where everybody lives with their grandparents plus summer vs. winter probably matters somewhat.
If there's a credible argument for the middle ground between apathy and lockdown resulting in more economic harm than a full year of lockdowns, I haven't seen it. And I don't think most economists are making that argument with those qualifiers.
* and to social trust and institutions, public mental health, etc.
The economy is one of the reasons why we should lift the lockdowns. But there are other reasons too: preserving our democracy (elections have already been cancelled), our liberties, our privacy, our sanity, our religious freedom, our freedom of expressions (no protests against lockdowns are allowed).
I worry about the power trip the government is taking and the complete ignoring of our Constitution very seriously. For some reason, the Spanish Constitution only matters when it comes to the matter of an independence referendum; the Supreme Court seems to always side with the government.
I’d say that even if the deaths from coronavirus inflict an equal pain to our economy than the lockdowns*, I still believe that people should be able to make a decision for the level of risk they find acceptable on their own, without it being forced on them. We do allow people to ride motorbikes, don’t we?**
*Which I don’t belive, by the way. The death of elderly people in care homes, however regrettable, is not something that will affect the economy at large that much.
**And please don’t tell me about externalities; motorbikes also cause negative externalities, and we don’t ban them.
The vast majority of the danger re: motorbikes is to the rider. A much larger part of the danger re: a young, healthy person flaunting the lockdown is them spreading the disease to those at risk.
To who? I can’t spread it to someone obeying the lockdown order.
1. Essential workers who can’t stay home.
2. Separately, people who were taking risks that would be prudent if the overall spread is low, like going to the grocery store. If a bunch of people start spreading a lot, those people have to resort to other methods. You can model this as a finite amount of risk to go around, and if several people start eating up extra shares of the risk, it takes away the amount available to others.
Have you got a good link for economists saying the virus will cause worse economic damage if we end the lockdown?
I found https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/economic-cost-coronavirus-recession-covid-deaths, but I don’t find it very convincing. The paper argues (I think correctly) that millions of people would die if we abandoned all attempts at controlling the virus. But then it tells us that we should value each lost life as worth 9.3 million dollars of damage to the economy, and using that number it reaches the conclusion that ending the lockdown would cause horrible damage to the economy.
I agree that lost lives are very bad, but I don’t agree that lost lives can be directly converted into economic damage. Taking this paper’s argument to an extreme, we could notice that 0.7% of the US population dies every year; if we convert that into economic damage, it’s roughly the size of the US economy, which means that the US economy is destroyed every year.
Also missing from the article was any discussion of whether, at the end of the lockdown, we would see fewer deaths when we finally reopened.
I think that, if the paper wants to argue that millions of people will die if we don’t lockdown, they should just make that their argument. They should avoid using made-up numbers to convert the deaths into “economic damage”.
I think ‘made-up numbers’ is a pretty harsh characterization of this. Estimating the value of a statistical life is an important thing to do and is basically what underlies almost all modern safety regulations (i.e. anything that doesn’t stem from a moral panic). Every safety measure will have some cost (both real and opportunity) and you need to have some way of comparing that cost against the gained value in lives saved, so you need a number. That number (9.3M) seems about consistent with every other number I’ve seen (around 10M in the US).
Except for the fact that most of those 0.7% of people are near or past the end of their prime economic contribution years. That 9.3M is for a hypothetical random person, and 0.7% of middle-aged workers are not dying every year. In any case the 9.3M is also the expected contribution over the rest of that random person’s life, not in a single year, so comparing it with GDP on a per year basis is inappropriate.
But most of the people who die of COVID are also already near the end of their lives, so if the number is bad to use for one estimate it is bad to use for the other.
Here’s my estimate.
The US GDP per capita is $62K/year. If most people work from age 20 to age 64 then the average lifetime contribution to GDP is $62K * 45 = $2.8 million.
(The $9.3M number seems to be derived from a metric about how much people will spend to avoid death. That’s a useful number for many purposes, but it’s not related to economic damage.)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ has some rough statistics about the age of people who die. 23% of people who die of coronavirus are on average 55 years old. 4.5% of people who die of coronavirus are on average 31 years old. (Everyone else is over 65 and therefore presumably retired.) Doing some math, people who die of coronavirus lose on average 3.8 years during which they could productively contribute to the economy, so we can estimate the damage to the economy of a coronavirus death at $235K.
— and, if we wanted to push this further, we’d have to note that the GDP _per capita_ is more important than raw GDP, and GDP per capita tends to go up as a result of coronavirus deaths.
We should be clear that people dying is horrible. We shouldn’t underestimate how bad it is when people die. It’s really bad! I’m definitely not arguing that we should cancel the lockdown and get a lot of people sick.
I’m just saying that cancelling the lockdown and getting a lot of people sick would not cause that much damage to the economy.
I think I mostly agree with your line of thinking, which is seems to be that those estimates are probably kind of high since they are based on how people value their own life (in terms of price they demand for increased risk), which might not be the same as their actual economic value in the broad sense. But I think your estimate is still too low, mostly because people perform lots of valuable services for free (especially things like childcare) which have economic value.
I’m not entirely sure about this, but it seems like the 9.3M estimate is probably high considering the demographic breakdown of those being affected, but your estimate of 235K is probably the absolute lower bound of the value. I guess it depends at what point between those two the damage crosses the threshold of ‘too much economic damage’.
Any idea how to account for the dead are disproportionately those with underlying conditions?
The vsl isn’t about how much people will contribute, at least directly – it’s about how much we’re willing to pay (as noted by Edward, on the margin.)
This calculation doesn’t actually make an a case based on the economy at all, rather it’s based on how much we usually are willing to pay to save lives because we want people to live.
It doesn’t take into account the fact that those who die are much more likely to be unhealthy and old.
It doesn’t take into account the differences between massive economic damage or going into a depression and a bit of cash on the margin.
It doesn’t make any real case that the economy would be better off with shutdowns.
If you want to value the old less than the young, you can use QALYs instead of raw lives.
$10M is also the marginal value of an average life. If we could stop one death per year, it would be worth about $10M to us, but that doesn’t mean 1 million more/fewer deaths are worth $10T.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what economists mean by the cost of a life, possibly because they don’t understand what economics is.
The issue isn’t how a life affects the economy, it’s what a life is worth to the person living it. The standard way of making the estimate is to find some situation where individuals are making a choice between alternatives that differ mainly in chance of death — driving a truck loaded with sand vs driving a truck loaded with dynamite would be a textbook example, although not, I think, a real example.
Suppose you discover that you have to pay drivers $10,000/year more to drive a truck loaded with dynamite, and that driving such a truck results in a .1% chance each year of being blown up. You conclude that the driver values 1/000th of his life at $10,000, hence values his life at ten million dollars. Do a lot of such estimates from different real world examples and you produce a value of life.
There are three things wrong with the argument of the paper, if I correctly understand it. The first is that the people dying will mostly be old, hence have less of their life left, so should value it at less. The second is that the calculation is done with values of mortality that are probably much too high, given the more recent data on how many have been infected. The third is that what matters is not how many people will die without a lockdown but how many more people will die, and there is no good reason to think that is several millions, or even within an order of magnitude of that.
What people want to know is:
1. How much damage are lockdowns doing to the economy, compared to letting the virus burn through?
2. How many will die in each case?
(Obviously it isn’t binary)
Then we can compare the deltas.
Slipping in lives lost as an economic cost because we value lives is not helpful. We are weighing lives as lives seperately.
This double counting is a nuisance.
As for the defintions, it’s feeling kind of similar to the
racism = prejudice + power shtick.
The economists should stop telling us how much to value lives as lives and get down to figuring out how badly the actual economy will be damaged.
Well, when you go to compare them, at some point you’re going to need to compare lives lost to dollars saved (or dollars spent to lives saved), and you’re going to need some conversion factor. I agree that this isn’t the most honest presentation, but I don’t think putting a dollar value on lives is in-and-of-itself the problem.
Look, the tradeoffs here are between economic well-being and people dying sooner vs later vs not at all. So there is no way to get around making some kind of $/life tradeoff in your analysis.
Voiceofthevoid/ albatross11,
That’s true but everywhere that I have seen this study mentioned, including by Scott in one of his link posts, interpreted it to mean that the economy would actually be better off by 5T with the lockdowns.
That calculation will have to be made yes. (For an optimalish solution)
That’s not my problem here.
This is being presented as damage to the economy itself, not a cost/life saved analysis, which it does badly anyway.
People are understanding this as : the economy will be better off with lockdowns and we get to save lives.
What it actually says is: we think the lives saved are more important than the damage done to the economy (and not because of the damage losing workers etcetera directly does to the economy).
A correct description, given your terminology. But the way you use “damage done to the economy” I think reflects a misunderstanding of economics.
Suppose a tornado destroys a lot of houses. Do you count that as damage to the economy? Presumably you do, because houses are of value.
So are human lives, so the tornado killing people is damage to the economy in the same sense.
People do not value their lives at 10MM when they are 75+. Consider: if you’re an 80 year old with a disease that has a $10MM cure, would you buy it if it meant saddling all your kids and grand kids with $10MM of non-dischargeable debt for the rest of their lives? How much debt would you be willing to give you an extra few years?
A lot of the past analysis assumed that if you got the disease you had something like a one to ten percent chance of dying, depending on age and health. If you believe the most recent evidence on the number infected, that was high by at least an order of magnitude, with an overall ratio of deaths to infected more like 1:1000. If that’s right, then letting the virus run to herd immunity gives you something like 200,000 U.S. deaths. Total staffed beds in U.S. hospitals are about a million, so if half of them are dedicated to coronavirus patients, each patient is in the hospital for two weeks, and a tenth of the patients die, the hospital system can handle all of them over about two months.
If those numbers are right, it looks as though ending the lockdown while encouraging social distancing to spread things out and quarantine for those especially vulnerable is the best policy, assuming that someone who has had the disease is immune thereafter for at least a year or so. And if most of the particularly vulnerable choose to self-quarantine for a few months, total deaths should be lower than 200,000.
Whether the newer infection estimates are correct, I don’t know.
If you believe the most recent evidence on the number infected, that was high by at least an order of magnitude, with an overall ratio of deaths to infected more like 1:1000.
Things move fast so I missed this. What are you citing?
We’ve had something like an extra 0.1% or 0.15% of NYC die. That right there is a 1-in-1000 chance if they all had it. If about 20% of them had it, then the chance of death is about 1-in-200.
If that’s right, then letting the virus run to herd immunity gives you something like 200,000 U.S. deaths
The US is at 60K deaths right now. Do you think we are nearly 30% of the way to herd immunity already?
I believe there have been several different studies giving different values, with the N.Y. one the highest.
If 20% of New Yorkers got the virus (and have antibodies, so hopefully they got it long enough ago to mostly have progressed to serious illness if that was going to happen), and .1% of New Yorkers have died of COVID, then we should figure that the IFR is around .5%, or 5/1000. But there should be very wide error bars on that, to account for uncertainty in the test results, the death attributions, and maybe the lag between exposure and serious illness. (I think it’s typically about three weeks from exposure to getting really sick and ending up in danger of dying, whereas I think antibodies typically show up sometime between 4-14 days.).
Some extra error terms I think we don’t really know much about yet:
We might be overestimating IFR (thinking the virus is *worse* than it really is):
a. Does everyone who was exposed develop antibodies? [If not, more people have been exposed than we’re counting, so the real IFR is lower than 0.5%]
b. Do antibodies fade away soon after the infection is cleared? [If so, more people may have been exposed than we’re counting–same effect.]
c. Are a substantial fraction of people in the population immune? [If so, IFR is around .5%, but unchecked spread will cause a lot fewer than population*IFR deaths.]
d. Is there some reason the most susceptible people have mostly already been infected? (For example, most of the nursing homes have already been hit. Extensive mostly-hidden spread in the healthcare system would also fit this.). [If so, IFR in the future will be lower than 0.5%, because most people are less susceptible than the ones who’ve been infected so far.]
e. Is there something about NYC that makes the virus more deadly there than in other places? (Maybe when you get infected you get a big dose because of everyone being so packed together? Or maybe NYC’s hospitals really did get so overwhelmed that the fatality rate went way up?). [If so, the fatality rate from infections will be less in other places.]
f. Have we gotten much better at treating serious COVID-19 infections without the patient dying? [If so, future infections will be lower fatality rate.]
Any of those would mean that our estimate of how deadly the virus is was too high, and it’s really less of a threat than we think.
We might also be underestimating IFR: (Thinking the virus is less bad than it is.):
g. Does the disease progress slowly in some people and take longer than we expect to put them into the hospital or the morgue? If so, we’re underestimating IFR. [The longer the lag, the smaller the fraction of people had been infected early enough to count in the death total.]
h. Has the disease been explosively spreading lately, so that most of the growth in cases has happened in the last few days? [Again, that would mean that the fraction of infected people who’ve had time to die yet was smaller than we think, and thus IFR would higher.]
i. Are there longer-term deaths associated with the virus? Like, you get sick with the flu, recover, and then drop dead from a heart attack a month later? [If so, we haven’t counted all the deaths yet from the infection rate.]
j. Have the most susceptible people been being extra careful to avoid getting infected? [If so, we’re underestimating IFR.]
The low rate of detected infection among the USS Teddy Roosevelt and the crew of the Diamond Princess suggests that (c) could be true–maybe some people are immune. (That could be genetic variation, or having had a recent coronavirus cold, or maybe exposure to some other thing that left cross immunity.) I also expect (f) is true–we’re probably better at treating COVID-19 now than we were at the beginning of the NYC outbreak, and that will probably mean that future cases have a better prognosis. I think (g) and (i) are true, but most likely the numbers aren’t that large so they don’t change the whole picture so much. I suspect (j) is true for later cases, and it may be that any apparent fall in lethality of the disease is less because doctors know what they’re doing now than because the 70-year-old diabetics have been holing up in their homes and accepting grocery deliveries with a mask and gloves on for the last month, while 40 year old overweight delivery guys didn’t worry about it till that cold turned nasty and went into their lungs and they started having trouble breathing.
I continue to say “I don’t know” about all this. There’s a lot we don’t know about this virus; there’s also a lot we don’t know about macroeconomics, in spite of those specialists more often claiming certainty (while disagreeing with each other).
Here are some scenarios; the first group can’t happen in most places because of measures already taken.
– Everyone gets it; 1% die, skewed towards males, older people, and those with prexisting conditions; maybe other skews as well (race, poverty, local hospital capacity). When the dust clears, folks don’t catch it any more, and we’re all back at work. Lots of trauma, some widows and orphans, and some loss of critical senior people. But the survivors are back at work in let’s say 3-6 months, and after they fire all their political and health leaders for “not protecting them” things are basically back to normal, with more funding for pandemic protection. In two years, GDP has recovered and is climbing normally – setback of maybe 1 year economically, probably less. Or infinite, if you don’t live to see the recovery.
– Same, with a much lower death rate. Less political turmoil, and sooner recovery.
– Same except that after let’s say 2 years, those who’ve had it once can catch it again, and face substantially the same risk. No vaccine is possible, or it takes as long to produce one as it did with AIDS. Huge social adjustments, and the economy is more affected by them, in the long run, than by the direct impact. Results unpredictable.
– “Hammer and the dance” competently executed, with a goal of keeping medical systems from being overwhelmed rather than of having as few as possible catch it overall. As any of the above scenarios, with fewer deaths (those who would have benefitted from treatment not available) and higher economic costs.
– “Hammer and the dance” competently executed, with a goal of getting R0 < 1 and keeping it there. Travel (even within countries) remains heavily restricted so that localities that successfully reduce their local transmission/case load can enjoy benefits in the form of return to work. I think this is a winner, except it's probably not politically feasible, except for pocket handkerchief-size countries. Probably double the economic hit we've all already taken, and a slower recovery than "let's all get sick right away".
– lockdown continues "until we have a reliable vaccine", with a few adjustments for things farther out in the supply chain. (Goal: "keep everyone safe".) This takes at least a year, more probably two or three. Horrific economic effects. In some places out of work, desperate, and possibly starving mobs storm legislatures, and are met with lethal force. In many countries, governments pay out much more than they take in and balloon their deficits and debts, then collude on "fixing" this via inflation. Worst case – runaway hyper inflation.
– Lockdowns get more and more porous. Eventually we have two kinds of people: paranoid knowledge workers, and those who've had the virus. See scenarios above, but with higher economic costs.
– A place like New Zealand or Prince Edward Island successfully reopens with contact tracing and long quarantines for visitors and travellers. Lost tourism dollars are partly replaced by new local industries, producing what can't easily be shipped in, but there's still significant unemployment etc.
This is not “double the economic hit we’ve already taken”. This is a “collapse the economy completely” economic hit for the United States. Not to mention spoiling one of the original political reasons for the United States, which is free travel between the several states. To keep R0 below 1 requires you keep measures at least as strict as those now in place in New York until virus extinction, and it’s going to take many months. Then you have to severely restrict international travel indefinitely. This is probably where Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand are going, and I don’t think they’re going to enjoy their newfound isolation.
From where I’m sitting in the SF Bay area, if we had a way to restrict travel in and out of the area, and didn’t have a state governor bound and determined that everyone in the state has to follow whatever rules are needed for LA county, we could have opening-with-social-distancing-measures for most workplaces already. Lots of folks might be working half time, or similar, or still be laid off, but more people would be getting more work. Combine this with good contact tracing, and we wouldn’t be doing as well as e.g. New Zealand at keeping everyone healthy, but OTOH, we’re also less dependent on tourism.
And I’m OK with a policy that if you come from or visit an area which either has too many cases, or doesn’t provide trustworthy information about the number of cases, you are going into quarantine for 14 days, no exceptions, and you are doing that in a way we can enforce. Even if you come from LA.
[Edit: with obvious provisions for transportation of goods – basically keep the drivers/crews from risky areas ‘outside’ isolated from the locals, then send them back with other goods. Container trucks/ships/trains/planes make that easier – no need for risk loading/unloading.]
But as you point out, it’s not politically feasible. Your right to travel from your plague-ridden area, and come spread your disease in less plague-ridden areas, is more important than my right not to have you do that.
Are you assuming there aren’t enough tests so we can require testing instead of quarantine?
I still find it super weird, bordering on unbelievable, that in an era where we’ve completely annihilated any sense that individuals have local rights that might trump “the state needs to prevent a plague”, we still respect these rights between various jurisdictions or what have you.
Like, the same people who argue that I have no right to go down the block and get a haircut, because it might infect people, will defend to the death my ability to drive from New York City to rural Kentucky, even though that might infect people. It’s just bizarre.
Yes, that was sloppy of me. If we have adequate tests, that don’t have a worrisome false negative rate, there’s no need for quarantine.
OTOH, I don’t recall encountering any estimates of the false negative rates for current tests. It’s clearly non-zero, but how high is it?
I recall that the antibody test used in the Santa Clara study is so prone to false negatives that the headline rate reported was approximately double the rate of positive tests – i.e. if you have antibodies, that test has a 50% chance of saying you do.
If Australia tries this route they are going to have major economic problems. Their immigration rate over the past 20 years is a major driver of their economic growth (probably worth something like 20-25% of their GDP growth over that period).
Yeah, nobody has to do this. Some nations have the option to chose between being a member of the community of nations that have to deal with this pandemic (and the next and the one after that), and being one more hermit kingdom with one less public health problem than everybody else. Australia at least has raw material exports that e.g. China will pay for even if Chinese can’t visit Australia; New Zealand’s material exports are more limited and more tied to New Zealand’s branding.
Addressing this comment more directly:
The economic damage is cumulative over time. Businesses and families can weather a certain amount of reduced income. (Some more than others.) Then they fall off a virtual cliff, and become less able to recover.
At best, each month without an income increases their debt; at worst, they liquidate everything they have at huge losses (few buyers, many sellers), such that possessions that could have kept them going for e.g. 10 years in better times – and took them 40 years to accumulate – now only keep them for one year.
The first thought, of course, is that those few buyers will make out like bandits, and rehire everyone else after the end of the shutdown. Except one of the ways people will liquidate their assets is by failing to maintain them. Skipping regular maintenance tends to result in repair costs larger than the costs of the skipped maintenance, with potential for disaters. (PG&E failing to trim trees near power lines comes to mind as a cautionary tale.)
A real economist could connect the dots better than I can, and find a lot more examples. But I’m sitting here, still employed, safe at home, and stressing about my now-to-be long-postponed retirement date. (My investments have crashed, like everyone else’s.) And I’m one of those in a really good position to weather this storm. Everyone who’s not WFH and not “essential” is already in worse shape than me, and the “Trump bucks” won’t last anyone 18 months. And some quantity of those either WFH or essential are already taking pay cuts or losing jobs, according to headlines I’ve read. I’d expect more next month, and more the month after that, as long as this lasts.
It seems clear that a (say) 2 year lockdown can’t actually work. Lots of necessary things are not getting done right now for lockdown reasons, and that can be sustained for awhile, but not for a couple years. Many people are not working right now, and again that can be sustained for awhile out of savings plus stimulus plus side gigs, but it’s not going to be able to go on for all that long. So any plan that says “let’s lock down until a vaccine is available” simply can’t work, and it’s not worth worrying about.
From the data we’ve seen, it seems like COVID-19 doesn’t actually spread all that quickly or well (most of the people on the Theodore Roosevelt and the Diamond Princess didn’t get it, despite close quarters and communal meals and limited ventilation and such), and it seems plausible (though more data is needed) that a lot of the spread comes from rare superspreader events that have an outsized impact on the world. This makes me think we could actually keep COVID-19 under control until a vaccine comes out, without trying to do something nuts like keeping everything locked down for a year or two.
One way to approach this is the “hammer and the dance” idea, which is supposed to mean that during the lockdown, we get ready for broad testing and tracing of contacts and quarantines of individuals who are exposed. The whole point of this is that you *don’t* keep everything locked down forever, so I don’t think it’s unbearably expensive. Broad testing and contact tracing are things other countries are doing now, so it’s not like this is impossible.
The other way to approach this (we need both, IMO) is to work out how to run something close to our normal life with minimal trasmission risk. How do you get back to work in an office building, or a factory floor, or a meat packing house, or a grocery store, or a school? How do we reopen restaurants and theaters and bars and sporting events–can we do that at all, or will some have to stay closed to avoid massive transmission?
Based on what I understand so far, it seems possible to do this without wrecking the economy or breaking the bank, and it seems like *not* doing it will have high costs–not only sick and dying people, but also people who don’t know whether they’ve been sick yet going out of their way to avoid getting sick. Now, I’m not at all convinced that we will manage it, and it’s quite possible we’ll do some dumb set of policies that give us the worst of all worlds. But this does seem workable in principle.
Registering an error.
Not to invite debate, but rather to show the form of the argument :
In a previous thread, I kind of took it to Robin Hanson over his “Buy Health, Not Health Care” article. I accused him of, basically, begging the question. He posits that people would be healthier if they follow health advice, meaning an important cause of unhealthiness is that people don’t follow health advice. If his solution to unhealthiness requires that people follow health advice, then he has assumed that there is no problem. If following health advice is effective, then it should be effective in any health delivery system.
Subsequently, I expressed incredulity at how a libertarian-leaning person could endorse a system that requires insurers to vet your daily actions. This slid into some further incredulity at libertarianism in general. Eventually I came to the conclusion “So if libertarianism is about anything, it must be about what choices I am permitted to offer to others.” Meaning, if libertarianism is to take positive effect, then our starting point must be our own personal obligations to other people.
But I am making an error of the exact form that I accused Robin Hanson of.
Basically, I’m begging the question : if society would work better if people started by thinking of others, then an important cause of societal dysfunction is people not thinking of others. If my solution to the problem of societal dysfunction requires that people be thinking of others, then I have assumed that there is no problem. If our societal/political starting point is “What are my personal obligations to other people?” then this would probably make any societal/political system effective.
SSC Discord invite continues to be invalid.
Don’t discord invite links expire after 1 day?
You’d have to post a new one every day.
No idea, but link on a new thread was invalid within minutes from posting.
Welcome to Hollywood. The studio you work for has secured the rights to a portion of the Lord of the Rings IP, and is figuring out how to monetize it. Specifically, they have the rights to appendices C through F: Family Trees, Shire Calendar, Writing and Spelling, and The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age. What sort of films do you propose to make from this material?
What sort of films do you propose to make from this material?
Murder mystery, perhaps in the style of Knives Out (haven’t seen it but have seen glowing reviews about it) based on:
Pearl Took – Murderess?
Indeed, Pearl Took – hired assassin? (The below is all canon, blame Tolkien not me).
Lalia Clayhanger marries Fortinbras Took, head of the Took Clan and The Thain. After his death, she becomes the Matriarch of the family, (as is often customary amongst Hobbits), despite her son Ferumbras inheriting the position of Thain and being titular head. She waxes in both power and girth, gaining the name of Lalia The Great (or The Fat, by the less-gruntled) and rules with such a rod of iron, nobody is willing to marry Ferumbras (who has been shuffled off to a small set of rooms in The Smials instead of being the lord and master as he should be) and come live under the dominion of Lalia.
Ferumbras’ cousin Paladin has better fortune, he marries and has four children (including our boy Peregrine). However, it’s Pippin’s sister Pearl that we are interested in.
She is assigned to be a caretaker for Lalia, who by now is confined to a wheelchair (which does not stop her domineering everyone) and who likes to be wheeled to the door every morning to take the air. One morning, Pearl is a bit careless about this, and oops a daisy oh dear me, poor old Lalia gets tipped out of her chair, falls down the steps, and comes down with a sudden case of death.
Cue sighs of relief all round.
Pearl is ‘punished’ for her gross negligence by being forbidden from attending the celebrations for Ferumbras who finally gets to succeed to the role of Head of the Clan in fact as well as name only. Still, poor old Ferumbras dies single and heirless, and cousin Paladin succeeds him as Thain.
Pearl is also seen, a short while later after Lalia’s death and Ferumbras’ accession, wearing a Took family heirloom necklace of pearls, which provokes a certain amount of gossip (hey, Hobbits are only human after all and they like a juicy scandal as much as the next person). A reward for a job well done? And/or payment for the hit? (Do we think no guv’nor it was an accident honest, she decided to bump off Lalia all off her own bat, or did the family drop heavy hints about quid pro quo?)
EDIT:
The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age
This is more The Silmarillion proper than the Appendices, but Fëanor’s little hissy-fit about The Shibboleth Of Feanor is endlessly amusing to me; that The Greatest Genius Of Elvendom Ever, Past Present Or To Come was so petty makes me laugh every time.
A farce with martin freeman’s bilbo dealing with his various relations, legal wranglings, and neighbors after getting back from his adventure would be an absolutely wonderful movie/series.
There’s got to be just one callback where he’s in a tough spot and uses the Ring to escape.
IIRC Merry or Pippen discover about the ring when Bilbo uses it just to avoid the S-Bs on the road.
bilbo dealing with his various relations, legal wranglings, and neighbors after getting back from his adventure
It could give us the backstory behind all the birthday gifts at his going-away party:
This is great
also
is really interesting
he saw the growing adoption of s by the Noldor, and especially now by Finwë and Indis themselves, as a deliberate insult to his mother and a plot by the Valar to weaken his influence amongst the Noldor
Yep, that’s our boy. “Self-centred” doesn’t even begin to describe him, and he has more issues than a newsagent’s shelves. He’d think the sun shone out of his own backside, were it not that he existed prior to the Sun and probably looked down his nose at it as shoddy Valar workmanship 😀
He not only existed prior to the Sun but also died prior to the Sun, so he lamentably didn’t get a chance to look down his nose at it. 😀
He not only existed prior to the Sun but also died prior to the Sun, so he lamentably didn’t get a chance to look down his nose at it
If he heard about it in the Halls of Mandos from all his sons (and other family members, and other unrelated Elves) who died following in his footsteps, he would definitely have looked down his nose at it: “Sun? What’s that? Oh, some bodge job those incompetents threw together instead of helping you regain my Silmarils, which are objectively superior as light sources! Typical!” 😀
Not only petty, @Deiseach, but mundane! Fëanor is rather like our own literati issuing jeremiads about linguistic changes. See here for a taste of it, concerning the replacement of the passival with the progressive passive in English:
Liberman links the full text at the end.
Assuming the Shire calendar has 12 months and there are at least a dozen family trees, that’s 25 years’ worth of Peter Jackson movies right there.
Don’t forget the days of Lithe and Yule, which aren’t part of any of the months.
The chapter in question has four family trees, one for each of the hobbits in the fellowship.
Golden Girls, but it’s hobbits.
Has anyone here tried Direct Primary Care?
I’m considering trying it out and looking for some experience reports or things to be aware of. Also, if anyone can recommend places near San Jose, that would also be very helpful.
I have a charity question. My wife wants to give to this charity since she’s from Atlanta and the mayor of Atlanta just recommended it: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/united-way-of-greater-atlanta-inc/atlstrong-fund
For some reason I have it in my head that united way is a particularly inefficient charity, but I haven’t been able to find my source for that. I found this on givewell: https://www.givewell.org/international/disaster-relief/united-way which suggests that they are at least bad at spending a reasonable percentage of disaster relief funds, but that seems very specific. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I don’t mind slightly inefficient charities (I’m not a purist by effective altruist standards), but I do lean towards trying to maximize the impact of my giving at least. Appreciate any advice.
Isn’t United Way inefficient in the sense that they don’t do any charity work themselves, but simply give the money to other charities? I suppose in some ways it might be more efficient as they can focus on fundraising whereas other charities can focus on their mission. But I don’t think this ends up being the case.
Donating to United Way basically offloads the giver’s task of having to choose which charity to give to and let’s them choose instead. If you trust that United Way is better at picking charities than you are, then you should give to them.
In some sense they are a less rationality oriented version of effective altruism – they focus on fundraising yes (so they are probably better and more efficient at it than most of the small charities), but they also have a vetting process where they evaluate charities for effectiveness and alignment with United Way’s broad goals.
Their other service is frankly distancing / buffering for corporate donors. In a world where the Boy Scouts and Salvation Army can suddenly become 3rd rails, United Way is a good way for companies to generate generic charitable goodfeels without risking controversy.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking as well. Giving to United Way is like giving to GiveWell, only without all the nerdy math stuff behind it.
that’s all interesting. It sounds like there isn’t a particularly compelling reason not to give to them. I’m not sure that I’m particularly good at picking charities, so as long as United Way isn’t too misaligned with my values, which they don’t seem to be, this seems like an unwasteful donation.
United Way does do at least a bit of charity work themselves; they organize my chapter of the VITA tax prep volunteer program under contract with the IRS.
You don’t think that they lie about fundraising and don’t do anything is a generalizable conclusion?
Like most charities, United Way is simply a patronage network that makes the world worse.
Cynical argument: Your prior should be that most charities are mostly ineffective until proven otherwise, so you don’t need specific evidence of inefficiency to reconsider donating; you should need specific evidence of efficiency to consider donation in the first place.
Even more cynical argument: Despite their years of research, Givewell’s evidence for even their most trusted charities is incomplete and debatable, so no charity has ironclad evidence of effectiveness.
Actual position: Consider donating to Against Malaria Foundation and/or GiveDirectly as well, but United Way looks pretty fine to me.
People will make a prediction about why they think some trend is going to start/end, it won’t happen and then people will dismiss them for being wrong and “explain” why they were wrong. A good thing to keep in mind is sometimes the original reasoning is completely valid, it’s just taking longer than they expected.
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
– Probably Gary Shilling, frequently attributed to Keynes.
How long you can remain solvent, in the context of market speculation, depends on what particular bets you choose to make. If you correctly estimate how long the market will remain irrational, you make bets that come due in a longer time than that.
Longer bet’s might be to expensiv for your current bankroll (or at least to expensiv for your risk migitation strategy).
Also, “In the long run we are all dead” – which actually is Keynes.
Keynes died young though.
Edit: Not young young, but not old.
That just proves his point, don’t it?
That’s also the excuse made for failed predictions. Paul Ehrlich is still at it, half a century later.
I don’t know. That seems like a good claim for something that people have dismissed but could be proven right in the long run. The idea that if you have too many people, you start running in to serious problems is sound reasoning but it is more complicated than “more people=more problems”. Let’s say 100 years pass and then his predictions come true. Wouldn’t he look prescient?
There’s a good example of this in the movie The Big Short. Christian Bale’s character helps make decisions for this investment firm. He notices some discrepancies in the data, sees a crash coming and bets against the housing market. The deal he makes is that every day the housing market does well, he loses money. It’s only if there’s a crash does he make anything back.
He makes this deal right when everyone else is extremely bullish about the market. His investors try to pull out but he has the power to lock them in to do his deal. They are continuously losing money this whole time, until they don’t. The housing market crashes and then this investment firm makes a ridiculously large rate of return. He was completely vindicated and focusing on all the times he lost money is missing the point.
Of course, we only know that from hindsight. You can’t just believe everyone who says they will be vindicated in the end, otherwise your brain will fall out. I’m merely suggesting that you should have more uncertainty over claims that some prediction has been “discredited”.
The problem with things that may prove true in the long run is that even a broken clock is right twice a day. If you predict something that is not actually impossible, chances are good it will happen at some point if you wait long enough. That doesn’t actually make you prescient.
ETA:
On reflection, it’s a special case of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
You probably have to look in to the specifics of the claim itself. The pundit who has spent the last ten years warning about another recession is different from the guy who bet against the housing market back pre Great Recession.
Bill Gates spent years warning about a global pandemic. It took a while but here we are. Would you not say he has been proven right?
This assumes your prediction stays static, which isn’t a necessary one.
No, that’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy to a tee.
We know epidemics happen. Saying that we’ll have an epidemic on a global scale at some unspecified point in the future doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already.
Worse still, all we’ve learned so far is how woefully unprepared we are to deal with a proper global pandemic* – starting from the UN/WHO and working on down. Nobody’s gonna come out of this smelling of roses, except – maybe – the Swedes.
* ETA: When we actually have a proper, existential-threat level pandemic, I mean.
@Faza
You say that epidemics just happen so no one gets any points for predicting that. But clearly few people were taking it seriously enough to do anything about it. This is clearly a point where we can say that if we had listened to him, we would have been better off. It looks like South Korea took the idea seriously and look how much better off they are.
It sounds like you are saying no prediction can ever be vindicated, and anyone who thinks otherwise is committing a “fallacy”. When exactly do you think a prediction coming true should be considered validated?
Surprising number of people were claiming that pandemics of any serious illness are nowadays impossible, or were acting like that.
“serious pandemic will sooner or later happen” is not an obvious claim
It tells us that there should be some basic level of planning and preparation and serious signs of new one should not be ignored.
It would be if for 20 years he would predict “pandemic will happen within next 12 months”. Or if he would claim “I predicted years ago that in 2019/2020 we will have a pandemic”.
“I predicted this pandemic” is still true for him.
—–
Similarly, I predict that sooner or later we will be devastated by a serious solar flare. It is prediction based on facts, and it is actionable. And it is not Texas sharpshooter fallacy to predict something that will sooner or later happen.
Once serious solar flare will happen (with serious economic damage – many satellites gone and/or power grid failures) I will be able to claim that I predicted this (hopefully it will not happen in my lifetime). But unable to claim that I predicted solar flare happening on a specific date.
“We will be hit by a severe solar flare on 2025-09-12” is a blatant crackpottery, “Sooner or later we will be hit by a serious solar flare and risk is high enough to treat it seriously” is a prediction.
And once will have over, for example, 10 000 death caused by solar flare everyone will claim that (s)he predicted this or that it was impossible to predict.
No, I’m saying that for a prediction to be worth anything it must be actionable.
Bill Gates doesn’t get any points for predicting global epidemics years in advance, unless he said specifically that there will be a coronavirus epidemic in early 2020 and I don’t believe he ever said anything of the sort.
South Korea reacted to an epidemic that was already confirmed, right next-door, as it were. It appears they reacted wisely.
The rest of the world had roughly the same time to react as South Korea did, but chose to act differently. It was, in my opinion, a poor choice and the results could be – and were – predicted in advance. We can look back on the predictions and see who got it mostly right and who got it mostly wrong.
Where this differs from an unbounded prediction is in identifying the specific set of circumstances for which the prediction will be held to be true.
If I predict a 50% drop in GDP over the next six months (being fanciful here) and the actual drop is only 5%, my prediction will have been horribly wrong even if at some hitherto unspecified point in the far future GDP does, in fact, drop 50%. Any decisions made with the assumption of a 50% drop – when GDP is only set to drop 5% over the time frame – will be actively harmful.
It is obvious. The fact that people choose to ignore the obvious doesn’t make it any less so. Living in the same country as me (and hence, facing the same issues of the day) you shouldn’t be surprised at this.
“A pandemic will occur at some point, and here are likely sources of that pandemic, and here are things we can do to prepare for it” is an actionable prediction, though.
It is actionable. For example laws allowing doing some things remotely, possible activated only in an emergency would be useful.
For example allowing to conduct parliament session remotely. That would fix stupidity of choosing between spreading infection among member of parliament and breaking law by conducting session in a way that breaks set rules.
Or basic plans for handling pandemic.
Or testing effective methods for controlling spread of typical pandemic vectors. Look at previous pandemic, look at transmission vectors and design emergency method for controlling that in case of unusually deadly or unusually infectious virus/bacteria/.. will appear.
Or provisions in law allowing to postpone elections (due to epidemic) not bundled with permission to activate censorship. Upcoming elections in Poland will be a ridiculous shitshow, in small part due to bundling all serious emergency overrides in one package.
All of that what I mentioned is not requiring such ridiculously specific prediction.
Yep. Indeed, to the extent we’ve had a functional response, it was largely because when H1N1 flu arose a decade or so ago, lots of people wrote up pandemic plans, stockpiled supplies, etc. In subsequent years, it looks like not so many people were maintaining those supplies (some were left to expire, some were consumed to save a little money in this year’s operating budget), and not so many people were keeping those plans updated and such.
Planning for foreseeable crises is one of the core things that the management of any organization is supposed to do. That ranges from keeping a rainy-day fund to having plans written down for how to deal with stuff you know might happen–hurricaines, ice storms, whatever. The problem is, this is a function of management that is seldom tested, and so it’s easy for today’s management to ignore it on the theory that the crisis is unlikely to come during their watch, or for the plans for responding to the crisis to be completely screwy and nobody notices until the crisis happens.
The distinction I’d make is that the housing market short had a time horizon over which it would either be vindicated or lose so much money that it would clearly be wrong.
If you tell people to sell their stock in 1985 because there will be a crash, the fact that there is one in 1987 does not vindicate you if it still ends up above were you told people to sell.
Ehrlich’s position isn’t merely “We might one day have a population problem”, it’s:
This did not happen. The actual trend ended up that we’re feeding more people better with essentially flat agricultural land usage over the last decades, and population growth is slowing with each passing year. So not only did the prediction not come true, it’s getting further away from happening with each passing year.
Spot on.
He makes his case even worse by currently claiming he was too optimistic
Wat? How he reconciles it with facts that clearly falsified “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” prediction?
Is he lying about his predictions, claiming conspiracy that hid millions of starvation deaths or what?
No he’s saying we’ve taken steps that stopped those deaths at the cost of causing even more deaths in the future, because we’re now above the long-term sustainable population limit. There’s a reason I picked the guy as an example of saying “I will eventually be-vindicated” to avoid admitting you’re wrong.
Thanks for reply!
OK, this is both less chemtrails-level stupid and even more arrogant.
And he would probably claim to be vindicated by any tragic even that would cause global population to be lowered.
There are two different questions:
1. Will overpopulation eventually become a problem? The answer is that we don’t know.
2. Is Ehrlich someone whose views about the future should be taken seriously? The answer is no. He made a prediction with great confidence, it turned out to be wildly wrong. Hence he is either incompetent or, if he didn’t really have the confidence he claimed to have, dishonest, and in either case his predictions are worthless.
Ehrlich himself, of course, isn’t very important. The important conclusion is that a public perception that all the experts agree about some impending catastrophe is only weak evidence it is true, even weaker if most of the sources of that perception are people who would approve of the things that are proposed necessary to prevent the catastrophe even if they did not believe in the catastrophe.
Which is the connection between the population issues of fifty years ago and my views on the current climate debate.
Today was supposed to be the day of the New York presidential primary. But for the same reason as everything else, the primary was postponed until June 23, to coincide with our state’s congressional and local primaries. Fair enough.
There were eleven candidates who jumped through all the necessary hoops to get their names on the ballot way back in the Paleolithic, but ten of those eleven candidates have since dropped out, so yesterday the State Board of Elections ruled that those ten candidates should be removed from the ballot, and since the primary will be uncontested, as provided in Article I, Section 1 of the state constitution it will not be held at all. Biden has been awarded the 274 delegates from New York by default.
Cue endless screams of “RIGGED!!!” from rabid Bernie Sanders supporters – never mind that Sanders himself has dropped out and endorsed Biden, he hasn’t quite been mathematically eliminated yet! This does mean that Biden only needs 1/3 of the remaining delegates to lock the nomination down. It’s all over but the shouting, but oh, will there be shouting.
Personally I’m a little miffed that I won’t have a chance to cast a protest vote for Elizabeth Warren, but that’s neither here nor there.
Embarrassing. New York should be ashamed of herself. Cancelling elections is the most un-American thing I can possibly think of.
Yes, it’s a primary, but it’s still offensive.
And for all the CW folks, yes, I will be this angry at Republicans who do the same.
Again, the problem with the theory that this is an extraordinary time, is that it is an empiraclly untrue claim. Hong Kong and Asian flu in the 50s and 60s were probably equal in virulence given world interconnection and populace, 1918 Spanish flu was much worse. If Polio, Measels, or whooping cough mutates to not be stopped by current vaccines, they will all be much worse, etc etc.
Including the Kansas, Nevada, and SC GOPs? Also Alaska and Arizona, I think. That was all pre-coronavirus, too.
Edit: I recognize that this is whataboutism, but @EchoChaos did kind of ask for it.
Yes, that’s embarrassing, although somewhat less so with an incumbent. I believe not holding a full primary against an incumbent is at least understandable.
And that seems like special pleading.
@broblawsky
No, it’s still embarrassing. Just somewhat less so.
can you expand on why it is less embarrassing with an incumbent?
from what i can see, one uncontested primary was cancelled, and many contested primaries were cancelled.
previous comments have often insinuated that new yorkers aren’t ‘real americans’. why is the distinction simply not a result of this bias?
@meh
I have been part of real-life protests against the Republican party for not holding primary elections properly, while I’ve never protested the Democrats for doing that, just called them an embarrassment.
Not holding elections, for either party and in primary or general is an embarrassment. I understand it somewhat with an incumbent, but it’s still an embarrassment.
None of the other candidates are running anymore. There’s nothing embarrassing about it.
Haven’t candidates done other things than “cancel” their campaigns, like “suspended” or “paused” them?
It seems wrong that they should be removed from the ballot. If someone wants to cast their vote into the void, I will always support them in that. It’s your vote, do what you want with it.
The relevant portion of the Election Law provides:
So legally, at least for purposes of the 2020 New York Democratic primary (as the state has separate laws for D and R primaries and they’re completely rewritten every four years to comply with DNC and RNC requirements, ain’t Calvinball fun), “suspending” and “terminating” a campaign are one and the same.
Note also that there is no Republican primary in NY because none of Trump’s challengers for the nomination qualified for the ballot.
This seems undemocratic. Firstly, legally there doesn’t seem to be any such official status that should be registered with the state, nor a requirement that makes a campaign suspended. So legally, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between the candidate declaring the campaign ‘magnificent’ or declaring it to be ‘suspended.’
In fact, as far as I can tell, the entire concept of suspending the campaign was invented so politicians could tell the electorate something, without it having legal consequences.
Secondly, what business is it of election law what candidates do to get votes? Should Biden be removed if he thinks that he can coast on the campaigning he’s done so far and stop active campaigning? Does this then even mean that he suspended his campaign or can some people then just arbitrarily decide whether he did? Should candidates be removed that never had the means for a campaign or that simply decided to run without one?
CA governor Newsom just announced California’s reopening plan. The next phase, which he says is coming in “weeks not months” though with no precise date, includes reopening of childcare and summer camps, and he also said they’re going to try and start the 2020-21 school year early. As a parent, this is extremely good news to me, though of course much could happen to frustrate it. Outdoor restrictions also get relaxed in the next phase, so less public health theater. Hair salons, gyms, movie theaters etc are lower priority and probably months out, and it sounds like dine-in restaurants probably are as well; concert and sporting venues explicitly will not reopen until there’s an effective therapy or vaccine.
Overall sounds like a relatively sane and cost-benefit informed approach. Any bets on what other states will follow the CA example and how soon we’ll actually get to the next phase?
I’m going to question the “cost-benefit informedness” of keeping the concert venues and dine-in restaurants closed; the best evidence I’ve been able to find suggests that those are mostly low-risk if reasonable precautions are taken. And I was hoping for more detail on when offices, factories, and retail sales outlets would reopen.
John:
We have at least one documented superspreader event in a restaurant. We also have documented superspreader events in churches, which seems not all that different from an indoor concert venue assuming the church sings some songs. (Probably more cheering and yelling than singing from the audience in a concert venue, but those both seem about as well-suited to launching big droplets across the room as singing.) Based on what we know now, it seems like those should both stay closed, to me. What am I missing?
From your link a couple of threads ago I got an image that “loud speaking towards somebody is high risk of infection”. I have no problem imagining this scenario many times a day between waiters and patrons – some are bound to be noisy with one person raising voice and the other moving the face a bit closer to hear.
Plus yeah, in the super spreader restaurant in China people downstream an aircon airflow from an infected person were at high risk. Obviously no masks when eating.
There were an awful lot of restaurants open in February and early March, and quite a few superspreader events observed. If the intersection between those two is a single restaurant-related event, then the takeaway should be “let’s look at what this restaurant may have done wrong”, not “we must close all restaurants for the next year”. And if your idea of modal or even two-sigma restaurant behavior involves waitstaff and patrons shouting at each other at any significant fraction of e.g. Mardi-Gras level intensity, you maybe need to patronize different restaurants.
Regarding concerts and churches, those aren’t exactly one-size-fits-all either. If the argument is, “I’ve heard that churches have singing, so we should treat them like rock concerts and shut them down”, no way does that pass strict scrutiny in the US and you’re going to need to look at more targeted solutions. And then apply them to the concerts as well.
And then there’s the bit about the schools. There’s been one superspreader incident I know of traced to a restaurant, and one to a school. But we’re committing to reopening the schools early and the restaurants not at all? Children don’t seem to develop COVID-19 symptoms, true, but since much of the current public health theater is based on the concern of asymptomatic spreading, this is a curious deviation from that norm – and also curious that I haven’t seen much of any actual investigation of transmission dynamics in school settings. Newsom committing to reopening the schools early, is practically an admission that this policy is being driven by what will have Democratic voters yelling at him the loudest, not by relative danger.
Just for the record, it is my belief that this is absolutely true, for all politicians, in both parties, at federal, state, and local levels. Everyone is doing what they think will get them the most votes.
Agreed that this is not driven by relative danger but by voter anger/impatience. But in this case it’s at least plausible that a cost/benefit calculation would give the same result: schools are more “essential” than dine-in restaurants in a lot of ways– even if you discount any human capital development effects and think only of the childcare provision for the parents now trying to juggle childcare and work.
John:
I don’t think we have nearly enough data to feel like we’re getting a representative sample of superspreader events, nor of more low-number spread. I think it’s really a bad idea to work from the assumption that if we don’t have a documented case of transmission in exactly this situation (say, a rock concert) that therefore that must not be a place where transmission happens.
As best I can tell, we have probably only traced a really tiny fraction of transmission events. Probably more superspreader events, but even there, I bet we’re missing a large number, probably a majority, even of those. So I think it’s nuts to try to make arguments that because we haven’t documented a transmission in environment X that therefore transmissions must not happen in environment X.
OK, but that brings us back to why are we reopening the schools? It’s just as plausible that there are lots of unrecorded school-superspreaders as there are for restaurants, so if the standard is “we’re not sure this is safe…”, then the schools should stay closed.
1. California schools aren’t opening today. Newsom said that might happen by July.
2. This gives time to work on plans to design schools to be less likely to be spreader environments, such as avoiding many students traveling at once. I’m sure someone will complain that these plans aren’t happening / aren’t happening fast enough / should have already happened / are lies and okay.
3. Schools are an essential part of the economy because they enable parents to work and many of those parents are working at things we need running to keep the food, power, and internet flowing. The daycare aspect is very significant here. Like keeping a pork plant running despite the increased risks to workers because its output is needed so much. (I’m not saying you necessarily need to agree with the trade-off there, but you can see that’s the argument.)
To reduce the likelihood of something being a spreading environment you actually need a good model of what a spreading environment is and a good model of how people are going to react to the shift in policies. It won’t do a damn bit of good to have students not show up at the same time if it causes a knock on effect that makes other more dangerous behaviors common.
From what we do know of the virus it appears that being outside in high humidity, high sunlight places should give you the lowest transmission rates. Why would we reopen schools in July, when we have hot, humid weather with lots of outdoor activities for kids (in many places) and instead put them in air conditioned buildings and think this is a good idea?
A lot of people say things like that. It makes an odd contrast with the usual argument for a public school system, which has something to do with education.
In the case of small children, it makes some sense. But I don’t see why someone of high school age shouldn’t be able to be home alone, or doing things in a park, or socializing with friends, during his parents’ working hours. Probably true for an eleven or twelve year old as well. Most parents nowadays have cell phones, so if there is some emergency, which is unlikely, they can be reached.
Suppose they reopened the primary schools alone. Would most parents of kids older than that feel they had to stay home to watch them? Should they?
@David Friedman I’ve heard talk of sending only 3rd grade down back to school.
I think people feel that once kids are in school, might as well just send all of them. The infection will spread anyway.
I know we aren’t supposed to say that schools are day cares, but this is SSC and we’ve repeatedly acknowledged that. Seattle closed the schools because it would make parents stay home. It was the region-wide trigger.
Elementary school kids are the easiest to manage. They usually all stay together in one room. They have bad hygiene, especially as you get younger. You can throw more manpower at this. Smaller class sizes is another way.
Older teenagers without supervision are typically a major societal problem. (David Friedman looking at his super-competent children is probably not seeing a good model of what most teenagers would do.) Maybe we don’t need to worry about them criming so much if lots of people are staying at home and watching things.
My only quibble with the plan is that there are a lot of businesses (like hair salons), where instead of forcing the businesses to be closed, you could instead require masks to be worn instead. Masks might not be as effective as having no activity, but on the other hand, you are essentially forcing businesses to operate under the radar if they want to survive. So in some scenarios it would actually be more effective than the status quo.
The implicit assumption with salons, AIUI, is that having the stylist’s hands on the client’s head for that long, and the stylist themself in physical proximity sufficient to let them get their hands on, is such a large risk that masks can’t mitigate it enough. Probably this needs more study to understand if it’s really that bad, but it plausibly might be.
Your implicit assumption is that things have to be proved to be safe before they can resume, since we can’t particularly prove things to be safe then the logical extension is that we shouldn’t open anything.
Right. Think of the “known to the state of California to potentially cause cancer” labels. They put those up on everything. But notice that they don’t actually ban any of those things. Because it turns out that proving something absolutely 100% is guaranteed to never cause cancer is near impossible, and because voters don’t actually want to live without everything that cannot satisfy such a demand.
The notion that we’re going to ban everything that cannot be 100% proven to not promote the spread of COVID is simply absurd.
My state is easing it’s lockdown to allow some non-essential business to reopen on a restricted bases (restaurants are reservation only, only household members can eat together, 20% capacity, etc) and one of the restrictions is that for retail stores all customers need to be wearing masks (exact wording is a “cloth face covering” so DYI masks must count). I’m happy to be able to buy some stuff I’ve been waiting on, but I don’t have a mask. I went to Wal-Mart (sans mask! I’m a criminal!) looking for masks or mask substitutes, but found nothing. My wife has told me in strong terms that she has no interest in sewing a mask herself, and I must admit I’m not exactly champing at the bit to try to sew one myself.
However, when I’m out and about I’d say the majority of people I see are wearing masks. Where are they getting them from? How am I supposed to comply with the new mask restrictions when nobody is selling masks? I could order one online, but I don’t think one will arrive for several weeks. I’m I just supposed to wear neckerchief as a piece of public health theater? Where is everyone getting these masks?
I have seen descriptions online of ways of making a mask that does not require any sewing.
Here, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNjpH5lBZ8w
In Poland (and also other European countries) many people started small scale production (making less than 40 masks) in home and either were gifting them to friends/family or selling them.
Maybe someone bored/looking for cash is doing something like that nearby?
A lot of them do seem like they might be home-made. Too bad all the craft markets were banned, I’m sure some nice ladies could be making a mint right now! It would help me too.
Maybe there is an active exchange on FB marketplace groups or something similar?
A kefiyyeh, bandana or kerchief over the mouth and nose ought to either absorb droplets or redirect them downwards.
The CDC has instructions for cutting a T-shirt into a mask, and for turning a bandana into a mask with the help of a pair of elastic bands.
You could probably also use a T-shirt ninja mask, if you don’t want to cut up your shirt.
I’ve tried using a scarf, but without a way to hold it over the ears it had a bad tendency to slide off of my nose. Something that ties tightly around your head is a better option.
Last OT someone mentioned a study showing that tying a pantyhose over a cloth mask strongly ups its effectiveness by making a better seal.
In Czechia, government declared sewing shops, where one can buy supplies for homemade production, to be an essential business which has an exception from retail lockdown.
I got my homemade mask for free as a gift from an acquitance. But surgical masks are more comfortable for outdoor activities (in addition to being better from health perspective), so now I am using those instead.
If your town has a local Facebook group or some kind of mailing list, check there. My town’s Facebook list has frequent posts by crafters who make masks and sell them or give them away, and occasional posts by people seeking masks. There are also a lot of homemade masks available on Etsy, though they probably cost more and have higher shipping times than something made locally.
I am (or was) seeing a lot online with people sewing masks. And there are small businesses that can be found on Facebook and elsewhere that are women who will sell home-sewn masks.
Sadly, it seems like the fast majority of the volunteer mask-sewing was simply donating their masks to hospitals, where I think they will remain unused. People just don’t seem to think that masks are necessary for themselves or their local communities.
I have a history podcast. Hanging With History, available most everywhere. There are 6 episodes online so far, coming out at a weekly pace. With 14 episodes written.
The theme is the Industrial Revolution, (That Miracle that Happened That One Time) so the focus is on Britain. And I’m approaching it slowly, because why not? There are many possible contributing causes and many circumstances made Britain unique. And I’m trying to have some fun with it. I hope you enjoy it.
Sounds interesting.
Deep in a thread, where reply no longer works, Matt M posted:
[This is a brief snippet – the comment is long and probably worth reading.]
He’s discussing in particular statements by “mainstream US media and mainstream politicians”.
There’s no question that much of what I’m reading about Covid-19 and the public health measures intended to contain it is variously inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, and sometimes incoherent.
My question is whether it’s any worse than what I get to read about other topics, from news media, politicians, advertisers and net.randos, both mainstream and otherwise. Or if it’s worse in any checkable way.
Advertising is a particular pet peeve of mine – while it often includes nothing falsifiable, it’s usually intentionally misleading. I’d argue that it’s the leading edge of post-Truth, aka “believe whatever you want, and if you assert it loudly enough, and appear high status enough, others will come to share your belief.” But all those other categories – including first politicians, then media – are eagerly following in the advertisers’ footsteps.
In general, the mainstream varieties of all these (including ads) are a bit less blatant than those farther out on the fringes, though to the extent a person has strong beliefs not acceptable to the mainstream, that tends to seem a bit less true. (Check mainstream sources for something you are neutral about; you may be surprised.)
So what do folks think:
1) Is the CV-19 coverage any worse than what supporters of a politician you hate were saying in the course of getting that politician elected ? Is it worse than what you’ve seen from the media about any topic where you have an unusual level of knowledge (software in my case)?
2) Look back to predictions that didn’t work out in the real world. Do you know anyone who’s stopped listening to the expert who made them, or the media that published them?
3) Just how visible would it be to you if either:
(a) 10 * as many deaths were occuring as being reported, and the PTB was underreporting for [conspiracy theory here]?
(b) 100 times fewer deaths and illnesses were occurring as being reported, for similar [conspiracy theory] reasons?
My guess is that everyone is at least somewhat tolerant of post-Truth, except perhaps a few institutionalized people with severe autism, and many people are so tolerant of post-Truth that they think the word “true” means something like “believing this makes me feel good”.
The set of people who are even angry about the flip-flop on mask wearing seems tiny, and its pretty blatant. The set who aren’t sure which one was false, let alone whether it was a lie – and also aren’t sure whether anyone can currently determine which one was wrong – seems even smaller than the set who are (still) angry.
I’m expecting I’ll come to believe some things that aren’t true as a result of this, but less than average, such that I’ll be perceived as even weirder – and possibly dangerous – that I already was pre-Covid. (Disbelievers in (some) local Truths are often regarded as thereby probably inclined towards all possible evil, in my experience.)
I don’t believe there was a flip-flop on mask wearing. It’s my understanding that they still don’t say that you wearing a mask will aid in preventing you from catching the disease.
They do say that everyone wearing masks will reduce individuals from spreading. This is not a distinction without a difference.
Yeah, the flip-flop here was from health authorities. The common line in the US from the CDC et al was that mask wearing didn’t really do much good in preventing spread; in Asia the common line was that of course it did some good and everyone ought to wear masks. IMO, one thing that probably changed peoples’ minds was that the countries that got reasonable control over the spread of the virus were overwhelmingly the ones where people wore masks.
To me the biggest problem here is the degree of confidence combined with the flip flop.
It’d be one thing if the media had been saying “We aren’t really sure, but it seems as if masks don’t work” and now is saying “We still aren’t quite sure, but after looking at it more, it looks like they might work and the low cost of wearing them probably makes it worth trying even if they don’t.”
But that’s not how it went. The actual authorities went from “It is not recommended that you wear a mask” to “Masks are required and you will be fined $1000 for not wearing one” within a month. The media went from “People who buy masks are paranoid hoarders depriving our health care workers of needed supplies (and probably racist)” to “People who are out in public without masks are reckless idiots who are contributing to the continued spread of a pandemic which will kill millions” even more quickly.
Indeed, this is the most disturbing part, and its clearly translated to the people who listen to these authority figures. Perfectly healthy 30 year olds have been screaming in a discord server about how someone passed them on the sidewalk without a mask on.
I thought we approved people from changing their ideas when proven wrong?
And the proper way to communicate that you have done that is what I lay out in the second paragraph, not the third.
What happened to “prove” them wrong in the last month? Did I miss some new study that now proves that home-made cotton coverings strapped to people’s faces definitely prevent you from catching the virus?
No. That didn’t happen. There has been no new evidence. It’s dishonest to act as if there is (and new evidence would be a precondition to change your opinion from “people who buy masks are actively harming society” to “people who don’t buy masks are actively harming society” so quickly).
@JPNunez
Changing your mind is a mark of epistemic humility; overweening confidence before and after is not. Which is obviously what Matt was saying. Reread the thread or stop asking bad faith questions.
Its possible to be wrong in both directions, which is what has happened. Its like if there was a bridge over the Mississippi river and the first time you were too far North and drive into the drink, then the next time you were too far South and drove into the river. Still wrong, just wrong for a new reason.
The way I understand it, the “masks for the public are a waste of time” idea was received wisdom in the US medical community–I heard this same perspective on TWIV months before there was any issue of mask shortages in the US or anything, so this wasn’t an attempt at a noble lie. And at that time, I already had a couple N95 masks and a few surgical masks I’d bought as pandemic prep before. (I was wearing a mask in public before the received wisdom changed, because I could reason about the risks and benefits myself.).
But it’s important to recognize that this was about using a mask to avoid getting infected by someone else. A makeshift mask or even a surgical mask isn’t all that helpful there–it can stop big droplets landing on your mouth or going directly up your nose, but does nothing for very small droplet nuclei, and it’s easy for you to mishandle the mask and infect yourself later. (Everyone talks about how healthcare workers are trained to avoid this, but I bet they often infect themselves this way too.).
An N95 (especially with a valve) or P100 mask is probably a lot better at protecting you, but a necessary consequence of that is that you’re having to do more work to breathe and it’s uncomfortable and you can’t do a lot of normal daily life (drinking, eating, smoking) with one on.
Getting the public to wear masks to avoid spreading to others seems very likely to lower the probability of infecting someone. But just having an occasional person wear such a mask isn’t all that beneficial, unless they’re known to be infectious. (Thus, even since the H1N1 flu, you see masks in doctors’ offices that are given to anyone who’s coughing or sneezing.).
The thing that changed was the ability to get almost everyone, including asymptomatic people, to wear masks. If we could get it together enough to give everyone a surgical mask to wear every day, we’d be better off, but even a makeshift mask is probably doing some good. The whole point of this is to decrease the probability that you will infect someone you come in reasonably close contact with, by:
a. Lowering the number and size of droplets that make it to them, and thus the load of virus they get. (You can think of this as decreasing the probability of transmitting the virus to someone given that they’re close enough to be in contact with you.).
b. Shortening the range of the droplets, so when you speak, cough, etc., you don’t fire those 100 micron droplets of mucus and virus across the room. (You can think of this as decreasing the number of people with whom you have contact.)
TL;DR version:
Old CDC guidance was about whether the public should wear masks to protect themselves. I think they were slightly wrong there, but not hugely wrong–a surgical or makeshift mask is probably a little protection, but not a lot.
Current CDC guidance is about whether the public should wear masks to protect others. Everyone already agreed that making likely-contagious people wear a surgical mask was a good way to keep them from spreading their infections. But they didn’t advise this for the whole public, probably because they didn’t think they could get everyone to do it at once. If the most careful 10% of the public wear surgical masks to avoid spreading the virus, it’s probably not doing much.
Now, we can get everyone or nearly everyone to wear a mask. That can be via a law requiring it, or a social norm that gets you the stinkeye if you don’t wear one, or private businesses requiring a mask to enter their store or office. In a world where we can get everyone to wear a mask in public, and where there are substantial numbers of asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers, the current guidance makes sense. Ideally, we’ll work out our production problems and everyone will have a pretty good mask (surgical, N95, KN95, or at least a high-quality makeshift mask) they wear in public indoor spaces until the pandemic is no longer an issue.
Can you point at any statement by the CDC prior to their reversal that implies that? My impression was that they strongly advised against wearing masks, not that they said “wearing a mask won’t much protect you, but it will protect other people.”
And why would you have to get everyone to do it for it to be worth doing? Each person wearing a mask is one more person whose chance of spreading the virus is reduced. If the CDC believed what you claim, shouldn’t they have been advising people that they should wear masks, rather than advising people that they shouldn’t?
How much of the change in conventional wisdom has to do with coronavirus having asymptomatic transmission? (Honest question: I don’t know the expectations the CDC works with.)
