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Here’s a list of countries ranked by GDP per capita, at purchasing power parity. Estimating purchasing power parity is quite hard, so even experts differ. But three different institutions (IMF, World Bank, CIA) rank Ireland in the top ten in the world (4th, 4th, and 7th, respectively.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Lists_of_countries_and_dependencies
That’s unexpected. For a long long time, Ireland was notable mainly as a source of semi-disposable laborers. Did someone discover a dollar mine in County Kildare?
It’s the leprechauns. By judicious management of their gold reserves, they ensure we punch above our weight on global rankings.
More seriously, it’s the huge number of multinationals that we’re dependent upon; bookkeeping jiggery-pokery means the profits temporarily parked in Irish accounts before winging their way to Luxembourg or wherever get recorded as exports for us, and hence contribute to our GDP.
Or something, it’s too fecking complicated for me to understand, the leprechauns make more sense.
That money was just resting in their account. /ted
Huh. If I compensate for the claimed 62% over-reporting of Irish GDP per capita caused by the tax schemes, that leaves Ireland with an effective GDP per capita (PPP) of $53,000, putting it right between Australia and Canada in the IMF rankings.
That makes more sense. But I thought Ireland was even poorer than that, like Poland or Portugal, say. Has Ireland had some sort of economic boom this past generation?
Huh, based on what?
Huh, based on what?
Probably our austerity budgets after the 2008 crash. As to how our economy works, I have no idea. Trump wants to bring the American pharma plants home, which if he does Cork will basically shut down and my own brother will be out of a job.
We’re supposed to be in a recovery (or we were before the Coronavirus) but mostly the jobs are in Dublin and are going the tech/finance/services way rather than the manufacturing plants way. Again, having tech/finance quarter in Dublin where the FAANGs have outposts probably distorts our figures; if you stripped out all the American and other multinationals I imagine we’d be reliant mainly on agricultural/food business exports and tourism.
It’s PPP adjusted. Ireland is quite a bit more affordable, at least in housing, and that’s a huge part of the cost of living. Ireland has South European prices while having North European salaries.
Ireland is quite a bit more affordable, at least in housing, and that’s a huge part of the cost of living.
Well, the private sector rental crisis wishes to disagree with you 🙂
We had South European prices after the bubble burst and the global crash of 2008 meant that house prices fell through the floor. They’re starting to creep right back up again, though. Rent seems to be shooting up; again, it’s worst in Dublin because that’s where the jobs paying North European salaries are, there aren’t enough houses/apartments and landlords are seeing that they can start hiking up rents to take a good chunk of those salaries.
You mean this economic boom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger
Well yes. Looking at PPP per capita numbers Ireland was ~$21,500 in 1990 and the UK was at $26,500, so while they weren’t a developing nation by any stretch they were a laggard in the western world and they have caught up more or less in the last 30 years.
One reason you might think of them as poorer than they are though is that their population growth has been low and starting from a relatively low base. Their population hasn’t even been Dublin (sorry, not sorry) over the last 60 years so they haven’t gotten that double whammy of international attention from increasing per capita wealth and also having a large surge in population.
Ireland underwent an economic boom, at least in part driven by a population that mostly speaks English and has enough cultural ties to several other rich countries for this population to get educational and employment opportunities, and it takes time for cost of living to catch up.
Why would you expect the cost of living to catch up? If people become more productive, the result is more stuff per person.
Rents and quasi-rents? When they rise (which doesn’t happen immediately because of lease durations etc.), the “more stuff” that was previously concentrated on the newly productive is now spread out to include the owners of the inelastic resources they were using. So it doesn’t catch all the way up, but does rebound a bit; from the perspective of the non-rent-collecting labourer, some of their gains are reversed.
That results in a rise in the income going to the owners of those resources. So as long as they are also Irish, real income per capita has gone up by as much as it would have without the effect, just distributed a little differently.
So your statement about the non-rent-collecting laborer is correct, but balanced by an increase in real income to the rent collecting non-laborer.
Agreed. I was suggesting an answer to “why would [keaswaran] expect the cost of living to catch up?”, not arguing that that affects GDP-PPP in the way implied. I could have been a lot clearer about that, sorry.
@DavidFriedman,
There’s some economic principle similar to this which I’ve been trying to remember the name of. It’s named after some guy. It states that if real estate is constricted by either geography or regulation, then the fruits of economic growth end up going to the landowners. Do you know what I’m talking about?
I don’t recognize it.
LesHapablap – are you thinking of Georgism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Ireland is a massive tax shelter. No idea how to correct GDP for this.
Another Elon Musk tweet. He seems to be suing Alameda county to reopen the Freemont factory, and is threatening to move to Texas.
Actually, moving to Texas seems like a wise move: they received most of the subsidies they could from California, and now they have to become a mature company, and start building more cars. While moving the factory may not be wise, moving the headquarters seems quite a good move.
How many other businesses will move out of California? Will states start poaching businesses out of states that have been stricter with the lockdown?
There has been a large amount of California -> Texas migration for years now, especially to places like Austin that have a rapidly growing presence of technology companies. This is largely due to the lower cost of living here in Texas and the lighter tax burden, which benefits both employer and employee. The tech startup environment obviously doesn’t exist in Texas like it does in Silicon Valley, but that’s less of an issue for well-established players like Apple, who just began construction of a $1B campus in Austin.
That said, most CEOs aren’t nearly as hasty as Elon Musk. I would expect taxes and regulations to be a much larger driving factor than a temporary lockdown with an indefinite end. This could be the straw that breaks the camels back for some companies, but Elon seems to be making this decision based at least in part on principle, as evidenced by his tweets over the last couple weeks.
That said, if you’re just looking for low taxes, cheap labor, and a favorable regulatory environment, even Texas is probably too progressive at this point. You could do better on all three attributes by going to Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere like that.
Of course your talent pool would suffer more, but hey…
Just want to point out that Huntsville, AL is a growing technology center, particularly for rocketry, aerospace, and defense, but there are tons of software and electrical engineers — one of the highest densities of engineers in the country. Blue Origin is set to start building its rocket engines there.
It’s not Silicon Valley or even Austin, but you could do a lot worse when it comes to talent pool.
Is there any evidence that lockdown policies at headquarters offices anywhere are stricter than what corporate internal governance would choose?
Whenever there’s a recession I hear economists talk about a permanent loss in growth, presumably meaning that even though growth will eventually return to normal, not all of the loss will be made up for.
Is this true? Since long-term growth depends on productivity increases , technological innovation is key, and perhaps economic crises drive as much if not more innovation than the good times do. It’s well known that a lot of technological innovation occurred in the 30s despite not being put to use in the economy until the post-war era.
It even makes sense on some intuitive level that hardship could be a source of innovation.
What makes most sense to believe?
Occam suggests permanent loss. It’s a loss after all, and only by adding complexity to the model you can get to overcompensation. So the question is: why wouldn’t the loss be permanent?
And to try my hand at an answer: I see this pandemic as a chance to reset things. Stop the social and institutional entropy growth and maybe cut it back a bit. Make culture war less relevant. Put some topics into perspective. And yeah, to be perfectly honest: make my side of the CW gain ground, or at least make the other side lose some (Greta who?)
Economic-wise… bankruptcy is not not necessarily bad for society. Goods are not destroyed per se – just the entrepreneurs and investors, which is kinda in their job description. And even them – they rarely end up in personal bankruptcy, so while it’s a very very shitty situation, they can always start from scratch.
On the other hand, having whole sectors decimated and repopulated in a couple of years may be a chance to overcome local maximum issues. We keep expecting ubiquitous WFH for… 10? 20? 30 years? Nope, exactly 50 years.
I wonder how gig economy will survive this. On one hand, uber is in a pretty shitty situation. On another, it’s much more flexible: uber drivers can do deliveries by just installing a couple of extra apps, and there’s no looking for job process when things pick up – things just pick up. Plus they’re freer to arrange their time – maybe 3-4 hours a day for uber+deliveries when things are moving, and something completely different the rest of the day.
Long periods of unemployment makes you less employable and hurts your long term wage prospects. This holds even when huge parts of the population is unemployed for structural reasons.
Conversely, some random “looser” getting a job for half a year because the economy is so overheated that “You are a warm body, that showed up” will suffice for getting hired can kick that looser into a positive spiral because they can now afford to eat right, buy clothes that is respectable, and get into the habit of being productive.
Hysterisis is very, very real, and the fact western central banks er on the side of excessive restraint has done enormous, lasting, and catastrophic amounts of damage to the west. Ditto politicians who are in love with austerity.
The first-order version: If you were expecting to spend the year Making Stuff, and you instead spent the first three months Watching Stuff Rust, you will forever more have less Stuff than you otherwise would have. By somewhat over three months’ production.
The ideal that second-order effects are going to wholly compensate for this is speculative and needs to be proven. Also needs a plausible mechanism at the level of actual Stuff production. Are you expecting everyone to work fifty-hour weeks for the rest of the year to make up for the early shortfall, or what?
This is reminiscent of the argument that socialists used to make: Capitalism produces a lot of waste because you have different companies producing the same product, therefore socialism is better economics. Of course, they were wrong but it did make intuitive sense. If you look at the last hundred years of the American economy, you notice a correlation between reduced frequency of recessions and decreased productivity. Of course, the null hypothesis should be that they are unrelated but there is some evidence in favor of his hypothesis.
If you have a certain amount of wealth that grows at 2% per year, and you spend half of it on something, then from then on you will have half the amount of wealth you would have otherwise. So in 10 centuries you’d have half the wealth you would have otherwise. Which at 2% growth would be about 20 years behind.
So when you say 3 months’ production, that’s true, but in 10 centuries we’ll be behind by year 10020 AD’s version of 3 months production.
That’s all very spherical cow of course
If that was true, then shouldn’t we have seen increased productivity after the last recession?
The very concept of permanent loss only makes sense if you believe (like Keynesians) in a world with a permanently booming economy. Then you can compare the present world to the Keynesian paradise.
However, the Keynesians offer only one explanation as to why their paradise has failed to materialize yet, and that is: not enough money was printed (see Thomas Jorgensen’s comment). I don’t find that convincing, to say the least.
I would be very surprised if that description had much if anything in common with actual Keynesian belief.
I feel like Keynesians are somewhat like feminists in the sense that Scott wrote:
I feel that way because I have already played that game with Hoopdawg the Krugman fan. I’ll let you decide the score. Of course if I can’t figure out what one particular Keynesian believes, then it’s entirely hopeless for me to figure out Keynesian beliefs in general.
Was the comment section really filled with people defending feminism in 2014? Times sure have changed.
For the record, I am neither a Keynesian (much less a New Keynesian) nor a Krugman fan, and frankly I find any insinuations to the contrary offensive.
Also for the record, what Scott described and our earlier interaction are incomparable. In Scott’s account, people who try to minimize the impact of the quotations still agree with him about their literal contents, their meaning, and even their severity. Nobody comes over and tells him “you are misrepresenting what’s being said on a fundamental level, in a manner transparent to everyone with basic reading comprehension”.
@Hoopdawg
For calling you a Krugman fan, I apologize. It was an easy mistake to make, given the fervor with which you rushed to his defense.
As for your insinuations about everyone with basic reading comprehension, I – as you can see – am perfectly willing to display our encounter as an example of weird stuff that happens when you talk about Keynesians and let the readers decide for themselves.
I’m not sure how you are defining “Keynesian,” but back when it was the dominant school of thought, followers of Keynes rejected the idea that increasing the money supply would gets us out of a depression — that’s the “pushing on a string” metaphor. Their prescription was government deficits financed by borrowing.
Come to think of it, I’d define Keynesians as clowns hired by a criminal gang that controls a territory. The clowns’ job is to convince the population that it’s awesome for the society to have a gang of burglars, because the burglars would take money that would otherwise lay unused and immediately spend it in the pub, thereby accelerating the economy. While we’re at it, I would define MMTists as upgraded clowns that additionally tell the population how great it would be for the economy if the criminal gang would also counterfeit money in addition to burglaries.
This is of course a political outlook on Keynesianism, so I apologize to anybody who honestly believed in it. In this particular conversation, I’ve recognized the idea that the pendulum of booms and busts should be stopped in the “boom” position as trademark Keynesian. A related very Keynesian idea is in Thomas Jorgensen’s comment: hiring a lazy and incompetent worker is a win for efficiency because it gives him a chance to improve.
In my view this is obviously wrong: the employer would benefit from (and would pay for) more accurate information about his workers’ performance, and since in this scenario he’s not getting it, the situation is inefficient. You know better than me what this view is called, but I’d guess it’s Austrian.
Oh, it is not ideal for the company, but since no modern society is going to let the lad(ette) starve to death, getting them straightened out – and this absolutely will happen to a fairly high percentage of them – is a clear win for the nation.
Conversely, involuntary unemployment will turn productive workers into “incompetent lazy bums” in a shockingly short period of time. Productivity is not a fixed inherent characteristic, it is a set of skills and habits, which can be both learned and eroded.
@Thomas Jorgensen
Productivity also erodes when people around the worker are paid for doing little to no work. For example:
Less of this please.
Yes. That. Seriously. If you have unemployment and low inflation both, you are absolutely not printing enough money, and are ritualistically cutting the nose of your entire economy to project the appearance of virtue.
That sounds as though you believe that the Phillips Curve represents actual causation, that there is a long term tradeoff between inflation rate and unemployment rate. That was accepted economics sixty years ago, but I don’t think it is now, the experiment having been done and the error explained.
Not exactly. Monetary flow is the upper bound on trade – that is, beneficial exchanges only happen if there is enough liquidity in the system to facilitate them. This means if money supply is not growing, the economy can not grow.(yada yada monetary velocity, yada yada,. Velocity cannot infinitely increase, so irrelevant to theory, even if very relevant to any central banker doing practical implementation) Technically, if you get the monetary expansion exactly right, you get full actualization of the real economy without inflation.
But every time you err low, you are strangling real growth. So in practice, being inflation phobic is terrible economic policy.
And the “disproof” of this has an other name. I like to refer to it as the great Opec Heist. The cartel imposed enormous rents on the west, which showed up as inflation. The “lessons” learned from that event were damn well wrong.
That assumes that prices are frozen. With zero economic growth and a reasonably flexible economy, the nominal money supply is fixed but the real money supply grows as prices decline.
In the same way in the other direction, increasing the money supply faster than economic growth increases the demand for money doesn’t make economic growth faster. Prices go up, so the real money supply is growing at the same rate as economic growth.
But as a matter of empirical fact, prices damn well are frozen in the downward direction. Getting enough deflation going to expand the monetary supply even a tiny bit takes vast under supply of money, and deflation has pernicious effects on everything, besides.
Sure, you can expand the base too much, and get inflation. The problem is that we, as a civilization, have pretty consistently not been doing that. Decades of near zero inflation.
How likely, exactly, do you really think it is that this is because central banks have been riding the knife edge of exactly sufficient expansion?
As opposed to the much less super human competence assuming explanation that they have consistently been overly hawkish and leaving real growth on the floor?
@Thomas Jorgensen
much less super human competence assuming explanation that they have consistently been overly hawkish
How about a third explanation: central banks have printed money like crazy with little to no restraints but printing money doesn’t automatically cause inflation, because the more people rearrange their activities from doing useful stuff to catching the sweet sweet stimulus, the more damaged the economy becomes?
Think about what you just wrote. You just said that damaging the economy – that is, reducing real output – while increasing the money supply will somehow result in reduced inflation. You can see the basic flaw in that logic, right?
@Thomas Jorgensen
If money velocity goes down, you could see reduced output and expanding money supply and reduced inflation, no?
Since a number of folks here are knowledgeable about economics, I have a question about the state of the discipline in microeconomics vs. macroeconomics.
My understanding is that in macroeconomics there are a bunch of different schools of thought with varying degrees of overlap in how they think about macroeconomic issues. I’m inclined to the cynical view that more or less whatever conclusion you want to come to, there’s a macro school to back you up.
On the other hand, there don’t seem to be schools of microeconomic theory. Disagreements in micro seem to be about relatively obscure or technical stuff. I’m aware that Austrians reject indifference curves and various other methods for philosophical reasons, but I’m not aware that they draw radically different microeconomic conclusions from these differences. (Maybe Marxists differ more on micro issues?)
Is this about right?
That way I like to put it is that a course in macro is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.
But to be fair, I don’t do macro, so may be a biased judge.
Or should you say, a construction site of a cemetery? 😛
I think you are correct that there is, let’s say, higher degree of consensus in micro vs macro. But that consensus is only about sort of basic stuff on how markets, on the fundamental level, work. When you go deeper on things like microeconomic effects of various types of taxation or environmental economics, level of consensus rapidly deteriorates on a level seen in macro.
(disclaimer: I am not a professional economist, just an interested observer of the field)
Do these differences in opinion tend to correlate with affiliation with the different macro schools? If so, that would explain why you don’t see different schools of microeconomics; they’d be redundant.
Most honest answer is that I am not sure. But in general, economists are so specialized that if somebody is, let´s say, focusing on environmental economics, he does not do a macro, so it is not readily possible to slot him into particular macroeconomic “school”.
But everything correlates with politics. Perhaps economists arrived at their political opinions by researching what is “optimal policy”, but I dont think so. It is imho the other way around. Economists tend to do research that confirms their preexisting political opinions. Like everyone.
There is some of that, but some positions are easier to support with economic arguments than others. So the political position of economists comes out of a tension between what they want to believe for ideological/social pressure reasons and what they think they can make good arguments for.
To take two examples, economists, whether on the left or right, are generally pro-free trade. That’s because the usual arguments against it depend on not understanding the relevant economics. It’s possible to make arguments against free trade that don’t depend on that, but it’s harder.
Economists are much more likely to be critical of minimum wage laws and rent control than other academics, although not as likely as I think they should be.
It isn’t quite the same issue, but economists are more likely to be libertarians than other academics are, although again not nearly as likely as I would like them to be. The strongest argument against the libertarian position is based on the inability to understand decentralized coordination, and understanding that is part of understanding basic price theory. There are other arguments that don’t depend on that, and many economists make them, but the result is to make a position that is very uncommon among social scientists in general fairly common among economists.
Ideological libertarians tend not to realize that, because they observe that there are lots of economists who support political positions they disagree with and make economic arguments for them, which is true. But academics, social scientists in particular, are heavily biased towards the left, and economists are not. And extreme libertarian academics are, in my experience, more likely to be economists than in any other field.
Of course, in that case, my sample may be a biased one.
Has anyone else considered purchasing a cheap prepaid burner phone for the purposes of potentially evading a track and trace system?
Putting aside the moral dimension of whether it’s appropriate or not, would it really be that simple? They just ask for a phone number and if you give them a working one that stays in your house, they’re satisfied you’re isolating as required?
Who is “they” in this scenario? Because some “they”s might track you in a more sophisticated way than others.
Good question. Hell if I know. Who would be in charge of this? Local health authorities with the assistance of local law enforcement, I assume?
I’m pretty sure that isn’t what track and trace is, but even if it was this almost certainly wouldn’t work. Beyond the fact that they can probably figure out that isn’t your “real” phone number, all they have to do to short circuit this is random phone check ins during the day.
Unless you switch it off at home, they’ll be able to detect that the burner seems to be living in your home.
Because “living in your home” is exactly what they’re demanding/what you and your phone are supposed to be doing at such a time?
Yes, but then they know it’s you.
I want them to think/know the burner is me.
I don’t want them monitoring my real phone.
Why do you need to take your phone with you on these covert outings? Just leave the thing at home.
Because I am a normal western consumer who cannot be apart from his smartphone for more than a few seconds without experiencing physical pain?
Mainly it’s got my music on it, which makes driving 100x more enjoyable.
iPods are still a thing. Furthermore, the tree of liberty requires refreshment not only with the blood of patriots and tyrants, but also the sweet, sweet tears of the 21st-century consumer deprived for a while from his smartphone.
Yeah, I have a separate music player. The thought of draining my phone battery on something as frivolous as music when I could have a dedicated device with much, much, better battery life makes me twitch.
I do sympathize with bringing a phone on errands, as I can easily bring up something to read when standing in line for anything, which you can’t always do with a book.
@AG: Does listening to music through earphones with your display off except when switching songs actually drain non-negligibly more battery than phone stand-by, though?
My understanding is that most places using these phone apps for tracing require you to present a phone with a green app rating in order to engage in commercial transactions.
Will you be taking the license plates off your car too? Cameras with plate recognition are already widely deployed, I’d assume they’d get roped into whatever tracking regime gets imposed.
Some people in Korea have tried this to evade quarantine and no, it doesn’t work – they check up to make sure that you are actually with your phone. Several foreigners have been caught and deported for attempting this.
Reading some interesting things in the Lancet today:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31098-9/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31095-3/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31097-7/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
TLDR:
– New Zealand have 0 covid 19 cases today (9/5/20) so are close to eliminating covid in the country.
– Some scientists have formed an independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the UK, mirroring the official government one, in an effort to try and make the official one behave better
– The president of Brazil is being an ass about coronavirus, which is getting pretty bad in Brazil (“So what?” he says)
Which made me think – to what extent does and can the government in one country affect the government in others? And to what extent do governments really have “culture” which alters the culture of the country, or does this relationship only go people –> leaders?
A few things struck me from the article about New Zealand eliminating coronavirus, but one of the main ones was that there might be talks with Australia about opening transport only between those two countries as both of them have went hard on covid elimination strategies (NZ explicitly, Auz just hard lockdown quite early). Of course, the two of them could also join into some relationship with Hong Kong which has also done really well. The ridiculous conclusion of this pattern would be some kind of fractioned world where there is a network of countries who have covid under control, and a network who don’t, and never the twain shall meet (without quarantine procedures or whatever).
Some possible implications of something silly like this:
– It seems likely that the “clean” countries might be better off with their trade and citizen happiness, assuming the “dirty” countries don’t just say “screw it” and share covid between them.
– The fact that some countries can trade and others can’t puts an extra stick up the ass of countries who are failing to control corona, and might actually make governments try harder to join the “clean” club, both now and in future pandemics.
– This says that good government might be catching, at least where infectious disease is concerned.
– It’s kind of interesting to me that “ability to join the selectively open borders club” impresses me as something which would get governments trying to imitate good practice elsewhere more than “having fewer deaths” or “able to go outside normally” – I haven’t entirely got an argument why this would be, apart from some kind of wanna-be-in-the-ingroup psychology, and I might be completely wrong about it. (Thoughts?)
This peer pressure in governments links to the other two articles in different ways. The SAGE scientists are basically trying to peer pressure the UK government into being better, which might work? Not too much to say I just like seeing something done well tbh.
RE the Brazil article – now that Is a politician behaving badly. How much does that kind of attitude legitimise being an ass in the country? How much in other countries? I’ve seen some opinion pieces saying that people in parts of America seem meaner and ore callous than one might expect re coronavirus, and pinning this on Trump’s influence – though the same people were probably surprised Trump was elected, so it is still difficult to sort out the mean American-Trump causality paradox. But beyond this, are other politicians around the world getting more… Trump-ish because of Trump, in the same way we can hope the UK SAGE might get more transparent, or other governments more New Zealand-ish? How much is there a global culture of government or a peer pressure effect in governments?
Not a huge amount, I think. The main thing is transparency – there’s been some drama over the fact that who is on the official group was never made public, and neither were the details of its meetings and advice. This follows people being unhappy with the UK’s initial “mitigation” coronavirus strategy, where they said they were “following the best science”, but wouldn’t say exactly who or what they were reading/listening to. The independent group might not be better at what they are doing but they are certainly doing well at being more open.
If they take the privacy seriously, there most definitely are a few. What are the chances you pick two 10 person groups of the most qualified people and have no overlap?
But in practice they probably just politely refuse, probably saying in private why.
I’m extremely skeptical on this point. The United States isn’t going to be one of the “clean” countries. The EU isn’t going to be “clean”. Neither is the UK. China isn’t credibly going to be “clean”, and Hong Kong isn’t going to be able to seal its border with China. South Korea might be “clean”, but it’s not likely to survive saying “We want nothing to do with you dirty, filthy American!”. By the time you exclude all the “dirty” countries, you’ve excluded almost all of the world’s markets and almost all of the world’s heavy industry, you’re basically stuck with a bunch of low-population island nations with limited industrial capabilities. A union of hermit kingdoms, isn’t going to be that much better off than a single hermit kingdom.
The nations which adapt to endemic COVID-19, are almost certainly going to be richer than the nations which seal their borders against it. Ideally we get a decent vaccine and don’t have to make the choice, but if we have to chose I’m staying on this side of the border.
So, the plan is for the Kiwis, etc, to present themselves to the world as a people who have developed a superior way of living, based on a code of purity and cleanliness, which has made them rich and prosperous, but from which outsiders are kept at a distance because of their uncleanliness. And you think this plan is going to result in everyone else saying “These people have clearly Got It Right and we should be ashamed of ourselves and strive to be more like them”?
Because, I seem to recall another group adopting that plan, and they kind of got the opposite reaction from most of the world.
A couple notes:
We (NZ) can still trade with ‘dirty’ countries. It’s just going to be more expensive and almost all trade requires face-to-face meetings at some point, so it will eventually wane.
NZ government has committed to having the borders closed (except to Aus) until there is a vaccine. They invested a lot in this approach so it will be politically hard for them to back down from it if there is an effective treatment developed, but possible I guess.
There is no way that the clean countries will be better off. This will be glaringly obvious in three months when all the ‘dirty’ countries are back to business as usual and NZ is stuck by itself. The economic hit to NZ is going to be absolutely massive. In a month the 12-week wage subsidies are going to run out and unemployment is going to skyrocket.
There is hope here that the ‘clean’ NZ image and Jacinda Ardern are doing some good advertising for NZ which may help tourism once the border is open. But it is all moot until a vaccine is developed.
There aren’t that many clean countries to open borders with. Taiwan is out because it would piss off China. Hong Kong is possible but they’ll be facing protests again once the lockdown is done there. Australia still has quite a few cases. Singapore has gotten a resurgence of cases.
And as John points out, if western countries actually tried to eradicate the disease, it is not possible at this point without 6 months+ of really serious lockdowns, way more serious than anything the US has had. That would mean -40% GDP for 6+ months and you’d have rioting in the streets long before the vaccine ever got eradicated.
But let’s say you’re right and the US and Europe were clean: third world countries cannot afford lockdowns, even though some of them are trying. So that means you’d cut off the third world, creating humanitarian disasters so bad that the west will forever be blamed for committing genocide on developing nations in order to save themselves.
Do you think that’s still true in a networked world?
Refusing to let foreigners in wrecks the tourist industry, but I don’t see why it should have a large effect on trade.
The United States
AirSpace Force buys a lot of rocket engines for its satellites from foreign suppliers. And, apropos New Zealand, it’s talking about buying Electron launch vehicles for some of those satellites. But not a single engine will be bought without me or one of my people physically inspecting the production facility and witnessing the tests. If that can’t happen, we’ll buy from someone more accommodating.People don’t make billion-dollar deals, and rarely even million-dollar deals, by clicking “buy” on Amazon or Alibaba or even having a Zoom chat with the other guy’s sales department. If they can’t meet the people and inspect the goods, they’ll take their business elsewhere.
@John Schilling
While the size of some deals is indeed large, it could be that the total trade in toilet paper is about as big … actually googled, and it’s about 16 billion for Europe only. And you can get by with samples and quality controls.
Also I think that for strategic deals they’re likely to bend, and just test you a couple of times. Possibly keep you in a 24 hour quarantine between tests.
Which leaves the middle ground, when you want to build a new toilet paper factory to your specs. This could also be accommodated somehow, or just postponed a couple of years.
It is eventually required. Just as an example, my ex’s brother used to import e-cigarettes and airsoft stuff from China to Japan. So, small goods, not terribly complex or anything. He needed to travel to China regularly, sometimes urgently like when one of his products exploded. He also needed to go to trade shows in other countries, mostly the US.
It could obviously be done without the face-to-face, but there’s an extra cost/risk to doing so which is passed onto the consumer. In some cases the extra cost or risk would not make it viable or competitive.
@LesHapablap
There’s need and need. If going vs not not going means a sizable income or risk difference for the business, you need to go.
There’s also a pretty big equalizer in everybody not being able to go. For example – no more trade shows. And no more relative risk vs the competition.
If NZ has the virus under control, they can still people in from countries with circulating virus, they just need to require some testing. For example, require people coming into NZ to have two consecutive tests (a week before departure and at arrival) that show negative for viral RNA. that captures the overwhelming majority of cases. That plus some contact-tracing as needed and maybe asking visitors to wear masks and avoid big groups of people for their first week there (when they get one more RNA test) would get the probability of bringing the virus into the country acceptably low.
@albatross11,
That certainly seems possible but the NZ government or media hasn’t proposed anything like that. They seem pretty adamant about the 14 day quarantine.
I think this will all be different in two months however when the shit really hits the fan. And some in our government (Foreign Affairs minister Winston Peters of the NZ First party) really want NZ to be entirely self sufficient with little trade or export, and are actively trying to piss of China at the moment to make that dream come true:
https://www.nzfirst.org.nz/winston_peters_self_reliance_needed_for_economic_restart
https://www.interest.co.nz/news/104742/wearing-his-nz-first-leader-hat-foreign-affairs-minister-winston-peters-says-covid-10
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/416437/winston-peters-not-concerned-about-blowback-from-china-after-supporting-taiwan
Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Austria, Israel, Greece, Norway, Czech Republic and Singapore seem to have joined a “first movers on COVID” group:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-09/coronavirus-lessons-from-first-mover-countries/12230250
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6749716/what-was-discussed-by-the-first-movers-covid-19-group/
Well then, at least we know that they can go back to absolute normal for a decent period of time (except international travel).
If you have workable fast testing and some trustworthy partners in other countriea, you can probably allow outsiders to come to NZ with minimal added risk. Require a COVID test a week before coming to NZ, and another as you get off the plane in NZ. Give every traveler another one as they leave, or two weeks after they arrive if they’re staying longer than two weeks.
Politics has plenty of pathologies, so you can imagine them tainting the selection or operation of the advisory committee.
Six schoolboys were shipwrecked on a tropical island for 15 months.. They cooperated and thrived.
Why is there such an appetite for stories like Lord of the Flies?
Discussion
The Myth of Man the Killer.
Sigh…More like “The Myth Of ‘The Myth Of Man The Killer'”. The “Fact, well known among military planners” is in fact no such thing. It is in fact provably false for modern conflicts (as Grossman, who’s cited in that article, notes), and the only evidence that it has ever been true is a claim by S.L.A. Marshall with no actual documentation backing the claim.
Also, “Lord of the Flies” was written as a response to “The Coral Island” (kind of like Philip Pullman deciding he would write the anti-Narnia in “His Dark Materials”).
So it’s very deliberately inverting the story of the older novel, and that’s possibly why it’s so grimdark. It may or may not have pretensions to psychological realism, but it is very much working to “if the original said they all worked happily together, this must be the opposite”.
(Side note: I read this and the sequel The Gorilla Hunters back when I was a kid, and the contrast between the 19th century view of the gorilla – hideous violent man-killing monster! – and the modern view, probably heavily influenced by David Attenborough, of ‘gentle noble creature’ is striking).
Also he was writing shortly after the war and the holocaust and the Dresden and Stalin and the beginning of the threat of nuclear war (which is what had happened in-universe).
It was never really about children.
The control group, composed of middle-aged English Lit professors, was dead within the week.
See also “In the Heart of the Sea”, preferably the book about the aftermath of a shipwreck rather than the movie that thought it was the True Story of Moby Dick(tm), for another outcome. Core group of veteran whalers with relevant skills and strong social ties, mostly came through OK. Newbies hired just for the one voyage, mostly got eaten by the core group. Well, mostly-ish, I really don’t want to go back and tally the disposition of fates
Is it referring a real story or is it a joke?
Joke; William Golding was an English Lit professor IIRC.
I don’t think your account there is an accurate representation of what happened.
The 20 crewmembers of the striken whaleship Essex set out in three whaleboats on November 22nd of 1820, two days after the ship was wrecked by a bull sperm whale. They had salvaged what they could from the wreck and rigged the boats with makeshift masts and sails. The boats were commanded by Captain Pollard, First Mate Chase, and Second Mate Joy. On December 20th, they arrive on the deserted Henderson island, where they restocked on supplies. Three men, the three crewmen who were not Nantucket natives in fact, elected to stay behind. They were rescued on April 5th of 1821 by an Australian transport that had been asked to look for them and taken to Port Jackson, Australia.
On December 27th, the remaining 17 men resumed their journey on the three whaleboats. On January 10th they had their first death, Second Mate Joy, whom they buried at sea. On January 11th the boat under the command of First Mate Chase separated from the other two with five men aboard. One of them died on January 18th and was also buried at sea. Another died February 8th, but his body was kept and cannibalized. The remaining three men, First Mate Chase, Boaststeerer Lawrence, and Cabin Boy Nickerson were rescued by a British whaler on February 18.
Of the remaining two boats, Joy’s boat was now commanded by Boatsteersman Hendricks with two other men aboard: a sailor and the ship’s steward. Captain Pollard’s boat had seven other men, of whom four died between January 20th and January 28th, with all bodies kept for food. On the 28th Hendricks’ boat became separated, and would eventually wash up on Ducie Island with three skeletons aboard.
On February 1st the men on Pollard’s boat drew lots, and the Captain’s first cousin, the unfortunately named Owen Coffin, got the black mark. He was shot and devoured. On February 11th another man died and was also devoured by the remaining two survivors: Captain Pollard and a sailor named Ramsdell. On the 23rd they were rescued by a Nantucket whaler, 93 days after the wreck of the Essex.
It is very likely all 20 men would have made it if they had sailed for Tahiti as Captain Pollard initially intended, but the crew objected because they feared the island was inhabited by cannibals. Instead only 8 men survived, five of them after cannibalising seven others.
Also
what is a ridiculously good luck.
Thanks for linking it, very interesting story!
So people can say “maybe I am wretched, but not as wretched as this fictional people”?
Are there many cases like this? Thinking about it, it seems like all my intuitions about how this is likely to work out are based on fiction I’ve read, and so tells me a lot more about what the authors of the fiction believed than what’s actually likely to happen.
The real boys are teenagers, whereas the ones in the Lord of the Flies were kids.
I hated the book so much I couldn’t read it, instead reading the sparknotes version.
But I agree with some of the comments in the discussion: modern teenagers are artificially placed in a jail and not allowed to contribute to the survival of society. Teenagers in the past were expected to contribute more, and in some cases were full adults. In my experience, people become way more decent when they grow up, and teenagers are way more civilised than kids*.
So while I don’t agree with Golding’s views, I think that little kids don’t have good chances of survival alone.
*I don’t know, it could be because I’m a woman; once little boys become adolescents, they don’t hit girls anymore.
Am I crazy or is this article admitting that the state of Wisconsin engaging in race-based rationing of health care?
I think the most charitable interpretation is that Wisconsin is seeing quite disproportionate rates of infection between racial groups (per the article, Latinos are 7% of Wisconsin’s population but account for 29% of COVID-19 cases; African Americans are 6% of Wisconsin’s population but account for 21% of COVID-19 cases). People are generally aware that testing shortages exist, and it may be difficult to get people from at risk groups (which Latinos and African Americans in Wisconsin are apparently disproportionately in) to understand that they should and can get tested. This approach might have some success from a public communication perspective. Also, it says “free COVID-19 testing,” so it might not be about access per se so much as reassuring people that payment won’t be an issue (and perhaps there are means tested programs for poor people in other groups? If so, not mentioning that seems like a PR failure).
Less charitably, yes, this seems pretty clearly to be race-based distribution of health care. Long-term, I doubt this will play out well at all. Someone’s going to have the clever idea to juxtapose this with a proposal re: Medicare for all . . . .
Is it before or after starting race-based rationing of health care?
Those numbers are from the article announcing the new policy, so presumably from before.
Of course, the policy may end up looking self-justifying if it results in even higher official infection rates in those communities (because that’s where additional tests get done). But, assuming those are pre-policy figures, it does seem like there’s some justification for focusing on testing among these groups (even if this is an extremely ham-handed way of doing that).
At a guess, this has to do with outbreaks in meat packing plants, which tend to be very heavily Hispanic and which appear to be a nearly-optimal environment for the spread of the virus–they’re refrigerated, loud, with fans blowing everywhere, everyone is working hard and fast all the time, and there are power saws and such going constantly to aerosolize any glops of virus that happen onto the meat being cut.
I think this is a very different sort of thing than the usual affirmative action program–more like “Holy shit, we’ve probably got extensive spread in this immigrant worker community that basically never goes to the doctor unless they’re deathly ill–let’s try to get a handle on this!”
@albatross11, I don’t disagree with that view, which is why I feel much, much more charitable toward this program than I would toward most things that could fall within the class of “government provided race-based healthcare.” That said, at best, I think the way they announced this program represents a serious PR misstep by the people running it (even if I think the motives could be understandable).
Uh, then why not just have your policy be “free testing for meat packing plant employees?”
Why bother bringing race into it unless you have/want to?
And is there really zero of poor white workers in this meat packing plants?
Why not just make it “free for people that are below powerty line” (or whatever else method for defining it)?
Because I am going to assume that poor/rich people is not cleanly separated by race.
Assuming that article is true: yes.
You may claim that such racism is beneficial and should not be called racism but some other euphemism.
Still, it is clear case of race-based rationing of health care. And as bonus it will heavily distort statistics that will be used to justify it.
Probably, but since stay at home orders have a disparate impact on disease risk reduction by race it seems reasonable to try to rectify that with expanded health care access. Unless we have a crazy excess of testing I think all testing should be going towards “essential” workers and those in their family units but if we can’t make that happen having a similar result demographically seems fine.
Why do you think that stay at home orders have a disparate impact on disease risk reduction by race?
More affluent people have more space to spread out in, less likely to have roommates, etc. Race correlates with wealth.
From the article:
Unless evidence that race is a risk factor — which I haven’t seen — we are better off targeting true ‘risk factors’. Why use race as a proxy for poverty when you could more simply target poverty.
Testing by race rather than by poverty (or whatever medically demonstrated marker) is divisive, but no doubt politically expedient for some.
I tend to agree with albatross11 up-thread about why this is the approach.
I said above that I’d prefer to push all tests towards those that are essential workers (even over symptomatic people who are not essential workers), and in an ideal would they’d do that.
I have seen statistics, both in that article and from WA’s testing that indicate a racial disparity in incidence of the disease, while I haven’t seen similar numbers based on poverty. We’ve already tossed out a pile of norms for the sake of responding to this disease, so yes, I think rationing the tests to a group where the tests are more likely to detect the disease is worthwhile.
It appears to be unconstitutional and violate equal protection. And for good reason, in my opinion. Tossing out the social norm of government not discriminating on the basis of race would be a massive loss.
I believe it is based on material resources and that no one proposes a genetic component is involved.
Race is obviously an important factor in terms of trust and relationship with law enforcement and government advice. (Just look at the last five years of history if you have any doubts about whether white people or black people consider cops more trustworthy.)
Trusting law enforcement and government advice has been extremely important during a public health incident like this.
Sort of. Testing for a disease isn’t quite the same as caring for it – the main beneficiaries will be not the person being tested but everyone they interact with – but it’s a hair-splitting enough distinction that I wouldn’t go as far as saying you’re wrong.
The fact that we aren’t *drowning* in tests by now is pretty strong evidence that we, as a nation, have comprehensively screwed the pooch w.r.t. our response to the virus. At this point, nobody should be rationing tests–instead, people should be complaining about how they’re constantly being asked whether they’d like a COVID-19 test, a pack of N-95 masks, a bottle of hand sanitizer, and an application form for a job as a contact tracer.
Agreed. Assuming that we do have to ration tests though, we should ration them so the results to change individual’s behavior and reduce spread.
I’ve heard that there are plenty of jurisdictions where they have tests and not enough people who want one. Haven’t attempted to verify this myself.
I certainly don’t want one. Have you seen the videos? The most common form of it looks like torture.
Where is this alternate universe? I want to immigrate.
Why are coronavirus survivors permanently disqualified to join the military? They can apply for a waiver, but they presumably wouldn’t start this policy if they were going to blanket waive everybody.
I guess this is legal, because the army gets to recruit according to the criteria of their choice, but is it politically tenable? Should we expect other discrimination of coronavirus survivors?
There is some nonsense about not knowing the health consequences of recovering from coronavirus, but the military does fitness tests. A person with lung damage would not be able to pass those tests (and if they would, maybe they should make stricter criteria for the fitness test?).
The article you linked takes a stab at explaining the decision:
Coronaviruses do damage organs other than the lungs, for example they can cause inflammation of the heart muscle, which in some cases can cause the person to suddenly drop dead weeks later. In very rare cases even normal “common cold” coronaviruses cause this. It could be detected if they made the medical examinations stricter, but I guess they’ve decided that it’s not worth the effort.
If a lot of people get covid, to the point where 30% or more of the population are “covid survivors”, I bet they’d change the policy of not accepting any survivors, replacing it with exams or tests that check for whatever the actual problem is.
I’m guessing this is precautionary; we don’t know what the long-term consequences of COVID-19 infection are, and the military doesn’t want to get stuck with fat bills down years from now. There probably aren’t any big consequences, but the military is careful about guarding its budget.
Agreed, and I expect that they’ll eventually back down from this when it becomes clear that the potential for long-term damage from an uncomplicated COVID-19 case in their target age group is small. But for now, there’s still some uncertainty on that front, and they don’t have to take the risk so they aren’t.
There’s no way this is going to last long-term, although it makes little sense in the short term either. I’d guess that they were trying to protect the training pipeline from infection, as coronavirus has basically stopped all military training. But that ship sailed weeks ago. Of course, this is the US military, and they’re often slow about this kind of stuff. There’s also the concern about long-term health problems, which I’m sure will be resolved eventually.
But yeah, there’s no way this will stay in force.
I think it’s ‘permenantly’ as opposed to ‘hasn’t had a fracture in the past year’. Not as in ‘we’re never going to change this rule ever’.
They’ve been blanket waiving “marijuana use” and “small, inoffensive tattoos” for a couple decades now. So I wouldn’t be surprised.
Then why have the policy?
Or is it that they want to have an excuse to reject somebody they don’t like for another reason that can’t be stated?
I think it’s one of those “ideally, we wouldn’t take people like this, but without doing so, we’ll fall short of our manpower requirements” things…
People in the military who get kicked out for medical problems, even those unrelated to their military service, get a surprisingly large amount of money. It makes sense for the military to wait until we have a better sense of the long term impact of covid before potentially being on the hook for these kinds of payments.
I’m looking for a quote that I really enjoy, but I can’t remember who it’s attributed to. To paraphrase, it goes something like this: “All human progress was created by a very small minority of people, who were usually hated.”
Sounds like Heinlein, maybe?
Also, shades of George Bernard Shaw:
Ah yes, that’s the one! I had a hunch it was Heinlein, but I couldn’t find this particular quote through Google. Thank you!
But is there any truth to it? I don’t remember Newton, Einstein, Leonardo, Franklin, Edison, Westinghouse, or any other scientific/technological innovator being despised or condemned or universally opposed.
Didn’t Scott have an entire post a while back debunking the whole “they laughed at visionaries” thing?
The first half of the statement is obviously true, though perhaps dismissive of the majority who kept things running while that was going on. The second half is less clear to me.
Your favorite bar, coffee shop, or fast-food place has shut down and reopened under new management. And the new management is a neo-Nazi. The guy who runs the place now doesn’t make a big deal about it, but you recognized the tats, asked him, and he told you. You’ve never seen him mistreat anyone, and the goods he’s selling are about the same as the last guy who ran the place; they’re different, but neither better nor worse.
Will you keep doing business with this establishment? And if not, how far out of your way would you be willing to go?
Had to replace neo-Nazi with SJW to make it challenging. Nazi is remote and exotic, I’d be more curious than anything.
But yeah, as long as his behaviour would be pleasant enough in routine interactions, sure. I see no reason why not. And quite a few reasons to expose myself to things I’d tend to avoid. But only if the coffee’s still good.
I wouldn’t have thought to do the SJW thing, but I agree – I’ve never knowingly met a neo-Nazi so I’d be intrigued.
With the SJW I’d probably get triggered, fume and carry on frequenting the place.
I don’t have to imagine. My local coffee shop was run by a proud SJW.
Good coffee. ‘Nuff said.
I would keep coming in both the neo-Nazi and the SJW case.
I wouldn’t, because a proper Neo Nazi would hate me personally. So I wouldn’t trust him not to give me bad service on purpose.
If it was someone whose views I found hateful and offensive but not personally threatening — let’s say a strictly focused anti-muslim activist — I wouldn’t go if it was somehow really obvious, like if he hung up posters about it in his establishment. But if it was just his private opinion, I guess I might go.
If it was just someone I disagree with, but find ultimately harmless, e.g. an SJW type, I’d still go even if they put up SJW themed decorations. As long as they’re not making me feel unwelcome, I don’t mind.
Part of the reason I go to a bar or coffee shop or a sit-in restaurant is the ambiance, and a neo-Nazi likely wouldn’t have the same aesthetic as the previous owner. OTOH if we were talking about a grocery store I’d have no issue, unless there was an almost equally good one nearby or the new one seemed likely to actually act upon their ideology beyond just tattoos.
He might have a better aesthetic.
“It’s a nice enough coffeeshop, but all the baristas wear jackboots and red armbands for some reason….”
And the boss works the espresso machine themself and your server offers you a drink called a ‘Hugo’…
“Another Hugo, Boss!”
I object to the premise of the question.
Being a neonazi or a hardcore SJW is a pretty extreme thing. If it really never meaningfully affects his behavior, he can’t be that much of one, can he? I wouldn’t associate with someone specifically because someone who really thinks that way is liable to do something nasty that I don’t want to be associated with.
Nothing is more common than people having political beliefs which don’t affect their behavior.
Not unique to political beliefs, you see that pretty much everywhere.
The first half of this is true, the second is not. Just because someone is part of your outgroup doesn’t mean you should suspend Godwin.
I think this would work as “being on the far-right or being an SJW is a pretty extreme thing.” Neo-Nazis are a tiny despised fringe even among people on the far right.
If he didn’t bring it up while running the business, yes, I would keep doing business there. I am generally opposed to penalizing people for privately held views. If, for example, he started playing neo-Nazi music over the PA, then I would find someplace else to go.
Sure I will. I’m an an-cap Brexiteer, and yet I regularly patronised a drinking establishment with Communist imagery on the signboard and a public FBPE stance, until they stopped stocking the soda I like. It’s not just pecunia that non olet; when engaging in trade, why should I care about irrelevant details of the counterparty?
Anyone who shuns me as a result is probably not someone I wanted to be friends with anyway.
I don’t know if this is me being libertarian, or me being Aspie. (I think they correlate, anyway, so porque no los dos?)
> why should I care about irrelevant details of the counterparty
Because a good part of the population doesn’t think like that and will actively work to drive you out “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” and all that. So if the other side is going to defect, the game-theoretic correct thing to do is to retaliate in-kind at least once.
And if I were economically insecure or otherwise highly dependent on others’ goodwill, or if doing it violated some law, then maybe I wouldn’t do it. But luckily for me (and for businesses run by people I dislike, I guess?) I happen to have marketable skills and no dependents or major fixed liabilities. This in fact means that social opprobrium can push me towards such things, on the grounds that “if I can’t stick my head over the parapet, who can?” (This is no idle boast, either, as those who followed the LinuxGate controversy may be aware.)
That depends on what effect “setting an example” has on the behaviour of others; I’m sure plenty of people would be capable of scrupulously separating their valëssef if they ever came to believe it was good to do so.
The imagery on the signboard is hardly an irrelevant detail of a drinking establishment. There’s a reason why I’m drinking there rather than just buying drinks at a supermarket and drinking them at home.
In this case, my main reason was the excellent street food trucks that parked outside it.
… what, you thought I would be there to socialise? I just mentioned I’m an Aspie 😛
If I can see the tats to recognize them, it’s likely that he’s seeking and even more likely that he will wind up with a Nazi clientele. But if that’s not the case, then I don’t have a problem with it, nor with e.g. an ex-tankie.
Yeah, this is an important distinction. Guy who has Neo-Nazi/White supremacist tattoos as a result of former poor life choices who no longer holds such views? Not really an issue (though I’d recommend he cover the tattoos regardless). But I’d rather not patronize a den of Nazis if I can help it.
Just look at the case of Whole Foods.
For your specific scenario, I would get a member of their outgroup to be a customer and see how the owner reacts. If there’s little to no reaction, then there’s a clear Daryl Davis opportunity.
Portillo’s is run by Nazi?!
If you’re not going out of your way to cause problems for people, I don’t really care, and I don’t really care about this particular industry because there are a good number of substitutes.
Well I never boycotted Chick-Fil-A. My lesbian aunts have boycotted Cracker Barrel, but I imagine it’s a much more personal situation for them.
At any rate, I think it depends on whether they flaunt it or not. If it’s just a normal business, the only reason to avoid it is the distant risk of being shamed on social media.
If it is subtle the political views of owners do not matter for me though they can be small plus if it makes me feel like the place is part of my sub tribe. But there are lots of reasons why I would shop at a High Tory Anglophile catholic royalist shop in America so it is hard to distinguish.
If it is in one’s face it does slightly impact my consumer behavior, but I still buy cheeses that celebrate a (quasi)genocidal regime that would have hunted me down and killed me.
No. I have no strong favorites among the bars/restaurants I go to regularly, and live in an urban area where competition for such services is intense. As a minority, I’d be more than happy to take my business elsewhere, and would encourage any friends I have who also frequent the establishment to boycott it as well.
I will keep doing business with the establishment.
My favorite coffee shop for years, one of the most influential places/social groups of my life, was run by a lesbian couple, one of whom was fairly activist. I was then, as I am now, a fairly conservative Christian. (The people who ran it, and some of the other customers, are still my friends a decade-plus later.)
I still miss 17.5 Cafe. It was actually living up to the liberal ideal of “we need to be able to get along with and learn from people who are very different from us.”
A Hollywood producer wants an Oscar-worthy drama about the travails of French people who were domestic servants when WWI broke out. However, due to mid-budget Oscar bait losing ground on “core” Academy Awards like Best (male/female) Actor and Best Picture to superhero films, they want to combine parts of the studio’s budget and make the characters slightly-superhuman martial artists.
What’s your pitch?
Late in the war, the French military forms units of shock troops with special training in infiltrating and breaching trench-lines. They are rather like the German Stoßtruppen, except they have borderline superpowers. They units are very successful, and the soldiers in them become very famous. The people with these powers come from all walks of life, including the most humble, like street-peddlers and domestic servants. The B-plot deals with some of these folks adjusting to their new-found fame.
You and Johan Larson join forces as producer and director and crowdsource the dialogue from MCU comments on Reddit. I would pay to see early 20th-century French chambermaids discussing the relative merits of the Avengers movies as they empty spittoons and fluff pillows.
It’s an espionage movie, of course.
As I comment more here I worry more about meeting 2 of the 3 standards for commenting, because I really want to stay within the bounds Scott wants.
1) Truthful. This one seems easy. I assume saying what I believe to be truthful counts & if it turns out the Earth is flat it won’t be held against me I thought it wasn’t.
2) Necessary. This is the hard one. I don’t think any post is necessary so I interpret it to mean “relevant” “does it add something to the conversation ” But even that is pretty subjective.
3) Kind. This is easy if you aren’t in the process of disagreeing with someone. Disagreement can be civil but can it be kind?
I find the hardest measure to be #2.
If you check through the list of bans and the examples of comments that led to them, I think you’ll find that no commenters have been banned for kind comments.
I agree that it’s possible to argue the toss about whether something is true or whether it’s necessary, but if a comment is at least not (at all) unkind, I think it’s going to be in line with the ethos of the blog.
As Socrates said “Justice is knowing one’s place.” And as Keats said “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
QED Anything true is both necessary and kind.
I’d argue that HH, despite being prickly on occasion, was banned mostly for being unnecessary.
Perhaps, but I thought his perspective was both unusual and interesting.
However, the comment given as an example of what he was banned for (…You want to be fat. Anyone can tell by looking) is surely characterized by unkindness.
Perhaps it’s kind if you have lots of tempting opportunities to say something hostile to the person you are disagreeing with, and don’t take them?
Has anyone gotten an email for the NIH Coronavirus Serosurvey yet? I got mine today.
I got one inviting me to fill out a short pre-screening questionnaire, which I did.
Same here.
I’m dreaming about when we’re allowed to do international travel again – as an American Europhile what secondary or tertiary cities should I be dreaming of visiting? Right now I’d love to go to Lyon, Split or Malmo – I’ve loved Ghent, Salzberg and Florence but found Cologne lacking.
When airline ticket prices crashed, I got tickets for the whole family to Aruba in September. That was my best guess as to when we would be allowed to go with a high probability, but because the airlines were (are?) making all tickets fully refundable/transferable due to the uncertainty, it seemed like an easy bet to make.
I guess the risk here is bankruptcy. The tickets may not necessarily be honored in that case. They generally have been in past bankruptcies (to some degree or another, generally at minimum to get stranded people home even if the governments step in to do so) but for tickets way out I’d be hesitant at least about smaller callers that might just cease to exist as opposed to restructure. These are pretty unprecedented times. That said governments are likely to backstop major carriers to some degree in many countries (it’s a fairly essential service in normal times and you don’t necessarily want to rebuild the whole industry from scratch down the line).
I did check into that ahead of time. The tickets are with American Airlines. In previous bankruptcies, tickets were honored, if nothing else because the new owners of the assets (name, planes, airport slots) want to continue to have customers also. Also, I believe the order of claims works out favorably for ticket holders. If worse came to worse, could probably get CC company to give a refund and/or use the travel insurance which comes with the card.
I’ll suggest northern France/southern Belgium for WW1 history. Amiens would probably be the best center point.
Ooh and Jules Verne as well! Appreciate the recommendation.
Ieper has a good WWI museum that I enjoyed (Northern Belgium). In Louvain-le-Neuve there is also a Waterloo museum and battlefield, which I haven’t had a chance to see yet.
In terms of planning a vacation that makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe it’s time to finally visit “Disneyland with the death penalty”, if they’ll let Americans in.
What in particular are you looking to see? I made a brief visit to Malmo as a side trip from Copenhagen. It was nice in relation to its size, but wouldn’t have been worth a dedicated trip.
It seems that lately, political ideology has been a dividing factor here on SSC. So I decided to explain my own stance on ideology – my own meta-ideology, in a sense – and why I generally find myself supporting liberalism over conservatism, leftism, or the more extreme forms of libertarianism.
I’ve studied political theory for years, and at the end of the day, if there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of, it’s that I care more about how policies will affect people’s day-to-day lives than about any grand abstractions about how the world “should” work. When I’m considering policy stances, the main questions I’m asking are: “How will this affect me? How will this affect the people I know? How will this affect the average middle-class suburbanite?”
I think that’s a big part of why I’ve moved away from hardline libertarianism, and also a big part of why I reject far-left politics. Liberal reformism might be “boring,” and it’s not as sexy as the idea of a glorious revolution in which the old system is completely burned away so that a perfect new system can be created from scratch, but it offers a clear vision of what life will be like if its proposals are implemented. “Things will be mostly the same, but [everyone will have healthcare like they do in most other first-world nations] or [income tax brackets will be arranged differently] or [there won’t be as many pointless regulations that hurt consumers and hinder small businesses] or [everyone will get a Universal Basic Income so they have a safety net to fall back on] or [the electoral system will be more fair and more accessible to all citizens].”
The idealists (of both the free-market libertarian sort and the far-left socialist/communist/anarchist sort) generally don’t offer these sorts of answers. Typically, when asked what life will be like under their preferred system, they’ll handwave the question with vague utopian promises (“we can’t know exactly what it’ll be like, but it’ll definitely be better!”). Or they’ll dismiss the question, either by exaggerating the plight of our current situation (“it doesn’t matter, because anything would be better than what we have now!”), or by appealing to some sort of deontological morality without regard for the consequences (“it doesn’t matter, the current system goes against my principles”). And I don’t find any of those arguments particularly compelling.
Of course, it’s easy for someone to say “sure, I’m not ideological at all” without actually realizing what that entails, so I decided to give an example using two deeply ideological arguments that I see all the time. (Actually, they’re more or less the same argument, there’s just a right-libertarian version and a leftist version.)
The libertarian version of this argument is “taxation is theft.” Libertarians imagine a hypothetical world that’s exactly the same as the current one, except citizens didn’t have to pay taxes at all and they’d simply have X dollars more in their bank account, where X is the amount of money that they pay in sales tax, property tax, income tax, and so forth. Of course, this is nonsensical: without taxes, the government wouldn’t be able to exist at all, and U.S. dollars wouldn’t be a thing. Sure, you could use Bitcoin or gold or pressed latinum or some other form of independent currency, or maybe just go back to a barter system. But in terms of real purchasing power, that would almost certainly be a net loss that left the libertarian (and everyone else) far worse off. And that’s without even considering all of the government-provided services (infrastructure, utilities, law enforcement, emergency services, logistical coordination) that contribute to economic growth and result in a higher quality of life and a greater degree of wealth for everyone.
The leftist version of this argument is “profit is theft,” the idea that any money which goes to a corporation’s shareholders is being ‘stolen’ from the workers who actually produce the goods and provide the services that make money for the business. Again, this posits a hypothetical world that’s exactly the same as the current one, except the money that now goes to shareholders would instead be distributed among workers in the form of increased income. But again, this hypothetical falls apart: if there hadn’t been shareholders to invest their money in the company back when it was a startup with no guarantee of success, the company wouldn’t have existed in the first place. Sure, you could have sole proprietorships and partnerships and co-operatives, and those models work great for small businesses. But for large-scale endeavors that require the coordination of thousands of people across the world, and might not survive, and probably won’t generate any net income for years even if they succeed? It just isn’t feasible. And again, that’s without even counting the numerous ways in which the world as a whole would be worse off without the shareholder model in place. Without the large-scale enterprises made possible by investment, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits of mass production and global supply chains and modernity in general, and people would be much poorer in terms of real purchasing power. (Marx himself understood this, he just predicted that the economic and technological developments caused by capitalism would plateau at some arbitrary point, allowing the workers to do away with the shareholders. This is why the Communist Party dictatorships of the USSR and China practiced what Lenin called “state capitalism,” in which the government itself would serve as the shareholder class until “true communism” could be achieved.)
But even if I was to concede the point that “taxation is theft” or “profit is theft,” so what? To the very limited extent that they’re true, they’re only true in a highly abstract philosophical sense. Maybe if you subscribe to some extreme deontological “never compromise, even in the face of armageddon” code of ethics, it makes sense to oppose taxation/profit purely on principle. But to me, that’s the same kind of logic as saying “no, I wouldn’t lie to an axe murderer, not even to save my friend’s life, because lying is always wrong regardless of the circumstances.” (And no, I didn’t make that post last week to build up to this point, it just seems salient now.)
Personally, I prefer to put the actual, tangible, material well-being of real living people above these sorts of esoteric ideological reifications. If some amount of codified “theft” results in better outcomes for everyone, then so be it.
Probably correct, although Ayn Rand would disagree.
Yes.
Privately issued money isn’t rocket science — Scotland had it when Smith was writing.
So far argument by assertion. Why do you believe that? How carefully have you looked at proposals for how a modern stateless society would work? If not at all, you are in a poor position to reject (or accept) them.
If you are curious, my first book provides such proposals. The second edition is a free pdf on my web site, the third a $4.99 kindle.
I have, and for what it’s worth, I’ve actually seen a lot of good proposals for how a stateless society with a decentralized market economy would function. (And some very bad proposals, but that’s neither here nor there.) As for whether I believe it could work, my tentative answer is “no, it can’t,” but with the caveat that saying that a political or economic system “can’t work” can mean a few different things.
For instance, when I say that a Soviet-style command economy couldn’t work, I mean that in a very literal sense. It could never work under any set of circumstances, because the very structure of the system contradicts the laws of economics. In fact, the system is ultimately self-contradicting, albeit in ways that might not have been immediately apparent to the people who originally developed it.
When I say that an anarcho-communist gift economy couldn’t work on a large scale, I don’t mean quite the same thing. In fact, I could see it potentially working if material conditions were very different – for instance, if we lived in a post-scarcity civilization where virtually all goods and non-social services could be provided by machines for free. I could also see it working if humans were wired differently, if we had different cognitive functions or different social and emotional capacities or an entirely different set of drives and impulses built into our minds. But since humans are humans and not some other sapient species, and since we don’t live in a post-scarcity society yet (and probably won’t for a long time, if ever), I think it’s safe to say that such a system is functionally impossible.
When I say that market anarchism (what you call “anarcho-capitalism”) couldn’t work, I don’t mean it’s conceptually impossible like Soviet communism, or functionally impossible like anarcho-communism. In fact, I think a market anarchist economy could work quite well, even with normal modern-day humans using normal modern-day technology, provided it came to exist in the first place. If it were possible to create an entire fully-formed civilization ex nihilo, without having to go through the trouble of actually developing one from another state of affairs, I think market anarchism could both sustain itself and bring about good outcomes. I simply don’t see any viable path for getting from here to there, because the existing set of sociopolitical incentives are constantly forcing the system in any number of different directions.
Funny enough, I’m already in the process of reading it. I downloaded the pdf onto my phone a little while back, and I’ve been going through it piece by piece. (Ironically, my entire refutation of the “profit is theft” mentality in the post you replied to was inspired by a similar argument in that very book.)
On that, you and I are in agreement! The difference is that I respond to that by continuing to search for such a path, while trying to push society in directions that seem likely to widen relevant parts of the option space.
Do you believe that there’s a valley of worse outcomes in the ‘hybrid of current system and market anarchism’ region that we shouldn’t enter if we can’t cross it, are you choosing to focus your efforts towards some other system which in your estimation is more reachable or more beneficial (or both), or are you focusing on hill-climbing/optimisation within the broad outlines of the current system? (All are defensible positions, I’m just curious which — if any — applies to you.)
In the spirit of this, my ideology:
I’m pretty generically conservative in philosophy for a lot of reasons, but I don’t believe anybody in either party at the Congress or Executive level isn’t completely bought and paid for in a way that makes their political ideologies anything but window dressing on most issues.
In recent years I hardly care about politics to the point where I rarely read the news anymore and can barely bring myself to vote. I care a LOT about arguments I perceive to be flawed for reasons I perceive to be intellectual dishonesty or laziness.
The way this all pans out is I don’t have anything interesting to say, but I pounce on other arguments and try to tear them apart. I’m not particularly charitable when I do this, because as mentioned above I feel rather than always think the people I’m going after are either being intentionally dense, dishonest, or lazy. Because of my bias towards conservative philosophy, I end up doing this to people I perceive as liberal 9/10ths of the time.
I’m not at all sure I add any value to conversations by doing this, and I’m pretty sure it makes me a dick.
Well, you get ten out of ten (from me, at least..) for honesty.
I suspect what you see in yourself applies to most of us more than we realize. I’m much more like that than I’m usually happy to admit.
I can’t decide whether I’m social democratic leaning or libertarian leaning. I’m for vastly fewer laws and regulations but a bigger welfare safety net paid for by more progressive taxes. Isn’t that kind of what Sweden does compared to us?
I despise how American leftists look to Scandinavia as a utopia without understanding that Scandinavian country’s lack of business regulations is a big part of why their system works, and one we couldn’t hope to emulate unless we got rid of most regulations. Of course there are other issues but let’s start with that.
Practically speaking, that’s exactly where I fall too. I’m fairly opposed to most forms of economic regulation, although I do believe that some basic “common sense” regulations are necessary to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. I’m also supportive of universal healthcare, albeit through the German model where the government simply pays for private insurance on behalf of citizens who can’t afford it, as opposed to the British model where the government itself is the primary healthcare provider. And I generally see welfare as a good thing, although I’d greatly prefer a Universal Basic Income to the current system. But I also think UBI can and should be used to phase out other forms of welfare as well as minimum wage laws, both of which would largely be rendered superfluous by a basic income. So even in terms of fiscal policy alone, I occupy a weird place on the political spectrum, at least by American standards. And that’s without even getting into the complexities of social policy, civil policy, foreign policy, and so forth.
And yes, seeing Americans talk about the politics of Scandinavian countries is always extremely frustrating to me. Both conservatives and leftists like to conflate Nordic-style welfare capitalism with Soviet-style state socialism – the former to condemn welfare capitalism, the latter to promote socialism. It’s especially ironic and especially annoying because the Nordic countries are actually more capitalist than the U.S. in some ways, particularly with regard to regulations. I recall a story from a few months back that sums it up perfectly: A Swedish Social Democrat went to a Bernie rally during a trip to America. In terms of actual policy, the Social Democrat was basically on the same page as Bernie, maybe even slightly further to the left on some issues, so he expected to find people who more or less shared his views. Instead, he was shocked and appalled to find people shouting radical slogans like “abolish rent” and “nationalize the banks” and “end capitalism now,” and generally espousing some extreme far-left viewpoints that (according to him) wouldn’t be heard in Sweden outside of a few Marxist and anarchist circles on the fringes of society – certainly not at a mainstream political rally for a major party’s second most popular candidate!
My point is more that people should assess each policy position individually, as opposed to supporting or opposing the policy on the basis of who else supports it or what ideology it’s associated with. I’ve seen too many libertarians take up a position simply because it’s the designated libertarian stance, too many progressives take up a position simply because it’s the designated progressive stance, and so forth. When discussing a policy, the right questions to ask are “Will it achieve the intended results?” and “Who will it benefit and who will it harm, and by how much?”, while asking something like “Is this the most [capitalist/socialist] position?” is definitely the wrong question.
Also, not everyone needs to take a stance on every single issue! I’ve spent my life studying politics and there are still issues that I’m undecided on. Should the internet be treated as a public utility? I’m not sure, because I don’t know enough about the way that internet infrastructure works to even make an educated guess on whether or not that would produce better results for most people. Should education funding be used to improve public schools or to provide families with vouchers so they can choose the school that’s best for their child? Again, I’m not sure and I’d have to do a lot of research into the structure of the American education system to feel comfortable taking a hard stance.
I think “I support this because it’s the Designated X-ist Policy” is shorthand for “I don’t have time to think through every policy issue myself, but other X-ists whose intelligence and probity I respect have considered this one in detail and have concluded that the basic principles, values and assumptions of X-ism lead to this Policy, and while their version of those principles might not be identical to my own, it’s close enough that it’s highly probable that this is the policy I’d settle on if I did examine the issue myself”.
It’s sort of like Aumann’s agreement theorem, if you squint at it.
Do some people overuse this shortcut? Very probably; man is a herd animal (and other clichés). But then, most people haven’t “spent [their] life studying politics”, so their choice might be to either get such political opinions as they have from ‘ideology’ or remain strictly apolitical. I suspect you wouldn’t be okay with a system where the political conversation and franchise are restricted to the liberal gentleman with leisure enough to devote his time to study; so there’s clearly a trade-off to be made. How do you propose we should locate the optimum?
My personal solution is to start from a libertarian default, but open to being convinced. Sounds like a little thing, but it’s amazing how many things are regulated by the state simply because it’s the default to be regulated. There are _a lot_ of people that go so fast to the regulated default, they don’t even understand the null hypothesis – they jump right into “how we should regulate this” and never ever get out. Could even be a majority.
You seem to have assumed that the end goal of leftism is to have as many regulations as possible.
…frankly, I hope simply phrasing it this way already demonstrated the absurdity of such assumption.
I think that the goal is to eliminate injustices, which means either replacing us all with AI’s in a simulation, or to try to micromanage away all injustices.
When people of either tribe refer to Sweden or any of the other Nordics as evidence for X, I mentally swap “high trust society” in for X.
It’s almost always what they’re actually arguing for, albeit unintentionally
I dunno, I’m not sure Argentinians trust each other less than Swedes, and they definitely don’t trust each other less than Belgians, but I don’t think all of the people who praise Sweden would pick Argentina over Belgium.
High trust society has a very specific definition.
On the spectrum Argentina would be low, Sweden would be high.
> I’m not sure Argentinians trust each other less than Swedes, and they definitely don’t trust each other less than Belgians
Why do you assert this? And why makes you say “definitely”? There are different ways of measuring “trust each other”, but one way is to ask “would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?”
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes?tab=map
Share of people agreeing with the statement “most people can be trusted”, 2014
Argentina: 23%
Sweden: 64%
Belgium: unfortunately no data
Germany: 42% (for interpolation below)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-rating-of-trust-in-others-selected-countries
Trust in others in Europe (on a scale of 1 to 10):
Germany: 5.5
Belgium: 5.7
Sweden: 6.9
Combining these two graphs, Belgians seem to trust one another slightly more than Germans, who in turn trust each other much more than Argentinians. Swedes are higher than all these. This would seem to disprove your assertion. That said, there are definitely other ways to define trust. Do you have one of these in mind where your interpretation is true?
Yeah, we on the far left call it a “class analysis”.
Note that all of those examples are actually promoted by actually existing far left, and rejected by most actually existing liberals. Calling this kind of reformism “liberal” significantly misses the point, it’s leftist reformism, as opposed to the alternative of leftist revolution, which, in present times, is not seriously considered by anyone (including the LARPers). And as opposed to liberal reformism, which, if it can even be said to exists at all, consists, at best, of fixing things that fail to work so spectacularly even liberals (i.e. propertied and professional classes) are hurt by them. At worst, of actively breaking things in the name of proprietarian free market ideology (see:late 1970s and onwards). It turns out it’s easier to choose realistic short-term goals when you have an overarching grand goal in mind.
If there hadn’t been capitalism, we wouldn’t be reduced to relying on investors because most people would have resources to invest. (In fact, historically that’s how capitalism starts – relatively wealthy egalitarian societies discover market and financial mechanisms to put their resources into more efficient use. Unfortunately, along with a short period of rising productivity, comes a longer period of rising inequality which leaves most people poorer and a bunch of oligarchs more interested in “safe” financial gains than in “risky” capital investment.)
Also, co-ops work great for any size of business, as evidenced by all the co-ops who have grown to be “large-scale enterprises”. (The main problem successful co-ops face are, simply put, the perverse incentives of capitalism. Once the business grows big and rich, current shareholders find out they can benefit more by changing the ownership structure so that new workers can’t join. Disallow that, and essentially nothing changes to productivity and investment, while our societies get significantly more equal.)
Are you claiming that the US poor today are poorer than the poor, or even median, of any pre-capitalist era anywhere? Because that to me is an absurd claim (how many pre-capitalist peasants were well-enough fed to be obese?), but I can’t figure out what else you might mean by this.
If there hadn’t been capitalism, most people wouldn’t have resources to invest because we wouldn’t have seen rapid enough economic growth to escape the ‘Iron Law of Wages’. It’s only once the stock of capital is large compared to labour (making capital cheap and labour scarce) that it becomes possible to organise high productivity without the organisation’s main purposes being concentrating capital and guarding it against principal-agent problems. (One of the few things Marx got right was that capitalism (in this sense) is a phase society has to go through in order to get to another, better one. He was just completely wrong about why it was necessary and what the next phase was…)
And anyway, why would those people invest if they weren’t going to be allowed to make a profit? Capital is deferral of consumption, and people don’t do that without an incentive, because time-preference is a thing. The worker at a co-operative is actually receiving both wages and profits in the same paycheque, but that doesn’t mean profits have ceased to exist; and if the shareholders can benefit by changing the ownership structure, that indicates that restricting one’s buying opportunities for labour and capital to bundled sources of both is inefficient (as they tend to be anti-complementary in production).
Saying “we wouldn’t be reduced to relying on investors” makes it sound like you’re thinking of investors as a class (and slightly Othering them tbh). If “most people” invest the capital that companies need, that makes them investors; you’re still “relying on investors”, just not professional ones. Both kinds of investors have the same basic incentive: profit. (In fact, the wealthy are more likely to subscribe capital to eleemosynary corporations, as its marginal value to them is lower.)
No, I am claiming is that poor people were historically getting poorer in pure, prototypical examples of capitalist societies (e.g. late medieval Italy, early modern Netherlands, industrial revolution era UK).
I will also claim that this is a meaningful thing to point to when discussing effects of capitalism, while a comparison between citizens of modern and pre-modern societies is meaningless for this purpose. It’s impossible to decouple effects of capitalism from other, unambiguously positive processes that happened in the meantime. Unless, of course, you are trying to attribute the entirety of technological and social progress to capitalism, but this is a dubious proposition. Technological progress show no apparent relation to it (in fact, the biggest leaps it made in recent times were under government control during large-scale military conflicts), while social progress has for quite a while been happening in direct opposition to it (in fact, ever since it has reversed somewhat in recent decades, poor people in the US are again getting poorer).
This is the kind of statement that only makes sense in simplistic economic models with a single numerical value representing wealth. (In what way can constructing a building with concrete represent deferral from consuming said concrete? In what way is the cessation of activity a consumption?) I find it more helpful and meaningful to frame this as people whose existence rises above basic subsistence level having spare resources and workpower to redirect to forward-looking enterprises.
That’s indeed what I do. I concede I wasn’t semantically rigorous. (I don’t think I was alone in this in the course this discussion, consider for example your own equivocation of capitalist absentee rent with all profit.)
My point throughout is, largely as you stated it, that there will always be “investors” who have a “profit” incentive. This is true regardless of whether particular regulations specific to the capitalist system are present. (This of course does not mean all regulations are equally efficient, but again, I find no reason to believe capitalism is particularly good in that aspect. And, to return to the original topic, plenty of reasons to believe the status quo can be improved by (even simple and gradual) interventions aiming toward greater social accountability.)
I don’t believe that’s historically true. People flocked to the cities and the mills because it was a better life than backbreaking farm labour. But as Anthony Trollope reputedly* put it, “Poverty, to be scenic, should be rural”; the dark satanic mills look distasteful to us in a way that Far From The Madding Crowd doesn’t, so we tend to assume the former’s inhabitants are poorer.
* It’s not on wikiquote, which is my usual “did they really say it” check, and a quick google didn’t turn up anything like quoteinvestigator either. I got it via Dan Hannan.
Technological advances are a form of capital. That is, they are something which has a cost to produce which then reduces the costs (or equivalently, increases the output value) of subsequent production — much like, say, an individual machine tool does, except that the technology generally has a wider effect and is somewhat harder to capture all of the value from.
Partly that’s because technology has more of a positive externality problem than other forms of capital, but partly it’s just that militarily-relevant technologies happen to also be more visible. What war and what government bureau was responsible for the smartphone revolution? (I don’t use a smartphone myself, but I don’t disdain the tremendous value other people get out of theirs.)
[citation needed]
Most of the world’s economic growth recently has been being eaten up by the global poor (fig. 1a); the 80 and 90%ile (which roughly corresponds to “the poor” in highly developed nations like the US) have mostly missed out on this growth but are still slightly positive.
The resources (land, labour, capital) that went into the creation of that concrete could instead have been used to create consumption goods. Perhaps it would be more strictly correct to say that deferral of consumption is the opportunity cost of capital; but I don’t think that affects my argument. I apologise for using the shorthand form; illusion of transparency / forgot to engage theory of mind.
But they will only redirect in that way if they expect benefits to accrue to them or their descendants as a result. Otherwise, they’ll simply expend those resources directly on improving their immediate standard of living (e.g. eat more meat and fewer lentil stews). Having more than the minimal survivable income is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for capital formation.
In fact, Marxism’s equivocation of profit with rent is one of the things that drives me mad. Rent is the return on unproduced resources (such as unimproved land), quasi-rent is the return on resources which are produced but in an inelastic way (such as a person’s inborn talents), profit is the return on capital which, being elastic in production, can be incentivised by it. (There’s actually a strand of libertarianism sympathetic to the Henry Georgists, on the grounds that true rents can be taxed without deadweight and/or are morally common property; see geolibertarianism.) “Capitalist absentee rent” is not a rent, it is a profit; it is not the only kind of profit*, but it’s the kind which scales, by decoupling the task of capital formation from the other tasks involved in production. (As the Unix boys say: Do one thing well.)
* I think I was explicit about this, when I said “The worker at a co-operative is actually receiving both wages and profits in the same paycheque”; I don’t know why you think I’m equivocating.
Investors will always have a profit incentive. But if there is no profit incentive to be had, then there will be no investors either (in which case the statement “all investors have profit” is vacuously true, of course).
You seem to have a narrower conception/definition of “the capitalist system” than I do, possibly equating it with “current US trade, corporation and securities law”.
In my ideal world, there’s nothing to stop you from setting up a worker’s co-operative, or a joint-stock corporation with or without limited liability, or any other form of organisation you can define in a contract; as long as you can get enough other people to voluntarily subscribe the necessary capital / sign on to provide their labour / permit the use of their land beyond what you’re able to supply yourself (for, if you could supply it all yourself, you wouldn’t need the organisation). Costs imposed on non-members (externalities) are handled through Coasian mechanisms.
Your “greater social accountability” would, if I understand it rightly, consist of rules forbidding some of those possible organisations. I find this deeply objectionable. Related: the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits; make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.
+1 Conditions in factories were horrific by our standards but people migrated into cities. Typically people without even scrap of land and even worse future in villages.
That’s just not true. We’re talking rich, advanced societies operating way above subsistence level. The farm labour wasn’t backbreaking, and the peasants could afford a lot of slack, especially compared to industrial labor. No, the problem was that peasants were increasingly finding themselves without work, or rather, without land to work on. You may recall England is often accused of intentionally orchestrating that state of affairs with enclosures etc., but as The Netherlands’ example shows, it can arise organically. Often by simple chance, someone literally breaks his back, cannot work his fields, has to sell them to someone less unfortunate to fund his recovery, and from then on he and his children become, at best, tenants on someone else’s land, but usually – wage laborers. Iterate over millions of people and a few generations, along with productivity improvements, and you have an army of the poor willing and needing to go and work anywhere to survive. This is, simply, how capitalism works.
Now, Netherlands in their prime had a positive net migration rate, thanks to arrivals from countries with more powerful feudal class, where serf labor could in fact be backbreaking. But it must have been the reverse for England, I’m not aware of any significant immigrant inflow to it, while many of its citizens (not to mention citizens of its nearby colony of Ireland) decided their future lies in rich, and readily available, arable lands of the New World.
Again, and just to make sure. I am not arguing, and never had, against capital as in tools of production. There will, by definition, always be some “capital” in a minimally civilized society. I am merely arguing against a particular ownership scheme that is, for a reason but entirely incidentally, called “capitalism”.
I mean, there are official statistics.
To my understanding they don’t even look that bad in the median case, but they show a complete collapse of the bottom half (which is now in debt on average), and near-total inability of people under 40 to accumulate any kind of wealth (which is a significant change from just a few decades ago), meaning things will get worse in the foreseeable future.
Specifically, by China.
This is a matter of framing. You could go “the world overall is statistically getting richer”, or you could go “a country with unique, idiosyncratic policies is eating up most of the spoils”. Only one of those statements implies the current system is working fine.
I mean, you are using profit in a pretty narrow sense (which, admittedly, may not necessarily be equivalent to “capitalist absentee rent”, but the reason I have specifically invoked capitalist rent is because I am specifically arguing against it) and admitting there are other ways to (to use another word to disambiguate) benefit from investment other than this narrow kind of “profit”. At the same time, you claim no investment would happen without (such) profit, as if there were no other ways to benefit from it. That simply can’t be true, the benefits exist and their total value cannot change. The only difference lies in how they’re distributed.
I actually had a short paragraph pointing this out written for my previous reply, but wasn’t satisfied with how it came out and deleted it right before posting. This is probably what made my earlier objection incomprehensible. My fault.
Unlikely on both counts. I am by default using the basic socialist definition of “economic system based on private property”. Admittedly I may sometimes switch to a narrower Polanyian conception of “market system that directly rules over society, rather than being embedded in social relations”, as this allows for gradation (and therefore, well, reformism).
Framing. I like to say I would not forbid absentee property, I would just stop the state from enforcing it. Or, in other words, lift the rules forbidding actual users (workers) from fully controlling the capital they work with.
My theory is that the agricultural revolution led to job-loss in rural regions, which caused people to accept factory work, mining, milling, etc.
So it’s not that people had the choice to be a farmer or farmhand like their parents.
IMO, this is way more logical, also explaining the revolutionary behavior of these workers, which doesn’t make much sense if their life was better than on the farm.
No, it’s how feudalism works, on account of how the lords don’t have to compete for the serfs because the serfs aren’t allowed to move.
Do you really believe that the pre-capitalist rural milieu consisted of smallholding farmers working their own land, rather than a mix of serfage and villeinage?
Your view of historical rural life is extremely rose-tinted. Trollope strikes again.
And your model of enclosure etc. is not how it happened; here’s my version, based on Adam Smith and rendered in the style of Rudyard Kipling.
It’s not incidental at all. It was (or so we hypothesise) a deliberate sleight of rhetorical hand by Marx to associate two distinct concepts — free exchange, and rule by the holders of capital — in the minds of everyone who used his language.
… and India. And the rest of Asia. And Africa. And Latin America. China may have seen the biggest growth, but the whole ‘Global South’ is getting in on the action. (I don’t see Africa on Fig 1(c), but they are growing too — they stay in the bottom quantiles because other lower-quantile inhabitants are growing faster, not because they’re failing to grow at all.) The measures in Section 5 might be more relevant to such subset considerations, but watch out for cases where the paper talks about country-deciles gaining or losing position in the global distribution rather than income itself — the running text sometimes mentions gains or losses without being explicit about which kind.
I’m noticing a distinct lack of, well, links to official statistics that show what you claim.
No, I’m using it in an extremely wide sense: any income derived from return on capital, where capital is in turn derived from the deferral of consumption. It’s you who brought up the narrow sense (“absentee rent[sic]”), in the process of incorrectly accusing me of using it.
That’s because I was never using the narrow definitions of “profit” and “investment” (the ones that require money and securities to change hands). If a smallholding farmer keeps back some of his corn to use as next year’s seed (deferring the consumption of eating said corn), then that corn is capital, and his yield (income) next year contains elements of wage (for his labour), rent (on his land), and profit (on his capital). All in the broad sense, because there are no paycheques, rent payments, or dividends involved, just the imputation of the value of his crop.
If there were a Stalin going around liquidating kulaks, then our hypothetical farmer wouldn’t bother to ‘invest’ in next year’s seed corn, as he knows it would be taken from him anyway. Instead, he’d just eat the seed corn now. Om nom nom, tasty corn.
Secure property rights are necessary for the (broad sense) profit to accrue to the creator of the (broad sense) capital, in the absence of which that capital will not be created because its putative creator has no incentive to defer his consumption rather than consuming now.
Narrow-sense profit and narrow-sense capital are just a thing that happens because some people are able to create more capital than they can put to work themselves, while others vice-versa, and it is in the interests of both to allow them to co-operate voluntarily on mutually agreeable, mutually beneficial terms.
And yet you speak of “particular regulations specific to the capitalist system”. Regulations, as restrictions upon trade imposed by an external force (the government), fall without the ambit of ‘private property’, and are a limitation or qualification upon it.
Would you also lift the rules that forbid individuals from enforcing it themselves or contracting others to do so? Up to and including the capability to enforce their property rights against the state? If you have read DavidF’s book, you’ll be aware that in his system property isn’t enforced by the state.
In my experience, most people who oppose “capitalism” also (e.g.) support gun control, but maybe you’re different.
There’s a game-theoretic point here in that the workers may want the ability to sign away that control, in that it’s the only way they can get enough capital. If Scrooge McDuck knows that anything he lends becomes the property of the recipient, he’s strongly incentivised to sit on his mountain of gold instead of sending it out into the world to fuel productive activity.
Again, the workers are in the situation they are in (of working with capital that they do not control) because they contracted freely and voluntarily to do so. If you want to make them sufficiently well-off that they no longer find that trade attractive, then solve that through secondary distribution; don’t just ban the trade itself, thereby making them poor and unemployable.
I think most marxists would disagree with you. For Marx, capitalism was preceded not by relatively wealthy egalitarian societies but by feudalism. The shift in the mode of production is described in Part VIII of Capital – primitive accumulation through forceful expropriation creates both a capital and laborers who must work for wages. It’s Adam Smith who attributes the creation of capitalism to improved productivity from the division of labor (Book 1 of the Wealth of Nations) and accumulation of capital by voluntary saving (“parsimony” in Book 2 or ec249’s “deferral of consumption above”). Marx acknowledges that this exists (e.g. a village blacksmith saving up funds to expand his workshop and hire laborers) but dismissed it as proceeding at a “snail’ s pace” saying it was blocked by feudal institutions (lords and guilds) and insufficient to deal with the world markets created once European ships reached the America’s. (Chapter 31 of Capital). For Marx, inequality isn’t a unintentional byproduct, it’s the direct result of force and state power. “These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”
He attributes the creation of capital to that, but his origin story for capitalism is in Chapters III and IV of Book 3. Fortunately, you don’t have to read through Smith’s rather weighty prose, because I summarised it in the form of a pastiche of Kipling’s poetry.
That’s lovely! We really should see more book reviews presented as pastiches of Kipling.
It took me a few tries to make
scan.
Through the vagaries of browser rendering, I see — (‘a’ with circumflex followed by the Euro symbol followed by right double-quote) where I think you see an em-dash. I mention that only to help the next person to read it.
I go towards libertarianism on purely utilitarian grounds. True, my personality also matches it pretty well, but the fact is that if your goal is to have people living better – we need to move towards freer markets. I don’t go to David Friedman’s levels of “free”, but only because ideas need to be tested to be properly validated, and farther they are from mainstream the bigger the unknown and the risk. For example I really like the idea of private coins and I do think they will work – but world now is much bigger than Scotland then and we have high speed transactions. So I wouldn’t say “let’s move to private coin”, partly because I don’t think it’s a properly validated idea and also because it’s too far outside the Overton window to be a productive topic of conversation. But I would definitely support “let’s also have private coin, because why not?”. Cue overton window shifting, ideas being validated in practice etc.
I also see libertarianism as needing to compromise with commons. I know David has clever ideas about how free markets can solve most/all commons issues, but they usually have two drawbacks: 1. they need a lot more freedom than we’re likely to get any time soon (again that Overtown window) and 2. they need time to reach a proper equilibrium. Plus again, we should first move to test them more.
And the third point I want to make: all this is just a second order effect of politics. We need a lot more though poured into this, otherwise it’s like trying to devise ways to run faster with a millstone attached to your leg. I don’t think politics is as unpredictable as to make research and discussion useless. To the contrary, I think the patterns are very few and depressingly repeatable. And most of them are very amenable to research. So why aren’t we seeing more “theoretical politics”? Because the first condition of doing it right is to be 100% mistake theorist, and people are people.
And to be honest, I think there’s something else I’m not seeing, to explain the complete lack of political science topics. I know it can be interesting and relevant, because I’ve very occasionally stumbled on such. I strongly suspect the tools of economics would be sufficient at least to make a very good start. And yet. Other than being way too easy to derail, I have nothing.
Good point.
I can see the value of this sort of particularistic approach, but I think there’s also a trap lurking in it: it makes your view of how politics affects people’s lives deeper, but at the expense of making it narrower. The mind naturally gravitates toward schemes to enrich the people you’re considering at the expense of the people you’re not considering.
This is not a trivial axiom. For many people, their sense of morality is not grounded in human welfare. Some people are honest about this and others rationalize. For example, people in the Middle East believe that sexual immorality offends God so fornicators, homosexuals, unmarried pregnant women all deserve to be punished. Until recently in many parts of the Western world, people agreed homosexuals needed to be punished but left fornicators alone mostly due to rationalization.
Other examples abound. Sophisticated socialists* claim that billionaires shouldn’t exist because wealth inequality distorts markets, stifles competition, and reduces opportunities for the lower class. But many self described socialists stop at “billionaires shouldn’t exist because no one should have that much wealth” – if billionaires lost all their wealth and no one else was any better off, they would be happier with that state of the world.
I should say I am not above moral rationalizations. If you successfully convinced me that say contraception reduces overall societal welfare by reducing human capital because educated women tend to use birth control more, I don’t know if I would support banning contraception. I don’t have a good reason – I could flail and gesture towards personal reproductive liberty. But without further thought this just a rationalization – why that liberty over other liberties? Obviously I am not saying any of this is true.
*I’m well aware of the formal definition of socialism but that isn’t how the word is used nowadays.
Penetrating the rock I live under is news of people boycotting — or at least saying they’ll boycott — Costco because of Costco’s mandatory facemask policy. It reminded me of a recent experience I had while standing in line for a return at Menards hardware store. Menards has implemented an even stricter policy than Costco, since not only do they require facemasks, but they are not allowing anyone under the age of 16 to enter. I watched a guy try to enter the store, get told by the security guard that facemasks were mandatory and he could purchase one for a dollar, and then he turned around and walked back out the door in a huff. A few minutes later (I was standing in line for a return) another guy came, got told the same thing, and also left in a huff. Both those guys were white and between the ages of maybe 40 and 60.
(Menards doesn’t normally have security guards as far as I know, so it seems like they hired this one just to enforce the mask policy. And she was wearing a bulletproof vest, so maybe they were anticipating some severe negative responses…)
But it got me wondering, what kinds of people are refusing to wear masks right now? Like, what is statistically likely to be true about those two guys who stormed away from Menards, based on their having stormed away?
Probably not statistically likely, but one group unlikely to benefit much from masks would be people who have already recovered from COVID-19. They’re likely both immune and unable to infect others.
People who don’t like to be told what to do, people that don’t like change, and people who don’t like wearing masks.
Er.. I think you nailed it.
Yeah, so…are these libertarian types? People who drive around with their radios permanently tuned to Rush Limbaugh, who maybe has been telling them [*] that the orders to wear facemasks have come from the liberal establishment? Those are my two first guesses but I have no basis for them other than raw intuition.
*I haven’t listened to Rush in maybe four or five years so I have no idea what kinds of things he’s saying these days.
I think there are a lot of people who dislike masks or being told to wear one without having any ideological basis for doing so. I suspect many of them are elderly or live in more isolated areas. Among white men aged 40-60 at a hardware store, there’s probably some correlation with listening to conservative media, not necessarily Rush, but I doubt it’s a great proxy. More of a personality thing. For some people, it could be the $1 thing as much as the mask. I think even most people who have issues with masks would be willing to put on a freely offered one for a few minutes, but some won’t.
Some may have elaborate conspiracies, but for many it is more like they find it instinctively off-putting and unnecessary and that’s enough. We had resistance to masks in 1918 and I’m sure that’s been the case any time they were used. I think a lot of people really find it hard to grasp the idea of wearing one to prevent asymptomatically transmitting the disease to others—the concept of being asymptomatic doesn’t register for some people.
I hope the huffing was metaphoric, otherwise it’s a pretty dangerous job for the guard.
I’m having a hard time reading this as anything but, “Look, a new outgroup! I don’t know much about this outgroup; what stereotypes should I have about them?”
For the actual answer, yeah, see FLWAB. Also much less likely to be Blue Tribe, because it’s Blue Tribe that has made masks part of its civic religion. Red, Black, and Brown tribes already have a perfectly good religion, and Gray Tribe is mostly agnostic.
I’m trying to figure out what kinds of narratives about this situation are permeating into different social veins around me and influencing people’s behaviors, mainly because I’m curious. My lifestyle is such that I don’t directly absorb much of any zeitgeist, so I’m asking others about this rather specific thing, since they already do.
Also for whatever it’s worth I don’t consider libertarians or red tribers my outgroup. It’s a bit troubling if there’s people who think C19 is a liberal conspiracy or something (no idea if there are), but I also think there’s a ton of social value in a group of people who feel fiercely defensive of American rights and freedoms, even if they aren’t perfectly rational about it.
I’m complying when specifically forced to, and mostly staying away from places that require masks. I’m aware that wearing a (non-medical) mask may partially protect other people from me, if I’m infected but asymptomatic, though will almost certainly have negligible value in protecting me from them. But:
– I don’t like sewing, and the masks I’ve ordered still have not arrived (ordered 21 April, IIRC, from 3 different sources; today is 9 May)
– wearing cloth over my mouth and nose increases my tendency to heat issues. (High of 90 expected today here.) I’ve worn a bandana as a face mask 4 times; 2 of those times left me with breathing difficulties [hyperventilation that wouldn’t stop?] after I removed it – the first time for about 15 minutes. On a fifth occassion, it looked like I’d have to stand in full sun for at least 15 minutes with the bandana, in the hopes of getting into the store before I developed heat stroke; I turned around and went home instead.
– My housemate is extremely hard of hearing and lipreads. Neither of us knows ASL. If I don’t wear a mask, I can repeat what the masked people say to her. Otherwise, she’s unable to understand anything. (And she generally insists in participating in any shopping trips.) I found a video on line explaining how to make a mask with a transparent panel over the mouth, and the materials I ordered for the purpose arrived yesterday. (Since they are also usable for making face shields, and were sold out already at some online sources, I figured they’d sell out shortly if I didn’t move.) I still may need to order more basic materials (cloth, thread, etc.) particularly if I don’t want an obvious mismatch of thread and cloth colours etc. also see “do not like sewing”.
– I’m angry about the flip flop on masks/no masks
– I’m not convinced in my gut that any homebrew mask I could breath through would actually protect those around me. (Evidence says it probably would, but my gut refuses to believe it.)
