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Suppose we have a piece of wood, maybe 5 cm by 5 cm by 25 cm, that is actually a piece of the cross that Jesus was crucified on. How close can we get to proving that this is true, if we are willing to use really elaborate historical and scientific methods of investigation?
More importantly, can we use the blood sample to clone Jesus, Kahless-style?
Or we can take samples from all great religious teachers to create the ultimate
warriorpeace-maker, Serpentor style.Or would it just turn into Jesus’s sister, Jurassic Park style?
“Why did we even add the frog DNA, anyway?!”
Water into wine, fish into fishes, something something male frog into female.
@Randy M: Stained glass window from this timeline.
iirc there’s a millenarian christian science fiction series on precisely this concept, though I believe the blood involved comes from the shroud.
Yep, the Christ Clone trilogy! It’s a pretty good series!
You use the clone to answer johan’s question: if it turns out to be the Second Coming, the wood is probably legit.
If it turns out to be a Bizarro, does that count as the Anti-Christ?
The Uglitudes, preached by Bizarro Jesus:
Blessed are the rich in flesh, for theirs is the Republic of Hell.
Blessed are those who cheer, for they will not be comforted.
Blessed are the proud, for they will not inherit Mars.
Blessed are those who are full and hydrated of unrighteousness, for they will be hungry.
Blessed are the merciless, for they will be shown no mercy.
Blessed are in the impure in heart, for they are blind to Satan.
Blessed are the warmongers, for they won’t be called parents of Satan.
Blessed are those who aren’t persecuted because of unrighteousness, for theirs is the Republic of Hell.
Blessed are you when people compliment you, don’t persecute you and truly say all kinds of good against you.
I want to get into what Jesus’ DNA would look like.
Possibility 1: He was a clone of Mary. Occasionally one’s biological sex doesn’t match what the DNA says it should be. So either he’d have a Jewish Y chromosome inherited from Mary’s father through Mary, or no Y chromosome at all and future researchers would mistake his blood for a woman’s blood.
Possibility 2: Half of his DNA appeared miraculously. I’d guess that this would be King David’s DNA, given the importance of Jesus being from that bloodline.
Possibility 3: Jesus has a haploid genome.
Possibility 4: Half of Jesus’s genome is made of ineffable divine whatchamacallsit instead of DNA.
Well, Jesus evidently looked reasonably enough like an ordinary Jew in phenotype…
Which is what the H in Jesus H. Christ stands for.
Possibility 5: someone puts his DNA into 23&me and various ancestry services and it turns out that he has a bunch of half-siblings all over the country right now.
Possibility 6: someone puts his DNA into 23&me and various police databases and his DNA turns up as an exact match for a currently extant serial killer cannibal.
Possibility 7: When comparing his DNA to the GRCH38 reference genome the variant SNPs in his genome turn out to encode a binary sequence that when turned into binary and unzipped yields an x86 executable that plays an animation of the Buddy Christ giving a thumbs up to the camera.
Possibility 5: someone puts his DNA into 23&me and various ancestry services and it turns out that he has a bunch of half-siblings all over the country right now
That’s the mediaeval construction of the Holy Kinship:
In Soviet Russia, Jesus eats YOUR flesh!
Joseph was David’s descendant, so the Holy Spirit could just have said “hey, this way he looks like his dad.”
Is it possible to use certain techniques to at least determine that the wood was cut at the time and location that it approximately would have needed to be?
For time, radioactive carbon dating. Wood absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while its alive. In the atmosphere, the carbon of C02 is sometimes the product of cosmic rays hitting nitrogen, which makes it an uncommon isotope (C14). We generally know the proportion of this isotope in the atmosphere. Once inside the tree, the carbon decays from the rare isotope to nitrogen at a predictable rate, and no (or very little?) new C14 is produced . So, by measuring the proportion of C14 to C12 (the common isotope) we can determine how long the carbon has been decaying.
Not sure on location.
5cm x 5xm x 25 cm may be too small, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
You could try to cross reference the variation in thickness of the rings with the climate of the ancient Levant.
Carbon dating gives you the approximate time. It might be possible to use tree ring data to get it more precise, if the piece of wood shows multiple rings and you have a good guess at the geographical location.
I don’t know whether isotope frequency in wood varies with location for some reason — if it does that might give you some geographical information.
Type of wood varies by location, and presumably you’d use some wood that grows in the general vicinity for your crucifixions (though a half-decent forgery would take that into account). Does anyone who has knowledge of 1st century CE Judean flora and Roman crucifixion practices want to weigh in?
I think about this a lot.
Piggybacking off some Shroud of Turin Stuff I discussed in the last thread, it probably depends on how far back we can trace the existence of the block historically.
Say some church has claimed that it’s the true cross since 1567.
Say we have an army of scientists, the entire resources of major world economy (say the state of california), and years of time. Here’s what we could do (I think)
* Isolate SOME DNA from the wood, getting a good idea of the tree’s genetic makeup in minute detail.
* Perform the same analysis on a huge number of trees of the same kind from the levant etc.
* Perform the same analysis on other trees of the same kind all over the world
* use some kind of mitchondrial wizardry to compare common ancestors of the wood and other trees from the same region
using this we could get a crude baseline for “how likely was that block of wood to have come from the same place and from roughly 50BC to 100 AD”
even if our resulting percentage is pretty low, say 50%, I think it’s quite likely it’s genuine. After all, what are the odds that the church, at that remote time, saved SOME OTHER block of wood from that place, from that time period, when at the time no known method existed to verify either?
* if they maintained the truth of the cross fragment as a prextual swindle, the amount of effort involved would have been far in excess of what was necessary at the time
* if they were swindled by someone else, likewise
* if every actor involved was genuine (IE some crusader really found a little shrine that someone really had kept faithfully since 100 AD which at that time really happened to acquire the wood the owner of the shrine really thought was specially connected with jesus…but it wasn’t from the real cross) we still have, quite by accident, stumbled onto the oldest connection between the christian church and the present day.
note this analysis doesn’t work if, say, somebody shows up tomorrow claiming to have the fragment. he could have set out to fool our genetic tests. the same is not true of the knights templar (unless you subscribe to a conception of their abilities that borders on dan-brownian and would actually make for a pretty good science thriller)
This might be elementary to a lot of people here, but a lot of modern Christians really underestimate how tenuous the connections are between their faith and the traditions that emerged immediately following J-dog. Our oldest depictions of the guy date from hundreds of years after his death (whenever the hell that was), as do most of the texts from the gospels themselves. if that block of wood was fake, it would still be a very important historical artifact.
To generally agree, I think the best we can prove scientifically is that the wood comes from within about a century of the correct time, more or less the right area, and has Jewish male blood on it. There’s nothing we can do to prove that it was used in this specific crucifixion unless we already had a known good piece of the actual cross to compare it with. The Romans crucified a lot of Jews, probably especially after the rebellion in 70AD.
Now, if that were paired with a very old historical claim that this was a piece of the real cross like you describe, those two together would constitute pretty strong evidence. But we already know we don’t have a piece of wood that fits that criteria.
Even if we could date the fragment to the exact date [and place] Jesus died (which we don’t know), there’d still only be a 33% chance of getting it right.
Can you do better than “Jewish male” by using the Y chromosome? What is the historical consensus on Jesus’s descent from the Davidic dynasty and are various modern claims of descent from said dynasty considered remotely accurate? This is, of course, setting aside the question of how immaculate conception would interact with genetics, which I don’t care about, but presumably Christians would.
Nope. Christians are pretty clear that he had no human father, and even if you don’t buy that, I think it’s safe to say that Joseph wasn’t his father.
Is there a canonical mapping between the hebrew alphabet and the amino acids (including selenocystine and pyrrolysine)?
If the Catholics are right about transubstantiation, then we should be able to get a fresh blood and tissue samples from Jesus at just about any Catholic church to use as a basis for comparison.
If the Catholics are right about transubstantiation, then we should be able to get a fresh blood and tissue samples from Jesus at just about any Catholic church to use as a basis for comparison.
Nope, doesn’t work like that, the accidents of bread and wine remain the same, it is the essence/substance that changes.
Unless you’re going to try and source something from one of the Eucharistic miracles, such as the Miracle at Bolsena or the Host of Lanciano, you’re out of luck.
And just to go down a different rabbit-hole, seeing as how we were speaking elsewhere of the Aztecs, whilst looking up the names of the Eucharistic miracles I was led to the Mass of St Gregory and in turn to this – an Aztec feather painting of the subject commissioned by the nephew of the last Emperor as a gift for the Pope 🙂
How can it be possible for essence and accidents to be mismatched?
@Nancy Lebovitz
There’s nothing weird about the essence and accidents being mismatched; that happens all the time. For instance, if you chop your arm off or dye your hair blue, your accidents have certainly changed, but you’re still Nancy, still a human being, etc. Likewise there’s nothing weird about a substance changing along with its accidents; the accidents changing along with it seems to be the rule in nature. For example, when I die my matter will no longer have its substantial form, as evidenced by the rapid decay which will follow.
What’s weird about transubstantiation is that the substance changes and the accidents don’t, which doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else in nature. In that way it’s kind of the dual to the chopping-off-your-arm or hair-dyeing examples. But there’s nothing metaphysically impossible about it.
Considering there were a bunch of Christian soldiers and pilgrims rummaging about the Holy Land for the entire Crusader period who were grabbing every remotely plausible looking relic, I’m guessing a lot of bits of wood that were legitimately very old and legitimately from Judea found their way back to Europe. Given the acclaim (for themselves and their local church) likely to come from bringing back a nice relic, I doubt Crusaders were particularly motivated to closely examine the claims of any locals insisting that this or that little block of wood was from the True Cross.
“Why are the hills of Lebanon bare?”
“Because every Frank in Christendom has a splinter of the true cross.”
I don’t think that’s true. The academic consensus about the gospels these days is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all come from the late 1st century AD (perhaps bracketing a few later interpolations like the infamous SCABMOM passage) and John from not long after that.
Indeed. Mark is usually dated to 40 years after Jesus was crucified.
“Our oldest depictions of the guy date from hundreds of years after his death” better describes Alexander the Great:
Diodorus of Sicily Book 17 (circa 40s BC)
Historiae Alexandri Magni of Quintus Curtius Rufus, 1st Centuty AD
Plutarch’s Vita of him, circa 100-110 AD
Alexándrou Anábasis, Arrian, 117-138 AD
Justin’s Epitome of The Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, a Gallo-Roman (so reign of Augustus at earliest)
And of course the Alexander Romance, whose contents were too plastic to date without an ancient manuscript.
by “depictions” i meant literal depictions. Like “Here’s a drawing of this guy” IIRC the oldest image of Christ is from
300 ADjust checked its 235 ADMy memory of when the gospels were written was off by more than 100 years though, so clearly I need to repeat catholic school.
EDIT: I was remembering when they were NAMED not WRITTEN, oops
how would the answer change if it was a block of wood for some random historical person, with no religious connection?
Touch it to a hated political figure’s forehead and see if they burst into flames. Saves you the lengthy investigation and gets rid of hated political figure.
I’m having Indiana Jones thoughts, but I’m not sure exactly why…
I agree with everyone else who said carbon-dating, blood analysis, and trying to trace the kind of tree is the best you can plausibly do.
Implausibly? The best I can imagine this possibly going is that our heroic gang of extremely rich archaeologists convince every church with a True Cross relic to donate it to them for analysis. If you can find that multiple different relics widely separated in time and space came from the same individual tree, that would be pretty exciting (although of course you can’t prove they didn’t all just come from some very early ur-fake). Then if our sample comes from that same tree, we’re in business.
The Emperor’s mother will not be told no!
If you could carbon date wooden Catholic/Orthodox relics to 50 AD with an error bar of 23 years, statistically it’s 167 times less likely that it’s from Golgotha on the day Jesus was crucified between two robbers than the cross a rebel was nailed to on one of many Tuesdays by Titus’s orders.
Cross-post from HN, How priming research went off the rails.
Thanks for the link. At while ago, I was explaining the replication crisis to my teenage daughter, who is interested in psychology and thinks she may end up majoring in it when she goes to college. (She is only a high-school sophomore, though, so who knows?) If we ever discuss it again, I can direct her to the article to show her what I am talking about.
Also, I found “The Lacy Macbeth Effect” an amusing typo. It sounds like a mashup of the Bard’s work with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Lacy Macbeth sounds like the protagonist of a teen noir pastiche to me.
It seems to me that the COVID 19 pandemic has some interesting intermediate qualities. If it were only killing/disabling a tenth as many people, our reaction would be a lot smaller. If it were looking to kill a third of the population- or nine tenths– I don’t know what we’d to, but it would be more drastic.
If it had happened 50 years ago, we’d be almost helpless, I think. Pretty much just let it burn through. If it were 50 years from now, we might be able to handle it easily.
Modern communications take a lot of the edge off, but not enough. In terms of the economy, I think it would help a lot if remote-controlled robots were high quality and cheap. How much would have to be developed for those robots to be feasible?
I think I mentioned this before, but we’ve made the (developed) world safe enough that a large fraction insists on classifying everything as “absolutely safe” or “intolerably dangerous” and then excluding the latter from their lives. Something like seasonal influenza rounds to “absolutely safe”. COVID-19 mortality isn’t low enough for anyone to call it “absolutely safe”, and we don’t really know how to exclude it from the general public’s lives. But it isn’t so dangerous as to seriously challenge anyone with more sophisticated risk-management strategies.
That’s another grey area, and a divisive one.
A general point: The mainstream/blue American emphasis on health and safety is relatively recent (started in the 60s, I think) and not at all a human universal.
Not a human universal, but I think it’s common throughout the (highly) developed world.
There is a similar pattern of reducing a continuum to a binary in both accounting and tort law, as well as various places in morality.
Is there any reason to think this binary classification is new? What seems new is just that as quality of life goes up, the probability of death that moves something from the “safe” to “dangerous” classification has gotten lower.
Interestingly, it did happen, almost exactly 50 years ago, and as best I can tell we didn’t do much about it. It even had its early US foothold in the Navy! There was another pandemic about a decade later, but that might have been a less deadly strain the current virus depending on where you stand on the IFR vs. CFR debate.
This is an important point to remember when people make historical comparisons to measures that were or weren’t used, for example in evaluating legal precedents for government power in a pandemic. Even quite recently, human societies had a much higher tolerance for death by infectious disease.
We’re in a sort of awkward position. if we were utterly helpless then we would just have to let it burn and there would be damn-all anyone could do about it.
But we can roughly project that a year to 18 months from now we will likely have vaccines and even before that treatment protocols are improving rapidly.
Combined with that we very rapidly had a solid idea of who was at risk the most.
So that turns it into choices. No longer just a roll of fates dice by unknowable cruel gods.
Add in that we’re on the margin where our society can afford some degree of lockdown.
Sure, we could unlock right away but wouldn’t it suck if your Mom dies and you know that if you’d not visited for a few months she’d still be alive then the tradeoffs become more real. Not some unknowable curse of a dark god but rather direct consequential results from the actions of individuals.
Historically, government tend to have extreme power in the face of pandemics because few other threats can kill so many citizens so fast.
Historically, human societies had a much higher tolerance for death by infectious disease (though important to note, plagues were still treated as a special case where the government could wall you into your own house and wait for a long time to see who survived, this is distinct from mundane infections like infected wounds) because there was no other choice.
Given that we are in lockdown now, it is unfortunately the case that Heisenberg ethics kicks in: If you ease the lockdown, then all resulting deaths are on your head.
We would be much better off if we could make the lockdowns just tight enough that we get hospitals that are 50% full rather than 5% full, because that might get us to herd immunity in a more reasonable time. That is a tricky thing to do, since any small change at the beginning of a two-week exponential process can have a huge effect on the outcome at the end of two weeks — I liken it to trying to flip a light switch with a ten-foot pole. But it’s moot, because it is politically impossible to say, “We are making this change and we consider the likely magnitude of the resulting deaths to be acceptable.”
Also, I’d note that:
a. If we get to herd immunity by spread of the virus, then we will inevitably overshoot it–we’ll get more than the number of people we need infected for herd immunity. Keeping R_t lower means we overshoot by less, and I think that can have a substantial impact on total number of deaths.
b. As long as the virus is circulating and is a significant risk for a lot of people, those people are going to be very reluctant to do a lot of normal economic activity, like taking a flight somewhere or going to a crowded bar or restaurant. If 80% of the population needs to get this for the virus to die out, and I’ve got a 2% chance[1] of dying if I catch it, then I’m going to be working pretty hard to be in that other 20% that never got it. Multiply that by several million, and you get an economic impact that’s probably comparable to the lockdown.
[1] I’m in a somewhat-high risk group for COVID-19. My best guess is IFR is somewhere between 0.5% and 1% overall, and it’s probably at least 2-3 times as high for me.
Our reaction also has unfortunately middling qualities: it’s too painful to continue indefinitely (or really much more than it already has) but not so crippling as to have been immediately rejected as unjustified. It’s not useless – it does seem to slow the spread – but not so emphatically effective that everyone is onboard with keeping it up regardless of the cost.
I think it’s also interesting to compare it to the other pandemic that is still ongoing, that everyone tends to forget about because it’s been raging for about my entire lifetime. In the first decade and a half, HIV was far more deadly than COVID, but we’ve now got treatments that make it far, far less deadly. It had a much longer incubation period, both in terms of asymptomatic transmission, and just a very slow rate of transmission. (Even an infected superspreader who has unprotected sex with one new person every day tends to transmit it only once every few weeks or months, rather than giving it to 50 people in one evening five days after catching it.) Nevertheless, I think that even with massive undercount of COVID, we still haven’t reached the point where the number of people infected is as high as it is with HIV, and we’re nowhere near the total number of deaths. We’ve largely slowed the spread in the developed world, at first through social distancing that everyone involved hated (whether it’s closing the bathhouses for a few decades, pushing condom use on everyone, pressuring people into abstinence, or returning gay people to the closet for a decade) but now through a good enough understanding of the mechanisms of transmission that we know precisely which drug taken when can make it safe to do all the fun things you used to do in the ’70s. Of course, after the first couple years, most people learned that it was unlikely to be a risk factor in their own community, so they ignored the social distancing requirements (it always shocked me in college how much straight people thought birth control pills were all the protection you need!)
I think that’s more or less what happened during the 1957 Asian flu pandemic, and the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic. The CDC claims the 1957 flu took 116,000 lives in the US, and 1.1 million worldwide, with a world population less than half of today’s. We have yet to reach that level of death with covid 19.
I don’t have detailed month by month numbers, but given that world
population has more than doubled, and US population nearly doubled since
then the CDC figures of 1.1 million worldwide deaths and 116,000 US
still look large compared to COVID-19 so far. Here is a description
from the UK:
see more at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2714797/
Although children were the most affected, schools don’t seem to have
been closed. However, “In London 110 000 children were off school
suspected of having influenza.”
One bright spot was the forward thinking action by Dr. Maurice Hilleman
to produce a vaccine cultured from samples collected in Hong Kong. This
vaccine actually became available in time to be of significant use in
limiting US losses.
see https://www.history.com/news/1957-flu-pandemic-vaccine-hilleman
Although children were the most affected, schools don’t seem to have
been closed. However, “In London 110 000 children were off school
suspected of having influenza.”
One bright spot was the forward thinking action by Dr. Maurice Hilleman
to produce a vaccine cultured from samples collected in Hong Kong. This
vaccine actually became available in time to be of significant use in
limiting US losses.
see https://www.history.com/news/1957-flu-pandemic-vaccine-hilleman
Sad to say I haven’t seen any evidence of similar excellence today.
The 1957 Asian flu was certainly not the garden variety seasonal flu; it
was a worldwide pandemic caused by a novel virus. Quite a bit like the
one we’re living through now.
Still, if deaths over the complete pandemic cycle were only two to four times higher than deaths in the first two months of covid, and if they were limited to that amount even without any school closures or widespread mask-wearing, let alone lockdown, then it suggests that the virus that time was far less dangerous than the current one.
Eat Rat, Make New Body: Easy Stuff for Pythons
CW: the article goes for the gross-out in both pictures and descriptions of snakes killing and eating.
Anyway the article is about studying the snakes which fast for weeks or months and then eat a huge meal. It turns out that when they’re fasting, they don’t produce stomach acid. When they’re digesting, they increase their metabolism beyond anything otherwise known– for weeks they’re putting out more energy than a galloping horse does for a few minutes.
They increase the size and capacity of their digestive organs tremendously, then shrink them back when they aren’t digesting.
Question not addressed in the article: How do snakes avoid being eaten while they’re digesting a big meal?
General follow-up question: what do snakes do while they’re digesting? Not looking for food obviously; aside from the occasional mating or moving to new territory when food is scarce, what do they occupy their time with, and how likely are they to be hunted/eaten while doing it?
King cobras live on snakes, but I don’t know what other species especially eat snakes.
In discussion on facebook, I was told that ball pythons at least hide when they’re digesting. I don’t know how much that can help with small predators (rats, canids, carnivorous birds) which I would expect to be rummaging around, but I might be underestimating how thorough the rummaging is.
I’ve seen recommendations to feed pet snakes dead prey, or at least never leave a snake unsupervised with its prey.
Moses had a snake on staff who could take these questions if it was still alive.
If Shakespeare had used Dutch fixed expressions in his plays, he might have gone places.
‘Zweten als een otter’ = Sweating like an otter
Sweating profusely.
‘Ik kan geen ijzer met handen breken’ = I can’t break iron with (my) hands
I can’t do the impossible.
‘Oliedom’ = Oil dumb
Extremely dumb. Probably derives from ‘olijk dom,’ where ‘olijk’ is an obsolete word for: very badly.
‘Kletsmajoor’ = Major babble (as in the military rank)
Someone who babbles a lot.
‘Of je worst lust!’ = Whether you like sausage!
This is what you can say if someone asks you to repeat your question and you are upset at them not listening to you initially or because they rudely asked you to repeat the question. This comes from a 1935 youth novel called ‘Polletje Piekhaar’, with Rotterdam lower class dialect/slang, which also gave us:
‘Geef mijn portie maar aan Fikkie!’ = Give my portion to Fikkie!
I don’t want any part of it. Fikkie is the name of a dog, in the novel. The bestselling novel is now forgotten, but the expressions from it remain used.
‘Verstrooid’ = scattered
Being absent-minded. A typical usage and stereotype is: ‘verstrooide professor’ = an absent-minded professor.
By any chance, is the Dutch word verstrooid derived from the same root as the Yiddish word farshimmelt? (serious question)
No, it comes from PIE *strew-.
Schimmeln might be related to words like ‘swamp’ and ‘sponge’.
I found no evidence of that and it seems very unlikely. The root seems to pretty clearly come from straw (‘stro’ in Dutch, but ‘strooien’ is the adjective version, as in straw hat = ‘strooien hoed’).
The earliest know use of ‘strooien’ to mean scattering is from 1287 (‘ver’ is added to words to indicate that the act happened in the past, so ‘verstrooid’ means: it has been scattered). Various related languages have very similar words to ‘strooien’ that mean the same, suggesting it goes back way earlier, to a common proto-Germanic root language:
Old English: streawian
Modern English: strewn
Nynorsk Norwegian: strøya
Old High German: strewen
Alemannic German: streuwe
Modern German: streuen
Gothic: straujan
Luxembourgish: streeën
Yiddish farshimlt means ‘mouldy’ (German verschimmelt – different spelling for the same underlying phonological representation; from Schimmel ‘mould’). Totally unrelated to verstrooid, except that both have the same prefix (Yiddish far- = German ver- = Dutch ver-), which is a cognate of English strew. Taken literally, verstrooid is something like ‘strewn out’ – and now it’s immediately apparent how it acquired its metaphoric meaning. German has zerstreut with the same meaning (just a different prefix, which emphasises the ‘apart’ or ‘in different directions’ aspect of it). Russian also has a word meaning ‘scatter-brained’ that is formed exactly analogously (complete with the closest matching verbal prefix): rassejannyj. I’m not sure if it’s a loan translation of German zerstreut or simply an independent development of the same metaphor.
It’s funny that in Dutch “scattered around” and “absent-minded” are the same word. When the comedian Heinz Erhardt said that he is totally scattered around (verstreut) today, instead of zerstreut, people found it a hilarious wordplay!
Isn’t this why Rudi Carrell did so well in Germany? He just spoke bad German and people found it hilarious 🙂
He would have made it anywhere, with the family talent and early learning, the hard working, and the perfectionism. I think he cultivated his funny accent somewhat, but that was not the main driver of his success.
Some from Australia:
“It went off like a bride’s nightie” – A really fun, energetic event took place
“Goes like shit off a shovel” – Usually in reference to a car or some high-powered machinery, it performs really well.
“Could eat the arse out of a low-flying duck” – very hungry
“Doesn’t know whether he’s Arthur or Martha” – someone is totally confused
“A month of Sundays” – a very long time
“It went off like a bride’s nightie”
I’m going to use that at my next management meeting.
Say “hi” to Carol from HR for me.
A dream I had recently:
It began as the classic teeth-falling-out stress dream. I have these, oh, once or twice a year, but this one was different. As soon as my teeth felt the slightest bit loose early on, I recognized the feeling and was about 99% sure I was dreaming. I also remembered that usually the way these dreams end is with my dental condition being exposed in public somehow, and the dream fades away just as I reach the point of maximum embarassment. This time I was determined to end the dream myself.
I decided I’d mimic the conditions the dream usually ends with – I just went outside somewhere crowded and showed people what was happening. I got some weird looks, but mostly people being annoyed that I was bothering them. The dream went on. I tried to find more and more public places, more conspicuous ways of revealing what was going on but it never worked – teeth just kept falling out. Each failure made me just a little bit less sure I was dreaming after all – eventually I gave up and decided to wait it out, 50% sure the dream would end when I ran out of teeth, 50% sure I’d just go the rest of my life toothless. I didn’t care, I was just frustrated by that point.
The last third or so of the dream consisted of me staring into my bathroom sink, mouth open, and teeth falling out. By then, the rate had gone from one every couple minutes to several per second. Obviously, I was not only losing teeth, I was growing them back just as fast. What’s more, I realized the teeth coming out were becoming larger and larger – the last few were comically large, dentist-office models that shouldn’t even have been able to fit in my mouth.
When it got to the point of my sink overflowing with teeth, cascading across the countertop and around my ankles, I finally woke up.
Well there’s a perfect nightmare for me.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t really scared. By the end I was just annoyed since I couldn’t do anything but stand there.
Come to think of it, I have had one or two losing-teeth dreams where my reaction was more “dangit, now I’m gonna have an ugly gap in my teeth for the rest of my life, unless I get some expensive dental implant, but that means a whole procedure…ugh!” and less abject terror at the symbol of my bodily decay. But the latter is by far my typical response in those dreams.
Before you even got to cash that in?
I don’t think they’d have fit under my pillow
My interpretation of your dream is that it’s actually a very meta lesson in epistemic humility.
Your subconscious gave you a dream narrative that it knew you would recognize, but deliberately robbed you of the ability to demonstrate in-dream that you were competent enough to short-circuit the lesson (public humiliation) through initiating the humiliation yourself. The meta-lesson is that you think you’re the master of your own domain and can manipulate your surroundings totally, but actually you are still subject to the vagaries of brain chemistry and complex environments just like everyone else. The sink overflowing with teeth is a playful exaggeration by your subconscious to illustrate this point.
damn
Gardeners of SSC: What have you found is the most effective way to keep pest animals — in particular, raccoons — out of your garden?
Ditto question for squirrels.
a dog.
but i’m still figuring out how to keep the dog out of the garden.
A crocodile would do the trick
If it’s a small dog, a whole load of raccoons would probably work..
I grow a lot of really hot peppers in my garden and believe that it has a noticeable deterrent effect on mammalian garden thieves. I know it’s probably some old wives tale but i have had much less of a deer issue since i started. My current garden is about 30% really hot peppers, habeneros and spicier. I think you could get some of the benefits with more strategically placed rows of peppers on the outer edges, but YMMV.
Also you get lots of hot peppers using this strategy.
That works once the peppers are up, but what about when you’re first planting? We surrounded our garden with hot peppers that never sprouted. Meanwhile the crops on the inside got dug up and eaten.
Before plants really get growing, I use some metal fencing material that comes on big rolls at home improvement or farm stores. I’ve heard it called roll fencing or cattle fencing. It’s maybe 4′ wide and the roll is probably 50′ long. It’s metal mesh with ~2″x4″ openings.
I cut it into pieces a few feet wide so that I have several panels I can lay down on top of the garden and rearrange as things come up at different rates.
It does have sharp edges, so if it will stick out into an area where kids will be running around, it can be a hazard.
It works for me, but I just have two 4×8 raised beds.
Ahh, raised beds! So you basically have “walls” already — ones that are much less likely to be dug under than ground-level walls — and you make a sort of trellis roof out of the fencing material.
I’m living the dream! If it makes you feel better, I have raised beds because the soil here is impossible to work with and just digging up the yard isn’t a winning proposition.
Whereas I built raised beds for my daughter’s use to put on the part of our back yard that is covered with concrete.
Most of the rest of the sunlight falling on the yard is going to my fruit trees.
COVID-20 hits in december of this year. It’s way worse than COVID-19. Anyone who steps outside their residence is instantly disintegrated by viral forces beyond all scientific comprehension.
How exactly the virus defines “their residence” similarly evades science: the virus somehow understands statutory and common law, and does not attack people that remain domiciled within areas they have a personal property interest in. Given the complexity of property law and the legal definition of residence, this is itself a touchy question: it’s safe to say that any tenet of an apartment, anyone who owns real property (in fee simple or in wilder versions of ownership), and people that live in parked mobile homes are safe. Tenets can move about the common areas of their apartment complex as well, but anyone who (IE) steps into their car, turns it on, and leaves their driveway is instantly dismembered. no one is quite sure what happens to people that live in their car, etc. Easements, adverse possessory interests, and the like go from being arcane legal concepts to concrete matters of life and death.
It will take, at minimum, 3 months to reform property law to allow humanity to survive the pandemic. Until then, the virus will apply the law as it is understood, this year, in the jurisdictions where that law is in effect.
You might have 12 hours of unique forknowledge that the virus will hit. You cannot purchase, rent, or otherwise obtain real property in that time.
How screwed are you?
EDIT: Added some stuff for clarity, I might add wrinkles below as
the mood strikes me.new details about the virus emerge.How does it handle AnCom communes?
For real: no one is really sure.
Does this affliction affect everyone instantly? Or is there warning, with the coasts seeing it first before it slowly creeps into the Midwest?
I think that accounts for the 12 hour window. Some places get hit right away, you might be lucky enough to be one of those people that knows its coming.
The virus will surely overrun the whole planet in a 24 hour window, working jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, consuming common law countries first. In america the outbreak will begin in the 3rd circuit, then spread to the 2nd, then the 1st, then the 5th and 11th simultaneously…
I think I’d be able to make it 3 months on water and carefully-rationed canned food.
For food, I’d need to do some stocking up to last 3 months, which hopefully won’t be as hard as it is now.
For water, I have some property with a well, but won’t be able to count on electricity. I also have a generator, but…. it’s not yet hooked up. I think I could stockpile enough gas to run that exclusively to power my well, and be okay. As it’s happening over winter/early spring, I may just be able to melt snow/collect rainwater as well.
Other difficulties: hopefully I never come down with food poisoning, or need other medical attention. Also, without electricity, I wonder how much longer it would be before information that the pandemic is over would even be disseminated – maybe I’d end up staying in an extra month or two just out of ignorance.
Conclusion: survival odds 7/10, though it’d be very unpleasant.
Mark Watney disagrees.
Scoop:
“Most people would be able to make it three months with no food at all: water and vitamin pills.
“Hell, a three month fast would be about the healthiest possible thing for a large portion of the nation.”
The lack of salt sounds dangerous to me, and I’m wondering about bone loss. And muscle loss.
It’s not as though fat people are actually lean people with detachable fat.
Scoop, there’s a ;history of ignoring fat people’s lives and health on the assumption that nothing is more important than making them lose weight.
I’m dubious about evolutionary arguments, but human history includes a lot more food shortages than total lack of food.
You’re right; I didn’t think it through enough to note that three months is actually a relatively short time.
I’m a citizen. Does that mean I have some however-attenuated ownership interest in public roads? At least in my city? How fast do you think it’ll take the city council to change things so I do?
One very interesting factor here is whether current law allows for legislative meetings to take place over videoconference, and whether that can be changed without first holding an in-person legislative meeting. I’m afraid that probably can’t happen for the US Congress without a Constitutional amendment, so I suppose we’ll finally have a constitutional convention since that’s the only legal way to propose an amendment without Congressional action.
In the meantime, I’ve got two weeks or so of food, and I don’t expect that to change before December. I can stretch that out if I need to, but I expect to be pretty hungry by February at the latest. I do hope the power stays on. Also, I’ll be carefully watching my neighbors to see if the common areas of our condo complex count as our residence…
apologies, I added some details that MIGHT help clarify some of these questions, though of course
a hypothetical like this is supposed to be messya real life problem like this, which is definitely going to happen, trust me, is always going to involve unknowns.Maybe 12 hours of unique foreknowledge? If I get that reliably, I think I’ll try to tell others so they can get food too. That’s still going to be the constraining factor for most people, I think.
Well, either that or medication. Until/unless the power or water goes out, but there’s nothing the average person can do about that one.
I think I underestimated how easy it is to acquire 3 months of food in 12 hours. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem that hard really…
Oh, I myself could probably do it, or at least I could before COVID19 – drive to Costco, get a membership, stack up on some really large containers. But most people presumably won’t have those twelve hours’ notice, and even if they do, crowding would keep most of them from actually getting enough food.
All utilities will stop working within a few days, since the people keeping them working are either holed up at home or vaporized. Some of the “keeping stuff working? thing can happen from home, but most of it can’t. I’m guessing power and internet/cable/phones go out within a few days at most, and water stops working a week or two later because no more water is being pumped into the water tower.
Fires, once they start, burn until they run out of fuel because nobody can fight them. (I’m not sure how long till the water goes off, but after that, you can’t even stand in your yard and spray the oncoming fire with your garden hose.)
I guess the plan would be to buy lots of food, plus propane tanks and a gas grill, etc., to ensure I have the ability to cook things. Also big containers in which I can store water, and a few big barrels to put outside and catch rainwater. I don’t have to worry about anyone stealing anything left in my yard, which is a plus. A generator and fuel for it would be nice and maybe doable in a day, though it would only let me provide power for a few things at a time. (Just charging up laptops and ipads and rechargable lights and such would be a win.)
Most people in the world will die. Not very many people have three months’ supply of food/water/etc. on their property–especially in cities. In many places, you can’t get enough water to survive without going off your property.
If only I get the 12-hour warning I’ll warn some other people while frantically trying to save my family, but statistically this will round to zero. If everyone has the warning, nobody will be able to get anything and we’ll just all die except for the very rare people who have enough supplies to get through it and don’t get caught up in a riot/shootout trying to get the last box of pasta from the grocery store.
OTOH, you probably don’t have to worry about running up debts or even committing crimes to get your supplies. Most likely, there won’t be a functioning society left to enforce any rules on you when the three months are done anyway, given the massive die-off.
So basically, COVID-19 came from bats, and COVID-20 came from vampires.
I had not considered this. Given my interest in one day tangling with dark forces beyond the ken of mortals, I probably should have paid more attention in property law.
And COVID-21 movies can only be viewed by adults.
I now realize this
hypotheticalcrisis implicates my favorite area of the law: 4th amendment searches and seizures as they pertain to property rights. At least some courts have characterized apartment guests as having a distinct property interest in the apartment, though they’ve never needed to characterize exactly what sort of interest. If the Supreme Court took cert on a case like US v. Bain right before the pandemic, their decision could reshape human history.If I open this apartment, will you die?
For bare survival, water is the the only thing that would be a concern even if I were locked down instantly; I’ve got a bit over a month’s worth stored at short rations, and not sure how much I could fill into improvised storage once locked down (can’t count on rain in the desert). So, quick shopping/scrounging for storage containers, and filling them before the water pressure drops too low from everyone else doing the same.
For sanity, more cooking fuel, generator with fuel and/or solar panels with battery storage, candles or lantern fuel, and sanitary/hygiene supplies would be a priority.
So you can die of starvation, dehydration, or eviction? Assuming it rains (does the rainwater harvesting law in your local government matter?) or I’m allowed to fill my bath tub I’m fine, as a rule I keep at least a few months calories on hand. But hell, most people can probably go a few months without food, so likely have enough on hand to make it, especially given they can just lay in bed.
Have you checked your bathtub? Mine does a slow drain even when the drain is theoretically closed, and I don’t know how to make it really water-tight.
I think you could seal it up with household tools if you really had to. What comes to mind immediately would be
1) close drain
2) seal the drain with a giant mound of crazy glue
3) get a plastic cup from the kitchen
4) put caulk or sealant of whatever kind available around the rim of the cup
5) mash the cup down over the drain, putting something heavy on top of it until the sealant sets.
Suppose you want to be able to use it as a bathtub later.
Buy the house next door in three months, its inhabitants being long dead and the real estate market having crashed, and use their tub.
There’s an app for that.
The tricky part is that I gather it’s use-once, so I have never deployed it.
The early phase of COVID-19 was an interesting demonstration in exactly how much of various supplies I have in my apartment, because I took lockdown very very seriously in mid-march and pretty much didn’t leave my unit for 3 weeks.
I *still* haven’t had to go out and buy toilet paper, paper towels, or Kleenex. Turns out my wife and I just always have a 179-billion year supply in my closets. Also, I have a curiously large supply of large frozen slabs of meat at all times.
/r/legaladvice is obsessed with arcane property law. They’re going to *love* this pandemic.
We already own our house and yard. I’m pretty sure that we have three months worth of food currently in the house, especially if you count fruit coming ripe in the yard over that period. But the three months doesn’t give a cure, so isn’t very relevant to us.
It sounds as though most of the population of the world dies, which will have serious negative effects on us even if the virus magically vanishes before we run out of food.
People who have let their mortgages go underwater feel like real goobers.
I feel like I’m missing something, because in this pandemic, surely literally everybody dies? Even if we assume the disease comes with an instruction sheet that explains its relation to property rights, how would you spread this information if nobody is allowed to go to work? Surely after a few hours or days without maintenance, all internet and phone lines will be out of service? Not to mention water and electricity.
So even preppers with a generator and months of food on hand die, because they never learn about the new risk. Everybody else dies because they’re unable to get food and water. People who literally never leave their property die because they can’t get deliveries or any utilities. Everyone is now dead.
Also, do children and babies own property? Fetuses?
[sarc]
I don’t know, most of the beliefs that I hold don’t move around on their own…is there some sort of materialization of tenets going on in this scenario?
[/sarc]
I’m not very screwed, as a homeowner. The virus will likely ignore me walking across my lawn to the mailbox. However, if the virus strikes a family member who goes out for a walk in the neighborhood, things will get bad fast.
Worse for society: an uncomfortable fraction of people who drive trucks for USPS/FedEx/UPS/Amazon, as well as police/EMS/Firemen, will die the first day. Not to mention a huge number of high-level politicians (and their chauffers and staffers).
What about people who live in a room on a cargo ship, or on a Naval vessel? What about people who live/work on offshore oil rigs, or spend half the year at a mining location?
This is beginning to sound like the discussion of social disruption from a Coronal Mass Ejection that destroys the electrical grid. Except instead of destroying infrastructure, this disaster has removed people and their know-how from a large section of society.
It would certainly be a new thing to have a sapient virus that could read and understand human law. However, this virus has a pretty low IQ, since they are basically exterminating their prey species.
So I think I would try to communicate with them and explain (in a nice way) how dumb their behavior is. Maybe we could come to an accommodation where I would agree they could freely live in my body if they don’t kill me. In fact it might actually be useful to have a sapient virus inside me that wanted me to survive as long as possible. Did y’all see the Futurama episode where a bug inside Fry made him into a superman? Something like that would be my goal.
been asking this here for a while… no good answers in the article, but others are also asking
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/if-trump-is-down-in-the-polls-why-do-so-many-americans-think-hell-win/
Joe Biden is just so unimpressive, and even his supporters seem so generally unenthusiastic about him, that it’s difficult to imagine him actually winning, even considering how unpopular and hated Trump is among certain segments of the population.
This would be starkly apparent right about now and leading up into the election, if Trump were still allowed to hold his rallies…
Edit: And to be clear, when I say “difficult to imagine him winning” I mean that in the most literal sense. Remember, I’m the guy who bought Biden shares on predictit when COVID shutdowns started. Logically I think right now he is more likely than not to win. But I have a tough time visualizing in my head him giving a speech as President or something like that. He just doesn’t “seem like that guy” in my mind. And Trump, back in 2016, didn’t either! And people also underestimated his chance of winning, too!
If Biden is so unimpressive why is he the presumed winner in the Democratic primaries?
Because all the potentially interesting people dropped out in the same week in order to torpedo Bernie?
It seems that the DNC, the media, various insiders, the politically active branch of Dem voters have settled on Biden as the “least offensive option.” And he almost certainly is that.
What I’m saying is that the “least offensive” guy doesn’t always win. In fact, they usually don’t.
It’s weird that the less offensive candidate won the primary but is worried about losing the election for being unremarkable. [edit: Because usually you take extreme to court your base, then moderate to attract the undecideds]
His primary support was predicated on this unremarkablity being winning in the general. Did no one have the sweet spot? Or is he still favored, and the worry is just an irrational dread?
Why did they drop out to torpedo Bernie if Biden is unimpressive? Why torpedo Bernie at all? (OK, I know know why I would have, but I don’t imagine they all share my reasons.)
Is this just the inevitable endgame of “coalition of the fringes”? An inoffensive and unimpressive candidate election year after election year?
And, why is Biden considered inoffensive? Even discounting his drug war history which most people evidently have no clue about, I thought people think of him as kind of a gaff-prone weirdo who sniffs children?
Are people so dumb that they think Biden being Obama’s VP means he has Obama mojo on him, and Obama was super popular and won the election easily so they think Biden will do the same?
Two plausible reasons:
1. Because many Democrats believe that his views and image are too extreme, and will result in Trump being elected.
2. Because many of the Democrats currently influential in the party believe that if Bernie wins he will take the party away from them — rather as Trump took the Republican party away from the Republican establishment.
Nobody thinks their own politician’s gaffes matter. And the bar for thinking their own guy’s personal behavior matters is set well above the annoyingly touchy grandpa level. The people who think of him primarily as a “gaffe-probe wierdo who sniffs children” are the people who were never going to vote for any Democrat, or who were going to consider it nigh unto treason for the DNC to nominate anybody but Sanders, and most of them will go to their grave wondering “but why didn’t the Biden voters care?”
By late February, Bernie and Biden were the only candidates 538 gave a higher than 1% chance of victory to (Bloomberg was the only other even breaking 0.1%). In the event of a contested convention, it seems very unlikely that the nomination would pass over the establishment candidate and the two guys with the best poll numbers to land on, say, Warren. The really obvious reason for all the candidates dropping out in March is that they noticed they had no chance and decided to stop wasting their time.
You got any evidence to back up your conspiracy theory about their true motivations?
> Why torpedo Bernie at all?
Let’s assume that Biden gets the nomination and loses. Sure, another 4 years of Trump. But what is the long-term harm to the Democratic brand? At-worst, some Bernie supporters will be mad at the DNC for back-room shenanigans, but the DNC can always claim that the people responsible no longer work for them and it will be difficult to prove false. The responsibility will be diffuse and not clearly documented because it’s all back-room stuff. In-general, the public won’t care.
But if Bernie gets elected, the Democrats go from a party slightly to the left of the mainstream to “party who nominated *that guy*”. Bernie hasn’t really been criticized or attacked by the Democrats in a serious way. But I’m certain the Republicans are salivating at the opportunity. In the general public’s mind right now, Bernie is the guy who talks about healthcare and billionaires a lot. After Republicans start digging up his quotes about how awesome Venezuela, Cuba, bread lines, etc. (sure, some of it’s out of context), the Democratic *brand* will be seriously harmed for having nominated him. And should he win a *huge* amount of the money which currently goes to Democratic candidates and causes will go towards thwarting Bernie. Probably meaning the Republicans.
A Biden candidacy is possibly a short-term loss. A Bernie candidacy is a long-term loss for *the party*.
Why is this meme still around?