If you assume that people who aren’t visibly stick aren’t spreading, they don’t need masks. And you might worry that people who are visibly sick think they can go out if they just wear a mask.
Well, just about every doctor’s office I’ve been to for the last few years has asked people to put on a surgical mask if they were sick, so it seems like mainstream medical opinion was pretty clearly on the side of masks preventing spread of illness. OTOH, it seems like the mainstream medical opinion in the US was also that the public wearing masks during flu season or outbreaks wasn’t helpful–that was what the TWIV people were all saying, and it mirrors WHO and CDC guidance. Trying to make a sensible worldview of those two things, the best one I can come up with is the idea that surgical masks mostly won’t protect you, and that we probably won’t be able to get very many people to wear them so they won’t slow the outbreak much.
@Nick
Yeah, but the overweening confidence is less important than actually correcting course. While I place some value on epistemic humility, it’s not higher in value than either the ability to change opinions or actually providing the correct advice.
This thread is overreacting to the overconfidence too much. It’s not that important. This change is a net positive.
If the media/authorities flip flop back to masks being bad, then I’d change my opinion, but I haven’t seen that yet, modulo some weird corner case.
I don’t think they said “it won’t control spread”.
The health authorities said wearing a mask won’t effectively protect you from being infected.
Under the covers they may also have been calculating whether asking everyone to wear masks would actually cause 80% of people, rather than 20% of people, to wear masks. But I actually don’t think they knew enough about disease vectors to know that this would be helpful.
Literally days before the CDC started recommending that people wear masks, the news (this was either a nightly network thing or CNN I can’t recall precisely) had a medical doctor on talking about how masks are somewhere between useless and actively dangerous because no one can wear them properly and they make you touch your face more.
Now, in the very technical sense, this never got directly contradicted. And also technically, the CDC never “flip flopped” they just went from “we cannot recommend wearing masks at this time because we lack evidence of their effectiveness” to “we now believe we have enough evidence to recommend their use”. They never directly recommended against wearing masks.
But this is a bit of a cop out. The bottom line is that, for the average joe trying to figure out if he should wear a mask today, that went from “no” to “yes” in a heck of a hurry.
While I understand why the CDC wants to use language carefully, they seem to have forgotten that they are tasked with communicating to a public that will have a hard time distinguishing between “we do not recommend that you wear a mask” and “we recommend that you do not wear a mask”.
Missing the potential benefit of mask wearing in reducing community spread (even if the mask wearer is not directly protected) also looks like a huge oversight.
@gbdub:
Do you think they should have lied?
For the umpteenth time, wearing a mask likely doesn’t help you. It likely helps other people, and that only matters if enough people wear them.
You are right that people don’t like the whiplash and don’t process nuance. That’s why they didn’t recommend wearing masks absent data, because people will insist on misinterpreting why they should wear them.
As best I can tell:
a. Wearing any mask probably provides you *some* protection. Large respiratory droplets full of virus get stopped short of your face, and you’re reminded not to touch your nose.
b. Wearing any mask very likely provides those around you some protection–not only are large respiratory droplets stopped, but also, when you cough or sneeze, most of the force of your breath is redirected so it’s not launching the droplets across the room so effectively.
c. The best thing for protecting you is probably an N95 or P100 mask with an outlet valve.
d. The best thing for protecting others is probably an N95 mask without an outlet valve.
e. Surgical masks are probably better than makeshift masks, which in turn are better than nothing.
f. All those masks work better with a cut piece of pantyhose pulled over the outside of them and tied into a knot, because the pantyhose pull the mask tight against your face so you get a better seal.
Mask-wearing is also a reminder for others around you to take the whole thing seriously.
Which is a bug, not a feature, IMO.
It’s a propaganda campaign designed to increase fear, that has been launched because the disease isn’t deadly enough to panic the population on its own.
If so, they were clearly wrong about that, as once they switched to “everyone wear masks” everyone (who can get a mask) is wearing one.
@heelbearcub – I do not think the CDC should lie. But I do think that, in this situation, they failed to tell the truth in a useful way; this resulted in a practical if not technical flip-flop in recommendations to the public and more importantly delayed the implementation of a probably helpful tool in limiting the spread of the pandemic.
The job of the CDC in a pandemic is not merely to be technically accurate. They must also convey this accuracy in a manner that the public will understand and translate into correct useful actions.
“Should I wear a mask” is ultimately a binary question. Now it was true that the most scientifically accurate answer was “maybe”, but the way this was presented to the public was, intentionally or not, rounded off to a definitive “no”. Again, the most mainstream presentation I got was a doctor on the news saying “the CDC does not currently recommend wearing a mask” (technically true, technically a “maybe”) and then going on about all the ways masks might actually be harmful. Of course that is going to be taken as a hard no!
The other problem is that the CDC seems to have taken far too long to pivot away from individual risk focus and “bias to inaction”. In a pandemic, they need to be more collective risk focused, and recognize that inaction can be just as consequential as action.
The actual facts about mask effectiveness did not change, the way the CDC (and those disseminating the advice of the CDC) chose to weigh and present those facts did. That’s an error however you look at it.
@Conrad Honcho:
“You go to war with the army you have.”
Any calculation about these kinds of things depends a very great deal on how the population perceives the threat.
For instance, here are the flu recommendations for 2018-2019 from the CDC. The include the following:
Now, how many people do you think were actually handwashing in the way that would help prevent the spread of the flu?
“What will the result of these recommendations be?” is a question you always have to ask.
Matt M:
This is a disease that probably has a 1% or so chance of killing some people in this conversation, on this board, if we’re infected. I agree media spread fear for dumb reasons, but this is something that’s actually pretty dangerous. It’s not the 1918 flu, thank God, but it’s seriously nasty, it’s killed a lot of people, and it stands to kill a lot more. If everyone in the country eventually gets this virus, then we’re probably looking at more than a million deaths (assuming an IFR around 0.3%, which is consistent with what we know right now), many of them people with another 30+ years of life ahead of them, some in the prime of their lives. And probably ten times that number who end up much worse off in terms of lasting lung and heart damage.
I understand that it would be more convenient for your preferred policies if it were not dangerous to anyone other than 90 year olds already on their last legs. I feel exactly the same way about your attempts to pretend this isn’t so bad and that people claiming it is are all spreading fear as I do about the attempts of a bunch of people on the left to do that w.r.t. black/white IQ differences or differences in crime rates. Trying to shade the truth in a direction more favorable to your desired policies is a lousy way to make the world a better place, and a lousy way to have worthwhile conversations. Please stop.
None of that tells us whether lockdowns, graduated lockdowns, moderate social distancing, or a big party where we all strip off our clothes and give each other big wet kisses is the right way to respond to COVID-19. But the only way to think clearly about that problem is to be honest about how serious it is, how big the risk is to individuals and to the broader society.
So an IFR of 1%
But it’s actually 0.3%? I’m fairly sure the SSC commentariat is not particularly weighted towards high-risk groups.
Any evidence for this beyond anecdote? Not just that there exist cases with such damage, but that they occur at 10x the death rate.
Back at you.
@albatross11, I can’t help but notice your IFR estimate of 0.3%. If it weren’t for people like Matt M pushing back on the widespread panic, do you think you would still have given such a low estimate? Outside of the SSC bubble, the official case statistics and many estimates from the “experts” still show an IFR close to 1918 flu levels. At this point, we know enough to say that this is very unlikely. People who continue to repeat this narrative are not conducting the debate honestly and are absolutely guilty of spreading fear (I recognize that you are not doing this).
OK, but this is the only thing I care about.
I am all for people “taking this seriously” in their voluntary personal interactions. I put in a request to start working from home before my company mandated it. I had a long phone call with my father where I had to beg him to stop volunteering at a local homeless shelter (which he has done since he retired) in order to minimize his exposure. I advised friends and co-workers to start stockpiling food, TP, and medicine before the panic buying started.
That said, I still don’t know anybody who has COVID. I know lots of people who have been laid off their jobs. In my area, job loss seems to be a much more clear and present danger than COVID. You can say this is because of the lockdowns, but when I go outside, I still see tons of people out and about. The national media would tell you that my region implemented lockdowns too late, that they didn’t go far enough, and that people aren’t obeying them rigorously enough. And yet, still, COVID is basically a non-factor here.
I’ve said from the start that my threshold for this being a really serious thing is somewhere around a 1% total population fatality rate. Yes, I understand that would mean 3-4 million American deaths, which is a very large number. But that’s how percentages work when you’re dealing with very large denominators. I think so long as the population fatality rate is below 1%, there will still be tons of people out there who don’t know anybody who has died from COVID. There certainly won’t be “bodies in the streets” as the media has been promising us if we do not repent from our wickedness.
Look at what people are saying in social media. Not rationalists, not ivy league white collar people, not political partisans. The normal folks you know. Find them and try and get a gauge on what they believe. Based on what *I* see from such people, they believe this thing is far, far worse than 0.3% IFR. They believe that walking within 6 feet of someone who isn’t wearing a crappy homemade mask is basically risking death. These beliefs are wrong, and they are harmful, and they need to be corrected.
The Nybbler:
a. Higher risk people have a higher probability of death given infection. My vague guess at an IFR is somewhere around .3% for the whole population, but it could be fairly different–the data we have so far isn’t really all that great. My current estimate of my own probability of death given infection is somewhere around 1% or maybe a bit lower. There are people older than me and with more serious comorbidities who are regulars on SSC, as well.
b. If you think I’m lying or being deceptive about COVID-19 facts, please point out where.
There’s a lot of uncertainty about COVID-19, but I’ve done my best consistently to play straight with the facts as I understand them, including pointing out things that don’t play well with my preferred policies (for example, the possibility that nobody gets long-lasting immunity). I’ve also tried to link to academic papers, popular articles, and blogs/podcasts by experts in the relevant fields.
That said, I still don’t know anybody who has COVID. I know lots of people who have been laid off their jobs.
I don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten measles. I know lots of people who have had to suffer measles shots.
I get those two variables are the two most visible to you. But it’s useless to compare them. Seen versus unseen.
There is another path with less economic devastation and more deaths. And I admit that might be the better world. I’m fine saying there are a certain number of dead grandmas worth a trip to Disneyland.
But since lots of people are committed to the current path, people who want to flip to the other path need to show their work.
We accept more dead grandpas for some disneyland trips every flu season. The question is entirely in what the available tradeoffs are, and deciding what the best choice is among them.
HBC:
I don’t understand this. Each additional person wearing a mask reduces the chance of transmission by one person’s worth. I don’t see how the effect of the millionth person wearing one is greater than that of the first. Or the hundred millionth.
If there are 10 people I might meet today that are contagious, and 1 of them is wearing a mask, I have very high odds of catching it anyway. That 1 guy wearing a mask isn’t helping much.
If 9 of those 10 people are wearing masks, my risk has gone down significantly.
Like herd immunity from vaccines, society don’t gain much from the first few percentage points of people that are immune, but those last few percentage points are pure gold.
If there are ten people you might meet today that are contagious, and none of them are wearing masks, your odds of catching COVID-19 are ~20%. One of them wearing a mask, ~19%. All of them wearing masks, ~10%. Or maybe we’re talking about idealized perfect masks and it goes all the way down to 0% when everybody is masked. But it does so roughly linearly, with the first mask having about the same benefit as the last.
COVID-19 is not so contagious that a handful of social encounters with unmasked carriers puts you in a risk-saturated regime where nothing else matters because you’re doomed to infection anyway.
@HeelBearCub:
> Now, how many people do you think were actually handwashing in the way that would help prevent the spread of the flu?
My guess would be almost off them. I assume that any attempt at handwashing (especially with soap) significantly reduces the number of active viruses on ones’ hand, and thus helps to prevent the spread of flu. Do you think it does not help at all unless done perfectly?
If I was trying to quantify it, I’d guess that handwashing with soap probably removes or deactivates viruses at roughly a constant percentage per time. Thus if the CDC recommended 20 second washing leaves something like .01% of the active viruses, I’d guess that an untrained quick 5 second handwashing leaves about 10%. Washing for 1/4 the time multiplies the number of viruses by something like .1, while washing for 4x that time would multiply by (.1)^4 == .0001.
Do you think these numbers are implausible? Or am I misinterpreting your question, and you are making some other point?
From some of your other comments, I wonder if one difference in our thinking is that you may think unprotected contact with someone who is infected is almost sure to cause transmission, while I (and others) think there is a relatively low percentage chance of transmission per encounter. If transmission was practically certain, it would make sense that a 90% reduction in number of viruses might have no effect, since it’s transmission is “overdetermined” by a surplus of infectious agent. Whereas if transmission per contact is unlikely, a 90% reduction in virus should imply almost a 90% reduction in risk of transmission, as there is very low “redundancy” of agent.
I think the fact that the flu has a single digit effective reproduction rate implies that a brief contact with infected individuals is a numerically low risk. If an average infected individual is infectious for several days, encounters dozens of uninfected each day, and only infects a small number of them in total, doesn’t it have to follow that the risk of each encounter is something like R/num_encounters? And if this number is small, doesn’t that imply that even imperfect handwashing should reduce transmission close to as much as perfect handwashing?
One really simple technology I would like to see deployed in lots of places are portable handwashing stations. I imagine something about half the size of a hot-dog cart that you just roll out.
Subways, airports, schools.
The CDC was saying masks to include N95 respirators don’t help prevent infection.
Which is absurd on its face.
Haha, I see what you did there.
Indeed. They should have kept their mouths shut.
Going from a nigh-unanimous and -universal “Masks will not help the general public in any way worth mentioning, and you should feel bad for wearing them when our heroic medical personnel need them!” to “This thing that masks might do is so very important that you must wear them, and should feel bad if you don’t and mock people who don’t!”, is absolutely a flip-flop.
That both the flip and the flop are usually expressed with careful weasel-wording so that they aren’t technically false, counts for nothing in my book. Deliberate misdirection via depraved indifference to the truth, whether you’re using false statements or just carefully chosen half-truths and omissions. Don’t do that, and don’t cheer for people who do that, not if you want me to trust you at least.
And in this case, it’s flip-flopping to the worst sort of cargo-cult thinking.
“Look, here’s a thing that technologically advanced professionals can make that has clear and proven benefits. But we can’t have that because they won’t make them for us, only for people more important than us. Hey, maybe if we use our amateur skills and improvised materials to make something that looks like the thing we can’t have, it will work the same way! Never mind the lack of evidence, it looks right and it’s got truthiness, and something must be done and this is something!”
That’s pretty much literally how cargo cults work. And this is the worst kind, because it’s the kind where the cult leaders make it the civic religion if not actual law of the land, mocking and ostracizing anyone who doesn’t constantly practice their faith in public.
And, again, it’s a complete flip-flop from the official and media consensus of February and early March.
This is basically my exact feeling on the subject. Thank you for expressing it so clearly.
I’m a bit baffled why you are so adamant that anything less than an N95 properly fitted is worse than useless, to the point of mocking it as a “cargo cult”. Experiments have shown that homemade masks might be ~half as good at filtering small particles as N95s, and they definitely stop large particles from sneezing / spitting.
An “N47.5” mask might not be something you’d wear confidently into an infectious area and expect personal protection, but I find it hard to believe that reducing the available infectious particles in circulation by half (hell, even by 10%) would not be a net benefit when applied over the whole population. Any reduction in R0 helps!
“Something must be done and this is something” is not good logic, but both “wearing masks” and “not wearing masks” are doing something. We should follow the evidence, but we aren’t going to get perfect evidence in either direction in a timely fashion, so in the meantime we ought to go with whatever direction is “probably” right.
That is not what “Something must be done and this is something” means, and you know it.
I’m pretty convinced that masks make it less likely that you will spread the infection to others, if only by deflecting the airflow from your breaths and sneezes downward and so limiting the distance the virus-laden respiratory droplets are launched. This is the whole point of surgical masks, and while makeshift cotton masks aren’t as good as surgical masks, the best of them are pretty close. And even just a bandana over your mouth is redirecting your breaths down and so limiting your range.
I think makeshift masks probably provide a little protection from you catching the virus, thanks to having a chance to catch the large droplets before they reach your face. I doubt it’s much protection, though. Think of this like wearing a leather jacket in a swordfight–it might save you from a really marginal cut, but it’s not a lot of protection compared to a mail shirt or some such thing.
N95 masks and equivalent probably do a decent job protecting you if you get a good fit, but in practice they probably aren’t all that great because they’re usually badly fitted and so you’re sucking air in around the mask pretty often. And similarly, they’re probably better at protecting others from you than surgical or makeshift masks, but leaks around the edges of poorly-fitted masks probably make that worse.
The improvised masks I’ve got from e.g. Etsy, have mostly been directing the airflow upwards and to the sides. The chin seal seems to be easier to get right than the cheeks and (especially) nose.
That’s a unnecessarily snippy way of ignoring the meat of my comment, and you know it.
I agree that we should normally be suspicious of people “doing something” because of the human bias to action, and “wear masks” is the direction that bias is going to go.
At this point though, it doesn’t matter – the question of mask wearing is in the air, and ignoring it is not really an option. You can either say things that will encourage more people to mask up, or discourage them from doing so. The scales of all things here are large, so it’s an important question. One you can’t really ignore by hiding behind a lack of a perfect randomized controlled trial to answer definitively.
“The evidence is inconclusive” is one thing. You’ve taken that a step farther into openly mocking mask-wearers as cargo cultists. I think justifying that requires not merely lack of evidence supporting mask use, but definitive evidence against using them, which I don’t think you’ve provided.
FWIW I think Scott took pretty much the right approach in his post on the subject.
Anecdotally, I made some simple home sewn masks with a pattern from JoAnn’s. There is definitely some leakage (mostly on the top) but there is clearly a lot of flow going through the mask. Perhaps counterintuitively, “better” filtering material can make things worse (harder to get air through so more leaks out the sides).
1. no.
2. no
3a. not visible
3b visible
1) No, in fact I think the Covid coverage has been slightly better than normal.
2) Yes, myself for one.
3) Trivially for either.
I think you’re discounting the real amount of uncertainty and lack of good information about Covid out there. There are lots of real uncertainties about how many people have been exposed, what the fatality rate is, whether reinfection is possible, how helpful various treatments may be, and a host of other things. This isn’t the media or politicians screwing things up; there are a lot of real uncertainties and a lot of unknowns that are just unavoidable when dealing with a new pandemic. I’m not convinced the media or politicians are actively lying so much as posturing while mired in the same ignorance as the rest of us.
1) No (but that’s a lower bar than the one on the Dead Sea)
2) Alas, no.
3) I would notice both — I’m in the NYC area. I know some people who have had COVID and through a short chain, one who has died of it. With 100 times fewer deaths and illnesses, I shouldn’t know any of these; with 10 times more deaths, I should know more.
So the official CW lines have been drawn. Ending a lockdown is now racist.
Here’s one.
Another
And another (this one from David Frum).
That’s bait.
Yes, for a discussion. About a brand-new CW topic. On a CW friendly thread.
If that’s how CW threads optimize for light, you have done me a service in reminding me why I abandoned them.
Election can’t come soon enough. Maybe I’m overly optimistic but I hope both Partisan Teams will lower their guns for a moment since the stakes won’t be as high, and maybe we can start to use an actual cost/benefit framework approach towards Corona response.
But I’m probably wrong, and both sides will instead amp stupidity to 11.
It looked like that was going to be the case. But then anti-lockdown protesters wore some MAGA gear and now we’re right back to where we started.
Stupidity is already at 11. Expect post-November stupidity to be 121 at minimum.
Less of this, please.
I don’t expect anyone here to defend the attitude. I figured that I was highlighting an obviously growing sentiment that will likely affect covid policy in an election year. I can understand objecting to a salon link, but we’ve got MSNBC, David Frum and Vox. What about bringing this up for discussion is offensive to you?
It’s low-effort self-congratulatory culture war bait. This might be a CW-OK thread, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to post everything that offends your sensibilities, especially if you’re not going to put any actual effort into analysis.
We had an entire thread of that from the other side last time with no request for “less of this”.
Culture war is culture war. This seems imminently fair, since he’s linking to respected news outlets like Vox.
I can assure you that there is not enough time in the day for that.
If I had put what I just said there about it being a growing sentiment about covid policy in an election year, in the original post, would that have ameliorated the offense?
As I previously stated, I honestly felt it would be informative. (edited for tone. apologies)
One of those is an actual academic study; the other is a bunch of opinion articles. They aren’t equivalent.
@broblawsky
I promise you that I didn’t edit that to make your reply not make sense. I honestly thought it sounded too snippy. You are correct that they are not equivalent. But that does not mean that they are not relevant. The press led the lockdowns. Growing narratives fed to large audiences (I mean, Vox and MSNBC aren’t massive, but they’re not negligible either.) would seem to be the kind of thing that could impact policy. You disagree, obviously. I suppose I could have left the salon link out, but it was the one that led me to finding the others.
Would adding that analysis to the post have ameliorated the offense?
Yes, that would’ve been better.
Edit: Also, please don’t use Google AMP links.
@broblawsky
Noted. Will correct in the future. Although it looks like I got lucky this time and the discussion mostly proceeded along those lines up and down-thread.
As to the AMP link, my mistake. I was trying to avoid linking to an autoplay video. I consider it bad netiquette to put one in a list of otherwise articles.
Domain announcing low quality content (crooksandliars.com) and AMP site. Nice combo.
Didn’t want to link direct to the msnbc video that that one covers. It was Frum. He’s got quite the audience.
it’s this guy, if that helps. He’s a senior editor at The Atlantic.
*sigh* I could wish that every discussion of class/poverty etc. in the US didn’t turn into a discussion about racism.
Not having read any of those links, one good thing I can see about government mandated lockdowns is that the lower you are on the economic scale, the more likely you have a boss who will fire you if you take the sick days to which you are supposedly entitled, and the less likely you are to have savings that could tide you over if you decided to stay away from work while the epidemic went through, because of being highly vulnerable or living with someone in that category.
With this lockdown being mandated by the government, it’s harder (not impossible) for your boss to require that you work anyway, with no precautions at all, and fire you if you try to stay home because you are infected. And there’s at least some extra money for those unemployed.
An official reopening would reduce that effect – while probably also making it significantly less difficult for those who are healthy etc. to find work if that’s what they want or need to do.
Damned if I know which effect dominates in practice. I’d guess it depends on a lot more than anyone’s going to bother mentioning in any polemic ;-( And for any particular individual, what matters isn’t the statistical effect, but the effect on them personally.
But who’s going to click on something even as nuanced as what I just said, let alone respond to it ;-(
Is this true? In the low-paid jobs I worked in high-school, that kind of pressure would be unimaginable: many employees were so incompetent that someone who bothered to call in sick instead of just not showing up was a “good employee.” I saw far more nonsense at my first white-collar job.
Good point.
I now realize that while I know a fair number of people who complain of illegal bad boss behaviour and they all make a lot less per year than I do – and have more trouble getting another job – not many of those I know count as being on the very bottom. (Though one is “minimum wage + very trivial annual increase”.)
I don’t recall ever working a job where people would commonly fail to explicitly call in sick, or anyone who did that without a good explanation would keep their job – not even while I was a college kid, doing random minimum-wage temp and part time work.
On the other hand, I can recall at least 2 cases where something I witnessed or experienced, in my relatively high end jobs more recently, might well have gotten a lawyer salivating. (I knew it wasn’t OK, because my own mandatory annual training in “good business conduct” had told me never to do them. – That “training” is blatantly intended as a CYA, so that when employees get caught doing these mostly illegal things, the company can try to claim “we didn’t tell them to do that; you can’t include us in the resulting lawsuit, fine us, etc.”.)
And then there’s something like Wells Fargo – lots of employees doing all kinds of illegal/unethical things, because they were the only way they could see to satisfy their bosses. They probably weren’t quite bottom-of-the-heap either.
I think one of the main problems that’s causing this is plain old economic illiteracy. My mentality is that production, not consumption or trade, is what creates wealth. So when the barbershops and tattoo parlors are shut down, society is made poorer by having fewer haircuts and tattoos. Doesn’t sound like a big loss to me. Can’t we have a year of no additional tattoos and DIY haircuts? Isn’t that worth it to prevent some people dying and many more being sickened? But the normies look at barbershops and tattoo parlors being shut down and they think that because there’s less greenbacks changing hands, there’s less of every kind of wealth, including less medicine and less food. So my state’s going to let them re-open:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-reopening/like-test-dummies-as-colorado-reopens-some-see-too-much-risk-idUSKCN2280E6
What about the distribution of wealth and how that will be affected by the shutdowns? We can change the distribution of wealth. We already do a lot of it, often for reasons which are far stupider. My suggestion is a program to pay small business owners who can show that their businesses were shut down by the government. This is not the same as the bailout that governments are doing now because the payments under my proposal will be made to individuals and will be equal: a standard payment to people put out of work. What about the guy who was counting on a six figure small-business income and has a bunch of mortgages to pay? Declare bankruptcy, give up your expensive house, and be happy at the time you had to enjoy it in the first place.
I agree with you, but I would, I dislike tattoos and already do my own hair. I imagine there are people who are losing something of value to them in tattoo shops closing down, just as I lose when game shops close down (bad example, because I haven’t actually spent money in one for awhile, but I do on occasion), or, say, churches.
Obviously it takes far less labor than whatever the most recent best employment figure is to keep our entire nation fed and the lights on. We could, through some hypothetical distribution (that has never really worked before, but nevermind) continue to provide for everyone the same amount of essentials they had before. But those left running tractors are going to feel like chumps, with more free loaders to compare to, and less tattoos (or whatever) to reward themselves with. Nevermind having nothing but Netflix to occupy the rest of the workforce sounds like a problem for a number of reasons.
That is rather hard on the barbers and tattoo artists, if they need to pay their apartment rent (or mortgage), and they just used their savings to buy groceries.
Multiply that by hundreds of janitors, waiters, baristas, home-repair contractors [1], landscapers [2], etc., and there are a lot of people who are wondering where their next meal (or rental payment) is coming from.
And that some of the business owners for places like barbershops and tattoo parlors need some sort of income so that they can make payments on the rental of their business property.
Even if they aren’t central to the economy, they are hurting for money. Yes, the local pizza place is likely looking for delivery drivers…and Amazon may be hiring. But there are more people seeking those jobs than there are jobs available.
There wasn’t much warning. Now a lot of people are hurting, economically.
Yes, there is a potentially better way to line up the economy. But getting from here to there will be very painful for lots of people: including both tattoo artists and home-improvement contractors.
[1] I had an electrician on tap to do some work on my house when the shutdown was put in-place. He said he was risking a $10000 fine if he was caught.
[2] I think the governor in my State banned landscape workers from doing their job. Even though that’s one of the few non-essential jobs which can be safely done while respecting rules about social distancing…
Why do you assume people are looking at the barbershops and tattoo parlors, as opposed to factories and offices?
You can always make people sound as dumb as possible by cherry-picking examples, but the tattoo parlors aren’t even mentioned in the executive order, they’re just part of general “Non-Critical Retail”. So are computer and vehicle repair services, but citing those would make the order reopening them sound a whole lot less stupid.
Preempting the inevitable “the reopening order is too general, it should exclude obviously-bad choices like tattoo parlors”:
Colorado (like most places) already had an essential/non-essential division, and as soon as there’s a list of people who can open and people who have to stay closed, everyone plays “defect”, trying to get themselves on the open list while denying others.
So in Denver cannabis dispensaries (including in-person shopping, not merely curbside pickup) are essential.
At the national level, the customers for our company (restoration contractors) put together a lobbying effort to get Homeland Security to add them to an essential workers list. I’m sympathetic to why they’re doing it (they’re sufficiently obscure that a random attempt by a county to list who’s essential will probably exclude them without even thinking about it), but it’s still the deployment of lobbying effort that gets you to stay open in a lot of cases.
Given the relative awfulness of the 2-category list, I’m not exactly hopeful for a large number of categories to suddenly get things right.
Better to put some rules in place that lower effective R0 and let businesses judge whether staying shut down or reopening under those restrictions is better. That plus consumer reluctance will quickly sort out essential from not.
@Christophe Biocca
It is definitely looking like the Swedish route is the way to go.
Exactly. I’m able to work remote (for now), but this depends on my computers running.
So we can live without Tattoos and Haircuts. How about building maintenance repairs for all the places that produce those services? Who is paying for those with a chunk of servicers out of business for the year? What about garbage collectors, police, road repairs etc? Those typically paid through taxes to which the tattoo parlors and barbers and stylists all contribute.
What about landscapers? We don’t NEEEEEDDDD them, we can cut our own grass and go with a few extra weeds and some overgrown shrubs for a year right? OK the occasional emergency with a downed tree and we need someone, but not necessarily 90% of what a good chunk of people do. How many other jobs could we go without for a year just in theory?
How about capital structure? How do we make loans and build businesses going forward if a bunch of them can just be shut down for a year with no income? What about construction? Who is building new stuff with all the soon to be empty floor space from businesses you just ordered closed and won’t be reopening?
Culture war hot-button issues are a great way of shutting everyone’s brain down so they can’t think clearly about real stuff.
An honest discussion about the costs and benefits of further lockdowns requires thinking. It requires reasoning about uncertain things, trying to understand mathematical models while recognizing they’re imperfect and may be based on all kinds of wrong assumptions, and trading off important values in ways that are guaranteed to hurt sympathetic people. It’s possible for most people to try to think about this stuff, but it’s hard and unpleasant.
Yet another bashing-the-outgroup culture-war discussion, by contrast, is easy and fun and appealing. It will make you feel good about yourself because self-congratulation is such a core part of the whole thing. But it will shut down your brain and help you tune out unpleasant facts and questions so you can just shout your side’s slogans at the other side louder.
Me, I’d rather keep my brain working.
Unfortunately, the CW will be a large (maybe largest) determinant of our public policy response.
So to paraphrase, you may not be interested in the CW, but the CW is interested in the public policy response.
If the stances are hardening, cost/benefit will have less of an impact, and tribal identity will become the ultimate factor.
I feel like you’re off the mark here. What slogans do you imagine I’m shouting? I’m highlighting a growing media narrative that could very well have an effect on policy. There are Republicans and Democrats saying it in the links provided. They are all anti-trump, however. Do you imagine that I’m on team MAGA?
I for one favor a middle ground to ending lockdown.
Enforce these rules, in order of importance:
1. No speaking, singing, or shouting.
2. Carry a whiteboard or memo pad for communication.
3. Wear a mask.
4. Sign language is encouraged.
Do as you please while following those rules.
The evidence all points toward droplets, so the rules are aimed at the source and provide an alternative.
I think 3 is a heck of a lot more feasible than 1 and 2.
We could always give “The Gentlemen” a call.
It’s like someone gave a writing prompt, “look for concentrations of white people and write an article about it!” And then the students spill out into the world looking for it. It seems like a good formula: it’s pretty easy and gets an audience.
Honestly, you can write this about any generic hobby that people engage in. I’ve seen it about hiking, about D&D, various types of metal music…. You could probably put in bird-watching, blogging, Quidditch, gardening, and probably virtually any hobby not associated specifically with a different non-white ethnicity.
Something our host has noted in the past.
Ah, that’s basically exactly what I said, haha.
This is almost certainly where I got the thought in the first place without realizing. It wasn’t intentional stealing — I apologize, Scott!
I’m surprised that this is the view, and I have to assume it’s because the protesting comes from
idiot MAGA groupspeople the authors don’t agree with. In my mind the key point (as quoted from the vox piece) is:Lock-downs are disproportionately destroying wealth of the poor/working class (waiters, bartenders, barbers), without commiserate pain for much of the middle class or rich, while trading the health of marginalized and poor “essential workers” for the health of wealthy older Americans.
And honestly, it seems like these pieces agree with me about who is suffering, but come to a different approach to fix it – they see racists arguing to end lock-downs, and therefore conclude arguing to end lock-downs is racist, I see poor and marginalized people suffering disproportionately and think that continuing them without some way to equalize the suffering is wrong.
> Lock-downs are disproportionately destroying wealth of the poor/working class
I know. It’s great. Is there a good way I can go about encouraging the lockdowns to continue or get more stringent? Trying to phone my governor results in the phone ringing continually without even an option for voice mail.
The lockdowns will harm the lower class, and the virus will harm the lower class.
Indeed, one of the reasons to try to increase one’s income and wealth is so as to be less vulnerable when things go wrong.
Vox claims that blacks (proportionately to their population size) die more and have more cases.
They seem to think this means that blacks are more susceptible(i.e. both more likely to get it and more likely to die if they get it), so getting rid of lockdowns will hurt them disproportionately.
So first off, if they have more cases they’ll also have more dead. This is pretty obvious, bur spinning this as two seperate issues makes the racism case easier to make.
(Having poorer health and medical availibility seems plausible to me, but most of the difference in deaths is most likely due to the difference in cases.)
This also begs the question – why are blacks disproportionately infected (assuming cases track to infections)? There are more white people in the country, and add in economic differences and it is much more likely the disease started with a white or asian than a black, but both of those demographics have much lower case rates.
This means the virus most likely had more time to spread in non black demographics.
Culture is probably a big difference.
This opens up a can of worms, as lefties would not like to discuss any parts of black culture that could be seen in a negative light, regardless of whether the issue is moral, practical, acute or chronic.
As for ending lockdown hurting them more, there are two parts:
1. Economic. Someone else shoild handle that, I don’t know.
I would think economically everyone gains or everyone loses more or less.
2. Deaths. If a much larger percentage have or had it, they are closer to herd immunity, and should have be less affected by getting rid of lockdowns, even assuming the lockdowns are doing enough to stop it with much higher percentages of infected.
If blacks are much less healthy (and if the medical thing is relevant) that could change their preferences, but I’m not convinced that this is very important here.
Even if the health were true in an important way, this is the wrong argument – it should be about ableism, ageism or something, because blacks and whites would all suffer ~proportionately to their lack of health and age, though whites would suffer more at the same health and age (more people/percentage to be infected).
Medical availability, assuming it is important and the healthcare system doesn’t get overwhelmed might change things as well, but it would still be the wrong argument – rich-poor or class is the distinction, not racism.
I think it’s probably mostly geographical. Percentage-wise that demographic is in disproportionately crowded cities. Obesity rates are probably an issue as well.
Doesn’t seem to be. Georgia is hot and humid and blacks are substantially more rural, but blacks are doing way worse in Georgia than whites.
Underlying risk factors plus culture are more likely.
One of the major superspreader events in GA was a funeral, for example. Cultural differences in how you mourn at a funeral could explain why it was a superspreader event.
What do underlying risk factors have to do with it?
@Purplehermann
We know that some percentage of cases are asymptomatic and thus never reported because the victim never shows symptoms.
If underlying conditions exacerbate the disease, then even if the exact same percentage of whites and blacks were infected, we would see more black cases if blacks have more underlying conditions.
Just spitballing, but it made sense to me when I typed that.
They are still represented higher in urban areas proportionally than total state demographics, although the difference isn’t that much (4 percentage points or so). So yes, after looking that up, I agree that geography is unlikely to be the predominate factor.
@EchoChaos that makes sense, though I kind of doubt its an important factor- lots of white peole are fat, and I think whites are older on average (less children, larger life expectancy)
@Purplehermann
Status: Total speculation, but seems reasonable to me
Just googling about, blacks are much unhealthier than whites in things that we know are major factors.
For example, 75% of blacks have hypertension by middle age:
https://www.cardiosmart.org/News-and-Events/2018/08/African-Americans-are-More-Likely-to-Develop-High-Blood-Pressure-by-Middle-Age
Blacks are almost half again as likely more likely to be obese as whites:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/cdc-obesity-data-reveals-wide-gap-white-black-americans
As for age, you’re likely thinking of the fact that there are lots of young minorities, but that’s mostly driven by Hispanics. The black age curve and the white are similar.
https://qz.com/1013714/one-metric-shows-that-race-in-america-is-about-to-experience-a-dramatic-shift/
There are certainly tons of unhealthy whites out there, but if we’re looking for why blacks are doing relatively worse in terms of COVID cases and severity, lifestyle seems to be a big reason.
Is there still evidence that blood types matter? There was a link here a while back that had B as significantly higher risk and O as significantly lower. This alone would produce racial disparities, and w’re not normally used to treating bloody type as an “underlying risk factor.”
(African-Americans have a higher proportion of both B and O relative to Caucasians, so I don’t know how that would shake out prediction-wise.)
@Jaskologist
It was type A that was the high risk group.
Current theory is that it is tied to ace2 receptors. So it dovetails with the smoking being preventative theories and the blood pressure meds causing worse outcomes theory.
@EchoChaos
The hypertension is interesting.
The obesity article is from 2014, there isn’t much of a difference between black men and and white men, though black women do have a higher rate. The average is 1/6 again for blacks vs whites.
I would re-read the quartz article and look carefully at the charts, blacks are definitely younger by a good bit, though hispanics are even younger.
I was baing it on most black families I’ve met having a bunch of kids, whole the average is 2.3 or something in the US.
A quick Google search shows black kids are the same percentage of the US children now as years ago while white children are a noticeably smaller percentage.
I don’t understand what obesity has to do with infection rates.
If the intent is that obesity difference are responsible for death rate differences, I’d like to see some sources for both a higher infection:death rate among blacks, and that blacks have more obesity.
Blacks (and even more so hispanics) have more kids in a household, for an example of a cultural risk facor
Obesity rates
and deaths:infection
Obesity is probably just a good metric for cholesterol lining the arteries. I think that is the more accurate risk factor, given what we know about covid causing unusual blood clotting. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned obesity at all, as although it’s more likely causative than race, it’s less precise than high cholesterol. But I have seen mentioned that there are other explanations as well, such as reduced lung capacity.
Not speaking to the ethnic issue, but obesity appears to play a big role in case severity:
link text
@rumham I checked the link for infection:death rate, and this is the source for the black hospitalization rate. I didn’t see any source for community infection rates and am fairly skeptical that they would have good data on that.
The results speak for themselves – unless you think <14% of hospitalizations in general are asian or hispanic combined, while blacks are ~33%, something is weird there.
Maybe n=580 is too small for accurately measuring this of thing.
The New York data just shows that there is higher population:death rate, not a higher infection:death rate as far as I can tell.
As for obesity, I looked your link and it's source.
This is for adults. I don’t know how the age adjustments affect things.
Blacks have an age adjusted 49.6% obesity to white 42.2%.
It mostly plays out in fat black women, the men are not significantly more likely to be obese apparently.
So obesity is not a reason to expect more black men to have cases than any other male demographic, and we should expect relatively larger amounts of black female severe cases.
@Purplehermann
Interesting. Thank you for the breakdown. I keep looking and every link has “age adjusted”. More granular would be better, as we could rule it out with male vs female. Age sex and race data would be the best. As it stands, you are still probably correct. But if it’s the result of a wider community spread, we should know in a month or so.
A potentially relevant observation: In the past week or so, I’ve noticed a greatly increased number of not-just-family social gatherings in my suburban neighborhood. These have been predominantly among black families, some hispanic, and almost no whites. And for that matter, the whites are mostly working-class rather than professional-class.
Pre-lockdown, conducting one’s social life through the internet I think fell largely in the SWPL category. It is quite plausible that willingness to maintain strong social distancing during (and for that matter after) the lockdown is going to be significantly higher among the professional white people demographic and diminish with cultural distance from that demographic.
Almost nobody seems to be talking about the fact that males are also substantially more likely to die of it than females — about twice as likely from the data for my area as of a while back.
After 9/11, the phrase “security theater” became widespread to refer to anti-terrorism measures that naively look protective but have little if any evidence of effectiveness. Why haven’t we seen “public health theater” get traction yet? Or has it (or some similar phrase) done so already and I missed it? There’s no shortage of examples to point to– banning low-contact outdoor activities and services as “nonessential” is my current pet peeve; I imagine Europeans might regard official permission forms to leave the house similarly.
I don’t doubt eventually there will be, but pro-shutdown is really an overwhelmingly dominant position right now with people who control most of the news. My sister in law who is a stereotypical NYT junkie was arguing with me forcefully about the merits of shutdown being 100% the thing supported by science. She knew nothing of the antibody studies, that most models have been amended, etc.
This kind of talk is pretty common in the various “reopen” groups populated by hardcore shutdown opponents, but as Clutzy points out, this is still a pretty small/fringe group…
Well, the other commonality is the lack of nuance. ANSWER, Code Pink, etc were and are pretty crazy back in the day: I would say both similarly crazy and similarly unpopular to today’s “reopen now” protester groups. But they saw and publicized aspects of the essential ridiculousness and immorality of the establishment response to 9/11 much more loudly than most others were able. Which meant, unfortunately, that if you raised what now in retrospect look like moderate and reasonable concerns about that establishment response, you got lumped in with the ANSWER types.
Similarly, those of us who think that Sweden looks to have about the right balance– which, note, is way way stricter than “do nothing”– and that moving stricter lockdowns to the Swedish level would have a nonzero but acceptably small public health cost and very large benefit find it hard to articulate that position without being lumped in with the stupidest claims and antics of the “reopen everything” protest crowd.
Michigan making it illegal to buy seeds for vegetables was pretty clearly public health theatre.
Security theater is where you do things that are unproductive but look productive, to reassure people. Having the national guard send soldiers (with unloaded guns, apparently) to stand around in airports was security theater.
Michigan making it illegal to buy seeds for vegetables sounds more like plain old dumb policy–more like banning nail clippers from airplanes. Nobody feels more secure (rightly or wrongly) knowing that nail clippers were kept off the plane.
Meh, its really hard to distinguish for me. Someone roped off the playgrounds around here. Thats theater.
Playgrounds seem like an easy place for spread, what with kids touching all the same pieces of equipment.
Depends on where you live. In high temperature high humidity regions in sunlight (most of the American south), it seems that the virus can only survive for about 2-3 minutes on surfaces.
In other words, unless your kids are actively playing on the same playground equipment at the same time as other kids, the risk seems pretty damn negligible, where I live at least.
@Matt M this seems odd – the human body is pretty warm and humid and we know the virus can survive outside the body, do you have a source?
@purplehermann
https://www.dailywire.com/news/top-dhs-official-coronavirus-dies-fastest-in-sunlight-heat-humidity
I like the term. Some of the stuff seems outright counterproductive.
The outdoor activities bans you mention are, I’m assuming, motivated by fear of being accused of discrimination. Allowing tennis and golf but not basketball is the sort of stuff that gets into New York Times op eds.
In the park near me the baseball field was locked up. That’s about 33% of the park. Before it was locked people were walking around it at a safe distance. Now they’re packed tighter.
Locally, we saw families playing tennis together for the first few days of the lockdown; then they locked the tennis court area. (I’d say they were obviously families – usually one adult and 1 or 2 children.)
Seems that way now that we have mounting evidence that, while surface transmission can be a thing, outdoor surface transmission is mitigated quickly by exposure to heat and UV, and airborn droplet transmission is the larger risk.
A month ago, when the playgrounds were roped off near where I live, it seemed clearly within the realm of reasonable, if a little severe.
Yeah the park’s basketball hoops are zip tied and playgrounds are closed, but I don’t mind either of those decisions. But the baseball field is mostly just space. Around me we need as much space as we can get — every street is crowded if the weather is remotely nice
I’ve been using the term “security theater” to refer to some of the measures put in place supposedly to protect us all against Covid-19.
It didn’t even occur to me to try “public health theater” instead.
“public health theater” will never catch on. “Safety theater” maybe?
so georgia restaurants were allowed to reopen, and contrary to some predictions here, everything did not go back to pre covid levels. many places chose not to reopen, and many customers were hesitant to eat out
I don’t think anyone here or elsewhere was predicting significant gone-to-hellishness being observed in less than a week or two, so this is very premature.
I wrote up a whole comment saying meh’s comment was dumb, but it turned out I misread it, and I deleted it immediately after posting.
People’s behavior isn’t going back to pre-covid behavior, just because lockdowns end.
+1
We need at least another two weeks, before we can get anything from the data, and even then it will be really noisy. But honestly, I think as long as curve isn’t obviously trending exponential again, we don’t need to close things again.
There is of course a huge middle ground between “normal economy” and lockdown. Almost certainly the sweet spot is somewhere in that middle.
“Normal economy” is not a choice even if we wanted it to be, just like “no extra deaths” is not.
What if no government anywhere had implemented restrictions and the news media insisted that COVID was no big deal and most people didn’t have to take any extraordinary measures to protect themselves from it?
Even if we were in complete ignorance of the coronavirus, we were still going to take an economic hit from the surplus deaths.
And I guess it’s conceivable that meat-packing plants would continue to operate when so many workers keep getting mysteriously sick. But not likely.
Matt M:
Noble lies backfire, especially when they’re about observable things. Let’s imagine the mainstream US media and mainstream politicians had continued the “it’s just the flu, go out and party, the real problem is racism in thinking Chinese people are more likely to have it” line until the present day. New Yorkers and anyone in that area would notice with their own eyes that hospitals were overwhelmed and morgues were overloaded–with nobody taking any precautions and no official above-the-table preparation, that situation would be way worse. Imagine that line persisted up until today, two months into a terrible outbreak that killed a big pile of people.
Who still believes anything those media organs say at that point? Even the normiest of normies is treating the NYT as slightly less reliable than RT and the Weekly World News. Who will believe any pronouncement from the mayor of NYC or the governor of NY or the president, after they’ve visibly lied in ways that have huge personal consequences for lots of people, and got a bunch of people killed in the bargain. The best outcome available for them would be all those politicians permanently out of power, and the media organs out of business. The worst outcome would involve several of those political leaders dangling from trees and perhaps a civil war, because at the end of that process, once again, even the normiest of the normies would have zero faith in their government, and would see them (correctly) as people who’d put their own citizens into mass graves rather than be off-message and risk harming the economy.
My family supports three news sources–WSJ, Washington Post, and NPR. If they lied to us about something like this, gave us intentionally bad information to stay off message, when do you suppose we’d be sending any of them any more money? About a week after hell freezes over.
Later on, suppose the virus had been dealt with–we’d acquired herd immunity, or a vaccine was available. The respectable media organs of your society assure you that the vaccine is safe, and the political leaders all agree. How are you feeling about trusting them? Last time you trusted them, your mom died of pneumonia and you spent a month deathly ill and still can’t walk up a flight of stairs without being winded. Are you getting that shot? Are you believing them when they tell you it’s safe to go back to restaurants and stores? Nope, not ever.
Mainstream information sources already do some of this, and it has cost them and us as a society. Every time someone in a mainstream media outlet complains about antivaxers or online conspiracy theorists, I want to email them links to the NYT’s coverage leading into the war in Iraq, their coverage of IQ and educational issues, their coverage of the shooting in Ferguson, MO, and similar stuff, with the subject line “reap as you sow.” But that’s mostly about stuff that’s not so immediately observable. Do it in a way that gets a whole bunch of people killed, visibly, and you’ll spend those sources’ credibility forever.
I agree. The problem is that the media switched from one noble lie “it’s just the flu” to another “it’s a horrible plague that will definitely kill you even if you’re young and healthy and it will spontaneously appear in any place where two or more people gather in its name”
The current media coverage of COVID isn’t any less wrong than what they were saying in February. It’s just as wrong, but in the other direction.
@Matt M
(I know I will regret that question because you will have an example)
But who said it will defenitly kill you?
Everything I read is: It can kill you even if you are young.
And if it don’t kill you it can give you lung fibrosis to a degree that you need to visit a doctor regularly, rises your chance to get a stroke, fucks with your ability to taste and smell, and might even attack your brain, all of which might leave permanent damage.
We could just as well ask: Why do we ut billions into stroke medicin if it mainly hit’s old people?
DarkTigger,
I don’t have an example of a news organization saying “If you get COVID it will definitely kill you.”
What I do have are thousands of examples in various social media comments of people saying things that only make sense if you believe that is true.
Consider the recent example of a teacher who, encountering two kids playing on a playground, was reported to have said “I hope you catch COVID and die.” Is it reasonable to assume this person understands that the IFR for COVID is somewhere between 0-2% (and significantly less for the teenagers she was specifically berating)?
The hysterics among us seem to be making a lot of very incorrect assumptions about this disease. They got them from the mainstream media. Not by the mainstream media literally saying “this disease kills everyone who gets it” but by saying more general things like “stay at home, save lives” which could probably be evaluated as “not entirely false” by a neutral fact checker, but still gives a very misleading impression (that if you don’t stay at home, someone will probably die as a result).
So can lightning bolts. Numbers matter.
Well, they ought to. The insistence that everything has to fit into either the “Absolutely Safe” bin or the “Intolerably Dangerous” one has caused no end of stupidity, and COVID-19 only amplifies that.
I’ve read that in many jurisdictions, the median COVID death is actually higher than the life expectancy (no I do not have a link/source handy, feel free to not believe me).
@Scoop
A third of USAmericans are obese. Obesety is an privious health problem that is known to be a risk factor for covid. This might affect the 0.5-2% number of people with out previous health risks.
In Europe EuroMoMo has reported an rise in the exess deaths in the group of the 15-65 year old in the last few weeks, so it does hit people who we exepct to live and work for at least a couple of more years.
In the US so far, the population fatality rate for Americans under 45 (all health conditions) is about 1-in-375,000
Which makes “COVID can kill young people too!” the exact sort of “technically true but unbelievably misleading” statement that modern media seems to be almost exclusively built around.
News lady on some channel as I walked past the break room just now said something like “No matter how much you want to go out, remember, it’s still safer inside.”
It’s always safer inside, barring an earthquake, fire, hurricane, etc. The percentage is highly relevant.
The fact that the mainstream media is completely unwilling to put COVID risks in context by comparing them to fatality rates from other things (whether it’s the flu or automobile crashes or lightning strikes or whatever) should, itself, speak volumes.
The only thing they are willing to do is repeat ad-nauseum “this thing is dangerous and can kill you.” Once again, not technically false. But chairs can kill you too and we haven’t banned those (yet).
Sorry, I was unclear. What I wanted to say was: The prevalence of people with health risks puts the death rates for people into an perspective. Yeah your chances are really good if you are under 65, and have no previous condition, put the precondition isn’t true for a lot of people.
Various thoughts:
1. There is no policy that gets us no economic damage, and no policy that gets us no additional deaths. Either extreme still has big losses in the thing it’s trying to save.
1.1 There are side-effects from both kinds of losses that spillover into the other. Economic harm will lead to health harm; health harm will lead to economic harm.
2. The best policy is probably between the two extremes.
2.1 But many policies between the two extremes might be strictly worse than either extreme. The “even with no law against murder we still won’t have a lot of murder” example elsewhere illustrates this. If something is banned, it might be better to really be banned [1] for everyone rather than letting your altruists take one for the team and be destroyed.
3. Even where the virus is serious, if people have stuck with the social distancing guidelines, they need some visible reward and signs that things are getting better. So nearly everywhere that has gone through some lockdown should be opening up some things, relative to where they are now. This doesn’t mean you have to let everything go. But look at the places where you can get the biggest economic bang and/or put in the best precautions and/or the least marginal unit of risk is created, and give it a go.
3.1 The messaging on this needs to be clear. “Despite the continued danger, we think this is a prudent risk we can afford to take.”
3.2 Different places should open up different things, based on what they think is best. All models are wrong, but some are useful. And we can get real-world data showing what really is and what really isn’t safe to open up by watching the people making their best decisions and the results of that.
[1] This doesn’t mean 100% compliance. But it might mean 99% compliance and the cheaters aren’t flaunting it.
FWIW, I fully agree with this.
The statement of “healthy people are at low-risk of dying from COVID” is true, but there is an issue with it because most people don’t realize just how many things technically count as “unhealthy” and they don’t see “manageable diabetes” or “top quintile of BMI” or “high blood pressure” as unhealthy, even though it is.
I’ve said this before too.
I wonder if people would agree or disagree with the following statement:
The worst case scenario here is not “millions die from COVID” or “we suffer a huge economic depression.” The worst case is that we get both.
My worry is that current policy of lockdowns, but with minimal enforcement and huge exceptions, practically guarantees we’re going to get both.
Unless you seriously believe we can keep this level of lockdowns in place until a vaccine is discovered (which might possibly not ever happen), then the lockdowns are doing damage, but are not saving any lives in the long run (excepting the sense in which we are preventing hospital capacity overloads, in the original meaning of “flatten the curve”).
@Matt M
So okay let’s play:
In the US
– the flu season 2019/2020 killed according to the CDC 24,000 – 62,000 people (remember those numbers are an estimate compared to the CFR we have for Covid-19)
– Car crashes killed 38800 people according to the NSC
– Lightning killed 0 people according to the National Weather Service.
In the last two months Covid-19 killed 58,123.
So despite massiv interventions this deases killed about as much people in two months as the flu did in seven, and moce than car accidents in 12.
(Also car accidents in Wuhan does not cause deaths in NYC just saying)
@DarkTigger Thanks for bringing data into it!
I so overestimated how many people are directly killed by lightning.
Matt M:
But that’s true of all risks ever. Your kid was never likely to be molested by a stranger or a priest, you were never likely to be killed by a terrorist, etc. That’s just the way most media sources are, both because of incentives and because of statistical innumeracy.
@Scoop
The Census estimates under-44 NYC population at 5,097,000. COVID deaths for those ages are 487 confirmed, 112 probable. So the mortality risk in Plaguetown, USA for COVID-19 if you’re under 44 is about 0.012%. Or 1 in 8509. About the same as the (all-age) risk of dying in a car accident in a year. Or, looking at that same chart, not as likely as dying of poisoning in a year. But about that one: you may recall that calls to poison control centers are up by a considerable amount….
There are a lot of ways the virus can fuck you up short of killing you.
Same goes for poisons and car accidents. Leave the goalposts where they were.
Gotta keep in mind that the various levels of lockdowns _probably_ lowered traffic accidents, tho.
I’m pretty sure this is mainly directed at me, and my general anti-lockdown stance.
I feel like I’ve acknowledged the circular nature of this debate many times, but I’m not sure that you have. All I’ll say is that “even if the lockdowns are lifted, people will still stay at home” seems to me to be an argument in favor of lifting the lockdowns, not opposed to it.
If you can achieve similar social distancing results without heavy-handed government policy that restricts the basic rights of individuals, that’s probably the best bet. If you don’t think that will happen, then you agree that lockdowns are altering behavior.
It’s an argument, but I don’t think it’s a sufficient argument.
If the government repealed the law against murder, most people probably wouldn’t kill anyone, but a few would, and they’d cause a lot of problems for the rest of us. Similarly, supposing that most people would still stay at home in the absence of lockdowns, there’d still presumably be some who wouldn’t. If those some then get the disease and spread it to many other people (maybe at grocery stores?), that would cause some problems.
I maintain that it’d cause fewer problems than continued lockdowns, but that’s a longer argument.
Further, if the government repealed the law against murder, people would take private measures to avoid being murdered–probably including every adult walking around armed all the time and maybe including a contract with some criminal gang to go kill the SOB who knocked me off if I turn up dead.
Yes. The bother of taking those private measures is among the problems that it’d cause.
IIRC, you and several others have rather vociferously argued that economic woes were the result of a failure of supply (lockdown order) not a failure of demand.
This doesn’t contradict his position at all.
Just to be perfectly clear, my position is not that even if everyone did exactly as I demanded, there would be zero economic impacts associated with COVID.
My position is that the economic impacts would be far less severe than they will be in a reality where people order huge swaths of the economy shut down, for everyone.
How much less severe? I don’t have an exact number handy, but I’d be willing to say at least 2x.
How are places like Sweden or Nicaragua doing, economically?
I wish I knew! It seems like economic statistics are one of those things that tend to lag by at least a quarter, if not longer.
I suspect we won’t really be able to answer the “which approach was best” question until at least a year from now, at the earliest…
@Scoop, you’d also have to compare it to data from before and to other countries with strict lockdown measures.
This is the first hit I found for Swedish unemployment rates, which is somewhat up from last year, but not significantly. Then again, neither are the same graphs for Belgium, Germany or France.
Lockdown orders produce a reduction in supply (factories and businesses closed) and a reduction in demand (fewer consumers for many goods and services).
Ending the lockdowns, or not implementing them in the first place, would result in more supply, more demand, and a stronger economy from whichever direction you look.
Not all the way to pre-coronavirus normal, insofar as people are still apprehensive about going out. Maybe 50% of normal. And since this predictably didn’t turn out to be the one-month temporary measure that was first promised, odds are pretty good that’s close to where we want to be and maybe ought to have been all along.
Yes, I completely agree. I made that point at the time.
And, also, Covid-19 itself does both of these things (not as much as lockdowns though).
We are well above 50% of normal already. 2nd quarter US economic activity is estimated to drop 20% to 30%. This is unprecedentedly large.
But I don’t know how you can be at all sanguine about what the “right” level is.
50% of the economic activity impacted by the lockdowns, if that wasn’t obvious. And if it was 50% of the total economy, we wouldn’t be having this discussion because we wouldn’t be having lockdowns.
if the lockdowns are lifted, people will still stay home is an argument in favor of lifting them.
if the lockdowns are lifted, the economy will still be hurt is an argument in favor of keeping them.
this was just showing that the argument that we can return the economy to normal is wrong.
Fair enough.
I agree that COVID will produce economic impacts detrimental to the economy, and that there is no course of action available that will completely prevent this.
and i agree we shouldn’t overdo these lockdowns, and we should end them as soon as possible.
:
handshake:Edit:
:elbow bump:
thanks @Nick!
@meh
Could you do an elbow bump instead?
How about air-fiving from an appropriate physical distance?
Take it to zoom, you guys.
For someone like me, restaurants and beauty salons were never my problem with the lockdown. Its the other things that look just like a grocery store, but sell other things, like an Iphone store, or repair shop. And the various “nonessential” factories that actually are quite essential, particularly in electronics.
I currently work for Best Buy (for another two months). It is my understanding that Best Buy is still open everywhere, but providing curbside service. Are there some states that have forced Best Buy down completely? The stores are certainly open in my state of Minnesota. I agree that electronics is essential in the lockdown economy.
The best buy nearest me is shut down. I don’t know if that is a choice or a requirement (they don’t have a good spot for curbside), but I couldn’t run over there to get new headphones when my mic stopped working.
Annoying thing: big-box stores near me which have gone to curbside-only won’t allow the curbside purchase of ammunition or firearms.
PTSD in ancient times – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990296 points out https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6ssm/are_there_any_indications_of_combat_ptsd_in/cbbvfib/ that in turn has claim that PTSD manifested in a different form in ancient times rather than not existing.
What I find most interesting is that the first (?) materialist explanation, “shell shock”, turned out to be false just like ghosts. We didn’t get a more accurate understanding of war trauma by the early 20th century, just an anti-supernatural paradigm.
The early 20th century explanation was still much closer to the truth than “ghosts did it,” though, and paved the way for the actual truth to be discovered. In much the same way that “the Earth is round” is vastly closer to the truth than “the Earth is flat,” and paved the way for us eventually discovering that the Earth was actually an oblate spheroid. The flat-Earth hypothesis never could’ve led to the oblate spheroid hypothesis, just like the ghost hypothesis never could’ve led to a nuanced understanding of post-traumatic stress.
Is that true? The “Shell Shock” theory was that it was due to the physical trauma of brains rattling around skulls due to concussive force, wasn’t it?
Whereas PTSD is actually caused by the psychological feeling of helplessness and prolonged dread and repeated and unexpected terror? Correct me if I’m wrong on either count.
Given the above, ghosts, despite not actually existing, sound closer to the explanation than shell shock.
I believe that TBI and PTSD related to each other, though.
Note that blast wave pressure can cause TBI on its own.
Correction noted!
Interesting! So to our current knowledge, it has both TBI and geistig (psychological) components.
In the early 1800s, doctors treating the new wave of railway crash victims noticed similar symptoms and diagnosed “railway spine.” The theory was that their spine’s molecules were “deranged” in the crash from being whipped around, and caused problems in the nervous system.
Before shell shock, we had “soldier’s heart”, or “Da Costa’s Syndrome”, an explanation for the change in Civil War era soldiers based, literally, in their hearts, which were suspected of being damaged by the physical demands and privation of war. One of the symptoms is orthostatic intolerance, that feeling, once one has stood up, of preferring to sit or lay back down.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.CIR.53.5.749
I’ve been reading a *great* blog by a military historian who strongly disagrees with this perspective: https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
(This is seriously one of my favorite blogs now, from analysis of armor and armies in all your favorite fantasy books, to coverage of historical war poetry, to chemical weapons…)
Lollops over to linked site
First thing eyes fall upon is a mention of Bertran de Born
Hey I know that name! From Dante!
Well, you’ve sold me on this blog 🙂
Also an Ezra Pound poem.
I read this blog for DMing a game where logistics of war and city building were an important part of the game and really liked it.
Some of the argument over ancient vs modern PTSD reminds me of Scott’s observation on reading The Body Keeps The Score that “wizardry” – e.g. ritualized BS – might actually help some people with PTSD. Some people with PTSD seem to respond well to being formally told by someone they trust that all of the ghosts are definitely gone, you’re welcome, please deposit your denarii in the vase by the door.
Variants on the scorpion and the frog, some of them from a game theory point of view
How much fun can you have with a fable?
More fun than that: https://www.metafilter.com/186768/For-some-reason-I-never-considered-this-possibility#inline-7918429
That was really fun to read – thanks!
I think part of what I liked about it is that it really lays bare how fungible story outcomes are. I feel like one weird fallacy I’ve run into (not here) is people saying things like “Fictional story X teaches us the dangers of Y.” No it doesn’t! Someone just wrote a story well that happens to resonate with you.
The best I’ve been able to steelman it is that humans have decent heuristics for evaluating the likeliness of a scenario if it’s presented to them, especially ones they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. It still seems horrendously vulnerable to bias, though.
Reminds me of a youtube video I came across a while ago [content warning: civil but passionate atheism]:
https://youtu.be/NfyoDgszas0
Thank you– that was excellent.
It’s a rare pleasure to see a video– perhaps especially an atheist video– with ideas I haven’t seen before.
I’m glad you got something out of it! This channel is a rare specimen of (for lack of a better phrase) atheist propaganda that makes high-effort, well-thought-out content rather than just constantly trying to dunk on Christians.
Brilliant! Reminds me of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/28/two-wolves-and-a-sheep/
Sour grapes (starting with the original fable for those who haven’t heard it):
A fox came across some grapes hanging from a vine. He reached up as high as he could, and even tried jumping, but he could not reach them. He gave up and walked away, saying as he did so, “it’s just as well, those grapes were sour anyway, and not fit for consumption.” Moral: It’s easy to disparage that which one cannot attain.
A fox came across some grapes hanging from a vine. They were very low to the ground, so he could reach them easily. He began to eat them, and then sputtered and spit them out. A dog had peed on them. Moral: Don’t eat fruit that is below dog-height.
A fox came across some grapes hanging from a vine. He could not reach them, so he walked away saying “ah, who needs those sour grapes anyway”. A watching raven mocked the fox: “What a fool. He’s just mad that he can’t reach the grapes.” The raven flew up to the vine and began eating the grapes himself. He sputtered and spit them out. Moral: Sometimes the grapes actually are sour.