– I’d rather people actually stay 6 feet away from me, than come close to me because they think that masks will protect us. Not wearing a mask might scare a few more of the non-distancers away. (The record in the past couple of weeks was the adult cyclist on the sidewalk, who came up quietly from behind, on two non-young people, one with grey hair, and a large dog – I half wish I hadn’t been able to move fast enough to restrain the dog from taking a nice healthy bite ;-( She was quite willing to enforce social distancing ;-()
– I’m angry about several local counties (not mine, fortunately) mandating masks with insufficient time for people to acquire them – no store selling sewing materials is ‘essential’ locally, and people were given something like 3 days notice of the new requirement.
Don’t be. If people realize they have made mistakes, you want to encourage them to admit and reverse the mistakes, not to dig their heels in further.
It’s not the flip flop. It’s the smugness and the lack of nuance.
Precisely.
Also, if masks are so all-fired important that I’m required to wear one, why don’t I see any sign of any of these authorities making it easier for me to acquire even a washable homebrew cloth mask, let alone a sufficient supply of masks more likely to be effective?
They reversed the mistake. Did they ever admit it? Was there ever a public apology for giving lethally bad advice?
It’s also unclear which version is the mistake. And if it’s that easy to be mistaken about this, then you can’t be so confident in the belief du jour as to be imposing it on others with the zeal we’re seeing.
The Imperial College COVID-19 epidemiological model, which informed government policy in the UK, the US and various other countries, is falling apart: the original source code, allegedly a single file of 15,000 lines of C++ code developed over the course of a decade, has not been and won’t be relased, but they eventually released a modified version, heavily refactored by Microsoft and others, and apparently its terrible. Here are two analyses: link, link.
TL;DR
– It has non-deterministic behaviors that cause each run to yield significantly different results, the researchers try to explain this behavior away by pointing out that the model is stochastic and you are supposed to average over multiple runs anyway, but in fact it produces different results even when the PRNG seed is the same, which means that either there are bugs (in thread synchronization, most likely) or the model is chaotic and even the slight non-determinism introduced by e.g. floating-point non-associativity in multi-thread operations can induce large divergences. Averaging over chaos may or may not be statistically valid, averaging over bugs most definitely isn’t.
– It contains 450 different parameters and lots of ad-hoc rules. Most of these parameters appear to be “magic numbers” without any documented relation to ground truth data. Likewise the rules seem quite arbitrary. E.g. there is a loop that computes some value over all the places known to the model, excluding the hotels. Why are the hotels being excluded? Unknown. Maybe some of these choices might have been motivated in the papers published by the Imperial epidemology group over the last 10 years, but still it’s a terrible form of documentation and most of these choices probably make no sense anyway for the current version given that the model has been developed and adapted to different diseases and different scenarios over and over.
– Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t fit recent data, e.g. from Sweden.
On a side note, Neil Ferguson, the leader of the Imperial team, had to resign from his government advisory position after it was discovered that he and his mistress met multiple times in violation of the UK lockdown guidelines that Ferguson himself publicly advocated for. This doesn’t speak to the quality of his research, but still, rules for thee but not for me.
So, how should we update our view of the world based on this information, both specifically on COVID-19 and more broadly on the “trust the experts” issue?
before this came out, what was your baseline for code quality and documentation for decades old code?
Well, somewhat better than a single file of 15,000 lines of undocumented mess, especially for a scientific model intended to produce replicable research and inform public policy.
If this model was 15 years in the making I don’t think it was meant to do either of those – rather, it was meant to translate researcher hours into journal papers at the highest possible rate. Tests and documentation don’t publish, they perish.
Oh I understand that the incentive structure of academia is one of the causes for this hodgepodge. Still, I have read academic research code (in various computer science fields), often published alongside the papers, and it isn’t typically that bad.
Maybe CS researchers are just better at writing code even when they don’t work in the industry, maybe they want other people to use their code so that their papers collect citations, maybe the peer reviewers push harder for code releases. I don’t know if the Imperial model code quality is the standard in epidemiology research, and why this is the case.
@viVI_IViv:
Well, code in non-CS academic fields originally intended to be used by its authors only rather than to be published anywhere does tend to suck balls. Usually not 15k-LOC single files, but still I’m not astonished in the least.
My baseline is that this is typical for academic code. But that means that scientific papers which are based on computer models should be assumed faulty. They’re mostly just an encoding of the assumptions the researcher started with, plus a lot of bugs.
If they refuse to share the source code, that’s equivalent to a scientific paper that refuses to disclose its methods.
+1
And it is not equivalent, it is exactly case of refusing to explain how one arrived at some claim.
I am surprised that source code was not available (I am probably revealing to be naive).
Such research is not worth much. And “we are embarrassed about code quality” or “it is a legal quagmire” is not changing that it makes such research nearly worthless.
I think the thing about proper ivory-tower academia is that there’s probably only about 12 people on earth who might conceivably want to read or execute your code, and you’ve met all of them at various conferences.
If these people want to look at your code, they’ll email you and ask.
This leaves the code functionally accessible despite not being published.
This isn’t a great state of affairs. Academic code should be available in git repositories and postgrads should be taught to write code that doesn’t look like semicolon-rich alphabetti spaghetti.
> If these people want to look at your code, they’ll email you and ask.
I did and I got no response.
> Academic code should be available in git repositories and postgrads should be taught to write code that doesn’t look like semicolon-rich alphabetti spaghetti.
Yes. And if they are unable to do so, their research projects should include the funding required to bring someone onboard who is able to produce quality (and unit tested!) code in an accessible format.
> I did and I got no response.
I mean like, if you’re running simlulations of the accoustic coupling between the air columns in a saxophonist’s trachea and their instrument or something, and you personally know all of the several people in your field.
> their research projects should include the funding required to bring someone onboard who is able to produce quality (and unit tested!) code in an accessible format.
Agreed. But they should also bring in CS profs to teach students how to write unit tests etc. as part of their under- or postgrad studies.
Then to answer the OP’s question, I guess you are updating very little based on this information.
I don’t think criticizing the quality of the code for one (early and albeit influential) model is a productive pursuit. Frankly, the only thing that is surprising to me is that it is written in spaghetti C++ (or C as Carmack says) and not spaghetti R (biostat’s people love their R from my experience) or Fortran (mmm those arrays). The amount the model varies based on weird assumptions is unfortunate, but in reality unimportant. You’ll run it, either get a result that you think is “reasonable” and write a press release, or get one that you don’t think is “reasonable”, chock it up to a bug and iterate.
Lockdowns are a political decision, not a scientific one. People will pick a model that supports their priors – I like the IHME one because I know people who used to work there and I trust them, although it was more pessimistic then my taste initially. This model matters significantly less in political impact then the meme of Flatten The Curve.
Politically, “Scientists” or “experts” are either shields used to either make sure your marginal middle class white voter’s grandma doesn’t die (so you don’t lose their vote) or rail against as elites trying to destroy liberty or the economy (so you can mobilize your base). Governors need to own this political decision and lead – we should understand what they believe is an acceptable number of covid cases prevented by pushing an extra person to suicide, make explicit words what we’re doing by mortgaging the lives of the poor and the livelihoods of the small business owners for the benefit of the white collar class and and either end or explain apparently unequal enforcement of stay at home orders.
.
Models like this matter because politicians will back up their decisions by pointing to science. They don’t say we should quarantine because they saw this really cool animated thing on insta, they say it’s because the smart people in white coats tells them it’s the right thing to do. So maybe they don’t really base their decisions on these models, but they sure pretend to. Calling criticism of the models (and their implementation) “unproductive” sounds fairly close to saying we shouldn’t fact-check or question political decision processes.
I really appreciate this criticism of my take on models – I think this is valuable.
I don’t think that the legitimacy that was gained from this particular broken simulation is any higher then what you get from the general concept of “science” and having some talk show hosts have an episode. Idk, what does Jon Oliver think?
As a scientist I feel the duty to be especially upset about “science” being used as a cloke of authority because I know all to well how little science can actually tell us for certain. It’s a little like how professional magicians would feel if government officials went to a professional mentalist’s show and then went home and started consulting fortune tellers.
Mostly it’s personal. I’m sure politicians can and do find other ways to sell their ideas to the public, but this is my field you’re eroding for your own gain, dammit.
Science is only science when it is subjected to intense scrutiny. Any authority it has derives from the intense scrutiny and from being brutally honest about its limitations. Presenting “science” to the public as the real thing can only lead to an erosion of the real thing.
Our institutions gifted us a garbage model that’s not even self consistent, signal boosted the garbage as Official Science (TM), and made world changing policy decisions based on said garbage.
Western civilization is a zombie meme.
It’s not surprising to me that the code is shit. Academic code is always shit. At least in my experience as someone who’s spent a lot of his career trying to get it to do something useful for industry.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the results are invalid in the general case (though it seems to have done poorly with COVID, and the inter-run replicability issue is concerning); to figure that out, we’d need to see how well it does on a broad sample of epidemics. Does that data exist?
They published papers based on it, so one would hope they evaluated it against real data, but each paper likely used a different ad-hoc version of the codebase and none of the experiments can be really replicated. As far as we know, they could have overfitted the model to each scenario by tweaking the magic numbers and ad-hoc rules.
So much this. ….the things I’ve seen. Horror stories. It’s a wonder we know anything about the world.
It’s not as bad as it seems. Sue Denim’s review in particular is quite uncharitable – it’s a decade old software for a research project that wasn’t that big of a priority. She/he comes from from a background where both expertise and budgets are incomparably higher. Total compensation for a google developer in a middle management position is probably over the budget for that whole project.
I am pretty unsettled by the model not being able to match Sweden’s numbers. That’s strange, considering one of the complaints is that it has too many parameters to fiddle (which I don’t find odd – reality has many parameters to fiddle).
I’m not at all worried about it not being deterministic. I can easily imagine a scenario in which several threads model separate populations in parallel, and the exact moment interaction happens influences end result. Say you make a one day visit from city A to city B, where A is clean and B is infected. A few microseconds of cpu time equivalent of a couple of days of modeled time catch B in different points of its exponential curve, so what you take back to A can be dramatically different. Just like in reality. Catch is to model enough cities and repeat enough times to get an idea of likely results.
That’s supposed to be something the RNG decides, hence determined by the seed. If the determiner of ‘time passed in simulation’ is ‘elapsed processor time’, rather than being an in-simulation variable, You Are Doing It Wrong. The visit to B should use B’s state at a time specified by the model, not some state that B had at some point but who knows when.
(Though I don’t believe the Imperial model is designed in such an Egregiously Wrong way; it’s probably just common-or-garden race conditions, uninitialised variables, aliased pointers, and other such heisenbugs.)
How is this relevant to the claim that “the model is too poor to be acceptable as an input to policy”? Sure, it may explain why the model is so poor, but Google don’t use all that expertise and budget on a whim, they use it because buggy code produces garbage answers. Sue is only uncharitable if she’s saying “this code is buggy, therefore its authors are Bad People”, which I didn’t see in the linked piece; what I did see is “the authors are claiming that the bugs don’t matter to the science, which makes them Bad People”, which I think is an entirely reasonable criticism.
Nonono. If you have a real multitasking system, order of operations is specifically not guaranteed. It can vary with … god, pretty much anything. Very interesting things happen at high loads, and it’s actually a frequent mistake to assume that things happen in the same order when you run a test run and when you actually put the system under production load. You specifically shouldn’t assume that.
Nah. Every production code is buggy. Most have known bugs forgotten in Jira tasks lists for years. This doesn’t make every software you use garbage – just means it sometimes fails in some ways. Just like, I guess, everything does. Trick is to work well enough to be useful. Think earlier Windows versions – they were buggy as hell, and still the best and most uses OS on the planet.
And a minor quibble. As far as I can tell (there’s no written rule) charitable is used here to mean “consider the best possible interpretation of a text before responding to it”. You’re not obliged to take it seriously, of course, but the simple act of putting it in your head tends to clear up a lot of misunderstandings before they happen.
Just to be clear: you don’t need to explain that to me; I’m a Linux kernel hacker.
But you know, we have these things called “spinlocks” and “mutexes” and “RCU” and what-have-you, specifically to constrain the order of operations in those ways which matter to the correctness of the output. If your system is written correctly, the execution order should be — well, CPU designers would call it “architecturally invisible”. If the output depends on it, that’s very nearly the definition of a race condition. (And something else you “shouldn’t assume” is that the result will be in any way sane; I don’t know the details of the C++ concurrency model but in C we say that if you do something that’s not defined by the rules of the abstract machine — invoke undefined behaviour — then it is “legal for the compiler to make demons fly out of your nose”.)
Given that Unix exists, I don’t think any version of Windows has ever been the best OS on the planet. (“Most used” depends on how you measure it. Unixen tend to get used for anything important, except for some stuff on mainframes that runs under MVS or VM/CMS.)
And y’know that open-source trick that we use to make stuff like Linux demonstrably less buggy than proprietary competitors? Yeah, we copied that idea from science. Shame they stopped doing it themselves.
I know the definition of rhetorical charity, but I don’t quite see how to construct a better interpretation of “this [bug] isn’t a problem running the model in full as it is stochastic anyway”. Except if you interpret “stochastic” to mean “a steaming pile of bugs and BS”, in which case, sure, this bug doesn’t make the output any more garbage than it was already. But that doesn’t exactly invalidate Suedenim’s “this model should not be used for science or policymaking” conclusion.
And however you interpret buggy code, it’s still buggy; I don’t see where interpretation and charity come into that at all. (No-one’s suggesting the Imperial researchers deliberately wrote a buggy model.) The only way to steelman the code is to fix the bugs in it to find out what it was intended to do… at which point you’ve changed the text, not merely your interpretation of it.
So please explain to me in detail what’s “uncharitable” about Suedenim’s review.
@ec429:
> we have these things called “spinlocks” and “mutexes” and “RCU” and what-have-you, specifically to constrain the order of operations in those ways which matter to the correctness of the output.
Get with the times — that’s the old slow way of doing it! Now-a-days we don’t bother with all that locking nonsense, we just let the strongest results win:
Hogwild!: A Lock-Free Approach to Parallelizing Stochastic Gradient Descent
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/papers/hogwildTR.pdf
> (No-one’s suggesting the Imperial researchers deliberately wrote a buggy model.)
Oh, so you mean Hogwild! isn’t the current state-of-the-art in epidemiological modeling? Then nevermind.
Which is to say, I agree with ec429 here: if your modeling routine produces non-deterministic results and you aren’t writing a peer-reviewed paper explaining why this is actually a good thing, you’ve got a major bug, and the default assumption should be that the bug is large enough to invalidate anything you would otherwise call “results”. Yes, this may mean you should ignore the results of a lot of academic models, and for good reason.
Well, I guess we’re stuck on whether order of operations matters for correctness of output or not, in their case. A charitable review would spend at least a bit of time to say why that’s not so, instead of automatically assuming they lied and demolishing them.
In principle, I agree with Radu, a parallellized simulation can be non-deterministic, and variations in output doesn’t necessarily mean that the output is not correct. For all its spinlocks and mutexes, Linux is plenty non-deterministic – but hopefully in places where it doesn’t matter, or where there are no implicit guarantees.
I didn’t read the review, so I won’t have an opinion on whether the review is uncharitable or not. But if we are charitable and pretend C and C++ actually have a “concurrency model”, it is one that allows every thread to write anywhere, and then provide some easily circumvented tools to help the programmer out. This is incredibly hard to get right, I’ve been programming computers for 30 years and I try to avoid this kind of parallelism wherever possible. It is defensible for projects with Google- or Linux-kernel scale resources, but I’m skeptical that epidemiologists should enter into this kind of territory.
And when someone writes a program as a single multi-Kloc file, it is a further sign of bad programming practices, and an indication that the programmer should learn better discipline before being let loose on multithreaded coding.
Even though the program may appear to work, there is the difference between a program with obviously no faults and no obvious faults. A huge block of multithreaded C++ is almost by definition in the second category – at best.
Sorry, that’s too CW, and only allowed in threads divisible by 4711. 🙂
@Ketil:
FWIW, the C11 standard introduced an explicit memory/concurrency model, and various atomics, threading etc. features. (Which the Linux kernel doesn’t use, because they don’t match our needs; we have our own, written in asm for each arch, along with a machine-readable memory model to try and prove whether they work or not.)
I believe C++11 did something similar, but I don’t know anything about it as I refuse to touch C++ with a bargepole.
I agree with you, though, that these epidemiologists don’t look like the sort of programmers I’d trust with threads. (I’m not sure I’d even trust them with Go CSP.)
If this place had upvotes, you’d get mine just for quoting Tony Hoare 🙂
> It is defensible for projects with Google- or Linux-kernel scale resources, but I’m skeptical that epidemiologists should enter into this kind of territory.
The UN predicts an economic impact of $2 trillion due to COVID-19.
Pandemics this severe are perhaps once in a century events.
Maybe we should be giving epidemological teams Linux-scale resources.
How much is spent on kernel development, anyway?
More than 10 million, less than a billion – probably. Commercial, of course, open source is a different beast. And you can get away easily with much less, if you just want a small OS.
But, like I said in a different comment, problem isn’t the cost. It’s the complete lack of a market for this kind of things. Commons problem, yet again.
@Radu Floricica:
> I guess we’re stuck on whether order of operations matters for correctness of output or not, in their case. A charitable review would spend at least a bit of time to say why that’s not so
The original author has a followup critique that adds more explanation of why run-to-run consistency matters:
“In an uncontrollable model like ICL’s you can’t get repeatable results and if the expected size of the change is less than the arbitrary variations, you can’t conclude anything from the model. And exactly because the variations are arbitrary, you don’t actually know how large they can get, which means there’s no way to conclude anything at all.”
“Averaging samples to eliminate random noise works only if the noise is actually random. The mishmash of iteratively accumulated floating point uncertainty, uninitialised reads, broken shuffles, broken random number generators and other issues in this model may yield unexpected output changes but they are not truly random deviations, so they can’t just be averaged out. Taking the average of a lot of faulty measurements doesn’t give a correct measurement. ”
https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-model/
Ensemble models are really useful things, and can be spookily accurate in certain cases. But behind the scenes they make a lot of assumptions about the cause of run-to-run differences. Once you’ve established that you are dealing with race conditions and memory corruption, all bets are (or at least should be) off. It’s not impossible for bugs like this to be benign, but it should never be the default presumption.
If it really is one programmer writing a single program, that only they will ever use or maintain, what difference does it make how many files the code is broken into?
And that does describe a lot of academic computing, and some of my own engineering computing. The problem is with code written and validated by one amatuer coder(*) being used for critical policy decisions. If you do that, you can’t trust the results no matter how elegant the code or how faithfully the coder adopted the “this is how professional coding teams do it” practices.
* Or a series of amateurs each picking up the project abandoned by the previous one. Serial coding monogamy?
@ec429:
Is there a way I might contact you through a separate channel? I have some kernel internals issues which are causing me pain and have exceeded my ability to understand.
@Garrett: sure, just email {my username} at cantab dot net. Can’t guarantee I’ll be able to help, though; the kernel is a big place and there’s lots of bits of it I don’t understand either 😉
It would be politically untenable for a government to pay for this kind of thing until it is too late to matter.
Remember the story of France’s 2009 H1N1 preparations, which got publicly lambasted and resulted in France cutting back in preparedness by the time COVID came around?
Project with logical management of code are easier to manage.
And it is not such program, it was developed by many people, each person building on previous work.
@ec429 What do you think about the following model? (Inspired by one of the Twitter comments, though I’m not sure if this is what they meant.)
A thread pool is used. It’s non-deterministic which thread does which task. Each thread has its own PRNG (to avoid having to synchronize). Whenever a task needs a random number, it gets one from its thread’s PRNG.
No undefined behavior is invoked at any point. I don’t know if it’s technically considered a race condition, but the results should be valid (assuming that the code is otherwise valid): it shouldn’t matter which PRNG a particular pseudo-random number comes from.
Then again, if changes to the PRNG seed or the execution order cause major changes to the result, it’s very suspicious that the code is not otherwise valid.
Explaining why someone couldn’t do better than to implement a crappy model in crappy code, doesn’t make it any less crappy.
Yes, and the ability to generate numbers that match reality is what distinguishes good models from crappy ones. If you put good data into what looks like crappy code and get a crappy output, there’s a pretty good chance you’re dealing with a crap model.
*shrug* Haven’t reviewed the code myself. I’m just responding to the criticism I know a bit about. And yeah, the Sweden thing fails an outside view check, and that’s a lot more serious.
This is pretty normal for models that try to “build up” to the phenomenon you are studying from the interactions of many small parts (like statistical mechanics models of gases or agent based models of populations) instead of just black box fitting an enormous family of functions to data (like a neural network).
The specific way in which the different interactions are linked together is a strong constraint which usually means that wide ranges of behaviors are impossible in the model. They wouldn’t be impossible if you used something very flexible. This means overfitting is usually not as severe as a problem as in black box models. It’s typical for the effective number of parameters that control the states of the model that correspond to what you actually go out and measure to be much smaller than the number of actual parameters.
The tradeoff is you often won’t have very good fits. From a scientific point of view that’s actually useful, it’s easier to rule out your model as missing some important dynamics when it can’t fit. But from the point of view of short-term extrapolation or prediction, it might be less useful than a flexible black box.
From the link:
No, the results of the research don’t necessarily belong to the taxpayer. Many things developed with taxes do not belong to the government. That’s not how government funded research works.
I checked this paper to see the funding;
The UK Medical Research Council is an NGO; the UK Department for International Development is a government agency; the NIHR is a government agency, but the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Modelling Methodology was started april 2020, so they clearly don’t own the research, either; Community Jameel is an NGO.
It’s not clear who funded this code; if it was made during 10 years, that means there was a long string of different government and non-government funding. Some parts were even written for free by interns, extra hours worked by researchers, etc.
People who work for a single company with a stable salary don’t understand how research funding works.
The responsibility of the policies instituted as a result of the model belong to the politicians. The code probably was terrible, and not up to industry standard. But researchers probably don’t get paid even half the industry standard.
True. That part was a bad take, but still, publicly releasing the code used for academic publications is definitely a best practice, and government funding agencies can and should mandate taxpayer-funded research code to be released.
But politicians are not, and cannot be expert at everything. Trump was severely mocked, and probably rightly so, when he rambled about disinfecting the body from the inside, because he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. But if politicians have a duty to listen to the experts on scientific issues, then the experts have a duty to get the facts right.
And if we live in a society where predicting the course of world-crashing pandemics is valued less than predicting which ads people are more likely to click on, then I say we have a problem.
I can’t see anything at your link.
Politicians are not experts, but they should still factor in the uncertainty. That’s the job; making important decisions without having perfect data. If we had a crystal ball that told us what the results will be, it would be so much easier to make policy decisions.
If a stock experts tells me that airlines are great investments right now because [reasons I don’t understand], I should be able to use *common sense* to deduce whether what he’s telling me is realistic. In any case, the decision to buy or not buy belongs to me.
Just a Joker meme, apparently the link is broken.
Not as much “valued less” as “harder to monetize”. There aren’t many buyers for pandemic models, and probably more important, there isn’t a market where you can sell incrementally better and/or cheaper pandemic models. So… not path from you garage to a prosperous business.
Just another commons problem. 10 billion beneficiaries, give or take, many people who would be willing to work on solutions if properly paid but… nothing in between.
> which means that either there are bugs (in thread synchronization,which means that either there are bugs (in thread synchronization, most likely) or the model is chaotic and most likely) or the model is chaotic even the slight non-determinism introduced by e.g. floating-point non-associativity in multi-thread operations can induce large divergences
With respect, I disagree with the implications here. A multi-threaded stochastic simulation WILL almost always produce non-determinism, even if the thread syncrhronization and locking is absolutely perfect. The effort to avoid this is usually some combination of heroically obscure and/or performance-crushing code, and if you bite these bullets the LARGE costs are usually 100% scientificially pointless.
In a large stochastic simulation, the tiniest divergence even once (due to e.g. floating point issues, or my core was pre-empted to handle an interrrupt and yours wasn’t) quickly leads to divergences as large as if you had chosen a different random seed in the first place. Stochastic models always have a range of outcomes: calling this “chaotic” is either unreasonably pejogative (if you mean ‘chaotic’ in a colloquilal sense of ‘variable’) or simply false (if you have a more technical meaning in mind).
The commonly referenced non-determinism critiques of this code (I am only addressing those criticisms) have a core of correctness, but are basically naive. Give me a criticism that of someone (however credentialled) who has worked on a large multi-threaded schochastic simulation. The rules (well some of them) are just different there.
We WANT to know the range of outcomes correctly programmed model produces under different randomization. Adding more randomization via OS thread scheduling is probably irrelevant (scientifically). But if it’s not for some subtle reasons (and we are talking about really subtle here) … the question becomes how many tens of millions of $ and decades do you have to get it ‘right’???
The model was sold as (and is intentionally) deterministic. Running the model with the same inputs gives answers off by hundreds of thousands of deaths.
They’re not running the model and giving us their probability density function. They’re running seeds, taking the average of garbage and selling it as Gospel truth which is then parroted by the media
Not really. From the first review, a quote from documentation:
It’s just the reviewer that assumes the model should be deterministic (without giving very good reasons) and proceeds to judge it through this lens.
I much agree with pjs – it’s complicated to make an efficient, deterministic parallel simulation, and nothing to be gained from it. Imagine for example you have a crowdsourced version, with nodes running in computers all over the net. No reason this wouldn’t be stochastically valid, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be deterministic – at any point somebody can switch off their laptop unpredictably.
It depends. If each node runs independent simulations starting from different seeds, then averaging them is statistically valid, because you are averaging (approximately) independent random samples from the same probability distribution.
This might not be always practicable, sometimes a model is so big and computationally expensive that even a single run needs to be split over different cores or nodes, and in these cases guaranteeing exact determinism can be hard and impose a performance penalty. But you can’t naively assume that the effects of this kind of non-determinism will cancel out on average, they may or may not, depending on the details. This is something that requires an analysis, which they didn’t do here, and in fact if I understand correctly, this isn’t even the intended behavior.
Myself, I never even bothered to try to write any multi-threaded simulation. I don’t think the effort it’d take would be worth more than just launching n single-thread processes with n different random seed (well, at least in the kind of systems I simulate).
I think a more important aspect is that the added complexity of the code itself makes it much more likely that the programmer introduces errors.
> Running the model with the same inputs gives answers off by hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The code is buggy if single-threaded runs, with the same seed, compiled the same way, give different results. The code is apparently buggy in this respect, and to this extent the criticism is fair. But the criticism also explictly calls then out for nondeterminism with multi-threading, run (and presumably compiled) elsewhere, and so forth.
If you have the tiniest nondeterminism perturbing a decision even if only once, and either as a genuine bug or in runs where it is to be expected, you often get outputs roughly as variable as if you change seed. If if it’s inherent in the model that that’s variation is tens of thousands, so be it; that’s a model characteristic. But it’s misleading to imply that the bug/nondeterminism is *especially* awful – because look how dramatically the results vary! Rather, given an inherently variable model, this usually just reiterates the fact that there was some nondeterminism.
The point is not that there are bugs in this particular piece of code: there are bugs everywhere, even in security-critical mass-deployed software components (e.g. OpenSSL, not to mention the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco).
The point is that if this is going to be as good as it gets in terms of our ability to model the world, at least in the foreseeable future, then as a society we should come to terms with the fact that we know much less that we think we know.
I don’t think it’s even a matter of academia vs. industry: quants get paid a s**tload of money and I’m sure their models look tidy and pass all the nice regression tests, yet in the 2008 financial crisis they got their predictions wrong by several orders of magnitude and crashed the economy.
Yes, but if the model is so sensitive to tiny perturbations, chaotic in the technical sense, then what happens if you change a little bit the magic numbers or a few rules of its very complicated logic? That variation certainly wouldn’t average out over multiple runs.
> Yes, but if the model is so sensitive to tiny perturbations, chaotic in the technical sense, then what happens if you change a little bit the magic numbers or a few rules of its very complicated logic? That variation certainly wouldn’t average out over multiple runs.
Not confidently sure what you mean by ‘chaotic in the technical sense’, but if I guess your intent correctly my answer is: there’s no evidence or suggestion or faintest reason to believe that their simulation is so. Do you have an argument or citations otherwise?
Nothing I’ve read makes it sound as anything other than a regular schochastic simulation with a certain (albeit wide) range of outcomes from run to run, but with no statistical abnormalities. For other reasons (NOT scientific reasons) we’d very much like same-seed, same machine, one-thread, runs to be replicable and it sounds as though they failed that which is worrying. But ‘techincally’ ‘chaotic’? Please justify.
If your model simulation gives different results in different runs (e.g. by changing the seed or anything else), them reporting other than mean +/- standard deviation is egregious malpractice. BUT that’s not a _code quality_ issue.
Edit: if by chaotic you mean that a tiny perturbation can change the results a lot, then yes, but a large stochastic simulation is either perfectly deterministic or chaotic (in this sense): it’s rare to find much in between. It’s super rare to find a complex multi-threaded simulation that is deterministic (and thus not ‘chaotic’ in this rather uninteresting sense) unless it’s coded to be basically as slow as one thread or else rewrites the entire operating system.
…and starting from the same premise I find only praise for the authors. They were, after all, the only ones that actually bothered to put years of effort into developing a model at all. I kinda understand where Dominic Cummings is coming from: we need a lot more physicists* employed in government organizations if we want to solve this kind of problems.
*) he’s a bit obsessed with physicists as being best scientists, but pretty much any numbers profession works.
This reminds me of the ClimateGate release.
Not the emails and conspiracy theories: but the observation that the modeling software was hard to understand, opaque, and very poorly structured.
I suspect that is a regular problem for academic research projects.
Exactly — the first thing I thought about ClimateGate was “if you’re going to distrust computational climatology because of that, you better distrust pretty much all computational physics…”
Note that research code is uniformly awful. One would have hoped that they cleaned things up before it entered use as a policy tool, but it’s not exactly surprising that they didn’t. The thing you have to ask is “who’s going to pay to fix the code?”
Don’t they have grad students? (I kid, but only barely.)
That’s probably who wrote a lot of it in the first place.
Why is this tolerated? I could not turn in anything that looks like this at my job. My personal projects are exceptionally well documented because I know I’m going to have to look back at them later.
Why is it just expected that “serious experts” are going to produce junk code?
Because noone is willing to pay scientists to write high quality throw away code.
“Throw-away code”? I thought this model was supposed to be the fruits of a decade of development and use. (And possibly more than that, since there’s a suggestion it started out as a translation of an earlier FORTRAN codebase.)
This isn’t something that was hacked together for one paper, this model is supposed to be the foundation of an entire research programme, examining the effects of all kinds of variations in parameters, and providing a base on which to model additional hypothesised mechanisms. Any field that considers this kind of junk to be adequate “science” should have its funding taken away and given to someone who’s not a cargo cult.
It’s generation after generation of throw-away code produced by different students, each of whom don’t have to go back to it.
So somebody comes to the lab, they get the work of the freshly graduated student, have to figure it out despite the shitty documentation, and do the same thing to the next student. Unless there is one person who is permanently assigned to the group (like an on-staff programmer), nobody is responsible for the continuity of the code. So yes, it’s throw-away even if it gets picked out of the garbage every time it gets thrown.
There is no continuity in such projects, since you rarely get to keep the same person on the same project; thus, nobody has an incentive to make it possible to continue the project by documentation etc.
Sure, that’s the mechanism. But some people in this thread seem to be talking like it’s a justification, that academia’s inability to do better makes it acceptable.
If your institutional structure isn’t up to getting computers to do anything better than GIGO, put the fancy models away and stick to science you can do without the computer; or use off-the-shelf models written by someone who’s not part of your shitty broken system. Don’t carry on as normal, pretending not to notice that the planes don’t land.
“Destroy the old world, forge the new world”, sounds good, but if you don’t remove the reasons why the old world didn’t work, you won’t forge a better one.
Academia works badly, but it works. Don’t try to destroy it.
And if you try to cheap out and expect top quality stuff, that’s how you get GIGO. Garbage Pay, Garbage Results.
What does the tertiary eductaion of an epidemologist look like?
Do biologists whose work impacts clinical practice but who aren’t themselves clinicians get the ‘If you get this wrong then people die’ talk at university?
POM-dependant models might be an acceptable tradeoff when the question is about some obscure bit of astrophysics or something else where the results don’t have an immediate impact on us.
It’s using the products of that culture as a load-bearing part of society that’s the problem.
I don’t want to destroy academia. I just want it (or more precisely, any given field of it) to get laughed out of town whenever it starts claiming knowledge and certainty far beyond what its methods actually support; instead of getting respected because it’s Science Don’cha Know and that makes everything it says gospel and we have to do massive iatrogenic harm to our civilisation because the nice egghead’s model says otherwise we’ll all die of global warming / pandemic / whatever the next eschaton ends up being.
Precisely; which is why you should reduce scope so that you can achieve quality within your means, rather than lying to the funding agency and saying “yes, we can totally build a complex and intricate simulation model on a budget of thruppenny-ha’penny and half a grad student”. But every academic right now does the latter because all the other academics they’re competing for funding with tell the same lie, so we have to change the incentives of either the academics or the grant agencies, and loudly and publicly mocking bad science sounds like it might go some way towards achieving that.
I agree with this.
But this does sound like “destroy current world” to me. They do some models, and those models are not that good, and yes, you shouldn’t make decisions about locking the country on that basis. But at least they do something. You’re suggesting they do nothing until a new world is built.
EDIT:
@Lambert
Exactly. It’s the politicians who want to give the responsibility to somebody, instead of taking it for themselves.
Also, using bad models is still better than a dartboard.
A dartboard doesn’t inspire false confidence.
@ana53294
Does academia work? A very high percentage of papers appear to be p-hacked to produce false results, which is basically cheating. The supposed mechanism to catch such cheating, replication, is not actually often enough to embarrass the cheaters.
Wouldn’t we be better off if far fewer shitty papers were published just to fill the resumes of ‘scientists’ and instead, the focus would be on actually figuring out what is true?
This doesn’t require destroying academia, but rather, reform.
@Aapje:
The thing is, because academia depends so much on the work of grad students, a lot of work is bound to be shitty, because it takes time, mistakes and effort to figure out how to do good work. It’s much harder to do good work from the beginning when most science is stumbling around in the dark trying to figure things out.
But then, the thing is that the most innovative research is done by young people, mostly. So you do need to hire young, inexperienced people, and throw them in the pond. The fact that so many of them will sink, producing shitty research, is compensated by the few who learn how to swim.
I agree p-hacking is bad, and it comes from bad incentives. But I think that most people in academia are making honest efforts to figure things out, and p-hacking, in many cases, comes from a lack of knowledge of statistics.
@ana53294
So isn’t the logical step to hire professional mathematicians (in permanent jobs) and have those work with the scientists to improve their methodology?
These people don’t have to be young, as their job isn’t to come up with hypotheses or such.
@Aapje
They’re called ‘professors’.
Professors in fields other than mathematics and computer science, generally don’t have better math and coding skills than do their grad students.
Well, a bit of this.
But also, professors tend to stick to what they know. Going around stumbling in the dark is miserable, and that’s why grad students do it. So if you want innovation, you do need grad students.
But I do agree that we should have more permanent professionals, who do have an incentive to build systems that last. There’s just no funding for that. In fact, many funders prohibit funding going towards permanent on-staff members of the team (and how will their salaries get funded?).
But is it really a failure of academia? I honestly don’t expect people in their specialty to have the knowledge to properly re-code to standards a software this large. And I also don’t expect every research program to hire outside developers to build their software to standards from the beginning. Neither is a realistic real world option.
Problem happened when you get to use this to make policy decisions. At the point where it started to give results and it got to be used in a “break glass, use tool” capacity, somebody outside academia should have paid for the conversion to a professional tool. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect the recipients for the grant to say “yeah, you paid us for the 10 years of work, we think we got it, but we need a bunch of money to completely rewrite the main tool”. Not only they won’t, they can’t. Somebody else needs to come and make sure a research project is ready to be used as a policy tool, and this needs to be semi-official and funded.
And I think I need to add this to every comment: They were the ones to try. Don’t shit on the ones to try.
@John Schilling: Even that’s an understatement. IME most of the academic code that doesn’t suck is written by youngsters.
But the lab does have permanent staff: Neil Ferguson has been working at the Imperial College for the last 20 years. He should have been the person responsible for the continuity of this codebase, or he should have hired somebody to do it if he didn’t have the will or skill to do it himself.
The problem is that the incentives in academia are set in such way that it is not personally advantageous to the actors involved to do quality research: the grad students try to maximize the number of paper they can publish while toiling at the minimum wage in order to pad their CVs before moving to greener pastures, the professors get to put their names on these papers and use them to pad their grant proposals for the next round of funding.
Replication, which ought to be the main quality control of scientific research, is not practiced to a sufficient extent (e.g. I’m quite certain that no paper based on the Imperial model has been replicated, because it would have been impossible before the code was released, and even with the code in its current state it would be extermely hard to replicate anything).
The result is that many, maybe most, papers are garbage: we don’t become any more knowledgeable about the world by funding their production, if anything, we might become actually more misinformed and mislead by a sense of false confidence.
This is particularly terrible if the fruits of this “research” are used to directly inform public policy, but is bad even when they are not. The world might not fall if astrophysicists get their models of the Big Bang wrong, but as taxpayers, why are we paying them to do get them wrong?
> Professors in fields other than mathematics and computer science, generally don’t have better math and coding skills than do their grad students.
Nit: I have no confidence that professors of computer science are good at writing code, either. A lot of their research tends to be … esoteric. One of the most disappointing interviews I performed was of someone with a Ph.D in computer science. (I’m also a terrible interviewer)
@ana53294
There is no funding issue. Academia right now is wasting a ton of money on producing shitty papers. They could instead spend that same amount of money on producing fewer, but better papers (where more of those are replications)
It would mean testing fewer (hopefully the most important) hypotheses and getting good answers, rather than producing lots of papers that are barely better than flipping a coin.
It would require changing the funding model and there would of course be winners and losers. That’s what happens when you reform things, you can’t change things significantly and yet keep things the same.
@Lambert:
Doesn’t it?
If it’s a project the student expects to go back to, they are much better. So, code written by a core group that does research on the same topic, and maintained by a professor or whatever, is good quality.
Most students don’t get funding to continue with the project they were working on. They know that they’ll do this project, and it’s unlikely they will return to it again. Most projects end when the money runs out, not when they’re done and finished. In this scenario, it doesn’t make sense to do industry grade code for 10-20% of the salary.
A UK PhD student earns minimum wage; 17000 USD/year (14000 GBP). It’s below a living wage.
Let me ask you this: what kind of administrative software do you use at work? For managing hours, personnel, budgets, projects, paying bills, that kind of thing?
In my experience, these all suck in ….interesting ways, and while I have never – and hope I never have to – look at their guts, I am absolutely convinced that many corporate programmers are not held to any kind of standards, other than the program must kinda work for someone who is intimately familiar with it.
My experience from working as a programmer in industry is admittedly a bit dated, but we were among the best in class because we used “advanced” tools like version control. Really.
Even if the software was trash, the recommendation to lockdown was correct.
IIRC, the original recommendation (using magic numbers set up to model flu pandemics) was not to lock down.
Then they realised that COVID-19 was much more likely to require treatment in an ICU and ventilation than flu so they changed the relevant parameters and decided to lock down in order to ‘flatten the curve’.
I’ve been thinking about starting a programming blog, and I was wondering if anyone had advice about hosting providers, blogging software, etc.
Criteria:
* Software/provider has a decent security record and is easy to set up and maintain
* Editor supports at least markdown style features, and ideally WSIWYG support with headers, links, code blocks with syntax highlighting, etc. Math support via Latex would be nice but probably asking too much
* Ability to embed Javascript or WASM to provide an interactive demo directly in the page would be nice
* Separate domain name for branding purposes and ability to migrate hosting providers should it prove necessary
* Cheap
* Not needed: I don’t plan to support comment sections on my blog in order to simplify administration, prevent spam, etc.
Does anyone have suggestions? I think Github Pages fulfills most of my criteria, but I’m not sure where a good place to get my own domain name is, and I don’t know if there’s a good editor/blog software to use with gh-pages, or if I would be better off with something else.
If you don’t want to support comments, seems like it would be easier not to bother with blogging software at all. Static HTML is low-maintenance and secure, and can be trivially generated from Markdown or what have you.
In particular, you can run almost any blogging software locally and export to static pages.
I would definitely recommend GitHub Pages based on your criteria. Apparently you can get Latex support w/ Kramdown (the default markup for GP) pretty easily: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26275645/how-to-support-latex-in-github-pages
Pretty sure you can support comments too with some hoop-jumping, but who would possibly want to do that
Big +1 if comments are not included or hosted externally (Google “Various ways to include comments on your static site”)
I am happy about Namesilo – seems to have domains without hidden costs, so far was unproblematic. It seems good for people with minimal[0] technical experience (I needed to look a bit and click “”setup for Github pages” somewhere what completed configuration).
Google domains looked promising but I skipped it to reduce risks of “Google randomly banned your Google account” and to avoid adding payment method to my Google account.
Many other sellers refused to provide clear info about real costs or had hidden costs that I managed to notice.
“first year 0.01$, second year and every subsequent – 50$, 100$ to migrate” scam is common. Bundling unwanted services with extra cost is even more common.
Here I am unsure, I ended hand-crafting HTML for my personal site (mostly because I wanted to do this way and wanted to remind myself how basic HTML works)
[0] Person who writes blog about programing is likely above it
I started with GH pages using Hugo and migrated to Netlfiy. I found it a lot easier to set up SSL with. Bought a domain through google domains, had no issues. You should be able to add MathJax, although I’m not sure how well that would work with the rendering engine.
In my case setting up HTTPS for Github Pages required a single button press in settings (either at domain provider (Namesilo) or in repo settings, I don’t remember).
EDIT: It may be a good Namesilo thing, they had button somewhere “configure for Github Pages”
If you can set up https and it works, just use GH pages. If not, look at netlify, it might also just work.
Why does something like this need https? The content is static and one-way, the only information coming from the client is “I want to read this blog” and “I want to read this specific post”, and the former is leaked anyway even with https.
Iunno, maybe I’m just a grognard who wishes the Web still looked like this, but I’ve never quite seen the point of “HTTPS Everywhere!!!”
Better to have TLS and not need it than need it but not have it.
And I don’t trust the average non-grognard (on either the client or server side) to decide whether they need it or not.
Even apart from all the usual reasons, a lot of browser features like service workers are blocked for non-HTTPS pages (and for good reason too).
Unencrypted pages are getting more warnings, AFAIK encrypted pages get SEO boost, eliminates MITM attacks (not only exotic ones! It includes ad injection on some wifis), leaking data using other channels may be finally fixed in the future.
Both of those are “because someone else is telling you to use https”, not reasons why using https is intrinsically a good thing.
And most of those browser features are utterly unnecessary, especially for things you can do with simple static HTML. (What part of ‘grognard’ didn’t you understand ;))
And if you’re serving a blog about, iunno, homosexuality and you don’t want your readers to accidentally out themselves to their conservative Christian communities, that might be a reason to use https.
But a programming blog? I still don’t see it.
It didn’t occur to you that a programming blog with demos might want to use service workers?
At any rate, the discussion is going nowhere. I see these as nudges to do things that any reasonable person should be doing anyway, whereas you seem to be coming at it from the perspective of “they’ll pry HTTP from my cold dead hands”.
I see it as a bit like answering the question of “do I really have to wear a seatbelt when driving” with “well apart from the obvious safety reasons, the car won’t let you go above 60mph if the seatbelt isn’t plugged in” and getting the response “well who would want to go that fast anyway?” The entire premise of the debate seems unreasonable to me. (Of course actual cars don’t work like that, this is just an analogy)
If the seatbelt were so heavy that it halved your miles-per-gallon, maybe. Cycles and RAM are cheap but that doesn’t make them free; and complexity is neither.
Not unless they were demos of how to use service workers, no. And there were plenty of things “programming blog” could mean that weren’t about front-end web programming, and I didn’t notice that the person mentioning service workers was the thread OP.
I mean, I did say ‘grognard’; I’m not quite sure what else you were expecting. If you don’t feel that the grognard perspective is one you’re interested in hearing from, that’s entirely up to you.
@ec429
It probably doesn’t, but it should have it anyway so we can tell the normies “if you’re using a site without HTTPS then Bad Things might happen and you should be scared” without caveats.
@Loriot
I have no earthly idea what a “service worker” is, but I’ll bite that bullet. Yes, take those away.
Let me explain why I say that, as a very-non-web programmer: the web is broken, and these (mis)features are big contributors.
I used to regularly read two websites on the train. One was Cracked, and the other was my local newspaper’s website (I got tired of dealing with the printed copy, and delivery was really iffy that I’d get it before going to work anyway.)
I no longer read either one, and cancelled my subscription to the newspaper. Because their websites stopped working on my phone. This wasn’t, like, petulance or principle or anything. I just couldn’t consume their content at a convenient time and sort of gave up. Cracked would typically hang about 1/3 of the way through reading the listicle, and often I couldn’t even get the news story to pull up without the browser tab reloading three times and giving up.
Do you recognize what’s the same between these sites? They’re both serving me textual content! Admittedly, I’m using an old phone (Windows Phone), but again: these are both text. You shouldn’t need the latest and greatest to consume something that can be expressed 100% in ASCII. My phone is still light-years beyond the computer I had in the late ’90s, which was capable of serving me simple text. Yes, there are typically some images with either one, but those weren’t usually necessary, and besides, serving static images alongside the text is also a long-solved problem that my late-’90s computer could also do.
What happened to both of them was they kept ladling more webdev horseshit onto their pages until my phone choked on it. So I couldn’t consume 2kb of textual content because of the (I dunno) 2 MB of other crap that I definitely didn’t need–again, because I’m there to read text–and probably didn’t want because it was either slurping personal data out or trying to shove ads in my face. A little bit of it may have been making the website more pleasant to look at.
So when you say that we need people to be forced to use HTTPS because otherwise we can’t safely use a bunch of stuff that consumes vast amounts of computer resources, I say: let’s stop consuming these resources instead, and use simpler web pages.
Offhand, Youtube is literally the only website I use regularly where I’m not consuming primarily text and static images. I guess some of the videos on Twitter, but honestly I probably wouldn’t lose a whole lot there. I’m perfectly happy sandboxing those websites that need this kind of additional content and forcing the rest to use something closer to ec429’s example. I recognize that most websites use a lot more than that (including this one), but most of that isn’t necessary for the user; it’s for the website owner, either to improve aesthetics or to track users. I don’t know precisely where something like the typical commenting system fits, but I’m willing to bet it could be a lot simpler than it is now, because we’re way down the slope of wasting 30% more of the user’s computer cycles to make it 5% shinier, rather than simple text input-output functionality.
My understanding is that the overhead of HTTPS is negligible nowadays. If anything, HTTPS enabled pages are *faster* because it allows you to use HTTP2, which has a lot of important optimizations compared to legacy HTTP1.1.
I’m really sympathetic to CatCube, though I don’t expect https to be the cause of their problems.
I don’t want more features – I want tools that work.
And I want them to work without requiring me to upgrade my hardware, just to support fancier graphics, continuous updates, or even more distracting ads.
And if your programmers are unable to supply that, you’ll need to hire some competent ones if you ever want my business, with rare exceptions where I can’t do without the product and the suppliers are in a race to the bottom on quality.
I’m not sure the problem, in this case, is the programmers being unable or unwilling to supply something. They’re just doing what they are told by various managers/the marketing department/etc. Your real problem is probably all the other customers who have different preferences than you who are getting their preferences enacted.
ec429:
If encryption were extremely expensive and cumbersome, it would make sense to carefully ration its use–in that case, you’d have to think about the very small number of cases (bank transfers, diplomatic communications, etc.) where it was needed. That’s what the world looked like in the mid-80s, when encryption was used only for rare special things in the civilian world.
But with modern computers and cryptography, encryption is very cheap. So instead of spending lots of human time thinking carefully about whether this particular page lookup on this particular day needs to be one of the rare ones we can afford to encrypt, it makes sense to just encrypt everything by default.
Almost certainly, the problems CatCube was talking about came from either ads (blocking ads makes the web *way* faster) or from some other source of bloat on the page. The work of doing key agreement (what you do setting up a TLS connection) is not much work for the processor inside a smartphone, and encrypting the traffic once the keys are shared is a tiny bit of overhead–again, much, much less than you’re suffering from ads and trackers and such.
It is problem (or not, I stopped wasting time on Reddit after they redesigned site into unusable trash), but it is unrelated to an encryption. Encrypting actually relevant text takes some resources, but it is something utterly negligible.
Ads and ad-related surveillance is a problem here.
@CatCube: thank you. This is the rant I wanted to write, but I didn’t have enough steam left in my ranting tank to do it justice.
@Loriot: HTTP/2 has network performance features, mainly attempts to reduce round-trips and HLB for latency reasons, but also some bandwidth-saving compression (although really, if your HTTP headers are big enough for compressing them to make a significant difference, you’re probably using too many Pointless Webshit Features). Those features (especially the compression) actually increase the cost in cycles and RAM, though for the latency savings it’s probably worth it (and it annoys me greatly that browser vendors decided that they would hold the good ideas hostage to the bad ones by rushing through HTTP/2 and making it SSL-only). Both HTTP/2 and its deployment strategy are layering violations.
@albatross11: readable textual protocols are an advantage for debugging and, thus, robustness. SSL is an extra source of complexity, which is the most important cost in software nowadays (not cycles or RAM or whatever). So while I’m totally happy for something like GH Pages to default to HTTPS (heck, they’ve got the sysadmins and maintenance programmers to make sure it keeps working), it is very important that the tooling/ecosystem in general retains support for the simple protocol.
@all:
Peak grognard looks like either this or this. (Oh, and the latter’s original author was called Uriel. Mumble mumble coincidence.) Share and enjoy!
Oooh, more of this, please!
I agree 90% with
cat -v‘s assessments, have no idea about 8% of them, and am puzzled about tmux vs screen (I use the latter, and don’t have any complaints), andhead, which while provides a subset ofsed, seems to belong in the category of do-one-thing-and-do-it-well (which we all know is Good And True, and therefore Beautiful). Comments?@Ketil: I suspect the trouble with
headis that it should just be a shell alias for the sed script; i.e. it should be written in the high-level domain-specific sed language rather than low-level general-purpose C.But idk, that one did seem a bit odd to me as well.
I don’t use
screenortmux, but I occasionally usedtach. A surprising number of things can also be accomplished withnohup+tail -f. (Mostly I just have several workspaces full of xterms and leave them all running. I’ve just counted and my home desktop right now has 28 xterms across 7 workspaces.)Others that come to mind: http://suckless.org (full disclosure: I found about them from them putting my IRC client on their “stuff that rocks” page); yarchive’s section for that bastion of grognardy, the LKML. Actually, if you like that, you’ll probably like all of yarchive.
Not optimal, but if y’all want to be able to read text-heavy sites while cutting away the Web 2.0 nonsense again, I recommend switching to Firefox and installing the NoScript add-on.
You will have to do some finagling every time you visit a new site (especially since some cursed sites require goddamn Javascript just to load their friggin’ text), but I find it worth it.
Firefox’s Reader Mode also tends to work great at cutting out all the crap on websites where you just want to read an article.
@thisheavenlyconjugation Why should we tell that, rather than that you shouldn’t use a site without HTTPS to send or receive confidential information?
@ec429:
No, that hideous typeface automatically disqualifies them as a grognard, however otherwise minimalistic they are 😉
@albatross11:
I dunno, even reading Slate Star Codex comment sections in Chrome in Android sometimes makes me disbelieve that I’m looking at mostly plain text on a machine with 8×1.8 GHz CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM. And these days lots of even ostensibly trivial Android apps take up over 100 MB for no apparent reason.
@A1987dM
Nah, I’m pretty sure the typeface was chosen as a form of satire. See also the About page, which uses CSS animation to make your eyes bleed.
I just run a twistd web instance on my home PC (since that’s powered on 24/7 and I don’t get enough traffic to strain it) and serve static HTML to a .no-ip.org domain name (which was free). If you want a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, you can use something like https://stackedit.io/ and export the result as HTML which you then paste into your site. You do need to do the headers, footers, navigation links etc. by hand, but that’s not too onerous if you’re willing to not bother with fancy stuff like tag clouds. If you need to do anything server-side,
twisted.web.resourceis pretty easy to work with (I’ve done tons of single-purpose servers that way).The main limitation is that it’s hard to do a comment section (you’d need to either set up a DB and write your own admin tools, or farm it out to something third-party like a Discourse instance that you iframe in), but you’re not after that so that’s fine.
Replacing ‘twistd on your PC’ with GH Pages in the above should still meet your needs.
It shows figures for what percentage of the population in each category got the disease and die of it. Do we have any estimate of how many people in that population got the disease? It’s possible that the risk by age, say, rises much faster than they show, and that their results reflect the fact that older people, knowing they are more at risk, are being more careful not to expose themselves to the disease.
For whatever it’s worth to all the amateur epidemiologists out there (and which of us is not?):
My wife and I were down sick in mid-February, largely with a bad cough, following a road-trip to visit friends in Santa Barbara. The illness was unusual in that both of us had the cough without much else of our usual cold symptoms — no runny nose, no sore throat, no pluggy head. When the news about Covid suggested that it was actually around in California during that time frame, and that it preferentially hits the deep lung rather than, say, the nasal passages, we played it safe but still couldn’t shake the idea that we had already had it and survived.
Last week we shelled out $130 each to get Quest Diagnostics to give us the antibody test. It came back negative for both of us. The accompanying boilerplate says that a false negative can’t be ruled out, especially if you have been diagnosed with Covid-19 or had contact with someone who has, but absent such considerations it is very unlikely. Oh, well.
I’ve read that young people sometimes don’t produce the type of antibodies that the test checks for, because they can defeat the virus some other way. So if you had a mild case of covid, that’s consistent with existing data.
But for your own safety I wouldn’t assume that you’ve had covid until you have some official confirmation. Weird coughs are super common in winter and could mean anything.
Just in case others might like to do it: how did you get Quest to give you the test? Was it through One Medical, or Quest directly, or some other channel?
Kaitian-
Interesting but not relevant here, as I am far from young.
salvorhardin-
I just ordered it myself on QuestDirect. But you would probably first want to go in through the Quest front door and select “Test options” -> “immune response blood test”, which will tell you:
and
to make sure that some local instance of Quest is offering this.
If you can get a doctor to prescribe it, your insurance will most likely cover it, but where I live doctors are still mostly saying you don’t need it. Which I can’t argue with.
No, you almost certainly didn’t have Covid. This is basic Bayesian analysis – basic extrapolation of exponential growth shows that there were only a few hundred cases in the entire US at the time, while your symptoms were common enough to be caused by many other pervasive viruses at the time. This was obvious even before the tests, and your experience with tests should be a lesson to other people who think they had it very early on.
Or as they say in the medical field, “when you hear hooves, think horses not zebras”.
Which of course we knew going in. I’m not as sure as you seem to be about the fewness of cases in February, and California was an early adopter, but sure: the big argument against it was that we didn’t actually get very sick, and we are definitely in some risk groups. But it would have been such a boon to learn that we had had it and recovered handily, even if there is (still?) doubt about whether the antibodies confer immunity for a while.
Which of course is why I told the story.
@Doctor Mist,
Thanks for this, I never heard of “Quest Diagnostics” before.
Re: the bans
Isn’t this method exploitable? Suppose there was a topic that I didn’t want this community to discuss. Couldn’t I pick the top 10 or so terms relevant to that discussion, make accounts with those user names, and post incendiary comments until they all get banned indefinitely?
Ah yes, the great martyr TR*MP. He came to this board and was banned so that we might have productive discussions. It is forbidden to speak his name, so we place an asterisk on the vowel to remember not to say it.
It’s been brought up before. Scott’s response was that he has other measures available to him should someone try to abuse the system.
Perhaps it would be useful to ask: what would be the consequences of widespread knowledge of racial IQ statistics and their implications in the modern US?
My predictions:
a. Discussions about public policy on things like affirmative action, discrimination, and public education would all get much smarter, as people stopped expending so much mental energy on dancing around taboo subjects.
b. Some people would feel justified in their racism, and overt anti-black racism would get a little more acceptable socially.
c. Most people would still continue opposing racism. That opposition is a visceral and moral one, not based on claims of fact. (In exactly the same way, convincing evidence that blacks and whites were equally intelligent would not have eliminated the drive among whites for Jim Crow back when that was a going concern, because again, the drive for that stuff was visceral, moral, and tribal, not based on any actual claims of fact.)
I think the question is not framed quite correctly: “widespread knowledge” of more or less any set of statistics seems pretty unlikely, and I don’t think there is just one set of implications. I think the more plausible path to “widespread knowledge” would be something like a general stereotype about intelligence and race…and I’m not sure how far off from that we are today?
This suggests that something around a quarter of whites believe that whites are more intelligent than blacks (at least, as of a few years ago), and given social desirability bias I think we can probably bump that up a bit (if anyone can find data on how much we think social desirability bias is playing a role that would be great).
This link says that in 1966, 80% of whites thought that blacks were as intelligent as whites, and 57% of Southern whites; this is at the height of the Civil Rights movement so obviously there’s a lot of social desirability bias going on here.
In 1942, 50% of Northern whites and 20% said that blacks and whites were equally intelligent; this would presumably be too early for much of the social desirability bias, predating widespread knowledge of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement, both of which are why IQ studies are held in so much bad odour.
So, basically: I think depending on how much social desirability there is going on today, we may actually basically be in the world you imagine, or at least we are not so far off.
And to answer the original question, I think that the more you imagine people broadly hold the idea that whites are smarter than blacks, the more you should expect society to look like it did when the 1942 survey was taken. At the very least I’d imagine a surge in support for the idea of segregated educational facilities. Although not strictly the same issue, I suspect this alternative world would also be a lot more willing to entertain the idea that blacks are more likely to be criminals, and so there would a lot less pressure to crack down on police brutality against blacks, or to worry about racial basis in the judicial system. I think there’d be a lot more toleration for discrimination in hiring.
This makes me wonder: if discrimination was officially allowed (as in the government says feel free to put up “no blacks need apply” signs if you want), how common would it be?
If it did occur, would it be for racist reasons, or as an easy way to avoid people who grew up in bad ghetto culture and would likely make bad employees?
I’d expect very little (but not zero) official discrimination in terms of what customers a business would accept. Mostly it’s not going to be worth the bad PR.
In terms of hiring, it depends on whether employers are allowed to see the applicant’s criminal record. If so, there’s very little (but again not zero) reason to discriminate there. If not, then when you’re not allowed to know whether Tupac is a crook but you are allowed to take into account that he’s a black guy named “Tupac”, I’d expect a lot of people are going to go with white guys named “Dave” instead.
Why do I not expect the majority of people to reason correctly based on standard deviations, and not just round off to the nearest stereotype? I think the question more or less answers itself.
So people are too stupid to handle the truth, therefore we must deceive them?
I never said that, I was just asked what I thought the consequences would be, and answered.
I think these few comments are the crux of the matter. You can try and tell the people that “the top of the hump is a little to the left”, and one journalist later it will be “the hump is to the left” and one reader later it will become “there’s first this hump, than this hump”. The heuristic that sticks in the mind of the average person will still be “they’re stupider, maybe with a few exceptions”.
But does this justify not talking about it? *shrug* I’m too biased to be able to answer honestly.
I watch media get so excited over discovery of mental differences between men and women, and they generally don’t include charts. What’s the overlap of the distributions?
Why? I’d imagine a marginal uptick in say, polling, from say 1 lizardmen constant to 2 lizardmen constants, but nothing that makes much difference. People who want to keep their children away from whoever they view as undesirable can already manage it with the current public school system in most places and with private schools when that doesn’t work. The system you fear already exists de facto, and lots of upper middle class and upper class types talk a good game about integration and blah blah while making sure they already get a segregated model over what really matters to them. Keeping away the poor people.
I said support for the idea of–as in, it wouldn’t be a de facto system where everyone talks a good game, it would be an acknowledged fact that the system is segregated with much less apology. As I said in the beginning, I genuinely don’t think we’re far off from the hypothetical world we’re being asked to imagine.
What do you mean by “segregated?” Belief that blacks average lower IQ isn’t a reason to have schools that only admit whites, since a smart black would still be smarter than a stupid white.
But if the claim is widely accepted, there would be less pressure against a tracking system in which most of the kids in the fast track were white, since that wouldn’t be seen as evidence of discrimination.
Is that what you mean by segregated?
What I mean by segregated is that the average white student will attend a school where the student body is X% white, where X is some number between 70 (the current number) and 90 (the number in the South in the immediate aftermath of segregation).
And yes, as quanta413 notes, the difference between what I envision in albatross’s hypothetical future and what we observe today isn’t all that big–precisely because I doubt albatross’s premise that we don’t already live in a world where many whites believe that blacks are inherently less intelligent (and well-behaved, and etc.)
I think we’re far off in the sense that most people sending their kids to school aren’t interested in avoiding minorities qua minorities. Which is why I said what matters to them is avoiding poor people. Although that isn’t quite accurate either, and I’m being somewhat unfair.
They’re interested in avoiding poor people or keeping their kids away form ill-behaved kids, many of whom are minorities. They don’t say it, but that matches the overall pattern fairly well. White people don’t say they’re trying to avoid having their kids sit in school with poor people (even though a lot of white people obviously are), but they also wouldn’t mind having their kid be in school with William Julius Wilson’s kids or Thomas Sowell’s kids or something (I don’t know if either of these people have kids). A lot of them would prefer their kids go to that school.
For a lot of people to whom this matters (I’m pretty sure it’s most), it’s just as important to them to keep their kids away from the “wrong kind” of white people as it is the “wrong kind” of black people.
Which is why I think it strange that you think there would be a significant surge in support for racially segregated facilities. The middle class and up don’t care that much about that and already have what they want. Why would they bother pushing for racially segregated schools? To keep poor whites and poor blacks apart? Why?
I’l add to quanta413’s point that I don’t think avoiding poor people qua poor people is a big deal either–it’s the cultures and family structures that go with poverty, not the poverty, that is the problem
Very few people avoid sending their kids to schools where there are lots of kids whose parents are graduate students.
‘Gifted Programs’ and Tracking already take care of the issue of certain students being held back or pushed forward unnecessarily. So there’s no to explicitly sort students by race when you can simply use past performance to decide whether the tracking is too hard or too easy for the student. The expectation of equal representation in these ‘tiers’ under an equal opportunity regime would go away. And the big reason tracking and AP programs etc, are opposed nowadays is precisely because they don’t achieve the kinds of representation we would expect under the null hypothesis (so they’re either biased or perpetuate privilege).
Parents have been quietly pulling children out of schools and creating a de-facto segregation for awhile. I can chock this up to 1 of 3 things:
1. Behavioral issues of students unrelated to student IQ, they either fear for their child’s safety or don’t want said child adopting the negative behaviors. I have no “solutions” for this, sadly. And frankly I think behavioral differences cause more angst than IQ differences.
2. Thinking the school is ‘bad’ because under-performing students pull down the academic performance of the school. This would actually be mitigated somewhat if it became common knowledge that ‘school quality’ is something of an illusion created by upper middle class people congregating in the same neighborhoods.
3. Parents thinking the children are being held back because the teachers have to become ‘remedial’ with certain students; again this is solved with tracking.
Your argument ignores the more interesting question by focusing on Blacks. We have already seen what that world would look like. What if it was widespread accepted that Asians were smarter? Damaging to the American psyche? Or would we excuse it and claim that our individualism still made us better?
Edited because of overlap with comment above.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of Americans already believed that Asians were smarter (on average).
I think you’ve answered half of how they deal with it. They think their individualism makes them better, or that Asians are boring grinds who lack “creativity” or “leadership”.
Or just think “Say, maybe I should go with that Chinese doctor–she’s probably pretty smart.”
I think the difference here is smaller. Large enough to see consequences in real life, but not large enough to worry anybody.
Knowledge != acceptance. There are many reasons to dismiss the practical relevance of such statistics. You act like your opponents simply haven’t looked at the data.
What is the reason to dismiss the relevance of such statistics to the question of whether unequal outcomes — more white kids than black kids in the fast track at high school, more men than women as math professors at Harvard — are proof of discrimination?
What do you make of the claims that black children are punished more severely than white children for the same offenses?
I’m not familiar with either those claims or the evidence for them.
If you are talking about K-12, I would expect some negative correlation between severity of punishment and ability of parents to complain about it, with the latter linked to income and status, which correlate with race.
I have a hypothesis which I lack the domain knowledge to more thoroughly evaluate. However, many models of justice believe that punishment should be related to the severity of the offence (a person who steals $10 should be punished more than someone who steals $5), and/or that punishment should be associated with the degree of agency (a person who intends to commit a crime should be punished more than someone who accidentally commits the same act).
Given that, I dug into height-weight growth charts for children. Though it’s considered politically-incorrect these days, older charts I was able to find which have now been memory-holed had different values for white vs. black boys. IIRC, between the ages of about 6-14, the values for black children roughly corresponded to those who were a year older and white. So the 50th percentile height/weight of a 9y/o black boy was roughly corresponding to that of a 10y/o white boy. All of my examples below are assuming a black/white boy at the 50th percentile because that was the data I had to look at, and would *probably* reflect aggregate trends.
Given that weight categories exist in eg. boxing, it’s reasonable to assume that a larger person is able to commit more damage/harm when engaging in similar actions. Thus, if a black and a white boy acted inappropriately in a way which involved strength (throwing a book, punching, whatever) it’s possible that the black boy would have caused more objective damage. Likewise, if you saw two such people engaging in such inappropriate activity it’s likely that the black boy would be assigned more moral agency due to the bias of assuming among children that bigger=older=mature=responsible.
I don’t know if this holds up, or if the charts I was previously able to locate were accurate. And even then, I’m not certain it proposes a solution – it would mean in a mutual fight between white and black boys of identical size that the white boy should be punished more severely because they have more moral agency. Or that we accept differing racial punishment outcomes.
I haven’t seen anything about actual size differences between black and white children, but I’ve seen a lot of complaints about (white?) people overestimating the ages of black children and therefore unreasonably expecting them to be more mature than should be expected.
Consider that in this corner of the internet racial IQ statistics are, in fact, well known. Pretty sure the most popular website that makes them well known is Steve Sailer’s. Now wade into the comments section of that website. It is full of White Nationalists. Intelligent White Nationalists. Were this not the case, were the leading website promoting racial IQ differences not full of White Nationalists I might be able to believe that the American public at large could accept the likely fact that there’s average differences in IQs among races without becoming more racist. But because that’s not the case, I’m not optimistic about the political results in this country were racial IQ differences made as popular among high-schoolers as they are among readers of Steve Sailer.
White nationalists are mostly created in reaction to affirmative action policies and the associated censorship of critical ideas.
I’ll second this. I know a number of people who are aware of the idea that average intelligence varies between racial groups in the US. To the best of my knowledge, all of them became interested in that topic because of affirmative action, and the overriding reason they care is linked to their opposition to affirmative action policies.
It turns out that when the government and society expressly discriminate against people because of the color of their skin, people often get pretty worked up about it. In my experience, that seems to be true regardless of the skin color of the people being subjected to differential treatment.
Justice John Roberts’ quote that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” nicely captures the core of this viewpoint.
Alternatively, white nationalists exist in some number independent of any facts, and are attracted to anything that looks remotely intelligent and which can be used to justify their position.
(Not unlike earlier discussion about slavery being motivated by the need for cheap labor (i.e. profits), but using inferiority as a justification – attempting to negate the obvious moral objections to it. But also a common theme across all topics, I think.)
I think Ketil is right here in that for many the racial IQ justification comes after the belief and that the order of events is any different for white nationalists than for other topics. I’d add the order is the same for mainstream liberals and conservatives.
This theory is obviously at least mostly false, because white nationalists have been around and numerous for a lot longer than affirmative action or socially-powerful left wingers; the increasing stigmatisation of racism over the last few decades has seen them getting less numerous, not more so.
I would be prepared to accept that there exist people who are white nationalists but would not be if affirmative action weren’t a thing, but not that they are a statistically significant fraction.
Counterexample: Literal Nazis. I hope that Godwin´s law is not a part of comment moderation policy here.
As a counterpoint, it’s possible that the reason the comments on a website that acknowledges the possibility of differences in average IQ between races is “full of White Nationalists” is because that idea is so thoroughly toxic in the general discourse that no one dares to say it aloud (even if they think it might be true) unless they’re already far right. Apply some evaporative cooling to the group beliefs, and you can end up with an extreme viewpoint echochamber pretty easily (I don’t know if this describes the comments on Steve Sailer’s website; I haven’t read it).
As another real life example, consider how the alternatives to reddit have consistently become far right. I’ll also gesture toward our host’s article titled “Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle.” Excerpt: “The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”
Thus, the end result might be quite different if this viewpoint became more normalized. Of course, it also might not. But I’m not sure how strong an inference we can draw from the viewpoints of people who are willing to post on websites several standard deviations outside the Overton Window (including this website).
Well, the example we have of this viewpoint being normalized was in the 1930s and things didn’t work out so well. This viewpoint has a kinda horrible track record. Maybe we shouldn’t emphasize it until there’s decent evidence it would lead to positive results.
Or at least admit that treating very similar ideas seriously resulted in horrible atrocities.
And explain how current one differs and why it should be treated seriously.
And confirm that you consider race-based genocide and race-based slavery as horrible things that should not happen.
Denying that it happened or claiming that it was not caused/helped/justified by supposed race-based cognitive differences will not help.
Did it cause it? Or did it correlate with it?
@Uribe, I think the implications from history are less clearcut than you’re making them out to be. As David Friedman pointed out elsewhere in this comment thread, the Nazi antipathy to Jews, for instance, was not because Nazis saw Jews as less intelligent, but because the Nazis believed Jews were “engaged in a conspiracy against the Aryans.” That’s a very different basis for conflict.
I think the story underlying affirmative action policies — i.e. that the reason certain minorities in America continue to experience worse outcomes than whites is because of pernicious discrimination by whites — pattern matches closer to the adversarial conspiracy approach of the Nazis toward the Jews than it does toward an explanation that differential outcomes may partially (partially!) be explained by inter-group variation.
Of course, that isn’t to say that people who want conflict between racial groups wouldn’t try to use this as a tool in their arsenal. They certainly would. But they use the current socially acceptable explanations that way anyway. The issue is whether the inter-group differences theory tends toward that type of conflict. I’m not so sure that the historical record indicates that it has to.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, this:
ignores that the alleged conspiracy was a natural consequence of the Jews natural racial inferiority to and incompatibility with Aryans; this is much more similar to “racial theory of differences” than to any other motive, a fact which is easily confirmed by taking a glance at what the Nazi beliefs were on the matter of racial differences when it came to groups other than Jews, like blacks.
As mentioned elsewhere this claim is misleading, nazis were claiming both. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_(1940_film)
And murder of millions of non-Jewish people was motivated by supposed inferiority. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/06/open-thread-153-25/#comment-892952 (and that is just what they did in one country)
Eugene:
I think putting “knowing about IQ statistics” in the same bin as “accepting Nazi theories of race” is approximately as good a model of the world as putting “knowing about income statistics” in the same bin as “accepting Communist theories of class.”
If more people knew how unequal the income and wealth distribution in the US is, there’d probably be a few more supporters of a violent Communist revolution, as well as a lot more supporters of Bernie/AOC type social-democratic economic policies. But almost certainly no engineered famines, network of gulags, or great leaps forward. That’s true even though most people will not really understand the details of income / wealth statistics (as is visible in public discourse now, in fact).
I think open knowledge of IQ statistics would look much the same–a few people would become more open racists, but mostly, people would accept that and be about as decent to each other as they were before, but also a lot of public policy debates would be less dumb because some relevant information would no longer be off-limits.
Are you seriously claiming that claim was
putting “knowing about IQ statistics” in the same bin as “accepting Nazi theories of race”
? This is a ridiculous distortion. No one claimed that knowing about IQ statics makes you a Nazi-eqivalent.
knowing about IQ statistics” in the same bin as “knowing Nazi theories of race (knowledge about some topic)
And my claim was that “describing $RACIAL_GROUP is less intelligent based on $SOMETHING_PRESENTED_AS_A_VALUABLE_RESEARCH” bin contains both IQ statistics case and Nazi case.
Whatever it changes anything is a separate thing. Is it relevant / suspicious / alarming / misleading? Feel free to argue that.
But it is clearly the same bin and trying to present them as not related in absolutely any way seems the weakest defense possible.
I agree, but “accepting that blacks are generally mentally inferior” looks a little closer, and as I’ve argued this is the more likely message to be absorbed. I think if you turn “know income statistics” into “believe the rich are getting more than their fair share” or something, I think this does start to have some similarities to Communism; if the USA had a 150-year history of a Communist dictatorship, and then the above message started becoming popular I suspect you would be more than a little concerned.
The 1930s weren’t the only time this viewpoint was normalized. Accepted wisdom throughout the 19th century, for instance, was that blacks were less capable than whites. Even Abraham Lincoln and many abolitionists believed this. One didn’t have to believe that blacks are equally capable to believe that cruelty and exploitation of them are morally wrong.
Uribe:
By exactly the same logic, Jacobin’s readers include an alarming number of communists.
If only there were some aphorism about correlation and causation we could fall back on….
I…am pretty sure their readership does include many communists? Whether you find this alarming depends on how many communists you require to be alarmed, but I don’t think the example proves what you think it does.
Uribe’s comment suggested that open discussion of IQ differences led to white nationalism, and cited the makeup of Sailer’s blog comment section as evidence.
Does Jacobin convince some people to become liquidate-the-Kulaks style Communists? Probably a few, but probably not very many. On the other hand, they probably attract a fair fraction of that tiny minority of the left who are into liquidate-the-Kulaks style Communism. In much the same way, I doubt that Sailer’s blog is a major driver of people becoming white nationalists, though I certainly don’t have data either way.
I am not sure that liquidate-the-kulaks communists are in perfect analogy to white supremacists; I’d say liquidate-the-kulaks commies should be in analogy with liquidate-the-mud-people white nationalists; but as I am a regular reader of neither Sailer nor Jacobin I won’t pretend I have an idea of what the typical commenter at either looks like, and so admit that I can’t judge the analogy fairly.
I read Sailer’s blog and comment threads relatively often. I’ve seen a fair amount of overt white nationalism there, a fair bit of casual anti-black/hispanic racism, but zero calls for mass-murdering any ethnic groups, or even any kind of legal mistreatment of them like, say, reviving anti-misgenation laws. Maybe some of them believe that, but I’ve never seen anyone advocate for it.
Also the majority of participants in the comment threads aren’t remotely white nationalists. The median participant is probably a relatively bright h-b-d aware Trump supporter.
As I say, I can’t speak to the precise contours of the analogy
Steve Sailer : White Nationalism :: Jacobin : Communism
but based on your most recent comment that there is “a fair amount of overt white nationalism”, it sounds like Uribe is basically right that Sailer’s site is “full of White Nationalists. Intelligent White Nationalists”.
The only possible differences I can see between your characterizations are the difference between “full of” and “a fair amount”, which I’m not too interested in as I doubt either is meant as a precise estimate; and whether we are characterizing the comments or the commenters.
Ultimately, it seems you and Uribe don’t disagree too much on how to characterize Sailer’s site, and I think mostly disagree on whether we should be alarmed by white nationalism that is not explicitly violent or coercive.
But it does sound like Uribe is right that (though perhaps overestimating the degree to which) open discussion of racial IQ statistics is associated with (whether it causes, or is caused by, or attracts) white nationalism. I’d also consider the possibility that the fact that Sailer’s commentariat are intelligent white nationalists moderates their propensity to be violent and coercive: if you created more white nationalists who are, on average, less intelligent than the ones who frequent Sailer, would you expect those white nationalists to be more or less likely to be in favour of violence or legal mistreatment?
I think that there would be virtually no consequences.
Almost nobody would change their mind about anything, because few people do that in response to facts. Discussion would not get smarter, since you need people to get smarter for that to happen, and revealing new information to the public does not make people smarter.
Some people are making themselves act dumber than they are because of the taboo on some h-b-d adjacent facts. Getting them to do the equivalent of taking the ball-and-chain off would make discussions smarter.
Also, knowledge is good. When more people have better knowledge about what the world looks like (because major news sources stop omitting it from their coverage), we will almost certainly get better discussion and better policies.
COVID19 is nowhere near the scope of WW2, and since WW2 there have been at least two flu pandemics quite comparable in size with COVID19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu
Just a decade apart, each killed about 1million world wide and about 100k in the US, back when the world and the US had about half and 2/3rds of their current populations, and we don’t even have any of them in our cultural memories.
“Waiving privacy regulations” means retroactively reneging on core social guarantees that were in place for people when they went to seek medical treatment, so no nothing like this is remotely justified, especially since there’s no reason to believe any non-clinical data will be relevant towards finding a cure and anonymized clinical data of covid19 patients is already being actively researched.
I mean, killing a million people seems pretty small by the scale of COVID19. Remember that we’re still only a third of a year into COVID19, and even with a massively unprecedented global reaction, it’s still already killed a third of a million people. If the rest of 2020 is on average the same as the first third of 2020, then we should expect COVID19 to have the same number of fatalities as these other pandemics that we barely bothered to try to stop. Presumably that means that if we hadn’t tried to stop it, then we would have had fatality numbers well into the tens of millions, and thus comparable to World War II.
In any case, it’s quite obvious that COVID19 is the first time since World War II that there has been any attempt at a collective global response to anything. Even 9/11 and the various financial crises have only involved responses from a few dozen governments, and very little direct personal action from most individuals in those countries.
Eliezer tweeted a few days ago about cryonics, as applied to preventing “permanent” COVID-19 deaths. It reminded me about my general discomfort around the field and potentials of cryonics, even/especially if it works. I know there’s no shortage of short stories extrapolating on the premise of cryonics, but I decided to try anyway.
I have three overarching qualms:
– By taking up (small now, but potentially vast) resources on body-preservation we’re draining resources that would otherwise be spent supporting, growing, and enhancing the lives of “alive alive” people. Prioritizing the lives of the now-alive over people who could be alive in the future is the opposite of what how we traditionally build moral societies — by grinding through the pain now, in the hope that our children have a better future.
– “Cryonics as default” moves us closer to the “death is the worst possible policy outcome” camp, which narrows the ambitions of civilization as a whole. Risk-aversion and safety prioritization is what killed manned spaceflight and childhood in the developed world. If cryonics becomes the default option, how can we morally justify letting people risk their lives in ways where they can’t be preserved? (Skydiving, mountain climbing, etc).
– The saying goes, “science advances one funeral at a time”. Radically increased longevity without radically increased dynamicism as we age risks locking society into the same morals and ideas as the generation that invented cryonics; there’s no recycling of leaders, the powerful, or the wealthy.
I know it’s an extrapolation past what was intended (using cryonics to prevent acute, dumb death), but the ethical framework behind it makes me uncomfortable. I’m open to being convinced this is dumb, though.
1. I am signed up for cryonics and the total cost to me is ~$100 per month. It’s unclear how it could require “vast resources.” Furthermore, from the perspective of people living in the future, the “now-alive” people are them, and they should sacrifice for the sake of the “could be alive” people in cryopreservation.
2. We should justify letting someone risk their life because it’s their life and it’s none of your goddamn business what they want to do with it.
3. This is a fully general counterargument against medicine in general.
That has nothing to do with how much it would cost to cryogenically freeze everyone who it appeared might die after catching the coronavirus.
On the contrary. That, allowing for some probabilistic calculations, measures how much the provider thinks it costs, since they are unlikely to offer the service at a price at which they expect to lose money at it.
Would you expect the annual cost of holding a bunch of bodies, possibly just heads, at the temperature of liquid nitrogen to be substantial relative to what an ordinary individual spends on himself?
Eliezer had absolutely nothing to say regarding the funding mechanism for his latest crackpot proposal. If Jeff Bezos wants to pay for it all, I have no (fiscal) objection. I’d strongly oppose using taxpayer money for this. Eliezer having a harebrained scheme is not really an argument against cryonics.
#3 isn’t a fully general counterargument against medicine. It’s only an argument against measures that drastically extend the human lifespan (i.e. on a scale of centuries, not decades).
What’s your evidence for a threshold effect? It seems clear to me that every incremental increase in lifespan slows the turnover rate by that much more. Since there’s no evidence that the current turnover rate is optimal, I modestly propose that we start culling emeritus professors and see what happens.
It’s not necessarily a threshold effect. It’s just that civilization is on a longer timescale than human life. A few years one way or the other won’t make or break the march of progress, and the trend is probably noisy, so the effect of a relatively short lifespan extension might not even be noticeable. It’s only when you slow turnover practically to a stop that I’d see room for concern.
A lot of this depends on what people who don’t age, or age much more slowly, do with their lives. Your implicit assumption, which might be true but doesn’t have to be, is that they would continue doing what they had been, that tenured professors would remain tenured professors in the same field forever.
I can see two other alternatives. One is that, having accomplished their goals and accumulated enough capital to live on forever, successful people would retire, having become bored of what they had been doing.
The other is that, having exhausted their interest in one field and with the necessary renewed youth, they would switch to another, becoming part of the new wave of scholarship there.
A similar issue arises with population. Do you decide that having children is something you have done and you can now enjoy grandchildren and great grandchildren with other parents doing the hard part, in which case the end of aging gives you only a linear population increase. Or do you decide that having children was so satisfying that you want to do it again. And again. In which case the increase is exponential.
I’ve wondered what not aging will actually mean. Is everyone stopped at their current age? Is there some degree of rejuvenation? If health is maintained for much longer than is now possible, do we get types of maturity we haven’t seen yet? Or types of mental rigidity?
If the “damage” done by cryopreservation can be repaired, the damage done by aging should be child’s play. I expect we will get the latter much earlier than the former.
Sensible questions. I think I have considerable wisdom I did not have forty years ago, but cannot deny that I have more mental rigidity, too. I would like to think that after a few centuries of experience, the wisdom would be more important — and (at the risk of motivated reasoning) I sometimes suspect that even now my rigidity is the result of my wisdom: As with Niven’s Pak Protectors, when you see the right thing to do, why do something different? (Since there are other people of my age who disagree with me about the right thing to do, this unfortunately argues for Conflict Theory over Mistake Theory. So be it.)
But I actually suspect that a lot of the sources of rigidity might be phenomena of the breakdowns caused by age, and may be treatable along with the rest of it. To have the time, as David Friedman suggests, to undertake something entirely new when your old calling palls also seems likely to be important.
Maybe, but it seems to me that even #2 has the same flaw. We are good with the AEDs and the blood thinners and the quadruple bypasses and the appendectomies and the suicide-prevention hotlines because we are used to them and because we know people who are very grateful for them, but it’s hard to argue that they did not move us closer to the “death is the worst possible policy outcome” camp.
The other part of #3 I didn’t articulate well in the OP is that you’ll be pulling wealthy, powerful people out of cryonics, into the far future. Even if you aren’t radically extending lifespans, you’re setting up a situation where people can hop in & out of cold storage, pulling with them the morals and opinions of centuries ago, and imposing them on the future.
But yeah, “radically extended live expectancy” also concerns me, if we don’t extend neural plasticity with age as well. I don’t think it’s right to build a society where 600 year olds rule with the opinions they gained at 20
… but at that point, if you’ve re-engineered individuals to have the neural plasticity and open-ness to new opinions of the young, why bother with the life extension? Maybe I just don’t believe in the sanctity of individual human life, but it feels like a long way around just letting new people inherit the earth.
The obvious answer, for me, is that I don’t want to die. Neither, so far as I can tell, do most other people.
It seems to me that $100 a month for every person who is interested in being frozen really would be “vast resources” if we are asking to make this universal.
If nobody is subsidizing it, that means the individual has to accumulate enough capital to pay the cost of keeping him frozen. The productivity of that capital is then just balancing the cost.
Obviously, both the cost and the productivity of the capital are being estimated in advance.
Widespread cryonics would likely reduce healthcare costs because people with expensive to manage brain wasting diseases such as Alzheimer’s would decide to get preserved before they would otherwise die.
I’m one. I have APOe4 and am really hoping I have it in me to starve myself when the time comes so that they can preserve my brain intact. Better still would be if either cryonics or assisted suicide were generally accepted enough that I could do it in a more comfortable manner.
Fortunately I think/hope the moment of truth is still a fair ways off.
#2 seems irrelevant to me (people should be able to make informed decisions about risks and generally do) #3 is about increased longevity, a separate issue.
#1 is a fair point, right now the cost is relatively small but one imagines an unbounded-in-the-limit cost on society to simply maintain a bunch of frozen corpses. There is a hansonian economic argument that mitigates this if you assume continued exponential growth, where the cost should be bounded by some constant fraction of the economy.
A lot of this comes down to your optimism about economic growth and the emergence of strong AI. I’m not sure where I stand, and the idea of ancestors continuing to collect rent on descendants beyond death isn’t nice. But even in the pessimistic case I’m not that worried, if it ever became a serious burden I think there would be something akin to a debt jubilee except with a lot of thawing corpses.
The irony would be if somebody dies of COVID-19, is frozen, then the virus is eredicated, and 50 years later the corpse is thawed for some reason and the pandemic restarts because the virus survived cryopreservation.
Ironic but unlikely. The advances needed to revive a cryopreserved person probably go along with COVID-19 being a trivial concern.
Thawing != revival.
They have thawed bodies before, in some cases apparently the cryo companies folded shop and they literaly dumped the bodies or their equipment failed, in other cases the companies decided that they would only store the heads, so they sawed them off the frozen bodies which they them thawed and dissected.
Ah, I see your point. Quite right. There are agencies that economize by preserving patients in permafrost, so one hopes that permafrost stays permanent. Fortunately Alcor does not do that. The events you describe are from the infancy of cryonics.
“The advances needed to revive a cryopreserved person probably go along with COVID-19 being a trivial concern.”
This is vaguely plausible but lacks detail. What would it take to make revival possible, and how would that interact with dealing with viruese?
Well, of course, if I had the details we could be reviving people now!
My own model, probably completely naive, for how it will happen is that nanotech lets us deploy godzillions of little machines to travel through the preserved body repairing the things it finds wrong, including deducing the most likely correct configuration across whatever freezing damage has occurred, and providing a scaffolding that keeps everything quiescent and stable as you bring the body back to room temperature. The application of such technology to rooting out unwelcome visitors from your cells seems pretty obvious.
Does anyone think it’s plausible the virus will eventually be eradicated?
If catching it gives you lifelong immunity, I think it’s quite plausible. If immunity wanes after a year or two, probably not.
If it’s like the flu and mutates enough to stay ahead of vaccines, it will be tough.
I know that Twitter is not balanced for making anything more than simplified slogans, but this tweet language implies that successful resurrection from preset-day cryonics is very likely.
What seems clearly absurd for many reasons.
Sorry, but this is language of a secular religion.
Yes, when did Yudkowsky switch from “cryonics might be unlikely to work but the costs are fairly low and the benefits are huge so the expected value is high” to the vastly less justifiable “cryonics is definitely going to work”? Or is he just being silly with a non-standard use of “could”?
Gentle reminder that cryonics doesn’t offer a clear path to resurrection – currently it only suggests recovery of memories+personality. You don’t get defrosted, you get copied out. Main reason I’m not very interested.
Otherwise, I really really hate your arguments. They’re valid, I agree with them and so on. But you’re comparing them with all the loss caused by death. That’s like… huge scope insensitivity?
The hate comes because I suspect the same fallacy makes us invest so few resources in life extension.
This is a genuine question, and not necessarily specific to cryonics. Is there good reason to believe that those memories are stored in the physical brain matter to be recovered (as opposed to in part relying on the signal activity constantly running through the brain)? It seems entirely plausible to me that once a brain is “off” the information is gone…but I don’t know if this is probable, plausible, or already proven false.
For an analogy (a weak one, try not to parse into this too hard as it is just to demonstrate what I’m talking about) are we sure the brain isn’t more like a big gooey hunk of RAM than a hard drive?
The brain, so far as I understand it, shuts down in pretty profound ways during sleep. This precludes much of anything beyond short term memory being stored in active patterns, because if that were the case, you would suffer amnesia whenever you slept. This does not guarantee whatever the storage mechanism is will survive freezing and cryoprotectants.
Or if not sleep, medically induced comas are as close to deaths as most people can get, but we come out with intact memories as far as I’m aware.
I find it plausible, but I suppose we don’t really know either way. I’m not a neuroscientist or anything.
IMO, cryonics is basically wishing on fairy magic given our current state of technology and scientific understanding. I would be extremely surprised if anyone frozen today could be revived in a meaningful way, even in principle.
Could be. Probably. But what’s your alternative? If you rot or burn your chances are even lower.
Unclear. Certainly information-copying/uploading is a potential tech for revival, and I am mostly untroubled by whether that would “really” be me.
But current practice at Alcor, for example, is vitrification (essentially freezing with antifreeze to keep large crystals from forming) rather than preservation with fixatives like formaldehyde, which do a better job of preserving the fine structure but which seem much less likely to be reversible in situ. Their ideal outcome is repair and revival, not uploading, and they are willing to compromise the chance of the latter if it enhances the chance of the former.
I’m more concerned with the other end of it; what happens after the thaw.
You’d essentially be an undocumented immigrant from the past, with no roots or connections in the future you’d find yourself in. Even in our current time, immigration is a large point of contention. We could have even less in common with the residents of the future than immigrants to our country do with us, which could lead to stronger antipathies. The novelty of waking people from the past to learn of their perspectives or any lost technologies will quickly wear off. Depending on the zeitgeist of the world you wake up in, you could very well be discriminated against or even enslaved.
One counterargument might be that a country would only go through the troubles of developing technology to bring people back to life if there was enough societal support behind the decision, and that they could be easily assimilated into the new world. However, I can just as easily imagine up a dystopian scenario in which a corporation would leap at the opportunity to have a large influx of human capital that has no rights and no one that will miss them.
Even assuming magical technology and that frozen brain survives I think that waking in some dystopian scenario with debt for resurrection is quite likely.
It is moot anyway, as chances that current process actually preserves brain contents and that preserved brain will survive until restoring seems absurdly small to me.
Is Eliezer expecting this process to be reversible within years/decades? Or is he expecting both USA and company handling preservation to remain stable for centuries allowing this cache to be preserved?
I think Eliezer is extremely overoptimistic about the future rate and course of technological progress. It’s a common affliction in the rationalsphere.
I’ll note that people routinely come to the US from very poor parts of very poor countries, where both technology and social attitudes are quite different. I’d expect immigrants from the past to fit at least as well into a future soceity as, say, a guy from some farming village in Uganda fits when he comes to the US.
Even if the time traveler is much more fish-out-of-water than a highly unskilled immigrant of today, I wouldn’t be worried about it. I’d presume that in a world where people can be brought back to life, you’ll have more than enough added longevity (or immortality) and learning resources to catch up to the rest of society.
What I would primarily be worried about in that scenario is being locked out of society (via caste, lack of citizenship, etc), or the aforementioned slavery. Even if you do wake up in a utopia, you may not have access to any of it. You’d be reliant on the charity of some entity, and you might not get it. Imagine coming to America with absolutely no resources and not being able to access welfare, healthcare, the job market, etc without having an SSN imprinted in you via chip. Technology can amplify the difficulties of reaching a decent standard of living from scratch.
There’s an interesting timeline where germline humans have been improved in the intervening centuries via gene editing (removed genetic defects, optimal beauty, improved intelligence) but there’s no way discovered to gene-drive that for existing people (brains have to develop structures from infancy, bone structure can’t change, etc).
Then you figure out how to defrost people and cure cancer or whatever, and you defrost the survivors into a timeline where they are… useless, ugly, and unfixable, a permanent charity-underclass. Yay!
@bpodgursky Most permanent-charity underclass much prefers being so to dying, and so would I.
I expect that the technology to revive or, much more likely, upload cryopreserved brains won’t come about before a post-scarcity society, in which no one has any reason to enslave anyone, and there is no competition for resources in the way that generates anti-immigration sentiment today.
Folks who identify as SF Bay Area-rooted, techie, and or rationalist/rationalist-adjacent: have you, at some point in the past decade, seriously considered leaving the US to live somewhere else?
If so, how did you weigh the pros and cons of that decision, which values of “somewhere else” did you consider, and what did you ultimately decide?
I’m especially (though not exclusively) interested in those who considered leaving– whether they ultimately did or not– for philosophical/institutional reasons, i.e. “the US has become/has turned out to be the kind of polity I don’t want to live in anymore, let me consider whether there are better polities out there” rather than “I got a cool job/met a wonderful partner which/who happened to be outside the US.”
No, though I did consider the possibility of someday retiring to Thailand at some point to save money. Then I realized that it was a terrible idea.
Leaving the country for ideological reasons is just stupid. Also, even if you ignore the MASSIVE costs involved in immigration, I believe the US is by far the best place to live for anyone educated/rich enough to have a real choice in the matter. It’s easy to fall into the “grass is always greener” trap, but it’s still a trap.
I do have a cousin who moved to Canada and seems intent on staying there for life, but that was for work, not a dumb political gesture.
If, as you seem to imply, you think the US will continue to be the best place to live for folks who have a choice through the next few decades, can you say what makes you believe that?