So, lets look at the data. In the 2016, the democratic primary basically didn’t happen. In 2008, every candidate not named Obama or Clinton had dropped out by mid January. In 2004 the primary lasted a bit longer, but had still cleared up by early March. 2000 was also a weird year, with Al Gore pretty much walking away with the nomination, but if you go back to 1992 you see that the field contracted in the first week of March.
For the past human generation we have a system where in the Democratic Primary the field begins to contract in January and has almost always reduced to two candidates by early March. In 2020, we have a system where… the primary field began to contract over the first few months of the year and reduced to two candidates by March. So, was this some kind of anomalous conspiracy? Clearly not.
Saying that candidates dropping out is conspiracy against the Bern is like saying gravity is a conspiracy against NASA – yeah, it doesn’t help them but it’s a known risk that they’d have been stupid not to take into account.
Look, you can quote me all the dates and statistics you want.
The fact remains that…
a. They all dropped out within a remarkably short period of time compared to each other
b. At the time they all dropped out, Bernie was leading and looked like he might very well win
c. Nearly all of their supporters went to Biden, and not to Bernie
I don’t know that there’s a “conspiracy” in the sense that they all agreed to do it or that someone ordered it or anything like that. And yes, I understand that rational self-interest can explain any individual’s decision to drop out.
But it still very much looks like “they dropped out to stop Bernie.”
Are there reasons to think many of their supporters would have gone to Bernie instead at some point if they’d stayed in? If not, then the only effect from them dropping out was increasing Biden’s chance of winning outright with a corresponding decrease to his chance of winning at the convention.
An additional factor that I don’t see mentioned above is that they dropped out immediately prior to Super Tuesday. There was effectively zero campaigning and spending to be done between the time at which they dropped out and a massive set of election results.
That strongly suggests that they dropped out for the purpose of influencing the Super Tuesday results. What was their to lose otherwise?
Have you ever noticed that in presidential elections, nearly every losing candidate ends up conceding remarkably close to the first Tuesday in November?
Treating the dates they dropped out as an independent variable ignores the fact that they were all either staring down the barrel Super Tuesday or dealing with the aftermath.
The first part of your statement is true. Polling in mid-late February had Bernie somewhere around 25-30% and everyone else shuffling around the 5-20% range depending on the day.
Sure, he also had a narrative around him that made it look like he’d win. People were saying he could expand his base, that Biden was considered a dead fish…
Then the South Carolina Primary happened. Everyone who mattered was still in the race and Biden completely destroyed them. He got just under 50%, Sanders got 20% and everyone else was fighting for table scraps. This proves that Biden was still a dominant force while Mayor Pete, Amy, and Sen. Warren were active in the field.
So, yeah this is one data point, but it’s a pretty important one. SC ended up being pretty indicative of the South as a whole, which really doesn’t like Sanders. Bernie was no sure thing even before people started dropping out. He had a chance, but it wasn’t in any way locked up.
Beaten to the punch on this one by thisheavenlyconjugation. The fact remains that Bernie is incredibly divisive on the democratic side and very few people have him as their second choice. If you feel the bern, you’re not rolling with Mayor Pete. But, someone who’s first choice isn’t around any more can and will gravitate towards the generally popular and unobjectionable Biden.
ETA
Prestige. Losing an election or primary sucks and potentially hurts your future political career, since no one wants be remembered as that guy who barely broke 2% in Virginia, or wherever.
Sure, they could have stuck around (and remember, Warren DID stick around), but if you’re young and don’t want to have to explain your poor election performance when you’re running again in 2032 or whenever, you’d rather just get out early.
Biden had strong support among “very offline” people – older churchgoing African Americans, plus the handful of blue-collar whites who haven’t jumped to the Republicans yet. And that’s still enough to win a primary in most states. For all the visibility that the DSA and the Pantsuit Nation have online, they don’t actually amount to a lot of voters.
This is a popular sentiment on the internet which I think is so strange when Biden was popular throughout the whole Obama presidency. Biden memes were really popular back in late 2016/early 2017. I’m guessing that too many people are picking up the Bernie supporters talking points.
Biden was popular as the President of Vice, but that doesn’t mean people wanted him to actually be president.
Maybe not, but it’s just bizarre how people are talking about him as if he’s on the same level as Hillary Clinton for terrible candidates. The guy has charisma and folksy charm. It’s not exactly a mystery why he’s the Democrat nominee.
> The guy has charisma and folksy charm.
Note that his charisma and folksy charm work wonders on “very offline” people (as mentioned above). But for people like me, a wonkish discussion by Hillary Clinton of policies for adults with special needs due to developmental disabilities is far more endearing than anything Biden has ever done. And in many online forums, people like me aren’t as rare as we are in the general public.
These would be the forums filled with people who don’t know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon, if online forums had existed in 1972.
The answer is in the question? Because last time round, everyone and their dog had Trump dead last, lower than a snake’s belly in a coalmine, down in the polls.
But he won.
So this time round, polls going “No, we’re sure this time, he’s down down down in Davy Jones’ locker!” are not so convincing.
That’s doesn’t mean the polls are wrong, it just means people are perhaps correcting for what happened last time.
EDIT: Also, strike me pink, but if FiveThirtyEight have a senior writer hyperventilating about Trump doing something naughty to win by cheating, then this makes me downgrade any kind of prediction they might make, based on “stop being such a hysterical little girl” because haven’t we heard this song and dance before? Bush is not going to hand over to Obama, he’s going to declare martial law so that the Republicans will be in office forever! The Republicans are engaging in vote suppression! Hanging chads stole the election from Gore who really won it!
Though that guy does address things more calmly as the discussion goes on and does contemplate Biden’s lead being weak, so not as bad as I originally thought. But honestly, is the go-to excuse this time going to be “Trump cheated by taking extralegal, unethical or norm-violating steps” the way “It was the Russians!” was the excuse in 2016?
There’s definitely some of this going on, too.
The logic isn’t necessarily sound, but I think there’s a decent segment of the public saying to themselves “Last time they said Hillary had a 95% chance of winning, but Trump won; therefore this time so long as their estimate of Biden winning is 95% or less, Trump will win again” or something like that.
> most people are just smart enough to realize that a lot could happen between now and the election that would change people’s mind.
That would explain people being very uncertain who would win. It doesn’t explain people being confident that Trump will win, because it requires them to think that what could happen between now and the election would uniformly point in one direction.
The way I read this was that he was suggesting that some voters thought Trump might cheat, which would partially explain why they thought he might win, not necessarily that he himself thought Trump might cheat.
That’s horribly misrepresenting him. He’s not saying that Trump will cheat, he’s saying that other people think Trump will win because they think Trump will cheat. And he’s using a definition (“norm-violating steps”) so broad that it has already been met.
I mean for God’s sake he wrote one paragraph ended it with “Basically, if some people already think Trump will cheat to win, they will likely not find the polls much comfort.” How do you come away from that with the conclusion that Perry Bacon is being a little girl?
Your assessment of Perry Bacon Jr’s position is not so much what he claims but what he surmises people fear. The actual quote about cheating from the discussion is:
He writes about the idea of Trump ‘cheating’ to win the election in the indicative and not the subjunctive, like one would write about a real prospect, but that is as far as he goes. It is a big leap to conclude that Perry Bacon Jr personally believes Donald Trump will do that, when his actual statement is about what other people may believe.
Thanks for posting this verification.
The way things are going, I think it’s very possible that Trump will contract, and possibly die from, COVID-19. Biden, too, especially if he’s out on the campaign trail shaking hands. November may look a lot different than it does now.
My impression is that people in fairly high risk groups who get the virus still have a risk of death or long term disability which is well under 50%. No?
Not sure of the statistics, but I think it would be virtually impossible to conduct an effective campaign while simultaneously recovering from COVID-19.
I wonder if Trump or Biden’s willingness to take a COVID-19 test will be a defining issue of the campaign. What if, for example, Trump takes the test and is shown to be an unsymptomatic carrier?
Contracting a fairly serious case of CoViD-19 pushed Johnson’s approval numbers from good to stratospheric, so as long as they didn’t die there’s no guarantee it would be a bad thing for their electoral prospects. And frankly, anything at all that stops Biden from talking in public may well be a positive for his chances…
Trump, and lots of people Trump meets with, are tested daily or near daily already.
Some pundits have wondered, since access to tests allows Trump and his team to to campaign and appear with more ease, if Biden’s team should get the same once the race really starts.
I’ve been assuming that if Trump or Biden actually contracted COVID-19, he would not die from it because he will get a level of care that ordinary people do not get.
But I realize that I’m hazy on what that level of care is. I have not heard of anything that would be an effective treatment except it costs a hundred times more than insurance will pay. Is there a payoff to the presence of a full-time nursing staff not distracted by a hundred other patients?
People wondered if Boris Johnson might die, and he did not — but he is twenty years younger than Biden or Trump.
There are no such treatments for most diseases, for both medical and economic reasons, and I’m pretty sure that COVID-19 is no exception. Nor is there much benefit from having a nurse standing by your bed 24/7. In general, by the time you’ve reached the level of a middle-class citizen of any developed nation whose hospitals aren’t utterly overwhelmed, the marginal benefits of throwing more $$$ at medical problems are small.
“X will live much longer / is much less likely to die of Y than the average person because he is Rich and Powerful”, is right up there with “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” on the list of things often believed but rarely true.
Well, there are a few counterexamples. Malnutrition for sure, and probably auto accident. We don’t have a very good handle on the count of people who have died from Covid-19 because they tried to self-care and therefore were not observed sliding into a cytokine storm. I would guess that Trump is getting tested pretty regularly (but maybe not, if it is judged that the optics of that are bad) and could therefore get remdesevir sooner than Joe Public is likely to get it. But perhaps that sort of thing has more of an effect on the intensity of the bout and the time to recovery, rather than on the likelihood of survival.
I also know there are things that have treatments that are, for one reason or another, insanely expensive. AIDS was like that for a while, though it might not be any more? And whatever that drug was that Shkreli cornered? But of course both of those are diseases that had been around for ages so that expensive treatments be developed in the first place, and Covid-19 has not.
I’m not trying to argue with you, just provide context for my query. I expect you are correct.
For middle-class citizens of developed nations? Unless you’re using “shops at normal grocery stores rather than Whole Foods” as your standard for malnutrition, I don’t think there are significant gains/$$$ to be had there.
Daraprim, and the price he was charging was the one calculated to have have the median insurance company scream but pay up. Or possibly miscalculated, but probably not by a huge margin. You can’t make huge profits by pricing your drugs so high that insurance companies won’t pay for them, because then almost nobody will actually pay for them.
Sucks to be poor (or a citizen of a nation with a penny-pinching national health service) and sick with whatever the next Shkreli has cornered the market on, but you don’t have to be filthy rich to get the right drugs.
IANAD but I’d think the rare non-scalable treatment would be transfusions of convalescent plasma or whole blood. (Give the patient blood from people who have already recovered; this blood will have antibodies against the virus.)
Nobody has yet demonstrated its effectiveness against covid-19 to my knowledge, but there hasn’t been a decent trial yet. But the technique works against other diseases.
>I’ve been assuming that if Trump or Biden actually contracted COVID-19, he would not die from it because he will get a level of care that ordinary people do not get.
There is no actually effective level of care inaccesible to ordinary people in a western country, assuming a non-overwhelmed health system.
It is quite possible that it would be ever so slightly worse, given the pressure that might be on a treating team given celebrity status. That is, the temptation to throw a bunch of experimental drugs at them which most likely don’t work and are likely to contribute to potential complications. I include convalescent plasma in that but an early administration of that is the only thing I can really think of that might be effective but is currently out of reach of the general public.
Predicting who will die or not is a mug’s game at an individual level anyway.
You’re forgetting that Trump has the cheat codes to reality. Here’s what actually ends up happening.
Mexico, due to fears over the Coronavirus, shuts down their border with the US. To be safe, they build a wall, which they pay for.
A miracle cure is ultimately discovered: a variant on the Chloroquine molecule, notable for its double-iron bound. This COVID Iron-Iron (CovFeFe for short) medicine sweeps the globe and effectively eradicates all concerns about the virus. The US is the primary supplier of this; nobody trusts Chinese manufacturers after all their faulty COVID tests.
But that doesn’t come in time for Ginsburg, whose infection opens up a Supreme Court vacancy that McConnell quickly moves to fill. The sexual harassment accusations against Amy Coney Barrett don’t slow things down much, but they do help keep the accusations against Biden in the public mind, while revving up Trump’s base. That combined with a reopened economy powered by covfefe secures Trump’s first reelection.
I chortled.
Why would Biden shake anybody’s hands? Is he afraid he doesn’t look Trumpian enough?
Why would Biden shake anybody’s hands?
Part of stumping for votes on the campaign trail – meeting the people, pressing the flesh, kissing babies… well okay, maybe Joe had better hold off on that last one 🙂
But I don’t understand why anyone would be doing any of that right now. Presumably part of campaigning has always involved going to the Iowa State Fair and eating at diners in New Hampshire, and none of that is going to happen either. Most people’s lives are drastically different right now from what they were three months ago – why not think the campaigns would be done at least somewhat differently?
But then again, Trump keeps saying that he keeps shaking hands, and refuses to wear masks when visiting hospitals, so maybe politicians in general are much more conservative with the behavior that makes them “look presidential”.
I would also say Biden has the appearance of senility and accusations of sexual assault while also appearing creepy not yet dealt with. Regardless of one’s takes on those issues, Trump has yet to play those cards. Now with Covid taking up all the air I doubt any network other than Fox will really cover those issues in detail except to criticize Trump for bringing them up in a crass objectionable way. But I have a hard time betting on Trump not getting the media to talk about what he wants by being crass and objectionable.
also, there’s probably a large degree of defeated cynicism. He’s so obviously bad, but he keeps winning, so a huge portion of his base must be those “barbecue and eat all humans” party adherents that Scott keeps warning us about, so no matter what he’s going to carry the day with his zombie horde, etc. Plus he’ll cheat, and so on.
Rightly or wrongly, I think a lot of trump opponents believe that literally nothing can be done to win over large portions of the country, so they might not even care at this point.
Stop assuming the man in the street is the kind of nerd who cares about polls or generally checking the state of reality before generating a belief. His predictions go against the polls because he hasn’t read them. He doesn’t expect Trump will win despite polling, he expects Trump will win end of thought.
Sure, I’ll take you advice about the man on the street… now what about the many commenters on SSC who also have this belief? (there have been many instances of both pro and anti trump commenters expressing near certainty of another term)
Polls mean nothing this early in the campaign. Let’s wait and see a few debates, let’s see what scandals get surfaced or invented.
The first debate is Sep 29; the second is Oct 15. I don’t expect I’ll assign much weight to the polls until then.
There was just a special election in California for a House seat that flipped from Republican to Democratic in the previous election. The Republican candidate won it by a substantial margin. That’s a little evidence that current conditions are strengthening the Republican position, although obviously it’s a very small and non-random sample of voters.
People (including many really smart people) don’t really believe early election polls. They tend to be wildly inaccurate, in part because there is no real way to validate them, unlike polls right before the election (which must match election results). This leads to less than rigorous decision-making by pollsters, who many times have other motivations.
What’s the correct percentage of turnout for each party, or each demographic to include in your poll weighting? Where is your cut-off for how likely a respondent is to actually vote in the election? Yeah, the pollsters mostly don’t actually know those answers either. They tend to go with less risky decisions, or ones which match conventional wisdom in their polling circles, or just include less likely voters, and call it good.
Also, there are generally wild swings over the last few months leading up to an election, both as candidates save their ammo/money and as unexpected events occur. The final result thus has only a loose correlation with the May polls. So at most, they’re a minor indicator, not some reason to put your faith in an eventual winner. If you do want to weigh them, last time I checked, Trump was doing better in the “poll of polls” than he has for his entire term, with only a 4-5 point national margin against him, so if you thought he might win pre-covid, you’d update the other way based on recent polls, not toward him losing.
If you want a “poll” to rely on, then the betting odds show Trump as a clear favorite. Is that usually better or worse than the non-profit-based polls?
So in reality, I think what you’re seeing is a rational discounting of those polls at this point, and more of a reliance on other perceived factors.
Everything I’ve seen shows Trump at almost exactly the same point in the polls as he had been all along. (He had about two weeks in mid-March of a slight bounce.) And there’s always quite a bit of movement in the polls in the last six months, but the amount of movement has been decreasing in recent cycles as elections become more partisan.
I saw a social media post the other day that I can’t find now… I think it was supposed to be pro-Trump, but it was showing the “approval rating range” and Trump had the tightest range of any President since like JFK.
Basically nobody has changed their mind on Trump, one way or the other.
Because I read the site daily for other reasons, the RCP average is the one I pay the most attention to over time. It is fairly noisy because it depends on the timing of various polls which don’t necessarily agree with each other.
The peak is the beginning of April, but Trump’s currently polling above anything earlier than the end of February this year since the start of his term, so he’s well above average at this point.
Amplifying this from a thread below, because it’s an interesting issue I haven’t seen discussed here yet. Is there any precedent for asking a presidential candidate (and sitting president) to take a COVID-19 test administered by an impartial third party, and disseminating the results?
What if Trump and/or Biden turn out to be asymptomatic carriers of the virus? What if one of them tests positive for COVID-19, say, a week before the election? I can see all kinds of scenarios playing out.
Why would it make a difference, other than there might be extra media attention over whether the candidate/president is displaying the proper safety precautions in public?
Well, imagine a situation where Trump or Biden test positive one or two weeks before the election. How will the disease progress? We might not know until after Nov. 4.
If Trump, especially, were shown to be an unsymptomatic carrier now, there would be huge pressure to 1) wear a mask and 2) scale down his activities. Not to mention all the “I told you so’s” directed at the White House.
Perhaps more to the point, will the candidates be using COVID-19 tests as a political weapon pointed at each other’s heads? “Joe Biden took a test and was cleared of COVID-19, why won’t Donald Trump do the same?”
I can imagine all sorts of permutations.
(BTW, I use the opening “Well” as in “well,” not your name “Well,” but properly capitalized for the beginning of the sentence. Cue the Abbott and Costello routine.)
What would be the point of a handle like mine if it didn’t cause those kinds of situations?
Anyway, I don’t think what you’re talking about would be as big a deal as you’re imagining. It’s just not that interesting. News outlets might get one or two days of stories out of it but that’s it. I’ll register that as a prediction with 89% confidence, dependent upon one or both candidates testing positive as asymptomatic carriers.
It’s funny, I feel the exact opposite way. I think it would be a big deal, since we’ve been living, breathing and eating COVID-19 (its infectiousness, its course of symptoms, its possible long-term effects in individuals) for three months straight. Curious to hear what other people on the board think…
The number of times I’ve deleted that eponymous filler word from the start of my posts around here is nigh uncountable.
Yeah, let’s hope Well doesn’t get banned, I don’t want to lose that word from my online vocabulary.
Now I can’t get the Captain Beefheart song “Well” out of my head.
Is “we” the types of bright, curious, highly literate, disproportionately well-educated people who read and comment on SSC, or is it the average voter and journalism consumer?
ETA: Bobobob’s last remark has me idly wondering if I’m one of those people Scott secretly to ban.
Banning Well… would be inconvenient, but if there’s one person around here Scott mustn’t ban, it’s albatross11.
My wife keeps telling me: “You should try to be more like that SSC commenter”. I find it annoying, but I know she means Well…
If a candidate tests as having already had the disease and recovered, that coud let him interact with others without social distancing. And if he was known to be immune, that would reduce the criticism of him for doing so.
I don’t know about Biden…but I’ve seen stories indicating that the White House medical staff is testing the President and most people who meet him every day.
Last week, there was news about a press secretary for the Vice President testing positive. The story seemed to indicate a daily testing regimen, and a test that switched from negative one morning to positive the morning after.
Anyway, I suspect that it will be impossible to hide a positive result for the President, or anyone in his Executive staff. Simply because notices will be sent out to the pool of people who interacted closely with him, that those people should isolate and be tested.
I’m not sure why we would be testing for an acute condition right before the election, especially if it’s one that people likely get only once. If the candidates have managed to get through 8 months of pandemic without being infected, it would be really weird if one or both of them got infected right before the election! Much weirder than if one of them got infected in the several months after the election (which is just a longer period in which anything could happen).
Isn’t this one point of having a VP candidate as well as having the actual electoral college vote later and then confirming it in Congress?
A candidate might die or be incapacitated for lots of reasons, right up to a car accident on election day. What’s the point of having a special test for one particular reason? Are you concerned about the “infect others” issue? Presumably, they’d eventually have to isolate just like anyone else for a limited time. I mean, I guess they meet more people than average during a couple of days there, but is the risk really that specifically huge?
Tara Burton, who is not my ex, was in the NYT last week with a piece on Millennial traditionalists:
The most prominent element is aesthetic and especially liturgical traditionalism, which Burton, an Episcopalian, appears to be on board with. Not everyone who is a “Weird Christian” prefers Gothic architecture and the Latin Mass, but revulsion toward contemporary church art, or attraction to chance-encountered traditional worship, is a common gateway. She recounts one such story from Episcopalian seminarian Ben Crosby, and another from Rod Dreher, whose first conversion experience was in Chartres cathedral. And of course, liturgy has been the sticking point for Catholic traditionalists for more than fifty years.
Burton puts her own spin on the typical story: the aesthetic is as punk as it is traditional. This is true of punk taken in the broadest sense, of course, as transgressive alternative culture. Go around in leather and a mohawk, and everybody will clap. But start sporting rosaries and tonsures, or sneaking out of the house to attend midnight Mass and adoration, and you’ll really raise eyebrows. And isn’t that the point? This interests me not least because yesterday I read the to-me surprising claim that punkpunk literary genres tend Romantic:
I suppose I should have realized this a long time ago. Anyone, anyway, can see the affinity between a Romantic perspective and both traditional aesthetics and traditional Christianity. Interestingly, in my experience punkpunk genres have rarely used traditional aesthetics. But if you are telling a dystopian story of the little guy ground under the heel of The Man by technology advancing under the guise of progress, it makes little sense to dress The Man in the regalia of a king or the red robes of a cardinal! Tradpunk, it seems to me, is cataphatic where other punkpunk is apophatic. Or, it’s the nostalgia instead of the pessimism realized.
The second element is the political. If you follow this stuff on Twitter, you’ll know it tends strongly Marxist; this frustrates me personally, but I get it, I really do. I too was attracted to the faith in part because of its radical social teaching, and I’m disappointed but not surprised folks interpret it in Marxist terms. Besides them, there are a lot of oddballs—illiberals and postliberals, quite a few integralists—and the closest any come to our two major parties is support for Bernie or a better populist than Trump. Leah Libresco Sargeant is an establishment shill by comparison when she favorably cites the American Solidarity Party. 😉
Burton is also correct to note that traditional Christianity gets wrapped into sketchy all-trite stuff, but that is not new, and it didn’t need dwelt on. She mentions for instance that Roosh V returned to Christianity last year, banning discussion of premarital sex but “continuing to attack feminists and LGBTQ people.” Well, maybe we should celebrate his reversion, and guide him toward a fuller one, instead of insinuating it was done in bad faith. More importantly, though, there is more to say here about the right than cheap conversions and racist dogwhistles. For heaven’s sake, even the integralists admitted a few months ago that the debate over integralism has largely been one on the right. That goes for illiberalism generally, which is far from a “progressive” project. And I know Burton knows this, because I know who her friends are; she’s not shy about mentioning Susannah Black or Leah in this piece and others. In other words, she knows there are more folks on the right than racists and reacti*naries, and she’s at most about two steps from them in the social graph. The selective attention here is inexcusable.
The last element is the theological. Weird Christians are typically thoroughgoing in their espousal of traditional doctrine. Yes to the parts that seem cruel or outdated today, a hearty yes to the supernaturalism, and an especially hearty yes to scandalous passages from ancient or medieval writers. Alas, Burton is brief on this point, so I don’t know where she stands; all I know is she hasn’t swum the Tiber yet. Garry, whom she interviews, recounts finding theology as taught in Catholic school dumbed down, and it’s clear he sought out better instruction himself. This is not an uncommon story.
It’s a flawed but interesting piece, and I wish it were longer; Burton should have discussed the political element more comprehensively, the theological element, well, at all, and the punk half of “tradpunk” more, too—especially since the piece ran in the paper edition with the title “The Future Of Christianity Is Punk”. Still, I enjoyed seeing the Grey Lady don a mantilla for just a day. 🙂
Dr. Becky’s Ten Favorite Astronomical Mysteries
1. What’s inside a black hole?
2. What’s the Universe expanding into?
3. What is dark energy?
4. What’s dark matter made of?
5. Where is all the antimatter?
6. What happened in the first 10^-43 seconds of the Universe?
7. What came first: the galaxy or the black hole?
8. What causes fast radio bursts?
9. Why does the Sun’s magnetic field flip?
10. Does life exist on other planets?
In The Matrix, the Earth’s sky has been permanently darkened by a thick cloud layer made of self-reproducing, solar-powered nanomachines, so things are uniformly dark at surface level.
That said, would wind turbines, dams, and tidal power still be able to generate electricity?
I ask because I know most of the planet’s weather (wind and precipitation) owes to the uneven heating and cooling of different regions. With the sunlight blocked, the Earth’s surface would be much more uniform in temperate, surely reducing wind speeds and rainfall. But would there be enough anyway to make wind turbines spin and dam reservoirs fill?
Would the tides be affected at all?
https://youtu.be/EVM5-_fusjs?t=131
Venus has very fast winds despite very heavy cloud cover. The sun would heat the nanomachines instead of the surface, which I’m sure would do something to the wind, but I don’t know what.
Dams would work as long as there’s still rain, and it seems to me there would be; the sun still puts heat into the system, just at a different altitude.
Pretty sure the tides would not be affected.
In addition to the Venus example, Titan also still has winds and rain, despite a very hazy atmosphere. The winds are slower, and rain is less frequent, but neither is nonexistent.
I thought wind was mostly the coriolis effect?
The coriolis effect reorients motion, it doesn’t create the motion. I’m pretty sure the coriolis effect is acting to turn equatorward/poleward winds into east/west winds. The north/south winds are caused by uneven heating (the equator is hotter, etc) setting up large scale flows in the atmosphere.
It is a force. You can’t reorient a force without exerting force. So they are two competing forces. In a world with no spin, the wind would just be north/south and in a world with no temp differential, the wind would just be east/west. In observation of our non-hypothetical world, the forces compete and predominantly go east/west with a smaller north/south tendency. This leads me to believe that the coriolis force is the stronger of the two, though I’ve never seen it quantified.
No, you’re misunderstanding how the coriolis force works. If a fluid is stationary, it does not experience a coriolis force.
You can see this if you look up the formula for coriolis force, e.g. http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/CoriolisAcceleration.html
Notably, it’s a = -2(Omega cross v). If v is zero, it evaluates to zero. The force exerted by the coriolis effect is proportional to velocity (and dependent on its direction).
Qualitatively, the coriolis force is a result of existing in a rotating reference frame. When a fluid moves perpendicular to the spin axis in a rotating reference frame, its velocity relative to the frame velocity changes, and there’s an apparent acceleration. The coriolis force isn’t just something that randomly exists, it’s specifically a result of certain types of motion in rotating reference frames, and if there’s no motion it has no effect.
While we’re talking about that scene, I’m always annoyed when Morpheus describes Neo’s appearance (“residual self-image”) as “the mental projection of your digital self.” What’s being projected digitally is his mental self-image. It should be “the digital projection of your mental self.”
So I just finished 10% Less Democracy, a decent (and contrarian to the spirit of our age!) little book by Garett Jones, another GMU economist. I’d be interested in hearing the opinions of other people who read it. I found myself mostly agreeing with the author, and I probably share a lot of his policy views, but the book was a little underwhelming and he had some random/unfocused chapters in there. Overall I think his biggest issue is just framing- even if we’re advocating for ‘less democracy’, I think we have to lie about what we’re doing a bit, and find a politically palatable way to sell that to the masses. Anyways, a chapter review:
Chapter 2: He advocates for longer terms for politicians, and says that 2 years for the House of Representatives is an unusually bad design. Agreed- I’d prefer 4 for Reps and 8 for Congress (partially so that we can avoid the mess of midterm elections), and I like his idea of staggering the House elections (a third at a time, say) as well. Less populism, and braver politicians who can make harder decisions.
Chapter 3: Central bank independence. Big agree on all of this, nothing to really add.
Chapter 4: He argues for appointing judges & city treasurers, not electing them. Another big agree, but I wish he’d broadened this to include prosecutors and other random local/state functionaries. (Do sheriffs have to be elected? Why do we have such a random tangle of different law enforcement agencies anyways?)
Chapter 5: Here he starts to go off the rails a bit. Basically argues for requiring a high school degree to vote, which I don’t have a moral issue with, but he fails to quantify exactly how many non-high school grads are voting in every election. Seeing as education & income are highly correlated with voting- I’m not clear what problem he’s solving here. He also disparages the cognitive ability of the uneducated to make quality electoral decisions, which is fine, but he doesn’t address the more interesting question of why an uneducated person voting for the same candidate as a highly educated voter is ‘bad’. If they both reach the same electoral conclusion- again, what’s the problem that we’re solving here?
Chapter 6. He thinks government bondholders should have political representation in government. OK- but every government is already at the mercy of the bond markets, who can choose to flee if they want- what exactly is gained by giving them literal votes? Bondholders already constrain what governments can do (enormously for everyone other than the US), so for the third time, I’m unclear what problem is being solved here. Also would be logistically tough as ‘bondholders’ are not a homogeneous group and may frequently change (here I think you see the ivory tower abstraction of the professor, who has a high-level but not a practical understanding of financial markets).
Chapter 7. Argues for bringing back earmarks to help pass legislation. Another good chapter, I’ve been saying this for a while. My basic mental model for democracies is that a little corruption being the norm is a lot better than every elected politician being a Self Righteous Ideologue, which I feel like the US is sliding towards. A little more payoffs here and there, please.
Chapter 8. Kind of unfocused, rambling chapter about how the European Union is too much of a democracy? (Not really an expert, but- don’t people say the opposite??) I dunno about this one.
Chapter 9. Something about Singapore. A little too quasi-authoritarian praising for me.
Overall, I’d love to see these ideas expanded to the less sexy but more crucial plumbing that make up developed countries. For instance I was pretty surprised that he didn’t recommend removing zoning power & construction approvals *away* from local cities- that’s a pretty hot topic these days. The ability to delay every piece of new housing, infrastructure, factories, whatever with endless NIMBY lawsuits & ‘concerned neighbor’ meetings is a great example of too much democracy at the local level- could’ve replaced that entire EU chapter with this, say.
Getting rid of primaries and just having political parties choose their nominees is a more risque/controversial move, that I’m not sure I’m advocating for, but is definitely in the mix for ‘10% less democracy’ arguments.
Would love to hear other reviews!
Regarding Chapter 4, a while back I read an article by a former elected judge arguing that electing judges is terrible. Voters have no good way to evaluate a judge’s performance, so they go with conviction rate. This leads judges to knowingly convict the wrong people in order to stay in office.
Regarding Chapter 5, I agree with your point, and also I’d expect politicians to start fiddling with graduation requirements to prevent certain demographics from voting. I’m in favor of giving the government as little leeway as possible in deciding who gets to vote.
I’ve people in my life who are very close to me who are judges. Your correct that electing judges leads to warped incentive structures, but I think you’re over-simplifying the issue.
Let’s say your a judge who’s got an election in 6 months and obviously innocent person comes into court. There is no electoral incentive for you to find him guilty; in fact, there’s a pretty huge risk – if your actions lead to the imprisonment of a guy who doesn’t deserve it, hell your opponent could make hay out of that, so you let him go.
Now, an obviously guilty man comes in. Yes, there would be an electoral risk to letting that man go free, but… why would you? He’s clearly guilty. You sent that man to prison. In this case the additional motivation of getting re-elected was in the same direction as justice, so we don’t really care.
It’s the edge cases that matter. The ones where the guy almost certainly did it, but maybe the prosecutor’s case isn’t air tight. Where your guy has a prior’s sheet a mile long, but maybe the rational behind the cop’s initial search isn’t believable and you’ve got a nagging doubt that the evidence should be suppressed.
Mind you, there’s no great solution to this. Even in states where judges are appointed, there are still outside interest groups who will attempt to sway the process. I’d almost recommend lifetime appointments, but those have their own issues.
Suppose we went halfway: you get to vote for every judge for whom you sat on a jury? That’s a period where you got to watch the judge perform in his/her job, and you’re already expected to pay attention.
Perhaps extend it to voting rights for everyone summoned, to prevent voir dire from being a method of electorate control. After all, the judge controls that process too, it should provide useful information.
Issues with that plan:
1. I don’t really care what my judges do during a jury trial. The only thing they’re doing then is just handling objections, they don’t get to decide anything important. Also, if the judge screws something up during a jury trial, it’s going to result in a process violation and the defense attorney’s would have to try to lose that appeal.
No, I want ethical and impartial judges when it’s a bench trial. That’s the primary time a judge gets to exercise independent judgement.
2. Again, judges control voir dire in the sense that they approve the strikes requested by the defense attorney and the prosecutor… but they don’t get to strike anyone for cause.
I haven’t read it, and I just put it on my list of books to borrow from some library, some day, if and when they reopen.
Looking at the description on the publisher’s site, I see a fairly obvious potential criticism.
If the stock market is doing great, and the owning class is raking in cash, but 90% of the year’s graduating class are on track to never be employed, or never have more than minimum wage gigs, the “economy” will appear to be doing very well indeed by most of the popular metrics.
I expect the somewhat amorphous category of elites to mostly do whatever they believe is individually good for them. When their interests align, and differ from those of the rest of the population, the result won’t be good for non-elites. That’s always true, and you always need some kind of counterbalance to avoid degenerating into an oligarchic autocracy.
When Trump and Sanders supporters talk about “elites were hurting the economy,” what they tend to mean is “the poor are getting comparatively poorer, the middle are getting pushed down to join the poor, I can’t afford what my parents had at my age, etc. etc.” They don’t mean “elites are keeping GDP low” or “elites are causing the number of people unemployed, actively looking, and meeting various other hurdles [to be counted as unemployed] to increase. I.e. the complaint tends to be “elites are causing themselves to get a bigger share of the pie than before”.
I don’t know how much Jones’ arguments rely on commonly-criticized-metrics, or similar. But without being clear about the distinction betweem economic metrics and human welfare, I can’t see him persuading anyone who doesn’t consider themselves somehow part of the elite.
The description also makes points like “the consensus of the field is that …”. That would, of course, be the consensus of experts (elites) in the field, who may be judging based on interests that align with those of other elites, and not of everyone else.
You need democracy of some kind to keep a check on elites with aligned interests without resorting to more destructive remedies (mostly violent). How much you need probably depends in part on just how aligned those elite interests are.
It would seem that both Trump and Sanders supporters agree that the interests of those currently powerful are significantly unaligned with everyone else’s interests. (Of course they have different definitions of who those people might be, etc. etc. But they do agree there’s a problem.)
I doubt that this is a good time for “more elites, less democracy,” even if there’s a reasonable distinction between technocrats and those who are merely very rich.
I mean this in a friendly discussion kind of way, and I don’t mean to personally attack you, but I loathe the ultra-handwavey term ‘elites’ with the passion of 1000 burning suns. To me it’s just the absolute worst part of the last 5 years, this now bog-standard phrase that Must Be Used In Every Discussion Ever. Who exactly is in this category??? There is no such broad homogeneous category. Please, let’s take ‘elites’ out to the shed like Old Yeller. (‘Neoliberal’ is a distant second).
You seem to grouping academic experts, people with PhDs and such, into this ‘elites’ category with- elected politicians? This is not a coherent grouping, except at a Trump rally or something. They are all distinct groupings. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, some people in the Midwest who run private mid-market firms, people with PhDs, elected office holders at all levels, the New York/DC media, various cocktail party types, factory owners, people who went to Ivy League schools and have upper middle class jobs now…. these are all separate groupings with separate incentive structures (who fight with each other constantly). It is not one huge, overarching category that are against the pure, working-class people of America. I am begging for intellectual rigor, literally begging.
The standard argument against populism is that the policy positions are bad, and would cause more harm to ‘the people’ than they realize
An interesting discussion I’ve had with friends, which I do think translates to some level of “being elite” is: who are the most powerful people you could get to take a call from you through the people you know socially and professionally. We put this at Bacon #2, but I think it’s reasonable at most numbers.
How else would you describe the observation that, while sometimes the interests of the Kings of England and the Holy Roman Emperors and the Doges of Venice and the Popes and whoever runs the Free Imperial Cities sometimes conflict——enough that they go to war about it every couple of years, even!——they all seem to be uniformly bad at caring about or taking into consideration the plight of the peasants?
It is a question of mutual visibility rather than mutual interest.
When you find a 20 dollar bill on the ground, it doesn’t belong to anyone you know, and you don’t even know anyone that still uses cash anymore it is really hard not to see it as free money. But it damn well did belong to somebody. You just couldn’t see it. Far more often than you find a 20 dollar bill yourself, someone you know will; you are far more likely to go along with something even when it doesn’t benefit you if it benefits someone can see and harms nobody that you can see.
All these groups have strong ties with each other, and they do have class interests that conflict with those of the peasants.
When the French Revolution happened, all the European monarchs were shocked by it and tried to support a monarchic restauration. Why? After all, these kings were constantly fighting each other. Still, despite their conflicts, they were all playing the same game, when something that went against the rules of the game happened, they all felt threatened by it and opposed it.
@hash872
Mostly well-educated globalists.
I don’t see why ‘elite’ is less sensible than ‘left,’ ‘right,’ ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative.’
That is also the argument for populism. The globalists mostly live in a bubble where they don’t recognize the harms to the commoners that they don’t know. For example, you see these people react with surprise when people oppose migration, because they mostly meet the upper crust of migrants (and when they don’t, the respectable thing to do is to ignore how some problems are much more common with migrants). They mostly don’t feel the pain (and when they do, usually don’t let themselves recognize the pain) that those lower on the totem pole feel, who deal with the less nice migrants much more often.
The claim that populists harm themselves usually seems to come from ignorance, where all kinds of debatable benefits are attributed to the policies that populists oppose, while downsides are ignored. And especially, it is constantly ignored how those harms and benefits impact different groups in society, differently.
@aapje. That’s a fair point. My concerns are more around economic populism (‘break up the big banks!’ ‘nationalize whole industries!’ ‘protectionism is grand’) that we have here in the US. As a center-leftist, my most withering criticism is really more for the far left, and my argument was that these economic propositions/emotional arguments would actually harm the working classes. I was less focused on immigration
It’s not just a matter of meeting the nicer immigrants, it’s effective altruism.
Making people who are very badly off much better off, primarily at the expense of people who are somewhat badly off is utilitarianism, I think.
@hash872
This actually suggests that the term ‘populist’ is just as problematic as ‘elite.’ Nowadays it seems to overwhelmingly be used as a pejorative aimed at people on the right, not as you use it (or perhaps that is just my bubble).
@Nancy Lebovitz
These people don’t line up to give away their wealth, jobs, etc; even when they argue that those were ill gotten, so at most it is forcing altruism on others.
Aapje, whether and how consent is involved in effective altruism is a whole additional topic, and one I haven’t seen discussed.
Do any of these work better for you?
“The professional class.”
“The managerial class.”
“The 9.9%.”
“The Cathedral.”
I’m arguing for linguistic precision & rigor- if that’s what you mean, that’s great! I just wanted to understand who exactly is in that class.
You’re more on the right, correct? Would I be unfair if I said that juxtaposing the ‘managerial classes’ against the ‘working classes’ is a bit Marxist?
They certainly come closer to meaning something than “elites” – if you’re using that as a synonym for one of those you’re going to get very confused if you talk to people using that to mean “Davos attendees”.
Sure, but what I support as my political/economic philosophy is the “American System” of cooperation between capital and labor. Right now I’m heavily on the pro-labor side because I think policy has been heavily slanted towards capital for far too long.
Not exactly. The managerial class isn’t the owners, it’s not capital, it’s…the managers. The wonks, the think tanks, the professors, the journalists, the lobbyists. The tinkerers of the policies who tilt things this way and that way. They ultimately work for capital, take their profits from things that are good for capital, and as such are heavily incentivized to think that what’s good for capital is good for everybody because it’s good for them. But at the end of the day they’re not actually capital.
They’re the “elites” because they man the elite institutions, not because they own everything.
I don’t know about Conrad’s use of the term, but I sometimes use it to distinguish non-owning management from the equity-holders. People who have control delegated from, but not the same incentives as, the shareholders.
Not trying to pick a fight here, but isn’t that a classic motte-and-bailey argument then?
If someone says to me, “Man, that guy over there is an elite, let’s get him!” I’d think I was going after some kind of shadowy plutocrat, not “One of the many people who man the elite institutions.”
I think pretty much no one likes the top 1%, I think that a certain group of people try to smear the next 9% as being fundamentally the same as the top 1% and the way they do that is via your incredibly elastic definition of elite.
Bringing up your earlier point, I love all of your proposed counter-terms, particularly “the cathedral” but that’s mostly because I think it would make Nick happy to hear more people talking about cathedral’s in daily conversation.
Well, no, first because I’m not the one who used it originally in this discussion. But I also don’t think most people use it to just mean “the 1% of shadowy plutocrats.” We talk all the time about “elite institutions” and “elite universities.” Isn’t it fair to call someone who graduates from an “elite university” and then works at an “elite institution” an “elite?”
When I think of this class and their group interests, I think of former Clinton campaign/WH communications director George Sephanopoulos now political correspondent for ABC News interviewing former FBI Director James Comey to promote his new book before he starts teaching an ethics course at William & Mary. Just gotta work finance into that example somewhere and we’re all set.
These are not capitalists, they are not the owners, they are not the plutocrats, but shouldn’t any reasonable definition of “The Elite” include them, and those a rung or two below them on the ladder?
@Aftagley
I basically agree with hash872’s point about “elite” being imprecise, but I think to be fair it’s fine when there is a context in which you’re calling something elite. Like, to take an example from sociology, Mills meant something in particular by the term power elite. I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong if someone wanted to use the term in a way very reminiscent of Mills, provided that context was actually clear. (But just going around saying “the elite” all the time is maybe not so clear.)
In Conrad’s case terms like “the professional class” and “the managerial class” and “the 9.9%” can be traced pretty easily: we’ve discussed articles that use these terms here on SSC! And Conrad was one of the people recommending one. (This link should work to read the article and get around the paywall.)
Aww, you’re too kind. 🙂 That would be lovely, but personally my favorite is “the professional class.”
“The top 1%” on what hierarchy is a key question.
Let’s put it in concrete terms: on one side, you’ve got Rocco Falcone, who owns a local chain of hardware stores started by his grandfather. Still lives near the same small city where he grew up and went to a local non-elite college. It’s very likely he is in the top 1% of US citizens by income or assets. On the other side, you’ve got Elizabeth Bartholet–Harvard Law professor, organized an anti-homeschooling conference.
They are both “elite”, but I think “the elites” usually means people like Dr Bartholet.
My apologies, I came in too guns blazing on that last one. I’m not trying to accuse you of anything or alleging that you’re the root cause of this term. Sorry if it came off that way; I still think it’s kinda motte-and-bailey esque but I don’t think you’re knowingly perpetrating any argument in bad faith.
For me, elite implies, well, some kind of elite status. Some access to resources, some ability to direct movement. Some kind of control or at least access to power. Not in a broadly distributed “well, they can solidify consensus around positions” kind of way but in a “pick up the phone and make something happen” way.
So, I spent a bunch of time while I was doing something college-equivalent couch surfing at Yale and I got to be pretty good friends with a bunch of people who went there. By and large, most of them were from middle class families and took out massive student loans to afford tuition. Some of them stayed in academia and now are mostly either PHD candidates or adjunct professors. Some of them work in private industry, but none of them really exert any kind of influence. One of them would have been the outlier here, since he was an early hire at a start up that turned into a unicorn… but that company ended up being WeWork, so I’m not sure what his situation is like right now.
In short, sure – these people to an elite university and most of them probably still work for what could be called elite institutions, but they’re drowning in debt, don’t work particularly stable jobs and definitely don’t have any significant prestige that would imply, to me, some kind of elite status.