A fox came across a grape vine, with many bunches of grapes hanging from it. He gathered all the ones he could reach, and enjoyed a very pleasant snack. Then he continued on his way. Then another fox came along. She tried to pick some of the remaining grapes, but could not reach any of them. “There is no more low-hanging fruit!” she lamented. Moral: Something something, efficient market hypothesis, something something.
Two foxes came across a grape vine with some grapes hanging from it. It had been a difficult year, and they were both on the brink of starvation. They fought each other bitterly for the right to eat the grapes. Eventually one fox managed to kill the other. He went to pick the grapes, but could not reach them. “Eh,” he said, “the bastard deserved to die anyway”.
A fox came upon some grapes he could not reach. So he waited, and watched. Soon the farmer came along with a ladder and picked the grapes and brought them into the farm house. Through a window, the fox watched the farmer smash up the grapes and put them into a barrel. Many months went by, and the fox returned often to see what was done with the barrel. One day, he saw the farmer putting the contents of the barrel into bottles, and loading the bottles onto a cart. The fox stealthily approached the cart, and stole a few of the bottles. The bottles were labelled “red wine vinegar”, but foxes cannot read. The fox picked up a bottle, popped the cork out, and took a swig…
Grapes are toxic to dogs and can cause kidney failure, I wonder if this is true for foxes as well.
That blog has some great spins on a lot of stories, including some incredible extensions to the “Nate the Snake” story (aka The Longest Joke in the World)
Also from Tumblr:
Once upon a time there was a city called Omelas…
There once was a woman who built her house upon the sand…
Ah, a deconstruction of Omelas is just what I didn’t know I needed!
And one missing variant from one of my favorite game settings:
“But little frog… I can swim”
Did the frog make it all the way across the road?
No, it did not.
The version of the story is from the L5R game setting, specifically the Scorpion clan. It is told to the clan’s founder (as a variant of the more common version of the story), who went on to deliberately lose a tournament and found a clan that frequently relies on being underestimated.
You are a German citizen living in Berlin during the height of the Second World War. One of your friends lets slip that he’s hiding Jewish refugees in his attic. Later, the SS come to your door asking if you’ve seen or heard anything about those refugees. You could protect the refugees simply by saying “no,” but that would require lying. On the other hand, giving an honest answer would assuredly result in the imprisonment and likely death of the refugees. What is the ethical course of action here?
1. Lie to the officers. Lying isn’t morally wrong in this situation, since saving lives is a much higher moral priority.
2. Tell the truth, even if it results in the refugees being killed. You can’t be responsible for the immoral actions of the SS officers; you can only be responsible for your own actions, and you have a moral responsibility to avoid lying.
3. Admit that you know the location of the refugees (thus refusing to tell a lie), but refuse to tell the SS officers where that location is (thus refusing to put the refugees in harm’s way). Alternatively, stay silent and refuse to answer their questions at all. You’ll almost certainly be arrested, and likely even tortured or killed, but it’s the only option that doesn’t involve wronging either the SS officers or the refugees, so it would be a worthwhile sacrifice.
4. Do whatever you want or whatever most benefits you, since morality is a spook and nothing actually matters beyond self-gratification.
Personally, I’d go with the first option, and I get the sense that most people would do the same, but I’m also a consequentialist and a moral pragmatist. For someone who subscribes to a deontological view of morality, adheres to virtue ethics, or has a religious basis for their moral code (and follows a religion in which lying is considered a sin), would the second or third options seem more ethical? And for an egoist or nihilist who rejects morality altogether, is there any valid reason to protect the refugees? After all, you’d potentially be putting yourself at risk by lying to the officers, without getting anything out of it for yourself.
The best course of action is probably to stay silent. If they give you an out, as far as poor wording or a too specific question (“Have you seen these refugees?”), take it. I think under such circumstances most folks would lie, though, and I can hardly blame them. I probably would, too.
It’s good that you mention this, because lots of people are not very good liars. A lot of these examples are rigged by assuming that when you lie everything turns out perfectly, but that is just not true.
I am not convinced that it is viable solution in case of someone asking you specifically. In case of addressing crowd – OK. But with “SS come to your door asking”…
At that point refusing to answer will cause SS to torture you/your family and/or going through the entire building.
I don’t know what you mean by viable solution. Of course it is not likely to turn out well; none of your options is likely to when SS officers bang on your door, although some are more likely to than others. But consequences are not how our actions are judged. In such an extraordinarily terrible situation, I can hardly blame a person for lying, but even less can I absolve it.
A deontological view wouldn’t necessarily preclude lying. The rules don’t have to be simple.
I lie. No duty of truth is owed to monsters.
@The Nybbler: Your answer and Baeraad’s come to closest to my own position. But for the sake of argument, would you apply the principle that “no duty of truth is owed to Nazis” unconditionally, even if no innocent lives were at stake? What if the Nazis were directly harmed as a result of your lie?
For instance, let’s say you knew some men in the German Resistance. Would it be morally acceptable to give the SS officers a false location with the intent of sending them into a Resistance ambush, where the officers themselves would be the ones facing near-certain death? Or would that be going too far?
What if you merely knew about an ambush that was going to happen, and didn’t play any part in it yourself? Would you have a moral obligation to save the lives of the SS officers by warning them of the Resistance plot, or is it acceptable to stay silent and allow them to go to their deaths?
Personally, I think sending them into an ambush would be justified, given the extreme circumstances and the reprehensible actions of the Nazi Party as a whole. But I realize that such a course of action is even harder to justify under traditional morality.
I have a pretty firm no lying stance.
I also have a pretty firm “No killing stance.” Honorable combat was nice and romantic, but if you can kill someone, you can probably lie to them. So, given the Nazis in this example being the aggressors and deserving defeat in combat, I think lying to them as a strategem of war is probably merited.
There may be more difficult cases where the conflict is not so one-sided morally and you as a citizen of polity X have a duty to the armed forces of nation x engaged in honorable combat, with a mirrored perspective on the opposition side.
Was there any serious German resistance? I’m not aware of any, and Googling doesn’t turn up anything of any real consequence.
As far as I know, Germans generally didn’t think of the Nazis as an occupying force, because they weren’t.
Yeah, while I’m aware of a few small insider plots to remove Hitler specifically, it seems like that was more of a “this guy specifically is nuts and will lead us to ruin and someone else could do a better job at all of this” rather than “this entire system is wicked and immoral and corrupt and needs to be replaced by something entirely different.”
Canaris, at least, turned against the Nazis over the scope and official approval of war crimes during the invasion and early occupation of Poland, at a time when Hitler was still leading Germany to victories and seemed likely to continue. I doubt he was the only one, just the most highly placed.
And I’m not sure, but the Nazis may have set a new record for Evil in being so thoroughly Evil that their own spymaster ratted them out over the evilness. I’m having a hard time thinking of other historical examples.
@John Schilling
That’s really what I was getting at. While there were individuals who turned on the Nazis (both low and high in the chain), there wasn’t really a capital-R Resistance like there was in France/Denmark/Poland/etc.
Of course there was German resistance! Look up White Rose, led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, for just one example. Other groups are mentioned such as the Kreisau Circle.
Purely incidentally: Sophie’s boyfriend Fritz, ambivalent about the Nazi regime, nonetheless joined the Wehrmacht, reasoning that he was fighting for Germany and not for Nazism. Sophie wrote to him in 1940,
Odd that this person who cared so much about Jewish lives thought there was something wrong with lying.
There was resistance to what Germany was doing. Dietrick Bonnhaufer had relatives who were involved in many attempts at killing Adolf Hitler and Bonnhaufer himself eventually become more involved.
When Adolf initially came to power there was more resistance. But I believe that he and his cronies spent the time leading up to WW2 purging all internal political resistance.
The rise and fall of the 3rd Reich highlights many such attempts at usurping Adolf’s power. I think most resistance focused on Adolf because he really was more like a charismatic Dictator than an elected official.
To Nazis? Sure; it’s basically a given that their whole purpose is evil. But it’s wider than that; there are a whole lot of people I simply don’t owe an answer to, and if they won’t accept that or will commit harm if I refuse to answer, there’s no problem with lying to them. As major as Nazis asking about the Jews or as minor as a salesman who won’t stop bugging me until I give him some lie that indicates he’s got no chance of a sale.
Even better, since they’re actual Nazis. At best they are cogs in a murder machine, and if they get broken, so much the better.
I’m reminded of Corrie and Betsy Ten Boom, who were themselves hiding Jews in the Netherlands during the war and disagreed about this question. Corrie said she’d take your first option for the same reasons you give; Betsy insisted the second option was the only ethical choice. Their disagreement persisted until the SS actually came to search their house, with just enough warning for their Jewish guests to hide in the secret cellar.
The SS demanded “Where are the Jews hiding?”; Betsy – visibly frantic – blurted out “Under the table!”
They glanced under the table, totally missed the trapdoor to the cellar hiding under the rug, yelled at Betsy for lying, and proceeded to search the rest of the house and leave fruitlessly.
Betsy would later die in a concentration camp, while Corrie would survive the war to become a famous Christian speaker and author. In her autobiography, she could only conclude from this scene that God would honor whichever ethical choice you make here as long as you’re sincerely trying to do good.
Indeed; Brandon discussed this at Siris a few years ago:
Maybe I’m mis-remembering or thinking of another book/person, but I seem to remember a similar incident that Corrie talks about where SS officers come to a house and ask the children of the house where the Jews are being hidden. The child then answers truthfully, but then laughs shortly afterwards. The officer thinks the child is playing a joke on him and doesn’t end up searching the location.
I guess “you tell the truth but the soldiers ignore the refugees” is a good outcome, but it’s not one you can plan in advance. If you deliberately tell the truth in such a way that they’ll think it’s a joke, that’s basically the same thing as lying, but riskier. After all, once you’ve stated where the refugees are, the soldiers might decide to look for them any time.
I also think the ethics of “you are personally hiding refugees” are different from “you know about someone hiding refugees”. After all, in the first case the refugees being found is also very bad for you (and you can’t really claim you didn’t know about them). In the second case, it’s mostly just bad for someone else, although you might conceivably get in trouble for lying about it. So from a purely selfish perspective, in the first case you should lie, and in the second case you should tell the truth.
I disagree.
If you tell the truth, you are telling the soldiers that you knew where the refugees were and didn’t tell anyone until they demanded the information. That’s more likely to get you in trouble than lying, assuming you are a competent liar and the soldiers don’t already know that you have the information.
I’d imagine you’d still be in less trouble than someone who was actively hiding refugees in their house, though.
And for what it’s worth: When I asked the same question on a different forum, one person did indeed respond with “I wouldn’t wait for them to come to my house, I’d tell the SS in advance,” which I suppose is the optimal answer if your only concern is self-preservation. (Though it’s also challenging the hypothetical to a small degree.)
@DavidFriedman
That’s a fair point. But in case they did find out you had the information, you’d probably be better off telling them now rather than never. I guess being selfish is not as easy as I thought.
@LadyJane
By that standard, isn’t the person hiding the refugees already lying by hiding them in the first place? That would mean them lying vs not lying at the moment they are asked would barely make a difference. Unless we suppose that lying in response to a question is worse than lying by omission, either morally or in terms of the risk to yourself.
@LadyJane Was the forum 4chan? That’s about the answer I would expect there.
@chrisminor0008
Funny, but that’s a legitimate course of action from the assumption that one’s own life and well-being overrides all other concerns.
@chrisminor0008: As HarmlessFrog pointed out, I think there’s a difference between “I’d help the Nazis so I don’t get arrested/killed myself” and “I’d help the Nazis because Nazism is awesome.” Though a few people did give pro-Nazi answers: One person argued “The SS wouldn’t come to my door because if I’d been living in Nazi Germany, I’d be in the SS myself, and I’d immediately arrest my friend and kill the refugees he was harboring.” Someone else gave a similar answer, with the caveat that he’d try to “redeem” his friend (by convincing him of the righteousness of Nazism) instead of arresting him or selling him out. On the other side of the spectrum, someone argued that lying to the SS officers was justified because the Jews are the Chosen People, so anything that helps them is inherently justified, even if it harms non-Jews.
@LadyJane
…Were they all edgelording or something? This forum you’re describing sounds awful.
@chrisminor0008, @HarmlessFrog, @Nick: I think it’s worth pointing out that prioritizing self-interest doesn’t necessarily require one to comply with the SS and sell out the Jews. Tarpitz’s answer below is one example; you might choose to protect the Jews because it makes you feel better about yourself, or because turning them in would make you feel guilty, or because you’re personally loyal to your friend, or because you have a sentimental attachment to the people you’re protecting. None of those require a belief in objective morality or even an adherence to any sort of comprehensive ethos.
Another example comes from a response I got on a different forum: “I would lie to the SS officers because I could never be satisfied living under such an oppressive regime, so it’s in my personal self-interest to sabotage that regime, even if it puts my life at risk.” And, similarly, the old Martin Niemöller poem could be interpreted through the lens of rational egoism; the SS might be rounding up Jews today, but they could just as easily be sending you off to the forced labor camps tomorrow.
I take the point of these stories to be that you don’t control outcomes. Most people assume that telling the truth will cost lives and that telling a lie will save them rather than admit that almost everything is out of your control during such times.
Honestly, this seems like a cop-out to me. Yes, technically anything could happen at any time, so there’s no way to know for sure what the consequences of your actions might be. Kant brought that up in his axe murderer scenario: Maybe lying to the axe murderer to protect your friend would inadvertently result in your friend’s death anyway (for instance, if the axeman goes in the opposite direction of your friend’s house, but happens to run into your friend on the street while he’s out shopping). Maybe telling the truth would’ve resulted in your friend surviving (e.g. if the axe murderer heads in the direction of your friend’s house and gets picked up by police along the way). We can’t know for sure, so instead we should just stay true to our moral principles.
But I never found that argument particularly persuasive. Sure, we can’t know for sure what will happen, but we can make some very accurate guesses. “Give up your friend’s location” seems much more likely to result in “your friend gets murdered by the axeman” than “lie to the axe-wielding murderer.” And sure, you can find real life examples where someone told a Nazi officer “the Jews are under the table” and the officer didn’t bother to check for a trapdoor, but I get the sense that those examples are cherry-picked. How many more instances were there in which being honest with the Nazis simply resulted in the Nazis finding and killing the refugees?
That sort of moral philosophy might be appealing to the devoutly religious, if they have faith that God will ensure that virtuous acts lead to virtuous outcomes (which seems to be the implication of the anecdote about Betsy Ten Boom), or if they’re so unconcerned with the material world that they simply don’t care what happens on Earth so long as they don’t tarnish their immortal souls through sinful behavior. But I can’t really see how a secular version of it would work.
It isn’t a cop out, it is an observation that morality for an individual is about what you can actually control.
The cherry picking is being done by the scenario. You do not have a good idea about what would happen in 1943 if the SS came knocking on your door. You cannot with any certainty think that you can alter the chances of the Jews being found by your words*, nor can you confidently predict what happens to your family, friends, neighbors etc in the branching aftermaths of your speech. Pretending that you can say ‘lying will save 0.X lives’ is exactly that, pretense. The real decisions are all in the build up- are you actually the person harboring Jews in defiance of a brutal regime? Are you the sort of person that will inspire others to do good deeds at great personal risk? Not ‘imagine you have a chance to be a hero in your own head, should you take it’?
*With the exception being specifically showing the SS where the Jews are hiding.
That asterisk is hiding a lot. Of course I can. If I tell the SS that I know nothing (keeping in mind that I’m not hiding the Jews, I merely happen to know of someone hiding Jews), that’s going to be a lot better than “Sure, they’re at Bob’s house”, or even “Yeah I’ve seen some Jews sneaking around outside but I don’t know where they’re hiding” (in which case they are likely to search more thoroughly) or “Fuck you SS, I ain’t telling where they are” (in which case they have ways of making me talk that may not be perfect but aren’t worthless either). Maybe I can do better by pointing them to Dantooine (that is, some place where Jews used to hide but no longer do), but it’s likely the SS is as smart as Governor Tarkin and will figure out I lied, and that’s going to go badly for me, and may or may not help the actual Jews.
Only because you are constructing a scenario in your head of a static once off interaction with the Nazi state where you get to control all of the parameters.
I’m using the scenario as given. The SS is at the door, asking if I know about any Jews. I do. In this scenario it is reasonable to believe that my words and actions with respect to the SS will have some effect on what happens to the Jews. Saying otherwise is fighting with the hypothetical.
Oh no, I wouldn’t want to fight the hypothetical, its so smart and deep and penetrating.
The whole point is that the hypothetical is set up to make it sound easy and predicable but what the ACTUAL STORIES from people who hid Jews show that real life is in fact messy and hard to predict. Setting up hypotheticals with no uncertainty gives you no insight into life or morality.
I think I best fit the definition of a virtue ethics, and I’d choose the first option also. Honesty is a virtue, but so is compassion. Lying is bad, but so is being callous to the suffering of others.
As for why I wouldn’t just refuse to answer the question, well, firstly because then the Nazis would know I knew something, and they might well start looking more closely at my known associates, or torture the information out of me. But also because I consider self-preservation to itself be a virtue. Again, lying is bad, but it’s less bad than allowing myself to be arrested and maybe tortured or executed.
And yes, that does mean that in a lot of situations I would consider confessing to an actual crime to be the wrong thing for an actual criminal to do, while I would also consider the police trying by any legal means to get a confession out of the criminal to be the right thing for them to do. Which is a bit odd, I’ll grant you, but that’s what’s intuitively feels right to me.
+1 I pretty much completely agree with this. I think I value “not lying” much less than most people in the rationalist discussion of ethics. I can understand where they’re coming from: in the fields they care about (communicating science, building an ethics module for our future AI overlords) “not lying” is a very important value. But I think in most everyday situations, the “no telling falsehoods” ethics espoused by people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Sam Harris are unintuitive and often counterproductive.
I’m not sure it would. Because torture and execution are unjust punishments for almost any crime. If the punishment is grossly unjust, I don’t believe the police are correct in trying to arrest you for it, unless they are doing their best to soften the punishment upon you to prevent worse, I guess.
And, if the crime you committed was heinous enough to merit the execution accompanying being arrested for it, then you are obligated to confess, beg for mercy, and go to your death.
There are situations where two people following their duties come into conflict, of course. Lawyers, of course, though neither should lie about it. In some cases soldiers.
I wouldn’t hesitate to lie my head off, nor would I expend the tiniest bit of mental energy trying to avoid a direct lie while still leading the SS officers into a false belief. If God has a problem with this choice, too bad. I don’t approve of all of His actions either.
Yes. This isn’t a situation you evaluate according to your moral system. It’s a test vector you use to verify your moral system.
I’m religious and believe that lying is a very serious sin. I would also have no moral qualms with lying in this scenario, since telling the truth is essentially the same as sentencing innocent people to death.
Different people have different opinions about whether this particular lie is considered a sin. Regardless, if I must ask for forgiveness, I’d much rather do it for lying than for knowingly getting someone killed.
5. You tell the truth since, even though you disagree with their politics and sympathize with the jews and your friend, the SS represents the government and rightful authority, and it is your duty to be loyal to it.
All right, so the SS and nazis are just our current day devil, i.e. pure essence of evil. But I think my case is more relevant. Let’s say there is a ravaging virus going around, and you think it is pretty harmless, and that everybody will get it in the end, so the difference is whether victims suffer now or in a couple of months. Also, you believe that a lockdown has severe consequences economically and socially, and likely costs more lives than the disease could conceivably claim. Yet, authorities institute lockdown. Do you respect it?
This is pretty much my position, and my answer is “yes”, I pretty much follow the official advice.
I think an important distinction can and should be made here. There’s a difference between a broad policy that may cause harm of unknown severity to an unknown quantity of people, and an immediate deadly threat to specific people whose lives directly depend on your actions.
In the former case, there’s a reasonable justification for obeying the law, even if you think it does more harm than good. After all, virtually any policy decision could potentially cause some amount of harm to somebody, through action or inaction. If we all refused to obey every law that we personally believed was more harmful than helpful, it wouldn’t be long before there were people disobeying every law, and we’d quickly find ourselves in a state of total chaos – not the sort of anarchy espoused by political anarchists, but rather anarchy in the Hobbesian sense, a war of all against all.
In the latter case, though, I’d argue that the immediate preservation of innocent lives takes precedent over following the law.
I’m not convinced this distinction is the central one. If it’s a group of armed jews that come knocking on your door, and you have gotten wind that your friend is hiding an SS officer and fromer KZ guard running from justice… you would still lie to the police?
But clearly, the loyalty argument works as a Schelling point of sorts, it’s the default policy when there are no other strong reasons for going another way. When consequences are uncertain or vague, obedience to authorities becomes the default.
Yes, of course. But this doesn’t depend on whether I agree with some of their specific policies or not. And if people only obey the laws they agree with, we can just dispense with the laws altogether.
Is it possible for an authority to not be rightful in your opinion?
Like LadyJane, I don’t think the two situations are analogous.
Furthermore, I think the rigid pro-authority stance, especially when invoked in the hypothetical WWII scenario, throws a red flag for potential edge-lording. I get that individualism, questioning authority, etc. are often commoditized and cliched past the point of incoherence (not to mention obnoxiousnes) in our society, but that doesn’t make “it is your duty to be loyal to the government and rightful authority” a necessarily true statement, or even meaningful beyond the cheap purpose of shocking people.
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm
Under Catholic interpretation it would be OK to outright kill this SS officers. Though knowingly burning their house with an innocent child inside would not be OK.
I am going to assume that lying is also fine.
—————
Also, for example, defense against Nazi Germany invading your country is also perfectly fine.
Both of these are false. Defense is legitimate only when defending against an aggressor, and you can’t respond with intent to kill or with immoderate violence. Lying is always a sin.
Why this part would be relevant here? People coming to my home to murder innocent people certainly qualify as aggressors.
As I understand that there is a difference between “I want to kill Foobar, now he is a SS officer so I finally have a reason to murder him” or “I want to kill Nazis” (not OK) and “I want to protect other people and my actions will have side effect of dead SS officers” (OK).
(If I am wrong, please correct me – and I am likely to be wrong, fortunately I never had reason to check what are recommendation in that case or think deeper what is OK, though my initial thought is that lying in this case is the best solution)
I would hope not! 🙂 I’ve never had to use lethal force, either.
I don’t think it’s that clearcut. They aren’t coming to your home to murder people, they are coming to your home for information. Of course if you refuse them and they unholster their guns you are justified responding in kind. But I don’t think you can just open the door and blast them away.
That’s true, but you can’t kill them when disabling them would do. Sometimes you have the option of using lethal force or just taking out their kneecaps. Or sometimes you have to use lethal force but you can shoot them in a way less likely to kill them. The point is that you can’t jump straight to cutting off their heads.
I would argue that given their plans at that point it already counts as attempting to murder people. Whatever murder will take place directly in my house or in a different place makes little difference to me.
Also, I would describe their plans as “go to this home, murder all found Jews and gather info allowing us to murder more”.
You’re thinking like a consequential. The point isn’t that these people have a high probability of murdering people in the near future. The rule isn’t “You can’t kill people unless they are probably going to kill someone.” The rule is that you aren’t allowed to kill people at all, and the only exception is that you are allowed to save your own life when it is in immediate danger, which may have the unfortunate but not guaranteed side effect of killing the person trying to kill you.
It doesn’t have to be your own life. You can also use lethal force in defense of others, as the quote from the Catechism above says. This applies to civil authorities waging a just war, and also applies at a smaller scale to individuals defending innocent people from Nazis. You just have to stick with the minimum effective level of force, as Nick says.
Incidentally, Catholic teaching on the death penalty follows the same principle: it’s justified when nothing less will serve to protect the innocent.
And you can use it against a threat that is less than immediate, particularly in the Just-War case. “Immediate danger” is the legal standard, for purely private use of lethal force.
St Augustine wrote two works about Lying, and from one (“On Lying“) he goes into questions like this.
There has been a lot of debate and development on this; outright lying is always wrong, but things may not be lying even if they are deceptive, such as equivocation. The Jesuits get a bad rap for this kind of hair-splitting but it’s a genuinely difficult problem: tell the truth or save a life?
To be fair, Augustine did say, when he re-read his books near the end of his length, that he would rather not have people reading On Lying, because it was too confusing. There’s a theory by an American scholar, Jason BeDuhn, who is in the process of writing a massive three-volume work (two vols. already out) about Augustine’s Manichaeanism and its ramifications, that On Lying was actually an essay in which Augustine worked out just how much he could bend the literal facts in presenting his heretical days to suspicious catholics. I’m not convinced, but there are famous inconcinnities between Confessions and our other data on Augustine’s early life (most importantly, for BeDuhn’s purposes, the coincidence between Augustine’s trip to Italy, then his retreat from Milan in 386, and imperial anti-Manichaean measures).
Like I said, I’m not really convinced, and I can see events in my own life that, interpreted by the hostile or by historians 1600 years after the fact, might look like they were due to some political or economic situation that had in fact very little to do with my decisions, save by some subconscious influence. But it is a reminder that Augustine’s worries may not be wholly theoretical.
I do wonder, though, what’s with the stuff about eating dung in On Lying. (And in case you thought that was the weird book about lying, Against Lying is, in context, absolutely hilarious: it’s his full-broadside rebuttal to this eccentric layman, bored by the lack of intellectuals on the Balearic Islands, who has been trying to get Augustine to teach his incognito heresy-hunting methods to “the most astute and select young men.” I’m planning to start a blog on Augustine among other things, and the first line is going to be my tag….)
The same was not unheard of even under the Nazi regime. From your buddy Tim O’Neill’s piece on the “Hitler’s Pope” myth:
It would be foolish to count on such an outcome, of course. Nevertheless it irritates me when things like this are treated as impossible or unthinkable.
The catechism says no one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it.
There is a reason that the commandments go out of their way to say “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” instead of “Thou shalt not tell lies”.
Morality is a spook, and I would lie. The fact that my preference for preventing the murder of innocents is ultimately arbitrary and sentimental does not make it any less my preference.
I’m interested in what you mean by ‘spook’ – I have a suspicion that my way of looking at ‘morality’ is similar to yours, but I may be wrong about that.
I think also that ‘sentimental’ probably downplays the validity (or depth) of your position – I hear it as superficial, if not pejorative. David Hume used it with some seriousness, but usage has changed considerably since his time.
“Spook” is a (translation of a) term Max Stirner used to describe concepts that were only agreed upon because society collectively believed them – he used it for things like “private property”, “the state”, etc.
Thanks
Morality is a system societies use to try and compromise their individual preferences to produce some kind of average everyone can just about live with. I would lie to protect the Jews, both due to my individual preference to protect Jews from being butchered, and due to my individual preference for the kind of society that provides such protections.
I like to think I’d do the right thing, whatever that is, but I agree with Jaybee Lobsterman when he says I’d probably give in to my fear and bloody my hands by cooperating with the Nazis like so many Germans did.
Isn’t it also the case that the average German did not have verifiable evidence that the Jews were actually being exterminated?
The Nazi party line was something like “We’re removing them so they can live amongst themselves in peaceful communities that we are generously providing for them out in Eastern Europe.”
Now maybe you had some reason to be skeptical of that claim, given the general environment, rhetoric, etc. But you couldn’t know.
Edit: Ninja’d by EC below.
How much Germans, or any given group of Germans, knew about what was happening to deported Jews is a very controversial topic in history.
The thought experiment only works if you assume that you know the refugees will be murdered and you know that they don’t deserve to be killed. If you take these factors away, it’s really no different from “the cops come to your door asking if you know of any undocumented immigrants in your neighborhood”.
Edit:
@matkoniecz
I’m sorry if it came across as me trying to say most Germans wouldn’t have known. I haven’t studied this issue, but it seems plausible that many knew, or at least had a general sense that something extremely bad was happening to the people who got deported.
But it’s true that the issue is controversial (the Wikipedia paragraph you linked starts “debate continues”). It’s certainly plausible that any given German may have no specific idea about what would happen to refugees who were caught, therefore the calculations you’d make in the hypothetical “SS at your door” scenario would be very different if you imagine it happening in the real world.
Describing Jews, Slavs and many other groups as subhuman was an official ideology.
Slavery/forced labour and mistreatment of various kinds was done openly.
Knowledge about mass murders was common, though how common exactly is obviously not clear. But AFAIK it is “15% vs 50% were aware”, not whatever it was information circulating in society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocaust#German_people
Mass murder was done openly in occupied countries so it is not a big surprise that this was becoming a common knowledge also in other places.
Specific details like death camps or gas chambers were probably not known well.
It was completely clear that they will be horribly mistreated. Maybe murder was not obvious to all in say Berlin.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard is an article, not a real source but matches my image of the situation (if I am wrong, please correct me)
It’s still different from that, because we know that cops looking for undocumented immigrants probably means those immigrants or people they’re associated with are going to get in some kind of trouble, with potential consequences including jail time or deportation.
Is it possible that many Germans thought the authorities would be searching for refugees for benign reasons? I don’t think so.
I think there’s a kind of state of knowledge where it’s knowable if you want to know it, but avoidable if you’d rather not know it.
An example of this from my childhood: I was in high school in a very small Midwestern town. The best teacher in the school was a woman who had, a few years ago, divorced her husband. She’d later started rooming with the girls’ gym teacher (another woman about the same age).
Anyone who wanted to know, knew that they were a lesbian couple living together. Anyone who didn’t want to know could allow themselves to believe they were just a couple good friends rooming together (along with children from the divorce). I was a geeky, not-terribly-worldly 14 year old, and I knew the score. Some people were more comfortable not knowing.
More recently, consider the “collateral murder” video that was released by Wikileaks. That video showed US troops doing stuff that it was pretty clear they had to be doing, from reading the news and understanding the shape of the world–including killing children and killing bystanders who stopped to help the dying and wounded people from the first attack.
Why was that video classified? It surely wasn’t because the Iraqis didn’t know we were doing that stuff–they couldn’t fail to know. It was to enable Americans who didn’t want to know what our military was doing in Iraq to retain their ignorance.
There are many more examples along these lines. There’s a lot of uncomfortable information out there that most people would rather not know, because it would make them feel bad or because it would require them to take actions they’d rather not take.
I assume the murder of the Jews (and lots of other people) in Nazi Germany was the same way–if you were paying attention, you probably had a pretty good idea what was going on when the hated ethnic minority were loaded onto trains and never heard from again, and you probably heard rumors that fit well with the obvious conclusion about what was happening to those folks. But it was probably possible not to know, especially if you really didn’t want to think too much about it and made sure to remind yourself that the enemies of the regime were constantly spreading lies and they shouldn’t be trusted.
@albatross11
Even if there are rumors, that doesn’t mean that you know for sure. A big issue in a society where reliable sources are suppressed, is that true rumor becomes very hard or impossible to distinguish from false rumor.
@Aapje
Doubly so when there is an active attempt by declared enemies to spread propaganda.
In WWI, there was propaganda that Germany was massacring nuns in Belgium. They weren’t. There were some bad things that the Germans did to nuns, including one instance of strip-searching them, but there wasn’t evidence of rape in that instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium
What Germany did in Belgium was bad, but the British stories were outright fabrications.
It would be quite easy for a German citizen in WWII to believe that the stories of the horrors inflicted on Jews were similarly exaggerated.
This is completely anecdotal, but:
My great-grandmother apparently never talked about the time the Nazis where in power, except once she told my mother “everybody knew something bad was happening, not the specifics, but something bad, and those who’re saying they didn’t know are either really stupid or lying”.
For context: my great-grandmother lived her entire life in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere(very, very rural), the entire population of that particular village was catholic back then since the land used to belong to a monastery, so there weren’t any Jewish citizens living there even before the Nazis came (or protestant or anything else but catholic). So if she was in a position to realize something bad was going on, I’m extremely skeptical of claims to not-having-known-anything of anyone but someone who lived even more remotely in a place that already had no Jews.
Yes, I realize that it’s just an anecdote, but I do think some conclusions to the general level of knowledge in the population can be drawn from that.
German Catholics were in a better position to know that something was going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit_brennender_Sorge
@Dack:
Thanks! Learned something new today 🙂
@Lurker
This is 100% what I believe. And people did not know specifics, because as long as they did not know, they could believe they were decent people despite not doing anything. If you know you are not going to do anything about a problem anyway, it is better for your righteous self-image to believe that the problem does not exist.
(Also, they knew it was not safe to ask questions. But if merely asking questions can hurt you, the people whose fate you are not allowed to ask about probably get hurt much more.)
On the other hand, without knowing specifics, it was possible to underestimate the seriousness of the problem. “Something bad” does not necessarily imply genocide.
One of the things that makes this a dilemma depends is your current knowledge of what is going to be done to them.
Switch it to being an American citizen on the West Coast and your neighbor is aiding a Japanese-American family in hiding from the authorities.
The internment camps are no picnic, but the American government isn’t going to genocide them, and hiding from the authorities may imply that the Japanese-American family is in fact doing something malicious, as in fact some Japanese-Americans did.
A mistaken belief about the consequences of betrayal may change your calculus.
Note that I am a Christian and a deontologist.
If I were in an occupied country (e.g. Denmark or the Netherlands) I would lie to them because resisting occupying invaders and denying them anything they want is a positive moral good.
But you’ve stipulated that I am a German, which makes it trickier, since it’s my own government. I assume you don’t want me to suppose myself an active Nazi, since that would mostly make the answer obvious. It would probably depend on to what degree I suspected that actual harm would come to them.
My understanding is that the average German citizen knew that the concentration camps weren’t happy fun places, but didn’t really believe actual horror and genocide was being inflicted, and that convincing the Germans of this after the war was an intensive campaign.
But certainly some Germans probably suspected beforehand, and knowing what I know now, I would lie to the SS with a clear conscience.
Decribing Jews, Slavs and many other groups as subhuman was an official ideology.
Slavery/forced labour and mistreatment of various kinds was done openly.
Knowledge about mass murders was common – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocaust#German_people
Mass murder was done openly in occupied countries so it is not a big surprise that this was becoming a common knowledge also in other places.
Specific details like death camps or gas chambers were probably not known well.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard is an article, not a real source but matches my image of the situation (if I am wrong, please correct me)
I am not defending the Nazi ideology, but the question of “is this person going to be sent to forced labor by proper order of the state” versus “Is this person going to be brutally executed” require very different responses.
Remember that the American government also sent citizens to camps where they were used to harvest beets, for example. This is technically also forced labor.
As for mass murder in occupied countries, my understanding is that was justified as executing resistance cells, which is very different and justified under the laws of war. It’s certainly possible for a German citizen to believe that the measures were harsh but legal and justified.
Edit: And note that my final sentence was “some Germans suspected” and that I would absolutely lie to the SS.
For start, terror executions of random people (100 Poles for 1 German) were an official policy.
Lie.
I’m sorry, you were going to ask me to choose, right? Do you want to finish?
Because why are we even having this discussion? There’s no absolute or general rule against lying. Lying may be a bad habit to get in to, but throwing innocents to the wolves to pave the way for your own escape is a much worse one. Lying leads to an absolutely better outcome, unless you believe that Jews are such an intrinsically dangerous threat that each one should be valued at about -100 QALY or below. Lying is almost certainly safer, if you stick to the Sgt. Schultz technique. It is intuitively obvious that you should be lying here. And when did you ever agree not to? Where, in any of humanity’s multifaceted theories of ethics and morality, is there anything that requires more than a few milliseconds of instinct to respond with a lie?
But if I somehow ever find myself in charge of an elite SS Jew-hunting unit, or antifa Nazi-hunting unit or any other such thing, boy howdy am I going to be hoping that my prey is being sheltered by a bunch of rationalists. Watching the gears crank behind their eyes as they try to puzzle out the obvious, is as good as proximity sensor.
About the only interesting counterpoint I’ve heard to the obvious right answer (lie) was in a discussion of D&D alignments. The poster claimed that a paladin, exemplar of Lawful Good, would be required to not lie, but instead–whether or not he was hiding jews–reply “Your pogrom is despicable and I’ll have no part in supporting it. Come at me.”
Now, other than in D&D or other lands of narrative causality where heroes win, this results in dead paladins and captured Jews. It clearly produces the wrong results. But this is probably acceptable, on the meta-level, for D&D; lawful good characters, paladins doubly so, are supposed to face consequences for holding to their rules. It makes the game more interesting. And there’s clearly something to be said for strong precommitments; HPMOR has an interesting bit about this.
But all of this is a distraction from the real world, where you fucking lie. Or better yet, you don’t get there in the first place (though that is harder.)
I believe one of the first commandments of every Lawful Good faith or ideology, is to strike down immediately and without mercy anyone who ever makes moral claims regarding the behavior of D&D Paladins. Some will also call for the extermination of the entire gaming group; it’s the only way to be sure.
Seriously, the whole subject is an open invitation for a generally chaotic group that has only a passing familiarity with the Laws that Good people actually make for themselves, to opine forcefully on the subject. If you believe that Good people have made up Laws that require them to Not Lie About Anything Ever, then sure, you can come up with all sorts of interesting moral dilemmas and impose them on your Sworn To Always Be Lawful and Good fictional characters. But it’s all angels-dancing-on-pinheads level theorizing, because those laws don’t exist.
I mean, they manifestly do exist! Kant was a person. People believe him. I get that you don’t agree with him, and neither do I, but it’s unfair to say that these rules and people who think like these are just nerd imaginations.
If my theory requires that we count Kant among the imaginative nerds, I think my theory still looks pretty good. Unfortunately, Kant predates D&D, so we don’t know for sure whether he’d have been playing a Paladin or just sniping at Paladins.
Sounds ripe for an Existential Comic (and indeed he is a Level 10 Paladin, Lawful Good).
Actually, you know what, I’m going to double down: if you don’t like paladins, how about Superman? As Drew says, this is about being an exemplar. Does Superman lie to the Nazis?
And before you reply “Superman can win”…I think he does it even if he can’t. My favorite panel in all of Supes (I’m not much of a comic reader, tbh, but I like the concepts) is when he confronts an armed robber while temporarily depowered. Jimmy Olson asks why:
“You think I only step in front of guns because I’m bulletproof?”
Yes, in many real world situations, this play loses. It’s probably not the right thing to do. I’d lie.
Superman is better than us.
@Andrew Hunter: Would Superman lie to save a life? The answer is, maybe. Depends how you interpret that last page.
This discussion reminds me of nothing more than how characters in Star Trek believe that Vulcans never lie, even though there is absolutely no reason to believe this. They lie when it is logical to do so. Why would they do anything else?
This could be true, but vacuously so, if it is never logical to lie.
What John Schilling said: Lawfulness does not require this, unless you’ve chosen to be Lawful in relation to a very specific moral code.
That said, that would be an ethical response for someone who doesn’t have any dependents (including hidden Jews) and wants to take a good chance of martyrdom. His example might inspire others.
Similar to Telemachus and the Roman games.
I think I agree, but think the duty comes from the “examplar” bit, more than the alignment.
A lawful good Fighter is a guy who’s trying to do his best for himself and society. The peanut gallery can comment on his decisions. We can like them, or dislike them.
But, ultimately, when we debate the fighter, the stakes are just how positively or negatively we feel about some guy.
Paladins are different because they exist to be a living embodiment of some code. They’re expected to be extreme.
A Paladin who compromises is a Paladin who’s undermining the trust in a broader ideology or movement. That could legitimately have more weight than the survival of some people in a house.
Where do you see rationalists having trouble with this? Link?
Pretty much every response in this thread that isn’t “Lie, obviously, WTF is wrong with you”? And the fact that the question was even considered worthy of serious discussion.
Not a great example. See also my clarification.
Definitely not the best description of those having trouble, to my eye.
Wasn’t “lie, obviously” the answer of just about everyone? With some side quests into whether or not the people involved would actually know enough to know that the answer was “lie, obviously” or would instead think the consequence of not lying would be Jews being treated badly and made to do forced labor in unpleasant conditions, rather than being gassed.
JohnShilling: “I can see you calculating, filthy rationalist! You are clearly working through some variation on the Trolley Problem!”
Rationalist: “No, no, officer! I’m just starting with my priors, constructing the potential alternative scenarios, then working out a Bayesian probability of where the Jews are in this iteration of the Many Worlds Hypothesis! If you press me any harder, I will be forced to tell you a hypothesis that will cause a future AI to re-instantiate, then torture you!”
(I don’t know enough about rationalism to make that fair or funny, but feel free to Steelman it, then laugh at the best possible formulation of that joke).
I was laughing by the final parenthetical 🙂
Likewise, FWIW.
I’ll consider this from the Christian perspective. The golden rule is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If I tell the SS officers the truth, they would have to follow the lead, and take the Jews to a concentration camp. If I was in their position, I would prefer to be lied to so I wouldn’t have to commit any further sin. In general I’m ok with people lying to me to protect me from bad outcomes, so I believe it would not be a sin. God can correct me if I’m wrong after I die.
I’m surprised you’re OK with people lying to you for that reason in general. I would consider it disrespectful and offensive for people to lie to me to protect me from a bad outcome, in general, because it means they’ve decided I couldn’t reason my way to the same conclusion they’ve reached of knowing the truth and still choosing the good outcome. There’re some exceptions (e.g. if I were somehow conscripted into an SS Jew-hunting squad, I’d want people to keep me as blind as useful), but they’re only exceptions.
What if future you somehow became convinced that hunting down the Jews was a great thing to do?
Wouldn’t present you prefer that future people frustrate future you in that goal, or are you convinced that if you came to that conclusion, it would be a good one?
I lie, but I probably take into consideration 3, cause maybe I am a bad liar or I am stressed enough that I cannot lie convincingly. It would probably depend on the exact situation and my personal stress levels; if I am a german citizen in nazi germany maybe I am used to the stress and can lie convincingly.
The chances of being arrested and tortured and killed if my lie is detected are high, but with 3 they are almost sure, so maybe 1 is still my preference.
The correct answer is probably 4, because that’s the option that lets me kill the SS officers and flee the country. Because if they’re questioning me, somebody else has pointed them in my direction, and I put no faith in escaping the situation otherwise.
Does anyone other than Immanuel Kant himself pick 2?
Deontologists have been carving out exceptions for when a bad thing prevents a much worse thing since Aquinas.
(Summa Theologiæ Secunda Secundus Question 64)
Carpet bombing Germany to take out munitions factories is considered justifiable by Catholics, even though it has the side-effect of harming civilians. (Deliberate de-housing isn’t though)
And yet Aquinas is quite clear that lying is always wrong.
This is something I have struggled with. What do you think of the following :
If you cut me with a knife, that causes me bodily harm. But if you cut me precisely and excise a tumor, you have prevented a greater bodily harm.
If I lie to the SS officer, I have caused him moral harm. But if I lie to him in the correct manner, and I impede him as he attempts to perform some despicable act, then I have forestalled a greater moral harm. And importantly, the proximate victim I save is the SS officer himself – just as the tumor, his actions would cause him great moral harm. I excise them with the lie.
So this may be an act of compassion. In a way, I have performed a sort of “moral surgery.” It is a sin – but as you have said, a venial one.
I like that you aren’t asking “what would **you** do?” because that runs into the problem that people don’t always choose the ethical course of action. I can’t say with certainty that this is what I would do, because I fear pain and death as much as any man, but at least I’m pretty certain which choice of those given is actually morally upstanding – which is #3, silence or refusal to cooperate. This is likely to result in your death, but then nobody said that doing what’s right will never kill you.
@LadyJane
I would lie, but if I somehow couldn’t lie, I would deceive in a way that can be interpreted as the truth.
For example, in your case, saying “I don’t know where they are” is technically correct. You actually don’t know, but merely suspect that they are hidden with your friends. Perhaps they were moved to different house after the friends told you. Perhaps they are out. Perhaps the friends lied. Perhaps the Jews were already caught.
Of course, these kind of deceptive answers can merely ease your conscience, but won’t save you from the anger of the Nazis.
Actually, when the officers are at the door, it is already too late to not run any risks. You already didn’t seek out the SS to tell them, so you are already part of the conspiracy to hide the Jews.
Also, telling the SS may result in repercussions by the community and/or the resistance, so lying may reduce those risks.
Admit that you know the location of the refugees (thus refusing to tell a lie), but refuse to tell the SS officers where that location is (thus refusing to put the refugees in harm’s way)
This seems foolish. If you are trying to refuse to lie, they can just ask “are the Jews hiding in the house of one of your friends?” and other binary questions. If you clam up only when you would confirm where the Jews are hiding, you are still giving them information.
Also, you will fold under torture. You might be able to give them a few lies along the way, but we were trying to avoid that, and they’ll still get to the truth anyway.
What makes you so sure that everyone will fold under torture? Considering how many Christians have refused to recant their faith under torture, it’s possible to hold out.
(Some did recant; see for instance Thomas Cranmer who later inspiringly recanted his recantation. So, it’s good to plan against that possibility if you’re in a conspiracy against a regime known to torture suspects. But others did hold out.)
If I want to get information out of you, and I have good reason to think you have it, I’ll just give you heroin for a few weeks and then wait for confirmed information before giving you the next dose.
Do Nazi torturers have heroin on hand?
People with the authority to torture probably have the authority to get drugs.
I think the real lesson of Heroin is that your body’s sensations can do terrible things to your will.
I do not think those sensations are limited to chemical dependency.
I have also heard many stories of martyrs that held up under torture, but I have to believe they did so with the help of divine grace. From all the secular sources I’ve read there is no known technique or training that has been shown to be effective in resisting torture, particularly on a long term basis. As far as I’ve been able to research, even the CIA doesn’t know of any method and trains their agents to understand that almost everyone will crack under prolonged torture.
Citation needed for this alleged 100% efficacy of torture in providing actionable information, because I’m pretty sure that’s an urban legend.
I definitely believe that torture is incredibly effective in compelling people to say things that they believe will cause the torture to stop.
Whether or not this information is useful/accurate/actionable/whatever is probably highly dependent on the specifics of the case at hand.
“Everyone breaks” is a different proposition than “You can reliably find out anything with torture.”
Yes, “will produce actionable information” isn’t true. The SS can’t just torture random people to find out information. You’ll get a lot of “facts” that aren’t.
But the scenario given was one where someone admitted that they knew the location of the refugees. That’s practically begging the evil people to torture them.
*EDIT* For some reason I remember this Deep Thought by Jack Handey:
There was one thing Giles Corey could say that would make the torture stop, and he knew from the start what that was. He never said it.
I’d have to go with option 2.5, be clever. I’d probably say “I have seen no Jews, I have heard no Jews!” Which is true. If they pressed and asked further I’d say “I wish I could help you, but I do not know where the Jews you speak of are.” This is also true: I undoubtedly wish I could help the SS (so they don’t kill me!), but I’m morally obligated not to. And it’s also true that I don’t know where the Jews are: I suspect where they are, because I was told where they are, but I don’t know they are there. I have not seen them myself, I only have hearsay.
Does this all seem like stretching a gnat and swallowing a camel? Well yeah, but it’s a tough situation! You gotta do the best you can.
In point of fact if it actually happened to me I would almost certainly lie. I have lied out of fear in situations where the stakes were far less. But I consider that a personal moral failing on my part, and the above strategy is what I wish I would do, even if I would likely fail to do so. I am a coward, but I am striving to be brave.
You’re reminding me of the Quakers involved in the Underground Railroad, who would cheerfully tell slave-catchers they weren’t hiding any slaves… without adding that they didn’t consider any man a slave.
5. Lying is (practically) a terminal good in itself because without lying you have almost no tools to effect positive change in the world through the outcomes of conversations! When you lie, you can say anything and just about anything can happen.
You can have deontology while still lying to the SS. For instance, almost ethical theories grant that if a madman with an axe is trying to kill you, you are entitled to shoot him in self-defense. Many of them also grant that if the madman is ignoring you and trying to kill babies, you can shoot him in defense of the babies. Lying is way less bad than shooting someone, so it follows that if we have self-defense and other-defense exemptions for violence, we should also have them for lying.
Even acknowledging that lying is a sin, the answer is #1.
The standard deontological argument, #2, is Pharisaic selfishness.
#3 is just a bluff. Violence will turn it into #1 or #2. It’s an unnecessary step.
#4 is delusion – morality is beneficial.
Am I married? Do I have kids? Ailing Grandma? What’s my personal economy like – am I rich? These things might or might not change what I do, but they certainly factor into any real world decision.
I can’t understand how anyone who takes moral guidance from the Bible could go with #2, when there’s a very direct example in the Bible of lies being used to protect someone being persecuted unjustly by the state, and being directly rewarded by God for it, e.g. Exodus 1:17-21.
Aquinas responded that what was being rewarded was their fear of God, not their lying.
That’s a pretty weak answer, IMO: God didn’t punish them for lying, so either:
a) He didn’t think their deception was sinful, or
b) He decided that He didn’t want to punish them right now.
A implies that deception, when motivated by fear of God, isn’t sinful. B is just a “God moves in mysterious ways” dodge, Book of Job style.
This does not follow. God need not punish anyone and everyone who does something less than perfectly. The lie in this case is clearly venial: they were trying to do good, but used means that are always wrong. It’s perfectly consistent to hold that a) their dedication to protect the children was admirable and worthy of reward but b) it was expressed in a defective act. Brandon stakes out the same position in a post I linked above.
Incidentally, I think you’re confusing things by introducing the term deception. It’s true that not all deception is sinful, but some deception is lying, and lying is always sinful.
@Nick: So I’d attempt Jesuit mental reservation like “I don’t know where any hidden Jews are! (in the occupied Netherlands)” and if turns out that Jesuitry is a venial sin confess it later in American-occupied Germany.
God still rewards them for their action instead of punishing them for it. I can’t ignore the context of the action itself, which is what I think Aquinas is doing. It’s presented as a pretty simple set of actions and reactions:
1) Pharaoh commands the Hebrew midwives to kill Hebrew male infants;
2) Because the midwives fear God, they refuse to do so;
3) Pharaoh asks them why they failed him;
4) The midwives lie to Pharaoh;
5) God rewards them.
You can say that God rewards them exclusively for fearing him and not killing the Hebrew boys, but if that had been the authorial intention, you’d assume that (5) would be presented after (2), not (4). There’s no reason to present the midwives lying to Pharaoh unless you assume the author’s intent was to say that lying is morally acceptable, maybe even commendable, under certain specific circumstances.
Good catch! I’m Catholic and would try to deceive the SS. (Sorry Nick, but according to Catholic dogms Aquinas wasn’t right on absolutely everything.)
If you’re fully aware of the fact that the SS involved are planning to murder the Jews (and likely will succeed), then the moral answer is #5: Kill/disable (If possible) the SS officers who are asking you.
Otherwise, as others have noted, it’s obviously going to depend on what exact knowledge you have, but if killing to protect them is morally fine, then lying is certainly just as moral, as long as it seems likely to give the same results (you and the Jews are actually saved).
That will actually cause more deaths than telling on the Jews (or not intervening when they can do so without your help), given Nazi policies.
Total effects depends on how this actions reduce power of nazi regime and increase chance of its removal.
(yes, it is not really possible to calculate)
Perhaps we can update this scenario to be a bit more modern and realistic.
You are a New Yorker living today. Health department authorities knock on your door and ask, “Know of any Jewish weddings going on in the area?” What do you say?
That is the second in a three-tweet series.
The fact that de Blasio’s comms team doesn’t understand how Twitter works is 100% de Blasio’s fault.
I demand only politicians who know how Twitter works. 🙂
How about #5? Don’t answer the door.
NO HABLA INGLES! POR FAVOR VETE, SENOR!
This occurred to me, too, but remember you’d have to take steps in advance to avoid attracting suspicion. Like, make sure there’s no light visible in your windows if they stop by. You might have to lay low yourself to consistently avoid them.
For your amusement: high-tension power line towers shaped like . . .
clowns
A tennis racket (or racquet, if that floats your boat)
Mickey Mouse (located at Disney World, unsurprisingly)
Two men doing . . . something. Linking arms? Maybe they’re fighting because they’re under [sunglasses]high tension[/sunglasses].
There’s a giant ball in front of them; I think they’re playing soccer or something and contesting the ball.
You’re right. I completely missed the ball. If they’re playing soccer, though, shouldn’t one of them be lying on the ground clutching his shin?
I kid! I kid! All in jest.
Mostly.
A previous thread had a lot of discussion on whether NYCs hospitals were “overwhelmed” or not.
Anecdata, but here is the experience of a respiratory therapist who quit her job in Texas to take a temp job in NYC.
Here is here description of the very first shift that she worked, on April 17th:
So, 14 vents, 3 codes, one death in her very first shift as a temp.
By the Sunday the 19th, things are calmer, but at least partly because all of the temporary staff is now in place.
In other words, that hospital couldn’t run with normal staffing. One of the things that was necessary was that staffing could be pulled in from other places in the country. One should see that this is not the kind of situation you want to happen everywhere all at once.
An ER medical director for one of their top hospitals just committed suicide.
What is the base rate here? I feel like we may be risking the Chinese Robber fallacy just because NY is under a spotlight.
This is not saying it isn’t bad in NYC.
The fact that this particular doctor committed suicide isn’t particularly material. Absent some statistically anomalous signal that suicide risk is indeed correlated with Covid-19 healthcare work, we would have to chalk this up as another personal tragedy that might have been precipitated by many events.
However, as more anecdata that the situation of providing healthcare in NYC was incredibly impacted (i.e. not merely “whelmed” as some have put it), the particulars of her story are material.
Her anecdotes are interesting, but they remain anecdotes.
She talks about a 22 year old dying. That’s sad, and I don’t dispute that it happened.
But the data show that so far, COVID has killed fewer than 1-in-300,000 Americans under 45. That seems worth pointing out.
Keep in mind, when I was talking about the system being “whelmed,” I started saying that two weeks ago after New York was no longer whelmed. And it definitely applies in the rest of the country. There’s no reason for everybody to be staying home in my neck of the woods now because NYC was bad four weeks ago.
And in fact that’s what’s happening. My boss says everybody has to be back to the office starting Monday, so the dream is over. I pretty much didn’t leave my house for six weeks and it was everything I imagined it could be, but all good things…
@HeelBearCub
I disagree. This is exactly the sort of anecdote (anecdata) that creates a Chinese Robber Fallacy.
I am not stating either way whether NYC is overwhelmed. My impression is that in places that COVID is bad it is worse than we expected, but in places where it’s not bad, it’s better than we expected.
Edit: oops, ended up a bit of a dog pile.
Your arguments don’t make much sense.
This is like someone saying that all those campers don’t need to use bear bags and bear vaults, as barely (sic) any food is being stolen.
(Yes, I know you will break out the anti-tiger charm story. It’s not valid.)
You can’t just evaluate what is happening under lockdown as if this represents what would have happened absent the lockdown. Not sure the name for that fallacy, but it’s common. Perhaps the composition/division fallacy applies.
We have lots of evidence that NYC was getting very bad. Three days later and it would been twice as bad. Six days later, 4 times as bad. That’s highly explanatory for how we went from Cuomo preventing De Blasio from locking down to mandating a lockdown in 3 days time.
Yes, what I am presenting is anecdata, but it’s anecdata in support of data that show that we had 10k excess deaths in a few weeks in NYC. “Anecdata” like body bags being stored in refridgerator trucks and mass graves being dug stop being anecdata when you see enough of it and it starts to be just data.
True.
But you also can’t just assume that the only possible reason that actual results differ from modeled results is that the lockdowns worked (better than expected).
Particularly so for those who have also been kicking and screaming this whole time that lockdown measures were implemented too late, that they didn’t go far enough, and that too many people aren’t taking them seriously enough.
An issue is that there seems to be a fairly long period between infection and being admitted to the hospital. So if you take measures by the time the hospitals are whelmed, there is a substantial risk that they become overwhelmed, before the measured have visible effect.
I linked this in the last thread, an account from an Idaho nurse doing the same thing: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/04/13/coronavirus-nurse-new-york-overwhelmed-hospitals
You don’t have to have a higher death count to overwhelm the hospital. As the account says, merely being in a total care patient would do it, as it’s not like these people could not go to the hospital. This also addresses some of the arguments from the last thread about labelling any death as COVID-related if possible, as that doesn’t have bearing on whether or not a hospital is overwhelmed or not.
Sure, that’s been known since early on. It’s exactly what “flatten the curve” meant. And I’m glad NYC is getting help from less brutally hit areas. That’s what we should be doing.
NYC probably will not be able to open up for a fair bit, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the States can’t.
NYC hospital visits for influenza-like illness are practically at baseline. There’s no reason NYC can’t re-open now.
This assumes a bunch of stuff that may not be true.
The key question is “for how long?”
And one answer is “not long enough, and not as long as we would have if we take time to further decrease infection and increase infection fighting measures”.
Opening for 3 weeks doesn’t do much good.
Permanently. In NYC ~25% of the population has COVID-19 antibodies. The most vulnerable have likely already survived or succumbed, since most nursing homes have already been affected. Given that, I would not expect any new peak in cases to be as high as the previous peak. Particularly since at least initially, even with a complete opening, I would expect more voluntary distancing than there was pre-lockdown.
Waiting for unspecified or unlikely measures is just “lockdown until riots”.
Why should the other parts of the hospital be suddenly empty? People did not stop get heart attacks (rather the opposite as Covid-19 makes the blood clumb) and cancer.
Because they’re closed by government diktat. Sure, heart attack patients might still come in. But a lot of those people with cancer surgery (or bypass surgery)… “Sorry pal, that’s elective, you’ll have to wait until the emergency is over, around the fifth of Never according to our governor”. Note that “elective” does not mean “optional”
Most (all?) hospitals have postponed non-emergency services, so their total volume is down. The hospital near me is having their staff take one day off a week.
edit: nynjer’d
What makes you think those nurses that can be shifted haven’t been already?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not
Excellent article comparing Seattle’s response to New York City’s. De Blasio and Cuomo get called out for their early dithering.
Take-aways:
* You need scientists, not politicians, making announcements, because otherwise 50% of the audience tunes out. Obama credited the stuff the Bush administration set up to let this happen for H1N1.
* You have to show public leaders and visible people following the rules if you want everyone to follow the rules.
* Trying to get people to listen is difficult. The biggest short-term benefit of closing the Seattle schools is that it forced parents to stay home. You have to change the Common Knowledge quickly, and you can’t necessarily do it just by telling people. But once the schools closed everyone knew this shit was real.
* Politicians often say the opposite of what their public health experts want them to say.
I think the overlap between science and policy is tricky here. You need scientists/technology people to help the political leaders and the public know what tradeoffs are available, to the best of available knowledge. Immunologists and virologists and epidemiologists and public health doctors are in a position to know a lot about the nature of the tradeoffs we face. But it should be the political leaders deciding what tradeoffs between values to make.
I mean, saying “we’re going to keep running the economy normally and just let the people who are going to die, die” is a tradeoff we can make–and indeed, it’s one we make every flu season. And “we’re going to shut down as much as we can to slow transmission of the virus” is a tradeoff we can make–we’ve made it in most of the US. But while the scientists know their fields pretty well and probably understand more than the politicians what tradeoffs can be made, they are no better equipped than anyone else to decide which end of those tradeoffs we should make. That should be being done by poltical leaders, in the open, with them getting the accountability for the decision.
Now this runs aground when we have, in general, pretty inept leaders who won’t make those decisions all that well. And also when leaders will (as they definitely will) try very hard to get cover from the experts for any unpopular decisions they make, so that they can just say “yes, we had to {let grandma die of pneumonia, let you lose your job after three months of lockdown} because we were just following the advice of {the economists, the epidemiologists}.” But it’s really important to remember that just because you’re smart and know some technical field doesn’t give you any more right than anyone else to decide what tradeoffs between fundamental values the whole society should make.
I would go further. Someone who makes this decision (activating lockdown) is a political leader.
So it is not “decision made by scientists” vs “decision made by poltical leaders”, it is “somehow selected scientists are political leaders” vs “elected people are political leaders”.
This is a great point. To the extent that Trump’s policy is “I will do whatever Fauci tells me to do,” then Fauci has become acting President of the United States, and should be seen as a political leader, rather than a scientist.
The difference is that Fauci doesn’t actually have the power to enact his preferred policies, and also is only accountable to the president, not to the voters. By contrast, Trump can and does make his own decisions about what policies to pursue, and that’s actually right–he’s the one who’ was elected to make this kind of decision, and he’s the one who is going to face the public in November and account for what choices he’s made[1].
And the reason this makes sense is that Fauci is a very smart guy and he knows his field, but it’s neither his job nor in his area of expertise to weigh all the different important issues and consequences of a policy against one another. How many saved lives is worth another 1% of unemployment for a year? There’s no reason Fauci’s opinion on that is any better than anyone else’s.
[1] Trump isn’t at all the person I’d like to see in that position, but he’s the guy we elected president and he’s standing for re-election in a few months, so to the extent anyone in this mess has any democratic accountability or legitimacy, it’s him.
Agree, as usual, with albatross11.
Experts should not set policy, because they are focused and not always seeing the full picture. The job of the executive (and I advance to assurance that Trump is particularly suited to this) is to synthesize expert advice, weigh the costs and the benefits, and decide on the policy.
@matkoniecz
Exactly. The Dutch epidemiologist in chief is not actually limiting himself to science. In fact, causality is so unclear that many choices are more determined by the personality traits of the decider, than how well they base themselves on scientific fact.
Not only will the relevant experts not have any particular expertise in making trade offs, they will have a bias. Everyone thinks that their field is important and an infectious disease expert will likely over emphasize the importance of minimizing deaths by infectious diseases. That is how they have been selected and trained to think. The same thing mutatis mutandi is true for any specialty. Moreover, roles matter for how most people act and think. If I am selected for a committee by virtue of being X, I will prioritize x related things in my actions as a committee member. If an expert from some field is selected for some position by virtue of being an expert in that field then their over emphasis on that field will be even more extreme.
Should we have some generals and admirals involved in determining the type and magnitude of defense spending? Yes. Should generals and admirals be the only people making these decesions? No. Should admirals and generals be thought of as neutral experts on these matters? No.
The same thing is true for a wide range of fields.
Climate science comes to mind. But there’s a further distortion – out of tens of thousands of climate scientists, the ones who will be quoted (and offering up quotes) are the most extreme fraction of 1% of the already activist portion who want to stick their necks out.
The same is of course true for contrarian voices.
Which may be why those who support the current orthodoxy take it for granted that anyone who doesn’t is someone who doesn’t believe warming is happening, or at least doesn’t believe it is due to human action.
While you are not wrong, I think part of the problem is that many politicians saw a third option early on, which was just to take mild measures and let a few people die out (like with the regular flu) and have the best of both worlds, but COVID just doesn’t work like that.
Most countries switched course after that initial period, but by then it was too late, and they had to go with more restrictive measures than they could have done initially. I think that we haven’t had too many more countries behaving like Italy and Spain is because those two, for whatever reason, were hit too early, but now the rest of the world’s population is scared too into complying with the restrictions, which has made them more effective, regardless of the actions taken by their politicians.