To show my hand a bit, I’m concerned about continuing decline in US institutional quality/competence imposing increasingly large costs from the next few decades’ worth of disasters, so arguably more competently-run developed countries (Canada yes, but also Australia/NZ, Germany, Switzerland, maybe South Korea, maybe the Scandinavian countries) would be the natural points of comparison. The motivation is less ideology and more “these people can’t crisis-manage their way out of a paper bag, that isn’t going to change based on who wins the next election, and eventually it’s going to have effects I can’t buy my way out of.”
If you’re in the Bay area tech industry, you’re going to take a huge pay-cut if you move to any other country. When cities were bidding for Amazon’s second HQ, the bid documents from Vancouver and Toronto included pay rates for technical staff. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but Toronto programmers are paid something like half of what Seattle programmers get. And the Bay area pays even better than Seattle, as I understand.
US/California/San Francisco institutions would have to get really damn crappy to cover that factor of two.
I think most people give too much attention to easily comparable metrics like pay and not enough on other factors. I think most commenters here know the research about diminishing returns of money earned on happiness, but it’s also that especially in the US, you have some trade-offs that are rather unique. The bay area will pay a multiple of most cities in the world, that much is true. From what I get by lots of discussions, it’s also a place with a pretty horrendous homeless problem, a lot more crime than other cities and less-than-ideal government. All of these are hard to rate in monetary terms, but definitely influence your well-being in a city.
The discussion is assuming a software engineer though, and thus not someone at risk of homelessness. The only way homelessness really impacts you is if you visit certain neighborhoods in SF.
Also, I’m not sure where you get “less-than-ideal” government. IMO the bay area governments are pretty much infinitely better than Atlanta, where I grew up. (This isn’t just a matter of politics either, government corruption is rampant back home, but almost unheard of in the bay). When I was a kid, there was a scandal where a local politician literally assassinated an opponent.
If it weren’t for the cost of housing, I would absolutely prefer to live here more than most places in the country, even in the absence of a job.
I didn’t mean risk of homelessness, although that is certainly increasing the longer this crisis lasts. I meant that a lot of stories from the Bay Area mention stuff like “people shit on sidewalks” or “homeless guy gets aggressive/shouty at passersby”, stuff like that. It is of course totally possible that I overestimate the frequency of such stuff.
One big part here seems to be that developing the town seems impossible, both from a political and a zoning perspective, at least towards a city with a bit more density.
As far as I know, that’s only an issue if you visit certain neighborhoods in SF. The easy solution is to not visit those places, although I suppose depending on precisely where you live and where you work, it can be inconvenient. At any rate, that’s all confined to SF. It’s not an issue in the South Bay where I live.
I don’t expect Trump to still be in charge come February, let alone decades hence.
Or to elaborate, there’s no real reason to expect America to have a large and consistent disadvantage when it comes to disaster management, especially to the extent that it would outweigh everything else.
OK, I think we probably differ on the extent to which getting rid of Trump will help. I think he is a symptom more than a cause of a larger rot which has been proceeding for decades and will take decades to fix regardless of who is President. Not to say that getting rid of him won’t do some good, just not nearly enough.
So which countries do you think can reliably do better? And be careful to avoid the grass is greener fallacy. Everyone is aware of the downsides of their own system but rarely sees the downsides of systems they don’t interact with.
Remember the eurozone crisis? A massive self-inflicted disaster that the US, for all it’s faults, is organizationally immune to?
The United States having crisis-management problems that an upper-middle-class American can’t buy their way out of, is going to give the entire world crisis-management problems that you can’t run away from without a better spaceship than anyone can presently build. You might want to factor that into your analysis.
And if it matters, the relevant spaceships are far more likely to be invented in the United States.
Depends what the crises are. A large-scale nuclear exchange or runaway AI would create inescapable worldwide problems, yes. But I expect that the other countries on my list will do much better at e.g. climate change adaptation, monetary policy and financial regulation, grid resilience against CMEs and cyberattacks, and biosecurity. Any one of those can be cushioned against by an upper-middle-class person but mitigating them all gets awfully difficult.
Approximately no single nation can “do better” on most of the things that are on your list, because they are transnational in extent. The United States is almost unique among nations in that it can have largely independent policies on e.g. monetary policy, and treat the rest of the world as a minor perturbation. You’re welcome to imagine another country with the same independence but better management, but the reality is that the allegedly better managed countries are far more subject to the whims of their less-well-managed neighbors.
And the constraints on what their neighbors can do to them, are mostly enforced by the United States of America, so if the US becomes grossly dysfunctional, all bets are off. You mentioned South Korea as one of your better-managed countries; how long does that last when the Kim Dynasty realizes that Seoul is no longer under the US nuclear umbrella?
Also keep in mind that despite their relative politics, the US has been far more successful at reducing greenhouse emissions than Germany.
If you cherry-pick a time interval, you can sort of make that technically true, but it’s incredibly misleading – according to http://energy-ecology.blogspot.com/2018/03/greenhouse-gas-emissions-per-capita-top.html the US went from emitting 26 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per person per year in 1990, to 29 tonnes in 2000 and is now back down to 24 tonnes, while Germany has been declining steadily from 16 to 11 or so over that time period.
So if you look at percentage reduction from 2000 to 2020, the US might narrowly come out ahead, but that’s really not a good measure of “which country handles greenhouse gas emissions better?”
And Poland was even better thanks to heavy industry dying during and after fall of communism. It is easy to game or cherry pick such metric.
And to be honest you need to handle cases of pollution generating part of production moving elsewhere.
Moving cement production or steel mills to Russia/Ukraine/China and being proud that pollution decreased is not useful.
I’m thinking about the most recent decade. To be honest, I didn’t bother to look up the statistics first to confirm my impression. I just assumed it would be true since in the US, fracking flourished and mostly pushed out coal, while Germany mothballed all its nuclear plants early and doubled down on coal, despite supposedly green policies.
I’m in the middle of considering leaving. The big issue is my partner is not a citizen, and the immigration system has become unpredictable. But neither of us is really enamored with the US as a place to live (I hate driving, we’d like to both live in a city and own our dwelling, not attached to single family house with a yard, various other aesthetic preferences). Not in tech, but our list is London, Toronto, Madrid, Istanbul, Barcelona, Berlin, and Vancouver, but that’s a combination of idiosyncratic preferences and job opportunities. Obviously not selected for administrative capacity either, only Canada and Germany are clearly better than the US (sorry UK).
Moving to NZ is tough. You’ll have no friends and you won’t be able to relate well to anyone unless you are exceptionally socially skilled. The language, culture, values and humor are very different. If you aren’t white you’ll have lots of racism to deal with. Conveniences which would take a few days in the US, like getting internet hooked up at a new apartment, can take 6 weeks. Everything costs more and wages are lower. You’ll miss all the weddings and funerals back home because it will cost a fortune to fly anywhere but Australia.
Dealing with any government department is like a breath of fresh air compared to the US though. That includes police and civil servants like that: they have a completely different attitude. And the culture and values are much better than the US: they are sort of halfway between the blue and red tribes. A bit like if you took left coast liberals but made them value self-reliance and toughness.
Yeah, that’s a good summary, thanks. The friends/community thing is tough for most expats in most places, but I can believe that it’s even tougher than average in NZ. The culture and values are an extraordinary part of the draw though, and were immediately apparent on even my one short visit there: not only the self-reliance and toughness thing, but what seemed to me an unusually low level of status seeking and display, much lower than that of even supposedly egalitarian Blue Tribers.
NZ culture is what Britain was like before we all became so atomised.
I’m currently a SF Bay area techie, but I came here from Canada (via 2 other US states), so I’m not sure if my viewpoint is interesting.
At this point I’ve put down a lot of roots, and have a housemate who very much does not want to move to Canada, so last year I began to implement expensive parts of a plan to retire in place, rather than selling out and moving.
However, the possibilty of moving back to Canada is always somewhere in the back of my mind, and with both my parents and all their siblings now deceased, the main reason to do so would be political.
I don’t feel as safe here as I did in Canada. Some of this is due to changes over time, that also affected Canada, but much of it is not. I have slightly lower expectations of just about every government representative, from the cop on the beat to the decision makers at the CDC. I see a society that knowingly transfers more risk to individuals (and families) over time, away from any larger group, than Candians would tolerate even now. From where I sit, it’s not a big difference and I’m well positioned to do well in spite of it, but if I’d been average for my family, it would be huge.
Getting back to safety – as well as social safety nets, and things like “right to work” legislation (aka right to fire randomly with no severance), there’s the problem of gun-happy cilvilians. The sound bite version would be to point out the scale of Canada’s recent mass shooting in Nova Scotia – largest ever in Canada; kind of trivial in the US. But the bigger impact is small scale, retail violence. It’s almost impossible to imagine that a Canadian who objected to a face mask requirement would come back and shoot the security guard charged with enforcing it. It’s vanishingly likely that I’d ever encounter a civilian carrying a firearm, concealed or visible, in some random place like a city convenience store.
Now it’s also true that a lot of nasty things have been happening in Canada, that we’d done a better job of not noticing than the equivalent American problems. At the point when I moved to the US, I was blissfully unaware of many of them, some of which have since become public scandals. (Equivalent behaviours in the US were already well known, and sometimes proudly proclaimed by the participants.)
When it comes to politics, neither side of the US two party system has ever represented me. Bernie Sanders is the first US politician I recall encountering who simply seemed normal/mainstream to me. (Seeming mainstream doesn’t mean I’d have supported him, at least not in Canada where there’d be other mainstream Canadian options. But at least his page came from the same book as mine, unlike e.g. Clinton or either Bush.)
As long as I’ve been living here, I’ve had an eye out for political developments which would indicate to me that it was time to go back to Canada, possibly in an emergency fashion. (Just get out; deal with finding a job and selling or shipping what I can after I get there.) I’ve been fortunate in that US xenophobia and scapegoating have not, so far, focussed on people like me. (Who’d have expected, in 1992 when I moved here, that it would have settled on middle Easterners and Muslims?) And the longer I live here, the less obviously foreign I am – I am, after all, a white person who grew up speaking English. (No one asks me “where do I really come from”, even though I could name the places from which 2 of my grandparents immigrated to Canada.)
I think if I’d had children, it would have been harder to convince myself to stay in the US, in spite of the career opportunities and the lovely weather. I’d have wanted them to grow up with Canadian values, and to have a Canadian-style safety net if things went wrong for them. (One nephew has Crohn’s disease. That would be even more of a disaster in the US – unless we were wealthy beyond the level of a mere software engineer.) Or if I’d been better at languages, I might have considered some parts of Scandinavia, which (from a great distance) feel to me as if they have many of the best parts of Canada, without the US as a neighbour.
“A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” has “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part II: Total Warg”
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/08/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-ii-total-warg/comment-page-1/#comment-4458
And from comments:
Yes, this is both accurate and hilarious. If you have a ship full of men*, they man the oars, etc. If Mordor had any ships crewed by trolls instead of men, you’d have to say “Troll the oars!” and “Troll your battle stations!”
*Ambiguously including female humans. Did Greek galleys anthrope the oars or andre them?
I was wondering why the local choral society suddenly got so guttural when they came to the last line of “Deck the halls”.
Heh.
I’d also like to remind everyone that Plutarch reports Hannibal using a stratagem that required detaching some Spaniards from his van. One is free to imagine the van with detachable Spaniards having a wizard and elephant painted on the side.
Really? I was under the impression that chariot-riders were normally labelled by the drawing animal, i.e. horse-drawn chariots would be called cavalry. I mean, I guess they could be both depending on which factor you want to emphasise; if you’re discussing tactics of armies which have footsoldiers and chariots, you’d talk about “Odysseus trying to use his cavalry to flank the Trojan infantry” but if you’re discussing the advantages of horse-riders versus chariots you might say “in this-and-such battle, the Roman cavalry saw off the Briton chariotry”.
And if you really don’t care about the mechanics of it because you just want to focus on tactically planning your battles, you might use ‘cavalry’ just to mean “the mobile element of my forces, that are for manœuvre and skirmishing rather than static stand-up fighting”, in which case you’ll happily apply it to a category of tank.
‘Wargry’ isn’t wrong, and it’s a fun word, but let’s be a bit less giddy about correcting ‘cavalry’.
> happily apply it to a category of tank
Cisternary?
Well, “tank” is just an ascended codename; the tank wing in general is usually just called “armour”. (French “blindé”, German “Panzer”). So I guess if we’re going to assume French words are a hotline to Latinate roots (which this one isn’t, it actually comes from German according to wiktionary; but if My Ass is a good enough etymology for ACOUP then it’s good enough for me), the word would be “blindry”, and the pre-war British doctrine would divide it into (following the military tradition of Frenchily putting adjectives after the noun) “blindry-cavalier” and (what else?) “blindry-roundhead”.
This is incorrect. Wikipedia, every online or physical dictionary I can quickly check, and the Harper Encyclopedia of Military History all agree: Cavalry refers to people who fight on horseback(*); people who ride chariots are a different thing for which the only collective noun I can find is “chariotry”. Plural “chariots” also sees some use in this context.
* Or in some contexts in helicopters or light armored vehicles, but even after we started using it in that sense we didn’t retroname the ancient chariot-riders “cavalry”.
Do you mean to say that Lindybeige lied to me? Gasp!
(More likely: translators of epic poetry will call it cavalry but military historians will call it chariotry, because they’re writing for different audiences and purposes.)
IIRC, chariotry usually fought on foot.
They tended to be fight more like dragoons or motorised infantry than cavalry.
The Britons may have been an exception.
I think you’re right as far as directs shock combat goes, and lines of chariots smashing into each other (or into infantry) like medieval knights with lance and shield was never a big thing.
But throwing javelins or shooting arrows from a chariot, and using its speed to escape anyone who tried to retaliate, was I think fairly common and may have been the dominant use of chariotry.
Charioteers?
There is a Charioteer tank model though.
That’s the plural for the people, not the collective for the military force. The only thing that explicitly include people+horses+chariots as a body is “chariotry”, and the people who think that’s a silly word that they don’t want to use generally just use “chariots” because the context usually makes it clear that they aren’t talking about unmanned horseless chariots.
So, “Egyptian chariots routed the Hittites at Kadesh”, or “Charioteers represented a military aristocracy in early Egyptian society”, but the reverse usage would be rare. “Chariotry” would be more correct for the former case but there usually won’t be much confusion.
Very cool video showing how germs can spread on a buffet line. Yikes!
Aw, you’re reminding me that my favorite restaurant, Souplanation, just shutdown for good. Apparently they couldn’t make take out only work.
Hard to find a place, cheap, healthy, filling, and amenable to everyone.
Have hotels shut down their breakfast buffets? Switched to room service only?
Bar soap recommendations?
Most things are back on store shelves, even rice. But liquid soap remains elusive. So I need to get some bar soap for handwashing. I haven’t bought bar soaps in at least 20 years.
I tried Irish Spring, but it gives off way too powerful an odor. My wife got rid of all of it because she said it was enraging her allergies. It had a slimy feel probably because it has some kind of moisturizer, but if I’m going to use it a lot I’d probably rather have the slimy feel than dry out my hands.
Are there bar soaps out there that don’t smell? I’m limited to what’s on the shelves, obviously. Any way to tell before buying it?
Dove beauty cream bar: it doesn’t smell, and it doesn’t dry your hands that much because it is superfatted. We have it in most stores in Spain.
Really probably any Dove bar soap will be fine, they are rarely very strongly scented. I was going to make the same suggestion.
I also would recommend Dove. Be sure to get one without added fragrances.
FYI, if you don’t like the slimy feel of Irish Spring, you definitely won’t like Dove.
Apparently there’s only one kind of Dove which is absolutely scentless. I’ll look it up if anyone is interested.
I don’t know whether it will be available, but yes this stuff exists. Some products will be labeled unscented or fragrance free.
Any reason you’re not ordering some off Amazon, by the way?
Some people recommend just using WD40, others swear by a drop of 3-in-1 oil, but I personally prefer to use a good Teflon based product for my scizorhands.
WD40 is a water displacer, not a lubricant. It will attract dirt and clog stuff up! Makes it really hard to snap your fingers!
Lithium grease is technically a type of soap.
Are there bar soaps out there that don’t smell? I’m limited to what’s on the shelves, obviously. Any way to tell before buying it?
Look for ones marketed as for “sensitive skin”, those tend to have fewer/none of the perfumes in them. You should also be able to see if any are packaged as “fragrance free”, though you may not have a great selection depending on what is on the shelves of which supermarket. Dove soap is mild but does have moisturisers in it, so it may well feel “slimy” to you.
You could try Ivory bar soap. I find it to be like Dove except 25% less scented and lotioney. I can smell soap at the store through the packaging….although I guess if you’re wearing a mask that’s probably not so effective.
> I’m limited to what’s on the shelves
Not if you can find hardwood ash and lard.
non-sleep-deprived me would like to note that handling caustic soda when there’s a plague around is a bad idea. Do not make your own soap.
Kirk’s coco-castile soap. It’s just actual quality soap, it’s available as either original scent, which is not overwhelming, or new non-scented. Shouldn’t be too expensive.
In the past, I’ve bought 5 lb blocks of glycerin soap, which is incredibly unscented, but kind of hard on the hands. It has the advantage of being very inexpensive, but you have to cut it into usable bar sizes yourself, which is very doable with a hacksaw or similar but not very fun.
Oh holy hell, this is something else. Okay, call me an idiot, but damn it this is the 21st Century that skiffy promised me back when I was seven and watching Star Trek in syndication in rural Ireland! 😀
United States Space Force recruitment video.
brb joining star force.
Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?
I say we take off, nuke the whole site from orbit.
This future is more like it. The two things in the Trump presidency I’m 100% behind: trying to buy Greenland and shamelessly ripping off the Starfleet logo.
Eh, I wish that were true, but it’s not.
Let’s compromise and agree to rip off the star trek uniforms.
You could tell they were more serious in TOS, because their uniforms hadn’t yet turned into pajamas.
I must say that being in space has its advantages. Any terrestrial force that changed their uniforms as frequently as Starfleet would be getting a serious lashing from the budgeting department. It is a little hard to argue with the people with the orbital bombardment weapons, though.
Starfleet also has replicators, so replacing uniforms has got to be a lot easier.
At least Starfleet doesn’t have seasonality!
The real US Navy technically changes uniforms semi-annually!
You say that, but their fielding schedule looks to be a complete mess. Some backwater station gets the new uniform years before the flagship? Even when fielded there is a mish-mash of uniforms being worn by the bridge crew and senior staff? I mean, I suppose there could be some tenacious hold-out waiting for the wear-out date before switching but you would think the Captain would have a little talk with them about setting an example for the rest of the crew.
The budgeting department of the U.S. Navy doesn’t raise a peep about uniform changes significantly more frequent than those of Starfleet. During my 8 year tenure there were around six very significant uniform changes with several more in the few years after I left.
Like many Naval rumors I can’t vouch for its accuracy but there was a widespread belief that the changes were essentially a grift by the companies producing the uniforms, made possible by offering retiring admirals sinecures in exchange for leaning on the not-yet retired leadership to support the changes. The fact that the recently retired had nurtured and promoted those individuals over the years combined with general elite chumminess makes the leaning easy. Plus messing with the uniforms is fun – it’s like getting to play dress up with real people – and it’s not as though it’s your money that you’re wasting.
I don’t follow naval uniform changes in particular, but I was actually thinking about the fact that Congress was getting annoyed enough with constantly getting hit up for money to fund uniform changes and have, AFAIK, started clamping down on them a little bit.
Ah. That makes a lot of sense.
I’m still upset we never got the Gingrich Moon Colony.
Naval Gazing’s comments are broken for the moment (trying to get them fixed, but it could take a while) and I just put up the first part of my tutorial on Aurora. As such, I’m going to hope Scott doesn’t mind me moving the comments here for the moment. So this is the official comment thread for that post, and I’ll make sure anything said here is mirrored over there.
You are tempting me really strongly to try it!
Is there a trope for “alien/fantasy world that treats our world’s history as part of their own”?
That’s probably a bad name. I’m reading The Phantom Tollbooth with my son again, and the characters in The Lands Beyond regularly refer to historical figures like George Washington and historical events like the exploration of America. But they are in an alien world that you need special techniques to access. No one in our world knows about theirs. They aren’t deliberately hiding from us like some secret society like in Harry Potter; in fact, they have a welcome center.
I know this is too far to read into a children’s book. But it feels like I’ve seen this before. Like the Donald Duck comic books that describe American history and how the Europeans founded America. I guess that’s an alternate universe where Columbus wasn’t the weird dog-man creature that is so dominant in that world, but I don’t think they’ve ever showed us his picture.
“You’ve not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
Edit: wait, I might not be understanding what you’re saying. Are they correctly (in universe) experiencing earth history, or are they erroneously appropriating it?
Nitpick: Donald Duck comics takes place in the real world (in the fictional city of Duckburg in the fictional U.S. state Calisota). The connection to the real world is not super strong but it exists. As an example: Theodore Roosevelt is a prominent character in some of the Scrooge stories. So it makes sense for the ducks to talk about the U.S. and George Washington.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/DisneyMouseAndDuckComics
So I don’t think Donald Duck is a good example of what you are talking about. Bu the trope you describe exists.
Remember that Donald Duck has two Latino friends who are a chicken and a parrot.
I derive way too amusement from trying to figure out which real-world figures would be dogs vs ducks vs chickens vs parrots. Were Montezuma and La Malinche parrots while the conquistadors were chickens?
The French Revolution would be so much funnier if all the nobles were chickens.
I’m laughing, but I feel guilty about it.
The graphic novel Maus assigns different animal-man races to the various nationalities who participated in WWII.
Yes but in Maus the analogy breaks down, in universe as well. Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Polish are pigs, and Americans are dogs. Yet, what animal is the Jewish American? He is shown as both a dog and as a mouse in different panels.
I haven’t read Donald Duck comics, but I saw DuckTales, in which most people are dog-men. I’m pretty sure Columbus would have been a dog or a duck in that show.
Is this meant to include things like Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, where the fantasy world is parallel to our own, or Planet of the Apes and 1984, where the world of the fiction is later than our own, or both or neither? I think there was a time when the genre label “fantasy” took it as definitional that the fantasy world was somehow visited by a character from the “mundane” world (like The Indian in the Closet, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, etc.), though of course this definition is no longer considered, because it would define The Lord of the Rings as non-fantasy.
I think there was a time when the genre label “fantasy” took it as definitional that the fantasy world was somehow visited by a character from the “mundane” world (like The Indian in the Closet, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, etc.)
I think this (what Kaitian called Isekai) is what I was thinking of. Imagine the characters in Narnia knew about Abraham Lincoln or mentioned their ancestors being on the Mayflower.
They knew about Adam and Eve.
Did they know about them, or did they just know the phrase from a prophecy?
Regardless, numerous inhabitants of Narnia were always canonically from our world.
Are you (Edward Scizorhands) looking for examples of coherent worldbuilding like this that incorporates Earth timeline, or incoherent worldbuilding that haphazardly has references from Earth thrown in?
What is not surprising given that their royal line was imported from then still religious England.
Are you (Edward Scizorhands) looking for examples of coherent worldbuilding like this that incorporates Earth timeline, or incoherent worldbuilding that haphazardly has references from Earth thrown in?
I dunno. I don’t have a great concept here.
But maybe if I read about several of these things I’ll realize it’s a common trope and stop worrying about it, like just accepting hearing ships fly in space in sci fi.
Hey, I want to read this!
Oh, you mean those are two different books…
There should be a Ducktales crossover called His Duck Materials.
What kind of daemons do the ducks have? Can they shapeshift into humans?
I’ve been browsing tvtropes for this for a while now and I can’t find anything. Strange, this seems like an interesting category.
It can be quite insidious. One of my cringes is when people cry “Fire!” as they shoot their bows in fantasy (looking at you, Peter Jackson). This doesn’t make sense because the reason we cry “Fire!” is because we have firearms, and a culture without firearms would use a different word. (Medieval England used “Loose!” or “Shoot!”.)
These insidious things are a lot harder to spot than aliens talking about George Washington, but it feels like they belong to the same category. I guess the question becomes where to stop: if you want to be hard about it I guess almost all idioms are off the table.
It always bugs me when people in stereotypical “medieval England” fantasies have names like John and Samuel. There are no Hebrews in this fantasy world, and if there were, there’s no reason for your fantasy pagans to be named after them. Call your dudes Fred and Carl and William if you want real world names.
Do you mean medieval England, or pre-Roman England? Because England (Wessex) was Christian by the end of the 7th century. “Bad King John” was a real-world character.
He means faux medieval England, like Westeros, say, that exists without a similar analog to the ancient world.
I’m pretty sure it’s satire, but hard to tell.
I’m talking about fantasy stories that are set in “medieval Europe”, but with a fantasy history that doesn’t include Christianity. Of course many people in real medieval England had Christian names.
Examples include A Song of Ice and Fire and most D&D worlds.
Sidetrack: Westoros has a mixture of common modern names, variant spellings of common and uncommon names from our timeline, and completely alien names.
Any one know why Martin did it that way? Theories about how Martin got away with it? It seems like it should be very jarring, but it generally doesn’t seem to bother people.
If you really want to be consistent, construct a language and culture and draw all your names from that.
If you really want to be consistent, construct a language and write your story in that.
I guess from a writing perspective it makes sense to have recognizable names. It just puts less strain on the reader’s brain. I’m amazed how many people manage to read about Jaime Lannister for thousands of pages and go on to write a comment about Jamie.
Construct a language and culture and draw all your names from that then usually translate that back to English (except for one, where you just change the suffix).
Yeah, I have no patience any more for fantasy authors who can’t be bothered to create their own custom language, orthography, theology, philosophy, cartography, and cuisine.
It’s like, are you even trying?
(This is satire, by the way.)
Welp, I guess I just fell victim to the Mandela effect again.
They should have pronounced it high-me in the show.
Cersei as Greek, Jaime as Mexican, “Are the Lannisters POC?” a thread locked after 14226 pages of debate
I’ve grown increasingly annoyed by this as well. Especially when they say
ready, aim, fire” as opposed to “notch, draw and loose.”
You wouldn’t use “draw” and “loose” in the same command sequence because archers cannot hold a bow fully drawn for very long, and having them wait for a separate command after they’ve drawn would tire them out unnecessarily. Consequently you use either “draw” or “loose” to mean “draw and loose”. The medieval English seem to have preferred “loose” but the Spanish and French used “draw” to the point that to this day “to draw” still carries the meaning of “to throw or shoot” in both languages, and in Spanish “a draw” can mean “a shot” including gunshots. In fact in the dialect of Spanish I speak the word “to draw” which is “tirar” is only really used in the contexts of shooting, throwing, and having sex.
the genre convention of archers holding their fire for far too long is annoying, but it’s too dramatic to go anywhere. but we can at least use the right words to describe it.
Just once I would like to see characters menaced by archers who are correctly holding their bows with arrows notched, but not drawn. It might even give some tension as the characters wonder if they could charge the archers before they draw and loose. Could even have some dramatic shots of panicked archers letting loose short of a full draw and the arrows flying off wildly or bouncing off armour.
Relatedly, when I roleplay in fantasy games I use the phrase, “loosing short of a full draw” instead of “going off half-cocked”, since I like using phrases that make sense in universe.
Tvtropes actually does have something like that specific scenario as “Orphaned Etymology”
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrphanedEtymology
I quite enjoyed the Penny Arcade example at the top of Hold Your Hippogriffs. I haven’t read Penny Arcade in probably 10 years or so.
I remember a panel at an sf convention which got into this on a world-building level. The specific example was that if your characters have no contact with the ocean, the adjective “pearly” shouldn’t be used. Now that I think about it, they could have had fresh-water pearls, but I don’t think that takes much away from the example.
Pearls were widely traded throughout history, being valuable, small and non-perishable.
Wealthy Roman women often wore pearls from the Indian Ocean, for example.
IMO, unless you’re Tolkein, you aren’t going to be able to create a fictional variant of English that is sufficiently “realistic”. And even if you could, readers probably wouldn’t understand it. Better to just use the Translation Convention and call it a day.
No idea of a name for it, but this kind of thinking can be both fun and disturbing.
I think there are too many different genres that fit this description:
Magical realism, where a “normal” real world story is told in a way that includes magic or other fantastical elements (maybe the movies Pan’s Labyrinth and Life of Pi are good examples).
Urban fantasy and other types of “hidden fantasy society” stories. This includes Harry Potter and everything that has vampires hiding among us. Maybe the Cthulhu mythos stories also fit here.
Space fantasy where human history is often present as “what happened before space exploration”.
Isekai stories where a character from our world is transported to a fantasy world. This is arguably the most common kind of fantasy story (as @keaswaran has noted). Those worlds often have some sort of ongoing connection to our world too.
I don’t think Donald Duck counts as fantasy at all. If you changed the characters to look like normal humans they’re no different from other adventure comics.
Urban fantasy isn’t necessarily about hidden magic. Laurel Hamilton’s Anita Blake was the first thing I’d seen where everyone knew about werewolves and vampires, and I believe they’re considered urban fantasy.
Is there any difference between Isekai and portal fantasy?
I don’t think so, with the exception that isekai can also include “reborn.” I’m thinking of Konosuba, where the protagonist is killed in a horrific…slow motion heart attack tractor accident…and then reborn in a fantasy world. I don’t think western portal fantasy ever includes rebirth…it’s always something like “walk bodily through a magical portal.”
That’s an interesting difference.
Columbus has appeared in Donald Duck and he was human. From “The Lost Charts of Columbus” by Don Rosa: Imgur
Well that just shows that Don Rosa remembered that Columbus was Italian, not Spanish. Sadly we never got an illustration of chicken Queen Isabella selling her jewels to finance human Columbus’s expedition.
A question just occurred to me: was Carl Barks the one responsible for filling Donald Duck’s world with man-dogs?
Hillary Clinton once said “Women have always been the primary victims of war”. While I understand the immediate umbrage taken at this claim, isn’t this irrefutably true? Civilian casualties in modern war typically outnumber military ones. A look at the Soviet Union in WW2 estimates 10 million military to 16 million civilian, which I imagine must be dis proportionally female. I would say it’s even more dramatically lopsided in conflicts like the Iraq war.
I’d say American’s might interpret this statement differently because we are unique in not suffering large civilian casualties in our wars.
What percent of civilian casualties are women?
If the 10 million military deaths were exclusively male then the 16 million civilian deaths would have to be 82% female for it to be a 50/50 split (and ignoring that these are generally divided into men/women/children, not male/female).
Yeah, I was thinking that, but maybe the soviet union is a bad example, because early in the war so many soldiers were killed/captured and died in captivity enveloped, among other things. If you look at the the total for the entire war, its something in the range of 21-25 million military, and 50-55 million civilians. So that’s roughly 2:1. and if you assume that the civilian deaths will be at least in the range of 60% female, maybe higher, than it stands that women suffer more.
Why are you assuming that civilian deaths are 60% female?
21 + .4×50 = 41
.6×50 = 30
So on your numbers, male deaths are still much larger than female.
Why would you imagine that? Estrogen-seeking smart bombs?
Even if you’re saying that the civilian casualties are predominantly female because the men have been taken out to serve in the Army, A: that’s rarely more than 10-20% of the male population, and B: if I take a balanced population, select out an all-male group, specifically kill a bunch of people from the all-male group, then go kill a bunch of people from the remaining group, it’s pretty likely that I’m going to kill more males than females overall.
Or we could just look it up in Wikipedia, which gives an estimate of 20 million male, 6.6 million female casualties for the Soviet Union in WW2.
My analysis isn’t deep, just that in general if you have twice as many civilian casualties as military, and over 50% of your citizens are female (because some men have been taken into the army), then you’ll have numerically more dead females.
Of course I suppose you could have factors like Women surviving famine conditions easier than men, or disease, so very possibly civilian deaths could skew male in some ways.
I think that you are making a statistical error, where you seem to believe that it is safer to be a soldier than a civilian.
Group sizes are very important in this analysis. If 1/3rd of casualties are from the 10-20% of the population that make up the military, then that group is not actually safer than the general population per capita, even if 2/3rds of the casualties are civilian.
Furthermore, if military casualties are 99% men and civilian casualties are merely 60% women, then the greater gap between male and female deaths in the military is not necessarily dwarfed by the civilian gap in the opposite direction, even if there are more civilian casualties.
Also, as I argued in my other comment, it’s hardly obvious that the gender ratio of civilian casualties will be equal to the gender ratio of the civilian population. So civilian casualties can be very close to 50% male.
That does not follow, as you can easily check by putting in some numbers.
That was a very rudimentary error on my part, almost renders this whole post moot, but glad for the fruitful discussion, just incorporating the idea that civilian casualties would screw male due to targeting factories/female resilience was something I didn’t consider.
Yeah, the assumptions required for this line of thought to make sense would also lead us to conclusions like “the safest place to be during a war is in the army” which seems a little implausible, and leads to further interesting questions like “if that were true, then wouldn’t we start drafting women and children? for humanitarian reasons?”
There are probably some cases where this is true. I’m think of recent African conflicts, where there aren’t large scale engagements between enemy forces and more reprisals on civilians. In that case being in the army might be safer, you’re surrounded by people with weapons.
That’s a good point, but Clinton’s initial statement was categorical. Yes, there are some conflicts where it’s safer to be in the army, but those are very non-central examples of war. And based on the rest of that statement, she wasn’t thinking about Africa.
A lot of reprisals against civilians are not gender neutral. For example, Boko Haram used to murder school boys, while leaving school girls alone. Ironically, they changed tactic because few cared about those boys and they wanted people to pay attention. So they switched to targeting women, but even then they didn’t murder them like the boys, but merely kidnapped them.
Also, Africa has some nasty warlords who terrorize their own population. This doesn’t really compare to WW 2-style of warfare/governance.
That’s a good way to put it. If being in the army is safer than being a civilian, then casualties in war will predominantly female. Otherwise, they are going to be predominantly male so long as armies are predominantly male.
More like, the safest place to be in a war is directly behind the baddest-ass soldier in the army. But I imagine there might be competition for that spot.
(Inspired by Erika Eleniak’s character in Under Siege)
I mean yeah, there’s certainly cases where a “support” job in the army may be safer than remaining on the homefront, sure.
To use a less extreme example, one of my uncles voluntarily enlisted in the Air Force during Vietnam, because he was convinced he would otherwise be drafted, and being in the Air Force was considered safer (and it was, he was never in any real physical danger!)
But most jobs aren’t like that. There’s a reason that when war breaks out, nobody thinks “let me send my daughter to the front – that’s where she will be safe!”
@Bobobob
Perhaps he is bad-ass because he knows when to duck…
Seriously though, non-frontline troops regularly got attacked in many wars.
@Matt M
I assume that he wasn’t a pilot. That was fairly risky business.
Note that the opponent didn’t have a real ability to attack airfields in that war, but that’s not going to be true for every war.
My dad joined the Navy as a lawyer during Vietnam, because 1) nobody’s giving lawyers guns and sending them into the jungle and 2) the VC isn’t doing raids against lawyers on ships.
Almost certainly not, because that guy is going to be on the front, which means you’re also on the front, or near enough that you’re not safe from artillery. The safest place to be during a war is in an office somewhere that isn’t going to be attacked.
As long as you fight enemies without mine-laying, submarine and/or battleship capability that is a good strategy, but during WW II ships weren’t that safe.
Little colonial wars like Vietnam are not the best example, IMO.
He certainly will know when do duck and cover, and do so faster than you.
Being next to the protagonist in Act I is how you get killed so the protagonist can avenge you.
You are safe in Act II. But in Act III you might be bumped off to show how serious it all is, or have to sacrifice yourself to save the hero.
> “the safest place to be during a war is in the army”
This sounds way too much like it should be the theme of a 1980s comedy.
The next sentence was
So she was talking about women as victims of specific soldier-on-soldier type of warfare, but by proxy. To be fair, she then said “Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims.” So she was thinking about this, too.
Why would that be? And so much as to outweigh the military casualties, which are just shy of 100% men?
Edit: ninjer’d
You know, In my mind I was comparing female civilian casualties to male military, not male military AND civilian. Which is very foolish, early morning for yea.
I imagine there are still some conflicts this applies (perhaps some of the more genocidal campaigns in history), but as a rule probably doesn’t hold up.
@Conrad Honcho
Clinton’s statement also seems unfair to me by excluding soldiers as people who were victimized by being forced from their homes. It’s not like those soldiers would choose to live in barracks and trenches rather than their own homes, if they could choose, anymore than civilian refugees would prefer to vacate their homes.
It’s one thing to be forced from your home if you’re drafted, and another if you’re forced from your home because it’s been destroyed. I assume the latter is more likely to happen to civilians, though some soldiers would rather take the job than be refugees, and some soldiers have been drafted from their homes and then the homes get destroyed.
I think you’re underselling the wrongness of being forcibly plucked from your home, packed into a tin can, shipped overseas, given a rifle and told to go kill somebody you don’t even know.
Maybe I’m connotatively wrong, but I really think it makes a difference to have a home to go back to.
@Nancy Lebovitz
AFAIK, many people flee from troops that approach, without their home being destroyed. They are going to be unsure whether their home will still exist if they get back, where the same is often true for the soldier.
Nancy, imagine becoming a murderer against your will. I don’t like that concept.
@RMECola
Even if civilians are disproportionately female, that doesn’t mean that civilian casualties have to be, because bombings that hurt civilians were not random. They often targeted factories and such. I expect that factory workers would have been male disproportionately often, compared to the civilian population in general.
This not just true because men would have factory jobs more often, but also because women live longer, so the retired elderly who would not work in factories, would be much more often be female.
I found these numbers, which suggest that men died more often than women in every age group, in Russia.
In Germany, the losses should be way more lopsided, as the Germans forced a lot of men from other countries to work in Germany. With bombings concentrated on Germany, those forced laborers would be much more at risk than their wives, children and parents, who remained outside of Germany.
Then there are the reprisals. The Germans would execute male civilians in response to attacks by the resistance.
—
Note that a lot of civilian war deaths are due to disease and starvation. Women seem to be more resilient to these.
PS. Note that Clinton didn’t (just) argue about casualties, but talked about people suffering from losing a son or father to war. When making that claim she was being sexist, as she argued that the mother of a killed soldier would suffer, but excluded the father.
Well, we tried to, but it turns out that’s really hard, so we just burned down Hamburg instead. Sorry, Hamburg; it was nothing personal.
(Also, when we did bomb factories, we mostly did it at night, which at least early in the war meant the workers weren’t in them at the time.)
Of course the USAAF did things differently; but precision bombing in WWII was generally only a thing if you had air supremacy (and even then, if you happened to be the Luftwaffe, you might decide to bomb Warsaw or Rotterdam instead to induce them to surrender to the Heer. Not to mention what the Allies did to Dresden).
In WWII there was a big rise in female factory work, because mobilisation was causing shortages of male labour. There’s plenty of British newsreels showing young women and old men building aircraft.
Note that I’m not defending Clinton’s position, which was stupid; just quibbling some historical details I happen to be a nerd about.
I would still expect the area around the factories to have relatively many male civilians and the rural regions to have relatively female civilians.
It’s pretty foolish to try to stake anything on this comparison.
The front lines of combat are a super majority of male, and you are vastly under-counting “victims” if you only look at casualties; soldiers come back maimed or traumatized.
But, as noted, the civilian population suffers as well, depending on the historical period maybe much more, but lately probably less.
We generally see a death as the greatest loss, but losing a son or parent is tremendous suffering as well. However, these deaths fall upon both sexes equally, as do the depredations of war.
Possibly the statement is attempting to separate victimization on the basis of culpability; this is the apex fallacy; few men have the say in waging war to a degree much greater than women.
Trying to call one or the other a ‘primary’ victim should make the speaker look ignorant and callous. To the extent it doesn’t, the hearer is probably primed to see women as more morally virtuous or as experiencing more relevant suffering and the common man as having more agency.
Yeah, this sums up how I feel about the comparison more than any numerical argument would.
That makes sense, I really only thought about this in the context of raw numbers, and even then I don’t think it holds up to scrutiny.
The steelman of this presumably depends on counting sexual violence as well as more straightforward violence. As baconbits and John point out, there’s basically no way to have a big war and end up with more women than men dead. But armies have long had a reputation for being extremely unconcerned with consent, and depending on relative weighting of rape vs death, you could make an argument for this.
(I’m not really in favor of this argument, just pointing out that this is the strongest possible steelman. Another option would be that the benefits of war accrue mostly to men, leaving women with no offsetting advantages. This is also not really a great argument.)
Ancient* warfare could be merciless to civilians, and I’m glad my daughters aren’t growing up in a world where being on the wrong side of a siege means they are enslaved or killed after being used by soldiers.
But whether that’s worse than being impaled by some jagged piece of metal and left to literally rot is hard to judge.
*And some varieties of recent warfare that we are privileged to be far from.
If you’re going to bring in rape, you also need to bring in non-fatal combat casualties, like losing a limb, PTSD, etc.
One aspect of extended casualties from combat would be PTSD leading to domestic abuse.
Assuming that soldiers with PSTD are mostly male and heterosexual (this is less true with modern arrnies), this puts a wife and children at risk, so there’s a bias towards female victims.
As for Clinton’s claim, I’d say that the harm to women from wars is generally underestimated, but it’s hard to determine whether it’s larger than the harm to men.
It might be better to be clear that war is really bad for people instead of making it into a gender issue.
@bean
I want to point out that sexual victimization is not exclusive to men. In some wars, it seems to have targeted men extensively.
Here’s the full context of that speech. I think it may have just been a clumsy, if Freudian, attempt to tie the purpose of her conference in with the host nation’s recent history.
A better phrasing may have been “women have often been overlooked as victims of war”, which probably isn’t strictly true either but imo more forgivable.
Outside view: after war, there are many women left for few men. To the point where fatherless families are normal – women just get pregnant and raise children alone as a life choice. I have an example in the extended family.
This is definitely a good way of steel maning the position. The vast majority of people want to be in a heterosexual romantic relationship and those who do not are typically not going to switch for “price” reasons. And most people want at least serial monogamy. Thus to be crudely reductive both supply and demand are quite inelastic. So a small drop in the number of males dramatically increases the remaining males bargaining power. This results in males getting much more of what they want in romantic relationships in a number of ways. And males, as a group, want more casual sex and less commitment than females. We observe this happening in a variety of places but it seems very well established as an empirical trend. After southern Italy sent a lot of young men and fewer young women to the US, marriage rates decreased and out of wedlock birth rates shot up. In the US, southern Italians who largely dated and married other southern Italians had high marriage rates and low out of wedlock birth rates.
I guess next time there’s a war I want to survive, I’ll be sure to join the military.
This is an extremely cynical take… but the quote itself seems to me to just be a logical outgrowth of male disposability.
You don’t weight the lives and physical well-being of individuals and groups in a society equally. So even if you quantify that 2, 3, 4 or more times as many men are killed in war it doesn’t really matter. Clinton isn’t saying that more women die in war, just that they’re the ‘primary victims’ — which might be necessarily true by definition depending on how heavily you discount the physical well being of males.
Attempt to steelman it:
On the question of whether you are safer in the army or not. You are definitely more food safe in the army. When there’s rationing or less food, soldiers get their food before civilians (with many exceptions for high ranking civilians).
So, if you’re a poor woman in Westeros or something like that, you would be better off joining the army in winter. If they’d take you, that is.
The simplest explanation that fits all known facts is that women have more qualia than men, on average.
This explains why women cry all the time, and it also means that even if fewer women are killed or hurt in the war, they might still suffer more qualia of pain than men.
The only surprising thing is how Hillary Clinton could have admitted such politically incorrect thought.
You could argue that the sum of women’s suffering (in and after a war) is larger than men’s, since the soldiers that die don’t suffer any more.
I think we need to add “all women in conquered territories must be killed” to the Geneva conventions, to reduce the suffering of women.
More different qualia? More intense qualia?
I don’t think it’s true at all, but I certainly don’t think it’s irrefutably true.
1) If you define “victim” to mean “fatality,” then:
1.1) I’d look for data on how the ratio of men to women changed after a war. Based on the Russia numbers upthread, it sounds like Russia at least saw a relative drop in men relative to women, but I’d want to see some more data.
1.2) You could also argue whether you should determine primary victims by relative chance of death or by absolute numbers of death. If war caused men to have a greater individual chance of death, but more women died overall because there were more women, you could argue which was the “primary victim.” About twice as many white Americans as black are shot by police in a given year, but almost no one would argue that white Americans are the “primary victims” of police violence. (At the very least, it’s not “indisputable.”)
2.) Hillary probably meant “victims” more broadly that raw fatalities. So men have a greater chance of being drafted (and probably of being wounded or killed), but women have a greater chance of being the victims of sex crimes. Those are so hard to compare that I would say Hillary’s point is defensible (if you omit the word “always” as hyperbole), but not indisputable.
If you start counting non-lethal victimization, do you count them once by person or each instance? Do the traumatizing experiences of a soldier count as being victimized?
I’m curious about something. Those who’ve had naked-in-public dreams: did anyone else in the dream notice or care?
Generally they don’t in my dreams. The problem in those dreams is usually that I’m cold without my clothes on.
You feel temperature in your dreams? I don’t think I have have in any dream I remember.
Maybe we should do a survey about what sensory experiences people have in their dreams.
I don’t believe I have any true sensory experiences in my dream. It’s all just the brain filling a story (with no real attempt at continuity or consistency). Being in a dream isn’t like looking at a landscape. You don’t actually see anything until the brain goes, “wait, it would make sense for trees to be here” and then suddenly you see trees. And then you see aliens invading Rome without ever consciously leaving the landscape because dreams are like that.
Usually not, but in my very first naked dream one person was shocked and asked if I was crazy. No one else noticed.
I may be atypical; as I understand it, these dreams are usually distressing, but I like them.
A child?
In my dreams of this sort, it’s very common for the other people to care a little bit, and for me to care about them caring a bit more, but nowhere near as much as anyone would care in real life. It’s as though the dream occurs in some nudist-colony-adjacent place, where it’s mildly inappropriate to be nude outside of the colony, but it’s an understandable accident, more akin to forgetting to comb one’s hair or leaving one’s fly down.
Similar for me too. They’re not shocked in the way people would presumably be in real life, but there’s a clear sense that it’s a faux pas that they’re tolerating out of politeness. Usually there’s a sense of patronizing indulgence, like with a child: they’re not really bothered by my nudity, and even smile about it a little, but it’s plainly not a mistake that THEY would ever make.
That’s fascinating. I’m usually intensely self-conscious while everyone around me either doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind.
nudist-colony-adjacent
Side note, but I love how sticking “adjacent” at the end of words is such a thing around these parts.
Some people ’round here put “adjacent” next to words, but others merely consider it acceptable — they’re adjacent-adjacent-adjacent.
I felt like it was a term I learned a decade ago when studying Los Angeles real estate. (Everything is Silver Lake-adjacent or UCLA-adjacent or “just minutes from DTLA”.)
Back when I had these dreams (curiously, I don’t think I’ve had one I could remember upon waking for years), they were characterized by a gnawing fear of the umbrage people would take when they noticed, but even when I was around people, there was never a specific time when some dream-projection noticed & cared.
What would be the cognitive behavioral therapy approach to such dreams? Actually walk naked in public, and gradually get used to the fact that no one really cares?
I’m not sure I understand your question. I’ve never read or heard anyone say the dreams are a problem for them, so why would therapy be needed?
I haven’t had naked dreams in a long time but when I had them, people not only noticed, but also laughed at me. (Additionally, once I was only naked because some in-dream friends drugged me and stole my clothes to humiliate me, and another time there was a creep taking photos.)
In my naked dreams, I don’t have my glasses on, either, so I only see very fuzzy things. The without glasses part I tend to find a lot more frustrating than the naked part.
No glasses? Your subconscious is pedantic about the word “naked”.
Clearly, my subconscious is more afraid of being without glasses. The naked part is just a bonus.
But then, I’ve had a couple of panic induced meltdowns when travelling and not finding my glasses when waking up (begging other people to help me, while I stand on my tiptoes frantically panicking).
Being unable to see more than 20 cm away clearly is scary. The dependence on a fragile and hard to replace fast object is also hard.
Now that I’ve started buying glasses on the Internet, I am considering buying a second pair, so I never lose it.
Every time I change glasses I get a fancy, light frame polarized-lens pair, plus a cheap one just in case. Doesn’t even matter that it takes 10 years to need it – it’s just there, and the cost is very low. Order a couple of cheap pairs now, you’ll feel much better. If the main one breaks they give you enough time to have it replaced.
I take it you speak from experience?
My dreams are about preventing anyone from noticing that I’m not wearing pants until I realize how stupid this is and wake up.
Malls and non-essential retail stores have the option to reopen in North Carolina, effective 5 PM today.
My prediction: virtually no one (well, virtually no one I know, in any case) will take advantage of this and go out shopping. People are too suspicious of the governor’s motives and too used to staying at home. Complete disinhibition will take months, more likely an entire year.
Data from Georgia suggests rapid return to 80% of pre-lockdown traffic for many businesses and even 75% return for restaurants, and this after only a few days.
Not quite,
The average is still true, and 50% is a far cry from, “virtually no one.”
Is the average still true? The article claims that restaurants returned to 75% of normal levels while rural areas returned to 88% and urban areas to 50%, since the straight average of those two numbers is 69% then they must be weighting it toward rural restaurants. However Georgia is 60% urban/40% rural.
The most likely cause of this discrepancy is that they only counted the actual places that opened and ignored that which remained closed and who are at roughly 0% of their previous traffic. Without knowing that split between reopenings and non openings you can’t conclude much except that the actual numbers are lower than the headline numbers given.
I feel like this is going to be an urban/rural divide right down the map. Liberal urban areas will be slow to take advantage of the lifting of restrictions, while conservative rural areas will be much more eager to return to normal life.
The question is, what happens if there’s a spike in COVID-19 cases over the next few weeks?
That’s what’s supposed to happen.
I am utterly convinced most officials now recognize the only way we are getting out of this is through herd immunity, they just aren’t allowed to say so because they know the media will go full “YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE!!!” on them.
I meant more like “a spike in deadly, lung-rupturing, incredibly grotesque COVID-19 cases.”
But I don’t know. My wife’s aunt, who is in a nursing facility and was not in the greatest shape in the first place, had COVID-19 a couple weeks ago, never got particularly sick, and is now completely recovered.
With my luck, I’ll pass through a sneeze cloud dispersed five minutes before by an asymptomatic teenager and get the lung-rupturing internal-organs-dissolving strain of Coronavirus. This is a very existential disease.
A million dead Americans is probably not something they want to say out loud, yes.
So long as it’s not enough to overwhelm the hospital system, I don’t think it matters.
We’re going back to the original meaning of “flatten the curve”, whether the scientist-politico-journalist class likes it or not.
Well I hope not, because I really like your posting style and turns of phrase.
….And fwiw, a unique multi-interpretable username
Georgia has already had several major COVID outbreaks in rural areas.
I’ll bet your prediction is quite wrong. Have you been to a hardware store (like Home Dept) recently? They’re packed. A lot of people are yearning to get out, and are not as afraid of dying as the media thinks. “Too used to staying at home” is something I’ve not heard from anyone I talk to — “utterly sick of staying at home” is more like it!
I can’t wait no, (no I) I can’t wait (oh when)
When they gonna open up that door?
I’m goin’ (yes I’m) goin’, I’m a-goin’ to the
Goin’ to the (hard) ware I’m goin’, really goin’ to the
Goin’ (hard) I’m goin’ to the (hard) oh yes, I’m goin’ to the
Hardware store
Haven’t hardware stores been open the whole time?
What’s to be suspicious about Governor Cooper?
This is a month old link, but he’s one of the governors who seems to have public trust https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-like-how-their-governor-is-handling-the-coronavirus-outbreak/
Yeah. I agree with the conclusion (people aren’t going to start pouring into malls immediately) but I was a little confused about the part questioning Cooper’s motives.
Yeah, maybe I’m being too harsh on Cooper. I just wonder about the extent to which any governor (not just Cooper) has to balance public opinion, public health, and the need to stop the drain on the state’s unemployment funds. It seems like a really hard thing to get right.
I expect there to be some sort of complex fluctuation here. Probably in the first couple days, there will be a boom, as everyone who has been raring to get out goes out on the same day. But they will settle down to normal levels pretty quickly. And for the fraction of the population that is still skeptical, they will stay at much lower than normal levels for a long time. So we shouldn’t be surprised if there’s something closer to a recovery in visits in the first few days, but it quickly settles down to substantially below prior levels.
Further complex effects take hold if people decide that public spaces are much more fun or much less fun to visit when they’re at lower traffic than usual.
I think the big split will be between unsatisfied demand and satisfied demand. Very few people do at home tattoos, a modest amount of people do at home hair cuts and will be happy with the results, etc. If there was no economic damage and no consumer shifts you would expect tattoo parlors to explode and have 150% (random larger than 100% number) of their prior demand because there were multiple weeks of people not getting tattoos.
Having tattoo parlors and hair dressers open to 80% capacity is actually really bad, and kind of horrifying if a substantial number of these places haven’t reopened yet.
This is probably only of interest to Ultra-Catholic Nerds, or Ultra-Nerdy Catholics, but whatever.
It’s May! You know what that means – yes, it’s time to pray the Litany of Loreto in Quenya!
Does anyone have any advice for improving Mandarin?
I’m at an A2 level, and between HSK2-3 having practice on and off for about 5 years, maybe devoting 10 minutes a day for practice. I’m at a B1 conversational level with my fiancee (fluent) , but I have trouble finding books or movies I can understand easily
I used to get a lot of value out of Spaced Repetition Software, but I’m finding the new words I’m learning are just oddly niche, Right now its teaching sports terminology.. Catch, Throw, Team, Player etc.
Any thoughts/Advice?
Watch Mandarin variety shows with your fiancee. They beat jokes like a dead horse, cover culturally relevant language by definition, and put captions on the screen a lot as a part of aforementioned dead horse joke beating. Your fiancee can explain jokes to you, and then you get it repeated ad nauseam by the show.
Netflix also has a good amount of Cdramas available. Watch the same episode first with English subs, then Chinese. Then pick a single scene to actually write out the entire script (from the subtitles), and read it aloud to yourself.
Manhua might also be viable, especially the ones that have live action adaptations.
Here’s some things to look into for books/text in general. There’s a few different “graded readers” available:
https://wordswing.com/activities?show=text-games
https://mandarincompanion.com/products/
https://www.amazon.com/民间故事·月下老人-学汉语分级读物第1级-学汉语分级读物-民间故事-Chinese-ebook/dp/B01N1SWLGN/
If you really want to become fluent, at some point you’ll probably need to jump in and start reading books with lots of vocabulary you haven’t seen before.
For spoken, you could try the “Slow Chinese” podcast. Disclaimer–I’ve never actually used it myself. I agree with AG that you need to watch/read the same things over and over again.
I have to push back against the idea that you’re learning “oddly niche” words. Some estimates say average adults know up to 40K words — if you’re at HSK3 you’re still in the top ~5% of that. I love SRS but don’t recommend studying flash cards that other people have made. If you’re worried about the applicability of the words you’re learning, text your fiancee in Chinese and make flash cards from the new words you learn — by definition, these will be words that have occurred in conversations of interest to you.
If the variety shows end up a little difficult, I’ve had good results using English and Chinese subtitles for popular TV shows （from 人人 or whatever they call themselves nowadays）- watch for a few minutes, write down any new expressions combined with what it means, use it as much as I can for a couple weeks. It’s a great way to get a different speech pattern from what the online resources can provide.
The US Navy has selected the FREMM frigate, designed by the Italian company Fincantieri, to replace the Perry-class frigates. The Perry were supposed to be replaced by the Littoral Combat Ship but that program just plain didn’t work out, so the navy had to find a plan B quickly. FREMM frigates are already in service with the French, Italian, Egyptian, and Moroccan navies. The US versions will have US weapons and sensors, and will be built in the US.
Buying a foreign-designed ship is really rather unusual for the US Navy, isn’t it?
So the Littoral ended up being… figurattive? figorattive? Help me out here.
Ah, frig it.
To improve speed of delivery, the Navy explicitly required “mature” designs for FFG(X), which probably meant the design had to already be floating somewhere. Since the US lacks frigates today, as you point out, that left mainly foreign designs as eligible for the competition. In fact, maybe all of the designs were foreign if you exclude the LCS derivatives? Of course they all had US yards, though.
The real question will be how close to a true FREMM the USN ship ends up being. That will be a fascinating real-world test of all the sea stories about the differences between USN vs. foreign navy construction standards (and their cost implications).
There were some domestic designs in the competition. I think both of the Littoral Combat Ships were represented by “this time we’ll get it right” frigate derivatives, and there was another design based on the largest class of US Coast Guard cutters. But if you need something that is proven to work as a warship, then you’re pretty much limited to foreign designs.
Or possibly a modernized Perry, which I think could have been done pretty well but doesn’t have the shiny because cold-war relic, and nobody proposed it.
The US does have frigates. Corvettes, even. They are just called cutters and belong to the USCG. A variant of the largest cutter was in the competition.
This is indeed unprecedented, although I suspect that the resulting ship will be more heavily Americanized than you’d expect. FREMM is more of a framework than a specific design anyway, and the integration of US systems is going to mean a lot of design work, to say nothing of the realm of minor specs (firefighting, mess facilities, etc) the USN is sure to levy that differ slightly from French or Italian practice. On the whole, I think this is mostly the USN repeating the Super Hornet method of getting what they want while making it look like they’re saving costs. (This does actually work, but not quite the way it looks like.)
The only case of the USN buying actual foreign-built ships I know of is the Sirius-class, which we bought from the British in the early 80s to plug a gap in the auxiliary fleet.
Do you think that it is true that foreign navies build ships to “commercial” survivability and construction standards? And if so, do you think the USN will accept that for the FREMM-derived FFG(X)?
This is true, but with a huge asterisk. “Commercial standards” can mean several different things, with different implications for the ship.
The first one, and the one you’re reaching for, is that, yes, some ships do indeed get built like merchant ships. One backup generator, poor fireproofing, and what’s this “damage control” of which you speak? But those are the sorts of ships which get flogged to third-rate navies that don’t know any better, and France and Italy both definitely do know better. So that’s not really a concern here, because the USN won’t accept it unless the ship in question is “transformational”, and that’s on the banned word list now.
The second one is that each ship is designed to a certain set of standards, and naval and commercial standards often differ in how they handle problems. For instance, warships are traditionally built with lots of frames and thin skin, while merchant vessels are the other way around. So switching standards like this doesn’t necessarily have huge survivability implications, and it can make it a lot easier (and cheaper) for a yard without much warship experience. The various western navies have played with this, usually for auxiliaries, although it’s also been used occasionally to get around some onerous and now-obsolete rule in the warship standards.
None of this is likely to play much of a role in FFG(X). The USN is going to insist the ship meet their standards, which I suspect is going to do a lot of damage to the supposed cost savings. But such is life, and at least it’s better than the LCS.
Very interesting. I’d be curious to hear your over / under on what the unit cost of the FREMM FFG(X) will end up being (let us exclude mission systems for the purpose of comparison). Anyone dare to bet they’ll cost more than DDG-137?
Do you have a good reference for why the LCS turned into the train wreck it became?
@mfm32
Military costing is arcane, so getting hard numbers will be difficult. Also, if we exclude mission systems, pretty pointless given how much of the cost that is. That said, it’s likely to come reasonably close to its cost goals. This is a pretty low-risk program. Yes, it’s almost certain to overrun, but by a moderate amount, not a huge one. Again, it’s the Super Hornet of ships.
@Garrett
Not in one place, no. A lot of it came informally. But it’s basically that there’s no need for a 45 kt speedboat, but it imposes a lot of tradeoffs.
Perhaps I am partisan but Trump seems like the biggest, most blatant liar America has ever had for its president. Whatever you think about policy, it seems bad to have such a transparent liar as president. The public doesn’t trust or believe him. The rest of the world doesn’t trust or believe him. His own supporters don’t seem to believe him. They like him for other reasons.
This strikes me as a dangerous thing when, nobody, not even his own supporters, believe the president is telling the truth.
What is it that keeps the faith among Trump supporters?
President Trump does seem to say things that are false a lot. Some of them fall under hyperbole, some are things he probably believes himself and he’s just incorrect about, and some are probably outright lies. I think most politicians lie whenever it suits them, probably the only real difference with Donald Trump is that he seems much less careful with his language.
Having said that I agree that he definitely seems to be a more brazen liar than any other president we’ve ever had. Why support him if that’s true?
Well, my brother is someone who grudgingly supports Donald Trump because even though Trump comes off as unprofessional in tweets and interviews he nonetheless gets conservative policy passed. Conservative judges are filling the federal courts, taxes on businesses have been lowered considerably, undocumented immigrants have been deported in large numbers. Basically, my brother sees Trump as worth putting up with for policy reasons.
I think about this a lot in context of the “Trump is a liar” complaint. Does anyone realistically think that anything that, say, Clinton said was the most factually accurate statement possible as determined by the facts on the ground as opposed to him taking his understanding of the situation and spinning it into whatever benefited him politically the most at any given time, truth be damned?
I don’t believe he was judging anything he said by a standard of truth, just dual standards of personal/party benefit and what he thought he could get away with. So when people complain about Trump lying, I always come away with the impression that they are complaining about him being a Republican who isn’t very good at lying where they’d prefer a Democrat who was great at it.
This probably isn’t very accurate to their perceived world-view; a lot of them might defend Clinton as not constantly lying, or intentionally-misleading-but-worded-to-not-be-provably-untrue statements as not being lies, for instance. But so long as pretty much everyone I see at high levels of politics is constantly determining what they say by benefit as opposed to a love for truthfulness(and I honestly believe this is near 100% of them) this comes off as a criticism of skillfulness, which I don’t care about that much when counterbalanced by effectiveness in things I care about, like a conservative-packed SCOTUS.
I don’t think this is an accurate assessment of the sentiment of typical Democrats, but it might be of Trump’s supporters. I.e., they believe that the Democrat candidates are smooth-talking, manipulating liars, and they prefer an obvious braggart and ignoramus like Trump. He might not stick to objective truth, but at least his lies are less deceptive.
The second half of the comment addresses your comment
It is understandable why they’d believe that about Democratic candidates though, right? Between Bill “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” Clinton, Barack “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” Obama, and now, pretty much every establishment Democrat, who all swore until they were blue in the face that their opposition to Kavanaugh had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how it’s no longer appropriate to nominate an alleged rapist to high office, is falling in line behind the Joe Biden nomination.
Although Biden himself is notably not smooth, so it should be interesting to see how things develop from here…
> intentionally-misleading-but-worded-to-not-be-provably-untrue statements
Politicians generally make very rosy predictions about their proposed policies. But a very bad prediction isn’t technically a lie.
What really got me was when Obama came out and said something to the effect of “nobody is listening to your phone calls” and it was subsequently discovered that the phone calls were being computer-transcribed and then *read* by humans. Alas, that shifted me from dislike to distrust.
While I don’t disagree that this isn’t technically a lie(at least always), I think we’d be better off if we agreed to shift the definition so that it was, in all cases in the range from “I haven’t made sure it’s pretty likely my prediction is true” to “There’s no way this is happening unless weird stuff happens”.
When a politician says to hire him so he can fix something that needs fixing but realistically there’s no way he can do this, he’s often tricking people into thinking hiring him = thing gets fixed. Sometimes this isn’t his fault – say, if I said I’d lower marginal tax rates and then I got unexpectedly blocked by congress – but it often is, like if somebody promised something extremely unlikely to happen (banning abortion, reparations, etc).
who isn’t very good at lying where they’d prefer a Democrat who was great at it.
i prefer this, but would also prefer it with the parties flipped. thos is similiar to a complaint a few threads ago of ‘why should only smart criminals get away with crime’?
the answer is if you want to havesny system where laws matter, youwill have to concede this, and just try to do the best you can to stop it.
if you care about truth, you will allow some good liars, but not people who contradict themselves within a single sentence
I don’t see how this logically follows – as a lover of truth, why would I want to be more likely to be tricked? Why would I want others to be more likely to be tricked? If somebody wants to beat me up, I’d much rather he was bad at punching and kicking.
Again, this strikes me strongly as going “Well, both of them lie, but your guy doesn’t do it correctly“, and I’m not at all compelled by that argument.
@GearRatio
‘allow’ in this sense means ‘accept as necessary’, not ‘something i want’
The wrong interpretation is that i have some oracle of the truth, and i’m just ok with one guy lying because i like him better….
In reality, since i don’t have such an oracle, i am forced to evaluate the truth of each claim as best i can. My evaluation is more likely to have a false positive for the good liar than the bad liar. My claim is this is inevitable. The only way to for the rates to be identical is if I stop attempting to evaluate the truth of claims.
Imagine Alice is a good counterfeiter, and Bob is a bad one.
Alice comes into my store, and pays with a counterfeit five dollar bill that my machine fails to detect.
Bob then comes in with a cartoon drawing of five dollars, and says to me ‘by the way that is counterfeit’. I do not accept his money. LAter when I discover Alice’s money was also counterfeit, Bob’s friends get angry with me that I accepted Alice’s money but not Bob’s. I am left with three options
(A) Take all money no matter how poorly counterfeited
(B) Lie and claim Alice’s money actually was not counterfeit
(C) Admit that my screening is not perfect, and some counterfeits will get past, but I will continually try to improve the detection, and will definitely reject any counterfeits I do detect, despite still letting some in.
I think A&B are bad options. The “but they all lie, just some better” defense is like option A. Some will pretend only one side lies, and are going with option B.
I prefer option C.
If the conceit is that other politicians are either not dishonest whenever it suits their interests or undetectably so, I don’t know that that’s falsifiable.
Addressing the metaphor, though:
As I see it, your metaphor is optimized for holding only the “obvious” liar to standard in these ways:
1. There’s literally no way to catch the non-obvious liar in a lie. She passes bills you suspect of being fake, but what can you do? Meanwhile there’s literally no ambiguity on the other one – anyone would know it’s a fake.
2. Your method of catching either liar has nothing to do with bias – you have a machine which invariably rates one as truthful, and the other as a liar. The personal leanings of a sentient being don’t enter into the equation at all, and the machine itself has no reason or ability to lie.
3. Your store has no memory – By the end of your story, you know that both Bob and Alice are counterfeiters; they both got caught. But you’ve set up the scenario so Alice’s history of deceit has no bearing on your future – even though you’ve caught her doing so, you present “accept the known counterfeiter’s bills as real even knowing she passes fake bills” as an element of two of your three options.
Here’s an alternate metaphor, as valid as the other:
Bob comes into the store and gives a $5 bill to you. While he’s giving it to you, a man in the store says it’s fake; you have knowledge that the man is a friend of Alice, and like her hates Bob and will do anything within reason to damage him, but his outburst does make you look at the bill; it’s clearly fake! You reject the bill. If he has other undeniably real money sufficient to buy the goods he wants, you might accept it – but now you are looking damn close at the bills he gives you – his standard of proof is now very high, assuming you don’t just assume all his bills to be fake forevermore on general principle.
Alice comes into the store. She’s also buying $5.00 worth of goods; when she hands you the bill it’s obscured by her palm. At this point, one of three things happens:
1. She smiles real nice at you. You like her and she’s doing things that make you feel good. You chit-chat with her while you put the bill into the till, and she leaves.
2. She starts enthusiastically engaging you about what a liar and thief Bob is; you agree enthusiastically while putting the bill into the till. Alice leaves.
3. Her friend from earlier jumps to the store window suddenly and starts yelling “It’s Bob! He’s come back with a gun! He’s disgruntled and is going to destroy us all!” You shove the bill into the till and you all go outside – he tells you Bob ran off – crisis averted for now. He and Alice leave.
In all cases you were handed a $1 bill. Now, it’s not a clear fake as Bob’s cardboard-and-magic-marker bill is, but a close examination of the bill would have revealed it to be a $1 and not a $5 – you just didn’t check. Or maybe it’s not a $1, but a much more convincing fake – still detectable, but it didn’t get put through the paces.
Later on, your boss asks why you passed Alice’s bill and hurt the store while rejecting Bob’s and preventing harm. You explain that Alice is better at the whole thing, nothing you could have done, but you will continue keeping up on Bob. Plus, you say, Alice didn’t technically lie at any point; it’s hardly as bad as Bob’s blatant untruth.
Is this metaphor valid? Maybe – it depends a lot on whether or not you think politicians besides those who are very clearly lying are impossible to fact check, and whether or not you will factor in previous known lies into your determinations.
Your metaphor assumes:
1. That Democrats are such skilled liars that it’s impossible to catch them trying to mislead with reasonable effort, even if you’ve been burned by their previous lies
2. That something exists which is non-biased, better than you carefully fact-checking, and your sole form of seeing if people are lying besides super-obvious lies you’d have to intentionally ignore.
Here’s the deal, though: If you’ve run the bill through the machine (the media, snopes, politifact) and used the pen (forums like here, more in depth blogs) and held it up the light to see the watermark (your own independent research, understanding, knowledge and judgement), then I’m fine with that. For all I know you do this. Reject Bob’s bill as a lie; Accept Alice’s – that’s reasonable.
But if you scroll down this thread a few entries, you will find people saying:
Which strikes me a lot like “well, he made a promise he knew he couldn’t keep to mislead me; but that’s not really a lie”
Or, in response to the media misleading viewers on one particular thing by trying to make an uncommon threat seem like a common one:
Which is a list of them passing the same fake bill several times as a justification for them passing the first.
And when I see these things, I suspect without knowing for sure that there’s a different standard in play for when I’m supposed to be concerned about someone trying to trick me.
And that’s here – rarified air, a group of people who pride themselves on at least some effort towards impartiality. So while some people are definitely checking both bills (maybe even those above, who I’m reading maximally uncharitably) I strongly suspect some aren’t.
My personal read(probably obvious) is that if virtually any American politician isn’t lying, it’s on accident – the pattern is that their personal interest and goals accidentally intersected with the truth. The part where some are better at it than others doesn’t really affect me much. I think that differs enough from “Well, Democrats are impossible to catch in lies through fact-checking to the point where it would be unfair to subject them to false positives, so I’m only going to really look into prima facie lies” that it’s not necessarily reconcilable.
@GearRatio
It seems like these people are going for option B. I’m ok with you arguing against them in that subthread, but I explicitly rejected option B, so I’m not sure its a good objection to my example.
However, I do think I see what you are getting at. I want to try to steelman your position, and hope you will then extend the same courtesy and steelman mine; and in this way we can save ourselves a length(ier) exchange.
I am going to refer to my original analogy and options A,B, and C. I think your extensions took an idealized simplified example that is trying to show a point, and just adds too many complicating specifics to be understandable.
anyway…
My steelman:
< steelman >
On its face, option ‘C’ is fine in theory. The problem is that in practice option ‘B’ and option ‘C’ are indistinguishable. As seen in the other branches of this thread, people in option ‘B’ can pretend they are in option ‘C’, and pretend they are legitimately not detecting falsehoods from their side. Thus, in practice the information from option ‘C’ becomes so negligible, or non existent, as to not matter (since so few legitimate option ‘C’ people exist, and it is too hard to distinguish from faux option ‘C’ really option ‘B’ people). Now, in a Utopia I may prefer option C, but I see no way society as a whole will shift to make option C viable in the short or medium term. So maybe I’m option ‘A’ but only for small or insignificant things. For other things, I use other evaluation methods, more concerned about results than truth of specific statements.
Maybe in the ‘counterfeiter’ analogy, it would be as though I don’t care about counterfeit five dollar bills, but only about hundreds; and my method for checking is the value I receive from the hundred, not the specifics of its production.
< / steelman >
does this come close to your position?
So first: I’m suspicious that I’m misreading everything you said previously in a strawmannish way – if I am, I’m sorry; I suspect I made your position much weaker than it is in my head through non-careful reading.
Here’s a revised steelman that might be your position I’d have no simple problems with:
If that’s accurate to your view, what I’d remain being confused about is this:
Why is the baddy who is harder to detect the preferred version?
As for your steelman, it’s pretty close, I think. I think the context matters a lot here – I’m originally responding to the “How can you support him? He’s a liar!” crowd. I think who take that position are making an assumption that the rest of them aren’t lying whenever it’s to their benefit; I think this is naive. I think some of them have a narrow definition of lie where keeping things that are horrifically misleading factually true are not lying in a morally significant way; I think this is dumb.
Getting to the specifics of your steelman for me, I think it’s accurate in my assessment of “C” people – anybody can say they are carefully checking their own side, but I believe few are; in my estimation if they were, they’d come to a “all these people, on both sides, are lying whenever they want to; the main difference between Trump and others is sometimes he lies to his own disadvantage because of a lack of skill” position.
This, as you said, makes C a lot like B. For someone to convince me they are a C on this particular topic, they’d have to explain to me in a way that makes sense why I’m wrong that politicians at the Congressional and Executive level are all liars when needed on things they care about, and I don’t think they could do this; I’m pretty entrenched.
There’s also a D. class, who thinks that Alice’s fake bill is, while fake, better than Bob’s because it looks more real. For me to agree with them, they’d have to explain why Trump’s obvious lies are worse than subtle lies working towards the same goal would be.
One thing to remember is that I’m not claiming I’m especially great at detecting lies – I’m instead working under a model where anything that any of them says could be a lie or the truth, based only on their advantage. This means I don’t really try to assess their honesty very often.
As you (I think) were getting at, I mostly just care if they are doing something that I independently want or think is a good idea – if it’s a preferred action, I want it no matter what their rationale is. If I could get honesty instead, I’d want that, but I don’t think the market politicians operate in allows them to be honest and successful at the same time.
My first reply with the above quote was on phone, where I am less verbose and more prone to formatting errors, so some of the lack of clarity may be my fault.
Some of the issue I think is with the term “I prefer”. I do not prefer the good liar as a first principle; it’s just that (imo) this falls out of a the principle of preferring truth. In my view, not preferring the good liar would imply that I don’t prefer the truth. I see it as an unavoidable consequence. But like you allude to, in practice the ‘good liar’ may not really be that good, and one could just be using it as a cover to bash the ‘bad’ liar.
Some of it also is the difference between style/manner and substance. Those two are often getting mixed together. A true ‘Option C’ person would disregard style or manner, whereas a faux option C person may not.
@GearRatio
It also occurred to me that I should add that this preference assumes that I don’t know the good liar is a liar. Once I know he is a liar, good or bad liar doesn’t really matter.
Really, in no way am I giving explicit points to someone for being a good liar, merely the good liar may be undetectable as a liar. If I know for certain he is a liar, than no I don’t prefer him to the bad liar.
Now (again as you alluded to), there are ways this line of thinking can be weaponized, and I’m not endorsing any of them. There are ways my truth detecting can be biased, and I should fix that. But all I am endorsing is that I prefer truth telling, and the only way to prefer this is to accept that more good liars will avoid detection than bad liars.
This clarification here removes the vast majority of my objections to anything you said at any point. Preferring a undetected liar to a known one is much different than what I was thinking you were saying.
I would agree with you here, barring the belief that they are all lying; I have this belief, but I understand that not everybody does.
The advantage of the bad liar is that you are more likely to know which of the things he says are lies.
… entirely classic both-sides fallacy. Also the cynical fallacy, and the … is anchoring fallacy the right term? Where you falsely assume an extreme example must be a medium one?
Most politicians work very hard to not lie. They might steer a conversation or interview off in a direction away from things they do not want to talk about, or present the facts in the best light possible, and they are quite frequently just wrong. But blatant lying is not a standard. It has too high reputational costs.
I’ve always thought that most politicians, while worried about being proven factually wrong, are happy to mislead, give non-answers to questions, give empty promises…etc. This isn’t a recent view, and I think it’s a pretty common one
Because the corrupt politician is a stock character from central casting, and because the politicians who fit the mold get a lot of media coverage.
Consider the actual, specific politicians who represent you, all the way up the chain, and find some of their interviews and speeches. They will not be riddled with obvious lies until you hit the presidency, I am quite confident.
I think for many of these politicians it is at least plausible that they themselves believe what they are saying. They’re fed talking points by their handlers, and their job is to sell those talking points, not to start researching them. And many of the things I’d perceive as lies or motivated reasoning are things my opponents perceive as honest truth.
So I’d say the amount of conscious lies and weasel wording and similar from politicians is not as big as it seems. You’ll notice it a lot in politicians you generally disagree with, but that’s because they’re taking part in a conversation with different basic assumptions and values.
Whereas with Trump, it seems clear that he doesn’t hesitate to just straight up lie about things he absolutely knows better. He lies about things here has seen with his own eyes, and things he has said on camera. That’s not something most politicians do.
They will not be riddled with obvious lies until you hit the presidency, I am quite confident.
As I’ve mentioned before, I worked in local government offices where local politicians (including elected representatives to our parliament) were quite happy to take the credit for getting Mrs Murphy’s Seán his grant to go to college when this had Sweet Fanny Adams to do with them, and indeed if true, would have meant immediate disqualification for Seán.
It may not have been direct lying as such, but it was very much meant to give an impression to constituents that was provably contrary to fact. To the extent that the Irish public (and I wonder if the same is not true of the American public) still has the firmly entrenched belief that in order to get the medical card/planning permission/grants/other public service, you need “pull” – the intervention on your behalf of someone with influence or power.
Client politics, in short. Not helped by the fact that “parish pump politics” (or “pork barrel politics” in the American context) did unhappily mean string-pulling and political interference, albeit usually at a higher level than dealing with the general public.
A Minister whose department included social housing made the same announcement three times over a period of months of increased funding for new social housing, which was sent out to the media as big splashy PR release and reported on in much the same terms, and nobody in the Fourth Estate pointed out that (a) this was not three separate increases but the same increase announced three times (b) it hadn’t happened yet despite the intimation in the release that it would be happening soon, oh no it wouldn’t.
It was only when I asked my immediate supervisor “Does this mean the council can start building houses, so?” that I was informed of the real facts on the ground.
Was that lying? Maybe not, but not 100% pure unvarnished factual truth, either, and it wasn’t our President at it.
I think that both politicians and journalists believe that it is acceptable to selectively present true evidence, even if that means that most people draw a conclusion from that evidence that is false.
You say that like it’s a good thing in spite of the qualifier. If I’m going to hear lies, I want them to be the obvious ones. And I don’t care if they’re the “not technically lying” kind of lies either. If it’s a statement intended to cause me to believe something that isn’t true, I want it to be obvious more than I want it to be pedantically literally correct.
Better still if it isn’t any kind of lie, but there are relatively few politicians of any major party who meet that standard, and none of them were running for President in 2016.
Trump is a uniquely outrageous President, but he lacks the competence (and the taste for stupid foreign wars) to be a particularly dangerous one. The blatantness of the lies is part of that.
I view most politicians like I view advertising: the things they say are technically true, but bent in the most favored light they could legally get away with if challenged in court. Not always, but this has worked well for figuring out the truth.
With most politicians, you can point out the specific times they lied, and people will quickly pick out the same set of lies, and there won’t be that many. But with Trump, it’s just complete gaslighting. He might even believe it himself, because his business experience was basically telling a lie to a bunch of people to get past coordination problems and get things built (like telling 5 different people “everyone else has agreed to do this, if you agree it will move forward”) at which point the lie becomes the truth. But the Federal government doesn’t work that way.
+1
In particular, stuff like this causes large amounts of people to just give up on consuming the news media entirely. It’s no longer just a matter of fact-checking. Even if you take the time to manually verify all the “facts” in question, they could still be lying via omission, context, tone, and any other number of ways.
Scoop:
How is that different from media reports about victims of terrorism, serial killers, and shark attacks and mass-shootings? I mean, the media is all about reporting the weird rare things and not the common things.
If 50 dirtbags murder their rival drug dealers, baby mamas, or other members of the underclass who were standing behind the target this week, it’s not national news. If one whackjob shoots up a McDonalds and kills 5 people, it’s national news. This is what media *does*.
I suspect the intent is to drive clicks. Selective reporting is pretty much inherent in the media’s business model, whether it’s terrorists or shootings.
Edit: Beaten to the point by albatross.
would another bush not have put conservative judges in the court? i used to believe that judges was of course a valid reason to vote strict party, but lately it seems like it is just a cover
That’s a question for a primary, not an election. I don’t know anyone who was saying they preferred Trump in the primary for that reason.
The other Bush in question was Jeb Bush, who was out if you considered immigration a key issue.
I’m not sure conservatives are super happy with all the Bush judges in retrospect, but I also don’t know if that’s fair, it seems pretty hard to predict both how a judge will rule and how a presidential candidate will appoint.
Not to challenge the point but…how much of your impression of Trump being a big liar comes from reading what he has actually said versus what he has been quoted having said?
I really genuinely do not like Trump, I am someone who would never consciously vote Democrat under normal circumstances but the disaster the man has been and will continue to be has me planning to do so this year, but it’s pretty hard to not see how badly the general news media has started themselves lying about what he says.
This Business Insider article has the title:
and sentences like:
That is, an outright lie. Go ahead and click through on the ‘Trump said’ link, it’ll take you to a transcript of what he actually said from the Whitehouse website.
Read the whole thing, it’s worth it. It certainly won’t give you a great impression of Trump (he ends up coming off like a fifth grader), but it’ll also directly contradict what BI says about what he said.
He’s fairly obviously saying that he believes we don’t have the most cases (eeeh, sorry Mr President, we might) but it looks like we do because we’re testing so much and so we know about more cases than other countries do.
Now, this is actually kind of a stupid point he is making: The US has a large number of absolute cases because the US has a large number of people, first, and we’re still finding cases quickly (~6 tests to find a positive case) so we’re actually not finding a large portion of our overall infected population quite yet, but the broader point still stands.
Business Insider wants us to think Trump is saying that testing is a bad thing (with the implication that we ought to be doing less of it, presumably: Orange Man not only bad, but evil). Not only does that not accord with the specific context of what Trump is saying, it’s absolutely absurd in the context of why Trump is in Iowa: He’s congratulating the governor on doing so much testing.
Trump is saying that we don’t actually have it so bad but we’re doing so much testing that it’s easy to spin our high confirmed cases number as doing very badly. This is a stupid, wrong point for him to make but even that isn’t good enough for the media. They have to spin him as not only stupid and wrong, but evil to boot.
He may or may not be evil, but not on account of what he’s quoted as having said in that article. And that kind of thing is all over news media. They fucking hate him and will spin whatever he says. Don’t trust ’em, read transcripts. I don’t think he’s much of a liar, but only because I think you have to have a firm grasp on what the truth is from moment to moment in order to lie and I’m not sure he’s got that.
EDIT: I guess the best way to put it is to remember that politics is the mindkiller and this election season is going to be a mass-killing.
Counterpoint: what if we held the media to as low a standard as we hold Trump to?
You’re right, Trump didn’t say what the media said he said. But it sounds like something he’d say, doesn’t it? He says things like that a lot. So maybe instead of being boring, fussy elitists and taking what the media says literally we should be listening to the common-sense truths that it’s actually communicating, that is, that Trump is a stupid doo-doo head?
No, I’m not saying that would be a good idea. But if we really live in a world where professionalism, decorum and attention to detail are no longer things we should reasonably expect in a head of state, why should we expect it in journalists? Why aren’t they allowed to spout whatever half-truths and distortions they want as long as it fits the gist of their message? Turnabout is, proverbially, fair play.
Well, for one, I get to try voting for the other guy in six months when it comes to the head of state. Don’t get that opportunity with journalists. I can not buy from their employer but I am already doing that.
Well… you may vote Biden, but you might still get Trump for president. So it’s not that different.
Counter-counterpoint – maybe we do already hold the media to a lower standard and that’s the problem?
When Trump was elected in 2016, there was a brief, glorious moment of self reflection in the media. But it seems nothing came of it.
If we can’t expect professionalism, decorum and attention to detail in the main source of information we have about politics, how can we possibly expect it in our politicians?
Related SMBC
If we held the media to as low a standard as Trump, we’d either regard them as pure entertainment or ignore them entirely. Telling the truth is the whole of their job. A politician, on the other hand, can tell lies and still do all the other things we expect of politicians. (Indeed, telling lies of the right sort is often considered part of the job, as we saw during the big “president of Taiwan” brouhaha.)
I already do hold journalists to these extremely low standards. I expect them to engage not in truth-seeking but in propaganda.
I would like them to do better, but I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening.
About half the country already does this.
No, they just hold a different half of the media to extremely low standards.
why should we expect it in journalists?
I don’t. The American model of “just the facts, impartial journalism” contrasted to the European model of “advocacy, political spin depends on what party the proprietor supports” journalism was never very true, if true at all; from an early stage you had partisan papers, partisan proprietors, and partisan reporting.
My family bought The Irish Press because it was a Fianna Fáil paper, to this day I won’t ever buy The Irish Independent because that’s a Fine Gael paper. If you tell me there are no American newspapers, even at the local level, that are tilted pro-one party or the other, I will be very very surprised.
Why aren’t they allowed to spout whatever half-truths and distortions they want as long as it fits the gist of their message?
You think editorials, opinion columns, guest invitees to write their piece, and so on aren’t this already? Maybe plain “yesterday at the Local Baking Club fête, Ms Jones’ jam roly poly was the star attraction” reportage isn’t that bad, but I think it’s moving that way.
Advocacy journalism is now an actual thing that is happening.
If you’re a news source that wants to continue to exist, I very strongly suggest having a higher standard of honesty and care in what you say than Donald f–king Trump.
I do not read us media. Every example I can recall of Trump lies is the shit that crosses the atlantic, and is always in the form of a video clip of him telling giant lies or just him tweeting a lie.
I’m not maintaing Trump never lies. I am maintaining that, as pointed out, it’s easy to edit clips or report on what was said in such a way that it’s not quite the same thing as what was said, and if you compare one thing with the transcript this comes out.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I think I’ll be waiting a long time before I ever read something in The Guardian as outright critical about Religious Left supporting Democrats as about Religious Right supporting Republicans. Do you trust video clips put up by people with an interest in showing Orange Man Bad?
Nate Silver has been pointing out that by making more cases look bad, the media is discouraging testing. Every time there is a surge in cases he explains very carefully that we need the context but the headline is just too good to check.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1258404881347510272
see also
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1258506046596759553
On an object-level point, over on Tw*tter, N*te S*lver has made an extremely similar argument about tests: and that by hyping case numbers the media discourages testing.
(I would quote and link, but every time I do that my comment gets ate by the sp*m filter. I don’t know what triggered it hence my self-censorship.)
EDIT: I think it was because the guy said F*ke N*ws and I quoted that. Whoops.
I agree that Trump is singularly awful w/r/t/ telling the truth, across the board. I thought that was plain when it seemed clear to me that his Press Secretary was told to read an obviously-false statement about the inauguration crowd immediately after the inauguration. I think at a basic level he simply thinks everything is negotiable, with no special exception for telling the truth, and he sees getting away with lying as part of how he demonstrates his power. Resultingly, he’s willing to tell the truth only insofar as he can be made to do so, (which apparently isn’t very far) or in exchange for something, or by accident when his various embellishments in different moments work to cancel each other out.
You aren’t the first to see trust in leadership as critical:
Asked about good government, Confucius replies: “The requisites of government are that there be a sufficiency of food, enough military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler.”
The follow-up question: “If it were necessary to dispense with one of these, which of the three should be done without?”
A: “The military equipment.”
Second follow-up Q: “If it were necessary to dispense with one of the remaining two, which one should be foregone?”
A: “Part with the food. Death has always been the lot of men; but if the people have no faith in their rulers, then the state cannot exist.”
Or, if you prefer a different religion, I guess there’s, Proverbs 29:18, “When there is no vision, the people perish.” , or I Corinthians 14:8, “If the bugle gives an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself for battle?”
m.alex.matt’s point is a big part of it, but also: I think he’s viewed as an exception in at least trying to respect his campaign promises. His supporters certainly think so. I remember Obama turned on Guantanamo in … 3 weeks after being elected? And it was a pretty major campaign promise.
And again on m.alex.matt’s point: it created a pretty big immunization effect. I stopped following US politics a couple of years ago, but my go to conclusion to any scandals is still “meh, they’re exaggerating again”. And when once in a blue moon I actually check what he said in context, yeah, they’re exaggerating again.
my go to conclusion to any scandals is still “meh, they’re exaggerating again”
If we’re talking about video clips, let’s remember this one. Or more deliciously this one 🙂
Obama couldn’t fulfill his Gitmo promise. It was out of his hands. Of course, that was as true during the campaign as it was after his election.
Promising things you can’t do anything about, and voters voting for you because of it, is a big problem, but seems different than just lying.
Yes he could. Transfer them to a mainland prison, or release them.
That doing either of those was unacceptable to DC insiders is entirely beside the point.
I dunno, that still seems like a lie to me. If I promise to buy you a new car tomorrow, and then tomorrow comes and I don’t deliver the car, I’ve lied to you, haven’t I?
Even if I say “Well actually I wanted to buy you the new car but it turns out I didn’t have enough money so I couldn’t.”
That’s relying on hidden information I couldn’t have known (your lack of money).
But in this case, it wasn’t technically possible for you to deliver the car because the car doesn’t exist and I have all the information to know it doesn’t exist. Other people have told me it doesn’t exist and proved to me that it doesn’t exist. But I want to believe you will sell me the car, because that way I can blame you when I don’t get the car.
The reason I think it might be different than lying is that, if you wave a wand and make politicians unable to lie, you will probably just get right back to the same problem. You end up rewarding stupidity/ignorance: the realists tell you what can actually be supplied but you don’t want to hear it. Meanwhile the idiots/ignoramuses are telling you things they think are possible but are provably out of their hands if anyone bothers to check.
Obama could absolutely have fulfilled the Gitmo promise he actually made. We’ve discussed this here before. What he couldn’t do is fill the implied-but-not-stated promise, “…and make sure none of those people ever commit further acts of terrorism against the United States”.
But, being slick and talented in the art of deception, he is perceived as having been the honest man thwarted by the Evil Other Party in that incident.
Promising things you can’t do anything about, and voters voting for you because of it, is a big problem, but seems different than just lying.
“Vote for me and I’ll do X” when you know that you are not going to do X because you can’t do X is deliberate falsehood. That’s lying.
If you want to say it’s worse than ordinary lying, I’ll agree, but not that it’s something that falls short of lying.
“Vote for me and I’ll do X” and then you don’t do X because crap, turns out X is not doable, why didn’t anyone tell me? is different; you did intend to do X but the situation is such that you can’t.
We can’t tell which one Obama meant. I won’t say anything else because that will go into specuation and name-calling.
Even this I think is too generous.
When making a promise, the onus is on the promiser to figure out beforehand whether the promise is achievable or not, and if not, to not make the promise in the first place.
I’d take a campaign promise as a promise that you will honestly try to do it, and that you think you have a reasonable shot of succeeding–not a promise that you will succeed.
And in many ways, Trump is the most sincere, honest president in the last century. Because he says what he thinks, without coaching it for PC reasons.
“Fake media”, “shithole countries”*, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”, “Sadly, the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our major cities is committed by blacks and hispanics-a tough subject-must be discussed.”, “When will the U.S. stop sending $’s to our enemies, i.e. Mexico and others.”, “Mexico’s court system corrupt.I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop them from ripping off U.S.”
Those were all statements that were what many people truly thought, and are really honest. Things no other politician would ever say.
*Many of those countries really are shitholes. Not because they are full of black people, but because they are countries which lack secure property and human rights. Thus, North Korea is a shithole, Liberia is a shithole, Iraq is a shithole, and Switzerland is not. Not because Switzerland is white.
Sometimes the complaint is that Trump lies, but as you say, it’s very often that Trump is that he speaks truths you’re not supposed to. (People taking umbrage at his private opinions on Haiti stood out to me in this regard.)
Both of these can be true, but it creates whiplash when they’re deployed in tandem.
I don’t see a conflict between ‘he’s a liar’ and ‘he’s an asshole,’ but perhaps I’m missing a nuance of your argument?
I will also note that in fact a number of the examples given are very definitively not, from my perspective “truths you’re not supposed” to say, but rather false statements that he may honestly believe.
I’ll also point out, they are not private comments when you make them as part of (as far as I can tell) non-confidential negotiations with the opposing party.
People can make all three arguments:
1) Trump is a liar.
2) Trump makes recklessly false statements which he may, or may not believe are true.
3) Trump is an asshole in public and in private.
There is not actually a contradiction here.
It’s not a contradiction, as Jask already said, but there is a tension. The tension exists because shameless lying is characteristic of unusual dishonesty, while blunt truthtelling is characteristic of unusual honesty.
Trump basically refuses to engage in the masquerade of politics as some refined and civilized thing.
Sometimes, the masquerade requires careful attention to minute details that don’t actually matter. Trump doesn’t bother with this. And on occasion, it manifests as “lies” when he gets some trivial facts wrong in service of a larger argument. It gives the media something to pretend to be outraged about for a few days, but his supporters don’t care, and his haters already hated him anyway.
Other times, the masquerade requires white lies, or pretending to believe obviously untrue things (like ana’s examples above regarding which countries we might prefer immigration from). Trump refuses to do that as well, which manifests as “being an asshole,” similarly to how if your wife asks “does this dress make me look fat” the answer is never “yes, it does” (even if that is the truth).