I feel like I’m not really expressing my point well. Let me use an example: Elite Athletes
According to the NCAA only 7% of high school football players will ever compete in the NCAA, and that’s including D2 and D3 schools. If you limit it to D1, you’re talking about less than 3% of players . When you factor in people who go pro, the numbers drop down to less than .1% Going off the top 10% definition of elite, you’d have to call everyone in the NFL, the NCAA and most of those weird secondary leagues that no one watches elite, which just doesn’t correspond to my internal definition of “elite.” I want a Heisman winner to be my elite athlete, not Wheaton College’s 3rd string corner-back.
Right, but you just picked two people would, for sure, rank in the top 1% of any power rankings in america. Sure, neither of them are super rich, but they’ve both formerly occupied positions of massive power and prestige. I agree, they are both elite… but what about the production intern working on Sephanopoulos’s show pulling down minimum wage with no benefits who just graduated from Colombia?
In advocating for an expansive definition of elite, you picked someone who ran the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency and someone who worked directly for the president.
Yes!
No!
Agree, but with the added twist that I think the lack of clarity could be functioning as a feature, not a bug.
Again, agree. Ascribing anything to Conrad here was unintentional and regrettable. Once again Conrad, sorry for coming across like I was calling you out. I don’t like the idea, but I don’t blame you for it.
No harm, no foul, man. All good.
That’s where I disagree with you. Don’t you think the class interests of your Yale friends are far more inline with those of George and James? Much more so than the class interests of welders and dock workers and Wal-Mart greeters? The things which are good for George and James are probably also good for your Yale friends. They may not be so good for the welder/dock worker/greeter.
The difference between your Yale friends and G&J is that your friends are at the beginning of their careers, and G&J are at the ends of theirs. That production intern on George’s show isn’t planning on staying there forever. They’re there so they can be like George one day. That’s not to say they’re all going to wind up a successful as G&J, but they’re still on the same team, working in the interests of the organizations that give them and G&J their individual and collective prestige, wealth, and power, nothing the likes of our welder/dock worker/greeter friends will ever come close to.
They are the elite class. But still I prefer the term “professional/managerial class.”
I was writing a response to this, but then I realized that, as happens annoyingly often, SSC had already said what I wanted to say but likely better than I could say it. From the post about Social Class:
Using this framework, conflating gentry and elite belies some very real differences despite the fact that some people in the gentry might have more in common with certain members of the elite than they do with labor.
Okay, but that’s just like, one definition, man.
Come to think, I prefer something like “technocratic class.” “Managerial” sounds like the manager at your Taco Bell could be part of the “managerial class,” and that’s not the type of management we’re talking about. The technocratic class assumes the roles of managing…everything, by virtue of their “expertise.” The EPA experts manage what you can and can’t do with “your” land. The journalist experts manage your opinions, the political consultant experts manage your elections, the lobbyist experts manage your policies, the economics experts manage your trade. But the underlying assumption is that they’re managing these things in their class interests.
“Expert class,” however, sounds flattering, so perhaps “technocrat class.”
@Aftagley
Yeah, but that framework is not valid anymore in that the gentry and elite are becoming more similar to each other and are thus teaming up more and more, while labor is drifting away from both.
Note that labor has always required defectors from the other classes, ‘late bloomers’ (people who didn’t get access to education early on to shape them into gentry, but did have the talent), people marrying in, etc; to exercise political power*. See Trump, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders. None of these are working class people.
Social Justice tends to have little interest in actually fighting for the lower classes, so the leftists are abandoning labor (I read a story a while back about the student organizations presenting themselves to new students at an Ivy (Harvard, I think), where they had a ton of organizations for supposedly oppressed groups like non-white people, LGBT and such, but nothing concerned with the poor/working class).
* Many of these pipelines have been disrupted. Fairly good access to education by the talented, coupled with very little chance for those who miss out to make up for it, means that smart working class elites are very rare. Much increased assortative mating by education, means that fewer top tier men have a working class wife who influences him (or uses his money and power) to help the working class.
Yep, he just happened to say it particularly well.
I don’t actually know where we disagree anymore (I’m terrible at tracking arguments, sorry). Let me know if we’ve converged or just reached the end of useful discussion.
I’m not denying the existence of this class. I agree, somewhere near (but not quite at) the top of society there is a group of people who correlate closely enough to be effective labeled as a class. The group is over represented in the bureaucratic functioning of our society. Call them the gentry, the technocratic class, the managerial, the professional or whatever and I’m happy. I’ll even content that, on average, they’re going to take actions that will benefit their class (although might also postulate that the actions that benefit their class are mostly structured to benefit other classes as well, although likely in ways that they care about more than the other classes do. See, for example, free college)
But when people call this group the elite, they ignore or outright obscure the fact that there is an equally if not more powerful class of people “above” the managerial class who don’t need to bother developing complex regulatory systems to make changes, because they’ve got the resources to just have what they want happen.
@Aftagley
The people with lots of money tend to work hard to shape the regulations so they can avoid paying taxes or otherwise make the system work for them.
I just watched an expose on the Dutch King who gets custom legislation to make the government pay for his hunting hobby in a way that no other Dutch person can, while the prime minister lies to parliament that he is treated like everyone else. Yet the royal family has around €1 billion, so they could easily fund their own hobbies, yet they don’t.
Yet the royal family has around €1 billion, so they could easily fund their own hobbies, yet they don’t.
There’s some saying about corporate benefits (probably by someone I don’t like, but this quote is spot on) that goes something like “you do stuff all day and can’t tell if it’s really changing the bottom line for the company: but if you order some intern to do your dry cleaning, that’s a tangible benefit you can see immediately.”
How does free college help welders, dock workers, and Wal-Mart greeters?
No, they just lump them in together, because:
via the technocratic class is the manner by which the shadowy plutocrat variant of elite
When Mr. Moneybags wants what he wants to happen, like changes in immigration laws, he funds his think tank to write the position papers to flog at the journalists to get the results from his public opinion pollsters to give to the lobbyists to wave in front of the politicians. And he and his class companions are paying all of these people, all of whom are part of the technocratic class. Not bribing them, but whatever he wants to happen is probably something that’s indirectly beneficial to the technocrat class, too. Which makes it “good.” That it’s not good for the working class is immaterial. Mr. Moneybags has got another think tank to explain to us that the concerns of the working class are invalid because they’re short-sighted or backwards or motivated by racism or what have you.
I would prefer separating classes out as lumpenproletariat, working class, technocratic class, plutocrat class, but when someone merges the last two and says “elite” they’re not trying to get one over on you. They’re lumping them together because they see them acting in concert. “The Empire” isn’t just the Emperor and his will, it’s Vader and everybody down to the stormtroopers, too.
I think a lot of people assume that the only reason people are welders, dock workers, and wal-mart greeters is that they couldn’t afford to go to college.
(Note: I personally think this is obviously wrong. Free college wouldn’t mean “nobody has to be a wal-mart greeter anymore. It would just mean “now you need a college degree to even get a job as a wal-mart greeter.”)
Oddly enough, I can’t remember receiving any checks from him back around 1970 when I wrote the chapter of Machinery arguing for open borders. I should check with Bryan Caplan to make sure he’s gotten his check. Julian Simon isn’t around any more so I can’t check with him, but given that what he is best known for is being the leading critic of the then almost universal population alarmist position, I doubt he got much either for his arguments in favor of immigration.
And David, I’m pretty sure you’re well thought of by the universities that have paid your salary and the influential folks who invite you on speaking tours. Your ideas about free trade and open borders are excellent ideas for your class (and mine!).
Open borders was and is a very unpopular idea — note that even Democrats who arguably support policies that are equivalent to that almost always deny being for open borders. Complete free trade is more of a mixed case.
Frankly, so do I. I used it anyway, because that’s what my sources were using, and because politically speaking the folks who are mad about elite behaviour often seem to consider distinguishing among multiple meanings of the same thing to be yet another “elitist” behaviour that’s unacceptable to them.
I’m sympathetic to arguments about technocrats – defined somewhat sloppily – because I consider them to be people “like me” – i.e. people who can understand statistics, follow a mathematical argument, know the difference between Truth/truthiness (= it makes me feel good) and actual truth, and correctly explain the scientific method.
OTOH, I’ve observed a lot of “experts” produce handwavy feelgood nonsense, and/or predictions that don’t pan out, even while they continue to be consulted by the media, so I’m suspicious of that sympathy.
The real question, though, is whether the book that started this discussion uses the same fuzzy non-definitions.
Ultimately, the knowledge and ability to stay within the Overton Window, only making sloppy and/or pejorative claims where that is allowed, while walking on egg shells where it isn’t, is itself a matter of both talent and education.
For example, if you defend heterodox sloppiness like Foucault, Žižek or Pinker did, claims that tend to otherwise be outside of the Overton Window of the well-educated, suddenly become acceptable.
The simple answer is that the uneducated demographic does vote differently than the educated one (and their turnout is above zero, so it doesn’t matter that it’s lower than educated turnout, they can still swing an election), but ignoring that to address the hypothetical:
If the stupid people and the smart people disagree on who should run things, we’re probably better off going with the smart people’s choice. We can guarantee this outcome by disenfranchising the stupid. In the case where the stupid and the smart agreed, no harm was done by the addition of stupid votes, but that implies no harm will be done by removing them, the outcome’s the same either way. So we don’t let them vote just in case we end up a with scenario where they disagree with the smart people.
And note that there are softer and less abusable ways of doing this, e.g. let the “stupid” outvote the “smart” if they meet a supermajority threshold, but let the “smart” decide in cases where the “stupid” are relatively evenly divided.
You can model this generally by positing a democratic and an epistocratic house considering a change in the law, and each house’s vote can have four outcomes: supermajority yes, supermajority no, close yes, or close no. Let these be denoted Y/N/MY/MN respectively, and you could then have a rule like this, where E: denotes the vote of the epistocratic house and D: that of the democratic house:
E:Y, D:Y/MY/MN: change happens
E:MY/MN, D:Y: change happens
E:MY/MN, D:MY: change happens
else change does not happen. So a supermajority of epistocrats can outvote a weak majority of democrats and vice versa. Variations on the rules (and of course varying supermajority thresholds) would vary the balance of power.
Yeah, I’m a much bigger fan of meritocratic voting than the average person, but fully disenfranchising any large demographic seems like it creates the risk of candidates running on a platform of free money for voting demographics, screw everyone else. And with college loan forgiveness already being firmly within the Overton window of the Democrats…
Agreed. Putting on our conflict theorist hats, it’s worth remembering that smart people can still be selfish, just like everyone else. Granting more political power to groups deemed more meritocratic may just result in them finding clever ways to subsidize their preferences at the cost of others — college loan forgiveness strikes me as an excellent example of this sort of thing.
If the educated people are mostly urban and the less educated mostly rural, then disenfranchising the less educated may result in policies that benefit the former at the expense of the latter. Similarly, and more plausibly, if the more educated are professionals and executives and such and the less educated are farm laborers and waiters.
Beyond that point, I’m not sure that more educated people consistently vote more intelligently, given that rational ignorance means almost everyone is voting on the basis of very low quality information. William F. Buckley famously said that he would rather be ruled by the first thousand names out of the NY phone book than by the faculty and staff of Harvard, and I’m not sure he was wrong.
Are you saying that smart (which “educated” is a decent proxy for) people aren’t better at making decisions based on limited information?
Educated is an imperfect proxy for smart, and educational credentials are an imperfect proxy for educated. Both Plumber and Dieseach are clearly very well educate, but Plumber by his self-description and, I would guess, Deiseach as well don’t have very strong credentials.
Beyond that, there is the problem of what better at making decisions means in the context of voting. A smarter person is somewhat more likely to realize that his vote has an essentially zero probability of affecting the outcome of a presidential election. So “better at making decisions” doesn’t mean “more likely to choose the candidate better for the country.” It means something more like “more likely to vote for the candidate it is in his private interest to support,” which depends largely on which candidate people who matter to him will approve of his supporting.
Are you familiar with Dan Kahane’s work on beliefs about issues, such as evolution or gun control, that have become linked to group membership? He finds that the more intellectually able someone is, the more likely he is to agree with the group he is part of, whether that means believing in evolution or not believing in evolution. It’s rational behavior, although not rational belief, because whether you believe in evolution has essentially no effect on the world but can have a substantial effect on you, via your interactions with a setting where most people do believe in or where most people don’t.
Think of voting as something more like cheering for your football team than buying a car.
Even if that was true[1] I would still consider “faculty and staff of Harvard” to be a horrible ruler, much worse than completely random selection.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/29/open-thread-152-75/#comment-890241 (A Harvard Law professor say we need to censor the Internet for the common good, text starting from “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”)
Or “The reason parent-child relationships exist is because the State confers legal parenthood…” type of insane opinions (appeared in https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/22/open-thread-152-25/#comment-884958 ).
This kind of complete failure exists in much higher concentration among professors and university faculty.
I would prefer legislation written by GPT2.
Though this is a poor randomization method, easy to exploit and phone books are probably no longer updated/printed.
[1] and I suspect that it is, but not as much as smart and educated people expect
@Ninety-Three
The proposal was apparently to define smart as “graduated from high school”. But even if you increase it to “has a degree”, there are lots of idiots with degrees and political opinions opposite from yours.
NO. And you should know that, if you had read the article instead of a blog comment about another article about the article. His thesis is “The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow.” [empashsis added] He expresses no more approval or calls to action than an anti-war activist saying that the US is going to bomb a bunch more middle-Eastern nations in the name of national defense.
The article is entirely descriptive rather than normative, and this [emphasis added] is the only part that’s even a disputable fact and not a trivially true one.
Even the US, which has some of the freeest internet in the world, has, as the article points out pressure from Congress and bills like SESTA, which the author quite reasonably construes as the government playing a role to ensure compatibility with society’s norms and values (because it previously wasn’t). A reasonable person could argue that this doesn’t constitute a large role, it’s certainly smaller than the role that the EU plays. You could also perhaps argue that it’s wrong that the government must play a large role in the same way that a government doesn’t have to pass minimum wage laws, but that just downgrades his point from “must” to “inevitably will”.
I challenge you to find a quote of him saying we need to censor.
Isn’t this also how Karl Marx talked about Communism?
@Ninety-Three:
> The article is entirely descriptive rather than normative
> I challenge you to find a quote of him saying we need to censor.
To be clear, we’re talking about the article in the Atlantic by Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/? The one that says:
I take “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” and “governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values” to be a strong suggestion that the US Government should censor more actively. Did you miss this part, or do you really interpret it be entirely descriptive rather than the prescriptive statement I take it to be? He might not be saying we “need to censor”, but isn’t he clearly claiming that we should?
There are even more idiots without degrees and I clearly specified the problem motivating this solution: when idiots and smart people disagree, we’d rather go with the smart people. This achieves that outcome (though not in every case, proxy).
I’m seeing a surprising number of comments pushing back on educated ~= smart, even though I explicitly called it out as a proxy rather than a perfect indicator, and as an empirical matter everyone admits that it’s true to some degree. Moreover, I wasn’t even saying we should do it, I was answering hash’s question about what problem we were trying to solve with this approach.
I’m tickled that this is the issue that makes SSC comments go full “arguments are soldiers”, like when Twitter got made about Dawkins saying eugenics was bad but would technically work.
@nkurz
I literally quoted this part, with analysis of why I took it as descriptive. I even bolded the part you’re objecting to. Did you read my whole post?
@Matt M
He then went on to say that there should be a revolution, and it would be great. That is absent from this piece.
The text starting from “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” ?
I even quoted that.
They are subtler than “lets censor, I will happily bear burden of banning people and views I dislike” and they avoid words with negative associations (like “censor”) but
is quite clear in outright advocating censorship.
This is untrue, “we must censor internet” (or “Significant monitoring and speech control” if you prefer to avoid clear wording) is an opinion not a fact.
Similarly “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” .
ETA: On second thought, deleted completely. Terrible heat to light ratio, sorry.
@matkoniecz
Apparently we just disagree on what words mean, because I have heard an awful lot of people arguing that, for instance, imperialist wars are an inevitable component of a mature and flourishing superpower and they were definitely not advocating it.
These people are advocating something. In this case, probably “let’s not have an empire in the first place.”
So what do you suppose the author of this piece is advocating? If it’s not increased speech controls over the internet, then what is it?
You’re wrong in this case. People do not normally use positive words like “flourishing” in this context unless they approve. They might say something like “as internet use spreads and it becomes essential for a wide range of uses, calls for censorship will increase”. They would not say “any form of internet bringing true happiness and prosperity to the people must naturally have heavy censorship”.
@Ninety-Three
But in what cases do we find that “idiots” and “smart people” (with the distinction being made based on graduating from high school) do have something approaching opposite consensuses? I can’t really think of any.
@Matt M
As previously stated, nothing, because he’s being descriptive. If this is going to be an “everything is political” argument, I’m out.
Thankfully the author didn’t write exactly one article, so we can use others on the same topic to disambiguate:
“Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values”
Is not a descriptive statement. For the most part, Goldsmith and Woods are careful to describe with approval rather than explicitly prescribe, but they do prescribe.
Are you claiming that
“In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”
is descriptive, and states fact rather than opinion?
And that this statement is not advocating censorship?
@Ninety-Three:
> I literally quoted this part, with analysis of why I took it as descriptive. I even bolded the part you’re objecting to. Did you read my whole post?
Apparently not well enough! Sorry about that. The sequence was that I read your post, then had trouble finding a link to the right article, then read the article and came across that passage that seemed to contradict what you were claiming. And then failed to re-read your post before posting. I feel silly.
I’m also astonished that you think that is merely descriptive. I take it as a strong opinion that the US in the future should censor the internet in the way that China has in the past. I’m not actually bothered to the part that you bolded, rather the sentence before it, which is what that was the only part that I quoted.
That article by Jack Goldsmith has been super misinterpreted. As a follower of Jack, I knew immediately after reading it that it was being misinterpreted (and why). If you’re curious to know whether he thinks your interpretation isn’t what he was going for, he wrote a follow-up to claim exactly that. I think a fair amount of blame goes on the authors, because if so many people are misinterpreting you, you could have used better words.
Anyway, he was definitely trying to be descriptive. For a couple decades, the prevailing zeitgeist in the US was that the internet was magical; information was born to be free; there should be no regulations on the internet whatsoever, and there will then be no censorship – the magic internet will give all the best dissidents a platform and cause no harms in any way. Well…. that turned out to be not so terribly true. As the internet got older and more widespread (matured and flourished), people did do bad things on the internet, and other people wanted them to be stopped. Some of those latter people may have gone too far. But speech controls definitely came – often through the pressure points of major tech companies. In this big picture, the “don’t touch the magic, totally free internet” view was wrong, and China’s view was
less wrongright. This is all the descriptive bit.Now, the prescriptive bit is about as minuscule as you can imagine.
Anyone here who has said anything like, “Maybe the government should do something about Facebook/Google/Cloudflare using speech controls for bad political purposes,” should be applauding this claim. To spell out what you’re saying, “Maybe the government should do something about Facebook/Google/Cloudflare using speech controls for bad political purposes, because that type of political censorship is not compatible with our society’s norms and values.”
Thanks for this explanation, that is a quite sad situation. (I ended with something similar on a much smaller scale on some family issue more than once).
Because it was poorly written.
If you want to praise some part of China policy without making endorsement of Chinese government-style authoritarianism then
is a poor phrasing.
I now see what was intended by author, but I am reading a text – not a mind of author.
And author has written that China was largely right in their egregious censorship (freedom versus control).
Now I know that intended meaning was different but I have no idea how this was missed in proofreading.
—–
If I write “Hitler was right” I don’t get to be surprised when I say “I meant limiting cruelty toward dogs”. Being surprised that it was interpreted as praising mass murder is weird.
If I write “China was largely right” I don’t get to be surprised and say that it applies to “worrying about digital harms”. And be irritated that it was interpreted as praising extreme censorship, 1984 style treatment of history and government-style authoritarianism.
If you want to praise China for combating something but not for their methods then qualify your praise.
—-
Maybe it was not intended, but the text still had an opinion praising China-style censorship.
The non-parenthetical part doesn’t follow from the parenthetical part.
Nah. That’s not actually in there anywhere.
The US political system is permanently biased for the rural states, primarily by the Senate and to a lesser degree the Electoral College. So this seems unlikely. This is why we have tens of billions of dollars in farm aid to unproductive businesses, etc.
It seems intuitive that smarter people who know more will make better decisions. And yet, that’s surely not true in all cases–sometimes the smarter, better educated people are captured by an evil ideology or have incentives that lead them to make terrible decisions for locally-rational reasons.
I suspect in the modern US, one problem with concentrating decisionmaking power in the hands of a smallish number of highly-educated, smart people is that those people have very little actual understanding of what’s going on with less smart, less educated, less elite people. Often this is combined with an active dislike or hostility for some or all of the less educated/less elite.
@albatross11
There is research which suggests that more educated people are actually more radical & biased…in all directions.
And political elites seem to have more accurate opinions, but also more polarized ones.
—
I also think that a lot of these people (like politicians, professors and journalists) are in atypical environments with atypical and often not so healthy rules for ‘winning’. A lot of the time, they don’t win by testing their ideas against reality, but by testing them for popularity (and even then, often in large part within that weird bubble).
@Ninety-Three
What happens if the smart people use all the tools at their disposal to maximize the policies that benefit themselves, at the expense of the ‘stupid’?
For example, use (media) propaganda to tell these people that policies that will actually harm them, will benefit them?
Or make the system so complex that the well-educated/insiders get their way, but others lose out?
> policies that will actually harm them, will benefit them
1. We already did this with free trade.
2. Way too often “harm” is equated to “not being given as much “free” stuff by the government.
This relies heavily on mistake theory of government. What if there is a genuine conflict of interests and preferences between smart and stupid people? Then disenfranchising the stupid will probably result in worse policies with regards preferences and interests of the aggregate population, although better for smart people.
.. Actually, substantially worse than that.
The history of “governance” over people who are not represented is chock full of said people being ground under heel *even if it confers absolutely no, or even negative* material benefits to the governing class. Because people get off on lording it over, and feeling better than others.
Enlightened tyrants are unusual. It is far safer for everyone to have a say. Even if their say is stupid. Learn to persuade people, okay.
General principle: you get more of what you subsidize. Unless we’re in a world where we are so starved for calories we can’t afford intelligence *and* we can’t solve the problem with intelligence (which reads to me like civilizational collapse), you’d want to certainly not favor the stupid over the smart. Because then you get more stupid and less smart. So if only the smart can vote and they elect to prefer to structure things to their benefit, you’d ultimately end up with a population of more smart people long-run.
I do not think that this is a desirable goal.
@Garrett
This is far from a given, since the smart generally don’t seem to desire eugenic behavior (having lots of children).
> This is far from a given, since the smart generally don’t seem to desire eugenic behavior (having lots of children).
Not surprising given that the government is currently structured to have the productive people subsidize the non-productive. If you assume that intelligence correlates strongly with productivity, the system disincentivizes smart people to have children.
Also, there are some of us who really would like to start a family and have lots of children for (among others) reasons like this. But since the government has decided to reallocate my productivity to (disproportionately) women, one of my strongest mating strategies has been destroyed.
I don’t follow that.
Are you talking about welfare policies that help support single mothers and so reduce the pressure on women who want children to get married? I wouldn’t think the women that would be relevant to would make up much of the pool of women you would regard as potential wives.
Or is your point that equal employment laws reduce your income from employment and increase that of your potential partners, so make them less interested in giving up their income and living on yours?
Or is it something else that hasn’t occurred to me?
Excellent review, thanks for saving me some of the effort I was too lazy to expend earlier.
Chapter 5 would have been improved by replacing it by a hyperlink to Brennan’s _Against Democracy_ which makes the same class of argument in much more detail, with better evidence, and more rigor. The general idea that there should be epistocratic and mass-democratic bodies in the institutional mix that should check and balance one another seems like it’s worth a lot more exploration; Brennan provides some good starting points but one could brainstorm a lot more, e.g. having an epistocratic house of the legislature (like the House of Lords but selected by highly educated/intelligent people rather than composed of aristocrats) that can veto democratic decisions with a supermajority, or having assemblies of experts with similar supermajority veto powers over particular domains.
As I said before, I think the biggest omission is a systematic examination of the differences in governance quality between:
— parliamentary systems and systems with a separately elected executive
— party-list proportional representation systems and first-past-the-post individual district legislative elections
It seems like a party-list proportional representation parliament is effectively 10% less democratic than e.g. the US system in the way Jones likes, so we should look at whether those systems (of which I think there are plenty in the world these days) do better than the US by various measures of governance quality.
And of course there are more subtleties possible.
Does your parliamentary system empower the party leader to unilaterally change the portfolios of the ministers or is this done by the parliamentary party as a whole? Are party leaders chosen by insiders or by anyone who votes in some party leadership race? How much control over the judiciary does the government have?
Do you use a straight proportional representation system or first-past-the-post individual district system? Or alternatively, do you divide the jurisdiction into a bunch of multimember geographic districts and go proportional in those? Or do you do the New Zealand/Germany thing of having first-past-the-post geographic districts and then “overhang” seats to bring the total up to a proportional number?
FWIW I really like the NZ/Germany mixed representation system and suspect (with low confidence) that it is a significant contributor to their relatively high quality of governance, though it’s certainly plausible that the sort of cultures which produce high quality of governance also produce support for that sort of system.
Thanks for the review. I have not read the book, and I won’t be putting this on my list to read since you don’t have a high opinion of it. If anyone could recommend a better book on elections, I’ll put that one on my list. But some general comments:
Judges: Yeah it probably doesn’t make sense to elect judges, since almost no one knows enough to make good judgments. I always leave that part of my ballot un-filled. But I would like to have recall rights for a judge, so voters have a say if there are some critical issues. And at least for SCOTUS, I would like appointments to be for a specific time period, say 10 or 20 years, not for life-time. And then stagger them, so each president gets a similar number of picks.
High school degree to vote: I dislike this one mostly because a high school degree means very little. And like you say, this will have very little effect on elections anyway, since they rarely vote anyway. I would be in favor of a test to prove you know something first. Say a test that you know the name of your Congressman, both Senators and governor. This is a much more objective test of voting knowledge, and will also correlate with intelligence. And exclude a lot more folks than a HS degree, so might have some effect.
Bondholders have political representation: This sounds nuts to me. Even in corporate America, bondholders have no voting rights, only financial weight.
Bring back earmarks: No no no. I am not convinced they ever went away anyway. Trading favors is not a little corruption; it is about the waste of billions of dollars per year.
EU too much democracy: Yeah I am a bit surprised about that take. I’d like to hear from Aapje on this.
The EU has a ton of theoretical democracy, but if we look at it in terms of whether the policies reflects the will of the people and whether people can actually exercise the power to effect change that they theoretically have, I think that it is minimal.
Transparency is minimal everywhere, in fact.
I doubt that 5% of voters for European Parliament could even tell you which party in Parliament their vote went to (when asked point blank, rather than to get to pick from a list). After all, you don’t get to vote for these parties, but for national parties. They then have to form a coalition with other national parties. The resulting parties then tend to form a Grand Coalition in secret, but because they don’t pick the executive, they don’t have to be transparent about what deals they made.
Actually holding these politicians accountable requires so much study that even most journalists gave up on it. It’s just insider baseball now. Outsiders can only notice the end results and agree or disagree with that, but it’s not realistic for them to put in the effort to know who to vote for to create change, one way or the other.
Even figuring out whether a decision was made by the European Parliament or the national politicians (who are not insiders, so they vote blind too) is extremely hard.
So how can voters hold anyone accountable?
Whenever major decisions are made, I also notice extreme coercion and trickery being applied, to the point where the decision is about as much an exercise of free will on the part of politicians as paying protection money to the mafia.
A system that requires you to correctly answer the name of the congressperson, both senators, and the governor in order to vote will heavily incentivize everyone to publicize the names of these people, so that the test will no longer serve any discriminating function. However, because of the familiarity effect, it will then make the people who it was meant to exclude end up feeling more favorable towards the incumbents. Thus, this would largely have the effect of entrenching incumbents in any of the marginal cases where it was going to have any effect.
My system would require each candidate to submit a bullet-point list of “5 reasons to support me” (these could be anything, policy positions, character references, attacks on their opponent, etc.)
When you vote for someone, you are presented with a list of five options, and you are required to select the option that best explains why you are voting for that candidate.
But the twist is, only three of your selectable options are from your candidate, the other two are from the opposition. If you select an “opposition” reason, your vote is disqualified and thrown out.
I dispute this. Suppose McCain submits a list of things like “Conservative judges, powerful economy, promoting freedom abroad,” and Obama supports a list of things like “Liberal judges, powerful economy, better healthcare.” Suppose next that I really like McCain’s healthcare plan, and that’s my primary reason for supporting him. But it doesn’t get into the top five reasons he lists.
(a) If “Better healthcare” doesn’t show up on the screen for me, which reason do I select? Maybe I don’t care about conservative judges and dislike foreign interventionism, but I think it’s worth it to get McCain’s healthcare plan.
(b) If “Better healthcare” does show up on the screen for me, what happens if I select it? It was submitted by Obama, but I personally think it’s a valid reason to vote for McCain.
(c) Also, both candidates listed “Powerful economy”, so that term loses its discriminating power. I suppose this at least would degrade gracefully, since every voter can without fear select it as a good reason for supporting their chosen candidate.
I shouldn’t have said “bullet point.” Require a full sentence. In reality, what you’d get is something like “I’ll make a better economy by strengthening unemployment benefits and promoting green jobs” from one candidate and “I’ll make a better economy by lowering taxes on job creators and cutting harmful federal regulation” from another.
If people can’t tell which is which, that’s their own fault and they are the exact type of person we want to disenfranchise.
If the candidates themselves do a poor job in selecting their five statements, (i.e. if people are voting for McCain because of health care, but he doesn’t use health care as one of his five) then they have nobody to blame but themselves if their supporters get disenfranchised more than their opponents’
If Obama is campaigning on healthcare and McCain evaluates that healthcare is important to people, one of McCain’s statements can very well be “I will keep the existing healthcare system in place, and protect it from being dismantled as my opponent wants to do.”
And I assume, these five sentences are not allowed to put names in them? You said attacks on the opponent are allowed, then why wouldn’t every sentence be “Vote for me because I am not B C D E (and there am obviously candidate A)”?
And even if names are prohibited from the sentences, expect dogwhistling to immediately get instituted. Emails will go out to their supporters saying “Here are my five sentences. They’re the ones that all say ‘rubber ducky’ in them.”
I think you overestimate the engagement, attention span, and intelligence of the marginal voter.
Yes, the candidates would do everything in their power to telegraph “THESE ARE MY FIVE STATEMENTS, MAKE SURE YOU PICK ONE OF THESE FIVE SO YOUR VOTE WILL COUNT.”
Lots of people will get it wrong anyway.
This is a feature not a bug. It is a good idea for voters to know who their representatives are — if the test makes them learn, then they know a little more. But I don’t think this will happen for the the lowest 10% or 20% of the voters who are completely oblivious but just vote for whoever someone else tells them to. Good riddance. I am also skeptical that such a test will help incumbents even more than currently. I suspect a lot of low information voters just want to vote out all the incumbents — this will help them do this. Hard to say. In any case, I can’t think of a better test.
People respond to incentives, and elected politicians are always going to be monomaniacaly focused on re-election no matter what. Giving them longer terms won’t change that, especially in legislatures where there there is almost never any sort of direct accountability.
WTF he means by that? Too much democracy? Where? Basically nothing what matters in EU is elected. And EU parliament works in so bizarre and unfathomable way that elections feel like a black box anyway.
WAT. Just wat. Who would want to literally auction political representation? And give it retroactively for free?
Opens very ugly can of worms for literally no change (how many people without high school degree vote?). It is a freaking Chesterton’s wall, not fence.
I really dislike this meme of somehow limited voting. To me, it is based on a misunderstanding of democracy and of why we vote. The main purpose of democracy is not to make sure that we make the smartest decision all the time. The main purpose of democracy is to make sure that the rules of government are clear and fair to everyone so that power exchanges can occur without a civil war. “One person, one vote” is clear and fair. If you start adding clauses to this, it becomes less clear and fair. The people who you don’t allow the vote will rightfully feel disenfranchised from society and the social glue will become weaker.
In addition to this, there’s the argument of if voting really matters (remember that the election impact on the stock market isn’t noticeable) and if smart people vote better than dumb people (remember Beware Systemic Change).
So I have not read it, but call me unimpressed by some of his ideas.
Central bank independence – ECB is more independent than Fed (or Bank of Japan, I presume), and results of their actions have been dismal.
Requiring high school degree to vote – setting aside that I, for one, have a low opinion of cognitive abilities of not only uneducated but also many college graduates, this ensures that interests and preferences of non-high school graduates get ignored even more by the political system than it is currently the case. I think this is bad.
Giving political representation to bondholders seems totally crazy. Aren´t two main holders of US debt governments of China and of Saudi Arabia?
One issue with ECB vs Fed comparisons is that the ECB only has a mandate to fight inflation. The Fed explicitly (and thankfully, in my view!) has a dual mandate to fight inflation and maintain employment. The mandate seems to be a design choice that is separate from how much independence a CB is given to actually achieve that mandate (although I’m not certain about this).
To be precise “The primary objective of the European System of Central Banks (hereinafter referred to as “the ESCB”) shall be to maintain price stability. Without prejudice to the objective of price stability, the ESCB shall support the general economic policies in the Union with a view to contributing to the achievement of the objectives of the Union as laid down in Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union.” (I just looked that up). Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union includes list of All the Good Things in the World, literally starting with “peace”.
I agree that the mandate to maintain price stability above all else including employment and banking system not collapsing is too narrow, but clearly there is some wiggle room for having more or less reasonable policies, and lack of democratic accountability is not helping.
Other thing is that the mandate of the ECB cannot be changed in response to events or results of its actions except by unanimous consent of EU member states. This is what I mean by its high degree of independence compared to the Fed.
The ESCB isn’t the relevant institution. The Eurosystem, including the ECB is.
The ECSB also includes non-eurozone central banks.
@Lambert
That is correct, but ECB does not appear to have any other goals than those of the whole ESCB (unlike central banks of member states, who are also subjected of national law, as German Constitutional Court recently reminded us).
I should´ve included source, this formulation of goals of ESCB is from Article 127 of the Treaty on the functioning of the EU. Almost identical formula is in Article 2 of Protocol on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the European Central Bank, which is an appendix to that Treaty, and also at the same time an appendix to the Treaty on European Union.
This is a common misconception, but the main holder of US government debt, in aggregate, is definitely US pension and retirement funds. China holds more treasury bonds than any foreign country, though.
I still don’t think that giving bondholders extra votes or whatever is a good idea.
Another argument against limiting the franchise to those with a degree (besides the fact that it’s wrong, and well, history). CatCube made a comment several weeks ago (I’m rubbish at searching through SSC), that Red America has a much higher tolerance for risk, since they work the risky jobs, and their entertainment is also riskier (dirt bikes, hunting, etc).
A lot of the current coronavirus idiocy is because people can’t handle risks well. If we exclude from the electorate all the people who are the ones that know how to take risks and do so, we would become an even more risk averse society.
While I don’t like Heinlein’s view that only those who take the risk of defending a country by enlisting should have the franchise, the opposite argument is also wrong. And while the US military does require a high school diploma, there are other necessary and risky professions that don’t require a high school diploma.
The intelligence of the intelligentsia doesn’t make it good at taking risks, knowing when to take a calculated risk, or whether a risk is high enough to shut down the economy. It seems to me that uneducated people, when given the correct information (the median age of a death by covid; comparing the risks with a profession; a more intuitive way to grasp information), are more likely to reach a conclusion that weights risks better.
Also, two far more simple points. The point of democracy is not to select the absolute best rulers, it is to give everyone a stake in the country, so that there are no large groups with nothing to lose who will feel like it is a good idea to set the world on fire. US democracy is already not doing a very good job at that, restricting the franchise will make it completely stop working.
Secondly, specifically for the US, the point in the political process where utter stupidity happens is really easy to identify, and it is not the franchise that is the problem. It is the primary process. Oh. My. Goddess, something is very, very wrong with the way you do that.
Seriously. WTF. Anyone that wants to start political reform anywhere else but there and fundraising is palming enough cards to program a computer to send a man to the moon.
And note that your point doesn’t really depend on whether taking risks per se is the relevant axis on which people without a high school degree have some relevant insight that people with it are more likely to lack. It’s clear that there are all sorts of governmental systems that function badly because the people that design the systems have never used them (unemployment insurance is one that comes to mind, given the drastic failure of state systems to even receive calls over the past few weeks) and the proposal to disenfranchise one group would just increase this.
Yeah, I mean another objection is that the side that relies on sub-high school graduates would just game the system by giving everyone in their state a GED, if they think that’s going to swing elections in their favor. Jones is pretty naive about stuff like this.
I don’t personally hate the ‘restrict voting to the more educated’ argument, but it would’ve been nice to see Jones at least grapple with the obvious counter-arguments (that the upper middle class would simply vote for things that benefit them personally, would be ignorant of working class concerns, etc.)
Disparate impact makes this proposal DOA.
In Starship Troopers, Heinlein had a government where people had to do some sort of risky service to get to vote, but it didn’t have to be military. Weirdly, they couldn’t vote until after they finished their service (which could be extended indefinitely in case of emergency). I’ve never seen an explanation for the restriction.
Heinlein floated a number of other ideas for restricted franchise. From memory, they included only women above a certain age who had children for one, and ability to solve a quadratic equation for another.
An old and real version is limiting the vote to land owners.
That makes sense if people and other forms of property are mobile. Someone who owns himself, or a pile of gold bars, can support politicians who provide short term benefits at long term costs, then leave when the costs appear. Someone who owns land either stays or sells it at a loss when the long term costs become visible.
I’m not sure what a good modern equivalent would be. For Hungary, or some other country with its own language, limiting the vote to fluent speakers of that language might work, since they have a skill which loses most of its value if they leave.
the property own rule isn’t that good if people think they can sell before the costs of their policies come due.
Your explanation makes a lot more sense than the usual claim that people without property “don’t have a stake in the system”.
Before the future costs become visible to potential buyers. That could be well before the costs actually come due.
I used to ask myself “Why do I make money?” but the past couple days are really eye-opening.
-One of my coworkers wanted to know the overtime in April due to COVID. So he went through 90 spreadsheets (one for each shift, for each day) and manually entered in all overtime, with manually entered job titles, and manually entered wages.
-One of my coworkers issued a report that said we made $50,000 yesterday, despite the fact that we KNOW we lose $20,000 on a weekly basis. It took about 5 minutes to find 3 critical errors.
-One of my coworkers accidentally duplicated a week’s worth of data in her typical weekly report, and it was a particularly good week, so the month-end numbers came in WAY off. A brief look at the raw data would have revealed this error.
-One coworker spent 2 hours trying to investigate a $300 rounding error. See $20,000 per week losses above, reference against term “prioritization” in nearest dictionary.
-A set of coworkers has sat on the $2 MILLION 90+ day liability we owe vendors, which I am now taking over because, you know, I want to make sure our bills are paid.
-One of my coworkers apparently doesn’t own a home computer in the year of our lord 2020?
-One coworker said we “expensed” something instead of “accrued” something, which has caused roughly $600,000 to go missing in some godforsaken account. This coworker is a trained, experienced accountant.
-Our managers do not audit their machine time sheets. Their supervisors are judged based on how much they produce per given machine hour. You can judge the highly predictable results. Simple solutions for this have been rebuffed (mostly, “write down how long your 5 machines ran on a sheet of paper and check it against the database”)
Do you trust any of these people to make strategic decisions involving tens of millions of dollars, and, more importantly, do you trust them trying to DEFEND their strategic decisions to Vice Presidents and Company Officers?
Are these all different coworkers, or is there some overlap in the incompetence Venn diagrams?
My feeling for a while is that few people are qualified to do their job. But we don’t have anyone to replace them with. The world has gotten complex faster than we’ve gotten smarter.
I think “does not make stupid mistakes” is a much higher bar than it sounds. Human intelligence is much more powerful than it is reliable; never making stupid mistakes is much harder than being able to complete hard tasks that create lots of value for others on a regular basis.
Yes. It is hard to determine the context from ADBG’s post, but I do wonder if he expects to find zero mistakes. I remember years ago when I went from being a manager and always checking other folks’ work to doing a bunch of the work myself, and being reviewed by other people. I was quite humbled to realize that I make mistakes too. ADBG: perhaps the mistakes you found really were outrageous, but please be careful not to be too arrogant about this.
No one makes more stupid mistakes than me! There’s a difference between a stupid mistake, and “I don’t feel like I should check my data when it is literally my job to ensure data integrity and do basic analysis on it.”
Especially when it comes to tedious tasks.
My crowning achievement in this realm was designing a fix for a very highly-compensated lawyer who had the misfortune of having one of those printers where the sheets are printed in reverse order. He made enough hourly that he could have just BOUGHT a new printer, but instead he would flip hundreds of sheets by hand (no interns I guess), taking him collectively many hours per year. He did not want anyone messing with the printer settings because he did not trust technology (or maybe thought something would get broken). I told him that you could put the papers back in the printer and print out n-many blank sheets, where n is the number of papers to flip. The sheets magically came out in correct order, having been flipped twice. Voila, I save the company tens of thousands of dollars per year.
If errors of that magnitude are happening in only a few days, is this a system error rather than striking incompetence of many different people? Are roles and objectives ill-defined such that people are working outside of their expertise and are the systems and procedures either too complex or poorly explained?
It could also be that each of these people is involved in hundreds of comparable tasks, so that this represents an error rate below 1%. Exactly the sort of system in which it makes sense to employ someone as a double-checker, even though the people are quite competent.
This all sounds very familiar to me, but I’ll put in a word of defense for the worker investigating the $300 rounding error. Once I had an accounting discrepancy of only £20-ish, but it turned out it was the right thread to pull on to uncover a £1 million credit owing to us – and all because our supplier was even worse at this stuff than we were.
I frequently tell my team members that the worst number to be off by is one. If you’re off by a million, then something big and obvious is wrong, and it will quickly be spotted and corrected. But when you’re off by 1, the problem can lurk going unnoticed for a long time, and will probably be harder to fix if discovered.
Sometimes it’s worth tracking a seventy-five cent accounting error. If it turns out you only caught a thief who stole the seventy-five cents (or $300 or whatever), sure, you’ve wasted your time. But, a priori, all you know is that the math looks wrong. And math is pretty much the one thing we are sure is never wrong, so you clearly don’t understand what really is wrong. Worth a bit of time to get that straight.
I’ll also defend the coworker who doesn’t own a personal computer in 2020. In 2010 that would have been a warning sign, but ownership of proper computers has been trending downwards as smartphones etc have taken over their most popular roles. If it’s important to your business that they have a computer at home, issue them a laptop.
The rest, yeah, that’s stupidity and a lot of it is hard to explain as just careless stupidity.
You…..aren’t necessarily wrong. What you want to look at will depend on your job function, your industry, and the type of error. In pharmacy, I once looked at a 25 cent error, which turned out to be a BIG issue because an insurance company had altered our dispensing fee for all claims. That means a lot of money can be missed, because the pharmacy submits a lot of claims.
But you need to know what your job is and what you are responsible for. Most employees looking at minor discrepancies are just spinning their wheels over minor discrepancies and have other things they need to do, or else the company starts losing money.
I’d probably trust this one.
Sure, it’s a $300 error this week but unless you know the cause it could have been a $300 every week or every month and worse, if the numbers don’t add up and you don’t know why then there could be far worse errors lurking and when you run a bigger account through it perhaps 30K or 300K will disappear next time.
Sometimes you pull on one little unimportant thread and discover a trove of important error.
also it sounds like there are some shoddy workflows there.
Wait, what? Because of the shut down, seasonal, or some obscure accounting trick?
The trick must be to lose money slower than deflation. 😉
Let’s call it “obscure accounting trick.” Should we hit our number? Yes, we should. Will we? No. How do we cover ourselves? Build up the
fat“planned favorability” somewhere else. “There’s a great deal of ruin” applies basically everywhere.However, to set yourself up for success, you need to actually stop shooting yourself in the foot and grab the low-hanging $20,000/week.
I guess I’m unclear on what the “we” is in the that sentence, but from the explanation I assume it’s not the company as a whole on an average week.
Short answer: yes
Medium Answer: not really (we are probably unprofitable as a company right now, due to COVID-related shutdowns, but I can’t tell you because I don’t know full company results)
Long Answer: I am the Factory Controller, so I am responsible for budgeting standard costs for the Factory and explaining the variances. We do this in conjunction with Production. The biggest impact is “how many widgets can you make an hour” and “how many people does it take to run this line.”