Good news: Oxford vaccine candidate is still looking promising.
Bad news: if social distancing works well, the vaccine trials may not work to demonstrate effectiveness, because they aren’t doing challenge trials.
How might we get our sclerotic, ethically-shortsighted rulemaking establishments out of their torpor long enough to fix this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-vaccine-update-oxford.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Conduct the trials in Sweden?
They’re talking to various African governments about doing it in places where the peak is yet to happen.
Seems like Nicaragua would be a better candidate:
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/18/837933706/nicaragua-not-backing-down-despite-criticism-over-lax-measures-during-pandemic
Absolve them of responsibility if the vaccine trials blow up and kill some of the participants.
I don’t know how to do that in a way that can’t or won’t be walked back later either.
Sounds like something that could be done by Congress. Indeed, I think something like that has been done for vaccines in the past.
It was, for approved vaccines; the only reason manufacturers got in at all is because Congress agreed they’d be exempt from liability and all claims would be paid out of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund (name IIRC, but something like that).
EDIT: Program, not Fund. Also grammar.
If you have been under the impression that Covid-19 deaths have been over estimated, one should consider that to have been “cast out of the stacked beds”.
The Financial Times has done a 14 country analysis of all cause morbidity.
I encourage you too look at the charts to see just how abruptly all cause morbidity rose.
Is it possible that the lockdowns themselves are contributing to all cause morbidity, by reducing people’s general health, weakening their immune system, delaying needed (but “elective”) medical treatment, or by increasing “deaths of despair”?
The total deaths in the hard hit places doubled vs. the baseline over the course of two month. I don’t think increased morbidity from suicide and delayed treatment can explain that at all. Especially not when we have plenty of causes of death that should also decrease.
Basically, I think you are grasping at confirmatory straws there.
Sure, but those are going to be marginal cases. If you’re pretty sure you’re having a heart attack or stroke or something, you’re going to call 911. If you’re having very mild symptoms that maybe could indicate those things, you’re probably not calling them. (And most of the time you’ll be right, but some of the time, you’ll pay dearly for not calling early.). And in many of those cases, you’ll just wait and see, and call them a few hours later when the symptoms have persisted or gotten worse.
Yes, but the vast majority oof people aren’t avoiding the hospital because of a lockdown, because visits to the hospital are perfectly acceptable during lockdown. If people are avoiding the hospital, it’s because they’re worried they will catch Coronavirus at the hospital. Because they might.
Ending the lockdown won’t help with that fear while the pandemic continues.
Lockdowns might also (and I would expect are) causing fewer deaths, due to fewer cars on the road, and fewer people getting the flu (which does still kill people) etc. Fewer people having heart attacks during extreme exercise exertion.
Maybe long-term though, the negative effect of lockdown on deaths due will outweigh the positive effect. Not exercising for a couple of months probably doesn’t hurt people much. Not exercising for a year is a different story. Someone will need to write books about that.
If you are having chest pains, avoiding the hospital because you’re afraid of catching COVID is a very bad idea. Particularly if you live in the 95% of the country where COVID cases are minimal and the hospitals are basically empty.
I count “the media has terrified people into avoiding hospitals who otherwise would go” as lockdown-associated, but you could plausibly argue that sort of thing deserves its own category.
Not true. Just today I talked to a co-worker whose baby has a heart condition. The doctor ordered a CAT scan because of some concerns, but they haven’t been able to get it yet. Why? Because while the CAT scan is considered an essential procedure, getting anesthesia for the CAT scan is not. But they already tried to do the CAT scan without anesthesia and her baby wriggled around too much to get a clear image. The baby needs to be knocked out for the scan, but the hospital has decided that is not essential. Now her doctor is in a complicated bickering process with the hospital and it has been over a week.
I’ve heard of similar cases from other people. People are being turned away from hospitals because their their care is being determined as non-essential. And I’m sure people will die because of it, though how many is beyond me.
> If you’re pretty sure you’re having a heart attack or stroke or something, you’re going to call 911.
Anecdata:
Pre-Covid, of the likely-preventable cardiac arrests I’ve worked in EMS, all of them presented with fairly typical symptoms ahead of time for hours or days. These symptoms were all dismissed as indigestion or whatever in advance.
More recently, I had a patient who had a complex medical history and a severe presentation which we wanted to take “into the city” rather than to the local community hospital because … complex medical history. We had to work hard to convince them to go because they were worried about getting Covid-19.
Getting people to go to the hospital for severe conditions is hit-or-miss in the first place. And being afraid of getting Covid-19 is almost certainly tilting the scales.
> and delayed treatment
FWIW, I’ve been hearing from unverified sources that a significantly larger number of cardiac patients in the hospital are going into arrest than usual because the patients are being warehoused rather than getting the otherwise planned surgery. The problem being that not having the surgery increases the risk of further complications, but that you can’t say for sure that it will kill you in the next week or so.
The problem here is that there is only a limited selection of the total data available from which to synthesize. We don’t have published medical histories for everybody involved to facility good analysis. And we’ll likely only be able to determine excess morbidity in years to come as case-controlled evaluations are capable of being done.
It also doesn’t account for other just-so stories, such as the staff stressing out about Covid-19 so much that they are making more medical errors than usual, resulting in greater mortality.
There is also the issue that ambulances may be busy getting disinfected.
Steve Sailer proposed that we should be running public service announcements telling people it’s safer to go to the hospital when you have symptoms of a heart attack or stroke than to stay home and try to ride it out. No idea how much that would work, though.
After six weeks? I’d like to think we are heartier than that.
But more to the point, if you go to that level you have to also account for less workplace accidents, traffic fatalities, seasonal flu, and whatever else the distancing/lockdown is preventing.
(edit: what he said)
I would find it extremely unlikely if staying inside for four weeks or so weakened people’s immune systems to the point of death.
Caveat: everything I say about health and medicine is wrong.
Edit: ninjer’d
One thing I do worry about, though–COVID-19 seems to be worse for people who are overweight, and maybe for people who are in poor shape. The lockdown has probably resulted in lots of people getting much less exercise than usual and gaining some weight. I wonder what the statistical impact of that is on eventual deaths….
It’s helped members of my family to lose weight, because our home cooking is healthier than our restaurant meals.
I don’t know about people who are currently in poor shape, but by looking at parking lot activity, hiking is way up, as people are able to go during hours that would normally be taken up by the commute and work. They can go walking at their leisure on the weekdays, during daylight, instead of having to wait for after work, get up extra early to go before work, or waiting for the weekends.
Some are also going out more in order to accompany their kids going out to burn energy.
I’ve lost a fair bit of weight in the past two months. I attribute part of this to better portion control from not eating my weekday breakfasts and lunches in a fancy corporate cafe, and part to the calorie-burning effect of a substantially elevated general anxiety level. The former is probably a good thing for my immune robustness and overall health; the latter almost certainly not.
I’ve completely stopped eating out since I started voluntary self-isolation in mid-March, and I’ve lost quite a bit of weight.
I’ve been counting calories quite accurately, but I don’t pay much attention to macros. I’ve stopped going to the gym, obviously, but I walk a lot more, overall I think that my energy expenditure decreased yet I’m losing weight (and according to the fancy scale most of it is fat, although I don’t know how accurate the impedance thing is). I wonder how many calories I was actually eating before.
To partially answer my own question, the article says:
That strikes me as a pretty bogus answer. Countries suffering the worst outbreaks are also the ones that would have the strictest lockdowns, that will have had the longest lasting lockdowns, and will have the highest general fear/anxiety among the population at large.
Given the COVID situation in Italy, it seems reasonable to me to assume that Italians are far more likely to avoid the hospital out of fear than Danes are.
In order to reject the hypothesis that some of this is lockdown-related, wouldn’t you also have to reject the hypothesis that “lockdown intensity” is positively correlated with “severity of COVID outbreak?”
If people are scared to go to the hospital because they’ve seen mass graves or army convoys moving corpses on tv, then lifting the lockdown isn’t going to make them any less afraid. More likely they’d think that their government has left them to die.
I expect there is some non-COVID stuff in there, involving things like people with chest pains deciding they’d rather take their chances that it’s just indigestion than go to a plague-ridden hospital. But I don’t think that sort of thing can possibly explain much of the huge jump in deaths.
At a guess–lots of people are dying without being tested, probably mostly people who were sick with COVID but decided to ride it out at home rather than go to the hospital. I know one person who is currently sick (the illness having dragged on for three weeks now), and she can’t get anyone to see her or test her–she’s not sick enough or she’s potentially contagious, but in either case, she’s told to stay home. If she keels over from a heart attack next week under the strain of a month of untreated COVID-19, I wonder how her death will be counted.
ETA: I’ll personally count it the way I count kids in Haiti dying of cholera–they got screwed over by living in a shitty, dysfunctional country that couldn’t deal with reality well enough to keep a bunch of their citizens from needlessly dying. But then, I may be getting a little bitter about the quality of response I see in the US.
They’re showing NYC with 12,700, which comes in nicely between NYC confirmed deaths and NYC confirmed + probable deaths, so I’d say at least in NYC, probably not underestimated by a significant degree.
For another perspective, there’s the CDC fluview data, which shows pneumonia + influenza mortality as a percent of total mortality. The US is at 14.5%, compared to a baseline of 6.7%. In the 2017-2018 flu season, it hit 10.9%.
Agreed that NYC is no longer underestimating, at least not to anywhere near the same amount, and probably any underestimation is negligible. It’s not clear to me when the FT data ends, so I’d caution against comparing the raw totals as that may just be an artifact of when the measuring period ends.
We know this already. Every single person with any degree of biostatistical or epidemiological knowledge is perfectly aware that current confirmed counts are 100%-confidence missing people. Available numbers are bad. We know they’re bad. I and a bunch of other people have been saying they’re bad on this very site since at least early March.
Right, that’s why I predicated the statement by addressing it to people who thought things were being overestimated. There are definitely people here in that camp.
It’s just another data point to add on to the “actually this is a really big deal” pile.
To be clear, I am quite confident of the following:
1. Most hospitals (in the developed world) have a strong incentive, both financial and from a PR standpoint, to mark any plausible-COVID death as a COVID death.
2. There are anecdotal examples aplenty of them actually doing this (one of the most egregious, the Ventura County Star reported one of their numbers included a drug overdose from someone who had formerly tested positive). Yes, I understand that these are anecdotes, not data.
That said, I acknowledge that it is entirely possible that some COVID deaths are going uncounted, and that on net, the uncounted could theoretically outnumber the “overcounted” I discussed above.
What I’m not too sure on is the mechanism by which this might happen. I could see it in the developing world examples they give, where someone just dies at home having not gone to the hospital and nobody really bothers to alert the state or give a cause of death – they just bury them and move on.
But do we really have thousands of people, in the developed west, dying at home, of COVID, having never sought treatment, and then not getting autopsied or anything like that?
Like, what exactly is the hypothetical scenario in which I could die of COVID without having the death be attributed to COVID? What all would have to take place for that to happen?
Yes, there is a strong financial incentive to commit Medicare fraud. That is, if you lie to Medicare and inflate the level of service you provided to patients, Medicare will pay you more for the work you didn’t actually do. However, hospitals generally don’t do it because it’s extremely illegal and they’re, on average, not crooks. You should assume COVID-19-related Medicare fraud is about as common as however common you think non-COVID-19-related Medicare fraud is.
As I’ve said when we debated this before, it’s not fraud if it’s an edge case, or hard to determine. Or even if you have a blanket rule of “everyone who dies with COVID will be recorded as having died of COVID” and you are transparent about it and the Feds don’t tell you to knock it off.
Nobody ever got fired for losing a patient to COVID-19?
This is already a known type of fraud in healthcare billing, overcoding or upcoding. Among the reasons medical billing coders are told to not do this is not only because it’s wrong and illegal, but because it’s also detectable. It’s not difficult to look at the distribution of codes at one facility and compare them to a similar facility and say “hey, these people are consistently alleging their patients are one service level higher than other similar facilities! We better check this out.” And they get their documentation audited and they get fines and/or jail time. Eventually, people are going to notice when one hospital had twice as many COVID-19 patients as the hospital down the street and wonder why that was. And the Feds are going to hammer them, and you want to talk about bad PR? “Hospital defrauds Medicare during plague!” is not good press.
You’re doing an extremely naive first-level pass at fraud here. You forget healthcare fraud has always been a thing, so has healthcare fraud detection, and healthcare compliance education. None of that has changed with COVID-19.
Also note that trying to get away with Medicare fraud becomes a worse proposition as both Medicare’s fraction of your patient population and the size of your practice rise, since the penalty for getting caught out is triple damages plus permanent exclusion from billing Medicare for everyone involved, and you have to get a lot more people to go along with it. There absolutely is systematic misclassification of things, especially in fuzzy cases where it could be Thing A with reimbursement rate X or Thing B with reimbursement rate 3X and especially in cases where only your physician and his biller have to conspire rather than multiple hospital departments.
Or, to a first approximation, generally there’s fudging not fraud, and generally by small private practices and not hospitals. There are papers on this; I’ll dig some up when I have a chance, or if you look around in the ICD-9/ICD-10 validation section of PubMed you should be able to find some.
EDIT: Yeah, what Conrad Honcho said, basically.
Just further thoughts on this. I have done data warehousing work, and once built a data warehouse for a hospital system to analyze their billing data. While I do not know anything about health or medicine itself, I have had a great deal of experience with how medical billing works, CPT codes, ICD-9 and -10 codes, etc. Because I was working with healthcare data, I had to take the HIPAA training and the billing/compliance training everyone has to take, even though I wasn’t working with patients or doing any of the billing myself. And one of the review questions made certain you understand that if you committed Medicare fraud, it wasn’t just the organization that was on the hook, but you, personally. Criminally.
So the whole, “dude, they could just fudge stuff to get a little more money!” thing is not some kind of new novel idea with COVID-19. It is babby’s first healthcare fraud. They are absolutely aware of this, and the billing compliance training included large sections about not doing specifically this.
When a doc sees a patient and they bill the visit, there are a range of codes they use to describe the nature of the service. So for instance, codes 99211-99215 are for an office or outpatient visit for an established patient (that is a return visit, not an initial evaluation) with a 99211 being service level 1 (easy) and a 99215 being service level 5 (difficult). There’s similar distinctions for inpatient care, or new/evaluation visits, emergency care, psych care, etc. You get more money for each difficulty level. Obviously babby’s first healthcare fraud is, “gee, why can’t we just bump everything up a level and get more money? Who can say what’s the difference between a level 2 and a level 3?” Well, duh, the statistical analysis.
As for my work, among the things they wanted in the end dashboards for the providers and administrators was a code mix analysis. They were part of this cooperative where lots of different hospital systems would submit their code counts for different specialties. Then everyone could download the aggregated data, and be able to say things like “a general services pediatrician sees 30% level 1 patients, 40% level 2 patients, 20% level 3 patients, 5% level 4 patients and 5% level 5 patients.” And then each doc or group of docs could look at their code mix and see how well they stacked up with that, to make sure that either they weren’t overcoding or undercoding compared to everybody else (or maybe evaluate whether or not they were a doc who saw a lot of basic patients or one who went after the tougher cases). Part of this was also making sure they don’t have some problem with overcoding they don’t know about that’s going to get the Feds coming down on them.
The point is that fudging medical billing to make it look like a healthcare provider is doing more work than they are to get some extra cash is not a novel idea. It is a well-known form of fraud, such that health insurers and the government are actively on the lookout for it, and so hospital systems train their employees not to do it, threatening them with jail time, and join voluntary associations to share data to help make sure they and their providers are not doing in it actively or even inadvertently and then they hire people like me to build them complicated data systems so they can make sure they’re not doing this.
The idea that hospital systems go to all this effort to make sure they’re not going to inflate reporting about services they provide to insurers, including Medicare, even though they have a “strong financial incentive” to do so (until the hammer comes down and they get fined/jailed out of existence), but then as soon as COVID-19 comes around they’re going to say “Remember all that training we gave everyone in the organization about not fudging healthcare services or else you go to jail? pfffft, f that noise, plague time! Make it rain! Who got COVID-19?! I got COVID-19, you got COVID-19, yo mama got COVID-19, Err’rybody got COVID-19!” is not reasonable. If anything, people who were doing this stuff before might pull back during the plague since everyone’s looking at the healthcare system now. A reasonable estimate for how much COVID-19 fraud is going on is…about as much, maybe less than the base rate for Medicare fraud by hospitals (not one-man office shows, because they don’t offer inpatient services). I would guess something like 1%.
You just die in your bed and your body never gets tested for SARS-CoV-2. The doctor just writes on your death certificate “respiratory failure”, which could be anything from Covid-19 to seasonal flu to heart disease to asthma to lung cancer.
The real world is not CSI and they are not going to do an autopsy unless they suspect there is something “unnatural” about your death.
The thing is, as far as I can tell, that the people who don’t think this is a big deal don’t think that because they’re committed to the official count as it stood whenever the Financial Times did their analysis, but rather because they think current measures are either ineffective or won’t turn out to have had a positive ROI. These are completely different points of disagreement and I don’t think you’re going to change anybody’s mind this way.
I think we should approach this data with some caution. We are not exactly operating under normal conditions right now, and COVID-19 isn’t the only difference. The pandemic mitigation strategies employed may also have an effect (in fact, it is currently one of the bigger talking points, at least here in Poland).
I really don’t like the way FT have chosen to display their graphs, with much of the X axis remaining blank, because it pertains to the future. It doesn’t help us get an idea of the time frame of these mortality spikes, which would be better illustrated if we could look at the year-to-date.
Fortunately, we have EuroMoMo, who’ve recently improved their display capabilities greatly. Zooming in, we see that the big mortality spikes begin around week 11 (9th to 15th March), which – coincidentally – is around the same time the lockdowns began. Prior to that, excess mortality has tended to be substantially lower than in the previous two years.
I strongly recommend looking at the charts for the individual contributing countries, as well as the differences among age groups (it is somewhat unfortunate that the middle category is 15-64, which seems way too broad). There are some really major discrepancies between countries. I mean, if you compare Italy (179k confirmed cases as of 19th April*) and Germany (145.2k cases as of the same date*), it’s almost like we were dealing with two completely different epidemics.
Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine have noticed it too: Six Countries: Three-quarters of the COVID Deaths. Comparing this with EuroMoMo, we see that they haven’t included the Netherlands, which seems broadly comparable to Spain under EuroMoMo metrics (and EuroMoMo doesn’t include the US, for obvious reasons). Sweden and Switzerland also have noticeable peaks, but nowhere near the Big Six (if we include the Netherlands).
Everywhere else seems pretty much within the normal range of variation.
We don’t have a great deal of information as to what these people are dying of – other than COVID-19 – but we do have some. CEBM have obtained excess death by cause data from Scotland (whose excess mortality peak is visible on EuroMoMo).
Looking at the charts, we can see a significant rise in excess deaths due to cancer, dementia/alzheimers and other causes. Interestingly, respiratory disease caused deaths have been below baseline for all but one week (two, if you want to quibble about week 15 which is around baseline) and whilst circulatory diseases have caused a significant uptick in excess deaths in weeks 14 and 15, they seem to be trending back towards baseline.
The matter of excess mortality over the past couple of months is in no way clear cut.
* Numbers taken from the JHU dashboard.
Just to get a feel for the numbers (googling and not checking sources in any meaningful way)
The Us in 2019 averaged almost 8,000 deaths per day and has been averaging 770 deaths/day from Covid since the first case was reported. So a 60% higher rate would be an additional 462 deaths per day.
Suicides in the US averaged 132 deaths a day in 2009. I think its unlikely that the rate had more than tripled due to Corona virus, even doubling would be surprising to me.
Heart disease killed 2,300 people a day, a 10% increase from the stresses surrounding the virus, the shut downs, unemployment etc doesn’t sound implausible and that would be half of your increase on its own, 20% sounds high but not ‘no chance, no way’.
After heart disease you have cancer killing about 2,000 people a day, and after that nothing kills significantly more than 500 a day despite some broad categories (all accidents etc).
One plausible mechanism I could think of would be the reaction time for causes of death like heart attacks and strokes. Survival rates go way up for those who are around other people when it happens, especially in stroke victims (~300 deaths per day 2019) it is often an observer who notices something is wrong and calls for help. Overall you would need much, much better data but a look at some basic raw totals would make it seem plausible that this is at least a part of the cause of the increase in total morbidity.
Note that there’s at least 4% increase in cardiac mortality in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, even after accounting for climate, for reasons that are not well understood but likely cultural or psychological in nature. Something of similar magnitude for the coronavirus lockdown, and possibly a factor of 2-3 higher, seems quite plausible.
I didn’t realize that many people were eating my mother’s Christmas cake.
I cannot resist a true story.
Some years back, I was in a WoW raid led by someone we had interacted with a good deal, although only online. He noticed that I wasn’t responding and called the house. My son took the call, came into my office, found me semi-conscious on the floor. The family took me in to the hospital.
So an observer can notice that something is wrong via an online interaction, although it’s surely less likely.
(I had a meningioma, a “benign” tumor between the skull and the membrane around the brain, and it was putting pressure on my brain. Solved by surgery.)
This reminds me: Does anyone know Plumber’s real identity[1] and can see if he’s okay? I know his phone is busted.
[1] I forget if he’s public or private or secret about this.
@Edward Scizorhands
I have his first name and email address, but no more info. I sent email asking him to check in late last week, but haven’t heard back. If anyone does have more details, contacting him by other means seems like a good idea.
Could we make an educated guess at what union he might be in?
Not sure what else would work, short of flushing a message in a bottle down a prison drain.
The EuroMoMo data for Germany is basically useless since they show only the federal states of Berlin and Hesse.
This is in line with the data from EuroMoMo showing that 2019/2020 was on it’s way to be the mildest flu season since start of the study, until Covid-19 hit.
It’s not as good as we would like, but that’s overstating the case a bit, yes?
The Wikipedia page for the pandemic in Germany shows that the two accounted for 8.7% of total cases and 7.5% total deaths. Their combined populations are over 10% of the total population of the country. They could be complete outliers, for whatever reason, but I do not know why that might be.
That said, I’d love to see data as to how they compare with the rest of the country, if you have any.
Well I have no numbers for the excess death, since the federal data is only out until March 15. and wo’t be updeted before might June.
But the Dashboard of the Berliner Morgenpost (https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/corona-virus-karte-infektionen-deutschland-weltweit/) tells me that Bavaria and Baden-Wüttrtenberg have about twice the number of confirmed cases per capita, and those two make up about 30% of the German population.
Maybe usless is an exaggeration, but as my mother likes to say “Exaggeration makes your statement clear”.
Thanks for the link.
I’m not sure if we can extrapolate from confirmed cases to all-cause mortality in any meaningful way. I mean, if we look at Italy’s CFR of 13,5% v. Germany’s 3,9% where both countries are quite clearly past peak infections (in this wave, at least), we’ve got to ask: what’s going on here? The raw number of cases is an insufficient explanation, because Germany has had 80% the recorded cases Italy has.
Checking the Wikipedia numbers, Italy had roughly the same number of recorded cases as Germany has now (159k) on 13th April and they’d already crossed 20k total recorded deaths. Germany has had 6.3k recorded deaths, so it’s not like there exists a critical threshold of cases that Italy has crossed, but Germany hasn’t.
Even accepting that the EuroMoMo data for Germany is unsatisfactory, the evidence points rather to Italy being uniquely “bad” in some way, rather than Germany being uniquely “good” (acknowledging that “good”, in this case, may mean “good at hiding the full extent of the pandemic”).
Germany has yet to see how it fares when the retirement homes and self-isolated old folks are hit en masse.
The concentration of old people in homes, and many grandparents living away from their offspring (and now in self-isolation) make a huge difference to Italy.
Not comparable. Maybe in several months.
They have managed to successfully isolate retirement homes? How? Here in Poland they are one of the main sources of new infections, right after hospitals, I believe.
No, the retirement homes are not successfully isolated. The precautions merely delay when they are / will be hit. 🙁
But they haven’t been hit already? That’s what I’m asking about and how it was avoided.
I mean: you’re dealing with a concentrated group of the most vulnerable portion of the population. You also have caretakers who may, or may not, be living on premises. You’ll need food deliveries, and medicines and medical interventions. The virus only needs to get lucky once.
Retirement homes being hit is one of the least unexpected results in an epidemic of this magnitude. How come it hasn’t happened in Germany already?
(Edit: Because we’re dealing with a touchy topic, let me just emphasise that this is an honest question.)
Infections have reached retirement homes already.
What I wanted to point out is that, compared to Italy, a higher rate of old people do not live with kids and grandchildren but in a setting with fewer routes for infection. E.g, grandkids coming home from (pre)school every working day, hugging and playing in the family, vs. visiting granny every two weeks on the weekend (I exaggerate for clarity).
I’m not sure that this actually cuts in favour of Germany.
Say you have ten elderly people living with their families. In order for all of them to be infected, the infection must reach ten households which may have little if anything in common.
Put those same ten people in a retirement home and it is sufficient for the infection to reach but one household for all of them to be potentially infected. You may have a smaller attack surface, but a successful attack would be much more devastating, if you see what I mean.
You may have a smaller attack surface, but a successful attack would be much more devastating, if you see what I mean.
Yes. That is what I fear we will eventually see, and may be already beginning. (Testing in retirement homes is to get higher priority, and I hope this will keep IFRs a bit lower.)
My point is that the successful attacks come at a later point in time due to the fewer overall social contacts, and esp. much reduced time with kids.
Also a retarding factor may have been that in the early stages Germany has been hit rather inhomogenously. That gave retirement homes in areas* with no/few infections the additional time until CoViD reached the area to install procedures, while early news from northern Italy helped to take measures really seriously.
*I’m using ‘area’ to also mean ‘local social graph’, sloppy, yes, but you get what I mean?
All-cause mortality numbers are useful but difficult to interpret because you have competing processes:
1. COVID-19 is killing people
2. Responses to COVID-19 kill people
2a. Some people will die because they aren’t able to receive the level of care they otherwise would’ve because medical professionals are too busy/overwhelmed
2b. Mental health issues caused by the restrictions and other challenges associated with the virus will also likely be associated with deaths
3. Responses to COVID-19 prevent deaths unrelated to COVID-19 (In the US, think traffic fatalities, but you can probably imagine a host of other things, too.)
Etc.
So you can say, “This many more people died because of the whole COVID-19 outbreak and response”, but it’s hard to tease out the causality and effects of the concurrent processes.
One factor that might help to disentangle things, is looking at the age groups dying. COVID hits older age groups disproportionally, according to the recent Swedish survey, 1% of victims are under 50 – if we assume that group is 2/3 of the population, I make the risk to be 200x higher for those over 50 compared to those under. 90% are over 70 (~12% of the population), and 50% are over 86 (~2%).
The using the below 50 as a baseline, I find that the risk is about 25 times higher between 50 and 70, 250 times higher between 70 and 85, and 1800 times higher for those 86 and up.
Also, hypertension seems to be present in 80% of the victims, but I don’t know what the general prevalence is.
I’m not sure that you can do this kind of analysis safely. For example, with bars and liquor stores effectively shut down around my area, there are a lot fewer bar fights and “alcohol may have been a factor” incidents. Likewise for substantially reduced road traffic deaths, etc.
But the people most vulnerable to Covid-19 are also those who are least likely to have been on the road in the first place, or getting into bar fights, or whatever.
So it’s quite possible that the impacts of the lockdown vary by age as well.
True, and I’m not saying it will be easy. But there are myriad causes of death other than COVID, and they will all have different age profiles. So (central limit theorem?) they (and how they are affected by lockdown) will have a less clear distribution than COVID (which is really extreme), and could at least in theory, be separated from it.
At least in Chile we have a rise in the deaths in March, way beyond what the official COVID numbers would explain, but authorities are saying that it is due to March having 5 mondays in 2020 as opposed to 2019 and 2018, and that the open data has the weekend deaths attributed to the monday, and that the disaggregated data won’t be available for a while.
My assesment of truth on this is: could go either way.
What happened to the problem of “loose Russian nukes”?
Vladimir Putin happened, roughly speaking. Arguably we got lucky that none of the nukes got really loose during the Yeltsin administration, but I think the people who would later become the core of the Putin administration were spending those years taking care of the important business.
“Meet loose 18+ Russian nukes in your area today!”
Sounds hot.
To expand a bit on John Schilling’s reply, Putin came to power and (assisted mightily by rising oil prices) put an end the economic free-fall and general chaos of the Yeltsin years, and since just about the first thing a functional state is going to do is make sure it’s in firm control of its nuclear weapons, they did that.
Ted Turner bought them.
Machine Interface was banned 4/24 (for a month), but the relevant entry on the Comments page has a formatting error breaking the hyperlink. The link can still be followed, if input manually.
SCC was also banned the same day, but the link refers to a post that appears to be removed. This also removes any post Scott might have made pointing out the ban. This one’s a little weird, because SCC didn’t have a prior history of posting in Hidden Threads – it’s possible the link is just entirely mis-aimed, but if so I can’t find the correct reference.
The first reason given for dick’s ban also appears to point to a now-removed comment. Couple ways that might’ve happened, none of which are great from a clarity perspective.
Thanks for highlighting the bans. I often don’t see these.
New Jersey lockdown is now officially indefinite, with the governor publishing a
Five-Year PlanSix Point Plan to even begin to re-open. Like I said, governors like ruling by decree.I think New Jersey should reopen, but only the swampy, chemically toxic parts adjacent to Penn Station.
So open all of it?
Scott should put back the link to meetups in the sidebar. There have now been several virtual meetups, of which the one Sunday had about fifty people in a Mozilla Hubs scene. Hubs makes possible an experience pretty close to a real meetup, encountering people, chatting with them, having conversations with two or many participants.
Second.
I tried attending the meetup, but had trouble with my audio-I could either hear or be heard, but not both. But the conversations I heard were interesting, and I’d enjoy more online meetups.
I’m hoping Scott will see this: right now would be a good time for a classifieds thread.
I said this in reply to a commenter on a previous OT but the more I think about it the more reasons I can find. The obvious reason is a lot of people are out of a job right now and could use any additional places where they might find leads. Another reason is there might be a lot of people with free time at home who would love to check out the creative projects of other SSC readers. A third reason is it’s just been a while.
Oddball maybe insight into why a lot of media and poltiical leaders seemed to do badly w.r.t. COVID-19 early on:
Journalists and politicians are mostly in the business of reporting on social truth, not actual truth. (Often those overlap, but many times they don’t.). This mostly looks right because the stuff they interact with is also mostly social truth–polls, elections, ratings, and markets are all largely based on social truth.
But understanding what was going on with COVID-19 was actually all about actual truth. Since politicians and journalists are overwhelmingly atuned to social truth instead, they didn’t do well reporting on it–they can report effectively on/react to what the people they listen to are saying, but not on what the state of reality is.
There’s always a point where social truth is trumped by actual truth–no matter how thoroughly you’ve convinced your people God is on your side in this war so it’s impossible for you to lose, the other side’s bombs and bullets can still defeat you and leave your country in ruins. But there is a lot of ruin in a nation–people can evade reality in poltiical and social and business and personal contexts for quite a long time before actual reality comes crashing through the walls they’ve built via social reality. A pandemic is a time when actual reality is going to interact with you directly, pretty hard, and social reality isn’t going to buffer that very well.
I don’t know if this is really the same, but I think the initial slow reaction and now the super-lockdown indefinitely reaction are caused by the same thing: People being emotionally invested in the modern urban metropolis. Think of all these people who push public transit, particularly high speed and light rail, when study after study shows they aren’t even energy efficient per passenger mile compared to cars. These people also generally love air travel for tourism and vacations, and restaurants. All these things are things that Covid-19 says you can’t do. At first this subset didn’t want to believe their lifestyle was the cause of so many superspreading events, now they don’t want to acknowledge that most people who don’t participate in that very niche lifestyle don’t need to abide by the same rules that they have to because they built a very fragile system.
Can you link this studies for light rail? I am unsure how someone managed to achieve this state.
—–
And anyway, why it would be relevant metric? As someone from city where large part of traffic is based on trams and increasing part of commuting traffic is based on light trains I am highly confused why such metric would be useful at all.
1) main advantage of tram (or train or subway) in a city is that it is far more space-efficient. There is no need to waste enormous space for parkings, wide roads etc. Even assuming that “aren’t even energy efficient per passenger mile” claim is true then it would not follow that overall efficiency is greater for cars.
2) the entire point of public transport is that you have no need to circle endlessly around hunting for free parking spaces
3) energy-efficiency is only part of the problem. Pollution inside cities is a major problem, and often cars are one of the main causes.
For reference: I am from Kraków, Poland and in general I support limiting car traffic in preference to publc transport/walking/cycling.
I am not remotely convinced that you don’t need to worry about COVID-19 spread without subways and dense urban living.
I’ll keep linking this map.
In the US, Covid-19 is absolutely spreading in non-mass-transit areas. Look at Indian country in AZ/NM. Look across the entire deep-South.
Or read this account of the Dougherty county, GA coroner. That’s almost 3 hours from Atlanta.
I can’t hear the phrase “bus rapid transit” without thinking of this video from the Onion back in the day:
It may depend on situation in a specific place. For example, Kraków has an already existing and well working tram system https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/50.0640/19.9225&layers=T
I am guessing that establishing tram system from scratch is far more inefficient that upkeep and enlarging existing ones.
Primarily because you need pool of people who actually are experts in wide array of topics and you have experience with things ranging from what kind of features are needed in trams through tram repair, track repair, track upkeep, training drivers, tram upkeep facilities to how handle derailed vehicles and so on.
And due to local peculiarities introducing bus lanes is not cost constrained, it is politically and enforcement constrained. So sadly cost comparison do not actually matter here.
Can you link this? From looking at https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/ nothing compares light rail/trams to buses there.
And I suspect that this claim is true solely in cases where you count tram + tracks on one side and solely buses on the other side. And assume zero political costs to convert car lanes into bus lanes.
Or for some social reasons tram projects have vastly higher nonifrastructure cost like cost of mistakes (I suspect that it may true in cases where first tram line is constructed and tram network starts from scratch).
https://reason.org/commentary/cars-mass-transit-efforts-reduce-emissions/
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/light-rail-doesnt-work
Light rail, and sometimes even buses, need to estimate passenger rates far above mean and median ridership for most routes for them to be competitive with cars in a lot of areas.
As all of the models have always said (even the very wrong ones that said things would be much worse) stopping the spread is probably impossible, the issue is very very rapid spread that overwhelms your hospitals. You can’t stop spread.
All of this is non-central to my point. Which is how metro culture is what is being protected from criticism, that’s my hypothesis.
I don’t think this is true. It’s clearly possible to contain the spread of COVID, because several countries are doing it. What man has done, man can aspire to.
Now, whether the US is capable of doing so, or whether that’s possible given where we are now–that’s not 100% clear. Can we actually get the testing and contact-tracing capabilities up and running to keep a lid on further spread of COVID-19? It’s clearly possible in principle–that’s the basic idea of “the hammer and the dance.” But it may be as hard as, say, getting all the permissions necessary for building high speed rail from SF to LA.
It may be true in USA (due to car-centric cities) but in Europe it is often untrue.
Plenty of strong claims without sources.
Especially
is deeply suspect and uncited, making me suspicious of all other claims.
Not sure is it case of mistaken calculation, blatant lie or hilariously dysfunctional public transport system. Or is someone using steam locomotives in their tram system?
Or maybe counting production + operating of trams and tracks on one side and counting just operating cars on the other side?
Several countries are doing it, for now, but we don’t know what happens when they tire out. Also, as I said, no state has publicly begun hiring and training contact tracing teams per your US centric inquiry. No European country has done it successfully either.
Is it really so hard to Google basic factual claims like this? When I Google “California contact tracer” the first result is a story that mentions SF has already trained 250 contact tracers (ok, SF is technically not a state) and the article also mentions several states have publicly announced plans for contact tracing programs, including California, Massachusetts, New York and Illinois.
Having plans at this point is pretty inadequate. Its a pseudo-medical and law enforcement job. If you expected a 1 month lockdown, you need to be hiring day 1, then probably do an extra month of lockdown just to get enough people ready. Its not a job a displaced Kohls cashier can do with 2 weeks of training. Most people who could learn the job in 2 weeks haven’t been laid off yet. Some of the small business owners who have businesses that are surely dead forever probably could, but those people are probably going to be more likely to be stubborn and try to make it work until way after a T&T program starts.
Something seems unfair about saying “no state has begun hiring tracers,” being told “here is just one story that says the tracers are already hired and trained,” and then complain “but what about the training?”
The fair complaint is that e.g. California just seems to have announced the plan to hire and train contact tracers five days ago, so what were they doing in the five weeks of lockdown before that? Or seven weeks if we count from the offical state of emergency, or two months from the recognized start of community transmission.
If the theory is that the lockdown was to buy time, wasting such dearly-bought time is a gross abuse of public trust.
I don’t see how complaining about lack of plans and lack of plausibly executing them are not intertwined. My state of IL has not made plausible efforts to execute a track and trace plan. It doesn’t even really have a plausible rollout schedule. These things are oft intertwined, because things like “essential business” are oft defined illogically. Foot locker being closed but Binnys being open makes little sense.
I feel like the cost of building anything potentially controversial in the US is so inflated that the discussion quickly becomes kind of dumb–I mean, having it be impossible to build a high speed rail line from SF to LA in less than 40 years of insanely expensive legal wrangling is a policy choice, not some inevitable law of nature. In our current environment, it might very well be cheaper and more practical to plan a manned trip to Mars–that might actually happen one day.
OK, starting bus line is vastly cheaper than starting a tram line.
But that is because vast majority of infrastructure is existing.
Is untrue in many cases, for example new parts of the cities where one may decide to build tram/subway network rather than oversized roads.
Or where one makes decision between new road and new tram line.
The interesting question for me is the difference in cost for a dedicated bus-only lane/road system vs. a dedicated tram line. Simply putting buses on the street has the inconvenience of buses with the slowness of car traffic.
In the Pittsburgh area a few dedicated bus-only roads exist which allow for rapid movement over long distances, making taking the bus almost bearable. I happen to prefer this model over rail as, when riding the ambulance, we can use the roads in an emergency.
Imagine you are sitting in a nice air-conditioned bus with power outlets and WiFi. Being in a traffic jam isn’t as bad as being a driver who has to pay attention to the road.
Busses can be great, if we want them to be great.
If we are willing to pay for them to be great.
Pay not just in money, but in willingness to say to the crazy/smelly/obnoxious people “you’re not allowed to take the bus, sucks that it’s the only way for you to get to work”. Because enough of those and the bus is not only Not Great but worse than driving in traffic.
In Texas there’s a “luxury bus company” that fills an interesting niche. Pretty much exclusively travels between the large hub cities in the state. They are indeed incredibly nice, big comfortable leather seats, usually not very full, complimentary snacks available, functioning outlets at every seat, wifi, etc.
Pricing is roughly 3x the price of the gas that would be necessary to drive yourself (or a greyhound ticket), and roughly 3x less than the corresponding Southwest plane ticket would be. Travel time is about the same as if you drove yourself (maybe a little more because you get dropped off downtown and then still have to arrange transportation to wherever you’re actually going yourself), maybe 1/3 the time it would take to fly.
I’ve taken it a couple times. It’s an interesting value proposition and even though I generally liked it, I’m just not sure there’s enough of a market for that sort of thing. If you’re optimizing for speed, you’re going to fly. If you’re optimizing for low cost, you’re going to drive or take a cheaper bus. Their market is basically people who aren’t in a hurry but also have lots of money, and there really doesn’t seem to be a lot of people like that in the market…
That’s what a 1st class train ticket is like, but cheaper and slower.
Yes, “keeping the assholes off the bus” is typically the thing that people won’t do.
Everything I heard about the Google Bus was great. It was hated because randos couldn’t get on-board. But that’s why it worked.
Oh for. I see a lot of pseudo-greens make this mistake too. There is nothing inherently wrong with using energy, as long as the energy you use is produced responsibly.
The French TGVs expend energy with reckless abandon (The train engines are rated in megawatts..) but this is far, far better than having domestic aviation because the electricity they consume is all sourced from the french reactor fleet, which means the impact on the environment and public health is basically nil, while cars and planes kill people, because they run on oil.
Trains of all types are easy to electrify. Electricity is straight forward to produce cleanly.
Maybe electricity is not clean where you live, but that is not a problem with the trains, that is a problem with your utility you need to fix no matter what, because without clean electricity we are all goddamn doomed no matter what we do.
TLDR: Trains are good because you can run a wire from one to a nuclear reactor. Doing this for a car is rather more challenging.
Unfortunately this is a very big problem with environmentalism here (the US). One thing the green lobby has succeeded in is making it impossible for utility companies to build nuclear power plants. Except for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar, the newest reactor began operation in 1993, at a site where Vistra already had one (Comanche Peak, operational April 1990). That’s one new site (two reactors) in 27 or 30 years, and only under federal ownership, ergo by the power of the federal government to ignore regulations.
How much of that is a consequence of a) Three Mile Island/Chernobyl and b) the fact that we can’t build *anything* complicated and expensive?
If a governor came to office and announced plans to build a bunch of nuclear reactors, I doubt any would get built, and certainly not in less than say 15 years.
There should be a noticeable difference between building a new road (which involves rights-of-way and other existing rights-holders) and a new building on a site you already own.
Yhea, I do not particularly see a problem with government ownership of a utility. The overall experience of attempts to liberalize that market is that it is a fools errand, so if what getting a clean grid done takes is a whole bunch of quangos in the mold of EDF and the TVA, well, those are way better for the consumer than the average utility, anyway so.. win, win?
I’m sure the environmentalists would describe Chernobyl as the reason for their opposition, but it’s the environmentalists’ active opposition that prevents the construction. If there was a consensus that nuclear plants should be built, the regulations would be adjusted.
Some of the problem is that western regulations regarding infrastructure procurement is generally just not fit for purpose – too many consultants, too many veto points, not enough inhouse expertise and lowest bidder rules that make the state a purchaser with amnesia are all distressingly common.
I mean, I can see why some of those barriers got erected – having Robert Moses abuse his position of authority to actively destroy communities of color because he was just fucking racist is going to inspire some reluctance to empower any single individual to make decisions, but that does not change the fact that having a gazillion veto points just means nothing gets done.
And none of the pathologies are inherent to being a western democracy. Spain can and does build high speed rail cheaper than goddamn China while using western labor paid pretty darn well. I… really just cannot grasp why everyone else does not at this point adopt their praxis whole-sale.
@Thomas Jorgensen:
I’m not doubting this, but do you have a good citation handy? My starting assumption (why does prior always sound pretentious to me?) would be that differential values in real labor costs alone would be a significant barrier, so I’d love to be educated.
@HeelBearCub
This blog has quite extensive data on railway construction costs, and they even made a database (xls file), with the costs for different countries.
The writer has done a lot of fairly extensive research, and the conclusion seems to be that terrain* and procurement practices are by far the most important ones.
*terrain matters, but procurement matters more; but things like being built on top of the second Rome can make a huge difference in construction costs when you need to have an archeologist on stuff checking you aren’t ruining some ruins.
TBD as to whether this will hold with <$1 gasoline.
Cheap gasoline is unlikely to persist once the lockdowns are over; right now there isn’t a lot of demand for gasoline OR new cars however powered.
Maybe, but at least three things suggest lower demand for oil may continue for awhile:
a. As long as taking a plane to a vacation site is a good way to catch the plague, far fewer people will be taking planes places, so the aviation industry’s demand for fuel will drop through the floor. (Also, business trips, conferences, conventions, etc., have already been cancelled or gone online for the next few months, and that will likely continue.)
b. Driving vacations will also be affected, albeit less so. Driving vacations are a lot of gas usage in the US over the summer, but I bet this year, that will be much less common.
c. The economy is likely (IMO) to tank, and that will reduce demand for oil because there’s less stuff being bought, sold, and made, and fewer people commuting to work. (Some will be working from home, but many will just be laid off.).
Taking a plane to a vacation does not appear to be a good way to catch a plague; it’s what you do on the vacation that matters. But the messaging has been such that it’d still expect the planes to be rather less than full for a while to come.
I am surprised by the total disconnect of the ongoing rally in the stock market (as represented by the major indexes) from the seemingly dire state of the economy. I know people have made a distinction between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” for a long time, but this is still astounding to me.
Should I be reassured in any way by the rally? Or should the rally, conversely, scare me more — could it signal a belief that major corporations will benefit from widespread small business bankruptcies, or something similar? Or should I dismiss it all as noise from investors who were very wrong about the effects of coronavirus just a couple months ago?
I’m not sure if this is included or not, but I’m definitely suspecting it’s mainly an assumption that the federal government will do literally whatever it takes to prop up and keep alive the major corporations.
Remember: The CNBC version of 2008 is something like “This all could have been avoided if only the fed lowered interest rates and bailed out all the banks before everything collapsed!” This fed has already signaled that it intends to adopt that strategy. The business press class thinks it will work. I guess we’ll see…
To avoid my personal opinion for the moment: Remember that investments are relative. Currently you can’t invest money to start up your typical small business, and you are getting 0.6% annual return on 10 year treasuries. Where exactly should you be putting your money? Right now I would say that the market is benefiting from the restriction of available options. The Fed is buying bonds at record rates, businesses cant start up and run, cap ex is dropping at ridiculous rates- all that is left is stocks and FX/commodity speculation for decent potential returns.
The value of a company’s stock doesn’t represent its current income but an estimate of the present value of its future income from now to eternity. So if people believe things are going to be bad for the next year but then get rapidly better, it’s reasonable for them to put a high value on the stock.
That doesn’t change the question of what beliefs have changed recently to drive the rally. Or are you saying that the explanation is longer term expectations becoming more optimistic?
Sure. Why not? Two months ago we didn’t know what the hell was happening — was the death rate going to be 5%? 10%? Was the R0 going to be as high as 10 or 15? Were major figures on the political and economic scene going to die, producing chaos?
We now know, we think, that these worst-case scenarios don’t apply this time, so it’s not unreasonable to be more optimistic now.
Personally, I’m thinking the market will tank again after some places loosen the restrictions and either (a) the populace reveals that they are still not interested in being big-time consumers if it involves interacting with strangers, regardless of that the government says, or (b) people will swarm back into the marketplace, and a lot of people will start dying again. But the EMH says those possibilities are already priced in, so maybe I’m wrong.
Yeah. Personally I think the market is correctly reacting to the increasingly likely scenario that COVID isn’t nearly as bad as we thought/feared.
But still underreacting to the scenario that the government keeps lockdowns in place anyway, and that the lockdowns will be more disruptive to the economy in general than is assumed…
I agree with what Matt M said. It’s insane to me that people are still dithering about how and when we should “reopen the country.” There are 26 million people out of work. This a catastrophe unlike anything in American history. As I type this, I am running in circles and my hair is on fire. And I still have my job, and am under no threat of losing it.
My problem with this position is that the markets are contradicting each other. The stock markets are running up, while the bond market is saying that we are in for long term stagnation and the oil market is saying we are in for a depression.
The main issue with markets is you have to be in them to express your opinion, I think that everyone with significant assets who took Corna seriously from the beginning got out, and while some will have bought back in here and there most of the negative opinions on the future are being expressed in other areas which don’t have the same direct impact. Markets are often irrational at the top because of this action, the most pessimistic drop out and the remaining opinion is dominated by optimists.
We haven’t lost any income yet and have increased our savings rate, meanwhile our tenants who between them have lost a job and been prevented from working (with pay) between them have been clearly spending on consumer luxuries, most notably during the week that the stimulus checks went out. It seems insane to me that a couple with 3 children under 9 years old could look at this situation and spend more.
The comparison should not be the stock market today vs yesterday or today vs a week ago but today vs Jan 1. I don’t see any mystery there.
The S&P is down 10.7% since Jan 1 and basically even with May 1, 2019. Between the 30 million new unemployed, uncertainty over future breakouts, potential for bankruptcies, new levels of government debt, concern over states going bankrupt, presumed wishes among countries for a somewhat less globalized economy, etc, I am a bit surprised it’s only 11%.
Yeah. In terms of unemployment, GDP, virtually any statistic that anyone might care to forecast, every mainstream organization is in agreement that this will be worse than 2008-2009. Back then, the markets fell by nearly 50% from peak to trough.
Another view is it fell too much in 2008-2009.
Cite please? I certainly don’t believe that.
In the previous thread, Edward Scizorhands says:
“Big if true. Is it?
If what you say is true, then some employer would be able to save a bunch of money by telling employees “go buy on the exchange, and we will pay for it through payroll deduction,” and do it right now. Are they doing that?”
The short answer is that this is expressly forbidden by the Obamacare legislation. Companies are not allowed to pay for an individual to buy an individual plan, even without subsidies. I learned this the hard way.
I work for a German company that wanted to start up a US subsidiary, and I knew the German founder because we worked together previously. He reached out to me to start the US company and we came to an agreement. Although the German healthcare system is also employment driven, it’s quite different from the US, so I had to figure out how to get my family a health plan that the parent company agreed to pay for. No insurance company would issue a group plan for a single employee, for understandable adverse selection reasons, so my solution was that I’d buy a policy on the Obamacare exchanges and the company would reimburse me. I didn’t qualify for subsidies, so they were paying the full rate of the plan – but even still, we ran into trouble with regulators who shut that down immediately. I had to go with no insurance for a while until we found a regional cooperative that pooled risk across several small businesses that we could go with, which is what we still do today even though we’re now up to 4 US employees. It was really a mess.
You can’t even use HSA or FSA money to pay for health insurance premiums.
It’s like someone is deliberately trying to make sure the market distortion caused by employer-provided health-insurance being tax free always exists.
Cui bono?
(Not a trick question. I’m genuinely interested if someone lobbied for that.)
I’m only speculating, but my understanding is that the architects of the law were really worried about employers “dumping” their employees on to the exchanges, especially low/moderate income employees who would qualify for subsidies on the exchanges but not via employer insurance. Also, at the time, the deductibles/copays were higher for exchange plans than for employer plans, but it seems like they have roughly equalized now. That whole “if you like your plan, you can keep it” would have been even more disingenuous if most employers no longer offered insurance benefits to their employees, even if that were economically a better policy.
Any change that leads to any significant group of people getting thrown off health insurance spells electoral doom for the party in power. Even the relatively modest changes of the ACA sparked a colossal backlash that ended the careers of many of the centrist red-state Democrats who had to be begged and cajoled to vote for it. Actually dislodging the employer-based system would have sent the Democrats the way of the Whigs
or the UK Labour Party.I mentioned something about this in the Amish thread.
In my previous sector, we had a lot of low-paid employees and it would have been in all but one or two people’s benefit (in a company of several hundred) for the employer to simply stop offering health insurance and pay the per-head fine. If the company had then split the savings with their employees then 100% of the staff would have come out ahead.
Yes that means taxes would have to have been paid on the premiums, but the premium subsidies in the US are significantly larger than the tax savings as long as the employee isn’t making a lot of money combined with having a small family.
For example, last year I paid $75/month total for a family of 4 on a gross income of $75,000.
Also, your employer can absolutely pay for your health plan with post-tax dollars, either by giving you cash, or using a section 105 plan. Additionally some laws changed in 2018 regarding employer contributions to marketplace plans that may have freed up other options.
Oil markets look as if they are pricing in a long recession/depression. After the negative price debacle prices rose a fair amount, with WTI next month contracts hitting $18 a barrel last week. They have since dropped by ~1/3 down to a bit over $12 a barrel as I write this. More predictive/concerning is that distant months have given up much more of their bounce gains. The December 2020 contract has fallen to $27 a barrel, only about $1 above the intraday low set the day after the front month went negative and has fallen by 50% from the February prices. The most straightforward interpretation is that recovery in demand by December has dropped significantly in expectation, as even with an expected 9.7 mbpd cut starting this Friday and shut ins already starting in earnest.
Some of that might be pricing in all of the already-stored oil.
The stock of oil stored is dominated by the flow of oil pumped. The higher estimates of available oil storage are about 2.1 billion barrels, while pre-corona consumption was ~ 100 million bpd, so a completely maxed out storage would represent about 21 days of normal consumption, and that is extremely generous since oil storage is never emptied totally and that is the high end of estimates for effective storage (typical estimates are more like 1.2 billion). Just replacing the OPEC+ cuts supposed to start in May would completely drain oil reserves in ~ 7 months, add in expected non Opec cuts from shut ins of 3+ million and its 5-5.5 months.
WTI prices were over $50 a barrel for most of February, the first oil contract in the future that goes above this mark is in 2028 (with no real volume) and the highest contract that we have volume for is Dec 2023 at $39 a barrel, and we are a year out from any contract breaking $30 (May 2021 at $30.44). For some context here the Dec 2020 contract traded at over $36 a barrel 2 weeks ago, but to get to that level you have to go out to the Dec 2022 contract now. If we were looking at oil prices to give us an indication of the length of the recession* one would conclude that the recession is expected to be ~ 2 years longer now than it was 2 weeks ago, and ~ 3 months longer now than it was at the previous low for the Dec 2020 contract in mid March.
Back of the envelope- if actual storage is ~1.2 billion barrels, and total cuts over the next 3 months are 13 million bpd and 1/4 of oil storage is normally full we would be getting back to normal storage levels ~ 70 days after full recovery, so if I was looking for an expected start of the recovery date it would be the contract 2-3 months prior to oil price normalization.
* not that this is a good idea on its own
One thing to consider (something I only know a DK amount about) is that shutting down production of oil wells altogether is highly non-trivial, so much so that it’s not done very much, and definitely not in the short term.
I don’t know how that impacts calculations, but it seems worthwhile to consider the current glut of oil in light of that. Even when demand increases again, that doesn’t mean that we will necessarily be able to easily reduce current storage. That “minimum” production capacity has to push out the advent of prices rising.
That all could be horribly wrong, IDK. Just seems worth considering.
I have that impression too.
Like, you don’t just shut down an oil well the second it becomes unprofitable in the immediate term.
You only shut it down when you believe it’s going to be significantly unprofitable and that it won’t be returning to profitability for a very long time.
That is part of the calculation going on, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue which is that in the past week oil futures contracts were predicting oil prices going back to $32 a barrel by December and this week they have it there for Sept 2021, and oil was trading at $32 right after the big drop on the increased production announcement by SA.
Maybe, maybe not. Too early to tell. The economic impact won’t be uniformly distributed among sectors.
Travel might be much more severely reduced than other sectors. Work from home might increase permanently. Supply chains might move closer to destination markets. This would impact oil prices going forward even if other sectors are less impacted.
This seems very unlikely to be a substantial factor. Current estimates are between 15 and 37% (the highest I have seen is something like 36.6 mpb) of total oil demand decreased during the shutdown, and Dec 2020 futures are down 50% since early February. WFH would have to massively increase in the long run without significant offsets in behavior that went toward more oil consumption. Further it would be highly speculative to assume a resumption of economic activity plus a reduction of oil consumption, not to say some people wont have that position but oil was a $5 billion a day market in 2019 and a conditional position like that is unlikely to be a significant driver.
Aren’t you forgetting another potential reason that Oil is so low? Didn’t this whole thing start because of “overproduction’ of oil? (I put overproduction in quotes because really it isn’t overproduction, but really just full production). Under “normal” conditions oil production (supply) is voluntarily constrained so that the price can be higher. But these constraints broke down and thus the price of oil dropped because a lot more oil was being produced than was being consumed.. Can’t these low future prices of oil simply reflect either (a) a semi-permanent over-supply of oil for the future and thus a lower market-equilibrium price for oil or (b) marker uncertainty that voluntary constraint of oil production will fail again in the future causing oil to crash again.
Most likely it is a combination of both (a) and (b) above plus what you said, lower demand due to a near-term recession.
The numbers I’ve seen are roughly a global max production of 100 bb/d (i.e. what we have pre OPEC cuts), and a drop in consumption from 90 bb/d to maybe 60-70 bb/d due to COVID. So there was overproduction (and price drop) when Russia and the Saudis opened the faucets, but the drop in consumption made this a lot more dramatic. (So basically agree with baconbits’s numbers)
I’m not so optimistic that the economy will revert to normal, OPEC will successfully reach production goals, and others will follow suit out of…sympathy to the cause? and oil prices will bounce back. I think a resumption of the economy is going to be slow, and people I know are cancelling trips and events, preparing for domestic vacations or staying at home. Reduced activity followed by bankruptcies, the economy in general will take a hit, reducing purchasing power, which will make the effect worse and longer lasting. No amount of printed bills can change this, only ramping back up production of actual value. In addition, OPEC members will cheat, and non-union oil producers will make sympathetic noises, but keep the oil flowing to exploit any tiny price increase (lest the others do it).
I’m not going to guess any time frame, but I think we will have to see American and other non-aligned oil producers shutting down production before things stabilize. And that increasing oil price is going to be a very long, slow climb.
The Saudi oil production increase in early March was for ~ 2 million bpd and by most estimates would max out their capacity. This did cause a large gap down in the oil price at the open on the following Monday (it was announced on a Sunday)- a drop of ~$13. However it finished that week pretty flat off the decline, closing on Friday ~ $0.70 below the Monday close. Futures prices don’t put oil back to $32 a barrel until September 2021, so even with the announced increase by SA, and ignoring the cuts announced by OPEC+, expected decline in US production and the fact that there was a nearly 30% decline in oil prices from Jan through early March before SA’s announcement, oil prices are insinuating at least 16 months before economies are at full demand again. If you take a highly simplistic approach and take oil prices prior to the virus making significant headlines, and then subtract the $13 for SA’s increased production, you are looking at oil in the high 40s to low 50s, numbers that the oil market is pricing in 6-10 years out*. On the other hand the Dec 2020 contract was trading between $32 and $37 a barrel between 1 and 3 weeks ago, suggesting that we were ~7 months from a normal market implying that within the past week the oil markets have more than doubled their expectation for the length of the recession + recovery.
*Yes, you shouldn’t take these numbers this way and bet on oil prices being low that far in the future, its more an illustration that the current market saying that we are no where near the old normal from the past December
I started writing something like a novella about software development and madness. @DanRidge inspired in part by your comment several weeks ago, although not perfectly to prompt.
Better Living Through Functor Oriented Programming
Lately, when you fall asleep in the salt breeze, bathed in the quiet whistle of your laptop’s carburator, you dream of data validation.
Some nights, you dream about falling asleep covered in the loam of an eastern pine forest. You wake up to the sensation of a tarantula crawling on your shoulder. Unalarmed, you take out your cell phone. You google tarantulas and determine that there are no tarantulas in eastern pine forests. You are safe.
Other times the dreams are more oblique. There is a shriveling old man. You know him. He is speaking about sailboats, but his meaning is impenetrable. You wonder if the words are koans, or simple aphasia. The man is your father. Unalarmed, you take out your cell phone. You google fathers and determine that there are no fathers. You are safe.
You are sent these dreams because your team at Ocean First!, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mother Ocean, LLC., has recently taken over a failing TCMA effort from the Atlantis Group. The developers over there spent 14 months on the project and failed to deliver an MVP.
The Atlantean team claimed that this occurred because no one had defined “TCMA”, and the requirements document they were able to tease out of the business was a protean mess, changing constantly. One junior developer swore that it would be a little different whenever he came back from the coffee machine. When they explain this to you, you feign compassionate understanding – “Yes, yes, that sounds like you were set up to fail.” If you’re being honest with yourself – and what sort of person isn’t honest with themselves, in the almost private confines of their own mind? – you’re pretty sure this is happening because they’re using python. Whatever the reason for the failure, though, your team has a reputation for being a no-fail crackpot team, and you’ve been given the project to rescue.
“No, not crackpot. Crack. A crack team. We’re hotshots. Keep it together,” you think to yourself.
“What’s that, Dion?” Agnes looks at you, gently. You notice that you’re in a meeting room filled with people. A briefcase with a padlock is placed conspicuously on the table. The meeting is paused, apparently waiting on you.
You deflect, unsure of the topic. “I looked over the code, and we’re going to have to scrap it and start over.” You haven’t actually looked at the code, but you know this is the responsible thing to say.
Expressions of alarm spread across the room, so you keep talking. You read in a leadership book once that good communicators use metaphors. You decide to try that. “Atlantis has done good work, but the requirements problem…” You gesture at the briefcase. “It’s like they’ve built an aqueduct without fully understanding gravity. Everything flows in the wrong direction. It’s like Rome. It just won’t scale.” This sounds good. You nod, sagely. Several others nod, less sagely. Agnes is still. Rick from Atlantis looks indignant, bordering on livid.
“Dion, could you be a little more specific? How exactly do aqueducts relate to our python codebase for this TCMA project? You’re seriously proposing we throw away 14 months of work because, and I quote, ‘it’s like Rome’?” You feel anxious. You like Rick. He probably doesn’t deserve this. You start to change the subject by explaining the Liskov substitution principle. As usual, Eddie interrupts you.
“Rick, you and your team has already fucked this situation up beyond all reason. Everyone was sympathetic for a while, but you can’t just keep blaming everything on Decategorisation. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that Dion and their team managed to salvage your algal bioinformaesthetics project, too. As far as I’m concerned, what they say goes.” Eddie is such a dick.
“Eddie, please. Raising your voice and repeating your favorite recriminations isn’t going to…”
You only vaguely that particular bioinformaesthetics project, but since the Decategorisation Event, many things are like that. Everyone has holes – people in their lives they don’t remember, backstory that doesn’t entirely add up. Many people – the Eddies of the world – continued their changed lives without interruption or much examination. If they ever talked about it, they would say things like “Look. Life is how it is, not how it was.” Others, however, – those prone to introspection and doubt – suffered more from the Decategorisation, and the uncertainty it imbued on daily life.
At moments, even you have a niggling sense of doubt about bioinformaesthetics. While the definition rolls easily off your tongue – “Bioinformaesthetics is the science of redesigning fundamental biology to better match human aesthetic preference and cognitive limitations” – you feel dissonance. Have humans always done this? Did you really go to school for it? You remember your graduation day so vividly that it’s movie-like. The rousing speech: “Go forth, and make the categories for man!”, the cheers, the sky blackened with graduation caps like locusts. You smile in recollection.
You notice that the meeting has continued, and your smile lingers too-long, edging towards rictus. Perhaps the vitriol has subsided. “Dion? Do you have something to add?”
“Um. One more thing. As we all know, there’s a fine line between accountability and needless interruption.” You stand and reach over the table, and try to collect the briefcase. It’s just barely in reach. “Since everything got DC’d, Agile is broken. Two week sprints just don’t work anymore.” You manage to grab the briefcase without displacing too much on the table, and stand back up. “Now that we’ve got the requirements documents, we can probably dispense with the sprint planning phase. I think a better balance will be more like 6 months.”
There is a moment of silence. Blessed Eddie breaks it:
“6 months? That cadence feels a little long.” He looks uneasy. You feel uneasy. You contemplate explaining Liskov substitution again. You decide against it.