And I think this is a major part of why the media/political class hates him so much. It’s not necessarily that he’s making the sausage poorly compared to other sausage makers. It’s that he’s showing the entire world exactly how the sausage is made. He’s live-streaming from the slaughterhouse. He’s the magician with the FOX special giving away how all the tricks are done.
The problem is that frequently statements that are properly explained by (3) are used to erroneously support (1). Same with (2), except I would usually call it “obvious hyperbole” rather than “recklessly false statements.”
Actually, let me state it differently (and yes, this is changing the claim I made upthread).
Sometimes the complaint is that he lies (inauguration crowd sizes).
Other times, the complaint is that he doesn’t tell our lies.
This was the case with the sh*thole countries remark. Some countries really are*, and I’m pretty sure his detractors know that. And this is not a trivial white lie; the question of whether we want a lot of people from such countries is a serious policy question that should be debated. People complaining that he wasn’t telling the right lie were trying to shut down that important debate.
* My own parents taught me, though in nicer language, that my ancestors came from a sh*thole, and moving to America was the best thing they ever did for us.
+1
A lot of outrage at Trump is about violating socially-defined narratives, rather than actually doing evil things. (Though he does evil things sometimes, and lies pretty often, and very often just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.)
The one of these I remember is how the whole world was incensed at his proposal to stop Muslim immigration, but nobody much minded proposals that implied killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims by (say) invading Iran.
Polite society has a ton of these, right? It’s terrible to say out loud that you don’t want to send your kid to a majority-black public school, but it’s 100% totally normal and expected to choose a house or a private school with the goal of not sending your kid to a majority-black public school. It’s terrible to say that once someone has been in prison for a violent crime they should be cast out of society, but it’s also absolutely normal to be unwilling to let any such person come anywhere near your family. It’s terrible to say that middle-class kids should get much gentler treatment for drug offenses than underclass kids, but everyone with any resources whose kid is up on drug charges will be draining their retirement account to get the kid the best lawyer possible and angling to get their kid probation for the thing that sends poor kids to prison for five years.
I have a proposed solution to that sort of thing–don’t have huge areas where “social truth” is radically different from either actual truth or from what most people believe. But it’s not popular among anyone with megaphones right now, so we all pretend to be outraged that Trump would call shithole countries shitholes.
There is footage of Trump from a number of years back– I believe when he still identified as a democrat– saying nothing but positive things about Mexican immigrants, how they are hard-working and great for our country. This example makes me think that when he is supposedly “saying what he really thinks” he really isn’t. He’s saying what his base wants to hear.
He still says this about Mexican immigrants. Just not illegal aliens.
Yeah, describing legal hispanic immigrants as “hard working” but illegal hispanic immigrants as “criminals” is like, the default red-tribe view. It’s not some weird and noteworthy inconsistency…
To me the most vexing aspect of the outrage over “shithole countries” is that for years I’d read center-left types making the moral case for liberalized immigration laws, and they’d say something like:
“It would be one thing to restrict immigration in a world where all countries offered more or less equal scope for human development, with some minor local variations. But in the world we inhabit, many people are through no fault of their own born into societies of such appalling dysfunction that human flourishing is nearly impossible. Given that reality, any arguments for limiting immigration based on administrative efficiency or cultural cohesion are vastly outweighed by the stark unfairness of confining people to countries implacably committed to their oppression and deprivation.”
In other words: it wasn’t just that the existence of “shithole countries” was some uncomfortable truth that liberals would privately half-acknowledge but publicly disavow. For many of them the shithole/non-shithole classification of countries was the basis of their entire theory of immigration!
Yet the moment Trump says, “Ok, what about the people from the shitholes, maybe we should be having fewer of them,” the whole center-left consensus immediately becomes that not only the conclusion (let’s have fewer) but the premise itself (shitholes exist) is utterly objectionable.
The problem is that the framing you offer in Paragraph 2 is incredibly unpopular in general. The notion that Americans have some sort of moral obligation to bring in poor, low-skilled immigrants to benefit the immigrants, like it’s some sort of charity, is not universally supported.
To the extent that the left has been able to convince people that immigration is good, it has been with a much more selfish framing of something like “Immigrants come in and pick vegetables for cheap which means that you pay less for vegetables.” Even in the Emma Lazarus sense, the idea was something like “we’ll take the tired and poor and put them to better use than you did, which will benefit us” not “we’ll take the tired and poor, even if it makes us a lot weaker, because we’re just nice and charitable like that”
Should have thought of that before ratifying the preamble to the Statue of Liberty.
Has anyone used the Preamble to the Constitution in a Supreme Court case?
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
I could use some extra Blessings of Liberty. It’s an underexplored goldmine.
I can’t speak for Trump supporters, since I am not one, and I think the majority of the criticism he gets is well-deserved and spot-on. I’ve been a “D” voter my whole life (with the exception of 2016 when I voted for Johnson), but I’ve broken pretty hard with the dems over recent trends on the American left. I suppose I would identify as a reluctant Trump tolerator, and I can offer that perspective.
I have a strong philosophical dislike for the SJW/identity politics activist wing. I think the movement is bad for our country, bad for western civilization, and can’t see myself every voting for a party that adopts or kowtows to their ideas. Similarly, the “Bernie bro” / OWS / “Fight for 15” crowd. I’m open to big ideas like UBI and single payer, and I’d like to see less income inequality, but this “capitalism bad, socialism good” trend is generally appalling to me, and I think the movement has lost perspective on where the prosperity of our civilization comes from. I’m unwilling to lend any momentum to it.
I also have a strong preference for originalist SC appointments. I think the constitution is a fundamentally conservative document in a lot of ways, and it’s better if we play by the rules. For example, I strongly prefer pro-choice policies, but I think Roe v Wade is a terrible decision.
Finally, I’m irrationally irritated by the media’s apparent all-out war on Trump, as well as what I personally perceive as a comical overreaction to the election by certain people on the left. For lack of a better term, the whole “TDS” thing. It looks to me like a giant multi-year temper tantrum, and you don’t reward a temper tantrum by giving in.
Ultimately it’s unlikely I could stomach actually voting for Trump, but I suppose there is a non-zero chance of it, and it entirely comes down to what I’d be voting against. Do the lies bother me? Very much so. Unfortunately, Biden also seems to spout falsehoods as a pretty good clip. In the end, I expect I will vote third party or write something in, since I’ve never been a “lesser of two evils” type.
With luck you will have the opportunity to vote for Amash instead.
Why not Hornberger or Kokesh instead?
Now I’m actually curious though. You’re a reasonably “big name” within libertarian circles. Have you endorsed any particular candidate? This time? Before? Who are you leaning towards?
I have endorsed nobody, and don’t know enough about other candidates to reject them. I have heard Amash speak once and had a very favorable impression, so am leaning towards him. That’s partly from the impression, partly because I think there are advantages to running an experienced politician — even if doing so didn’t work that well last time.
My biggest complaint about the media reaction to Trump is that they seem to yell equally loudly when Trump is doing:
a. Something every single president always does.
b. Something any Republican president would have done.
c. Something weird only Trump would have done which can be argued on the merits about whether it’s bad or good.
d. Something uniquely bad Trump has done that probably nobody else would have done.
There are plenty of things in (d)–places where Trump has genuinely done something awful or seriously sketchy or really screwed something up. But it’s hard to hear the very reasonable complaints about that when 95% of the screechy outrage coverage is for Trump associating with dictators (everyone does) or enacting bog-standard Republican policies.
Moderately often, this has extended to major news sites deceptively editing quotes by Trump to make their point, or just flat lying. This is extra-weird, because Trump’s own words are quite often really awful and self-incriminating.
A big part of this is that working Trump’s name into the story is a huge ratings boost. Most major news sources have long since reached the point where getting another hit of that sweet, sweet click-driven ad revenue is more important than retaining any reputation for integrity.
Yeah, this is something that annoys me to no end. I am not a Trump supporter by any stretch, but I find myself constantly defending him and his actions from people that believe anything he does is the worst thing since Hitler. Especially annoying to me are the jumps from one “controversy” to another, when almost none of them matter, and they just take away from the ones that do matter.
+1
Any time someone tries to sell me that Trump is a unique and above-average danger, and I ask them to name the things he’s done that worry them so much, and the list starts with “appointed a pro-life Supreme Court justice” I immediately stop taking them seriously.
Well you see, he’s not fixing the problems. We need a president who makes the problems BETTER, not WORSE.
You can imagine the condescending tone yourself.
Yeah, I hate the crying wolf thing. The media complains with equal vigor no matter how horrendous or trivial the actual offense. But I suppose they do have to sell clicks somehow, regrettable as it is.
It doesn’t help that Trump is adept at exploiting this tendency to cover up his actual atrocities.
Not a Trump supporter as such, but my own yardstick is that “Every politician lies”. Where “lies” need not necessarily be “deliberately tells untruths knowingly and maliciously” but “puts the best possible spin on the matter for partisan reasons and other reasons, often of the ‘don’t panic the public and cause trouble’ kind”.
(If everyone thinks a bank is going to fail and turns up to draw out their money, the bank will undoubtedly crash. Is it lying if, in order to prevent this so they can get money in time to cover those withdrawals, the bank holds back information or spins it so that it doesn’t look as bad? Remember, if they get that breathing space, everyone will get their money or have it covered. If they don’t, a lot of people will end up losing everything they had in the bank).
How about Obama and “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan”? I often see this trotted out in online arguments, where one side says Obama lied and the other side said “no he didn’t, this was just the Usual Political Rhetoric and nobody really believed it, everyone knew this was just what he had to say to get the plan passed”.
Now, maybe you agree with all this and your point is “Trump is the WORST liar as American president ever”. I can’t make a judgement on that – worse than Nixon? Worse than Washington the Slave-Owner And Indian Genocider?
Of course, if nobody believed it, it wouldn’t help get the bill passed. The implicit conclusion in this attitude is that misleading the rubes for their own good is acceptable, and that this is a view anybody (read “anybody that is a smart and reasonable politico like us, wink wink”) ought to share.
I think normal politicians try to craft their lies to not be immediately falsifiable, and often try to deceive without *quite* technically lying. And Trump doesn’t bother so much with either one.
Timothy Burke’s discussion of Trump as an honest liar is probably the best explanation I’ve seen.
Yes, that’s an excellent article that should be read by anyone planning to comment on this thread. Highly recommended. Thanks for linking it.
I get the point that he’s seen as authentic because what he says, in terms of the words he uses, comes from him and not his handlers. However, in the last paragraph where it says “a politician who… speaks out of deep-set personal values regardless of whether it’s situationally wise…” I don’t buy. I don’t buy that Trump speaks out of deep-set personal values.
I believe that Trump’s supposedly non-mannered style is every bit as mannered as Obama’s with the difference that Trump’s performance is that of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” character. What Trump has that few other politicians have is decades of TV talk-show experience. He’s been appearing on them regularly since the 70s. He has acquired more talent at speaking extemporaneously on camera than most any politician in recent memory. A sign that he might be playing a character when he speaks in a rough style is that he often spoke with much more sophistication–he was playing a sophisticate!–on his TV talk show appearances decades ago.
The article compares him to Lenny Bruce, a good comparison! Lenny was a polished performer who played the truth-teller, but he could only do this because he was a polished performer.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we see a number of comics/clowns suddenly in high office in various countries. Boris Johnson, Trump, the president of Ukraine (professional comedian), the comedian elected in Italy… What we are seeing is a change in fashion. The smooth talking politician is suddenly out of style, clownish behavior is in. But it is still just a style, as inauthentic as any.
But Trump does have a deep personal value: ‘Murrica. He loves this country and its people. He’s not faking it when he says he doesn’t want people from sh*thole countries coming here.
The thing I really like about Trump is he sees me as a citizen to be served. But to Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama I seem more like a problem to be managed.
This is true in exactly the same way as it was true that Bill Clinton felt my pain.
I believe you are being overly cynical. Trump says these sorts of things in private, not as campaign rhetoric.
It is my impression that Bill Clinton felt a lot of things in private.
Yeah, I kinda like Trump but I don’t agree with this.
I think he sees his supporters in this way. But the second you stop supporting him, he sees you as an enemy.
I would guess Hillary, Obama, Jeb, and everyone else is much the same. With the possible exception of the establishment neocons who seem annoyed at the fact that they have to put up with social conservatives to win elections. So I can see how socially conservative Trump supporters might see Trump as the only politician who ever cared about them. But that’s really less about Trump and more about establishment neocons being bad at politics.
You’re never going to convince me that this man doesn’t love America.
Totally off topic, but can we get someone to give him a frock coat already? Trump wears an overcoat freaking everywhere and it always comes across somewhere between a little off and completely frumpy. Like, I guess I get what he’s going for but he could do so much better. Especially in a staged photo like that.
Trump definitely and seemingly genuinely loves the sorts of things that Red Tribe identifies as the positive aspects of “America”.
“Someone get this man a frock coat already!” is my new favorite fashion intervention. Preferably shouted like an EMT.
gbdub has it right. The problem of which Trump is a symptom, as much or more than a cause, is that the particular things he loves about America, and the particular Americans he loves most (remember “I love the poorly educated”?), are things to which about half the country is either indifferent or hostile, and people to whom we are either indifferent or hostile– especially hostile, notably, when their preferred policies start affecting our lives and the lives of those we care about.
Each tribe believes that its America is the one worth loving; that in order to love and preserve it we must defend it *against the other one*; and that the country we love would be a better place if the other’s vision of America were defeated and discredited utterly. Trump hates everything San Francisco stands for and represents, and we return the favor heartily. He serves people like Conrad Honcho by doing things that people like me find obviously abhorrent and barbaric.
I don’t know that this is equally true among tribes; one of the popular pastimes of Blue Tribe is complaining about the various ways the USA is not as nice as the European countries they visited in their gap year. And in general finding unabashed expressions of pride in the USA gauche.
I want to be clear, the “America” Red Tribe loves (and loves Trump for loving) is an idealized version of America that excludes a lot of things Blue Tribe likes. But still, openly loving “America” is much more a Red than Blue thing. (Also, the Blues identify a lot of things they dislike as quintessentially “American”)
(Sticking to Scott’s definitions here, where Blue Tribe is a mostly white coastal-urban upper middle to upper class)
Sure, and a right back atcha. The things you (obviously? probably?) find abhorrent are the things I think are the very basic duties owed by any government to its people, like “control the borders.”* I wouldn’t say I find the progressives’ policies “abhorrent and barbaric,” so much as…chilling?
From my point of view it’s like the AI values alignment problem. The paperclip maximizer will turn everyone into paperclips because paperclips are good, and that the people turned into paperclips disagree is not only immaterial, it’s outside the value system of the AI. Americans might prefer their neighborhoods not become Spanish-speaking, or have to put up with Muslim calls to prayer. But to the progressive social engineers, that the Americans would prefer their cultures and neighborhoods not change is immaterial. Diversity Is Strength. The protestations of American citizens are not legitimate values to be served by the state, but problems to be managed. That whole situation is chilling.
* apologies if you do not actually find Trump’s attempts to control the borders abhorrent and barbaric. I’m inferring from previous conversations. If the abhorrent and barbaric things are something different, I’d happily discuss those issues instead.
ETA: I’m having trouble expressing myself here, and I hope this doesn’t come off as some uncharitable “progressive are inhuman robots” take. It’s more like…when trying to figure out what the fundamental disagreements I have with progressives are, I largely think it boils down to “what is the purpose of government?”
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the strong impression that progressives think the purpose of government is to do good (within reason). Whereas I think the purpose of government is to do what’s in the interest of citizens (within reason).
Is that accurate? Would you agree or disagree?
@gbdub There is a loud status-seeking minority that does love to complain about America generally, but I don’t think it’s the majority Blue Tribe view. The narrative I got in my very Blue Tribe natal milieu was more like:
— the US has lots of wonderful things about it and also lots of horrible things
— the wonderful things are mostly to the credit of Blue Tribers, the horrible things are mostly the fault of Red Tribers
— if we could only reacculturate Red Tribers into our superior civilization, we could fix all the ways in which America does worse than other developed countries.
@Conrad Honcho I’m not a progressive myself so I have to be careful imputing beliefs to progressives. I am a cosmopolitan globalist and I think I am more radically cosmopolitan than most progressives. So for example, I think it obvious that countries do not rightfully belong to their citizens, but rather the whole earth belongs to all of humanity, and so if a person born in e.g. Bangladesh wants to live in the US they have just as much moral right to do so as you or I. The cruelty of the methods used to control borders indeed shocks the conscience, but really the thing itself is the abuse.
But I don’t think most progressives believe that. As best I can tell from the experience of my milieu, most progressives would instead say that:
— If the good of humanity is in tension with the interests of a particular country’s citizens, you (where “you” includes government officials) should pick the good of humanity, because that’s generally more morally important
— But in the case of immigration we don’t have to make that choice, because in fact immigration restrictions do not serve the interests of most US citizens
— The belief among some US citizens that immigration restrictions serve their interests is mostly rooted in racism. Racist beliefs are ipso facto morally illegitimate and governments should not act on them even if they are majority beliefs.
I don’t think so. When restrictions came in in the 1920’s, there were restrictions on European immigration but not on immigration to the U.S. from other parts of the New World. The late 19th century restrictions on Chinese immigration were largely racial, the 20th century not.
I think it’s largely a result of the mistaken idea that there is a fixed number of jobs, so if foreigners come they will take ours. Also in part suspicion of the new and different, where the difference does not have to be racial.
@salvorhardin
1) What are your opinions on colonialism? Also, the neo-colonialism China is conducting in Africa in the modern day.
2) What are your opinions on gentrification, and those who oppose it?
I’m inclined to think that the America which Blue Tribes love is their fellow Blue Tribers who also hate America.
Now that’s a charitable take if I ever saw one. Is that honestly what you think, or just a cheap snide remark?
That’s how it looks to me. There’s only so much of “wouldn’t it be great if we were ruled by Canada or the EU or the UN”, “,Murrica!”, and “slavery is America’s original sin” that I can take before I find myself there’s some general dislike involved.
There’s definitely a broad sentiment that American Nationalism is a thing to be disparaged and despised, and I hope y’all aren’t going to make me cite examples.
If there’s meant to be a distinction between “American Nationalism is despicable” and “America is despicable”, that usually doesn’t come across and I think I’ll save my finite reserves of charity for people more willing to meet me halfway.
It’s not that Mommie Dearest doesn’t love you, it’s just that you’re a continual disappointment to her.
Paul Zrimsek:
Exactly.
The funny thing is, I don’t like patriotic displays. I feel like they’re an effort to drag me into something which doesn’t make sense to me.
At same time, the anti-American aspect of the left takes it much farther than I want to go.
And we’re painting the entire “blue tribe” with that brush? I don’t dispute that there are people who have that view. I dispute the way it is being ascribed to the entire outgroup.
@acymetric
That kind of sentiment gets passed around on the Facebooks of various people I know pretty frequently, and I’ve never seen any of the cluster I view as Blue Tribe – a subset of whom are the ones who generally post it – argue with it, while I’ve frequently seen positive comments left on those posts, often by those people. I think there’s a correlation, where the more you post about left-wing political topics the more likely you are to post “y’know guys… if California seceded we could join Canada”. So this does seem to be a thing in the parts of the Blue Tribe I’m immersed in.
But I’m only familiar with some of the Blue Tribe (usually the less radical end, but I may be – probably am – filtering for other things too). Are there parts where the above suggestion would get disapproval?
@Rebecca Friedman
Most likely I wouldn’t take it as serious. That reads like a joke/sarcasm to me, essentially just venting about not liking some certain set of policies.
Compare to red tribe jokes/memes about deporting liberals (or shooting them).
These are just things people say to express frustration about beliefs or policies of the other tribe. Also, even in the case where they were completely serious, I don’t think it would be accurate to equivocate that with “hates America”. It could just as easily be spun as “loves America and what it stands for, but believes the country is drifting away from what makes it great” (a statement that would probably get wide approval from both tribes, for different reasons).
Either the blue tribe is way smaller than people here think it is (small enough that it isn’t worth bringing up in discussions of US culture/politics) or “Hates America” isn’t a dominate belief of the Blue tribe. I’m pretty confident it is the latter.
FWIW, next time anyone asks for evidence that this comment section leans right and is occasionally openly hostile to the blue tribe/liberals, remember this discussion.
(I’m not feeling personally insulted or anything, just annoyed, but if the consensus here is “blue tribe hates America” and literally only one commented is pushing back on that, it would probably be difficult to consider it a place friendly or open to people form that side of the aisle. A similarly ridiculous, broad, sweeping claim about the red tribe would see immediate pushback).
@salvorhardin
What do the Blue Tribers think is wonderful about America?
@Rebecca Friedman
Patrick Nielsen Hayden made an effort for the left to reclaim patriotism, but it didn’t seem to get any traction.
@acymetric
From my point of view, the Blue tribe has been pretty much taken over by Social Justice, or at least disagreement with Social Justice has been silenced. It’s quite possible that I’m filtering. Are there any non-Social Justice/moderate Blue sources you recommend?
Everybody always thinks their outgroup has been overtaken by extremists.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that in the last two presidential cycles, the Democrats went with the most moderate candidate, while the Republicans not only nominated the most extreme candidate, but also let him dominate the party to the point where it’s basically a personality cult.
Sure I think some people on the left have gone too far, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to pledge personal allegiance to Trump and write off half the country.
I am also amused about the call for moderate Blue sources when we’re literally arguing in the comments section of one.
Most Blue Tribers I know are big fans of baseball, Philip Roth books, Marty Scorsese movies, blues, jazz, rock n’ roll, democracy, the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, Popeyes chicken, Hamilton the play and the man, etc, etc, etc.
It is true that they are more skeptical of some patriotic symbolism (flag pins, etc.) but it’s not like red tribe can’t sometimes sound a bit down on America, too.
I think for the most part, red and blue tribe disagree on what symbolizes the America they believe in: I think blue tribe is more skeptical of the founding than red tribe owing to slavery (though see the renewed interest in Hamilton and anti-slavery founders) while red tribe is a lot more skeptical of things like the New Colossus poem and the whole “America: a nation of immigrants!” thing that plays a big role in blue-tribers’ patriotism.
Trying to find the least CW to phrase this, but I was wondering why in-group-variance being larger than between-group-variance was seen as some gigantic refutation of examining groups as separate in the first place.
As a maximally inoffensive example, if women were 1 IQ point higher than men on average but still followed the same bell curve, the between-group-variance would indeed be much lower than the in-group-variance. But between-group differences would be very noticeable to the smart women who, 2 St Devs out, would outnumber men 4-1.
Can anyone explain where my thinking has gone wrong?
Man, isn’t this such a tired question? Most of us have read Steve Sailer. This question was cutting edge in the blogosphere in 2009. We may as well be discussing whether negging chicks is a good pick up strategy.
The best answers to what you are asking are probably on old Steve Sailer blogs.
Only asking because I saw the assertion made waaaayyy down at the bottom of this very open thread.
It isn’t. But it is a moderately-strong indicator that those particular group memberships are not the most important factor in explaining differences in what you’re studying.
Also, basically everything that DinoNerd said (maybe with a few less turnips). I probably wouldn’t have added my own comment to his already-excellent one if I didn’t suspect you were responding to something I wrote in the most CW of CW threads deep below.
I guess that goes back to whether lived experience is more important than statistics or not. Or just that there’s plenty of ways to manipulate or misunderstand data.
I don’t think that is true at all, in the general case. Especially since “what you are studying” often ALSO has more variation within a population than between them. Heck, “number of testicles” has at least as much variation within the population of men as it does between the populations of men and women!
To use a less silly but still hopefully still uncontroversial distinction, there is a statistically significant height difference between the average man and the average woman. And yet, the difference in height between the shortest and tallest men is much larger than the average difference between men and women.
Despite this, if I’m trying to figure out who is most likely to bang their heads on a low ceiling, I’m going to get a significant gender skew in my results.
The only thing “more variation within than between” really means is that you can’t use that characteristic as a hard sort between individuals of a population. It does not mean that it is not a statistically significant distinction between the populations.
Unless what you are studying is differences in averages over groups, in which case the within-group variation averages out.
And that, of course, is the context in which some of us are so annoyed at the motivated reasoning.
It’s easy to explain. You’re dealing with people with motivated reasoning. It pervades the CW topics you’re circumnavigating.
The hardest part for me is to agree with the policy outcome but believe that the justification for it is harmful.
There’s both motivated reasoning and lack of ability to think in statistical terms.
Much depends on what you are trying to do. If you are trying to find the top 100 contributors to some statistical difference, you expect to find the effect of each contributing factor to be tiny. No problem.
If you fixate on one of the contributing factors, and don’t want to hear about anything else, and claim “you just want to understand the truth”, numerate people are likely to conclude that you have some agenda not involving truth.
If you take your example above, and conclude from it that for any task requiring intelligence, you should pick people by gender, in preference to any other measure of either intelligence of skill at the specific thing you are picking them for, people will either conclude you are hopelessly innumerate, or that you want a reason to pick women, and don’t actually care about intelligence.
And if you come up with some fuzzy argument that can’t be pinned down, such that no one is sure whether you are talking about small statistical differences (intelligence, in your example), large statistical differences (ability to carry a child to term), or matters of definition (whichever one you care to use for ‘men’ vs ‘women’) – people may conclude you are either trying to conduct a debate (for points, not truth), have the logical reasoning ability of a turnip, or once again have an agenda invlolving preferences for some groups over others.
That final point is why I responded as I did to the OP, deep in this OT, who asked a fuzzy wide open question about falsifiability of claims about “meaningful” differences between groups.
Other than that, I suggest you check your math. I’m not 100% sure [didn’t do the math myself], but my feel for numbers (generally good) says that if the difference of the means is a mere 1 pt, and if the standard deviation is something near what it actually is (15), you’ll have to go a lot farther than 2 std devs to get a 4:1 ratio.
Responding to myself, after rereading your words, not the I’ve-seen-this-before reaction I had to them.
I don’t think I’ve addressed this directly. Let’s try again, and let’s pretend that rather than being two participants in a net.argument, you are a Phd candidate planning a research project, and I am your thesis advisor.
Depending on what you are trying to do, you might try looking at a fairly homogenous group of subjects (let’s say white rats of the same genetic strain, so we can stay out of CW territory). That’s often exactly what you want. Of course your results may not apply to other strains of rats, let alone to monkeys or humans, but looking at where else they apply can be a seperate research project.
With a little thought, I’m sure I could come up with something for you to study where the variance between individual mice is larger than the variance between the average of let’s say mice and hamsters. That doesn’t invalidate this kind of research. In fact, mixing the 2 species together – rather than doing the same project twice, once for each species – would probably produce some fairly useless research.
It’s also often useful to look at a population subset, even something as fuzzy as “the largest 10%”. Of course it depends on what you are doing, and what hypothesis you have. Studying the largest 10% would be a lot more useful if you were interested in growth, or obesity; a lot less useful if you were interested in something unlikely to correlate with size.
But realistically, you are talking about studying people in groups based on (some conception of) race or gender. Much the same applies there, at least for big differences. It makes little sense to study medical issues with reproductive organs in mixed gender populations – they don’t have the same organs, and you are probably interested in e.g. prostate cancer, or cervical cancer or … not “all of the above”. (Or if you are interested in all of the above, that probably also includes lung cancer etc.) If you have hypotheses about melanin and vitamin D deficiency, you will be quite literally interested in skin colour.
Then there are the intermediate cases. Most of the ways some adult humans metabolize milk are strongly heritable – and you might want to study one of those metabolic pathways individually. But there’s no “race” where everyone of that race has that particular adaptation, or where only members of that race have the particular adaptation. Still, if you want to study the pathway that developed among the Masai, you’ll have to screen an awful lot of blond Scandinavians to find very few subjects; better to screen people more likely to have the relevant ancestry.
It gets weirder still if you decide to study something like height on a gendered basis, or a racial basis. Particularly a racial basis – that’s more likely to be about specific alleles, which gets you back into the lactose tolerance case above, except with probably thousands of genes and many alleles of each. (The gendered case might make sense, if looking at hormonal effects – and we know that sex hormones affect growth.)
But for every reasonable study, there are 100s of potential studies that aren’t reasonable. Or that are an extreme long shot, that will probably just give you negative results, a poor publication record, and no chance at tenure ;-(
Using some broad category as a proxy for something you could actually measure more precisely isn’t going to get you the clear results you might get if you actually looked e.g. at people with a specific type of lactose tolerance, rather than at black people (might have Masai lactose tolerance, or northern European, or none).
Pick your research subjects wisely, to match your topics, and you’ll go on to great things. Screw this up, and you might just drop out without completing your thesis.
—
I hope this makes sense. It’s well past my bed time, so it’s probably not as clear as I intended.
This was great
This is a good post, but I think in practice it gets applied with an isolated demand for rigor. We do tons of studies in lots of fields that consider social categories of race, despite our socially defined racial categories not mapping very well to the sort of categories you would draw if you wanted to do a rigorous genetic analysis.
Plenty of PhD candidates are researching differences in income, educational attainment, health outcomes, etc. between the races as defined in Western society. And designing policies and interventions deliberately tailored to these racial groupings.
It’s only when people propose poking around things like IQ that the “no scientific basis for race” and “more within group variation than between” arguments get trotted out. So that is either an isolated demand for rigor, or sociology isn’t a science.
I’ll play devils advocate on this one…
If you are looking for social causes, it makes sense to use categories as commonly perceived.
If you are looking for biological causes, it makes sense to use ancestry or genetic categories.
Could be extended further, like if you are looking for causes of official policy, it makes sense to use whatever categories are in use at the enforcement level (which may or may not mirror those at the level of policy or census).
If you are really agnostic, you need to consider all of these. Fortunately, they’re pretty well correlated.
I think gbdub hits the nail on the head.
To extend on that point, at my final institution of higher learning, applicants were expressly treated differently on the basis of race (in the social categories sense). Favored groups had more lenient admissions standards, and those who were admitted were given preferential access to employment and prestigious positions in the university. This is not a subtle process; everyone was quite clear that intentional steps were being taken for the sake of “affirmative action.”
The justification for these programs rests on comparing outcomes by our socially defined racial categories. I’m sure that a maximally detailed categorization based on ancestry or genetic categories would differ in some ways from our socially defined racial categories, but that seems like a side-issue to me when the policy decisions are being made based on the socially defined categories.
Similarly, I think a lot of this comes down to where people are trying to use data to make inferences. I agree that if you’re talking with your thesis advisor about studying the relationship between height and economic success, it makes little sense to use sex as a proxy value. But I think that’s a poor analogy for the very contentious world of affirmative action where institutions are picking winners and losers on the basis of race, purportedly justified based on differential outcomes for broad socially defined racial categories. At that point, it can make a lot of sense to care about the differences between those categories if you disagree with those policies, since that might well explain some of the differences in outcomes.
I think gbdub hits the nail on the head.
Like many other universities in the United states, my final institution of higher education expressly treated people differently on the basis of race. People from favored groups faced more lenient admission standards, an easier route to prestigious positions in the university, and additional access to high prestige / high paying jobs. These preferences were not subtle — the policy of the university (and the profession in general) was quite explicit that intentional steps were being taken in the name of affirmative action.
To be clear, the winners and losers of that process were picked based on the “socially defined racial categories” (as gbdub put it), not based on some type of rigorously scientifically defensible use of ancestry or genetic background. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are material differences between racial categories defined using those two processes, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to focus on the socially defined racial categories when that’s what the decisionmakers are doing.
Similarly, a lot of this comes down to how people are using data. If you’re talking with a thesis advisor about exploring the relationship between height and wealth, then it naturally makes more sense to measure height directly without using sex as a proxy. But, for the same reason, I think it makes sense to care about potential differences between socially defined groups in the US when decisionmakers are adopting policies that treat those groups differently based on the differential outcomes between those socially defined groups.
I think that as we move from biological research to sociological research, social categories become a lot more relevant, and biological categories somewhat less.
To take the obvious: people react to others according to the race they perceive – e.g. some quantity of Americans see folks from southern India individually as black and treat them accordingly. If you are looking at effects of being treated as black, that’s the categorization you care about. So for your purposes, a person who “passes” as white, and was raised by parents who also passed, isn’t black, whereas their non-passing cousins are.
Intelligence is a red hot mess. IQ tests are carefully constructed to make certain social groups have the same average results. There’s all kinds of controversy over whether IQ accurately measures anything else commonly referred to as “intelligence”. There’s fairly obvious evidence of cultural biases in the tests; as a trite example, one test (Weschler) used in multiple English-speaking countries, included knowledge of details of the American flag – at the time I took it in Canada. Intelligence is also, as you observed, very much politicized. With my thesis adviser hat on, I’d suggest you pick any other field, whether or not your proposed research also involves other demograohic categories. If you must work in the general area of intelligence, pick a subfactor that’s independently useful and independently measurable. Or study the causes and treatment of some particular pathology that affects intelligence.
Pursuing hypotheses about innate differences in a context of social categories is absurd. Find a better way of classifying your subjects, and seek out individuals raised outside of the social context they were born into – e.g. light skinned children of black parents adopted in infancy and miscategorized as white, and vice versa. It’s going to be a hard slog, and subjects won’t be plentiful. And you’ll never be sure how much environmental influence actually got through – maybe the birth mother ate the typical foods of her subculture while pregnant, and that affected the baby, maybe … basically, getting any kind of valid research in this area is very very hard, and there’s been so much bad “research” you’ll be subjected to extra scrutiny, on top of the inherent difficulty.
Pursuing hypotheses about socially mediated influences in a context of social categories is exactly the right idea, but excluding non-social influences is hard. You need a control group similar to what you need to study innate differences – people whose ancestry doesn’t match their upbringing or social role.
And doing fuzzy research about intelligence (dubiously measured as IQ) and socially mediated categories, while forming no conclusion as to how much is or is not socially mediated – not to mention how it’s mediated – isn’t likely to result in a meaningful contribution to human knowledge – i.e. maybe no doctorate, and certainly no tenure.
If you do research on differences between socially-defined groups in terms of, say, scholastic achievement, and you don’t account for differences in IQ distributions between those groups, you are doomed to speak nonsense. You will have omitted a hugely relevant confound at the beginning of your research and the results you come up with will be of little value to anyone actually trying to understand the world or to craft policies that will make the world better.
DinoNerd:
If IQ is such a hot mess, why is it so helpful at making correct predictions?
Imagine IQ, but everyone with green eyes gets an extra 5 points.
It’d still have plenty of predictive power.
Or consider BMI. It lumps in obese people with body builders, but that doesn’t stop it from correlating with all-cause mortality.
The other thing about IQ (and BMI) is that it’s easy to test thousands of people and do longitudinal studies with enourmous n. Therefore you can get significant results from fairly small effect sizes.
Essentially none of this controversy is about biological research. The question of what genes affect intelligence how is an interesting one, and to research it you would surely want to distinguish between Igbo and Yoruba, and among other groups who, judged by history and/or observable heritable differences, represent largely separated gene pools. But the present controversy isn’t about that.
The claim that blacks and whites, or men and women, differ, or don’t differ, in the distribution of heritable cognitive characteristics is important for the implication of differences, not the genetic cause. If the reason Africa is poor is that Africans are stupid, that has different implications for what can or should be done about African poverty than if the reason is something else. But when a world famous biologist suggested that that was the reason he was furiously attacked for even considering the possibility. If the reason Harvard has close to zero women as tenured math professors, assuming that is still true, is that many fewer women than men have the extreme level of mathematical ability that suits them for the job, that has different implications than if the reason is prejudice in Harvard hiring or differences in how male and females are treated in high school.
DinoNerd,
I think your focus on the “thesis advisor” hypothetical is missing the point. I agree that researching race and intelligence is a terrible idea if you want tenure, but I tend to think that’s mostly because of political reasons (although I’ll grant that it’s also a difficult subject to study — but subjects being difficult doesn’t make them not worth studying, after all).
I care about these issues because of political and social ramifications. If EVERYONE was willing to say, “This seems like an issue that’s too difficult for us to disentangle at this time,” then fine, fair enough. But that’s absolutely not the case. As albatross11 points out, failing to account for this discrepancy (if it exists!) can turn other research into nonsense. And that other research is absolutely being conducted and relied upon to justify various policies (e.g. affirmative action).
The real world implications are why I’m so unpersuaded by claims that the socially defined racial categories are too fuzzy to use for real analysis. They seem to be sufficiently defined when handing out admission seats to elite universities, or when hiring people at large corporations. Claiming that it’s “absurd” to investigate “hypotheses about innate differences in a context of social categories” simply results in the consensus view that no differences exist being immune to scrutiny. As gbdub pointed out, I think that looks an awful lot like an isolated demand for rigor to ensure that one side of the discussion gets shut out of the conversation.
EDIT: I posted my reply before seeing that David Friedman had chimed in. I agree with everything that he said, and I think he captured the core issue perfectly.
Actually, BMI is a great example.
If you try to research the results of obesity using a sample based on BMI, you’ll have body builders messing up your sample, reducing the significance of any results you get, etc. etc. Your results will be much more useful if you use an actual measure of obesity.
If you decide to improve population health outcomes by requiring people to reduce their BMI, e.g. by making their insurance rates go up with their BMI, or refusing to cover medical care for anyone above a certain level, then you’ll require useless or possibly actively harmful changes from those who won’t benefit from them, and provide lots of cherry-pickable examples for those actually obese to use to excuse their non-compliance.
If you try to predict health consequences for various populations based on BMI, without accounting for systematic variations that influence BMI but not obesity, and those variations are large, you’ll produce predictions not much better than you could get from using random numbers. (Gee, this group of athletes have the same average/median/etc. BMI as this group of couch potatoes; guess they’ll have the same rate of the same health issues – rather than more sports injuries among the athletes, but less of almost everything else.)
There are situations where BMI is all you have, and it’s better than nothing. But if my experience is any sample, that’s less than half of the cases where BMI is used. (My previous health insurance company tried to push BMI as a magic indicator of general health, and I’m still annoyed with them.)
[Edit – note that you if you could get people to succeessfully reduce their BMI – both bodybuilders (by giving up their hobby) and couch potatoes (by improving their diet, eating less, and getting off the couch) at more or less the same rate, you could improve population-level health outcomes. But less than if you didn’t waste time pushing body builders to exercise less. Some people care only about the population level, and don’t mind side effects like that, even when they are inflicted knowingly. I’m not one of those people.]
@DavidFriedman and @Mycale – you both have good points, that merit some serious responses – but not as deep in the thread as those postings have gotten. It’s really hard to respond to anything specific in this UI, once it reaches the point where replies don’t thread.
They are also somewhat tangential to my point in this subthread, which was to try to answer Belisaurus Rex’s specific questions.
I’m much more expert on the good and bad of scientific research than I am on the crazy things that humans in groups get up to, particularly the part often referred to as politics. My reaction to many of the observations you both make tends to be to throw up my hands in horror and make a facetious comment about wanting to live among Vulcans.
Sometimes I try to look at the crazy-seeming (to me) human tendencies, particularly because not understanding your neighbours’ knee jerks is potentially dangerous. (I’m proud of how well I predicted early parts of the CV-19 reaction, thereby making my life notably easier during the lockdown, even though I missed the investment meltdown until far to late.)
But mostly I’m just not good at this.
If I get inspired, I might start a top level thread about this; I’m even more likely to respond to one someone else starts. But for me it needs to be a different thread. and to stay a bit less CW, I’d probably make the topic be “bad research, with emphasis on small p political effects on research design, funding, and publication”.
My personal interest in intelligence differences among populations is limited, but if I were going to study that (please No) I’d start with small populations, as unmixed as possible, and if possible descendants of these populations who’ve all been assimilated to the same culture. The groups would be much smaller than races – and for political reasons I might try to make them all of the same “race” (let’s say Cree, Ojibwa, Iroquois; or 3 similar small-scale groupings in Africa (Bantu might be too large for this purpose; I really mean small).
DinoNerd,
Fair enough. Those are all very reasonable points. I think there’s a disconnect regarding the purpose / intended use of these types of research. I tend to think of these discussions in more of a conflict theory framing (there are opposing sides that are trying to use intelligence-related research for competing political/policy ends), and you’re focusing on the mistake theory framing (how best to design studies into intelligence).
I still think it makes sense to perform studies at the level of generality that decisionmakers are operating on — even if that’s problematic from a pure methodological standpoint — but I don’t think we disagree about there being serious caveats to that type of analysis. It’s certainly challenging and fraught with difficulty.
I’m obviously not Belisaurus Rex, but I wanted to say that I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this topic.
I think my question was pretty much answered: it is a rhetorical argument that doesn’t really fit with the statistics, but it stays alive as a low effort meme. I guess there’s a ton of these, and maybe back in the old days of the internet there would’ve been a debunking catalog or wiki full of them. Truth is that between-group differences can be important no matter what the in-group variance is.
I liked the BMI discussion, and about how this would be a difficult topic to study even if it wasn’t politically impossible.
My position is closest to what Mycale said “I care about these issues because of political and social ramifications. If EVERYONE was willing to say, “This seems like an issue that’s too difficult for us to disentangle at this time,” then fine, fair enough. But that’s absolutely not the case.”
Since we’re already so deep, I’ll leave it without further comment. Until the next thread.
@DinoNerd
The second possibility you are asking for (small genetically distinct populations with the same culture but low exogamy) maybe isn’t nonexistent (although no examples come to mind), but it’s going to be rare. Unless you have a very broad definition of “same culture” but a very strict definition of “same population”.
If populations have assimilated to the same culture, they will be intermixed. If they don’t intermarry at high rates (and I mean very high, i.e. there is almost no bias towards endogamy), I don’t think it makes sense to say they share the same culture.
@quanta413
You are perfectly right. The good news, from my POV, is that the long term trend is that the populations become indistinguishable. There are no major political or research issues about the varying capabilities, personality traits, or treatment of Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans in England; politically and socially their descendants all see themselves as English. Some researchers may be trying to tease out the specific sources of some English characteristics, but it’s not fraught with political importance. (And if you want genetic sources, you’ll be sequencing DNA from early burials.)
There are statistical techniques to attempt to sort out sources of traits in a lumpy mix. They are complicated enough that non-specialists rarely understand them, and mathematically trained reviewers get into arguments about validity. It appears to me that politically-motivated people will only trust such research if it confirms what they already want to believe.
@DinoNerd
A major thing that a lot of people care about is fairness. We often have fairly basic statistics like what the ratios are between various groups. If this doesn’t match the population ratios, then finding the cause(s) of that can help you determine whether and how much unfairness there is.
For such research, in-group variance determines how big your sample has to be, but it doesn’t make researching between-group-variance less useful.
For example, imagine black and white applicants, each group having highly varying skill levels, from 0 to 100. Racism might give one group a 20 point boost. The high skill level difference between different blacks and whites in no way means that you cannot identify that one group gets a boost, nor does it mean that the boost is insignificant when it is smaller than the in-group-variance.
+1 on the math error, but it’s not important for the concept. In the example given, if IQ is normally distributed with a SD of 15, then the +2 SD population will be 54% women, not 80%. If you go out to +4 SD it will be 57%. If you go out to +6 SD it will be 60% (out of the global 7.8B population, you’d expect a little under 4 men and 6 women).
A wider standard deviation also gives you interesting effects at the tails. Though I’m uncomfortable trusting numbers from a normal distribution way out in the tails–I think the normal distribution is often a pretty good approximation for reality toward the center, but that in reality you usually have weird stuff going on in the tails that don’t follow the mathematical model so well.
Thanks for the math correction, I meant 20% more women (10 percentage points) and somehow that turned into 4:1 in my head. Still significant on the ground, China has 15% more men than women and look at the problems there.
Hadn’t considered the effect of a wider standard deviation, but that’s a little too speculative for me. It is a talking point that men and women have identical averages but different StDevs, but I’d rather not dive too deep.
A wider standard deviation is also a more meaningful claim in the context of IQ.
My understanding is that men do better, on average, on some categories of questions in an IQ test, women on others, and that (some? all?) IQ tests deliberately use the weighting of different categories to make the average IQ the same for men and women. So claims about differences in average IQ can’t be deduced from test results and may not even be meaningful.
But claims about differences in the width of the distribution are still meaningful. And, as I understand it, the standard deviation of the distribution is wider for men than for women, which can have a large effect on density far out on either tail.
If you didn’t want to be too CW you could have picked almost any other example.
But yes, treating “more variation within than between” as a trump card to dismiss something is a very poor argument that reflects a poor grasp of statistics. Then again if we could ditch every argument that reflected a poor grasp of statistics, the internet would be much smaller.
I don’t know, doesn’t look like too much CW above. Social vs biological categories seems like a useful distinction, even with the enormous amount of overlap.
But yeah, IQ does seem to be a red hot mess, at least because of the many potential confounding variables. The extra scrutiny and difficulty of obtaining data points, as well as the long time span involved (lead in the water or proximity to power lines or whatever could affect existing cohorts for their entire lives, shifting the lower half of the bell curve lower) could make tiny differences of 1-2% practically invisible, if they were even noticeable under ideal conditions.
A 1-2% difference is effectively no difference, since proportions at the upper tail are basically irrelevant policy-wise. But is that actually what we’re seeing?
1.) The thing about ‘social vs biological’ is that you don’t need ground up classification schemes to investigate differences between subjects or groups, however those groups are defined. You could, for example, ask why in a school where seating arrangements are voluntary, students who sit in the first two rows of the classroom do better than those who sit in the back rows. Causality may go both ways, being closer to the teacher improves performance, and/or being closer signals higher conscientiousness/interest in academic success.
Imagine arguing that there couldn’t possibly be a genetic difference between front and back seaters because these groups don’t constitute biological categories.
Moreover, Classification schemes themselves, especially in biology are almost never perfect (they result in at least one subject who doesn’t fit well into the scheme) and the choice of cut-offs comes down to practical utility. In this sense they too are socially constructed.
2) I’ve said this before but in the context of IQ being messy:
a) assessing the predictive validity of the tests is generally already involves controlling for commonly pointed to confounders. It’s also a bit unfair, because while IQ researchers control for SES more often then not, I seldom see people who look at sociological variables ever try controlling for IQ.
b) Moreover, if we think that ‘IQ’ is, as it is currently measured, a messy proxy for ‘True intelligence’ or ‘true cognitive ability’ then however independently predictive IQ tests are, ‘true intelligence’ or ‘true cognitive ability’ would end up being even more predictive then the tests suggest, not less. Insofar as we define ‘true intelligence/CI’ to mean that which assists humans in, for example, scholastic achievement. I’d actually be a bit upset if it turned out we were underestimating the extent to which the course of our lives is dictated by the true ‘G-factor’
3) Differences at the tails are important insofar as they affect representation in positions of influence and prestige. This isn’t limited strictly to IQ as well. Small differences in averages result in extreme differences in percent distribution at these high levels.
It is a good argument against *ism, that is, categorizing people based on low variance superficial features (gender or skin color) as a proxy for high-variance characteristics (IQ).
But using it to dismiss high variance traits generally is just silly, and especially if one at the same time insists on group differences in other high variance traits (career achievements, salary, health outcomes) as meaningful.
I realize I’m starting 2 threads in a row. If that’s bad form, let me know. The 3rd gin & tonic tends to give me a bunch of unconnected thoughts at once.
We know we live in unusually partisan times for the US. I often feel flashes of anger when reading something by a proponent of the opposite tribe. So I don’t claim to be above it.
Yet… I can work alongside members of the opposite tribe. I can be friendly with them. All I have to do is is I ignore their political comments, which is maybe 1% of what they have to say.
What I’m wondering is if our era of partisanship isn’t something that is mostly semantic. I mean, we aren’t arguing over slavery. We are mostly arguing over symbolic things, not things we can even prove exists.
It might depend on your kind of workplace or the average age of your coworkers.
Whether we are arguing over something mostly symbolic or not?
Be careful with that one. I was pretty proud of being tolerant and being able to socialize with people with different opinions, until I realized they have to be tolerant as well for the socialization to work. I’m now more muted in my opinions.
If you point this out, you get the “Dur hur, my Paradox of Tolerance”.
I disagree.
And this is why. Not only is slavery a much bigger issue, it inspired significantly more partisanship. Recall that during the times of slavery, we saw a Congressman beat another one half to death on the floor. We had regular armed conflict between militia groups in places like Kansas and Missouri.
“We are in uniquely partisan times” is one of those things everyone says and most people believe but seems wholly unsupported by the evidence.
Could it be possible that we are getting more partisan but are just more lazy/less likely to be moved to act on our partisanship?
I think partisanship is probably at a local high, but not a global one in America. Matt M’s example of the pre-Civil War era is mostly good (though for a while that wasn’t strictly partisan conflict so much as sectional–five years before being caned by (Democrat) Brooks, Sumner had been elected by a legislature controlled by Democrats).
Basically, there have been periods in American history where parties are mostly pretty diverse, and periods where they have been sorted, whether ideologically or sectionally or in some other way.
When parties are diverse, there’s lots of cooperation between parties, and competition within parties, and so partisanship is low: your political friends and enemies don’t map neatly onto a partisan divide. Before 1850 or so, for example, there were pro- and anti-slavery factions of both Democrats and Whigs; in the 1930s conservative southern Democrats joined conservative western and mid-western Republicans to block FDR from extending the New Deal; and in the 1960s liberal northeastern Republicans joined liberal northern Democrats to pass the Civil Rights acts.
But over time, parties tend to sort, especially in the presence of one overwhelming issue that dominates all others; in the antebellum era slavery is an example, and more recently civil rights.
So, the Whig party broke up; anti-slavery Democrats split off into the Free Soil party, and finally, by the mid-1850s, you have the Republican party organized more or less explicitly as an anti-slavery party, and the Democratic party left with only its pro-slavery faction remaining. When Sumner was first elected, he was an ex-Whig Free Soiler in coalition with Democrats who were skeptical of him, but ultimately willing to vote for him; five years later he was a Republican, facing a pro-slavery dominated Democratic party.
In the 1960s, the passage of the Civil Rights Act pushed the southern conservative wing out of the Democratic party, leaving a mostly liberal Democratic party (with its conservative wing removed to the Republican party) and a mostly conservative Republican party (with its liberal northeastern wing moving to the Democratic party).
The latter-day shift has not been as complete as the one in the 1850s, perhaps partially explaining why we don’t see partisan violence quite like in the antebellum era. On the other hand, there have also been institutional changes that have led to more partisan competition over time, which along with demographic trends like the rise in the number of college-educated voters, have exacerbated partisanship.
Sure, the current times are less partisan than that one time where the country was so divided it literally broke in half and had a war; but that doesn’t mean that these times still can’t be unusually partisan.
If you want evidence, look at state-by-state voting patterns in Presidential elections. Throughout most of the 20th century, it was common for the winning candidate to win a super majority of states, including multiple cases where the winning candidate only lost a single state. (Reagan only lost Minnesota in ’84, and infamously, Nixon only lost Massachusetts in ’72, leading to some “don’t blame me, I’m from MA” bumper stickers after that presidency went pear shaped)
Of course, there were still close races, but it seems either people were less prone to associate with one party or the other, or else they were much more willing to vote across party lines.
But if you look at all the elections starting from the 1992 election, you’ll see a very different trend. Instead of seeing a red dominated map one election, and a blue dominated map the next, you’ll see that most of the map is static, with most states voting the same way in every election, and only a few “battleground” states flipping back and forth. Clinton won 32 of 50 states in 1992, and nobody has matched that since then, a far cry from candidates regularly winning more than 40 and up to 49 states.
This is, IMO, clear evidence of increasingly hardened partisanism. At the very least, it’s strong evidence towards increasingly clear geographic divisions of partisanism.
Actually, the period of slavery was one of the *less* partisan times, precisely because the parties *avoided* making slavery an issue in their platforms, until the Republican party upset things in 1852. From 1828 to 1852, the Second Party System (the first was Federalist vs Anti-Federalist from 1796 to 1816 or so) made very sure for every Whig ticket and every Democrat ticket to have both a northerner and a southerner, so that there would be a Senate tie-breaking Vice President on one side of slavery and a vetoing President on the other (the Senate was carefully managed to stay 50-50 throughout). The disagreements between the parties were about whether the federal government should invest in intercity travel improvements and foreign trade (Whigs) or should be more laissez faire (Democrats).
It’s a lot like the New Deal System (1932 to 1968 or so) when Democrats had a supermajority in Congress and won the presidency in every election that didn’t feature a famous war hero, but featured a three-way split between Republicans (the party of big business), Northern Democrats (the party of labor unions and urban immigrants), and Southern Democrats (the party of rural whites), where the big issues of the time around Civil Rights tended to split the parties, while the party divide initially focused on the hot button New Deal issues, but eventually returned to boring disputes about tariffs.
The only period that was definitely at least as partisan as the present was probably 1852-1876, when the Republicans stood for everything related to the Union (big business, internal improvements, and anti-slavery) and the Democrats stood for everything related to the Confederacy (rural farmers, white supremacy, and laissez faire).
I’m not so sure about 1880 to 1928, but the fact that T. Roosevelt ran as a progressive Republican and then split the party when his Vice President Taft ran as a conservative Republican suggests that the party split wasn’t necessarily as big as the progressive/populist/machine split.
I think comparing the willingness to resort to violence in one period vs. another is a pretty dubious indicator of the actual levels of intergroup animosity. That people used to use duels as a means of conflict resolution but don’t anymore doesn’t tell us much about the subjective intensity of the conflicts then vs. now. It just means different kinds of strategies are in or out of bounds in different eras.
My overall take is that it’s true that national politics today — though dramatically more fractious than in the immediately preceding era — may not be more fractious than it was at several other points in American history. But the dominance of national politics over all other areas of civic and intellectual life is so much greater at present than in the past that the net effect is that society as a whole is pervaded by partisanship in a way that’s qualitatively unique. That the one other period that *maybe* looks comparable is the Civil War era is, as others have said, not encouraging.
Put another way, it’s correct to say that the era most people look back to as a baseline, the period of relatively non-ideological media and comparative partisan comity from roughly the 1950s-1990s, is more the exception than the norm in the long sweep of American history. But that’s still the environment most of our current institutions and habits were devised to work in. There’s no way of just snapping our fingers and getting back to the more decentralized, regionally and locally variegated USA of 1900, where national-level political conflict was easier to keep in bounds and felt less like a defining condition of ordinary life.
Well, we may not literally be arguing over slavery, but the worldview and culture split driving our arguments is likely shaped considerably by the split over slavery and its knock-on effects. There’s a reason Nixon, who saw the split as exploitable and did everything he could to widen it, is now known as the author of the “Southern Strategy.” Jill Lepore’s article in the New Yorker on Kent State and the Hard Hat Riot is good on this too:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/kent-state-and-the-war-that-never-ended
The geographical dividing lines aren’t as neat as the Mason-Dixon Line was, but the cultural division is still basically Puritans and Quakers (and the allies they’ve picked up along the way) vs Borderers and Cavaliers (ditto). We’re arguing over deep cultural divisions about the good and the true, about how people should live and what we should strive for, that have been with us since before there was a US and never really got reconciled, and it’s unsurprising that that feels particularly emotionally intense.
Nixon lost the south in 68 to dixiecrats, and won 49 states in 72. Southern congressional delegations remained overwhelmingly democratic throughout his time. He didn’t really have a southern strategy in any meaningful sense of the term.
The Southern strategy in 1968 failed in comparison to Wallace’s more authentic version, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a strategy or that it didn’t pay off in 1972.
It also paid off in the North and West in 72 to the tune of 60% of the popular vote.
As Nixon won over 70% of the white vote in the South, it clearly paid off even better in the south than elsewhere, especially when you consider the difficulties Republicans had cracking the south prior to the Civil Rights Act.
1964 was the first time in history that the Republican candidate won a higher percentage of the popular vote in the South than in the country as a whole. Even when the Democrats ran a Catholic in 1928, he still won in the South, because he was a Democrat. Although Goldwater was the first Republican to do better in the South than elsewhere, Nixon was the first to make it an explicit goal of his strategy.
“Less partisan than before the civil war” is an extremely low bar. When people say we’re getting more partisan, they mean compared to previous decades.
I know that we live in times that feel unusually partisan. The culture warriors on both sides have gained access to social media, which gives them a wider reach than ever before.
I think I still place a decent amount of probability on the situation described by https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07 .
Are we? I’m arguing for a real physical barrier between the US and Mexico, and the deportation of illegal aliens, who are real people who exist, and for real tariffs on foreign goods, to encourage real factories to relocate to the United States to replace the bombed out real factories in the rust belt that definitely used to exist. My political opponents are arguing against those things.
I feel like these are real things.
I had coworkers four years ago who had very wrong opinions about Trump; and it was fine. I think it’s because we talked in person. The internet makes things worse.
As for being more partisan than we used to be, I remember 2000 when conventional wisdom said Bush and Gore were basically the same.
My parents are solid democrats, but they still voted Nader due to perceiving Bush and Gore as the same. It was a different time.
It always helps me to remember that in the past, people every bit as moral and smart and careful as I am supported really awful stuff like coercive eugenics and Communism, and the issues they thought most urgent often turned out to be overblown (the population bomb, all the oil running out). Other times, there were fake issues that drove elections and probably broke up friendships (the missile gap, who lost China). People, even smart decent people, have an *amazingly bad* track record on politics.
So when I talk to an otherwise-intelligent and decent person who believes what seems to me to be wacky things about politics, I remind myself that it’s par for the course.
Feel like asking one of those classic questions that has no correct answer but usually yields interesting incorrect ones. When did the Modern Era begin? Bonus: Did it end?
The Modern Era began at the American Revolution and ended on July 16, 1945 when the Atomic Era began.
My own answer is the publication of Don Quixote, with the recognition that maybe things aren’t what they appear to be but without the clarification of whether it matters. It seems to me that’s the era we are still in. Maybe we will move to a Rationalist era some day, but we are a long way from there yet.
The modern era began with the publication of Luther’s Bible in 1522. This event typified 3 key aspects of the modern era. 1) Use of the printing press to transform information into political capital. 2) Codification of a language group into a language (see also Dante, Shakespeare, etc). 3) Breaking of the power of the Catholic church and devolvement of authority to secular powers.
I would also accept 1602: The founding of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. 1698: the first energy extracted from the steam engine. And 1532: the publication of “The Prince” by Niccolò Machiavelli and the founding of the ethical school of utilitarianism.
Not 1543 with the publication of Vesalius’s “De Humana Corporis…” and Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus…”? That’s a date I’ve often seen as the beginning of Science (even if Kepler-Descartes-Galileo-Newton makes the 1600-1660 period a more solid foundation).
I suppose this means that I view science and respect and reverence for it more as a result of modernism than as a cause of it. I’m okay with endorsing this view.
To me, modernism is about a belief in technology, science, and enlightenment. I would argue it started to end after WWI, which opened our eyes to the dark sides of technology, and was clinched by WWII with industrialized genocide and destruction of whole cities.
Post-modernism is colored by a doom and gloom and skepticism to science, and then by a self-contradictory rejection of objectivity as a concept and even logic. Fueling a sequence of doomsday cults including Malthusians, environmentalists, and anti-scientific movements who reject and suppress discussion of facts that do not support their political cause. While PM comes solidly from the left, paradoxically False News and the veracity of Trump’s talk is the culmination of this trend.
I would label as neo-modernists people bringing back the positive sides of technology and pointing out that the doomsayers are in fact wrong on a huge number of counts, questioning established truth and asking for evidence, and looking for technology solutions to our problems. It’s too early to call this the next era, though.
I think you are confusing modernism with the modern era. Modernism is a late modern phenomenon (and post-modernism, despite the name, is more evolutionary than revolutionary, though everybody likes to pretend to be more innovative than they are by highlighting and exaggerating differences and ignoring similarities to what has already been done. Sometimes even if the exaggerations make them look stupid).
Knee jerk response: railways. Or well, the whole industrial revolution in England, but I think having big ass engines on big ass iron rods is a pretty obvious giveaway that change is here to stay.
For the bonus… I’d say that the Internet Era is qualitatively different. From net-enabled smartphones to the cyberbrain of the future.
The Modern Era (ME) began in 3956 AD and ended in 4617 after the invention of the chronos-byke.
There was some dispute among chronopedia admins if reference dates still count once they’ve been updated by past-meddling, but in most timelines it’s eventually established that the reference chronology of the traveler is their subjective time reference and everything else are just relative time frames.
Have you read _All of an Instant_ by Richard Garfinkle? It’s about time gone chaotic because there are a lot of time travellers.
For much of the world, the modern era begins when the Europeans show up. For Europe itself, the modern era begins when they become capable of showing up; if I had to put a date on it I’d say 1492. Never before had one culture even been aware of the entire world, let alone been able to conquer or influence all of it.
In philosophy, the Modern Era begins with Descartes – he self-consciously chose to question the ancients and his scholastic predecessors, while people before him tended to think of themselves as following a tradition, and people after him either built on his foundation or aimed at their own radical empiricist revision. I never hear people use the word “modern” to talk about post-Kantian philosophy, but I hear the phrase “Early Modern” used to describe the entire Descartes to Kant era, which suggests that post-Kant could be thought of as “Late Modern”. But in general, the post-Kantian world is more heavily described by the Analytic-Continental split, which didn’t get formalized until the 1920’s, but was read back into the figures of the 19th century (Frege, Mill, and Sidgwick as the main proto-Analytics, and Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche as the most famous proto-Continentals, though there are many other 19th century figures that Continentalists still study).
Tentative.
Pre-moderr = part of a tradition
Modern = independent genius
Post-modern = our heads are full of other people’s stuff and we’re figuring out how to deal with it.
Perhaps I am being optimistic, but I like to think more philosophers refer to 19th century figures by their century than on the basis of misapplied 20th century categories.
I was shocked a couple years ago when I read that Wikipedia article and realized I had never heard of the “Renaissance of the 12th Century”! After many years of studying philosophy, I realized that the standard Renaissance wasn’t actually as important as I had thought, but I hadn’t realized that there was a period when the translation of ancient scientific works had taken place, and yet in school history class we only learn about the later period when the translation of ancient literary works became more common, and when rich financiers commissioned some fancy public art.
I learned the just-so story that the Renaissance began in the west when Constantinople was sacked and all the important documents they had hidden away were carted off to Italy before the Turks could get them.
Nah, man, the Renaissance started when Constantinople was sacked and all the important documents they had hidden away were carted off to Italy because the Italians could get them.
(Not actually a theory, just a good joke opportunity)
Early modern era would be appx. 1500-1800. That’s where the Medieval mode starts collapsing after a few centuries of pressure in the Late Medieval Era. The Ottomans are kicking butt, we’ve set off on the Age of Discovery, the Church is getting pounded, and we’re transitioning to new modes of communication and social organization.
The French Revolution marks the modern era entering a maturation and begin the Late Modern Era.
I don’t think we can call the Modern Era over until a good century after we’ve the Modern Era institutions are dead and gone.
However, the mid-90s mark a turning point with AOL, WTO, and EU. Coupled with the end of the Cold War, I think the Modern Era will be considered over around that time, and with a “Globalist Technocracy” era beginning afterwards.
The focus on exact dates for so abstract a concept is a bit silly, especially since things rarely change overnight. I like what you’ve done with multi-decade turning points.
Subjectively, for me, modern times require a suite of “modern” domestic conveniences: flush toilets, electric lighting, running water, cars, and telephones. Before that, you’re dealing with chamber pots and oil lamps, fetching water by hand, getting around by horse, and mailing letters; it’s the before-times. An American living in an urban area might have expected all of this by, what, 1920 or so?
I’ve been toying with an idea for a sci-fi story. The crux of the story is that a planet is discovered that is perfectly suited for life: functionally it is identical to Earth in terms of day cycle, temperature, axial tilt, thickness of atmosphere, plate tectonics, gravity, etc. The only difference is that it is completely sterile: life never arose on that planet. The story would follow a group of human colonists trying to terraform the planet by introducing an ecosystem.
I ended up running into a lot of questions. It seems to me that some of the effects of never hosting life would be obvious: no soils, no limestone or chalk, little to no atmospheric oxygen. But then I started to second guess myself. I assume without life all free oxygen would oxidize and leave the atmosphere, but is that true? Would a nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere still exist without life? What would the ratio be? Would there be enough CO2 in the atmosphere to support plant life? What about the trace minerals that plants need: would they be readily available without various microorganisms making them accessible? Would the colonists need to dredge the oceans for vital nutrients that on Earth get cycled around the biosphere but on this planet would just drift to the bottom? Without life there would be no nitrogen cycle, but what about other cycles? What would be the best course of action to introduce an ecology to such a planet? I had my colonists start by seeding the oceans with algae to start pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, but would the algae even have everything they need to grow? Presumably the colonists could mine some iron and crush it into dust for them, but what else would they need to do?
I’d love the thoughts of people more informed than myself on what this planet would look like and what obstacles would stand in the colonist’s way.
I’ve often kind of wondered about this.
IRL, it took a billion ot two years for cyanobacteria to put a significant amount of oxygen into the atmosphere.
But plants and algae may be able to do it a lot quicker.
One issue would be that a great oxygenation event like that would crash the greenhouse effect. It may have caused the whole Earth to freeze over in the past.
This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about! Now the question is, how best to mitigate the greenhouse effect crashing? Presumably the colonists would need to find an alternative greenhouse gas to replace it with, or else focus their colonies near the equator and ride out the ice age. How likely is it that there are any untapped sources of inorganic methane they could release? Are there other gases that could be found trapped somehow that could serve as a strong greenhouse gas? I’m going to assume the colonists can’t just start volcanic eruptions at will here.
There used to be a bunch of methane in the early atmosphere but it got oxidised.
Aside from biological fixing of CO2, silicate minerals naturally sequester it. (maybe we can solve climate change by throwing enough olivine in the sea.)
There’s also the problem that any oxygen you liberate go to form things like banded iron deposits for a while before it accumulates globally in the atmosphere. (more local oxygenation of lakes and shallow seas may be possible, though)
My knowledge here is sub-par, but one thing I noticed from cursory astronomy is that there seems to be a lot of variation in space. Stars vary in mass and intensity, collisions can seed planets with various elemental composition, position in the galaxy can influence the elemental compositions as well.
To me, that set up would be a bit convenient, but I’d buy it nonetheless.
The corollary of that is that there are a lot of dud or marginal planets for every even close to habitable one.
Yeah, in universe I figured a planet like this would be extremely valuable and that naturally habitable planets are very rare. Which is why the colonists are willing to pour a lot of resources into building an ecology.
I hope there’s a Myth Arc where life is absent because the Old Ones xenocided everything in the primeval aeons and they’re still hiding somewhere.
You can certainly have carbon dioxide without life. Mars has it, and Venus has loads of it.
I don’t think you can have oxygen without life.
I have no idea about nitrogen.
I’m pretty sure I saw a National Geographic documentary that said ocean life affects plate tectonics, but I don’t remember how.
Nitrogen is an extremely stable molecule (that triple bond!) so if you have lots of free nitrogen, it tends to get into that form and never leave it. One of the biggest technological advances near the turn of the 20th century was the Haber process for converting N2 to NH4, without using symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria the way fungi and plants have done to support all the nitrates in all the nucleic acids of the world.
I’d be fascinated as to why there wasn’t any life on that planet, even the most basic primitive types of cells. Is there some reason for this? Will the humans run straight into a wall when they try terraforming this planet? Is there a Sinister Plot explanation for why this is so?
Even at the simplest, if they try introducing simple life first and it consistently fails because [background radiation from star/volcanic upheaval/strange new mineral in the soil] kills it off means that the problem is a lot bigger than first perceived.
To me, the question is more of “Why should it have life?” I mean we don’t really have a solid theory of abiogenesis at this point. I’m pretty sure the general explanation is “given a large enough universe with enough planets where life could arise, it will arise on some of them eventually even if it’s highly improbably.” If that was the case, we should expect to find a lot of habitable planets where life never developed.
Agree we don’t know. One data point for the inevitability of lie is that life arose on earth very shortly after the emergence of liquid water (where very shortly is defined in geological time, and the error bars are pretty big, including some scenarios where life predated permanent liquid water on the surface). But if the mean time for life to arise on an earth-like planet is long, then earth got very lucky, and if it’s short then the colonists got lucky to find a lifeless planet.
There are several reasons you might expect a planet to be capable of supporting life, but not give rise to life, such as lack of tectonic/geothermal activity, lack of a large moon to drive tides, or lack of meteor bombardment bringing organic molecules. But those are all much more speculative.
Life did form within 1 billion years of the Earth’s formation. If abiogenesis is expected to be incredibly rare, wouldn’t we have expected it to probably have taken longer?
But maybe there’s some anthropic reasoning going on. How long do we have left to remark about when life evolved before the sun cooks us all?
Future of Earth. Supposedly about a billion years.
The universe is not required to live up to your expectations, nor to deliver modal observations wherever you look. If you have one example of abiogenesis, and that observation is contaminated by the anthropic principle, then you have zero independent data points and you know basically nothing about the probability of abiogenesis.
So if you find a theoretically inhabitable but lifeless planet, then the most likely explanation is that p(abiogenesis) is very small.
The anthropic principle constrains our observation space to universes where abiogenesis occurred at some point in our past, but it doesn’t constrain when. Observing that abiogenesis occurred shortly after liquid water existed suggests that abiogenesis is fairly highly probable, at least on a planet like Earth.
Of course, it is possible that Earth is unusual and abiogenesis is very unlikely in any random star system, but if we where to find a planet that was similar to Earth, and suitable for life as we know it, then it would be surprising if it didn’t have life already.
The anthropic principle is biased in favor of worlds where life evolved long ago, because that gives them more time to involve complex intelligence capable of asking the question. And if you’re going to assess something as “highly probable” based on a single suspect data point, then the universe is indeed going to hit you with things that you “would find surprising”. But your surprise will be far from universal.
Agree with viVI_IViv , the anthropic principle would only be constraining if we expected our planet (or a hypothetical planet from the ensemble of candidates) to only be habitable for about the length of time that ours has been habitable. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
The trouble is we still have very little idea how it occurred: or if it occurred at all on Earth. I’m not saying that we were seeded by aliens or comets, I’m saying we don’t know. The state of the field is still mired in theories that were laid out by Haldane and Oparin in the 20s. Right now we have a lot of ideas but no real hard facts. So if we don’t know how life arose, can we really extrapolate for other planets? It would be like people who only had a phlogiston based understanding of fire saying that other planets must have fire because ours does. Well yes, as it turns out, other planets probably can have fires if there’s oxygen in the atmosphere for some reason: but the phlogiston theorists would only be right by accident. I really think we don’t know enough to speculate on the probability of ambiogenesis: all we know is that it might have happened on Earth at least once.
As someone who’s written a couple of origins of life papers in the last few years, let me just say, ouch. Also, if we only had haldanes view we would in some ways be less confused. I would still bet good money on life having arisen shortly after liquid water though.
I don’t think it is possible to have a planet where the initial mix of elements leaves a free-oxygen atmosphere. If you’ve got a terrestrial planet with an atmosphere, it’s going to start out as mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and maybe methane or ammonia. But you can have the water work over geologic time to turn the carbon dioxide into carbonate rock, as happened on Earth and probably Mars but not Venus. And you can postulate high-energy radiation (most likely UV) slowly splitting up everything in the upper atmosphere, and the hydrogen then escaping into space because if the planet’s gravity could hold on to hydrogen then it would be a gas giant in the first place. That leaves nitrogen, oxygen, and whatever carbon dioxide hasn’t been turned into rock.
This happens very slowly on Earth, because the ozone layer stops most of the ultraviolet radiation. But ozone layers seem to be fragile things, so if your imaginary planet spent an eon or two without one, maybe it got an oxygen atmosphere by purely abiotic means.
If it still doesn’t have an ozone layer, that’s going to be a major priority for the terraforming effort and your colonists are going to want lots of sunscreen in the meantime.
viVI_IViv said in this OT:
African Y-Haplogroups:
A00 was the first to branch off. It was originally named “Perry’s Y” because it was found when an African-American man submitted his DNA to 23andme or similar. It was later found in ~40% of one subgroup of Yemba, a group of Cameroon “Bantoid” speakers numbering ~300,000 and 1 out of 4 skeletons in Cameroon from >1000 BC whose whole genome was most similar to Mbuti Pygmies.
A1, associated with Bakola Pygmies (8.3%) but found in some Berber samples at 1.5%
A1a is found at rates of 2-3% in parts of the Western Sahel and Moroccan Berbers, reaching 5% in Mandinka men (Mande languages are probably Niger-Congo but at the highest time depth).
A1b1a1a is a Khoisan haplogroup associated more with San peoples, reaching 45% in Tsumkwe men.
A1b1b contains the most populous branches of haplogroup A and is mainly found in Southern and parts of Eastern Africa where Bantu-speakers are believed to have displaced Khoisan.
A1b1b2a is most associated with Khoikhoi, reaching 55% in a small sample size (6/11) of Nama, the largest people group in the Khoikhoi superset (who are one part of the larger set Khoisan, obv.)
A1b1b2b (M13; formerly A3b2) is primarily distributed among Nilotic populations in East Africa and northern Cameroon. It is different from the A subclades that are found in the Khoisan samples and only remotely related to them (it is actually only one of many subclades within haplogroup A). This finding suggests an ancient divergence. It is found at rates of 52.8% in South Sudan, 46.4% in the Nilotic Nuba people, and quickly drops to 2.3% in male citizens of Sudan: this is actually similar to Egyptians and some Middle Eastern populations (1/20 Yemeni Jews, 2/143 Palestinians, 2/30 Aegean Turks, 1/77 Sardinians).
In Y-haplogroup B, subclade M-236 has been found in 2/48 Bamileke (a southern Cameroon Bantoid people), M-182 at 3-6% in Pygmy groups from Cameroon (Bakola) to the DRC (Mbuti people) and 6% in the Khoikhoi-speaking Damara of Namibia.
B-M150 was found in more than one male when testing Mbuti Pygmies (5/47), Bakola Pygmies (4/22), Dogon (4/55) and many Gabonese Bantu people groups.
M-218 was found at 17% in Ugandan citizens of Nilotic groups.
B2a1a1a1 is found throughout Cameroon: Pygmies, Niger-Congo speaking peoples and Chadic peoples (subset of Afro-Asiatic), and also among South African Bantu peoples. No, it’s not especially Pygmy: highest is 31% of Chadic Wuzlam-speakers, 12.5% in Sudan (similar to most SA Bantu groups tested) and it showed up at 2-3% in southern Iran, Pakistan and India.
Other B2 subclades have generally only been found in either Pygmy or Khoisan samples.
C and D appear to have split off in Asia, and the most common African Y-haplogroup is E. E1a and E-M75 are found almost exclusively in Africa. By looking at the major subclade frequencies, five broad regions of Africa can be defined: East, Central, North, Southern and West. The division can be distinguished by the prevalence of E-M2 in East, Central, Southern and West Africa, E-M78 in East Africa and E-M81 in North Africa. E-M2 is the most prevalent subclade of E in Africa. It is observed at high frequencies in all African regions from moderate to high. E-M243 (especially its subclades M78 and M81) is found at high frequencies in North East Africa and North Africa and is the only subclade that is found in Europe and Asia at significant frequencies. E-M243 is common among Afro-Asiatic speakers in the Near East and North Africa as well as among some Nilo-Saharan and Niger–Congo speakers in North East Africa and Sudan. Our oldest sample was recovered from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture of the Levant (1/7).
African mitochondrial haplogroups:
L0 is the oldest clade to split and is found at 100% in !Kung people, very high frequencies in other Khoisan, and almost as high in Coloured people of South Africa.
L1 is found most commonly in Central Africa and West Africa. It reaches its highest frequency among the Mbenga Pygmies. It is likely that it was formerly more widespread, and was constrained to its current area as a result of the Bantu migration (which is largely associated with haplogroup L2). It was found at low frequencies in Beaker Culture (Early Bronze Age) Spain (one person) and AD 550-800 Sudan (Kulubnarti Christian cemetery). L1e, confusingly renamed L5, is also associated with both Mbuti Pygmies and Kulubnarti, and found at low frequencies as far afield as Saudi Arabia.
L2 shows high diversity throughout its range, making its origin hard to tell. Basal L2a is most common in Chad, Ghana, and non-Bantu peoples only in four East African countries: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique. L2a1 has its highest frequencies among Hausa-Fulani and related Sahel peoples, Bamileke of Cameroon, Kikuyu of Kenya, and certain peoples of West African origin including Wolof, Mandinka and African-Americans. Neolithic samples have been found from Syria (Pre-Pottery Neolithic) to Tanzania (pastoral Neolithic), suggesting relatively recent replacement of African forager lineages east and north of the rain forests. L2a1a and L2a2 (Bantu-associated) have recent starburst diversity estimated around 2,700 years ago.
So it’s somewhat more than 1/800, but an African selected completely at random probably has both a father’s-father’s-father-etc and mother’s-mother’s-mother-etc from the Neolithic Revolution, not too distant from average non-European “Caucasoids” and the “First Farmer” part of European genomes.
It’s probably worth noting that blacks in the US usually come from a pretty small region of Africa, where it was convenient for slave traders to buy slaves and ship them across the Atlantic. There is a lot less genetic diversity among American (also Carribean and S American) blacks than there is in Africa as a whole.
I wouldn’t call the area small, the people who became enslaved came from an area from today’s Senegal to today’s Kongo. That’s an area as large as western Europe. And I’d guess that the diversity in Africa at the time was higher than in Europe, due to the relatively high proportion of nomads and other mobile groups.
Your overall point that people caught in the slave trade didn’t represent all African ethnicities is still true.
Wasn’t at least the southern half of that region populated by the Bantu Expansion, so that there was actually not a lot of variation?
Bantu farmers gained diversity by making babies with indigenous foragers (more than 16% of Angolans have a Pygmy MT-haplogroup, L1c), but generally yes.
I think Senegal to Kongo being roughly comparable to Western Europe reinforces albatross11’s point. I’d call Western Europe a small area, and Western Europeans a fairly homogeneous group genetically.
In addition, the slave trade as well as slavery itself would likely serve as something of a population bottleneck, so even if slaves were sampled uniformly from Africa, today’s population would no longer be representative.
Thanks for the writeup.
Breaking: Justice Department is dropping charges against Michael Flynn based on the recommendation of Jeff Jensen, the US Atty who Barr tasked to review the case. Here’s how I understand the motion: the motion
– For it to be a federal crime to lie to federal agents, the lie has to be about something material.
– At the time of the FBI interview with Flynn, the FBI had already decided to close their investigation of whether Flynn was involved in the alleged Steele document allegations after finding no evidence, but hadn’t gotten around to it.
– The FBI learned through wiretaps that Flynn had approached Russia to discuss foreign policy after Trump was elected. Strzok wanted to investigate whether conducting foreign policy after an administration has been elected but before it takes office violates the Logan Act, but couldn’t get clearance.
– Based on administration statements, the FBI learned that Flynn had told the Trump administration (inaccurately) that he hadn’t discussed sanctions on those calls. Although the DOJ instructed the FBI just to tell the Trump admin about the discrepancy, instead, the FBI set up the Flynn interview.
– Assuming Flynn lied in the interview (the agents didn’t record the exact words of his statements, and didn’t think he lied at the time of the interview), then the question is whether those lies were material. As far as I can tell, the DOJ is now saying that where the Steele dossier investigation of Flynn was set to be closed and no Logan Act investigation was authorized, the only purpose of the interview was to see if they could get Flynn to lie.
> the only purpose of the interview was to see if they could get Flynn to lie.
This isn’t uncommon.
Don’t think of the standard as ‘it has to be material’ but ‘you have to be able to pursuade the judge/jury that it is material’.
But that doesn’t make it any less objectionable.
It’s been continuously objectionable in approximately eight zillion federal cases over the past few decades. So, “it’s a horrible injustice that Mike Flynn was persecuted in this unjust fashion”, looks from some angles like a very selective demand for rigor.
Eh, I was fine with Trump letting a few old black women out of jail for drug charges because Beyonce asked him to or whatever.
So I’m fine with this too.
Well, when it’s in the course of an actual investigation is a little different from “there was no investigation, plus the DOJ actually told the FBI to stand down, and they did the interview anyway.”
@Matt M
That was Kim Kardashian. And it was one old black woman.
I think it’s fair to make a selective demand for rigor here. Setting aside the accusations of political bias, it’s reasonable to assume for an investigation of this importance, with this much spotlight, that the FBI would assign their best agents and double-check all their work. It’s reasonable to assume this is their A-game, this is the best case they could possibly produce under the circumstances due to the intense scrutiny that would be leveled at it.
And if this is the best possible work the FBI can do, if this is their A-game, what should I infer about the average FBI investigation, much less the (inevitably) vast number of below average cases?
It’s similar to the CIA after the Iraqi WMD reports. Regardless of the partisan/political issues, it can’t help but decrease your confidence in future CIA reports and news based on them.
But that works the other way as well. Flynn wasn’t some random guy off the street, he was a high ranking political official who had worked in the government his whole adult life. He’s the kind of person who should know the dangers of talking to the FBI.
Best investigation, average investigation, worst investigation, makes no difference. The Section 1001 fishing expedition has been one of the standard FBI techniques for all investigations, for as long as anyone can remember, and everyone who has been paying attention has known that all along. There’s no need to “infer” anything. We know this.
So, not caring until one of your tribe’s VIPs gets caught, isn’t a good look. If you want to respond to that by reforming Section 1001, great. If you want to respond by dropping the charges against Michael Flynn and saying “injustice rectified, yay justice”, then no.
Hey my stated position has been “If it’s legal for the government to lie to us, it should be legal for us to lie to them” for many years now!
@John Schilling
Is there an equivalent precedent to this, another case where a major political figure was caught in a fishing expedition? I scanned the list of US politicians convicted of crimes and the closest equivalent looks like what happened to Mark Siljander. Is that the best example of another political figure caught up in a fishing expedition / can you provide other cases?
@zzzzort
Yes, Michael Flynn behaved unprofessionally and badly. That doesn’t change how the FBI acted.
Asking for “precedent” but specifying “a major political figure” is just assuming your conclusion that the latter should be treated differently. Criminal courts don’t only apply precedent from particular classes of defendant.
I personally favor a system where public figures get less leeway for due process and investigative obfuscation in exchange for their considerable power and the corruption it invites (an example being one of the more outrageous crimes Flynn was being investigated for before he took the plea deal: abetting a proposed Turkish kidnapping of an exile living here under asylum) but that’s neither here nor there in terms of “precedent.”
You should probably infer that they are *way* more concerned with getting convictions than with seeing anything like justice done. And the fact that they cut corners repeatedly when doing an investigation on a presidential candidate/president-elect/president and his entourage very strongly implies that they do much worse when they’re dealing with normal criminals. Some of who proabably even did whatever it is they’ll end up in prison for, or at least something close.
No one said this except for you. In order to make other people look like they were being unreasonable and selective, you had to change what they said.
Flynn admitted he lied in court documents. Now the prosecution is saying they don’t think they can prove Flynn lied. That is obviously BS.
If May 7, 2020 marks the end of Section 1001 hunting, I’ll do cartwheels. But I doubt I will.
1) This was a worse than usual “fishing expedition”, because not only was the lie immaterial, the interview wasn’t even justified in the first place. It’s one thing to say “we are sure a crime happened, let’s interview this person we reasonably suspect was involved, and try to trip him up so we can use his lies for leverage”. It’s quite another to interview a guy you’ve already determined to clear, and another thing still to actually try to put him in jail when it’s clear your fishing expedition failed.
2) You can’t cry “selective outrage” and then defend a prosecution of the Logan Act, which everyone is ignorant of until they can plausibly accuse their opponent of having violated it.
3) We SHOULD hold an investigation of Flynn to a higher standard, not because he’s a celebrity but for the same reason we shouldn’t treat the Watergate break in like any other hotel burglary. Dirty deeds done to undermine the political process are particularly corrosive, dirty deeds performed by the official investigative arm of the government and targeted against political opponents even more so. Any prosecution like this ought to be above the appearance of impropriety, and it is right to be more concerned by this than the nailing of some small time drug lord.
4) I’m against these sort of fishing expeditions and the punishment of “dubiously material lying to the FBI” and other procedural crimes when the government can’t prove their real case. In general, not just against Flynn. To the extent that this makes the public more aware of these types of prosecutorial abuse, hopefully the FBI and other will be pressured to play more fair.
They dropped the case in lieu of responding to the Judge on the motion as to why it shouldn’t be dismissed as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. The lack of materiality, while essentially true, is a nice face-saving excuse to cover the partisan nature of the follow-up investigation (when the original investigators wouldn’t have charged him with anything and didn’t think he’d lied) and the facts that not only exculpatory evidence was previously withheld from the defense in defiance of various court orders, but the prosecutor induced a guilty plea by running Flynn out of money and threatening to prosecute his son on a baseless charge if he didn’t give in.
If you’re looking for a good example of Justice at work, this case wasn’t it.
And yes, I think that’s way more common in the system than your average American does, especially with regards to anything political.
I think all the focus on the legitimacy of 1001 or materiality is a bit of an aside. Transport ourselves back in time. The released documents give this reason for investigating Flynn:
Later in the document, they give a little more insight into the start of this:
That is to say, “We got predication to investigate
TrumpRussiastuff in this space. That predication is elsewhere; it doesn’t explicitly call out Flynn. But, we’re sort of looking for a mole, so it makes sense to at least take a little look-see at possible vectors.” They took some really light steps here. This seems not unreasonable, since the steps they took are pretty measured according to how thin the predication was.By the time December/January rolled around, there was really no reason to think Flynn was a mole or knew about a mole. Even the FBI’s most ardent defenders (yes, I’m looking at you, Ben Wittes) don’t argue that Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak or his lying to VPOTUS is actually evidence that Flynn “may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security”. At best, they say that it could open him up to blackmail or that it made them wonder about “whether something had been missed”. Ok, maybe. We’re starting to feel a little tension in our muscles as we start stretching. I can definitely see the argument that they should have just informed the WH (Comey said he felt they “got away with” doing the interview), but they did an interview.
Oh, sorry. By the end there, I realized I was quoting from the IG report on the investigation of “Clinton’s emails”. But hey, here’s the routine 1001 violation that is as common as muck, right? Everybody just gets charged, right?
Ok, sure. You don’t charge everyone who lies to the FBI; that would take way too much time. There are a few factors, but the one cited by both these documents is whether it would “serve a federal interest”. They said that it wouldn’t serve a federal interest to prosecute this other guy, because
You can see a sort of mirror image here in the new DOJ document. Analogous to (1) is basically to ask, “What other knowledge were you expecting Flynn to have? What crime was that relevant to? What evidence do you have that he had any knowledge relevant to this?” I’m not sure anyone has given a great answer to this other than to point at whatever he actually cooperated on. Analogous to (2) is to state that he hadn’t retained any counsel for this interview and that after the interview, the interviewing agents “expressed uncertainty as to whether [he] had lied”, that he “did not give any indicators of deception”, and they “had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.” So, it sorta kinda comes down to (3). And this is kind of tough. Both giving immunity and pushing charges/looking for a plea agreement are valid ways to push at greater interests. The IG report gives:
Was Flynn unwilling to cooperate with immunity? That seems unlikely. To me, the key questions here are not, “Is 1001 valid,” or, “Was Flynn’s statement a material lie?” They are, “What the hell were you trying to accomplish by pressing this charge,” and, “Why didn’t you use the same principles you used in this other case and offer immunity in order to get that thing?” I think the people on the left are going to answer, “Russia mole,” and, “[I’m going to fail an ITT if I try this]”, while the people on the right are going to say, “Put convictions on the scoreboard for anyone who’s name we can associate with Trump,” and, “Because that wouldn’t put convictions on the scoreboard for anyone who’s name we can associate with Trump.”
I think this paper might be along the lines of what you’re looking for:
I don’t know exactly how it works, but Epic already does this.
https://www.epic.com/software#Cosmos
I know that my wife opted in for her data to be used when she was receiving cancer treatment, so I assume like her are where they get their data from. I’d guess the vast majority of people with COVID19 would be willing to sign a waver to help find a treatment.
I fear and hate Social Justice, but part of the situation is that it isn’t entirely false.
For example, I had no idea how ignorant people can be about cultures they don’t have a lot of contact with, or the extent to which people have false beliefs inculcated by other people.
I had no idea how fast a well-defended memeplex could move.
There’s probably more, but that’s what comes to mind.
So, while this is obviously going to be a discussion about Social Justice, I’m also curious about what other people have come to believe from ideologies they mostly disagree with.
Two black professors explain what they think is very wrong about Social Justice. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
part of the situation is that it isn’t entirely false.
Seconded–one super-useful concept from my experience is “micro-aggression.” Being asked occasionally about ‘random thing X’–fun and a good introduction; being asked in approximately every interaction about random thing X–wildly frustrating and unpleasant. (For me, random thing X is being ex-Mennonite.)
Similarly at second-hand from my sister (who’s quite pretty), being asked on a date occasionally is flattering; being unable to go anywhere without being approached by random guys asking for a date–really annoying.
That’s not quite what a microaggression is—a microaggression is when the framing of the question (or statement, or what have you) is implicitly hostile or derogatory, whether intentional or not. For instance, if you have dark skin but are from Kansas, and people ask you questions like, “But where are you really from?” A perfectly innocent question which nonetheless implies your being born or raised in Kansas doesn’t count in some way.
I can imagine questions about your being ex-Mennonite going that way.
Similar mechanisms, though. Both Nick and SamChevre’s examples are about how a hostile environment (in labor law terms) is constructed. The micro-aggression is only an issue because it builds up into an atmosphere with a particular context. The taboo against touching black people’s hair, for example, is not a taboo that exists in all cultures. Anything can become a micro-aggression, and to some extent, it’s determined by the subject of them (as unfair as that can be, as sometimes they’ve genuinely become over-sensitized).
Always being cast as an ex-Mennonite can become a dehumanizing experience, as it’s erasure of everything else about the person, even if the other people aren’t being derogatory about it at all. To be on the margins, to be othered, is unpleasant even when it’s done “neutrally.” Hence why tokenism has high risk for micro-aggressions.
One thing that’s important here is that there are two ways you can have bad treatment:
a. One person does really unreasonable and nasty things. You have one coworker who hits on you and constantly asks you out on a date and won’t take “go away” for an answer.
b. Lots of people do some slightly annoying thing, no one of them crossed a line, but it’s overwhelming to deal with them all. You have two dozen coworkers, each one only hits on you occasionally and only occasionally asks you out on dates. If it were one coworker doing this, you wouldn’t find it terribly annoying, but twenty people doing it drives you nuts.
The reason that’s an important distinction, IMO, is because rules against bad behavior at the workplace probably work much better for (a) than for (b). If Alice is tired of getting hit on all the time by Bob, Bob is probably breaking some rules that are widely understood to be reasonable and can be told to knock it off by the boss. If Alice is tired of being hit on by a different guy in the company every week, each guy is probably not violating any rules and certainly not behaving in a way that everyone agrees is out of line.
A is macro-aggressions, B is the microaggression framework. Labor law makes these distinctions, as well, but recognize the legitimacy of B, if it has an impact on the worker’s quality of/ability to work.
It seems like it would be a microaggression if you refuse to make small talk with certain people. Or maybe that would just come across as racist? Or maybe it IS racist. It is pretty condescending.
Either way, having everyone walk on eggshells around people of different races is not a good outcome.
@LesHapablap
It seems to me that the logical outcome of microagression theory + no cultural appropriation + progressive stack is racial segregation. It seems to be a trend on American universities to create racially pure dorms (euphemistically called affinity housing).
The useful insight is “don’t join a dogpile.” In internet terms, a dogpile is usually when Alice makes a comment that’s very unpopular, and 50 people respond. Alice can’t respond to all 50 people, and often gives up without ever being heard.
When you know the dynamics of a dogpile, you can avoid them by noticing that lots of other people are responding and holding off unless you have something new to say.
Something like that seems to be useful to take away from the microaggressions idea, even though the idea itself may be embedded in a bunch of broad theories that you don’t accept and ideas you think are pretty dumb.
To me, aggression implies intent, so I don’t like the term for what it ostensibly represents.
Got an idea what to call it?
Yeah, that’s the one thing I don’t like about this. It seems to me that “microharm” or “microinjustice” might be closer, though there are probably even better ideas out there.
Unfortunately, since the word “microaggression” got established, it might be best to stick with that. (Just like the phrase “social distancing”, which is a total misnomer – it’s about *physical* distancing, since we are actually *encouraged* to stay as *socially* close as we can, through video calls and balcony singalongs and the like.
Conflict theory me thinks the ambiguity is essential to its function as a scissor statement.
Mistake theory me thinks I should be a bit more charitable, but keaswaran is right about the time for naming being past.
@Purplehermann
I think this is probably a think where it having a name is harmful. The twitter-version process I’ve seen on things like this seems to have a pattern vaguely like this:
1. Here’s a thing with a lot of versions, some of which are worse than others; let’s give all those versions one name.
2. Since all the versions have one name, since nuance is hard, and since I’m in this to be perceived as good-er than average, let’s have 40% of us treat all things under that moniker like they are the maximally bad thing under that classification
2b. Let’s have the other 60% of us treat everything under the classification as exactly as bad as slinging around n-words, since everything with a definition that falls under racist is maximally bad.