We have a few different run rates:
-What Production says they can make. This number is “pure fiction.”
-What Production thinks they are actually hitting. This is closer to reality, but because it is a KPI that is not well audited, it is still not entirely correct. This number is “massaged.”
-What we can actually hit based on prior 12 month actuals. This number is estimated, but is the closest to true. This is our Budget Number.
-What we are actually hitting based on our recent reduced performance.
The disconnect is between 3 and 4. We are not hitting targets we know we can hit. We…sort of expect things like this to happen from time to time and build a little extra filling during the sausage making process, if you catch my drift.
So, we’re not producing as much as we should. Are we actually losing money to standard? Nah, not yet.
I’m guessing some amount of your reason for continuing operation despite operating at or near a loss is that some fraction of those employees need to be paid now to retain their services in better times, and you might as well run at half capacity while you do so?
The coworker who does not have a computer at their home may use a smart-phone for most email/social-media purposes. Or may use their work computer for some nontrivial amount of non-work use…
One of my old acquaintances did that for many years, and likely still does.
Yeah, I feel like this one exposes ADBG as the old fuddy duddy here.
I’d guess most white-collar employees under 40 don’t have home desktop PCs anymore. A lot of them don’t have their own computers at all. They use phones/tablets for most personal tasks, and their work laptop for everything else.
I challenge this. I am a white-collar employee under 40 and most of my friends and family members are white-collar employees under 40. I know some people primarily USE tablets, but practically everyone owns a laptop, and uses it fairly regularly. The only other person I can think of that does not own a laptop and uses only a tablet is my 90 year old grandmother-in-law.
Note that we followed up and asked about a tablet: doesn’t own one of those, either.
Since they could just as easily have done whatever they were being asked to do on a phone/tablet that is good enough to serve as a computer, I find it more likely that they resented being asked to do work stuff at home and this was their way of refusing (whether technically true or not).
You can’t assume that. My phone’s decent for casual web browsing and good for email. But it’s really bad for a lot of the stuff I need to do for work. Even a tablet probably wouldn’t have enough processing power for some of my work responsibilities.
I assumed nothing. I just find it more plausible that someone doesn’t want to do work stuff (in the realm of accountancy) at home than that they are unable to.
I make public, embarrassing mistakes often and fail to care about my job 90% of the time. Yet I’ve been called a high performer multiple times and everyone is coming to me to fix their shit.
The skill floor is really, really low and recruitment for most positions is more about experience/connections/pretending to understand the domain, than actually being able to do things. Also see the amazing effectiveness of checklists on expensive to train professionals using expensive equipment in high-risk situations (including risk to themselves).
I sometimes struggle with impostor syndrome and then I realize it’s impossible to avoid, with the modern workplace being set up such that everyone keeps the facade of professionalism while having no idea what they are doing. The impostor syndrome’d people were right all along, they just don’t realize that everyone else is an impostor too.
If you:
1. Show up for work on time each day you’re supposed to.
2. Do more or less what your manager asks you to work on.
3. Don’t get into wildly inappropriate loud arguments on a regular basis at work.
then you’re probably one of the top/reliable employees at most companies.
Being actually competent at your job is a big bonus as well, but also serves to offset some of the above type issues for some people.
Sometimes smart people work at smart people companies and are thus not exposed to as much of the regular masses of “normal” workers. A friend of mine joined a pure technology company I was at and his comment after a few weeks was that he was used to being the smartest guy at his work, but suddenly he was the dumb guy at work. In contrast, I have family members who are wildly successful at companies which are primarily retail-oriented because they can do 1-3 above, but the vast majority of their co-workers can’t.
I think this overstates things a little.
I have a friend who works at a job where acheiving all 3 points is unusual, and will put you in line for promotion. Her coworkers have, among other things, colluded in robbing the place, used the workplace for an illegal side hustle, turned up hours late without calling in, and called in as unable to come to work because they were in jail. Several appear to be too illiterate and/or dyslexic to handle basic job requirements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the job doesn’t pay well ;-(
In that part about managers not auditing time sheets, did you mean to write that their subordinates are judged based on productivity per machine-hour? Because the way it’s written right now confuses me.
(And if it’s written correctly, could you explain who’s putting incorrect stuff in the time sheets, how are they incentivized to do this, and why would you expect managers to even want to audit stuff if that had the visible side-effect of undermining their supervisors?)
Is ‘The Release from Deception’ (1754) by Francesco Queirolo the most impressive thing ever sculpted out of a single block of marble, or can you cite something even more impressive?
This easily beats any other sculpture I’ve seen for the “How was this physically possible” factor. What kind of tools do you even use to carve the inner folds of a tangled net out of marble?
I can’t find any information on that! Apparently he did it all by himself, not a single apprentice or anything in his workplace. Maybe he was a wizard.
I’m not saying it was aliens, but…
Doesn’t have to be the standard size hammer and chisel. Or not a chisel at all, rotary tools in several sizes would be useful, too.
There had to be some drilling involved.
Probably a drill. Or several, really.
ETA:
That is impressive!
Looking at it I am not seeing very many (any?) places where you would really need to reach through the net very far in order to reach the body. For example, while the net may be draped away from the torso, you could reach in the gap between the torso and the net rather than through the net. The net follows the form of the leg rather closely, before veering away from the body steeply. Based on the fact that the work is jammed into a corner, the back is almost certainly unfinished so the artist didn’t need to resolve how the net works around the back, or behind the legs. The tangled mass of net around the head and shoulders has a lot of surface details, but few actual perforations. Super impressive! But I don’t see anywhere the artist needed to be reaching through super far.
Also, the deep undercuts and perforations in the net would be predominately done with a drill rather than a chisel.
How do people feel about the Companion mechanic in Magic: The Gathering?
For those unaware, Companion is a mechanic in the newest set, Ikoria, which is currently only available online in one of the two Magic: The Gathering video games. It allow you to play a specific creature from outside of the game, whenever you want, as long as you meet a particular deck-building restriction. The mechanic has taken over every format, and has led to speculation that there will be a nearly unprecedented banning in Vintage, the format where you’re allowed to “play all your cards”.
Personally, I think the mechanic is a game-warping mistake and if the designers were at all competent at aping mechanics from hearthstone (a much worse game), they’d have seen the damage the odd/even deck-building restriction cards did to that game.
As a (former) hearthstone player, this doesn’t quite sound like the odd/ even problem. The problem with Genn & Baku was that they gave players a much stronger incentive to use their hero power every turn, which made the game much more predictable.
Getting an 8 card hand is stupidly powerful, and having that 8th card be exactly the same every game makes the games much more predictable.
Hearthstone and Magic are different games, but it’s hard to look at “you can only play even mana costs, but you get a 6/6 for 6 with an abusable ETB as an 8th card in your hand” (and Gyruda is not one of the strongest companions) as reasonable after seeing the Even/Odd metagame in hearthstone.
It is probably worth mentioning that there are 10 different companions, all with different deck-building restrictions and mana costs.
I accept the expert consensus on it.
I’m disappointed I haven’t seen this and also glad to never pick Timetwister in vintage cube again.
I mainly play draft where I think it makes for an interesting deck-building twist. It’s not as format-warping as the cycling deck right now. It definitely doesn’t feel unwinnable when an opponent has a companion, which was what I was worried about initially.
I can definitely see a world where every meta standard deck has a companion and every companion deck plays out very similarly game to game. If that’s the case I doubt we we want to be there for a full standard rotation.
My first impression on seeing the cards was also “oh they’re ripping off Hearthstone” but honestly a Gyruda deck doesn’t really play out all that much like a Genn Greymane deck. They’re still very different games and while Wizards is certainly pushing limits it doesn’t strike me as inherently a bad thing to steal the occasional interesting idea from Hearthstone.
I think the cycling deck would be fine (albeit strong) if games were still played in pods so people could take your cyclers that fit into their decks, instead of drafting with a pod and playing random people with similar records. I do think this is overall a really fun draft format, even with cycling (simic mutate/golgari graveyard/sultai hybrid is a sweet deck to draft also)
It’s cancerous, but Lurrus supremely useful in an enchantment or cycling deck. All the flickering agent decks are terribly unfun to play against. I don’t mind losing, but I want to feel like I had some sort of chance, those make losing feel awful, to the point that I just concede if Agent drops.
It’s felt like the last 3 sets have each increased the power level a little too much for my taste, this is sadly beginning to remind me of X-Wing in the period just before they scrapped everything to go with a dynamically adjustable second edition.
My impression is that the seed to the Companion mechanic was that someone at Wizards noticed that people really liked Commander, and got an idea to make normal MTG more like Commander. The fact that this idea survived to make print is either a case of a designer being unable to kill their darlings or executive meddling (I would go with the later since my impression is that the set switches hands a couple of times between design, playtesting etc.).
From a Limited/draft perspective, it annoys me that all companions would be clearly playable in limited even if you removed the Companion ability from them. And the Companion mechanic, as we know, is really really strong. That just feels like sloppy design.
But I don’t hate companion. I think it could be a fun mechanic if it was balanced as to not dominate Standard, and as to make sure no companion is an autopick in draft. Sadly they made the power level a tad too high (once again, executive meddling to pander to the kitchen table Commander players?) and now we suffer the consequences.
One issue with Companions that isn’t mentioned much is how anti-Vorthos most of them are. Lutri kind of makes sense: he’s a magical otter. But why does he care if you have copies of other cards in your deck or not? Gyruda is a big sea monster that mills-reanimates? What even is the flavor of mill-reanimation? How can a big dumb sea monster take control of your opponents creatures? Why does the sea monster care about even cards? Its clear to me that all companions where a mechanical idea first and then had the flavor painted on. And none of them really connects with the monster theme of the set or represents a monster archetype (except maybe Kaheera).
Oddly enough, Mark Rosewater has mentioned in the past playtesting a mechanic where you could set aside certain cards to start in your opening hand that was brokenly overpowered. Companions are even better than that, because they are an extra card and can’t be discarded. I’m not sure why the darling couldn’t be killed this time.
Not too wise if so. Commander players seem pretty uninterested in the cards, and more casual players would probably like them just as much if the power level was lowered a bit.
‘Cause it’s got eight legs. That’s like, four times as even as two.
Maybe the plan is to get the casual Commander players to start playing Standard online? Companions seem more geared towards getting Commander players into Standard than to improve commander play.
But Maro describes it quite good here on his blog. This may be corporate smoke-and-mirrors, but I want to believe him.
Maybe it was a genuine desire from the designers to bring the goodness of Commander to Standard?
I don’t really suspect any ulterior motives. It’s probably pretty hard to keep a game fresh after 20+ years.
There was also such an easy flavor win by having the companions as something akin to Dr. Who-esque companion to a Planeswalker’s Doctor. (heck that’s probably where they got the name from)!
I mean, can’t you just imagine a giant walrus hanging out in the Tardis fluttering it’s eyelashes at the Doctor?
I’m mainly a standard/limited player, so while I understand that the companions are kinda destroying the older formats, I don’t really care. I don’t particularly mind a format I don’t play having curveballs thrown at it if it means that formats I do play get interesting ideas from time to time.
That being said, in Limited I think companions are cool. If you draft them early you get to do a very unique style of drafting that modifies the traditional CABS/BREAD formula. If you draft them late, you still get a pretty good card. Anything that manages to be a build around AND a bomb is A ok in my book. You also don’t see them often enough to get sick of them. Overall, I think they’re pretty cool in limited.
In standard, I’m more mixed, but still generally positive about them. I like it when sets “feel” different from one another and this really makes the set stand out. Not sure if I’ll still like them in a year, but that’s future-me’s problem. Honestly, my biggest issue with Standard’s is the Agent of Treachery. The card is just not fun.
They’ve been moving away from BREAD “Draft the good cards in two colors” lately. Ikoria in particular is really synergy focused, almost cube like in the way you want to archetypes rather than color pairs.
To illustrate your point, the best deck fills up on off-color cards that cheaply replace themselves to power up the handful of pay-offs.
yeah, but that deck is pure cancer and way above the power level appropriate for draft.
IMO the single-mana cost cyclers either should be have costed 2 or at least required colored mana. And Zenith Flare should have the words “any target” replaced with “target creature or planeswalker”
is/ought distinction. (I don’t disagree)
As a limited mechanic, companion is a cool, if somewhat overpowered, way of encouraging people to try new ways of drafting. So not too bad, I guess – I wouldn’t mind seeing it again in future sets, for limited purposes.
On the other hand, constructed formats are dead to me until companions rotate or are banned. I thoroughly dislike the way companions take over constructed Magic in every format they are legal in, how they distort the deckbuilding process, and how repetitive they make games.
What would make them tolerable for me? I like the idea of introducing deckbuilding restrictions (if anything, we need more Battle of Wits-style cards), but the risk/reward for companions as currently implemented is completely off: the reward is so good, that you need an extremely good reason not to use a companion. The right balance, in my opinion, would be for companions to be playable in niche decks, but to have most competitive decks without one. That is clearly not the case at the moment.
How to implement a not-too-good companion? With the rules as currently written, I think only Lutri comes remotely close to having a fair requirement. Yorion might be fair if it required 60-80 extra cards, rather than the current 20. But all other existing designs are probably hopeless. So either we ban companions from constructed altogether, or we change the companion rule. This would be an unprecedented power level errata, and thus extremely unlikely. Also, I don’t think it’s possible to implement a change that makes companions fair without rendering most of them unplayable. Consider the following options:
– 1) Using a companion reduces your initial hand size by 1.
– 2) When you play a companion, as an additional cost, put a card from your hand in the bottom of your library.
Both are pretty harsh nerfs, but I’m pretty sure that, with 2), Lurrus still deserves a ban in non-rotating formats, Gyruda still has a tier-1 deck in Standard, and the remaining companions become weaker but still see a lot of play. If we go even further with option 1), I think Lurrus is still a thing (possibly even a broken thing, in some formats), and the rest are just no longer worth the effort. It’s quite a fine line.
The mechanic itself is not intrinsically bad, but it is extremely dangerous and R&D have stepped far, far over the line into the territory where it becomes a problem. Lurrus in particular is the strongest creature ever printed, and that’s not a good thing.
I do believe it is symptomatic of a desire to make Standard more Commanderish – more about decks getting to execute their plan, generally involving some sort of engine and trying to go over the top of each other – which is a style of gameplay that does not appeal to me. Commander players already have a format to play: it’s called Commander. Standard should offer something different.
I don’t think Companion was a fundamental design mistake from the word go. Lurrus is giving the whole mechanic a much worse rap than it deserves, being by far the most powerful and the one with the most repetitive effect (infinite recursion wee), but that’s more a specific development mistake that could’ve been avoided in the same way Oko/JtmS/T3feri were specific planeswalkers mistakes. Heck even changing Lurrus’s restriction to include nonpermanents – and exclude FoW/FoN – would’ve gone a long way to stop its Legacy/Vintage dominance.
Yorion’s also probably a mistake, though in Standard I think Fires of Invention/Agent of Treachery is the larger problem in those decks and will lose a significant amount of its edge once it can’t Lukka->Agent->Yorion in a turn. And the Legacy Snoko bullshit should’ve been banned anyway (#banastrolabe). Zirda’s possibly eating a Legacy ban, but again that’s more of a “cost reductions are typicall broken” than something inherent to the mechanic. The rest of the companions are reasonably fair, either requiring significant deck concessions (Umori) or just aren’t that powerful (Kaheera).
They’re pretty fun limited cards, drafts are quite interesting with them.
I know people wanted to sign up for vaccine challenge trials.
Scott linked https://www.thecovidchallenge.org/ before.
I’ve read about https://1daysooner.org/ on Vox.
I don’t know which is better, but if you sign up for one you may as well sign up for both.
The Epistemology of Henry Jones
You are a post-WWI male rationalist, a University of Chicago PhD whose father was also a PhD.
In 1935, you narrowly escape death by saying the name of Shiva to a priest of Kali who hypnotized you and displayed some explicitly supernatural power.
In 1936, you are captured by Nazis and see a German archaeologist melted by the Ark of the Covenant after he impersonated the Jewish high priest.
In 1938, you watch the cup Jesus of Nazareth used at the Last Supper perform miracles.
In 1947, you perform archaeological analysis on a UFO that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico with its inhuman pilot.
In 1957, you see thirteen crystal skeletons come back to life, merge into one being, open a portal to “their home dimension”, and the Peruvian temple they were in collapse to reveal a UFO that matches the one from Roswell.
What’s your religion and what do you believe you know about the nature of reality?
I don’t get paid for philosophy or theology. All I know is that it belongs in a museum!
Most of that could be shoehorned into mainstream Christianity. The Church, as far as I know, has no stance on aliens (I think they believe that God only incarnated on Earth, not a different Jesus for every alien species but I could be mistaken on that.)
I long for some good Catholic sci-fi.
Have you read C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy? (Consisting of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.) Not Catholic, but nothing specifically un-Catholic. Admittedly THS takes place entirely on Earth and could more accurately be called mythopoeic fantasy rather than sci-fi, and Perelandra, which is my favorite C.S. Lewis book, will either move you to tears with its divine beauty or bore you half to death.
Also A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is a very Catholic book and on my shortlist of favorite sci-fi novels.
Second the Space Trilogy, although of the three Out of the Silent Planet is the only one that’s cleanly Sci-Fi. Interestingly, the first time I read it I thought Perelandra was the best book ever written and That Hideous Strength was a bit of a slog. Every time I reread them though Perelandra drops a little and That Hideous Strength seems a little better. Out of the Silent Planet just remains solidly good.
I’ll second the recommendation of A Canticle for Leibowitz. I recently read it as part of a (still ongoing) project to read through all the Hugo Award winning novels. I found it much stronger than A Case of Conscience, which has two major parts that never really come together into a coherent whole.
In the short story space, The Star by Arthur C Clark is both fantastically written and from a very Catholic perspective.
Not convinced by that part. At all.
Rira nsgre nccylvat “Sbe zl gubhtugf ner abg lbhe gubhtugf, arvgure ner lbhe jnlf zl jnlf, fnlf gur YBEQ.” vg vf n ovg gbb zhpu.
Though I still recommend reading it.
This is fair, so I will be more precise. This is a book written by a practicing catholic about explicitly catholic characters that reflects the teachings of the catholic church (as I, a non-catholic, learned them from a catholic school) better than any other novel-length science fiction I have encountered.
It is also, in my opinion, very good.
Take the above with as many grains of salt as you feel appropriate.
Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t a practicing Catholic (or any other faith).
Is Harry Potter on that list?
Yeah, I’ve read The Star and Canticle but hadn’t heard of CS Lewis’ trilogy yet. I’ll put it on my ever-growing list.
“Have you read C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy? (Consisting of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.) Not Catholic, but nothing specifically un-Catholic.”
Actually given authors’ theological views and high-churchism, it is anglo-catholic SF.
Have you read James Blish’s famous A Case of Conscience?
Also, Karina Fabian’s recent Discovery is slow in terms of plot but has great worldbuilding. Of course, in a universe with spaceflight, there would be a monastic order dedicated to rescuing stranded spacefarers.
Try The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. The author was raised Catholic (though she converted to Judaism before she wrote the books) and the story centres around a Jesuit expedition to an alien civilisation. They’re really very good books, though in an “emotionally powerful and gripping” way more than a ”fun to read” way- some of what happens to the main character is genuinely disturbing.
I read The Sparrow in high school, and spent years trying to remember enough details to find it again! (Or, more precisely, have intermittently tried to remember the details over the course of years.) Thank you for helping me find it!
I read The Sparrow 3 years ago and just read Children of God about 2 weeks ago. I would second that they’re both really good novels. I was going to say more, but I think I’ll just leave it at that.
Edit: except maybe that particularly in Children of God, you can see the degree to which Judaism influences the author’s thought. And despite the fact that many of the characters are Jesiuts, religion mainly appears as something that influences how they understand their joy and suffering, rather than something that drives a lot of the story. The manner in which they undertake their expeditions is largely secular in nature.
There is lots of good Catholic SF! Check out Gene Wolfe, RA Lafferty, John C Wright, and Mike Flynn to start.
For John Wright – don’t you have to start after the Golden Oecumene? I recall there being somewhat of an uproar/backlash to Wright after he converted from atheism (which, I believe, happened after finishing this series).
I mean, the fiction of a guy about to convert is not a bad place to start, either.
Good point. My motivation for the comment was more of an interrogative than it came across as, I think. I’ll try again.
Wright’s later work has an explicitly religious tone that doesn’t appear (to me at least) in the Golden Oecumene (which is a great series that wrestles with lots of interesting issues). Would you consider the Golden Oecumene to be Catholic science fiction and why?
This also puts me in mind of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. These novels are both excellent and rife with religious themes. But the future Catholic Church operates as the antagonist in this series, and I’m not certain about classifying these as “Catholic science fiction.”
I haven’t read The Golden Oecumene, so I can’t say. I’ve heard it’s good, at least. I’m only saying don’t discount the possibility that his work was implicitly Catholic before it was explicitly Catholic.
Hyperion isn’t Catholic, but it certainly is Abrahamic 😉
Yes, Golden Oecumene is very good – it’s my favorite of all Wright’s stories. It isn’t explicitly Christian, but it’s very thematically compatible.
Wright has said that he got some unfavourable commentary about works that the reader thought were written after he converted but had been written while he was still an atheist:
Wolfe and Lafferty are nonpareils. Mike Flynn I know nothing of.
I am curious about Wright. I have read two short stories by him. His piece in the Jack Vance tribute anthology was one of the better ones in an extremely good collection. But the other, about some guy chosen by fate / angels to devote his life to a cosmic struggle and the contempt of society, had the sort of clunky over-sincerity that I associate with harmless but politically extreme internet debaters. And the language was extraordinarily stilted – I was okay with it but I imagine it would put many people off.
I guess I should check out that Golden Oecumene that people are talking about.
Randall Garrett is an interesting case here (though his most relevant work is more historical fantasy than science fiction). He was a very non-catholic writer who wrote some excellent stories about a catholic set of characters, then converted to the point of achieving ordination later in life (though the ordination was in the Old Catholic Church, which may be seen as catholic or merely catholic-adjacent, depending on how you look at it).
The arc and the grail prove that Yahweh exist and has power, but the existence of Shiva contradicts every Abrahamic religion. My conclusion would be that the bible is divinely inspired, but not necessarily true, with Yahweh being a god, but not the god, with claims of omniscience, omnipotence, and sole creation of the universe probably being propaganda, but possibly being a mistake over centuries of memnetic evolution (but why not correct it?). The existence of aliens reinforces this- while Christianity doesn’t say that they don’t exist, it’s a conspicuous omission- Yahweh either didn’t know about them or didn’t think we needed to know about them.
Citation needed! Christians grappled with the apparent fact of oracles and other powers belonging to small-g gods in antiquity.
Citation very much needed! On the contrary, the Bible in several places says or at least strongly implies that pagan gods are in fact demons – which means at least some of them might be very real. E.g. 1 Corinthians 10:20 – “What pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.”
Wait, is it the position of some modern Christians that Hindus are demon worshippers? It seems like it makes sense, but I’ve never heard anyone explicitly say that to me.
Well, “some” gives you a lot of wiggle room there. I think the most common position is now that the Hindus are simply mistaken, and worship a name that points to no thing. But when Christians believed that supernatural events like rods turning into snakes were a thing that happened, and that these things didn’t only happen for good Christians, then the belief was that it was demons handing out miracles to the pagans in order to tempt them away from the One True God. I’m not sure there ever was much overlap between Christian belief in pagan miracle-workers and Christian contact with actual Hindus.
Even if it makes sense in isolation, Indiana had a very positive supernatural experience by chanting to Shiva.
The entire Old Testament frequently contrasts the God of Israel with the gods of other nations. It rarely reads like “our God exists and yours doesn’t.” More often it is more like “our God can kick your god’s ass.”
Basically this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllMythsAreTrue
Specifically, I’d probably conclude something like: there are cosmic forces out there beyond our understanding, and our myths and religions were clearly inspired by some of these aliens/interdimensional beings/paranormal entities, but we have no idea what they really are or what they want, so a lot of religious dogma could be based around false assumptions. Functionally it’d probably round off to a sort of vague moralistic therapeutic deism with scientific (in the “Ancient Aliens” sense of scientific) undertones.
Also reminds me of this exchange from Agents of SHIELD:
Aw geez, don’t get me started on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
At the end of The Avengers, Nick Fury reports to a five-member “World Security Council” that has the authority to launch nuclear missiles. First off, who are these people? The United Nations Security Council? The Illuminati?
That aside, one of the council members scolds him for not keeping “the war criminal Loki” in custody. Wait… last year the world discovered that the god Thor is real (and by inference, any unknown number of heathen Norse truth claims) and that’s your ontological category for the jotnar Loki Laufeyson?
How to make rational sense of this universe was a mess long before “Satan don’t real just because your head is a skull on fire.”
HYDRA, according to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
I mean, I know that. It’s kind of hard to forget HYDRA Robert Redford. What’s confusing is who did Nick Fury and SHIELD think they served before HYDRA was revealed? The “World Security Council” front needed a source of legitimacy to control nuclear missiles and helicarriers. (The more I try to make sense of it, the more SHIELD-HYDRA seems like a rivalry within a hypothetical Deep State. Like I can’t imagine anyone but US taxpayers are paying for those helicarriers, at a unit cost of much more than $13 billion and yet weren’t allowed to know they exist. The… series pilot? IIRC of Agents of SHIELD also showed flying cars that agents of this Deep State keep secret from the public.)
Pretty sure that both SHIELD and the World Security Council were both operating under the auspices of the United Nations, at least officially. The WSC seems to be affiliated with the UN Security Council (though they’re distinct groups), and it basically serves as an intermediary between the UN and SHIELD, overseeing the international spy agency. They’re also responsible for “facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace,” according to the Marvel wiki. None of that even comes close to explaining why they have the authority to launch nukes, though.
I am not intimately familiar with the ‘canon’ of Indiana Jones. Are the games (Fate of Atlantis, etc.) canon? Young Indy?
Looking at the wiki, it seems like ‘official’ continuity follows a ‘throw it all in’ approach, with tiers of canon (films overruling shows overruling games) that should be somewhat familiar to Star Wars fans.
That means he’s also encountered the lost civilization of Atlantis, seen many more Judeo-Christian artifacts (like the fourth nail meant to finish of Christ during his crucifixion and the staff of Moses), met the Babylonian god Marduk, run across several candidates for the Philosopher’s stone, and fought Chinese spirits and dragons.
It still bothers me greatly that the dreck that is “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was made rather than a movie adaptation of Fate of Atlantis.
Well, Fate of Atlantis is the second- or third-best Indiana Jones movie despite not being a movie, so I don’t really care what the makers think, it’s canon in my heart.
This article has been mentioned positively a few times in recent comment threads:
The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them
It attempts to clarify what the risks of transmission of COVID-19 actually are, and how you can adjust your behavior to lower your risk. It’s written by a well-credentialed professional who teaches and studies infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth: https://www.umassd.edu/directory/ebromage/.
My impression as a non-professional is that one of the basic assumptions of the article is fundamentally wrong. Given my status, and that of the author, it seems almost certain that I’m the one who is mistaken, and the author’s understanding of disease transmission is correct. Could someone please explain to me why the article is right about some of its claims?
The part that I’m bothered by is the apparent presumption that there is a minimum dose necessary to contract the disease, which means that exposure to doses below some threshold are not just less likely to cause infection, but actually safe. Here are some excerpts as we proceed through the article:
Saying “need to” and “as few as” seem a little odd, but this seems mostly correct. His Ref 1 is to a Vox piece claiming (presumably correctly) that you aren’t likely to be infected by passing runner. Ref 2 has comments by a number of people, one of whom offers a seemingly authoritative definition of “infective dose” as “The minimal infective dose is defined as the lowest number of viral particles that cause an infection in 50% of individuals (or ‘the average person’).
This seems off. Assuming he’s using the definition in the reference that he linked to, we’ve switched from a 50% chance of infection for an average person to a “required dose”. If we assume the rate of viral particles emitted are correct, can you somehow be completely safe from infection if you restrict yourself to only 4 minutes of close contact with an infected individual?
Based on my amateur mental model of disease transmission, this seems just plain wrong. I assume that if 1000 viral particles are necessary to infect 50% of individuals under some standard conditions, then a smaller number of particles should cause infection with some lower but non-zero likelihood. I’d further assume that lower doses are probably close to linear in infectivity — half the dose probably means approximately half the likelihood. At the extremes this linearity might be broken, but it seems like it should hold true near the 50% infection dose. Is this false? Is he right there is actually some minimum number necessary for infection to occur at all?
The only way that I can see his argument being true is if we believe there is a strong relationship between initial dose and severity of infection. I’ve seen it argued that very high initial doses might cause a severe case by overwhelming the immune system, while small initial doses might allow the immune system to maintain control. But even if this was true, wouldn’t this just count as a mild infection rather than lack of transmission? Perhaps more likely, I’m simply misinterpreting the article. What am I missing?
I suspect she didn’t want to complicate the article by including the probabilistic reasoning. I’m no expert either, but I assume: In theory one virus could be enough to infect you, but the probability that it lands on exactly the cell it can penetrate is very small. The more viruses you inhale, the higher the probability. But for the message (how to avoid the risks) to come across, this is not so important.
Nit: the name threw me as well, but Erin Bromage appears to be male and the bio at the end of the article uses male pronouns.
I’ve recently been reading some of Robin Hanson’s work on this. He reviews evidence for an even weirder assumption – that your starting dose of the virus influences the severity of your disease (higher starting dose = worse disease). This makes no sense, but the evidence is pretty strongly in its favor.
I think the theory is that once you get some virus in your body, the virus “races” against your immune system – can it spread before the immune system can mount a response sufficient enough to kill however many virus particles there are. You can analogize this to national quarantines – if one person from Wuhan gets into Taiwan, the Taiwanese contact-tracers can probably deal with it; if 10,000 people get in, probably Taiwan is set for an epidemic.
I can best make sense of the linked article if the professor assumes that for any small enough dose of virus, your immune system is basically guaranteed to win the race.
To extend the analogy further, maybe as soon as your body discovers the virus it starts working on a vaccine and finishes after I don’t know, 10 days. And the virus doubles every 24 hours, so if you start with 1 virus particle instead of 1000, you have a 11 days extra days with the dose of 1 (2^10 is 1024).
But if that was true, wouldn’t the variolation methods work as a vaccine?
The effect is probably less than linear, since the immune response is also dependent on viral load. So depending on how the numbers actually are, there could be a dose for which the immune response wins the race before symptoms are felt, but it’s not guaranteed.
I’m told there are two major components of the immune system – the “innate” and the “adaptive”. Probably this is analogous to lockdown and developing a vaccine. If you have a small enough dose, like Taiwan, then a lockdown can destroy the infection before you develop a vaccine. If you have a somewhat larger dose, like Korea, then a lockdown can prevent you from developing too big an infection, but you still have to wait for the vaccine to clear it completely. If you have a much larger dose, like Italy, then the lockdown doesn’t even stop you from going into severe acute distress.
Why doesn’t it make sense? I’d heard the theory before and it struck me as entirely sensible.
Seems, naively, like it would matter a lot if you have 10 or 1000 cells already infected (totally made up numbers) whenever that first B cell bumps into an antigen and starts the immune response. Is there a reason this wouldn’t be so?
Agreed. This makes perfect intuitive “common sense” to the average person, such that you’d have to be some sort of reasonably well-informed expert to think it doesn’t make sense.
It’s sort of like economics. “Saving money is good” is common sense folk wisdom. You have to be taught stuff like “actually society is better off if everyone spends all the time” (which it turns out is not actually true).
If the immune system isn’t likely to notice the virus until it reaches, say, 1000 cells infected, it doesn’t matter much whether you start with 10 cells or 1000 cells infected. This would be the case if the chance of the virus being detected is proportional to the number of infected cells (which seems intuitively likely), and the chance per infected cell per day is low (which is more uncertain).
What is Robin Hanson’s evidence this is true?
Here’s a notion– that when people are asymtomic, it isn’t necessarily a mild case, the virus is already interfering with the immune system.
It’s a shame we don’t have adequate testing so that we can track the whole course of the disease in a range of people.
A dose effect – increased likelihood of noticeable or severe infections as the number of virions inhaled increases – makes lots of sense.
Zero chance of infection below N virions, for some substantial N – that is clearly nonsense.
Not an expert either, but a mathematician, which might be relevant. I expect that you’re right to be confused about an exact step-function threshold; I’d expect the infection probability to be differentiable, and certainly continuous, as a function of the number of inhaled viruses.
However, I think it’s possible (and maybe likely) that the transition is sharp: that is, that at the (1000 particles = 50% infection probability) the derivative of the infection probability w.r.t. the number of inhaled particles is large. The most likely mechanism I can think of is something like “to get sick, you need the number of viruses in your body to be above a threshold” (I don’t notice single cells in my toe dying; I do notice my toe dying). The number of virus cells in your body isn’t going to be completely deterministic, of course, but as long as the distribution is fairly compact (e.g. Gaussian), then the transition from “the probability of exceeding the threshold is tiny” to “the probability of exceeding the threshold is close to 1” can be quite sharp (as a function of the initial viral load). Just to clarify, I’m not claiming that this is how disease actually works, just trying to come up with a simple model that has a sharp transition.
A possibly-helpful analogy might be phase transitions in statistical mechanics: any finite number of atoms has to behave differentiably, but macroscopically you can have a sharp transition from water to ice.
The assumption that p(infection) is 1.0 for n>1000 viral particles and 0.0 for n<1000 is obviously an oversimplification, but I don't think it's going to change the results very much. Neither does the technicality that if ten viral particles land in your lungs and infect two lung cells, but the immune system kills them all by the end of the day, you've been "infected". For practical purposes, an infection doesn't matter unless it has a significant chance of causing symptoms and/or being transmitted to another person. And I'm going to hazard a guess that the number of people exposed to 1000-2000 viral particles who don’t develop clinically significant infections, is greater than the number of people exposed to 1-1000 particles who do.
My problem with the paper is that, to the extent that it offers quantitative guidance, it seems to be daisy-chaining worst-case assumptions. Starting with the 1000-particle threshold. He cites two sources for that, but both point to the same primary source and that’s an off-the cuff remark by a microbiologist speaking to a journalist. One of his sources then goes on to say that the probable value is “in the thousands, perhaps as high as 10,000”.
And then goes on to say that since speaking emits 200 viral particles per minute, it would take 5 minutes of face-to-face speaking to receive the required dose assuming every virus is inhaled. And therefore anyone a carrier spends greater than ten minutes with in a face-to-face situation is potentially infected. Is it really plausible that if two people are speaking face-to-face, each inhales a full 50% of the air the other exhales? That seems like a pretty extreme definition of “face-to-face” to me.
He cites a single source that “at least 44%” of all infections are from asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers. The last time I looked at this, the vast majority of studies were showing numbers in the 6-25% range.
Regarding restaurants, workplaces, indoor sports, and social gatherings, he cites a single example of each to classify these as high risk environments, despite those singular examples having reached his attention by virtue of being newsworthy (and thus rare).
If you’re going to give people a single set of numbers for something you don’t know with high confidence, those numbers should almost always be mean or median estimates, not worst-case estimates. If you’re going to give people worst-case estimates, you should be explicit that this is what you are doing. If you give people worst-case assessments and just tell people “these are the numbers”, then I’m going to suspect you’re trying to scare them in order to get them to do what you want them to do. Which, in some of his comments, Dr. Bromage all but admits to.
I think regardless of the absolute value of the probabilities of any of these transmissions, even with your caveats, the point about *relative* probabilities of different types of transmission seems accurate. There are single instances of major spreads in these circumstances (as well as other single instances of similar types that haven’t been studied in as much detail). However, in all the studies across all countries, there only appears to be a single instance of outdoor superspreading. And even if the estimates of what it takes to get an infectious dose are overestimates or underestimates, they’re likely to apply to outdoor events and brief events just as much as to these extended ones.
I suppose if you think the point of the article is to say “don’t go anywhere or do anything” then maybe that point is wrong. But I took the point of the article to be exactly the opposite – it’s saying that we shouldn’t avoid *all* activity, but instead should focus on avoiding things to the extent they are indoors, long-lasting, and involve extensive lung activity, and don’t worry so much about things that are outdoors, brief, and keep everyone’s breathing normal.
I seem to remember somebody here claiming that 20% of those who are infected are responsible for 99% of viruses shed. If this is true then basing your behaviors and recommendations on average shedders seems dangerous.
Some quick takeaways from looking at the article and the guy’s bio:
1. He opens by making a broad claim about the infection curve based on bad data: He cites the number of new daily cases (which is staying flat or even slightly going up) rather than the daily percentage of new people testing positive (which controls for the number of tests being done, and that metric is declining) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html
2. Judging by his bio and publications, he doesn’t appear to be an expert on the subject. He’s probably better qualified than a random biologist, but that’s not a high bar given how extremely specialized scientists are. In-depth knowledge of (for example) the immune response in the intestine of the Atlantic salmon doesn’t really provide you with a ton of unique insight into the spread of respiratory infection in humans.
3. I think he’s still right, broadly speaking, and simply neglecting to add a caveat to each statement to clarify that there is no such thing as 0 chance of infection if you’re being exposed to viral particles.
This is really helpful but the best we can do is just to stay at home and we can save lives.
Was this meant to be a reply to another comment?
Alternatively, he’s saying that talking in SSC open threads is really helpful? I’ll agree with him there.
Christopher Nolan’s latest film “Tenet” (some sort of spy/sci-fi/time-travel thing) is aimed at a July 17 release. How likely is it that movie theatres will be open by that time? The date is two months away.
Some are already reopening- Dutch movie theatres reopen on June 1, with various safety rules. For instance, there will be a maximum of 30 people per screen, tickets will only be sold online, and start times will be staggered to reduce the number of people in the lobby at any one time. Initially they will be showing a mixture of films that were showing just before theatres closed and popular films from a few years ago (Interstellar, the Lego Movie and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are some examples).
I think that would be a creepy experience for most people. I wonder if COVID-19 will kill movie theaters, given the near-total penetration of 50-inch plus TVs and fast streaming services. If going to a movie theater isn’t going to be a social experience, I’d rather watch a new release at home.
Going to a movie on opening weekend and going to a movie anytime after that are already very different experiences.
If you’re going to see a movie after opening weekend, crowding is not an issue. I generally hate big crowds, but I honestly can’t even remember the last time I went to a movie theater and had to sit within six feet of someone I didn’t know.
The question is, can movie theaters survive on a model that restricts opening-week crowds, due to social distancing? You might be looking at half the usual box-office take.
I guess one expedient would be to double ticket prices, but that strategy would only work (if at all) for Star Wars-level movies. This is all going to play out big-time in Hollywood.
You could double the ticket price, then reduce it by 20% per week it’s been out, but I doubt the confusion would be worth it.
I attend movie theaters with recliner seats. I’m 6 feet away from anyone not my wife anyway.
Well, there was “Birds Of Prey” where we in normal seats, but the theater was so empty we had 6 feet distance anyway.
Drive-in-cinemas are mushrooming in Germany*, the US should not be too different. A nice sunset before, a good selection of foods and drinks, nobody annoyed if you make out… could be even better than cinema as usual.
*Wikipedia.de has 73 new during corona ( (to be) started in April and May); others were 5 all year open + 7 seasonal + 4 recurring events; another source had 14 total open from before 2020).
What advantage does a drive-in offer over Netflix/Amazon? In 1955 it made a lot of sense, but right now it seems odd to me.
The same advantage any in-person event has. Concerts, Theatre, Sports and Talks can all be enjoyed remotely, but historically the act of physically attending has been regarded as distinct enough to have value despite the lesser convenience and cost.
Attend a theater or concert gets rid of the second-screen effect that is common at home, and it forces me to participate in the event fully.
I think being in a car would be just as distracting as being at home.
I live near one of the remaining drive-ins in the US and typically attend a couple times per year. The sun sets about 9pm at the latest here. They don’t wait for it to be completely dark before starting the show. They’ll show the previews and such while the sun is setting. There are always 2 showings, and the second one will start right after the first ends. They probably try to avoid showing two 3 hour movies at midsummer, but having the late show end at 2am is not uncommon. A lot of people don’t stay for the late show. A few people will come just for the late show. Either way, it is the same price to get in the gate whether you watch one or both shows.
A lot of the fun is not in the vehicle. The atmosphere is very much like tailgating before a football game. People come early, set up lawn chairs, spread out blankets, let the kids run around and play tag or catch.
So a lot of that is going to be diminished with covid restrictions. But…it’s something to do if you’re itching to get out of the house.
There’s a closed hotel in my city that is opening a drive-in theatre in the next couple of weeks. They have a large parking lot facing a blank wall, so it doesn’t require any construction.
@Scoop
LED walls (jumbotrons) work in daylight (there are afternoon kid movie shows) and are cheap to hire now for lack of demand. At least ten of the corona-born drive-ins use them, maybe more (missing data in wikipedia). Several drive-ins are in large halls. Some are set up on areas originally used otherwise, eg. learner driver closed course, fair ground, fair and congress hall, that are cheap to rent now, or the drive-in is a side business of the owner anyway.
@keaswaran
If all else fails: gawking at the neighbors. 🙂
There are rarely as many as 30 people in the room when I go to the cinema. Most of the films I see are smaller releases anyway, but when it comes to the big franchises I wait until they’ve been out a month or so and go on a weekday lunchtime in school term time. A couple of times, I’ve been literally the only person in the audience for a film.
One was The Descent, at midnight in a tiny screen in Lyon. That was indeed pretty creepy.
One was Cats. That was really creepy.
All he has to do is hold the premiere near a Kerr rotating black hole. Speaking of which, the movie opened six months ago.
Any CGI in the film had better be good, considering that The Other Scott proved that you can efficiently compute anything in PSPACE using a CTC.
The real question is, how many people are going to call the movie “Tenant” no matter how many times you correct them?
Now I know I will
You monster!
I give it an 75% chance that the spelling of “tenet” is a plot-point in the movie and so more people will figure it out. Specifically, that it’s a palindrome will be important.
I’m hoping that the Sator Square makes an appearance.
Czech movie theatres reopened on Monday. Of course it is possible that by 17 July will be closed again.
Lots of movies scheduled for release about now are steaming on various venues. It typically costs about as much as a couple of tickets to see it in the theater, which is higher than average for streaming, but not ridiculous. We watched the new Emma that way. (Inferior to previous Emmas, but Bill Nighy is always a pleasure to watch.)
Yeah, Hollywood is getting worse. 😛
Oops. 😛
The US Congress is in the process of passing (or rather renewing) a massive surveillance law that I do not understand the full extend of, but one aspect that has gotten a lot of attention is that they are allowing federal authorities to collecting web browsing history of Americans without a warrant. They are doing this on the basis of “national security”. This seems to violate the 4th amendment so blatantly I’m surprised it’s going to pass.
The legal argument I’ve seen in favor of the law are that they aren’t really searching a person’s private property – web browsing history is stored in a distributed fashion. It’s a record of where you’ve been online in some sense. Therefore it’s more akin to tracking where you drive your car or asking local businesses if they’ve seen you, which is something they can do without a warrant. The pragmatic argument is that it’s worth it to violate people’s rights in the name of stopping terrorism.
I don’t have rigorous rebuttal except fuck all that. Browsing history is clearly something that is understood to private, and something that any layperson would say should be private. Requiring a warrant is a bare minimum protection that should be available. I don’t use a VPN but maybe I’ll have to start looking into that.
>asking local businesses if they’ve seen you
If you work in a shop and the police come without a warrant and ask you whether you saw a person shopping there, are you compelled to answer?
My understanding is that there’s nothing stopping law enforcement from politely asking a server owner for their IP logs.
But yeah, screw warantless surveillance. And install TOR.
Similarly to how placing microphone tracking movement of air in your home is tracking air, not you.
And placing camera in your bathroom is tracking movement of photons, not you.
+1 And depending on your usecase – TOR may or may not work and may or may not be better.
VPNs are damn cheap these days.
I have 3 or 4 different VPNs on my machine right now, not counting corporate.
One thing that strikes me is the number of congressmen who spend a lot of time and energy either:
a. Proclaiming that the current president is a menace to Democracy and is doing his best to usher in fascism
or
b. Proclaiming that the Deep State and the previous administration had it in for the current president and did a bunch of illegal wiretapping and spying and entrapment to get the goods on them.
and who still support increased surveillance powers. I infer from this that those congressmen simply don’t mean any of the stuff they’re saying, since if either the executive branch is under the control of a fascist or if the deep state is out of control, the answer to that would never be to increase surveillance powers.