“We’ll provide monthly reports, and give you access to the beta as soon as its up. But paradoxically, delivering good software product means focusing on process over product. Our team can’t compromise on this point.” Process over product – that’s good alliteration. You should write it down.
Eddie looks pained. “Okay. If you’re sure, Dion. But you better not fuck this up.” You flex your cheek muscles graciously.
“Thanks for your confidence, Eddie. If there’s nothing else, I’m going to get back… I’ve got a talk on SOLID design principles…” You trail off, and let gently let yourself out of the room.
As you the door shuts behind you, your rictus turns into a grin. You’re giddy the entire walk – through the atrium, up the stairs, onto the deck – back to your open office. You did it. You got the project. Finally, you’ve got *time*. Time to rebuild what was lost. Time to build something better. Something perfect. Something pure.
You throw the requirements briefcase down carelessly besides your desk. You boot up your computer, and open your code editor. You create a file: `functors.scala`. The threads of reality begin to hum. Your breath catches in anticipation.
I am filled with equal parts terror and awe. More of this (the novella, not necessarily this specific quote) please.
I think my favorite part was, “Go forth, and make the categories for man!”
This is great, thank you for doing this! I just remember that your way of describing your plight in the other post was apt and turned everything into a compelling narrative, which sold me on the book you weren’t writing, and now that you’re writing the book I would read more.
I don’t know if this is helpful to anything at all, but I noticed three errors as I was reading, so I figured I’d just catalogue them for you here. Unfortunately that’s just after one pass, can’t guarantee that I caught everything:
1. “Rick, you and your team has”; you and your team are the subjects, thus plural, thus ‘have’ should replace ‘has’.
2. “You only vaguely that particular bioinformaesthetics project”; seems like a word is missing between ‘vaguely’ and ‘that’, probably ‘remember’ or synonyms thereof.
3. “and give you access to the beta as soon as its up”; ‘its’ should be “it’s”.
Thanks for the further encouragement, and also for the corrections. My intent is to publish this on a personal site, so they will certainly be incorporated. After the 3rd or 4th pass, writing blindness set in, and I’m just reading from memory. Much obliged.
>.scala
Oh well, it was almost perfect.
Did I miss a part one? I’m not sure whether I was supposed to understand this. But in any case, your writing style is captivating!
Good feedback. No, you didn’t miss anything: it’s just obtuse, and aims mostly to imply the existence of a plot, rather than show it. The next installment aims to be a little more generous with exposition.
So I have a question for you religious folks.
On the recommendation of some of the people on SSC, I’ve been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book about the Reformation. It’s interesting stuff, but somewhat dense—it feels like every single sentence has been boiled down from 200 years’ worth of theology-school master theses.
The book makes it clear that a lot of Christian traditions are synthetic (if that is the right word)—various councils over the centuries have set down official dogma concerning the Eucharist, the Trinity, the nature of free will, heaven, hell and purgatory, etc. Clearly, there is no single source of “truth” in any of these traditions; they are second-hand, endlessly argued interpretations of things that Jesus Christ may or may not have said and that the Old and New Testaments may or may not have meant.
My question is, to what extent do the Christians (of various persuasions) on this board subscribe to the dogmatic elements of your particular denominations? Do you really believe in the Trinity? Do you really believe in transubstantiation? Or are your beliefs less dogmatic and (I’m not sure what the right word is) spiritual, gestalt, all-embracing?
I can, to a limited extent, understand the latter kind of belief. I can’t for the life of me understand the former kind of belief (i.e., Jesus was resurrected, limbo exists, you either are or aren’t one of the Elect). So if this applies to anyone here, can you explain how you reconcile your rationalist leanings with Christian dogma?
“Jesus was resurrected”
I am pretty sure that in Christianity this is not fitting
description at all.
This is so; if someone denied the resurrection belief, I would call their profession of Christian faith a lie.
(I was going to say “doubted” but that’s a highly variable state, ranging from constant skepticism to occasional questioning, much of which is consistent with faith, if not the mountain moving kind)
They might be friends, they might be allies, but in that case they aren’t Christian.
Now, many other particulars I’m not so dogmatic on. I don’t expect anyone to fully understand the Trinity*, and particulars of the afterlife or eschatology are often pretty vague so I so don’t see any particular interpretation as a requirement. Indeed, it’s probably a better test of faith to see some grace on such matters.
*(Though denying the divinity of Christ is another deal breaker. The hard to understand bit is the three-but-really-one aspect that’s always explained via metaphors that can only go so far in representing a unique circumstance).
I wasn’t aware Christianity entails a literal belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Aren’t there some sects/believers that discount this claim, and talk more about the importance of Jesus’ message?
There is some disagreement about whether his actual physical body rose from the grave, and if not, what else happened. Some people go so far as to take the post death appearance of Jesus as a metaphor for his spirit remaining with his disciples. These are explanations I’ve read from mainstream Catholic and Lutheran officials, although I think the majority / official line in both churches is physical resurrection.
But if you completely cut out the supernatural aspect and just treat Jesus as a philosopher, you probably wouldn’t be considered a Christian by most people.
From a pure philosophy perspective, the philosophy of Jesus sucks.
Heresies, perhaps. At that point you’re either a Deist or Atheist philosopher. Possibly a swell person and fine neighbor, regardless. But heretical.
As Paul said, and one has to deem false to hold such a belief,
You’re gonna have to explain that. As a professed Christian, on what basis are you disparaging Jesus’ philosophy?
The Unitarian Universalists, maybe. At least, I once heard a UU adherent describe the UUs as people who valued Jesus the Teacher, rather than then Jesus the God. Don’t know if that’s actually fair to them.
@Bobobob
The Bible literally says if Christ is not risen, our faith is in vain. 1 Corinthians 15:14. That’s about as clear cut as these things get. In practice, however, religions are often categorized by family resemblance, so you can find people (and sects) who will deny just about anything about Christianity yet call themselves one.
ETA: Ninja’d by Randy.
The Nicene Creed is the list of things basically all Christians got together and agreed are the bare minimum that anyone who calls themselves a Christian have to believe. It includes:
“he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven”
There are minor variations, including the related Apostle’s Creed, but they all include the literal resurrection. And there’s no law (at least in the US) against believing whatever the hell you want and calling yourself a Christian, if ~98% of the people who call themselves Christian have explicitly stated that if you don’t believe these specified things then you’re not one of them, then you’re not one of them.
@John Schilling:
There is an implication there that I’m not sure you are willing to bite off. At a not very distant point in the past believing in only “two testaments in the Bible” was one of those kind of gates.
So when did the Mormons become Christian?
I mean, I basically agree with the idea. I’m always going on about the inherent malleability of language.
This would make “Christian” descriptive and not prescriptive and I’m not sure you are willing to bite on that. I definitely don’t think some of the more devoted adherents will bite on it.
CS Lewis famously makes the argument that if Jesus wasn’t either God or speaking for God, his pardoning of sins is pretty hard to make any sense of.
As I understand it, the standard scholarly “he didn’t originally claim to be God” line is basically that Jesus is Arian in Mark; he’s human before being baptized and then he becomes a supernatural being who comes from God and acts like God and speaks for God but is not, technically, God. This seems a fairly fine distinction to me–not nearly as big as it’s sometimes made out to be.
So when did the Mormons become Christian?
Relatively few non-Mormons agree that Mormons are Christians.
@SamChevre:
Citation needed.
Or, rather, that doesn’t appear to be true.
Overall, 51% of Americans view Mormons as Christians. Even 40% of white evangelical Christians think they are Christian and only 45% think they are not Christian.
@HeelBearCub
Thanks–that doesn’t match my memories, but Pew is a reliable source. (I wish it had the cross-tabs–I wonder if opinions are significantly different between people who know more vs less about Mormon belief.)
Or less about Christian belief. I could also see as the country because more atheist/agnostic/”spiritual but not religious” it’s much easier for people to say “oh, they believe in Jesus, right? Yeah, they’re Christian.”
I’m not quite ready to rule Mormons in (though if it helps, I’m glad I’m not the Ruler), but I do think they would assent to at least this much:
So other Christian’s acceptance of Mormons isn’t necessarily saying anything about the status of Unitarians or others who may wish to revere a still dead Jesus.
@SamChevre:
I wouldn’t expect that people know all that much about Mormonism, but I don’t expect them to know all that much about their own religion, either. It’s common for those who are interested in details to overestimate how much detail other people know about “common knowledge”.
But, I would expect that the idea that there is a “Book of Mormon”, wherein Jesus appeared in the Americas, to be pretty darn high on the list of things people know about Mormonism, simply because that’s what the Mormons themselves lead with. Maybe not as high as polygamy and underwear on the “things I think I know about Mormons”, but right up there.
@Randy M:
That was sort of the opposite of my point.
I’m saying that “The [Christian] Bible consists of [solely] The Old Testament and The New Testament” is also one of those things that would have been foundational to “being a Christian”.
I can make the point even more general, and point out that the Reformation changed a bunch of things that were previously canonical for being a Christian. There wasn’t any disagreement about the Trinity or transubstantiation.
Basically, this is vaguely akin to a “Christian of the gaps” argument. Christians believe a common set of things … until some group gets accepted as Christian that doesn’t believe something in that set.
And that predicts that you can know basically nothing about what Christians will accept, whereas I think there are limits, some that won’t change, even if some have changed.
I think Mormons are probably beyond the bounds, but there’s others I’m more certain of and believe are widely held.
@Randy M:
No it doesn’t. It merely establishes that the definition of “Christian” is temporal in nature. Much like, if you will permit me, the definition of the phrase “literal truth”.
@HeelBearCub
I guess I missed your point. Sure, language changes.
It’s probably as a result of such watering down that we get terms like “Orthodox” and “Fundamentalist” and “Literalist” and if and when Christian starts to encompass more groups one of these or a new term will begin to be used to designate people who believe in the literal literal divinity, death, and resurrection of Christ.
And to echo Nick, similar to someone calling themselves a man, if the appearance is kept, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they claim the label to make some authoritative statement, I’ll loudly dissent.
Like if there was a survey that asked “Are Unitarians a Christian” and then later “Christians believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead after being Crucified” you may well get a majority for both.
About the time the Culture Wars reached a point where the Christians needed all the help they could get, and it was clear that the Mormons were reliably cultural conservatives on the relevant issues, I think. That gets them a bit of slack on the less central parts to the creeds, e.g. Trinitarianism (which hasn’t been worth killing people over for at least five hundred years).
The divinity and resurrection of Christ would be a dealbreaker even so, I’m pretty sure. Fortunately for the Mormons, they’re on board with that. Also fortunately for the Mormons, the people who wrote the creeds stopped with the “ascended into heaven” part, without going on to say “and promised never to return”.
@Nick:
This is a strange verse to me, because it implies that the Christian faith is totally worthless if the historical truth claim “Christ is risen” is false.
But we’ve run the experiment of European civilization with the Christian faith, followed by European civilization without it, and we went from Rationalism to continental philosophy, Dante and Ariosto to barely being able to produce poetry at all, from Michelangelo to Jackson Pollack, from Bach to jazz. “In vain” should by definition preclude the ability to generate superior intellectual and aesthetic culture.
Logically one could say that if Christ is not risen, Christianity isn’t true, so Paul wasn’t divinely inspired and wrote a false belief that something can’t be false and Good. But that doesn’t sit right with me, due to being predisposed to agree with Plato for unrelated reasons (i.e. that mathematical objects and moral facts are real).
@Le Maistre Chat
When Paul writes “our faith is in vain” I don’t take it to mean “the entire thing is worthless all through” but rather, literally, it is in vain. As in, it is vanity and chasing after the wind. What else would you call a bunch of people going around, suffering persecution and pain to teach the world that Christ has risen if, in point of fact, he hasn’t? His point, as far as I understand it, is that the resurrection of the linchpin of Christianity. If it’s not true then the whole edifice is untrue, even if it produces some good results. If, for instance, it turned out that Peter never existed, or that Judas didn’t deny Christ, or that the sermon on the mount was plagiarized, Christianity could survive. But if Christ was not raised from the dead then the whole thing is bust.
Also, one could argue that if Christ had not been risen then none of the good things that came out of Christianity would have come out of it.
It seems obviously possible for a belief system to be false but still have some beneficial effects, at least in a given time and place, though. For example, you can imagine three worlds:
a. One in which Jesus was the son of God, just like we Christians think, and his teachings contained many true and useful ideas that lead to a good life for individuals and a good outcome for communities when they are followed.
b. One in which his teachings have the same properties, but Jesus himself was only a prophet speaking the word that God had inspired him to speak.
c. One in which his teachings have the same properties, but Jesus himself was just an unusually brilliant moral and practical thinker who thought in terms of the religion and culture in which he’d been born, and so formulated and phrased his teachings in the same way.
In world (b), Jesus is like Moses or Elijah. This is basically the Muslim view of Jesus, as I understand it–Muslims revere Jesus as a very important prophet and teacher but think Christians went off the rails with thinking he was also somehow God.
In world (c), Jesus was a great moral teacher living within the constraints of his times, like the Buddha or Confucius. This is the view Thomas Jefferson and I think a lot of other Deists and freethinkers and such had of Jesus.
I don’t see an obvious reason why the success of Christendom demonstrates that (a) is true instead of (b) or (c). Further, I don’t think the amazing expansion of Islam demonstrates that Mohammed was divinely inspired, nor that the impressive accomplishments of Mormons in Utah in building a productive and human-positive society demonstrates that Joseph Smith was divinely inspired. Maybe both were–I certainly can’t *prove* anything either way. But I don’t think success in building a good society guarantees that your beliefs are right.
Yeah, Paul also says something like “if the resurrection didn’t happen, then we are the most pitiable of men.” Basically, I think the right way to read that is in terms of the times when he wrote it. Basically, Christians were being thrown out of synogogues and chased out of town and disowned by their families and hassled by the authorities, and the most strongly believing of the Christians were trading off everything else of value to follow the word of Christ.
Now, in modern America, an atheist might say “Go ahead and attend a church every Sunday and more-or-less follow their moral teachings as long as they’re not too onerous–you’ll probably be happier that way.” And they might be right, regardless of the truth of the doctrines of that church–being faithful to your wife and reasonably kind and generous with strangers and willing to help out your neighbors and such is probably a good way to live. But that’s not the world Paul or the early Church were living in. In that world, being a Christian was, at least in many places, not any kind of obvious path to an easy or pleasant life. Going through the motions of worshiping the Roman gods and keeping up local traditions to stay on everyone’s good side was a lot more prudent, if you just wanted a quiet and pleasant life where you could marry a nice girl and have some kids and be on good terms with your neighbor.
@FLWAB:
@albatross11:
+2
Yes, it makes a lot more sense read in the context of the third or fourth quarter of the first century AD.
I wasn’t aware Christianity entails a literal belief in the resurrection of Jesus.
This makes me go bounce my head off walls.
I suppose maybe society and culture are at the stage of not knowing basic doctrines anymore, such that “Christian” just has the vague meaning of “one of those Jesus types” or “sorta generally nice person” (depending on how one experiences it) but yep, you sorta gotta believe in the Resurrection to qualify as a Christian, and it has to be the literal version, not some kind of “The disciples were inspired by the Christ Event” fudge.
And even if you’re a bishop of the Church of England and you’ve got really really sophisticated beliefs and it’s nothing that is expressed as crudely as “a conjuring trick with bones” which is only the newspaper headline version of what you said, you’re not a Christian. You may be a very nice guy, you may be moral and ethical and all the rest of it, but you’re not a Christian.
First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 15 verses 3-19:
“Minor crimes, such as murder, jaywalking, and shoplifting”
To the full extent, yes, yes, and definitely no.
I don’t really know what you want me to say here. I post all the time about these things on SSC. I endeavor to explain what Catholics believe, why they believe it, and where it comes from. If you want to know about something specific, I might discuss it with you. But I can only answer such a general question with the general answer that, if you’d read my posts, you’d know I am Christian because I am rational.
Nick, you are exactly the person I am looking to engage with. Do you have a blog/essay where you unpack that last phrase (“I am Christian because I am rational”)?
I do not. That sounds at first glance like a worthy project, but the problem is that people usually aren’t, and probably shouldn’t be, persuaded by such high level discussions. Like, to just unbuckle the straps, 1) I find broadly Aristotelian metaphysics persuasive, and hence 2) am persuaded by natural theology arguments based on them, like some of the famous arguments for the existence of God. Separately, I think 3) there is decent evidence for a historical Jesus and 4) for continuity between the teachings of Jesus and the early Church. I think that 5) that includes that there is a Church, which has been given a body of teachings written down by or passed down by the disciples—in both cases IOW coming from Jesus—and which is guided by the Holy Spirit to preserve it from error. But 6) Scripture doesn’t interpret itself and tradition may be corrupted, so 7) the Church has a duty to actually teach what it has been given, and we a duty to take up those teachings. Consequently, I believe that 8) certain processes like councils and have the authority to define doctrine I am bound to affirm, and everyday teaching I am bound to listen to and assent to. On top of that, I’m fairly confident that 9) continuity has in fact been maintained throughout history and consistency reasonably well proved. Taking all of this together I don’t really have any room to believe airy fairy nonsense about an all-embracing gestalt, but I am bound to believe that Jesus died and rose again on the third day, that some are marked by original sin but committed no actual sin, and that some are ordained infallibly to attain eternal life but none ordained to be damned, among many other things.
So at that high level—allowing that I wrote this very quickly—I think it all rather holds together. But consistency is just one mark of truth; seeing that it all fits (supposing it does) does not get you very far. So much of the time that these things come up I am not speaking extremely abstractly but instead discussing particulars: defending an Aristotelian principle or an argument which presupposes it, explaining how revelation or teaching authority works, discussing a solution to a knotty theological problem which revelation poses to us.
There are also all sorts of aids to belief which I could expand on, but I don’t know that they’d help you much. Miracles, I expect, sometimes occur, but I’ve never studied any. Christendom has produced a multitude of saints, but I couldn’t really judge whether they are especially numerous or saintly. I think there are clear cases where the Church was saved from error, but someone taking the Outside View need not be convinced of that: they would have to be persuaded first that alternative views (say, Arianism) actually contradict the faith, and second that this save was “lucky” after all. I think the Church’s social teaching was well ahead of its time, but I am as yet lonely in my distributism and increasingly lonely in my social conservatism. I think we’ve produced surpassing works of intellectual and artistic genius, from Thomism to Gothic architecture to the Divine Comedy, but there’s no accounting for taste.
Thank you for the reply, it’s very helpful.
As a fellow Christian, can we talk sometime about distributism? Its picture of the idea economy sounds attractive, but I’ve never come across a clear explanation of what it does and doesn’t allow, or how it could practicably be enforced. Maybe in a new top-level post, if you’re interested?
@Evan Þ
We can! I don’t know if I would write a top level post myself, because I don’t think I could do it justice, but I would probably respond if someone wrote one.
How much of the program of distributism is specific to the U.K.? I seem to remember some bits of Chesterton where he is arguing that the land was largely stolen under Henry VIII from the monasteries, hence that distributing it to the people would be just.
@DavidFriedman
It’s true the US had a very different start—after all, for a long time we were giving land away for anyone willing to claim it. This is almost an ideal distributist policy, actually: a farm for anyone who wants one.
I don’t think distributism in America today needs to go distributing farms, though. For one thing, not many people would want one; we’re a very urban country now. For another, you have to get the land from someone, and distributism is not about expropriating from Peter to give to Paul. A better idea, I think, would be creating much better conditions for small business ownership and self employment.
Bobobob–you might be interested in my favorite book on Christian apologetics is “The Resurrection of Theism: Prolegomena to Christian Apology”, by Stuart C. Hackett. The first half of the book is in fact a defense of rational empiricism: it is only after Stuart has established that knowledge exists as a synthesis of reason and experience (both by positive argument and by trying to refute alternative perspectives) that he proceeds to assert that rational empiricism in fact supports Christian theism. Stuart wrote this book half a century ago, but it doesn’t suffer for that age, since his arguments are rooted not in (say) recent discoveries about the nature of DNA, but in the more general structure of science and the ordered nature of the universe, as well as our presence within it. His style is dense, but intellectually honest; he dismantles Christian arguments that he doesn’t find sufficiently intellectually rigorous.
The Bible, by itself, doesn’t spend a lot of time on metaphysics or trying to give you an easy model to understand what’s going on. To take the doctrine of the Trinity as an example, there’s no single place in scripture where it’s laid out. What you have instead is talk about the Father and the Son, and Jesus says that he and the Father are one but also prays to the Father, and the Spirit is praised as God yet Jesus says he will send the Spirit, etc. Things like this happen all throughout the Bible. It is not a textbook of metaphysics and not intended to be. In the sense, the doctrine of the Trinity is “synthetic” in that it is an attempt to take everything that is described in the Bible and grasp the metaphysics behind it. It is not, in principle, particularly different from creating a theory to explain scientific data, only the data we are using does not come from observation and we are not able to do experiments to get more of it. There is the raw data of God’s revelation to man, and then there is trying to systematize it. What is absolutely clear is that the being we talk about when we talk about God must have a mode of consciousness different from the human mode in important ways. Trying to understand these ways is something theologians do.
And yet at the same time I can’t say that I only believe in the Trinity as “the best explanation we currently have” or whatever. It’s stronger than that, in ways that are difficult to define. A big part of that is probably the fact that no new data is forthcoming and people have had centuries to refine their models, which is unheard of in science. So I guess I’d say that the doctrine of the Trinity is a model, but it’s a darn good one that’s been refined a lot more then most models we come into contact with. Even that’s probably selling it too lightly, but it’s the best I can do for now.
First, a strong suggestion–if you want to understand those claims, and how they developed, the book to read is Diarmaid MacCulloch Christianity: the First 3000 Years; the Reformation book is great, but is about one chapter in a discussion that’s already a couple millennia old at that point.
Believing that Jesus was God, died, and rose again is definitional of Christianity–that’s not denominational. I think Two McMillion captures it well-these are syntheses from what evidence we do have, and fit with the world. (Good book on “how” is N T Wright’s “Simply Christian”.) The denominational things you mention – transubstantiation, election. limbo – are attempts to explain things clearly that are not really easy to capture in words.
For a scientific analogy, imagine attempting to explain general relativity in words, with no algebra. It’s not about whether the theory is true–it’s that words just don’t work for explaining it clearly in a non-contradictory way.
Southern Baptist here. The answer to your first question is largely going to depend on what exactly you see as the “dogmatic elements.” I do believe that scripture is the ultimate embodiment of God’s revelation of His nature and will and thus should be preeminent in authority, but some (but not very much) of it is dependent on a recognition of the culture of the time of recording. Here I am thinking of things such as the prohibition against tattoos: the idea is not that there is something innately evil about putting pictures on yourself; rather, in Old Testament times, tattooing was associated with Canaanite and other peoples’ deities and was therefore forbidden to the Israelites.
“Do you really believe in the Trinity?” Yes, indeed, although Ii do not pretend to comprehend it fully. We use many analogies for it — e.g., water at its triple point — but it is by its very nature incomprehensible to us. (For an amusing look at the Trinity analogies, see Lutheran Satire’s “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.”
As for transubstantiation, I believe it is possible but I don’t believe it happens; it is entirely symbolic.
As for squaring my beliefs with my rationalistic tendencies, I don’t worry about it. I understand things now that I didn’t ten years ago, I expect to keep learning, and I am looking forward to the day when I see the front of the tapestry.
I subscribe in good faith to all the dogmatic elements of my denomination. I’m always surprised when I find that core members of my denomination who don’t (it happens, but not that often).
This is interesting, and perhaps suggests why we may be coming from different assumptions here. I find it hard to understand the vaguer senses of belief, but quite easy to understand these dogmatic beliefs: they are factual things which which I either conclude are true, conclude are false (in either case with varied degrees of confidence), or conclude I don’t have enough information to take a sensible view either way.
So I am Russian Orthodox. I am not 100% certain about any teaching of Russian Orthodox. I generally do not bother putting precise percentages on all the teachings but I do believe there is a less than 50% chance that Russian Orthodoxy is right about every single doctrine. There are an infinite different potential metaphysics of the universe we live in. I believe that Russian Orthodoxy is the most likely of all those infinite possibilities, but still unlikely true.
Nevertheless, I act and behave consist with if Russian Orthodoxy is 100% right about everything. If I was agnostic about Russian Orthodoxy, I would lose all the benefits of being Russian Orthodox, for no gain. It’s better to behave that you are certain.
Also Orthodox Christian. I feel that most aspects of Christian doctrine which are least provable are least provable because they are least relevant to the immediate daily praxis. I don’t even know how to reasonably distinguish monothelitism from monophysitism, and it’s never been a problem. Orthodoxy is in some ways a very practical faith–I’ve heard it pretentiously described as “the science of salvation”–concerned with the ongoing process of self-purification, deification, theosis. My end goal is to become a less wretched person than I used to be, and I feel Orthodoxy has the right idea about what makes people so wretched and unhappy all the time. If it doesn’t have the right idea, it at least has the right process. I am willing to take any number of things on faith, and accept that, as the apostle says, we see through a glass darkly.
I like this blog because Scott is thought-provoking and some features of rationalism, at least as he expresses it, are things I also like about Orthodoxy or Christianity more broadly. I like willingness to doubt and question one’s motives, and the emphasis on charitable thinking. The broader rationalist project strikes me as … not exactly quixotic, but likely to meet with limited success. I outright dislike transhumanism and am not at all concerned about AI.
I think there is a lot of confusion in language here. What does it mean to believe in transubstantian? If you are a postAristotelian Thomist you might grasp what is meant by that word. Otherwise, you just get some dumbed-down formulaic expression which is the “right answer” according to authority, and bypass the need to spend 5 years reading Aristotle and the commentary tradition (which I’m doing by the way; it’s fun but not for everyone!).
To subscribe to a dogma means that you believe that a particular formulation is a legitimate way for a Christian to describe what is going on. For some Christians, they consider a dogma the ONLY legitimate way to describe what is going on.
Although dogma is a denomination’s approved way to discuss a matter, those categories are not therefore the best way to formulate an issue, and they are not beyond improvement. Nonetheless, the bodily resurrection of Jesus is pretty much a solid dogma in the wider tradition. That we will one day be immortal beings in physical bodies too also is pretty much a shared dogma. It’s the transhumanist aspect of Christianity, I’d say.
Exceptional outliers on dogma are Unitarians, 7th Day Adventists, Mormons(?) some nondenominational protestants (who can have a very great spread of beliefs).
You seem to assume that rational thinking could only lead to one world view. There can exist several mutually exclusive world views, where each one is internally logical and without contradictions.
What’s interesting to me, as a Jew, is the degree to which ancient Jewish beliefs of the time were integrated into early Christianity and effectively set in stone. Many of these beliefs, such as belief in Hell and the Devil, were at some point after the introduction of Christianity thrown out by mainstream Jewish thought, but survived in its descendant religions.
Is believe in the devil/Satan a dogmatic part of Christian belief? I was always unsure of that.
Satan shows up in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) to tempt Jesus, and in two of them offers all of the kingdoms of the Earth to Jesus. He shows up in nearly every New Testament canonical book, I think.
Devil/Satan is a dogmatic part of Christian belief, but what his roles and powers are is heavily debated. Along with that, the very existence of hell is also under some debate between and within denominations, but the alternative is still usually oblivion, which is of little comfort.
There’s also a version in eastern orthodoxy where heaven and hell are the same place / state, and the difference is just that the wicked don’t like it. Something like being fully exposed to the burning light of God.
The question of what is a “dogmatic” part of Christian belief is extremely complicated. I’m going to assume what you mean by it is “a belief a Christian is required to have to call themselves a Christian properly.” If that is the case, then the best thing to look to is the creeds.
The rough definition of a Christian creed is “list of things you need to believe for sure if you want to call yourself a Christian.” The (arguably!) oldest creed we have is laid out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 which reads:
One of the oldest creeds is the Apostles Creed which reads (debatedly!) as follows:
There are a lot of other creeds (like the famous Nicene Creed) but they all generally build, add on to, or refine the two creeds quoted above. As you can see, nowhere does it mention the Devil, which means belief in the Devil is not generally considered required to be a Christian. Note, however, the centrality and importance of Jesus dying and resurrecting in both these creeds. I have never run into a Christian creed that did not explicitly attest to Jesus’s death and Resurrection. It is foundational.
As a fun bonus, evangelical denominations are famously itchy about dogma, doctrine, and ecumenical councils (my own evangelical denomination famously started with the motto “No creed but Christ!”) so there isn’t really any offical evangelical creed you can point to. However the Statement of Faith of the World Evangelical Council is a good fit for what most evangelical churches believe (though, being evangelicals, you can find alternative statement of faiths from other evangelical organizations and each individual church almost certianly has their own if you ask them). It reads as follows:
The devil is not explicitly mentioned here, but would likely fall under the Holy Scriptures clause, since he is referred to explicitly in scripture. However that would mean you could still be an evangelical and not believe in the devil, but you would have to have a very good argument for why the scriptures were speaking metaphorically when referring to that particular entity.
This actually happens a lot in schisms (which is what the separation between Judaism and Christianity was).
For example, pre-Protestantism there was a lively free-will/predestination debate in the Catholic Church, with the free-willers mostly winning, but debates on both sides. Then after the Schism when a large part of Protestantism went predestination, Catholicism got locked into heavy Free Will.
Similar things occurred between Lutherans and Catholics.
It’s a similar reason why the early church and very early branches (like Ethiopian Orthodox) keep kosher or something very similar, but the major ones don’t.
When you have a schism, you emphasize differences and lock them in to make sure that nobody accidentally thinks that Christians and Jews (Protestants and Catholics, Socialists and Communists, etc) believe the same thing, because then they might switch.
A while back I tried to make myself passingly familiar with Judaism. I only learned a bit, but I did wonder to what extent the bits Judaism disavows now (but apparently didn’t way back when, per other sources) were explicitly rejected in reaction to Christianity at the time.
(I’m told we Orthodox continue to celebrate Easter on the old calendar in large part because of a medieval condemnation of people who “hold Passover with the Jews.”)
I’m told we Orthodox continue to celebrate Easter on the old calendar in large part because of a medieval condemnation of people who “hold Passover with the Jews.”
I think there’s two points here: (1) Julian versus Gregorian Calendar, where the new calendar was (a) all down to the Pope so No Pope Here and (b) there wasn’t an Ecumenical Council called by the Emperor so that’s not good enough and (2) Easter dates, where one strand celebrated it at a date coinciding with Passover and another strand decided “nope, not gonna do that”.
Oooh, the Easter Dating Controversy! Goes back a long time and was a big part of the 7th century Synod of Whitby, where the basic division was between Irish Christians/those educated by Irish who celebrated Easter at one date and the Continentals who celebrated it at a different one; eventually the authority of Rome was recognised and that was taken as the official date.
MK Ambedkar, one of the major architects of the Constitution of India, argued that many of the central elements of Hinduism were developed specifically as a reaction against or competition with the emergence of Buddhism in the classical era:
https://scroll.in/article/812645/read-what-ambedkar-wrote-on-why-brahmins-started-worshipping-the-cow-and-gave-up-eating-beef
Brahmins traditionally wore only draped, not cut and sewn garments, had an exception to the principle of ahimsa (harmlessness to people and animals) for wearing a tiger skin, and shaved their heads (mostly men, that is!).
Ancient Egyptian priests wore draped plant fiber garments (wool and leather were too impure to enter a temple), had an exception to this rule for leopard skin, shaved their heads, and Herodotus (mid-400s BC) reports Egyptians rioting against immigrants who ate beef.
Something strange is going on here if Brahmins didn’t have their “traditional” food and clothing taboos at the time of the Buddha’s parinirvana (Earthly death).
I don’t think that’s the case here – as far as I understand it, early Christianity had essentially the same position as Judaism with regard to the existence of Hell and the nature of Satan, but Judaism eventually abandoned the concept, while Christianity kept it around.
The schism doesn’t directly cause it (e.g. the schism wasn’t over Hell v. no Hell), but leaders on both sides have incentive to pick the one that the other side of the schism didn’t pick.
Look at Catholic v. Protestant on birth control. Both strongly opposed it until 1930 when Protestants started accepting it. This isn’t because Protestantism is inherently more pro-birth control necessarily, any more than Jews are more anti-Hell, just a natural inclination to differentiate.
@EchoChaos
I don’t think that’s quite right. Protestants and Catholics shared scriptural arguments against birth control, but Catholics also had philosophical arguments against it, and less of a tendency toward leaving it to the discretion of oneself or one’s pastor/spiritual advisor. Even supposing that the scriptural arguments are weak, the other tendencies would act as a bulwark.
@Nick
Sure, there are always valid reasons for abandoning whatever doctrine is on the other side of the schism. I am not accusing anyone of being disingenuous.
The big surrender on this was the 1930 Lambeth Conference, which is where the Church of England gave in. Sure, you can festoon this with qualifications (only for married pepple! only where families are completed! not recommended but tolerated!) but, once you give in, then the Zeitgeist wins on this and other problems. 1930 conference was in marked contrast on this to the 1920 conference, which had strongly resisted and condemned calls for liberalisation of birth control.
So they were rowing against the tide when they permitted limited use of contraception within marriage with one resolution, but adopted others about “no remarriage in church for the divorced, sex outside of marriage is wrong, abortion is sinful and abhorrent.
When you’ve given in on “Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood…and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles”, then it’s locking the stable door after the horse has bolted to try “In view of the widespread and increasing use of contraceptives among the unmarried and the extention of irregular unions owing to the diminution of any fear of consequences, the Conference presses for legislation forbidding the exposure for sale and the unrestricted advertisement of contraceptives, and placing definite restrictions upon their purchase”.
Being a state church also means the threat of “if you don’t do this, we in Parliament will do it for you”, as with the 1928 Prayer Book controversy where the revised version adopted by the Church of England was refused approval by Parliament.
@Deiseach
I’m a Protestant who doesn’t believe in or use contraception after reading Catholic writings on the subject, so you’re not here to convince me.
I am just pointing out that the phenomenon of differences calcifying after separation isn’t new.
I probably should’ve used Sunni and Shia in order to avoid all the brilliant and well-read Catholics descending on me in force. Although that probably just would’ve prompted some other line of attack.
Oh, EchoChaos, I should apologise! I did not mean to jump on top of you!
I really should have noted that we came very close to our own Lambeth Conference moment, when at the Second Vatican Council (yep, that again) the expectation was that the Catholic Church would give in on some form of artificial contraception in limited circumstances.
Instead, Paul VI (who is unfairly characterised by some as a trimmer because he was risk-avoidant and did oversee liberalisation) shocked everyone by producing Humanae Vitae. If you’re an old-style Catholic, you’ll be inclined to see this as the Holy Spirit preventing the teaching of error 🙂
Of course, this hasn’t stopped a ton of Catholics ignoring such teaching and steaming ahead with modern morality, but what can you do? Even the Holy Office has been re-named and is supposed to be all mollifying nowadays!
@EchoChaos
You are too kind! I only wanted to clarify a point of fact. It has no bearing on your overarching argument, unless, I suppose, you couldn’t find any more examples. But I doubt that is the case.
@Deiseach
If you’re a new-style Catholic, meanwhile, you’ll be inclined to weep and gnash your teeth. 😉
@Deiseach / @Nick
Thanks both. I really do appreciate the knowledge that comes from your discussions, even when I don’t agree with your priors.
Well, to be fair to the Anglicans, the Roman Catholic Church had already liberalized on the rhythm method. The only Church Father (AFAIK) to mention it is Augustine, who condemns it at On the Moral of the Manichaeans 18.65 as an impure practice of the Manichaeans that makes a wife into a prostitute. And he, having been a Manichaean hanger-on for some years–in which he managed only to have one child, despite the assiduous intercourse and great affection for his common-law wife that he mentions in Confessions–ought to have known.
So far as I can see, modern appeals to early Christian tradition on the issue, except maybe among some radicals (“Quiverfull”-types and so on), have more than a whiff of the factitious: without actually making anything up, they systematically miss the point. The ancient Fathers, at least from about the middle of the third century onward, believe sexual intercourse to be some mixture of a) repugnant, b) sinful, and c) inimical to holiness, not because it is distracting (the literal reading of Paul in 1 Cor.) but because it interferes in some deeper way with moral or ritual purity and uprightness. Thus Jerome in Against Jovinian 1, for example, says that a bishop who begets children (with his lawful wife, mind you) is tantamount to an adulterer. That is, he is going to hell, and for particularly shameful reasons.
(Incidentally–I mention it because it came up elsewhere in this thread–I can see little historical ground on which base a qualification of clerical celibacy as a mere “discipline” of the Church. That does not suit the revulsion and moral dudgeon with which its champions talked about departures from celibacy in antiquity. Perhaps it is introduced in some later counsel, when it came time to make common cause with certain Eastern bishops, whose churches had always been more lenient toward presbyters? If so, it’s a reasonable distinction to make, from the perspective of church order or canon law, but it doesn’t have much to do with the practice of the ancient churches of the West from, oh, the fourth century or so. Cyprian had already set aside his wife in 248/249, though, so the vogue clearly has much earlier roots–I’ll have to look at David Hunter’s book on Jovinian again.)
Of course, there were differences of opinion. One need only read just about any part of Augustine’s dispute with the Pelagians to se that. Julian of Eclanum, the great champion of Pelagius (to whom Augustine had once, with touching praise for the character of the then-young man, sent the sixth book of his On Music) is horrified to find Augustine linking marriage and intercourse with the transmission of original sin. It all seemed to him frightfully Manichaean. Augustine, for his part, had rebuked a position much like Jerome’s more extreme fulminations in On the Good of Marriage.
The Greek Fathers I don’t know as well, but I can hardly imagine any of the ancient Christian writers I have read cottoning to something like “Natural Family Planning.” To sleep with your wife only when you are sure she can’t conceive? Augustine, for one, would have been horrified, and I doubt he would have been moved by any appeals to natural law, double-effect, and the errors of consequentialism. The difficulty, though, is that his teaching doesn’t seem to have much in the way of philosophical or even exegetical root. The constant appeal (as in the anti-Manichaean passage I cited above) is to the actual terms of Roman marriage contracts (the “tables”), which name the having of children as a purpose for marriage (presumably without forbidding the having of pleasure). His insistence that marital intercourse is venial comes from a shaky reading of Paul in Latin (“I say this by way of pardon,” i.e., per veniam in 1 Cor. 7:6), whose meaning on the face of it is that he is offering a “concession” to a weakness he does not share. Augustine also stresses a reading of the Patriarchal history in Genesis that must seem to anyone attuned to the petty domestic politics of polygyny rather romantic. Abraham and Jacob had so many children with so many women because of their pious desire to people the world with God-fearers; now we don’t need to do that, because the world is already full!
From the historian’s perspective, all very fascinating: these are two more things that I wish one could ask him for a second opinion on, if only he had seen how history went after his day. (His conviction that Christianity was true because the whole world was adopting it–in accordance with prophecy–is another one. He needn’t have rejected it in hindsight, of course, any more than the other two positions, but they might all require some interesting rethinking.) But I think anyone who appeals to the authority of the tradition of which Augustine is a central figure in order to establish a ban on certain contraceptive techniques (but not others) and a discipline of clerical celibacy is going to have to reckon with the fact that his reasoning simply is not the same as the reasoning now advanced, and may even contradict it.
Yeah, razib made a point along these lines awhile back on Twitter–Christianity branched off from Judaism two thousand years ago, and both have developed in different directions since then. It’s easy for Christians to imagine we understand Judaism from the subset of its teachings absorbed into Christianity, but a lot has changed in both belief and practice since then.
I would like to chime in because I started off in a very small sect (an offshoot of the World Wide Church of God for those who know/care) and have since spent time around Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, Evangelic/Non-denominationals, a lot of time around Plymouth Brethren, and time with Cru/Campus Crusade. Because of this I have had to decide what are and are not important parts of Christianity. So now to answer your specific questions.
>extent do the Christians (of various persuasions) on this board subscribe to the dogmatic elements of your particular denominations?
Overall not great, I keep the Sabbath on Saturday and follow pretty strictly the no work part of it. That and a few other Messianic dogmatic elements that few if anyone here subscribe to. For the beliefs about God saving us through faith in Jesus Christ I think there is very broad agreement here.
>Do you really believe in the Trinity?
Yes. I think the Father is God. I think Jesus is God. I think the Holy Spirit is God. I think the Father is not Jesus or the Holy Spirit. I think Jesus is not the Father or the Holy Spirit. I think the Holy Spirit is not the Father or Jesus. Like others, I can give analogies but it is something that is kind of taken on faith at some point. I honestly think Flatland gives me the best way to be able to think about it.
> Do you really believe in transubstantiation?
No. Not sure why some denominations insist on taking the words of Jesus very literally on this specific point but they do.
>Or are your beliefs less dogmatic and (I’m not sure what the right word is) spiritual, gestalt, all-embracing?
There are some things I am very dogmatic on. I agree with others that if you deny the deity of Jesus you are not a Christian. I tend to be lest dogmatic as you get into issues farther and farther from salvation.
>I can, to a limited extent, understand the latter kind of belief. I can’t for the life of me understand the former kind of belief (i.e., Jesus was resurrected, limbo exists, you either are or aren’t one of the Elect). So if this applies to anyone here, can you explain how you reconcile your rationalist leanings with Christian dogma?
I am guessing here but I think the biggest hangup you have believing some of those things is that you rejecting that God exists. If assume God exists, and He is an omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal being that created the universe, its trivial that He could raise someone from the dead. Then it becomes a case of examining the evidence to see if there is sufficient evidence to see if Jesus was raised from the dead. I would agree with Nick that there is, you probably disagree. For limbo, I don’t know what you mean so I am going to skip it. For being one of the Elect I think you are taking about predestination. That is one of the ways people resolve the questions between an all powerful, all knowing God and people with Free Will. The answer is simply we don’t have Free Will God picks everyone in advance and you were either picked (the Elect) or not picked (not Elect). I don’t fully agree with this view but its held be many Christians.
As for reconciling my rationalist leaning with Christian dogma that isn’t very hard. The same Person who created the rules for how the physical universe works (i.e. physics) created rules for how the moral universe works. Sometimes those rules are obviously stated. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved (all Christians agree with this). Sometimes it becomes apparent after inspection (almost all Christians agree with the Trinity). Sometimes its debatable (predestination).
Feel free to ask more questions if you would like.
I would like to chime in because I started off in a very small sect (an offshoot of the World Wide Church of God for those who know/care) and have since spent time around Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, Evangelic/Non-denominationals, a lot of time around Plymouth Brethren, and time with Cru/Campus Crusade. Because of this I have had to decide what are and are not important parts of Christianity. So now to answer your specific questions.
>extent do the Christians (of various persuasions) on this board subscribe to the dogmatic elements of your particular denominations?
Overall not great, I keep the Sabbath on Saturday and follow pretty strictly the no work part of it. That and a few other Messianic dogmatic elements that few if anyone here subscribe to. For the beliefs about God saving us through faith in Jesus Christ I think there is very broad agreement here.
>Do you really believe in the Trinity?
Yes. I think the Father is God. I think Jesus is God. I think the Holy Spirit is God. I think the Father is not Jesus or the Holy Spirit. I think Jesus is not the Father or the Holy Spirit. I think the Holy Spirit is not the Father or Jesus. Like others, I can give analogies but it is something that is kind of taken on faith at some point. I honestly think Flatland gives me the best way to be able to think about it.
> Do you really believe in transubstantiation?
No. Not sure why some denominations insist on taking the words of Jesus very literally on this specific point but they do.
>Or are your beliefs less dogmatic and (I’m not sure what the right word is) spiritual, gestalt, all-embracing?
There are some things I am very dogmatic on. I agree with others that if you deny the deity of Jesus you are not a Christian. I tend to be lest dogmatic as you get into issues farther and farther from salvation.
>I can, to a limited extent, understand the latter kind of belief. I can’t for the life of me understand the former kind of belief (i.e., Jesus was resurrected, limbo exists, you either are or aren’t one of the Elect). So if this applies to anyone here, can you explain how you reconcile your rationalist leanings with Christian dogma?
I am guessing here but I think the biggest hangup you have believing some of those things is that you rejecting that God exists. If assume God exists, and He is an omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal being that created the universe, its trivial that He could raise someone from the dead. Then it becomes a case of examining the evidence to see if there is sufficient evidence to see if Jesus was raised from the dead. I would agree with Nick that there is, you probably disagree. For limbo, I don’t know what you mean so I am going to skip it. For being one of the Elect I think you are taking about predestination. That is one of the ways people resolve the questions between an all powerful, all knowing God and people with Free Will. The answer is simply we don’t have Free Will God picks everyone in advance and you were either picked (the Elect) or not picked (not Elect). I don’t fully agree with this view but its held be many Christians.
As for reconciling my rationalist leaning with Christian dogma that isn’t very hard. The same Person who created the rules for how the physical universe works (i.e. physics) created rules for how the moral universe works. Sometimes those rules are obviously stated. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved (all Christians agree with this). Sometimes it becomes apparent after inspection (almost all Christians agree with the Trinity). Sometimes its debatable (predestination).
Feel free to ask more questions if you would like.
Not a Christian, but my observation is that most Christians are not very informed about theology or dogmatics. They tend to believe things like going to heaven when you die, that there are ten commandments, going to Hell if you don’t repent, that souls in heaven are angels, and so on. Trying to fit all the pieces together into a sensible whole is a task for theologicians and church councils, most people don’t much care whether they get the full dogma, or even that their beliefs are consistent or not. They get together, sing psalms, pray to Jesus, read the bible, drink coffee.
(Obviously, they would agree that Jesus was resurrected, the trinity, and salvation through repentance and forgiveness due to Jesus’ sacrifice – but that’s just minimum dogma, I think.)
Apologies if this seems uncharitable or is offensive to some, it’s not intended as such, merely my own observations from trying to discuss theology, and my surprise that people don’t seem to care very much about something that ought to be very important. When I point out things that don’t make sense to me, I typically just get a shrug. Ineffable, and all that. Oh, and this is based on my experiences with an individualized protestantism, so dogma probably plays less of a role there than in more organized denominations like Catholicism or orthodox faith.
Nontrinitarianism is definitely one possible Christian belief.
Not according to Pope Innocent III, it isn’t.
One can never escape the power of Innocent III.
Nontrinitarianism is definitely one possible Christian belief.
Well, sure, if you’re taking the academic weaksauce position that heresies are merely “variant and competing Christianities”.
You could also say that Marxism-Leninism is definitely one possible American political belief of both major parties, and see where that gets you 🙂
No true Scotsman denied the trinity? I suppose wars have been fought over less.
HeelBearCub, it’s a bit like “I’m a vegan” “But you work in a slaughterhouse! And eat meat!” “So? I’m a vegan if I say I’m a vegan!”
No, saying “I’m a priest just like anyone else” does not make you a priest, just as me saying “I am a reporter for the New York Times” does not make it true, and the NYT would have opinions on that if I tried it.
I think a big part of this is that in Christianity, as in other world religions, you have an intellectual tradition that in theory defines what the religion is about, and then you have the actual practice of the religion, which has a tendency to ignore the intellectual tradition and go its own way (generally reverting back to the normal practice of religion as appeasing the spirits for a good harvest etc.) until someone from the intellectual tradition comes in and pulls them back in line.
That’s oversimplifying, of course.
One part of that oversimplification is that the intellectual tradition itself acknowledges that Christianity can’t be reduced to a textbook of doctrines; rather the physical practice of the religion is vital. Over the centuries there have been so many debates and schisms over the right way to perform and interpret baptism and the eucharist precisely because almost everyone considers them to be a big deal. The intellectual tradition (its artistic/creative side) also includes a rich repertoire of prayers and songs that are at their best when they don’t stay on the written page.
Apologies if this seems uncharitable or is offensive to some
Nah, you’re good. There’s a joke about “You know absolutely nothing about the faith, you must really be Catholic!” to the point where John C. Wright uses it as a running joke about Menelaus Montrose in the “Count to the Eschaton” series:
You’re right that most people don’t worry about the finer details (or even the thumping big lumpy giant details), about the same way I imagine people don’t worry about learning the chemistry of combustion and physics and what-not when they get into their car to drive somewhere; you just sit in, turn the key, and go, right?
Even most scientists don’t worry about the Higgs boson when they’re enjoying mass?
Snort.
Isn’t that a variant on “Electrons have mass? I had no idea they were Catholic!” 😉
Yes.
I guess so? I suppose the Orthodox would say that trying to define a miracle in Aristotelian terms created an unnecessary weak point in teaching the Faith, but I can see why it appealed to the rationalists of the time it was defined!
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” — John 1:1-4
Logic existed before all worlds, with God but also is God (that gets us 2/3rd toward the Trinity). All things that exist came into existence logically, nothing exists illogically. Embedded in logic is life for all living things, and rational animals (that’s us) can understand it.
Do you really believe in the Trinity? Do you really believe in transubstantiation?
Yes. Roman Catholic here.
Or are your beliefs less dogmatic and (I’m not sure what the right word is) spiritual, gestalt, all-embracing?
Nope, if I wanted that, I’d be a Tibetan Buddhist (yeah, really I know I should be Pure Land or something like that, but I’m too enmeshed in the physical for elegance and Zen).
I can, to a limited extent, understand the latter kind of belief. I can’t for the life of me understand the former kind of belief (i.e., Jesus was resurrected, limbo exists, you either are or aren’t one of the Elect).
(a) Jesus was resurrected, we’re currently in the Paschal season celebrating this. He is risen, alleluia!
(b) Limbo is a proposition, not a solid dogma. I am old enough that I got the tail-end of this before the full Vatican II reforms kicked in, and it makes sense to me, but it’s not binding on anyone and current practice is all in the favour of “no Limbo”; not quite “all dogs go to Heaven” but ducking the question of unbaptised infants – where do their souls go? by adopting the Protestant understanding of “babies in Heaven”.
(c) “You are or aren’t one of the Elect” – not our doctrine, I’m not a Calvinist/Reformed. This is where those “endlessly argued interpretations” come in; Catholicism accepts single not double predestination.
So if this applies to anyone here, can you explain how you reconcile your rationalist leanings with Christian dogma?
Not a rationalist, and I’ll cheerfully admit that if you put my back to the wall and a gun to my head, I’ll throw Science under the bus (whilst mixing my metaphors) if you force me to choose between Science and Religion.
I’ve been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book about the Reformation. It’s interesting stuff, but somewhat dense—it feels like every single sentence has been boiled down from 200 years’ worth of theology-school master theses
He may be English and liberal Anglican, but with a name like MacCulloch there’s Scottish ancestry there, and he’s very much an Oxbridge scholar. Anglicanism having a tricky and rocky history (I for one do not accept the branch theory) and being pulled here and there by the waves of which king leaned in what theological direction, as well as two different State churches (Anglicanism for England and Wales, Presbyterianism for Scotland meaning that the Queen switches denominations when crossing the border) in Great Britain, means that there is a dense tangle of historical contingency rolled in with your theology, hence the distillation of centuries of argument and fighting 🙂
It’s the same problem Jonathan Swift faced in A Tale of a Tub, where he’s trying to uphold Anglicanism as the via media and true way between the excesses of Romanism on one hand and the Dissenters on the other.
What’s the deal with single predestination?
Is it implied by immaculate conception or something?
Single predestination is “okay, yeah, God can pick people destined to go to Heaven”. (Please excuse the dense technical language I used there). That’s okay.
Double predestination is “and He also picks some people to be damned to Hell, and they can’t avoid it”. That’s not okay.
Here “picks” means “if God is omniscient, He knows everything, including the future and the result of any choices we may make. If God knows everything, then the future must be fixed. If the future is fixed, then we can’t make choices. If God knows I am going to Hell, this must happen, and for it to happen, God must will it since nothing can happen in contingent reality without His will”.
Calvin most famously, but not he alone, tried to square the circle of Free Will, Omniscience, and God’s Absolute Sovereignty, and he came down on the side of Double Predestination. Some of the rest of us didn’t 🙂
The Immaculate Conception is another matter, and I’m presuming from you mentioning it in this context that you are not confusing it with the Virgin Birth (and thank you for that!)
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception, as promulgated in 1854, is that the Virgin Mary was preserved free from all stain of Original Sin from the moment of her conception due to the grace of God and the saving merits of Jesus Christ in His death on the cross for the atonement of sins (when operating in eternity, effect can precede cause, indeed cause and effect become meaningless when outside of time):
It was a much-debated question, the Franciscans were for it, the Dominicans against, and despite St Thomas Aquinas, this time round St Francis won 🙂
“All dogs go to Heaven” is pretty much the only liberalization of dogma by Francis that I could see myself agreeing with!
It’s a whole lot more in line with loving-kindness than approving of things like Jesus H. Christ on a Hammer and Sickle.
Yeah, but then we get into the weeds of Universalism, and I can’t with that. The point of applicability is that if sinfulness is no barrier, then what is the necessity of the Incarnation? If Original Sin is not the divide between God and Man, then was it not unjust to all the souls who died in that state? More broadly, if “all dogs go to Heaven”, then why religion at all in the first place, since sin and good are meaningless when it comes to the state of your soul?
At that point, you’re dumping Christianity and going off into some version of Eastern religions for karma and the Wheel of Samsara, without even karma coming into it because “all dogs achieve Nirvana”.
Yes, yes, if you think about it much it’s intellectually incorrect and would therefore be heresy. If you care enough about dog salvation, Hinduism and Buddhism already have intellectually rigorous systems that incorporate it unlike us fuzzy-headed Westerners.
I’m just saying, it would be more genuinely charitable relative to the other liberal errors that manage to not be heresy only because Francis doesn’t define doctrine while committing them!
A lot of good answers above. A useful model I’ve seen passed around in Christian circles is to divide issues into four tiers of importance: “die for”, “divide over”, “debate”, and “decide”. (Protip: it’s not really Christian teaching if it doesn’t involve alliteration or clever initialisms)
1. The “die for” category are the absolute core beliefs of the faith. It’s the “heresy line” where if you disagree with one of these points, I’m going to have a very hard time calling your belief “Christianity”.
There’s a balance between being ecumenical – as much as possible I want to be unified with my fellow Christians, and not make theological mountains out of molehills – while maintaining that some aspects of the faith are really important and if you don’t set boundaries you can call just about anything “Christianity” and the term becomes meaningless.
But it’s a relatively small category: the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and the divinity of Jesus are the things I’d put in the category. The Nicean creed and the Aposles creed are a pretty good basis for this category as well.
2. The “divide over” category are issues where I can disagree with you and still recognize you as a fellow brother or sister in the faith, but are important enough that if we disagree, we probably need to “go our separate ways” – the disagreement would be too disruptive for us to function as a single religious body.
This is a much larger category, which is a big reason why there are so many denominations – the Protestant/Catholic divide is largely over the question of how much authority church tradition should have, and most of the protestant divisions come down to stuff like views on Baptism, on church governance.
3. The “debate” category is stuff that’s still pretty important, and that churches are likely to have documented views on, but where we can still effectively function as a church even if we disagree on those specifics.
A lot of biblical interpretation stuff generally lands here (age of the earth, end times), and for most people stuff like free will vs. predestination (though some would definitely bump that up to a “divide” issue) lands here as well.
4. The “decide” category is stuff that’s basically left up to each individual Christian to decide for themselves, where a church is unlikely to even really have a position.
A lot of “Christian living” stuff here – like what does “honoring the Sabbath” look like.
—
Of course, it’s not like Christians are all going to agree on what goes in what category: “free will vs. predestination” is either a “divide” or “debate” depending on who you ask, and while I think most churches will put the doctrine of the Trinity in the “die for” category, there’s a good number who consider it a divide issue, too.
So these aren’t strict categories, but if you view them as “probability fields” like atomic orbitals, it’s a fairly useful model that I think helps make sense of how there can be so much division in a single religion.
I think “die for”, “divide over”, “debate”, and “decide” could apply to most of the discussions on SSC.
3 categories instead of 4, but I like the way of expressing the same idea that goes: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”
divide issues into four tiers of importance: “die for”, “divide over”, “debate”, and “decide
The Catholic version of that is “dogma, doctrine, discipline, and devotions“.
A devotion would be “saying the Rosary at six o’clock every day”. You can be a Proper Catholic and never take a beads in your hand. A dogma is “Jesus Christ is both True God and True Man”. A doctrine is “you must attend Mass every Sunday”. A discipline is clerical celibacy; this did not apply at times in the past, does not apply with some Catholic Rites, and could be changed in the future.
I guess I’m what you mean by spiritual/gestalt etc. although I wouldn’t describe myself this way. I’ve been mistaken for an atheist here a couple of times. I do not have a denomination.
I have a rather negative view of the Catholic Church. First, they’ve slandered Nestorians, claiming that they believe in two Christs; that’s a lie, that’s not what they believe. Second, they’ve slandered Oriental Orthodoxes, claiming that they believe Jesus to be purely divine; that’s also a lie, that’s not what they believe. Then they alternated between two wills and one will, depending on how close the Arabs were to capturing Egypt and Syria; finally they lost Egypt and Syria and stabilized on two wills. Of course, they’ve slandered those who believed in one will, claiming that they believed that will to be purely divine; unsurprisingly, that’s a lie, that’s not what they believed. It amazes me how so many people trust this Church to tell them the divine truths.
So the religion you don’t believe in is Catholicism?
And your objections are based upon historical failures of the catholic church w/r/t heresy… very interesting!
Wow, I never thought I’d live to be rebuked by a Monothelite!
Things like this are why I love this place and you guys 😀
Should we stick around long enough, we might meet the disapproval of a Zoroastrian. Or perhaps a practitioner of the mystery rites of Mithraism. 😀
Why didn’t philanthropists/businessmen pre-empt the welfare state by inventing and doing really good Effective Altruism on a national level circa 1900
Some of them did, see Port Sunlight the model village set up by the Lever Brothers. A combination of changing times, change in emphasis within business, and reaction to the paternalism involved meant that as individual efforts these prospered for a while, but there was never a national network and these were replaced by government efforts.
While benevolent, the flip side of such projects was strict control over the private lives of the workers (see quote below). In the end, nobody likes the boss having the final say in what you do 24/7, everyone likes some kind of private life. The government may nag you, but they can’t (as yet) control what you do with the money you get from them.
I think most of the people on here wouldn’t take it too well if their boss said “Instead of paying you a Christmas bonus, which you’ll probably just waste on booze, drugs or going on holidays abroad, I’ll instead buy you all a gym membership and a subscription to Healthy Eating magazine” 🙂
The Quaker families involved in chocolate making also indulged in social altruism; Elizabeth Fry, who married into the Fry family, became famous for her work in prison reform and the Cadburys had their model village in Bournville.
A farmgirl explains how she is planting a field:
https://twitter.com/AGofTheWorld/status/1252965311269273602
(The girl is https://twitter.com/carlsonlaura64, by the way)
Just a fun look at what life is like on the Great Plains.
That’s pretty cool.
Thanks for sharing.
I recently started playing Stardew Valley, got curious about real farming and watched a similar video of a farmer planting seeds. We sure have come a long way.
Is there a formulation of so called Efficient Market Hypothesis that is both:
a) empirically falsifiable, and
b) not obviously falsified by real world events?
Here’s a stab:
Formulation: We say a domain is *more like an efficient market* to the extent that good opportunities are snapped up quickly, such that it is very hard to find good opportunities.
Claim: Stock-picking is more like an efficient market than the general US economy job market, and both are way way more like an efficient market than US philanthropy.
Prediction: Therefore we should expect it to be hard for me and you to beat the stock market in the long run, less hard for me and you to find high-paying careers if that’s what we want, and pretty easy to find philanthropic opportunities that do orders of magnitude more good per dollar than the average charity.
Isn’t that tautological, though? If it turns out it is really easy to make millions on the stock exchange, wouldn’t you just say that this shows it isn’t the efficient market we thought it was?
(Obviously, a tautology is, er, tautologically true. So ‘efficient market’ is just a definition, and as far as I can tell, the EMH just claims that the stock market is efficient in that sense.)
Wouldn’t you need to find an efficient market somewhere to empirically disprove it?
Weak form seems to be borne out pretty well.
I think most people read “efficient” as “always correct” but really it means something much closer to “very fast.”
I try & aim pretty hard for “niceness, community, and civilization” in my social media posts (on reddit, twitter, etc.) However, I feel like the things I write usually get ignored? And sometimes that makes me frustrated. Sometimes I feel like I’m making a really good point, a very simple, clear, undiscussed, and relevant point, which is about as polite & friendly as I can make it, and I just… don’t get any reaction or response.
I wonder to what degree social media outrage is just a matter of people wanting attention? Trolling, of course, is all about getting a reaction. I rarely give in to the “dark side” of agitating for attention or deliberately provoking people. Maybe I should try that just so I know what it feels like? (Hopefully this is not a supervillian origin story…)
By the way: Relevant blog post.
Duh. It seems you just discovered America or something.
Are you non-American? Is this only a thing on the American internet?
No, I am not an American. “To discover America” is a Czech expression meaning that you stumbled on something that many people discovered before you.
In Poland it is typicaly used in a sarcastic way when someone is unaware that (s)he discovered something obvious and is really proud of such discovery.
Fun!
So the problem isn’t assuming everyone is American, it’s assuming everyone is Czech. Or possibly Czech or Polish. Or possibly eastern European if the expession is regional.
@Nancy Lebovitz
I thought that even without being familiar with the idiom, people would get it :-).
It’s an expression in Spanish, also.
@AlesZiegler
I got it, but it seemed as though someone didn’t.
It’s an ordinary villain origin story. And yeah, it’s true.
One of the things I’ve learned to really like here (quite a lot, actually) is that I trust my comments to be read. No need for upvotes or replies. This doesn’t work on reddit or facebook, where the algorithm sorts content by feedback – you don’t get likes/shares/upvotes, fewer people read you. It’s a fact there.
It’s one of the consequences of community size. There was quite a lot of talk about this… god, probably 10 years ago. When slashdot gave way to digg and digg crashed and burned and gave way to reddit, and reddit survived. Why? Subreddits – they managed to break things up into smaller subcommunities where you get some of the same effects.
Other paths are just keeping the place small by the nature of the conversation. Hacker News – where a lot of this discussion took place, and which managed to survive quite nicely – used to change the topic to Erlang every time they were mentioned somewhere and had an influx of visitors. SSC offers little food for trolls with short attention spans, so they don’t stay here.
Ontopic – which starts non coincidentally with a link to Paul Graham from Hacker News.
You’re not the only one, this is a common experience online.
I’ve made thoughtful, considered posts (no, don’t laugh) and got nothing. Some throwaway joke or rant gets reactions (favourable and otherwise).
The lessons I’ve taken from this are (1) you’re never as funny as you think you are (2) nobody knows anything.
When I looked at my Facebook history, it was very painful to notice how the stupid things I wrote often got many likes, and the ones I considered important mostly got ignored.