So you have this situation where somebody asks somebody with a clearly visible novel family background for the area what that background is, and because of non-optimal phrasing they are now a racist. This is made worse by bad actors on both sides – there exist both people who are legitimately hostile to unusual-for-the-area ethnic backgrounds and people who would have still considered it racist to ask about backgrounds at all for the purpose of creating a me-the-hero-against-filthy-racists situation to blog about.
My go-to for the last situation – where I ask about someone’s background in good faith and they try to get anti-racist points to my detriment – has in the last several years been to calmly explain that I now consider them a gigantic asshole for trying to harm me and that I no longer am concerned about their background or them as a person in general.
This kind of conflict has been rare, but I think it’s the consequence of this thing having a definite name – there’s a certain percentage of people who I’d either have to contort myself around a vague approved-phrasing standard to please them(if they can be pleased at all) or be cast as a horrifying racist. Without the defined framework, they might have noticed that right up to that point I was trying to be friends.
I actually really like micro-annoyance. That feels more neutral then micro-aggression and similarly catchy (to me at least) and prob. better describes a lot of what gets labeled as micro-aggression.
An aggression always sounds bad, where as annoyance is bad, but has less on an inherent blaming framing.
Micro-offensive? I think we already have a general sense that “offensive” is a) in the eye of the receiver b) possible to be inadvertent while no less real and c) something people might be conditioned to accept without outward complaint even if they really are bothered. I think “aggression” loses all of those useful nuances.
“Micro-annoyance” is doubly trivializing, so probably not good.
I am generally SJW aligned (although I wouldn’t call myself one), but microaggressions is one place where I diverge pretty sharply. I agree with some other commenters that there is some value to the general idea, but I think ultimate the term is worse than useless now.
Not everything that other people say or do that you don’t like is a microaggression, but that is basically what it turned into. For that matter, not everything that people say or do that annoys you indicates a problem with the person doing it.
@keaswaran
I don’t have a problem with the phrase “social distancing”. It might be more accurate to call it “societal distancing”, but people commonly use “social” to mean “societal”, ie “of or pertaining to society” and that meaning seems apt to me as we want the whole society to practice distancing.
I’m not a native English speaker though, so I might be wrong.
I feel that someone had to have been going for “microaggravator” and just missed.
The first definition I’d seen for micro-aggression was a behavior which was ambiguous enough that you waste mental cycles trying to figure out whether you’d been mistreated.
I don’t know if it falls under micro-aggression or not, but in recent Netflix release film The Half of It, we have the situation of the protagonist being the only Asian girl in a rural white town.
In that the protagonist isn’t very social, other people often greet and refer to her as “the Chinese girl.” “Oh, it’s my son’s Chinese friend.” “Good job, Chinese girl! [from classmates]” etc.
These incidents are entirely neutral. However, because she is always referred to Chinese above all else, there is an othering effect. Add just a few overt macro-aggressions (some people mocking her last name, her father’s career getting stalled because his English isn’t great), and even the neutral-to-even-fond actions become a little cutting.
Some people online immediately called the protagonist’s life as one living under racism. I was very uncomfortable with jumping to that declaration, but can nonetheless relate to how the protagonist would have mixed feelings about said neutral actions. I tried discussing this with a friend, particularly about how sensitivity training or shaming wouldn’t solve this issue, and their response was that people should have tried to see the protagonist as a full person (classmate, musician, student, friend, etc.), and not just grabbed the first descriptor at hand (“Chinese girl”) every time.
(I really loved The Half of It, btw. I could analyze its detail and strong for pages and pages.)
@AG
You can’t effectively refer to a person by name, to people who don’t know the name. So you then have to describe an attribute that people do know, or accept that they might not understand who you are talking about.
People commonly do this by other attributes than race (like hair color, clothing style, facial features, props that the person carries, etc).
The examples you give from ‘The Half of It’ seem to either be bad writing or injecting politics into the show, because who says ‘“Good job, Chinese girl!’ or greets people like that? Also, why would the classmates and the other people that she interacts with a lot not just use her name?
The only way those comments make sense is if she is already disliked by other people and they are being mean to her.
Demanding to be seen as a ‘full person’ by everyone is just narcissism and selfishness. Others are merely obliged to threat you decently, in a generic way, not to memorize your life story and anticipate your every need & desire.
Also, classmate and musician are generic categories as well.
You’d probably have to watch the film to get the context. I’d have to basically describe the entire film to explain why it rang true to me, since the point of the micro-aggressions framework is the way the innocuous things pile up into a sum greater than the parts. Describing the specific cases inherently misses that effect.
But your personal experience appears to be different from mine, with regards to what kind of descriptors/monkers people get (see ana53294’s comment below).
> You can’t effectively refer to a person by name, to people who don’t know the name. So you then have to describe an attribute that people do know, or accept that they might not understand who you are talking about.
> People commonly do this by other attributes than race (like hair color, clothing style, facial features, props that the person carries, etc).
The difference is that when people do it based on other attributes, you often get different people using different ones on different occasions. But when race is the descriptor, it often ends up being the same one every time. This is the characteristic issue of the things called “microaggressions” – even if each individual behavior would be perfectly benign, they are part of a pattern that collectively causes problems (in this case, ignoring all distinctive features of this person other than a single one).
The problem I have with this is that people can choose to interpret something in the hostile way when there is no need to do so. For example, when I was a freshman in college, frequently part of meeting someone new was asking where they were from, since most people at college were from somewhere else. When asking an Asian person this question (as an example, because at least one Asian person I knew got upset at specifically this), I am not getting at ethnic origins. I want to know whether he/she is from the Bay Area, or Los Angeles, or somewhere else which has nothing to do with his/her race.
(Half) Asian here. When asked “where are you from” it’s about 50/50 for me. What’s annoying is that the half who are asking after racial affiliation immediately ask “Well, where are your parents from?” (Also California, and in the case of my mother, 6+ generations). It’s also annoying in a group setting where no whites/blacks/hispanics receive the follow up for ethnic clarification.
@Milo Minderbinder
Yes, those situations could, understandably, be frustrating. Though after answering that you’re from California, whether there is or isn’t a follow-up question should make clear what they were getting at. Or are you saying that for you personally it is only the specific follow-up question or lack of one toward others that annoys?
How should one ask a simple “where are you from?” question without adding specificity or caveats that would make me seem socially weird/robotic? (Not to say that I’m not weird and/or robotic somewhat anyway or that those things are necessarily bad, but I’ve found giving a stronger early impression of those qualities can be somewhat off-putting for others)
Of course it isn’t always a question, but sometimes a statement/observation/offer that could be interpreted charitably or uncharitably. It can be harder to know which is which in such situations without questions of your own, which itself could become annoying. If a majority of one’s such experiences from others turn out to be the uncharitable kind it becomes easy to assume that as the default, which seems unfortunate.
In this meaning, I’m not sure being asked about being Mennonite, or being asked on dates, are micro-aggressions–I like the suggestion by tg56 of “micro-annoyance.” But I do think both meet the common usage of micro-aggression–“if it happened once, it would be fine, but it happens ALL THE TIME.”
I tend to go with, “are you from [city/state]?” It’s sometimes slightly ridiculous in academia, because the odds that you end up where you’re from are little better than chance. I also had a landlord laugh and say, no, he’s from ghana, in a strong ghanian accent. Not sure if it would work in universities with a strong anti-townie bias though.
On the other hand, Americans in general are very preoccupied by ancestry, and will happily list the countries of their ancestors. At least, that’s my impression. Is this only/mainly a white American phenomenon? And if so, is it still racist or micro-aggressive to behave the same way towards other groups?
People ask me where I’m from all the time.
I say I’m Basque. They tell me I’ve got this slight accent. I tell them my mother is Russian. They accept the explanation. I’m mostly annoyed that I haven’t managed to get rid myself of an accent, even though I was born in Spain.
My mother, by the way, is also referred to as “the Russian” in third person in my town, because when she married my father, there were two foreigners in my town: she, and the Polish guy. But then, in my town, people usually try to find whether they’ve heard of you first: Whose relative/child are you? Who do you go to school with? Where is your house? Oh, so you’re my third cousin once removed? Great, nice to meet you. So, while my mother is “the Russian”, our neighbour is “the guy with the patch of marihuana who is the owner of a club”. I’m not sure being the Russian is worse.
I wouldn’t call it micro-aggression.
semioldguy – as a multiracial person who grew up in multiple places, I often get the annoying (and quickly annoyed) “where are you from?” question. In first year of college, I think a question that makes it clear what you’re asking is “where did you go to high school?” or “where does your family live?” or “where did you move to [college town] from?” Those questions won’t trigger the reflex of every vague ethnic-looking person that you’re trying to secretly ask after their race/ethnicity. When people see my last name (Easwaran), I also don’t mind the “what sort of name is that?” or “what language is that name from?” question. There it seems like it’s expressing an actual interest, rather than the generic othering point. (It’s really annoying when people just *say* “that’s a hard name to say” or something though).
In any case, the point about the “microaggression” talk is that even if you really do mean this as a question you ask everyone of every ethnicity equally often (which, you might want to observe yourself and see if you actually *do* ask it equally) us Asian or ambiguously ethnic people are used to this being the opening volley of a longer back-and-forth that comes down to “how do you fit into my racial schemata?” It’s just like a pretty woman being much more annoyed by any small talk question from a male stranger on the street, because she’s used to it being used as the wedge to get in for an expression of romantic interest. Even if that’s not at all what you’re trying to do.
This analogy sure makes it sound like the accusation of narcissism was on the nose. An attractive woman woman complaining about small talk from men is basically saying ‘I wish people acted the way I wanted them to, not the way they want to’, and any many who gets less than a desirable interaction from an attractive woman can add that to the list of micro-aggressions committed against him. Why I can complain that because I am an average looking and sounding white guy hardly anyone asks where I am from, and they just assume I am relatively local and start talking about the Eagles, when I am in fact an immigrant who came to the States at 6, and my father grew up in Rhodesia and South Africa. That is quite an interesting backstory, but does anyone every ask me about it?
@baconbits9
There are sects of SJ that agree with you that it’s a shame that the construction of white identity has erased all of the variations in that. They’re the same kinds of people who try to advocate for a salad model over melting pot.
For another case of micro-aggression through negative space (erasure), a gay or bisexual person comes out to their parents. The parents don’t react negatively to this. However, the parents basically interact with their child as if their queer sexuality doesn’t exist, perhaps continuing to try and set them up with only partners of the opposite sex, or only asking about their love life if they’re dating someone of the opposite sex. That can build up into souring the relationship, even though the parents haven’t been openly homophobic at all. Of course, trying to work through this kind of thing has overreached, as usual, with the cake baking business.
Nonetheless, people are aware of the flaws in this framework. There have been internal discussions among SJ people about the tension between women who get hit on all of the time and the women who feel invisible to men’s attraction. Competing access needs and all that.
Doesn’t stop the framework from being a useful mental concept for some situations, though, which is what Nancy Lebovitz started this thread about.
I think if you try to set a gay person up with someone of the opposite sex it could very easily be construed as homophobia. You are implicitly saying that you don’t approve of their sexuality. The only way I could see it not being homophobic is if you had tried to set them up with both people of the opposite sex and the same sex, because then you could make the claim that you were just basing your recommendations off of personality, but even there I think there would be a lot of room for homophobia.
I’m not seeing it as useful. Does it let me know how to treat a person? Is that attractive woman over there absolutely sick of being approached or is she on the other side and wants to be approached more often (or now specifically or not now but the next time I see her)? Is this ethnic person sick of being asked where they are from or are they frustrated that no one seems to care about their heritage at all?
How is this framework useful?
In the “where are you from?” questions, in my observation it’s far less annoying if the person asking is aware that Lahore and Kerala are no more the same place than Peru and Anchorage. (Similarly, when I was frustrated at how much attention “being ex-Mennonite” got, being asked whether my background was Beachy wasn’t at all annoying.)
@JayT There’s also bisexuality erasure.
@baconbits9
It’s useful to understand why someone might feel the way they do. If someone you know (and interact with quite a bit) explains to you that something is a micro-aggression to them, you can decide not to do that, since it’s a low effort to stop doing that.
You can then see if certain actions are more or less common micro-aggressions. For example, touching hair is a micro-aggression for more African Americans, but not for non-American blacks. It’s about realizing that the context of actions matter. You can’t derive whether or not a certain action does harm from first principles.
US labor law has also recognized that a hostile work environment can build from a lot of little moments, as opposed to obvious harrassment. So if you have an employee who brings a complaint that they keep having these sorts of incidents, you should address it with the rest of the workforce, instead of saying “well, this kind of incident seems neutral to me, stop being so over-sensitive, geez.”
I mean, the SSC commentariat has often expressed that they prefer the SSC comment section because it’s an oasis from a broader inundation from mainstream media treating them as an outgroup. Even if one has never been shoved into a locker, hearing unending quips about nerds or gamers or rednecks or Those Crazy Hets Amirite was enough to push some people from Blue Tribe to Grey Tribe, even when those people were never directly targeted.
It gives the broader consequence to Bechdel Test results. The test doesn’t say anything about the quality of any individual film, whether it fails or passes the test. However, the aggregate result is meaningful.
Someone could probably link the micro-aggressions framework to utilitarian eyeball dust specks, but it’s more often like death by ten thousand pin pricks.
As has already been covered a person might feel anyway about anything. If this was actually the stance micro aggression would be limited to people you know well, but almost all examples are of broad society acting in a way that a person doesn’t like.
This doesn’t remotely fit the examples given. Earlier in this open thread Nick posted
and albatross11 says
Virtually every example of microaggression is a description of many people doing something to a person, not one person doing one thing many times. Besides that you don’t need this framework to deal with people you know well, all you need is the broad ‘pay attention to your friends likes/dislikes’ which is already a part of society as it stands.
I should as in legally or morally?
@baconbits9
Consider the context of why the micro-aggression framework was developed in the first place. It didn’t spring out of a vacuum, people developed the concept and it became popular because it spoke to a situation that people were experiencing, but having their experiences dismissed by others. People were asked to just suck it up, to stop being over-sensitive, because each incident in isolation was neutral or low-harm. The micro-aggression framework explained to people why someone’s reaction wasn’t necessarily an overreaction, that their hurt feelings were valid.
I also don’t understand your quoting of Nick and albatross11. I agree with their takes. My scenario was that if someone comes up to you, and explains that something you were doing (that you thought of as a neutral action) has bad implications, and that it’s something they’ve experienced from many people, so that it really gets their goat, you can decide “okay, then I will stop doing the thing,” understanding that it’s a micro-aggression, instead of raising hackles over “well I don’t think the thing I’m doing is so bad.”
The fact that US labor law supports a form of the micro-aggression framework shows that the government has found it a useful concept in protecting workers’ wellbeing.
So the framework is good why? Because if we start from the assumption that these people have a valid complaint that they have a valid complaint?
Because in all the examples you will have already stopped doing the thing in question after only a few incidents at most. If you ask the same person out 20 times that is harrassment, not 20 separate micro aggressions. If you are sick because everyone you meet asks you ‘where are you from’ then telling each of them individually that you are tired of being asked that AFTER they have already asked you barely reduces how often you are asked*. Again I don’t see how this framework is useful outside of justifying a persons frustrations.
*occasionally you will have the same person ask you twice, but really the sort of person who asks twice isn’t likely to remember your request either.
> As has already been covered a person might feel anyway about anything.
Yes, a person might feel any way about anything. However, as has been very amply discussed, it is a very common sentiment for people of ambiguous ethnicity to say they are annoyed at people constantly asking “but where are you really from?”, and black people are frequently annoyed at people who think the’ve become friends asking to touch their hair, and attractive women are bothered by constantly being asked out or having strangers initiate uninteresting conversations with what seems like an ulterior motive.
Sure, it’s possible that the next black person wishes people would ask to touch their hair, or the next multiracial person would wish people would ask where they are from.
The microaggression framework is useful precisely because it allows people to make progress on these inductive generalizations, rather than insisting that every new human is a unique snowflake and we have no idea what they might find annoying, so I might as well just ask my question out of curiosity because I have no reason to believe that the next instance will be like all the others that have spoken so far.
@baconbits9
We’re not talking about good or bad. We’re talking about useful. Does the concept of the microaggression (or hostile work environment) have, say, the usefulness of motte-and-bailey?
I think you’re still misunderstanding my scenario. It’s not that I am asking a single someone what they do for a living 20 times. It’s that I ask most people what they do for a living as a conversation starter. A disabled person might come up to me and explain that this question carries a lot of assumptions and implications about a person’s worth, particularly for people who may not be able to work due to chronic illness, an injury, or doing non-paying work. I can now choose to change my behavior, whether to only use the question in more mainstream settings, or to change my conversation approach not to lean on that question at all.
A similar case would be always asking girls if they have a boyfriend (and vice versa), rather than asking if they have a romantic partner.
Or perhaps I have an Asian friend group, and I make statements to the effect of “this is so Asian/this is Asian culture” about various things, and a friend explains to me that what I really mean is for a very specific sub-group (e.g. middle class Chinese), that there are plenty of Asians for whom those things don’t apply to them at all. I never directed my statements at any particular person, much less to the point of harassment, but that doesn’t stop them from being a micro-aggression, and I can then evaluate if what I’m doing is adding straw to the camel’s back.
@AG
Is is actually possible to ask anything about a person without micro-aggressions? You can’t ask where people are from, for they might feel you are implying they don’t belong. You can’t ask people what work they do, because they might not have work. You can’t ask people about their friends, for they may not have friends. You can ask where they live, because they may be homeless. You can’t ask about their hobbies, because their hobbies may expose that they are poor.
Also, in practice it seems that the demand is often for people to perform reverse stereotyping (where you may for example ask a native-seeming person where they are from, but not someone who looks foreign), but can’t people then feel micro-aggressed against for avoiding these questions? Perhaps they want to talk about their foreign homeland or heritage?
I’ve also heard from people with an obvious physical defect with an unclear cause that it can be very irritating when people refuse to ask about it, as they don’t want to impose, but then have this suppressed question interfere with a honest, open conversation.
You could use “Where did you grow up?” which makes it unambiguous you aren’t asking about ethnicity.
What if I am asking about their ethnicity? If I’m going to interact with a person, one particularly important thing I should know about them is their cultural background. That correlates strongly with, and is often described in the same terms as, ethnicity. What city a person grew up in, is trivia.
Aapje – you make it sound like these are binary rules, that “you can’t” do one thing or another. Probably some people treat it that way, because lots of people like to binarize lots of things. But the correct thing is just to note that all of these activities are “potentially problematic” – and to take that seriously! There are contexts in which a potential problem is outweighed by some other consideration. When you start to get to know someone, you start to understand how their interests and desires might differ from others, so it becomes less of a concern to ask them about things that other people might find really annoying or painful to think about.
When you’re first meeting someone, the best question is probably something about the context in which you’re meeting them. If it’s someone you meet in class, ask about what they’re interested in this class for. If it’s someone you meet waiting in line at a restaurant (RIP), ask what their favorite menu item is or if it’s their first time visiting. If it’s someone you meet through a friend, ask how they know the friend.
Generic conversation starters like “where do you work” or “where do you live” are good ones for many people, but it’s sometimes reasonable to try to figure out whether one of these is a painful question first (or to figure out if you’re in a context where you’re unlikely to meet someone for whom it’s a painful question).
@Aapje
One of the places where SJ has gone wrong is treating all microaggressions as things to be banned.
The microaggressions framework is about helping someone understand the risk associated with their actions/language, but the consequences of microaggressions only comes in the aggregate. So in the motte-world, one who commits microaggressions can evaluate if the straw they’re throwing on their fellow camels is close to burdensome levels, but it might not be, because the situation has slack.
Furthermore, things are not universally microaggressions. Context matters. As I mentioned before, touching the hair of a black person has poor implications in an American (and maybe European, I don’t know for sure) context, but not really in an African context. Some friend groups use slurs as affectionate nicknames. And other people get triggered by niche things, which are rare in the mainstream but prevalent in their little corner of the world.
Motte land therefore requires a lot of charity from everyone involved.
@John Schilling:
Even just asking for someone’s ethnicity is usually a proxy for something else. I don’t mean this in an accusatory way, just that the question is still imprecise, and that creates uncertainty. It’s better to ask about the specific things you really want to know. Prefacing “If you don’t mind me asking…” also tends to raise the other person’s charity.
“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your cultural background? I ask because [the decision you’ll be making, which this information will influence].” This gives the other person context to be confident that their answer won’t fuel stereotyping.
@keaswaran
Yes, it’s not a binary in the sense that it always is used against you. It just stacks the deck against you, so you are beholden to the charity of others. It’s like a lower-status person dealing with a high-status person. In the case of conflict, the latter can deal far more damage. So the sensible thing for the lower-status person to do is to grovel when they need something that only the high-status ass person can provide and otherwise stick with other lower-status people.
And it’s not even the case that most high-status people enjoy lording over others (or at least, not all of the time), so they also tend to prefer segregating their own kind.
@AG
Like most of SJ, it is at best a half-truth and those who don’t take it with a huge grain of salt (or those who weaponize it), are pushed to act very immorally.
@Aapje
The framework was first developed because a sufficient number of people had weaponized microaggressions, though, giving them the plausible deniablity that any one thing they did was a neutral act. Much of SJ’s concepts were about that, words for how a harmless act in one context isn’t harmless in another.
“[Color/gender]-blindness is at best a half-truth and those who don’t take it with a huge grain of salt (or those who weaponize it), are pushed to act very immorally.”
My issue is that not only does SJ ideology seem to go out of its way to not add that grain of salt, it is encouraged to attack those that do.
And we’re back to the fact that this is the result of geeks-mops-sociopaths playing out in SJ as it does in any ideology.
The reason I’ve been emphasizing the motte in these threads is that Nancy Lebovitz’s OP was all about asking what the motte was in various outgroup ideologies was. Coming in and saying “but it’s all been bailey’d!” offers nothing to the discussion at hand.
Incel privilege. 🙂
From memory: Megan McArdle was asked what of her writing has made a difference.
She said she wrote about prejudice against conservatives (in academe?) and got a bunch of responses from conservatives which said they now understood what microaggression meant. She also got responses from liberals who said prejudice against conservatives didn’t exist.
I believe she was talking about structural bias, not microaggressions.
If we can find the thing, we can check.
Found it, will listen later.
My mistake– that’s not the McArdle thing I was thinking of.
I have to disagree with that. In my view, one of the biggest failures of the modern social justice movement is the inability to distinguish between $THING_THAT_IS_ANNOYING and $GENUINE_ETHICAL_VIOLATION. Framing well meaning but annoying behaviors as a form of aggression strikes me as quite misguided.
I think there are two failure modes– one of them in not distinguishing between bad thing which shouldn’t happen to anyone vs. good thing that everyone should have. Another is failing to distinguish between degrees of problems.
Maybe there’s a third, though it might fall under some combination of the first two. Instead of saying bad thing is an injustice which shouldn’t happen to anyone, instead if it happens to the not yet sufficiently marginalized group, the response is “You’ve been hurting us, we get to hurt you back. If you’re a moral person, you’ll just suck it up.”
And maybe a fourth, which is that memories of one’s ancestors being hurt should never be allowed to fade.
I don’t know if this is a failure mode or an intractable challenge, but the society/individual dynamic causes a lot of hurt feelings all around. In most SJ diagnoses, white supremacy and the patriarchy are a societal system. So if society is arranged so that everyone is a little bit of an asshole, even unintentionally, to certain people, then that is society’s fault, and the integrated assholishness is the concern of SJ.
This shorts out many individual protestations of innocence and questions of intent, because what matters is how the system behaves. But it also means that supporting society is supporting a system of oppression, of which everyone is guilty.
I don’t see why taking a societal view turns minor annoyances into a more fundamental ethical violation. If anything it’s less of a problem at a societal level.
I also think you have skipped a few steps in claiming that society is a system of oppression (because people annoy each other sometimes !?) . What are the actual ethical issues, and why are they related to microaggressions?
Because it lets you look at the integrated effect in a meaningful way. If I played a game where I pretended you don’t exist, that would be weird and rude, but probably not a gross moral offense. If everyone starts to play the game then it’s a real harm. Now if we all decided to play the ignore Ben game at a big meeting of the not-Ben’s, you could reasonably hold everyone responsible for the major harm of ostracism, instead of the minor harm of being rude. And if maybe someone showed up to the meeting just for the snacks and just voted present, they’re still not really innocent.
A society that allows individuals to play the ignore Ben game seems decent. A society that coordinates people ostracizing Ben seems oppressive (even though it is just a bunch of people annoying Ben).
Now, in the real world microagressions are more subtle and society is less coordinated (there are also more clear cut injustices, but ignoring those). So if you’re the 100th person in a row to ask an asian person where they’re really from, it’s less clear if you’re morally on the hook for the 1 minor annoyance, all 100, or somewhere in between. Or if everyone is liable for setting up this faulty system.
Does it matter if the person is just interested in their heritage (as opposed to assuming they weren’t born here because of their race)? It isn’t a question I would ask because it doesn’t really interest me, but some people are pretty into heritage generally in a non-race-specific way (“oh, your great grandparents are from [region] of [country]? My mother’s side is French but my fathers side is Irish” kind of stuff, or even “I spent 2 years living in [same region] while my parents were working with [company/organization] 5 years ago”).
Given that society isn’t coordinating to ask Asian’s where there from, it seems like we are much more similar to a society that allows individuals to play the ignore Ben game, than an a society that ostracizes Ben. So I ask again, where does the ethical issue come from?
I mean, it sort of is? Or else there is a big coincidence? To take another example, in grad school there was a female student a couple years ahead of me in the same group. When a random person popped into lab to ask a question, much more often than not they directed their question to me, not her. There was obviously no meeting to decide whether to assume men or women are better at science, but too many coinflips went one way to say that everyone acted independently.
One SJ ethic is to say people should be aware of how their actions are likely to be perceived, given the society we live in (eg, try not to do microaggressions). Another would be to actively work to change society for the better. This later one is in some sense independent of one’s interpersonal actions; everyone lives in a society, so everyone has an obligation to make that society less shitty.
I think you must be using the word coordinate in a very different way then how I am using it. Certainly it isn’t a coincidence. People clearly have unconscious biases that influence the way that they think. That doesn’t imply coordination. The biases in your examples are “Asians are from somewhere else” and “Women aren’t good at science”. It is hard to know exactly where biases come from, but I would argue that most likely they used to be true, and the ideas haven’t died out yet (ok, the only reason women weren’t good at science was because they weren’t allowed to study it, but it still counts). Unless your ethical system involves some kind of thought crime, I still don’t see where the ethical issue comes from. Particularly on a societal level.
You can use self-organized instead of coordinated, (though that elides elements of society that are very aware of what they are about). The ethical consideration is not thought crime, but that people have an ethical obligation to improve society and some culpability in how society behaves (the social in social justice). Or that you have an ethical duty to be aware of society, and at least try to correct unconscious bias (the ever popular ‘educate yourself’). You might not share that ethical system, and concepts bordering on corporate justice run into ideas of strong individualism. But ignoring the role that society plays leads to results where bad things systematically happen to certain people but no one is at fault.
@Nancy Lebovitz
I would say that a third failure mode is the idea that applying stereotypes can only hurt those who are identified as being from a group with less average privilege. For example, in some places Jews are stereotyped as having lots of money, resulting in irritating assumptions that they have more money than others, them being targeted for property crimes, etc.
@zzzzort
How do you know that they decided that you are more competent? Perhaps they are afraid of talking to women, for which there are many possible reasons. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with gender and you just look more friendly than her and they would have talked to her if she looked friendlier than you.
This kind of jumping to conclusions where it is decided with too little evidence that actions by the ‘oppressor group’ must be motivated by harmful discrimination, while similar behavior by ‘the oppressed’ against the ‘oppressors’ get judged differently, is actually one of my (many) pet peeves with SJ, as it seems endemic. It’s classic confirmation bias.
“Unless your ethical system involves some kind of thought crime, I still don’t see where the ethical issue comes from.”
I think the best way to think of this aspect of SJ discussion is as exactly the opposite of “thought crime”. The point is that we don’t care what you think – the problem is the consequences of the behavior. Now some SJ people definitely try to turn this into a deontological system of good and bad people. But I think the best versions of the movement treat this as some sort of virtue-consequentialist system, where we completely ignore the motivations, and just try to teach people to instill habits that end up causing less harm to people when practiced generally.
@zzzzort One of the reasons I oppose this ethic is that it leads to a positive feedback loop of people getting more and more offended by more and more things.
Let’s say that a subset of some ethnic group finds it marginally annoying when people say something. If a significant part of society starts to believe that it’s inconsiderate or racist to say it, then people will say it less often—but when they say it, the members of the ethnic group are increasingly offended by it, because they start to assume that the other person is hostile to them or racist. As a result more and more people avoid saying it (to avoid causing offense or looking racist), and the assumption that it indicates hostility becomes increasingly likely to be correct.
This could be a good thing as people actually stop saying it; but it may cause harm:
• Saying the thing in question may sometimes be beneficial (e.g. some people with foreign ancestry like talking about their country of ancestry, and tell useful information to others while doing so).
• Increased offense is caused when a member of the ethnic group who subscribes to the view that saying it is offensive meets someone who didn’t realize it’s considered offensive by many. Or someone who opposes the idea that it should become taboo to say it. It results in false assumptions of hostility or racism.
• When it requires (otherwise unnecessary) technical work, such as efforts to remove master-slave terminology from some software projects.
If, instead, society has the attitude that people should avoid saying obviously, grossly offensive things, but they are not expected to go out of their way to guess how their acts will be perceived, and instead the listener is expected not to assume bad faith, then the positive feedback doesn’t kick in.
@BenChaney I’m pretty sure that in Europe or America someone who looks East or South Asian is much more likely to be an immigrant or a child of immigrants than a white person.
10240, I guess I would agree that tradeoffs exist, and an ethic of never say anything that could be perceived as offensive is unworkable (and more than a bit of a straw man). The question is where to draw the line, and who gets to draw it. You have a lot of concern for people being mistakenly thought to be knowingly causing offense, as opposed to people being offended.
There’s also a lot of fatalism in accepting the status quo, when history shows that social change is possible, the rules can be rewritten, and the outcome is generally agreed to be better than what came before.
If an individual microagression is not wrong, then a long chain of them performed by different people cannot possibly be wrong, and becoming annoyed at them is simple narcissism.
…True…
Holy cow no. Have you ever had a pet peeve before? Do you think that pet peeves arise out of narcissism? How about a social allergy toward a certain person? Is it narcissism that drives that?
It’s not narcissism, it’s human nature.
I think that a certain amount of narcissism is part of human nature.
“If an individual microagression is not wrong, then a long chain of them performed by different people cannot possibly be wrong, and becoming annoyed at them is simple narcissism.”
Repeated unpleasantness adds up. One call from a telemarketer isn’t nearly as bad as the nth call.
Not according to US labor law.
Is that a metaphysical principle you apply to other areas? If releasing a bit of pollution doesn’t affect anyone, then it’s not wrong, so then a long chain of pollution from different people cannot possibly be wrong, and people coughing in Beijing are simply narcissists? If a single grain of rice is not a pile, then a long chain of them added by different people cannot possibly be a pile?
I’d halfway agree. Treating any one–including the 1000th–as wrong is unfair.
But finding it really unpleasant is not narcissism, anymore than wanting to vomit after drinking the 10th glass of water in an 10 minutes is. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the water or with that glass of water.
“If taking two boxes in the Newcomb problem is not wrong, then being the kind of person who regularly takes two boxes in the Newcomb problem cannot possibly be wrong.”
I don’t really know whether we should judge individual behaviors on the basis of the long repeated strings of behaviors of which they are a part. But it’s totally reasonable to judge personal habits on the basis of the long repeated strings of behaviors to which those habits give rise.
While I agree in theory that you shouldn’t be annoyed, and we should all try to be more stoic…
Narcissism is a bit far. Just try not to act on being annoyed by it.
It occurs to me that I should add – this was over 20 years ago. I don’t at all mind being asked about being Mennonite now.
Random strangers ask me where I’m from, maybe once a year or so. This has only happened since I moved to Philadelphia. It didn’t happen when I lived in Newark, Delaware, a medium-sized college town.
I didn’t think anything of it– my reaction was that a polite if weird question gets a polite (and in my case, boring) answer, and a minor background thought that normal people get interested in boring things. I’m not very past/history oriented.
Then I ran afoul of Social Justice, and have been left wondering whether people are implying that I look weird and as though I don’t belong. I really didn’t need that line of thought.
If I remember, I might ask the next one why they asked me that, not that I expect an honest answer.
I’ve been told that sometimes bi/multi-racial people get asked “What are you?”.
Oh, that’s just asking for an answer like “a human being; what about you?”
Or if you wanted to be slightly nicer, while still wilfully obtuse, “a software engineer”
Note that I’m not recommending these answers, and I’m unlikely to ever be personally in the position of being asked these questions. Back when “Jew” was a racial group, I would have been bi-racial, but even those loudest about their personal anti-Semitism currently can’t seem to recognize an Ashkenazi Jew when they meet one, let alone a half-Ashkenazi ;-(
I suppose it depends on the Ashkenazi Jew. I’ve got various evidence that I look Jewish, even if it’s hard to define.
Given correct knowledge about racial IQ statistics and crime statistics, a depressing number of people just demonstrate that they can’t or won’t reason statistically and assume this means all whites are smarter than all blacks or all blacks are criminals or whatever. I think this is partly motivated reasoning, and partly genuine inability to reason about group statistics.
For the case of the person who believes it is true, your explanation may be correct. For the case of the person who interprets a claim about differences as meaning that, I interpret it as a defensive tactic by someone who knows he is socially obliged to reject a claim that he has no evidence against, so misreads it into a different claim that is, conveniently, false.
I’ve seen it done by people on both sides of the h.b.d discussion.
Conveniently, we had an example in this OT, where someone asked people to post falsifiable hypothesis which disagreed with a hugely broad claim about category-based differences (“ethnicity” and “gender”, IIRC), without specifying whether or not he was talking about statistical differences – they merely had to be “meaningful”.
I expected a bait and switch of the same kind (quite possibly unconscious, rather than intentional) – people respond in terms of non-statistical differences, since the fact that statistical differences exist is self evident, whatever version of either category is being used this week, and they are obviously immensely meaningful emotionally to large numbers of people.
The only difference is that in this case (if I was right) the proponent of believing in such differences was the one setting things up to start out about absolute differences, and be retargetted to statistical ones.
Statistical thinking is ‘slow’ thinking. There was a subthread about Innuendo studios complaining that conservatives can only think in black and white terms, and depending on the topic that’s probably a correct observation, and the reason is probably the same.
A small part of it might also be cynical manipulation done for the greater good, by people who know better. So… not trusting that ordinary people will come to reasonable conclusions when exposed to information. (for example, the studies people becoming anti-vax the more they learn about vaccines)
For record: I am aware about difference between your claim that you made and claim of a strict superiority. BTW, thanks for a good explanation of your position.
But I remain unconvinced by statistics that would likely convince me in different fields like astronomy.
It is combination of general lack of trust in psychology as a science, history of this specific topic, and fact that topic is not just touching third rail, it is hugging it.
Social Justice is great as a springboard of education on certain concepts, but it’s pretty horrible as a memeplex. For example, you can easily interpret a fair amount of the Sequences through a SJ lens, how both have mottes about overcoming bias. The issue being, of course, that people immediately sprinted away with bailey implications. SJ is pretty useful for teaching people about certain perspectives for the first time in their lives, but becomes its own kind of microaggression/hostile environment when steeped in it. I enjoyed reading quite a few SJ-aligned blogs for a couple of years, before it simply became exhausting to only see 101-level takes over and over again. Some of the subsequent blogs that appeared to be examining higher level takes regressed to 101 bluster after 2016.
I’ve gone through that same kind of cycle with SSC a couple of times, actually, in the opposite direction, which is why I’m grateful to Scott’s reign of terror.
As for what I like from ideologies I don’t necessarily disagree with, I’ve found that the most interesting anime blog on the web isn’t the one where well-educated people pontificate on the artistic craft of this or that anime, but a blog devoted to using anime as a springboard to resonate with Christian teachings. The other Christian anime blogs are boring “here are the un-Christian things in anime, beware” types, but this one particular blog truly wrestles and sincerely engages with what they’re watching, and it’s so much more interesting to read than from the writers who know exactly how they want to critique the show of the day.
In the same vein, anime is just really good at making me root for memeplexes (within the context of the story) that I would find insufferable in live-action, much less put into practice in real life. They make me respect their internal consistency.
You’re going to say all that and not link the blog? 🙁
https://beneaththetangles.com/
Thank you!
Yeah, the writing isn’t deep or anything, but I still find it interesting to read in the broader context, especially since the writers are often picking the lower brow mainstream shows to watch.
Trigun is the most Christian anime fight me.
@Jaskologist, I’ve only watched a couple anime (not including Trigun), but what do you think of Haibane Renmei for that title?
I have a soft spot for Trinity Blood, but I don’t know that it could get the title of most Christian.
Alright, you’ve got me. I haven’t seen that much anime either.
Trigun is the best show I’ve seen at evoking Sehnsucht, that longing for Heaven as a place still remembered, but so very far off. I’m showing it to my young kids to discuss with them the themes of forgiveness and sin that it features.
@Jaskologist, if you’re looking for anime with those themes, you definitely want to watch Haibane Renmei.
Yuuki Yuuna is Hero Club Member (at least S1) gave me the strongest resonance with “faith as a virtue.” Plenty of people dinged it for deus ex machina, but it really struck me that the show is did that in order to demonstrate faith as a virtue, a case where the relationship with God is as Christianity purports.
And for the truest hot take, AKB0048. For all that they’re literally idols, the show is easily seen as “the trials and tribulations of prophets.”
Trigun is a fantastic and amazing anime because normally I very strongly dislike pacifists and pacifism but I absolutely adore Vash the Stampede. Trigun manages to bridge the gap by correctly depicting the fact that in order to live to up to his pacifist ideas Vash must be a literal superhuman, and even then it has cost him terribly both physically and mentally. It also includes people reacting with completely understandable anger and hostility when they realise what Vash truly is and stands for, because they know they can’t measure up to him. It’s the only show that felt like a serious exploration of pacifism that I could respect and engage with.
Sort of the same thing, I read an analysis of Chrono-Trigger looking for biblical allusions once that was fascinating. I doubt I could readily find it now.
If you ever do, please link it. I would like to read that.
Also here.
The Bible would have been a lot more entertaining if the apostles had to go find an exact body double of Jesus to substitute in the moment of crucifixion in order to enable the resurrection to proceed…
God took care of that. Judas was transformed into the appearance of Isus ibn Maryam and crucified in his stead, as was only just.
(I don’t know if the story is Koranic, but it exists in medieval Muslim sources)
I heard it was Simon of Cyrene.
@davidfriedman
I once read a book called Muslims, Christians and Jesus in which the author, a missionary to predominantly Muslim areas, said essentially the same thing. This seemed to be drawn from his own conversations with Muslims, so if he’s to be trusted it’s still an extant viewpoint.
The Gnostics have got you covered on that and I think some other modern New Age-type philosophies run along the same lines: it was an illusion (that would relate to the heresy of Docetism), it was another guy in the place of Jesus, only the Human half of Jesus died on the cross, Jesus was only human and Christ is a different entity, etc.
I find “it wasn’t really Jesus on the cross” kind of irritating– it’s like noticing the pattern in fiction where the main character doesn’t *quite* get raped or tortured.
Guys, stop, I was just trying to make a funny Chrono Trigger reference.
I’m pretty sure there is no sect crazy enough to believe that Jesus was replaced, the moment before death, via time travel, by a mannequin designed to look like him, that his apostles won in a carnival game (yes this is the literal plot of Chrono Trigger)
At the risk of reprising a topic from just a thread or two ago, if it wasn’t Jesus on the cross, he wasn’t the main character anyway.
@Matt M
Sounds the plot of a Kilgore Trout novel, though.
You know, people have honestly been debating if Aerith is actually going to still eat it in FF7 Remake, because other major characters that got dead in the original are still around this time.
@Deiseach:
That sounds terrifyingly painful. Excruciating, even.
“The sailors who brought me here weren’t very nice, but they did taste pretty good”, said Virginia, excruciatingly.
I’m pretty sure there is no sect crazy enough to believe that Jesus was replaced, the moment before death, via time travel, by a mannequin designed to look like him, that his apostles won in a carnival game
This feels like a challenge to me 🙂
The disparate elements are found variously; that Jesus was replaced is scattered around a lot of Gnostic and other heresies; the time travel element is covered by Moorcock’s “Behold The Man”; the “mannequin designed to look like him” could be stretched to mean “the fake body representing the Archons as rulers of the material world” in said Gnosticism; the carnival game winnings – that one has me stumped 😀
The idea is more about the willingness to be sacrificed. The resonance with the binding of isaac is pretty clear. But in islam, it is fair to say that Jesus wasn’t the main character.
Yeah, I was once having a discussion with a Muslim as we tried to convert each other, and he seemed to think “Jesus didn’t really die!” was a good selling point for Islam. Like, since I’m such a big Jesus fan, I should be super happy the crucifixion was just a trick. No, no, the whole point was the perfect sacrifice under the most miserably unjust of circumstances.
Tangentially related to both points, but I’ve always thought both social justice people and conservative christians would benefit from doing a global replace for ‘privileged’ with ‘blessed’, if only for bit.
“White blessing” is not a great improvement. Might as well stick with “white man’s burden.”
It does have the advantage of implying “good thing that we should seek to extend to everything” rather than “bad thing that needs to be clawed back from those who have unfairly taken it”.
Mainly it makes the phrases, ‘I’m poor, so I can’t be blessed’, and ‘*confrontational voice* check your blessings’ both sound ridiculous, which I would count as big advance for the discourse.
Okay, sarcasm aside, it
is amay be a good idea to adopt the other tribes language in order to communicate with them, and in this case you get across the point that some people have unearned benefits they are obligated to use for the good of others.I’m not sure the SJW wouldn’t see “blessing” as just as bad. “If God is in favor of inequality, I’m against God!” But maybe that’s uncharitable?
I think christianity has a sophisticated and robust way of dealing with privilege, where you focus on your personal privilege, how it was unearned and the obligations that imposes on you. The idea that people should share their privilege, and that everyone should count their privilege, both seem like good ideas.
Obviously the analogy has limits; society is not god and there is no reason to think its decisions are just. But I wished people paid more attention to the similarities.
Not if the other tribe is using the language to reshape the discussion. And doubly not if it’s a one-way street. There are terms that, if you use them, signal that you don’t really want to hear dissenting views. This is one of them.
(Quoted statement amended in response)
That’s part of my instinctual rejection of micro-agression. It smuggles in notions of malice.
But, to be clear, the term in this case was “blessing” not “privilege”. If SJW want to communicate to me, it would be useful to adopt my language to do so.
They still need to lay out the ground work in a convincing manner.
“Be nice to your neighbor because you are blessed by God in unique ways” is a convicting statement. “Overthrow the unjust social system because it gives you blessings you shouldn’t have” is not improved by the swap.
It’s improved in that “blessings you shouldn’t” in the sense that it is almost oxymoronic w/re the common usage of the term “blessings”. Almost nobody uses “blessings” to refer to a thing that anyone shouldn’t have. The most common usage of “privilege”, is for things that the privileged shouldn’t have. The latter allows one to smuggle in an unchecked assumption that should be central to the debate; the former just makes one look silly for trying.
I mean, SJ is overtly trying to take some privileges away. The common metaphor was to being able to see over a fence to watch the game. The privileged are either born tall or get to stand on boxes. Sometimes the metaphor posits that the solution is to take the boxes away…because the solid wood fence is replaced with chain link fence that everyone can now see through. (Not commenting on the feasibility of apply such a metaphor to broader real life inequalities.)
Point is, “blessing” doesn’t map well to that model.
If “being able to see ball games” is the blessing/privilege/whatever, we want everybody to have that. If “being tall” is the blessing/privilege/whatever on account of being intrinsically good (presumably up to a point), then we want everybody to have that. There’s nothing here that we should want to take away from people, so the language should reflect that.
The language of should and shouldn’t is somewhat imprecise (freddie deb had a good piece on that at some point). Privilege and blessings are both seen as being unearned (by most theologies), and beneficial to have.
The original piece on privilege, by peggy mcintosh, lists lots of things like “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race” that SJ pretty clearly want to extend to everyone, rather than remove. Personally, I think this is the most useful sense of the term, though I agree the usage is not universal.
How confident are you that the average SJW wouldn’t be happy to see white people subject to more IRS audits than they presently are? And not even secretly, ashamedly happy.
Is it wrong for my mental model of the modal SJW to be a white person reporting significant small business expenses relative to income? (E.g., yoga instructor)
@John Schilling
If you’re going to assert that the outgroup openly takes delight in the ingroup’s suffering, please provide sources.
(can we make this a formal moderation rule?)
I mean, somebody’s buying stuff like this.
That seems pretty evenly split between catering to the left, the right, DMs and lecturers but I’ll accept it.
Yes, my point wasn’t that the left does this, but that lots of ingroups like drinking the tears of the outgroup.
As Conrad Honcho points out, every tribe does this to some extent, and I should perhaps have been more explicit about that.
But by the time you call yourself an anything-Warrior, it’s a pretty safe bet that you are enthusiastically on board with doing harm to the outgroup as an acceptable and effective way of pursuing your goals even if you can’t chart out the exact path from a particular harm to eventual victory, because that’s sort of the essence of war and if you were less than enthusiastic about it you’d probably go with “Soldier”.
I think you’re piling uncharitable fallacy on uncharitable fallacy here.
An awful lot of social justice types wouldn’t refer to themselves as warriors, many of those who do would be using the word ironically as a way of reclaiming it from their enemies, without really thinking about its connotations, and a vast majority are not, as you imply, in favour of doing harm to their outgroup just for the sake of it.
John, I think you’re being more than a bit uncharitable. I also don’t understand the strong distinction between warrior and soldier (to me, soldier is someone who fights in an organized army, on behalf of a hierarchical institution like a state, but you seem to think they’re intrinsically reluctant?).
Imo, SJ does a better job than most groups (though far from perfect) of directing anger at depersonified systems. So patriarchy, whiteness, white supremacy, the gender dichotomy, etc. aren’t people. Though, as with the ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’ doctrine, the distinction is often lost on people both in and out of the group.
@zzzzort
I disagree and believe that this is just a motte-and-bailey tactic where the desired policy is to discriminate against individuals, but the rhetoric is about systems.
John Schilling:
Probably it depends on whether by SJW you mean normal people who hold that set of beliefs, or some sociopath who’s been enabled by the social pathologies of Twitter and clickbait journalism to get paid to hurt people.
Doing that the other way round makes the Beatitudes way more interesting as a topic for a homily 🙂
“It’s so unfair! Nobody persecutes me or makes me mourn! You suffering ones should check your privilege!” 😀
I could argue that it better conveys the subversiveness of the original to a modern audience. Saying that those who mourn are blessed is a radical idea that most people don’t grapple with because the beatitudes are so well known. Even the ‘modern beatitudes’ pope francis put out focus on people who do good works and care for others, rather than being persecuted, insulted, and suffering loss (especially as compared to the version in Luke, which dispenses with the ‘in spirit’, and just says blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, etc.)
Obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it only applies to manufacturers of organic vegan GMO-free cheese.
@zzzzort
I second what Aapje says above, only I’m not even quite sure I’d call it motte-and-bailey.
SJ as a style of politics strikes me in fact as largely defined by “directing anger at individuals.” Whatever SJ’s abstract theory of society might be, recruiting group opinion to name and shame specific persons certainly seems to be its primary modality of action. The only part that’s “depersonalized” is that SJ tends to work with a theory of individual culpability that depends in part on factors not within a given actor’s conscious control. (See e.g. the debate about moral responsibility for “microaggressions” above.)
Moreover — and this is the part that I think is harder to call motte-and-bailey — it seems to me that SJ’s working theory of the mechanisms of group oppression is actually much more explicitly focused on behavior at the level of the individual than are most other forms of Left analysis. Hence the intense interest in the nexus between language, representation, etc., and subjectively held attitudes, which are presumed to exercise enormous leverage over social reality.
EDIT: I may have messed up the nesting of comments. This was meant to reply to zzzzort’s observation about SJ being good at “directing anger at depersonified systems.”
Nah, I think that’s just a result of the regular geeks-mops-sociopaths cycle. “Directing anger at individuals” is where most any ideology with traction ends up. SJ isn’t unique in that, on the Left or Right.
Agree with AG. Christianity started with love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but still gave rise to the spanish inquisition. Call out culture isn’t great, but judging any movement by its twitter presence will lead to sadness.
Furthermore, I think a lot of people who are invested in the current system feel personally attacked when the system is questioned.
I’m not sure if this is be best place to put this point, but I do want to get it in.
SJ has found a way of blaming individuals for systemic problems by saying that if you’re part of one of the groups they’ve defined as oppressive, you’re at fault for not preventing bad behavior by the more destructive members of the group.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Even if you do, you still “don’t deserve a cookie”.
There is nothing you can do to get absolved of your original sin. Even if you single-handedly removed all evils from the world, the canonical response would still be something like: Of course, for a privileged person, doing something like that was relatively easier.
Which is like… technically true from certain perspective… but come on; if one person among many chooses to make an extraordinary effort, their actions shouldn’t be completely erased, just because they got a 30% starting advantage on this or that. Think about the incentives this creates.
.
I have read books on psychological abuse, and it seems to me that many situations can be explained as “a behavior of a mentally sick person, becoming a group norm”. (Oh yes, I know the canonical response to this: “boo, ableism!” Anyway…)
Imagine a situation of two people living together (a couple; family members; roommates), where one of them keeps yelling at the other about some bad thing the other did at some moment in a distant past. Something like: — “You inconsiderate asshole, you cheated on me, you bastard!” “I am sorry, honey; it was ten years ago and I truly regret it; could we please turn the page? I honestly don’t know what could I do to make it up for you?” “Shut up, you asshole, you are making this about yourself and your precious feelings again! Who cared about my feelings, when I found you ten years ago in our bedroom with Mallory? You didn’t seem sorry before you noticed me.” “I am sorry, honey…” — repeated three times a day, for a decade.
Even if the allegation was true, and you thought the harm caused in the past was significant, this is still some sick behavior, on the side of the criticizing person. As a therapist, you would probably recommend to split (if they are a couple) or otherwise get away from each other… and if that is somehow not possible, then simply to stop being sorry. To perhaps make one final apology, and then say it’s over and you are not going to have the same debate again. The idea that the wrongdoer is forever in debt, and needs to be psychologically abused day and night without defending themselves, is not what a sane person would come up with. (Not because the wrongdoer is a precious snowflake who needs to be automatically forgiven anything, but simply because the sane person would not find so much joy in prolonged abuse, even if they had a socially acceptable pretext.)
Now with SJWs, this becomes even more absurd, because the person yelling at someone about e.g. their white privilege, is quite often a white person themselves, and not rarely a privileged one (and here I mean rich — which is a dimension of privilege mostly ignored by SJWs, unless it can be constructed e.g. as “poor because black”). So they are using some minority as a shield for their abuse, and then sometimes the minority gets the backlash. Wow, such social, so justice!
I have a lot of problems with that analogy, and I’ve already mostly fulfilled my procrastination quota. But, analogizing a history that includes chattel slavery and jim crow to an affair, while analogizing bringing up that past to emotional abuse is a reach, valence-wise.
Maybe a more apt analogy would be that our couple, brad and jennifer, had a pretty toxic start to their relationship. Jennifer was forced into the marriage, and brad used to beat her regularly. The beatings have (mostly) stopped, but jennifer still has a bit of limp. Brad says he wants to turn over a new leaf, but he still controls most of the finances. Jennifer asks that they get rid mementos from the bad early days of the marriage, but brad is sentimentally attached. When they fight now, jennifer says brad shouldn’t yell at her, because it reminds her of of the past physical abuse. Even some innocuous things remind her–certain phrases, certain clothes–and brad tries to avoid most of them, but he resents it, and he resents being reminded even more. Clearly, this means jennifer is a sick person emotionally abusing brad.
@zzzzort
But we are not talking about Brad and Jennifer, but their kids or grandkids. Brad Jr or Jr Jr never beat Jennifer Jr or Jr Jr, but is blamed for what his ancestors did.
I agree that personifying the history of many people over hundreds of years as a relationship between two people leads to problems. Though I will note that John Lewis is still around; the jim crow era and civil rights movement weren’t that long ago (I’m choosing this as the last uncontroversial period of racial violence; one might start suspecting that widespread racial violence only becomes uncontroversially recognized as wrong when most of the instigators are out of public life).
@Aapje
Often it’s someone who merely has the same color of eyes as Brad or Jennifer. Still guilty by association, though. Should repent. And should never be forgiven.
A commemorative speech from Germany.. I have a lot of sympathy for “I don’t want to be blamed forever”, but this is very gracious. I don’t know how it works out for individual Germans.
https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/EN/Frank-Walter-Steinmeier/Reden/2020/05/200508-75th-anniversary-World-War-II.html?fbclid=IwAR2h14KyVUazQJW1EAumTasMKWJO2Dy8ylQByNayTe834VBH9OInjF72Gno
The social world really does look different to different people, in ways that matter and kind-of broadly fit the “white privilege” idea. When I was younger, if I dressed in a scruffy way, I would get no positive attention from salesmen in stores, but I would get a certain amount of suspicion and following me around to make sure I wasn’t stealing or something. Now in my 50s, I never get this. I’ve not only never been catcalled, I think I’ve only even *seen* someone get catcalled maybe a couple times in my life. Women in some places get catcalled all the time. My very rare interactions with the police range from friendly and helpful to formally polite with an overtone of I-can-be-an-asshole-if-you-irritate-me. Other people have very different experiences with the police, sometimes terrifying ones.
The lesson here is that it’s possible for all kinds of social things to be going on that you never see in your daily life and are completely unaware of. Accounting for that in your mental model of the world is a way of being less blind.
Feel like SJ could have easily just propagated this concept as a sub-type of Typical Mind Fallacy, and that would have ruffled less feathers. “What sort of universal life experiences are you missing” is a much less accusatory way of teaching people to make less assumptions.
I think it did start out that way, but became oversimplified and more extreme over time. “What sort of universal life experiences are you missing” is a crucial thing for a society to discuss, and I wish we could be better about the framing. I remember reading about an incident where a Facebook group cracked down on someone for a “microaggression,” and the person who’d been warned posted the moderator’s explanation. While the incident sounded like an absurd thing to be warned about, the written policy made what I thought were good points about making generalizations. Unfortunately, in practice, it means holding people to a standard of clear and thoughtful expression (probably not the best phrasing–more like painstakingly qualified and/or clinical) that most people are just never going to be on board with, and that would suck the life out of the conversation in many instances. But I’ve found most people are willing to acknowledge that they’ve had incidents where they’ve realized their own flawed assumptions and at least quietly tried to correct them. We should promote that.
It seems to me that in practice it just becomes a tool deployed in favor of some groups and against other groups.
@Aapje
That’s not specific to SJ.
@Aapje
Yes, this is the sad fate of most useful concepts, it seems.
@AG
Yes, that is true, but…
IMO, SJ advocates very often explicitly argue or implicitly demonstrate that such victimization can only go one way along the progressive stack.
I think that there is a significant difference between people who go against their ideology in a space where they have the power to do so and people who get encouraged by their ideology to treat an outgroup worse.
I’m still not seeing how SJ is uniquely “people who get encouraged by their ideology to treat an outgroup worse.” In fact, much of the abuses in SJ are justified by saying that the opposing ideology is so much more blatant about simply wanting to destroy the outgroup.
@AG
Where did I say ‘uniquely?’
And your other point applies to just about any conspiracy theory, including most of those that involve Jews. I think that there is a considerable difference between a theory that argues that people with certain demographic traits are pretty much all genetically or culturally disposed to harm and/or oppress those with (the) other demographic trait(s), vs merely arguing that a certain ideology encourages or mandates harmful and/or oppressive behavior against a group.
I’m pushing the line on whether or not SJ is uniquely bad, because you seem to be uniquely opposing it, while any alternatives you seem to support have the same failure modes. It is important to acknowledge when an ideology has failed in a way common to other ideologies, because then the solutions for dealing with those failures shouldn’t simply allow other ideologies, who will fail in the same way, to sweep in (can we change SJ for the better vs. razing it to the ground).
I still see plenty of pro-SJ places where the motte reigns, and in fact are actively pushing back against those who take things too far, whereas you seem to only see the baileys run amuck. But if SJ’s failings are that the baileys enable abuse, that’s different from an ideology where the motte is about abuse.
We could re-post all of these points about the things SJ does wrong, replaced with Christianity, but I don’t see you hopping into every thread about that to pooh-pooh the Christians on the board about how their religion keeps getting warped into abusing people. Your objections appear asymmetrically.
(And yes, I acknowledge that SJ gone wrong is about how they ironically replicate conservative fundie mechanisms. But recognizing that horseshoe is precisely why I’m not out there denouncing Christianity every change I get. It gets the same charity I give to SJ. Which works out on the ground, as I go to music ensemble rehearsals in a church with a prominent Social Justice section on their bulletin board, containing their volunteer sign-ups for their soup kitchen, and fly rainbow flags and hang “Immigrants welcome” banners out front.)
@AG
I doubt that whatever behavior you define as ‘uniquely opposing it,’ actually requires SJ to be uniquely bad. Singling out something certainly doesn’t require you to think that it is uniquely bad. If Russian tanks were actually advancing on my country, I would oppose it more strongly than the purely abstract idea of having German tanks advance on my country, but that’s not because I consider the former to be uniquely bad compared to a German advance, but merely because it is currently salient and currently poses a far greater risk to various things I care about.
It’s also possible to simply have a specialization, a personal reason, a special interest, etc.
I think that SJ can only fail and is way more likely to fail in far worse ways.
No, I see the extremists winning time and again. Discriminating people purely because of their gender has suddenly become acceptable to the elite in my country. Another win for the extremists, while the left-wing moderates are not opposing it at all (or at least, not in any way visible to me).
No, it’s main failing is that it is built on a conspiracy theory that dehumanizes the other and makes people interpret the very same evidence differently based on the identities of those involved. Discrimination is at the core of the ideology, not merely something that emerges when people abuse the ideology for selfish ends.
Reality is asymmetric. Also, while the Bible has some rather noxious elements, very many Christians have adopted interpretations that neutralized these bits. For example, did you fear that Obama would abuse people because of him being a Christian?
Also, Christians have mostly adopted some very important ground rules, including the freedom of religion which can be found in many constitutions. In contrast, SJ appears extremely prone to want to destroy important foundations to our societies whenever they can, like the principle of Rule of Law, non-discrimination, freedom of speech, etc.
Historically, it is quite common for supporters of all kinds of extremely horrible ideologies to run soup kitchens and such. This is perfectly logical, because major evil is usual done when bad ideology cause people to think that they can do good, by doing things that actually have very bad consequences. This not only can coexist with doing actually good things, but is actually a good thing in the view of the proponents, because their bad ideology makes them see it as a good thing.
This is only confusing to outsiders with a bad model of human behavior, who notice other people doing both things that they themselves see a good, but also things they see as bad & don’t understand how this can coexist in the same person.
Oh sure, I’ll concede that reality is asymmetric, since Christianity’s influence, and the effect of abusive Christianity, is certainly far more widespread in the world right now than SJ. Ain’t that why they’re your fargroup instead of the outgroup?
Our perspectives simply are too different. I’ve seen far more cases of SJ being applied moderately, with concrete benefits (that would not have been realized otherwise), than I’ve seen of out of control abuse, which seems confined to areas which would have been high-drama, regardless of which ideology they picked to further their agenda. To me, the tradeoff is currently worth it, and serves as a counterexample to you claim that SJ is fundamentally about discrimination. One look at the actual founding texts of all of these common concepts would prove it.
No matter how much you try to tell me how other people have warped SJ ideals, I can still personally apply those same ideals in my personal life in a charitable way, and no amount of pooh-poohing can stop me.
As per my other comment, your interjections simply don’t seem to be offering anything to the conversation. What even is the consequence you are going for here? If the people in here explaining the motte versions of SJ ideals all concede your points (in fact, most of us have literally already acknowledged them), so what? What does that do for you or us? It’s a conclusion with no impact.
I can even concede that SJ has perhaps run its course, and should be replaced with something else with the decade. That doesn’t mean that all of its ideals should be consigned to the dustbin, just as previous ideologies that have since become warped and somewhat retired still have concepts that are part of the background noise now. Shouldn’t you be pushing for SJ to go the way of defanged Christianity, instead of being so insistent that it’s permanent poison, that you induce evaporative cooling instead?
You support the spirit of the men’s rights movement, despite all of the warping of its ideals by sociopaths (and I agree with you on a lot of those points). Excuse me for doing the same with SJ.
@AG
I think that you are intentionally addressing an argument I didn’t make, to demonstrate that you disagree with it, which I consider an unpleasant tactic.
There are 41 countries where Christianity is declining and 2 where it is rising, where the rest is stable or there is no data. In the data, you also see that young Christians are intensively religious than the older generations. Is your opposition to Christianity centered on Ghana or Chad? If not, the place where Christianity is increasing is no less your fargroup than it is mine.
Again, my argument is that Christianity has largely been reined in* and made peace with important limitations to its power, but that this is not true for SJ. This is not an argument about how much damage each ideology is already doing, which is another discussion (and you seem to be unwilling to credit Christianity for anything, so I doubt I can discuss this productively with you).
Following your logic, as the British empire had done more harm up to 1939 than the National-socialists, one should back the latter over the former, at that point in time.
* This is not the same as neutered.
You’d probably have seen the same thing if you were part of a church. You seem to be identifying the outgroup with the worst that happens in that group (probably fed substantially by the outrage-media), while attributing the best to your own group.
I did and that’s actually why I concluded that the discriminatory bias goes to the roots and is present almost everywhere within the movement. When reading papers and (parts of) books by the most famous authors, I found an overwhelming amount of implicit and explicit stereotyping of people with one demographic trait as evil and universally privileged & people with the opposite trait as innocent and universally unprivileged. There was almost exclusively only an interest in facts and perspectives that fit this black/white model, even to the point of suppressing unpleasant research outcomes.
I asked a bunch of SJ advocates for their best authors on gender relations and they came back time and again with ones that demonstrated immense bias, where the advocates appeared blind to it, which strengthened my impression that this bias was nigh-universal.
You’ve merely told me that your SJ friends run soup kitchens, which religious and otherwise non-SJ people do as well. So no need for the SJ ideology, to do that. What is the part that is actually sufficiently specific to SJ that makes you support it?
What parts should actually be preserved that are better than older forms of progressivism?
Your question doesn’t make sense to me. A ton of people did argue that Christianity is permanent poison, yet it still got defanged. Perhaps that was actually necessary, for the defanging to occur. Or not. It’s hardly exact science where criticizing an ideology like X while always result in Y, no matter the ideology, the people involved, the circumstances, etc.
Also, it’s hardly clear that an increase in extremism only happens through evaporative cooling.
There is actually remarkably little warping. Pretty much all of the (hit)pieces in the mainstream media about it are outgroup homogeneity fallacies that equate the movement with people or groups that have no connection to the men’s rights movement or even explicitly denounce it. I just looked at the current Reddit page for /r/MensRights and I would call none of the posts sociopathic.
Note that it is hard for non-marginalized people to support the movement because of how the movement clashes with both the mainstream and gender roles, so going public is both career-suicide for anyone who wants to work within the mainstream and lowers your social status.
I’ve seen this dynamic a few times and it confuses me. Why do people think they understand a culture/group/etc better than people involved in it, without having much firsthand (or even secondhand) knowledge or understanding of it?
It’s possible there’s a forest-for-the-trees thing. Taking a broader perspective on a group/culture/whatever may mean that you see things which are likely to go wrong even if they haven’t, yet.
Because people rarely have an accurate picture of their own ingroup and your emotional connection to this person warps your understanding. We’re getting more information but it’s very unlikely to be accurate enough to shift our priors.
For example, pretend we’re in the same Ingroup but you have a friend within HatedOutgroup. You’re trying to convince me that your friendship with member of HatedOutgroup proves HatedOutgroup isn’t that bad, plus your friend has told you lots of good things about HatedOutgroup. However:
#1 I can’t expect you to be objective about your friend.
#2 It’s highly unlikely that your friend is a representative sample of HatedOutgroup. In all likelihood he’s the friendliest/least hostile member of HatedOutgroup.
#3 Even if you’re being objective about your friend and your friend is completely honest, he probably doesn’t have an objective view of his Ingroup, so why would I take his views seriously.
I applaud the ability for personal relationships to “drill” between different groups and allow friendships to blossom; it’s seriously one of the best things. On it’s own, however, it does not change my mind.
You may be best friends with a tiger. I applaud this, but it does not make me want to become best friends with a tiger. I still expect to be eaten. Maybe if many people are friends with tigers I shall change my mind.
OK, I’ll bite.
1) There’s a lot of good in most religions. There’s also a lot of bad, and many more people lead with the bad in dealing with non-members of their religion, or people who don’t follow one or more of its important tenets, whether or not they are members of that religion.
So pretty much any of the good I recognize about Christianity, or for that matter Islam, or any of their various sects, probably fits this category, in spirit at least, even though I actually believe there’s probably more good than bad.
[Examples on request, if anyone cares.]
2) People who insist on blaming all the evil in the world on a particular privileged group generally produce more heat than light, and their statements are generally either unfalsifiable, or trivially falsified. But every once in a while they point out a real problem.
Thus, unconcious bias seems to be a thing, even among those who can reasonably disclaim conscious bias. You can see it in implicit association tests and similar; you can also see it in such things as evaluations of candidates based on resumes, where the same resume is given to differet evaluators with only the name changed.
But the expletive-deleted person who purported to teach us all about our own racism [guest appearance in a class in grad school], on these grounds, and was politely listened to as the easiest way to get him out of our hair – the best I can say about him was that he was probably a sincere idealist, rather than some kind of troll, or a well-paid consultant capitalizing on a poltical fad.
And it’s far too often communicated in a non-falsifiable way more consistent with preaching than any form of rationality.
I did a few of those when they were linked in an recent OT. To put it mildly I would still need to be conviced that you can’t get every result you want by just chaning the order in which you do the test tasks.
> You can see it in implicit association tests and similar
IIRC, they have terrible retest repeatability, and haven’t been shown to have any predictive ability in the past 25 years or so.
Seems to me that ideologies are generally good at noticing the motes in Outgroup’s eyes, but fail to notice the beams in Ingroup’s eyes.
So if your goal is a lesson in humility and learning about your mistakes (which is a good thing, when done voluntarily and in doses you can handle), turn off your defense mechanisms and start listening to your enemies. You may get some valuable material for later introspection. It’s only when they get to the usual “here is the list of people who need to be hurt in order to make the world a better place”, when you should turn on your critical thinking again, and politely disengage.
So, here come some of my outgroups:
Religion:
As an atheist, I am just going to say “factually false” and leave it at that. (I have already wasted too much time in the past researching and debating this topic. I have close friends who are religious, some of them take it pretty seriously; I enjoy debating with them. I have read the entire Bible and Bhagavad Gita; large parts of Quran, Tripitaka, and Dianetics. I am not the blank-slate atheist depicted in Chick tracts — “Have you ever heard about our Lord Jesus?” “No, who is that guy?” “I have an interesting book about him.” “Gimme… wow, that’s awesome! Where can I get baptized?” gets hit by a car five minutes after baptism, dies, and goes to heaven — so the chances you’d tell me something I haven’t already considered are very low.)
This said, there are strong arguments in favor of religion, as a way of organizing people. (Roughly, this vs this.) I’d even go further, and say that religion was probably indispensable in the evolution of humankind, and it is an open question whether we could survive without some kind of “faith” in the future. (As an atheist, I still say: let’s give it a try, carefully.) By “faith” in wider sense I mean also Stalinism and Maoism, which is suspiciously similar to the primitive chieftain/ancestor worship; even more obviously, the Kim dynasty, which is literally ascribed supernatural powers. In other words, removal of religion, at least sudden one, seems to create a memetic vacuum where a new, more primitive religion, will grow; and the nominal atheists often become a part of it. (A possible counter-example is Czech Republic, with low religiosity, where the vacuum wasn’t replaced by new faiths; at least not more than in their way more religious neighbor countries.)
But how else are you going to organize a large group of people into following the same rules? Especially when you need them to also follow the rules in private life? (Like washing hands.) And you need them to sometimes bear the cost of not defecting in Prisonners’ Dilemma against members of the same large group, whom they may never meet again. Also, considering that most of them have average or below-average IQ, so sophisticated arguments about enlightened self-interest are obviously not going to work. “The invisible sky Daddy is watching you and will unfailingly punish you” is masterful in its simplicity! Of course, you need to add a more sophisticated layer on top of that, to give some mental food to your smarter members. But the sophisticated layer alone is not going to stop the IQ 100 person from stealing, and it’s hard to build a civilization with 80% of thieves. Even worse, in primitive times, without religion you probably couldn’t make them use a bathroom and wash their hands.
Also, many smart people in the past were religious, and they sometimes thought about non-religious things, but expressed them in religious language. If the religious language repels you, you are depriving yourself of lots of useful knowledge. You need to extract the non-religious part from the religious package. (Why bother analysing knowledge that comes mixed with nonsense? Because it’s probably still better, faster, and cheaper, than reinventing every single wheel by yourself. You don’t have to stop there; you can take it as a first approximation, and improve it later. Wash hands first, develop germ theory later.)
Maybe even religiousness itself is indispensable for effectively functioning humans, as individuals. If the bicameral mind theory of Julian Jaynes has some truth in it, maybe it is not a coincidence that “atheism” and “akrasia” often come together (at least this is how it seems to me). Stop listening to your “godly” part, lose your “godly” superpowers, and get depressed, duh. (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “Because you told me to fuck off, that’s why. And the fact that I am technically a part of your brain doesn’t make me less real nor my absence less harmful.”)
Specifically, whenever the rationalists are having the N-th discussion about how to best organize the rationalist community, I want to scream: “Just look at how Catholic Church does it; that is a time-tested model!” You get the official priesthood, with powers to set doctrine and excommunicate non-believers. (De facto, MIRI and CFAR are like this. You just have to make the boundary clear, and perhaps unconnected to working for a specific non-profit.) For people who desire high-intensity involvement, make priest orders, like the Jesuits. (The Dragon Army. Yes, some of those groups will fail. You want to have your subgroups fail once in a while and get replaced by new experiments, instead of having the entire group as a single point of failure.) For people who desire low-intensity involvement, make sunday mass, where they can get important updates, and feel like members of the community. (And you better treat them as fully legitimate members, otherwise you get into a cult trap!) And yes, you could make mistakes, but if you can make mistakes and later learn from them, it still beats getting nothing done, which is the default. (It’s called “Less Wrong”, not “Perfectly Designed from Scratch”.) But to get this idea considered seriously, I would first need to completely strip it of all religious connotations. And then the obvious question would be: why this complicated model, instead of something else?
Outgroup #2: feminists, social justice warriors, all that “cluster in memespace”
The motte is often solid. Yes, some people have an unfair disadvantage. They may be treated worse by the society you live in, and you may fail to notice, simply because those things don’t happen to you (and even if they once in a while happen in front of your eyes, you may dismiss it as a fluke).
Then there are many specific examples, some of them are valid.
What I don’t accept is the black-and-white thinking (and no, intersectionality doesn’t make it less black-and-white, it just makes it black-and-white in multiple dimensions), treating people as merely replaceable members of their arbitrarily defined groups (Hitler? Einstein? two white cishet guys, the same difference) that sometimes don’t even make sense to a foreigner (why are half-black half-white people considered black? why is Spanish language considered a race? why is Islam considered a race?), falsifying history (no, Americans didn’t invent slavery), the idea that the privileged person is always wrong and the less privileged person is always right, et cetera, et cetera.
But sometimes you can find a legitimate problem behind all this bad logic and bad behavior.
Outgroup #3: do I have any more? I suppose Nazis or something
You could argue that these days physical fittness doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Also, that the society is fundamentally based on violence, which often gets abstracted away (this is called civilization), but sometimes shit hits the fan (e.g. you meet a thug in a dark alley), and then you’d appreciate being able to defend yourself and the ones you care about. (Roughly: this.) And you definitely won’t get there by stigmatizing masculinity, or believing hard enough that an average woman could kick average man’s ass in an unarmed combat, if she watches enough Hollywood movies depicting strong women violating the laws of physics.
Outgroup #4: collectivism in general
Just watch in real time how Western countries waste lives of over hundred thousand of their citizens, because of the infantile cry: “I am a free person living in a free country! You can’t make me wear the face mask! I am going to breathe my deadly viruses at other people, just to exercise my freedom!” combined with the selfish: “Make the economy slow down for a few months? I think it’s better to make the old people die; they don’t have much time left anyway. Let’s pretend it just happened and we didn’t have a choice.”
Then look at the Asian countries, where people are simply told “wear a face mask”, they do it, and the hundred thousand citizens don’t die.
Like, freedom is nice in general, but when it becomes “give me liberty and give other people death”, something is wrong.
Unable to write a substantial reply, but thanks for this post!
Right, this is not Effective Altruism or rational anything, this is pure begging.
If anyone has a few spare quid (or your local currency) and feels like throwing it into a collection bucket, may I ask that you consider a small donation to the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund.
And why do I care about this, out of all the good causes looking for support? Because back in 1847 when we were having our own little crisis, the Choctaw were generous to us (yes, I know the Navaho are not the Choctaw, that’s not the point. The point is that we are returning the favour).
Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid.
Does anyone know what the final story was on the 3 million masks that were allegedly seized in the Port of New York? On April 2, MA Gov Charlie Baker said that Massachusetts had, sometime previously, “ordered 3 million masks through BJs” (insert, um, joke, here) but those masks were seized in New York by an agency he refused to name.
Since then, I’ve seen a bunch of stories about states hiding their PPE for fear of seizure, but no story identifying who seized the Massachusetts PPE or on what grounds. (Or whether seizure is actually a thing). Does anybody know what happened to the Massachusetts BJ PPE?
All of the reasons for which we have HIPAA still apply. Names and addresses are irrelevant, since with even a small amount of this data you could easily match health information to a real person.
When I was working on a hospital data system I had to take the HIPAA training, and all it takes for something to qualify as PHI (Protected Health Information) was anything that by itself or in conjunction with any other information could be used to identify a specific individual. So even “person had a visit with Dr. So-and-so on May 7th.” You can identify a specific individual from that.
If you’re going to publish the full medical histories of people in public, you might as well include the names and addresses, because they’re trivial to add with even a tiny fraction of that information. So the negative outcomes you can expect are all the same negative outcomes you would expect from having everyone’s medical information published with their full names and addresses. So, for instance, your employer or a potential employer could look up, say, your visits to your psychiatrist.
Nothing about your hypothetical said it would be illegal to use the information for non-COVID-19 research purposes.
I don’t think it’s currently illegal to evaluate publicly available information for hiring decisions? Except for specific protected classes like race, sex, etc. It’s illegal to disclose protected health information. I don’t think it’s illegal to possess or use medical records someone else published.
Kind of like how it’s illegal for people with government clearances to distribute classified information, but it’s not illegal for me to look at classified information someone else illegally leaked.
It’s illegal in most cases to discriminate based on medical history. But effectively, it would be really hard to prevent. I would bet some enterprising tech company would come up with a black box algorithm with enough plausible deniability but the basic info intact.
I would expect the biggest impact on places that self insure. If you hire someone at $75k, but you’re on the hook for their medical expenses, you really want to avoid the expensive people to cover.
Googling around, as far as I can tell, the only protection against medical history discrimination is for disabilities, which are defined as a mental or physical impairment that significantly restricts a major life function. So they can’t discriminate against you because you’re in a wheelchair, but they probably could over, say, high blood pressure.
You could probably have somebody come up with a “general health score” that looks at things that are not disabilities and uses that in hiring decisions, because healthy employees are probably more productive than unhealthy ones.
This is all getting besides the point, though. Hiring was just one example. Basically all the reasons you don’t want your health information published publicly are the same reasons you don’t want your health information published publicly for COVID-19.
Apropos of this, do people here think employers shouldn’t be permitted to base their decisions on information about the health of employees or potential employees? In a lot of contexts it’s relevant information.
Conrad, the ADA has explicitly been interpreted by the government to protect survivors of cancer. I’m presuming it would cover most chronic conditions under the same reasoning.
DF, I think there are current carveouts for relevant information, so you can’t ask if someone has a bad back, but you can ask if they can lift 50 pounds. But for edge cases it seems like a morass.
If employers can select based on employee health, that seems like it would mess up employer based health care a lot. It also seems worthwhile to privilege information shared with doctors to encourage truthfulness. To me that would probably outweigh whatever efficiency gains from better matching employees based on medical conditions.
Oh no, the most broken system in history will become even more broken, possibly finally collapsing it and forcing something new to replace it! What a shame!
(I mean, ok, there’s a risk that what replaces it will be something like the NHS, which isn’t that much better and is an awfully sticky solution itself, on account of how readily the institution metastasises into a religion. But I don’t see how, practically, the US system could change without that risk.)
Wouldn’t waiving privacy regulations even for this ad hoc purpose set a hazardous precedent? C19 is pretty bad but I don’t know if it’s “risk permanently giving up a key part of all our privacy for the chance to mitigate the virus somewhat faster” bad.
Does it bother anyone else that throughout all of this, we’ve made no attempts to codify exactly what sort of criteria constitute an “emergency.” Because without that, I’m not exactly encouraged by this sort of thinking.
Like, far before COVID was ever a thing, we’ve heard some people use the term “national emergency” to apply to all sorts of things, to include terrorism, gun violence, climate change, and a drop in housing prices.
The notion that we shouldn’t fear things that will only be used in an emergency is bunk so long as an emergency is something that politicians can unilaterally declare whenever they feel like it.
Yeah, but normally people don’t go into quarantine for gun violence in America.
Other than for the DC Sniper.
It’s fine. I mean, yeah, the word emergency has devalued, but I don’t think there’s risk of being forced to stay home for every little thing we decide to call emergency
Don’t give them any ideas.
The exact specifics of what rights you would lose would probably vary based on the nature of the emergency, sure.
But the point is, once you establish the precedent of “the government can violate your rights so long as there’s an emergency,” and you don’t define what actually constitutes an emergency, you basically don’t have any rights anymore.
related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States
“Blocking Iranian Government Property” is apparently emergency since 1979.
Right. When the power to declare the emergency rests with the literal same person whose power is going to be vastly expanded when emergency is declared, you aren’t even pretending to have “checks and balances” anymore…
It might be worth looking into what happened in India during The Emergency of 1975-1977: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)
Indira Gandhi basically turned herself into a dictator for a few years, but then ended the emergency and was somehow surprised at her party being voted out of office for the first time since Independence (but they voted her back in a couple years later, and then her son, and then later her other son, and maybe even daughter-in-law).
@Scoop, I disagree with that because I can easily imagine some really legitimate emergencies which don’t allow time for the legislature to convene. Take, for example, a nuclear attack. Or, perhaps the apocalyptic version of the coronal mass ejection being discussed upthread.
I’d instead mandate that the legislature needs to assemble and endorse it within maybe two weeks – and if they don’t endorse it, the governor automatically gets at least impeached if not turned out of office or imprisoned.
I don’t think it’s clear. As Matt M said, there’s the problem of what counts as “normal times”. But I also think “things that are being tolerated right now” is a broad category encompassing more than shelter-in-place orders. Mandatory business shut-downs come to mind. And encroachments on all kinds of privacy.
For a real world example of the problem, consider Trump’s tariff policy. Tariffs are supposed to be set by the legislature. Congress passed legislation some time back giving the president authority to impose tariffs if national security was threatened (from memory — I don’t remember the exact wording). Trump has interpreted that as a blank check, permission to set tariffs any way he likes for any reason. And has been doing it, with no significant pushback from Congress.
I dunno, they continue to forbid carrying water bottles across airport security even one and a half decade after the reason for introducing that measure.
Airport security has definitely been sticky upwards. But it definitely also has felt over the past 5 or 10 years that there’s been a slow, but noticeable, downward trend in the amount of interventions they’re subjecting us to. Some of it is just streamlining the policies that were implemented for several years in a very clunky way, and some of it is introducing more ways for frequent travelers to spend an hour once to get through the easy line for the next several years. But they’ve also more frequently been allowing shoes to stay on and the like in a larger fraction of lines.
I encountered this interesting preprint, linked to by New Scientist, exploring moral framing of public health messages. If nothing else, it’s impressive when a paper can cite “Aristotle,350BC” as a source, although I doubt they read the original Greek.
https://psyarxiv.com/9yqs8
Basically, deontological arguments (“IT’S YOUR DUTY”) were more convincing than virtue based (“BE A GOOD PERSON”) and utilitarian (“THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES”) arguments. (ALL CAPS was used in the experiment, because we NEED TO REALLY EMPHASISE WHY YOU SHOULD WASH YOUR HANDS).
The phrasing of the non-deontological arguments seems very awkward to me, but what stood out to me was that this is apparently the expected conclusion. Ignore their sub-group analyses, there’s nothing there that withstands multiple-test correction.
I just find it interesting that this is basically a utilitarian argument for deontological ethics i.e. the most effective way to convince people to do the right thing is to just tell them they have a duty to do so. It may seem a little dishonest, but that’s not (inherently) a problem for a utilitarian!
On the other hand, maybe “BE A GOOD PERSON” and “THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES” just sound ridiculous and there are better ways to frame non-deontological arguments in this context.
I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts, maybe this is well known, I’m not too familiar with moral psychology.
But why rely on mass messaging? With modern technology, we can have targeted ad… propaganda!
Surely Facebook knows me well enough to appreciate that “IT’S YOUR DUTY” won’t work, and will, in fact, just make me want to defect even harder! Why can’t it automatically filter all my friend’s posts such that the ones most likely to work on me are signal boosted?
This will bias turnout against the party that represents people who tend to have bad relationships with their parents. (For these people you have to find the picture of someone their mother hates, which Facebook should also have.)
Studies of election turnout find the opposite – they claim that “be a voter” messages work better than “you should vote” messages:
https://sparq.stanford.edu/solutions/dont-just-vote-be-voter
I’m skeptical of all of the supposed effects here.
Identity/tribe signaling beats out virtue/duty/ consequences?
Maybe “virtue/duty” is signalling membership in a tribe that mostly exists in your imagination. The actual tribe beats it.
My dreams appear to be maliciously attempting to make it harder to distinguish between them and reality, and I’m starting to get a little worried.
For a long time, it was easy to tell if I was in a dream or not: I would pinch myself, and if I didn’t feel anything, I was in a dream. A few years ago, however, this technique stopped working: I started being able to pinch myself in dreams. Still, there were other ways to tell the difference: small inconsistencies, especially regarding time and space, that I could notice and use to deduce that I was in a dream. And even if I couldn’t figure it out at the time, in retrospect it was easy to tell the difference between dreams and real experiences, as real experiences were sharper and had more sensory data.
Recently, however, even this has gotten much harder to use. My dreams have gotten extremely vivid, to the point where I recently had one with no apparent differences between it and a real experience: all the senses were present much as they are at the moment I write this. I was only able to figure out that it was not a real memory because it didn’t connect to anything. I couldn’t identify what happened before or after, as I can with real memories, and so I was able to know that it had been a dream.
Last night, though, I had another extremely vivid dream. In the dream I was at my parents’ house, and the layout of their basement was different then it is in real life. I didn’t notice the inconsistency until I woke up, but when I considered the experience, I realized that the dream had created not only the immediate experience that the basement was difference, but had also manufactured a set of memories indicating that the basement had always been that way. The memories that had been created so that I would not question the false reality of the dream were carried through by my memory of the dream into my waking hours, so that I was momentarily caught off guard trying to evaluate which was real and fake.
I’m starting to get a little worried about this. I don’t want to wake up every morning with new memories indistinguishable from ones acquired from actual events, but subconscious appears determined to defeat every method I have of telling the difference. My hope is that it’s not actually possible to fully simulate an experience of reality while inside a dream, and that eventually my subconscious won’t be able to make things any more lifelike, but it’s still a little worrying.
Do you eat cheese shortly before bed? I’ve heard that can cause very vivid dreams.
FWIW, it isn’t just cheese. Tryptophan and B vitamins (maybe just one specific B vitamin?) can cause vivid dreams, along with several other things.
Have you considered the idea that you are still in a dream, and only dreaming that you are having vivid dreams? When you wake up you’ll realize there was nothing to worry about all along.
I’ve considered it but don’t currently believe it.
I had this happen a lot when I was a kid. The false memories usually go away pretty quickly, same as memory of dreams in general, as long as you don’t try to pin them down when you wake up.
Yeah, this seems like a pretty normal part of dreaming for a lot of people. It is disconcerting, but not something I would be terribly worried about.
Agreed that the best thing to do to get rid of the weird dream memories/feeling after you wake up is to not dwell on the dream.
Maybe I should stop doing this then.
I dreamed once I murdered someone and woke up absolutely convinced it was true and I had to turn myself in to the police. I was very distressed and it took me at least five minutes after waking up to talk myself out of it: “no, I haven’t killed anyone in real life!”
Dreams can be astonishingly realistic, whatever the lump of meat in our skull is doing, it’s a fantastic creation.
I had a dream that I volunteered at an assisted suicide “charity”. Woke up sobbing.
I have several times woken myself up because I was laughing in a dream and was actually laughing in reality (usually at “oh God, this joke is so bad”). I can never remember what the jokes were, only that they were terrible 🙂
I did wake myself up crying once, because it was a dream about a Mafia assassination? I have no idea why, I hadn’t been watching any movies or reading anything to plant the seeds of such a dream.
A few months back I had a dream where I was at clinicals and, for some reason, got a Suboxone film out of the hospital’s dispenser to give to a patient (RTs don’t handle narcotics, RT students certainly don’t, and hospitals don’t stock Suboxone; it’s an outrageously expensive opiate used to treat addicts). Anyway, for some reason dream-me thought it would be hysterical to take the Suboxone out of its package, stick it on my tongue, and go up to my classmate and say, “Look! Melts in your mouth, not in your hand!”
Classmate reacted with, “Aw, shit. Well, it probably doesn’t matter, that patient’s senile anyway, we’ll just have the RT give her some of the cheap Suboxone tablets and she’ll never know the difference.”
My first reaction, of course, was to think that that was ridiculous–we’d be screwing up the inventory for two controlled substances that way. Then it hit me that I’d just stolen and ingested a narcotic. I was going to get kicked out of the program! And go to jail! And be permanently barred from healthcare! I had no future!
And then I woke up, and took at least thirty seconds to deduce that I was not, in fact, a federal criminal.
Doing arithmetic helps me figure it out. When the numbers don’t make sense or aren’t consistent, is dream.
In general any type of focusing intensely on the minute details around me works, in dreams there is usually some inconsistency at some point
I just get frustrated that the details don’t work out. I feel actively upset.
My dreams appear to be maliciously attempting to make it harder to distinguish between them and reality
Try to stick one hand through the palm of the other. If it works you are dreaming. If it doesn’t, the dreaming is just too good. 🙂 More generally, IDK if you can do this, but try to provoke glitches in the Matrix.
If they’re that vivid, you might be approaching lucid dreaming. Indeed, some of the things you’ve written make me think you’re already basically there. There is a tactic for this that works, but it takes some practice.
This guide most closely links up with what I did to achieve it. The journal part is probably not necessary for you (as it wasn’t for me either) but I believe that the reality check part is where you should focus.
What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
Does the vividness persist ? That is do you recall a dream you had two nights ago with the same vividness of a conversation at work two days ago ?
100 Years of Solitude. I didn’t really get the ending but it was a great read. A really fast-paced book.
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts is the best parody of Latin America I have ever read, though it’s probably a lot funnier if you are already familiar with the history of the region, particularly during the Cold War.
In the thread on Innuendo Studios it was noted that the content creator claims as a liberal viewpoint that what’s natural isn’t necessarily good, while also claiming that all human evil is artificial and therefore implying that the authentic human nature is inherently good.
To which I say, true, and arguably a common liberal starting point. If you want to understand liberalism, you could do worse than starting with the following premise: The world is inherently evil and does harm to humans. Humans are inherently good, except when we act inhumanely and therefore help do the evil world’s work for it. To make the world better, we need to through social enforcement make humans behave more consistently human and also through technology prevent the world from doing harm to us.
There is an obvious intellectual problem with that, which is that humans are part of the world and emerged through natural processes – so where did that supposed goodness come from? Liberalism, to be elegantly consistent, needs a creator to imbue people with an inherent dignity and noble qualities which are untainted by the savagery of natural processes. Once you remove that, it opens up the whole thing to hard-to-rebut criticism.
But, having admitted that, I want to stress that I still believe in the premise of liberalism as I have stated it, just with some additional caveats and wrinkles. My less catchy and less elegant version of it is something like this: The world is inherently evil and does harm to humans. Humans, since we emerged from the world, have much that is evil in us and causes us to do the evil world’s work for it. However, through sheer cosmic accident, we happened to evolve in such a way to develop emergent properties that are inherently good and stand in contrast to the evils of the natural world. To make the world better, we need to both through social conditioning repress our animal instincts and elevate our civilised intellects and emotions, and also through technology prevent the world from doing harm to us.
This is a harder sell because it can’t be swallowed in a single gulp. It relies on a you-know-it-when-you-see-it quality for telling the difference between civilised human traits and uncivilised human traits, and therefore doesn’t have the sort of streamlined consistency that can let you claim it as an incontestible truth. But it’s still what I would consider the best path forward.
Is the world inherently evil, though? All evil is created when consciousness meets reality.
A dead planet containing only rocks certainly isn’t evil. A cat mutilating a mouse for fun might be evil depending on your worldview, but here consciousness has to enter the picture (why care about the mouse if it’s not conscious in any meaningful sense?). A human mutilating a human for fun is certainly evil.
I think intentional, human evil happens as a failure mode of consciousness and/or empathy. Broken people inflicting evil on other people and making them broken too, a memetic equivalent of a prion. Humans seem fundamentally good in the sense of “if they see you as a person they will cooperate with you and wish you the best”, it’s just that the definition of personhood varies widely. Also see: outgroups.
This seems like a circular definition. They will cooperate unless you’re one those they’re not cooperating with.
It seems pretty clear that historically lethal human-on-human violence has been quite normal. It seems questionable to claim our ancestors would largely be mentally “broken” or anything like that (compare that with saying that most animals living in nature are mentally broken by their circumstances).
It is not circular in that it makes a definite prediction – that it is pretty much impossible to defect against somebody without dehumanising them in one way or another. You can be a Nazi but you’ll still be civil towards your ethnic group or whoever you consider to be “like you”. This is really interesting with the psychological phenomenon of splitting (e.g. in BPD), where one can oscillate wildly between considering someone a person (and being really nice to them and working for their approval) and unperson (and having absolutely no empathy towards them and being ready to wreck their life).
Historically lethal human-on-human violence was far more often between groups than within them, which speaks in favor of this concept.
Well “dehumanizing them in one way or another” sounds pretty vague. And if the prediction is just “people typically have this frame of mind when they’re killing each other”, I don’t see how that would imply people are fundamentally good.
It seems you’re taking “cooperating” state as the default, and then say people are fundamentally good because they default to this state. But you could just as well say that a “dehumanizing” view is the natural way humans view those they are not cooperating with, and it’s normal for them to place some others in this category – “cooperating” is not the automatic default. Where’s the “fundamental goodness” then?
“Dehumanizing” doesn’t quite cover the ground.
If you dynamite the side of a mountain for a mine, you don’t hate the mountain. However, a great deal of the injury people cause each other includes the deliberate infliction of pain. I assume that infliction of pain is interesting because of assuming there’s consciousness to suffer it.
This sort of liberalism is logically required to be thoroughly anti-environmentalist, except insofar as wild plants and animals are useful to civilized humans.
That’s a good point, and I’m reminded of the fact that the environmentalist movement was originally a conservative movement. Liberals derided them as standing in the way of progress.
How did that change?
I’m not sure it did. Rather, the definition of “liberal” changed.
Today’s libertarians are generally opposed to environmental regulation, and would identify with the “classical liberal” tradition.
That’s an opposition to regulation, which is a human act, not to the environment. There is no reason why a libertarian can’t favor environmentalist goals achieved by libertarian means, and there is an organization of libertarians, PERC, that does.
I think common usage of the term “environmentalism” or “environmentalist” has to do with government regulation almost exclusively.
The outdoorsman who buys a parcel of land to privately and sustainably hunt and fish on, and stewards it well, is not thought of as an “environmentalist” by society, nor is he likely to self-identify with the term, even if his end goals (the preservation and enjoyment of the natural habitat) are largely the same.
I don’t think the typical environmental group would count PERC as an ally by any stretch of the imagination (but I am familiar with their work as a result of their close ties with libertarian political groups)
It would probably be useful here to distinguish between “environmentalism” and “[environmental] conservatism” (maybe better called “conservation”).
@acymetric
Did you mean to say conservationism?
@Nick
Yeah, that’s probably it. I knew the word I used didn’t feel right but I couldn’t figure out what word I was looking for. Figured people would get the gist.
Only if “liberalism” is your sole value.
Why start with “The world is inherently evil,” though? You seem to subscribe to a kind of secular Manichaeism.
EDIT: More generally, I tend to think that thinking in terms of good and evil tout court, rather than good for this or bad for that, is not very useful.