This is called the third-party doctrine, and yeah, it’s kind of bullshit. We’ll see if the Supreme Court decides to throw it out at some point, and I certainly hope they do.
The basic idea is that by letting your information out of your hands, you’re showing that you’re not interested in keeping it private, so the government doesn’t need a warrant to access it, in much the same way as they don’t need a warrant to observe what shirt you’re wearing as you walk down the street. That it’s essentially not possible to interact with the modern world without leaving this sort of information and that most people aren’t aware that they don’t control it isn’t considered relevant. “Understood to be private” unfortunately doesn’t have legal force without a court backing it up.
Of course, if tech companies tried to do something about this, such as design their web browser so the information doesn’t leave the users’ computer in an intelligible form, the government would fight back. See the unfortunately bipartisan attacks on end-to-end encryption-by-default, as a tool that empowers pedophiles to share CSAM (term of art for child pornography). Similar arguments can be made about anything that reduces the government’s surveillance power. To be clear, I’m not saying that our surveillance capabilities are a bad thing per se, but the checks on their application are inadequate.
From what I’ve seen about the amendment in question, it mostly just reverts things back to the existing confusion. This has been an issue for a while. The Third Circuit viewed it as things like “www.google.com” is metadata, whereas “&q=midget@$$pron” is like post-cut-through digits and “content”. So, not really a new thing, but an complicated and controversial, detailed issue.
I don’t want to get too “conspiracy theory” here, but I’d say the answer is that a lot of people probably are out there, right now, thinking about this and investigating the sort of things you are discussing. The answer to “where are the engineers” is “off building things.”
But they won’t get any attention, because the government sucks at innovation and entrepreneurship, and the media is generally anti-capitalist and uninterested in covering the private sector, except to vilify them for being evil.
My buddy at church and his HS engineering students 3-D printed up masks that use portions of standard surgical masks as replaceable filters and are donating them to some under served medical center.
The economies of scale aren’t there, considering that we expect the problem to be solved in a few years.
The factory that can make all of these things cheaply would likely only just have started up by the time that vaccines are passing phase III.
One of the biggest gaps in government response has been saying “just make a billion of these things, if the market disappears for some reason we will buy them anyways.”
Just look at that cheese surplus…
20 years from now when “government ventilator” is a common idiom, we’ll all look back and remember how such a thing came to be!
But these things will have lots of collateral benefits against other infectious diseases present and future. Like platform vaccines and broad-spectrum antivirals, they should be part of a “man we really learned our lesson this time, Never Again” post-pandemic pre-more-pandemics preparedness toolkit. Unfortunately, that level of preparedness investment requires long-term thinking that voters and politicians tend to lack. Maybe that’ll change this time? *shrug*
The big problem is always going fast enough and having enough energy, but with interstellar travel, how big of a concern is the accuracy of our data on star positions? If you travel to another star and it takes you decades to over 100 years, can we aim the ship in the right direction to intercept our chosen nearby star on our chosen timeline? Also, if you’re travelling at high relativistic speeds there will be a lot of drag from the interstellar medium, and if this drag is slightly assymetric it will slowly push you off course. Is missing a star a big issue? You can course correct during the journey but then that’s more delta v to be accounted for.
It’ll be worse for earlier missions where you’re just aiming probes on fly-by missions, such as Breakthrough Starshot. The Breakthrough Initiatives website only says this:
What does the aiming plan look like for a hypothetical Starshot? I assume they’ve figured this stuff out already, because they never talk about aiming like it’s a major issue compared to other issues.
Our best telescopes have angular resolutions of 0.05 arc-seconds or better, which comes to 0.15 AU of positional error at ten light-years. If we’re travelling at 0.2c and wait until the midpoint of the mission to do a correction burn, you can still correct for that with a 1960s-vintage Apolllo reaction control system thruster and a bit over 10% of the vehicle’s mass in propellant. I presume we’ll have something better than that by the time we’re doing interstellar missions.
Being blown off course by the interstellar wind, er, “asymmetric drag in the interstellar medium” (but really it’s wind) is an interesting issue that I haven’t seen discussed, and it might be a serious issue for something like a starwisp. Anything more substantial should be able to compensate easily, probably by tailoring a corresponding asymmetry in the vehicle’s profile. “Trim the sails, astro-bosun, we’ve got a Nor’easter blowing hard out of Saggitarius!”.
>probably by tailoring a corresponding asymmetry in the vehicle’s profile
Just use any solar or radiator panels as control surfaces. It’s a trick that’s been used a few times to get extra lifetime out of satellites after their reaction wheels fail. (though I think those tend to use photon pressure rather than interstellar wind)
Ah, thanks. So it seems like it’s not mentioned a lot because it’s not a significant concern.
Now I’m getting David Drake flashbacks.
But I’m also not sure that this makes sense. The interstellar medium in question is essentially stationary relative to the ship (modulo some minor variations). So the vast majority of the force is just going to be drag. And asymmetric drag may be dealt with via trimming, if it even exists, but it’s not actually going to change the course relative to symmetrical drag. You could just spin the whole ship, and cancel it out that way.
If there’s a transverse velocity component to the interstellar medium, which I think is the case, then that will result in a transverse force on the ship even if it is perfectly symmetrical. But that shouldn’t be a significant issue except for the most ephemeral of vehicles. A lightsail could probably trim it out using photon pressure; a beamed-microwave starwisp may just have to live with it.
> Our best telescopes have angular resolutions of 0.05 arc-seconds or better,
Oh, that reminds me. How confident should I be that the Webb space telescope will actually be launched in 2021?
Not very. The March 2021 launch date was already likely to slip before COVID-19 hit, and now they’ve been under a stop-work order for two months. I’d be about 50% confident that it will launch before 2022 is out, though.
Thank you for the reply. Lambert: also thank you.
Late 2026, according to a linear regression at https://xkcd.com/2014/
I’ve seen navigation as an argument against relativistic missiles, but they’d be going a lot faster.
And the targets will be trying not to be hit. Even if they are planets – a civilization that can engage in R-bombing is a civilization that can e.g. put a planet-sized mirror between their homeworld and the enemy, reflecting an image of deep sky. Possibly even move the planet just enough for a miss, if you don’t do midcourse corrections, which you can’t if you can’t see the planet.
I think the argument was that small deviations for a relativistic missile would be too much to handle. Planetary defenses weren’t needed.
Also, I don’t know how much warning you’d be likely to get (at least for the first attack), and how long it would take to set up planetary defenses.
I assume there are people thinking about and to some extent working on things of this sort, but it doesn’t get talked about much. Because most everyone who’s not working on it, is implicitly assuming that we will for sure end the whole thing in a vaccine in a year or two and is expecting that we’ll have something good enough to end the lockdowns in a month or two.
Also, we went and convinced everyone that the masks they bought on Etsy are Good Enough(tm) PPE, and may not have the social trust left for another about-face where we convince everyone to throw those out and replace them with the new masks a bunch of nerds with 3D printers have cooked up, even if we could print up a couple hundred million of them in two months.
Is it widely understood that masks are mostly to protect others from you, and probably provide you only a little benefit?
I’ve seen a fair amount of public messaging to that effect; not sure how well it has reached the target audience.
Yeah, but on a wide enough scale, if that dude over there is wearing a mask, that mask is protecting me. If he would otherwise be super contagious and is now only kinda contagious, that mask is providing me a lot of benefit.
I think the more cynical members of the public have understood that masks may be mostly to protect corporations from legal liability and negative PR, and to protect governments from being assigned moral culpability for COVID infections/deaths.
This doesn’t sound to me like a plan that can be carried out in one year. Presumably, medical professionals and lab workers of all sorts have been interested in more comfortable and usable PPE for decades. If there was an easy and cheap thing to make, then someone somewhere would have been experimenting with it already. Now that everyone wants it, perhaps there’s a bigger incentive. But most of the things you’re mentioning sound heavy and uncomfortable, and likely not disposable.
(And in some contrast to your final point, it seems to me that 99% of the glorious feats of humanity have depended more on social engineering and behavioral change than any particular physical engineering – I’m counting here things like elections, traffic signals, fire drills, and sirens, even though there is a physical object involved in each of these things.)
I’m skeptical of this, because a lot of things in the world are just badly designed. Consider the paper cover on the doctor’s office exam table that is half the width of the table. This never made any sense, but it’s persisted for my entire lifetime.
I expect that it’s possible to design something better in usability/fit terms than a standard disposable N-95 mask. Maybe it hasn’t been done because of cost reasons, or because the people buying the masks are almost never the people wearing them in a health care setting.
Because capitalism is very efficient. There were already markets where innovation would have made a lot of money, so low hanging fruits have already been picked. Or to put it differently, n95/surgical masks are already pretty damn good, all things considered.
I’m sympathetic to this answer, but I’m also not sure it’s correct.
I definitely believe that in this environment, there are new “PPE use cases” that either weren’t considered at all before, or weren’t economically viable, but now will be.
Edit: And the “size of the prize” has definitely increased. Prior to this, making a better/more comfortable/cheaper mask would have made you a lot of money from all the doctors and nurses who wanted one. Now your potential market is everyone on Earth and you’ll make a hell of a lot more.
The potential market is everyone on Earth for now. In a few more months (and almost certainly within two years), it’s quite likely that the market for PPE will be basically the same size as it was eight months ago.
If that’s the case, then spending a pile of money to design and prepare manufacturing facilities for a business model that relies on the current potential market size is a terrible business idea.
My understanding is that PPE producers went through this already with H1N1. They’re understandably hesitant about falling into the same trap again.
Ehh.. Long term, I think you could easily persuade people to have a set of “biohazard light” gear in the closet as a contingency. Much the same way everyone conscientious has a first aid kit somewhere. Assuming you can make one that does not cost much more than a first aid kit, anyways. i
That was already the norm in much of East Asia, I believe. Americans doing what the Chinese have been doing all along is I think only a modest market expansion.
If it’s “everyone wears masks every day”, that would be pretty big, but I’m skeptical of that as a long-term thing.
I agree with John Schilling that the type of massive norm shift necessary to truly change the size of the long-term market seems unlikely.
Regarding the “set of ‘biohazard light’ gear in the closet” idea, I think that ends up being a rounding error when we’re talking about the size of the mask market. If everyone buys twenty fancy N95 masks and then doesn’t buy any more until the next major pandemic 10-20 years from now, your Fancy Masks ‘R Us business is going bankrupt a long time before the next pandemic. You need an increase in sustained demand.
“That was already the norm in much of East Asia, I believe. Americans doing what the Chinese have been doing all along is I think only a modest market expansion.”
I think United States plus Europe is comparable in size to China (especially when you factor in the greater average disposable income – I don’t know how many rural Chinese people were wearing masks regularly or if it was just the urban fraction of the population). I don’t know how India will compare to the markets in Japan and Korea and southeast Asia, but it could easily be a medium term doubling of the market.
I don’t doubt they’re trying. I think the publicity, much more than the size of the prize, will draw bright minds to this problem and yeah, pretty sure some advances will be made. But they _are_ competing with 50 years of innovation (N95 is from ’72). The chance for a game changer is very slim, and even incremental advantages are likely to be contextual. For example one would be self-sterilizing masks – so they’re safely reusable for much longer times. But that’s only useful in a crisis, normally you just pay your dollar for an N95 or your dime for the surgical mask, and don’t really care about reusability.
@Mycale Good point about being burned with H1N1. But this one is for real – masks will start being used in the west about as much as they were used in Asia 10 years ago. That’s more or less permanent, or at least likely to last for quite a while. I’d still be very paranoid to enter this game though – market will increase, but the production may well increase much faster, leading to a crash.
It’s not at all clear the mask market will go away. Covid-19 is probably with us for the next year or two, and during that time, there will be good reasons to have everyone wear a mask in most public indoor spaces. It would be better if those masks were:
a. More comfortable
b. Easier to get a good fit on
c. Better at filtering our small airborne droplets or droplet nuclei with virus in them
This all seems doable. And I’d love to see some government initiative to commit to buying a bunch more masks when the demand finally drops off.
A year or two is how long it takes to plan and build a factory.
It’ll still be churning out masks in 2050.
This is where I remind everyone that Juicero managed to get VC funding.
Are you seriously going to tell me that it’s impossible to fund a venture without 100% certainty that a product will be in high demand, globally, forever?
“Yeah sure everyone on Earth will want it, and governments and corporations will happily pay whatever you ask for it… but only for a few years. Pfft, why even bother?” Really?
Juicero got funding because investors believed there was a chance it would become a billion-dollar company. VC swings for home runs. That doesn’t mean you can get a single significantly easier.
Mask are a physical product, and worse, they’re a commodity physical product. There’s literally a specification for their grade. The margins on physical commodity are, in general, terrible. The reason VCs want to invest in tech companies is because they make non-physical goods, which means that the marginal cost of serving an additional customer is approximately zero. That means fat margins, massive growth potential, high revenue-to-valuation multipliers, etc.
Juicero didn’t exactly fit this model (physical product), but it was at least a high-end luxury product, with an ongoing revenue stream (the DRM-locked juice packs). This model got popular due to the success of Keurig. With hindsight, we can say that it was a silly idea (people don’t get addicted to juice like they do to caffeine), but the VCs were, as Edward notes, making a somewhat justifiable bet on the company delivering large growth on their investment.
With masks, there’s no way to dominate the market for a commodity good (there are lots of producers of N95/99/etc rated masks), and the margins are terrible. That’s not to say there aren’t sources of capital for them – banks like steady returns via debt financing, for example – but it’s not a good match for venture capital.
Well folks, I’m not sure whether this counts as me “calling it” or not, but if you’re looking for the juicero of PPE, we may have found it…
In my limited experience in EMS, until Covid-19 I’d never donned an N-95 mask. We’d always carried them, but you so rarely ran into a case where it was possible to determine in-advance they’d be useful. I used them a lot more for woodworking and home renovation stuff because I want my lungs to keep working.
And even if they sucked, as disposable equipment, people would be wearing them just long enough to deal with a patient contact. For a 30 minute ambulance ride, that’d be about the longest continuous contact you’d expect. In-hospital, they’d either be taking/disposing of the mask after a few minutes, or you’d have a team wearing a PAPR which I’ve told is a lot more comfortable.
That sounds like really expensive PPE. Basically all of our employees are going to walk around in NBC suits for a once in a century disease event. Plus, do our employees want to wear that? We put tape down on the ground to mark out safe social distancing: our employees rip up the tape because they don’t want to be criticized for not following social distancing.
Plus, do your front-line leaders want to write people up for stuff like this? Hell man, it’s hard enough to get 3rd shift employees to wear beard nets and stand at their line, and you want to dress them up like they are going to Pyongyang for a little VX vacation?
Lots of jokes these days about Elon Musk’s kid’s name. But I was reading about the 12th century logician/philosopher/theologian Peter Abelard who had an apparently “legendary” love affair with Héloïse d’Argenteuil. They named their son Astrolabe, after the astronomy device.
I do think I’d rather be named Astrolabe than whatever the Grimes-Musk kid is called. But clearly eccentric thinkers have long given unusual names. As a follow up, apparently Astrolabe largely disappears from history after birth. Perhaps he changed his name?
If they go through with naming their child X Æ A-12 (which might not be allowed in California), they’ll certainly call it by some other name in daily life, and it will probably just continue using that other name forever.
I think really odd child names are mostly used by very famous people, and by really low-class people trying to imitate celebrities. The middle class wants a respectable name for their offspring.
Any consensus on how to begin to pronounce that? I guess I’d start with something like “Zaya Twelve”.
Apparently, Musk and Grimes don’t even agree. But I believe that Musk said it was:
“X Ash Archangel 12”
Apparently the disagreement is how they want to pronounce “Æ”
This seems like a great way to compromise when two spouses can’t agree on a name. Make the name illegible and each parent can just call them whatever they want!
Peers will settle for “Ex” or “Ash”.
“Hey Ash, where’s ya pokeymans, Ash? Hey, hey Ash, where’s ya pokeymans?”
Being the same as the protagonist to a kids game is the least objectionable aspect of the name.
Given the gigabucks his daddy owns, Ash Musk just might have a functional pokeball he can beam you into. So watch out.
Exaa Adozen Musk
or Shah Atwell-Veigh
My three grandchildren are Iselle, Tovar and Honor. I don’t know if that counts as “really odd,” but my son is neither very famous nor really low-class.
I don’t think those qualify as odd. “Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette” is odd. “Moon Unit Zappa” is odd. “Kal-El Cage” is odd. Your grandkids’ names are “merely” exotic.
Or by people with odd cultural backgrounds. Four of my siblings have names that are rare enough I’ve never met someone else with that name except the person they were named after–and my family was neither celebrities not trying to imitate them. But the names are respectively Czech, Finnish, and obscure Bible characters–the first two childhood friends of my father.
Names from other languages aren’t what I’d call odd. At least not if the parents have some sort of connection to the original culture. If two white people in Alabama decide to name their biological child Xuan Vinh for no reason, that might count as odd.
And, in fact, the son of mine responsible for the grandchildren is named “Patri,” after a close friend of mine. I think it’s a normal Italian name, and I’m pretty sure the friend’s father was Italian — certainly his last name was.
Patri is absolutely not a normal Italian name, in fact, it’s impossible for normal Italian given names to end in -i. As far as a quick Google search yields, it’s occasionally used as a diminutive of Patrick in Portuguese and Finnish.
“Patri” is certainly not an Italian name as it is, but it could be a plausible diminutive of Patrizio (or Patrizia), at least in Northern usage.
My friend’s last name was “Pugliese,” so his father’s ancestors presumably came from Puglia, which is southern. But I don’t know anything beyond that about the origin of his father or the name.
I heard “Kyle” … hard X, “aye”, a, and L is the 12th letter.
I don’t think it’s about imitating celebrities – it’s rather that naming is a chance to exert your individuality and control over the world. It’s just like how lowbrow to middlebrow restaurants offer a combinatorial menu where you make a million choices about how to garnish and top your burger, while highbrow restaurants just three items on the menu, or even one.
(Why celebrities choose unique names is less clear, but celebrities are exceptions to many generalizations.)
Hrm, this analogy bears diving into.
A highbrow restaurant having less choice is about the customer trusting that the high class chef knows better how to put flavor profiles together. See also how getting the most authentic foreign cuisine is best done by asking the chef to cook at their discretion, instead of ordering anything from the menu, which has been optimized for accessibility.
The lowest class place (fast food) also doesn’t have much choice for any given dish, always just offering the cheapest options, standardized so cooks can make in bulk during the meal rush.
The middle brow place with all of the customization is about reacting to how the lesser restaurants can’t be trusted to make the best choices, the customer has the potential of knowing how best to serve themselves. Note that the dishes themselves aren’t high-brow dishes, but things where the core cooking is the same, no matter what your custom add-ons are. There isn’t a middle-brow place where you build your own paella.
Naming a child has slightly different considerations, unless the parents are that narcissistic.
I always figured middle class people choose respectable names because they’re imagining their child writing it on their college application.
A really famous and rich person’s kid has pretty good chances in life even if it has a bizarre name, so its parents can use the opportunity to expand their brand. A really low class person isn’t expecting their child to go far no matter what, so they give a name that seems fun at the moment. So that will often be something picked up from pop culture (Galadriel, Khaleesi) or just a name that happens to appeal to them.
The people I’m picturing are not the ones who go to fancy burger restaurants. I guess they would go to a pizza place where you have 50 options with fanciful names.
Wish I’d named my kid after a license plate. Missed opportunities.
Would you by chance have a vanity plate with ‘Bob’?
I’ve never understood why people get vanity plates. If I ever accidentally run over a mob boss’ son, I want my license plate to be as un-memorable as possible.
Okay, someone correct me here, because what I’m about to write is obviously crazy and I’m sure I’ve gone terribly wrong somewhere. But.
With all the controversy lately about the shooting of Ahmaud Arbey, I wanted to take a look at the extent of police shootings of black men in the US. From all the talk surrounding Ahmaud Arbey and others, I assumed there must be thousands of such cases every year. But mappingpoliceviolence.com (not going to link it for spam filter reason) shows just shy of 300 such cases every year since 2013. That can’t possibly be right, can it? But the Washington Post’s database shows similar numbers. Statista.com says there are about 680,000 police officers in the US spread through about 18,000 police agencies (wikipedia also gives a number just shy of 18,00 agencies).
My conclusion based on this is that the shooting of black men by police is too small a problem to worry about very much. I hate it, because it sounds like a horrible thing to say, but ~300 victims in a country of over 330 million with nearly 700,000 cops? Over 5,000 americans died from choking on food last year (Statista). An average of 335 Americans die each year from drowning in bathtubs (“Someone Drowns in a Bathtub Nearly Every Day in America, SeattlePi”). If I spend essentially no time worrying about those people, then I shouldn’t spend any time worrying about black men shot by police, either.
Does anyone have data to challenge this view? Are there thousands of black men being shot by police who for some reason don’t show up in the statistics? Should I care a lot more about small numbers of deaths? Anything else I haven’t thought of?
I wonder how widespread this magnitude error is… someone should do a poll where they have people guess how many African american men are shot on a yearly basis.
I wish he’d rot13’ed the real number and let us guess. Due to anchoring bias I have no idea how I might have guessed.
I believe something like that was a question on the last readership survey.
Ha, I know. I was trying to make a joke.
Also, according to the WaPo database, the number of unarmed black people shot in 2019 was 9.
@Aftagley Har.
ETA: Sorry, I didn’t see that this gets brought up downthread.
To be fair, “unarmed” isn’t necessarily what we should be caring about, since it excludes cases where someone was legally carrying and not making any hostile moves and the police saw he had a weapon, panicked, and shot him. I have no idea how common this scenario is; I’ve definitely read news articles about this, but I’ve also seen plenty of news articles about unarmed black men being shot.
And on the other hand, “unarmed” doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging in activity that would justify the use of deadly force (bare hands and feet are perfectly capable of being deadly force).
Yeah there is like 10 per year where the person shot was unarmed, and of those there’s 2-3 where the police look bad or questionable. We hear about every incident that is worth reporting on.
Which is why I hate it when Michael Brown is brought up as an example of an “unarmed youth” being shot by police. Sure, he was unarmed. He was also leaning into the officer’s vehicle and assaulting him.
Also, how many end up being like this? (Warning: video of man being shot to death by the police)
There was a claim of a knife being present, but it’s not visible in the video.
To illustrate, more people are killed with bare hands per year than with rifles and shotguns combined (as reported by the FBI).
If it’s the chart gbdub listed, that didn’t break out hands and fists from feet. Kicking someone to death on the ground is not that hard.
Yes, but since the vast majority of people have hands and feet on their person at all times, they don’t serve as easy indicators of being ready to do violence.
edit in response to Matt M (no relation): hmm, well…. yeah, maybe there’s not an easy difference.
The vast majority of people who own/carry guns never actually shoot anyone, either.
Scott’s covered the topic before on this blog, and the number was amazingly small. Probably like yours.
But while your number may be accurate (I’ve not challenging or supporting it, just taking it), a proper terror campaign doesn’t rely on actually killing lots of people. You make examples of people, and you also show that the cops can get away with it. “I can hurt you and my only punishment is a paid vacation” is a hell of a powerful flex in any social dynamic.
But that leads to the obvious conclusion that we (and especially the media) should all stop talking about it so that the terror cannot spread.
🤔
Do you prefer irrational fears over factual assessments?
Alternatively, we can conclude that the terror campaign is being perpetrated by the media, since it is them and not the killers who keep broadcasting the deeds in question.
Shoot the messenger?
Less flippantly, there’s a limit to which you can criticise the media for covering actual events. The tone may be wrong (I agree it often/usually is), but these are really happening and implying they shouldn’t be covered to prevent panic strikes me as a bit off.
Maybe not the extent they are? At the national level anyway? Do you think The Summer of the Shark gave people a more accurate, or less accurate perception of the risk of shark attack?
I agree that there is no strong connection between the coverage events get and their actual significance in terms of risk. Police shootings join murder, terrorism, plane crashes, sharks and a whole host of other things that present a minimal risk of death to people but are invariably covered extensively by the media. Much more dangerous things like car crashes, falling in the shower, choking, heart disease etc. get little to no coverage.
Complaints about the media like the above just annoy me a bit because in general the coverage reflects what people want to read / see / hear. That salience then feeds back into how frequent or significant people think certain issues are.
My point generally is that I think the media plays a more passive role in this than they’re given credit for and there’s not much they could do about it. Media companies that didn’t cover terrorism, crime, plane crashes etc. would probably be at a big disadvantage in the market because eyeballs mean money.
@NostalgiaFor Infinity
I have a fairly visceral dislike for the media, but you make a very good point. Difficult to see how they could be different in any meaningful way.
They could, while providing coverage of the tragedies, remind people how infrequent they are. We get this with terrorism. When an Islamic terrorist attack happens, while CNN will cover it, they also go out of their way to explain to everyone that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, and that your chances of dying in a terrorist attack are “killed by chairs” level. And they would certainly not give positive coverage to protests by people terrified “the Muslims are going to kill my kids.”
Not so for police shootings. For these the news outlets don’t challenge activist rhetoric that blacks are being hunted in the streets, etc.
Cover it, sure, because if it bleeds it leads. But provide perspective. They do for Islamic terrorism. They don’t for police violence or school shootings, which are also incredibly rare. I’m having a hard time coming up with a charitable explanation for the discrepancy.
I was also tempted to post something like “It’s only natural that they cover rare and interesting things like terrorism more than they cover mundane things like death-by-chair.”
Except that death by chair is actually pretty rare and kinda interesting too! How come those stories never make the news? Pressure from the “big chair” industry???
Maybe it is this shit-poster in me, but if I was Jeff Bezos I would totally have the WaPo cover death-by-chair once just to see if it turned into the Summer of the Chair.
@Conrad
You’re right about the contextualisation. That is something that varies by news outlet (and topic) and so presumably can be done better by the entire industry.
It’s a weird thing to say on a forum like this, but I think in this instance the actual numbers are completely beside the point.
I have a black friend, a single mom, who is terrified that her teenaged son might be targeted by police for simply being on the wrong street at the wrong time. She is a very rational person, and I don’t think she’s overreacting.
Whatever the (small-seeming) number is now, I’m sure it is dwarfed by the actual number of black men targeted by police before the prevalence of video cameras, the internet, and a concerned (white) press. So maybe you can forgive some folks for making up for lost time.
I think, given all the other useful discussions on SSC, that this kind of thread is just bad optics.
I’m not sure what exactly would qualify for the last item, but even before video cameras and the internet, bodies were still bodies and if a significantly higher number of black men were being killed by police in 1990, it would show up in numbers somewhere.
(It’s possible you would say we shouldn’t look at fatalities, but the myriad of unpunished minor indignities the system inflicts unnoticed by the rest of the country. Fair enough, but that’s a different argument from “we’re significantly at risk of death.”)
There’s nothing wrong with having empathy for the exception, of course, and emotional reactions are what they are, but it isn’t really rational to ignore the numbers when deciding what one should react to.
It’s very similar to wondering whether we should lock down in response to an epidemic. Saying “The infection rate doesn’t matter, people don’t want to choke to death” may be an understandable reaction, but it isn’t rational.
We should let them be unnecessarily terrified now because they weren’t properly terrified previously? Is terrified a good state to be in?
Forgive, sure; to ignore incorrect impressions seems unkind, though.
I’m not sure if I can sustain the health metaphor, but…imagine an epidemic 50 years ago that disproportionately targets blacks. Given that blacks account for 80% of fatalities, the (white) medical establishment is indifferent to the problem.
The epidemic recurs 50 years later, with a much smaller number of fatalities. The black community, sensitized by its previous experience and the indifference of the white community, reacts out of proportion to the actual number of deaths. I would find that understandable.
Jumping out of the health metaphor, I think 1990 is too recent a benchmark for black deaths stemming from interactions with police. I would suggest 1950 or 1960 for a truer measure of the problem.
It is possible for immune responses to be overly sensitized. It may be understandable, but that doesn’t make it rational or wise.
I’m not going to give a number and say “higher than this is bad, lower is good.” It’s all bad. But the amount of attention paid to it seeming distorts the picture, and exaggerating the scope of the problem has real consequences. It matters a great deal to a neighborhood whether the black community properly feels the relative risk of trusting the police versus not. And playing up the problem to the point of unwarranted terror is going to play into the hands of criminals, for one.
But you did suggest “before body cameras and the internet.” That’s why I picked that date. 1950 was 70 years ago. There’s not a lot of people with experience of being 20 years old in 1950.
And yet, from the numbers, she is.
Right. Is she equally “terrified” that her son might commit suicide?
Because statistically, that would be more likely.
@Matt M
Or be killed by a black non-cop, because that is way, way more likely than to be killed by a cop.
@Bobobob
Cool, do I get to accuse Italians of raping and pillaging because of Caesar’s actions in Northern Europe?
You seem to be simultaneously be arguing that she is overreacting, but that it is understandable because of the past…and that she isn’t overreacting given today’s risks.
I don’t see this as a consistent argument.
There is this weird vibe sometimes about SSC…I feel like lots of people here are capable of making airtight logical arguments and completely missing the point at the same time (not talking about you specifically, Aapje).
The reason I mentioned my black friend with the teenage son is that, a few months ago, I tried to convince her to participate in SSC discussions. I think it would be a good idea to broaden the perspectives here.
Also (and OK, I don’t want to overplay the “black friend” card) it’s interesting being exposed to this person’s Facebook feed. She has a group of smart, professional, rational, African-American friends who express reasoned views directly contrary to what you typically read on SSC, especially concerning the different ways white America reacts to black men and white men engaging in exactly the same behaviors.
1) it is not rational to be “terrified” of being gunned down by a cop for no reason – there are much more likely sources of fatal risk you encounter every day
2) but there are a lot of things that people are terrified of irrationally, so focusing on this one might be a bad look
3) but if we were talking about how it was irrational to be terrified of plane crashes or terrorist attacks, we’d be much less likely to be admonished for this
I’m not sure the right way to square all those. On the gripping hand, unjustified killings by police officers seem like the sort of thing it is reasonable to be unreasonably upset about.
“but there are a lot of things that people are terrified of irrationally, so focusing on this one might be a bad look”
Yes, I think that nails it, exactly. Singling out this issue, in this way, does no one any favors.
@gbdub & Bobobob
That depends. I’d rather have people be terrified of killer bees than of killer Jews. I’d rather have them have a bad theory about Mormons than something equally bad about the police, because the police is an important part of keeping society going, so we need good interactions between the police and citizens much more than between Mormons and non-Mormons.
Frankly, your ‘bad look’ suggests bad priorities, including if not especially for black people.
I’d say there is substantial evidence of police impunity in all kinds of situations–when the cops get caught doing something wrong, they seldom face the kind of consequences a civilian would face for the same thing. Sometimes, they even get to keep their job after {planting evidence, beating someone up, wrongly shooting someone}. We should fix this.
I also think we should pay attention to the size of a problem before we accept high costs trying to fix it. To the extent wrongful police shootings are the problem we want to solve, there are only about 1000 police shootings at all every year, so the absolute ceiling on how much good we can do is to save 1000 lives per year. More likely, we’re looking at, at most, a few hundred lives per year we could save by getting the wrongful police shootings down as close to 0 as possible.
If the problem we are trying to solve is police shootings of unarmed black men, then the problem is still smaller. Any deaths we could prevent would be good, but the numbers are so small, across so many encounters with police, that it’s hard to see how to reduce them all that much.
@albatross11
I agree, but there is very little evidence that this impunity is racial.
To frame it that way is harmful in many ways.
It seems to me that both Aapje and Bobobob actually agree on one thing – whether or not the police are using deadly force appropriately and in an unbiased manner is a very important question.
Which makes sense – this is literally the one thing about government that just about everyone agrees on: the power the state holds through their authority to engage in the use of lethal force is a Big Deal.
Regardless of how often they use it, the ability of the populace to trust their use of it is an extremely important concern. Undermining that trust is very bad (bad if the populace is doing it without justification, and bad if the police do it to themselves by failing to use their power judiciously)
Aapje and Albatross, I understand and respect your points. Let’s step back a bit. How would you approach the black community (whatever that phrase means) and explain that the number of black deaths at the hands of police has been exaggerated, and there are more important issues in the world to address?
In other words, is there a way to present a statistical/common-sense argument in a way that effectively defuses an emotional/fear-based counter-argument? Patent that, and you will be a billionaire.
@viVI_IViv
That strikes me as incredibly uncharitable given what he said. For starters, what makes you think this person ignores statistics?! If it’s because she’s scared for her son, even just going off what her friend said, targeted means a lot besides murdered. Harassment, intimidation, false-booking, etc. Your comment makes me think you interpret this statistic as the majority of black America’s distrust of police.
Second, he said “broaden the perspectives around here.” Someone posts a top-level comment and gets a variety of interesting responses, but as far as I can see, zero are from people personally scared of this problem. There are people who are in good faith trying to interpret the reaction, but do you really think that a first-hand perspective would be wasted? Nobody is asking the community to defer to any black American as a sole authority — that’s just not a risk for a place like SSC. But thinking that the lived experience from a thoughtful person wouldn’t be helpful towards answering the original post is hubris.
@gbdub
No, I don’t agree with that in the context in which Bobobob argued it (people feeling that societally is sufficiently just to support ‘the system’).
Deadly force, police profiling and judicial bias targets men in a way more biased & unbalanced manner than black Americans, yet aside from weirdos like me, people tend to think that it is just and proper, even if they themselves are men. Why?
Because society’s propaganda machine (not just the media) has a narrative where this is just and proper.
For black people a large part of society’s propaganda machine does exactly the opposite, not only presenting injustices that are done to other non-blacks as being only done to blacks, but also misrepresenting justices that are done to blacks as injustices.
The meta-narrative that injustice causes discontent, rather than a combination of injustice and narrative, is itself a false narrative that the propaganda machine spreads.
@Bobobob
An obvious way is for the media (and broader culture) that these people consume to tell a different narrative. This can be a more truthful narrative, but also one that is false in the opposite direction, like is done in many other cases where those who control the propaganda machine care more about keeping people compliant than about justice.
@AlexanderTheGrand
“Lived experiences” are interpreted and turned into narratives based on the beliefs of a person, which are heavily informed by the narratives that people are told. Time and again have I seen people interpret events that happened to them as evidence that their group is targeted, when I experienced those events as well, but don’t belong to that group.
It is pretty well established that people are prone to very poor statistical reasoning, so “lived experiences” very often tells you more about the narratives they believe, than uncovering statistical truths (for which we have way better methods than asking single individuals).
The impunity that albatross11 cites may indeed be the biggest problem.
At the immediate level, cops are insulated by both public-sector unions and civil-service job protections.
A level up from that, neither side seems willing to address those issues for cops. Republicans will talk about the danger of public-sector unions who already have civil-service job protections — and they are right — but they will exclude cops and firefighters from the list.
During the Democratic debates, Pete Buttigieg was challenged on why he didn’t get a local cop fired. And no one wanted to talk about how incredibly hard it is to fire a cop. The Broward cop who cowered behind his car during the 2018 school shooting was just reinstated to his job, with full back pay and seniority.
Bobobob wrote:
“I think, given all the other useful discussions on SSC, that this kind of thread is just bad optics.”
My interpretation is that he claims that certain statistics should not be discussed because they are “bad optics” that could turn away people like his black friend.
Aaapje:
“Deadly force, police profiling and judicial bias targets men in a way more biased & unbalanced manner than black Americans, yet aside from weirdos like me, people tend to think that it is just and proper, even if they themselves are men.”
Do you think men are punished too much? Women are punished too little? Men are punished for crimes by women? Crimes by women are simply ignored? Men are punished for crimes by other men?
@Nancy
I simply want men and women to be punished equally. The rest is not about gender issues, but efficacy of punishment, which is far more complicated than ‘too much’ or ‘too little.’ For example, you can punish differently, which is less of one kind of punishment, but more of another.
The studies suggest that there is a bias at each stage of the process, so women are more likely not to get charged at all, to get charged less heavily, to get better plea deals, to get lighter sentences, etc.
I don’t think that gender roles or their consequences are forced onto one gender by the other, but rather, that both genders enforce them on both genders (although not always in the (exact) same way).
I have seen no research that investigates whether female judges have a greater or smaller gender bias.
@Aaapje
It took me a bit to realize you mean what you’re saying, that all you want is more fairness.
I suppose I’m too much of a consequentialist or maybe a utilitarian to see that as a strong goal. Do you think better outcomes will result from more fairness, regardless of the form the fairness takes, or do you think of fairness as a value in itself?
@Nancy Lebovitz
The appropriate level of punishment is very complex, with a lot of factors being involved. I didn’t say that I didn’t care about it, but I don’t have very strong opinions about it given how complex it is and how little definitive data there is.
Fair punishment is much more simple, because if you reject discrimination, it is wrong per se. It also has a makes for a fairly simple argument to equalize punishment when aiming for efficacy of punishment, since if men and women (or white and non-white men) get different punishment, then at least one group is presumably being over- or under-punished. This also makes research more complex, since if you want to test efficacy, you now need to separate between groups. And if you find that a group reacts poorly to punishment, it is hard to figure out if it is because they get treated differently or because of that group reacting differently to the same punishment.
That doesn’t follow. The optimal punishment depends, among other things, on the characteristics of the offender. Those might differ by group.
I think police shootings are somewhat similar to mass shootings and terrorist attacks–they’re rare and horrible enough to be newsworthy, plus there’s political juice in reporting them in maximally sensationalized ways. And the result is that they seem like a bigger threat than they really are.
Fun fact: About half of all mass shootings in the US result in zero deaths. A large number of the others result in only one death. Remember this the next time someone gives you some huge mass shooting number.
Why?
What possible use would that data point have? Am I supposed to adopt the future position of “Eh, mass shootings aren’t all that bad?” just because the average lethality isn’t sky-high?
Actually – you just motivated me to go look up stats. Yes, the mode of mass shooting deaths from 2019 and 2020 is 0, but the average number of deaths is between 1 and 2. At the same time, however, an average of between 3-5 people end up being shot and injured in mass shootings.
It can help correct a false impression (that you personally may or may not have had).
When people talk about x mass shootings per year, the image they are trying to evoke (and likely have themselves) is of someone walking into a school and mowing down over a dozen students, as opposed to the much more typical case of a gang member shooting five members of the opposite gang and none of them dying. Both are not great; one is much worse than the other.
Bobobob:
So, I have a close friend who was terrified that her daughter[1] would be lured in by a stranger and sexually molested. I mean, she was constantly worried about this, telling her daughter (and my kids) about “stranger danger”, etc. Now, from everything I’ve been able to learn, the actual risk of a child being abducted and sexually abused by a stranger is *extremely low*, much lower than the risk of them drowning in a swimming pool or being killed by a car while on their bike. But there was no discussing this with our friend–she was entirely convinced of the danger posed to her daughter by every passing stranger.
I think your friend and my friend are suffering from the same basic problem, which is a media-assisted messed-up threat assessment. It’s not that there’s *no* danger there–both creeps who want to molest children and cops who are on a hair-trigger definitely exist and can do your kids harm, and one reason the rates of both are so low is that people do take some precautions. But I think media coverage leads a lot of people to overestimate the size of the danger in both cases.
[1] Her daughter is now in her early 20s, so presumably the worry about this particular issue is over now.
Counterpoint: the reason why we care so much about kidnapping, terrorism and police shootings is that they involve intentional action on behalf of the wrong-doer.
Getting hit by a bicycle (or striking someone on a bicycle) is something that people can imagine happening to them or by them. Same with other tragic events like parents running over their own children with their cars.
But someone going out of their way to commit deliberate harm – that’s a major civilizational defect.
That might be why we care about them, or punish them severely, or are fascinated by them. But that’s not a good reason to worry about them. When I let my kids out of the house alone, yes I’ve told them not to get in anybody’s car, but what I really stress is to not walk in the street and to look both ways before crossing. I don’t worry about them getting kidnapped, because that’s so unlikely such a fear is irrational, but I do worry about them getting run over.
Given the statistics above (which aren’t even for questionable/unjustified shootings, just ALL shootings), what is your basis for believing that? More to the point, do you apply that standard for rational reaction to all other risks of a similar magnitude?
EDIT: I see you’re arguing that since people do this all the time with all manner of threats (gun violence in general, terrorism, stranger danger), singling out this one is a ‘bad look’. Since we’ve entertained just this argued the topic on gun violence and stranger danger AND terrorism here before, that strikes me as special pleading.
And your basis for believing this is? Note that you say “targeted by police”, as in implying that police were deliberately going out of their way to murder black men who were not a threat. I have no doubt:
A) that this happened, as we have evidence of cases, mostly in the American south.
and B) that it happened more often in the past, though I would argue that the change is driven more by changes in societal attitude than technology, and if you dispute that I’ll be happy to compare the trend in shootings. I’m fairly confident that the number of shootings per capita trend downward well before the advent of dash cams, body cams, and cell phones.
But to say that it “dwarfs” the numbers implies a high degree of confidence as to just how common it was, and that you’re not providing numbers makes me think that either you are not actually that confident, or that your confidence is based on something other than facts.
To be honest, I was tempted to report your comment just for saying this, but instead I’ll just say that I strongly disagree, and that you should avoid making this sort of argument because:
A) it is the mark of a position unsupported by facts.
B) It’s an inherently bad faith act that poisons further discussion.
EDIT: Bottom line, your entire line of reasoning seems to be a mix of special pleading and emotional arguments. I know this is a high emotional saliency issue for a lot of people, but I’d argue that this is precisely WHY actually digging into the numbers is so important.
Just to clarify, I find these conversations very stimulating, and I don’t hold hard feelings for anyone on this thread. The great thing about SSC is interacting with people outside your particular bubble and being exposed to different views.
@Bobob
Fair enough, and as I’m about to note in the spinoff thread re: the police side, irrationality on this issue is absolutely bidirectional. I’ve had almost mirror image versions of the same conversation with friends who are police officers as with black friends, acquaintances, and coworkers.
And to take a stab at your “explain it to the black community”, the first trick is that you can’t explain it to “The Black Community”. “The Black Community” is an artificial construct with pretty much no relevance to the discussion. The largest relevant group with which is it meaningful to have a discussion like this is “The black population of Police/Sherriff jurisdiction X”, and even that elides the massive difference between the real world experience and risk profile of a middle aged black woman vs. a middle aged black man living in San Francisco vs. a young black man living in a middle class/gentrified neighborhood in St. Louis vs. a young black man living in a higher crime neighborhood in St. Louis. Differences in policing and police culture between departments, differences in crime rates and the effect of those crime rates on said culture and procedures, etc. To be honest I always try to frame these discussions in individual terms when I have them.
What does she mean by “targeted”, exactly?
I think the dynamic where cops routinely harm or kill people, including a disproportionate number of minorities, and then get away with essentially no consequences is a huge factor.
I remember seeing a number of articles decrying that the response to COVID-19 is insufficient by making an analogy to 9/11. After all, COVID-19 has killed far more Americans than the 9/11 terrorists! But I think that is flawed reasoning. People react much more strongly to other humans intentionally harming their in-group than they do to harm that is sort of endemic in the world (dying in car accidents, dying by falling off a chair, insert whatever hypothetical you want that kills a few thousand people annually in the US). I tend to think this distinction is reasonable.
“The cops might conduct a no-knock raid on your house at midnight, then shoot you to death when you try to defend yourself against multiple unidentified intruders, and there will be no consequences for them killing you even though their warrant was for another house” is absurd. Absurd! And there’s effectively nothing you can do to protect yourself against that hypothetical. Protecting you against other people intentionally harming you is one of the basic functions of the state, and this failure is made all the worse by the fact that it’s the agents of the state inflicting the harm.
If all of these stories where the cops clearly acted egregiously wrongfully in killing someone ended with the officers involved being promptly fired, charged, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, then I’d feel a lot less concerned by this. Until we’re at that point though, I’m not going to fault people for being just as concerned about cops (getting away with) murdering Americans as other people are worried about (for example) extremist Islamic terrorists murdering Americans.