Being on social networks means allowing the worst of humanity to condition you. Get away while you can!
This happened to me on an old forum. When they added upvotes to the site, I started to amass one of the highest reputations on the site. (Or on our corner of it, anyway, since subfora tend to provincialism.) I was proud of this (foolishly), but also disappointed how many of my rep points came from poorly thought out posts or dunking on the outgroup. For instance, it seemed a sure way to amass upvotes was to get a dumb but popular answer into a thread quickly, than to write a longer and better reasoned one later. So I tried to do better.
The result was a desert of upvotes. It was uncanny in its consistency—no one responded to my posts anymore or found them insightful. Turns out dunking on the outgroup was all I was good for. I stopped posting.
Reddit, twitter, etc. especially reward also anything that can be quickly upvoted.
Long text of any kind will take more time to process than anything else. And image macro (extremely short text on image) or just image will be the best to get upvotes.
Similarly, comment with lame pun will be better at getting upvotes than thoughtful on topic comment.
It was discussed many time that allowing such quickly consumed content and using score to rank what is displayed will result in image macros/images outcompeting anything that takes even minimal effort to digest.
Social media appear to be well suited only for some types of discussion. You can try to patch this by having an aggressive moderation with deleting any joke comments etc.
Yeah. I’m not necessarily proud to say this, but I defected on this a long time ago.
There are places where calm and rational and reasonable debate is valued and can get you somewhere (this is one of them!) But in most places, no, the way to not just “get attention” but to actually get your message out such that you can begin to convince people is to basically shout extreme positions and insults.
I don’t know that it’s fair to call it “trolling” because my goal is not to upset people for the rush of being an anti-social actor. However, there is a deliberate calculus of “in order to be noticed at all, I have to be less calm, less rational, than I might prefer to be in a better world.”
Relevant XKCD?
Non-nerds don’t usually go to social media to do work. Non-nerds go to social media to be lazy and entertained.
I think this explains your experience well enough.
Yeah, entertainment and information are different. Political memes on Facebook aren’t about informing anyone, and are often basically lies, even when forwarded by normally nice and reasonable people because they dunk so hard on the outgroup. But they’re popular.
I go the opposite direction from Matt M: I’m not going to lie about what I believe or take extreme positions strategically–I just end up not spending so much time trying to have real discussions in fora where that doesn’t work.
The fundamental issue with Reddit is that its users are, for the most part, not interested in having an actual conversation.
A lot of the time even the people writing reasonably well-reasoned posts of their own (or asking questions, supposedly inviting replies) won’t bother to reply to comments addressed directly to them.
Everyone wants to be heard and given approval, no one wants to listen.
The sorting algorithms make it worse, as does thew way the software (especially on mobile) tends to bury nested replies.
Some subs are better about it than others (a few small and niche ones where the users actually want to talk are usually not too bad) but even ones where the normal user base tries to engage in some critical thinking will get swamped by the drooling masses from r/all if the post gets popular, drowning out any real discussion that might have been going on.
I’ve never been a heavy user anyway, but these days if I’m tempted to reply I always check to see a) how many replies they are and b) how many layers down my response would appear. If the number of replies is past the mid-double digits, and my reply would be more than two layers down, I usually don’t even bother. (though I’ll admit I’ll throw the occasional grenade if I see something that annoys me enough, or make a low-effort joke/jab)
Reddit is built in a way that specifically prevents people from being interested in long conversations, so it’s no surprise that people there aren’t interested in it.
There are lots of examples of this, but one in particular is that it hides nearly all of the responses in a back and forth. They basically becomes something like DMs at that point. If are interested in someone else’s medium length back and forth, there isn’t even anyway to reliably see that new posts have occurred in that thread.
I’ve noticed that in the last year or two reddit has gotten extremely secretive about those, yes. I used to be able to read almost all of a thread without clicking to open replies, because there weren’t many that went more levels deep than my device could comfortably display. Now it’s like it hides replies basically at random. And I don’t just mean the ones where it says “2 more replies” and you click and they suddenly appear. Those have gotten more common, too, but they’re not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the “Continue this thread” ones, which are bizarrely ubiquitous now. I’ll go to a thread and there will be one reply at the top, and it’ll want Continue This Thread to see the single nested reply. And clicking to see those rejiggers the whole page without scrolling me correctly, so I’m constant scrolling up and down, too….
It’s all weird, inconvenient and, as far as I can tell, unmotivated.
I haven’t used Reddit for long, but I’ve noticed this. It could have to do with page loading speeds. But regardless, always “continue this thread” in a new tab! Reddit is extremely easy to lose your place in, especially long threads.
As for going back to continue a conversation, forget it. It’s hard to identify new posts and the order changes.
This sounds like the new reddit design, which everyone hates.
Try old.reddit.com, or change your settings on your account to always use old.
If the standard reddit design was designed for cheap calories like cookies and Doritos, the new reddit design is just snorting powdered sugar.
It’s really cool how the fancy new modern design is less functional on smartphones than the old one. Try sorting a subreddt by Most Upvoted – All Time without turning your phone sideways sometime.
It is deliberately crippled to push the app. I wonder how it worked for them, I really like it. Because now I no longer waste time on phone browsing Reddit.
Wait, compared to what exactly?
Back when I was a heavy commenter, my median engagement was probably one out of 5-6 of my replies in a thread over as many days. Both of those numbers compare favorably to the most immediate competitor, which hits soft technological limits after four replies deep and cultural limits after ~three days.
Could we have some samples of the posts you wish would get more attention?
I wonder if what’s missing is an element of surprise, but I’m guessing.
Or as people have been saying, some venues have a better defautl for conversation than others.
This applies to all writing, not just nonfiction. Getting visible engagement often requires a hook for someone to hang more material on, so something that’s written very tightly won’t get much traction. Source material written less well gets more fanfiction.
As others have somewhat mentioned, there just aren’t a lot of people who go to facebook/reddit/twitter seeking civil, well-thought-out, long-form political debate and discussion. There’s a reason my political takes go on SSC and not on Facebook.
IDT has produced primer and probe kits sufficient to enable approximately 31 million tests to be conducted in the US pursuant to the CDC EUA testing protocol for 2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2. World meters info says only about 4 million tests have been conducted in the US and probably not more than 10 to 15 million in the whole world. I suppose a lot of those tests were used for research; verify the test animals are infected before testing the treatment.
But there are other primer and probe manufacturers are as big or bigger than IDT and probably have produced similar amount of kits. Anybody know what is happening with all these kits?
The primers and probes are necessary but not sufficient for large-scale testing.
The major bottlenecks in genetic testing are going to happen at two points:
1. Taking the swab sample, then processing it to purify the viral RNA.
2. Actually running the qPCR assay
If you don’t have the man hours or enough qPCR machines available, the extra reagents are just going to sit on a shelf.
The qPCR part can be highly automated (most labs probably don’t have access to multi-million-dollar robotic systems, but even the most basic machines can potentially process dozens of samples at a time), so I would guess the biggest slowdown comes at the swab-processing/RNA purification step.
Is the “spit test” the ultra-rapid one, that takes 5 minutes or 15 minutes?
If yes, then that’s a fundamentally different process from the qPCR one.
In those tests, you’re looking for the presence of antibodies the body produced in response to the virus. Basically, whatever you’re spitting on is designed to a) have anti-COVID antibodies bind to it and b) have this binding result in a chemical reaction that produces a human-readable result, or can be instantly scanned to do so. It’s kind of like peeing on a pregnancy test.
This is virtually always a lot less sensitive and a lot less specific (more false negative and false positives) than a qPCR, because antibodies are inherently “sticky” and will sometimes bind to something that’s only kind of like the antigen they’re meant to target.
In the qPCR detection method, your input is highly purified RNA from the virus, which is then duplicated exponentially (something like 2^30 or 2^35 fold), with each step of duplication requiring high binding specificity. (there’s also a label added during the duplication that makes it easy to measure how much product was made)
So the inherent error of the qPCR method is much lower. (although there’s still plenty of room for contamination caused by direct operator error, or by having to run the test in a sub-optimal setting)
Edit: Never mind, looked it up and it does look like it’s just an alternate way of collecting RNA for the qPCR. (https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/first-saliva-test-for-covid-19-approved-for-emergency-use-by-fda-67416)
My understanding was that socialism came in the west, did the good stuff it was supposed to do and died the death of having succeeded. The good stuff being 8 hour workday, age limits, sick time off, vacation time, pensions, (some amount of) health care. Stuff like air – so much around us we don’t even see it any more. No amount of charity would have solved that – it was a real class struggle and it took a lot of coordination and some less than nice tools (like unions).
You can also say that part of it refused to die and, like feminism, is haunting society like a ghost, or a zombie looking for brains. But that wouldn’t be very nice so I won’t say it.
Is there actually any evidence that links this to unions or socialism or any such ideologically motivated causes? As opposed to general increase in productivity from technology trickling back to workers in a market that is more competitive for their skills? I seem to remember a talk by Milton Friedman about ‘who protects the worker’, where he points out that many social reforms predate unions and strikes etc. The right-wing view would be this, in addition to unions gaining negotiating power by limiting supply of labor (i.e. to the detriment of non-organized workers). Is there any evidence/studies for or against?
This reminds me of the idea (possibly read in The Bell Curve) that the Civil Rights movement just put into public awareness changes that were already happening, or had already happened.
On your question I don’t have opinions. Don’t know enough US history, and in Romania we had 40 years of straight up communism so… it’s pretty clear where the changes came from. Some pretty good btw. I agree with… forgot who now, that socialism is pretty good in the beginning because/when it’s a change from an extractive system. Ah, Acemoglu&Robinson. But when it starts competing with other inclusive systems it starts losing ground.
Libertarians would tell you this is the case for nearly every socially progressive government policy – that the state shows up late to the party to take credit for things the market was already doing.
There’s an infamous graph (sorry, don’t have links handy) of workplace fatalities following the creation of OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – responsible for imposing all sorts of regulations to ensure safety in the workplace) cratering dramatically. Of course, if you extend the graph backward in time 10-20 years (which no one ever thinks to do), the trend had already been happening well before.
I’ve heard similar stories regarding child labor, mandatory schooling, etc.
And both graphs are not allowing to distinguish between “OSHA was useless” and “OSHA was necessary to ensure that trend of improving safety will continue”.
I am sure that there was post about this on SSC.
One can easily provide story for both “useless bureaucracy wasting resources” and “in face of growing resistance to improve safety OSHA was necessary to ensure that it will continue”.
—-
Note that there are similar graphs for overall mortality showing no change in slope after introducing vaccines. And we know that vaccines had an effect.
So both cases happen, and it is hard to distinguish them.
Yeah, that’s typical of things with multiple causes. Like how economic growth is 1.5% per year no matter what, or Moore’s law for CPUs.
Each factor has a big impact in itself, but there’s a lot of them and if you average just a bit, it gets flat fast.
While I have never heard the argument made as it displeases both sides, that the changes would have happened soon anyway is one of the stronger defences of unions or labor laws. With no growth, increasing non wage benefits will cause unemployment and then in the long run lower wages. But if wages are rising then and the next “raise” the workers want would be these improvements the rigidities mean that it is possible for the government to create what is for the workers pretty close to a free lunch. This requires very precise timing to do without causing unemployment or wage tradeoffs that leave workers worse off. But it is possible but only if the changes would have happened anyway.
If general increase of productivity explains the 8-hour workday, why does it remain at 8 hours one hundred years later?
I believe it comes from auctioning houses. A dual income 8 hours a day couple will work as hard as they can to outbid the other dual income 8 hours a day couples, some of whom are working overtime to beat the rest of the market. Successfully charging all the market will bear creates the expectation that that’s what the house is “worth”. The price rises to track the rising ability of the top-earning couples to pay.
Houses are cleared in order from most desirable to less, out to the margin of the house bought by the last buyer. The quality of the marginal house depends on how many buyers until the last. With few buyers, you can pick up a good house at the margin, and leave some houses unbought (theoretically the marginal house would be $1, I expect practically the cheapest houses are just “cheap”, not a dollar)
The more buyers, the nastier the marginal house is, until no house, no matter how nasty, goes unbought. Then we must speak instead of the marginal buyers: the last one to get a house, and the first one to fail to get any house at all.
Rent becomes the monthly fraction of house value that appropriately tracks the interest rate (say 1/300 of the value per month but don’t hold me to that exactly). This drives up the cost of every property, domestic or business, which is passed on in the cost of anything using square feet of buildings as a business.
Rising prices just because the price is expected to rise is a recipe for inflation, and there’s no end to it but the limit of the would-be buyers’ purchasing power, which may be rising with productivity, but that doesn’t matter any more. Let’s not even mention the disadvantage a single house buyer is at with respect to couples.
Auctions are Moloch. They consume everything.
At a certain point, additional hours start being less valuable, because you are more tired, make more mistakes, and can’t even recognize it if you are worn out enough. Long enough and the value goes negative.
The 40-hour workweek had the benefit of being around that point. Dropping from 50 hours to 40 hours didn’t reduce output by anything close to 20%.
There is research showing mental work would benefit from a 6-hour workday. But implementing it would limn an issue we don’t want to talk about (how come physical laborers still have to work 8 hour days?), so we just let our mental workers fuck off on the Internet for 2 hours a day and pretend not to notice.
I don’t really have an argument here, but – I only know one person who actually only works eight hours a day, and he’s in a “I could take a dump on the CEO’s desk and they wouldn’t fire me” kind of position. Everyone else works at least ten or more.
The constant eight or ten hour working day reminds me of Marchetti’s Constant, the 40 minutes to one hour average that workers will put up with to travel to work. If you improve the roads or add more transit, workers just seek to save rent by living further away, with no reduction in average commuting time.
The European Working Time Directive prohibits an employer from employing a worker for the worker’s 49th hour in any seven day period. (i put it that way to stop clever ideas like being two employers who each “only” employ the worker 35 hours a week)
This works as a law, and the number could be adjusted down if you can swing it politically.
What industry are you in?
I’m in software, and in my experience very very few software people actually work ten-hour days. The typical workday is 10-6 or so. Even at Google, it was pretty standard that people would show up at 10, work until dinner was served at 6 pm, and then go home.
To be sure, there are some parts of the industry that work harder. Some startups are known for pushing hard, and the games industry seems to be in crunch time all the time, but lateish business hours seems to be the usual practice.
The research on this is mostly very old, but people can only sustain 40 hours of work long term. A two week sprint can be 80 hour weeks and double productivity, but this works because you are running down limited reserves and you should only ever do it if you can follow that up by giving the workers two weeks off.
Pushing beyond this means you need to arrange the entire rest of your workforces life to be effortless to free up more reserves. Basically, to sustain 50 hours, your workers should live in the same building (to have a zero hour commute) , have maid service keeping those quarters in order and eat food someone else cooks for them. (Very well paid jobs can rely on the workers setting up arrangements like this for themselves. Top lawyers are not buying down-town apartments and hiring housekeepers solely for the prestige, they do it so their workschedule does not eat them alive)
The problem is, a lot of bosses have seen that 2 week sprint in action. It can be very, very impressive. And to a certain kind of ass-hat, the fact that this stops working if you overdo it is just a sign your workers are not committed enough.
So a lot. really a lot of firms end up overworking their labor if permitted to do so. Even though it costs them productivity. Hence the very inflexible laws on this.
Socialists fought to get those laws on the books, but the reason noone ever repeals them is that they protect management from making a self-destructive mistake it is inherently very prone to making, and people notice things work better with the law in place
I wonder about that. Whenever people talk about finishing really major projects (like the iPhone) or the careers of really accomplished people, they usually mention working really long hours (60+, sometimes 80) for months on end, or even years. Are these people flat out lying? Or deluding themselves? Or are they just that special 1% that really can work 60 hours a week for year after year?
Agreed. When I worked in consulting, everyone worked 55 hours, at a minimum (average was probably over 60). The top managers and partners had all been doing that for at least ten years. Now it’s a well paying occupation so you could probably retire after 10-20 years of doing it (i.e. you won’t have to sustain it for 30+ like you would a blue collar job), but still. There are people out there who can do it. Maybe atypical people, but enough of them exist that top companies can simply have a policy of “only hire the atypical people who can handle this” and still be fine.
I hear the actual policy is more like ‘hire normally, the typical people will burn out and leave after a year or two.’
In a sense that’s true, but in another sense, you don’t even get an interview unless your test scores place you in the top 1% of the general public in terms of IQ, and your work ethic is “at least good enough to complete a bachelors/masters degree at a top 50/20 institution” so it’s hard to say they are hiring candidates who are “typical” of the population at large.
I’m skeptical; do you have a citation for this old research?
Johan: There is a lot of lying.
https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-some-men-pretend-to-work-80-hour-weeks
Also. This is perhaps rude, but the most important factor for startup success is not employee productivity – it is how good the basic idea is
and convincing people to give you money.
Always being in the office is a very effective way to signal commitment, which gets you funding even if it makes actual coding progress slower. Because venture capital buys into superman mythos too. Ideal strategy would probably be to buy/rent a building so you can house your entire staff on top of your office, hire a cook and a maid to take care of house chores, work 50 hours (with extra productivity from having no commute and no cleaning to do) and then lie your ass off pretending to work 70 to investors.
https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-work-six-lessons-2005/
has a very nice collection of links. From forty to fifty hours worked, total output per week is basically a constant, which means the last ten hours in a fifty hour week are entirely pointless. Above fifty, long term output is *below* that of a worker of equivalent skill doing a 40 hour week.
@Thomas Jorgensen
My impression of 60+ hours folks (and I know many) is that work also fulfills their social life portion of their life needs. They spend 15-20 hours a week watercooler joking, having business dinners (sometimes even with their wives present), etc.
If you allowed people to count 20 hours a week they spent having dinner and joking around with their buddies as work, we’d all work 60 hour weeks.
Which is to say that I agree with you. Note that some actual work probably does get done during this water cooler chat and business dinnering, so it’s not entirely “lying”, but it’s at least a little disingenuous.
That’s definitely a piece of it too. I think the sentiment of “my best friends are also my coworkers” probably correlates quite strongly with average hours worked per week.
Is the fraction of time spent around the water cooler any higher for the 60-hours-nominally-working crowd than for the 40s? I don’t think I’ve seen any such thing when I’ve been in a position to make the comparison, but perhaps there’s actual data to be found.
@John Schilling
It seems that way to me as someone who regularly interacts with them, but I have no hard data either way.
@Thomas Jorgensen
My company houses a handful of startups on the side, and the leaders are always going to and fro for meetings with potential clients, partners, investors, etc. Even if they housed at the same building and ate there, they would still lose a lot of time commuting.
I once interviewed with a consulting company. They said “are you willing to work 50 hour weeks?”[1]
I said “on occasion, but if it happens repeatedly that sounds like a screw-up of management.”
They didn’t like that answer. One woman on the call said “well, everyone I know works 50 hour weeks, even at other companies.”
I said that such a line might have worked on me in my early 20s, but not since I became a mature adult and knew how to establish boundaries. I work 40 hour weeks, and anyone who insists that it’s “standard” to work more can fuck right off. (I didn’t say that last part out loud.)
This was partway through the interview process, which had been going great. I didn’t get any more calls after that.
And I don’t regret it. Not one single bit. Stand up for yourself. If you don’t, who else will?
[1] Between this question, and another question about “Can you work on two projects at once?”, it sounds like they wanted me to do billing fraud against their clients.
Software as well, but it’s very much not a Silicon Valley-y company. The “programmers are typists” meme is still alive here. No-one’s hanging out at the water cooler either. Commit logs show plenty of 7, 8, 9 PM check-ins, and it’s not unusual for me to get EMails from my boss at 1 or 2 AM.
If you are in the top 1% of IQ, doing that doesn’t require much of a work ethic.
Working more than 40 hours per week requires paying non-exempt employees 1.5x their normal wage. Transitioning all of your non-exempt employees to non-exempt employees to skirt this can result in a Judge telling you that your exempt employees are actually non-exempt employees, and you need to give them backpay, plus penalty. For other non-exempt employees, it’s a useful Schelling Point.
However, if everyone else is working 40, and I work 50, I can use those extra 10 hours to do high-impact work to make me look more promotable. I can also see how entire industries can set different standards for themselves based on employee profiles. Consulting is full of extremely bright, extremely motivated, extremely young people that have no incentive to work only 40 hours per week.
I typically get stuck working more because the sheer volume of crap is insane, and also because I have certain standards for the numbers I report out. Plus all the meetings involved when you tell people they fucked up and need to cut their budget by 10% because they were dumbasses last month.
I think I could work an 80 hour workweek if it was divided evenly between physical and mental labor. I don’t know how sustainably I could do that, but I certainly have sustainably done 50 hour only intellectual workweeks for half a year. At some portions of that I also refereed 10 hours a week, resulting in a 60 or so hour workweek. But the refereeing was basically paid enjoyment, the same would be true if I had 10 or 20 hours of landscaping jobs appended to a normal workweek.
80 hours of one type of work seems to me to be a lie. Indeed, most the people I know that brag of long work hours rarely do much work at all.
This is, hilariously, perhaps the most replicated piece of science in all of economics and sociology. It seems that more or less nobody could give credence to this set of results until they had sponsored their own study to verify that yes, it damn well held for their special snowflake industry too. So variations on this result have been checked in real-world contexts literally hundreds of times until the governments of the world got tired of watching this innovation in productivity spread at the pace of one firm after another doing their own replication to convince management and just made it the law.
Which implies that the exemptions in labor time laws are almost certainly mistakes. That the consultancies and law firms and all the rest who think they can walk on water are just committing industry wide faulty management.
Does this seem implausible to you? Well, consider that all of manufacture once persisted in this particular mistake for literal decades until forced to stop, despite it being one hell of a lot easier to measure the output of a lathe operator than a lawyer.
Can you point us at some of the articles reporting such studies, preferably early ones? I’m surprised at the claim that they occurred before, not after, maximum hour legislation.
Reminds me a bit of friends in college and high school claiming they studied huge hours. They might have had books open in front of them but they weren’t studying.
Like a few others here I used to play online poker professionally. I would play about 4 hours a day, maybe 1000-1200 hands, with the occasional stint at 8 hour days. I figured I was working a lot less than most professionals and making decent money. Then I moved in with my sister, who is a successful programmer, and she said she’d never seen anyone work so hard for so little.
Once I got a real job I saw that most people in offices just talk to each other all day.
As another anecdata, I’m a manager, which means my job most of the day is collecting metrics and making sure people are doing their jobs.
Since the pandemic, with everyone locked in their offices and unable to “collaborate” in person, productivity has skyrocketed. People are in the offices for the same amount of time, sometimes less, but my metrics are through the roof.
However, we’ve seen burnout start to rise and have had to give generous flex time for people to deal with it.
I’ve noticed this. The e-monitoring feels much more oppressive even though my company doesn’t really care. But when it shows I totally disappeared 12-1245 it feels bad, even though I’m supposed to take a 30 minute lunch, and that often goes a bit longer normally (but often that’s talking to the boss!).
What about the stuff like air, the stuff that we don’t see any more thanks to the Clean Air Act? Is that independent of “socialism”? It seems to be about effective management of a common resource, which sounds like the core idea of socialism, and it doesn’t seem to be done yet either.
Management of common resources is the core idea of having a government, not just socialism.
In fact, I don’t think there is any ideological link between socialism and environmentalism, no matter how much the overlap in their sympathisers. I could tell you a very rude and retrospectively racist joke from communist Romania, with the punchline (delivered by a black man with a white hand): “No, no, I’m a gynecologist at Copsa Mica“.
It was cheaper to hire strike-busters and buy newspapers.
My vague impression is that there was a considerable amount(several percentage points of gdp) of charitable giving by the elite that was designed so as to be effective. How effective it was, I am not sure and it would be hard to find out.Also their conception of the good was somewhat different from what is standard today.
Assuming strictly vulgar-materialist voting behavior (i.e., assuming people vote only to increase their personal wealth), what’s the logic behind such a move? If the amount they give is less than the welfare recipient could acquire through taxation, then they haven’t negated the motivation for voting for the welfare state. If the amount they give matches that which the welfare state would take through taxation, they’ve done themselves no favors for their effort. So the only way it works, is if they would be willing to pay more dollars to prevent the welfare state than they would lose through the existence of it.
One could ask the same question today, no? We’ve got an election coming up: Why don’t wealthy people who are opposed to higher taxes take the sails out of Biden’s economic message by just promising that they will match it using private donations?
No matter how much they give, the voters could always institute the welfare state to get double up. So preemptive giving seems at best like a very unreliable way of avoiding taxation. And it does seem that if there’s one thing the hard left hate more than a rich businessman, it is a rich philanthropist.
There are such things as conditional gifts…
And this is one of the reasons why I don’t think poor people should be allowed to vote.
The assumption is false, grossly so. People vote to cheer for their team. The logic behind such a move is for the philanthropist-businessmen to be seen by the impoverished or working classes as being part of their team.
I agree its a grossly false assumption, I was just working with what I presumed was the logic of Atlas’s OP.
The “real answer” is that a significant faction of businessmen/philanthropists support the welfare state. So even if those who are opposed to it could coordinate some sort of action/messaging, there would be counter actions/messaging from the other side.
1) Assumption is clearly wrong.
2) People desperate to revolt or organize and push their demands in an effective way are likely to demand and get more than would be enough to placate them. In other words I would dispute claim “If the amount they give is less than the welfare recipient could acquire through taxation, then they haven’t negated the motivation for voting for the welfare state.”
3) Cash not the only part of the wealth. Even assuming truth of “So the only way it works, is if they would be willing to pay more dollars” it still may be a good idea if it prevents a revolution, allows them to control how cash will be distributed, allows to preserve other kind of wealth (security, control).
4) “just promising” who would believe that? Also, that would reveal capacity to give that money what would strengthen Biden. Also. they may expect that Trump will win anyway, so such money would be wasted. Also, it would be a giant cooperation problem, in practice making it equivalent to taxation in all aspects.
I think you are right on these points, and they provide good answers to Atlas’s question. Just to expand on what you’ve already said:
1. Modern events suggest that billionaire donations do not, in fact, confer a great deal of sympathy/good-will upon the billionaires by the general public. In fact, they seem to have the opposite effect by reminding the public that billionaires exist.
2. There’s no guarantees of electoral victory. Spending 100$ to keep 200$ is all well-and-good from the perspective of the anti-welfare donor. But spending 100$ with ~50-50 chance you’ll end up losing 300$ in the end is a bad deal.
3. Many of the ideological reasons people are opposed to taxation (e.g., the belief that people should “earn” what they have) are also reasons to be opposed private charitable spending. You havn’t gained anything by preemptively constructing a mirror-image what you fear your opponents might construct.
#3 needs to be broken up.
For example, I’m opposed to general taxation (as opposed to appropriate user fees or whatever) because I view it as the moral equivalent of theft or extortion. It is someone getting in between an agreement between me and another party and just taking what they want.
I don’t object to other people getting something that they didn’t “earn”, whether it is from charity, lottery, or whatever, as long as the means of acquisition were just/legal/ethical/whatever. Now, I might look at someone who survives on a low-wage job as morally-superior to someone who survives on legitimate charity as they are “earning” it (perhaps filtered through the means by which they ended up collecting charity in the first place) But that becomes a question of ethics or character rather than whether the giving or receiving itself is immoral.
I have no philosophical problem against a State-run welfare system if all of the money contributed to it is done so voluntarily.
The businessmen were the liberals.
They were not altruists. Even if they were, private charity is not effective in solving society-wide problems. In part because those are in large part created by the system they relied on to make money.
And for the purpose of not electing socialists, putting fascists in power turned out to be cheaper. Well, in the short run.
Today in Dungeons & Dragons analysis, the twitterati are calling alignment an inherently racist concept.
Trigger Warning: calling the Libertarian Party fascist.
Am I the only one having trouble parsing Gary’s first sentence in that quote? Depending on the way I squint, I can read it as both “lex talionis cannot be anything but Lawful Good” and “lex talionis can by no means be seen as exclusively Lawful Good”.
Personally, I cannot see any reason why the concept of (harsh) punishment for a (grievous) offence would be solely the domain of a Lawful Good alignment. Indeed, it seems to rhyme pretty well with any flavour of Lawful.
Ceterum, “woman could walk the length of the realm unmolested” seems to me the mediaeval equivalent of “Hitler made the trains run on time”.
I think he means that harsh punishments can occur in any alignment, including LG.
This saying is about Mussolini, not Hitler.
And it was just propaganda, trains were late as always.
I’ve heard both (I’ve also heard the one about virgins being able to walk unmolested across all of Asia under the Mongol Khans). Yes, it was propaganda. That’s the point.
Classical antiquity, not medieval. I believe it was a quote from one of the Greek historians about the Persian Empire, that it was so well policed that a virgin with a sack of gold could walk unharmed from one end of the Great Road to the other.
That makes three (Gygax’s England in the linked tweet, the Mongol Khans I’d seen in a Science of Discworld book, I believe, and now the Persian Empire).
Who else made the trains run on time other than Mussolini and Hitler? Any propositions?
I think you can have these things (virgins, gold, trains) basically anywhere. All it takes is an authoritative, repressive regime harshly punishing anybody who complains. 🙂
Oh, I agree.
My question was: about whom is it claimed that, for all their faults, they made the trains run on time?
Given that we have three claims regarding virgins walking across the realm, symmetry demands we get another train claim.
I heard it as a quote about the Mongol Empire; maybe whoever said it was quoting your Greek source?
Maybe David is confused because the author of the quote is Persian?
Certainly possible.
Mongol Empire Safety, a Controlled Experiment.
Objective: To test the oft-stated theory that a virgin with a bag of gold can cross the length of the empire without being molested.
Methodology: One hundred comely virgins, otherwise destined for the Great Khan’s harem, were selected. Their comeliness was rated as equal by the sons of the Great Khan and his nobles*. As a control, one hundred matrons were also selected to make a similar trip. Two hundred fine horses were chosen, and two hundred equally weighted bags of gold. All two hundred will be started at Zhongdu and started in staggered fashion over a fortnight, with instructions to deliver horse and gold to Samarkind.
Results:
Disaster. A group consisting of approximately 50 matrons and 10 virgins, along with approximately 200 warriors raided the finish pavilion and slaughtered most of the scientists. Of the rest, neither gold, horses, matrons, nor virgins were definitively heard from again, though rumors abound of minor eastern nobles taking on comely new wives and becoming rich on stud fees.
* Three former virgins were excluded from consideration when said sons managed to evade or bribe the eunuch guards. We do not believe this resulted in a significant effect.
Nice. If you were Scott, you’d title this “Social science abstracts lost to history”, and have the start of a blog post.
I think the latter, pushing against the idea that lex talionis is ungood: “even a Paladin could uphold it.”
He was, though, a curmudgeon who expressed himself in obtuse grammar.
Exactly.
I think “a virgin could walk the length of the empire with a sack of gold unmolested” only appears in primary sources in reference to the megacidal Mongol Empire, so… yeah.
Ninja edit: David Friedman says it goes back to a Clsssical Greek observer on the Persiam Empire.
Law vs Chaos is a pretty poorly-defined concept in D&D, and Good vs Evil is obviously very individual. Alignment, as a concept, makes for some interesting worldbuilding (e.g. the Great Wheel cosmology) but is otherwise inherently kind of incoherent at best.
I’ve been not a fan of alignment for a long time. We used to talk alignment over dinner and nobody could ever agree whether this character was this alignment or that, whether this act could ever qualify as Lawful or not, no one could agree about anything. In-game too it just seemed to be a hindrance.
Agreed. I never saw alignment as anything other than a rough guideline of things like “Look, if you want to roleplay a Priest you can. If you want to roleplay an evil Priest you can do that too, but don’t expect all the other Priests in the world to be okay with that…”
It’s basically there to try and provide some limits and boundaries to players who might otherwise get a kick out of just breaking the rules for the sake of it, or whatever.
I think the kernel of the Great Wheel cosmology is half the reason the AD&D Alignments exist, and “earthly” wargame factions are the other half.
To unpack, there was originally only Law and Chaos (Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword – Michael Moorcock was derivative of the latter). In both these novels, the Catholic Church represents Law (with Holger Danske also acknowledging sharia as Law when he reflects that the Crusades were distracting infighting from the war against Chaos) while Chaos is represented by Morgan le Fay, Elves, Goblins, etc.
Since most of Gygax’s players cared more about Tolkien than Anderson, Elves and Dwarves were put on the side of Law, but that wasn’t a long-term satisfying solution. Conflict between Elves and Paladins should be allowed to exist, but you could have them team up against Evil if you wanted.
Meanwhile! The Tolkien Estate had sued Gygax for using words like “hobbit” and “balrog” in the original 1974 rules. So later printings changed those naughty words, and a supplement defined the world of Demons, with the former balrog stats being renamed “Type VI Demon”. The mighty Chaotic beings above them were named as Orcus and Demogorgon: the literary source for this being that they’re courtiers of Chaos Milton names when the Devil and Chaos meet in Paradise Lost. This meant that when Gygax made monster entries for devils (some taken whole cloth from Dante’s Inferno), they were Lawful Evil in opposition to the Chaotic Evil of the earlier demons.
So now you had two factions of evil supernatural beings, whatever Crystal Dragon Jesus an elite minority of humans worshiped, Chaotic Good kinda-Tolkien-but-not-contradicrting-Poul Elves, and Neutrals primarily associated with non-sapient animals. But this is not symmetrical, so he and other writers felt the need to rationalize Chaotic Good supernatural beings, True Neutral gods, and an assortment of sapient species and supernaturals to fill out a 3×3 grid. As they did this, D&D got further and further away from this system’s literary inspirations, sort of climbing into its own navel.
Well, I suppose the fact that at least one person had the sense to point out that “deeply conservative and libertarian don’t really mesh well” was a small consolation. And another person mentioned that “You can’t be facist [sic] AND anti government”, though it was immediately followed with about half a dozen cringe-inducing strawman responses about how libertarians actually are fascist somehow. Also, this comment genuinely intrigued me:
Still, God, what an absolute trainwreck of a thread.
Though apparently you can be a communist and an anarchist. I never understood how it works.
It basically requires the assumption that capitalism (and private property in general) can only exist by being defended by government force.
Once you accept that assertion, anarchy essentially requires communism. Because capitalism, by definition, cannot exist in anarchy.
Of course it’s a ridiculous assertion that nobody should accept, but that’s how it works…
“Communism” and “socialism” both equivocate between a type of state and a type of collective property arrangement. Anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists support the latter but not the former.
Exactly. Alignment is dumb, but it’s much dumber that they have to pour disagreement into the mold of “It’s racist – just what you’d expect from a card-carrying Libertarian Party Christian and other fascists!”
Ach, the alignment thing was always a mess and I feel that it was done to avoid having straight-up Good versus Evil.
So you can argue about that and the particular magic system.
On the other hand, when the person doing the arguing has a laundry list in their bio of alignments they want us to know about them (trans poly lesbian Scandinavian cat girl) then maybe it’s pot and kettle?
Look, whatever media you consume or participate it, there are going to be Good Guys and Bad Guys. If this is “Orcs are always Evil, that’s racist!” well, switching it to “Cis het white Christian rich males” is no less racist, even if that’s the acceptable “these guys are the Orcs, be it Americans or Brits in the Raj” Baddies nowadays (as in some SF Hugo nominee stories linked a little while back on here).
So either strive to have no Bad Guys and Good Guys in your efforts, or put a sock in it.
This is the part that darkly amuses me. Everything they disagree with is fascism. Fascism is Evil, right? Either Chaotic Evil or Lawful Evil, for purposes of this kind of fantasy. So orc culture being something Evil that you could rescue individual orcs from by defeating their society in battle, breaking down their social structure, separating them from their parents and raising them Good… could be a metaphor for de-Nazification. Having to watch out that members of this race and only this race don’t revert due to being raised Good with insufficient rigor… well you wouldn’t worry about non-white individuals lapsing into Nazism, right? Are the concepts of Evil cultures and de-Nazification inherently racist?
ISTM that orcs and the like resolve a basic moral problem with war/battle role playing and fiction, which is that actual war involves killing people who were mostly no worse than the people on your side as individuals, even if their side was broadly pretty evil. I doubt the average German conscript in WW2 was any more inherently evil than the average British or American conscript. Wars in historical or swords-and-sorcery setting are mostly one peasant stabbing another with a spear on behalf of some nobleman whose reasons for going to war they don’t actually know.
If you want to cut down faceless mooks with abandon, with no worries about the morality of doing so, you want inherently evil irredemable creatures who can be killed for the joy of killing them, without having to spend any time thinking “Wow, that guy I just stabbed in the gut with my spear is just another peasant farmer a hundred miles from here–I wonder how his wife and kids will survive with him dead.” In a fantasy setting, that’s orks. In horror, maybe it’s zombies or vampires or something. In a modern movie setting, it’s usually nazis or terrorists or gangsters of some kind.
Yeah, D&D is a world where “racism” is baked into the rules; you’ve got whole races (referred to by that word) which are defined as e.g. “always evil”. The twitterati are only now realizing this?
Also: Dragons: color coded for your convenience.
I find the color-coded dragons really annoying, yeah.
I don’t think any humanoids have an ”always” in their alignment entry. Certainly in 3.5 Orcs are listed as ”often chaotic evil”, and Drow are ”usually neutral evil”. ”Always” is IIRC reserved for Outsiders (which are literally made of their alignment at least in part), true dragons, and creatures which are ”always true neutral” as they have only animal intelligence and therefore don’t know the difference between right and wrong.
In 5e, meanwhile, we have the following:
That’s some funny theology. I wonder what the relationship is between the orc gods (Chaotic Evil) and unique demons like Orcus and Demogorgon (CE).
And according to Planescape races like humans, elves and dwarves created the gods!
“According to myth” is an interesting get-out clause here- in the standard D&D setting, while the gods verifiably exist, the stories of what they did in the past aren’t necessarily true…
Gary Gygax was a curmudgeon and a bit of a troll – and by the time he was making those posts, D&D had already long passed him by. Lots of “old man shouts at cloud” stuff.
I actually got into a brief tiff with him (he was posting under the same handle shown here) shortly in the aftermath of 9/11, because he decided to post some stupid shit about how us young ‘uns needed to show a stiff upper lip.
He then randomly drove into me on his mobility scooter at a Gencon several years later, which I guess shows that the universe has a sense of humor… Or that the world of D&D geeks is a small one.
Or he held a grudge and had a list of people to run over.
The discussion is on this thread. Basically:
– Someone asked Gygax about a play situation where a group of adventurers was questioning the last survivor of an ogre tribe. The tribe had previously attacked a keep the adventurers were defending and then ambushed the adventurers. The paladin (AD&D) decided to execute the remaining ogre, reasoning that they didn’t have the ability to take him back to an appropriate forum for justice and that letting him go free would lead to greater evil. The forum started discussing whether executing prisoners could be consistent with the Paladin’s requirement to be Lawful Good.
– Gygax didn’t say that Chivington was in his opinion Lawful Good, but Gygax did quote “nits make lice” in arguing that the Paladin’s actions could be consistent with Lawful Good behavior. The Gygax post on this topic just before the one the tweet includes is:
In the next post, Gygax doesn’t say that Chivington was LG, but that “nits make lice” is an observation that’s bigger than Chivington.
All in all,
(1) I think it’s fair to conclude that Gygax was kind of an asshole for quoting Chivington, then defending a phrase used specifically to justify child murder, but I think it’s well known that Gygax was indeed kind of an asshole.
(2) Alignment is enough of a mess that it has been largely abandoned.
(3) But I can see some strains of LG that would agree with executing the imprisoned ogre. Calling the murder of innocent children “Good” seems like a strain, though maybe some people would disagree depending on the circumstances.
This assumes the children are innocent. Given that a Paladin has the ability to directly check with the arbiter of morality if they are in fact “Good”, the assumption seems to be invalid.
This assumes… a lot.
Does detect Evil weigh a target’s actions to date against some objective scale to see where the balance lies?
Does it check to which cosmic force they would declare allegiance at the moment?
What makes an person worthy of death? Having committed a specific act which merits the punishment or having the propensity to do so in the future?
Can preemptive killing be warranted if you can be credibly assured that it improves the world in the long term in some utilitarian way, or is it still always fundamentally wrong, a warping of Justice?
I am not against capital punishment, but I think being on team good means you have to let evil make the first move if you are not in an existential struggle–which admittedly many D&D settings are.
Edit:
This reminds me of the discussion of Original Sin. Basically all humanity pings evil to God, and will be punished accordingly. But not on sight.
I’m just pushing back against “Innocent”.
It’s (mostly) not the Paladin’s problem WHY his deity has declared this particular being to be Evil. There are a few edge cases where he can work with an Evil creature to fight a greater Evil, but for the most part, when you Detect Evil, you know if they are Evil.
In a D&D-esque Good and Evil, they pretty much are in an existential struggle.
And I think Gygax’s (badly stated) point is that Good does in fact not have to let Evil make the first move. A deity has told you “This is an Evil being”. You don’t have to be stupid and wait for something you can see to confirm a literal divine guidance, because that something may be something that occurs when you don’t have an advantage.
I’m not up on 4th and 5th editions of D&D, but up until 3.5 and Pathfinder, Lawful Good (or any Good) Clerics could cast spells that would do double damage (or in some cases, kill outright) anyone who was Evil.
So there actually *was* an objective (well, if you consider D&D deities objective arbiters) way of measuring it, in the game fiction.
There was even, IIRC, a distinction between someone actually detecting as Evil (Good gods say you deserve to die), and having a lingering aura of Evil (you did a really bad thing recently, or maybe you were just a victim of someone truly Evil – mind-controlled by a demon, exposed to an area that was Desecrated – but you’re not Evil-aligned).
Of course, none of that has ever stopped an alignment argument at a gaming table. 🙂
I’m aware that good and evil are objective attributes in D&D verse. What I’m concerned with is whether being evil warrants death apart from specific evil acts done, or if being evil means you have done evil acts to date. Or what specifically this says about your future actions.
Is every entity that pings evil certain to wreak havoc in the future, or might they go about a squalid, selfish life in a mostly harmless fashion if left alone?
Or even be redeemed? (This brings to mind the difference between The Order and Empyrean religions in FfH2, because I haven’t referenced that recently enough.)
It comes down to the inadequacy of having a binary (okay, trinary) descriptor for a spectrum of behavior, and then granting the most extreme sanctions to all members of that set.
In D&D how do creatures become evil without doing evil things? Are any creatures born evil?
I read somewhere that this was a tough theological problem for Tolkien, because the LotR God, Eru, doesn’t create anything to be naturally evil.
@Randy M
Sure, and the Paladin isn’t compelled to kill all Evils, especially if doing so violates a Law, but he is never actually wrong to do so in a D&D setting.
I see it as equivalent to a homeowner during a break-in. He has the objective right to kill the intruder. Law and morality will back him up if he does so. If he manages to convince the intruder to surrender and give up his home-intrudering ways, then he wins, but he is absolutely morally justified in doing it.
Similarly (assuming no Law bans it), a Paladin is always justified in killing anyone his deity calls Evil. He may choose not to in order to serve some greater good (like converting him), but it’s always an acceptable thing to do, even if the Evil being isn’t actually directly threatening him, because the act of being Evil is threatening.
This rings of sophistry without a definition of Evil that supports it–that is, Evil means has a near infallible tendency to do harm on the level of killing innocents. That may be the case, depending on the setting assumptions, of course. Though if such a setting were to be similar to the real world I’d expect a lot of neutrals out there, probably the vast majority of all sentient species.
Also and mostly unrelated, the wise Paladin will not always want to kill the great evil, because, depending on the cosmology, he may very well be giving the evil gods another foot soldier in an even more important battleground.
@Randy M
Sure, because I am steelmanning D&D theology, which I obviously do not personally believe in. And D&D theology is pretty goofy.
Although on that point, I really wish that more DMs would lean into the goofiness and actually let it be its own weird theology/morality rather than trying to fit real-world morality. I think it makes for more interesting sessions.
I don’t think so. Gaining XP and power seems to be far faster on the material plane, which means the sooner the Paladin kills the Evil creature, the better for that larger battleground in terms of the long-term power of the evil being slain there.
That’s a good point. Also, a lot of Team Evil’s foot soldiers in the after life seem to be used fighting other Team Evil’s foot soldiers in petty turf wars, so it may not matter much.
@Nick
It may help you to understand that the traditional “Great Wheel” D&D cosmology is a Duelist universe. (Well, technically its a…Quadratic universe? I’m not sure the right word.) Evil is not a corruption of Good but a positive force in and of itself. The universe is at war with Good gods fighting Evil gods. Evil gods make races like the orcs or goblins, so those creatures are born Evil. They could potentially become Good, and that would essentially be changing cosmic allegiances.
Of course, as you likely know, the problem with Dualism is that you can’t properly call Evil evil if it has just as much a claim to “rightness” as Good. There’s all kinds of ethical and theological problems. But that is explicitly the kind of universe the Great Wheel is set in. Which is why it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you try to apply real world morality to it, because our ethical systems are not based on a Duelist conception of the universe.
Detect evil* is an interesting case in how it has evolved. In OD&D the description was:
We note that only active evil will be detected. An
evilly aligned characterevil person** who has no particularly evil thoughts or intents at the moment (perhaps he’s thinking on what’s for dinner) would not be detected.The spell does detect evil magic, however.
For B/X D&D, the situation is essentially the same:
In BECMI D&D, the spell is almost, but not quite, the same as in B/X:
Here, the spell’s application towards creatures is somewhat restricted compared to previous versions. Not only must the malice be active, but it must be directed specifically against the cleric.
We should note that in all of the above editions, evil isn’t an actual alignment; the alignment system only including the Law-Chaos axis. Things get interesting when we turn to AD&D, which introduces the Good-Evil axis into the mix.
The 1e version comes closest to the dilemma posed:
Here, it is sufficient for a creature to have an evil alignment. What that means in practice is an interesting question and one that the rulebooks don’t really answer. On the one hand, we might be led to understand they are simply a system for classifying ethics:
On the other, there’s a strong suggestion that they are the expression of common cause that one explicitly joins up with:
Given that one of the special features of the assassin class is the ability to learn alignment languages other than his own – and only if he has sufficiently high Intelligence – we can guess that alignment is something of an ontological quality, especially when we note that:
Alignment languages appear, therefore, to have something of a magic quality, suggesting that that choosing alignment changes something fundamental about the character, and that’s what detect evil detects.
As with a lot of things AD&D, 2e walks this right back to where we were in D&D:
Final emphasis present in original text.
Overall, detect evil doesn’t cause that many difficulties under most versions of the spell in the original TSR versions of the game (WOTC’s versions I choose to pointedly ignore). A safe assumption would be that it detects presently occurring evil intent (which doesn’t require an evil alignment), an affirmed commitment to the cause of evil (assuming that evil exists as an ontological entity in the game world) or magic wrought specifically for malice.
* I’ll adopt the AD&D 2e convention of italics to indicate spell and magical item names.
** Edited. There was no evil alignment in OD&D, as stated elsewhere.
@FLWAB
“D&D assumes a dualistic cosmology” is my new favorite complaint about RPG realism.
More seriously, this makes me a little more certain that purportedly generic systems should avoid alignment. I’m a fan of Savage Worlds, for instance, which doesn’t go in for it. Any spells like Detect Evil would have to be replaced, though. Maybe with a Detect Ill Will? 😛
I find that alignment actually works only when it is an alignment, as in: taking sides in a cosmic struggle through the aeons. Law v. Chaos, Good v. Evil, Light v. Dark, Republicans v. Democrats – it doesn’t matter what the struggle is, so long as there is a struggle.
If that’s not the ontology you’re looking for, alignments are probably a net negative.
One issue that does arise, though, is that certain commonly encountered fantasy tropes become a lot more troublesome.
Take vampires: one typical way of dealing with them is through invoking divinity. Actually, it works for a lot of things other things, too: evil spirits, demons, sundry undead… “the power of Christ compels you” solves many issues.
Provided you’re Christian, of course.
Abominations in the eyes of the Lord can be dealt with by turning the Lord’s eye towards them, which is common enough in folklore. But what if they aren’t abominations at all, but rather just a different sort of entity? Coming back to vampires, we observe that driving stakes through their hearts and cutting off their heads also works – and works for non-vampires, as well, which is a bonus. A world where vampires are dispatched through judicious application of excessive force is certainly workable, but a very different one from that in which holy water and a crucifix are just as strong, if not stronger, than sheer brute might.
If everyone gets their own holy water and symbol, we have a different issue: why do so many different deities have broadly the same approach to things like the undead, spirits or demons?
No. Detect Evil is not infallible. It can be foiled by approximately equal level magic to produce both false positives and false negatives. Therefore, it does not count as “your deity telling you something” and you need more than that to justify executing someone.
On the subject of “innocent children,” I was thinking more of the real life examples Gygax uses in his later post (Chivington and a native american warrior) than Paladins. “Nits make lice” doesn’t mean that the kids themselves are Evil, just that the speaker thinks it’s reasonably certain that they will be at some point. (Cf. Goblin Slayer, for anyone familiar.)
AD&D mythology gets weirder, in that (a) Paladins can get a signal from their God whether someone is inclined towards Evil or not and (b) it’s frankly up to the God (or the GM) whether killing someone for being Evil alone is itself a Good or Evil act.
(One GM could very easily create a state of Paladins who summarily kill anyone who detects as Evil and declare that those Paladins themselves reflect as Good, another one could declare that a Paladin actually falls for killing someone without evidence of an Evil act, and I wouldn’t say that either was illogical.)
Oh yeah, Chivington was an absolute evil ass. Do not let your real-world morality be guided by D&D.
I’m just trying to steelman Gygax’s point.
The paladin (AD&D) decided to execute the remaining ogre, reasoning that they didn’t have the ability to take him back to an appropriate forum for justice and that letting him go free would lead to greater evil.
Ironically, to me that sounds like the beginnings of grimdark. Why doesn’t Batman just shoot the Joker? After all, he’ll simply escape from Arkham Asylum and start on a criminal rampage again!
And given that Paladins suffer from the “honour above reason” trope where people want them to be a little more pragmatic and practical, and a little less idealistic and rule-bound, then “we have no way of handing this creature over to a court of law, we can’t take prisoners and bring it with us, if we let it go it is likely to keep on committing crimes, it’s already guilty of crimes, execution it is” sounds like the kind of “in war, you do stuff that you wouldn’t do in peace” that a lot of real life people engaged in.
I don’t agree with this decision, but given that they’re going to be the closest thing to law enforcement on the spot, then being judge, jury and executioner goes with the territory.
I do think that it is also important to remember that D&D is a game that has a strong mechanical focus on violence. In other words, fighting and killing are a big part of the game. So, yes, in the real world its pretty dark to go around executing people in the scenario described. But in D&D even the Good are expected to kill a lot of sentient beings in their day to day adventuring job. If you don’t like that, then D&D is not the best role-playing system for you.
I mean the Murder-Hobo is a trope for a reason. In most games even Paladins are eager to go through a dead man’s pockets for loose change.
I’m not a D&D buff (I’ve played maybe a dozen or so sessions of AD&D when I was a teen), but are ogres actually considered people in the standard D&D setting? My impression was that ogres were something in between monsters and animals, or at best semi-intelligent humanoids so culturally alien to the civilized races that they couldn’t be expected to adhere to their laws, and hence had no rights to a trial in a forum of justice.
Yeah, that wasn’t smart, and he wouldn’t have cared.
For non-racially charged examples, just read the non-smart ways his prose expressed his ideas in his Dungeon Master’s Guide (1st Edition AD&D).
Today? It appears that it was October 5th, 2019. But someone does appear to have resurrected it yesterday. Hard to get twitter to show you everything though, so maybe I’m missing something. I can’t even see any posts about Libertarians.
And the main point of that post back in 2019 would seem to be, to go Godwin here, that if we can’t put Hitler in the “evil” camp, then the concept of alignment in D&D is so flexible as to be essentially meaningless. To paraphrase Carnegie, everyone sees themselves as the good guy. Whether it’s a real criminal like Al Capone or a fictitious one like The Godfather, they viewed themselves as Lawful Good, too.
And that means alignment just isn’t a very good system if you want to play a nuanced world. Otherwise you need to impose some sense of what “Good” means. Sauron was evil. Frodo was good, but corruptible as is the inherent state of man. None of this retconning relativism.
As to Twitterati? She’s got fewer than 10K followers. Not nothing, but not exactly one the leading lights.
Not exactly sure why you want people to get angry about it.
My understanding is that Al Capone was actually one of the few criminals self-aware enough to realize he was a criminal and not really a good dude (which in effect boosted his popularity, because hey, at least he was honest). Although that could be something that modern fiction has just placed in my brain… hard to separate fact from fiction in cases like this.
Well, we contain multitudes and all that, but Al Capone is quoted as saying:
Did Carnegie make that up? Maybe. But I think it’s consistent with how plenty of people see themselves.
This is Weakmanning to the highest degree, as well as fudging the words on just what is being objected to.
People who happily call themselves pro-SJ grew up and still adore their Hogwartz sortings. Alignment charts of all kinds are great meme fodder.
But it makes sense to side-eye the Planet of Hats trope.
I’m sorry, I don’t know where to find the cutoff between Weakman SJ, the left-wing equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church that secularists like to use against Christianity despite no significant Communion agreeing with its theology, and SJWs significant enough that entertainment corporations will bow to them.
Maybe by counting the followers, like @HeelBearCub implied?
Rather than counting the followers, counting the counter-examples. It’s trivially easy to find people posting alignment chart memes right alongside their “Representation matters!” screeds, and seeing that the larger number of notes contain no backlash. A large number of followers means nothing unless it surpasses the Lizardman Constant.
And Carnegie did it with his own money.
The first two of which, I suspect, he thought with some justification was effectively altruistic.
Wikipedia says Carnegie “devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education, and scientific research”. Those all seem like decent longtermist plays in the early 1900s.
Another fun fact I just learned from Wikipedia: Carnegie was opposed to imperialism and allegedly tried to buy the freedom of the Philippines (so they would not be a US colony) for $20 million.
Those first two (especially libraries for which he had a specific fondness due to experience in his formative years) was that they enabled those of poor station in life to better themselves such that they might accomplish great things. My *ahem* reading of it is that if access to a good library wasn’t good enough, it was evidence that you were simply lazy, indolent, or some other terrible thing and couldn’t be saved.
a lot of them thought they were doing exactly that via the welfare state.
Precipice is about specific risks to the human future. However, we couldn’t even know that asteroid impact was a potential risk until people did a lot of research, most of which seemed very impractical.
What could people do to increase our capacity to understand and act on risks?
Reform our political system(s)?
There’s quite a lot of stuff that can and should be done at the government level, including a lot of thinking. But it’s just not practical in current context – no incentives are even remotely aligned for it to happen. Sure, some of it can be solved by other means, but John Schilling dig in the last thread really stung. Having random nerds on the internet answering major questions is a huge sign of inadequacy.
Alternatively we can go the opposite way and try to make political systems redundant. A marketplace of WHOs instead of a big, political WHO. This has a better chance of getting to results fast, but it hits a small snag from the beginning: resources. We already pay a stupid amount of tax, and we’re supposed to finance a private ecosystem of organizations on top of it? Who has the money? Oh, yeah, the government.
Could be cynical me before coffee, but might be that the best use of money is financing proper political science, probably one based on economic and psychological principles. Like for example how Sowell spent half a book talking about market failure in politics.
Sorry for the offtopic response.
A marketplace of WHOs instead of a big, political WHO
The problem with that is then we the public get battered with competing messages, all delivered at the top of their lungs and with burning sincerity, about what the Big Danger is that we should be worrying about – it’s an asteroid strike! no, it’s climate change! no, it’s a pandemic! no, it’s overpopulation!
Everyone is yelling that the sky is falling in a different manner, who is right? We still have no idea.
It’s not that bad. Of course they have to say the sky is falling to get funding, but the point is they also get the hard data needed to stop the sky from falling. Like how the damn masks are useful or not or what exactly IFR is for Covid, and NOT 4 months after the epidemic started.
But point made, relying on donations means a lot of useless yelling. If this kind of marketplace is to work, it needs to find some other way to function than just donations.
Why would they? Organizations that devote >0% of their resources to stopping the sky from falling get outcompeted by organizations that devote 100% of their resources to screaming that the sky is falling, and don’t run the risk of finding out that the sky wasn’t falling after all.
For the one who hasn’t seen the idea yet 🙂
Something to lighten the mood — redo works of art at home.
https://www.instagram.com/Tussenkunstenquarantaine/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/izoizolyacia
https://twitter.com/GettyMuseum/status/1242845960343924737/photo/1
https://www.pinterest.at/oonapeyrer/kunstgeschichte-nachstellen/
Dutch expressions are like healthcare, you can’t get enough of it
‘Bijspijkeren’ = Adding nails
Brushing up. Used to mean repairing, but shifted to fixing a deficiency in knowledge or skill.
‘Binnen zijn’ = Being inside
Having earned enough to no longer have to work. Probably comes from sailors who would get paid as well as shore leave after reaching their destination.
‘Jong blaadje’ = little young leaf
Pretty young girl that one is sexually interested in.
‘Het bloed kruipt waar het niet gaan kan’ = The blood creeps where it can’t go
Blood is thicker than water.
‘Bloementjes buiten zetten’ = Putting the flowers outside
Partying.
‘Een blok aan het been’ = A block attached to the leg
Carrying a burden, usually used when referring to someone or something: Bob is a block attached to my leg. Comes from prisoners being shackled to a piece of wood to restrain their movement. ‘The old ball and chain’ is a somewhat similar English saying, although that is limited to a burdensome spouse.
‘In de luren laten leggen’ = Letting yourself be laid down in diapers (although Dutch people wouldn’t know that ‘luren’ means diaper, as the modern Dutch word for it is ‘luier’)
Letting yourself be misled. Originally, in neither Dutch and English did a ‘diaper/luier’ specifically mean a diaper, but rather, a specific kind of cloth. This was used for swaddling. So a baby that ‘let himself be be laid down in diapers’, was actually swaddled and therefor deprived of the use of his hands and feet, allowing others to do with him or her as they please.
We have roughly the same expression in Norwegian “en klamp om foten”, meaning something that seriously hampers your movement or slows you down. The word “klamp” is not in common use, so I looked it up. Turns out it was common to put a piece of wood around one foot to limit a horse from moving to far about, or alternatively, to lock both forefeet together with a piece of wood between them. Link in Norwegain, but some good pictures of the devices.
https://snl.no/hestehelle
In German, “Een blok aan het been” is a “Klotz am Bein”, for example an unwelcome person lingering with a group.
But I wanted to ask about “Het bloed kruipt waar het niet gaan kan”: Duolingo taught me that the word order would rather be “Het bloed kruipt waar het niet kan gaan”? Or is “gaan kan” Belgian Flemish, again?
BTW, after five months of Dutch on Duolingo, I can understand almost everything in Dutch translations of Peppa Pig. I highly recommend Peppa Pig for language learners. They speak slowly, everything is explained thrice, and it’s hilarious.
Do you have witty expressions for going to the toilet? I can think of:
“wo der Kaiser von China zu Fuß hingeht” = “where the empereor of China goes on foot” = the bathroom
“das Kartoffelwasser in die Ecke stellen” = “put the potato water into the corner”
“meinem Kutscher einen Cognac bringen” = “bring a bourbon to my coachman” (probably from the Proustian time when people were brought to the social gatherings by coach, and the coach driver had to wait in the cold)
Both are valid if it is part of a where/if construct like this. For example: ‘hij poept in zijn broek als hij niet naar de wc gaan mag/mag gaan.’ The latter is probably more common and the former more old-fashioned, but not so much to be truly remarkable.
In the particular fixed expression you refer to, only one variant is valid, because it’s a fixed expression.
Not really, just minor euphemisms, like:
‘Een grote/kleine boodschap’ = A large/small errand (pooping/peeing)
‘Het kleinste kamertje’ = The smallest room (toilet)
‘Stoelgang’ = chair going (defecating) = German Stuhlgang
‘Hoge nood’ = High distress (close to peeing/pooping your pants)
Finally, we have arrived at that kind of topic! “Großes/kleines Geschäft” is the German equivalent to the boodschappen, but mostly used by children. “Pipi” and “A-a” are other childish euphemisms. Adults could also use
“um die Ecke gehen / ums Eck gehen” (depending on region) = “go around the corner”
“Hände waschen” = “wash hands” (pars pro toto!)
For the kind of expresion used by funny people in the bar, I remember one more which is rather offensive, so use with care: “einen Chinesen abseilen” (rope down a Chinese). Oh look, “to abseil” is an English verb, too!
“poepen” is almost a false friend, because in German “pup[s]en” is flatulencing.
Which brings us to the more appetizing topic of false friends. The worst Dutch false friends are the auxiliary verbs:
“ik mag” = “I’m allowed to”, German “ich mag” = “I like”
“ik durf” = “I dare”, German “ich darf” = “I’m allowed to”
“ik zal” = “I will”, German “ich soll” = “I shall”
Misunderstandings galore!
More fun false friends:
“slim” = “clever”, German “schlimm” = “bad”, English “slim” = “slender”
“nuttig” = “useful”, German “nuttig” = “slutty” (e.g. clothing)
“huren” = “hire”, German “huren” = “employ a prostitute” (= Dutch “hoeren”, I think)
Please be patient with Germans who pronounce “een auto huren” like “hoeren”. German “oe” = “ö” is pronounced like Dutch “eu”, German “eu” is pronounced like “oi”. Theo Waigel had the great idea to call the currency “Euro”, but didn’t think of how differently it would be pronounced throughout Europe.
My favorite false friend is symmetrical. German ‘Meer’ = Dutch ‘zee’ (sea), but German ‘See’ = Dutch ‘meer’ (lake).
So it is confusing no matter which way you are translating.
Fahren/varen are also fun. German for driving vs Dutch for boating.
No, it’s ‘hoerenlopen’ = whore walking.
A reference to the more visible pre-purchase process, where the man walks by the windows, looking for an agreeable offer.
It’s even worse: “Der See” (male) is the lake, but “die See” (female) is a somewhat poetic word for the sea.
Fahren/varen is indeed funny: Dutch people ride their cars, whereas for us “reiten” is uniquely for horses. These are the little things I enjoy so much about learning Dutch.
Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup today.
Our next meetup is on May 10th at 10:30AM PDT.
We will be meeting at this Hubs link: https://hub.link/Zd85BZs
You can click here to register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfx4oanzAzYdl8hZDIhRI-ZdUQ5MvSaY1aa1sh-N0eKWzee7g/viewform?usp=sf_link
An FAQ can be found here: https://cephalopods.blog/2020/04/12/april-26th-ssc-lesswrong-meetup/
This picture seems appropriate for some of our COVID conversations lately.
Upgraded version
Thanks. Stolen and posted on FB w/commentary. 🙂
If you don’t mind, who are you on Facebook? You can PM me there.