Let’s try you question again: If the world is often bad for us, and we arose from the world, why are we capable of being good for us? Where’s the problem?
The evil inherent in the world is the second law of thermodynamics.
Imagine I gave you a magical button, which if you press, it would randomly re-arrange the atoms in your body. Would you press it?
There is a non-zero chance that the re-arrangement would help you. There is a chance it would fix all your health problems, including the ones you don’t know about; it would double your IQ; and possibly give you some almost-superpowers.
But most likely, it would just kill you. There is no malevolent demon in the button, just statistics.
The configurations of atoms we call “good” are an astronomically tiny minority in the set of all possible configurations. But they exist. And we happen to be capable of good.
Let’s ignore the “configurations of atoms” that correspond to dead stuff. Among living animals, only a few species are capable of making large groups without killing each other. Ants, wasps, bees, naked mole-rats, they achieve it by having huge families, where the siblings don’t kill each other; but they still kill anyone who is not a close relative.
Only humans are capable of not killing a non-relative neighbor. (Ignoring the rare cases when an animal mistakes another animal for a relative.) If you consider this ability an important component of “good”, then humans are the only species capable of being good.
And even humans often have wars and otherwise kill each other.
So, the possibility of good is there, but it’s very rare.
Just ditch the evil world good human stuff and you are good.
“We live and developed in an uncaring world that is not aligned with our interests. Humans, shaped by evolution, developed both, egoistic and altruistic drives and desires. To make the world better, we need to through social enforcement make humans behave more consistently prosocial and also through technology shape the world to our needs and wishes.”
Problem gone. Also, if there is a good creator why is the world evil? Oh, yeah I remember. Original sin. No intellectual problem here people, nothing to see, move on…
There’s a saying “What’s natural can’t be wrong” which in one sense is true: whatever is in nature simply exists, it is neither good nor bad.
It’s false when we come to standards of human behaviour, though: male lions may kill the cubs of lionesses that were not fathered by them in order to initiate mating, but we would certainly not take that as an excuse for a stepfather killing the children of his wife by a previous marriage.
If there is no such thing as “human nature”, then you cannot appeal to it as a standard. So you can’t appeal to “the brotherhood of man”, a desire to do good, an exhortation to be better than our instinctual animal selves.
And of course, if there is no such thing as an innate human nature, then there is no wrong done by things like conversion therapy – the human Ding an sich is infinitely malleable and can be shaped to fit whatever is the most favourable response to current conditions. If it’s true that LGBT persons are at higher risk of suicide and so forth, then why not re-shape the orientation to the more stable heterosexual model, rather than re-forming society? You’re not trespassing against any innate, pre-existing nature.
I hope you can see from the above I don’t accept the premise that “there is no such thing as human nature”. There is, and an awful lot of it is formed along the same lines as animal nature, under the pressure of environmental forces operating over large time scales.
I think the human nature argument is frought because it’s not explicitly stated what is meant by human nature. “Human nature” almost sort of reminds me of the efficient market hypothesis, where you have an extreme and implausible version, a soft trivially true version, and then spectrum that falls between the two.
If I read into the way the term gets used, belief in “human nature” is that, for a particular context, the way that a person or persons behave with each other constitutes the way that they must, necessarily, behave. No modification is possible. It’s poor wording to say that human nature is basically fake but that humans are naturally “(Insert how i would like people to behave)” — “Human Nature” here means the present, undesirable behaviors, not the “True self”.
People who think in evo-psych terms tend to confuse people who think like this and also are confused by people who think like this. Insofar as human nature is ‘real’ it becomes like a multivariate function of different external inputs, that allows for malice and altruism because both of these things were evolutionary advantageous but in different contexts.
The ‘output’ is a function of short term environmental inputs but the function itself is not a function of short term environmental inputs, it’s a function of your DNA structure which is a function of prior selection pressures and random mutation. At least until gene therapy becomes more advanced.
If your goal is to reduce drug addiction in a society, you may or may not have an easier time of it than someone whose goal it is to make homosexual men find women attractive or make boys enjoy playing with dolls and not action figures.
Tentative: Human nature isn’t a thing, it’s a heuristic about how much you can change people.
The desire to change people seems to be a rather solid part of human nature.
@Baeraad
It’s a lot simpler if you just accept that humans weren’t designed to be good or evil, but merely adopted traits that let them survive & procreate. That it is often beneficial to cooperate to achieve these goals is merely a happy circumstance.
Nature is similar. A cleaner fish is not good, while a predatory fish is evil. Rather, the cleaner fish found a niche where it can survive in symbioses with another species, while the predator found another niche. Neither type of fish studied philosophers and chose their method on moral grounds.
Humans have this
defectfeature where we can reason about our actions and develop a morality, yet we also have ingrained strategies and needs that are hard to square with most and perhaps all, moral frameworks.In the protestant moral framework, this incompatibility is interpreted as people being drawn to evil by our base nature, while our better nature seeks good.
The kind of interpretations where humans are inherently good suffers from the problem of explaining the origin of human evil (and those where humans are seen as inherently evil suffer from the problem of explaining human good).
Is your claim that nature threatens human survival and we can only survive by committing lesser evils, so that we are essentially coerced into evil by the circumstances?
I agree that it’s a common liberal viewpoint that what’s natural isn’t necessarily good, but I don’t see why liberalism needs to take a position on whether human nature is inherently good, or whether evil is artificial.
As someone who probably gets categorized as liberal, this surprised me. It had never occured to me to see this as a general attribute of liberals (or any other flavor of leftist).
It still doesn’t ring true to me.
I might support the idea that liberals see all people as having worth, being deserving of dignity, compassion etc. But their actions can be good, bad, or indifferent, even before we get into problems like defining good and evil.
I dunno, it seems to me that the concepts of good and evil exist to categorize human behavior, and as such human behavior will tautologically exist on and thereby define the whole spectrum of good to evil. Projecting those concepts onto the natural world is a category error.
Liberators by Robert Harvey. Goes in depth over the leaders and independence movements for each region of South America. Great breakdown on Bolivar and his generals and an introduction to a lot of other figures, like San Martin in Argentina.
I suspect that we don’t have a lot of this data because the government isn’t that interested in having it promoted. They must have access to enough data to provide more information than they are currently doing, and, if not, other countries with more centralized systems do and can share it. I doubt privacy laws are the major barrier here. It seems a lot of publicly available data, especially from countries hit earlier, initially fails to get traction because it is politically inconvenient in some sense.
I don’t mean this in a partisan sense. I think this is because the leaders want to maintain optimism, and also that the information makes things complicated from a policy perspective in a lot of different ways. Concerns about disproportionate impacts and all the issues that flow from that seem to play a major role. Not just serious concerns about stigma, but the fact that the strict policies many leaders want to enforce are simply not going to retain support if a lot of people feel their risk is low. I suspect that what Skeptic says is true: “the true mortality rate for those under 50 with no serious health problems will be so low it will cause a backlash to effective lockdown policies.”
That doesn’t mean there won’t be serious and unpredictable risks evident for younger people. Just that they’ll seem low enough that many will decide to take the risk. And it forces tough questions for the leaders. It raises all sort of questions about tradeoffs they don’t want to have. It also raises questions about the efficacy of certain treatments and all sorts of other factors they seem to want to minimize. Lots of controversy arises over trying certain drugs, for example. Or if smoking has an impact. Or what the effects of ventilators are. And if it shows changes were made because the wrong choices were made at first, this causes more controversy and maybe liability. Why didn’t one hospital try this intervention if another one did, etc. If we realize living in a multi-generational home is a huge risk factor, what do we do about it? What about if first responders or healthcare workers seem to be the main vectors, and people react to them with fear?
Blood Meridian?
I’ve only read All the Pretty Horses of the trilogy, but I’d highly recommend it. Much less of a slog than The Road. I haven’t read the latter in years but I remember it having a distinctly bleak style (apart from the bleaker subject matter) that the former didn’t.
I gave up on McCarthy after reading The Road as well until my sister convinced me to give him another shot.
I really like the Border Trilogy. The style is still pretty spare, but not nearly as hard to follow as The Road and there are actually traces of humor showing up by the last book.
Blood Meridian is kind of nuts. I absolutely recommend reading it, but I can’t really articulate exactly why.
It’s not part of the border trilogy, though (although it takes place on both sides of the border). That’s All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. (Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.)
Blood Meridian is very dreamlike, but the dream is a nightmare.
No Country For Old Men is also significantly better than The Road, IMO.
No Country is a great ride, well-paced, and filled with interesting philosophical thoughts in the midst of the carnage.
I like Blood Meridian‘s wild literary flights of fancy, it’s dark brooding nietszcheanism, and it’s bizarre scenes of the supernatural, but you have to like “literary fiction” to like it, I think.
Why did the centers of human civilization swing from temperate river deltas to much colder weather locales? The original cradles of civilization as I understand them were in what is now Iraq, the Indus Valley, the North China Plain, Peru & Central America (using primarily modern lingo/geographic descriptions here). Later this broadened a bit to include Egypt, Greece and Rome. All temperate/pretty warm climates, mostly river deltas- all of this makes intuitive sense, easy places to live & cultivate crops at that level of technology.
So- and maybe this is too broad a question- but why did this trend break? Europe’s dominance over the rest of the world for a few centuries has been pretty broadly discussed in many venues, but between northern Europe & the US we generally see the rise of colder climate nations. (Yes yes I know the US is a big place, but the original core of the US was New England & later New York to some degree- not exactly the Caribbean). Given that agriculture was probably more challenging/less rewarding there- is there any kind of overarching reason why those countries started to dominate, and also why we started to see less dominant civilizations out of the middle longitudes? I can make up a handwavey answer that imminent winters required a greater degree of organization to harvest crops & wildlife in the good months which spurred more structure overall, but I don’t find this particularly convincing. Thoughts?
Perhaps the answer is simply improving technology. With the technology available to the first builders of cities, the only places you could reasonably build big cities were places that were extra-friendly to low-tech farming and such. Build a big city somewhere that’s marginal for getting a good harvest every year and keeping everyone alive through the winter, and it tends to die off. Over time, you invent better technology–better tools, clothing, weapons. You also have had a long time to selectively breed better crops and animals. Then the set of places you *can* maintain a big civilization gets much larger.
There were a range of inventions who adaptation was slow and unmarked but together dramatically expanded the importance of northern Europe starting in very roughly 870 AD and ending in 1300. These included heavy iron plows, horse collars, horse shoes, and sticking a horse stomach when it gets sick. There was also considerable land improvement and removal of hard wood forests. This slow transformation meant that the heavier northern European soil was now better for agriculture than the lighter southern European soil. This in tern lead to a shift in the populational center of gravity within in Europe.
What you mean by that? Sounds interesting and my quick googling failed to find anything.
Wrong food > too much flatulence for natural way out > need for artificial relief?
ETA
Wasn’t it James Herriot who, as a young veterinarian, applied a trocar to a cow, then put a lighter to the exhaust? Resulting in a rare sight of a bovine flamethrower crashing through several fences?
Basically this, more basic tools
Two dates that sound suspiciously similar to those of the Medieval Warm Period…
Indeed. Basically, heavy soil is very hard to grow food on, but very productive with good technology. This is also the reason why early agriculture in the low countries was on loess (which is very productive with minimal preparation, although it is very prone to erosion).
The Romans considered what are now the premium parts of The Netherlands to be a horrible swamp, unfit for humans, which it pretty much was. Many dikes, canals, polders, etc later, it’s so good as farmland that it is too expensive to farm on.
Where did you get these facts?
Heavy moldboard plow, horse collar. The ox-drawn scratch plow was a world-changing improvement over the digging stick for agriculture in subtropical flood plain soils: evidence for plowing show up in the Indus Valley and Egypt at about the time that they invented writing to manage large populations, the beginning of civilization. Evidence from the second quarter of the 4th millennium BC has also been found around Prague, but what’s now Czechia did not develop dense civilization until the Middle Ages. Just before the Bronze Age Collapse, archaeological consensus is that population density in countries like Germany was less than 5 people/square km. 1100+ years later, the population of Roman Gaul is estimated to have been 4.9-5.8 million in an area larger than the French Fifth Republic’s 640,679 km^2, while Egypt had 7.5 million. By the High Middle Ages, agricultural technology for heavy soil (heavy plow, horse collar) had improved to the point that modern French land supported 18+ million people before the Black Plague.
In the Middle Ages, Indian states and Muslim Egypt were still great powers, just not as overwhelmingly as when northerly latitudes supported far fewer people. In the Middle East, salinization and desertification from deforesting the forests that stood where rain-fed agriculture was marginally productive caused climate degradation as far back as 2000 BC. It was a slow inevitability that a city sitting on the Babylon/Seleucia-on-Tigris/Baghdad trade routes would not be able to take enough surplus food to be a world-capital anymore. Babylon itself had even replaced sites further south, where salinization was worse like Ur, Isin, and Larsa circa 1800 BC.
Beijing is as cold as Berlin is in the winter, though much warmer in the summer. China itself shows the opposite pattern: the center of population and economic activity shifted south over time, rather than into Siberia.
Middle East is a desert. When it was the first to develop farming, it could compete with the rest of the world demographically, but when Europeans developed more advanced farming during the middle ages, the demographic center of gravity shifted Northwards. As for the US and the Caribbean, the US was more hospitable to White settlement. Barbados, for instance, received as many English immigrants as did Virginia and New England, but eventually most decamped for North America and were replaced by imported slaves.
Industrialization. I think it’s pretty hard to declare Western dominance before the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and it’s pretty clearly in place by the First Opium War around 1840. And that’s…basically the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution.
Still, the question arises, why did industrialization take hold in the cooler temperate regions before the subtropical regions that had been economically dominant up until that point?
The agricultural revolution meant that there was enough surplus food to feed factory workers.
Or possibly that the fall in food prices drove farmers off the land and into the cities, where the factories were.
Because of what people were saying elsewhere in the thread about heavy soil and maybe turnips.
EDIT: maybe tropical diseases, too.
Also, big early drivers for industrialization were pumping water out of coal mines, etc, and textile production. So possibly a stronger motive in cold, wet climates.
The point about farmers being able to leave the fields makes sense for why cooler climates would still be compatible with the economies of global trade and industrialization than with the agricultural economy, but it doesn’t make clear why they would actually win out, rather than just catching up.
And as for tropical diseases, it sounds like malaria was endemic as far north as England during most of the early modern period, and its characterization as a tropical disease for some reason only applies to the periods before and after 1600-1900 or so. (I don’t understand why this would be.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7898959
I’ve heard the opposite story — that high food prices (particularly in England, possibly due to the Corn Laws) pushed up the price of labour, thus encouraging the substitution of capital, hence Industrial Revolution. (Though obviously such a monocausal explanation isn’t the whole story.)
Easy access to resources and demand for industrial products what resulted in large scale mining?
What resulted in actually productive use of steam power (pumping water out of coal mines)?
I don’t think it was overly determined, and certainly not clear that it’s determined primarily through climate. Industrialization had to arise somewhere first, that somewhere happened to be northwestern europe. Even western countries that were not early adopters benefitted from the spread of technology and overflow of wealth.
The second place prize for industrialization probably goes to mughal bengal, which has a distinctly different climate than england.
Yeah, this. We don’t have all these cold climate cultures developing industrialization, we have one culture developing it and all the neighbors copying it. Britain developed it, everyone else just copied it. In 1800, why would we predict German or French industrialization if the British hadn’t begun it?
Japan, for example, is at a similar cold latitude to Europe, but their industrialization is blatantly caused by copying other nations. Why would we use climate to predict industrialization when proximity to the original British innovation is such a stronger predictor.
And if it’s not everyone in a region independently industrializing but instead copying one outlier, why would we look for a general climate explanation?
Yeah, it could well be that the best explanation is that there was a one-time event, that could have happened anywhere, and it just by chance happened in northwestern Europe. But this doesn’t quite seem totally satisfying though, given that Amsterdam and London were already the centers of global commerce by 1650 or 1700, even before industrialization began in the area around Manchester.
But it still may just be chance rather than an explainable fact.
Being center of a global commerce seems likely to increase chance of starting process known now as an industrial revolution.
Much better than say grain oriented, noble-controlled economy based on serfdom, with heavy restrictions on trade and industry.
@keaswaran
I’m a little torn on this. On the one hand the Dutch, and later the British, did build something fairly unique. They were the first people to establish truly global trade, where Chinese/Japanese goods could regularly and reliably reach Columbia, with all trade centered in one area. That’s unique and very valuable.
At the same time, I can’t imagine that the trade was of significant volume or value to impact the bottom line of the Ottoman Sultans or the Qing Emperors. The Portuguese and Dutch were banished to small islands in the Far East, although they did have significant holdings in Southeast Asia, and I can’t think of any evidence in those records of this trade being that important.
So while it’s new and unique, I doubt these early trade networks had enough volume to really effect the major powers.
Now it’s possible they were a fertile ground for industrialization, which does just kind of shift the question up to “why did the Dutch/British establish global trade, which lead directly to industrialization”, but this actually does bring back the latitude question, since the Portuguese also had significant global trade, all the way out to Macau, but never heavily industrialized and are in a significantly hotter climate. I just don’t know enough Portuguese/Dutch history to comment.
I think it’s not a direct relationship between industrialism and international trade but them both being connected to a well-developed market economy.
(not sure of the exact causality)
The agricultural revolution turned susistence farmers into cash crop ones and the industrial revolution turned subsistance farmers into factory workers.
The idea of capital as a driver of innovation is also important. You need a system where investing in more advanced machinery is a good way to make money. In systems where the way to get rich is to acquire land or slaves, you don’t get industrialisation. Complex systems of fealty and vassalage also get in the way.
@Lambert
Re capital: yes, crucial for innovation, and when you look at the role of capital investment the question arises how is the capital accumulated. How is it deployed? War is one answer. England was able to raise huge sums in for the 18th century wars with France and outspend France, despite being much smaller at that time. The roots of that success were in the short 17th century republic period where England came to be perceived as a safe place for capital from all over Europe.
Then there is the issue of deploying capital vs labor. I used to think the more capital applied to early industrialization the better. But the experience of other countries trying to industrialize shows that isn’t always true. It partly depends on wage levels. Japan was far more successful than some countries because they adapted industrial methods to their own circumstances (cheap, abundant labor in the 19th century) instead of trying to directly copy English and American methods (as happened in parts of Latin America). Robert Allen’s Global Economic History goes into this.
Try Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey. The short version: it began with a cultural innovation that valued commerce and commercial innovation. Hence it is not random that the industrial revolution began in England.
@WoollyAI
Small scale trade can be very valuable when trading capital goods, goods that are useful in relatively small quantities and/or when it also means sharing technology.
I think I should also probably be a bit more careful about what it means that “Amsterdam and London were centers of global trade”. There were centers of global trade before that as well. I recall seeing somewhere that in 1600, Tenochtitlan/Ciudad de Mexico may actually have been populated in nearly equal parts by people from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, due to it being the hub connecting the Spanish Manila Galleon trans-Pacific trade to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
I think at least some of what the Netherlands did is that when they revolted from the Portuguese/Spanish empire (at that point in a personal union with both empires run by the same Philip), the Dutch sailors who had worked on Portuguese colonial endeavors then systematically went through and conquered the Portuguese holdings around the Indian Ocean and Pacific. (I don’t understand why they didn’t do it to the Spanish holdings, but perhaps it matters that Portugal had a string of small forts among the empires of the East, while Spain had vast expanses of colonial land imposed on the decimated American populations.)
But Amsterdam and London ended up with stock markets, while the Portuguese and Spanish empires didn’t.
This piece by brad delong on china is interesting. Specifically, the east-west trade was mostly the west shipping gold and silver to the east in return for manufactured goods. So trade probably helped with industrialization more because it moved technology from china then because it gave an incentive to manufacture more goods, as we think of for industrializing economies today.
This doesn’t much affect your broader point, but I think you are misusing the word temperate. Climate classification systems vary, but as far as I know all of them count most of northern Europe as temperate (including the southern halves of Sweden and Norway, and all of Britain) whereas many would classify places like Egypt, Iraq and the Indus Valley as sub-tropical, and some even have a separate categorization (Mediterranean) for the likes of Greece and Rome. Peru and most of Central America, meanwhile, are tropical under every definition.
In less technical but more archaic usage, temperate = moderate/restrained, not hot.
I think it’s probably more historically contingent and determined by multiple structural factors, but pithy guess would be the northwestern europe is warm enough for wheat, but not warm enough for malaria.
Malaria was endemic in much of England for several centuries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7898959
Existed, but was probably less of an issue (I was going for pithy).
“this study also suggests that the species of malaria endemic in England were vivax and malariae and not the tropical strains of P. falciparum”
Not to contradict points made above about agricultural improvements, I’d say defensibility. All the way from Teutoburg to the Continuation War, forest = good defense. If you live on a plain and cultivate too many tasty crops, somebody at some point will hop on their chariots/horses/tanks and pay you a visit.
The core of US is in the North because at that point the Native Americans already had horses and the horses were spreading from the South northward, therefore North was the safest place to have a colony.
I’d say Europe is more tilted to the West than to the North as West is safer from cavalry. The weakness of the South is rather a series of accidents: Spain buried itself under a mountain of debt (Philip II hadn’t grasped the damage that 10 defaults in a row can do to a country), Greece had suffered too much under Turkey, and Italy was actually pretty strong until it accumulated a lot of debt recently.
Thanks for asking the question. It’s a fascinating topic with a really broad scope.
The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions were the end results of complex processes. There was a lot of technological progress towards improved agricultural productivity and a commercial society in many societies, but improvements were frequently reversed. They were reversed so often that I refer to the Industrial Revolution as a miracle. (Not a literal divine hand type of miracle)
My thoughts on the topic have been changing and, I hope, improving as I’ve been writing a podcast on the subject since January. Hanging with History is my attempt to answer the question. There are some good answers upthread. I’d add that there are cultural factors that reinforce or at least do not block technological progress.
I would recommend Jonathon Scott’s, How the Old World Ended for an examination of how the Dutch led the way with improved agricultural productivity and technological development. The Dutch example of a rich commercial republic was emulated by the English who had a number of unique circumstances that allowed them to take technology further. And their society was flexible enough to avoid many of the traps that other societies fell into.
There are a number of really weird combinations of events that England had the benefit of. One was the way Parliament developed during the 14th century, a very odd story which is told in episode 10 (not yet released). Others: the way Magna Carta became popularly understood, the way society and the economy responded to the Black Death, the way the Knights Templar assets were confiscated. Legal innovations coming out of the Danelaw is another. Were these all necessary preconditions for the Industrial Revolution? Was Wycliff and the printing press necessary? It’s hard to know exactly, but we can enjoy the process of thinking about it.
Why did the original civilizations fail to fully achieve? Partly, they had no examples to aim at. The English had that Dutch example of a rich commercial society practicing the Reformed religion right over there. I’m not sure it’s right to make too much of that though. Some historians and anthropologists argue that cultural evolution usually impedes technological innovation and adoption rather than encouraging it. Emmanuel Todd’s Lineages of Modernity goes into the question in some depth. It’s a more difficult read, at least it was for me.
Anyway, fascinating topic. I’m still trying to figure it out.
For the Catholics, people interested in battles, and metal fans–it’s May 6. It’s the anniversary of the last stand of the Swiss Guard.
I like Sabaton, this one is really promising, I want to like also this song.
But WTF is “reincarnation” doing there? It is a complete theme mismatch, that is like mentioning planes and trucks in song about Battle of Marathon.
Yeah, “reincarnation” is bad, I think it’s only there for the rhyme. If they changed it to “the Incarnation” it’d fit better, but that might be awkward to work in.
Otherwise, crikey that’s a banger and no mistake! I might even buy this album (based on the other banger about the Winged Hussars) and I’ve never bought metal music in my life before 🙂
My current Sabaton hit is Great War (link to an official lyrics video).
I also really liked and recommend The Price of a Mile, No Bullets Fly, Ruina Imperii, Wolfpack, Cliffs of Gallipoli, Winged Hussars, Aces in Exile, Uprising, Primo Victoria, The Attack of the Dead Men, and my initial contact with this band – 40:1.
(if someone can be convinced to try them by adding direct links – let me know)
Does anyone know of something reasonably rigorous about people being semi-rational? Not the ideal rational voter or investor, but not completely random or self-destructive either.
Do you have a more concrete example of what you’re looking for? On the face of it, it sounds like behavioral economics is what you’re looking for, whether it’s the underlying pattern in the irrationality or the incentives behind supposed “irrationality.”
I thought of the same, however, many claims of irrationality depend on assumptions that nay not be true. For example, the sunk cost fallacy is not necessarily a fallacy if the environment can reasonable be seen as being uncertain/volatile.
The keyword here is “bounded rationality”, and you find lots of discussion of it in the field that eventually came to be known as behavioral economics, but also in psychology, computer science, philosophy, and other fields. Herb Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky developed some of the important theories early on.
I’m not convinced that the concept as described makes sense, and I”m more interested in more contemporary theories that look at optimal rationality for agents under specific constraints, rather than bounded rationality without a theory of the constraints. The paper I’ve been recommending for people (with a strong mathematical background) is Andrea Wilson, Bounded Memory and Biases in Information Processing, Econometrica, Vol 82 No. 6 (2014), pp 2257-2294
You might want to look at Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel prize in economics for his work.
So, it sounds like Trump is warming up the (trade) war drums on China again. This is, I think, also connected to the assertion on the part of the Trump White House that China is directly responsible for COVID-19.
On the one hand, it makes sense as an election year move – Trump’s stance on China is probably his single most broadly politically popular position. Trying to paint Biden as soft on China and himself as being hard on them is probably his best bet.
On the other hand, if Trump reimposes tariffs, the recession precipitated by COVID-19 will get substantially worse. The last thing you want to do in a slump like this is raise taxes, and tariffs are particularly regressive taxes. A V-shaped recovery was already unlikely, but a resumption of tariffs will make it impossible. Trump might not reimpose tariffs, but if he doesn’t, I don’t think he’s going to get much political benefit from playing at being a China hawk.
On the gripping hand, Trump and Pompeo do seem to genuinely kind of believe that China is directly responsible for COVID-19. I’ve perceived this stance as getting increasingly popular on the right recently, and the largest consumers of right-wing media I know are signal-boosting it more and more. We’ve already seen the feedback loop between rightwing media and the Trump White House; this could potentially turn into something more than just a trade spat.
Thoughts?
I’ve noticed this as well, and I have been meaning to do a deep dive into the claims to see how much merit they have. Since I haven’t looked into it hard, here are the scraps I’ve been hearing in the rightosphere.
-Ted Cruz says that offical documents from some program (this is all off my memory) where we fund medical research in collaboration with some global program shows that the US did provide grant money to China that was for the express purpose of studying wild coronaviruses and the possibility of them transfering to humans from bats, and that the viral research lab in Wuhan was performing that research.
-The Washington Examiner says that a “senior intelligence official” told them that a majority of the 17 US intelligence agencies believe that the coronavirus originated with an accidental lab escape from Wuhan.
-I heard a claim on a Daily Wire podcast that somebody somewhere (again, off memory here) has claimed that the wet markets in Wuhan where the virus started don’t even have bats for sale.
-A lot of coverage of Pompeo saying that “there’s enormous evidence” that the Wuhan research lab was the source of the virus.
The general thrust I’ve been getting is the idea that the virus was a wild strain being researched at the Wuhan Virology Institute that accidentally escaped, not an engineered virus or one that was intentionally released. I’m interested to see if this goes anywhere, or if all these claims will disappear with time. In any case, anti CPC rhetoric is ramping up in the right-wing media I’ve been consuming.
Yes, I haven’t paid close enough attention to these claims to form my own opinion, but I have seen several mainstream outlets “fact checking” Trump by explaining that the virus appears to be naturally evolved and not genetically engineered. I don’t think the claim is that the Chinese government intentionally created COVID-19, just that it escaped from one of their labs.
If I claim a tiger escaped from a zoo, chiding me because tigers are natural animals and not genetically engineered does not debunk my claim.
Of course, this whole theory conveniently ignores the role of the pangolin as the intermediate species that hosted the virus for several years between bats and humans.
https://www.sciencealert.com/more-evidence-suggests-pangolins-may-have-passed-coronavirus-from-bats-to-humans
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2302/
This seems to be the most common iteration, although I’ve seen stronger versions that suggest COVID-19 is the product of actual engineering.
The problem is, I don’t see any way to falsify these claims – they’re too vague, linked together by a web of assertions without actual evidence.
Whatever happens, Trump finds someone else to blame. This was an established pattern long before Covid-19. His opinions in this case cut no ice with me.
I find slightly more persuasive the interview with China’s “bat lady” (a scientist working at/leading the lab in question). She recounts being terrified in the early days that her lab was responsible, and relieved when detailed virus sequencing convinced her that the human cases could not have come direct from any bat virus in their collection.
At this point, we’ll never know. Lots of people are invested in “proving” whatever it is they want to believe, and have the power to both create excellent forgeries and suppress inconvenient facts.
Lab accidents can happen, and if that’s what happened here (probably not, as far as I can tell, but I’m no expert), then that means the lab needs to tighten its procedures and maybe someone ends up going to jail or getting fired for cutting corners.
But scapegoating exercises also can happen, and in fact are common as dirt in politics. My default (admittedly based on my own biases) is to put about ten times as much trust in claims from the bat lady (the Chinese woman who is a genuine world expert on bat coronaviruses) as I do in claims from any politician. And it would monumentally suck if we somehow ended up sacrificing the world’s expert on bat coronaviruses as a scapegoat to cover the failings of politicians and bureaucrats, either in the US or in China.
They also told us to stop feeding antibiotics to farm animals. Did we listen?
You seem to be willing to accept a lot of moral luck here. The swine flu pandemic of 2009 is said to have most likely emerged in Kansas, and we just got lucky that it was nowhere near as dangerous as covid 19. If you’re just counting dangerous novel disease that emerged from zoonotic sources, China has SARS and covid 19, Egypt has MERS, United States has H5N1, Indonesia has H1N1, and something like Congo has HIV (and maybe Ebola?). On a per capita basis, that leaves a ranking of Congo worse than Egypt worse than Indonesia worse than United States worse than China.
The only reason to scale this responsibility in proportion to the danger of the viruses is if something about human practices in the different places makes it more likely that dangerous or benign viruses will emerge in one place than another.
Agreed. And don’t forget jailing doctors in December who were trying to get the word out about a new disease. The other failings of the Chinese government could conceivably be corrected, but freedom of speech is an existential threat to the CCP and can never be adopted.
I think they see it as a way to distract from the blame placed on the Trump administration for all of this, while they figure out what to do next. (I’m sure both assign a lot of responsibility to China, but I doubt they see things in such simple terms, and assigning blame doesn’t suggest much of a course of action.) I think both sides are stuck in pre-COVID thought patterns, trying to use old plays that will no longer work, and whoever can break out of this first has the best chance of victory. The timing is really rough, though. There is so little time to change course before the election, or for the public to come to terms with the new reality. The illusion of normalcy can be somewhat sustained until around that time, I suspect.
What China did doesn’t absolve our leaders of responsibility to defend against issues plausibly caused by other countries, and both parties are in trouble here. But I think for most people, assigning blame is going to take a back seat to what we need to do to function right now. Even if we got China to acknowledge 100% responsibility, it’s not going to do much to help us. And we’re reliant on them, so it’s just bad idea right now to pick a fight. Someone needs to articulate a game plan for dealing with this reliance, and, presumably, reducing it. Trump’s best move is probably to pair some anger at China with a concrete plan to rebuild, and let go of the stock market measurements so that he can abandon clinging to the status quo. As in, a V-shaped recovery is never going to happen, so let’s face reality and do the work needed to restructure the economy, which includes de-coupling from China. But in the short-term, this is risky, and it is hard to know what will happen in the next few months.
I think Trump and Pompeo also want to keep China and pro-globalization elites nervous by reminding them that their position and narrative is much less assured than it once was. It also baits them into risky responses like trying to defend the Chinese government’s response or existing business arrangements with China, or derailing into arguments about xenophobia. They’re trying to figure out whether a major shift will happen, and whether the old election year moves are tenable or not. The best move for Trump would be channeling his anti-China support into a vision of a constructive domestic program, but there may not be enough time for this. (Talk radio people probably enjoy the ratings that result from the controversy and playing to existing anti-China sentiments, and therefore help with the distraction.)
That is not viable because they produce our stuff.
Only 3% of the stuff we buy is labeled “Made in China”. A larger amount of the stuff we buy is labeled “Made in America” because the final assembly of Chinese-made parts and materials occurs in an American facility. But numbers on that are harder to come by.
That 3% number is misleading though because the biggest expenditures for Americans is not on “stuff”, it’s on things that largely can’t be produced in China, like housing, healthcare, dining, and taxes. in other words, the things we buy largely isn’t “stuff”, it’s services and existing goods.
Could we shift all of the manufacturing of stuff out of China? Theoretically, sure, but it would be extremely painful.
4 u.
Also, in that 3% are they counting all the stuff that’s made in China and then assembled in Canada or Mexico and shipped into the US under NAFTA?
Eh, I’d weather it better than most, but it still would be at the very least uncomfortable.
In the article they mention cars as something not made in China, but they don’t mention car parts, so I’m guessing they are only counting finished products, which would mean cutting trade would be even more painful than I first assumed.
I’m positing that it would be extremely painful in both the short term and the long term, because you would be losing a whole lot of productivity for little gain.
America isn’t manufacturing less than it was 40 years ago, it’s just consuming more. The losses in manufacturing employment since then is almost completely due to automation. There would be some new jobs, but it wouldn’t be a massive boon to blue collar workers.
Minor win.
I will concede that it would be good to keep a good portion of medical production nearby for emergencies, but that could also be accomplished with stockpiles.
Moderate win.
The best way to make a nation friendly is to tie their economy to yours. The best way to make an enemy is to be hostile to them.
Major, horrific, possibly world-ending loss.
I read that as “we can’t wage war on them if we are trade partners!” That’s not a negative.
Another huge loss.
Again, acting hostile to the second most powerful army rarely has positive outcomes. Also, the US only accounts for 20% of China’s exports. This would slow it down, but not by much.
Big loss.
The US is just as capable of producing bad products. I’ve never seen any studies, but my gut feeling is that there aren’t any more recalls on Chinese-made products than American-made.
Possible win, probable nothingburger.
I agree with this, but we could also just agree to do this without halting trade.
Again, this really sounds like war drums that I’d rather not be played.
This hasn’t worked in the past (North Korea, Iran, etc) why would we expect it to start working now? Trade on the other hand, has absolutely improved the quality of life of the Chinese people, and I would argue that they are freer today then they were under Mao.
Likewise.
I largely agree with @JayT’s analysis, but I would like to add that this:
would be utter madness. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency because every meaningful financial institution is confident that the US government will pay back their debts come hell or high water. If we arbitrarily cancel Treasury securities because we don’t like the people holding them, T-bills become junk bonds, and (as far as I understand) interest rates and probably inflation in the US spike massively. The economic consequences would be worse than COVID.
@broblawsky says:
The dollar is the world’s reserve currency because people want to invest in US financial markets, not because Tbills are steady. that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be consequences from unilaterally cancelling Chinese debt, there would, but not as dire as you claim.
If you do so unilaterally, you’re probably getting sued, and if you’re somehow immune from being sued you’re probably going to find a lot fewer people willing to loan you money. Or both. You’re almost certainly better off eating the $500 loss.
The Nazis had a policy of discouraging trade with countries outside their sphere of influence. They may have still been fairly tied to the rest of Western Europe, but they were actively trying to get rid of trade with countries like the UK.
If the US cut off trade with China it would most likely cause China to go into a depression. That is absolutely a hostile move.
I’m open to the possibility that Chinese imports are of a lower quality than American, but I do wonder what happens if you look at like products. Skimming the document you linked they mention things like toys and hoverboards which tend to be very low cost items that don’t have American-made equivalents. I know some people in the toy industry, and they have told me they couldn’t bring their manufacturing back to the US at any price due to environmental laws. So we are in a situation where almost 100% of toys are made in China, and therefore 100% of recalls are for Chinese toys. That doesn’t necessarily make Chineses toys dangerous.
The things like tires and drywall are a more compelling argument, but as far as I saw they didn’t break things down in a way that I could see if these were uniquely Chinese issues, or just issues that happened recently. The tire one, for example, mentions two deaths. There was that whole Firestone/Ford Explorer fiasco back in the 90s that killed far more people, so again, it’s not like this is purely a Chinese issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_controversy
There is denial on parts of some people who neglected the early spread of the virus, roughly summed up as “if this turns out to be not that bad, and/or there was nothing we could do, and/or our response was wrong and/or those lives weren’t worth it anyway, then it doesn’t matter if I neglected it.” They’ve built up barriers to listening to counterpoints.
I’m seeing a weird and disturbing strain of something I can only think to call anti-denial. “Yes, it will be super super bad, yes there was everything we could do, we should be mourning a daily 9/11 like it was its own 9/11 every day, every life is infinitely valuable.” They’ve built up similar barriers to listening to counterpoints.
And “100% China’s fault” and “0% China’s fault” each slot into their own place in there.
Funny thing is that wet market explanation, which is of course far more plausible, imho shows Chinese government in worse light than lab accident explanation.
Lab accidents with dangerous viruses also happen in the West. So far none of them resulted in a huge epidemic, but perhaps we have just been lucky.
But Chinese “wet markets”, which Chinese government allowed to reopen even though they already caused previous SARS epidemic in 2003, are something that does not really have a Western equivalent imho. Perhaps we should be careful in what level of human interaction we allow with a country with such low hygienic standard.
It is interesting that this line of thinking is not really popular among people who are vocally “anti-China”. Perhaps because it does not fit the narrative that Chinese government is all powerful totalitarian machinery, showing it instead as corrupt and captured by private interests?
But it is not really true that ALL is fault of the Chinese. There would not be an pandemic of such catastrophic proportions in both Europe and US if Italian authorities had not bungled handling of their local outbreak.
Remember that the virus was not created by China, it simply showed up there first.
So I think a better analogy would be: Europe and the US are getting mugged. SARS-CoV-2 is the mugger. China is the parents who adopted SARS-CoV-2 as a child, and had bad parenting skills that let his bad qualities get out of control.
So yes, China’s poor parenting is part of what let SARS-CoV-2 start running around mugging people, and that certainly gives them some responsibility. But if, say, the US had adopted that child instead, how much better parents would they be? Would the child still grow up to be a mugger anyway? And if so, whose fault would it really be?
A proper analogy is not that SARS-CoV-2 is the child, but that being a mugger is SARS-CoV-2.
Then the initial bad parenting consists of having wet markets that allowed COVID to pass to humans aka the child to become a mugger. For example, by allowing the kid to have criminal friends.
Then the later bad parenting consists of not containing COVID well enough aka not preventing the already rotten child from mugging people.
China is very guilty of the first kind of bad parenting and moderately guilty of the second kind. Italy is not guilty at all for the first kind, but more guilty than China of the second kind.
There is no reason why people can’t consider one parenting mistake to be morally worse than the other.
When you talk about “wet markets”, are you using the term in the general sense (markets that sell meat and produce, as opposed to dry goods) or in the more specific sense of having live animals of species other than pig, duck, chicken, cow, goat?
I’ve noticed a lot of people use this word in a very vague sense, shifting back and forth between these different definitions.
It probably makes sense to ban the sale of live animals in markets.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/ban-wet-markets/609781/
It probably also makes sense to ban the sale of meat, given its importance in so many other epidemics of the past century (and the continuing role of slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities as a source of outbreaks of the current coronavirus). But for reasons of cultural sensitivity to non-vegetarians (which would make it very hard to enforce a full ban anyway) it makes sense to just impose reasonable safety regulations on the meat industry. And probably both the American meat industry and the Chinese wet markets need more regulation (probably even more so for the latter, but there’s no reason to play coy and pretend that one of these is innocent).
You overestimate my knowledge of Chinese food scene. I mean “that thing where they are selling meat without proper hygienic standards, which caused two epidemics in two decades”. I´ve read that it is called “wet markets”, but apparently it is just bad terminology, so I am going to avoid it in the future.
Do we really want to set the precedent that a state can be blamed for an essentially natural catastrophe because it allowed its markets to sell goods that some people were good at producing and other people wanted to buy, with insufficiently draconian regulation?
Given a libertarian state, no. Given a state that’s more authoritarian anyway, it seems fair.
+1. Especially that it is about pangolins(?) and bats for human consumption that can be easily banned.
+1 Put a bit less resources into oppressing religions and a bit more into blocking sale of bats/pangolins as food, everyone will benefit.
Yeah, we don´t want that. To be clear, I am personally opposed to any demands for “reparations for coronavirus”, and that would not change even if it turns out that it really originated in Chinese laboratory.
However perhaps more stingy visa regime unless they clean up their house with respect to public health would be appropriate.
While I oppose any kind of sanctions to China, they really should put their house in order about eating/selling whatever animals without proper precautions.
While this’s a good reminder to be careful not to advocate overbroad bans, I believe there’re two narrower principles that do press to ban this:
First, things with readily available alternative options should be banned long before things without them. Animals can be slaughtered off-site and their meat displayed for sale at the market, just like in most other countries.
Second, things posing a high risk of pandemic contagious illness should be banned long before things posing risks only to participants, or even only to a few people nearby. This’s sort of similar to the principle where we ban private ownership of nuclear bombs but not firearms. Yes, if we extend this a ways, we end up with all sorts of food sanitation restrictions targeted against norovirus. I might not be fine with that, but I won’t vigorously protest.
Yeah, what’s odd about this is that the complaint boils down to something like “The Chinese government was insufficiently totalitarian and should have done a better job of using force to restrict and eliminate indigenous dietary traditions.”
Which, you know, call me skeptical that the people criticizing them for this right now would have highly praised the draconian action it might have taken to bring this about pre-COVID.
Also IIRC, they tried to shut down that kind of market but only suceeded in driving it underground.
Great, what’s next, mole-meat virus?
Or in another, better-liked country (or their own).
I don’t know about that. Imagine a pandemic had started due to an Ohioan hunter eating a diseased squirrel. I don’t think the US government would have any luck at all shutting down hunting for wild animals, and I doubt it would even try, and the rest of the world talking about our disgusting filthy habits would just piss off the hunters in the population all the more.
Wouldn’t the analogy be someone buying a diseased squirrel from a hunter, at a legal marketplace? That we would expect the government to do something about.
The point was about the difficulty of getting people to change their behavior, not about the specific circumstances surrounding this epidemic.
There are reasons to look at imposing tariffs on things like healthcare materials. The lack of US domestic production capability combined with China limiting exports has seriously harmed the US ability to respond to SARS-COV-2.
Speaking more broadly, the significant foreign manufacturing of pharmaceuticals makes the US more fragile. And it’s having an impact on US domestic law – the US has been having troubles performing executions due to EU export laws on drugs no longer made in the US.
Do we need tariffs on goods? Or to just build / subsidize more domestic production?
What’s the practical difference between the two?
One of them makes things more expensive for the people consuming them, the other makes things cheaper (subsidized by the government). While the end result may be the same for Chinese companies exporting to the US, one of them looks less aggressive if you are selling it politically. “I’m just helping my brother” is more rhetorically defensible than “I’m stopping you from selling here.”
It’s a different place to put your thumb on the scale to distort the market.
If we put a 1-cent tariff on each unit of stuff made in China and then get stuff being made in the US, and then China gets more efficient, do we automatically re-up to a 2-cent tariff?
In the other method, the government just agrees to buy stuff from domestic manufacturers at some price if no other buyer can be found to ensure that domestic capacity survives. (What does the government do with it then? Dump it back onto the market driving the price back down?)
That is not obviously true. Before the previous round of tariffs we were warned tariffs would hurt the economy or cause a recession or cause prices to skyrocket and they largely didn’t.
I don’t want to get into round 4,278 of “Tariffs: Best or Worst Thing Ever?” with DavidFriedman, but suffice to say, neither I nor Trump think tariffs would make the recession worse, much less substantially worse.
Except ridiculously cheap labor part that is, from what I know, pretty important.
Are there places with non-evil governments and similarly cheap labor?
—
Also, rebuilding factories would take some time.
Isn’t the whole ridiculously cheap labor thing going away already anyway?
Yes and they now produce quite a few things better than we can, because we forgot how and/or stopped improving.
It seems that this is an important point to remind people that governments and nations are different things. You start by talking about separating from China, and from all the discussion of what you’re talking about, it’s China the place and people. you’re talking about. But then in the last paragraph you say something about an evil government. It doesn’t seem like the *government* is involved in any of the things we need out of China.
I might, in theory, be on board with “let’s stop doing business with China until they stop being evil.”
Y’know, things like building concentration camps holding 1.5 million people.
But we need to be really careful that we know what we’re doing, and have it written down what the end conditions are when we decide they aren’t being evil any more.
Yeah, based on our previous discussions I don’t think I’m going to convince you on this. Suffice it to say, even if there are long-term economic benefits on this, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find economists who would say that the middle of a serious economic crisis is a good time to introduce new taxes.
Chinese manufacturers are, in my experience, really good at setting up assembly lines quickly and well. It’s not just cheap labor, they have way more tooling engineers per capita than we do.
This is one of the other long-term reasons I want manufacturing moved back to the US. The assembly lines here means the engineers are here which means the advancements in manufacturing processes happen more quickly here.
There are substantial barriers to that, given that a) being a tooling engineer doesn’t pay very well and b) tooling engineers are the first people to be let go when a business downsizes, since you only really need them when you set up an assembly line.
Edit: Tooling engineers actually get paid reasonably well (~$60k-$80k, depending on location) but not much better than you’d expect for any other associate degree-requiring position, to be clear.
I find it funny/sad that some of the same people who pushed the Iraq war are now calling for indemnities from China over coronavirus.
If holding China to account just means a tougher stance on trade and foreign policy than I’m for it (and I’d like to imagine that my views are not exceptional). But the idea of having legal liability for coronavirus in any meaningful sense is borderline ludicrous; the amount of concessions a country could extract would have no relationship to China’s culpability, and every relationship with that country’s ability to extract concessions. And personally, china’s handling of coronavirus was bad, but probably not in the top 3 beefs I have with them.
Agreed, hopefully “blaming China” means considering the likelihood of future danger in our trade & diplomacy policies, not that we consider this an act of war.
If the virus had been intentionally released from a Chinese government lab, I would’ve considered that an act of war.
As it is, I agree, it isn’t.
The story as I think I saw it is that the U.S., for some time, subsidized research on viruses, some of it in China. The research was controversial because, while it might provide information useful for dealing with viruses, it also could result in a dangerous virus escaping from the lab into the world, and it was conjectured that that might have happened. The research was supported by some in the field, including Fauci, opposed by others. I’m not sure if the research was supposed to involve modifying viruses or simply culturing and studying them.
If that story and conjecture are true — someone here may know more about it — then the U.S. government, under several administrations, is in part to blame for the pandemic.
Scoop said “One way or another, all this is the fault of the Chinese government.
Said government either let the disease escape from a research lab or allowed for its creation by allowing unhygienic food markets where diseased wild animals spread this disease to humans and started a pandemic in exactly the way experts had predicted dozens and dozens of time.”
This reasoning proves too much: using the same logic, San Francisco’s refusal to close bathhouses in the early 1980’s can easily be framed as implying that the AIDS epidemic among gay men in SF is the fault of whoever refused to close them and that those SF officials (and only them) should be on the hook for the AIDS consequences on US gay men. Are you willing to bite that bullet?
Anyway, I think that the urge to blame China for COVID-19 is much more a consequence of other grievances agaist China than any objective “blame” or “responsibility” pertaining to their actions or inactions regarding the pandemic. I would bet you 20:1 that if COVID had appeared at allegedly unhyigienic markets in Lesotho or Laos there would be no calls for punishing their governments, even if they had done everything exactly like China did. But that is “like, my opinion, dude”…
“AIDS is all the fault of the FAA, who didn’t impose a vow of celibacy on flight attendants, despite knowing that many of them like to have sex in multiple cities”
Everybody knew, for centuries, that unprotected sexual practices with multiple partners (or with partners who, themselves, had had multiple partners) has an extremely high possibility of spreading STD: syphilis, gonorhea, genital herpes, chlamydia, etc. , etc. The overwhelming majority of the medical establishments throughout centuries have urged “sexual restraint” , not because of “purity”/morality concerns but because of basic hygiene. If your attribution of blame is correct, every official, legislator, lobbyist or member of the public who pushed for the 1976 “”Consenting Adult Sex Bill” who made sexual conduct in bathhouses legal as well as the activists who fought the 1984 SF Health Department decision to close them (many of whom were themselves gay and considered that move was borne out of bigotry) is liable for at least part of the cost of the AIDS epidemic. Are you willing to condemn the sexual revolution as vehemently as you condemn China, and to advocate its reversal through the policing powers of the state?
Incidentally, I am yet to find any neutral description of what exactly goes on in the infamous “wet markets”, and how the ones in CHina compare with the ones elsewhere. I have found too many emotional video snippets shared by outraged Facebookians , but remarkably little in the way of an objective comparison of the Chinese markets with other traditional live cattle/ live poultry markets in rural regions. For example,I remember seeing, in my childhood (35 years ago), live chickens being sold at my local farmers’ market , in a Western European country. What makes the Chinese wet markets different: the fact that they sell what we consider “exotic” animals? The conditions where those animals are kept? (but then, how humane are those conditions in industrial cattle-rearing places)? Honestly, it looked, to me, too much of “look at the different things those foreigners are doing. That proves they are barbarians!”
And AIDS is now a global disease that’s killed tens of millions of people most of whom never participated in or benefited from the promiscuous gay subculture, so how is that very different from the current situation?
I need a referral for a female therapist in Manhattan or Jersey City. I have a client who is looking for one and I don’t have any connections of that kind. Scott, can you help? My client is late twenties, no mental health issues other than the general angst of being a gay man, living through covid-19 and being in slightly over his head in a high-growth tech startup .
In case Scott (or anyone else knowledgeable) doesn’t see this, there’s a list of recommended mental health professionals linked in the top menu bar. (Apologies if you’ve already checked this!) No idea if it’ll have what you’re looking for, though, or if it’s up-to-date.
Related to the Innuendo Studios discussion downthread:
My YouTube tastes run towards the “man talks about video games at extreme length” genre. All the cool people tell me that this is the domain of the all-trite and similar nasties, and I should expect to be radicalized any second now. So why isn’t YouTube recommending any of this content to me? Thanks to its recommendation algorithms, I’m subscribed to several openly left-wing channels. I’ve stopped watching several channels it’s recommended because the content was too far left for my tastes (e.g., self-identifying as a social justice warrior, overtly Marxist, etc.). I’m failing to recall any instance of YouTube recommending right-wing content to me. (It did recommend the IS video discussed below, though I haven’t watched it.)
So what’s going on? Are the panicked thinkpieces made up out of whole cloth? Has YouTube neutered its algorithm? Does it just think I’m much farther left than I really am? Color me confused.
Yes, Youtube noticeably changed algorithms relatively recently.
This is not really productive.
None of this please. Even ironically.
+1 It neither OK, nor funny, nor interesting, nor original. It is not 4chan.
Sidestepping all of that, Shamus Young has started posting his column in video form on Youtube and it’s always entertaining.
I have no idea what his politics are, which says a lot.
I read Shamus Young a lot when I was younger, and have checked in on him occasionally. If I’m remembering right, he’s a computer programming evangelical Christian homeschooler with a variety of kids – but who has a trans daughter who he is very proud of.
I ‘m not certain what his politics are, but I think they can fairly be described as interesting.
Is someone named Shamus Young praising his kids nominative anti-determinism?
I have reviewed the data and they are conclusive: Yes.
I’ve been reading Twenty Sided since it was a place for Shamus to write up his DnD campaigns. To my knowledge, Shamus has mentioned his politics only once, in the context of refusing to ever discuss his politics, but he hinted at libertarian-ish tendencies. I could go digging for the post, I suppose, but digging through someone’s old blog posts to find their hidden political beliefs when they’ve repeatedly made public that they rather not have their political beliefs public knowledge feels squicky.
He does an excellent job avoiding hot-button culture issues and sticking to the games, and is probably my favorite video game commentator on the Internet.
Did he ever write up more than one campaign? I only saw the one back when I was reading his blog, but I enjoyed both that and DM of the Rings.
I am subscribed to his Patreon, but I much prefer text articles over video.
Go take a crap in someone else’s living room, halfwit.
As do mine, and I’ve never noticed politics in any of these programs. They usually just talk about, ya know, video games. Who are these cool people who are telling you these things?
The only time I’ve seen anything like what you’re talking about would be anti-feminist rants during The Antening.
This is the premier example of the phenomenon.
Then that’s a pretty weak phenomenom. They barely mention video games in the article. Here are the applicable sentences:
and
There’s no evidence provided, and they don’t even claim the video game streamers themselves are making political content. So yes, to answer your question, they appear to have made it up out of whole cloth.
Youtube still consistently recommends hard right and hard left content, no matter how many times I click the “I don’t like this recommendation” button. The majority of my recommendations are CW-related even though I try hard to avoid that kind of thing – I think it just knows that outrage gets clicks.
Speaking specifically to people talking about video games, I’ve noticed a tendency for channels that start out explicitly trying to be neutral going hardcore anti-SJW (not necessarily right, just that one cluster of ideas) over time. A central example would be SidAlpha; he gave off a blue-triber who doesn’t really care about politics vibe, until he covered a story about a person doing something bad who happened to also be transgender, and you could watch the backlash he received push him right in real time over the course of a couple months.
Personally, I think people are massively overestimating how effective these recommendation systems really are. The vast majority of recommendations I get are stuff I would never click on, usually just “oh, he watched a video from a guy who talks about conlangs, let’s recommend him a ton of conlang videos.”
Gamers tend to be anti-SJW because of that incident in 2014. The fact that they continue to get attacked for it only adds to the resentment.
I visited Youtube earlier and discovered it’s recommending Innuendo Studio videos to me now. Dammit.
Since it’s topical – what is the most likely event that could destroy modern civilization and take us back to the Industrial revolution or even before? Yellowstone erupting? A pandemic 10 times worse than the current one? An Asteroid?
My initial guess is a coronal mass ejection. It’s almost inevitable – they are pretty common events. Take out a significant chunk of our electrical infrastructure and large swathes of society collapse.
1998 called. Obviously not the same kind of event, but a ton of infrastructure was actually physically destroyed and it took a few weeks to get back to more-or-less normal (some smaller/less-populated areas were affected for longer). We wouldn’t have the luxury of using a continent’s worth or resources to fix a few cities’ worth of powerlines like we did in 1998, but that just means it takes longer to get everyone back online. As I understand it, generators would still work, so a lot of short-term problems can be managed while this happens.
The analysis by Lloyd’s of the damage by a serious CME is also worth reading. It falls well short of what you’re predicting.
And 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012
That’s exactly the sort of analysis I was looking for and it seems pretty reassuring and well researched. Thank you.
This came up like two threads ago – there are analyses that are much more grim, for values of grim up to and including ‘total collapse of civilization and death of the bulk of the population’.
The basic problem is the supply chain and how interdependent everything is, and how dependent on very thin margins to gain maximum efficiency. You know how every city in the first world has two or three days of food on hand, with the rest needing to shipped in on a Just In Time basis?
A modern day Carrington Event stops all the food from getting to the cities for weeks, maybe months.
So the question is, how quickly do you think we can rebuild a destroyed power grid while the majority of the population are starving to death and a significant portion have turned into roving Mad Max cannibal gangs instead? And also most communication technology is gone?
If the answer to that question is anything greater than “weeks” then most people die.
(And consider the answer to this question in light of just how much trouble something comparatively minor like this virus is giving us.)
AFAIK it is not certain. It is not entirely clear how widespread damage would be.
For example https://blog.givewell.org/2015/08/21/coming-down-to-earth-what-if-a-big-geomagnetic-storm-does-hit/
And https://blog.givewell.org/2015/07/02/geomagnetic-storms-historys-surprising-if-tentative-reassurance/
I was most reassured by the claim that a Carrington level event would not hit the entire Earth uniformly. Previously I thought it was a given that almost every transformer on earth would be off-line. Obviously we don’t know for sure what will happen but that worse case scenario might not be the case.
How? A Carrington Event affects long-distance electric power distribution networks. And satellites, but that’s pretty much it. It is not a magic EMP that destroys everything “electronic”. It does not affect trucks, locomotives, ships, barges, tugs, or even airplanes. It does not affect farm equipment, except that the farmer has to fall back on his diesel generator. It does not affect radios.
So unless you are going to assume that people are completely inflexible in their methods and will e.g. curl up and die when it is no longer possible to schedule deliveries via the internet, it’s hard to see how this “stops all the food from getting to the cities for months”.
Why would you join a roving mad max cannibal gang when you could join a purposefully walking to Ohio or somewhere that suddenly has a bunch of food it can’t get rid of foraging gang?
Manhattan to the midwest is about 25 days on foot or 10 on a bike.
It may affect them via collapse of fuel production and distrubution. Not sure how likely is this effect.
Yeah, that was part of what I was thinking. A massive global infrastructure is required to keep gas in everyone’s car. Shut off the grid and the fuel goes away too.
That said I definitely did think the list of things affected would be larger – just read up on the difference between a CME and EMP and updated my understanding.
Fortunately, we only need to keep diesel fuel in a small fraction of the trucks and locomotives, which is a much easier problem.
All of it, in a matter of weeks?
There’s way too much absolutism going on here. Coronal Mass Ejection, mumble-something-electricity, therefore anything within three degrees of separation of “electricity” is 100% gone in effectively zero time, because reasons. You all are smarter than this, when you want to be.
While there’s a lot to be desired in how American society and government responded to coronavirus, one encouraging thing is that lots of people just said “do what seems right to keep things working like they were before.”
So if electronic communications over 100 miles somehow became impossible, people would keep on shipping things while waiting for the mail to come through.
We’d adapt with a bit of delay, almost certainly before starvation sets in, but electronic communications isn’t going to become impossible. So why are we even having this discussion?
Oh, man, thanks for giving me something else to worry about. On the Wikipedia page for CME: “According to a report published in 2012 by physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc., the chance of Earth being hit by a Carrington-class storm between 2012 and 2022 is 12%.”
Seems like the chance of Earth being hit by one between 2020 and 2022 is about 2.4%, assuming the risk was equally distributed within that decade. Did the risk go down later? Or was it supposed to be a constant 12% risk per decade, and we just happened to go 16 decades in a row without one?
Solar cycle is 11 year long so I suspect that it should be a constant rate?
0,88^16 = 13% so it is not ridiculous, especially with recorded near miss in 2012.
WW III remains (currently) low probability but with awful consequences. Widespread use of nuclear weapons would be bad.
10x worse still would not have so massive results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk has an entire artticle
We don’t have the equipment or know-how to run a 19th century civilization. If the power goes out and doesn’t come back on, we all die.
Even the Amish would be in for a bad time. Their only metal tools would be what they can forge by hand (which I don’t think would include guns or saws) and they’d be generally poorer without the “English” to trade with. And that’s assuming the starving masses don’t murder them in the first year.
How do you think prople made guns and saws before steam hammers came along?
And I’ve got books from the 19th century about how to run 19th century civilisation which I can consult, if I need to.
Certainly it can be done, if you know what you’re doing. How many people do?
How many people have those books? How many Amish (who, according to a previous open thread, have 8th grade educations) own 100+ year old books that are of interest only to historians?
Not many, but you can learn basic blacksmithing in a few days.
And you can move books.
You die, a bunch of people like you die, the rest of us figure out how to get along without you. And if things go well, we maybe help you not die after all.
Quite a few people make saws by hand, actually. They’re one of the easier tools to do — all you need is a steel plate of the appropriate gauge (21st century: buy at Home Depot. 19th century: hammer out from bar stock), tools for cutting the saw plate to shape (21st century: angle grinder. 19th: heavy shears), and a file for cutting the teeth. Plus the handle, but carving wood was a solved problem in 9000 BC. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Amish make their own, although I don’t have any particular knowledge.
Hand forging is impractical for modern guns. It’s just barely practical for older styles of shotgun, but still tough — the process involves working strips of steel in a Damascus-like pattern around a mandrel, and it gives you a barrel too weak to work with modern loads. On the other hand, if you’ve already got a gun drilling machine lying around it might be possible to refit it to use another power source. The main reason they’re tough to make from scratch is that it’s hard to accurately bore long, straight holes in stock, and that’s solved with tooling, not with power.
I think a CME is a pretty good bet too. There’s no reason to think that a Carrington Event is anything close to an upper bound on how intense these could be.
SSC thread on CMEs from 2017
Thread from earlier this year
Givewell papers which say we should be concerned but perhaps not panicked.
TBH the other SSC threads are not that great. The Givewell papers seem quite good to me.
Some thought that would happen in Germany. Didn’t happen.
When?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1994-041-07%2C_Dresden%2C_zerst%C3%B6rtes_Stadtzentrum.jpg
It works (very poorly) if you occupy other countries and have no problems with stealing their food. What just moves some starvation deaths to other places.
And in long term requires external help anyway.
Also, world population tripled since that time (2.5 billion -> 7.5 billion). With agriculture and logistics depending more on parts that require electricity.
A tiny proportion of the world’s electricity output. And much of it isn’t necessary anyway: we could pick and plant crops by hand. Some people would hang themselves rather than do so, but the rest would get on.
This is absurd for multiple reasons.
Farming is requiring skills and tools, both that would be totally unavailable.
Fine, switch to scythes. Now find tens of thousands scythes and sharpening tools needed to handle that. People will not magically learn to us them. And supersized fields are not going to be easy to process this way.
You don’t find them, you build them. There are shops where metal products are produced. Look around you: there is far more iron and steel than there would be in the hovel of our peasant ancestors, yet you think we couldn’t equip everyone with scythes?
It won’t take long to learn. There will be some eggheads unwilling to do so, sure, it’ll be a bad time for them.
Not sure whatever you underestimate skill needed to manual farm labor or overestimate how easy is to learn them.
That is because making scythes is also requiring skill and tools, both nowadays are really rare.
Yes, there is plenty of iron around. Turning it into scythes is not trivial.
Village of my peasant ancestors had more scythe making skills and knowledge that entire modern city.
And they were not making scythes from scratch every year.
It is functionally impossible to swap from industrial farming to labor intensive farming in a short time frame without mass starvation. The collapse in irrigation alone would probably cause a billion or more deaths.
Farming requires a wide variety of skills and has an unforgiving learning curve. This isn’t learning a sport or studying for a test, failure doesn’t lead to embarrassment it can lead to literally not having the strength to try again.
There are metal shops which make a variety of products. Give them the design, they’ll make it. Might not get it right with the first batch, but they’ll figure it out.
Of course. There are parts you can’t replace: irrigation is very hard and with fertilizers you need a big industrial process.
The urbanites will be overseen by experienced farmers. Will they do it well? No. They don’t need to. There’s a lot of slack in the system: look at all the meat we consume. What happens there is we take many calories of corn and turn it into few calories of beef and chicken. Stop doing that and you find you can lose a large proportion of your corn production and still wind up with more calories than before.
In case of electricity (and therefore most of mechanization) stopping we have no slack whatsoever.
In times of manual farm labor (scythe level) the employment in agriculture (% of total employment) was ridiculously high. Currently in USA it is about 1%, nearly none of them familiar with fully manual labor. Even today it is 70% in Uganda.
And that old manual labor relied in large part on animals that we no longer have in sufficient numbers.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS
https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
Going back to manual farm labor means that vast majority of population dies. Half of farming degrades this way? Still, large part of population will starve.
(maybe we assumed different meaning of “Take out a significant chunk of our electrical infrastructure and large swathes of society collapse”?)
Farming requires skills even though there’s also a lot of repetitive heavy work. In particular, knowing where and when to plant, how to take care of the crops and protect them from non-humans, and preserve the food– all require considerable knowledge, and there’s no slack for major mistakes.
Look, the problem is with what tools. Without electricity, all of the tools we have are useless. All those three phase motors don’t run on pixie dust and unicorn tails. And if we are back to whacking things with hammers (a) that is an incredibly skill intensive task that took thousands of years to figure out (b) I’m not sure there are enough hammers in the US to pound out the numbers of scythes you would need (c) we don’t have any build infrastructure for the “where you put the fire” part of the whacking things with hammers process (d) we don’t have the infrastructure to kiln all the bricks, sans electricity, you would need to build all of the places to put the fires (e) we have neither the tools nor bricks to make the kilns to make the bricks to make the forges to make the tools.
Nor the axes to chop the trees, nor the planes to shape them into handles for the hammers, and axes, and planes. Nor the shovels to dig the pits to make the charcoal to fire the kilns and the forges. Nor the knives to skin the animals to make the leather (much less whatever the hell you use for tanning agents) to make the bellows. Nor the, well, fucking everything.
And you have about two weeks to figure it out from first principle without the internet (or probably even talking to your neighbors very much) before you’re too weak to swing a hammer.
A global loss of the electric grid that lasted very long would be really, really, really bad. Regional breakdowns for various lengths of time are demonstrably survivable. Global? We’re fucked.
Whether a sufficiently global loss is actually possible under plausible circumstances is a different discussion.
And with less electricity, some of the tools we have are useless. A Carrington Event is not a Magic Electricity-B-Gone Field, it is a thing that disrupts long distance power transmission networks. That’s some of our electricity, not all of it. There will be some electricity available in the aftermath. And since the actions being proposed require only a tiny fraction of the electricity currently produced, I’m guessing there will probably be enough.
And I think I need to bow out of this discussion before I say something I’ll regret.
Now find tens of thousands scythes and sharpening tools needed to handle that.
Horse drawn mowers, threshers, etc. are A Thing. Granted the wider point that they’re not just lying around and people in general don’t know how to manufacture or operate them, but at the same time, we wouldn’t be back to the days of the scythe (which, um, include my early childhood so well within living memory).
What farmers have experience in overseeing a massive influx of inexperienced workers with tools they have never used themselves?
I think you greatly underestimate the number of hammers, knives, etc. presently available.
But horses to pull those machines aren’t.
At last, the dog-powered society will have its day!
I think he means around 1944.
I’m really not clear on the specifics of how charged particle ejections from the sun interact with stuff here.
What would a worst case scenario coronal mass ejection do beyond the power line/electrical infrastructure level? Do individual computers get “destroyed” in some way that even if you plugged them into some fresh electrical power source after it was over, all the components would be fried? Would it matter if the computer was off or on? Would harddrives be magnetically scrambled? What about classic HDDs versus solid states?
Generally, how can I protect my data? What’s the penetration of the effect? Could I protect an SSD with enough shielding?
If you care about data – multiple regularly created and tested backups. Including ones kept in other locations. And if feasible – online on someones else servers.
But for this specifically:
Not a real concern.
First of all, power to do this would need to go beyond solar storms and into gamma-ray bursts. This is funny to consider, but chance of that happening are basically 0.
Cosmic weather strong enough to erase SSD/HDD or damage electronics would be enough to kill enough power transformers that you would not worry about your data.
Bad scenarios for solar storms are AFAIK for power grid that is more vulnerable to this kind of danger, in particular transformers.
The Carrington-event style Coronal Mass Ejection seems to generate a lot of discussion… but no one took you up on Yellowstone erupting.
Yellowstone National Park contains a very large volcanic caldera. It’s not what people think when they think “volcano”, because it’s not a single peak with a big divot out of the top from the last time it erupted. The caldera is large enough (35 miles by 45 miles) to contain the base of Mount Saint Helens (cone was ~6 miles wide before the 1980 eruption) comfortably, and have lots of room to spare for other comparably-sized volcanoes.
Geologists say that the Yellowstone caldera had several major eruptions, ranging from 630,000 years ago to 2.1 million yaers ago. There may have been a lesser, but still very large, eruptions and/or lava flows on the order of 170,000 to 70,000 years ago.
Some predictions of the effects of a super-eruption range from “make large parts Wyoming/Montana uninhabitable for a year” to “put enough ash into the sky to make another Year without a Summer“. That last option might include a thick blanket of volcanic ash across the grain-growing regions of the Great Plains.
From what I can make out, the Yellowstone caldera may be more active than was suspected a decade ago, but there isn’t a major risk of an eruption anytime in our lifetimes.
Which is, I think, good news.
Also good news: the geology of the Yellowstone caldera would give us many months, and possibly years, of warnings before the next eruption.
There is nothing that we could do to stop Yellowstone eruption. And it is monitored, so fortunately it seems to not be a big issue.
From what I remember (I like reading about natural disaster scenarios) decades of advanced warnings are likely and it is closely monitored. With no signs of things getting worse.
There is a proposal to stop Yellowstone from erupting by removing energy.
On the plus side, a Yellowstone eruption might create really cool new fossil beds containing whatever megafauna have replaced the extinct rhinos of the Great Plains (most likely turning Omaha or other cities in a similar radius of Yellowstone into Pompeii).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashfall_Fossil_Beds
I agree. But for the sake of steel manning the Devil’s Advocate:
1) the true mortality rate for those under 50 with no serious health problems will be so low it will cause a backlash to effective lockdown policies
2) infection and mortality rate will be different for different ethnicities or protected groups (illegal immigrants, immigrants, homosexuals, whatever) and this could be used to incite fear or hate of said groups
3a) data collected could be used against the individuals – some patients will have open arrest warrants or deportation orders
3b) even if a firewall is established, data collection will cause those with warrants and illegal immigrants to avoid treatment
4) data could be used for nefarious other purposes if identity can be backed into (you really want addresses, or at least neighborhoods or 50m radius)
5) do you trust the government with your medical records?
None would be a game changer for me policy wise.
And this is supposed to be a bad thing? There’s very little evidence for the proposition that locking down the young and healthy does anything to protect the vulnerable that’s not already achieved by the social distancing measures that people (at least in civic-minded societies) seem to be willing to take without being forced to. As far as I’m concerned, “true facts becoming known that provide rhetorical ammunition for lockdown sceptics” is an unalloyed positive.
I’d been thinking along those lines too. I do think that in the US, even without waiving regulations, you’d have a huge data-integration mess to deal with before anything useful could happen.
However, I’d expect someplace like the UK’s NHS to have enough data to weigh in fairly definitively on some burning questions. In principle this could be an advantage of centralized government-run health care, but I’m not seeing any of this research being produced. In practice of course these agencies may not be centralized enough, or if they are centralized they may not be competent enough.
e.g. lots of people think hydroxychloroquine will, if given early, prevent covid-19 from becoming serious. About 1.5% of the population is on a prescription for HCQ; the UK has had ~30K deaths so if HCQ had no effect you’d expect about 450 people to have died while on HCQ. Obviously you then need to control for a bunch of stuff, but if the effect of HCQ was very big then the details of the controls shouldn’t matter too much.
The NHS ought to have all this information, I think, and it could do all the research internally without releasing any patient data so I don’t think there are privacy issues. I don’t know enough about its internal workings to know what obstacles there are to producing research like this. (And ditto for all the other countries, and for other common medicines besides HCQ.)
As I understand it, there’s no central store of records in the NHS, and attempts to unify things with technology have failed miserably.
That’s the impression I get from a friend who manages a complex disease and visits several specialists in different NHS trusts – she’s reliant on them mailing pertinent information about her condition (blood work, etc) to each other, or she carries a copy herself to appointments to make sure her doctors have the latest info on file.
That’s really a tragic waste – there is so much science that could be done with 60+ million complete medical histories. Not just for COVID, but generally.
There seems to be a lot of potential for exploiting data from natural experiments. For example …
I take Losartan as blood pressure medication. There has been some speculation that Losartan might block the Coronavirus. Also some speculation that it might make one more vulnerable to Coronavirus. I gather some research on the subject is currently being done.
If one had large scale data on what prescription medications people were taking, whether they got Covid and what the outcome was, you would have evidence from a natural experiment much larger than any deliberate experiment.
@DavidFriedman, that’s been happening on some scale, and it was what gave rise to the suspicions Hydroxychloroquine might be an effective preventative.
Does anyone else feel a weird brain-bliss feeling after they eat meat? I noticed the difference after eating just vegetables for a while. It might just be me, but the closest thing I can relate it to, is a kind of inverse headache, where your brain feels really comfortable. The brain doesn’t actually have any feeling, so really it must be something to do with blood vessels in the head.
I also feel somewhat smarter. I swear this isn’t pro-meat propaganda.
On occasion, after eating a large portion of meat on a mostly-empty stomach. I figure some of it is endorphins rewarding me for a good day’s “hunting”, and part of it is blood being diverted away from the brain.
However, I wouldn’t say it makes me feel smarter. If anything, I feel a little drunk, even without having any alcohol at the meal.
Is it meat in particular that makes you feel that way or just anything particularly calorie-dense?
I spent a week eating extremely calorie dense stews of carrots, potatoes, dumplings etc without any meat, and it doesn’t really have the same effect. Both provide satisfaction of appetite, but only meat seems to affect my alertness and “brain comfort” (for lack of a better world), and it’s way more noticeable after subsisting on only vegetables for a while. Perhaps I was lacking proteins? Then again, I was hardly wasting away.
If your stew contained large amounts of beans or lentils, then this might be a useful control, but it does make a big difference whether you have that protein. You’d probably also want a lot of oils added, whether from coconut or avocado or whatever.
There was a fair amount of beans so actually, yeah, that’s a protein source.
As I’ve gotten older (though I would not yet be classified as old by most) I’ve found that protein-rich foods reliably make me feel better than any others, even if I overeat them. I can fill my every crevice with steak and feel perfectly good afterwards, if a little plump and sweaty. Meat is definitely especially satiating, and feeling satisfied encourages feeling content and collected, which in turn probably makes one’s mind feel clearer… but I don’t think there’s anything fantastic going on here. Eating a big fat steak does put me in a good mood, but I think that’s just attributable to it being really great tasting.
I certainly get that effect with steak over say chicken or meatloaf, but nothing makes me feel cleaner, healthier, and more right than eating fish. In stark contrast to other foods I could eat sushi and sole meuniere and oysters and finish it off with a light vigilia and still sprint home afterwards feeling refreshed.
I’d like to take this chance to gush more about meat. I’ve been indulging in steaks during this troubled time, since I’m not spending much money in general. I have just recently come to understand the true value of meat quickly seared to hell on the outside but left nearly raw on the inside. I always regret it if I end up cooking it for more than about 5 minutes, and when I get it right, it’s better tasting than just about anything I can think of.
I also have been re-frying any thick chunks of edge fat I that aren’t done after the initial cooking, and those are almost more delicious than the meat itself. They also create a lot of amazing grease that I’ve been reserving and using to cook other foods. That steak fat grease is both very flavorful, and seems to stand up very well to cooking, and prevents sticking to the pan better than say, bacon fat.
If you haven’t tried using that fat to panfry cubes of potatoes, you should–they are amazing.
Just cut peeled potatoes into half-inch cubes, soak in water for ~5 minutes, drain and shake in a towel, then put in a pan with ~1/8 inch of beef fat, sprinkle with salt, and fry until soft inside and crunchy and brown outside.
Oh gosh yes, meat fat + starchy carbs + frying = the heaven of the tastebuds, the hell of nutritionists and dieting 😀
Personal taste, fry some sliced onion in with those spuds in the meat fat, yum yum yum 😉
Nobby Nobbs, is that you?
And yet when we English eat potatoes roasted in the fat from our rosbif, everyone says we’re Bad At Food. Seriously guys: we don’t eat Sunday Roast to show off how boring and conservative we are, we eat it because it’s delicious.
/me tries very hard to resist arguing with Deiseach over whose Full Breakfast is better. Fried bread = food of the gods.
If His Lordship the Earl of Ankh and I are in agreement on onions and spuds fried in meat fat, who am I to disgree with my betters? 😉
The only thing that makes it better is if you have a bit of leftover meat from the day before, such as the remains of the roast beef or some of the boiled bacon or whatever else, fry that up until crispy and plate it up with the fried carbs – delicious!
Bubble and squeak is even healthy – look, it’s got greens in! 😀
Yes, I get this too. I’ve always eaten small amounts of meat, but my family meals were vegetarian for several years, then pescatarian, now we eat an occasional (humanely raised) chicken. I definitely feel very happy after eating the chicken, and this usually happens after several days of no meat and low protein. And I had the same observation as you, that it likely comes from the meat after no-meat effect, a hunting-feast effect as broblawsky suggests. I also think that the meat being grilled/rotisseried and also eating the skin and drippings (fat, usually on potatoes) also contribute, because the reheated leftovers don’t nearly the same effect (even with a day or two of no-protein in between). Similarly, a juicy grilled steak sounds really good, but a pot roast not as much (even though I love pot roast). So I wouldn’t be surprised if some neolithic hunter genes were involved, and I can understand how a chicken-in-every-pot can have an oversized effect on voters.
Steve Sailor has suggested something similar, and if he were here he’d point out that Raj Chetty was given similar access to tax records in order to do his demographic studies a few years back.
I like how you subtly illustrated how errors in the data would frustrate researchers (his actual name is Sailer).
Headline on NBC News. Are we getting intersectional yet?
“Illinois Target worker threatened to call police on unmasked special needs woman, dad says”
This is low effort. I don’t even know what you are darkly hinting at, and you’ve actively cut away context. Not kind, not necessary, and unclear truth value. Do better.
I think you may be reading too much into it. Just from the headline, it was unclear whether NBC wanted me to be angry at Target, the police, COVID-19, concerned dads, or people not wearing masks.
I think I am looking at too much news lately…
Mispost deleted.
It seems to me that the natural hypothesis is that NBC doesn’t actually want you to get angry at someone in particular, but just wants you to think about the moral complexity of the world that exists. If we weren’t so primed by the idea that every news agency must be a nefarious political actor in disguise, this would be the natural hypothesis.
@Bobobob
Thanks for clarifying. What set off my alarms was “intersectional.” What did you mean by that?
AG, I’ll admit that I used the word sloppily, it’s not in my normal vocabulary. I think Keaswaran nailed it above–sometimes when I read news headlines I think, “who, exactly, does the headline writer want me to be angry at?” when they’re actually just presenting the information in a clumsy way.
On a related note, has anyone else noticed that headlines have become much more tendentious lately? As a blue person, I’m used to getting my news from CNN and NBC, and I don’t recall noticing this trend until very recently. I imagine the situation is similar over at Fox News.
(BTW, I used to be a headline writer, though not at a major news organization)
Let me take another stab at this, since it may lead to some fruitful discussion. My basic prior about an NBC headline is, “this news outlet would like me to be angry about a person who refuses to wear a face mask to Target.” However, in this case, the person not wearing a face mask had special needs, so now I am not sure what to think, and I’m guessing the headline writer didn’t know what to think, either.
By the same token, if the police had been called because a red-state protester had gone into Target without a face mask, NBC would have been assuming/courting my approval, but threatening to call the police on a special needs person is, once again, what? An overreaction? Standard operating procedure? A social-justice violation? Once again, I don’t know, and neither does the headline writer (or the person who wrote the article).
Like I said, I consider myself fairly liberal, but my usual news sources seem to be going off the rails in how they package and present information.
I’d have to read the article, but the special needs part could be relevant. My workplace just issued guidelines that everyone has to wear a mask, but there’s an exception for people with “medically documented breathing difficulties.”
Does the special need have something to do with being unable to wear a mask for medical reasons?
Thanks again for the clarification. As to your question, I don’t think the headline was trying to get anyone to be mad at anyone. Instead, it’s trying to maximize curiosity in the reader. “What in the hell was going on in that situation?” leads to more clicks. Outrage is but only one avenue to interest. People love a good Florida Man level of bizarreness.
Here’s another one. Consider this the weird COVID-19 headline thread, honest, I’m not trying to darkly hint at anything.
“Woman killed in alligator attack was manicurist on a house call during lockdown”
Wow, real headline!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-killed-alligator-attack-was-manicurist-house-call-during-south-n1201751
This looks like what future horror movies will look like where the prohibited behavior isn’t teenage sex but violation of social distancing rules.
It’s more like a Family Guy cutaway gag. “Peter, you know it’s dangerous to go out during a Coronavirus lockdown!”
What makes you say Gorsuch is partisan? My impression of him is that he is quite principled, even if I don’t always agree.
Are partisan and principled mutually exclusive?
Generally? No. In the context of Supreme Court Justices? There is some middle ground, but I would put them at opposite sides of the spectrum.
You can be unprincipled and unpartisan: rule in favor of whoever offers the better bribe.
Really? This sounds backwards to me – being principled seems to lead people towards partisanship. Most people seem to think that in my lifetime, some relatively principled justices include RBG and Scalia (two very partisan ones) and the most unprincipled justice was Sandra Day O’Connor (one of the least partisan ones).
Agree, but it all comes down to the positive valence on the term principled. My side is principled, your side are ideologues.
They might correlate, but they can easily enough come in conflict in the judicial context. A principled strict constructionist is more likely to be a Republican, but there will be some things a Republican administration wants to do that are inconsistent with a strict construction of the Constitution.
I find the tendency to discuss the current Court in terms of being “partisan” or “politicized” quite interesting. Because one of the things that most strikingly separates the modern-day SCOTUS from its predecessors is its professionalization, and in that sense insulation from the political branches, whereas within living memory Justices were routinely *actual party politicians*.
Earl Warren was governor of California when Ike made him Chief Justice. William Douglas was widely expected to be FDR’s running mate in 1944. Both Truman (Tom Clark) and LBJ (Abe Fortas) appointed close personal and political allies as Justices; LBJ cleared the way for Fortas by offering then-Justice Arthur Goldberg a spot as UN Ambassador; later he successfully maneuvered Clark out by making his son AG, in exchange for which the father stepped down, enabling Thurgood Marshall (then SG) to assume his seat.
That sort of entwinement between the Court and the ordinary processes of politics was standard then; it would be unthinkable now.
Is anyone here familiar with the youtube channel Innuendo Studios? What are your thoughts, especially your thoughts on his videos about the alt-right?
Speaking as someone who is fairly right-wing, I find the channel intriguing and bizarre- intriguing, because this is a person who has clearly spent a lot of time thinking these things over, and bizarre because he somehow manages to grasp quite a lot about how conservatives think while managing to miss the point entirely. His “I hate Mondays” video strikes me as a prime example: he correctly grasps that conservatives see bad things as more of a “fact of life” then liberals do and tend to see the law as more about punishment then teaching, yet somehow, in a lot subtle ways I can’t quite grasp, he takes all that and makes it into something terrible rather than the really rather good way of living life that I know it is.
It’s odd.
I had not heard of this before, but checked out the Mondays video based on this post.
I do not share your positive interpretation; this looks to me like “boo outgroup” with high production values. Even ignoring the dialog, look at the visuals of the “before work” scene. “New guy” and “Payroll” are shown next to each other. “New guy” is wearing a blue shirt with no tie, has a full head of brown hair, is taller, is thinner, and is initially smiling. “Payroll” is wearing a grey shirt with a narrow red tie, bald with a grey beard, shorter, slightly broader, and never smiles throughout the entire exchange. We can clearly tell which of these characters is sympathetic even without the dialog. Even more tellingly, the expressions on the bystanders faces change not when “New Guy” brings up the contentious topic, but when “Payroll” appears to respond.
The discussion he follows up with does not accurately reflect the views of conservatives as I understand them, but I am more conservative-adjacent than conservative myself, so my opinion on this probably shouldn’t carry much weight. Would you mind highlighting a couple things you think he got right? Am I correct in assuming that “If we can’t save every life, there’s no point improving healthcare” is not one of them?
I wonder what he intends to do with right-wingers once he wins? They’re not going away, they’re not staying out of politics, and they’re not going to always lose. With the extra powers he’s wanting to give the government, right-wing authoritarians can do way more damage than they could otherwise.
“New guy” is wearing a blue shirt with no tie, has a full head of brown hair, is taller, is thinner, and is initially smiling. “Payroll” is wearing a grey shirt with a narrow red tie, bald with a grey beard, shorter, slightly broader, and never smiles throughout the entire exchange.
So… this is “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” updated?
Same theory, but less subtle. Imagine if “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” wasn’t a commercial but instead a presentation at a Mac-users conference.
Now I’m worried I inadvertedly rekindled a different culture war, mentioning OSs twice. Sorry.
@noyann
I seem to recall there’s a correlation where Mac users are significantly more likely to be Blue Tribe than Windows users; I wonder if there’s a similar Linux/Grey Tribe skew?
(Full disclosure: I typed this on my Windows PC. My two laptops are Mac and Linux, however, and my tiny Beelink PC runs Linux as well.)
EDITED: for clarity
I seem to remember, though I may be mistaken, that the effect of the ads was opposite to what was intended: by making Mac the Cool Guy and making PC the Underdog, people instinctively identified with PC and started preferring him to Mac, or feeling that Mac was picking on/bullying him.
Unintentional effects could come into play here as well!
It’s only one datum, but go and look who’s behind that “Armed and Dangerous” entry in Scott’s blogroll*. (And if you want another datum… well, I’m a Linux kernel dev at $DAYJOB.)
‘Course, that could be Linux/libertarian rather than Linux/Grey Tribe; I’m not entirely sure what the difference is but there seems to be one.
* Incidentally, is it just me who finds the term “blogroll” ridiculous, or does every Brit think it sounds too much like “bogroll”?
Do you think Eric Raymond is gray tribe? I’m realizing I’m not sure what gray tribe is.
I’m pretty sure the guy who compiled the Jargon File is grey tribe. And for a definition of the admittedly fuzzy term, “Grey Tribe”, you could do a lot worse than “the sort of person characterized by the Jargon File, even if their thing isn’t specifically comp sci”.
esr is mostly grey but he co-opts/affects parts of red culture for anti-blue purposes, IMHO. Classic alliance of convenience with the fargroup.
He’s too much in favour of zen, paganism, anarchy, (sex positivism and nonmonogamy too, IIRC) and against organised religion to be truly at home in the red tribe. He’s also very contrarian in a world where the blue tribe makes a lot of decisions about what the conventional wisdom is.
Eric Raymond is certainly not red tribe or blue tribe, and grey tribe seems closer to describing him than any alternative candidate.
Basically if you’re not in either the blue or red tribe, you’re likely to have positions and beliefs that read as blue-tribe to red-tribers, or as red-tribe to blue-tribers.
John Schilling, it’s been a long time since I’ve read The Hacker’s Dictionary, but I remember it as being fannish. Maybe that used to be gray tribe.
In the 20th century, at least, there was a pretty strong overlap between Hacker culture, Fandom, and what would become Grey Tribe. “Hacking”, in the non-perjorative sense, was probably the modal occupation of the proto-Greys, and (SF-ish) Fandom their modal entertainment. And all three were considered nerdy things that normal people oughtn’t be involved in.
Just watched the “I hate Mondays” video. He’s eloquent, and I think he makes a good point on conservatives’ tendency not to think in terms of systems.
The biggest problem I have with the video is the constant undertone of illiberalism: he doesn’t seem to see conservatives as reasonable people who believe the things they do for reasons that don’t boil down the bigotry. They’re just icky, bad, nasty trogolodytes.
Another thing is that while the video is ostensibly about the alt-right, and he talks about them toward the end of the video, Payroll Guy is just your stereotypical Fox News junkie, and there’s no acknowledgement that there is a significant difference between them. This is, ironically, the sort of thing your stereotypical Fox News junkie would do to the left by treating New Deal liberalism as a front for, and a slippery slope to, socialism.
The biggest irony is at the very end, where he pretty much straight up says that the stereotypical Fox News junkie is right. Makes the whole thing sound a bit like projection: my moderate views are just a front, so yours must be, too.
I haven’t read up much on NDL and have heard it called socialism a few times. What are the differences (in broad sweeping terms) between socialism and New Deal Liberalism?
The fundamental difference is that NDL still thinks the market is basically the right way to allocate resources. The non-market institutions favored by liberals since FDR are supposed to be a hedge against the worst failure modes of the market, not a replacement of the market as such, except in a select few cases such as municipal utilities and nationalized healthcare.
“Socialism” is a slippery term because both socialists and anti-socialists use it to mean whatever is beneficial to them, but traditionally the socialist ideal was to replace the market economy with one that allocates resources through either central or collective planning.
Thanks
The position of he New Deal Liberal isn’t full scale socialism, but it’s a shift in that direction, since it replaces some market decisions with decisions made by the central government.
Socialism isn’t a binary category. Two of the largest industries in the U.S., K-12 schooling and the military, are socialist (in the former case mostly socialist) in the strong sense. In the Soviet Union some allocation was through markets, although much less than in the U.S. The USSR was much more socialist than the U.S., but the U.S. today is more socialist than it was a century ago, in part due to the New Deal.
Also, of course, “socialism” is sometimes used to describe the Scandinavian welfare states, which are in most respects no more socialist in the economic sense than the U.S., and New Deal Liberal types at present tend to regard those as an attractive model.
Yeah, my biggest problem is that he talks about “influencers”, conservatives, and neo-nazis like they are the same people for all practical considerations. He does distinguish them in the sense that he believes people like Joe Rogan have people like Ben Shapiro on who encourage people to check out Richard Spencer, but then when it comes time to arguing against philosophical and political points, he mashes all right wing positions into some kind of inconsistent gestalt.
Indeed, in a series about the alt-right he’s talking about bogstandard conservatism, and saying they don’t think in terms of populations and systems, and then flashes up a picture of Richard Spencer, who is a racialist, wants universal healthcare, and thinks coronavirus lockdowns aren’t severe enough. He then starts talking about the Nazis.
It’s fine if he wants to say that conservatism leads people to Nazism, but he should at least acknowledge the difference in thinking about issues if most of his point is that conservatives don’t think systemically.
I saw his video on radicalization as well, and I think it’s largely bad faith content for an internal breadtube audience. He mixes in the neutral sense of radicalization as bad while making clear he wants radicalization towards the left instead, so it comes across very muddled. He attacks the alt-right worldview as seeing a narrow history defined by group battles, without acknowledging the recursion problem of anti-group groups. He also argues from a standpoint that their bigotry is propped up by economic anxiety, and so the left can salve all wounds, without really addressing the plentiful non-economic arguments about demographic change. Anyone who comes to his videos with that worldview is going to find it strengthened, not weakened, and so as deradicalization content, it fails miserably.
Culture war note: let’s not take this as an indictment of the left in general. There’s a whole level of argumentation that is simply above the shallow strawman level this individual content creator is operating on.
A common mistake is also to mistake the desire for work with the desire for income, where many people want the benefits of work other than income as well.
I went and looked up the video, since I’m already procrastinating. And… wow. Here is the argument, summarized as best I can:
0:00-3:29: Progressives speak out about how they want to change the world with policy measures like gun control and universal healthcare. Conservatives, meanwhile, respond by arguing about how this won’t really fix problems; bad people will still get guns, and sick people will still die eventually.
3:29-4:53: Conservatives, to put it generally, tend to think in black and white, unable to reason in terms of scale or degree.
4:53-5:41: We know this because progressive arguments are obviously right.
5:41-6:10: Conservatives typically agree about what the problems of the world are; they just don’t think these problems can be solved, because they think solving these problems means completely doing away with them forever.
6:10-7:10: So the conservative basis for morality is just commiseration. Evil is a thing to sit around lamenting about, not a thing to be reduced. And this is a social, or particularly a ritual, basis: the proper ritual response to evil is “thoughts and prayers,” not discussing solutions. Hence conservative outrage when the new guy in the office advocates gun control immediately after a tragedy.
7:10-7:58: And conservatives are consistent in that they believe that laws, like anything else, won’t reduce evil; so, the reason they uphold them is just to punish the bad people. Laws exist to separate The Good People who walk The Narrow Path from The Bad People who lead A Life of Sin.
7:58-8:35: Conservatives don’t even care about what policies work or don’t work; we can see this in the way they support abstinence and oppose contraceptives (remember, on points like this, that progressive arguments are obviously right). If they cared about reducing those things, they would support contraception; since they don’t, they don’t really care. Instead, we can infer what they really care about is sending the right message, in keeping up appearances.
8:35-8:50: This is starkest where conservatives want certain lifestyles put in the closet. They don’t care that such lives are in fact being led; they just don’t want that to interfere with the message about how the world is supposed to look. And since law is all about punishing evil, conservatives are trying to send the message about who should fear the law and who shouldn’t.
8:50-9:45: So, law shows the path everyone is supposed to be on, and punishes deviation. From this we can see why there’s a religious right and but no religious left: religious conservatives can very comfortably put this view into religious terms, of a world drenched in sin which cannot be saved, but containing a narrow path by which you might save yourself, and the law just might keep you on it. Changes by degree don’t fit here because it’s all about mortal sins, you see, and you can’t very well go to heaven with fewer mortal sins on your conscience, it needs to be zero. Thinking in terms of populations doesn’t work because the world is all about testing you, your integrity, your piety. So it’s hard to be a religious liberal, but easy to be a religious conservative.
9:45-10:30: But don’t go thinking all reactionary conservatives are Catholics. (This is apparently who we’ve been talking about all this time, when we discussed e.g. people who oppose gun control or universal healthcare; not conservatives in general, but specifically reactionaries!) There are also Protestants (the video image for these folks is a kay kay kay member), pagans, and atheists (this one’s Rich*rd Sp*ncer). But even the atheists are basically Christian atheists, in the sense that their ethics and worldview is very strongly informed by Christianity.