It’s also worth remembering that we have limited visibility into the system. If the police can get away with killing Eric Garner or Breonna Taylor or Daniel Shaver, then you have to wonder what they’re getting away with that doesn’t make the news. I get that the stats suggest there’s a cap (in the hundreds! Albeit it’s probably materially lower than that) on how many murders the police might be doing without justification, but if they can kill people without justification and have no consequences, then I think it’s reasonable to suspect that there’s a lot of less-than-murder misconduct that is also resulting in no consequences for the police (I will gesture here in the general direction of civil asset forfeiture). If we can’t impose responsibility on officers who murder people, then I’m skeptical of our prospects for other policing reforms, so it seems to make some sense to focus on this issue for that reason as well.
That’s precisely why there is no point in worrying about it.
I suppose I didn’t expressly add the obvious caveat “unless you (and others who agree with you) successfully implement structural changes such that police can no longer get away with this type of misconduct” — clearer now?
Of course, that point — that we could implement changes via politics to decrease the perceived risk of this issue — is the entire ballgame. That is, after all, the explicit goal of most people who treat this as a serious issue.
Is it really your contention that cops are conducting a “terror campaign”? That is, deliberately targeting and killing innocent black men to keep the black community “in line”? Or is that just a rhetorical flourish?
It’s possible that it’s an unintentional emergent property of the system.
It’s also possible that manufacturing the existence of such a campaign is good for ratings/fundraising/political aspirations.
I looked at this a couple years ago, and based on the Washington Post and Guardian numbers, I think you’re right.
There are two caveats that may matter:
a. I think the Washington Post / Guardian were only counting fatal shootings, so there might be more black men being shot by the police but not killed, and that might change the numbers a bit–I don’t know of any available data.
b. There’s a lot of bad stuff the police can do to you short of shooting you dead, and maybe the 300-ish black guys shot by the cops correspond to a hundred times that number of black guys getting roughed up by the cops. Again, I don’t know of good data on this stuff.
Also, IIRC, the set of fatal police shootings of unarmed people is only around 300 or so people a year. Taking that as a first approximation of the number of bad police shootings[1]–the ones we would like to prevent by changing something about policemens’ training, rules of engagement, oversight, etc. A few hundred people a year being killed is a bad thing, but in perspective, it probably shouldn’t be a huge nationwide political issue. It would be easy to do more harm than good in trying to solve that problem.
[1] Not all unarmed people shot by the police *shouldn’t* have been shot, but not all armed people *should* have been shot–I imagine it very roughly balances out and that this is at least a good rough guess of the number of police shootings we could prevent with better policies.
According to the WaPo database the number of shootings of unarmed people in 2019 was 41.
You’re right, I was misremembering it. I think combining unarmed and “unknown” together, we get to less than a hundred.
If you’re referencing those WaPo numbers, please keep in mind that they consider someone with a vehicle or a toy weapon not to be unarmed. If you include those categories, the number of unarmed people triples.
On b, I thought there was a Harvard professor who attempted to study that and I believe his conclusions were that, for a given police encounter, black men were actually less likely to be shot, but more likely to be “roughed up” or otherwise physically handled by the cops. They also were subject to more police encounters in general.
Isn’t that consistent with ‘Black men are slightly more likely to be shot but far more likely to be stopped by police’?
I think it is consistent with “slightly more likely to be shot BECAUSE they are far more likely to be stopped by police”.
No, that’s wrong: slightly less likely to be shot per encounter but many more encounters – significantly more likely to be shot by police.
Do they control for other factors such as income, employment or marital status when it comes to likelihood of having a police interaction?
You’re probably recalling Roland Fryer’s study of police interactions in Houston:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force
Worth looking at some methodological critiques too, e.g.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-police
which also links to other circumstantial evidence for the “yes, there is racial bias in shootings” view.
Huge gender bias too…
Arbey was not shot by police, although the local police seemed slow to act on the sort of shooting that probably ought to get you immediately arrested and charged even if a self defense claim ends up deciding the final verdict. This might be one of those cases that, seemingly contradictorily, doesn’t get as much attention as we saw in Ferguson, because I doubt many people are going to be vocally on the side of the shooters here.
(Aside: If you think that number is low, wait till you find out how many people are actually killed by “assault rifles”)
In defense of highlighting police shootings, we really should be holding police to a higher standard and be more concerned by abuse of authority there. Personally I think the police are shooting more often than they should, and have a built up series of defenses that allow them to justify every shooting after the fact. “He had something in his hand”, “a caller said the suspect might be armed”, “He was reaching toward the general direction of his waist”, “he was close enough that he had a knife he could have gotten me”, “he did not immediately respond to the contradictory commands my armed partner and I were screaming at him”… all these somehow get cops off scot free every single time. This may be falling disproportionately on black men (I think it is unclear and depends heavily on what you mean by “disproportionate”), but the fundamental issue is itchy trigger fingers at least as much as racism.
To be clear, I suspect most police shootings are justified, but the fact that we fail to punish (or usually even deeply investigate) even the few cases that seem obviously unjustified erodes public confidence in the police, which is itself deadly.
How many police officers are actually seriously injured or killed by suspects every year? Police should not be engaging with deadly force unless their lives or the lives of someone else are in immediate danger, so if their “kill ratio” is too high I would think that indicates their idea of immediate danger is poorly calibrated.
We’ll see what happens if they’re acquitted, because according to the District Attorney, the shooters didn’t commit a crime.
But of course he would say that, since he’s now in CYA mode.
A lot seems to rest on the claim that they were in “hot pursuit of a burglary suspect” which seems really, really dubious. Certainly not the sort of claim you would expect a cop to just take at face value unless he’s racist or an idiot.
I mean, they rode up on a jogger with guns drawn. You really need a damn good reason to do that (like, literally chased him out of my house with him leaving a cartoonish trail of stolen goods, not “maybe saw him cut through a construction site on his jog”)
At the same time, the only reason we think he was a jogger was because his family said so, and of course they would say that.
We’ll just have to wait and see what gets presented at trial, but I don’t think a conviction is a forgone conclusion.
In a state without open carry, I’m led to believe that anyone who has a gun out has escalated violence to the point where others can respond with deadly force.
Georgia is an open carry state. What is the standard there for having guns out? If some guy chases me and he has a gun, am I allowed to believe he is bringing deadly force and allowed to defend myself?
Conrad… People dont rob construction sites on foot. Ive worked construction, and there is a lot of stuff there one has to lock up, but you are not going to be running away with.. any of it .. slung over your shoulder. Or rather, if you did, that would be very damn prominent in the press coverage because it would fall under the heading of “comedic stupid crook”
@Edward I’m not sure what the law is specifically in Georgia, but there is definitely a difference between “carrying a gun” and “brandishing a gun”. Not sure where this falls exactly.
“Open carry” should really just be though of in comparison to “concealed carry”. There are many places where having a gun is legal, but only if it is visible. It is basically never legal (and never a good idea) to point a gun at somebody except when you reasonably believe you will be justified in shooting that person.
@Conrad I don’t think a conviction is a foregone conclusion (especially if the Attorney is representative of the “peers” who would make up the jury pool) but “a conviction is not a foregone conclusion” is a long way from “we never had reason to even try to charge these guys”
If you are assigning the same priors to “he’s a jogger” and “he was fleeing on foot from a burglary he had just committed in athletic attire in broad daylight”… I mean, that’s kind of the problem right? What’s the possible justification for assuming the latter is equally likely? There are many, many, more jogs than robberies.
You underestimate the irrationality of criminals. A guy once smashed my window to take a GPS worth $20 so he could sell it for crack. Wandering through a construction site looking for a drill he can sell for $20 for crack is exactly like something a criminal would do.
What do you want me to say? Fry the bastards? I was told Trayvon would have looked like Obama’s son and Michael Brown was a gentle giant, but it turns out Obama’s kids aren’t much for breaking open people’s skulls on pavement and gentle giants rob convenience stores and punch cops in the face. Now I’m told this guy was a jogger and some rednecks decided “hey let’s go do murder in broad daylight because we’re racist.”
Thanks, but I’m going to wait for hear both sides of the story presented at the trial.
A trial that would not happen at all if the local District Attorney had his way, which, c’mon, lends just a bit of stink to the whole thing.
See, that’s why I’d like all the facts. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone mention “athletic attire” (admittedly I haven’t been paying much attention because I pattern matched this whole thing to “media hullabaloo that winds up being completely different than initially presented”) so I just went and looked at the video and it looks to me like he’s wearing cargo shorts and a loose t-shirt. I wouldn’t call that “athletic attire,” but the video is kind of grainy. It would be nice to be able to see the exact articles in question presented at court.
What about his footwear? What about headphones? What else was in his pockets? Where does he actually live? Is this his neighborhood or not? Does he jog often? Does he jog here often?
Has anyone asked or answered these questions? That would be nice to know before I join you with the pitchforks and torches because I’ve seen media frenzies like this before.
“He was out jogging” is not an extraordinary claim. It is in fact the default assumption you ought to make if you see somebody running along a road in the middle of the day.
“We were so certain this person was in the process of committing a crime that we felt justified confronting him with firearms as private citizens” IS an extraordinary claim. You should not be treating the burden of proof as equal here, let alone assuming the burden is mostly on the dead man.
gbdub:
If you personally see a black guy running along the road after having poked around in a construction site, your priors should be massively tilted toward “jogger who was curious about what they’re building” rather than “thief I need to shoot.”
If you see a media outrage frenzy about some alleged racist murder sheltered by racist police, I think your priors should be a bit different, because a large fraction of those media frenzies turn out to be bullshit, and many more end up being ambiguous enough that it’s hard to be sure what happened.
The reporting in the Martin and Brown shootings sounded just like the reporting on this story. The eventual facts that came out were pretty different from the initial reporting in those two cases. That makes me quite uncertain of what additional information might come out here.
And to be clear, I’m not “joining the media frenzy”, but it is ridiculous that these guys were not immediately arrested. Their justification was literally that they thought he was the suspect from a bunch of burglaries that didn’t actually happen, and that they assumed he was armed because one time (not the day of the shooting) they saw “him” (an unknown black guy, possibly him, they had seen on surveillance tapes) stick his hand down his pants.
He was on a home construction site, shortly before the shooting (the cops were called about this) but that’s at worst a misdemeanor unless he committed grand theft while he was there (Arbery is on a surveillance video from the site but it doesn’t show him taking or damaging anything).
Georgia law permits a “citizens arrest” only for a felony committed in your presence, which didn’t happen here even if Arbery did commit a felony in the construction site (because the McAlisters were not there to witness it).
So I don’t see any way they shouldn’t have been charged immediately. The delay in bringing this to court is an injustice regardless of the final outcome of the trial or what additional facts come out.
And even if the ultimate result is an acquittal, I think it’s completely reasonable to be bothered by these guys playing vigilante like this.
While wearing exercise clothes, and a headband, with earbuds, at a steady pace, absolutely. Was that what was happening here? I don’t know. If I see some guy I don’t know in my neighborhood in regular clothes sprinting haphazardly down the street, I’m going to assume he’s either in trouble or up to no good. I don’t know what the case is here, but I do know you’re inventing stuff like “athletic attire” out of nowhere to justify your preferred narrative.
That’s not what the District Attorney’s letter says.
The felony thing is only for “reasonable and provable grounds of suspicion.” I’m not sure if this counts, but okay, great, arrest them for…false attempt at a citizen’s arrest? Or the arrest isn’t valid? The guy didn’t get shot for “suspicion of burglary,” he got shot for attempting to steal the guy’s shotgun. If somebody rolls up on you with a shotgun in broad daylight and yells “freeze!” the correct answer is “throw your hands up in the air and call for the police,” not “try to take shotgun from guy.”
I kind of think you are because
You definitely seem to have a side here.
You’re talking about priors, but “white racists hunt down an innocent black jogger in broad daylight and murder him” is not a common or likely thing. “Black guy runs from crime scene and then attacks people who try to stop him,” is still very rare, but…if we’re doing the Bayesian thing here, one of these essentially never happens, and the other one occasionally does.
But I don’t want to do the Bayesian thing, I just want to see the evidence, and all questions asked and answered to the best of our ability.
Again, this thing you claim you want is only happening because of the “media frenzy”. If the DA had his way, this would never have been investigated at all. That’s why I think this is an injustice regardless of the final outcome.
What questions do you have for the shooters? So far you seem to only be interested in coming up with ways the dead guy’s wardrobe and pace (which by the way you can answer for yourself – he was moving at a jogging pace down a road before he was blocked) may have justified his killing. What did they do or say that made Arbery believe he needed to fight for his life? Why did they think a report of a black guy on a construction site was sufficient justification to ride out and start a confrontation with the implied threat of deadly force?
Wait a minute, you’re the one who started bringing up his wardrobe, not me. As for
How can I answer that myself? I’ve seen the video, and I can’t tell how fast he’s running. The video is short and janky. This would be more a question for the shooters. And yes, I would like them to tell their side of the story. This is probably going to be pretty similar to the story they told to the police at the scene which caused them to not be arrested. If their story is correct, then I’m not sure how the media frenzy is a net benefit. If their story isn’t, then by all means, fry ’em.
Regardless, this is turning into a back-and-forth, which is the sort of thing that eventually results in people saying things that get them banned, and I don’t want that to happen to either of us. How about we shelve this for now and circle back when the trial happens and we can see the evidence and hear the testimonies?
It’s clearly possible we’ll learn more, I’m just curious what additional information would make you believe the shooters’ actions were reasonable here.
I’m not trying to get you banned, but you’re still ignoring my most important point, namely that this would not go to trial (or even be investigated seriously as a possible crime) if the local authorities had their way. I don’t like the “media frenzy” either but it looks like there’s a good chance this would have gone away quietly had that not happened.
Since you seem to agree that there are questions that need to be answered, can we at least agree that the DA’s original decision to not pursue any investigation on this was unreasonable?
Right now I don’t believe their actions were reasonable. I certainly wouldn’t do that, and everyone knows how reasonable I am. For their actions to be reasonable (confronting someone with a shotgun) they need something more than “was running from a construction site.” Perhaps they have that, I don’t know. But that would be something to present at a civil wrongful death trial.
The DA made his decision because it doesn’t appear what they did was illegal. It’s not illegal to have guns, it’s not illegal to conduct a citizen’s arrest, and it’s not illegal to shoot someone who tries to take your gun. The DA investigated and concluded no crime took place.
What they did may be stupid, or reckless, or unnecessary, and based solely on what I know at this point which is not the entire story, I would probably find them liable in a wrongful death suit.
But the criminal issue is whether or not they had a reasonable suspicion to conduct the citizen’s arrest, which is why the issue of whether or not the victim was “just a jogger” matters. The DA seemed to think he was not “just a jogger,” which is why no charges were filed, because the shooters didn’t commit a crime. Perhaps the DA got it wrong, and the jury will let us know.
@Conrad
Yes, at least to some of them. Workboots on the topic of footwear, no headphones, no idea about pockets, about 2 miles from the neighborhood, no idea about frequency of jogs.
That’s not what the District Attorney’s letter says.
The letter says some things and not others.
1. People are debating whether B is true.
2. Someone says “iff A is true, then B is true. And B is true.”
3. We are left to interpret whether A is true.
We’re wondering if they were allowed to make a citizen’s arrest. Barnhill says “they are allowed to make a citizen’s arrest if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.” But whether or not they had “immediate knowledge” or “in his presence” is in dispute! And Barnhill hasn’t actually said it.
People with experience in the legal system know to say things are true when they are true. If they don’t know something, they don’t say it’s true, because it might be proven wrong.
From the 911 call, the dispatcher was urging them to say what the immediate crime was
So they don’t know what this is the guy.
@ChangingTime
Do you have a source for that? I looked at the video and to me they looked like…I’m not sure exactly what type of shoe. They didn’t look like running shoes, but maybe high-top skate shoes? I’m not sure what I’d call them. But it doesn’t look clear enough to me to say.
@Conrad Honcho:
>> Workboots on the topic of footwear
> Do you have a source for that?
I hadn’t looked into it before reading your question, but this Reddit thread has a surprisingly reasonable summary of the evidence: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/gg35jd/was_ahmaud_arbery_wearing_boots_when_he_was_killed/
The summary would be something like “the videos are nonconclusive” but there are claims that misleading doctored images are making the rounds.
This case is probably more parallel to the Zimmerman/Martin shooting than to a police shooting. The basic question that matters here is whether the local authorities wrongly let the shooters get away with killing this guy, or whether there is some additional evidence that hasn’t come out yet that explains why they didn’t arrest and charge him.
In the Zimmerman case, the original media portrayal of the case was quite different from the facts that eventually came out. (The original stories I heard had Zimmerman as a big white guy who’d killed a little black kid; when details came out later, Zimmerman was a little hispanic guy, and Martin was a pretty big black kid, notably taller than Zimmerman. That’s not super relevant, except that it shows that early media reports were getting even the easy-to-check parts of the story wrong.) In that case, there was a public outcry that went through the whole country, with a lot of accusations of racism on the part of Zimmerman, the police, and American society. The prosecutor charged him with murder, he stood trial, and he was acquitted because he was acting in self-defense. One reason was that when he shot Martin, Martin was on top of him beating the crap out of him. There was physical evidence from the examination of Zimmerman and an eyewitness for that, IIRC. Nobody in the several months of media coverage discussed any of that before it came out at the trial, as far as I remember, and I was paying some attention to the case.
So it does seem plausible to me that there will be some similar evidence that will come out in this case, which justifies not charging these guys. It’s also quite plausible that they killed this guy and almost got away with it, thanks to having friends on the police force, or paying the right person a bribe, or all the police being racists who were totally okay with murder as long as it was of a black guy[1]. An independent investigation is probably the best we can do here.
[1] Of course, the world looks nothing like it would if that were broadly true, but who knows what was going on in this one town on that one day.
One thing that’s always bugged me about the Martin/Zimmerman thing was that Zimmerman could claim self-defence despite initiating the confrontation by following Martin (which IIRC was clear from the 911 call, where the dispatcher specifically told him not to). My reading of stand your ground laws (I am not a lawyer or American) is that you could just as easily defend Martin’s use of violence on the grounds that he felt threatened by someone who was following him and he perceived as a threat. I don’t see how you can claim self-defence when someone has reacted with violence to your initiation of a confrontation. I’m not sure what the outcome of competing stand your ground defences would be.
1. Despite media insistence otherwise, the Zimmerman/Martin case had nothing to do with “stand your ground.” Stand your ground is a legal doctrine that simply eliminates the requirement to retreat if possible, but if we accept Zimmerman’s general narrative of events as true, retreat was not possible anyway. If you believe Zimmerman, his actions would have been legal self-defense in basically any US state, even ones that do not have “stand your ground” laws.
2. Following someone is not “initiating a confrontation” and the law is not “you can kill anyone you perceive as a threat.” Zimmerman’s story is that he resorted to deadly violence only after Martin had initiated violence in such a manner that threatened his life. If Martin had killed Zimmerman, he would have to credibly show that Zimmerman’s prior behavior (following him) put his own life in danger, which is… uh… a bit of a stretch.
SYG isn’t actually that germane to the case. The right to self-defense and presumption of innocence are enough. You are correct that had Martin emerged alive, he could have used the same defense. All we know from the outside is there was a scuffle and the surviving guy claimed he acted in self-defense. If you really want to weight your court system so 10 guilty go free rather than jailing one innocent, you can expect this sort of result a lot. Court verdicts don’t follow Peano axioms.
@Matt M
Thanks for the correction on stand your ground laws. But I disagree that for Zimmerman retreat wasn’t possible – yes, obviously once Martin had noticed and attacked him, he couldn’t retreat. But he could’ve retreated at any point prior to that instead of following Martin – which again was the advice he was given by the 911 dispatcher.
Following someone is threatening, especially at night. I imagine most people would feel threatened in that situation (I definitely would).
Confrontation was perhaps the wrong choice of word – but whatever word you choose for their initial interaction / encounter, it was Zimmerman who started it and it was in a way that could reasonably make Martin feel threatened. Had Zimmerman not followed Martin, none of the subsequent events would have occurred.
I agree that had Martin killed Zimmerman, it would be a stretch to say he felt his life was in imminent danger. But the violence he used wasn’t actually deadly and so presumably (?) requires a lower threshold to justify its use.
EDIT:
@Jaskologist
Fair points. The part that still rankles with me is that I consider Zimmerman to have initiated the situation. It seems obnoxious that he could then use deadly force and get away scot free (legally; obviously there have been massive non-legal problems for him since then). I’m dissatisfied with a situation where someone can provoke another into violence and then claim self-defence if they kill the other in the resulting fight. But maybe you’re right that there isn’t a cost-free way to improve this in a judicial system.
I disagree. Martin would just have to claim that Zimmerman attacked him, which his lawyer would then put together with the evidence that Zimmerman followed him after being told not to to paint a picture of a crazy stalker.
We don’t know the details of what happened between the two beyond what the survivor tells us.
I don’t dispute that someone following you feels threatening. But it seems obvious that following someone is not a crime, and does not constitute sufficient justification for the person you are following to assault you.
Zimmerman has no legal obligation to not follow Martin, period. Martin does have a legal obligation to resolve his fear of Zimmerman by means short of attempted murder. The violence Martin used against Zimmerman included slamming his head against concrete with great force. And Zimmerman alleges that Martin saw his gun and was attempting to take it from him. It seems entirely plausible that had Zimmerman not shot Martin, Martin would have killed him.
@Matt M
Agreed that following someone doesn’t give you the right to assault them. I’m unconvinced that Martin would have actually killed Zimmerman, but I can see why in that moment Zimmerman could have genuinely feared for his life.
We could go back and forward quibbling over details here. I previously thought that SYG laws might have provided a legal defence for Martin’s violence – I was wrong. The legal outcome still bothers me but maybe we should leave it at that.
Wasn’t he at that moment engaged in lethal actions? Blows to the head can be very serious.
If you feel piled upon, please let me know and I’ll bow out.
Is this because you don’t like Zimmerman? Let’s give this hypothetical:
A black man follows a white man to his house at night, but does not enter the house. The white man goes inside or to the front door, but instead of staying inside and locking the door or calling the police, he comes back and bashes the black man’s head against the concrete, stopping short of killing him.
Is this just?
I think the key problem with Zimmerman’s behavior was that:
a. He eventually got into a situation where defending himself by shooting Martin was legally acceptable and probably his least-terrible option.
b. …but he got there by making some bad decisions that got him into that position in the first place.
The fact that he could probably have avoided the whole situation with some better judgment makes it hard to swallow the self-defense claim, even though he was eventually in a bad enough situation that shooting Martin was defensible.
My intuition is that this is likely one of those risk-balancing situations–he might not have gotten himself into the situation if he hadn’t been carrying a gun.
@Randy M
I said above I can see why Zimmerman felt his life was under threat. I don’t think it was impossible that he could’ve died, just unlikely. It’s obviously dangerous but I don’t think it’s that easy for a teenager to beat an adult to death. Maybe “unlikely” is an unhelpfully broad word.
I wouldn’t say Martin was necessarily actively trying or planning to kill Zimmerman, but I do think it would not have been hard for him to accidentally do it any moment from that position.
My memory is that he was straddling him against the concrete. Correct me if I’m wrong.
@Conrad
No problem.
I don’t think it’s just – he was not immediately under threat and had other options e.g. call the police. But I don’t think Martin’s behaviour was just either – he could’ve called the police or run off. Assaulting Zimmerman was wrong. But I also don’t think a situation where he winds up dead because he reacted violently to an interaction he did not initiate is a just one.
I broadly agree with albatross11’s comment.
where the dispatcher specifically told him not to
The dispatcher is not Zimmerman’s boss.
And a 911 dispatcher will never authorize use of force because that isn’t their job.
If I have sheltered my family in my bedroom while two men and cutting through the bedroom door with a chainsaw and screaming about how they’ll kill me, and I ask 911 for permission to use my shotgun if they get through, they will never say “yes, kill him” even though that is obviously the right answer.
We don’t know the details of what happened
We have forensic evidence and the statements of other witnesses. We know that Martin had successfully gotten either into or close enough to touch his destination house. And then he decided to go back and confront.
Following someone is risky, and probably unwise. But Zimmerman looks like a genius compared to the most recent incident, where some people decided to brazenly confront. They had two vehicles and the runner was boxed in.
The proper context of the 911 dispatcher telling Zimmerman not to pursue is less “I am a law enforcement officer and you are ordered to stand down” and more “Following a suspicious looking youth seems like a generally bad idea that might end poorly for you.”
Which, of course, was 100% accurate. It was a bad idea for Zimmerman to keep pursuing, and one that very well could have ended up with him dead in a ditch somewhere.
But that doesn’t mean that from that point on, whatever Martin does to Zimmerman is legally or morally justified because Zimmerman “didn’t obey instructions” or whatever.
As I recall, the 911 operator’s words to Zimmerman were “We don’t need you to do that.” So not even an instruction, let alone a binding order.
How many? I will predict 50 per year on average, with fairly big variance.
Answer here although it only breaks down to “rifle” not “assault rifle”.
Without looking, how do you think it compares to:
1) murder by handgun
2) murder by blunt instrument
3) murder by bare hands or feet
Wow. I didn’t even have the rank ordering right.
Technical point, but assault-rifles are by definition fully-automatic (or capable of firing more than 1 bullet with a single action of the trigger, for which a 3-round burst would also qualify). Of those legally owned by civilians since the NFA was passed, I think a total of 2 have been used in murders (1 was by a police officer). Which rounds to approximately 0 per year of legally-owned ones. I don’t know of numbers for illegally-owned ones.
Garrett, are you thinking of machine guns? The definition of “assault rifle” is pretty hazy, but I think everyone agrees common rifles like the AR-15 are “assault rifles,” and they, like dozens of other varieties of “scary looking black guns” we call “assault rifles,” are semi-automatic and freely sold at gun stores and shows across the country without special permitting.
Garrett is technically correct (the best kind of correct), which is why I put “assault rifle” in scare quotes. But approximately nobody except pedantic gun rights advocates use it that way anymore, so now “semi automatic scary looking rifle” is what is usually meant.
This does remove an important distinction between civilian AR- and AK- style rifles and their actual military counterparts: the latter are capable of full auto or burst fire, i.e. they are machine guns (and therefore very heavily regulated already).
I’ve reluctantly accepted the shift in meaning of “assault rifle” but if anyone calls them a “machine gun”, especially in the context of their accessibility to civilians, they are still dumb.
No, the not-especially-meaningful subcategory of semiautos is ‘assault weapons’.
Machine guns fire bigger bullets than assault rifles and are generally too large to be sensibly fired from the shoulder. I’d be surprised if anyone in the developed world was murdered by one of them recently.
True assault rifles are always capable of selective automatic fire and have detachable magazines. They were designed to be shoulder fired weapons that provided a compromise between the reach and stopping power of a battle rifle and the rate of fire of a sub machine gun (an automatic weapon firing pistol caliber rounds). As such they fire an “intermediate” cartridge, more powerful than a pistol round but less powerful that the typical rounds used in bolt-action battle rifles or “true” machine guns. (Another distinction of “machine guns” is that they are designed for sustained full automatic fire (heavier, features for better cooling, usually designed for fast replacement of overheated barrels in the field))
The original assault rifle is the German StG 44 which has all of these features.
The confusion starts to pop up when the government passed an “assault weapons ban” that focused on certain military style features in its definition (several of which are primarily cosmetic).
And certainly, the civilian AR-15 and similar rifles are derived from true assault rifles, and are essentially identical to them except for the lack of selective fire.
@Gbdub
Calling an AR-15 an “assault rifle” is just as dumb as calling it a “machine gun”, and it’s conceding to a campaign of deliberate misinformation and obfuscation which you yourself alluded to with the introduction of the neologism “assault weapon” into the public discourse.
EDIT: Hell, in the US, all Assault Rifles ARE Machine Guns by legal definition! Someone calling a M4 or M16 a machine gun is arguably more correct than someone calling an AR-15 or a WASR-10 an assault rifle.
The proper response to someone saying something ignorant is to correct their ignorance, not to grudgingly concede that it’s ok to be ignorant, at least if they are expecting you to give their opinion on the topic under discussion any weight.
I figure I should provide an actual response to this question:
Calling it X deaths in Y overall population isn’t the best way to think of this problem, because your generalizing what is purported to be a high threat risk for a subset of the population against a low threat risk that potentially effects the entire population. A 60 year old Asian woman likely would be completely correct to not worry about getting shot by the police, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a 22 year old black man shouldn’t.
Let’s start with an imaginary version of this issue to hammer home what I’m talking about. Let’s say that one out of every million person was born with green hair and every single one of those people was shot by the police at the age of 32. The average risk of this happening to you or anyone you know would be infinitesimally small, unless you or a loved one had green hair. If you did have green hair though, this is the most important problem in the world for you and your would be correct in devoting every possible effort into ending it. The counterargument of “well, statistically more people die in baths” would be laughed out of the room since, for the segment of the population with green hair, it’s completely false.
Expanding this back out into the real world, the last time I looked, your risk of being shot and killed by the police as a black male between the ages of 15-40 were somewhere equivalent to your chance of dying from pneumonia or aids, somewhere around the top 20 likely cause of mortality. If you expanded the data to include non-fatal shootings AND sorted it by region/socioeconomic class, I wouldn’t be shocked if it crept into the top 10. I think justifies the amount of attention that people who are heavily effected by this phenomena give it.
Assuming you don’t fall into that population group, how much you care is I guess dependent on how much empathy you extend to that group.
This differs from your green-haired example because not every young black man dies in that age range.
That is, based on what you say I still have no idea how likely it is to occur. We need to know the mortality rate. If being shot by a cop was the leading cause of death for 19 year olds but only 10 19 year olds died each year, while each case would be worth investigating (as every murder is), it wouldn’t rise to the level of a major systemic problem.
You are right to consider the demographic as the denominator, but we still care about the actual numbers.
Concur, it’s not an amazing thought experiment.
But isn’t the chance of dying of pneumonia as someone in the 15-40 age group vanishingly small? Does anyone really worry about that?
I think you also need to adjust for lifestyle. You also mentioned deaths due to AIDS, but you probably only need to be overly concerned about that if you’re engaged in promiscuous sex or intravenous drug use. Yes, it’s possible to get AIDS from a single broken condom from your one-and-only one-night stand, or a blood transfusion, but that’s so rare you’re in “got crushed by a vending machine” territory. We don’t worry about those things unless we’re neurotic.
Similarly, the number of unarmed black people killed by police in 2019 was 9 (if we just want to talk about men, the number is 8). Now, just because someone was unarmed doesn’t mean the shooting wasn’t justified (Michael Brown was trying to cave in the officer’s face with his bare hands), nor does it mean all the shootings of armed men were justified, but it’s probably not that far off. If you’re a young black man who is not engaged in crime or waving guns at cops, we’re talking about single digit (or lower double digit) deaths per year (and similar numbers per capita for whites). Ideally that number would be zero, but I don’t know what one can do to get that number to zero without the Law of Unintended Consequences making something else worse.
So, yes, I think it’s unreasonable for a young black man who is not engaged in crime to worry about being killed by police.
Yes
Not directly, probably, but we’ve got a bunch of societal protections that are kind of enforced at this point without it really being noticed. We have norms around cleanliness, washing hands and not spreading disease. We have people who are paid lots of money to make sure you don’t die of a disease if you get it. Even without thinking of “we must stop pneumonia” there’s still a lot of, I guess you could call it “energy” that we invest to prevent people from dying of that (and other) disease(s).
And we also have norms to prevent cops from murdering people, like…laws against murder, and a court system that arrests, tries and punishes murderers, and training for cops that says “don’t murder.” It seems to work out okay, with extremely few murders by cops each year. It would be nice if we could get that number to zero, but I don’t see how, given human free will and all, and the societal need to have police. I’m certainly open to reasonable ideas, though.
Given the extremely low numbers of such fatalities, worrying about being shot by cops (when you weren’t waving guns at them or doing crimes) is like worrying about being killed by beds, lawn mowers, vending machines, etc etc.
If I told you, “Aftagley, I’m seriously concerned about lawn mowers. I’m planning protests, and marches, and DEMAND that something be done, because 75 people each year are killed by lawn mowers,” would you think I had a reasonable fear? Or that I was being neurotic? And that the correct response to my fear isn’t so much “reforming lawn mowing,” but correcting my misunderstandings, assuaging my fears, and maybe wagging a finger or two at the media for running 1-2 new “man murdered by lawn mower” stories wall-to-wall each week?
How many cops actually get arrested and charged, let alone convicted, for killing people while on duty?
If this is meant as a deterrent, I would think it would need to be used more often.
Go watch the Daniel Shaver shooting body cam video and explain to me how that officer should have not only been acquitted of any charges, but also reinstated to the police force.
We don’t teach police to “not murder”. We teach police “if a drunk sobbing guy does literally anything other than instantly and perfectly comply to contradictory commands screamed at him while you and your partner point rifles at him, you are justified in executing him”
Most people consider deaths by agency as worse than accidents or deaths by nature.
Doubling down on this point. I’ve been through several use of force trainings. A priority might be to reduce deaths, but the priority is officer safety.
I’ve been told exactly how close a guy with a knife can get to me before shooting is justified. I’ve been told exactly how to articulate why an unarmed guy made me fear for my life enough to open fire. I’ve been taught exactly why someone reaching into their pocket and not listening to my verbal commands is justification for force. I’ve had to watch the Dinkheller video, and no one walks away from that thinking, “man, I should shoot less people.”
Cops are taught to use whatever force is necessary to get home at the end of the day. This isn’t necessarily bad, but we definitely don’t optimize our cops for not killing people.
Part of the problem with this issue is that the cause is misdiagnosed and then inflamed for political purposes. This is massively counter-productive, if you’re trying to reduce the number of murders.
To hear the BLM/media telling, cops are out there wanting to shoot blacks because they’re racist against them, and every story which can possibly be must be forced into the racist shoots black narrative.
Back in reality, the statistics not only don’t back that up, they contradict it. For example, black cops shoot blacks as much (if not more) than white cops. Blacks are less likely to be shot by cops than whites are adjusted by the usual confounders (presumably because of the massive over scrutiny each incident gets). Maybe there is some systemic racist argument to be made there for young black men’s propensity to interact with the police, but just like young white men’s propensity, it’s mostly based on their own choices/behavior patterns.
The real problem with police violence is unjustified and unnecessary police violence. There are definite training problems and incentive problems which could be massively improved, but those driving the young-black-man narrative don’t seem to want to bother with that because they want the problem to be racism and require racist-related solutions.
So my personal measurement is that if someone wants to get police trained better to handle armed and/or potentially lethal confrontations better (In general their training to protect themselves is also terrible!) or is willing to support some other solution (body cameras, easier to fire bad officers, higher pay to attract better officers, whatever it is) which will improve police actions in general, I’m completely on-board with supporting that. As a bonus, it will presumably help with the shootings of young black men just like it will help with the shootings of young white men. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Why must we try to help only one group involved rather than all victims of police shootings and even police who get shot?
But if your proposed solution is to promote racial divisions and set “civilians” up for continued and ongoing conflict with police, then that’s not an actual solution, so there’s no reason for me (or the rest of the general population) to support it.
In short, if BLM supporters want to actually solve the problem being presented (and almost all the big cities are completely run by their supposed allies, so why isn’t it solved already???), then how about they reach out to the political opposition and get together on solutions everyone can agree on? Let’s start with body cameras which don’t just protect the police (i.e. not the police union version), real funding for training in handling high-pressure situations and not doing stupid things like a cop standing out in the open waiting for a suspect to shoot him, making him feel like his life is in danger as soon as a stoned suspect scratches an itch on their back.
Sorry, I’ve probably devolved into a rant, but the sheer level of irrational non-problem-solving on this issue just gets to me.
Exactly. See how ‘all lives matter’ was not allowed because it doesn’t limit the narrative to white-vs-black.
People objected to “all lives matter” because they interpreted it as an attempt to distract from the possibility that black Americans are policed differently to white Americans. It wasn’t seen as a good faith amendment. You’re framing it in a negative way.
@NostalgiaForInfinity
It is a very high level of intolerance of alternative viewpoints:
A person who believes that all non-white people are targeted by the police more, might very reasonably consider #AllLivesMatter to describe their position better than #BlackLivesMatter.
A person who believes that the police is generally abusive and/or has too many special privileges that they shouldn’t have, probably considers the police to be abusive to everyone and thus might prefer #AllLivesMatter. In general, SJ is very often implicitly authoritarian and/or intolerant of anti-authoritarians* (which seems hard to square with the common claim that the power centers are biased, which suggests that weakening the power centers reduces the impact of that bias).
A person who disagrees with the tactic of solely describing blacks as the ones who are victimized and believes that non-blacks are more sympathetic to inclusive language, might think that #AllLivesMatter gets better results.
None of the above require white nationalist beliefs, conservatism or even a belief that blacks are not the hardest hit by police brutality. Yet the people who hold these points of view are hampered in expressing their point of view by the taboo on #AllLivesMatter. It is really only a fairly small slice of opinions that is allowed to advertise their views in this manner, when only #BlackLivesMatter may be used.
* Which is not the same as opposing the current leadership, because people want their own ideology and/or people to rule.
No, I know my history.
People who clearly used it in good faith, like various blue tribe celebrities, were attacked for it.
Manufacturing a taboo by attacking people who use an expression in good faith, by claiming that it cannot be or is not used in good faith, is a disgusting tactic that feeds back into itself, when this terror campaign convinces all but edgelords to abandon the expression. If this tactic works, you create your own justification, where none had to exist initially and the actual effect is to greatly overreach beyond merely hampering the extremists that get used as justification.
This kind of tactic was once used against the Jews, by forcing them to live in overcrowded, undersupplied ghettos. The horrible living conditions were then used in propaganda as evidence that society should be protected from these filthy animals. So the result of forcing these people to live in ghettos became a justification for forcing them into ghettos.
Wish this website had a ‘like’ option for posts like this. Well said!
Most big cities are run by Democratic politicians. If you’re going to group everyone in America into two “teams,” then Black Lives Matter activists and Democratic Party office-holders and officials would be on the same team. But on the ground, they don’t necessarily feel like they’re on the same team. There have actually been quite a lot of stories about hostility between Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party.
The Democratic establishment and liberal media outlets like to try to co-opt left wing activism as an anti-Republican political weapon, but actual left-wing activists typically believe that both the Republican and Democratic parties are enemies of the people.
There was a pretty amazing meeting between BLM activists and Hillary Clinton where the former wanted to change hearts, while the latter argued that she couldn’t help with that and needed actual policy proposals, resulting in:
A true train wreck of a meeting.
You’re not really accurately presenting what was said in that meeting. She asked for specific policy proposals they wanted to see brought up, they claimed it wasn’t black people’s responsibility to solve problems that were caused by white people, then she responded with your quote.
I don’t remember at the time that meeting being portrayed as or commonly thought of as a train wreck. To my recollection it played pretty well into her overall wonkish vibe. I personally remember reading about it and liking her response. I remember some backlash against her from BLM, but at the time they were backlashing against everyone (bernie, Clinton and Trump) so it didn’t reflect all that poorly on her.
I’m not the only one who interprets the position of the BLM activists that way:
As for it not being a train wreck, if the argument becomes so heated that one side threatens how I would paraphrase Clinton’s statement: ‘I’ll stop talking to your ethnic group about this, if you are going to be like this’; then it seems to me that she is looking to offend out of frustration (and I think that the BLM activists were being assholes too, BTW, for not accepting that Bill’s policies were not white people’s policies, but that they had a lot of black backing).
To me this meeting seems like a good example of the hostility that Orion believes to exist.
This supports my point, since I don’t see much reason to spend a lot of time and energy on those other causes of morality for that demographic, either.
I think the obvious objection is that as far as society is concerned, someone being killed by a cop and someone accidentally drowning in the tub are not problems of the same magnitude.
It’s like one person dying from Ebola vs one person dying from a heart attack.
The problem is deciding what magnitude of response is required. (I do think people approaching it as if it was infinitely important and could not even be discussed are more wrong than those who think it really doesn’t matter much, but I won’t pretend to know what the fair compromise would be.)
@TwoMcMillion,
You are not the one going crazy.
Fatal shootings by police (or, “Homicide: Legal Intervention” sub-category in the CDC statistics published on their WISQARS tool) have been in the vicinity of 600 per year for most of the last decade. About half of the victims of fatal shootings by Police are Black.
These numbers were remarkably stable across 2005 to 2015 (which was the last set available when I looked. I suspect that they had a similar level of stability during the years since then.
I am aware of these facts because I used to research these kinds of things on WISQARS.
I was more interested in comparing “Homicide” to “Suicide” in the the “Death by Firearm” category, as well as looking at various rates-of-unintentional-death.
A short guide to the things I found in those studies: For most of the past 40 years, deaths in automobile-accidents outnumber deaths by gunfire. For all of those years, suicides-by-gunfire outnumber homicide-by-gunfire. If you see any death-by-gunfire statistics which indicate more than 20,000 deaths per year in the past decade, those statistics have combined suicide and homicide numbers. Suicides in general, and suicide-by-gun, are typically done by older men who live in rural areas. Homicide-by-gun is typically done to young men who live in urban areas.
Replying to myself: I just started looking up numbers on the WISQARS tool provided by the CDC. It turns out that my memory was off. The numbers that the CDC claims come much close to ~100 Black people dying at the hands of a Police Officer in the average year, with the total for the United States coming to ~500 per year.
There were spikes in the data for the years 2011-2013, and one more spike in 2017.
During most of those years, Homicide numbers were in the rage of 12000 to 14000 for “All Races”, and in the range of 6000 to 8000 for “Blacks”.
Category: Homicide, Legal Intervention.
Method of death: gunfire
2018, All Races: 539
2018, Black: 112
2017, All Races: 553
2017, Black :126
2016, All races: 510
2016, Black: 111
2015, All Races: 484
2015, Black: 109
2014, All races: 464
2014, Black: 108
2013, All races: 467
2013, Black: 133
2012, All races: 471
2012, Black: 123
2011, All races: 454
2011, Black 122
2010, All races: 344
2010, Black: 79
2009, All races: 333
2009, Black: 87
2008, All races: 326
2008, Black: 94
I think not every jurisdiction reports the numbers, though. The Washington Post page is from a project the newspaper has to try to chase down and document all fatal police shootings in the US, and it gets almost 2x the numbers of the official statistics.
I am quoting CDC data, which is, to my knowledge, as complete as we can get for the entire nation. The main advantage that those numbers have is that they are based on the same set of definitions (since 1998), and a process that has remained roughly the same since the 1980s.
According to their FAQ, the sources are
In the definitions, I eventually found
If the Washington Post is right, about half of those death certificates for killed by injuring inflicted by law enforcing agents are filled out wrong.
I’m not sure what to make of that. Are there any double-counts in the Washington Post database? Are there any edge-cases where the local authority who filled out the death certificate had a different opinion? Are there any other factors which cause a dead body to not result in a death certificate?
I don’t know. I do remember that:
a. The homicide stats have a similar issue–some localities just report a homicide, others report stuff like race of the victim, race of the murderer, etc. Some localities don’t report justifiable homicides separately from other homicides in their totals, as I understand it. ISTR that the actual numbers are pretty far off from the reported numbers, like maybe a factor of 2.
b. CDC data and FBI data don’t give the same numbers for deaths by homicide per year. They’re not *wildly* different, but they’re not super close, either. (This was discussed on Marginal Revolution a few years ago.)
c. The Guardian did a similar project to what the Washington post did, and came up with fairly similar numbers. I think they were counting all police fatalities, not just shootings, but the numbers were still very similar.
@albatross,
I’ve spent a little time, and dug up the numbers published by the FBI in their Uniform Crime Report of 2018.
They have a number for “Justifiable Homicide at the hands of a Law Enforcement Officer”, and have a table from 2014 to 2018, subdivided by type of weapon. However, the victims are not broken out by race.
The FBI totals are about 10% lower than the CDC totals. However, the homicide numbers for that year are about 25% lower in the FBI numbers than they are in the CDC numbers.
The part that I’m trying to underscore is that the CDC numbers come from medical authorities and coroners, while the FBI numbers come from voluntary reporting by Police agencies.
I’m not surprised by under-reporting of crimes from local Police agencies.
I am surprised by the assertion that local medical authorities are incentivized to undercount homicides, or to not classify homicides at the hands of a Police officer correctly.
I’m kind of shocked that you’re shocked – even in my big city, officer involved fatal shootings are rare enough that every one gets top billing on the nightly news (while not every murder gets that treatment), and any shooting of “unarmed black man” DEFINITELY gets coverage. So I would not have assumed a number much higher than “a few hundred annually”.