Believe it or not, there are at least three Nancy Lebovitz on Facebook, but based on one shared friend and some mutual interests, just sent you a friend request if that’s the correct you. 🙂
Not exactly– the other two spell their last names differently.
I am becoming increasingly unconvinced that “taking COVID seriously” is worth the time/effort.
What about those who also want the lockdown to continue with the hope of the world burning from all of the terrible things at once?
I am not worried about civil liberties because it seems that the restrictions are only possible by people’s consent, which is contingent on coronavirus being a viable threat.
Here in Poland, we’ve had, at one point, the government forbid recreational activities in public spaces, coupled with a ban on entering parks and forests, which the police immediately started to enforce with fines. They suffered immediate reputational damage and constant ridicule, and the ban was lifted after a week. (Now we’re all “forced” to wear masks, which everyone seems to be fine with.)
The economy looks worrisome, though, for obvious Keynesian reasons. (The coronavirus is different from war, in that there’s nothing to rebuild afterwards, and thus no clear work opportunities for the impoverished and jobless.)
I didn’t consent to the local parks being closed, but they remain closed behind locked gates. I don’t believe that a majority of the local population consented to the parks being closed, but they remain closed. There’s an awful lot of stuff going on in the name of the coronavirus that I didn’t consent to, but am nonetheless stuck with
Unless by “consent” you mean storming the barricades or the like, in which case expecting that sort of nonconsent to restore civil liberties strikes me as somewhere between naive and dangerous.
Dumb provisions in the lockdowns are pretty bad if you think the lockdowns are a good idea, as they decrease public tolerance for lockdowns.
Basically all provisions in the lockdowns are now dumb. The lockdowns could only ever postpone the inevitable, and that at enormous cost for a few months delay, unless, A: we maintain them for the year-plus it takes to develop a vaccine, or B: we do something with those dearly-purchased months that prevents the pandemic from rebounding as bad as ever. Since A was never plausible and B is not being done, the lockdowns are now completely dumb. Individual provisions are more or less dumb to the extent that they cause various harms – particularly including the erosion of public trust.
North Carolina says it needs to double its current number of tests and number of testers in order to be able to efficiently to do contact tracing and believes it will have that ready in two weeks.
I don’t know exactly why the US seems to have dropped the ball on getting testing capacity up over the past two months, but it seems to finally be done. (I’ve been optimistic before and let down before, so don’t bet the house yet.) When this is all over and people can do the investigations to find out what should have happened, I’m curious to find out who dropped the ball.
As a fellow Pole, I feel its necessary to correct/clarify some matters.
The closing of public “green” spaces (parks, etc.) was effected by the Government Regulation of 31st March 2020 (Dz.U. 566.2020), §17 item 1, for the period from 1st April to 11th April. This ban on visiting parks was extended to 19th April by Government Regulation of 10th April 2020 (Dz.U. 658.2020), §16 and further extended to include public spaces in forests (this last restriction may have been introduced earlier, by an amendment of the former Regulation, but I cannot readily find the amendment).
The government didn’t “lift” the ban, public opposition notwithstanding. The ban lapsed and the government chose not to extend it as they had done on the 10th.
This renewed access to green spaces (and the much less discussed lifting of the ban on going out of the house in general, other than to go to work or to buy groceries) has been touted by the government as an important first step to unlocking the economy. Next steps: the ability to play tennis and soccer (coming 4th May, insh’allah). I wish I was making this up.
I would like to hope that very few people are fooled by this. As for masks, my observations on the streets of Warsaw are that the perception of this as theater is fairly common and that people aren’t all that keen to play along (roughly 60/40 split betwen people who wear masks as intended, and those who leave their noses uncovered/use them as chin-straps, don’t wear them at all).
I am not convinced that there is a real difference between “lifted” and “not extended”. AFAIK nearly all (all?) Covid restrictions in Poland are done as expiring bans, requiring explicit extensions to keep them.
Interesting, in Kraków compliance was much higher and seemed to reach about 90%. With 10% being people going from car into a residential building, homeless and people removing mask during talking.
Also, hello to all people from Poland active here.
I’ve said this before in another context: “inaction is cheaper than action”.
My view on the matter is that everyone’s in favour of lockdowns right up until they’re the ones getting hit in the pocketbook. The initial round (from mid-March till about Easter) didn’t seem so bad because it came before payrolls and before bills. (Most?) People can scrape through this one time, but now payrolls and bills are rolling around again, and this time the government is also taking a hit (ZUS payments were due by the 15th, payroll taxes for March by the 20th, VAT for March is due today). If the government can sell people on the idea that things will start returning to some semblance of normality next month, those who haven’t given up yet may still make an effort to scrape through. If not, people are going to cut their losses and run (meaning major layoffs, shutting down businesses, etc.) which leaves the government on the hook for all the assistance they’ve promised, but seeing reduced payments on pretty much all sources.
And that’s leaving aside the rest of the BS going down now.
Why it is supposed to be bad? There will be no need to rebuild everything, so resources can be put into productive things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
And if the problem is that people are unwilling to spend money, then printing cash and giving every citizen N zł should be less destructive that destruction of random objects.
It did strike me as “oh no, how can we employ people to fill holes if we didn’t dig them!?”
Wars have the positive effect of employing people as a side effect of mobilising all effort to not lose a war to the other side. Post-wars have the positive effect of employing people as a side effect of replacing everything that was destroyed. But in neither case was the “destroy” part a positive thing.
I notice that the predictions of economic ill coming from the lockdown are that work is not being done, and work desperately needs to be done. That doesn’t sound to me like a description of nothing needing to be built afterward.
Yeah, everything done to rebuild from a war is basically good-for-nothing wasted effort trying to get yourself back to zero, at least in comparison to not having the war at all. This is regardless of if individuals profit from. The less destruction the better.
Now, you might have decided to tear down rebuild cities anyway, but having your hand forced is by no means an advantage unless you count both the market and individual decision makers as more foolish than blind chance. Tearing down and rebuilding buildings could have been done in more constructive ways. (pardon the pun)
Rebuilding maybe feels like prosperity because there is still a war-footing mindset where people are denied luxuries, or the government is spending war bonds or borrowed money or whatever.
It’s conceivable that in some cases the destruction allows growth because there were regulations preventing any changes whatsoever that were loosened after the war. It’s even possible that this was generally against most everyone’s wishes for Molochian reasons. I’m not sure this is often the case.
The positive effect of “employing people” is the “paying” part of it, not the “working” part. Isn’t it fun how universal basic income solves everything?
There’s no “consent” here. The governor closed the parks, people go anyway, men with guns remove them. That’s the opposite of “consent”.
The people going to the park should bring their own guns.
They’re starting to.
I’m in New Jersey, no guns for me. Besides, while just shooting the Sheriff’s Department officer might slightly extend my time in the park, I suspect in a few minutes it would result in a bunch of his buddies showing up and killing me.
Well, then you would get to stay in the park for the rest of your life …
I don’t know, the civil liberties after 9/11 didn’t really come back. And we still put up with the pointless security theater.
This is a concern I have about technology for contact tracing[1]–this is something that will likely take awhile to get into use, and which will then never go away.
[1] The contact tracing proposals I’ve seen try to minimize abuse potential, but it’s still potentially a problem.
Right. TSA regulations have gotten more, not less, strict since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, despite essentially zero successful plane-based acts of terrorism since then. And calling for the roll-back or abolishment of all this stuff is way far off the 3×5 card of allowable opinion…
Of course one option is to leave the smart phone at home when you go out to do something you don’t want publicized. Or just leave it at home more often, on general principle.
That was already a good idea – Google remembers where I had breakfast several years and two phones ago – but with contact tracing apps, more people may notice this.
Somehow I don’t think most Americans significantly younger than me could make that choice though, judging by the shocked reactions to the large % of my relatives who don’t even own smart phones.
The technology for contact tracing is, if you test positive a caseworker asks you who you’ve lived with, worked with, partied with, etc, for the past couple of weeks, and sends other caseworkers to go test those people. This is how contact tracing has always worked, it works well enough for diseases like COVID-19, and the abuse potential is no greater than for e.g. census-taking.
The bit where some techno-enthusiast talks about how he’s figured out how to beat the coronavirus by having everybody always carry a smartphone with an app that keeps track of everyone they’ve ever come within six feet of, is unnecessary, probably unworkable, definitely dangerous, and ought to be ridiculed and rejected every time it is proposed.
If it isn’t, then yeah, someone in the government will get very enthusiastic about the prospect of 24/7 tracking of the entire population and it will soon enough be illegal to leave home without a smartphone running said app.
“TSA regulations have gotten more, not less, strict since the immediate aftermath of 9/11”
That was true from about 2001 to 2008, as we first had screenings to enter the terminal, and then rules about shoes, and then liquids (in whatever order). But it seems to me that over the decade or so after that, the rules gradually started getting looser. More airports allowed people to keep shoes on, it was easier to get pre-check options, and so on. Security theater was definitely decreasing more slowly in that second decade than it increased in the first decade, but I think there was a change.
We can have electronics now!
@John Shilling,
If the app uses bluetooth for contact tracing, and they all seem to, then it isn’t 6 feet it is more like 20m-100m depending on reception. Which is much worse than 6 feet.
And it requires everyone to leave bluetooth on, which for most phones that I have had means you get about 6 hours of battery life.
There is probably a custom LoRaWan solution that could be implemented, requiring everyone to carry around thick credit card sized card, which would be pretty cheap (<$50 per unit?) and not require charging for 6 months. Likely cheap enough at scale that it would be preferable to tanking your economy. Too late for most countries, but it would be nice in NZ if we could have that, since the government is insisting we keep out borders shut until a vaccine arrives.
The schemes I’ve seen described involve having each phone send a random code that changes every so often, and using low-power Bluetooth to estimate range. If my phone receives your pings and estimates you as being within (say) 2m for a few minutes, then it adds your random code to its list of people it has seen. (My phone is also sending out a random code.)
Later, when I discover I’ve been infected, I upload all the codes I sent out over the last couple weeks to some central database. Periodically, you can check the database to see if any codes you’ve registered as being close to you have been added to the list.
The good news here is that this doesn’t let anyone seize your phone and check whom you were close to over the last two weeks. (They’ll do that more approximately with location information from the phone company.) The bad news is, the random codes can be a way of tracking a user (the codes roll over every so often, but not all that often, and code X disappears at the same time code Y starts being sent out, so it’s not so hard to link them). Worse, when my codes are added to the database, it’s very likely that anyone who’s just put listening nodes in a lot of public places will be able to link them all together and get a picture of my travel around town. And worst of all, if this is mandated, then the cops can get any two people, take their phones, and determine whether or not they’ve been in contact lately–you can absolutely bet there will be cases where some policeman or prosecutor does that, and maybe it finds its way before the supreme court in a decade and then some kind of ruling comes out on whether that’s unconstitutional.
But it will be done with all the attention to security normally associated with commercial software develop. So the Chinese government will know who everyone in America was associating with inside of a month. The FBI will probably wait until they can get a court order forcing Apple to rewrite the app because they need to track Super Evil Terrorists, so maybe two months.
OK, I exaggerate. Slightly.
And the NSA will have a hand in writing the app so it leaks information out a sideband, and have it right away.
Generate a new code for every handshake and that problem goes away. More data gets used but we’re talking 16 bytes per contact event to get collision-free random identifiers. Assuming 10 contacts per second, 24/7 because you live and work inside an NYC subway station, that’s 193MB to track every last one of your 12 million contacts in the last 2 weeks. Twice that if you want to track the codes you’ve handed out (but a good nonce-hashing scheme could let you regenerate those on demand, so you can optional skip that part).
The volume of publications gets a bit crazier as total infections go up, but at that stage are you really going to be doing contact tracing anyways?
None of the above is an endorsement of forcing people to use such a product, because once you do that the next thing that happens is whatever you did to guarantee privacy gets rolled back.
albatross11,
How does the bluetooth estimate range? By signal strength?
The way I’ve understood it, it’s signal strength, and I think the pings include some additional information to figure out likely range from signal strength. I think to be useful, you need to see multiple pings, because you’re wanting to estimate total exposure in terms of distance and time.
There’s also some work on using ultrasonic signals, where you can get a challenge-response protocol going that lets you estimate distance based on the speed of sound. (There are existing crypto protocols that do this using lightspeed, so they can absolutely bound the maximum distance between two devices–if the round trip from challenge being transmitted to response being received is X seconds, then you multiply X times the speed of light and divide by 2 to get a bound on the distance.)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/challenge-proximity-apps-covid-19-contact-tracing
The EFF wrote about this, and they don’t completely hate the idea.
If you worry someone has hacked the app or the phone, or forced the developers to do so, there are already thousands of other ways they can see exactly who you are and who you hang out with. You can buy “anonymized” location data already and do this.
Proximity apps probably don’t move the needle in a harmful direction at all from our current privacy nightmare [1], while actually being specifically focused on just the thing that is important: what other [devices of] people have you been near?
Their recommendations are still good and I hope people pay attention and audit the proximity apps when they come out.
[1] People still need to stop sharing so much. Don’t let apps that need your location track your location when you aren’t using them. There are like 8 or so forest fires of location tracking that are raging right now. Telling normies how bad it is makes them say “why bother?” But we can put them out, one by one, with some marginal benefits each time. A proximity app following most of the EFF’s recommendations would not be another forest fire to put out.
Is there an organization that’s like the EFF but not “meh, we’ve already lost, who cares any more”?
Most of my comment was about my views, not the EFF’s. You can read the EFF’s own words, which pretends that everyone already has all their privacy stuff locked down, like they probably do, and wondering what the worst-case is for a proximity app and how we can prevent it.
I recommend podcasts by Nickolas Means— this is the first one I listened to, which is about a plane crash which could have been much worse. He lays out technical and human issues very well, and puts emphasis on people getting things right though he also describes mistakes.
What podcasts do folks recommend? I’m especially interested in podcasts which leave you feeling saner.
I am a big fan of podcasts about history. Most recently someone here (thanks) recommended me China history; somewhat topical to current plague season.
Another Chinese history option is The History of China.
I was looking for something more History of Rome style that proceeds chronologically through history, rather than CHP being topical and jumping around, and The History of China is exactly that.
Quite a bit lower in production values, compared to CHP (especially the early episodes… again, following in History of Rome’s footsteps) – but it’s a lot easier for me to digest chronologically than to have the first episode about something that happened in the middle of the 20th century, the second episode about four inventions spread across history, etc.
But The History of China is also not finished, (currently in 1333 AD…), so that’s an obvious downside. For modern stuff, I started, but didn’t finish “The Fall and Rise of China”, a lecture series available on Audible, but it seems pretty good, as it again is more chronologically organized.
On that note I´d like to also recommend The History of Byzantium, which picks up when History of Rome finished and is imho better, going deeper below surface political history. I was disapointed by a treatment of 5th century in History of Rome.
On China I want to learn more about current China, and knowing something about its modern history is imho good way to do that, at least for me. So China history, which has series e.g. on Cultural revolution, Civil war and similar stuff is suitable for my purposes.
Anyone knows why monogamous marriage became a cultural norm in Ancient Greece?
As for when: By the Dark Ages at the latest, and probably before that. In particular, the way husband and wife is used in the Odyssey implies that a husband and wife is one to one. It’s possible Homer is being grammatically innovative but it’s also possible that he just lived in a monogamous society. Before that, we have no definitive evidence either way on pre-Dark Age (ie, Mycenaean) Greeks. We have pretty good evidence that the great lords sometimes sired children with multiple women, but there does appear to be some stigma to some of these children. This leaves it open whether it was a concubinage system or something more clandestine or what. Likewise, even if they were not monogamous we know other societies they would have been familiar with were.
As for why it became the norm, that’s really more the realm of anthropology, since it’s a prehistorical phenomenon. What I’m aware of is that most anthropologists agree that monogamy is the most common state of humanity, in that even if you remove all restrictions on polygamy the vast majority of family units will continue to be monogamous. Polygamy is concentrated in a small elite, even in societies that explicitly encourage it.
Why wouldn’t it – what cultures of the period, in particular the Greeks’ trade partners, did not have monogamous marriage? It seems to surface everywhere in some form or another (with the degree of acceptability of concubines being the main difference).
Apparently Mycenaean Greece already had it, though I’m having trouble digging up definitive sources on it.
Don’t know about the dates here, but the Old Testament is full of polygamy, so I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that some neighboring cultures practiced non-monogamy. Like monogamy, polygamy seems to surface everywhere 🙂 (At least in rural/pastoral cultures that still allow accumulation of significant wealth?)
I keep seeing stories about farmers destroying food because plummeting restaurant demand has destroyed their markets and they, presumably, can’t easily switch to selling it all through a grocery supply chain.
One story was about how demand for potatoes has crashed and many Idaho potatoes are being left to rot. Does this mean people are more likely to eat a meal with potatoes in a restaurant than at home?
Doesn’t this mean that, unless we are all now consuming a lot less calories on average, somebody eventually is going to starve? I’m not seeing stories about other food producers massively increasing production, and it seems like that would be a hard thing to do quickly.
I suppose it’s possible these stories give the impression the phenomenon is more prevelant than it really is. These are anecdotes, not data, after all.
There is going to be alot less food waste. People will not get served large amounts of potatoas as sides that they only eat a small amount of.
Great point. We are all getting served fewer calories on average.
I think there’s a substantial changeover cost to selling in a form that’s useful for a household of 5 instead of a restaurant that serves several hundred meals per day, and that producers/processors may be reluctant to eat that cost when they know the restaurant lockdowns won’t go on forever. OTOH, I personally expect that there will be a lot less business for restaurants in August of 2020 than in August of 2019, even if there are no lockdowns by then, so I suspect they’d be smart to get started on those changeovers if they can.
I’ve seen a plausible claim that highly specific nutritional labels are required for home-use sized food packaging, and that’s one of the costs of changing over.
Some states have waived the regulations requiring that labeling, to allow restaurants to sell groceries to consumers.
I’m glad to hear that.
French fries are pretty much the American restaurant food. Anti-nomative determinism.
Similar situation in Belgium and the Netherlands. And while people here do AFAIK eat quite a lot of potatoes at home, they are more likely to boil them, mash them, or perhaps stick them in a stew rather than frying them. Many of the surplus potatoes here seem to be varieties bred for frying that will be unpleasantly watery if cooked in other ways.
Potatoes are rather famously what people eat when there is a famine, so if demand for them is indeed collapsing, market probably does not expect food shortages.
In the most famous case I know, potatoes were specifically what people weren’t eating during the famine.
I was thinking more about Eastern Europe during 20th century. My grandfather had a small strip of dirt dedicated to growing potatoes, and homemade tractor for harvesting it. There was no famine at that time, it was probably just a precaution. But their production is whatever the opposite is of “capital intensive”.
Unless demand isn’t falling – supply of logistical capability is.
OP was specifically referering to demand, so I am reacting to that. Breakdown of supply would lead to price increases for consumers, or if price controls are in place (in the form “price gouging laws”) to shortages.
But it’s demand by intermediaries. Consumers don’t get their price signals directly to farmers. Consumers get their signal to grocery stores and restaurants, who each get their signal to wholesalers, who each get their signal to farmers.
If there are frictions in these intermediate stages, there can be an increase in demand at the consumer level that doesn’t get translated through to the other end.
@keaswaran
Yeah that could happen. I assume that by “frictions” you mean breakdowns of supply chain. But still if that were the case, increased demand on consumer end should be visible in either higher prices or shortages in grocery stores.
Or maybe people in USA are now eating less, closer to optimum diet. But still more than optimal?
I suspect that food consumption in USA can drop noticeably with benefit to health.
About 71% of Americans are overweight or obese according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
From what I’ve read, that obesity is in a large part due to consumption of sugary drinks and the massive amounts of fat and sugar contained in many processed foods. Eating fewer potatoes probably won’t help much if sugar is still available.
I suspect restaurants have a lot more waste than the average household, on the basis that they’d optimize for simple and efficient processing rather than getting the most out of a given sack of potatoes.
You can’t always switch from delivery to restaurants to delivery to supermarkets. There are dedicated pipelines and it takes time to switch.
Potatoes shouldn’t matter that much, I’d think. But I’ve learned this is a lot I don’t know.
(Incidentally, there are lots of potatoes available at the supermarket. We have switched from rice to potatoes as our primary carb because we can’t get rice any more.)
Potatoes are a lot harder to prepare at home than to prepare in a restaurant. Many of the best potato preparations have large fixed costs and small marginal costs – to make 100 servings of french fries is much less than 100 times as hard as to make one serving of french fries.
Rice is much easier to do at the household level.
Potatoes can be easy, rice can be hard. Fries are hard, but so is puffed rice. Mashed potatoes is easy, regular old rice is easy.
Also those commercial water-powered potato peelers are dope.
But you simply don’t have the option of making french fries out of rice (though fried rice is nice, it needs a lot more ingredients to be great).
And you do have the option of just boiling potatoes and throwing some meat and sauce on top.
Or microwaving them, even easier.
Yes.
Some are already predicting this will push over 100 million people to at-or-near starvation levels in the third world.
Economic shutdowns have consequences. It is not all about haircuts and spring break.
The only silver lining I can see in this whole affair is that just maybe the idea of strangling the economy in the cause of some “greater good” will become commonly recognized for the criminal folly it is.
A helpful exercise: substitute “people earning a living” every time you see “economy”.
I’m not sure that this article says much of anything about economic shutdowns – isn’t it entirely about the economic consequences of the pandemic? I don’t see any obvious mechanism by which shutdowns in the developed world produce famine in Yemen, Congo, Ethiopia, Nigera, etc. (There’s one mention of loss of remittance income to countries with large numbers of economic emigrants, like Haiti, Nepal, and Somalia, but that doesn’t seem to be most of what is being discussed in this article.)
Because a lot of first-world food is being wasted because it can’t reach people via the usual channels, which is turning out to mean “must be destroyed”.
E.g. pig farmers are having to euthanize their pigs because the processing plants can’t take them off their hands in time because they’re shutting down due to COVID. So instead of 50,000 pigs being turned into however many million calories, they’re turned into essentially compost.
The first world can absorb this, especially the USA, which produces an absurd amount of extra calories, but that means the prices will bump up to the point that we won’t ship as many extra calories to the third world.
My wife is on her way to the store right now to buy a bunch of meat to freeze. I’m sure we’re not the only ones. Even if the plants don’t shut down I expect shortages just like toilet paper.
Africa generally imports calories.
Most of my potato consumption was in restaurants. I’m able to cook them myself, but generally don’t care to. If I’m in lockdown mode I’d rather have beans and rice which store better for longer, and which make a complete protein together.
It’s a lot easier to cook rice (w/ or w/o beans) than potatoes, that I’ll agree with. Assuming you aren’t just doing a big baked potato for each person.
Maybe it’s just my Irish heritage but I use potatoes as the main starch in a lot of meals–mashed, baked, roasted, fried–you can do a lot with them.
I’m on team potato, too. Rice is fine, and pretty easy, although you can slice and boil potatoes just like rice and end up with a fairly similar flavorless calorie mush.
Potatoes have more variety and I like their intrinsic flavor a bit more.
So, rice is easier to cook than potatoes, if you don’t cook the potatoes the easy way.
Rice I just put in a rice maker with a bit of water and push one button. Is there a machine that does the same for a baked potato? It seems that at best, a baked potato is as easy to make as rice in a pot on the stove, which I find really annoying when I’m trying to cook something to eat with it. (But also, cultural practices have made most Americans eat most of their potatoes in forms that are fried or roasted, unlike other grains.)
Pro: You can put a potato right in the oven and press a button (or turn a dial) and it will be cooked in about 30-40 minutes. I’m not sure I’ve accidentally overcooked one, ever, but I’m sure it’s possible.
Con: A baked potato is really boring and hard to portion out (not everyone wants to eat portions measured in “potatoes” or “half-potatoes.”) They also seem to stay unreasonably hot after being put on the table.
Or you throw unpeeled potatos in salted water, bring the whole thing to a boil, for around 10-15 minutes, than take the potatos, peel them as you put them on your plate.
I recomend serving it with dressing of salted quark with chive. It’s the favorit meal of a lot of people I know.
We had words for people who where able to fuck this up, back in college.
@Edward Scizorhands
I don’t like potatos so big you can’t use portion sizes of three or four potatos.
Yeah, baking potatoes is still easier than rice with a rice cooker. Just remember to poke holes in the skin. Of course, it takes longer, which matters when meal planning.
Plus, you don’t need an additional appliance–as somebody whose microwave is on the kitchen table due to a lack of counter space, that matters.
I do rice on the stovetop, which I can again because I finally found rice this past weekend after the store being out since the lockdown started.
For potatoes, in addition to baking, I like to peel and cut them up, and fry them in butter on the stovetop with Lawry’s seasoning salt and a little black pepper. Easy and great.
It’s a lot easier to cook rice (w/ or w/o beans) than potatoes, that I’ll agree with.
Well, if you’re going to be fancy about it, I suppose?
For us Irish peasants, it’s plain boiled spuds (with a bit of meat and another veggie).
(1) Open your bag of spuds
(2) Tip ’em into the sink and sort roughly by size
(3) Wash ’em
(4) Stick into saucepan – if you’re boiling them in their jackets. If you want to do mashed spuds, you have to peel them first and yes, that takes longer
(5) Fill saucepan with cold water (unless you’re doing new spuds, in which case you boil the water first, throw a bit of salt into the saucepan after the spuds, then add the boiling water; if boiling peeled potatoes, add salt before the cold water)
(6) Place onto cooker and bring to boil
(7) Turn down to low boil
(8) Cook for 15-20 minutes, or however long it takes to be just done (you can gauge this by sticking a fork into them or seeing if the skins have split) (boiling time will depend on size and variety of spud; small potatoes cook quicker than large ones, surprise surprise, and floury potatoes need to be watched because they can cook fast and when the skins split you have a mess of starchy water, whereas waxy spuds will take a little longer and maintain integrity. Experience is a great teacher)
(9) While your spuds are boiling, go do something else (prepare the rest of the dinner, do other household chores, mess around on the Internet)
(10) When the 15-20 minutes are up, check spuds, drain water, put back on low heat for 1-2 minutes to steam (then the next stage for mashing comes if you’re doing mashed spuds)
(11) Serve them! Then eat them!
I mean, it’s not rocket science 🙂
And here is an English transplant doing a really old-style “everything cooked in one pot” dinner; the opening images of the bastable on the crane over the fire? yeah, some of the old people still lived like that when I was a kid, and my mother was able to cook for them using those methods 🙂
You can cook a potato by covering it with aluminium foil and putting it on ambers. You don’t even need any utensils. What could be simpler than that?
For what it’s worth, I’m eating a lot more potatoes than I ever did before. Prior to WFH, I had never tried to cook potatoes before, but now it’s the most common thing I make since they’re cheap and easy to prepare and don’t taste that bad. (Cut them thin enough and they practically taste like less salty potato chips)
Does this mean people are more likely to eat a meal with potatoes in a restaurant than at home?
Looking at this report, a large proportion of the crop goes to processors not the retail market:
And if I believe this, it’s the other way round: demand for potatoes for home consumption is increasing as people stay at home during lockdown and cook their own meals, so the growers are scrabbling to turn from “production for large food processors” to “retail size distribution”:
Does anyone play DVDs anymore, and if so, what do you use to play them on your PC or laptop? I used to play them on Windows Media Player, and it worked fine, but my current laptop for some reason won’t play DVDs in WMP–WMP refuses even to acknowledge that DVDs are something it can play. My laptop tries to play them in some program called “Cyberlink PowerDVD 12.” Yes, that program sounds like it was made in the nineties, and it plays like it too; I tried to load up an episode of Firefly and it took something like twenty seconds for the production company logo to get onto the screen. Slow and jittery to the point of uselessness. I’ve had bad luck with VLC player in the past, it tends to cover the screen in big ugly blotches for some reason. Any other recommendations?
No problems with VLC on laptop here. Would recommend.
‘It took something like twenty seconds for the production company logo to get onto the screen. Slow and jittery to the point of uselessness.’
If that’s the case with VLC, maybe the optical drive is slow, and/or dirty?
Also, DVDs age…
I’ve downloaded VLC onto the laptop to give it another shot. I think it’s the fault of the Cyberlink program; it was a monstrous flashy memory hog that took like thirty seconds just to load, then couldn’t perform at a decent speed. Like Microsoft Edge, but for DVDs.
EDIT: VLC works fine once the abomination is uninstalled. Thanks.
MPC-BE is the standard recommendation for Windows. I use it, it’s fine. Miss the ability to turn the volume up above 100% though.
Public trust in the US government is currently very low. Only about 17% of Americans believe the federal government can always or usually be trusted. But things weren’t always so grimdark. Back in the Johnson administration, and a whopping 77 percent trusted the government.
https://www.people-press.org/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help Americans regain half the ground that has been lost in this area, raising public trust to 47%. You’ll have twenty years to do it, and you may assume you have the firm support of senior figures in both political parties and many major public institutions. How will you do this?
Bring back pork barrel spending.
No seriously.
This has been a major thesis of mine for like 15 years. Most political positions are not things humans can fundamentally compromise on…most are in fact things that have historically been worth killing people over. Politicians will only compromise with the other side if they can be bribed with targeted spending to their district.
Because they have to sign on to legislation with opponents in exchange for that spending, they have a greater incentive to actually treat their co-singers like human beings instead of flesh-eating cosmodemons that promise only destruction…
Nice typo.
I’ve actually been wondering whether this is the answer for years now. I still don’t know. It feels dirty somehow.
I don’t think so. I tend to call myself a “Pluralist”…for a lot of good reasons, a society should have a ton of people that all believe different stuff, even if most of these factions are strictly “wrong.” Society is a way for us to get lots of little monocultures together without them killing each other.
Given that we all need to like, eat and live in houses, it makes sense that a lot of this peacemaking takes the form of something that looks a lot like explicit bribery.
Why does it feel dirty?
Having regional representatives that represent the region, instead of the interests of their party, is one of the reasons why you vote for your local representative, not your national one.
In Spain, the parties are a lot more powerful, and can kick out MPs who disobey the party line (which means they become unelectable, while keeping their seat). The thing is, this means that national interest trumps local interests every time, with the exceptions of parties that represent only local regions.
The Basque nationalist party has been criticised, as it’s practiced something akin to pork-and-barrel every time the government needs to pass the budget. So what? We get to keep more of our money thanks to that. If other regions want that, they should do the same, instead of criticising us for defending our interests.
But then, I believe in more regionalism, less federalism.
In U.S. usage, the meaning is roughly the opposite of the way you are using the term. Being in favor of more federalism means being in favor of having more decisions made at the state instead of the national level.
In increasing order of centralised power:
A group of entirely independant states — The EU — Federations — The USA (today) — Germany — A unitary state
Federalism means having a certain amount of decisions made at the state rather than federal level. For the EU, that’s more centralisation than the status quo but the opposite for the US. Note the concept of federalism in the early US.
Not sure where Spain fits, exactly.
‘Legalisation’ vs ‘decriminalisation’ of drugs vs prostitution makes no sense to me, though.
@ana53294
Because sometimes we should be putting national interests over regional, or even personal, interests. Suppose you’re a Senator who will cave iff you get a really nice infrastructure project in your state. Your state doesn’t actually need the project—it might be an almost complete waste of money—but maybe you think it needs the jobs, or maybe you just want it because it will make you look good for your reelection campaign. And you get it, and you give your vote. So a bill that a majority did not want to pass did pass, at the measly cost of wasting taxpayer money.
Of course maybe it’s not realistic that in this example we’re getting the worst of both worlds. Maybe it would be really good sometimes, or most times, if the bill passed. Maybe the project usually is good for your state, or the amount of money wasted is not so bad. I’ve been inclining more and more towards sclerosis being the worse evil, but I can’t justify it quantitatively.
@Nick
I tend to believe everything the government does is just different degrees of money-wasting and freedom infringing. So I don’t see what’s so wrong with getting the government to waste money on things that benefit me and my close neighbours instead of my “nation”.
But then, maybe you’re just more patriotic than I am. I see the interests of Spain frequently go against Basque interests. I don’t see why protecting ourselves and ours even if it harms the country is bad.
I am also skeptical of being able to achieve the greater good by sacrificing our region, by the way. Spanish regions (other than the nationalist Basques) have been voting the party line, presumably, for the good of the nation as they saw it, and now all the middle of Spain is empty. The depopulation is so high, that some regions have half the population they had before. Huge regions of Spain have 0 inhabitants/square km.
All those issue were know and getting ignored, until we had a regional party for the empty Spain that got one MP to represent them, and that MP was needed to make a government. Suddenly, there is lots of interest in the empty Spain.
I think that sometimes, voting for the benefit of your region is good for the whole country. There are reasons why we vote for local representatives instead of national ones. Sacrificing that, in the national interest, when there are other mechanisms to defend national interests (the presidency, for example), did not lead to good outcomes in Spain.
So yes, I believe that not only was the Spanish version of pork-and-barrel good for the Basque country, but it would have been good to at least reduce depopulation and increase services in those empty parts of Spain.
@ana53294
I feel like there’s a fundamental disconnect in this conversation. I don’t see why people thought voting for the good of the nation meant depopulating huge regions of the country. Why are the two so strongly opposed at all? Is the region around Madrid massively distorting things or something?
@Nick
If you look at this map of Spain, you’ll see that all non-coastal parts of Spain lack population, with the exception of Madrid, in the very center.
“Voting for the nation” usually means voting for the political party’s line*. And, if the party line does not include extra money for depopulated regions, then no luck.
A bit more selfishness on the regional representatives side would mean that they put the interests of their region ahead of the national ones, if the national ones don’t happen to include their regions. In essence, politicians who cared more about the people they represented than their party, would be able to bring some benefits to their regions.
The depopulated regions of Spain are not just depopulated; they are poor and lack services such as doctors, pharmacies, and schools, which mean that nobody will move there to farm or whatever, since they would need access to those regions first. Putting the interests of your region before the party interest means your region may at least reduce the rate of people moving out to get to the schools and hospitals they need. Giving them good broadband internet, that kind of thing.
*Because, if you don’t believe the party line is good for the nation, why are you part of it?
EDIT: Basically, the idea is, the national party always whips to vote the party’s line, whatever that is, and that is, from that party’s point of view, the good of the nation. Regardless of whether the political party’s line is the good of the nation or not, not allowing the voices of regional representatives to be heard means the nation, or at least sizable portions of it, get harmed.
The regions that got more depopulated also happen to be the regions without regional parties. Basques and Catalans have the strongest regional parties, and they are some of the richest; but there are also regional parties in: Galicia, Cantabria, Canary Islands, Balearic Islands, Valencia, Andalucia, Navarre. So the regions with a more formed identity, who fight more for themselves, end up better. Madrid being the exception, but then Madrid is Madrid.
And yet, alas, the “Anti-Federalists” were the people like Patrick Henry who opposed a strong central government. Such is life.
Agreed. John Boehner did way more damage than we understand with earmark bans.
This seems plausible to me, and like it illustrates some really important thing about tinkering with complex systems full of self-interested actors. It’s possible to find something that looks entirely offensive and dumb and remove it, and then discover that it was load-bearing in some complicated way you never understood….
heh. Good general point. What do we do though? Try out removing it in a sample case? Like, say, have one state eliminate it and see how it goes?
On the flip-side, it also reduced a lot of wasteful spending which itself is a good.
Any evidence that the ban on earmarks reduced wasteful spending?
Good thesis.
“Representative government” is a type of oligarchy that retains some of the dangerous features of the democracy it claims to be, such as vigorous open debate of issues worth killing people over. The original, direct democracy was based on the principle “one soldier [or sailor, for poor Athenians], one vote”. If rhetoric gets so heated that the opposing faction of your fellow citizens looks as worthy of death as an individual who commits a heinous crime (“what are capital crimes?” being a valid debate topic in the legislature or jury!), the only reason not to shed their blood is if the number of their weapons that show up at the polling place relative to yours makes civil war look too costly.
Are you a Democrat? Seems to me like this idea comes exclusively from Democrats hoping they’ll be able to bribe Republicans to agree with their Democrat stuff. Doesn’t seem to occur to them Republicans could use it to bribe Democrats.
On the contrary. While I think both sides are pretty prone to the “seeing the other side as aliens in skinsuits masquerading as people” problem, it’s definitely worse left->right than right->left (or maybe this is just my own bubble, which is mostly lefty-hating-righty). I see this mostly as a way to get people like AOC to have to sell SOME righty policies to their lefty base, in exchange for local money.
Both sides have sacred values that, if held earnestly, it makes zero sense to compromise on in exchange for some compromise on the other side. “How much SNAP funding do we have to give you in exchange for allowing states to roll back abortion protections” is not a calculation anyone wants to make. You can’t exchange one for the other. But everyone needs money, and politicians can shift the narrative so no one realizes they’re trading values for dollars.
You are *really* selling me on this. It’s a wonder Jared Diamond didn’t mention this in Upheaval.
It’s a big theme in a work of fiction I wrote and posted online, but then I got lazy and the website got taken down because I fell behind on the payments. I’ll tell you when it’s back up (just need to finish law school).
Also I’m hoping to write a paper on this soon as I exit this funky semester.
What are you interested in doing with a law degree? I actually recently became interested in law as a career after an especially interesting settlement conference for a family lawsuit.
I’m specializing in criminal law…esp. searches and seizures. Still looking for a job…not exactly easy in the present situation. Happy to talk to you about law school just write me an email, it’s just my name here at gmail.com
As a Democrat, I wouldn’t necessarily object to that.
The Defense budget is one item the Republicans use to get more money spent on projects which may or may not actually contribute to national defense. It’s often a bargaining chip used to get more GOP votes on social spending. I saw this up close while working in the 5-sided wind tunnel on the Potomac.
Agreed. Which probably first requires a reset in the public and political leaders’ understanding of politics.
Has this really gone away? It seems to me that’s still how all budgets get passed.
If pork barrel spending does decrease partisanship, which is doubtful, it would have to do so a tremendous amount to make up for the tremendous increase in spending it would cause.
My memory was that earmarks (another word for pork barrels?) were a really big deal in GW Bush’s regime, which was when I realized that Republicans could spend just as much money as Dems when they had full control of the government. It also seems to me that partisanship was just as high in that period as it is now. I don’t think there is a correlation between pork barreling and partisanship.
Earmarks have been banned since 2011. Not the only source of “pork” but the most prominent. The ban was initiated by Republicans, FWIW.
What does “banned” mean? How can you ban trading favors to districts? Could you cite the law or something? I am skeptical it really banned them.
Jonathan Rauch makes this case in Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy (free on Kindle).
An absolutely MASSIVE propaganda campaign combined with a vast internet surveillance and censorship apparatus.
First of all, we bring back Operation Mockingbird but bigger and better than ever. All media is subordinated by the CIA. No more unorganized whistleblowing, no more Snowdens ever again. Something like the Comics Code authority is introduced except for the media: everything is uplifting, confidence-encouraging news. No more toxoplasma against the other side in politics, no more fanning of racial tensions or polemics against inequality. Instead of getting articles telling them that the outgroup is out to get them, they hear nothing at all. The outgroup doesn’t really exist, we’re all just Americans. The government is no longer split between pure evil and saints, just people with minor disagreements on policy priorities.
All the news outlets that can’t be easily integrated get silenced permanently. Infowars and the ilk get annihilated at the ISP level by decree. Perhaps they were advertising illegal and unsafe drugs or distributing child pornography. Who knows? Certainly not the general public, who will only have one source of information albeit through many outlets. If everything (newspaper, tv, radio, facebook, twitter, reddit and insta) all have the same talking points, people will eventually believe it. Nobody is going to be able to accuse the entire country of lying without a shred of evidence to back it up – and even if they do have evidence, that can easily be debunked since the facts can be changed if necessary.
Now, obviously the first thing you’ll be thinking is that this sounds awfully totalitarian, just like what China does. But what China does really works:
https://www.statista.com/chart/12634/where-trust-in-government-is-highest-and-lowest/
They have the highest trust-in-government level in the world! Some of that might be because of rapid economic development. Unfortunately, it’s hardly possible to rapidly develop an already rich state and even if it were, the US government would be totally incapable of doing it.
Having lived in China a bit, they’re shockingly effective. Even independently minded people who are maybe a bit edgy believe a lot of stuff just ’cause it’s in the water supply. Simultaneously though, everybody also doesn’t trust the government. A lot of weird conspiracy theories get traction simply because if they were true, you wouldn’t know. The government covers up true stuff and false stuff, so how can you tell? It reminds me of this thing I remember hearing a while back about how in the soviet union advertising decreased sales because people assumed if it were any good people would be queuing to buy it; thus, if it needed advertising, it must suck.
This may be true, but people were not going to admit to disliking or not trusting government in Nazi Germany, USSR or in Cambodia during Pol Pot. Even if they hated and were not trusting it at all.
The same effect (not sure how strong, certainly lower than in this cases, certainly higher than in USA) will be active here.
Such polls are going to not be truly useful. In case of North Korea, China and other places where disliking government is likely to cause big problems for you such polls are useless.
I am surprised that 16% declared not trusting government, it slightly improves my opinion about China.
That’s just not true, anybody who has any knowledge of China beyond Western media headlines knows there’s plenty of criticism and dissent allowed.
That is the knowledge of China coming from the Chinese media headlines, I suppose.
Try to organize a trade union in China, and you get your organs harvested and then you get shot. Post a Winnie the Pooh meme, and you get banned and your social score goes down. (But you won’t get shot for merely posting the meme. You might call it an extraordinary freedom of free speech, I call it having priorities.)
But feel free to provide evidence. What is the example of worst criticism published on a Chinese website that you could link here? (By “Chinese website” I mean something with “.CN” domain. Not an article on American server, written by an American guy with a Chinese name.) Something like “the Party members are doing everything only for money and power, the gap between the super-rich and poor is growing, and the kids of current middle-class will probably fall into poverty” would be appreciated, because it seems to be a common sentiment among the Chinese middle class.
But what reason can you have to not trust the government? All reasons must be based on evidence of some kind.
To believe the government is corrupt, that the politicians are dishonest, that they’ve conducted war crimes, embezzled and so on requires that you KNOW something about what they’re doing. And that can be fixed fairly easily.
If the government performs at a base standard of competence in providing basic services, if the population’s standard of living is decent, then you can manufacture a great deal of consent and trust.
Even in Nazi Germany, there was a great sentiment of ‘if only the fuhrer knew about it’ when dealing with corrupt gauleiters or other issues in internal administration. And Nazi Germany was very popular in Germany before the war, if only since the social democrats, communists and Jews had fled the country or were in concentration camps. Historians seem to agree that the Anschluss was popular, indeed modern Germany has banned plebiscites because of how effectively Hitler used them to legitimize his rule.
Well, the Johnson administration brought in the “War on Poverty” and escalated the Vietnam War, so I’ll go with those two trends (poorly run welfare programs and wars) obviously are what destroyed the public’s trust in government.
If true, then the simplest way to restore trust would be to eliminate all the extra-constitutional programs, slash the budget back to 1960s per-capita inflation-adjusted levels, in the process moving the military back to a smaller group focused on efficient defense.
At that point, with massively lower taxes and nobody doing much in the national government to complain about (complaining they aren’t doing anything is a different dynamic), then I think trust in government would be warranted by people again.
Of course, this could just be another case of the phenomenon of any national crisis causing people to propose the solutions they already wanted to implement anyway, so who knows… certainly worth a try though, right? 😉
I have a simple explanation.
Government is not trustworthy today.
Government was not trustworthy fifty years ago.
Government was not trustworthy a hundred years ago.
Government was not trustworthy a hundred and fifty years ago.
What changed was the size and intrusiveness of government. A hundred and fifty years ago, all government, federal state and local, spent about ten percent of the national income, and of the three categories the federal was the smallest. Today it’s thirty to forty percent, the federal is the largest, and government affects our lives in lots of ways other than taxing and spending. So the same level of incompetence and dishonesty that existed in the past is much more salient than it was.
True. It certainly matters much more that person X is a cruel and incompetent taskmaster if person X is suddenly in charge of running an ever-larger portion of your life.
right, but the government of 1965 also spent about 30-40% of GDP, and a huge percentage of voters had experienced it first hand serving in uniform. So why was it trusted then?
Look, the government is either trustworthy or not. I’ll agree with David that it is not, never has been, nor will ever be trustworthy. So when you ask “why was it trusted” the answer is “
pure stupiditynaivety.”Government should not be trusted. The last thing we want to do is to encourage people to trust government.
Maybe the first answers the second.
I mean, I’m about as hardcore of a libertarian as they come. I was in the military for nine years. Basically everyone I interacted with on a personal level during my time in the Navy was a normal, decent, person. Everyone from the new recruits all the way up to a couple flag officers I worked for. If you extrapolate that up to the top, you think “these are mostly decent and capable people who will do what’s best.”
The reasons why government fails has little to do with the explicit intentions of its members. It’s a much more nuanced and detailed issue of incentives and such.
+1
I thought it was all about the disaster of 1968 (the assassinations, the violent convention, and the social upheavals around the world) followed soon after by Watergate. Last time I looked at polling, it looked like summer of 1968 and late 1973 are two clear dropoffs in public trust, that has since continued to gradually sink, but has had a few rises in the mid 80s and late 90s that went away (and never even got back to the post-1968 pre-Watergate level).
End the two-party system by having representative representation from constituencies. This would allow multiple parties to negotiate a coalition for power, and voters would to a larger extent accept the trade-offs necessary for supporting their favorite hobby horses.
I’m not sure there’s a way back. Vietnam and Watergate basically broke the consensus that existed at the time. Although those certainly weren’t the first scandals to hit the Federal government. It’s very possible that Teapot Dome didn’t have the same effect because it was easier to isolate, or because it was followed by the New Deal which essentially rewrote the book on how Americans and government interacted. I’d suggest you’d need a couple of big public successes on the part of the Federal Government to get where you’re asking to go. Not sure what those would be.
Kill bin Laden again?
Hire another bunch of Nazis, build another rocket, go to the Moon again?
But more seriously, what do people generally agree the government does well? (It won’t be universal agreement, of course, since we don’t always agree on what the government should be doing in the first place, and some people don’t really want a government at all.)
Win wars. Build and maintain nukes so your country is un-invadable. Enforce maritime law/protect sea trade (Somalia was not complete chaos when it went stateless, but no one on Earth liked the situation off the stateless coast). Build sewers to every house.
What have the Romans ever done for us?!
I don’t know if government is good at that… In Spain, we still have places with no sewers. In my hometown, one of the major complaints in one neigbourhood is that they have to pay the sewer fee, even though they have no sewer.
Does the US have sewers to every house? Plumber frequently mentioned that in California, at least, sewer capacity is insufficient and cannot deal with rain or more people.
Almost. Every house in an urban area has toilets that flush to common sewer pipes that run under the streets. In rural areas, where you are essentially living on a farm or a ranch, the toilets flush to septic tanks that have to be emptied periodically.
If you look around in the poorest and most rural areas of the US, you’ll probably find an odd house or two that doesn’t have a proper toilet. Some of those will be summer cottages that weren’t built with full-time occupation in mind. Others are probably dormitory shacks for migrant agricultural laborers.
A private septic tank, which you are responsible for maintaining, is not a government-provided sewer system.
So, many rural Americans pay taxes for the sewers without getting the government funded sewers.
My impression is that sewers are usually funded at the municipal (town/city/hamlet) level. Some rural areas are not within any municipal boundary, so if you live way outside town, you may not have paid any municipal taxes. Such people don’t have sewers, but also didn’t pay for any sewers.
The picture gets more complicated if you factor in downward transfers between levels of government and such things. Sometimes it’s just hard to figure out who is in the end paying for what.
I grew up in a rural environment with a well and septic tank and no, we did not have to pay city water/sewer taxes.
IIRC, the big demarcation (in most states) between being in an incorporated municipal area are:
a) Who pays for surface roads (municipal or private) other than state roads and highways (the state), and interstates (the feds).
b) The required presence of a sewer system, paid for by the municipality.
School systems and police jurisdiction change at the municipal line, but they are present everywhere.
One significant outcome of incorporating previously non-municipal areas into an existing municipality is that sewer lines are installed. The cost of this can be a bone of contention. Surface roads (usually) become the responsibility of the municipality, but merely need to be maintained rather than installed.
If we look across the South, we can see a stark reminder of this, as some municipalities simply would not incorporate black neighborhoods, and thus we will see, to this day, “lakes” of non-incorporated area, completely surrounded by a municipality, still without sewer systems. The result on fecal born disease prevalence in those areas is predictable.
So it seems the US government is not very good at building sewers to every house, either.
That they manage to do it to most houses by making municipalities pay for that is not a surprise; private towns with voluntary contributions can also do that. What’s the advantage of government here, because I don’t see it.
Sewer quality is going to vary a lot by locality because each local government is different. Rural areas or exurbs won’t have sewers at all, just your own septic tanks. Generally the sewer quality is good in the sense that when you flush, it will drain the sewage away from your home. However, historical combined sewers (IE, rain goes into the same place as your sewage) are prone to MAJOR disasters and MAJOR flooding, which results in sewage floating around in your home. It was particularly bad when suburban sprawl eliminated the ground’s ability to retain water and it all flowed right into the sewers.
The easy solution is to…uhhh….dump untreated sewage into the Chicago River. However, you can easily have local flooding, particularly when the ground is partially frozen. Also pipes break and decay, and putting in new pipes requires shutting down streets and breaking them up.
We’ve done better in modern times, at least around the Chicagoland area. We have a lot of areas that are on separate sewer systems, so rainwater does not flood sanitary sewers. Subdivisions are built to have areas designed to flood, there are recreational lakes that serve as flood overflow, etc. Chicago has been working on Deep Tunnel for a long time to increase the reservoir. Modern homes have ejector pumps on overhead sewers, basically meaning your sewer water is ejected out of your home rather than gravity-fed, which makes it much less likely the overflowing city sewers flood YOUR home. We are replacing old clay sewer pipes that break down with newer ones that last longer.
OTOH, you can’t just move an additional million people into an area and hope the sewers can handle it. You have to build out new sewers. Which requires shutting down streets and yanking out sewer pipes and putting in new ones. Plus probably a lot of structural stuff.
Going to the Moon happened right after trust in government started to fall and didn’t help get it back. You need World War II. Or, optimistically speaking, a good aftermath to the coronavirus pandemic.
Yeah, we’re f–ked.
Looking at the textbooks on my shelf, I realize that the ones I remember both fondly and with concrete recollection of what they taught me tend to be very short (not much more than 200 pages, often less) and focused: they don’t strive for comprehensiveness, but for clear, lucid, immediately usable exposition of the core of a topic. It’s especially outstanding when immersion in that topic either fundamentally changes your way of looking at the world, or teaches you a skill you use over and over again, or both.
Would others who feel the same care to nominate examples they feel are outstanding in various fields?
My nominations, first round, I’ll probably think of more as I go on:
Computer science and mathematics:
K&R, The C Programming Language
Hankin, Lambda Calculi
Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication
Alon and Spencer, The Probabilistic Method (in a way a spinoff of Shannon)
Diestel, Graph Theory
Herstein, Abstract Algebra
Bartle, The Elements of Integration and Lebesgue Measure
Saxe, Beginning Functional Analysis
Music:
Hindemith, A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony
Anne Carothers Hall, Studying Rhythm
Morris and Ferguson, Preparatory Exercises in Score Reading
Campbell Biology. Reads like a popular science magazine and it’s just showing you nature’s wonders one after another, and yet it’s the definitive introductory source that keeps being useful for topic overviews even at university level.
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.
definitely does not fit the “short” criteria.
According to Amazon, it’s 368 pages. Nicholas’s short criterion was “not much more than 200.”
The much beloved Feynman Lectures on Physics books, by Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, really are wonderful. And they’re available (legally) online: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
Oh that reminds me, I should certainly have mentioned QED too.
Economics in One Lesson by Hazlit
…seems to me to be the quintessential classic in this mode.
As someone who knows very little about economics but doesn’t have much time to learn it, a book titled “Economics in One Lesson” sounds very appealing! I noticed that the book was published in 1946, though; can anyone recommend a more recent book in a similar vein? Or does this book hold up despite its age?
It was most recently updated in the 70s, but the principles and most of the examples hold true.
In terms of holding up despite its age, I’ll just note that (I just checked it) it’s currently #14 in economic history in the kindle store, which based on it’s sales rank in the overall store equates to about 11 new sales per day. That’s more than most new books sell. So a few people are still finding it useful…
I never liked the book. I can’t remember it very well, but I found zero insights in it. Just to give you one anecdote in opposition to all the adulation it gets.
I can’t speak to Economics in One Lesson, but in general it’s my perception that Economics books got much better in the past 15 years. After Kahneman and Tsversky uprooted a lot of its fundamental assumptions, it got a lot more interesting and applicable. I periodically teach economics, and I enjoy using the book Principles of Economics in Context: https://www.powells.com/book/-9780765638823.
In my experience, it is worth the time to find a really good textbook with lucid explanations (“as simple as possible but not simpler”). It’s a triple win: Simple explanations are easier to grasp. They are harder to forget. And they are more useful & easier to apply.
The ability to boil things down and simplify until only the essence remains is an underrated skill. Simplicity is obvious in retrospect. It’s not impressive. But it usually corresponds a deeper level of understanding.
Introduction to Probability by Blitzstein & Hwang is an amazing textbook. Not short though, almost 600 pages. There’s a lot more to probability than the basics that you likely already know.
Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century
It’s really great. Also pretty much a replacement for all self-help books.
Trefethen and Bau, Numerical Linear Algebra
Korner, Fourier Analysis (also The Pleasures of Counting)
Shanks, Solved and Unsolved Problems in Number Theory
Carothers, Real Analysis
Williams, Probability with Martingales
Elements of Statistical Thermodynamics, by Leonard Nash
In the US Constitution AIUI, the eligibility criteria for people in the line of succession for President are somewhat looser than those for people in the Presidential line of succession. This means that in theory, for example, a 32 year old, naturalized-citizen Speaker of the House could become President if those ahead of them died or were incapacitated. Is there settled legal precedent, or a consensus among scholars of Constitutional law, about whether such a President would be legitimate?
The constitution means whatever the Nine-Headed Caeser says it means. Everything else is irrelevant.
The reason we’re after settled legal precedent and scholarly consensus is that they’re pretty good at predicting what SCOTUS will say the constitution means.
IANAL, but I expect they wouldn’t be able to become acting president. See here:
I am trying to calculate the expected impact in deaths caused by coronavirus of me going to the grocery store. Depending on the output of this calculation, I may decide to stock up for longer – say by buying two weeks of food and going biweekly rather than buying a week of food and going weekly.
My formula is:
Expected number of deaths caused by me going to supermarket = Probability of getting disease per trip * 1/Number of people who currently have Coronavirus * Total number of future expected deaths
The idea behind the formula is that everyone who currently has coronavirus gets an equal share of the “blame” for all future coronavirus-induced deaths.
Back of the envelope guesses for the second and third parameters on the right hand side (in the US) are 10 million (I’ve heard there may be an underreporting of 10x for coronavirus cases) and 200 thousand respectively. This means that if I get coronavirus, there’s about a 1/50 chance someone else will die as a result. Of course the expected number of deaths is lower once you include the chance I get the coronavirus.
Some follow-up questions:
1. Do people think this formula is a reasonable one? Some potential issues I can think of, along with my thoughts:
1a. The two back-of-the-envelope numbers I chose are way off. Please let me know if you think this is the case. Given our experience over the past months, it seems unlikely that the number of deaths will reach the high death tail estimates that were made a month or two ago.
1b. I’m less likely to spread coronavirus to other people than the average person with coronavirus. This may be true, although I think it would shift things by less than an order of magnitude.
1c. It doesn’t make sense to say everyone has an equal “blame” on the margin, if someone gets coronavirus from me, they might have gotten it from someone else in the counterfactual. This is true, but given the expectations I’ve seen on the number of people we think will get the disease (a good deal less than majority), I don’t think this will change the results much.
1d. This is implicitly assuming that the total number of deaths will not change as a result of me getting the disease by treating the 200k as constant. That’s true, but if the 10 million people with the disease today share an equal “blame” for the 200k future deaths, for 1/50 of a death per person, by marginal returns, I wouldn’t expect my impact to be much different, unless the point in 1c is especially relevant.
1e. Going to the grocery store both raises the chance I get it and the chance I pass it on. This is also true, does anyone have an idea of how to estimate the impact of this? If we assume I continue to be safe enough as to not become more likely to spread the disease than the average person, then we can put an upper bound on the impact of this however.
1f. Something else?
2. Does anyone have a reasonable estimate or method of making an estimate for the chance of me getting coronavirus per trip of going to a grocery store? If it helps – I live in a borough of a major city (think something like Brooklyn), I have about a 10 minute walk where I try to stay 10 feet away from people and wear an N95 mask, and I try to stay away from people in the supermarket but due to the large amount of traffic I pass close to people regularly.
Note: I’ve made a number of edits to the follow-up questions in the 25 minutes after I originally made this post, so things may have changed since you first looked.
You are missing possibility that you already have an asymptomatic Coronavirus and are infecting part of people interacting with you.
That’s a good point. If I have a 1/30 chance of having coronavirus now (10 million/300 million), then that raises my expected number of deaths by 1/30 * 1/50 = 1/1500. A part of that 1/1500 is caused by more trips to the grocery store.
All of this assumes that ‘flattening’ is preventing infections, not just delaying them.
No.
The relevant question is how many more people will die as a result of your going to the grocery store. You have no responsibility at all for anyone who already has the disease and later dies of it. If your pattern of behavior makes you less likely to pass on the disease than average, you are responsible for a smaller fraction of those who die subsequently than the fraction of infected people you make up.
Suppose, for instance, you go to the grocery store, catch the disease, go home and self-quarantine until you die or recover. You are responsible for no future deaths other than, possibly, your own.
This definitely heavily depends on where you are.
In my city, you’re several times more likely to die or cause death in a car accident while traveling to the grocery store than you are to have any interaction with Coronavirus.
Also, in addition to what others have mentioned, consider that if your area has a >1 reinfection rate or a <1 reinfection rate makes a huge difference to future infections. But if you assumed a 1 reinfection rate, and if someone is infectious for 3 weeks, then that means on average people are only actually infecting 1 person over the course of 21 days. In other words, the vast majority of the time, even the already infected aren’t doing anything which ends up infecting anyone else.
“In my city, you’re several times more likely to die or cause death in a car accident while traveling to the grocery store than you are to have any interaction with Coronavirus.”
This seems very surprising. My county seems to have stabilized its cases, but still we had almost 200 detected cases, out of 200,000 people. I think there’s far more than a 1/1000 chance that I “have any interaction with coronavirus” on a trip to the grocery store where I am within a few feet of several people over the course of 20 minutes or so. I don’t think there’s a 1/1000 chance of getting in a collision on the way to the store.
Looking up statistics, we seem to have about 50 traffic fatalities per year, and have had almost 200 detected coronavirus cases so far and 16 fatalities, in the past month. So I would suspect that the chance of catching or spreading coronavirus in a grocery trip is far higher than the background rate of receiving or causing a traffic fatality on that single trip, at least at the moment, even if the chance of being directly involved in a coronavirus fatality is still lower.
Your 200 detected cases are presumably a cumulative total, not the number of people who are infected at the moment.
On the other hand, that doesn’t include the cases undetected but contagious.
On 1e.
If your only trip is to the grocery store, and you go weekly, you will only increase the number of sicknesses if you catch something on week N and give it to someone on week N+1 or week N+2.
Despite people’s “14 day quarantine” talk, most people who get symptoms show them in 4-5 days. I think. I forget the exact timeframe.
There’s the chance of being asymptomatic, of course.
Also, for 1b., if you are above-average in conscientiousness, you are likely to be quite safe at a grocery store. Wear a good mask. Wash your hands before going in. Wash your hands in the store. Use hand sanitizer just before putting your groceries on the belt. Wash your hands several times as you are unpacking.
It’s worth writing down properties that you want this blame allocation system to have and check whether your proposed approach has them. Here are two:
1. No double counting: If we calculate this for every action by everyone and sum it up it shouldn’t exceed the total number of deaths.
2. Symmetric in time: The formula is the same for people yesterday, today or tomorrow, there is no special privileged reference point.
Your model allocates all future deaths (I’m going to assume you meant all deaths from future infections, to avoid David Friedman’s objection), to the group currently making the decision to go to the grocery store. If you use this formula every day, you break property 1, massively overcounting the deaths. If you want to not break 1, you have to blame zero deaths on all future grocery shoppers, which breaks property 2.
Your model implicitly assumes the current grocery shoppers are responsible for either stopping the disease cold or allowing it to proceed unabated, which leads to these issues.
A symmetric model would assume that each person, if they decide to grocery shop, will result in some expected # of infections, which in turn face the exact same choice as you did and the same expected deaths formula.
Under that model, the expected deaths from your action is “Probability you have the disease already” * “expected # of people you’d infect if you took the action” * “Percentage of infected people who die”. Don’t count the deaths from them further propagating infection, because that’s their fault, so to speak.
If we use R0 as expected infections for a single grocery trip (that’s not realistic, but it’s a good upper bound), then 10M/328M * 2.5 * 1% gives you 0.000762 expected deaths per grocery trip.
Note that formula may be the same, but result will change due to change in parameters. Initially, before COVID arrived in a given area, the risk was 0. Later it was growing, and later as more people get infected anyway or become resistant it will start dropping.
Eyeballing the COVID-19 worldometer charts, it looks like the US as a unit has failed to get R0 substantially below 1? Italy’s chart shows a clear reduction in new cases, where the US seems to have flatlined for both cases and deaths, and is perhaps even trending upwards. At first blush, this really bad for the “reopen without massive casualties” camp, which is I think most people.
One issue with just looking at these charts is that it fails to take geographic distinctions into account. NYC’s lockdown seems to be having an effect, and that the US isn’t constitutionally incapable of effective action. If NYC’s is reducing, though, that implies that growth is occurring elsewhere. Clicking around on the CCSE map, I can see that e.g. Illinois is still growing. I’ve been thinking I want to take the CSSE dataset and make a map that shows R values by state to confirm this, but I’m taking the “armchair” part of armchair epidemiologist seriously here. We’ll see.
So if we’re managing the outbreaks in some geographic locations, and failing to manage them in others, this means that we’ll have either 1. places that are continuous reservoirs of infection, or 2. rolling peaks in different locales, where flareups will continually provide infection pressure on neighboring/well connected locations.
Another potentially confounding factor here is that we’re increasing testing capacity, so perhaps we’re having better luck containing the virus than the data can show. Unfortunately the death rate doesn’t really bear that out. It’s been hovering around 2k/day for most of April. I’m 90% confident that will continue for the next two weeks, but because there’s no discussion I’ve seen of intensifying quarantine, I’m expecting that to continue quite a bit longer. But again, this global outcome is driven by a bunch of local situations, which I’m not interrogating responsibly.