10:30-12:05: Yet “people whose ethics and worldview is very strongly informed by Christianity” spans most of the US. Even liberals fall into this when they say something like “I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils.” Liberals or not, they’ve made the mistake of not being consequentialists. Liberals may have rejected Christianity or talk of staining one’s soul with sin, but they still think this way; just less commonly or less intensely than conservatives.
12:05-13:24: And this is how fascism happens, and why conservatives are especially susceptible. Fascism is politics-as-faith: the N*zis made Ary*ns into their savior. It doesn’t even have to come from Christianity; it happens wherever people “want their egos flattered and their sins absolved and to be folded into an authority structure that privileges them.”
13:24-15:00: One must counter with the narrative that problems can be solved, that there’s mostly no such thing as human nature, and that nature doesn’t determine right. After all, nature would say the solution to a pandemic is everyone susceptible dying. Humanity today exists in defiance of nature, and most of our problems, from bigotry to oppression, are things we’ve created, from which it trivially follows that we can do away with them. (I’m saying it’s trivial that it follows, not that we can do away with them easily.) This view is secular, and while it can be reconciled with Christianity, it cannot be reconciled with “reactionary fundamentalism.”
There are a lot of things I could say about this argument. There are a lot of things the rest of you could say about it, and I look forward to reading them. My own comment is that this is the epitome of Easy Mistake Theory. He’s so convinced his side is obviously right that he concocts a theory to justify why conservatives keep disagreeing. Surprise surprise, it’s not because we think the facts are different or the arguments don’t work; it’s because we think there is such a thing as human nature and/or that nature has something to say about morality, which we are just wrong about. I know this sounds like a values difference, but it’s not at all clear to me he thinks so, at bottom; he continues to talk about it, even at the end, as if it’s just obvious that this is a dumb thing to think, whence his “pandemics are natural” argument.
Folks, don’t watch this video.
(ETA: clarity)
Random comments, which I acknowledge may be slightly off-base as they are in response to a summary rather than the original, and I don’t fault Nick for accidental misunderstanding on my part.
This reminds me of an exchange in “Hunt for Red October”.
“You see everything in black and white.”
“Not black and white. Right and wrong!”
In that case, a conservative applause line. But it’s clearly not just conservatives who do this. A common strand of libertarian believes there are things government is not meant to do, no matter how much utility it might bring. Some for deontological reasons, some for long term consequentialist ones. Progressives are often in favor of equality, full-stop. A sign of black and white thinking is pointing stating the negatives or positives only, without talk of trade-offs. This may be done because the proponent has done the math themselves and moved on to the rhetoric stage, or because they are simply not thinking about the full context. I’d have to think about it to know if one side is more guilty than another, but I think it’s close.
This actually sounds like a rather nuanced view on the matter. A toleration without promotion, to put it charitably.
I assume this is a paraphrase? Because clearly there is both a religious left, and religious elements to the secular left.
But, broadly, I agree that religion and leftism tend to be opposed, because religion (at least in the Western sense, perhaps not Eastern?) believes that some things are known, whereas progressives have to be open to the possibility of figuring out new ways that we’ve been wrong all along.
I (and likely Nick) would counter argue that Christianity in fact would be protective against fascism (or other statisms) because we already have a savior, and thus cannot make our race or our class or the government or the innate goodness of man into one. Whereas, “Something must be done!” thinking is, not exclusive to, but certainly closely aligned with a secular progressive ideology.
One out of three. And isn’t “problems can be solved” rather black and white thinking? “Problems can be reduced in scope, but we should be careful, supposed solutions can backfire” is conservative, more nuanced, and more true.
The blank-slatism is still the core of the new Progressive Person, I guess?
If it helps, his exact words were “we have a religious right and not so much a religious left,” with emphasis on “not so much a religious left.”
Certainly I would counter with that. But if I gave every criticism of the video that occurred to me while writing this summary, I’d be here all day. 🙂
@Nick >
I sincerely hope that I’m not cracking the ice but his statement is so demonstrably false (and intuitively to me as well) that I’m really bugged, and want to chime in.
Going by:
contemporary U.S. Left = Americans who don’t vote for Republicans
and
contemporary U.S. Right = Americans who don’t vote for Democrats
a quick look at the Political Preferences of U.S. Religious Groups chart from Pew Research shows that many denominations still have decidedly “Left” leanings, some even more “Left” than ‘atheists’.
To cite two denominations of what (to me) look to be very similar theologies: the National Baptist Convention (which is the denomination of the church across the street from the house I spent most of my childhood in) leans decidedly Democratic Party (and the more church-going the more likely to vote for a Democrat), while adherents of the Southern Baptist Convention lean Republican (and the more frequently they attend church the more they tend to vote Republican).
There’s been a trend in the last couple of decades towards more folks who lean Left being “religiously unaffiliated’ (a growing category), and a higher percentage of believers leaning Right, but most of the Left is still religious, and most of the religious are Christian (as is the Right) – just like decades ago.
Is there a word for claiming something already exists that’s just the possible end point of a recent trend?
@Plumber
On top of what you mentioned, there’s a quite plausible argument that the fact that we had a Religious Right instead of a Religious Left was basically a freak accident: evangelicals had been consistently left-leaning on economics and social issues prior to Francis Schaeffer’s rise to prominence — and that included Schaeffer himself.
I like to imagine there’s a timeline where Democrats courted Schaeffer instead of the Republicans, and where the lady I heard in the store in 2016 saying she liked Hillary but couldn’t vote for someone who supported abortion said that about Trump instead.
@Iago the Yerfdog,
Your “alternative history” timeline sounds pretty good to me.
I’m going to defend him on this one. The Religious Left is a spent force in America, and has been for about a decade now.
This is not a fact of nature, and has not been true historically, but it is true currently.
(For a good example of Past Religious Left, read the 1896 book “In His Steps,” which popularized the phrase “What would Jesus do?”)
@Jaskologist, @Nick, @Plumber:
there is a Religious Left in America, and members of it publish think-pieces about “Why does a Christian nation not care about poor people who simply want to emigrate into the United States and find a job?”, with accompanying think-pieces about “Why does a Christian nation treat poor-and-minorities so badly?”
I can’t tell how influential the Religious Left is: they appear to latch onto Left and/or Progressive causes, and add their own version of “can I create a religious-sounding slogan to support this cause?”
There are cases where the Religious Left seems to want to take on the Secular Left, but I don’t get the feeling that the Religious Left is in the driver’s seat.
On the other hand, the Religious Left often criticizes the Religious Right for the behavior of “grab a political cause and wrap it in a religous slogan” behavior, so I suspect that it is a problem that is common to both groups.
This is what I mean; they’re just an echo at this point. What issue does the Religious Left care about that they would stand up to the rest of their coalition about?
The Religious Right, for example, cares about abortion. The rest of the coalition cares about this because the RR cares about it, and not vice versa. Similarly for social conservatism in general, and religious liberty.
What issue does the RL bring to the Left?
@Jaskologist
Chicken/egg issue. There are a lot of issues on the left that likely had religious origins (you don’t have to go that far back in the past for basically everything everywhere to have religious origins), but I suspect it would difficult to convince you of that (as opposed to the other way around, where the RL adopted the left’s ideas and then added religious reasoning to it).
The Religious Left is a spent force in America, and has been for about a decade now.
Seriously? Okay, declining mainline Protestantism numbers back up the “spent force” argument but the influence in society always vastly outweighed the numbers in the pews anyway; see a comment elsewhere about it being advantageous to switch denominations to Episopalianism from whatever your original denomination/faith was, because that was the church of the elite.
At its peak, The Episcopal Church had 3.4 million members in the 60s. It has dropped down to around 1.8 million members. But what is the denomination which is the home of the National Cathedral?
There is a definite Religious Left which crosses denominational barriers (yes, you get them amongst Evangelicals as well) and which does get disproportionate influence and attention, but simply because it’s part of the Zeitgeist does not get identified as “religious”. Take the much-fought over issue of abortion – any time religion is mentioned in that context, it’s in the terms of the pro-life/anti-abortion rights side being the “religious Right”. Organisations such as The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which are part of the religious Left, are never mentioned in terms of “religion” in that sense, but rather as the kinds of moderate, sensible, ‘everyone thinks this way’ reporting on such issues. Do you think that, for example, their advocacy on who and how to vote in the November elections is going to draw the same kind of “preaching from the pulpit about who to vote for is not permitted” opposition or coverage? I think I’ll be holding my breath a long time waiting for a Guardian article on “Christian mainliners worship Planned Parenthood more than Jesus”, don’t you?
@acymetric
How far back are you thinking? Prohibition is an obvious example in the early twentieth century and civil rights a huge one some time later, but I wonder if there are any good examples in like the 90s.
@acymetric
It would be easier to convince me if you gave examples. What is a current issue where the Religious Left has a distinct identity, and cares enough for it to matter?
@Deiseach
I feel like you’re agreeing with me. The Religious Left used to exist as a significant force. Now it doesn’t. (in America)
Put that in Josh Lyman’s mouth on West Wing, and it’s a perfectly good liberal applause line.
You know what? I was wrong, it wasn’t Hunt for Red October, but A Clear and Present Danger (same protagonist
stillbut now played by Harrison Ford, iirc), apparently in reference to a government action in South America. So in this case the line codes liberal (though I’m not coming out in favor of the villains in this film or any given South American military action either!).It was Harrison Ford in Danger but Alec Baldwin played the protagonist in Red October.
The naz/ argument makes me think he isn’t such an innocent soul.
Haven’t watched it (no desire after your comment)
I’d say 7 parts easy mistake theory, 2 parts aggressive outgrouping and 1 part seeing anyone who doesn’t agree with him as one large, amorphous group (though he at least recognizes differences in intensity of not-himness)
From this we can see why there’s a religious right and but no religious left
There very goddamn is a religious left, I haven’t watched the video so are you sure this is what he’s saying? Or is he just saying “religious left don’t believe in sin and punishment so this is why this vision of the law is the one the religious right uphold”?
I’m pretty sure his argument is that religion can accommodate the conservative view as described but cannot, or cannot nearly as well, accommodate the liberal view as described. That is, if you are religious, it is easy to accept that evil can’t be reduced and the law exists simply to punish those who will inevitably do wrong, and harder to accept that laws can guide or shape society.
This is a very good summary.
Thank you.
Unfortunately I have already lost 6 minutes and 40 seconds of my life.
I do agree that Monday’s suck and that videos like this are just a fact of life, though, so maybe dude has a point?
I think he has a hard time finding conservatives who disagree with him. My disagreement on health care isn’t that we cannot defeat Death, it’s the trying to ape a federal health payment scheme is not going to obviously mimic better health care and certainly doesn’t imply automatically better health outcomes, and any actual reduction in health care spending will require the magic wand Jaime Lannister used in Game of Thrones Season 8 to move his army around.
Gun control is a particularly odd argument for this video to make, because the criteria “end all mass shootings” is not a conservative tenet, it’s the gun control advocate tenet. I’ve never seen a gun control advocate make the argument that we should only seek to avert 5% of mass shootings, or 10% of mass shootings, or whatever. Quite frankly, I never see them make the same argument about health care, either: it’s always “people should get the healthcare they need” not “everyone should have guaranteed access to healthcare that adds 1 QALY per $50,000” (especially since that implies they should NOT have the right to 1 QALY per $100,000, but I should be allowed to purchase insurance that accomplishes the same effect).
Every country that is not the US has achieved cheaper healthcare somehow. I though magic was supposed to be exceptional.
How many countries have achieved an actual reduction in health care spending? I think the answer, at least in the developed world, is zero. There are a bunch of countries that didn’t spend the 1960s and 1970s creating ridiculously expensive health care, but that’s a different thing entirely – path dependence matters, the United States did create ridiculously expensive health care, and actually reducing health care costs seems to be a thing nobody knows how to do. Magic required.
On the contrary, the US has managed this trick over the last couple months–total healthcare spending has gone *way* down. There may, however, be some small downsides to our method of accomplishing this….
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
Keep in mind that it is always politically easier to not give something to a group compared to taking something away. Especially when that group is an extremely high status group that is routinely called “heroes”.
Nurse and doctor salaries are something like a quarter of the healthcare costs in the US, and both of those professions make almost double what they do in every other first world country. There is no way the US can lower its healthcare costs without lowering salaries, and that just isn’t going to happen, hence the need of a magic wand.
Sure it can. Those salaries are partly driven by med school costs. Stop artificially throttling the supply, and customers spoiled for choice will go shopping for the best price, and suppliers will have to compete. Didn’t Scott write about what it would take for him to offer bare bones lowest price services?
And how will you lower costs without lowering the salaries of extremely high status professors?
And how will you do that with every nurses union and doctor’s association fighting you every step?
It looks to me that a magic wand is the only possible solution.
By having them take on more students? More students = more tuition to pay.
Healthcare is currently in a Molochian dip, where a good number of people are not even getting healthcare because they can’t afford it. Lower the prices for everyone, and make up the revenue in volume.
As suggested by Scott in one of his more popular blog posts (tulip subsidies I think?) stop requiring an undergraduate degree to go to med school, which is what other western countries do.
If you have rules that make cheap healthcare artificially difficult, such as the rule that healthcare providers can’t bargain down the cost of drugs, that would be a non magical starting point.
That’s going to be a very small gain, I should think.
First, the biggest factor in the “cost” equation is the opportunity cost of spending twelve years in the training pipeline before you can start earning real money. Reducing that from twelve to ten, is only a modest gain.
Second, the bottleneck as I understand it isn’t medical schools, it’s residency slots. Supply and demand won’t change, so the market-clearing price won’t change and doctors will still be able to command the same salaries. That their costs are reduced makes them richer, not cheaper.
And third, wages are very sticky. Existing doctors aren’t going to take a pay cut, so it’s going to take a generation for any gains to materialize. If they materialize at all, because a two-tier system in which new doctors cannot hope to make as much money as their older peers is likely to be somewhat demoralizing for the newcomers that you are hoping will flock to this new opportunity.
There’s probably not much we can do about the first issue; it likely does still take a decade to learn to be the sort of doctor first-world nations will demand so long as they are piously insisting that everyone gets The Best Possible Health Care.
The second, we could deal with by creating more residency slots.
For the third, the United States needs a time machine to go back and not push its doctors into the Upper Upper Middle Class in the first place. Or we need a generation or two of persistent social engineering.
The practical solution here is to leave the MD track alone, and allow more and more practice by NPs and PAs. In a primary care setting, I rarely see an MD anymore. The PAs have lower educational costs and shorter time in training and are starting out expecting a lower salary/lifestyle, so there’s no painful attempt to force cardiologists to sell their McMansions and Tesla Roadsters in favor of townhouses and Honda Accords.
I largely agree that using nurse practitioners more is a good way to help lower costs, but keep in mind that an average nurse practitioner in the US makes more money than an average doctor in Europe, so we are still in a place where to lower our healthcare spending significantly we will have to lower the income of our healthcare workers significantly, which I believe is a non-starter.
Adding more students doesn’t lower education costs, if anything we’ve seen the exact opposite. As more people go to university, the universities increase spending, they don’t decrease admission cost.
Undergrad should take four or five years, not two years, right? So that would result in a career that is at least 10% longer, so even with the same number of people becoming doctors you’d have more supply.
As far as wages, aren’t salaries for just about every profession higher in the US?
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay-disparities-000557/
A few more thoughts on salaries:
Real salaries can be reduced by holding nominal salaries constant.
Reducing qualification times would reduce student debt and debt repayments, meaning MDs could have the same take home pay at a lower nominal salary. (something like this already applies to military sponsored MD’s).
US MD’s don’t have the option of moving somewhere else where wages are even higher.
0:00-3:29: Conservatives, meanwhile, respond by arguing about how this won’t really fix problems; bad people will still get guns, and sick people will still die eventually.
You see similar low-quality argumentation of this kind with respect to, say, Marijuana. But there are steel man versions. “It won’t really fix the problem” if literally true. In practice it’s more ‘expected outcome’ vs. ‘expected cost’… but there’s a lazy pedestrian version of the argument where ‘fix’ = ‘perfect outcome’
3:29-4:53: Conservatives, to put it generally, tend to think in black and white, unable to reason in terms of scale or degree.
Social conservatives tend to be deontological and non-quantitative.
4:53-5:41: We know this because progressive arguments are obviously right.
This smells like a straw man to me. Did he actually say that? I mean yes, watching the video for myself is easy but in theory someone who paraphrases a video should basically eliminate the need for doing that.
5:41-6:10: Conservatives typically agree about what the problems of the world are; they just don’t think these problems can be solved, because they think solving these problems means completely doing away with them forever.
Agree with liberals or with each other? I assume liberals. In which case I disagree. cons and libs only agree on what problems are if the ‘problems’ are phrased in such a way as to leave them open to interpretation. Even when there’s consensus that X constitutes a problem generally X ranks high on one group’s list of priorities and low on the other group it ranks low.
But this is a truthy statement if we’re talking about Burkean conservatism. Human beings are not perfectible. In that world, you don’t “abolish” things like income inequality or violence, your only practical responses involve manage, mitigate, and/or deter depending on what the root causes are. I’m kind of assuming though that we’re talking about fox news watcher conservatism.
6:10-7:10: So the conservative basis for morality is just commiseration.
See above
7:10-7:58: And conservatives are consistent in that they believe that laws, like anything else, won’t reduce evil; so, the reason they uphold them is just to punish the bad people.
I think psychologically a conservative has a much stronger desire to “punish” people who violate norms. Political correctness is interesting in that it constitutes a highly novel set of norms where liberals think, feel, and act like conservatives.
If your would-be conservative isn’t going strictly by implicit beliefs, they’d tell you the point of punishment both to deter offenses and also to keep people who don’t respond to the threat of deterrence away from the rest of society so they can’t re-offend. It’s easy enough to see that, if more than zero crimes occur, it’s not evidence that your criminal justice system has failed. Unless of course you think mankind is perfectible and abolishing violent crime is feasible.
That said, if the *most* optimal criminal justice system actually did involve next to no punishment, it would probably be hard for a conservative to accept even if you had enough data to prove it. Ditto for liberals and broken windows policing.
Again I think that the instinct to punish often isn’t explicitly designed to deter, but evolved to do just that. I don’t think that instinct would exist if punishment had no deterrence effect.
7:58-8:35: Conservatives don’t even care about what policies work or don’t work; we can see this in the way they support abstinence and oppose contraceptives (remember, on points like this, that progressive arguments are obviously right). If they cared about reducing those things, they would support contraception; since they don’t, they don’t really care. Instead, we can infer what they really care about is sending the right message, in keeping up appearances.
If you value chastity as such (deontologically), pointing out that contraceptives ‘work’ is rather silly. Even if you’re a consequentialist and you are partly motivated by a desire to avoid unwanted pregnancies, you might have multiple competing considerations such as fertility rates or the stability of relationships that you think are imperiled by the use of contraceptives.
There is a bit of truth to this though, in that because small c conservative social values are often 1. implicit 2. the product of historic circumstances, your sense of disgust at sexual license was forged in a world where unplanned pregnancies and STIs were extremely dangerous. It’s not unreasonable to question the utility of chastity on those grounds (in a world of modern medicine) but most liberals are not that “meta”. Note this is not the same as saying a view is outdated because ‘the progress of history says so’
8:35-8:50: This is starkest where conservatives want certain lifestyles put in the closet. They don’t care that such lives are in fact being led; they just don’t want that to interfere with the message about how the world is supposed to look. And since law is all about punishing evil, conservatives are trying to send the message about who should fear the law and who shouldn’t.
This attitude makes more sense then the speaker gives it credit. If something is undesirable but it can’t be eliminated completely, then manage it in a way that the potential damage it can do to bystanders is limited.
It’s also reasonable if you think something straddles the line of being bad and you don’t have the stomach or righteous fanaticism to kick down the doors of people who are violating the norm and string them up for their wickedness.
An example would be de-criminalizing marijuana.
8:50-9:45: So, law shows the path everyone is supposed to be on, and punishes deviation.
‘Left wing’ religiosity certainly was a thing when left wing and right wing had more to do with issues like monarchy, private property, the means of production, etc. An example of this would be liberation theology.
If left wing means, athetistical, then the statement is trivially true. Left wing is non-theistic, QED.
I’d say political-correctness-as-law in the mold of the UK fits his model fairly well. Even the pessimism seems to come into play where it’s kind of a bad thing to NOT admit to being a
sinnerracist.But again I’m not one of those people who thinks that by analogizing something with religion means it’s wrong/false/bad/stupid etc. I just don’t think the speaker is being very introspective.
It would be interesting for the speaker to ponder how much more dangerous conservatives would be if they were, in fact, optimists. If they thought sin could be abolished with the right policies in place. If they weren’t willing to look the other way when the sinners of the world were discrete about their practices.
9:45-10:30: But don’t go thinking all reactionary conservatives are Catholics. (This is apparently who we’ve been talking about all this time, when we discussed e.g. people who oppose gun control or universal healthcare; not conservatives in general, but specifically reactionaries!) There are also Protestants (the video image for these folks is a kay kay kay member), pagans, and atheists (this one’s Rich*rd Sp*ncer). But even the atheists are basically Christian atheists, in the sense that their ethics and worldview is very strongly informed by Christianity.
Well… “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism”
But then again, the key word here is theology, which is an explicit moral system, versus small c conservatives who are predominantly implicit moralists.
12:05-13:24: And this is how fascism happens, and why conservatives are especially susceptible. Fascism is politics-as-faith: the N*zis made Ary*ns into their savior. It doesn’t even have to come from Christianity; it happens wherever people “want their egos flattered and their sins absolved and to be folded into an authority structure that privileges them.”
This is falling into word-salad territory. Blending all the things I dislike together in a way that makes sense to me and no one else.
Italian Fascism (if we’re going to use it the way the self-identified would have, rather than just using it as slur) had no equivalent the concept of Aryan, and at least perceived itself as a third way between the excesses of Communism [as it was being practiced in russia] and atomic individualism. Hitler used god in his speeches but so did FDR and Churchill.
13:24-15:00: One must counter with the narrative that problems can be solved, that there’s mostly no such thing as human nature, and that nature doesn’t determine right. After all, nature would say the solution to a pandemic is everyone susceptible dying. Humanity today exists in defiance of nature, and most of our problems, from bigotry to oppression, are things we’ve created, from which it trivially follows that we can do away with them. (I’m saying it’s trivial that it follows, not that we can do away with them easily.) This view is secular, and while it can be reconciled with Christianity, it cannot be reconciled with “reactionary fundamentalism.”
There’s lots of bouncing around and bait and switch here. Human nature being fixed and immutable is not incompatible with the notion that any particular problem is unsolvable, as long as you accept that any action which pushes the state of the world in a more preferred direction is part of the ‘solution space’. I think the problem is that once you jettison the idea that humans are a blank slate and that people can be environmentally perfected, the solutions that account for this are not glamorous or cathartic.
_____________
Aside:
On problem with people like this is that they often see Science(tm) as basically debunking old bigotries. That’s their implicit definition of science. It’s therefore impossible that anyone could use scientific methods to conclude that there are innate biological differences between ‘males’ and ‘females’, or between those who excel in sports or academics and those who don’t.
I put times on everything so you could easily check my work; anyway, I was short with that part because there was very little to say. To flesh it out, he thinks conservatives make the basic mistake of extrapolating from “if a criminal can still get a gun … then every criminal can get a gun” or “if a poor person can get a gun then every poor person can get a gun.” He then beats this ridiculous strawman, and goes on to build other parts of his argument on conservatives just being obviously wrong on these and other policy questions. I think it’s fundamental to his whole argument, as I say at the end: conservatives are obviously wrong, so we need this big complicated theory to explain what they’re “really” thinking.
This is something CS Lewis pondered in his book That Hideous Strength. The gist is that punishment is, in a way, a lot less scary than medicalized “treatment.” The prison gets you for a set number of years; the mental institution can have you for as long as it likes.
The gist is that punishment is, in a way, a lot less scary than medicalized “treatment.”
I forget which of his essays it was but there’s one where he points out that punishment requires you to have done — or be attempting to do — something wrong, while treatment (and I’d add deterrence) can in principle be forced on you preventatively.
What I got out of that wasn’t that punishment is the only legitimate aim of law, but that it ought to be a part of it.
This smells like a straw man to me.
I think what Nick is referring to is how he makes few real arguments for his object-level positions and the overall argument doesn’t work without assuming he is correct on those. I think that’s somewhat defensible since the video is targeting his fellow progressive activists, not trying to persuade conservatives, but it exacerbates what I think is the overall portrayal of conservatives as inherently unreasonable in their views.
I’m kind of assuming though that we’re talking about fox news watcher conservatism.
He keeps switching targets. Payroll Guy is a Fox News junkie; but then he starts talking about Catholic conservatives (and apparently was all along?) and immediately hops to “Protestants, Pagans, and Atheists,” who are portrayed as Nick mentions.
7:58-8:35: Conservatives don’t even care about what policies work or don’t work; we can see this in the way they support abstinence and oppose contraceptives (remember, on points like this, that progressive arguments are obviously right). If they cared about reducing those things, they would support contraception; since they don’t, they don’t really care. Instead, we can infer what they really care about is sending the right message, in keeping up appearances.
Ach, stuff like that is the same argument often trotted out that “if you conservatives/pro-lifers really wanted to reduce abortion, you’d support contraception and sex education in schools!”
Funny, but whenever conservatives/prolifers have given in on contraception access being liberalised (see the Lambeth Conference of 1930 and what came after it), abortion comes trotting along right after it. Whenever the argument has been successful about “for the sake of humanity, permit abortion for rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother!”, then down the line it becomes “These controlling bigots only allow limited abortion!” (see Northern Ireland, which for a long time was regarded as more liberal than the South re: contraception and availability of abortion – for the rape etc. exceptions – but which now is being pilloried for not having the same laws on abortion as the rest of the UK, which in practice if not law is abortion on demand).
Yeah, as someone opposed to abortion, I am not whit convinced by “allow contraceptives if you really want to reduce abortion”, because that’s the camel’s nose under the tent – after all, sometime contraceptives fail, how can you be so cruel as to force a woman to go through with an unwanted pregnancy? No liberal has ever offered the bargain “give in on contraceptives to prevent abortion, and on our side we’ll agree no abortion in the case of contraceptive failure”. So why on earth would I agree to this bargain, which gets me to give in on a matter of principle, and which I know will only evoke further demands for further concessions?
“Why give in on anything if they’re just going to turn around and demand more?” explains a great deal of the culture war in general.
I forget who it was, but someone once pointed out that demands for compromise these days boil down to “You get nothing of what you want and I only get half of what I want.” That’s a formula for polarization.
A related point is that a large part of the argument for making abortion and contraception relatively easily available and providing sex education in schools was in order to prevent “unwanted children,” assumed to describe essentially all children of single mothers. Those changes occurred, the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers went sharply up instead of down and, so far as I can tell, nobody who supported those changes responded with “Oops. We were wrong.”
After all, nature would say the solution to a pandemic is everyone susceptible dying. Humanity today exists in defiance of nature,
Thinking more about it, this line of argument irks me. It’s too close to being the anprim worldview with the evaluations reversed: “Boo nature! Yay civilization!”
Also,
One must counter with the narrative that problems can be solved,
Problems can be solved. Predicaments cannot. And you can’t wish the latter into being the former.
The evaluations arguably aren’t reversed. He thinks all bigotry and oppression are things we created (13:55, if you don’t believe me). In other words, he is positing an ideal state of nature, too. (It’s hilarious, by the way, that he says just after this that evil in the world being mostly due to human fallibility is irreconcilable with “reactionary fundamentalism”; he has apparently never heard the story of Adam and Eve.)
I’ve heard both points from conservatives many times.
Proven by the above.
Errmm..we know that black-and-white thinking is wrong because of maths. Not all non-zero numbers are equal, as I like to say.
Perhaps different people think in black and white about different things. The things about which people think in black and white probably match pretty closely to their core values. Are there any things on which progressives will not compromise, even though others might see them as existing in varying degrees?
“Conservatives cannot do X” is itself black and white thinking. Also, two examples do not “prove” an inability to do otherwise, and, while we’re at it, the word “prove” is black and white thinking.
edit: Wait, are we really rehashing “Only a Sith deals in absolutes?”
“Only the Sith deal in absolutes!” Tom absolutely said.
hmm, that was a bad post on my part. It’s not black and white thinking if he leads with “to put it generally” and “tend to”.
@Randy M
Yes, the video does use the words “tend to.” Amusingly, though, its illustration is that, even if you say that Australia or the UK have fewer gun shootings, conservatives will just find an example of one anyway, as if to say, “Look, they still happen.” So our hypothetical conservative points to a real event as evidence, while our real video writer points to a hypothetical conservative as evidence; who is the one engaging in poor reasoning here? 🤔 Evidence that this is a general problem for conservatives outside his imagination, and one whose scale is unique to them and not afflicting liberals in equal measure, is never provided.
@Nick
It’s mostly the bubble I live in, but these days the response I see most often to “countries with gun control have fewer mass shootings” is either (1) challenge the definition of “mass shooting” or (2) point out that gun violence was already falling prior to those laws, and actually ticked up a bit afterward.
While I still agree that conservatives tend to not think in terms of systems enough — but vice versa! — these are not failures to think systematically.
In this gun control example the liberals are the black and white thinkers. “Guns do bad things, they should be illegal” is a much more black and white answer than “guns can be used for good and bad, making them illegal won’t do much to restrict the bad, but will very strongly restrict the good, therefore they shouldn’t be illegal.”
Errrmm… how do we get from:
to:
Because to me that sounds like saying:
“We now that black and white thinking is bad, and we now that conservatives use black and white thinking, because we are right.”
To misquote John Oliver: “This has a certain roundness to it.”
If he’s interpreting the conservative objection as “black and white thinking” I think he is badly modeling conservatives. On gun control, the objection is not “we can’t fix everything so let’s fix nothing” it is “Your proposals will be ineffective AND they will punish the law abiding by making it harder to exercise their rights”. So it’s more of a cost trade off issue.
On the flip side, the failure mode you see much more often is “This is a problem that is not solved. Therefore, the government should DO SOMETHING to fix it”. That strikes me as much more “black and white” thinking (and it is not limited to one side of the spectrum, but this “do something” bias is probably much more common on the left than “if there is no perfect solution we should do nothing” is on the right)
I’ve been following his content for a while, and I’m generally positive about it.
I think he is generally more realistic about where we are as a society than a lot of leftist commentators, in that he doesn’t seem to expect things to change magically or easily, and acknowledges that for a society to function the way he prefers would take work, incur costs, and have disadvantages. Obviously he still views the benefits as outweighing the drawbacks, but he doesn’t ignore them or downplay them. I would describe it as someone who understands how things are, but doesn’t believe they have to be that way (see for example the end of his Mainstreaming video where he talks about the phrase “this is not normal”, how it is misused, and how it could be legitimately useful as a rallying cry).
Most of his early work was examining and picking apart bad-faith claims, and I think his analysis generally fares much better when examining people who are acting either in bad faith or from behind a layer of irony, than examining people who genuinely believe what they say (such as Payroll Guy). That being said, he seems to have a good ability to acknowledge that the people who have a conservative worldview really have that worldview, and aren’t just saying they do as a smokescreen to be evil.
As a side note not related to his alt-right videos, but I highly recommend his video “The Artist Is Absent” to anyone interested in media analysis or narrative theory, as it covers in just over half an hour more than I learned from a semester-long class on the topic.
Would you say that “I hate Mondays” isn’t really representative of his views overall?
I don’t think I’d call it unrepresentative of his views, but I would say it’s certainly not a natural starting point. There are ten previous videos in the Alt-Right Playbook series, and as with most series like this, the early ones cover larger and better-defined ideas, and lay groundwork for ideas that are covered in later videos; by this point, it’s more about detail work and edge cases than capturing the main sweep of the group.
Is anyone watching the Amazon series Tales from the Loop? I’m three episodes in and wondering whether to continue or not.
So far there’s not much overarching narrative in his sci-fi quasi-anthology about a town researching something underground. The McGuffin is implied to be a collapsed star; it basically enables them to do magic once per episode to tell character dramas … and put like that you would think I would like it, but for a couple things. The pace, like the scenery, is glacial, with the hour or so run time usually being padded with introspective walks in the snow. And the characters never really seem to actually think about the consequences or possible uses of the tech that’s literally lying around. Time travel, body swapping, time stop… world changing, surely, but apparently not worth pursuing for anything beyond some teen nookie.
Is Peter F Hamilton involved?
What makes you think of Hamilton? Randy said nothing of ending everything by deus ex macchina yet. scnr
Was going to warn you about an episode, but it seems it was episode 3, which you already saw.
I was definitely interested in watching, but episode 3 was a little too much for my tastes and don’t intend on continuing.
A couple different friends of mine said it was excellent, so my wife and I started watching it.
I’ve been disappointed, for about the same reasons as you. We watched 4 episodes and took a break after that. (If you thought the first 3 episodes were too slow, don’t watch the 4th.)
We had thought about giving it another shot, but your comment got me to looking around on the internet. Seems the rest of the season is more of the same. We’ll give something else a chance.
I also got to episode 3 before giving up. It’s just… so… angsty. Nothing much happens, there’s just a lot of people walking slowly through snow-clad forests and staring broodingly out of dark windows. All the reality-warping sci-fi elements are just there to emphasise how life is all, like, HARD and stuff. :p
I’m too angsty to find angst very interesting. I can gaze into my own dark soul just fine, I don’t need to watch other people gaze into theirs.
I was sort of impressed by the production values: like an art-house movie but in smaller bites. And I was very impressed by their willingness to go 100% show-don’t-tell even if sometimes it meant you weren’t sure what was being shown. But in the end two episodes was as far as I could go.
I have mentioned before an interface problem — sometimes when I search for the next unread (~ n) message I go to the top of the thread instead. It turns out that is usually, perhaps always, something that happens immediately after I post a comment.
Which explains why I experience the problem more often than most.
Usually it’s because you need to click on text in the main column of the page. Once you’ve posted a new comment, you need to re-click text in the main column again. If you click in different columns, then the search will boot you up to the top.
Are you sure? If I click anywhere (including the center column) while using searching though new posts it will return me to the first match on the page.
I would definitely not expect it to hold its place after posting a new comment. I probably wouldn’t want it to, either, because it would cause me to miss new comments that had been posted above my new comment between the last time I loaded the page and the time I commented.
You have to click such that your cursor is the “text highlight” symbol. If you click empty space, that resets the position again.
If I post a comment, then select text in that comment, then use find squiggle n, I go to the top of the page. Similarly if I select text in the comment below mine.
Huh, yeah, that doesn’t happen for me.
I do what you describe, and that happens to me intermittently, but not consistently.
Also the “Hide” button has disappeared for me (this happened a few weeks ago)
My observation is that when I comment, the posts marked “new” are still marked “new”, and also newer comments appear that are also marked “new”, and I can’t tell which are which. Also commenting unhides all the threads I’ve hidden.
So what I do is search for all the “new” comments and read them (or hide the threads I’m not interested in), refresh, and repeat, until there are no new comments. Then I do my own posts, search for new comments in between each one. I’d post more if I didn’t go through all this.
On the upside, that strategy saves you from repeating what a poster said in the window between opening the page and responding to a given comment.
If you post a comment, the web page is reloaded (to show the new version that contains your post). It’s very likely that your browser will not keep the search position from the currently loaded version of the page when you reload and get a new version. It’s not even obvious what it would always even mean to keep “the same position” – if the new page is not exactly the same as the old, what is “the same position” on a different page? Should the browser try to search for a place where similar text occurs, or what?
In most browsers you should be able to select where to search from; if, after reloading, you select text around the place where you want to continue searching from, then the browser should find the next occurrence of the searched term after that point.
At least in Firefox, that is not the case.
Works for me in Firefox – I just tested repeatedly selecting some text from my comment above then pressing ctrl-g to repeat search, and each time it found your following comment instead of continuing to other new comments.
It sometimes happens to me; I use Firefox.
Yes, would like to post a correction to my previous comment. In Chrome, I had no issues.
In Firefox, if I post a new comment, and then select text after it, and then search, it boots me up to the top. But after that first search, I can select text and it will search after.
My experience as well.
This happens to me sometimes when I use Safari on my wife’s MacBook, but never on any other system that I’ve encountered.
My apologies for raising a very CW topic.
I have a question for those who believe there are no significant cognitive differences between different ethnicities and genders. Do you consider your view falsifiable? If yes, what kind of data can falsify it?
Less of this please.
Or rather, I’d rather that SanctaSimplicitas first provide an answer to the opposite direction first, instead of immediately framing the other side as the one with the burden of proof.
No need to get adversarial. I’m not here to represent or make converts for “the other side”. I’ve asked my question to understand the POV of rationalists with an average IQ of 140 and hopefully learn something new.
You might have better luck asking on a rationalist forum, then.
Yet the way you’ve framed your question sets up “believe that significant cognitive differences” as the default assumption, and that “those who believe there are no significant cognitive differences” are the ones who have to explain themselves.
This area of the internet is actually more likely to believe the motte of the former position already, so framing the question the way you did has a bit of a punching down subtext, which is likely why qwints replied the way they did.
Basically, there was no give-or-take in the OP, which can be a rhetorical red flag.
I think it’s reasonable to ask those you disagree with to explain themselves. I wouldn’t ask why someone believes the earth to be round. I would ask why someone believes it to be flat despite the evidence I know about for it being round.
The default assumption is “we don’t know.” If someone claims either that such differences do or don’t exist, it’s reasonable to ask his reasons or, as in the initial comment here, to ask how one could tell if his claim is true.
A of lot claims people make are based on the implicit assumption he is asking about, so it’s perfectly reasonable to ask how one would test it. If the answer is that it can’t be falsified, the conclusion is that one should not make claims that depend on it being true. If the answer to the mirror image question is the same, one also should not make claims that depend on its being false.
@uau
Like I said, the issue is that the OP was all take, no give. SanctaSimplicitas offered no context for this information query, nor if they considered their own view falsifiable. If a Christian swaggers into a group of atheists and says “I have a question for those who believe there are no supernatural beings that create our reality. Do you consider your view falsifiable? If yes, what kind of data can falsify it,” or vice versa with an atheist swaggering into a church, that’s not asking anything neutrally.
@DavidFriedman
I don’t find that the OP starts with “we don’t know” as the default. A lot of claims people make are based on the opposite of the implicit assumption he is asking about. Why is only one side being asked to clarify, without knowing the context that they will be replying to?
To clarify, I’m not opposed to the topic of discussion. I am, however, leery of the way SanctaSimplicitas worded the OP. Simply providing their own perspective to accompany the questions asked would have assuaged that.
(Assumption: “significant” in your question can be defined as “sufficiently strong and established to be considered when defining policy”)
For all practical purposes, no. Not because contradictory data could never cause me to change my opinion, but because current instruments measuring the sorts of cognitive differences commonly discussed in this context are not strong enough to produce data that I would trust sufficiently to make that change. Based on my (admittedly shallow) knowledge of the field, I do not believe such instruments are likely to be created in the forseeable future.
Thank you. Given the political and emotional pressures surrounding this topic it certainly makes a lot of sense to be wary about the accuracy of any published data. But if your view is not falsifiable what makes you believe that it‘s true (rather than being agnostic about it)?
Because opposite view has nothing convincing behind it and treating it seriously tends to result in terrible effects? With terrible effects including, but not limited to, “millions of people murdered”.
And that opposite view was (and still is) used as justification to murder, enslave and in general oppress people. With little evidence that treating it seriously is improving situation in any way.
And there is clear evidence of people often overestimating such differences, primarily to justify whatever evil thing they are doing.
Just as an aside, if belief that X is true has corresponded in the past with bad behavior, that doesn’t actually tell us anything at all about whether or not X is true.
Similarly, if you believe that X being true would have bad consequences for the world, once again, that tells you zip about whether or not X is true.
Can you give examples of that happening? I don’t think the Nazi complaint against the Jews was that they were cognitively inferior but that they were engaged in a conspiracy against the Aryans.
The belief that blacks were inferior certainly helped support the institution of slavery, but slavery has existed in lots of societies, such as Periclean Athens, with no such justification.
The obvious reason not to believe it is true — which is not equivalent to believing it is false — is that if you believe it is true and it isn’t you will misdiagnose important problems, interpret differences in outcomes actually due to innate differences as due to something else and so attempt cures that won’t work.
But the patent office still won’t look at any claims for perpetual motion machines. Anything that’s been asserted that often, and wrong that often, isn’t worth the bother of investigating yet again.
For start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation
And they had plans to do far more. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
AFAIK they had weird mix of both claims being present at the same time.
It reminds me about
from Umberto Eco (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism )
dinonerd:
I cheerfully await your rejection of all medical science, since nearly everything medical professionals believed and asserted before 1850 or so was just massively and comically wrong, and since medical science has been used repeatedly to assert various “social truths” as having been handed down from science (women having hysteria, homosexuality being a mental illness, masturbation causing bad physical effects, etc.).
matlkoniecz:
This is a bit like deciding that nobody may every look into any problems with capitalism because of the horrors of the gulags and the engineered famine in the Ukraine. Or that we must never allow ourselves to believe that, say, the wealth distribution in existing countries is unfair, lest we unleash the ghosts of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot upon the world once more.
Extremely long history of lies, propaganda, bad science, many mistaken people and associated evil is a valid reason for doubting new evidence/research and applying extra scrutiny.
For the same reason that I treat seriously tax return info statements and delete emails from Nigerian princes.
I am really confused about how my comments implies that. I would apply it as “I am not enthusiastic about repeating USSR style economy, how it differs from the previous attempt?”.
It is not “everything opposed to something evil is perfect”, such claim is idiotic (see Nazi Germany vs USSR).
Note that my comment had two parts:
“opposite view has nothing convincing behind” and “treating it seriously tends to result in terrible effects”
Neither applies to “wild runaway capitalism without rules is a great idea, 20h work day is a good idea”.
“capitalism should be regulated” has piles of supporting evidence
“treating it seriously tends to result in terrible effects” is blatantly untrue (unless you go full “any taxation is theft, any regulation is murder”)
@matkoniecz
“Because opposite view has nothing convincing behind it and treating it seriously tends to result in terrible effects? With terrible effects including, but not limited to, “millions of people murdered”.”
And that opposite view was (and still is) used as justification to murder, enslave and in general oppress people. With little evidence that treating it seriously is improving situation in any way.”
Only if you already have a worldview that supports “millions of people murdered”. If you are strongely egalitarian, opposite view just gives you really, really good reason for affirmative action.
And if you are anti-egalitarian but not fond of enslaving or murdering others, you just simply don’t care.
Would you consider the history of transportation regulation in the U.S. — rail, airlines, and trucking — as evidence for or against the claim?
rail, truck – neither, as I have no knowledge whatsoever here, except that minimal safety regulations are a good idea as far as I know
airlines – this seems similar in EU and I am pretty sure that safety records of airlines support that safety regulations were a good idea (and as bonus: free competition between airlines turned out to be good for consumers)
Or at least I like that air travel is ridiculously safe, even if that adds some overhead.
A combination of consequentialism, pragmatism, culture, extension from other areas with better data, and personal experience.
From a consequentialist perspective: I believe that the potential negative consequences of making policy assuming greater-than-true differences are significantly greater than the potential negative consequences of erring in the other direction.
From a pragmatic perspective: There are groups with much stronger evidence for cognitive differences between them (lawyers vs landscapers, college professors vs olympic athletes, young professionals vs retirees), but for entirely valid reasons, our policy does not treat those groups as fundamentally different. I expect those same reasons to apply at least as strongly to divisions where the difference is less obvious.
From a cultural perspective: I grew up in the rural midwest, where I encountered and absorbed cultural values of treating people as individuals and being wary of attempts to group people and treat the groups differently. This is not necessarily evidence for or against anything, but it informs where my defaults are (and what I assume in the absence of evidence).
From looking at other areas: I have seen studies looking at more easily measurable traits across demographic lines. Some find statistically significant differences, some don’t. But the vast majority of the ones I’m aware of that find statistically significant differences also find that those differences are swamped by individual variation.
From personal experience: Among people I’ve interacted with, I’ve seen evidence for cognitive differences between individuals, but those differences do not seem to generalize along demographic lines. I’m well aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but if my current model were severely miss-calibrated, I expect I would have noticed some confusion by now.
So I guess you could technically say I’m “agnostic” about the idea. But since my full opinion is “I don’t have strong evidence for or against this, but I expect it to be false, have weak evidence that it’s false, have personal experience suggesting that it’s false, and believe that even if it was true, we should behave as if it was false.”, it feels disingenuous to abbreviate that to anything other than “I do not believe this”.
Please note that in this case, my reasoning is my own. I am not claiming to speak for anyone besides myself. This is also not necessarily an exhaustive list; it is my attempt to identify the strongest contributors to my opinion.
I’m glad you wrote this comment, it was very interesting to me. I have pretty much the opposite view on whether there are differences, but my opinions on racial policy and my cultural upbringing (at least for the beginning of my life, we moved when I was a young teen) are near identical to yours
ime people from different groups do act differently, and there are similarities along the different grouping, including demographic, lines.
[Added: which is probably why we think differently]
Keep in mind that you most likely live in a bubble of people with intelligence and personality similar to your own. If you pay attention you might notice that in your social group certain demographics are under or over represented. The standard PC answer is structural X-ism, but this is typically claimed without evidence.
Thanks again for a detailed reply.
In the situation when group differences are smaller than individual differences you can still get very different outcomes at the edges of the distribution.
In my experience in recent times it has been more common to use this logic in reverse. If one assumes that all differences in social outcomes come from the environment, it makes sense to argue for giving preferential treatment to underperforming groups instead of treating everyone as an individual. Personally, I don’t like the situation when Asian students need higher SAT scores to get into prestigious colleges, so from a consequentialist perspective I would prefer governments to adopt an agnostic stance on this issue.
If true, that’s a reason not to put much weight on race or sex in evaluating an individual. But lots of claims used to support policies and conclusions are claims about averages.
Suppose someone observed that men were on average taller than women, rejected the possibility of innate differences along your lines, concluded that women must be on average more malnourished than men, and based policies on that belief. The fact that height varies more within each group than between the groups would not make the conclusion and the policies correct.
There was a feminist intelectual who argued that skeletons of men differ form skeletons of women only because women have been consistently malnurished because of patriarchy oppression. I forgot her name unfortunately.
This is a study that makes that claim.
@Filareta
Charlie Stross on his blog made a similar claim: he suggested that women are shorter than men because the patriarchy has been systematically undernourishing them for millennia.
Extremely systematic.
Apropo other discussions in this thread, that kind of conspiracy theory seems like the result of assign high and unchanging priors to strict human equality in all relevant metrics across all groupings.
@Randy M
Yeah, you can guess my reaction to the claim. Academically speaking it sounds rather interesting, but I am baffled that anyone outside academe would suggest it. It parallels nicely with the state of nature view Innuendo Studio expressed above: in both cases the pious explain our fallen state (inequality) by positing an ideal state of nature and telling a story where evil enters the world in the form of human sin, viz., bigotry and oppression, the effects of which were imprinted on humanity and remain with us today.
Charley believes in Lysenko?
What about the view that there are no significant height differences between ethnicities and genders? Do you believe it? Do you hold it to the same epistemic standard?
Yes, yes.
AFAIK this is not considered to be controversial and is pretty well confirmed.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples
Height is a hell of a lot easier to measure than intelligence is.
Intelligence is nevertheless fairly easy to measure.
We can tell that a pig is smarter than a chicken. We can tell that Bill Gates is smarter than the stoner next door. I don’t trust humanity in [CURRENT YEAR] to reliably judge intelligence well, let alone determine why such differences exist.
…Why?
IQ tests correlate well with professional success and don’t show any obvious cultural bias.
And if you don’t want to rely on tests, certainly you wouldn’t disagree that e.g. the average physicist is smarter than the average person.
At what level do you believe this? Regarding the specific example of the black population of the US having lower IQ scores than the white population, which of the following describes your position:
1. Blacks wouldn’t actually score any worse than whites if the tests were administered fairly. It’s racism/biases on the part of the test takers which causes incorrect results.
2. The tests are administered fairly and blacks do score lower, but ability to perform well is not very strongly correlated with “real intelligence”, so “lower ability to do well on existing IQ tests” does not mean “less intelligent”, and blacks would do no less well on a perfect measure of “real intelligence”. (If you do believe this, do you also believe that things like “does well in this mentally demanding work position” can not match with “does well in IQ tests”?)
3. The current black population is genuinely less intelligent than the current white population, but this is all caused by things like poor living conditions (exposure to lead, poor nutrition, etc); if current blacks had grown up in at least reasonably good conditions, they would not be less intelligent.
4. The black population is genuinely less intelligent, and this is at least in significant part caused by genetics, or other long-term issues with no known straightforward fix (this could include explanations like epigenetic effects).
In my view, number 4 is currently the most credible option. Note that your “when defining policy” is kind of ambiguous. The differences are not big enough for a policy like “choose the candidate based on race”. But they are big enough to invalidate a policy of “assume equality, and view differences in outcome as proof of injustice” (which is in many cases also incorrect because of culture differences).
I’m pretty sure the original question was about differences in {intelligence, interests, personality, etc} across race, ethnicity, and sex. That doesn’t require knowing what the cause of any such difference is. If you observe that Dutch people are a lot taller on average than Salvadorans, noticing that doesn’t require you to determine what fraction of that difference is genetic vs environmental.
I think your comment is confused and fails to correctly address what it’s replying to. The point was that we do have instruments that indicate differences which are relevant to group outcomes and policies which depend on those, yet he disagrees with the result they show.
This is not a case of “everyone agrees the Dutch are taller, we’re discussing why” as your post assumes.
This is a case of “we’ve measured people’s heights and got higher values for the Dutch, yet you say our measuring instruments are not good enough to show the Dutch are taller – which part exactly are you disagreeing with?”
Replication crisis part. Previous claims in this style turned out some time later to be hilariously bad science. Large part of modern (and supposedly better) psychology turned out to be bad science already.
So case 1? You’re saying that they’re simply administering IQ tests wrong, or incorrectly choosing populations to compare?
I don’t find that at all plausible. This is a very widely reproduced result. And there are a lot of people who desperately want it to be false, yet haven’t managed to get different results.
As I understand it, psychometrics has not been much affected by the replication crisis. Probably, that’s some mix of their being on average much more numerate and statistically sophisticated than most of the rest of psychology, and their being so heavily criticized on ideological grounds that they’ve actually had to bring their A game if they wanted to be listened to at all.
And if you don’t want to rely on IQ tests, you can just walk in a STEM college department or company. Despite all the affirmative actions programs that have being going on for decades, the demographics will still be strikingly different than the general population.
In an average scientific conference you can easily spot more people wearing a kippah than black people, despite the fact that only a fraction of male Jews regularly wear kippahs and black people outnumber Jews about 80:1 worldwide.
Let me suggest an alternative 5 which I suspect is to some degree true.
5. The difference is due to innate characteristics, but is correctable.
The characteristics I am thinking of are that black skin does a less efficient job than white skin of converting sunlight to vitamin D, and that blacks are considerably more likely to be lactose intolerant than whites. Those are heritable characteristics, and in an environment with substantially less sunlight than subsaharan Africa, and one where nutritional vitamin D comes largely through milk, mean that blacks are more likely to suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which can have cognitive consequences.
But you can solve the problem with vitamin D supplements, which cost something like a penny a day.
And a commitment to the claim that the differences can be due only to differences in the environment between blacks and whites will make it harder to recognize that particular possibility.
@DavidFriedman
Is there any evidence that skin color and milk consumption correlate with IQ after controlling for ethnicity?
Intuitively, there do seem to be some problems with this hypothesis: people from Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have possibly the highest avg. IQ after the Ashkenazim, yet they are usually darker than most Europeans and they are often lactose intollerant. Japan and Eastern China aren’t even very sunny for their latitudes (slide 6).
Moreover, black people in Africa tend to have lower IQ than African-Americans, despite being in the environment their skin color is adapted to.
(Also recently immigrated Igbo-Americans are allegedly smarter than slave-descended African-Americans despite being as dark or darker, although this might be confunded by immigration bias).
There is a lot of vitamin D in fish and the Japanese are known for eating lots of fish.
To me the more interesting case to consider is Ashkenazi Jews. They have the largest population mean difference on IQ tests, averaging a full standard deviation higher the the general population. That has several advantages over the ‘black population in the US’ example:
A) Very few people find the ‘racist test-givers’ a plausible explanation. The other genetic subgroups of Jews don’t have above-gen-pop IQ, so it’s implausible that pro-Jew bias is responsible for the elevated scores of Ashkenazis
B) While Ashkenazi’s are somewhat more affluent on average than whites and east asians in the US, they’re not as geographically segregated as blacks are. That makes ‘poor living conditions’ a bit less likely as an explanation (and most Ashkenazi’s don’t practice kosher eating, so this probably isn’t diet.)
C) Very few (if any) ethnonationalists, neonazi’s, etc. are motivated to believe Jews are innately better than whites. That helps avoid the common association of ethnic differences with motivated reasoning to justify discrimination, and makes the entire topic far safer to broach socially.
There’s obviously nothing fundamentally wrong with discussing this in terms of the US black population, but I usually find the Ashkenazi example more compelling and safer.
How confident can we be that it isn’t a matter of culture? Do children from non-Jewish backgrounds who are adopted by Jewish families turn out more or less clever than children who were simply born into Jewish families of comparable socioeconomic level?
One of the interesting things about IQ is that it’s remarkably impervious to interventions. Many different interventions have been invented and tried to increase IQ (for obvious reasons) and they’ve all been failures. An intervention may make you score higher on a particular type of IQ test (for instance, one could learn how to solve progressive matrix style tests by practicing them a lot) but that increase in ‘intelligence’ ends up being completely non-transferable to other styles of IQ test (and so isn’t actually a gain in the generalized intelligence factor that we refer to as ‘g’ or IQ.)
There’s been a TON of motivated research trying to raise IQ and failing, so I’m skeptical that there’s a culture that can manage a full standard deviation of improvement. I’m further skeptical because other Jewish genetic backgrounds don’t have an elevated IQ, and I would generally expect them to be more similar culturally to Ashkenazi than to the general population.
But so far as I can tell, the study you suggest has not been carried out. Stephen Pinker noted the lack of such a study in 2006 (THE LESSONS OF THE ASHKENAZIM) and I haven’t been able to find one since then. It would be really interesting if we could get a high enough n, and somehow control for the selection bias of whose children tend to get adopted out. You’d probably need a twin study to really do this properly.
I am not quite so convinced that culture can’t affect IQ scores, given the evidence that there is a small IQ boost for additional years of schooling. And as I understand it, in adoption studies, there’s a correlation between adoptive siblings’ IQs in childhood, but it fades away as you get older. Both of those make it plausible to me that deep culture-level stuff can influence IQ.
Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and his second cousin David Yulee Levy were Sephardim lawyer-capitalists, matching yet predating stereotypes of Ashkenazi success.
Though maybe that’s just noise because bourgeois elites are all going to look like that?
A still more impressive example is David Ricardo.
@DavidFriedman:
Huh, that’s right.
“His family were Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic. His father was a successful stockbroker and Ricardo began working with him at the age of 14.” (he got himself disowned at 21, though)
This is difficult to answer because 4 seems to be defined in such a broad way that it includes 3 (as well as both my opinion and some other opinions that I strongly disagree with).
I am aware of the difference in test results and do not believe that they are due to bias on the part of the test administrators. Bias in test creation is decreasing, but I suspect has not yet been entirely eliminated.
I am mostly ambivalent on how valuable IQ (as measured by tests) is as a measure. Developing an informed opinion here would require research that I have not done.
I believe that both complicated long-term issues and more obvious, immediately addressable issues contribute to the gap. I strongly suspect that most of the long-term effects are at least partially environmental (GxE is everywhere).
A better question to capture my opinion might be “In the long term, how much of the achievement gap do you believe can be eliminated without unjustly allocating resources or harming other groups?” My answer to that question would be “Between 90 and 100 percent of it”.
If it can’t be tested, wouldn’t it be sensible to avoid claims or policies that depend either on its being true or being false?
Yes. To the extent that this conversation is still about my personal opinions and what backs them, I agree with this entirely and tend to support such policies whenever they’re available.
Several people seem to be arguing against the “unequal outcomes are strong evidence of wrong-doing” position. While I think that discussion is worth having, that is not an opinion that I hold or support. My actual opinion on the matter is “People should be treated as individuals wherever possible; From a utilitarian perspective, people with poor outcomes are usually a more efficient place to allocate resources than people with already good outcomes; it is very rare for policy that selectively targets a particular demographic group to be good policy”. I apologize if I have created confusion on this front.
By that, do you mean
“Sufficiently strong and established that in some circumstances we should define policy based on the assumption that they exist”
or
“Sufficiently strong and established that we should not define policy based on the assumption that they don’t exist”
The former is obviously a much, much higher bar than the latter.
The former. My intent in calling out this assumption was to communicate that I was applying the higher standard and explaining why my personal opinion did not clear that bar.
To a first approximation, nobody can notice cognitive differences since nobody can observe what people are thinking, only what the output is. Obviously there are significant differences in how, in practice, people of different ethnicities and genders think, which can be observed by looking at the demographics of a typical engineering department. (That’s a difference in how people think whether or not you decide that different ethnicities and genders are better or worse at engineering, or just that they’re more or less interested; in any case, either one causes the other quite easily.)
If you want to raise a very CW topic, you probably mean to ask whether these cognitive differences are genetic. That one’s pretty much unfalsifiable since the politically correct alternative is that some groups lack opportunities to learn engineering, or else they are raised to believe they shouldn’t do those things because it’s not cool or whatever, and since there’s definitely at least some of that going on.
I have no idea how to distinguish “this is going on, and that’s all there is” from “this is going on, and there’s also genetics”, and I have no idea how distinguishing them would change my actions – except that arguing the second one is probably not helpful if you’re writing those diversity essays you need to work at a university in California.
In the case of male/female differences, it seems to me that the default assumption should be that they exist, at least if you believe in Darwinian evolution. It implies that humans are optimized for reproductive success, the difference between male and female is their role in reproduction, and it would be a surprising, although not impossible, coincidence if the characteristics that were optimal for the male role and for the female role were the same.
So far as what the differences are, one can suggest conjectures a priori, but which are true is going to depend on data.
Male/female differences clearly exist (for some reason pregnant males are hard to find), but the question was about significant cognitive differences.
My understanding is that average IQ scores are about the same for men and women. Men tend to do a little better on spacial reasoning tasks; women tend to do a little better on verbal tasks. Also, women tend to have a somewhat narrower standard deviation than men, so that men tend to dominate in both the upper and lower tails of the distribution.
Though to paraphrase my grandpa, sometimes evolution produces things as useless as teats on a boar.
I have nipples. I don’t have functional breasts — I can’t nurse an infant. My guess is that a boar can’t either.
Right, male nipples are non-functional but still expressed by mammal genes after mega-years of selection pressure.
Which evolutionary biologist was it who named retained features non-functional for reproductive success “spandrels”? Men and women’s brains could share spandrels rather than each being hyper-optimized for our reproductive roles.
Science done by angels.
.. okay, that needs unpacking. Historically, many, many claims have been made about differences of ability between the sexes and the races that have subsequently been proven utterly, ridiculously, grotesquely wrong. And all of which were entirely respectable in their day.
The people claiming women were inherently incapable of math while Ada Lovelace was publishing in the very same city thought themselves the very paragons of rational thinking and disinterested research.
People proclaimed african americans to be an inferior race, even as Macoy and Woods were working despite all their encumbrances to make railroads work.
In other words, this is a field in which people have historically been prone to the very most egregious of biases, cognitive error and scientific mal-practice.
The base assumption that there is no differences in ability is, simply, epistemic humility. The last 293 measures of the differences turned out to be a bunch of humbug inspired by ego and the need to feel oneself superior. Why on earth would you presume measurement 294 to be otherwise? Is this presumption accurate? Eh. Accurate enough. The existence of Ruth Lawrence rather demonstrates if there is any difference in inherent limits, it cannot be very large, and Emeagwali is a rather better bootstraps story than any white man I can recall ever having.
Actively believing in differences being exactly zero does not seem at all like epistemic humility. And your reasoning is objectively wrong if you assert that all conclusions of differences have to be a result of biased reasoning on behalf of those finding differences.
Look at what IQ tests contain. Do you really believe they have all been somehow intentionally designed to disadvantage some people based on race? That’s absurd. Or do you still claim that if some group consistently scores worse on the tests, “ego” is the only possible reason anyone could consider the results to reflect anything real? That it’s “epistemic humility” to assert that you know better?
Yes, this.
I mean, it’s clear that there are genetic components to intelligence. But the most popular definitions of “race” are so broad and unscientific as to render useless all generalizations using them. Last I checked, there was more genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world combined, which makes me incredibly suspicious of any sort of category like “black” or “African”. I find that people using those categories are generally either engaging in uninformed speculation about a dangerously sensitive topic, or have ulterior motives.
Personally, I find that a good rule of thumb is to only pay attention when a study cares enough to distinguish Igbo from Yoruba. If they can’t be bothered to even do *that*, what’s the point? (For instance, I hadn’t heard of Emeagwali before, but prior to looking him up, I’d have happily bet cash that he’s Igbo. And lo, he is.)
And besides, for most practical purposes, it’d be better to just use the individual results of the SAT or GRE or an IQ test. There’s no sense in measuring individual people, lumping their results together in broad categories, and then basing decisions on the categories, when you can instead base decisions on the individual test results. IMO, to do so betrays an unhealthy and unscientific attachment to the categories themselves.
Does this mean that you oppose affirmative action policies based on race?
To the extent that people in 21st century USA use those racial categories to discriminate, I’m fine with solutions that also use those racial categories. It’s obviously not as good as an individualized solution, which considers each person’s life uniquely, but I don’t have any deep philosophical objection to it.
What does an Ivy League educated law professor who can trace almost all of their ancestry back to slaves in the American South, have in common with a 1st-generation refugee from the Rwandan genocide who can barely read and write? If they both get called the n-word and are singled out for suspicion by police, that’s something they have in common, and that’s something that a broad category of “African-American” is suited for.
If you observe different outcomes by group, there are a lot of possible explanations. One is different abilities. As best I can tell, an ideological commitment to never consider that possible explanation is a way to sabotage your own brain, so that you simulate being dumber than you actually are. The appeal of a lot of rationalist ideas, to me, is the goal of simulating someone smarter than I actually am, so I find this as unappealing as the idea of an ideological commitment to never consider discrimination as an explanation.
@Exetali Do
Do black people actually get called the n-word in a non-negligible quantity nowadays, other than by black rappers and other black people? Do they experience more suffering due to the n-word than white (or ‘white’) people do?
For example, half-Japanese racing driver Kyle Larson was fired last month for saying the n-word to a white person. Only white people seemed to have been hurt due to that.
As for being stopped by the police, men are stopped far more than women (just like the scientific evidence suggests that there is a judicial penalty for white men and a greater penalty for black men, but no penalty for black women, compared to white women).
AFAIK, the evidence also shows that police target people in criminal neighborhoods much more, where those neighborhoods are more often black, but they target white men in those neighborhoods just as much as black men.
So do you think that men deserve affirmative action based on gender and more so than black women, but less than black men? Should rich black men that live in good neighborhoods be lumped in with black men that live in poor neighborhoods? What about white men in good vs bad neighborhoods?
Tangential question, but when does this kind of intersection analysis get into p-hacking territory? The textbook example used for p-hacking is a study that shows that the medication is only working for [age] [gender] [race] subgroup. Is that just about how in an individual study, the sub-group sample is too small?
The judicial studies have pretty large datasets. Lots of criminals exist.
In general I would want a pattern that makes sense, as well as the same pattern for different studies using the same methodology and using different methodology.
So are you saying that a claim like “blacks have been discriminated against” is meaningless, because there is no definable group of “blacks” that could be said to have faced or not faced discrimination?
I think at least the groups “black population in USA” and “white population in USA” are definable well enough, show measurable average differences, and are practically relevant to discussion. It’s not necessary to consider whether any results generalize to various African populations – that can be an interesting question, but the topic is not “useless” even if you completely ignore such considerations.
This can be a reasonable view, but only if you adhere to it consistently, and avoid claims like “blacks earn less or have less high-level jobs, this is evidence of racism/discrimination” on either national or per-company scale. As long as people make such claims, it’s important to know when such results can be explained by reasons other than discrimination. And people keep making such claims. Thus it’s important to be aware of race-related IQ and culture differences and when those can explain the different outcomes.
We could perhaps ignore average differences between races if people didn’t care about racism (as in, for example nobody would jump to accusations of racism if some company hired very few blacks, and wouldn’t consider it any more important than whether they hired more people born in the evening than people born in the morning). But as long as accusations of racism are a relevant thing, and people care whether they are true or not, they need to know the reasons other than racism why differences occur.
You are moving goalposts. Initial question was asked about significant cognitive differences.
Now you are taking comments about “genetic components to intelligence” and applying them in a different context.
Initial post was troll-baity, but to my surprise resulted in interesting responses. But now you try to take comments out of context and post new troll bait.
Please do not present such things like it is confirmed or a known truth.
No, I am not moving goalposts. People make claims like “worse black outcomes are evidence of discrimination” and then create policy based on that. But if worse outcomes are explained by “blacks have lower IQs”, that means the policy is mistaken. This is one of the most important practical contexts where racial differences come up, and if “black” makes sense for the discrimination claim, it makes just as much sense for the IQ claim.
I gave the reasoning behind this position. You didn’t even try to address it, and instead posted a pretty much zero-content reply. Try to make more meaningful posts.
Note that post I was replying to was itself making various claims as if they were obviously true, but my reply was a lot more constructive than yours.
I agree with matnoiecz.
Different categories are appropriate to different questions in different areas of life. The original question was about genetics and intelligence, and my response was (roughly) that the standard categories we think of as “race” aren’t especially meaningful there, and that anyone with a serious scientific interest in discovering truth will happily acknowledge this.
To pick a less controversial example, in some contexts it’s useful to talk about “Asians”, but in other contexts it might be more useful to distinguish “East Asians” from “South Asians” from “South-East Asians” from “Central Asians”. There might be times when it’s useful to distinguish “Chinese” from other “East Asians”, but (IMO) the category “Chinese” is mostly an imperial political construct, bound together by a shared writing system and the Communist Party of China. And if you’re discussing genetics, it is definitely useful to distinguish various ethnic groups in China, such as “Han Chinese”. And there may be many more layers that I’m not aware of, or that no one alive today is aware of yet. Maybe there’s something significant about the Hakka? I dunno.
Or for another example, sometimes it’s useful to talk about diseases caused by viruses vs. bacteria vs. parasites vs. whatever. And sometimes it’s useful to talk about, say, coronaviruses vs. herpesviruses. But if you’re trying to develop vaccines, you’ll need to be operating at a level where you’re talking about covid-19.
Please believe me, that to the extent that I have a “side” here, I find it very frustrating when people make bad arguments for what they think is a good cause. I feel your pain, more than I’m willing to share in public. And I don’t know of any good solution to that, but one of the reasons I like this site is that people here don’t do that nearly as often as elsewhere.
But to go back to what Thomas Jorgensen said, people have a bad track record of making decisions based on “race”, so I err on the side of requiring more proof than normal for those sorts of claims.
Please reply to the specific case I mentioned in my post. That is, do you disagree with the following specific claim:
The two categories “black people in USA” and “white people in USA” are meaningful enough and have measurable and relevant average differences.
I could respect such a view, but only if it also meant that you would apply this higher burden of proof to things like accepting allegations of racism, or considering things like affirmative action acceptable.
Meaningful? That depends on what is meant, and to whom. But I do agree that those categories have measurable differences. When I said “useless”, I meant more along the lines of “useless for scientific study of the causes of intelligence”, and not “useless for arguing against bad public policy”.
That sounds like me, to me. *shrug* As an example, I prefer forms of affirmative action that aren’t directly based on race, but rather on measurable conditions (which can be the result of past discrimination), such as poverty and low SES. We’d lose the affirmation that “past policies were wrong, and we’re sorry, and we’re trying to make up for them”, which can be psychologically important. I hope that can be accomplished through other means. But we’d also reduce stigma and ethnic balkanization. And the policies have the virtue of being self-correcting over the long run. (If we have a Martian underclass in 300 years, they’d benefit too.)
@uau
Just because there are average differences doesn’t mean that those differences justify policy.
It is a fact that black Americans are more criminal on average. Does that justify a curfew for black Americans? That is not merely a question on whether there is an average difference, but a subjective moral question on what kinds of discrimination and for what reason, you consider (un)just.
Treating white people as a group that doesn’t get aid that black people do, suggests that there need to be structural advantages for all white people that are larger than structural advantages that some clear categorization of black people enjoy over white people outside of that category. For example, if white Billy-Bob has ’10’ advantage due to being white, but 20 disadvantage due to being Appalachian ‘white trash,’ while black Malia has the opposite, then Malia is on net, advantaged by 10 over Billy-Bob. So if you affirmative action Malia over Billy-Bob, you increased the lack of privilege of Billy-Bob.
There are indications that this is happening. For example, black African 1st and 2nd generation migrants are immensely over-represented at top universities, compared to descendants from slaves. Is it then fair to then judge that group of black people who profit from affirmative action by statistics for a group with a far different composition?
Similarly, Jews are immensely over-represented at universities. Is it fair to judge them based on statistics for whites in general, when the statistics for Jews specifically are different?
What is the justification for using black and white as categories if it is possible to categorize in a more nuanced way than just by race? Is that even a good categorization or can dis-privilege be determined much better by parental income or such?
PS. Note that if the original type of intersectionality is true, this gets even worse, as one black/white person may then be (dis)advantaged by their skin color by much more than another black/white person. In fact, some black/white people could be (dis)advantaged by it. Interventions purely by race would then often help the already relatively advantaged and/or harm the relatively disadvantaged.
I largely agree with your post. If government was truly ignoring race (which would need to include ignoring accusations of racism), then those differences would not give a cause to start enacting race-based policies.
But as long as there are race-based policies, and when it matters whether accusations of racism are considered true or false, those differences are relevant.
Shouldn’t that include the claim “the distribution of cognitive abilities is the same in different racial groups”? That claim is implicit in factual claims on which policies are based. Yet you appear to accept it with no evidence and no a priori reason to expect it. In the male/female case, there is a strong a priori reason to reject it, as I already pointed out.
The whole “there’s no such thing as race” line falls apart on a couple points, as discussed here earlier:
a. Genetic tests very reliably tell you the self-identified race of the testee.
b. Forensic anthropologists can pretty reliably tell you the race of the person who died, given the skeleton.
c. There are known genetic disorders and other diseases that occur with very different frequencies across racial groups. (sickle-cell, hypertension)
d. There are also easily-observed differences that occur with very different frequencies across racial groups (lactose intolerance)
If you wanted better information to predict the behavior of an individual, that would be desirable. But if what you want to explain is differences in average outcomes for different populations it isn’t essential and may be impractical, since you are more likely to know the color of skin of a large number of people you have data on than where in Africa their ancestors came from.
If Igbo have an average IQ of 110 and Yoruba of 90 and the African-American population is 90% Yoruba and 10% Igbo, then the statement that African Americans have an average IQ below 100 is true, and could explain differences in average income, or educational attainment, or the like. And the data to confirm it does not require a study that distinguished Igbo from Yoruba.
Yes, I agree.
I’ve seen various studies that show modest differences in IQ among races. Some of them controlled for different things. I don’t recall seeing any that controlled for enough of the stuff I could think of off the top of my head, that I’m absolutely convinced that a significant gap exists. But on the other hand, it would seem highly unusual if there weren’t any difference at all; that would actually be fascinating news in itself.
In general, the average gap reported between different races is small compared to the gap among individual people I meet in my day-to-day life. This matches up nicely with my philosophical preference to treat each person as an individual, and not pre-judge them, so I tend to get along fine.
I mostly come across discussion about average racial IQs in the context of a counter-argument against bad left-wing arguments (such as, pay gaps are 100% caused by discrimination). That’s pretty much the only decent use for the concept of average racial IQ that I can think of. As far as I’m aware, it’s not useful for doing scientific research into the causes of intelligence. It’s at best a minor weapon in the Culture War, and one that has a long track record of damaging the people who use it. And I have enough distaste for the CW, that I think I interpreted the original question as being more about doing scientific research, and less about preventing bad policy, especially since I hadn’t seen anyone discussing a bad policy beforehand.
This claim is often repeated, and it is true to some extent but misleading: most of the genetic variance in sub-Saharan Africa is due to groups of Khoisan and Pygmies who are highly ancestral and quite different than any other human group. Even early European explorers, without any knowledge of genetics, immediately recognized them as different than other Africans. Overall they amount to about 1.3 million people, 1/800 of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. The rest of the population is not that genetically diverse.
I agree, too.
Racist science has an extremely long history of being extremely wrong, which is a good reason to distrust claims made in its favor. It has an extremely long history of being used in favor of horrible policies, which is a good reason to be cautious about using the belief to shape your further worldview. Our understanding of human intelligence is not very good, and the people who want to use their belief in innate differences between races are not very, um, cautious about them even today. It isn’t clear to me that I should start believing in innate differences in intelligence at all, let alone that I should act on such beliefs.
As already mentioned by other posters, compare these two types of reactions to “group A is doing badly”:
1. This is due to inferior abilities of group A.
2. All you people in group A, you should blame group B. It’s due to their unfair behavior that you are suffering.
The second one has been used significantly more to justify horrible behavior than the first. If you consider bad history as a reason to demand a high standard of proof, “blame (racism of) group B” is at least as bad as “group A is less intelligent on average”.
Although the history of the US shows pretty unambiguously that group B enslaved and oppressed group A for a few hundred years, and one of the explicit justifications given by group B was that group A was innately inferior. It’s not some wildly unfounded claim that group B has behaved unfairly in its collective treatment of group A.
Missing a few “ancestors of”.
Justification maybe, but quite obviously not the reason they did it, not even in the sense of using it to get others to actively support it or participate in it. Nobody went “those people are inferior, and we have a duty to enslave inferior people”. Their motivation was financial. And even this was with a claim of inferiority a lot stronger than “less intelligent on average“.
“Blame the racism of group B” is a lot more directly the kind of statement that history should make you wary of.
There are a lot of groups whose ancestors were treated unfairly at some reasonably recent point. You should still be wary of claims like “Unemployed? Blame group X! Just remember what they did in WW2!”
And my point here is not that any claims have to be “wildly unfounded”. It’s that when you compare the statements “it’s because group A is worse on average” and “it’s due to unfair behavior of group B”, it’s wrong to claim the first is of a type that is historically worse and thus you should set the burden of proof higher before evaluating any specific evidence.
Saying that you should be really careful about claiming a group is less intelligent, while simultaneously not demanding extremely high standard of proof if you want to blame one group for another’s suffering, that’s nonsense.
Sure, that’s a bad thing to do as well. Why’re you telling me for?
No, really, why are you telling me? I’m not making any such claims!
Sorry for derailing this thread further from its initial starting point, but I want to chime in on a few points:
If you’re thinking of slavery, yes. Jim Crow, not so much. If my quick Google of black demographic statistics is accurate, something around one fifth of black people alive today were born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
They absolutely did:
I know no reason to suppose that Stephens was lying, or covering for a financial motive; in particular, a financial motive doesn’t explain race-based slavery. If slavery were motivated purely financially, one needs to explain why poor whites were never enslaved, and why Stephens considered “subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race” to be a “violation of the laws of nature”.
A financial motive also doesn’t satisfactorily explain Jim Crow, which did not have any obvious financial beneficiaries. Indeed, famously, the railroad company in Plessy v. Ferguson had opposed the Separate Car Acts as it would require them to buy more railway cars. And yet Plessy still lost his case.
I very strongly dispute this. From 1789 to 1965 there were at most a few years where the majority of black Americans were not, as a matter of law, second class citizens or functionally non-citizens: at various periods in that duration they were enslaved, denied the right to vote, denied equality before the law, were targets of state-enabled violence on a scale comparable with pogroms in the Russian Empire, and were generally not regarded as having rights that whites were bound to respect. This was not just common opinion, but the opinion of the highest court in the land.
There is basically nothing, nothing at all, that compares in terms of what has been done by a group blaming another group for racism. You are welcome to dispute this point, but you are going to have to give some examples that stand up against a multi-century racially-based caste system that invited violence, oppression, and literal slavery.
They certainly were in pre-Christian times. With Christianity it was established early on that enslaving a fellow Christian was morally unacceptable.
Religion aside, the real financial reason why Africans consituted most of slaves in the Age of Sail was that costal West African kingdoms based their economy on capturing slaves inland and trading them with Europeans for guns and stuff. Buying African slaves was much cheaper than trying to enslave anyone else, and since slavery was so common in Africa, the practice was considered culturally acceptable even by Europeans who would refrain from enslaving each other.
In context, this is clearly about slavery in American history. The point I and NostalgiaForInfinity are making is that, contra uau, it requires only a brief inspection of American history from the founding until 1963 to conclude that a racial group (African Americans) suffered dramatically, in part justified by arguments about racial inferiority.
The restriction of slavery in the American south cannot be explained by positing primarily financial motives, nor by the argument that slaves were differentiated based on religion, as many (and eventually most, though I don’t know when this occured) African American slaves were Christians. Moreover, slaveholders on the eve of the Civil War explicitly justified slavery by appealing to racial inferiority.
Africans were also better suited for tropical plantation work where the NA slave trade originated.
(That said, it was surely more of an “us vs them” thing than strict economic optimization)
So they fact that they forced the slaves to do back-breaking work in the plantations was just a coincidence?
The financial motivation is quite obvious: plantation agricolture was labor intensive and the American economy was labor-limited, thus it was cheaper to buy an African slave from the West African slavers and pay for his upkeep than to hire a worker or get a slave from anywhere else. Any other justification is a post-hoc rationalization.
While I am sure this plays a role in explaining African slavery in the tropics, African American slavery extended well north of the tropics in America, but those same regions never saw white slavery.
And all of this talk about the financial motives only apply to slavery, not Jim Crow or other instances of obvious oppression of African Americans.
EDIT to respond to viVI_IViv:
Of course it’s not a coincidence; but nor is it a coincidence that there was never a legal category for white slaves, even though there is no a priori reason why a white slave provides any less financial benefit. The point is not that slavery was racially motivated, but that targeting slavery at blacks was.
And, again, this does nothing to explain Jim Crow. What financial interest did white southerners have from forbidding African Americans from riding on white rail cars? What was the financial motivation behind lynching?
“Why was there slavery?” is a different question than “Why were Africans the ones that were slaves”.
For what it’s worth, I think the best question to ask is: why did slavery persist in the American South against clear moral arguments for abolition? And a huge component of the answer has to be, “because blacks were regarded as inferior, and so less worthy of moral consideration”–the fact that Southern politicians explicitly used this as a justification, both for slavery, and for the post-slavery black codes and Jim Crow, for which other motivations are not well-suited, suggests that this perceived inferiority really did matter.
@Eugene Dawn says:
I think a much better answer is “because the salaries and social standing of a large number of people depended on it persisting.”
How many such people had their social standing and salaries depend on slavery? If less than a majority of southern society, how did they manage to create political institutions that defended slavery that relied on the support of a majority whose social and financial standing was not dependent on slavery?
And, does that also explain Jim Crow? And popular support for Jim Crow laws among white people?
It doesn’t; I’d say Jim Crow is better modeled as a general conflict between racial/religious/etc groups that we have lots and lots of examples of.
Not using the word “racism”, but that’s just nitpicking. If you take that as a defense, then nobody’s ever done pretty much anything bad at all for believing some group to have “lower average intelligence with enough individual variation that there is still lots of overlap between the groups”.
Telling one group to blame another for their suffering is very much the kind of thing that has a bad history.
How come it maps to the exact same divide as slavery? How come no other racial or religious groups were subject to Jim Crow? Why was the conflict between white southerners and blacks so much more intense than between any other racial/religious groups?
The implication is that the first group would only blame the other after being told to blame them; when in fact two hundred years of history plainly attests to the fact that one group treated the other monstrously with no comparable mistreatment in the other direction no “telling” is necessary.
The reason why blacks are justified in blaming racism is because even a casual glance at history validates this view. “Scapegoating other racial groups” has a bad history; “accurately representing the way your racial group has been scapegoated” really does not.
But this is all very abstract: what specific instance of “blaming another group for your woes” would you stand up against the history of American slavery and Jim Crow? And, if you are certain that slavery was actually motivated by financial concerns, and Jim Crow was simply racial competition, how do you know that these reasons weren’t in operation in this case as well?
Probably lots of reasons, and I wouldn’t expect to be able to list comprehensive reasons for that or most other conflicts, but I’d expect that at least population size and being very easy to distinguish were factors.
There have been a huge number of injustices in history. It very much does matter whether people go around telling others to keep those in mind. And telling that the current people of some group are bad with light demands for evidence.
You’re shifting between present and past. Intentionally bringing up past grievances is bad even if true. Scapegoating present people is worse.
If you try to justify present scapegoating by accuracy, at the very least you should acknowledge that it does have a bad history, and demand rigor to make sure it really is accurate. As in not having the attitude that it’s a priori bad to say that blacks have lower average intelligence, but just fine to blame white racism, before evaluating the specific evidence for just how accurate either claim is.
Lots of conflicts. As already mentioned, the Nazi hatred toward Jews was mostly motivated by “they caused/cause German suffering” (WW1 backstab, and so on).
In what case? If you mean generally “responsible for some black suffering somewhere”, I don’t know that for sure.
You don’t have to list comprehensive reasons, but presumably you formed this opinion based on some evidence? Some books you’ve read, primary sources from the time, etc? Even just a sketch of the reasons that led you to this conclusion would be helpful.
I’d specifically be interested to hear why you think this is a reasonable explanation even though Jim Crow didn’t arise in the north, despite black people being similarly distinctive, and why Jim Crow was so much more comprehensive, sustained, and long-lived than prejudice against Chinese immigrants, given that they were similarly distinctive.
It certainly matters how we use history; one possible bad use of history is to dig up old grievances. Another possible bad use of history is to downplay past injustices so that we cannot understand them properly, and can’t properly address their lingering effects.
Again, it matters why we bring it up. I don’t think small Eastern European states bringing up grievances against Russia is bad just because the grievances are in the past–not if we can learn something about how the relationship between these countries might play out in the present day.
This standard effectively forbids us to learn from the past, especially past injustices, which seem to me quite important to learn from if we want to prevent future injustices. Scapegoating is bad, but not all presentations of past grievances are scapegoating: some of them are legitimate demands for justices, and forbidding discussion of them forecloses the possibility of achieving justice.
FWIW I can’t imagine you mean this as categorically as you’ve stated it, so I’ll ask: are there any circumstances you can think of where it’s justified to bring up past grievances? How do we determine those cases?
Of course making this judgment a priori would be insane: that’s why I think the ~200 year history of black oppression is important, and particularly the fact that, in my reading, a significant justification for this was the claim that blacks were “inferior”, fit only to be plow hands or manual labourers.
I think the fact of black oppression is incontestable and overwhelming; if we disagree on this, then I don’t think there’s much point in continuing the discussion. If our only disagreement is on the extent to which claims of racial inferiority were responsible for it, then I’m happy to make a stronger argument for my claim, but for what it’s worth I think there is very good evidence for it.
The reason this comparison fails is because, unlike slavery and Jim Crow, there are no incontestable and overwhelming examples of Jews treating Germans badly en masse; this is what distinguishes mere scapegoating from an accurate presentation of historical facts. That’s why the German narrative about Jews is ludicrous, but the Jewish claim that “Jews were treated very badly by Germany” is not mere scapegoating, and is just a plainly true historical fact.
My argument is that “blacks were treated poorly by whites in America” is much more like the second claim than the first.
The practice of slavery requires a mechanism by which to create slaves, as well as a way to keep slaves enslaved. For example, in ancient Rome, one of the main ways was to enslave conquered armies (or rebellious people), which led to the logical consequence of very dangerous slave rebellions (made up of military men), including the best-known one, led by Spartacus.
Another major source was piracy, which can make people rather upset if they notice that you deal with pirates.
There are logical reasons why America couldn’t get (white) slaves at a reasonable cost from conquest or piracy. Trading with Europe was highly beneficial. Debt bondage and such seems to have been relatively inconsequential in Rome, causing a lot of unrest among the lower class, while providing relatively few slaves.
Finally, Roman writings appear fairly obsessed with escaped slaves, suggesting that it was a huge issue. Having skin color as a good indication means that it is easier to find escaped slaves and harder to mistake non-slaves for escaped slaves.
“Racism” is too narrow. The category originally introduced was “one group blaming another for bad things that happened to it.”
Quite a lot of antisemitism, from blood libel through the holocaust, fits that pattern.
Let me be clearer: for bad things that the other group actually did. There is no comparable history of Jews actually doing the things non-Jews accused them of, in the same way there genuinely is a history of black slavery and oppression. If Germans could point to two centuries of Jews denying them rights and treating them as second class citizens, this would be a counterexample. In fact, though, it is the exact opposite: the argument more analogous to the one others in this thread are pursuing would be that it is dangerous for Jews to accurately describe their mistreatment at the hands of non-Jews; that we require equally strict standards of evidence to assert that “Jews were treated badly in Europe and this may have effects on their culture today” as to assert that “Jews control finance and industry, and use this position to advance their own interests”.
@Eugene Dawn
AFAIK, at the time Jews were actually overrepresented in positions of power (just like they are today, in the USA). So if one believes that those in power are oppressing others, then it follows that Jews are more guilty of oppressing others.
Note that if one replaces Jews by men, this is a very common feminists argument.
I don’t necessarily agree with either argument…
If Jews were .75% of the Germany population at the time, then even 1% of positions of power being held by Jews would count as over-representation and yet it would be plainly ludicrous to suppose that this is sufficient grounds to believe in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
As it happens, this whole point is asinine, as this was not the justification offered by German antisemites, who ignored evidence of Jewish over-representation in the army to argue that Jews were profiteering defeatists who had cost Germany the war; that they were an alien race who did not belong in Germany; that they murdered children and raped women.
I fervently hope you do not disagree that the actual causes of German antisemitism, unlike charges against Germans for perpetrating the Holocaust and those against Southern whites for inflicting slavery (which are plainly and obviously true) are plainly false.
Even your imagined causes of German antisemitism (which, again, are only hypothetical) require, are clearly less evidently true than oppression of Jews during the Holocaust.
But this whole line of argument is devolving into farce, so let me ask you directly:
Do you think the Holocaust constituted oppression of Jews? Did slavery constitute oppression of African Americans?
Are the facts of the Holocaust and slavery obviously true for anyone with even a casual knowledge of modern history?
If you answered yes to the first two questions, do you think it was trivially easy to draw those conclusions, and that anyone with a passing familiarity with these events would draw the same conclusions?
And finally, do the examples you and David Friedman have offered bear anything but the remotest resemblance to these cases? Do you really think that “Jews say Germans did bad things to them in the Holocaust” and “Germans say Jews did bad things to them in the Weimar era” are remotely comparable statements?
You’re again conflating past and present. I think our primary disagreement is that you seem to be treating “black oppression” as a single monolithic truth – in intentionally exaggerated terms, “Whites took blacks as slaves in the 1700s! This is absolute historical truth! Therefore it’s perfectly OK for Black Lives Matter to spread a narrative of whites killing blacks in the present!”.
Again, there were a lot of people who were unjustly treated in history. You need to distinguish talking about historical facts, and bringing up past grudges in discussion about current problems. “It’s factually true!” is not a justification for the latter. Even where you discuss past events with relevance to current situation, such as “what caused blacks to adopt a bad culture?”, there’s a difference whether you blame “the 1920s government” for some relevant injustice, or “whites” in a way meant to place blame on current whites.
So if you want to scapegoat current whites for the current problems of blacks, my view is that you should face a high burden of proof. “Blacks have lower average intelligence” should not be considered a priori a worse explanation than “blame whites” scapegoating. That you point to past injustices does not change this, whether they’re true or not. Scapegoating an existing group requires strong evidence that they’re doing evil now.
There was no supply of white slaves. You couldn’t just enslave a random person off the street, and essentially nobody was selling white slaves internationally. The only people who traded in white slaves were the Barbary pirates who kidnapped people off the coasts of southern Europe, but engaging in such trade with them would have been an international relations nightmare for the British-American colonists. Similar considerations applied to most other ethnicities.
There were some Native Americans who were enslaved, generally they were captured by other Native Americans during tribal wars and sold off to the colonists, not unlike the African slaves, but after a certain point the the Native American population was small and keeping Native Americans captive was tricky: unless the whole tribe was enslaved or destroyed, the slaves had somewhere to run off to, or their fellow tribesmen could attempt to free them. African slaves, on the other hand, had nowhere to go and nobody that could come to free them.
No one has mentioned BLM before this point; what this thread started debating was whether claims about black intellectual inferiority have an “extremely long history of being used in favor of horrible policies”, and if so, is there a comparably long history of horrible policies justified by claims along the lines of, “blame the racism of group A”.
To evaluate this, we have to evaluate the actual history the horrible policies each set of claims has been used to justify. This is why I keep harping on slavery and Jim Crow: they are evidence that DeWitt’s initial claim is true; trivially true in my opinion.
In contrast, you have asserted that
To judge this claim, we very obviously need to compare the historical records of groups claiming “group A are our inferiors” to those of people claiming “blame the racism of group B”.
I continue to claim that the first kind of statement has a much worse history than the second, and that the supposed counterexamples presented don’t really shift my thinking; Nazi attitudes toward Jews are more like the first claim than the second.
Somehow, you have determined that my insistence on bringing up history is an attempt to justify statements of the form “blame the racism of group A”, which it is not–I am willing to have this discussion, but as we are already losing track of the discussion, I’d prefer to defer that to avoid further confusion.
So, to return the actual matter at hand:
1. Do you agree that slavery and Jim Crow count trivially as bad things done to blacks?
2. If “yes” to 1, do you count them as part of the set {horrible policies justified by claims like “group A is inferior”}?
3. If “no” to 2, why not?
4. Do you think the Nazi claims against Jews are better regarded as members of the set {horrible policies justified by claims like “group A is inferior”}, or as members of the set {horrible policies justified by claims like “blame the racism of group B”}? If the latter, why?
For your purposes, I think you need the stronger claim that the horrible policies would not have occurred, or would have occurred much less often, without the claims.
Yes.
Depends on your meaning of “justified”. Did someone use that excuse to justify their behavior? Yes, among others. Was that what motivated people to do it? No. As I already said earlier in the thread, slavery happened for economic reasons, not because people believed it was the right thing to do even if it cost them money.
Very clearly the latter. Germans were not angry at Jews for generally sucking at their jobs. They were angry at Jews for betraying them and causing the loss in WW1 with bad consequences for all Germans, etc.
@David Friedman
Yes, though of course the same caveat applies to the other set of claims and justifications too.
@ uau
You certainly said; what you didn’t do is give any evidence why you believe this. And similarly for Jim Crow: you have argued that Jim Crow is only tangentially related to a belief in black inferiority, but I don’t see any reason to believe this true: I think the coincidence between the same minority group first being enslaved and then being subject to onerous restrictions on their freedom and rights is best explained by supposing a belief that the targeted minority differs from the majority in a way that makes it okay to deny them rights. I have already offered evidence that, at least in the case of slavery, this supposed difference was the natural subservience of the minority.
If this is where we disagree, on whether a belief in racial inferiority was necessary and/or sufficient for these episodes of oppression, I will provide more evidence–but first I’d like to see some evidence for your claim. I’ve already offered some (though certainly not sufficient or decisive) evidence, and have so far only received assertions in return, so I think it’s fair that you point me to some evidence in favour of your view.
On this I disagree. First of all, the stab-in-the-back-legend doesn’t really map to blame on the racism of the Jews; it also, as I’ve said, differs in that the racism of white Americans towards black Americans is an incontestably true historical fact, in very stark contrast to the claim that Jews sabotaged the war effort.
Even more, the stab-in-the-back-legend is very much not the totality of Nazi antisemitism: Jews were literally regarded as inferior people, capable of defiling German blood with “foreign poison”, ineligible for the rights of German citizens. This obsession with Jewish race and ancestry is basically inexplicable in your model, and entirely fits mine. And again, insofar as German grievances were phrased in terms of prior bad treatment at the hands of Jews, they were basically wholly imaginary, and often still had a racially essentialist character–Nazis blamed Jews for the Weimar Republic and its various failings, but not as a matter of Jews instituting bad policies, but rather because Jews were naturally a pollutant of German culture, causing decay simply by their infecting the German race with their presence.
Given that, again unlike with blacks in America, the alleged harms caused by Jews were pretty much all imaginary or grossly overexaggerated, I don’t think the German case looks much like a grievance for past injustices at all.
This is whitewashing a lot of the history of the “This is due to inferior abilities of group A.” kind of statements
https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp
So yeah, it was used to justify slavery, and will be used again to justify tons of policies and injustices alive today.
That’s a bit odd. Did they also believe that stupid whites should be denied rights?
If they thought that blacks were all the equivalent of lunatics or imbeciles it might make sense, but it’s hard to believe that anyone routinely interacting with them would believe that. How does “on the average they are a little less intelligent than we are” lead to “it’s all right to deny them rights?”