The figure of 9 shootings of unarmed black men from WaPo is somewhat misleadingly low: there are a lot of people in the database with unknown race, and a lot of the people who are classed as armed were “armed” with a “toy weapon” or vehicle (a car can certainly be a weapon but in several of the articles I checked it wasn’t).
Well, one big skew you have on these numbers is that the policeman who’s just shot you has a *very* strong personal incentive to find some way to explain the situation that involves you posing an imminent danger to his life.
Every time some question about how much caring we should give to death by some cause, people get in to these extensive arguments about it. But there’s no objective answer here. It’s all about what you value. Someone could tell me that 9/11 wasn’t a big deal because only a couple thousand died, but I’m not going to agree. Getting someone else to think some class of deaths is important involves changing their entire worldview.
9/11 appears to be about ten times a bigger deal then this issue by number of deaths. Examining my inner feelings, it appears I do care about 9/11 approximately ten times more, so I’m okay with that.
I’m 30 years old, so in my experience 9/11 kills fewer than 100 people per year.
Still, ten times as many unarmed people killed by a single terrorist attack as by cops…
Standard rebuttal is that the statistics don’t matter, the African American community’s feeling do. A completely valid point, but who is making them feel this way: the media or the cops?
This website tracks fatal shootings, not all shootings. The all shootings is presumably a lot higher, and also part of a general trend of “how the police treat black men”, which also includes unjustified arrests, violence, arrests at gun point, general hostility etc.
I had thought that the scandalous aspect of the Ahmaud Arbey shooting was the fact that two non-police took it upon themselves to accost someone for what they perceived was a criminal act.
(And the spectrum of what actually happened falls somewhere between shooting a jogger in cold blood or shooting a burglar as he tried to wrestle a shotgun from one of the two people involved)
As far as police are concerned, my Steelman is that the vast majority of the negative interactions between police and AA’s don’t end in fatal shootings. In which case fatal police shootings are the tip of an iceberg and hence why they’re treated as larger than other types of violence that result in far more deaths.
I suspect that’s an aggravating factor, but I think the predominant reason is about what gets reported and how much. Homicides are a local news phenomenon until some with the proper megaphone makes the conscious decision to elevate a story to national news. This is going to affect your sense of scale since most people don’t look at ‘the data’ and those that do often disagree with each other for valid reasons about the true numbers.
There’s also the fact that people are more worried about being killed by ‘the other’ than they are a member of their own group. See terrorism vs. conventional homicide. (Though there are counter arguments to that like sharks vs. dogs, per capita adjustments, deaths from terrorism not being the primary threat of terrorism etc. etc.)
Anybody want to try and convince me that A Clockwork Orange is actually good? I mean the book, as I haven’t seen the movie and don’t plan to (since I hated the book). Spoilers for an old book you may have read in high school follow.
We’ll leave aside the aggravating slang. Consider the main point of the book: that the freedom to do evil is an essential part of being human. This is correct, as far as I’m concerned; however, the novel does an absolutely terrible job of convincing us. Alex is an utterly terrible human being who does terrible things for fun. He also likes this one Beethoven song, though it’s questionable whether he appreciates it on a particularly deep level; the lyrics are about things like peace and brotherhood, and he listens to it while raping women or beating people up.
Then he gets reprogrammed, and he … stops raping and robbing and stuff, but he can’t enjoy Beethoven anymore and it makes him very depressed. So he tries to kill himself, and everyone feels so bad that he gets the process reversed. Whereupon he returns to the exact same horrible delinquency he was involved in before. Eventually, in the final chapter that’s sometimes omitted, he gets bored with his wild lifestyle and settles down. This takes years.
Yes, I get that it’s all very symbolic and artsy, but on the immediate level, it really seems like it was a much better world when Alex was reprogrammed and not gang-raping women to death. Given a strict choice between slight-restriction-of-free-will and delinquent apocalypse, the first option just sounds better. Especially given the excluded middle possibilities. Like enforcing laws more aggressively, or some kind of youth outreach program? They might shut down the bars where they serve drugged milk, too. Alternatively, they could give him different brainwashing that doesn’t incorporate his favorite song. There are a lot of possibilities missed here.
Every time I try to tell someone this, they act like I’m missing the point. Yes, I get the point. It’s just a dumb point. To the extent it’s true, it’s obvious, and the way it’s conveyed in the book is unpersuasive and bizarre. It seems like it was tailor-made to appeal to superficially clever people. What am I missing?
Sorry, I haven’t read it, but based on your summary, is there a chance it’s an ironic argument for that kind of mental tampering?
I could construct an argument that that kind of punishment should be beyond the pale, but it wouldn’t look like “It’s worth a bit of societal decay to keep the hooligans appreciating good music.”
No. The book was written as a response to something Burgess read (and seemed to have misunderstood) about conditioning being necessary to teach virtue to children. The point was at least partly supposed to be that doing good needs to be a choice and not a conditioned response. It’s been more than 10 years since i read it, but I remember one part in particular that was relevant to this idea where Alex is in prison and has agreed to undergo conditioning as a means to being released. He’s talking to a priest who makes exactly that point, although he concedes that choosing to undergo conditioning is kind of like indirectly choosing to be virtuous. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the book.
There’s a lot of fiction where the goal is simply to be evocative, and get across the character’s strong feelings/perceptions across to the reader. Any argument advanced by such narratives is kinda by accident.
So A Clockwork Orange is artistically “good” if it makes its audience feel the things the writer wants them to feel, even if it’s shit at actually saying anything meaningful (non-artistic value).
I’d say there are many kinds of artistic value, but I can’t think of one possessed by ACO. The words themselves aren’t beautiful–Nadsat is a really ugly slang, full of phrases like “horrorshow groodies.” There are some striking moments, but they aren’t beautiful or appealing, mostly just shocking. I mostly remember them breaking in and raping the housewife to death. The world isn’t well constructed–kinda vague, in fact, and not especially plausible. It’s not really thought-provoking, except for the thought, “where is he going with this?”
I mean, suppose I write a fifty-page description of flies and other vermin eating a half of a hamburger abandoned on the side of the road, vividly framing the way it gets soaked through with exhaust and dust from passing cars, the eggs laid in the bun, maggots popping out, cheese and meat rotting, rats fighting over it, whatever. The reader may well have strong feelings about this passage, but does that in itself give it artistic value?
Disagree inasmuch as I read A Clockwork Orange years ago as a teen and.was.struck most by the beauty of the first passage where the protagonist listens to music. I remember finding that passage utterly sublime. Maybe it wouldn’t hold up.for me on a second read, but I remember that part as distinctly beautiful, the more appropriate by the deliberate contrast with what came before it. It was evocative and pleasurable to read.
@theredsheep
Re: your second paragraph, the answer is yes? There are plenty of artistic works that hang on the mechanism you describe. Gore is quite popular in subsets of fiction, from horror movies to gross-out comedy to Oscarbait about The Plight of X Which We Should Do Something About. I can read your second paragraph description in a Werner Herzog voice.
If it makes you feel any less crazy, the author of A Clockwork Orange definitely agrees with you.
I think a large factor in this book’s lasting presence is the fact that one of the best filmmakers ever decided to turn it into a movie. A world without Kubrik is a world where this book gets quietly forgotten.
So you’re saying that Asimov was making a valid point about the real world in “Gold”?
I don’t know if I can (or want to) champion the book, but this seems like a fairly superficial summary.
For example, regardless of whether Alex’s interest in music is enough to even remotely humanize him, it definitely goes far beyond “liking that one song.” He’s pretty sophisticated in his tastes and has a deep appreciation of classical music. The “cure” doesn’t just destroy his ability to listen to one song, it wipes out the only redeeming quality he had.
No one feels the least bit bad about his suicide attempt. (even his useless parents don’t seem that upset) His treatment is not reversed because someone was convinced the world is better off with him having free will and a reborn appreciation of Beethoven, but because he is being used as a pawn – first by the political opposition (which includes the writer of The Clockwork Orange he brutalized), then by the government. (which uses the fact Alex was nearly driven to kill himself as en excuse to lock the writer up)
And on a separate note, I liked the slang. I speak Polish and have studied Russian, and I thought Burgess did a rather good job of incorporating those expressions in a way that didn’t feel artificial. (it wasn’t perfect, but it was supposed to be idiot hooligans using words from another language to be transgressive, and I think it worked well on that level)
Sorry, I haven’t read the book in more than ten years. I’m not surprised I left out or misremembered details. As for the slang, it makes the book much more difficult to read–effectively forcing the reader to stop and decode every sentence or so–while amounting to little more than flavor.
My read on it was that Burgess was trying to make an argument for free will, and make it in the the most honest way possible. Anyone can agree that stealing the free will of a nice person is wrong. What Burgess seems to have set out to argue is that stealing the free will of anyone is wrong, even if it’s someone who has at every point, freely and intentionally, made the worst possible moral choice.
Like you, I do not find it a convincing argument. I think, pretty much, that Alexis is an evil little shit who needs to be shackled by any means possible. But I respect Burgess for not creating a strawman. He gave the reader every possible opportunity to disagree with him, so that if they didn’t, it would mean that he was definitely right, completely and under all circumstances.
Suppose the choices are
a) Imprison Alex, but leave his love of Beethoven intact. Possibly give him access to Beethoven’s music.
b) Make Alex safe for other people to be around at the cost of his enjoyment of Beethoven.
If this is possible, what is the morality of offering the choice to Alex? Imposing b> on him?
You cannot make art without transgressing; this is why most Christian movies are bad, and why a lot of artists are socially transgressive people.* The impulse that permits us to make art is exactly the same impulse that makes Alex rape and murder. How important this is depends on how much you care about art; from your review, I would imagine that you don’t think art is particularly important. It does not surprise me that Burgess, who makes his living by art, thinks otherwise.
*Note that modern art culture has developed a workaround where they transgress the outgroup’s culture instead their own group’s culture, but the principle is the same.
Says who?
I guess that’s why stonetoss is so highly respected and critically acclaimed among modern artists.
Ever seen the Sistine Chapel or listened to Handel’s Messiah? Good art can build as well as tear down. Modern artists may hove forgotten this, but that’s probably why their art sucks.
@Two McMillion
A lot of modern art is pubescent, which doesn’t make it interesting for people who aren’t drama queens.
Art like this is not transgressive at all, but beautiful and amazing.
I rather enjoyed my Art History class back in college. My tastes are admittedly somewhat conventional; I like the impressionists, particularly Monet. I suppose I would be interested, on a purely technical level, to see a Monet painting of some teenagers beating the shit out of a homeless guy, but Rouen Cathedral is somehow more appealing. I am hopelessly bourgeois that way.
Yes, I get the point. It’s just a dumb point. To the extent it’s true, it’s obvious, and the way it’s conveyed in the book is unpersuasive and bizarre. It seems like it was tailor-made to appeal to superficially clever people. What am I missing?
I don’t think you’re missing anything. I haven’t read it either, and don’t mean to. But Burgess’ book A Mouthful of Air, about language, is sublime, and I must re-read it some day.
@nornagest responded in the last open thread and I missed it until today. If it’s gauche to bring it up here instead of there, I apologize.
I was talking about how I was amazed nobody is reporting on the new charitable exemptions, particularly the $300 above-the-line exemption. Nornagest reponded:
I personally don’t see how this could be the case reasonably. The standard deduction is $12,200/$24,400. Interest rates on mortgages have been at about 4% the past decade or so. That means you’d have to have an outstanding mortgage of $305,000/$610,000. You can run into that in a few high cost-of-living cities in the US, but a very large swath of the US is significantly below that. There’s also SALT deduction, but that’s capped at $10k even for married filers. So let’s take 1.8% for a property tax in a state without income tax (Texas) in order to keep things simple.
That brings it to $210,344.83/$420,689.66 (note that this would only be at the beginning of the mortgage’s life, as the interest decreases and principal payment increases throughout its life). The payments on those homes would be $1319.52/$2639.03 before insurance. Lenders prefer being under 28% for mortgage payments (although realistically lower is better) so we’re looking at an income of $56,550.74/$113,101.50 before a person even starts to itemize (and again, the interest percentage goes down over the life of the mortgage).
Now sure, I know you also mentioned high-tax states, but California (for example) has significantly lower property taxes to make up for having an income tax.
I don’t see how having above-the-line charitable contributions doesn’t affect large swaths of the US, including many lower-middle- and middle-class families. Now I also get (and have to reiterate to people) that giving away money doesn’t make a profit. As in if you give away $300, you aren’t going to get back $301 at the end of the year. It’s still charity. But most people’s marginal rate is ~20-30% (if you consider various credits as a form of NIT) so it’s still a significant portion back, and furthermore it’s an incentive that tells people “Look, I know you may not make a lot, but you’ll just chip in a few hundred bucks where you think it needs to go, we recognize that you did something.” and I think that recognition is powerful.
I’m not an economist. My numbers above may have been wrong. Maybe I’m a lot poorer than I think I am, relatively speaking. I would appreciate if you (or someone) could help me see where I’m going wrong.
My itemized deduction has never even come close to being as good a deal for me as the standard deduction, and I’m on my second house in one of the states colored red on this map.
Most people (aside from a small but vocal minority of internet edgelords, and an even smaller and more vocal minority of actual ethno-nationalists) can agree that the Nazis were really bad. Likewise, most people who aren’t delusional tankies can agree that the regimes of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot were really bad too. But “really bad” is a huge understatement. In fact, I’d say that modern society is largely defined by the collective trauma caused by World War II, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields, and all the other atrocities committed by fascist and state-communist regimes over the 20th century. And I think most people, all over the political spectrum, really want to avoid letting anything like that happen again – to the point that the desire to avoid those outcomes is one of the biggest factors influencing people’s political stances.
Of course, that’s easier said than done, because it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it was about the Nazis and Soviets and Ba’athists and all the other monsters of the modern age that led to war crimes and genocide. The most shallow conclusion would be something like “they were bad because they were Nazis,” as if the problem was just the specific individuals who were involved, or the name they chose, or the uniforms they wore. If you just blame the Nazi flag, that does very little to help prevent future atrocities, because that particular regime is dead and gone and won’t resurface in any meaningful capacity. Future atrocities will be carried out under a different flag.
Another conclusion, less shallow but only slightly so, is to blame some non-central aspect of the regimes in question. “Nazis were right-wing, therefore we need to be suspicious of anyone who’s associated with the political right in any way, shape, or form, since they’re all potential fascist bigots who want to commit genocide.” Or “Stalinists were left-wing, therefore all leftists are potential totalitarians who want to control people’s lives and send anyone who disagrees with them to the gulag.” Or “Nazis and Stalinists were both statists, therefore anyone who’s not an anarchist calling for the complete and immediate dissolution of all nation-states is basically Hitler-Stalin.” The tragic irony is that this sort of thinking can actually lead people to commit exactly the sorts of atrocities that they’re trying to prevent. (See: pretty much all of the anti-communist interventions undertaken by the U.S. during the Cold War. Or the mass murders committed by the anarchist faction of the Spanish Civil War in the name of fighting the fascists and Stalinists.)
Yet another conclusion, broader than the first two, is that atrocities happen as a result of people willing to kill and die for a cause, willing to compromise their basic empathy and human decency for the sake of some utopian ideology. The fascists and the communists, the Americans who committed atrocities in the name of *fighting* fascism and communism, the Islamists in the Middle East and the Christian fundamentalists in the West – all of them fought for what they believed were right, and all of them committed horrible wrongs. This interpretation is extraordinarily prevalent in modern pop culture: in countless works of middlebrow fiction, it’s the villains who are constantly going on about how sacrifices need to be made for the greater good, while the heroes reject the idea of systematic change and simply do good on a purely interpersonal scale except when reacting to the villains’ schemes.
I’m almost inclined to agree with this conclusion, but it doesn’t quite sit well with me either. I’m a consequentialist, and I genuinely do believe that sometimes sacrifices really do need to be made for the good of the many – hopefully not often, but circumstances don’t always allow us to stick to our morals *and* do what benefits other people. Staying true to some moral code even if it results in harm coming to others is its own form of fanaticism, even if it’s caused by inaction rather than action. So where does that leave me? I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure what lesson we should be taking from the many mistakes of the modern age. But I do think, at the very least, we should avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls like “let’s blame all of the problems in society on this one discrete group of people.” And beyond that, I think we should try to err on the side of caution when discussing any sort of major sweeping change to the fabric of society, and do our best to assess the potential benefits and drawbacks involved. A sane, sound, sober analysis of the facts would go a long way.
Part of it is an epistemic humility angle. It takes a lot of whatever the opposite of humility is (epistemic chutzpah?) to say “I know what the problem is and I’m willing to kill and die for it.” Those of us with more humility are not willing to make that commitment even if we agree with the goals.
A saint said “Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood.”
A man cried out “I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan.”
They were one man.
Excerpts from one of Galich’s poems/songs (my apologies for the translation quality):
I was just going to say “it’s totalitarianism,” but that’s way more eloquent.
“Epistemic chutzpah” is a fantastic phrase.
> the opposite of humility is (epistemic chutzpah?)
‘Chutzpah’ sounds too positive for me. The “I know what the problem is” in LadyJane’s problem is so often not a neutral daring that I’d always call it ‘epistemic hubris’.
ETA
mtl1882 elaborated. 🙂
Q: Did I do the right thing in the end?
A: Nothing ever ends.
I think the major thing to avoid is hubris, or something similar: the idea that humans can perfect things if they just make sweeping top-down changes. I would say this is a major aspect of why so much of this happened in the 20th century. That century saw the miraculous development of science, technology, and mass broadcasting/politics, as well as a distancing from religion and natural threats that emphasized human fallibility and humility. It was possible to both entertain the belief that you *should* try to impose your way of doing things as widely as possible, and that you had the ability to do so. This is an oversimplified explanation of what went on, but close enough for now. (Other commenters basically got at the same thing–epistemic humility; there is no “end” like in a game or controlled environment, so no permanent winner.)
We often get close to this point but miss it by blaming the problem on some form of enthusiasm/fanaticism, which is essentially what you say about the willingness to martyr yourself for a cause and your idea that systematic change and sacrifice can be necessary in some situations. I agree with this. I think human society needs an element of the kind of passion that sometimes runs to extremes, and it wasn’t rare before the 20th century. I also do not believe it can be eradicated, and that trying to do so leads to denial of its existence. It needs to be channeled productively, not allowed to simmer and explode on provocation. But I think there is a difference between be willing to die to promote a cause that is important to you personally, and claiming that you know the one true solution best for everyone and should be given the power to enforce it (and also being in a position to access that power.) The first can do a lot of damage, but it is likely to do a lot less damage, and is a lot less attractive to most people. It’s easy to delude yourself that you are pursuing power or influence because you’re doing it for the greater good, and not because it’s in your immediate self-interest. (It’s less easy, and somewhat alarming, to actually believe you know what is best for everyone and should impose it on a 20th century scale.) I believe it is the “mass” character of ideology (which depends on removing independent thought because of the number of people that need to be controlled) rather than the fervency that tends to lead to large scale disasters.
Diagnosis is relatively easy compared to the cure. Removing the mass nature of ideology is hard to even conceptualize without a return to the technological setting of the past as well. If we solve it at all, it will be by accident.
Yeah, I have no suggestion for a “fix,” and agree if we have one, it will be accidental. I do think that the fragmentation of “consensus information” has taken a lot out of the mass broadcasting model of the 20th century. It’s hard to even have everyone awash in the same images, as people can so quickly go to another video. I suspect that when the generations who lived within the television news era pass out of power, things will change somewhat. Our era’s form of ideological polarization (culture wars, basically) was shaped by that environment–the internet merely continued it at a more intense level. The neat two-story framing (roughly right v. left) will fall apart without the constant reinforcement. What replaces it may be no more healthier, but I think things will splinter and it will be harder to rally the general public at a national level. 20th century state-level actions that rely on mobilizing mass opinion may become impractical.
However, the realization that this is occurring could lead to an attempt to stabilize the old system by banning information from “non-authoritative sources.” We see this battle going on now in some areas. Not sure how successful it will be, but it definitely would be possible to centralize the Internet and use it like old-style mass broadcasting, even more effectively targeted. Or, it could be used to distract the masses while those in charge go on with their 20th-century scale big plans without bothering to appeal for support. You don’t need huge armies anymore. But I think the use of technology will be decisive–we may not need to reverse to the pre-mass broadcasting age, but we would have to escape the age of mass broadcasting, which I think is possible. It was initially driven by circumstances unique to the time, and it would be a choice to continue using that model at this point. (A choice attractive to many in power, especially those used to that form.)
I suppose a related issue is “persuasion,” which is part of the distinction I was trying to make earlier. Martyr types often die to make a statement, to attract others’ attention. Fanatics often like to evangelize. They want others to believe. They want to persuade, and resonate with others. Their success depends upon getting others to respond. Top-down central planning stuff isn’t necessarily like that. It isn’t always driven by much belief, nor is it fed by accumulating followers; it is driven more by intellectual preference, a desire for power, or an arrogant disregard (or outright rejection) when it comes to what others think. The persuasion is often necessary to get the masses on board, but isn’t always sincere–it sometimes involves misrepresenting what is going on because it otherwise won’t resonate. Certainly most wars require some of this. I’m pretty sure Hitler had some things he was very persuasive about, and others he had to keep quiet because enough of the public was turned off by it–it wasn’t all charismatic influence; it was partly his own determination to execute his vision at all costs. In the future, will mass persuasion be seen as necessary?
> Removing the mass nature of ideology is hard to even conceptualize
The root word of ‘ideology’ is ‘idea’. To avoid the mass nature of ideology you have to avoid the mass nature of *ideas*. You might be able to do so if you strictly limit education to concrete, provable facts. But the moment you start allowing people to discuss metaphysics, ethics or politics in-principle you are going to face ideology.
Ideology isn’t inherently bad. It’s what develops when you think that an idea is important.
[I posted this in the wrong place somehow. Apparently the top-of-page comment box silently changes its behavior if one clicks “log in to reply.” Rest assured that Canyon Fern will paddle my bum… sigh
-Ludovico]
This is closely related to Sowell’s “Two Visions”
I agree with the others that epistemic humility is valuable for preventing fanaticsm running to the point of making piles of skulls. I think maybe one other element that’s useful there is maintaining enough practical freedom in your society to allow for people to criticize the fanaticism of the day or mention the nasty things being done quietly and not talked about, without being sent to prison or disappeared in the night or done in by an angry mob.
When we were headed into war in Iraq, there were people (mostly ignored by big media outlets, but definitely present) who were arguing against that war, predicting (correctly) that it would be an expensive clusterfuck, arguing that it was immoral and wasn’t even in our national interest. They didn’t succeed in stopping that war, but perhaps over time, they got enough of a hearing that when the war went sour, the folks in power found it increasingly hard to get public support for the next proposed adventure in nation-building. If the authorities had been able to completely shut those antiwar voices up–either jailing them or just making it impossible for them to be heard/seen by much of the public–I wonder if there would have been as much of a brake on our later wars.
Similarly, every one of the war on terror excesses of the Bush administration had some vocal opposition. Without that vocal opposition, it’s quite possible we’d still be running a formal torture program and a network of secret prisons to torture people we kidnapped. Public opposition to those things had an impact. Not a perfect impact–nobody went to jail for their war crimes, the current CIA director was one of the perpetrators so it was not necessarily even bad for your career to be a war criminal, but at least those programs seem to have stopped. With the power to shut the opposition up, we’d still be doing that stuff.
There are examples of society-wide atrocities that didn’t involve completely shutting down opposition–the ethnic cleansing of lots of Indian tribes and the slave trade are examples. But the slave trade was eventually shut down by internal opposition to it, driven by annoying gadflies arguing that it was wrong and evil and terrible, and not being successfully shut up everywhere. (Even though they certainly were suppressed in the South before the Civil War.) I think having free speech of some kind provides a mechanism for your society to pull itself back from fanaticism-driven evil, at least eventually. It’s not a guarantee you’ll stop, but it is at least a chance to pull back from the abyss.
Very good points.
And makes more likely to notice as a society that you are sitting in a deep abyss and climbing out would be a good idea (abolition of slavery seems a clear case).
I think there’s a fourth common conclusion, the centrist conclusion – “we don’t know exactly why atrocities happen, but we’re not committing any atrocities right now, so let’s not change too much”.
We can tell ourselves that we are not committing any atrocities, but history may not see it that way. There are large amounts of unnecessary suffering that we regard as normal.
We do not even have to go far back into the past to see places where the status quo was atrocity and the hypothetical centrist would be complicit. This of course goes back to humility–it could have been me had I been born in an unenlightened era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Seems that estimates for this alone go from 150 000 to 650 000.
> centrist conclusion
Technical point: that’s not a centrist conclusion. It’s an incrementalist (as opposed to radical) conclusion.
The 20th Century isn’t the origin of genocide; the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade was a classic genocide. The 20th century, however, made genocide easy: telecommunications made mass murder easier to coordinate, and better transportation (railroads, etc.) made it easier to supply. Look at the Rwandan genocide: radio broadcasts by Hutu ideologues were crucial for motivating ordinary Hutus to attack their neighbors. The horrors inflicted on the Congo during the existence of Belgian Free State were only possible because of the Matadi-Kinshasa Railway. Before the 19th century, organizing and supplying a genocide required immense effort. Now it’s far, far too easy.
Can’t find the link at the moment, but I remember reading a paper that cast doubts on this (seemingly common sense) idea. From memory, the gist of it was that hearing reports that massacres were already happening elsewhere and the perpetrators weren’t being punished made listeners much more likely to partake themselves; hearing the actual hate-filled broadcasts calling the Tutsis a bunch of cockroaches to be exterminated made little to no difference.
That seems plausible, but it doesn’t change the hypothesis that modern rapid communication plays a role in lowering barriers to initiation of genocide.
One of the memorable and chilling experiences in my life was visiting a childhood friend, and participating in family worship; as is customary, they were reading through a portion of the Bible, and that day we read Joshua 10:
This was in Poland: the next day I visited Auschwitz.
@LadyJane
I don’t agree with that at all. I don’t see a lot of people moderate their support for immigration to weaken the far-right or want higher taxes on the rich or companies to weaken support for the far-left.
The people who do want less migration or higher taxes also very rarely argue that they want this to weaken the extremes, which they ought to argue if that was really their main concern AND even more importantly if it was the main concern of others (because then this would be the most persuasive argument).
The problem with this is it admits that the extremes are of a similar kind to you, which then gives your opponents ammunition. Safer to say “Dems are the real racists” or “That wasn’t real communism” or whatever.
My argument was not that they want that or should want that, but that they act more centrist than they are and they can get away with, with the express purpose to reduce support for extremists.
Isn’t that the logical play if they value preventing support for Hitler or Stalin over anything else, including their desired policies?
If everyone wanted that, they could also just make that argument and win all elections, right?
My point is that since politicians don’t act like that and voters don’t demand it or reward it, it is not actually what most people value most.
Except I do exactly that. In my ideal world, borders would be almost completely open, with checkpoints existing purely to prevent known fugitives or people with dangerous and easily communicable diseases from passing through. But I’m aware that’s a staggeringly unpopular idea and trying to implement it would only push people to the far-right, so I take more of a liberal stance on immigration than a radical one: Make the process for legal immigration quicker and simpler, provide citizenship to children who were born in this country to illegal immigrant parents, and give amnesty to illegal immigrants who’ve been working here for a long time without taking advantage of social services or engaging in criminal activities. Is that still too far to the cultural left for a lot of people? Sure, it’s not a compromise that will appease the far-right, but I think it will keep more centrist people from drifting right.
Likewise, I support capitalism. But I also think that we need a social safety net to take care of the poor, in part because otherwise they’re either going to start resorting to crime to survive (if they’re disorganized), or they’re going to band together and then we’ll have a socialist/communist revolution on our hands that threatens the very existence of capitalism as a whole. Is that still too far to the economic right for some people? Sure, and I’ve gotten a lot of flak from actual leftists who oppose things like Universal Basic Income for the exact reason I support it: because it prevents things from getting so bad that people revolt. But again, I think it’ll keep more centrist people from drifting further left.
I wonder if that’s empirically true. Average real income in the U.S. is something like thirty times what the global figure was through most of history, which suggests that literally being unable to survive requires a level of poverty rarely seen.
On the other hand, it’s easier to combine crime with collecting welfare than to combine legal employment with collecting welfare, so the existence of welfare could result in increasing the number of people choosing crime over low paid employment.
True, but when there are stores that are stocked full of food everywhere, it’s safe to assume that most poor people will turn to crime or revolution before they turn to subsistence farming, animal herding, hunter-gathering, or any of the other methods that people in pre-industrial times used to feed themselves. There’s also the fact that those things aren’t even on the table for the urban poor, partially as a result of pure logistics (there isn’t a lot of room in the city for farming, or a lot of edible plants for gathering, or a lot of animals for hunting) and partially as a result of laws that would make attempts at doing so criminal in their own right (someone who tries to set up a garden in a public park will quickly get in trouble with the authorities unless they’re willing to navigate their way through various bureaucratic hurdles to get legal permission for it).
This is a result of perverse incentives that result from poorly designed welfare programs, not from welfare itself. It happens because people are forced into a position where actually working would cause them to lose their welfare benefits and make less money than if they didn’t work. I don’t think that’s a problem intrinsic to welfare in general; it wouldn’t happen with a Universal Basic Income, for instance.
A UBI has to be funded, which means higher tax rates to pay for it, and criminal income is tax free.
I don’t think my other argument requires that people live in the same way as people a thousand years ago. My point is that a very low income, whether from charity or very low paid work, is enough to buy the level of goods and services on which most people who have ever lived survived.
It also happens because you reduce consequences. If you get arrested on a Saturday night and don’t make it to work on Monday you might lose your job and 100% of your income, the higher your welfare payments are the less of a disincentive there is towards bad behavior. There is no way around this issue.
Not true! The IRS requires people to declare criminal income on their tax forms. It also allows people to take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity (except for the illicit bribery of government officials, which is considered a non-deductible expense).
“Very low paid work” doesn’t exist because of minimum wage laws. “Very cheap housing” doesn’t exist because of laws against shanty-towns, housing regulations, zoning regulations, and so forth. Very cheap food does exist, which is why death by starvation is exceedingly rare even among the perpetually homeless. But the combined effects of exposure and malnutrition (either from not having the amount of food they need, or not having a diverse enough variety of food to get the required nutrients) can nonetheless be quite detrimental to one’s health, which is why homeless people tend to be far less healthy than the general populace.
I’m inclined to think that the problems start when people decide that they are so obviously right that they don’t have to listen to any dissenting opinion. That does seem to be the common theme here. I think people fundamentally need to be contradicted a lot, even when they’re right, because “people don’t have a right to say things that are incorrect” invariably seems to turn into, “people who persist in believing things that are incorrect don’t have a right to exist.” Not to mention even if you are 100% right when you start out, you’re going to start being more and more wrong in a hurry if no one is allowed to point out the weaknesses in your reasoning.
The fact that “people don’t have the right to have bad opinions” is a notion that’s gotten a lot of traction in recent years would worry me, if not for the fact that it’s mostly gaining traction among people who I think are too wussy to actually try to shut anyone up physically. I am somewhat worried about all the people with bad opinions getting increasingly worse because no one is arguing against them anymore, though.
Yes, excellent post.
This is why I think it is a mistake to focus on fanaticism, or to spend so much time worrying that charismatic leaders might become Hitler. If people are still trying to convince others, that’s in many ways a good sign, even if they can convince them to do bad things. If people don’t believe they need to make a case, and won’t allow others to make one, things can get out of control very quickly. This is in part because someone in that position likely has a vast amount of power and certainty.
And the fear of passionate belief, the way charisma is often portrayed as mainly dangerous quality, can lead right into this trap. An obsession with rooting out anything “unreasonable,” or not based in some form of cerebral approach, leads directly into the “people don’t have a right to say things that are incorrect” line of reasoning. And, as you point out, this becomes “people who persist in believing things that are incorrect don’t have a right to exist,” or at least a demand for some justification of people’s existence. This is why the consequentialism thing discussed below is also a problem. A “cold-blooded” approach is not necessarily better.
Cynically speaking, I’m not sure I agree. Sure, most people would say “never again” and shake their heads solemnly. And yet we let the Rwanda massacres commence and then develop into the Congo war, we’ve seen ethnic cleansing in Darfur, we let Syria descend into war and chaos, and we are currently looking at concentration camps for Uighurs, not to mention the whole country of North Korea being for practical purposes a concentration camp.
As long as they don’t march under a literal swastika, we rather politely look the other way.
More cynically speaking, the way we dealt with people marching under a literal swastika was by invading, occupying and partitioning their country and then kept at it for 45 years.
I have little doubt we could have dealt with Rwanda and Darfur in this fashion, but it would’ve been a bad look. I also suspect that if the people who led and fought WWII were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan (Syria too, perhaps, though here having Russia on the opposite side makes things tricky) things would have also been different.
Then again, we’d likely also need the society who lived through WWII.
There’s your problem, ma’am.
And there, too.
This requires elaboration.
Any time you adopt a consequentialist stance you have taken the first step on the path to the kind of oppression you worry about in this post. It is inevitable.
Let’s take the most basic approach there is: the trolley problem. A consequentialist approach deems it justified to kill one person in order that five others might not die. The distinction between “kill” and “die” (rather than “be killed”) is important. By pulling the lever, you decide that the solitary person on the other set of tracks should die, in order that the other ones may not. His death is on your hands, just as surely as if you had pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger, because he would not have died were it not for your action.
What of the others? Surely there’s a symmetry here and if they die because you didn’t pull the lever, it will be just as if you had machine-gunned them down?
Not so.
Picture yourself in this same trolley scenario but with no lever. Do you bear any moral responsibility for their deaths?
How about a scenario where there exists a lever, but it is stuck tight and try as you may you cannot shift it, so the trolley crashes into the group killing everyone? Are you culpable?
Or maybe the lever exists and moves as expected, but the switching mechanism is broken and despite you pulling the lever the trolley still continues on its present course? Are their deaths your fault?
Or maybe you weren’t there at all and simply hear about it on the evening news. You could have been there to pull the lever. Should you have been? Are five people dead because of you?
Or maybe you weren’t there and it didn’t make the news and you live to ripe old age without the faintest idea that if you had been at the train yard on that day, five people would not have been lost? Is this a stain on your conscience?
Or maybe you weren’t there because you don’t exist at all and the whole situation happened in a pocket universe of philosophical hypotheticals that may never be reached from our own, but whose inhabitants nevertheless have hopes, dreams and loved ones; who feel pain, cry, bleed and die just as we do? Does their blood stain your hands?
Or maybe you actually were there, with a working lever within your view and reach and yet you did not pull it.
Observe that the consequences of inaction are the same as those of action that cannot succeed or the non-existence of the actor. A more realistic version might have you not existing because you died in a bizarre railway accident a few years back and you may have been alive to pull the lever had you not chosen to wander alone on the tracks. Do you have a moral obligation to stay alive that you may be there to rescue those people in the future (leaving aside any other perceived obligations and/or benefits of staying alive)?
If the consequences are the same whether you could not or would not act, you cannot arrive at a consequentialist distinction between them. Either it is the case that you have a moral obligation to act, even if it is objectively impossible to do so, or it is the case that you do not have an obligation to act, because the consequences of your inaction are the same as those if your action wasn’t an option at all. If you cannot be held morally responsible for inability to act, you cannot be held morally responsible for choosing not to act – if consequences are the criterion by which we evaluate what is moral.
The five people in the original path of the trolley will die if you choose not do anything, but they will die just as well if there is nothing you can do, or even nobody who could do something exists.
This is why I use the word “die”.
Let’s flip it around to the single person on the other branch of the tracks.
If you don’t exist, he lives. If you’re not there, he lives. If the mechanism doesn’t work, he lives. If there exists no switching mechanism, he lives. If you choose not to act, he lives.
Only when you specifically say “this person needs to die, so that the others may live” and pull the lever (which works as intended) will this person die.
That’s why I use the word “kill”.
The evil of “five people dead” occurs in all potential worlds except the one where you pull the lever. The evil of “one person dead” occurs solely in the world where you chose to pull the lever. Five people die whether you exist or not – this is not an evil of your doing. One man dies if and only if you exist and choose to pull the lever – this is an evil of your doing.
Choosing to pull the lever is an evil act – to the extent that someone will die who would rather live, who will be missed by his loved ones. You choose this evil in order to avert a “greater” evil – five people dead.
There’s always a greater evil. That path has no end.
Much like this comment.
But what if you’re the railway manager? What if the lever position is your and only your responsibility? Should you hide behind “But that’s the position the lever was in when I was came!”?
The function of the person deciding can turn a consequentialist position into a deontological one. It’s not just “the act that kills fewer people”, but it’s also your decision to make according to the rule system you live in.
How about the hospital manager that can choose between saving a single young girl with a very expensive transplant, or renovating a whole hospital wing? He’s in a position to pull such levers almost every day. Some more subtle than others – he may chose to put money in the staff rec room. And because he’s living in a room full of levers, there’s an ubiquitous social convention that we aren’t to blame him for each death that happens under his watch, even if he accidentally touched a lever with his elbow, unless the damage is too great. Sometimes the correct reaction to that is the famous “Fire him? I just paid for his education!”
Interesting question, but misses the mark. Remember: in the trolley problem the choices are “let five die”/”kill one”. There is no “right” position for the lever to be in.*
As a railway manager, the question you should be asking is: “how did these people get on the tracks?” or maybe “why is this trolley barelling out of control?” It is possible that there are indeed things you should have done, but didn’t (locking the gates, securing the trolley), but ethically these are more akin to deontology than consequentialism, as you rightly note. Disregard of safety procedures doesn’t become any less troubling simply because nothing’s gone wrong, yet.
One thing I’m reasonably sure of, is that if a railway manager did pull the lever, they’d be tried – and likely punished – for killing a person.
On the other hand, I don’t find it ethically worrying if I determine that “those people had no business being in that place at that time; they should’ve known the risks and if they’ve gotten themselves killed it’s their own damn fault”.
I would point out, as a general rule, that the further we depart from intentional actions, the less firm our ethical grounding is. Once you find yourself in a room full of levers, that work in subtle ways, consequentialism begins to fail as an ethical beacon, because the sheer number of combinations – not to mention environmental conditions – overwhelms our capacity for predicting outcomes.
Hm… just like real life.
In defence of consequentialism, it makes a pretty fine ethical filter, but please – for the love of all that’s holy – don’t use it for affirmative decision-making.
* Aside: I find consequentialism – especially in its utilitarian variant – to be much like an attempt to turn ethics into a solvable game. The results are much as what we’d expect them to be.
Ugh god, didn’t read that comment thread yet, it’s horrible. That’s not consequentialism, that’s just bad judgement. Which, I guess, is the real reason why Stalin and Mao and Hitler fucked up. I don’t think it’s the fundamental problem of trolly-killing – it’s that in none of those cases they touched the right lever. Jews weren’t devils, the Great Leap Forward was plain mistaken, and Stalin… not sure exactly what he was trying to do, other than a general “kill everybody that moves” policy. Which I don’t think it’s really defensible.
If you think that killing the monk that disagrees with you is a good idea, the problem is not (just) the fact that you’re willing to kill monks, it’s that you think killing in this context is a good idea.
And here deontology comes to the rescue, and proves itself the better bet long term. We are often wrong, and occasionally we are very very wrong, but if we live in an ethics system that doesn’t let us easily kill people, that automatically limits the consequences of our stupidity. Sure, this will also somewhat limit our progress – and there’s a trick to having ethical systems that minimize the downsides while allowing for progress, which I guess can only be evolved though group competition, since we don’t yet have the art of developing them from scratch.
EY had a very nice concept here, about designing AIs with what he called “deontological kill switches” (can’t find the source now). You let an AI evolve and develop its values, but whenever this values tries to do something outside your predefined acceptability range (like kill people), you have an external mechanism that cuts its power. Humans have that already – no matter how much you feel like strangling your family, you (almost) never really do.
Not that I disagree with you about the “bad judgement” bit, but I think you aren’t giving the consequentialist angle enough consideration.
Form aside, those are valid concerns. If we choose not to pursue cures to diseases we (in our twenty-twenty hindsight) are preventable/curable, people will die. If we do not pursue efficiency gains in agriculture that allow us to produce more food with the land and people at our disposal, people will die.
If we choose not to pull the lever, people will die.
Funny thing happening here. No? The real trick is spotting the price that must be paid.
Alex M’s post is hilariously bad, because of its cavalier approach to what is perhaps the most important question in statemanship.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao aren’t nearly as funny because they applied this approach in actual statemanship.
The consequentialist trap is that once you’ve convinced yourself that a gain of sufficient magnitude is worth the price, you can continue the process indefinitely – or at least up to the point of industrial-scale murder and going to war with everybody. Pascal-scenarios aren’t meant to be taken seriously.
Deontology has its own set of problems. Everyone knows the one about the murderer/SS-man going after your friend/Jews, but how about the one where your wife asks you “does this make me look fat?”
It’s all fine and dandy to talk about how lying or murder are never justified, but I’d much rather live in a world where knife-wielding terrorists are clubbed to death* with narwhal tusks and that dress doesn’t make your wife look fat at all – and I suspect so would you.
So I suggest the exact opposite approach: use deontology to tell you what to do – unless consequentialism tells you you really shouldn’t.
* Yeah, I know that this particular terrorist was actually shot by the police, but I wouldn’t have minded the former.
@Radu Floricica
I agree with you deontology comes to the rescue here, but as transmitted, that suggestion from Yudkowsky is dumb. Under many reasonable definitions of the word “kill,” the person who redirects the trolley is killing the guy. So if he thinks AI can’t be allowed to kill, then he can never make an AI that solves a trolley problem his preferred way. That is a bit of a problem. Of course he doesn’t have to accept that a definition of killing like that, but then he must at least persuade us he’s not papering over the problem by playing semantic games.
It’s also really ironic coming from Yudkowsky, because he wrote a whole post years back about how obvious it is that brutally torturing a person for fifty years is better than a zillion zillion people getting the littlest dust speck in their eye. You might wonder whether Yudkowsky thinks an AI can ever be trusted to get the “obvious” answer. Since we don’t have the source to hand I’m going to guess he had something different in mind from what you said—this objection is too obvious to have been overlooked.
@Faza (TCM)
I have to note how on this point you chose a level of abstraction where we’re talking about society at large, and where not moving levers is a choice in itself, while in the previous two comments we were talking about literal levers and literal people. Not a disagreement in either scenario, much agreement with both actually, just an “I see what you did there”.
Mentally replace deontology with tradition and you’re likely covered. Plenty of unspoken rules say that you should be nice to your wife.
It’s normal for consequentialism and deontology to overlap a lot in real life. Actually, when they don’t it’s a sign something is amiss and you need to pay attention. And the larger and longer the difference, the likelier that something is seriously wrong.
@Nick
Definitely don’t judge EY through my foggy memories – like I said, I looked for a source but couldn’t find it. But either way, it’s a concept, not a prescriptive approach. And definitely not one to meant to optimize an AIs thought process. A lot thought goes not into making a marginally better AI, but one that doesn’t turn us into paperclips. And in this respect, having AIs that shut down when they try to play the trolley game is actually a pretty good idea. Worst case with a deontological kill switch is a burned AI and 5 dead people. Worst case without one is whatever a strange AI that went completely bonkers thinks is a good idea.
From Radu Floricica:
From Acicirolf Udar, goatee-sporting mirror-universe resident:
Every system looks good if we ignore the mistakes it can make, but don’t extend its alternatives the same courtesy. The practical choice between deontology and consequentialism comes when someone encounters a situation where they disagree. This is actually quite rare, which is why contrived thought-experiments are so commonly used to juxtapose the two systems – in practice, they’re rarely in conflict. A person who finds themselves facing such a conflict is either in a situation that their deontological rules apply poorly to, or a situation where they can’t accurately predict the consequences of their choices. Figuring out which is a job for probabilistic reasoning, not blind faith (either in the rules or their own insight).