I think we would be in a much, much better position if our initial response had been driven centrally and uniformly. Likewise, I think our response would benefit from some heavy handed centralization now. I’ve seen no discussion by people in power of inter- or intra-state travel restrictions, which seem like they will be necessary for effective mitigation/containment, owing to the cascading peaks. I’m also deeply bearish on widespread testing as a solution, per Fauci saying he’s bearish on our ability to build that infrastructure. I was bearish before because I thought, you know, there’s no way this administration could build out that kind of capacity – and there’s no way all 50 states could succeed individually on a reasonable timeline – but now somebody who’s in the action said so.
So… in summary, not an unmitigated disaster, but certainly an ongoing one. It could be worse. We’re containing COVID-19 in some places. The impulse to not to shut down to prevent economic ruin seems to have damned us towards longer lockdowns, and increased the probability of economic ruin.
All of that said, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I have it on good authority if you drink enough bleach, you will definitely prevent any COVID-19 symptoms.
If you want to see what this looks like across the US, at least as of 4 days ago, you can look the map in this article. You can see that the most recent spread is, near literally, all over the map, but mainly in areas adjacent to hard hit early areas and in areas that locked down later.
Interestingly, Illinois appears to be doing a good job on a per capita basis.
As someone from IL, I would say its probably mostly because of the Chicago population of what appears to be “big time spreaders” largely acting way before there was institutional action. That is, the largely white collar professional class here switched to telework, stopped eating out, stopped flying, and stopped using the L way before Pritzker and co. did much of anything.
Of course, the problem is this leaves us more vulnerable during wave 2, if it happens, which is likely, because we have large non-compliant populations that I observe whenever I go for a supply run. Also, Pritzker hasn’t really made up a post-lockdown plan, which you’d think is the most important thing… He hasn’t started hiring and training a testing squad or the like, for example.
The US isn’t a unit, so the current plateau is the sum of a bunch of individual outbreaks, some on the downswing (e.g. NYC), some on the upswing.
The only way out of this is through. Containment is not possible any more, and has not been for a long time. No vaccine is coming in the near term. And we really can’t lock down indefinitely no matter what Inslee and Cuomo want. That means that the epidemic is going to proceed to its natural conclusion under any likely set of circumstances, and the only thing the lockdowns do is prolong that.
Lockdowns are pretty much not being enforced any more in many places. A Houston restaurant owner opened up for in-person dining Friday and law enforcement shrugged. My guess is the floodgates open this week as far as civil disobedience. And despite the GA governor getting egg on his face, there seems to be widespread convergence on the first week of May as a Schelling point for “official” reopening. Since there’s no indication yet that we’re flattening the curve (our cumulative effort has merely wrestled it into linear growth) trajectories are going to be skyrocketing again by June unless the virus is comically weak to heat. (Then again there’s a lot of evidence indicting recirculated air conditioning in hot spots and that’s most buildings in the US.)
Linear growth is flattening the curve
What you’re describing is at rt.live and also includes historical/preliminary data.
Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted. Slick visualization, too. Thanks!
Unfortunately this dataset is garbage.
@Cliff,
What, specifically, is wrong with it? Did you share your concerns with the authors of the visualization, or the COVID Tracking Project data it’s built based on?
It appears they’ve been making fairly frequent updates to improve their results based on feedback as well as publishing each iteration of their calculations and values, so if you have an improvement to suggest, I’d guess that they’d listen.
The COVID tracking project only tracks detected cases, right? There’s no reason to think that R0 is a meaningful calculation for detected cases, but only for actual cases.
Anyone have any tips for calender/life organizer? I am starting to schedule my life, but I personally like using sort of contingency planning where I have an idea of what I want to do and why so that I can adjust my day to day activities in response to what I like. Unfortunately, the only form of scheduling software I am familiar with is Google Calendar, and that isn’t that good for this sort of thing in my experience. I’m trying out google docs and sheets, but I feel like there are definitely some clever apps out there I just don’t know about. Googling has been surprisingly unenlightening.
In terms of devices I would be using this on, I own a chromebook, surface pro, and pixel 1; and my wife has a macbook pro.
Have you tried a bullet journal? My sister swears by it. The original creator intended it to be done with a physical notebook, but there are a lot of electronic implementations.
It’s got a book! I’ll look into it thanks!
The platform you’re using is irrelevant to the outcome. More important is the approach. This is something I write, consult and coach about regularly. Here’s a short primer on it.
If you’re really determined to try a new app, I’ve been testing Woven.
It’s not quite ready for prime time, but it has some killer functionality based on really smart insights.
That was an interesting read. Are you the author Amy Devaro?
Seconding the bullet journal. You’ll probably want to butcher it and salvage parts into your own system, but it’s modular enough that it sort of works. It has a lot of non-obvious insights – for instance, having to rewrite delayed to-do reminders is a feature, as it forces you to review them and drop the ones no longer necessary. Also, writing on a permanent, physical object works differently than writing on the PC, from a psychological/neurological standpoint, in ways that are very obvious once you start doing it.
Personally I use GCal to note whatever time-sensitive stuff I want to attend, from which I copy into a physical notebook when planning for the next day/week.
If you want to have a more “flowing” sort of schedule – optimizing towards things you like, but not necessarily having them laid out in hourly blocks – you want goal setting more than a calendar. Look into SMART goals, lag vs lead measures (this one is really important) etc.
One thing I recommend scheduling by hour is the kind of activities that you DON’T want to do in excess – if you spend half of your day browsing reddit, limit it to e.g. after 9pm only – so you don’t have to decide about every urge to do it and spend precious willpower. Once the easy timesinks are taken care of, you start getting slightly bored and doing the actually interesting, demanding projects.
Scheduling things you *don’t* want to do in excess is a very logical idea, now that you’ve said it like that. Do you recommend I read the book, or read a summary?
Start the book at least, maybe skim it a little. It goes a bit into the reasons why things are set up this way, which is key for adapting the system to your needs.
A lot of the book is self-help garbage so you don’t necessarily need to finish it, most of the meat is in the early chapters AFAIR.
Thanks. I’ve downloaded a copy. I’ll check it out and report back.
Emacs and org-mode. But only if you’re man…eh, I mean, geek enough. The advantage is the flexibility to mix documents, date stamps, todo-lists, and links to emails, bibtex references, whatever – and kinda manage to keep it all organized anyway.
I find that all more specific tools, Getting Things Done, and similar schemes are too rigid, and become too tedious to use – so I tend to fall off after a week or two.
Planet of the Humans is a documentary film by an environmentalist questioning the environmental movement and whether the proposed solutions are actual solutions. Directed by Jeff Gibbs. Produced by Ozzie Zehner. (YouTube video 1hour 40min).
Discussion
What I find interesting is that there seem to be a lot of people who have lost patience (or never had patience?) with humans-are-evil environmentalism.
Favorite comment:
“The coronavirus outbreak, and the reduced travel and activity, has got me thinking about how practical it would be to cut back on a lot of “economic activity” while still feeding, clothing, housing and caring for everybody. We seem to be managing to do those things now (not great, but managing). And yes, we’re incurring infrastructure and inventory debt, not to mention debts that are “purely financial.” But at some level we could do all the necessary things with a lot less resources and effort. The problem, it seems to me, is that so much effort is going toward building up dragon-hoards of treasure for about 10000 people and those in their immediate orbit. What if we didn’t need to do that?”
How valid is this? This reminds me of the argument that we really produce enough surplus that we could have people work a lot less like Keynes predicted. Personally, I value leisure time quite a bit and would love a society where people paid opportunity costs to engage in activities that improve their wellbeing rather than literal costs to palleate their discomfort of living.
It’s not just dragon-hoards of treasure for about 10,000 people; most “luxury” spending is done by middle- and working-class families. And that’s a huge part of the reason why those classes do the working they do. The guy who puts in a solid day at the meat-packing plant, five days a week every week, isn’t doing it because his family will starve if he doesn’t, he’s doing it because it means he can take his family to Disney World and the Florida beaches for one glorious week out of the year.
When you tell him that he’ll never be allowed to do that again because of coronavirus or because of your restructured no-luxuries-focus-on-the-essentials economy, he’s going to stop going in to work at the meat-packing plant and settle for your nobody-starves, nobody-goes-to-Disneyland dole. Because why shouldn’t he? And so will all of his coworkers, and then people will starve.
Feel free to blame this on the ten thousand and their dragon-hoards.
Also it’s more like dragon hoards filled with slips of paper that say “IOU” on them, which they will never live long enough to redeem all of anyway. Any treasure is being used in the most productive way anyone can think of. If it wasn’t, someone would trade more IOUs for it.
The Hobbit, but Smaug just imposes a heavy tax on dwarven industry, reasoning that it will get him more trasure in the long run.
I don’t work full time jobs because I prefer luxury spending: I work full time jobs because lucrative part time work is difficult to come by. My hourly goes down when I do part time work.
It’s hard to believe a different equilibrium couldn’t be struck, where people worked less and spent less. In a similar vein, what constitutes “luxury” is obviously malleable. It’s not plausible to me that spending to show status will ever go away, but surely we can create norms/regulations that prevent that spending from being environmentally ruinous. I’m not convinced of it, but maybe people mostly work exorbitant hours because of they love status. Disney World is a consequence of that, not a cause.
Why would you care about lucrative part-time work when you won’t starve or be thrown out of the street with crappy part-time work and most luxuries are unavailable or unusable?
You could just work full time for some time, spend little, then retire early.
I’ve been working part-time in some companies and full-time in others. Currently it’s part-time and remote (due to covid but possibly I’ll stay on it indefinitely) and I’m loving it.
40+ hour workweeks are an abomination and need to stop. There is no activity interesting enough that you’ll want to do it 40h per week for the rest of your life, or, for that matter, that you’ll keep being productive in the 8th hour of the day. Excluding perhaps the menial work that is being automated as we speak.
I’m with you. Every now and then I look at what it takes to work part-time at whatever company I’m working at. Usually it involves being no less then 3/5 time and having my salary cut in half, but at least keeping health insurance.
The problem with part-time job is signaling. It shows that there are things you care about more than your job.
Well, maybe most people actually have a life outside their job, but then asking for part-time still signals that you are not even willing to pretend.
Right. I also think that’s why part-time work is relatively common for unskilled labor, but practically unheard of for white-collar work that isn’t quite explicitly freelance or independent contractor…
The answer is “consulting.”
Consulting requires a 60+ hour work week, unless you start your own firm and are an independent contractor.
Which you probably can’t do unless you either worked in consulting for a long time before, and/or have decades of relevant industry experience and some really good contacts who work for companies that are flush with cash.
The answer is that lots of jobs effectively work sub 40 hour weeks. With vacations factored in teachers can easily average 30 hours a week over the course of a year. Now many teachers might put in more hours than this, or pick up additional jobs, but neither are requirements for the job and many don’t. My vague impression from personal trainers is that they aren’t working nearly 40 hours a week either (again not all, but it is a space where you can make that lifestyle work). I bet there is a long list of jobs where working less than 8 hours a day is a reality experienced by a lot of full time workers.
If you count time spent on Facebook/chatting with coworkers/fantasy football/SSC comments, I’ve probably worked less than 20 hours a week for most of my life!
@baconbits9
I’ll contest the teacher bit. My wife interned for her education degree and my mother is a public school teacher (both in the US). They work(ed) significantly more than 40 hours a week, and it really isn’t optional for them. They would be able to decrease their hours once they had enough lesson plans written up, if it weren’t for the school changing the curriculum annually and then being required to update their lesson plans to match (plus a variety of other non-optional duties).
Although in general I’ll agree. A job I worked earlier in my career wasn’t paid great, and was a 40-hour job, but I had almost 3 months PTO/year and my actual work hours were much less than my scheduled work hours. A friend worked in IT for a nonprofit and yearly negotiated an hours cut instead of (or in addition to) a pay raise.
Currently I’m running as single-income for my family so in theory we average 20 hours/week between us for our income (although my wife does important work around the house and with the kids). Although we have sometimes fantasized about finding a job that we could share and trade off throughout the week. Our skill-sets are complementary and there are a number of things that could likely be done more efficiently if we each just did what we are good at.
Every teacher I know works a lot of hours away from school doing lesson plans, grading papers, and such. I don’t think they’re getting less than 40 hours a week of work on average.
As an engineer, I really would be less productive if I worked part time. There’s a fixed cost to keeping up with corporate policies, training, time keeping, coordinating with my coworkers on the project to make sure we are neither duplicating work nor missing pieces and we all understand the overall picture. Only after I’ve done all of that, do I start making forward progress on the project.
Further, if everyone were part time, coordination would take even longer since there would be at least twice as many of us.
It makes sense that my employer pays more for one full time worker than two part time employees – they definitely get more from me than they would from two part time versions of me. Then, on top, my employer has some fixed costs for me as well – my computer, my share of HR and payroll and management, my office – paying one set of those instead of two means my personal take-home can be higher still.
Even at 50 hours a week during the year the ~13 extra weeks of time off the typical public school teacher gets pulls them down to under 40 per week on average. That is point 1.
Point 2 is that most teachers don’t have to work a full day. In my high school teachers had at least 1 free period per day without lessons planned plus lunch. That was part of the union contract, and was effectively 80 mins a day worth of break. In elementary school I remember taking a rotation with either gym, art, music or library time most (every?) days, and our teachers got the same lunch break we did.
Point 3. For many teachers the uncompensated activities they attend look an awful lot like hobbies. The football coaches were all former football players, the faculty member of the drama club had spent a lot of time in plays herself. Lots and lots of people do these things in their spare time, my dad didn’t credit his time as a scout master or soccer coach to his work week because they weren’t associated with his job.
Do you think every teacher is working from 8-4 every day at school, or are at least a significant amount taking lunches/free periods (which most have) and not working straight through those 8 hours?
Are teachers doing that more or less than other office-type professions?
I am not postulating that teachers are uniquely lazy, only that they are a clear example of how a ‘full time’ employee can effectively work fewer than 40 hours per week.
As a former teacher, I’d like to assure you that school holidays do not imply vacation. It’s the other way round; as a teacher, you can only take the vacation during school holidays. (That’s when all people with school-age kids take vacation, so everything is crowded and expensive. Forget about any out-of-main-season discount.) But after you spent your vacation days, you are supposed to go to school during holidays… there is a lot of paperwork waiting for you, long meetings, etc. The last week of the summer holidays is especially busy.
(Speaking of paperwork, one thing that triggers me is when people talk about how verbal evaluations of students are much better than numeric grades. Yeah, sure; anything verbal is more popular than anything numeric. But have you ever tried writing hundreds of verbal evaluations in a row? How much time do you expect it would take? Go ahead any try it; if you are not a teacher, just make a list of hundred people you know, and write one paragraph about each of them, listing their strengths and weaknesses, trying to be specific and diplomatic at the same time. For extra motivation, remember that 80% of parents actually never read that. Two months later, do it again.)
Some of this may be country-specific. I am not an American. By the way, I still preferred being teacher to being a software developer. But given the salaries in my country, this is not really an option; you can’t really survive on teacher’s salary, all teachers I know can only do this job because their partners take the burden of making money.
@Matt M
Many people working in an office have a similar experience (some report working effectively 50%, others 75% of the time). But this still drives me crazy, because the time spent “in office, not really working” is effectively prison-lite. Yeah, you don’t work… but there is a long list of things you are not allowed to do either. You cannot spend the time with your family or friends; you cannot do sport; you cannot cook or do the dishes; you cannot watch a movie or read a book. You can procrastinate, but you are not allowed to do anything useful or actively pleasant for yourself. And you spend most of that time sitting; slowly damaging your spine, not burning calories. (Then you wonder why people procrastinate so much? They spend decades of their lives being conditioned that “doing what your boss told you” and “procrastinating” are the only two options.)
Why couldn’t you simply work those 20 hours and go home? The amount of work done would be the same; your private life much better — or maybe wasted online anyway, but at least that would happen from your free will, and you would have the option to change it anytime.
Even with the Chinese virus situation, working from home, things are different. With the same amount of work, the breaks between the work are much better spent. I can do the dishes, cook a lunch, or exercise. I can walk across the room while thinking about a difficult problem, without attracting undue attention. If I feel tired, I can take a nap. I spend the smallest fraction of time sitting since I entered elementary school (excluding vacations); I only sit down when I am literally typing, or eating. This is what freedom tastes like! And it will all be over, soon.
@David W
Yep. When I get back from a week-long vacation, my inbox is full and I spend half of the first day just going through the e-mails, and doing the things required by them. But this is what “bullshit jobs” means, isn’t it? I never had a job that was literally 100% bullshit, but in many jobs about 20% of time was spent doing work that someone thoughtlessly generated. (Messages that don’t concern you, because it was easier to simply send them to everyone. Meetings where agenda is not specified and everyone comes unprepared and the managers keep rambling.)
And maybe this is because the people are there for 8 hours, and everyone knows they are not really working hard 8 hours without a break, so it is cheap to waste their time. Maybe, if it was a law that people only stay at work 4 hours a day, fewer meetings would be organized and fewer people would be invited to them. Bullshit work expands to fill all available time.
Work full time and save and then retire early bears the same relationship to working part time for a full life that staying awake all week and sleeping on the weekend does to alternating wake and sleep every day.
Good question overall. I think a lot depends on what you consider to be luxuries. More depends on your economic theories.
The impression I get is that a lot of people would work if they had time on their hands, but they wouldn’t take on shit jobs which they experienced as any of idiots lording over them; producing nothing of any real utility; not getting a fair share of the wealth being created.
I’ve been watching my recently laid off housemate, and while she’s caught up on her sleep etc., she’s also doing more gardening, housecleaning, and on line hobbies. She didn’t need to increase the amount of work she was doing at home; I’ll happily continue to pay her expenses either way. She just failed to appreciate the amount of dog fur accumulating everywhere since we stopped being able to have people come in to clean the house for us, and decided to do something about it. Ditto a bunch of other things many of which our cleaners hadn’t been dealing with.
I think she’s pretty normal.
Is it really true that people would starve if many humans worked less? My perspective is that a large portion of human productivity goes into the production of goods that ameliorate discomfort or goods that enable the production of goods that ameliorate discomfort. This might be way off the map though because I judge I base this estimate base on the expenditures of myself and people I know. On a related note, are bullshit jobs a thing? not a thing? Slightly a thing? If they are a thing, then there certainly is senseless labor.
I assume you are excluding govt jobs when you ask whether “bullshit jobs are a thing.” I’m not anti-govt but the GOP has done such a good job of decreasing trust in govt for the past 40 years, it has had the effect of driving away good people thus hollowing out the agencies which (DoD and the IC being the ones I’m most familiar with) used to be filled with high-performers. State Dept used to be the exception but who will forgo high paying jobs and spend years in school just for a chance to pass the foreign service exam and end up working for someone like Pompeo who openly disdains your work? So, yes, many jobs in govt have become “bullshit jobs” because they’ve attracted people not for the chance to make a difference in the world but because the retirement system and health care are great and likely to be paid for in the future.
Starve, freeze, die of plagues spread by rat-infested piles of uncollected trash, whatever kills you fastest.
There are a lot of jobs that absolutely have to be done to avoid gigadeath catastrophe, that absolutely nobody will do unless doing those jobs will make their lives a whole lot better than not those jobs. And for added fun, some of those jobs (e.g. trash collector) intrinsically convey negative status and you’re not ever going to make them anything but negative status. So you have to make the lives of the people who do those jobs so much better, that they’ll do them even though their hard, dirty, dangerous work is costing them status. Which you can do…
…and this is how we do it, by offering them goods and services that make their lives more comfortable. Which means we need the people who make those goods and services.
There are other ways. We can enslave a bunch of people, say “your job is to collect the trash, and when you’ve collected enough trash the whipping will stop for the rest of the day – won’t that be a wonderful improvement!”. We can tell people “You don’t know how to farm, and even if you did we’ve already allocated all the fertile land to not-you. So you’re going to starve and we’re going to let you starve, unless you improve your lot by finding some dirty dangerous degrading job to do – and since there aren’t quite enough of those to go around, there will always be a bunch of actual starving people for you to look at and remind yourself how much worse it could be for you”.
Or maybe you’ve got some other plan, in which case now would be a good time to explain it.
This seems a bit extreme. Can’t you just think of working less as another luxury good that people could choose over others. It’s not like some don’t do that already. I have an extremely hard time believing increasing how much people value free time vs other luxury goods would end the economy as we know it and people would be dying in the streets. But maybe I’m misunderstanding your point or the point you are rebutting.
You need for people to continue to get some benefit for doing unpleasant work that’s much greater than the benefit they get from staying home and playing video games, or no coal will be mined, no trash will be collected, etc. But it’s very clearly possible for people to work less than 40 hours a week on average and still have a system that rewards people doing necessary jobs. Consider the largish number of stay at home moms in the US. That’s a set of people who have chosen to work 0 hours or work much-reduced hours in order to raise their kids and run their homes. We have a lot of women doing that, at the same time we have luxuries for sale and coal miners being paid enough to convince them to go down in deep dark holes for a living.
It’s not about working less. The average trash collector won’t work at all unless it makes his life significantly better. And the first hour of trash collecting is almost certainly the most expensive, because that’s the one that makes a man a trash collector – requiring hundreds of hours of up-front training in how to not get yourself mangled in the machinery, resulting in one’s being looked down upon by one’s neighbors, and coming home as filthy after one hour as they would after eight.
Isn’t that what this conversation is about?
Why isn’t working less, while still earning decent money, something that can make a person’s life significantly better?
It may or may not be true that a garbage collecting job that only required 75% of the hours at 75% the pay (with the same stability/benefits, etc..) would get more applicants than the existing structure. It is definitely true that it would be less efficient. But it’s also true that if garbage collectors worked more hours it would be more efficient. 40 hours a week isn’t a magic number (except in a legal sense, I guess). I don’t think the world would end if 30 hour weeks for garbage collectors was made law tomorrow. Maybe 75% of pay wouldn’t cut it to get enough applicants, but I’m sure it would be less than 100%.
Perhaps, but this conversation is by people who mostly have cool(ish) jobs that they’d probably do for ~10 hours a week(*) for some combination of fun, novelty, and self-worth. We really need Plumber back for this one. Maybe Deiseach can fill in.
Because it’s not going to make their life that much better. We started this conversation by talking about how great it would be if we could stop “wasting” so much time making luxury goods, which I expect most people think means megayachts but also means bass boats. So, let’s say half as many bass boats. If you’re cutting the standard work week for trash collectors by half, now that’s one-quarter as many bass boats per garbageman.
If you tell someone looking at a trash-collecting job that, if he sticks with it for five years, he’ll be able to afford a bass boat (and a nice new truck to tow it, and all the usual working-class “luxuries”), then that’s a pretty good deal that empirically will get your trash picked up. If you now tell him that it’s going to be twenty years before he can afford the bass boat, etc, then meh, why bother?
Particularly since you’re not going to let him wallow in misery if he doesn’t – I’m pretty sure the plan everyone is envisioning here is one where the people who can’t or won’t work even as 20 hr/wk garbagemen nonetheless get comfortable working-class lives. You think offering them a slightly more comfortable working-class life is going to get your trash picked up? I think not.
* In a less structured form with a lot more “you’re not the boss of me!”, to be sure.
There are so many jobs I would do for nothing in exactly the right situation. I worked in bakeries for a few summers and one place I was really good friends with a couple of the longer time bakers, and I would go in every couple of months at 3 am to work with them for 5-6 hours and it was always a good time. Years and years later I was working for a different branch of the same franchise system, with worse people and I was one of the long term guys and I couldn’t wait to get out of that place.
I know people who have bought a boat, used it once or twice a year because they never found the time they thought they’d have, then got rid of it. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who would trade a shittier boat (or a cheaper hobby) for time to actually use/do it.
Years ago, I assigned myself two hours of writing work a day, seven days a week, so 14 hours. The reason isn’t that I need the money.
I have two objections:
1) People worked grueling hours long before going to the beach once a year was invented.
2) It’s not like this guy’s only luxury is going to Florida once a year. He probably consumes a lot of luxury in between; his consumption of some of these luxuries may increase during the lockdowns. It may certainly never replace that glorious week, but see point 1.
My understanding is that having a week (or even much more) off for feast days, etc. was pretty standard through all of settled human history.
I read “going to Disney* for a week” as the synecdoche for all the other breads and circuses people consume.
I don’t think we’d lose anything really significant if aliens beamed the Disney parks into space and wiped our minds of them. But this social design isn’t being done by aliens as a one-off. If we shut down all the Disney parks, whoever had the idea is going to interpret that as success and then ask “what else do you like?” and go after that, next.
Exactly. It may be getting drunk in a club surrounded by pretty girls, a ticket to the opera or your favorite group’s concert, a date in a restaurant, childcare so you get to sleep for a night, buying things in an online game, or whatever is considered a luxury that the person wants to buy.
I didn’t take it that way; I obvs don’t expect everyone to take a trip to florida’s beaches, but I do expect almost everyone to consume some luxuries that involve travelling and going to crowded places, and that’s out. But there are LUXYs that involve staying at home.
It most def is, and I’ve already took one holiday day, and another one is coming this week -both fridays- since our quarantine started. I stayed at home, and played videogames and binge watched Mad Men. The government forbid going to a second house on the beach, but a lot of people didn’t respect that so they are getting more stringent now, but that does not mean staying at home isn’t a more attractive proposition than it ever was in history.
That was the intent, yes.
But the old feast days happened whether you worked hard or not. It’s not the same as the resort.
Everybody wants to go to the resort, but the resort can’t take everybody. If you don’t work hard, someone else who works hard and goes to the same resort has more money. So the resort raises its prices until you stop going and they don’t. The resort would rather have the tourist with more money than the tourist with less, if they can’t accommodate you all.
Now if you still want to go to the resort, you have to be paid at least as much as the least well-paid tourist who could afford to go to the resort. At the margin, you want to be one dollar on the can-afford-the-prices side, and make the other guy be one dollar on the can’t afford the prices side. This Red Queen’s Race goes on until you’re all working as hard as you can to ear enough to bid against each other, short of making yourself utterly miserable through the work itself.
Why, in this simplistic model, aren’t the people who are going to lose the bid not just saying “since I’m going to lose the bid, I’m not going to play the game and at least enjoy having my time to myself”? It’s not like people don’t know pretty well where they fall on the socioeconomic ladder.
And at lest the people who are working to pay for their resort visits, are picking up your trash and doing other vital stuff. If you shut down the resort because the Red Queen’s Race is Pure Evil, then you and everyone else get to enjoy the trash-filled, rat-infested streets because without the resort visit, picking up trash is a sucker move.
They go to a cheaper resort, which is cheaper by virtue of not being the preferred choice. Marginal thinking works both ways. But they wish they were at the best one.
you get to enjoy the trash-filled, rat-infested streets
Please don’t engage in i-suppose-you-thinkery.
It’s only a Red Queen’s Race if you assume that the supply of resorts and the equivalents is fixed, which is obviously wrong. If everyone works harder total output goes up, providing the resources to support more resorts, Disneylands, etc.
To get to go to a resort you don’t have to make more money then some other person, you have to make enough money so that you can afford to pay what it costs to provide you with time at a resort.
And if people are outbidding each other to pay extravagant prices to get in to the resorts, that highly incentivizes investors to develop new resorts slightly cheaper than the other guy’s, bidding each other all the way to the bottom. I forget, do we call that the Black Queen’s Race or the Red King’s?
It’s pretty clearly a thing that happens. Pre-tax operating margins for the hotel & tourism industry in 2019 averaged 8.8%, which is about the “any cheaper and it wouldn’t be worth our while to do this” level. Certainly not the “Poor suckers are working until they drop to outbid each other for our overpriced product” level.
It’s mostly not valid. It’s true in a sense that we could live on 15 hours a week as Keynes predicted but that would mean giving up things that the people who talk like that would howl with outrage if anyone tried to take from them. Like education and healthcare. Would they be willing to go back to 1935 levels of spending? No way. Would they be willing to give up their cars and airlines and distant vacations? Probably not. How about reducing living space? Again, probably not.
If society did make the trade of work for leisure time I outline above, I think they’d be much less happy. Hedonic adaption would make this hard to measure, but I think it would be correct from the God’s eye view. Fundamentally, what would happen to people if you freed them from the materialistic status-game? They’d just involve themselves in new status-games. Remember high school? Heck, remember elementary school?
There is a difference between the work rat-race and the high school popularity contest rat-race: one generates positive externalities. As a group, the Uber drivers working fifty-hour workweeks so they can compete with one another in a zero-sum status game probably aren’t made much happier by all the bling they can buy. But it generates positive externalities for the non-Uber drivers, who get a cheap method of transportation. If they were freed from it, it’s unlikely they’d use their newly freed time to do whatever made them happiest. Instead, they’d just join the latest status game, but it’s unlikely it would have the positive externalities of work in a capitalist economy, as imperfect as it is.
Part of the attraction of bashing the materialistic status game is because you can blame external forces like corporations and the media for it, and tell yourself that if only they didn’t exist then people would be acting reasonably. It’s harder to find a scapegoat for the phenomenon of teenage boys doing dumb stunts to signal how brave they are.
And if you would prefer less-work more-leisure, I think you’d be less happy in that world as well. While I think society should make it easier to work 20 hours a week instead of 0 or 40, there’s nothing preventing you from saving a large part of your income and retiring early. In the alternate low-work high-leisure world you wouldn’t feel the pull of social pressure back toward the high-work norm, but you probably would feel it pulling you toward alternative ways of using your leisure time. And you’d lose all those positive externalities of their work-and-spend lifestyles. Imagine if nobody traded in their cars for newer models: used cars would be significantly more expensive.
tl;dr: Normies pay the fixed costs!
The “save more and retire early” has a key flaw, though, which is that leisure is not equally valuable later.
I’ll take myself as an example: right now, leisure is as valuable to me as I expect it ever to be–I have elementary-school-aged children and spending more time with them is both valuable and enjoyable. Being able to work 30-40 hours a week, rather than 50-60, but make an equal amount per hour and have an equal level of career stability, would be hugely valuable–and is very challenging to find. (I’m changing jobs next month, in that direction–I hope it will help.)
Yeah, but work is also not as valuable later as now. All things equal, a younger worker is more valuable than an older worker.
So you can’t buy leisure now with work in the future, because your future work is worth much less.
Depends on the job, I think. Young workers are cheaper, more intellectually and materially flexible, more capable of working long hours, but less skilled, less knowledgeable, less well connected (important in executive or bureaucratic positions!), probably less cautious, and all else equal probably less likely to have a strong work ethic.
Which of those you want depends on what you’re hiring for. A “move fast and break things” startup is probably better off hiring right out of college, but that’s not necessarily true for, say, a healthcare company that needs to have all the boxes ticked just so on every project.
Sure, but an older worker who worked less to spend more time with his family/travel the world/use up his valuable leisure time while young, would have none of the advantages of an older worker and all the disadvantages of being older.
So you can’t buy leisure now with work in the future, but you can buy leisure in the future with work now. Such is life.
Retiring early is boring and working full-time is soul-crushing.
Being involved in a bunch of projects is cool, having said projects take over my life and wreck my energy for anything else is not cool.
You’ll notice that most people who “retired early” and preach the lifestyle, like Mr. Money Mustache, are still working and earning money – though on their own terms and often outside of their previous area. The entire FIRE meme is just having an actual, proper work-life balance with extra steps. Personally I’d rather retire late (even after the ‘scheduled’ retirement age) just to work on something meaningful if I have the capacity.
IMO, people who say they’d be bored with early retirement are people that never developed any outside interests. I have so many varied outside interests, I can imagine having trouble scheduling all those things I’d like to do before I get too old to do them. My work paid/pays well enough but none of it ever captured my imagination or created any desire to work longer than absolutely needed. My own father retired in his mid-50s and spent 25 years developing his own side interests some of which produced just enough income to pay for said activities but all of which he loved.
I’ve been taking 3-month long sabbaticals while between jobs, it’s absolutely awful after the first month. I have no shortage of things to do but I kinda fall apart without a greater whole to be a part of, and waste time on trivia. My intermittent depression gets worse too. I’m slowly getting better at this kind of self-directed work but it’s a struggle.
It’s easier to keep being busy when other people’s work depends on yours.
You probably do live in such a society. If you’re stuck working the shelves at Walmart then no, you probably don’t have the option, but if you’re an educated professional there’s nothing stopping you from doing this. Consider the following options to trade money for leisure:
#1 There’s a wide variety of state, county, and city governments where you could work for a lot less time and effort if you were willing to accept a lower salary.
#2 You can find a job that allows you to work remotely, where they won’t monitor or care how much time you spend as long as you complete your work. Again, probably lower salary unless you’re really good.
#3 You could go for FIRE by dramatically lowering your standard of living and increasing your savings rate. If you’re willing to move abroad (to say Vietnam), you could fire with as little as $300,000 and live very comfortably.
These options exist, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of people doing each of these, but the vast, vast majority of people with these options don’t take them. I won’t claim to know why but I suspect it has less to do with consumption and more with your job being your primary means of self-identification and social status.
This. I’m a software engineer for a state government. I work significantly less, have significantly less stress, and yes, make significantly less money than I would otherwise. And while my kids are young, that’s a tradeoff I’m probably willing to continue making.
It is indeed the case that a lot of economic activity consists of other things than those that are necessary for “feeding, clothing, housing and caring for everybody”, and that in developed countries, you might cut back masivelly on an overall production and still be left with more than enough to comfortably feed, clothe and care for (with rather austere definition of care) everyone. But it is very wrong that most of the rest of the economic activity consists building dragon hoards for plutocrats. What is a current equivalent of a dragon hoard, anyway? Perhaps some luxurious survivalist compound, and resources devoted to building those are only insignificant fraction of overall economic activity.
Luxury consumption by plutocrats and their megalomaniacal projects are far larger fractions of an overall economy than true “dragon hoards”, but majority”nonessential” economic activity consists of things devoted to making leisure time of nonplutocrats like us enjoyable.
Note: I think that current levels of income inequality are unjustifiable, but that is an argument for redistribution, not for reducing production to a level of bare necessities.
What determines what level is justifiable? Are you assuming that the objective is to maximize per capita utility? That there is some moral ground for deciding how much each individual is entitled to get? Some other basis?
I am sort of Rawlsian. Ok, I have not actually read Rawls, I am going with my headcannon version of him.
You and most Rawlsians. A Theory of Justice is one of those notoriously tedious books that is more respected than read.
So the distribution of income is unjust as long as there is any way of raising the income of a very poor person at the cost of less poor people, however great the cost?
Consider two worlds:
1. 10% of the people make $40,000/year, 90% make $60,000/year.
2. Everyone makes $40,100/year.
If you take the Rawlsian position seriously, 1 is unjustifiable as long as 2 is an option.
Is that your view? If not, I repeat my question.
Actually if you take Rawls’ book literally it’s a lot worse than DF says:
If 100 million people are making $60,000 per year, and one person makes $40,000 per year that is unjust. Everyone making $41,000 per year is more just. I wonder if even Rawls believed everything he said literally. There are some useful concepts in The Theory of Justice but hopefully few take it as gospel. Since Ales says he hasn’t read the book, presumably he is only looking at the more general concepts.
@Mark V Anderson: I don’t think that’s an accurate interpretation of Rawlsian theory at all. In fact, Rawls explicitly didn’t demand a society of perfect equality; rather, he seeks a world where social and economic inequalities are “attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.” He was more meritocratic than you seem to give him credit for.
Now, there is a sense in which you’re technically correct. All other things being equal, Rawlsian logic would consider it unjust for 90% of the population to make $60,000 per year while the remaining 10% of the population only made $40,000 per year. But the phrase “all other things being equal” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In reality, there are plenty of other conditional factors to take into consideration; for instance, if equalizing incomes had a negative effect on the economy that resulted in the populace as a whole being poorer, then it would be justifiable to allow for a certain degree of inequality to prevent that outcome.
Rawls definitely wouldn’t prefer a world where everyone made $41k, because that would be a poorer world in general. In theory, he might prefer a world in which everyone made $58k (which is the actual figure you’d get if you redistributed the income levels of the 90% who made $60k until the remaining 10% were equal to them), because that would result in greater equality without shrinking the pie. 90% of people would suffer a small reduction in income, but in Rawls’ view, that would be worth it because 10% of people would receive a significant boost in income. Of course, that plan only works in the realm of pure theory; in practice, the world is a lot more complicated, and attaining that level of perfect equality is almost assuredly not possible without causing any number of first-order and second-order effects that would result in massive economic harm across the board. Thus, it’s unlikely that Rawls would’ve endorsed anything like the “everyone gets $58k” idea in practice.
@LadyJane.
This thread is getting old here, but I will make one more comment.
You are definitely reading Rawls differently than me. I found my copy of A Theroy of Justice and found this comment in section 11, Two Principles of Justice: All social values — liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect — are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage.
To me this is saying 100% of all of society’s resources should be spent on increasing the lowest person’s situation, except to the extent that lowering resources of the best off also harms the worst off. Do you interpret this differently?
And this is just one quote — he hammers on this point again and again. I’m a bit surprised that you see this differently.
I believe you are mistaken. The claim in The Theory of Justice is that a society is judged by how well off the least well off person is. So any loss to people above that is justified if it improves the condition of the worst-off person, even by a little. It’s decision behind the veil of ignorance with infinite risk aversion.
Harsanyi did the veil of ignorance first and got it right — the implication is to choose the society with the highest value of average utility. There are problems with that, too, but at least it isn’t crazy.
David:
Have people played around with the percentile to deal with risk aversion? Like, it might be reasonable to think of the median person, or the person at the 10th %ile, or whatever.
Rawls’ version is a defense against Omelas, but it seems like it doesn’t really work well in a world where we can’t cure all mental or physical illnesses–the worst-off person in most reachable societies is probably someone with some kind of terrible illness screaming in constant pain while he has terrifying hallucinations in the midst of suicidal depression.
It doesn’t work in any world. Lots of people speak positively of Rawls, but I have not yet found anyone with a defense of his Difference Principle, and the arguments in the book are hopeless.
Can anyone here defend the claim that, in designing the optimal society, the condition of the worst off member has lexicographic priority, trumps all other values, so that of any two possible societies, the one where the worst off person is better off should always be chosen?
I hypothesize that much of the Left would never accept that any problem could derive from the choices made by non-Whites. If it were only white Mormons and evangelical Christians having ‘too many’ kids, then it would be very easy to say “you need to stop this behavior for the sake of the planet.” But saying the same to non-whites? Blaming problems on non-whites is basically Nazism, a comparison explicitly made by one commenter on the site.
As for the whole thing, I just find it difficult to understand why anyone would want there to be fewer people so there could be more trees, even if the population reduction could occur without any suffering of the people alive now. Yes, we should preserve a couple of the trees. But suppose we could flip a switch and make the Amazon disappear and be replaced by a billion people living on high-productivity agriculture. I say flip the switch. Yes, it’s possible that some species in the Amazon that has the cure for cancer would get trampled. But, assuming the abilities of the population are high enough, a cure for cancer is much more likely to come from those extra billion people.
Re your difficulty understanding – it seems you just lack any sort of misantrophy. Rainforests are beautiful, while people and their creations are loud, ugly and possibly dangerous. I definitely prefer to leave Amazon as is and would gladly replace a few inhabited parts of the world with additional foliage.
FWIW, I can’t imagine a mindset where spawning additional people is an unconditional good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3NMw9c6OO0&feature=youtu.be&t=10
Hmmm, I’ve traveled a lot and been in many of the human-produced edifices deemed ‘wonders’ and products of genius but none have compared to the awe I experienced standing in an old-growth forest. Societal boundaries prevent people from acting on their worst impulses. Yes, having a billion more people might produce someone with the cure for cancer but will produce lots of those with the charisma and intelligence to foment revolution and war – the latter of which seems to be the only consistent feature of civilization. More people will produce more friction leading to the inevitable.
Yet violence and torture were endemic in prehistoric societies, but increasingly rare today
Yet war continues – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts
Also, we seem to be entering a stage where conflict is going at least partially into the information realm as the increasingly fluid information environment has given autocrats a means to undermine those that oppose them without much worry about whether those under attack will do anything about it – see the multiple reports on Chinese fomenting Corona virus misinformation, or the constant Russian meddling in US an European election. These are all part of long-term conflicts those two powers have undertaken that we’ve yet to even recognize much less fight back against. My previous statement remains: War (of the violent variety) is a feature of human civilization and the current state of armaments around the world give me no hope this is likely to go away.
@WayUpstate, America’s been meddling in foreign elections for decades.
You don’t need physical distance to maintain social boundaries. If the Amazonians were fomenting war and revolution, nations could react by excluding them from immigrating.
It doesn’t seem true that the most densely populated areas are the most violent.
I wonder if this is like the PETA thing–it’s easy to get agreement from most people about some common-sense level of environmentalism, but that doesn’t get attention, whereas taking extreme positions (“Ban the internal combustion engine!”) does. But I also think there’s a puritanical streak in US politics that gets engaged by some of the environmentalist movement–what I’d call “hairshirt environmentalism.” Like it’s virtuous to turn the thermostat down and wear a sweater instead of keeping the room comfortable in and of itself.
Re-posting my invitation to the Unofficial Slate Star Codex Extremely Heavily Modded Minecraft Server. I’ll be posting this again in the next three integer OTs unless someone tells me to cut it out.
We currently have three players, counting myself, and we’re having a ton of fun. When I started the server I envisioned something a little more like 2b2t where we’d all be hiding in caves and making uneasy peace treaties and trade deals, but that’s pretty much the opposite of what’s happened – considering where I’m drawing my player-base from, I probably should have seen this anarcho-socialist utopia coming. We’re currently thinking of starting a space program.
To play on the server:
Short version: We’re running the Technic 1.12.2 pack; the address is unofficialsscmc.404.mn
You will need to have purchased Minecraft, and have a Mojang account to log in with.
1. Go to technicpack.net and hit “Get the Launcher.” Download and run the launcher.
2. Type “The 1.12.2 Pack” in to the search bar. Hit “install” in the bottom right corner of the window.
3. Wait.
4. Hit “play,” it’ll be where the download button was.
5. Wait.
6. Go to “multiplayer,” then “Add Server.”
7. Paste unofficialsscmc.404.mn in to the Server Address box. Put whatever you want in Server Name. Hit done.
8. Double click the new entry at the bottom of the server list.
9. It should just work from that point on. If you have a problem, tell me about it in this thread, or EMail me – my address is my username at gmail.
I’ll probably try it out after finals!
It’s a commonish sci-fi trope that child’s math classes include calculus from a young age.
I tend to think of calculus as limits, differentiation, integration, and the reasoning needed to understand and apply those ideas. A bright, well supported student might encounter this calculus as young as 15 or 16, a significant percentage of math-inclined students will have an understanding of calculus by 18, and I imagine most who need it in life will have learned the basics by 22.
Given a robust, well-funded and supported educational system, what’s the youngest age you think it could be common for students to encounter calculus? What curriculum gets them there?
I took my first calculus course starting when I was fifteen, as a high school senior taking a college class at the adjacent university, which ran the high school. But there was some calculus, I don’t remember how much, in the senior math I took a year earlier.
I don’t see any reason why a bright twelve year old couldn’t learn calculus, if so inclined. I don’t think it would depend on a well-funded educational system, just a good teacher and interested students. The fundamental theorem, that derivative and integral are inverses of each other, can be derived in ten minutes with a pencil and one sheet of paper. Going on from that to the details of how to take the derivative of a function or derive the integral, beyond very simple functions, can get complicated, would be doable for a kid who liked that sort of puzzle solving, boring for one who didn’t.
Probably start with the difference between position, speed, and acceleration, keeping it one dimensional since you don’t need the concept of vectors at that point. Bring those in when you start applying it to physics.
I honestly question whether calculus it the best type of advanced mathematics to teach young children. Art of Problem solving even has an art even has an article on it, arguing for developing a more robust grounding rather than having young kids learn calculus. In college math classes I’ve definitely observed how in the long run this can lead to better returns than acceleration.
Personally, I would have favored linear algebra or logic I think.
Personally, I think there should be more emphasis on statistics, since it’s more useful than calculus in daily life and citizenship. I say this as someone who took calculus in high school and enjoyed it.
I don’t think the details of p-values and all that are terribly relevant to the average non-ssc reader.
Better to make sure their science lessons emphasize the scientific method.
(including things like confounding variables)
Statistics and economics were the two most useful classes I took in High School, I’d second the recommendation!
Though this is from memory, so I can’t cite the studies, from what I recall the statistics indicate that understanding statistics makes you significantly better off in measurable ways. Unfortunately, the research I recall also indicates that having studied some statistics in college is not sufficient to produce a notable difference in whether people understand statistics; it seems to require something more than a few classes. This makes me skeptical that high school classes could actually convey the subject effectively enough to make a difference.
At that point I have to wonder whether the studies are simply measuring “smarter people generally better off”.
Conceptual statistics and the basics of data are wonderful things to teach people early on. Unfortunately, they’re traditionally paired with z- and t-tables and NHST, which are confusing, uninteresting, and mostly useless to the general population.
The Central Limit Theorem is cool, but we don’t do a good job of illustrating its utility outside the narrow scope of t-tests.
The best intro stats curricula I’ve seen focus on data and computation and use nonparametrics as a gate-way to motivate distributional statistics.
I think giving intro stats courses (as they’re traditionally taught) to middle-school-aged students would be disasterous. But basic numeric literacy, simple probability theory and calculations and apps/software to do nonparametric inference? Now we’re talking!
I’m pretty sure the studies tried to control for that, but of course that controlling for things is harder than it looks seems to be one of the lessons of the replication crisis, so perhaps you are right.
I took AP stats in high school and didn’t like it. Lots of circumlocution about “area under the curve, which you can find in a table or with your calculator” since it didn’t assume any knowledge of integrals. Consequently, all the different distributions felt arbitrary and unmotivated. The whole class started feeling like an exercise in memorization of meaningless phrases like “fail to reject the null hypothesis”. I do know what that phrase means, but in AP stats it and the paragraph surrounding it were pretty explicitly a “teacher’s password”.
+1
I’m sure if you started with ‘I want to teach 13 year olds calculus’ and designed your whole curriculum backwards from that point, you could do it.
But you’d be missing out a load of other stuff that’s more important to the average person than calculus is.
I took highschool Calculus at 13 in 2007. I’m perhaps somewhere between the 95th and 99th percentile in terms of IQ[1][2], putting my IQ between say 125 and 135. Extrapolating linear development into the future from this graph[3], I frivolously estimate it will take between 89 and 129 years.
[1] I’ve never been tested, but I’ve taken standardized tests and existed in educational settings. I scored in ~80th percentile on the SAT at 12 for example, and in educational settings there would generally be 0-2 people I perceived as smarter than me around me depending on context.
[2] Granted, looking at my friend’s IQ test I see that there are multiple scores so one number might be oversimplifying things.
[3] It should be noted that the article accompanying the graph claims the Flynn effect is peaking or reversing in developed countries, completely invalidating my calculations.
How much genetic engineering am I assuming? Because even just a future that did a very conservative “lets remove all the obviously harmful mutations” sweep through the genome could fundamentally change how school works. How does a classroom look if none of the students in it have any cognitive disorders or other congenital health issues?
Actually, more than that – if we are assuming a future with a very good educational system, it is entirely plausible that their student body has been run through an entire regimen of performance boosting measures before they ever set foot in a class room. Curated gut micro biome (energy, focus), nutrition optimized via weekly monitoring of micro-nutrient adequacy (General cognitive health). And not just for the rich kids, for everybody. Pace of teaching in a school where the minimum baseline is what we would call 130 iq with conscientiousness to match could reasonably be insanely high.
And that is modest. If it is a society that really pushes this.. well. “Ruth Lawrence.”
First we need to figure out mental health, which from what I hear is getting worse rather than better on average among children.
..I suspect that a curated gut microbiome would make a dent in that. Also just being less poisoned in general.
That is not exactly a scientific approach
Anecdotal, but I taught myself what I later recognized to be the absolute basics of calculus (derivatives and integrals) at around 12-13 by building hovercrafts and target-leading gun turrets in Garry’s Mod. Plenty of other kids my age taught themselves such from the same resources I did.
A truly utopian society would probably have figured out how to trick kids in to becoming interested in things that require them to learn what society wants them to learn, and teaching themselves at whatever age they happened to do so, be it from 8 to 20.
A mass-education system designed to actually exist and work in the real world wouldn’t even be thinking about teaching calculus, it’d be teaching kids how to calculate tips and balance a checkbook and pay their taxes and build a table out of dimensional lumber, and trust them to figure out the basic principles of arithmetic from the applications. There’d be a brief algebra and pre-calculus course to get kids to recognize if they have an aptitude or interest in it, but there’d be no tests and kids who don’t want to be there after the first few lessons wouldn’t have to show up.
They would not. A whole lot of people, probably a majority, simply can’t generalize that way. You can teach them some rule or formula in a given context, and they will be able to apply it in that context, but as soon as you move to a slightly different context, they will not be able to apply it. So your mass-education system wouldn’t work as a mass system.
It would also likely be a rather inefficient way of teaching even for those who could handle it.
Why accelerate at all?
I think focusing on developing a good understanding of the tools you have in each grade, and learning to solve problems using those tools, is more important than learning new tools.
In Soviet Russia, where at least the math pedagogy was quite good, even if subjects like literature and history were quite a bit more politicised, they focused on teaching arithmetics* well, only introducing algebra once arithmetics were understood. A lot of the problems students were given to solve with arithmetics were much easier to solve with algebra, but they learned to solve them arithmetically first. This way, they understand why algebra is useful much better.
Being able to play with concepts and solve complicated problems with the tools you have is a much more useful skill than just learning new tools, in my opinion. I don’t think it makes sense to study calculus until you start studying physics at the level that requires calculus.
*To be clear, they also started teaching math with arithmetics.
You may be interested in Lockhart’s Lament.
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I went to what I believe may well be the world’s best school for 7-13 year olds. I was in the top set, and I believe we started calculus at 11 or 12. IQ testing is not widespread in the UK, but based on the universities my peers eventually went on to attend, I would guess the top set at the Dragon is drawn from approximately the top 2-3% of the population by academic ability. We were well taught by mostly experienced teachers with degrees from good universities in the subjects they taught, in an environment conducive to learning, but we weren’t notably hothoused or exposed to any radical or unusual teaching methodology, other than simply being grouped with other able children and expected (with good reason) to pick things up quickly.
I thought the same thing.
I don’t think so, given that it’s in Oxford and educates the kids of the most distinguished Oxford people. One would expect a high level of achievement from these kids at any school.
£10,000 fees per term probably helps as well.
On the one hand, there is obviously a significant pupil selection effect from being a prestigious private school in a leafy suburb of a city with a world class university, an hour and a half from a major global financial hub.
On the other hand, that’s pretty much all the selection that goes on, and it’s hard to see how it explains things like the outrageous success of the school’s sports teams. When I left, no school first or second team had lost a match of any sport for three years – and the second teams would play other schools’ firsts while the firsts played club teams in the hope of finding a somewhat competitive opponent. They sent a team to the U13s rugby schools World Cup in South Africa, and conceded a grand total of 10 points in the course of winning the tournament.
And again, it’s not as if the school had any particular focus on sport in general or rugby in particular. The best players in the older age groups trained for perhaps five hours a week, mostly with coaches who were also teachers of academic subjects.
And everything was pretty much like that. Internal exams for the higher sets in the last two years were old A-level papers (public exams intended for 18 year olds who have spent two years studying only 3-4 subjects of their choice). To be top of the year, you needed marks in the 90s (where 70-something would be an A in the exams’ original context).
Of course all those famous alums benefited from their wealth and connections, but I’m pretty sure they also benefited from actually getting an insanely good all round education, in what felt like a very relaxed environment. Expectations were high, but discipline was by no means strict: it was very much not a pressurised hothouse crammer. It really was an incredible place.
The biggest advantage these students came with is not wealth and connections, but genetics. I imagine many of their parents are future Nobel Prize winners and so on, so of course they are going to take classes on an accelerated schedule.
Another important factor, I’m sure, was being surrounded by kids of the best and brightest even if you weren’t one yourself. That means a lack of discipline problems, and peer pressure to succeed, and other positive factors unrelated to the actual educational program.
If you separate out 1) the talents of individuals due to their genetics and home upbringing 2) the positive effects of being surrounded by other students with such talents 3) the unique networking opportunities which I think contribute heavily to alumnis’ success in fields like acting and diplomacy, then I don’t know if there is anything which other schools can use to improve based on Dragon’s model.
Somebody else here mentioned Eton – at least on Wikipedia, the list of Eton alumni is far more impressive than Dragon alumni. Of course it’s not fair to compare a primary to a secondary school, but still.
I’d say a little under five percent are children of academics. The boarders (roughly half the pupils) are children of assorted rich people with a skew towards old money; the day pupils are predominantly the children of local upper middle class professionals. They absolutely are not a representative sample of the general population, but there are many other schools in Britain with similar demographics and much less impressive outcomes, short- and long-term. I went on to a leading private secondary school, also in Oxford. I barely covered any new ground in five years there, and that was not true for classmates who’d been to other prep schools.
Yes, Eton has a number of advantages like multiple stages of genuine academic selection (aptitude test + entrance exam), extremely generous academic and sporting scholarships, a student body roughly double the size and a history more than four hundred years longer in which to generate notable ex-pupils, a significantly different source demographic even more conducive to forming useful professional connections for the future…
And of course, Eton is also an extremely good school.
I think the Dragon is, at minimum, a pretty good data point in favour of streaming by academic ability, and I think it also suggests that if you double what you’re willing to pay teachers you can get significantly better teaching (though obviously that doesn’t automatically mean that’s a good tradeoff to make). I’d also take it as a point in favour of encouraging academic competition: end of term reports featured ordinal ranks by both term work and exams, not just grades, and I’m pretty sure that was a significant incentivising factor for work.
I think Eton’s playing a different game. It’s a feeder school for the political class and the gentry.
Optimises for connections (old boys network), reputation, possibly entitlement.
Not for making Nevil Shutes or Wolframs, but Rt. Hons and lords.
@Lambert- of course, Wolfram did go to Eton, though he left both it and Oxford early.
(Nevil Shute went to Shrewsbury, another of the seven major public schools within the meaning of the Act.)
My experience as well.
No one even knows how to quantify the quality of teaching. I don’t think there is any really good way to screen for it upfront. Some Harvard grads may be great, some HS dropouts may be. My K-Law school experience is that less than 1/10 is good at all levels.
I realize with vague horror that my time there was significantly closer to Watkins’s than to the present.
As to boarding, I have no direct experience of it; my suspicion is that the increasingly popular partial/flexible boarding schemes are pretty healthy for both parents and children, and that full blown traditional boarding is fine for older kids and would probably have been good for 13 year old me specifically, but that 7 is too young to pack someone off to another continent for weeks or months on end.
The average age at which the majority of kids could learn calculus is never. They don’t need it, don’t understand it and won’t get any use out of it. There is no necessity in making school more math intense, except for maybe some students.
+1 I simply don’t understand the emphasis on calculus. As was recommended by someone above, statistics is probably the high-level math most people can use, because it is so important for understanding social issues in the world. Although even there only a very simple understanding of probability is possible for most folks. I think most people should learn calculus in college, and only then if their main field of study requires it.
Statistics and exponential growth. Both very important for managing one’s money.
Calculus requires abstract reasoning about math, which only the gifted kids can pick up from school because math is explained completely backwards by people mostly unqualified to teach it. I had a far better than average math teacher in HS and learned limits and derivatives at age sixteen, though the entire class was composed of more-or-less gifted kids.
Most of the population has completed high school and has no intuitive concept of a function, you can’t really build anything on this kind of foundation. I think in the utopian super-competent education system basic calculus would be around age 11-12, with integrals as extra credit. Integration is a mess in general and should probably stay in focused courses for the STEM-inclined.
So let’s say you had a trio of students who you wanted to learn math the right way, how would you go about it if you aren’t a math artist yourself?
Do you tutor over the Internet? Know of any resources for teaching math which get it right which they could be instructed with? Have a plan for how someone could rope a mathematician somewhere into mentoring them in their math learning?
Good question. I’m not a good tutor, nor a good mathemathician for that matter. I know enough to get by in my STEM job and interests. Also, from my experience, good researchers and good didacticians are seldom the same people.
Re resources, I think the kind of intuitive, graphical explanations preferred by 3blue1brown or Vihart are an interesting angle. The Mathemathician’s Lament linked above goes a little bit into the philosophy of how math should be taught.
It’s reasonably easy with things that have graphical explanations (especially animated ones, or even interactive) but I have no idea how you can explain what e.g. a function or a variable is to someone who is just not used to reasoning on this level of abstraction, and/or a bit dense. But people pick up far more complicated things from their everyday life so I still think this is a failure of instruction.
In case anyone thinks 3blue1brown (Grant Sanderson) is only a graphical wizard, he’s been doing livestream “lockdown math” sessions presenting as himself, using pen and paper (and some nice polling software for feedback) to teach basics of solving the quadratic, trigonometry, and complex numbers. It turns out he’s no slouch as a regular teacher type either.
Eddie Woo in Australia is also good, but what you get is the material he makes for his high school students, and recordings of his sessions with them. Less wow than 3blue1brown but more basic for the young.
I am a graduate student in math who was born in the early 90’s. I can probably name at least 10 friends who learned calculus when they were 13 or earlier–if you are in the right circles, 13 was a common age even back then.
Students only seem to getting more prepared (anecdotal evidence, how much harder math contests get every year, how many more students skip lower division math classes in college), so I would be very interested to hear what, for example, a freshman at a top university can say about how much further calculus has been pushed back.
It’s really important note is how little difference there was between students who took calculus when they were 13 and those who took it at a normal time even by Junior year of undergrad. There is so much slack time in everyone’s daily life that whenever they develop enough interest, they can put in some focused, 90hr weeks and catch up. Maybe the one’s who started earlier get to party a little more in college.
I’ll second the “little difference” from the other side. I didn’t attend high school, and started college when I was 23. I took pre-calculus (algebra and trigonometry) my first semester; that was the first time I had a class that covered algebra. I graduated with a math minor, and work in a math-heavy field.
Intelligence variation in the first world is mostly the product of genes and randomness, so my first guess would be “never.”
That said, I do believe in the power of incentives. Want kids to learn calculus? Offer to pay 12,000$ to any kid who can ace the AP calculus exam. There are about 4 million kids in each grade cohort, if all of them receive money it would cost 48 billion, hardly cheap but not bankrupting either.
Serious news first: has anyone any opinion on all the rumours about Kim Jong-Un? Is he dead, in a vegetative state, or alive but seriously ill?
Fluffy feel-good news now: if you can’t go to the pub, the pub will come to you! And you can still celebrate your 104th birthday while maintaining social distancing!
The twitter hashtag says #kimjongundead, but it doesn’t say what kind of undead. Zombie? Vampire?
What a ghastly topic.
The only upvote system I want is one that’s let’s you indicate chuckle or laugh, and only if the post is (secretly even) marked “humor”.
ETA:
Although, I can think of other status markers that might work in the same way as “laugh”.
Maybe an up-vote labeled “I get it” and a down-vote labeled “I don’t get it”
@Randy M:
I think the fact that you instantly translated those into “up/down” is something I’m looking to avoid.
Rather, I’m just saying that it’s nice to be able to acknowledge a net positive contribution without having to actually post something that “clutters” things. But you don’t want it to be ambiguous enough to translate it to a generic “like”, “upvote”, etc.
Humor seems like it’s an easy example, although I can imagine even that resulting in people endlessly looking to post jokes instead of discussion. It seems a delicate balance.
So they weren’t kidding about Kim Il Sung being the Eternal Leader. Blah.
There was some KJU conversation at the tail end of the previous open thread. The consensus seemed to be that he’s not likely to be dead yet. Beyond that, not much known for certain…
My non-expert guess is that he is seriously ill. That seems to fit the evidence better than either fine or dead.
He may have been ill for some time. I remember reading odd reportsabout his staff vacuuming every room he’d slept in and collecting every glass he’d drunk from, perhaps to keep outsiders from collecting bodily fluids or hair that if analyzed might have revealed an ongoing illness.
Based on the official script, I predict Kim Jong-Un will be confirmed dead on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Here’s one.
CART MASTER: Nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!
CART MASTER: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing. Here’s your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!
CART MASTER: ‘Ere. He says he’s not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not!
CART MASTER: He isn’t?
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I’m getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER: Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don’t want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don’t be such a baby.
CART MASTER: I can’t take him.
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Well, do us a favor.
CART MASTER: I can’t.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won’t be long.
CART MASTER: No, I’ve got to go to the Robinsons’. They’ve lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when’s your next round?
CART MASTER: Thursday.
If the situation genuinely gets hairy, will we be seeing troop concentrations north of the Yalu?
I recently came across a forecasting competition looking to get predictions about the effects of COVID-19 and the related societal upheaval on various topics. I was a little surprised because the topics they chose (political polarization, racial/gender bias, emotional wellbeing) seem like weird things to be ‘predicting’, both because they are very challenging to measure in the first place and because it’s not at all clear to me that a solid prediction has much utility here (what sort of mitigating steps is it even possible to take on these issues, given perfectly prescient information about the future?).
I’m wondering what people’s thoughts are on this, and whether I’m missing some obvious utility. My best attempt at coming up with valid uses for this kind of thing are:
1. Making predictions forces people to lay out theories that can be tested/falsified, rather than post-hoc explanation which can more or less make any dataset fit any story.
2. Collecting a bunch of demographic information on the people doing these predictions, and repeating the measurements over time (which is part of the study), might make for an interesting examination of how people of different groups interpret incoming information on these nebulous social measures.
I was a little surprised because the topics they chose (political polarization, racial/gender bias, emotional wellbeing) seem like weird things to be ‘predicting’
Here comes the cynicism bit: it’s all about selling people stuff.
This particular set of forecasting competition guidelines provides the would-be forecasters with datasets from Project Implicit. Clicky-clicky on the link and it brings you to this page, which has a discreet yet noticeable banner about the Obagi Skinclusion something-or-other. Perhaps Obagi are their sponsors?
Go to “learn more about the Skinclusion Initiative” and it’ll bring you to this, which I don’t know about you but is certainly giving me flashbacks to the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.
It looks like a fashion magazine ad for cosmetics but purports to be about inclusivity or education or something or other. They have a spokesmodel with a video you can watch.
Track down Obagi, and it’s a medical skincare products company. But it sells and markets itself, and the website design is very much in the style of, cosmetics rather than medical products.
So maybe it’s all very above board and they’re only sponsors or joint whatsits with Hahvaad on Project Implicit’s Implicit Association Tests, but I get my hackles up whenever I see a “order your expensive skincare online now!” links to anything, which is why I’m going “this is fundamentally about marketing”. Hence the hot takes on gender bias etc. which can then be fed into another publicity campaign for Skinclusion (and Obagi Products, demand nothing less from your dermatologist!)