How does it even lead to segregated schools? Wouldn’t the obvious implication be that, if you wanted to segregate schools by intelligence, i.e. track them, you would expect the smart track to be mostly white and the slow track mostly black, with no need for further racial sorting?
The pattern looks more like tribalism, in-group out-group, than a consequence of belief in cognitive differences.
To take a somewhat analogous case, I’m Ashkenazi. My wife is a Christian. A smart Christian. That makes more sense than marrying a random woman of my own ethnicity, despite the difference in mean IQ of the groups.
It doesn’t specifically use the word “racism”, but it is of the “they’re an enemy who’s attacked us” variety, as opposed to the “they suck at everything” variety.
I never claimed the Nazi/Jew case was an example of bringing up past grievances. If you want that, look at the Balkans.
Your comparison is a bad one in other ways too: the Nazi message was that the German suffering was caused by recent and ongoing enemy action. If you apply that to the American situation, it is no longer incontestably true historical fact. And that version (racism of current whites is to blame for current bad situation of blacks) is exactly the version I’ve talked against.
I don’t think that really shows anything. Once the Jews very the official enemy, they were attributed pretty much every possible bad thing.
@David Friedman
Because people rounded down from “on average less intelligent” to “as a group less intelligent” and from there “not much more than beasts”, and the last step to denying rights wasn’t so far from there.
Just so it’s clear I’m not editorializing or inserting my own opinion here, allow me to quote Nathaniel Beverley Tucker on the matter, from his essay On the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation Between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave, in which he describes Africans as
Insofar as the pro-slavery faction could be forced to admit that Africans were not quite so brutish as all that, they would chalk it up to the edifying effects of slavery.
The issue is that a belief in cognitive differences can both exaggerate tribalism and be exaggerated by pre-existing tribalism.
Obviously other beliefs can have this property as well, but the belief that one group of people are, in a more or less unimprovable way, stuck with lower abilities and so will have to content themselves with a lesser lot in life on the whole is unsurprisingly more prone to this failure mode.
@uau
I asked you for an example of when one group of people blaming another for their woes led to bad outcomes, and you responded by bringing up Nazi Germany. You are welcome to clarify what you meant by that, if not as an example of people justifying terrible behaviour as a redress for past grievancse.
No, that was not the Nazi message. Once again the Nazi message was that Jews were literally subhuman vermin who polluted the Aryan community by their presence; German suffering was merely regarded as an inevitable outcome of having allowed the purity of the German state to be corrupted in this way.
If you think I am mischaracterizing the Nazi message you are welcome to provide evidence to the contrary. So far you have offered nothing but assertions with no evidence, and I don’t intend to continue this discussion if you are unwilling to provide a single piece of evidence to back up your historical claims.
I separately mentioned two things, “bringing up past grievances” and “scapegoating another group for current suffering”. You asked for an example of the latter. The Nazi/Jew situation is an example: Nazis blamed Jews (and some other groups) for the loss of WW1, which was causing significant suffering in Germany. This is not redress for “past grievances” significantly in the past; this is saying that the other group is working against you, and is the reason for your problems.
“Blame white racism for the current suffering of blacks” is comparable to such scapegoating. If you mean that as “racism of 1700s whites” then it could be interpreted as bringing up past grievances instead, but I don’t think many interpret it that way.
Even if you believe this was more significant than the backstab for getting Germans to hate Jews, isn’t this quite different from mere “inferiority”? This is itself saying that they’re pretty directly harming Germans.
“That’s a bit odd. Did they also believe that stupid whites should be denied rights?”
At least one of them did– he had plans (dreams?) of a autocratic Confederacy, and lower class whites wouldn’t have equal rights. I’m hoping I can find the source.
Not the thing I was looking for, but
Further evidence of the hostility of the ruling class towards the Poor White is found in the enactment by several southern states of a poll tax, which required an annual payment of $1.00 (equivalent to $28 in 2019),[15] to vote, in some cases, or at least payment before voting. The poll tax excluded not only African Americans, but also the many Poor Whites, from voting, as they lived in a barter economy and were cash poor.
This is simply about poverty rather than any claims about intelligence.
Defining anything that implies cognitive differences between races as “racist science” is a very good way of insulating your brain from unwanted facts, but a pretty lousy way to help yourself think clearly.
It’s the term commonly used in English parlance to talk about such science, and terms such as H – beedee tend to get picked up by the comment filter. Sheesh.
DeWitt:
Just to clarify, are you claiming that the normal English language way to refer to mainstream IQ research (which definitely recognizes the black/white average IQ differences) is “racist science?”
(“racist science.”)
Can you see how dishonest that is? “Racism” doesn’t mean “the belief that there are some differences among races,” a belief that is obviously true. It means, roughly, hating or despising other people because of their race.
Labeling research in racial IQ differences as racist science is asserting that the only possible reason to want to know whether they exist is because you are a racist. That’s name calling, the behavior of someone uninterested in rational discussion or considering that his beliefs might be mistaken. People who behave that way don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Wash out your browser with soap.
Perhaps the most famous example of racial science being “wrong” is the 19th century Samuel Morton’s study of brain sizes based on his collection of skulls from various places in the world, where he concluded that blacks had smaller brains than whites. This was famously “debunked” by Stephen Jay Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man, which became a bestseller.
Except that Morton’s skull collections still exists and in 2011 some researchers actually measured these skulls with modern imaging techniques. Turns out that Morton was right and Gould was wrong: the skulls of black people really had smaller brain cavities than those of white people.
Was “racist” science really wrong?
I suspect that this particular debunking was low quality.
Low quality debunking is not implying that original was better.
Selecting bottom tier arguments from the other side and replying only to them is not useful at all and.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Let’s hear the top tier arguments then.
> Let’s hear the top tier arguments then.
The problem is that it’s not always easy to find them, even if you are looking for them.
Oh dear. You have far too many inadequately defined terms above. I don’t know what I’d need to believe to be one of the people you are addressing.
What do you mean by cognitive differences?
I would take that to mean any of:
a. Differences in overall intellectual ability.
b. Differences in relative strengths and weaknesses among different intellectual abilities.
c. Differences in interests.
d. Differences in personality and temperament.
I think all these exist among different identifiable groups. Those differences are almost never relevant when evaluating or interacting with an individual, since there’s also a huge amount of variation within each group. (For example, men average better at spacial reasoning than men, but a female mechanical engineer is better than the overwhelming majority of men at spacial reasoning.) I think the root causes of those differences are still unclear–probably some are ultimately biological in origin (particularly many of the sex differences), but it’s very hard to untangle that from culture/environment/etc.
We have imperfect but workable ways to measure all of these. IQ tests seem to correlate pretty well with what we mean when we talk about intelligence, the scores are consistent across an individual’s lifetime, and scores correlate positively with both work performance and school performance, as well as correlating more weakly with all kinds of life outcomes. Both IQ[0] and tests of learning (which also correlate strongly with IQ among people who’ve had approximately the same education) allow us to split out different kinds of intelligence or tasks, like separating spacial/mathematical reasoning from verbal reasoning, or separating fluid and crystalized intelligence[1]. We can also observe what the most intellectually demanding things are that people do, informally, and then note who’s better/worse at them overall. Or we can define things that are extra hard to do intellectually, and then note who manages to do them.
We also have personality tests, which are imperfect but still seem to give pretty consistent results from the same person over time, and to be useful in making predictions. And there are certainly plenty of observations that seem plausible about different personality types going into some fields, etc. I think there’s some evidence that women and men have somewhat different average personality test scores, and this probably matters in the big wide world.
To gauge interests, we can look at simple questionaires (“which of these is more interesting to you”), at experiments where we let kids play with whatever toy they like and see which ones they prefer, etc. We can also observe what choices people actually make–when a woman has a choice of going into economics vs psychology, or medicine vs engineering, it’s informative to note that a lot more men choose economics/engineering and a lot more women chose psychology/medicine.
In all these cases, I agree that the information available isn’t perfect, but I think it’s enough to support an informed opinion about differences between groups in these areas. I’d say IQ tests are very solid, with more than a century of scholarship and experimental results and statistics behind them. I think personality tests are a lot fuzzier, but that’s not something I’ve studied much.
And of course, if you want to argue that there’s simply no way to say anything about intelligence, then that justifies saying “nobody can know whether there are intelligence differences between groups,” not “there are no such differences.”
[0] The best way to know that IQ scores are meaningful is that they allow you to make predictions that are more accurate than you can make without them. Give Alice access to a list of students with their race, socioeconomic status, and previous grades. Give Bob the same information, but also their IQ scores. Bob can reliably make better overall predictions about how those kids will do in later years of school than Alice can make.
[1] Fluid intelligence means how well you solve a new problem; crystalized intelligence means how well you solve problems you’ve already learned to solve. Fluid intelligence is highest when you’re young and declines as you age. Eventually crystalized intelligence declines, but much more slowly/later. Aging genuinely sucks.
So, I do think significant differences exist across racial groups, and that the evidence for those differences is overwhelming. I don’t know why the differences exist (you can make a plausible argument for genetics, but it’s very hard to untangle from culture, environment, etc.), but their existence seems hard to dispute, to me.
That evidence comes from IQ statistics, but also from basically every other standardized test–SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT, bar exams, etc. It also comes from observing the racial makeup in STEM fields, among NSF fellows, among winners of prestigious prizes like the Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, etc. You see it reflected in chess champions, math competitions, science fairs. You see it in graduation rates from high school and college. In a world where black, white, and Asian intelligence is the same, every one of those needs an explanation. In a world where they’re different in the way the IQ statistics claim, they’re all roughly what you’d expect.
Note that in a world where those test and academic differences are due to racism, someone needs to explain why it is that Asians average better than whites on the tests. Maybe also why people of Eastern European Jewish descent do even better than Asians on average on those tests–something that caused a lot of heartburn when the kids of the big wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants started taking too many spots at Ivy League schools earlier in the last century.
The differences between group averages are not very important in daily life–you interact with individuals, not with huge populations. When it becomes important is when you want to know what’s likely to happen with group statistics, or with policies geared toward treating groups differently or changing group statistics.
For example, many public school systems have tracking by ability–they put kids together in a classroom with other kids who are performing at about the same level. This almost always ends up with the advanced tracks having a high concentration of Asians and a low concentration of blacks. Many school systems also have magnet schools intended to take the brightest kids and give them an advanced education. Those programs tend to be *really* heavily Asian–it’s common to have a population of school kids that’s less than 10% Asian and a magnet population that’s like 50% Asian. Black kids are disproportionately *not* in those advanced classes.
Now, this is what I would have predicted from racial IQ averages[1]. About once ever few months, there is a big blow-up somewhere about the racial disparities in these programs. Many news articles are written explaining that this must be due to racism among teachers, principals, parents, *someone*. (The overwhelming majority of those articles don’t mention the disproportionate success of Asians–probably because that doesn’t really fit the narrative, and raises a lot of uncomfortable questions.)
Lots of people seem to believe that any mention of the racial IQ statistics that very economically explain the pattern would be inflamatory and evil. Yet hardly anyone seems to feel that way about accusing teachers or principals or even the whole society of being racist and keeping the black kids down. This seems nuts to me–if talking about racial IQ differences in taboo for fear of causing social unrest, whipping up racial antagonism should be *super* taboo. Yet somehow, it isn’t.
Understanding racial IQ statistics helps you make sense of the world–it lets you make correct predictions that people without that knowledge will fail to make. It helps you know what the likely outcome of some proposed policies will be–something that will apparently be shocking to everyone else when the thing you were pretty sure was going to happen indeed happens.
So, what’s the cost of this knowledge? First of all, to make any use of it, you have to *really, truly* get through your head the difference between a population average and an individual drawn from that population. Otherwise, you’re going to make a bunch of dumb predictions at an individual level, like assuming a black mathematician or doctor is not very smart because of population IQ statistics. The other cost is that it’s one of those places where the “social truth” that everyone is supposed to know and believe happens to be wildly out of step with the actual true truth. That means sometimes you are going to know things that are true, but that are socially unacceptable to mention out loud.
At a societal level, there’s a danger that knowing about IQ differences will lead you to fail to correct for things that would have helped in some situation independent of IQ differences. Baltimore city schools turn in an amazingly horrible performance at teaching kids, and the kids are mostly poor and black, but there are probably a lot of other things wrong with that school system. That’s the flipside of having “everyone know” that all races are equal in intelligence, where you spend a lot of effort trying to fix things like the performance gap in education, by treating problems that aren’t actually responsible for much or any of that gap.
None of that leads to piles of skulls or a holocaust by any plausible path I can imagine.
[1] Though I believe there are also substantial cultural and environmental effects going on there–blacks are probably undershooting their native abilities, and Asians are probably overshooting their native abilities.
I just want to highlight this.
You know the thing that led to the holocaust? It wasn’t so much thinking Jews were dumb. It was moreso thinking that the Germans were impoverished because Jews were colluding against them.
The “kinder” narrative of blank-slatism + institutional racism being the default explanation for all differences seems crafted to foment resentment.
edit: added wishy-washy-ness.
I mean, the Nazis were not exactly…unconcerned with races who they thought were dumb. And they definitely thought Jews were inferior; the collusion they alleged was a totalizing racial collusion that was carried in the blood, that could be spread by sexual contact, and that degraded “superior” cultures in a way akin to parasitism. It’s not “IQ differences”, but it’s definitely “biological differences”, and I think much more bears a family resemblance to “IQ differences” than to “Jews have treated us badly in the past”.
Nazi racial ideology owed a lot more to the racial theories advanced by white supremacists in the States than to anything that resembles modern social justice.
But do you truly think that 0% of the problems of black people in america are due to institutional or personal racism? Because as long as that’s a significant problem, it should not be taboo to denounce it.
I mean, obviously in Nazi Germany it would be taboo to denounce the Aryans for committing genocide. Why would you want to take away people’s ability to denounce institutional racism?
What if I think it’s <10%?
I don't think it should be taboo to discuss it, but I do think it should be taboo to discuss it without any thought to what might be in the other 90% whatsoever.
I don’t think the currently stated position by most SJ-adjacent people is “institutional racism is just one of many factors that might explain minority underachievement.”
Fair, but let’s say that it’s true. What would you be able to do to solve some genetically caused lower IQ in certain populations right now? It’d be science fiction to do propose a fix.
If you were right, that 10% would still be fixeable today, while the other 90% would be fixeable in ??? so let’s attack what we can fix, and ignore what we cannot and that _we_know_ can cause even further racism.
By all means, speak the truth!
My comment, as I perceived albatross11’s, was specifically in response to people who believe we should not consider genetic differences because that can, through some chain of paranoid or motivated reasoning, lead to mass oppression. This objection feels disingenuous when you also push a narrative that is risking social friction.
I’m cool with presenting evidence largely without regard to how the plebs will deal with it.
But if you’re good with lying for pro-social reasons, as I’ve seen advocated regarding human subpopulation distinctions, let’s just go all the way and adopt a state church. You might not get to sleep in on Sunday, but we’ll have much firmer footing for stating “All are created equal” than the precarious current orthodoxy which hold that of course evolution wouldn’t be in favor of materially significant inequality now, would it?
It’s not a problem!* It’s okay for groups to have different starting and ending points. In intelligence, in life expectancy, in income, in height, in sex appeal, in charisma, in twitter followers or NYT bestsellers. Equality is a false god.
But there are numerous policy implications if some level of inequality in inherent. Like, perhaps we should try to keep a proporationate number of steady paying, respected jobs around. Let’s value people for their virtues and not (primarily) their brilliance. Let’s not require universities to admit on the basis of mirroring population demographics. Etc.
*Obviously, some unknown factor that actually makes people dumber than their potential–or known and unaddressed factor–should be addressed. But that applies whether it mitigates or exacerbates group differences.
Again, intellectual inferiority of the african slaves was a justification for slavery, so when you say “chain of paranoid or motivated reasoning” it actually means “history”.
This is super dangerous territory and should be treated like nuclear weapon research.
Basically nobody opposes this. Everyone is generally in favor of “doing what we can” to eliminate racism and improve equality.
But, if you concede that racism is only one of many things causing inequality, that essentially requires you accept that even if we completely eradicate racism, inequality will remain. Which means that “unequal outcomes” cannot be treated, by themselves, as evidence racism exists.
I don’t think very many SJ advocates are willing to concede this, at all.
JP Nunez:
Without delving into SF, I’d say one thing we could do would be to put substantial resources into lead abatement. Black kids are substantially more likely to be exposed to high lead levels than white kids, and we know lead impedes brain development and causes both lower IQ and behavior problems. The world would be a much, much better place if we took every penny we spend on any kind of affirmative action, set-aside, etc., and put it *all* into lead abatement in low-income housing.
To understand why that’s not a priority, I think you have to look to public choice theory. The beneficiaries of affirmative action have very little overlap with the people whose kids growing up in a high-lead environment.
Of course, if you think knowing about racial IQ statistics is inherently super dangerous and so all discussion on the matter should be suppressed, you’ll have a harder time arguing for that, or for other speculative but not crazy stuff like vitamin D supplementation. Why, it’s almost like more knowledge leads to better decisions or something.
Yeah, “I want slaves, how can I make slaves without being at risk myself?” is motivated reasoning.
But more important in the syllogism was the idea that it was okay to enslave people. Fortunately, this notion was successfully challenged and not held any longer in Western nations. (This comes off as a little blase; I agree this requires diligence to transmit the value.)
The trouble is, it takes a lot of hard work to uncover nuclear weapons research. Whereas human sub-populations distinctions require sophisticated arguments to cover over.
Lead abatement is pretty popular on the left: here’s Vox making the case. Hilary made it a part of her campaign, and she has been interested in the idea since at least 2003. Obama and Biden also paid some attention to the issue in 2008.
This cycle, Julian Castro had a lead abatement plan; I don’t think any other Democrats had a specific lead abatement plan this cycle; though I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden ends up with one as his climate change plan already makes some references to Flint, MI and lead in water.
What would you be able to do to solve genetically caused IQ differences among individuals right now?
Nothing.
Does it follow that we should pretend they don’t exist, allocate roles in society by lot?
@JPnunez
It’s also justification for reparations in the form of western spending medical/genetic research since intelligence differentials are not ‘earned’ in a strict sense.
It’s also not as if belief in underlying cognitive sameness isn’t being used to justify less than honorable behavior. I’m looking at you South Africa.
The genetic hypothesis might be irresponsible if the people who pushed a 100% environmental assumption were laissez faire libertarians, and the other side was opening pushing for new, expensive, compulsory social engineering schemes based on genetics. But that’s not really the way it has played out at least since the end of WW2.
It certainly was irresponsible when the players involved were pushing far more and understood the situation far less.
The world looks very unlike this. I mean, America regularly goes out of their way to supress the votes of african american. For starters.
Sure, if you ask around, most people will _say_ they are against racism and pro equality, but their actions won’t be exactly 1:1 to these affirmations.
For the record I am talking in hypotheticals. I mean, sure, maybe, very probably racism isn’t the only thing causing inequality, but it’s probably among the main causes. Certainly not “less than 10%”.
Yeah I wonder what’s the deal with South Africa. surely their history with racial inequality isn’t to blame, no. Or colonization.
To be fair, the people doing said vote suppressing claim to be doing it for non-racial reasons. Sometimes they even claim to be doing it for non-partisan reasons. And I think they probably honestly believe this as well.
Most people don’t think of themselves as racist.
By “America” you presumably mean both political parties? It looks to me much more as though people who expect African-Americans to vote against their party try to discourage them from voting, and people who expect African-Americans to vote for their party try to encourage them to vote.
@Randy M
(1) not considering at all is stupid, but being aware that science was already misused (or pseudoscience was successfully presented as a science) is a good idea
(2) “paranoid or motivated reasoning” claim shows that you are not aware about history surrounding this topic.
It was widely used to justify slavery in USA, it was reason and justifications for German occupiers murdering 4.5 million to 5.7 million of people in Poland (and murder of more people elsewhere) ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/06/open-thread-153-25/#comment-892952 ).
It was also ideology that fueled WW II German dreams (Lebensraum, Generalplan Ost).
We already have piles of skulls, claiming that being suspicious about similar claims (significant cognitive differences) is paranoid and has 0 justification makes me just more dubious about quality of your other claims.
Do you seriously think we haven’t noticed them?
And I don’t think Randy M was saying that ‘theorising that IQ research will be used by racists’ is motivated reasoning, I think he was using that term to describe what the racists so using it would be engaging in.
If you think that “belief in cognitive differences” was what caused Nazi Germany to atrocitate Poland, rather than “belief that only one’s own in-group should properly be counted in one’s ethical calculus”, may I suggest reading Bill Shirer’s Berlin Diary?
Do be honest, yes. In a number of threads people have pointed out that a belief in racial inferiority has been used to justify atrocities, and the most common (to the point I think of unanimity, though I may be missing some responses) is to deny that a belief in racial inferiority had anything to do those episodes. That is the opposite of noticing the skulls. That is having the skulls pointed out to you and responding, “What, those? No, those aren’t mine”.
You’re equivocating with the phrase “belief in racial inferiority”.
We believe that the population distribution of intelligence has correlations with genetic factors which in turn correlate with traditional indicia of race, in ways that have population-level statistical consequences, but that don’t justify treating individuals unequally on racial grounds.
Nazis (not just the footsoldiers but the high-level theorists) believed that any given individual Pole was sub-human purely by virtue of Slavic race and that this justified executing that Pole to make room for more Germans.
Now technically you can (if you choose your definitions carefully) encompass both of those with the phrase “belief in racial inferiority”, but do you really think there are no ‘skulls-relevant’ differences between the two?
I obviously don’t think there are no differences between the two, but I also don’t think that there aren’t similarities. I’d feel a lot more sympathy for people taking the other side of this if they would just say, “sure, I agree that there are some uncomfortable similarities between ideas of racial inferiority’ and ‘white people are more intelligent on average’ than black people, and the more-or-less corollary ‘we should expect black people to predominate in less-intellectually-demanding fields that are not always given much social respect’.
I’m even more sensitive to this given the bad history in America of justifying unconscionable treatment of blacks on the basis of perceived racial inferiority, which has been one of the biggest and most persistent sources of wide-scale injustice in American history.
Ultimately though, here’s why I think the two concepts are different enough that we shouldn’t expect people to round off to the worst ideas that have been common in American history; and moreover here’s how I would argue against someone who did try to conflate the two”.
Instead, I’ve gotten, “racial inferiority? What are you talking about, no one in America has ever done anything bad to anyone else on the basis of racial inferiority”. This does not leave me optimistic.
Yes. Multiple people in this discussion were unaware about direct connection of nazi ideology of inferior races ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch ) with mass murder of millions.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/06/open-thread-153-25/#comment-892952
There were people unaware that Nazis claimed that Jewish are distinct and inferior and used it as one of justifications and reasons for a Holocaust. (yes, stab in the back treachery was also claimed for German Jews and there was also this supposed conspiracy – but it was not a sole claim)
Nobody from this people (maybe I missed someone?) admitted that actually idea that “$GROUP is less intelligent” was actually used as motivation and justification for this atrocities.
So, yes. I am claiming that it is case of standing on a pile of skulls and pretending that it is not there.
Maybe this new research is of better quality, maybe it is true. But pretending that it is not suspiciously similar triggers very intense doubt for me.
Someone unwilling to admit that? Then what else is hiding and I am unable to spot it? I am unable to review science behind IQ tests comparison. Genetic vs cultural influence for start and deciding whatever signal is actually significant.
But if someone is claiming something extremely controversial and at the same time makes clearly wrong claims about history? I am not going to treat it seriously.
Also not true, even Nazis were more subtle.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksdeutsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksdeutsche#'Volksdeutsche'_in_German-occupied_western_Poland
@DavidFreidman
True, but (and this is kind of separate from this discussion) suppressing the votes of people who don’t vote for you is…still not great.
On top of that, someone who is actively and explicitly targeting black voters for suppression is definitely engaged in racist behavior. That their motivation may or may not be rooted in personal racist beliefs hardly matters.
Any institutional racism left in the United States forty years after Martin Luther King et al, is going to be the fruit at the very tippy-top of that particular tree, and I’m not optimistic about your fixing it any time soon.
The other 90% is going to be mostly cultural stuff that we haven’t touched for forty years because It’s Racism Stupid. Well, OK, MLK made some efforts in that direction, but he somehow wound up dead, and Bill Cosby talked about it some, but he had to be cancelled. I think there may still be some low-hanging fruit there.
It’s not like the holocaust is the only undesirable outcome possible. Slavery was often justified by the lower intellect of the black people that was being slaved.
It seems to me that there are two ideas that possibly get run together here.
There’s an empirical question – “are there cognitive differences?”
There’s also a methodological question – “should we act as though there are cognitive differences?”
It seems to me that there might be very good reasons to accept a negative answer to the methodological question regardless of what we think is the correct answer to the empirical question. This has certainly been the case for many other vexed debates in the past, ranging from religious orthodoxy (since 1648 the accepted view has largely been something like “even if there is a fact of the matter as to which type of Christianity is correct, it’s probably best to legislate as though there isn’t such a fact”) to the supernatural (since 1900 the accepted view has largely been something like “even if we can’t prove that there are no souls and demons and gods and ESP, it’s probably more productive to pursue scientific explanations that don’t involve these things”).
Of course, actual individuals pursuing the methodological goal might accidentally have it shape their personal beliefs as well, so they might get factually wrong beliefs from pursuing the more productive social/political/intellectual policy.
Using Dutch fixed expressions increases your perceived IQ by 10 points, according to a survey among Dutch people.
‘Bijdehand’ = with-the-hand or close-to-the-hand
Being smart or a wise-ass. Probably derives from the obsolete expression: ‘vroeg bij de hand zijn’ = early with the hand. This referred to someone who was up early and was ready to work with his hands.
A similar expression that means smart and wise is ‘bij de pinken zijn’ = being with/close to the pinky fingers. However, the actual meaning of ‘pinken’ in this expression is probably the Bargoen/Rotwelsch Pink(e), which means money. So a person who was ‘with his pinken’ was close to his money aka frugal.
‘bij de vleet’ = with the ‘vleet’
In abundance, with the implied meaning that the thing that is in abundance has little value. For example: she has boyfriends ‘bij de vleet,’ implies that the woman in question keeps attracting and pushing away non-serious boyfriends.
‘Vleet’ is an absolete word that resulted from a changed pronunciation of ‘vloot,’ which in the 13th century meant floater and fishing net, where the latter meaning probably comes from a typical kind of language evolution, where a reference to a part of a thing, becomes used for the entire thing (here, the word for the floater attached to the net, was then used for both the net and the floater).
In both English, you now have ‘fleet’ and in Dutch ‘vloot,’ which have come to mean a different collection of floating things: ships.
‘Bij de vodden grijpen’ = Grabbing by the rags
Grabbing by the collar (which is also a Dutch expression, in fact, we have a lot of expressions for grabbing hold of someone). ‘Vodden’ used to mean old clothes, but is now only used to refer to rags.
‘Bij nacht en ontij’ = By night and not time
When other (normal) people stay at home. ‘Ontij’ is short for ‘ontijd,’ where ‘on’ = not and ‘tijd’ = time. So ‘ontij’ is not the time to do things.
‘Bij slot van rekening’ = when locking the bill
In conclusion. ‘slot’ now means lock, but probably used to be a synonym for closing, where once proper locks became common, it got used to only refer to those.
Using Dutch fixed expressions increases your perceived IQ by 10 points, according to a survey among Dutch people.
Even backed up by science!
Once again, thank you for all this! It kind of humbles the Dutch learner. Where the English have their cockney rhyming slang, and the French have their verlan, this seems to be how the Dutch make their language a little more opaque to foreigners.
Do I understand correctly that “slot” today only means “lock”, and the other meaning of “end”, “closing” is outdated? As in “tot slot van deze eerste herinnering”? Or is “tot slot” now kind of a fixed expression itself? Or is it that this show was about fifty years ago, when people still used “slot”?
Also, I’m pondering that thing about Dutchmen understanding German better than Germans understand Dutch. Thought experiment: Suppose there was a language called Ünglüsch, which is like English, only all vocals are replaced by ü. Üt süünds ü büt lükü thüs. Obviously, the people in Ünglünd will understand English better than vice versa. The English will have trouble, because in Ünglüsh everything sounds the same.
Would this imply that in Dutch things tend to sound more “all the same”?
The paper that was linked a while ago, about those children in Oldenburg, gave the example of Dutch “dag” (day), which sounds like German “Dach” (roof) and leads the children astray. I’ve tested it on my son with the Duolingo sentences, and indeed this kind of thing happens.
Another example: Ik was een kleine jongen could mean “I was a little boy”, but also “I wash a little boy”, like baby parents always do.
I love the way that learning a new language opens up a big treasure of music on Youtube! You might smile at these songs, but they’re a lot of fun for me.
In hindsight, my English translation (and explanation) for this expression was not that great. ‘Slot’ is also used to indicate an ending, although in modern Dutch outside of fixed expressions, it is only used in the context of time (like the end of an evening or the end of a meeting).
So ‘at the end of the bill’ is probably a better and more sensible translation for ‘bij slot van rekening.’ However, it’s still a fixed expression as you’d never use the same construct for anything else or non-metaphorically. For example, you’d never say: ‘bij slot van brief staat mijn handtekening’ to mean: my signature is at the end of the letter. Nor would you say: ‘bij slot van rekening staat het eindbedrag’ to mean: the final tally is at the end of the bill.
This is very much a grey area where you can argue that it is barely a fixed expression or not yet, but close.
A very similar Dutch expression/word that is clearly a fixed expression is ‘ten slotte’ or ‘tenslotte’ (which also means finally). The word ‘ten’ is an old Dutch contraction of ‘te den.’ Here ‘te’ is very similar to the German ‘zu.’ It’s harder to translate to English, as it can mean in, at, to or too. The article ‘den’ is an older and/or dialect variant of ‘de,’ the male article.
‘Ten’ is then pretty much the same as the German ‘zum,’ which is the same kind of contraction (‘zu dem’ -> ‘zum’).
Anyway, people are turning some of the fixed expressions that use this prefix into new words. So ‘ten slotte’ means ‘at the end,’ but people also use ‘tenslotte.’ You have ‘ten minste,’ (= at least) but people also use ‘tenminste’. The word where this has happened most strongly is ‘tentoonstellen’ (= the verb exhibit), which is never used with the prefix separate.
The lack of separation of the prefix in words is very clear proof that people no longer see it as a separate word that has an independent meaning.
I don’t really get what you mean by this.
Your example is a basic homonym. Note that the Dutch ‘dag’ is also a homonym for day, hi and bye. Of course, the latter two derive from an expression (basically, the Dutch equivalent of ‘good day’ was shortened to ‘day’). However, to make things easier, there is also ‘doei’ (= bye), which came from a dialect word for day: doeg. So you got goede dag -> dag -> doeg -> doei.
There are hundreds of English homonyms (homophones and homographs), so that’s nothing special. Eye can right sum hear.
Very interesting about “tentoonstellen” and the like! Once again, I see how similar the laguages are, give or take a consonant shift. “Zumindest” is the same contraction as “tenminste”.
The thing about the homonyms is a bit speculative and half-baked on my part.
Consider French, they have even more homonyms. Famous example: Vers, ver, vert, verre, …
Remember those funny stories a few years back, culminating in a pun on some proverb? I tried to come up with such puns on German proverbs, but couldn’t find any which were any good. Surely, I’m not as creative as our host, but I have a suspicion that these homonyms are a bit rarer in German than in English.
My German is rather poor (in general, I need lots of exposure to a language to learn it, which never happened for German or French), so I didn’t know you had something so similar. Interesting!
BTW, the noun ‘tentoonstelling’ can be separated out in components like this:
‘ten’ = ‘te den’ = at the
‘toon’ = show
‘stelling’ = rack or stand
So an exhibit in Dutch is literally: at the show rack/stand.
It’s one of the wonders of the world.
Our friends the aliens with the giant spaceships have taken all our cars. They left the motorcycles, buses, and heavy trucks. Vans and pick-up trucks used as cargo transports remain; those primarily used for personal transportation were taken. Sedans, sports-cars, and SUVs are just gone. How screwed are we?
And you know, I don’t think these aliens are actually our friends.
THANK GOD.
Somewhere in America, a guy with a warehouse full of Segways is cracking a wide grin.
Will they keep taking our cars if we build more?
I guess everyone who used a car exclusively will switch to some arrangement of motorcycles and side cars.
Depends. Some populations will be extremely fucked in the meantime, while a bunch of others will benefit a lot (but probably not enough to make up for the people who lost their cars). Contamination wise everyone is better off in the medium future, but maybe traffic accidents go higher than in the car era.
No. This is a one-time de-car-ification.
Then eventually people get cars again, as their fear of getting decarified again fall more and more. Probably not to the same levels as originally, since in the interim public transport will pick up the slack a lot and it will become way more attractive.
That assumes that land use reform follows the de-car-ification. A temporary extension of buses into the masses of low-mid density subdivisions in the suburbs is going to fall apart once people start getting cars again, unless they’ve also opened up a new “town center” where you can get coffee and breakfast and groceries and tools within walking distance of most of the houses.
Very screwed. In the US total auto loans are valued at $1.2 trillion dollars, the complete loss of all collateral alone would basically ruin our financial system before defaults on payments started rolling in.
Is it really that big a deal to have the collateral disappear? The borrowers still owe the money, right? And nearly all of them will find ways to keep working, despite losing their cars, so they should be able to afford the payments. They’ll hate making them, but they won’t really have any choice. The lenders will just lose a little more than usual, when there’s nothing to repo in case of non-payment.
Yes, the way our banking system works it matters a lot, banks have to estimate the likelihood of you not paying a loan back and then the value of the collateral that they would receive if you default. If the value of the collateral drops the bank has to raise more capital to maintain its balance sheet, this is why Bear Stearns* and Lehman went bankrupt well before the peak in delinquencies. Every bank that had any significant exposure to auto loans would be insolvent (without a bailout) immediately.
*Technically they avoided bankruptcy.
You are way more knowledgable on finance topics than I am, so I’ll ultimately defer to your assessment, but banks aren’t limited to repo value when someone defaults. If they repo your car and it isn’t worth enough to cover the loan (damaged, or heavily depreciated), they can sue you for the remainder and probably get an order to garnish your wages directly. If there is no car to repo, they just sue you for the full balance of the loan.
This is true, and the loss of the cars would be less damaging in terms of % of the loan than it would be if the aliens vanished a house, but the banks would still be forced to write the collateral value portion of the loan to zero which would ruin their balance sheets.
Won’t some insurance kick in in this case?
Probably the cars would be declared stealed, particularly if the aliens are forthcoming about it.
Insurance does not work when everyone claims at once.
The car insurers and the reinsurers and the insurers of the creditors of the car owners would all run out of money if they had to pay out for that sort of act of god.
It seems to me perfectly reasonable that we should expect the government to step in in cases of massive exogenous shocks that insurers/reinsurers can’t cope with for this reason. We’ve already seen that governments in practice provide de facto pandemic insurance, and I don’t see why multi-trillion dollar extra-terrestrial larceny should be any different. There’s no moral hazard I can detect in a bailout in this scenario.
Consequently, if this happened under normal circumstances I think we should expect to see a severe but short-lived global economic downturn followed by a v-shaped recovery: we can probably ramp up car production pretty damn quickly, given that it’s simply a case of building more facilities to apply existing processes.
If it happened now, in the early stages of what is already shaping up to be a global depression set off by Coronavirus, that might be quite different. On the one hand, the immediate shock might not be so bad, because we’re using less transport anyway and can probably compensate more easily in the short term (by repurposing idle vans as minibuses, for example). On the other hand, we’re in a rough spot to start with, with less ability to address an additional major problem.
How long do you think it takes to build new car manufacturing plants (and the parts plants to supply it? The real problem, though, is what do you do with those plants once supply has recovered? I don’t think we’re going to be building a bunch of new plants, we’d likely just ramp up the production at the facilities we have. Maybe re-open some recently closed plants that can quickly be made operational.
Even with that, it would still take a pretty long time to replenish our car supply. Maybe it hinges on a different sense of what “short term” is, but I would expect it to take a pretty long time to recover from this, with a lot of side-effects that also take a long time to resolve themselves.
Brrrr?
And you know, I don’t think these aliens are actually our friends.
I told you so!
Gig workers are completely screwed. And most amateurs and small time employees are screwed, as they didn’t yet have the capital or need to schlep around their equipment with a larger car.
Kids suddenly have to take the bus, but that doesn’t solve how they get to sports practice, without all those minivans.
They start doing sports practice over Zoom instead.
Rather with Oculus Quest.
The Dutch will defend us all from the aliens with our bicycle army (and then we’ll conquer the world).
I thought you were waiting for the aliens to start draining the ocean?
To use a Dutch fixed expression: we have multiple irons in the fire (‘we hebben meer ijzers in het vuur’).
This means that we have multiple options to achieve the same thing.
That’s also an English expression.
I always thought the English expression was “too many irons in the fire” and was meant to describe a bad situation, in which one is doing too many things at once and is likely to get distracted, and achieve none of them well.
In my city most industrial areas are separated from residential areas by a river. The only bridges over this river without going ludicrously out of the way are interstate highways. Assuming the interstate highways were opened to foot and bicycle traffic (but what do the cargo trucks do?) my 15 min commute just became a 3 hour hike, or a 45 min bike ride. I’m not sure how feasible it would actually be for the average person to bike over the bridge, it’s a pretty steep grade.
If forced to go the long way around, it’s not a 10 hour walk or a 2 hour bike ride. Doable with a bike but a pretty massive hit to quality of life.
Any chance that in the event of such a sudden catastrophe, the city would allow some industrial buildings to be repurposes as residences, and some residential or commercial spaces on the other side to be repurposed for industry?
Sure, but nobody wants to live too close to the chlorine plant.
You know how the economy is imperiled when a significant portion of the workforce is prevented from going in to work?
Yeah, that.
“You still have buses!”
Yeah, can we scale that up instantly, to have capacity for the currently ~85% that drive themselves to work? I doubt it.
What portion of the workforce shows up for work the day after the carpocalypse? 75%? 50%?
I can take the subway and a bus to work, so I could probably make it in, but the system would be absolutely packed, so I’d probably be late.
Half sounds about right. I assume there’s plenty of slack in the public transit system, especially mid-day, and this phenomenon would probably lead to staggered working times to take advantage of that, eventually. But is there enough slack to take 5-6X as many riders? I really doubt it.
(Also, if my car disappears, I’m calling in sick so I can figure out what the heck happened to it asap.)
The day after? Way less than half. Probably somewhere between 10-20%. A lot of people won’t go to work simply because everyone is trying to figure out WTF just happened to all the cars. “Sorry, I can’t come to work today my car was stolen”.
Even if we don’t account for that, I do not believe public transit could accommodate 50% of the population of a city/area anywhere even if we staggered them across all 24 hours of the day (which wouldn’t be very helpful for work schedules the day after the snatch anyway).
A non-trivial % of the population has no access to public transit in the area where they live. According to this 45% have no access, which means your max if places with public transit have infinite capacity is 55% (technically a little higher, to account for people who can walk/bike, but since transit capacity isn’t infinite it probably doesn’t matter).
Also keep in mind we have to move these people to work and from work, so two transit trips per person. According to that same link, there are 34 million transit rides each day. I would expect the system could accommodate no more than 50 million running constantly at max capacity during working hours with no planning (which we wouldn’t have on day one).
With every single car gone I would be worried about leaving house. After all, who knows what and how disappearance was triggered?
Also, what happened to the people inside cars when they disappeared? Did they disappear with them? Or were they suddenly flying through the air at 80mph on the interstate?
Funny you should ask. Only cars that were stopped were taken. Cars with the engine running and in motion did not disappear, although they did disappear if the engine was turned off or the car came to a stop. A few lucky and industrious people were able to keep their cars by never coming to a complete stop, and never turning off the engine.
This quirky behavior kept injuries to a minimum, although some very surprised people did find themselves sitting on the street at stoplights. A few people were hurt when they turned off the ignition while their car was in motion; the car disappeared and the people skidded down the street on their butts. But most cars just quietly disappeared from parking lots and garages.
How did that work? moving refueling from moving tank trucks, which were then refueled from refueling planes doing low height passes?
e: *reads reply* oh yeah, forgot that trucks wouldn’t disappear
lame
The tank trucks wouldn’t disappear, only consumer/personal use passenger vehicles disappeared (so you wouldn’t need the plane refueling part).
You could even just slow down to a few miles an hour and have someone walk beside your car with a gas can filling it up. Or, to avoid walking the fine line of going super slow without stopping, just have someone pass a full gas can in through the window to a passenger and they can refuel the moving car while leaning out the window.
I mean… things seem to be doing okay right now. Sure everyone’s screaming about the depression but no one thinks the world is about the end.
How many people thought it was going OK in December of 1929? The first 6 weeks isn’t the issue.
That’s why I said “economy” and not “world”.
Things are okay because the bills are being paid with IOUs. It’s possible we live in a world where this can go on forever, but I’m doubtful, if not screaming.
I despise cars.
I’ve also lived in china and taiwan, where people get by just fine on scooters most of the time. Really, a scooter is ideal for about 95% of what americans use cars for (moving to and from work and the store a billion times a day)
Personally, I’m fine: I’ve structured my life so I bike or walk literally everywhere important, or bus on the (rare) occasions I can’t do that. This requires living in the downtown core of a city, sure, but not a BIG city…and all my needs are still met just fine. I haven’t driven a car since 2018.
You can’t carry a normal Costco trip’s worth of food on a moped.
And you can’t chain together trips the same way on a car (especially if one of those trips is to hang out at the bar). In a world designed around cars, CostCo is a thing and people make those trips. In a world suddenly deprived of cars, people wonder how you do those trips. But in a world that is not designed around cars, CostCo doesn’t even exist, and you get your supplies from more frequent smaller trips to conveniently located retailers or deliveries.
Maybe it is different where you live (don’t know where you are from) but you can’t drive a moped after drinking either. Or ride a bike, even.
Delivery services are the key here. The majority of Costco customers are buying bulk not because they stock up, but because they have large families with a high consumption rate. They’re going to Costco with the frequency of single people going to local grocery. In a world without cars, that consumption rate is still the same, so they still need to be able to carry a full shopping carts’ worth of food on a regular basis.
One of the common Costco purchases I see for such families are giant jugs of milk and 36+ cartons of eggs. In the past, this would have been alleviated by a daily delivery from the milkman and such. They can go around with a large cart of their single product. Puts the onus of transportation on the supplier, not the customers, but the supplier is the one who can afford the economies of scale in the first place.
acymetric says:
> you can’t drive a moped after drinking either. Or ride a bike, even.
Right. But the alternative to a car-centric lifestyle isn’t necessarily a moped-centric lifestyle or a bike-centric lifestyle, or even a transit-centric lifestyle. The most natural alternative is actually a multimodal lifestyle, where you take a bus to work in the morning, then take a bike share to a bar with a friend, then walk somewhere for dinner, and then get a taxi home. The transportation modes where you own a piece of physical capital that moves you around (private car, private bicycle) require you to use that same mode for every trip (at least, for every trip until you get back home) and also require empty land to be set aside for parking, but the modes where the capital goods that move people are owned in a distributed fashion (transit, walking, bikeshare, scooters, taxis) can very easily be linked to each other.
I own a motorcycle (and two car-type vehicles… )
I would contemplate riding the open roads that are now mostly car-free. It would make weekends much more fun. If my wife would let me disappear for a long ride on the weekend, that is.
My current employment would not be affected until the next time I need a ride to an airport…
The near-term economic havoc mentioned by others would make the future very hazy. But the opportunity to ride and not worry about most of the other cars sounds exciting.
We are very screwed.
A lot of essential infrastructure is only feasibly accessible by car, but needs very regular staffing. All the major industrial farming would be hard hit: I would bet on shortages of produce, meat and eggs within the week.
I’m glad I scrolled down before posting, because I was going to point out something similar. I was out at a dam today, working with the operating staff for it. The only non-alien-stolen vehicle in this hypothetical was the crane. Everybody came from their house, the engineers coming from the city in personally-owned vehicles (because of the ‘Rona, normally we’d pick up a government vehicle and carpool), while the operations staff came in their POVs to their normal clock-in location and picked up all their also-alien-stolen GOV pickup trucks, (except for the crane operator and his crane) and we all drove way out to the site remotely operated from elsewhere.
Losing all the mid-sized vehicles would get really hairy really quickly. I can’t try to squeeze my inspection kit on a damn bicycle, even leaving aside that I had to travel 110 miles each way. Plus the roving operator would have a great time trying to huff and puff his way between facilities. It’s not like the population density makes a bus worthwhile.
So how would this play out?
Any existing public transit system is going to get swamped with demand and will start running absolutely full out, with every bus, subway train, streetcar, and ekranoplan that can be scrounged and staffed.
A lot of informal van- and truck-pools get organized to move people to and from work and maybe major shopping destinations. A lot of small-business owners with legit delivery vans will find it worth their while to get in the worker-moving business for a time. Governments will look the other way on safety issues, because there’s no alternative.
It’s a good time to be a mechanic as a lot of marginal vehicles that were recently consigned to scrap yards or just sitting idle get put back in service. (Let’s stipulate the aliens took all the junked cars that were in pretty good shape, but left the junked vans and trucks, and maybe some of the really junky car-hulks, too.)
It’s a good time to own a truck or bus of any sort, as demand for them for use as people-movers soars.
A lot of marginal activities that are currently car-dependent, like children’s sports leagues, shut down for a season and are then reorganized along much more local lines.
Bicycling comes back in a big way, to the point that some roads that have two lanes in each direction have one lane in each direction turned into a bike lane.
Things don’t get back to normal quickly. It looks like the world has something like 1.4 billion cars, and produces 70 million per year, so the global fleet is replaced every 20 years. Car manufacturing is heavy industry that can’t just be pulled out of thin air, but maybe capacity could be doubled in a couple of years. That still means replacing all the missing cars would take 10 years.
Ooh, and police-cars disappear for a while. They probably get some sort of priority during reconstruction, and maybe use military hummers for a while.
I think this is a wild underestimate of our ability to increase production given an effective global war footing for doing so.
One thing to keep in mind is that while there may be 1.4 billion cars, we don’t need that many to have things run close to normally. I’m seeing that in the US there are about 25% more registered cars than licenced drivers, and there are a lot of multicar families that could get by with one or two fewer cars. My wife and I always had two cars, but the days that we actually needed two cars would probably be less than 10 a year. Most of the time it was purely a convenience. I’d guess that the US could shed almost half its cars without a major hit to productivity.
That said, if it was just done one night with no warning, the effects would be dire because the infrastructure just wouldn’t be there to absorb all of the people that suddenly needed a way to get around. If the aliens instead gave an ultimatum that was something like “we will take all cars that lack feature X on January 1st, 2025” then I think we could meet the demand for new cars.
We need a name for this event. In other posts, I’ve used “de-car-ification” and “carpocalypse”. Those aren’t great. Anyone have a better idea?
Maybe “car-pe diem”?
Obviously Carmageddon.
Already used for a much lesser event.
Fine. “Carmageddon II: Electric Boogaloo.”
The sequel is clearly Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now
If we tweak the event so the aliens take only the cars with internal-combustion engines, we get much the same effect but Conrad Honcho’s name works. Also, we can then assume that Elon Musk is in league with the aliens. Hmm, he launched that Roadster into deep space as a tribute offering, in exchange for their leaving all the Terrestrial Teslas alone.
Probably worse than the COVID-19 crisis or the Iraq war, but not worse than WW2 or the black plague. So “big fucking problem with major economic impact and headlines for months” but “restructure the entirety of society to solve the problem or perish”.
If someone could make a scale of disaster badness that would be interesting.
Sure, I’m game. Operating on a log scale from 0-10 where 0 is one death and 10 is the extinction of humanity we get this scale. Note, some examples listed have been scaled with modern population levels so are in a category above their true casualty figures.
0 – 1 unexpected death. E.g. tragic accident, suicide or illness. Negligible long term impact on society but with ripple effects across a social network.
1 – 10 unexpected deaths. E.g. A mass shooting, major traffic accident or industrial accident. Negligible to minor long term impact, perhaps resulting in new regulation or criminal charges for those responsible. Large effects to those related to the dead, especially if they were initially clusters, for example the loss of an extended family.
2 – 100 unexpected deaths. E.g. air-crash, domestic terrorism, major industrial accident, low impact natural disaster. Reported world wide and may result in changes to policy or politics at the local level. Severe impacts on those associated with the disaster and likely will likely define their historical impact.
3 – 1000 unexpected deaths. E.g. natural disaster, local conflict or major terrorist event. International news and may shape policy and politics for decades to come, especially in the region. Those affected have their entire lives reshaped by the incident and may never fully recover psychologically. Many people only tangentially related can experience major shifts in behavior.
4 – 10,000 unexpected deaths. E.g. catastrophic natural disaster, small war or contained disease outbreak. Major talking point for months world wide and likely to greatly shape events for many decades to come and cause political shifts far beyond the immediate impact. Societal level impacts are plausible and everyone involved is deeply affected.
5- 100,000 unexpected deaths. E.g. Civil war, local famine, genocide, disease. Regional crisis that promotes intervention from world powers, to varying degrees of success. Effects on populations can have cultural shifts that last generations but are never the sole driving factor.
6 – 1,000,000 unexpected deaths. E.g. Regional war, famines, genocide. An international crisis that is quite capable of destroying countries and disassembling established political orders. Will have long term impacts to everyone in the affected region regardless of their links to the victims.
7 – 10,000,000 unexpected deaths (~1/1000 of all humans). E.g. Major war between two countries, catastrophic famine, pandemic. Represents the loss of a major city’s worth of people and unimaginably disruptive to everyone in the region with knock-on affects on the international order.
8 – 100,000,000 unexpected deaths (1/100 of all humans). E.g. WW2, a limited nuclear exchange, major pandemic. International order is reshaped by events, leaving the politics beyond hard to recognize or at least majorly disrupted for all concerned. No region escapes unscathed regardless of their proximity to the disaster.
9 – 1,000,000,000 unexpected deaths (1/10 of all humans). E.g. General nuclear exchange, Black Death level pandemic or dinosaur killer meteor impact. No part of society remains unchanged by the disaster and major changes to future civilization are the norm rather than the exception.
9.95 – 9,000,000,000 unexpected deaths (9/10 of all humans). E.g. the estimated proportion killed by European contact with the Americas. Utter dissolution of society, although with cultural continuation.
So the Tsunami of 2004 clocks in at a 5.2 but the tsunami that caused Fukushima is more like a 1 or 2 if I recall correctly. Does coronavirus rate a 5 or a 6, or maybe even a 7? It seems that some events aren’t properly measured by the loss of life – this loss of life scale makes the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull shutdown of North Atlantic air traffic rate at a 0 or 1 or something, but it was a massive economic disruption for the few days that it lasted.
Economic disruption leads to loss of life, but in indirect ways that are hard to measure (e.g. less wealth means poorer healthcare, possibly worse diets). So Eyjafjallajokull’s severity might be correctly represented by this scale, but only by a number we can’t readily get. (We could possibly estimate it if we have a figure for the dollar value of a human life that we can use in a conversion, but I’m not sure how valid such an analysis is.)
COVID-19 would currently rank at about a 5.4, so broadly equivalent to a catastrophic natural disaster. It’s probably going to be a 6 to 7 by the time everything is said and done, depending on how well mitigation methods go.
I’m not sure how you’d map non-lethal disasters to this scale. Probably it would be better to treat the Iceland Eruption as maybe a 3 on this scale, localised large scale disruption even if it didn’t actually lead to any deaths. There’s also a weakness of where you put downstream deaths. 911 caused tens of thousands of additional deaths from to car accidents due to the downtick in flights, but it isn’t something that greatly increases the impact of the disaster.
@fibio:
I think you aren’t paying enough attention to the local/global difference that comes into play with a scale like this.
By your own definitions, 100,000 deaths is a regional catastrophe. Globally, several hundred thousand deaths aren’t exactly Tuesday, but they’re pretty close, especially considering the time-frame.
Purely as an illustration, Poland’s COVID-19 death tally stands at around 750 at the moment after two months or so of the epidemic. That’s roughly how many people die daily under normal circumstances. Daily recorded COVID-19 deaths haven’t exceeded 50 so far, so locally the whole situation looks like a 1, 2 tops. One of the reasons it doesn’t look like a nigh 3 (major local catastrophe) is that it fits the profile of “old people get sick and die” more than anything else.
So there’s a cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand we’re asked to view this on a global scale, with nothing but numbers to give us a sense of scale. On the other, it sure doesn’t feel like a disaster, in that – as the Nybbler would put it – you actually need the men with guns to get people to act like there is one.
Physics question:
Whenever physics texts discuss the principle of least action during their presentation of the Lagrangian formulation, they always mention as an aside that it’s not necessarily that the Langrangian is minimized, but it’s possible that it could be maximized or even a stationary point (saddle). However, in all the examples I’ve ever seen, the Lagrangian is actually minimized. Of course, you could always replace the Lagrangian with its opposite in sign to get something which is maximized, but this seems like cheating. Is there a good natural example where the Lagrangian is maximized, or even better, the physical solution occurs at a saddle?
I will keep thinking to see if I know other examples, but this Physics Stackexchange question is pretty much the same.
I think one can construct an example in this way. Consider a particle in two dimensions going from (x = -X, y = 0) to (x = +X, y = 0) at speed v in a time T = 2X/v. If there is no potential, this is obviously a physically possible, action-minimizing motion. Now add a “valley” potential V(x,y) = f(|y|) where f is an increasing function with f(0) = 0. It is clear that the motion remains physically possible and must still extremize the action. Will it still minimize it? Clearly yes with respect to alternative straight trajectories, going only on y = 0 but not at constant speed. But consider an alternative trajectory joining the initial and final points by curving and going slightly around the center. This will require a higher average speed than v (to cover more distance in the same time), increasing the kinetic energy K and the Lagrangian K – V. But it will increase it by a fixed amount, dependent on the geometry of the alternative curve but not at all on V. This means that by making V a function that increases steeply enough, one can make V > K on the alternative trajectory, and have the action be lower than the initial one. Therefore the true trajectory in this case (with sufficiently steep V) will be a saddle point but not a minimum. (Finding a V(y) that does this is left an exercise for the reader.)
I’ve confirmed that this is possible for a power-law potential with exponent between 1 and 2.
Since the x and y motion are decoupled it’s just a matter of finding a potential and periodic trajectory that has the correct period and arbitrary negative action. Power-law potentials with n > 2 can’t yield negative action. I excluded power-law potentials with n<1 because they have a weird infinite force at y = 0. But other than that given a fixed 1<n<2 it is always possible to choose a strength coefficient for the potential and an initial energy that give the correct period of T and an arbitrary negative action. The expressions are incredibly ugly.
Ah, yes, it does work. Thanks, all!
Along these same lines, if we are talking about classical mechanics where the action is the time integral over $K-V$ then it is impossible to find a trajectory that is a local maximum, only a local minimum or saddle point.
To see this take the true trajectory and at somewhere between 0 and T add a part where the path deviates from the classical trajectory for a brief instant dt at a very high speed but very small amplitude. Because the amplitude is very small the average potential energy of the trajectory doesn’t really change, but the kinetic contribution increases as dt decreases. By choosing dt arbitrarily small you can always find a deviation like this that increases the action.
Does anyone have covid sources for south korea, specifically number of serious cases and a source that updates stats the day of (on 5/6 the new deaths and current number of active cases for 5/6 are already up)?
Do the official government sites not meet your criteria?
I live here, and I mostly get by with either those or the day’s Korea Times.
Anyone care to offer predictions on how the Justices will vote in Mazars vs Trump? Even though this is a CW-allowable thread, I think discussing those probabilities is more likely to be interesting and fruitful than a discussion of the merits of the case itself.
Of the four more leftish Justices, I’m 95% confident in each of Sotomayor, RBG, and Breyer voting to uphold the House subpoena against Trump’s challenge. I’m 80% confident that Kagan will as well– she generally takes a more expansive view of executive power and might well have voted to protect similar privileges of a non-Trump President; she probably will not do the same for Trump, but might grit her teeth and go with her pro-executive-power principle.
On the right, I am likewise 95% confident that Alito and Kavanaugh, the two consistently most pro-executive-power justices, will rule in Trump’s favor. Gorsuch I would say is 70% for Trump; he is strongly partisan but seems generally much more skeptical of executive power than A + K.
Thomas and Roberts are the wildcards; I’m rating them both at 50% coinflips for lack of a better intuition about their leanings. Thomas I see as likely to go with his originalist, damn-the-precedents sense of what the Constitution really means, and it’s not clear to me which sort of originalist theory he’s going to go with here. Roberts is going to try his usual triangulation to build consensus and save the Court’s legitimacy, which may well mean he concurs with one of the other sides on narrow and inventive grounds, as he did with the “Obamacare is legal because the mandate is really a tax, not a penalty” opinion, and again that narrowness could go either way. There’s also a distinct possibility that he will try and throw out the whole thing as moot because the impeachment process is over, and not even reach the merits of the question, and he may well get a majority to go with that.
Don’t know enough about the case to apply any analysis to it, but I do think you’re about right regarding the justices’ various motives/biases/priorities.
Related question: which justice used the bathroom during oral args?
What makes you say Gorsuch is partisan? My impression of him is that he is quite principled, even if I don’t always agree.
That is my impression as well. He has voted pretty consistently for the originalist or textualist argument, often against the right wing of the court. He’s so far been much more consistent with his principles than Scalia.
I only did 10 minutes of research, but I can’t find a good originalist or textualist argument in favor of Trump. I’m expecting an 8-1 decision in favor of Miller, though likely with a lot of caveats and different opinions. Alito is 100% on Republican Executive powers, and even 50% on Democrat executive powers. Kavenaugh is up in the air, just since there are not many opinions from him, but usually votes with Roberts. Thomas is definitely unpredictable in this, since the precedent doesn’t matter to me.
The one way I could see Trump winning is on the mootness or political question doctrine, but since a bank has the records, not the IRS, I think he’ll lose.
I think Trump was trying very hard to appoint a partisan Supreme Court justice. I think he did this by asking the Republican party who they thought would be a good pick for a partisan Supreme Court justice, and then nominating whoever they said.
I don’t know very much about Gorsuch’s voting record, but I think it would be pretty weird if Trump tried that hard to get a partisan justice and he just completely failed.
How many SCOTUS justices have the Republicans put on the bench since 1973; how many times have they held a majority on the court with their hand-picked justices? And yet abortion remains legal, with Roe v Wade still the law of the land. Either it’s a lot harder to pick reliably partisan judges than you think, or the Republicans don’t want judges as simplistically partisan as you think.
Or both, which I think is the case here. Trump, doesn’t want partisan Republican judges, because to Trump being a Republican is a means to an end. He’d want partrisan Trumpist judges, but no reason for the Republicans to give him one of those.
And “asking the Republican party” isn’t a thing you can do because “the Republican party” is not an entity that can answer questions. There are certainly smart and powerful GOP individuals, who will want judges who will say “no you can’t do that” not only to Democrats, but to stupid Republcan voters, activists, etc who are asking “the Republican party” to do soemthing stupid. Doing the stupid thing gets you voted out of office in the long run, calling the people asking for the thing stupid gets you voted out of office in the short term, passing the buck to SCOTUS avoids the stupidity and lets you keep your cushy gig as a Senator or whatever.
Also, people who can speak for the Republican party are people, not partisan maximizers. A lot of them have a strongly favorable impression of Antonin Scalia as a principled textual originalist, and when they are asked to recommend a SCOTUS candidate specifically to replace Scalia, are going to lean towards recommending a principled textual originalist to fill those shoes rather than a partisan maximizer hack.
How uniformly anti-abortion were Republicans between 1972 and 1992? My impression is that a lot of the partisan sorting along abortion only became more uniform in the decades since then.
I concur with what you said 100%, with the exception of being slightly more confident on roberts. I think it’s not a question of IF he concurs, it’s what bizarre niche area he concurs on that settles the issue.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say Trump wins if they get to the merits. That’s just my instinctual reaction from looking at the history, as addressed by Rao’s dissent. I feel like the Supreme Court will give this a more clear-eyed look than it has received in recent decisions, and practical considerations will loom larger than current partisan ones.
Someone at the end of the previous thread mentioned card games, and people suggested FreeCell.
I am strongly recommending against FreeCell as it is a short cycle addictive cognitohazard.
The nature of the rules leads to decisions that can be recognized and carried out quickly. Automation trivially removes any waiting for rote decisions and makes reversal from failed attempts easy.
A D-class subject was exposed to FreeCell. They quickly reached a 1 minute average solve time. Once past that point, they began using any tiny break in other tasks to play a round. The original test was only intended to last a week, but the subject continued to run the game when unrestricted by other research for 2 months.
A random inspection of FreeCell logs noted the unauthorized use of over 200 hours. The original D-class subject was located and a rehabilitation program was instituted. Attempts to remove the cognitohazard were unsuccessful.
A weaning plan was used, where the subject must meet these conditions:
1. Allowed one round at a time.
2. Must complete an actual task immediately prior.
3. Must be waiting for machinery to process previous task and assign a new one.
Over the next 4 months usage gradually lessened until cessation. The D-class was released for other research, with a warning to avoid similar cognitohazards.
Pfft. If you really want to see a short cycle addictive cognitohazard, try Freecell’s hyperactive little brother, Penguin. You have to match suit too to move cards, but with 7 free cells and no limit on cards moved at a time, the game speeds up dramatically; you have to balance getting the right cards “out of the way” without trapping yourself to clear things as quickly as possible. My record, if anyone wants to try to beat it, is 31 seconds.
My record on Freecell was 28 seconds, so, done?
https colon slash slash i dot imgur dot com slash Dm7zUlq dot png
Any time below 40 seconds is mostly a result of a favorable layout.
Oh my. The game that came immediately to my mind was Kung Fu Chess. I played a lot of chess and chess variants when I was young. This one was the first time I noticed exactly these features (without having this perfect terminology to describe it). My brain craved it, and unlike most other chess variants, this one immensely harmed my ability to play regular chess. I’m so glad I realized and just quit playing entirely.
Continuing the discussion about World War I, since I don’t think I expressed myself clearly in the last thread.
Here’s my reading of history, and the reason I lay the blame (mostly) on Germany for WW1. Germany coalesced as a nation much later than France, England or Russia–it wasn’t until 1870 that Bismarck engineered the unification of all those tiny principalities, landgraves, electorates, and what have you with larger entities like Bavaria and Prussia. England and France, having a 200-year or so head start on nation-building, had already extended their colonial tentacles into much of the rest of the world and built up their armies and navies.
Kaiser Wilhelm inherited the new nation that Bismarck had created for his father and grandfather, and he (and I suppose the rest of the new German aristocracy) was envious with a capital E. The ultimate driving force of WW1 was Germany’s desire to play “catch-up” with its rivals, in colonial acquisitions, military power, and just general Throwing One’s Weight Around.
Now, it doesn’t seem that you can blame France, England and Russia for Germany’s lateness to the World Power game. But this is where my knowledge of history fails–if there is evidence that the Great Powers, in the early to mid 19th century, deliberately conspired to keep Germany disunified and weak, that might temper my judgment about (unified) Germany’s aggression and guilt.
I am not a historian, I only process and convey what I read in books, and I am very open to (polite) discussion..
Re: scheming against a united Germany: France and Britain (and Austria), in 1815, signed a secret treaty against Prussia and Russia to make sure neither of them get all the territory they wanted out of the Vienna Congress, specifically because a unified Germany or a westward-oriented Russia are bad for European stability (see Polish-Saxon Problem). Also, look at how the HRE-replacement German Confederation is absolutely dominated by Prussia and Austria, who’d been at war like half a dozen times over the previous hundred years and who nobody could possibly have thought wouldn’t be at each others’ throats again shortly – it seems to me that a disunited Germany was explicit French and British policy for a century before WW1, even before the Franco-Prussian War really bakes in that hostility for the French. Britain might have come around, but not after the Germans started building modern warships.
Dude, the French literally declared war on the Germans to keep them from unifying. It’s not a very controversial matter, it’s not an obscure war, and I’m not sure how you could’ve missed it if the unification of German is of any interest to you.
Yeah, that’s the kind of polite discussion I was looking for.
And anyway, was the fragmentation of a large part of Germany into hundreds of cities, landgraves, etc. a direct consequence of Great Power meddling, or was that something intrinsic to the region? I was under the impression that it was the latter, and that unification would have been difficult even in the best of circumstances.
I am not sure if there was a fragmentation of Germany. I suppose one can appeal to Charlemagne and his immediate successors but their kingdoms were hardly germany. The term rex teutonicorum was used but for the Holy Roman emperor and hardly in what would clearly be a German nation.
Great powers intervened to maintain a status quo and largely in stopping small states from being conquered by big states. This is hardly a bad thing. Whether German and Italian unification were ultimately good or bad, I do not know, but stopping conquest for geopolitical reasons is hardly objectionable.
Germany* had been part of the Holy Roman Empire. IIRC, Napoleon broke up that empire, and it didn’t reconstitute after his defeat. (Because they liked independence, I guess?) Austria and Hungary were relatively large states with the same monarch and German was a patchwork of tiny states because that’s just how they happened to have been organized within the empire.
*I mean the area we now call Germany, not the larger area called Germany at the time, though the empire had most of that too.
Habsburgs tried to increase the role of central imperial government in Holy Roman Empire, but were prevented from doing so by internal opposition aided by external powers, mainly France. That was a little event called Thirty Years War.
I always thought the german blame heaped on france and co. for preventing unification was weird propaganda. The HRE was a powerful, german political unit that existed for a really long time. It was relatively decentralized, but then France in the 1600’s wasn’t exactly a unified nation state (and Spain still isn’t a unified nation state). Other powers meddled in the internal politics, but germans meddled in other people’s internal politics as well (see the war of spanish succession). And if the germans really wanted to be unified, why did they fight so many wars against each other?
To me the biggest issue was that colonial powers had substantial atlantic coastlines (or a border with the siberian steppes, in Russia’s case). Germany wasn’t weak because of some conspiracy, it had just missed the boat on the colonial riches.
The fragmentation was mostly a result of internal friction and inertia pulling the empire apart rather than external meddling.
The HRE was a pretty typical decentralized medieval state for most of its existence, mind. In most places like England, France, Iberia, and Germany you had the king or kaiser having to compromise and wrangle his internal vassals far more than dealing with foreign powers. The only real difference, though, is that some of the medieval states pulled themselves into coherent, centralized kingdoms through various historical forces (usually lots of bloodshed and war), while others (Italy, Poland-Lithuania, Germany) never really did. I think it’s because of a variety of different factors depending on the kingdom. England was geographically isolated and had the Norman conquest pushing for a unified kingdom, and it still took hundreds of years. Iberia was geographically isolated from most European great powers, had the external threat of the Moors, and took centuries, including the fortuitous marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, to unify (and even today is far less unified and centralized than other European nation-states). France lacked the isolation, and if the Hundred Year’s War had gone the other way perhaps would have remained a patchwork confederation of competing petty nobles like the HRE. Russia was isolated by the steppe and took centuries of strong Tsars gradually building up a (rickety) empire. I think the lesson here is that strong, unified states are hard and are more likely than not to fall apart, until modern advances in communications and statecraft made holding large areas together under a single polity viable.
However, there wasn’t any real external interference that I can think of to prevent unification outside those 4 large European kingdoms, because it was never really necessary. Any state that seemed to start acquiring enough gravity to unify the entire empire (Austria, Bohemia, Brandenberg, Bavaria) would be pulled down by a union of its neighbors, or it’d get sucked into external great power politics and be sidetracked from its dream of unification.
It’s not until the mid-19th century that unification became an urgent project, anyway. Part of the legacy of the French Revolution was this idea of nationalism, and the idea that ‘Germany’ wasn’t just a geographic expression but also a coherent people, and that furthermore all coherent peoples should be ruled by the same government. This impulse gets especially strong in the decades following 1848, and you DO see efforts by France and Austria especially to prevent German unification. Both failed, of course, thanks to the team of Bismarck and Moltke.
My understanding is that early empires were very decentralized, due to a lack of infrastructure. It took so long to get messages back and forth that micromanagement was not an option. Furthermore, high diversity made it hard to make generic rules.
The entire nobility system was set up so local rulers were halfway decent, having a better morality than maximally exploiting the locals.
I get the impression that the end of feudalism and increasing centralisation of states was also driven by the military revolution.
In a system where armies were composed of small groups of landowning heavy cavalry, these nobles were capable of wielding a lot of power against the King. The practice of homage and military service neatly coupled with the system of land ownership.
The development of the musket took power from the small warrior class and gave it to those capable of organising a large number of armed peasants or mercenaries. i.e. centralised states
@Lambert
It was less muskets than cannons. Cannons were (A) expensive, which meant the cost of a minimum viable military force got a lot higher and (B) could easily destroy old style fortifications, which meant that you couldn’t just hide in your castle with a few retainers and foil the king. Both effects served to increase the power of the crown vis a vis the nobles.
One piece of evidence in favor of Germany’s diplomatic errors being a major factor in precipitating World War I was the post-Bismarck German government’s decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty, the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm apparently believed that his personal friendship with Tsar Alexander III was enough to prevent any kind of war between Russia and Germany that might be unfavorable to the Reich. Wilhelm’s arrogance lead to the Franco-Russian alliance, which substantially imperiled Germany by leaving it effectively surrounded by states in alliance against it, and made World War I almost inevitable.
it’s worse than that. the russians flat out told the germans that if the treaty wasn’t renewed, they’d seek an explicit alliance with france. Bismark once said that the secret to european diplomacy was that in a gave of 5 players, be on the side with 3. He worked a magnificent balancing act to make that happen. Caprivi (and I blame him at least as much as the kaiser) didn’t just throw that out the window, he picked weakest major power to be on his team of two. Had the germans gone the other way in 1887, they’d have had a place to invest their capital that would have reduced some of the demand for colonies and crushed a franco-Austrian alliance if war ever came.
But in 1870, Diplomacy was demonstrably a 7-player game!
Yes, I feel like the British bear a lot of responsibility for it. The Germans wanted to be friends with the British Empire, Willy was notoriously jealous of his British relations. It’s quite likely that he even built up his navy to make himself a more equal ally for the British, not to challenge them. Instead the Brits decided that Germany is trying to undermine them and engaged in an arms race, building dreadnoughts, thus raising the stakes. Of course, historically the British rivaled the French for colonies, in fact it continued until the end of the 19th century (Fashoda incident) and they were engaged in the Great Game against Russia in Central Asia. So it made total sense for the Germans to think the Brits would be interested in an alliance.
I don’t think this is entirely fair. While the Germans were indeed more traditional British Allies than the French, it was Wilhelm who did most of the work to sour that relationship.
Specifically on the naval issue. If building up the German Navy was intended to be as a friendly move towards Britain rather than a challenge (a supposition I’ve never heard brought up before, but that might be my lack of knowledge of the historical discourse) then it was probably the single stupidest piece of foreign policy I’ve ever heard of. Britain officially adopted the ‘2 power standard’ the year after Wilhelm became Kaiser (and before he kicked the Naval build up into high gear). With that policy in place, there was no way a naval build up would be interpreted as anything other than a challenge. Look at it from the British pov. They don’t need an ally with a major navy, that’s what the RN is for. So why would Germany want a massive navy to go with its massive army, especially when the Kaiser makes claims like “our future lies on the sea”? Germany must intend to use the navy, and Britain is the most obvious target (Germany doesn’t need ships to fight Austria, France or Russia). Wilhelm was clearly angling Germany to rival British power where it mattered most to the British, and then acted directly antagonistic (see instances like the Kruger Telegram). So of course Anglo-German relations declined. But this look to be very much self inflicted wound by Germany rather than ‘silly British didn’t realise Willy wanted to be friends’.
Note that even Germany wasn’t a completely autocratic state when the naval race broke out, and while William might have wanted it in imitation of the British (although it wasn’t just that), he didn’t control the purse strings enough to do it on his own. Other people had to be convinced to pay for it, and they were definitely not trying to get the British on-side. That said, Tirpitz’s “risk theory” was predicated on the British not being able to risk their fleet for fear of losing their margin of superiority over France and Russia, so the stupidity was pretty widespread. Of course, that was just a smokescreen for what Tirpitz actually wanted, which was a bigger bureaucratic empire for himself.
The basic idea of “let’s build up our navy to be a better ally to the British” is even stupider than the South American Dreadnought Race and Stalin’s “all great powers have navies, so we need a big one too” in the late 30s. That takes some doing, but it’s also mostly untrue. The Germans wanted a navy to secure international trade, which was increasingly important to them, and access to their colonies. They’d wanted to intervene in the Boer War, but couldn’t because of the RN.
Yes it was a deliberate challenge to the British.
Now, it might have something to do with the fact, that the British told Germany, that they would blockade them, if Germany supported the Boor (and the Emporer not liking the idea that Germany might just be blockaded into submission).
On the other hand, telling the (seconed) biggest economy around, that you can and will blockade them into submission, and than react pissy when they start producing Dreadnoughts, is maybe not the smartest move.
But Germany did support the Boers. From diplomatic incidents like the Kruger telegram, to the Boers infamously stockpiling and using German arms (Mauser and Krupp). The point was Germany was sticking its nose into British spheres of influence, in an antagonistic role. Now it seems to me that either both sides were at fault (because increased tensions and international ‘prestige’ measurement contests aren’t actually worth it) or Germany was at fault (for sticking its nose into British affairs, you can’t plead innocence after kicking the hornet’s nest). It’s hard to fault Britain alone for responding to German antagonism and provocation.
@DarkTigger
Yeah, I don’t think that takes the blame from Germany and moves it to Britain. “If there’s a war, the British will blockade” had been the standard playbook for at least 150 years. The British may have reminded the Germans of this to make a point, but it’s not like anyone was under any illusions about how they’d make their displeasure known if they so chose.
And it’s extremely obvious that the British depended on their control of the seas for both power and even survival, so threatening that isn’t a smart move unless you can follow through. The Germans didn’t realize how vulnerable they were to the blockade until the naval race was actually winding down (the relevant studies started in 1912) and they were the ones who made the choice to strike at the heart of British power. Again, we find Germany as the one with an actual choice, not just an option between surrendering a long-held national advantage and trying to preserve it. This is a repeated choice they made in the years leading up to WWI, and it makes me very sympathetic to Fisher’s theories that the problem was baked into the German state in 1870.
Were the British justified in either Boer war? In both cases the British had earlier accepted that the Boer states had a level of independence that they later didn’t accept anymore, for predatory reasons (in the first war because ZAR had a strategic position in the region and for the second war, because gold and diamonds were found).
The Reinsurance Treaty’s role is overstated. In my opinion, the critical event there was the breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund in 1887. Since an open three-way alliance between Russia, Germany, and Austria had broken down because Russia and Austria were increasingly seeing one another as strategic rivals, then Germany ultimately had to choose between Russia and Austria.
Bismarck’s solution was to openly maintain a bilateral alliance with Austria, but also establish a secret under-the-table agreement with Russia. It didn’t directly contradict the terms of the Dual Alliance, since the Reinsurance Treaty explicitly didn’t apply if Russia attacked Austria and the Dual Alliance didn’t apply if Austria attacked Russia, but it was contrary to the spirit of the Dual Alliance, and it did directly contradict other secret treaties where Germany and Austria had promised to intervene if Russia were to attack Romania. It was not tenable in the long run, since it relied both on secrecy and on the contradictions between Bismarck’s promises to Russia and Austria never being put to the test while the RT remained in effect.
Probably true, but if the Germans had to choose, they chose wrong.
Wilhelm’s personality had quite an influence.
He had a handicapped left arm due to his exciting birth, but was nevertheless very vain, liked to have himself portraited, liked to be right, hated to be wrong, was kind of a spoiled brat and loved to play with his toy soldiers, which were unfortunately life-sized.
You might be aware of the comparisons with the US president. I don’t know how far that carries.
There is a nice documentary about him, called Majestät brauchen Sonne; he loved to be filmed, and he needed sunny weather for that (which is still sometimes called “Kaiserwetter”). It is a little apologetic, because it portrays him as a naive playing child, who is not aware of the catastrophe he is churning up.
Still, if Friedrich III. hadn’t died so young, things might have been very different.
Or if Willhelm had died young and the more diplomatic, leavel-headed Prinz Heinrich had become Kaiser.
Now, it doesn’t seem that you can blame France, England and Russia for Germany’s lateness to the World Power game. But this is where my knowledge of history fails–if there is evidence that the Great Powers, in the early to mid 19th century, deliberately conspired to keep Germany disunified and weak, that might temper my judgment about (unified) Germany’s aggression and guilt.
They were all conspiring against one another; this is what is expressed by Palmerston’s famous dictum:
I agree with you about Wilhelm’s ambition, and it is true that he disencumbered himself of Bismarck who was very much opposed to the young Emperor’s bellicose foreign policy and martial ambitions, and that this throwing off of the guiding hand was decried by the other powers. Though they mostly decried it because Bismarck’s policies were favourable to them, and with Wilhelm’s ambitious re-ordering of matters, the British public and politicians were equally vocal about Britain’s “military unpreparedness” for any potential future conflicts. The Riddle of the Sands is an Edwardian novel about German plans to invade Britain so there was definitely a strain of thought viewing Germany as an enemy and not merely on the political stage but one that would eventually have to be met in the field.
At the same time, it was Bismarck who gave into Wilhelm’s hands a unified, strong Germany with discipline of a distinctly martial cast; he was seen as a stereotypical Prussian making sure that Prussia was the dominant influence in the new Germany. And though Wilhelm had ambitions to build up the German navy, and it was his development of a rival fleet that brought British attention to bear, the notion of a Prussian (not really a German) army was the view in wider terms (see Chesterton’s “The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse” from The Paradoxes of Mr Pond):
There seems to be some suggestion that once war was prosecuted, Wilhelm was side-lined and it was the army generals (the Prussian von Hindenburg and Ludendorf) who had the actual running of the war.
These are all fine precursors. Yes, you can look at the evolving situation and say “at some point, Germany’s lateness to the playing field was likely to result in war” but the concert of Europe had, by and large worked.
I firmly lay the blame for WWI on Russia. They did not have to mobilize when the Austro-Hungarian empire was preparing to go into Serbia. I don’t care if you’re the defender of the Slavs, when an archduke gets whacked, you let the empire enact some justice. The Russians knew that mobilizing against Austro-Hungary meant war with Germany and did it anyway.
Imagine that after the murder of the Pope Italy prepares to invades Bulgaria. The USSR responds by mobilizing. On their way to Russia the american troops invade Sweden and Finland and starve their population to teach them some respect. Would you say that the USA response is totally appropriate?
I’m trying to parse, your comment, please let me know if I missed something. I assume your expressing the opinion that Germany’s invasion of France by way of some countries that can best be described as “not France” was bad? Totally agree.
I’m not saying that the Schlieffen Plan was ethical or even a great idea. Germany walks away from WWI with significant blood on it’s hands based on how it escalated the conflict dramatically… but the key word there is escalated. Without Russia mobilizing, Germany wouldn’t have done anything.
Possibly. But without Austria annexing Serb-populated territories just a few years earlier the whole incident in Aug-1914 was unlikely to happen.
@Scoop
Roughly half of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s territory had an Orthodox Serb majority.
The province could have been split along the ethnic lines.
@Scoop
This assumption is far from obvious. Animosity between Croats and Serbs which exists now is mostly a consequence of latter awful developments. It is quite possible that Bosnian Croats, or at least some of them, would in 1914 prefer to be from ruled near Belgrade, than from geographicaly and culturaly distant Vienna.
One of the conspirators in the plot to kill archduke Ferdinand was actually Bosnian Muslim, which suggests that loyalties of local population were not neatly split along religious lines.
Germany was persecuting civilians from neutral countries that it was treaty-bound to protect. It was also planning to annex an entire neutral country (Luxembourg).
Christopher Clark claims that Russia was pressured to go to war by France. Russian government was dependent on French loans, and Russian security was dependent on an alliance, so France had a lot of leverage over them.
War with Serbia meant war with Russia, as Serbia was Russia’s last ally in the area, and Russia was not interested in surrendering the whole region to Austrian influence, no matter how much Austria already tried to do it long before any Crown Prince was killed.
German and Austria diplomacy in this period is both extremely aggressive and extremely assertive, and entirely counter-productive. Austria traded short-term, pointless gains in exchange for total and irreconcilable enmity from Russia AND Italy, thinking its big brother Germany would win all their wars for them. German aggressiveness solidified a French-British-Russian alliance that had no reason to exist if not for German aggressiveness.
History books usually express it in terms of Wilhelmine psychology, using the phrase “A place in the sun.” It’s a very Romantic framing: “if my cousin King George’s people have an Empire, they have a place in the sun. If my people don’t, they’ll be out in the cold… and not synthesize Vitamin D? :(”
There was a tradition of 19th and 20th century intellectuals broadly painting Germany as having gone more Romantic than other more rational Western countries, some to boo them and others to hurrah them. It’d be interesting to unpack the fairness of that.
I think 3’s the main one.
It’s what they got out of Brest Litovsk.
A lot of Osten had already been Gedranged nach. The Germans expanded from the Elbe in the 9th century almost to the Vistula by the 15th. The East seemed like the obvious place to colonise.
WWI did not start with Germany attacking other Great Powers in order take their colonies or other possessions. It started as a conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia which other parties joined to defend their respective allies.
Now, it is true that Germany wanted overseas territories, and since at that time desirable parts of the world were largely partitioned among old colonial powers, that meant taking something from them. And fear that Germany would do exactly that was indeed a strong factor that pushed France and Britain into hostility towards Germany and eventually to war. But, do we think that a defense of colonial empire, aka power to rule as a foreign authoritarian regime over “natives”, is a legitimate political goal worth going to war for? Well, I don´t.
I have maybe an unconventional scapegoat for WW1 – Austria-Hungary. Hear me out:
1) A-H is obviously responsible for the unacceptable ultimatum they gave to Serbia, they knew it wasn’t going to be accepted and concocted it as a pretext to go to war. A-H felt very insecure about its Balkan possessions and felt they had to eliminate independent Serbia which the murder of the archduke gave them a pretext to do but they were planning to do it for a long time.
2) More specifically, the plans against Serbia were made by the war party in the A-Hian government. Notoriously, Conrad, the chief of the A-H general staff, was rearing to go to war and looked to push pro-war policies. Ironically, the murdered archduke Franz Ferdinand was the leader of the peace party, he wanted to reorganize the A-Hian government to give more voice to the minorities, including the Balkan ones, which may have solved the problems caused by Serbian agitation.
3) A-H was also not trusted by the Russians after the Austrians double-crossed them during the Bosnian crisis. In this crisis Bosnia which previously was autonomous part of the A-H empire was annexed outright by A-H. Because the Russians were sensitive about any changes of the status quo on the Balkans, A-H made a deal with them: the Russians will acquiesce in the annexation of Bosnia in exchange for A-H supporting the Russian aspirations for access through the Turkish straits which was a long-term goal for the Russians because they wanted an open ice-free port in the Black sea. Instead the Austrians annexed Bosnia but didn’t keep their end of the bargain and presented the annexation as a fait accompli when Russia complained. The Russians were justifiably aggrieved and didn’t trust the Austrians henceforth.
This is basically the correct take imho; fact that you labeled it “unconventional” is interesting, since Austria-Hungary was first to declare war. Perhaps Americans have trouble to even remember that Austria-Hungary existed, so they can hardly blame it for anything.
I labeled it “unconventional” because, yes, often people don’t even consider Austria-Hungary as an independent participant in the war and a major power in its own right, they basically view it as a German lapdog. In fact, Austria-Hungary had its own policies, goals and objectives as well as dealing with challenges from the minorities and its dysfunctional government (for example, the Hungarians had their own government and prevented Austrian investment in the military and rearmament).
As for Americans, given that in WW1 they contributed even less to the defeat of Germany than in WW2, it’s not surprising they don’t learn much about it.
I take exception to that. The Allies don’t win WWI without American involvement – at least, not in 1918 they don’t.
Just because we didn’t have Third Army cutting its way across occupied France doesn’t meant the US wasn’t contributing. Shipments of arms, food, and ultimately, bodies, were all essential to maintaining the Allied war effort.
(Also, we HAVE heard of Austria-Hungary and many people DO blame it)
It wasn’t just logistical support, either. Both the practical and morale effects were very real. In morale terms, having the US backing you up and knowing that the Americans are on their way was probably tremendously helpful during the Spring Offensive, when things came close to disaster. And it gave the confidence for a counterattack, instead of the Allies digging in. Conversely, I strongly suspect that the US being in the war contributed greatly to the panic that gripped Germany after the failure of the Spring Offensive, which led straight to the revolution. (Well, that plus the blockade.)
On the practical side, there were a lot of American troops in Europe by mid-1918. By November, the AEF and BEF were of approximately equal size. Yes, a lot of those didn’t make it to the front, but the fact that the American troops exist and will keep coming means you have a bigger margin right now, and can take more risks. The Hundred Days wouldn’t have been possible if the US had stayed out.
(I’m not saying “Oh, of course it was all the US”, because that would be stupid. The US contributions are better-recognized than those of (to pick two) the Italians and the RN. But it wasn’t like the US was the guy who showed up late and just took credit for it.)
I second Chevalier Mal Fet’s objection, but I’d also point out that while austria began the war independently, they became decreasingly so as the war went on and they became more and more dependent on german support.
Slight tangent, but how many people blame the Schlieffen Plan?
For those unfamiliar the Schlieffen Plan was Germany’s grand strategic move that, in the case of war with Russia they’d immediately try and knock out France via a grand sweep through Belgium. Yes, Germany’s Russian war plan was to invade two other countries and cause a massive diplomatic incident with the British Empire. Tactically it was actually rather inspired and damn well near worked, and really only needed the addition of tanks and motorized trucks as demonstrated aptly in WW2. Even without these, if Britain had stayed out of the war a little longer, if France had been a little less speedy with its reserves and if the Belgians had just fought a little less, France may well have capitulated in 1914 and Russia forced to the table in 1915. That a lot of ifs for a war plan but I think it’s unappreciated just how close the Central Powers came to a fait accompli victory with France and a swift end to the Great War.
Strategically, the plan was a catastrophe of the highest order and would have had Bismarck spinning in his grave and a 100rpm. It wedded Germany to an all out attack against a country that was its military peer with the assumption they would win a swift and overwhelming victory, which was never certain. It relied on the thin hope that Russia could be delayed long enough to win the war in the West, which was insane on the face of it and it’s obvious why for anyone who can read a map. And invading Belgium destroyed their international reputation, and brought in the British into the war. While it can be argued that no one in Germany high command through invading Belgium would produce such a strong response this really isn’t a defense. On entering war with the third and fourth most powerful countries in the world the very last thing you should do is wave a red flag in front of the most powerful.
Ironically, I think luck and Russian incompetence allowed the Schlieffen Plan to succeed beyond its inherent quality. However, it was still a bad plan to fix a strategic issue that never should be allowed to form in the first place. The very existence of this plan that, kind’a sort’a if you squint, was usable meant that the Germany government believed it could act as a belligerent when really they should have acknowledged they were on the diplomatic back-foot and adjusted their policy accordingly.
Not really. The Schlieffen Plan is too far removed from the initial cause to have influenced the ultimate causation. By the time the plan was activated and the German trains rolled west, it was already a Europe-wide war on a scale that hadn’t been seen for a century. Now, the plan and its outcome (ultimate failure, and ensuring British entry into the war) were crucial to WW1 panning out as we know it. A war in 1914 without the Schlieffen Plan deviates from our history quite drastically, but so does a history where the plan wasn’t mucked about with, which may well have resulted in German victory (as it came close, even with the poor alterations made by von Moltke the younger weakening the offensive thrust).
Germany wanted colonies because everyone else had colonies, too. And they ended up with colonies in Africa and Asia that made no sense at all, and were quickly snapped up by the Allies when war broke out. Except in southern Africa, which is a fascinating campaign, but didn’t really help their war effort.
I don’t think 3 was a major motive going in. Brest-Litovosk was probably a combination of only being able to beat up Russia and the blockade revealing that Germany wasn’t really self-sufficient on food. (Post on that going up at Naval Gazing on the 31st.) Take enough territory from Russia, and that problem can be solved, making them much better able to resist the blockade.
Let me give you a short form of my view:
The German government/military wanted a war with Russia, “before Russia became to strong to be beaten.”
The Frenche government/military wanted revnache for ’70/71 and their land back.
Great Britians government wanted a war with Germany, because the did not like the idea of an European power able to challenge their dominance. (Both France and Spain had lost the ability to be that power)
Russia and Austria-Hungary weren’t exactly pawns in this game, but bishops at best.
Great Britain didn’t want a war with Germany. If Germany had stayed out of Belgium, Britain would probably have stayed out of the war. But Belgium was vital, for both diplomatic reasons and more pragmatically because it provided the best ports from which to invade Britain. And Britain at the time was absolutely paranoid about invasion. It seems silly in retrospect, particularly with modern knowledge of amphibious operations, but this is the era that made The Riddle of the Sands a best-seller.
I have just started rereading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy and I am reminded why I loved it so much when I read it decades ago. When I read Wolfe — as when I read Chesterton — I often stop to reread a paragraph or a sentence just to marvel at the prose. Both of those guys turn out sentences, paragraphs, entire chapters that I could not write in a week if you paid me to do it.
If you enjoy science fiction and the English language and you have not read Wolfe, you are missing out.
Thank you for this. I’m always looking for new things to read and while I’ve heard of Wolfe before, I appreciate the reminder that I should bump Book of the New Sun up towards the top of my to-read pile.
I would like to answer your recommendation with one of my own and a question. For the recommendation, Ninefox Gambit is very weird but very good. If pressed to place it into a genre, I’d call it “Military Science-Fantasy”, but that description doesn’t really do it justice. It’s one of the most enjoyably unique written works I’ve encountered this decade.
And for my question: Is your username, by any chance, a reference to the John Myers Myers tour-of-literary-references?
I recommend bumping it further. Or at least check beginning, I remember that I liked it from start.
It most certainly is, although maybe I should have gone with Golias instead.
I thought that was obvious.
Have you seen my verses for the rowing song?
I have not, but I would like to.
+1 Skeptical Wolf. I would indeed like to see them.
They are in the expanded version that was published with a bunch of similar things, but here they are:
East of Abd-er Rahman he had seen his brother
fall,
Westward was the coast where all roads drown.
“Trust alone in Allah, for He alone knows all,”
He set his turban on a spear and went to find a
crown.
Al-Andalus and all the West when he had won
his throw,
With hunters baying at his heels he dared not
travel slow,
He made them brace and bend their backs and
row, row, row.
East of Kveldulf’s island was a world his
foeman ruled,
West of it the land where men were free.
Death’s the price of living and the Norns are
never fooled;
He saw the stolen ship go by and followed it to
sea.
He would never look on Iceland but he let proud
Harald know
That even kings pay wergeld, though they would
not have it so,
He made them brace and bend their backs and
row, row, row.
I was reading it long time ago, but I really loved the story told by Ascian soldier.
Told solely in slogans from totalitarian double-speak, but at least partially going against regime.
“The people meeting in counsel may judge, but no one is to receive more than a hundred blows.”
with meaning of
“He complained, and they beat him.”
See https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1983-wolfe-thecitadeloftheautarch-thejustman#chapter-xi.-loyal-to-the-group-of-seventeens-storythe-just-man for a quote
I’m tempted to buy the tetralogy, but the hero being a professional torturer makes me wary — graphical violence or suffering repulses me, however fine the esthetic and artistic rendering may be (sorry, Tarantino). Is there much I’d have to endure to enjoy the rest?
It has been at least a decade since I last read the books, but I don’t remember much in the way of graphic violence. There are a couple of instances where Severian’s lessons and duties as a Torturer are mentioned but very little in the way of gore. That isn’t really Wolfe’s style.
Thank you!
There’s a couple of fairly gruesome scenes, but only one of them, early on, actually has to do with Severian’s profession, and there he’s not the perpetrator. It comes out in his personality, and there’s a lot of philosophizing about justice and punishment, but the actual practice of his profession is mostly glossed over — there’s a couple of exceptions, where a particular gig of his turns out to be important to the plot, but none of them are graphic.
The nastiest stuff in the books is purely psychological, no blood at all.
Would anyone who’s read more of the New Earth books care to recommend or anti-recommend them?
There’s a lot after the tetrology. There’s the Urth of the New Sun, The Books of the Long Sun, and the Books of the Short Sun. And _The Castle of the Otter_, a short collection of short pieces about the Book of the New Sun. I’ve read that one and I recommend it.
I found Urth of the New Sun okay, but unnecessary. The Long Sun books are fantastic; Patera Silk is a fascinating character—I find him more so than Severian—and it’s easier to look back after reading the whole thing and think you have a pretty good handle on what happened and why than the New Sun books, which seem to me to sometimes go a bit farther than necessary into being deliberately obscurantist (which, yes, is a big part of Gene Wolfe’s shtick). The Short Sun books are also very interesting, although Wolfe skips huge chunks of time even more than the New Sun books, and it is deliberately made unclear who the narrator even is by the end. What’s going on other than that, though, is figurable out, and it’s a lot of fun to do so.