@Radu Floricica
Yeah, I’m not passing any definite judgment on Yudkowsky here—that’s why I said “as transmitted” and that I doubt that’s really what he meant. But I don’t know how anything you say solves the problem. You claim this approach reduces risk. That’s true, but the same goes for consequentialists who aren’t silicon, like Yudkowsky himself. So maybe Yudkowsky should be applying a deontological “kill switch” on his own conclusions. But of course he doesn’t, as we’ve seen, and instead brags about how obvious his answers are. Wouldn’t Clippy feel the same? You also claim, and I don’t understand how this relates to the risk argument, that it’s just a concept and not a “prescriptive approach.” Does that mean Yudkowsky will discuss the idea of giving his AIs killswitches and then never actually do so? Then what is the value of the concept? What role is it playing in developing an AI that isn’t Clippy?
@Radu Floricica:
I play the hand I am dealt.
Alex M picked the first level of abstraction, so it is fitting that I address those specific examples.
I brought in the trolley problem (before I’d read Alex M’s thread, mind) so intellectual honesty demanded that I note the parallel.
It’s not that big a difference in the context of philosophical discussion, in any case. Given that we can assume whatever ontology we feel best illustrates the argument (and explicitly do so in the trolley problem), all we have to show is that:
a. The consequences of inaction are such and such,
b. The consequences of action are such and such.
I don’t think we are in disagreement that failure to develop treatments for treatable fatal diseases will result in people dying. The question then becomes “what actions are allowable in ensuring such treatments are developed?”
“Is it okay to kill anyone who obstructs the development of such treatments?” is a specific instance of that question. Sure, there may be non-lethal ways around it (since it is much closer to an actual real-world scenario), but there are non-lethal solutions to the trolley problem, too, unless we assume that there are none – and we typically do.
@Skeptical Wolf
I think we were typing the same conclusion at the same time. From my next comment:
@Nick
I feel like offering you a snickers. Is it impolite? 🙂
Humans both have and need kill switches. We often feel like killing somebody, and we just as often think that somebody would be better off dead (Trump would be a no. 1 contender). And yet, somehow, people are remarkably unlikely to kill – against both their judgement and emotions. Partly because we have strong inhibitions against killing – both inborn and cultural.
As for needing them, well, see all the talk about runaway ideologies. Sometimes we get carried away and end up with 6 million dead in concentration camp, or god knows how many million dead in Russia and China. That’s a good example of when we should have had better kill switches. It’s likely no coincidence either – we had evolved cultural protections against community murder, but not industrial extermination. Not at the time. Now we have a bit – just try and say that immigrants should wear a badge, and you’re likely to hit a freshly evolved cultural kill switch – it’ll terminate your political career well before people think about whether it may or may not be a good idea, utility-wise.
And the last point – AIs are very different from humans. We have a good idea what’s the range of human behavior, and the range of human pathologies. How would you feel about instating a random human as global dictator for life? Might not be a good idea, but I wouldn’t be terrified. It’s not an existential risk. An AI gone off the rails however… or even an AI completely on the rails, but in a direction totally foreign to us… now that scares me. A lot. I’d actually feel a lot better if there were whole areas of behavior that would be completely closed to it, even if it would make it (a lot) less efficient.
Thank you for the detailed post, this is the best explanation of deontological systems I’ve seen and has caused me to update my opinion of deonotology relative to consequentialism.
Would you be willing to talk a bit about how the scenario changes if you have two buttons instead of a switch? Specifically, some enterprising railway manager noticed that out-of-control trolleys are unreasonably attracted to tracks with strangely-immobile people on them and installed an emergency barricade system. Unfortunately, there’s only one emergency barricade and you have two out-of-control trolleys. Push button 1 and trolley 2 kills 5 people, but the 1 person on track 1 is saved. Push button 2 and trolley 1 kills 1 person, but the 5 people on track 2 are saved. Push neither button and 6 people die.
Would you be willing to make the point you’re making here more explicit? I want to be careful about reading too much into punchlines in a thread that started by talking about historical atrocities.
But I worry that you’re implicitly straw-manning your chosen opponents here. The consequentialist answer to the trolley problem is “when you have a choice, make the choice that piles up fewer bodies”. There’s a lot of distance between that and the events discussed upthread.
Or, put another way: There’s always a cost to doing good. That path has no end either.
I wasn’t aware that I was talking about deontology. Everything I said was an exploration of the logical consequences of consequentialist ethics.
In this situation, saving five people seems like the best choice, though I should stress that this doesn’t – in itself – create a moral obligation to push either button, for much the same reasons as in the original formulation (what if it turns out that pushing the button doesn’t do what you think it will, or there’s nobody to push the button?)
The difference here is that the action is, in fact, costless – as compared to inaction. By default, everyone on the tracks dies. No action we can take will cause someone to die who would have lived had we chosen not to act. Our action can only improve the outcome: someone who would have died had we not acted will live.
There is no symmetry between the inability to save everyone and the conscious choice that someone who would have otherwise lived must die, so that someone else might live.
The consequentialist answer to the trolley problem states that it is acceptable to kill an innocent to save the lives of other innocents. You cannot get around that. Once you accept that inflicting suffering is a viable way of securing a greater good, the rest is just haggling about the price.
My solution to that problem is not to try to do good, lest I end up on the road to hell. Not doing evil is, overall, a more secure ethical heuristic.
How far does this logic go? If an airline pilot coming in to land notices both that their approach is off-target (and will lead to a crash if not corrected) and that there is a person on the runway (who will be struck if the approach is corrected), do they have no obligation to correct their course? Do they have an obligation not to? Does a “moral obligation” ever exist? Or was the pilot’s mistake taking off in the first place?
Yes, I agree that your first sentence accurately summarizes the consequentialist answer to the trolley problem. I am not trying to “get around” anything. But I am still confused by the significance you place on “the rest is just haggling about the price”. Are you suggesting that we should only pursue courses of action with no costs or downsides? Is “inflicting suffering” a Schelling point you’re trying to pin down as something we should never do no matter what the benefit? Is “killing an innocent”? As I understand it, every significant decision “just haggling about price”. That doesn’t mean we don’t make them.
“Don’t be evil” is fine, but then what do you do? Why comment on SSC? Why do anything besides sit passively and wait for death? Aren’t you worried that you’re going to accidentally inflict some trivial amount of suffering? The fact that you’re taking actions at all means there must be some factor you weigh against the costs and risks of those actions.
That’s not a good example, given that “runway obstructed” is something we know exactly how to deal with and it doesn’t involve running people over* (or moral obligations for that matter).
The pilot would most definitely be mistaken in taking off, if he had no plan for “what happens if I can’t land where I intended to?” – which is why this is a standard element of flight planning.
However, on the deeper subject of whether moral obligations exist or not, I’ll bite right on down on the bullet and say that I don’t believe a moral obligation towards action exists, ever. But I’m a moral nihilist, so I can say that.
The point is that once you feel it justified to kill one person to save five (under your ethical framework) you are immediately faced with questions regarding how far that goes.
Is killing two people to save ten acceptable? If one for five was a good price, why wouldn’t just a straight up doubling be one?
How about a million for five million? Ten million for fifty million? Is there any number of intentional deaths (remember: in the classic trolley problem, you’re choosing to kill an innocent person – with certainty of outcome) that is too much? If so, where do we get the ethical guideline that allows us to say that killing one innocent person is okay, but killing ten million innocents isn’t?
People are understandably wary of those who even contemplate killing ten million innocents, so you need a very good answer here.
Not killing innocents is a damn fine Schelling point, as it happens, but I must stress that “killing” is not the same thing as “letting die” for our purposes. To “kill” someone is to take an action that will cause a person who, but for this action, would have lived to die, with this being the desired outcome.
Not inflicting suffering isn’t a bad Schelling point either, with the same caveats (not preventing suffering isn’t the same as actively causing to suffer), but “suffering” is a much more hazy concept. Still, “do not kill or torture innocent people” is something of a no-brainer, so if you’re seriously going to propose “killing or torturing innocent people is sometimes okay”, you got a damn lot ‘splainin’ to do.
The vast majority of things we do aren’t morally entangled to begin with, unless you really try to do so. I seriously doubt that even the most dedicated consequentialists perform a moral calculus before initiating any and all day-to-day actions, mostly because they’d never get anything done.
I was going to say that commenting on SSC isn’t a moral question, but that would pass up a great opportunity for moral justificationism (aimed at myself, natch, and thus somewhat lost, given my aforementioned moral nihilism): I am making the world a better place by helping otherwise very intelligent people apply their considerable intelligence, by actually thinking.
That was a joke.
That doesn’t sound very different from “living” to my ears.
De minimis lex non curat.
Indeed. Inaction also has a cost. It just so happens that inaction is typically cheaper.
* Pilot initiates a go-around and notifies the tower to get the idiot off the runway. If the obstruction cannot be removed, the pilot diverts to an alternate landing site. You’ll find that we’re really good at not running people over on runways, mostly because real-life doesn’t have to follow the artificial restrictions of outcomes such as those present in the trolley problem.
How far are you willing to carry the argument?
My standard counterargument, directed at libertarians who see rights from a strong deontological point of view, is to imagine that there is an asteroid headed for Earth which, if not stopped, will wipe out all life on the planet. By some implausible circumstances, you can stop it, but only by stealing a nickle from someone who is its rightful owner. The owner is a depressed curmudgeon who doesn’t care if the asteroid hits, so you can’t claim that stealing the nickle is using it as he would desire.
Do you steal the nickle?
If you want to restrict the action vs inaction argument to cases with human lives at stake on both sides, I expect you can create your own hypothetical, where the choice is not between one life and five but between one life and five billion, and see if you still approve of letting the five billion be killed.
You might also want to think about the probabilistic version. Are you entitled to impose a risk of death on A in order to prevent the certain death of B?
Does such a thought experiment get you anywhere?
Say you thought an asteroid was heading towards earth and would soon kill everyone, would you not drug and rape women freely? All of the long term consequences of drugging and raping are gone even for the victims, and you would keep the drugged woman from experiencing fear and anxiety of her impending doom while also enjoying yourself, seems like a win win for consequentialists.
What if you’re a preference utilitarian?
No, I would not. These anti-consequentialist arguments are starting to sound like secular versions of the old “without God, what’s to keep everyone from going around robbing and raping and killing each other all the time?” argument that religious fundamentalists would make.
To quote Penn Jillette: “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.”
Consequentialism is not moral nihilism. It’s based around the idea that people should do whatever brings about good outcomes, but that still requires a core belief that some outcomes are good and some outcomes are less good and some outcomes are not good at all. Drugging and raping people is a not-good outcome in itself, and can’t be justified simply because there are circumstances in which it won’t lead to other bad outcomes; the only way it could even potentially be justified is if it somehow prevented a worse outcome. A consequentialist might argue that rape is justified in a situation where someone had you and another person at gunpoint, and threatened to kill you both unless you raped the other person in front of him for his pleasure. Or that drugging and impregnating women against their will might be necessary in a situation in which there were very few humans left and it was the only way to ensure the survival of the species. But not simply on the basis of “she won’t feel it and she won’t be around to be upset about it afterwards because we’ll all be dead soon.”
To be fair, that’s not the point. The point is, how can you condemn someone who does rape people (presumably because he wants to) without some kind of objective morality.
But more to the point, in the asteroid hypothetical the point is that if we only use consequential ethics then we would have to say there is nothing wrong with the drugging and raping in the scenario as outlined. But most of use do believe there is something wrong with drugging and raping someone, even if there are no negative consequences. Which points to something being wrong with pure consequentialism. Which means either creating a more nuanced version of consequentialism (preference utilitarian, etc) or adding in other ethical systems.
In short, the point of the hypothetical isn’t that consequentialists would rape people if there were no consequences, but rather that in some hypotheticals consequentialism would hold that nothing is wrong with rape, while a different ethical system would not.
That sounds like deontology to me (some things are bad because they are bad, so don’t do them): if no pain is caused by the rape and drugging, then why is it bad under a pure consequential ethic?
I’m not making an anti-consequentialist argument, I am making an anti-extreme example argument. You learn very little about behavior from once off examples in iterated games and you learn even less from a once off hypothetical that violates the rules of the game.
You’re not the marginal case. What do we do about the marginal case? This is like saying, “Why do we need laws against fraud? I commit exactly how much fraud I want – zero.”
Because it negates the other person’s preference to not be drugged and raped.
Why should we favor people’s preferences over their pain? Or over another value of our choice, like an individual’s beauty or height? I mean I know why I do, but then again I’m not a consequentialist.
@LadyJane, I don’t see how averaging people’s preferences can work as an acceptable ethic. Seventy years ago, there were a supermajority of people with strong preferences that you not marry someone of a different race. Presumably you would somehow hold their preferences are invalid and shouldn’t be considered?
(I myself avoid this difficulty by being a deontologist.)
Again, you’re acting like consequentialism and nihilism are the same thing. They aren’t. “Why should we favor people’s preferences over their pain?” is not a consequentialist argument, it’s a nihilist one.
Fair enough.
I’m entitled to have my preferences respected when it comes to my own body, no matter how many other people disagree with me. I’m not entitled to have my preferences respected when it comes to other people’s bodies, no matter how many other people agree with me. No one said that all decisions should be made by averaging the sum total of everyone’s preferences on everything.
I agree with this (with the usual edge cases where your preferences have spillover effects on other people). But that means that either you’re not a utilitarian, or you add up utility in some atypical way?
What do you think the “typical” way is? I can’t really think of any form of utilitarianism that would condone rape, even if the rape victim was unconscious and technically suffered no physical or mental pain as a result of it (except perhaps in some extreme niche cases, like the example I gave of the gunman forcing someone else to commit rape at gunpoint). I also don’t think most forms of utilitarianism would condemn interracial marriage, even on majoritarian grounds in a society where most people were against it (although I could see a very small number of utilitarians with racialist views condemning interracial marriage because they genuinely believe it would lead to worse outcomes for everyone as a result of social disorder, dysgenics, etc).
I don’t think religion solves that problem. If you don’t have some basis for morality other than “God tells me,” how do you decide whether the supernatural being you are dealing with is good, hence whether you should accept his judgement on moral questions?
I’m not arguing for only using consequential ethics. I’m arguing against only using deontological ethics.
That’s why I constructed a case where a tiny rights violation is being weighed against an enormous benefit in consequences.
> I’m entitled to have my preferences respected when it comes to my own body, no matter how many other people disagree with me.
What do you consider to be the range of appropriate responses should your preferences not be respected?
And, how should someone under your model evaluate the case where they believe that their work-product is a product or consequence of their body and/or mind? If not inclined to participate, should this same principle not hold against taxation?
David, you are presuming that I’m not the curmudgeon. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this coronavirus business, it’s that this world isn’t worth saving. Let it burn.
That aside, stealing a nickle is perfectly reversible in a way that killing is not. Hell yeah, take the nickle and pay him back five bucks once the whole crisis is over (saving the world is worth five bucks to you, surely?)
Also, I’m not a deontologist (why does everyone keep assuming this?) I am a pragmatic moral nihilist, thank you very much.
One life vs. five billion? I’ll be out having a smoke someplace quiet. Those five billion aren’t my responsibility, nor are they the responsibility of that poor slob I’m being asked to kill. We all gotta die of something, but the only thing that I can accept responsibility for is that people aren’t dying of Faza (TCM).
The probabilistic version is more interesting, at least. What are the odds?
Actually, don’t tell me. We both know, of course, that any numbers we come up with will be pulled out of a hat for the sake of compelling argument, so let’s just skip that part and assume that we defer to the choice of the person taking the risk.
The person at risk of death isn’t able to consent, you say? Well, I guess that B dies, then.
People die. It’s, like, a key feature. Preventing deaths isn’t my job. It’s not my responsibility. Even if I were a doctor, it would be my job to prevent deaths (where possible) of the people who are actually in my care; not those being treated in a neighbouring state, much less those on a transpacific flight.
Preventing deaths isn’t your job either (generic “you”, now – unless, of course, your literal job actually does involve saving lives). I’d much rather you didn’t try. People aren’t very good at predicting outcomes of complex situations and it seems to me that killing A is, overall, much more likely than saving B.
Yeah. I think the line between commission and omission is real. This ties back into the issue of hubris. It isn’t natural human thinking to assume people are responsible for everything that happens, or for saving every possible life around the world. Traditional religions did not emphasize any such responsibility–if God chose to take someone, it was a sin to rebel against it.
Of course, you were expected to make basis efforts to help someone who you witnessed in distress, but they didn’t see responsibility on a grand scale. When child mortality was that high, you couldn’t be held responsible for the deaths of faraway children–you couldn’t even save your own. Most abolitionists believed you had a moral duty to oppose slavery, but they didn’t usually spell it out as a responsibility to save individual lives–it was usually portrayed as wrong as a matter of principle, not consequence.
Such thinking only became popular once we acquired a lot of centralized power and a more consequentialist and universalizing worldview, because it was pretty nonsensical before that. I mean the whole COVID-19 “we must save the maximum number of lives at all costs” attitude is pretty new thing. People aren’t built to accurately understand the consequences of widescale intervention or regulation, and the risk of it it can’t be equated with the risk of failing to act. I’m not saying it should never be done, but they aren’t the same.
I’m really puzzled by this passage. I don’t see any logical basis for it at all. In fact it seems obviously wrong to me. Obviously there is moral culpability only for things within your control. I didn’t think that was controversial.
By the way, in a “real world” sense I agree that inaction should be considered very differently from action, simply because you are never operating with unlimited time and information. So you have to be more careful when choosing to act. By the way that is reflected in the law. However in a pure theoretical framework with full knowledge and time I don’t see a difference.
@Faza (TCM): Let’s flip the scenario around the other way.
There are five people tied to a railroad track. There is no one on the other track. The trolley is coming down the first track, and it’s going to kill all five of those people unless you pull a lever that switches it onto the empty track, thus harming no one. Do you have a moral obligation to pull the lever? Is pulling the lever the right thing to do, or is it morally equivalent to not pulling the lever and allowing those five people die?
What if there is no overarching conclusion beyond that? Complex systems are … complex, and human society is not only quite large, but also made of people that are constantly trying to out-think each other. Not exactly an easy environment to model.
So given that it’s our first time going through this kinds of growing pains, I kinda think it’s just a series of gotchas that we just had to go through. The case for socialism is extremely easy to make. Hell, I think we’re all naturally socialists in adolescence, unless we happen to read Ayn Rand first. Nowadays we have the benefit of 100 years of counterexamples, AND Hayek & company, and most educated young people are still more or less socialists.
This is a sobering thought, because it means that we most likely haven’t figured it all out, and there could be another gotcha just around the corner. And it’s useless to look for simple, sweeping solutions for what’s fundamentally a very complex problem. One which permits progress, of course – we learned quite a few things already.
I don’t think you can find a single “cause” for the evils of the 20th century. Multiple causes seems to exist and interplay.
The holocaust was maybe an example of the “people willing to kill and die for a cause, willing to compromise their basic empathy and human decency for the sake of some utopian ideology”. At least at first, among some of the higher planners. But it was not a utilitarian “this sacrifice will make the world a better place” plot, instead it was based in weird race-vs-race theories with little basis in reality. But there were probably Nazi true believers that planned the holocaust as a necessary effort to save “the German race”.
The destruction of Warsaw doesn’t map to this pattern. Everyone knew the war was lost. Yet the Nazis spent tons of resources, that could have been used to evacuate civilians or stop the Russians, to slaughter civilians and destroy the cultural heritage of Poland. What was the greater good here? Nothing as far as I can see. The motivation seems to have been some twisted sense of pride and revenge and pure sadism.
The Soviets stood and watched when Warsaw was destroyed. Why? Not because Stalin was an ideologist who thought it would help the global revolution. To my amateur historian eyes, Stalin seemed to have been utterly pragmatic, completely different from Hitler in this regard. Instead, Stalin knew that the Warsaw partisans wouldn’t support his plans of dominating Poland, and so he let them die. This pragmatic evil is can also be seen in e.g. the Holdomor.
And all of this is complicated by incompetence and outright delusions. The soviet purges might have been the right move from Stalin to get rid of rivals and usurpers, or it might have been a disaster caused by his paranoia. Hitler was notoriously unstable and high on all kinds of different drugs. The eastwards Nazi expansion was motivated by “Lebensruam”, and some kind of bizarre plan to make Germany a state of self-sufficient citizen-soldier-farmers, which is an utterly ridiculous way to organize an economy from a modern perspective. Was the German leadership mistaken about the goal but “correct” about the plan? Was this an honest mistake or an outright delusion? Was it just propaganda? Overall, the Nazis seems like a mix of ideologists, opportunists and sadists and it’s kind of hard to spread the blame among them.
So ideology, sadism, pragmatism, delusions and incompetence, and a ton of other things, seem to matter.
To your list of collective trauma, I’d add The Great Depression, which was a driving factor for people to be looking for alternative solutions. It’s really easy to be happy when you have bread and circuses. People start to get a little squirrely when the bread runs out.
The President takes Goodhart’s law to its logical conclusion: the COVID numbers are so high because we test so many people. If we stop testing we can make the numbers fall and the virus goes away.
Now I recognize that you can’t judge the President like an ordinary man. He’s clear in the mind but his soul is mad, and whatever else Dennis Hopper said in Apocalypse Now. So instead I will recognize that there are certainly times when we’re better off with worse information – I’m thinking of the functionary in British Hong Kong who prevented the government from collecting economic data so it’d be less likely to intervene in the economy. Is this one of those cases? I hesitate to imagine a worse outcome than the one we got, and yet…
The piece you linked leaves out the sentences immediately before what it quotes: “And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world,” he added. “But why? Because we do more testing.”
The obvious reading is not that people wouldn’t be sick if we didn’t test but that if we didn’t test we wouldn’t know they were sick, so the figures on known cases wouldn’t make us look bad. With the implication that we aren’t really doing worse than other countries, we just appear to be doing worse because we test more.
That isn’t, I gather, true, but it isn’t the absurd argument you are attributing to him.
If he were making your argument, he wouldn’t have preceded it by boasting about how much testing we were doing:
“America has now conducted its 10 millionth test. That’s as of yesterday afternoon. Ten million tests we gave. Ten million,”
I saw this a few days ago and agree that he was misquoted. However the FT published this yesterday:
https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed
Which does suggest that he and others in the administration want to suppress test numbers.
Given that the US was much criticised for its low testing numbers early in the pandemic, I can also believe that Trump would boast about high test numbers at the same time as wanting to do less testing. Consistency isn’t his strong suit and he’s extremely defensive when criticised.
If he convinces himself that the US actually isn’t doing worse than other countries but merely appears to be doing so because it’s testing more, he might decide that the US should test less.
Are there timelined data of tests per million capitae, to compare various countries?
Also of interest to me would be a comparison of the tests being used. Are they identical? Or do they have different false positive/false negative rates and if so, what are they?
The data’s pretty crap, but here’s one link:
link text
If you want to get an idea about the rest of the world, you’ll have to manually add the other countries on; I’ve no idea how they chose which to display as a default.
It also omits countries like Spain, Germany, and Sweden that don’t report daily test numbers.
Other important measures to consider is our positive rate, which in the US (~8% last I checked) remains well above where we’d like to be to say we have “enough” testing (at least <2%, according to experts).
Broken link. Identical to ourworldindata.org below?
It was. Sorry about that.
Per-capita test per day
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#tests-per-day
Thanks!
I don’t get it. Maybe I’m missing something. My first reaction is that the Mother Jones piece is clearly interpreting Trump’s words in a way unsupported by the actual statements he made. Trump appeared to be making a simple and factual observation about the relationship between testing volume and positive results. I’m inclined to dismiss this take as just more mendacious partisan gotcha-ism on the part of MJ. If there is a wider context that actually looks bad for Trump which was omitted from the linked article, I’ll be happy to reconsider my position.
The media has harped on many regions for having jumps in cases, when what was happening was that the region was dutifully increasing its testing. We need to stop discouraging good behavior.
the functionary in British Hong Kong who prevented the government from collecting economic data so it’d be less likely to intervene in the economy
That was Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong Financial Secretary 1961-71. From Wiki: ‘He was once asked what the key thing that poor countries could do to improve their growth. He replied: “They should abolish the office of national statistics.”‘
My father’s story was that when he went to Hong Kong, none of the people he spoke to could explain how the monetary system worked. He figured it out for himself, then had a conversation with Sir John Cowperthwaite, who turned out to already know it. He asked why nobody else did, and the answer was that if they understood it they would mess it up.
I think it’s entirely possible that 1-2 years after this all shakes out, we’ll look back and see that countries/governments whose approach was “bury our heads in the sand and insist everything is fine” will come out on net as having achieved better overall results.
Which, of course, is not a prediction that “if we don’t test the virus will just go away” but more of a prediction that “the things the government will try to do to contain the virus won’t fall on the right side of a cost/benefit analysis”
I swear i read that sentence as “bury our dead in the sand”
I mean, Japan did this too, trying to make the Olympics happen. Are they more or less mad?
Good evening, and may this message find you well. This comment doesn’t have a central thrust because my fool of an assistant is low on energy, but I hope it sparks some discussion.
Opinion: mass media is the primary culprit for the negativity and divisiveness in our world, because it is incentivized to magnify every individual bad actor or event into a crazed hatred spiral.
Observe two discussions happening in this OT: mass broadcasting of ideology, and the “news” media’s role in loudly covering every outlier event (in this case, the shooting of blacks by police officers.)
A miniscule number of blacks (or people of any race!) are actually shot by police officers — yet, as @albatross11 points out, every one of those instances is going to be amplified to no end by the “news” media … because those instances are good at fermenting outrage in lots of people who watch “news”, and outrage makes people spend attention to “news” sites, and leave comments on “news” posts, and share “news” on social media, and these are all good outcomes for “news” organizations.
There are (at least) two things happening here. One, “news” organizations have incentives to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). Two, individuals are empowered to further spread FUD by long-distance, instantaneous (social media, forums like this one, texting)
What horrid things will happen in our lifetimes as a result of the ever-accelerating, ever-hungry outrage spirals tighten? What might be in store for you, a gracious commenter; for me, a humble plant; or for Ludovico, my human amanuensis? What bad dreams may come?
[Vague, hypothetical, ill-defined ones, you fool of a plant! -L]
Ludovico is a Jew. From what he has taught me of human history, I believe his people are the most at risk of suffering should there ever be [god forbid] one outrage spiral too many. Regardless of how rational it is for an individual to worry about “the Boogaloo” or “the Big Collapse” or “the Decline,” I submit it is less irrational for a Jew to worry than a non-Jew.
The media will whip up global mass hysteria about a virus, leading to world war 3.
You started talking about media hype frenzies, and then switch to:
Which don’t seem to have much to do with media outrage cycles.
Do you think the major news outlets in the United States are hostile to Jews?
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018/tables/table-1.xls
Anti-white hate crimes (762) are only slightly below anti-Jewish (835) according to the FBI hatecrime table for 2018.
What does that have to do with the media?
ETA: In case you can’t see what I’m getting at, the US media has lots of Jews at very high levels. Wolf Blitzer, whose parents survived Auschwitz is not going to start riling up anti-Jew hatred on CNN. Jewish Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post, is not going to have his paper start publishing anti-Jewish screeds.
I am not at all convinced that Jews have anything to fear from the US media, and that they have the most to fear is highly irrational.
Those statistics should be taken with some salt. An entirely equivalent crime with a different victim is more likely to be marked down as an anti-Jewish (or anti-black or anti-Muslim) hate crime than as an anti-white hate crime.
I meant comparing the number of anti-jewish crimes to the number of anti-white crimes to indicate that there is not any special reason for Jews to be afraid in the US. I know Jews make up a much smaller proportion of the population, but it does not seem like there is any special hatred here beyond what other groups experience.
There are about forty times as many whites as Jews in the U.S., so those figures, if correct, imply that an individual Jew is more than forty times as likely to be the victim of an anti-Jewish hate crime as an individual white of an anti-white hate crime.
Whites are also the majority which makes the number of realistic perpetrators much lower. Individually you are more likely to be victimized if you are Jewish but it also says that non Jews are less likely to commit a hate crime against Jews than non-whites are against whites (assuming of course that there aren’t a significant number of white on white or Jew on Jew hate crimes).
I think the list classifies anti-white crime as race based, but anti-Jewish is religious. So the categories are not directly comparable, and the same crime could conceivably be considered both.
More fun with numbers: I think I saw that around 40 policemen out of 700K are killed in the line of duty. If murders are evenly distributed between black and white perpetrators, a police officer has a 1:35 000 chance of being killed by a black man. Conversely, there are 300 police killings of black suspects, out of a population somewhat larger than 30 million, so a less than 1:100 000 chance. Who should be afraid of whom? 🙂
(Obviously not intended as a serious or particularly accurate analysis)
We were discussing who would be the most likely victim of a “Boogaloo”, so I would take absolute numbers as more important than relative amounts, especially since the pool of potential perpetrators changes as well. But I guess most of the commenters don’t agree?
Although I do agree that from an individual’s perspective a 40X likelihood to be a target is not great, that doesn’t mean that America has any special dislike of Jews.
Edit: For the numbers to come out the way that they do, the chances of a non-white committing a hate crime have to be much much higher than the chances of a white committing a hate crime. You look at the potential perpetrators for degree of hate, not the possibility of being a victim.
In the cold light of day, reading these replies, I am convinced that the Jewish part of my take above was silly. I should have left that off altogether to focus on media incentives. And now, a totally unrelated news story from my local paper:
~~~ ❦ ~~~
Barganthia Trubbs, Junior Correspondent
Beach City Business
LAGUNA HILLS——Residents of the Bollington neighborhood were awakened early this morning by screaming and the sound of shattering glass. When Laguna Hills Police Department’s Officer Tingles arrived in response to a 911 call, she found a blood-covered man sprawled and panting on the lawn of a opulent house. Ludovico L’amour, 25, told Officer Tingles that he was “perfectly all right” and just wanted to return to work. “As soon as I fix that,” he said, pointing at a shattered second-story window, “my boss will expect me to return to my normal duties.” Mr. L’amour claimed that at the time of the accident which propelled him through the window, he was engaged in “gift-wrapping a Pterodactyl of Gratitude” at the request of his supervisor, Canyon Fern. Mr. Fern, who is listed in state records as the home’s owner, declined to comment for this story, but the Business has discovered there are already outstanding charges against Mr. Fern for violating state laws preventing home-based businesses from employing outside workers.
Tell Ludovico to get you a grow light for nighttime.
Does anyone want to try and steel-man Trump’s understanding of trade? He claimed yesterday that cutting trade ties with China would save $500 billion (US goods imports from China are about $450 billion a year). Because of previous statements like this, I’ve thought for a while that he seems to think that a trade deficit is an actual financial deficit – that the US is in some sense losing $450 billion a year to China, like it’s a company and its revenue is lower than its costs.
Don’t know if it really counts as a ‘Steelman’, but my impression of Trump is that he ultimately seems to believe in Mercantilism. So a negative trade deficit is an overall financial deficit to him. More money is leaving the US to China than its getting in return. So that means that China is enriching itself at the US’s expense (bad for clear ideological reasons, America must always be the ‘winner’ of any exchange). Plus the missing money has to be made up somehow. Traditionally this is either by increasing borrowing or attracting foreign investment. The former is bad because it leads (or at least, is believed to lead) to bigger government (and so is bad for a politician in the ‘pro small government’ camp), and a spiralling government debt is also generally viewed as a bad thing. The latter is bad because foreign investment in inherently bad to a mercantilist or nationalist (Trump being both). It both increases foreign control/influence over the home country’s business (bad, because foreigners will always be trying to benefit themselves to the detriment of the home country) and means that even more wealth will leave the home country’s borders when the foreign investors take their returns out of country, ultimately making the ‘home country’ poorer.
Now, I’m far from a professional economist, so I might have gotten stuff wrong, but that’s my interpretation of Trump’s view with a bit of sanity added.
.
I can’t speak to what Trump believes, but if you include buying U.S. debt as investment then, unless foreigners are actually accumulating dollar bills, a trade deficit is automatically balanced by foreign investment. What else can foreigners do with their excess dollars?
Increasing debt held by Americans, on the other hand, has no effect on “making up the missing money.” If foreigners are hoarding dollar bills the U.S. can always print more, thus getting an interest free loan from abroad.
Purchase American capital assets? Which means we’re giving them the land in exchange for
beadsiPhones.Warren Buffet likened a trade deficit to someone buying consumer goods with their assets/equity rather than with their income (exports) which in the long run will lead to a similar kind of impoverishment as if borrowing was involved.
Except:
1. Only the overall trade deficit is meaningful in this way. If X dollars of exports go A -> B -> C -> A, everyone is at 0 overall trade deficits, but bilateral measures will tell you A is “impoverishing” itself against C.
2. In a world where total capital is increasing, this doesn’t mean a lot. Someone owning a company whose equity value grows at 3% yearly and sells off 1% of it each year to spend on goods is “impoverishing” themselves relative to the one who doesn’t spend that money, but much better off than if his company didn’t appreciate in the first place and he had to work for every dollar of earnings.
2. matters a lot when the US has an aging population, a very long track record of respecting investor assets, and been accumulating capital for multiple centuries (including a lot of it abroad). People from all over the world want to buy US-based assets for that reason, and many retirees in the US are very much OK with what they’re getting for it.
Aggregating this measure at a national level discards a lot of what’s actually going on. Especially with the federal deficit being more than 100% of the current account deficit (so if you split the US government off from the rest of the US, the current account balance would be very different).
I don’t disagree with anything that’s said here. Though i would be curious to see data that confirmed these counter-examples.
But wouldn’t the deficit trading nation suffer a depreciation of their currency, which would balance things out in the long run?
The problem, I think, is that the dollar is not just a national currency but an international currency too, with a _lot_ of dollars running outside the american trade, so it does not depreciate naturally. But this gives America a bunch of advantages so they won’t want to stop the dollar from being used as an international currency.
Trump is not entirely wrong, but maybe his solutions are.
I think you answered your own question in the US Case.
Whether the global reserve currency thing is a blessing or a curse depends on what your position is in the US Economy.
Also, If you’re in a currency union depreciation isn’t really a thing.
Depreciation *should* keep total trade deficits from growing indefinitely. But since they don’t the mental model needs to be revised IMO.
That’s the specie flow mechanism. It works if both countries are on the gold standard and the deficit means that the country is exporting gold, which increases the domestic value of gold and so lowers domestic prices measured in gold.
It would work in a fiat system if the foreigners simply piled up dollar bills and the deficit country didn’t choose to print more dollars to prevent the deflation. But most foreigners who get dollars want to use them, either to buy U.S. assets or U.S. goods.
The specie flow mechanism doesn’t necessarily work. An outflow of money from a country will not necessarily lead to lower prices in that country, but instead to tighter credit and higher interest rates. See this article from Critique of Crisis Theory.
Some commentators have called Trump’s policy economic nationalism. This seems like a pretty accurate idea of how Trump views the economy: not as something to be maximized along the lines proposed by economists but as an asset to achieve national goals, which they believe will increase wellbeing.
One of the fundamental conceits of the Trump presidency is that the United States has a much stronger negotiating position than other nations have acknowledged. The view is that the US has, for the last twenty or thirty years or so, been cooperating with the global order while the other countries have been defecting. And in doing so, they’ve forgotten that they’re defecting and forgotten that they need the US more than the US needs them. Trump is pursuing an explicit policy of reminding allies they need the US and that there are no good alternatives. And reminding enemies that they too rely on US sufferance. This is part of why he articulates the need to renegotiate basically every trade deal. Even when it ends up similar to where it started, the point is to make them remember these deals are very important to them and that a US president could end them with minimal domestic implications.
Trump’s view on China isn’t mercantilist. It’s that both sides are benefitting but that matters more to China than the US, so we’re doing them a favor and China better start behaving. This is similar to his view on the Saudi-Russian gas war prior to coronavirus: it will hurt the US but it will hurt the US less than everyone else, so go ahead. (And since none of these people, except maybe Saudi Arabia, are behaving in Trump’s view the damage is a good thing.)
Also, keep in mind Trump’s ire is uneven. He renegotiates with allies and sometimes gets into spats with them. But he’s much more willing to compromise with allies, especially respectful allies, than enemies. Trump made significant concessions to the Mexicans because they reminded him they were US allies and they asked nicely. Even when Trudeau took an anti-Trump pose Canada didn’t get the full brunt of a trade war the way China did.
So the steelman of Trump’s trade policy is this: Trade, as fancy economists have proven, benefits both sides. But we’re America: we’re the biggest, most advanced economy in the world and the locus of the international system. Trade benefits any one nation more than it benefits us, even if the finances of such a deal are theoretically equal. Cheap goods are more fungible than access to American markets or expertise. Allies which honor their agreements with us and support us deserve access to our economy as a reward, though we do put Americans above even them. Allies that don’t honor their agreements need to be compelled to do so and remembered as unreliable. Enemies should be cut off as much as possible. This will lead to more economic prosperity in the long run as we no longer let people exploit our economy, no longer let nations free ride off our institutions, and maintain our pre-eminence on the international stage through such policies.
More broadly, Trump is kind of a neo-cold warrior. He famously stood at the border of Russia and claimed that his goal was the defense of western civilization. Which he appears to define as democracy and capitalism rather than literal Europeaness, such that he includes places like India or Japan in that group. His appeals to both ASEAN and the Ukrainians both basically said he was doing it because the US has an interest in opposing China/Russia. So it’s not too surprising he’s returned to viewing the economy as a carrot, the same way we used it in the Cold War.
Note: Obligatory this is my description of Trump’s beliefs steelmanned as I perceive them and have no relation, either positively or negatively, to my own.
This is a really good steelman of the economic nationalist position. Thanks for the write up!
Yeah, I second Milo. This seems good to me. Thanks.
IQ and intelligence again, but I hope not as CW as it may look. I stumbled across this on Wikipedia, attributed to Nisbett et al (2012):
This caught my attention, because a) it is a really huge effect, one whole standard deviation, and would bring somebody in the lowest 15% up to the average, and b) it goes against everything I (thought that I) knew about intelligence, namely that it is strongly genetically determined, and not affected very much by environment (except for obviously harmful things like poisoning the fetus with alcohol, or severe iodine deficiency).
I guess I should update my views? But if this is actually correct, I can hardly see a more important task than to isolate the factors responsible for the increase, and implementing across the population. Even if we only manage a fraction of this effect for a fraction of the population, the impact would be fantastic. So I suspect there is more to this.
Edit: a more moderate effect (about 3-4 pts due to adoption), from a Swedish study here: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/4612
Possibly they report childhood IQ, which is known to be fairly subject to environmental factors, as opposed to adult IQ, which, counterintuitively, is much more strongly heritable.
It’s discussed in the Bell Curve. Adoption are a good proxy for “The Environment”, because the max difference you see in adoption studies is pretty much the ceiling on environmental IQ changes. In this light, it’s actually a bad news: no matter what we do, we can’t expect much more than that.
And the Swedish study also makes sense. Sweden is pretty civilized and there aren’t many starving children. So no low hanging fruits. The easiest to fix cause of low IQ is malnutrition in childhood. One can expect such differences in US, especially between families that give children for adoption and families that adopt, which explains the 12-18 point gain. What remains is the 3-4 point difference in Sweden.
Malnutrition incidence btw explains most/a lot of the black – white difference, and most/a lot of the Africa – rest of the world difference. All of the controversy is whether it’s “most” or “a lot”.
Also there’s a strong 80/20 effect, with nutrition being the 80. The best and most expensive educational programs are almost an order of magnitude less efficient, with orders of magnitude bigger costs.
Sweden also has less lead, presumably
Is there significant malnutrition for children in the U.S.? The poverty rate after taxes and transfers in the U.S. is under 2%. PPP per capita income is significantly higher in the U.S. than in Sweden, and of course there are all the various food stamps and other safety net programs. If malnutrition in the U.S. was causing losses of 1SD in IQ I think I would have heard about it before.
Isn’t there a big difference between people of the same SES (class)? It seems it would be easy enough to confirm or disprove this hypothesis but I have never come across any serious claim, are there some studies?
Breastfeeding, in and of itself, produces a ~2-point improvement in IQ scores. Childhood nutrition isn’t just about number of calories; food quality seems to matter a lot.
A lot of breastfeeding research has failed to replicate. A big problem was that ability to breastfeed tends to select for high-conscientious people, especially any research that took place around 2005-2012, when it was really popular among rich white people.[1] Even if you “randomly” assign people, you get more dropouts among people who don’t have the time or freedom to breastfeed.
[1] I thought Gwern had an essay on this but I can’t find it.
This seems obvious, given a growing child is building itself from scratch, they are going to need more than simply energy.
When you’ve got your car, maybe all you need is gas and oil and blinker fluid, but while you are building it, you’re going to need some steel. Very inexact analogy for several reasons, of course, including that all food is going to have some structural molecules.
Nutrition is not just enough calories. Its also vitamins and various other micro nutrients, and a somewhat sane balance between fats, fiber and protein.
An insanely high faction of all african americans are vitamin D deficient, if you run the blood serum test. In northern states, most african americans that take vitamin D, are still deficient, because the standard vitamin D formulation was made for ghostfaces, and is too weaksauce to do the job for someone with high melanin count (Eyeballing the percentages who are not vitamin d deficient, I get the sneaking suspicion that it is mostly simply african americans on the pale end and those who work outdoors who dodge this bullet).
The fact that the US mostly supplements v d via milk.. which a heck of a lot of african descended people cant drink.. is just.. Did some racist on the public health board set out to make sure that solution would do “the coloreds” no good?
The reason is that vitamin D aids very much in the absorption of calcium.
According to this study, while very many African Americans are lactose intolerant, this is mostly a moderate intolerance, where very many people can digest a glass of milk a day without symptoms.
Also, it is possible to produce lactose-free milk products by adding the lactase enzyme. When visiting DSM, it seemed that this was mainly popular in Asia, but it could easily be targeted at African Americans, although cultural reasons may make them uninterested in milk products.
IIRC, West Africans never evolved the lactase persistence mutation (though individual African-Americans could pick it up from their white ancestors), while it exists at high rates in certain East African peoples whose ancestors have been pastoralists since the early Neolithic.
Oops.
On a similar note, a full 1/3 of the 1-SD difference in black-white IQ was wiped out in just 30 years, and therefore cannot be genetic.
I hope this isn’t needlessly provocative, but if 2/3 of the difference hasn’t been wiped out, could that not be (partially) genetic?
I believe that hypothesis fails to add explanatory power, and potentially fails Occam’s Razor. Do you think that all of the socioeconomic, nutritional, and cultural challenges facing African-Americans were wiped out by 2006? Because if not, there’s no reason to add additional entities (e.g. race-linked genetic factors) when we have other entities (socio-economic, etc.) that already have proven explanatory power for the IQ gap.
Is this a case where we should expect diminishing returns? After all, we haven’t done everything we could, but we’ve done a lot. If so, greater efforts might only eke out another point or two.
That’s possible, but I see no reason to believe that it’s true. If a tactic works, and shows no sign of not working in the future, there’s no reason to stop using it.
Is there any mechanism by which race-linked genetic factors could be considered to have proven explanatory power? For example if children of white and East Asian (or Ashkenazi) parents had average IQ scores equal to the average of East Asian/Ashkenazi and White IQ scores, would that indicate explanatory power? Or would anything? What if they found genes that affected IQ and their frequency differed between races?
@broblawsky
Compelling response. Thanks
a. We know there are examples where big changes in childhood environment change IQ distributions.
b. We know a substantial fraction of IQ is inherited and thus almost certainly genetic.
c. We see a difference in IQ distributions between two groups which have somewhat different genetic makeups (but still with a lot of overlap) and somewhat different environments (but still with a lot of overlap).
Let F = the fraction of the black/white IQ difference you think is attributable to genetic differences. My sense is that it is very hard to have a lot of confidence in any estimate of F. It surely shouldn’t be 1 or 0, but someone who claims certainty about the value of F is very likely to be claiming a lot more certainty than they’re entitled to.
My sense is that the fact that the IQ gap has narrowed in too-short a time for much genetic change should cause us to revise our probability distribution on F downward. And indeed, so should the existence of the Flynn effect. I don’t think the available evidence lets us exclude a lot of the range of possible values of F.
+1
@Anteros My pleasure. This is going a lot better than the last time I argued about this topic on this website.
@albatross11 That’s a good point. This is definitely an area where no one should claim a high degree of certainty on whatever their median estimate of F is.
That’s not correct – socio-economic factors cannot explain the gap. Adoption studies put a cap on how much living situation can affect IQ post-birth. And studies on regression to the mean from high-IQ/successful blacks to their children also show a larger drop than for whites (discussed in earlier threads).
I don’t know of any way a study could strictly show that the difference has to be genetic (at least if you distinguish long-term epigenetic effects from base genes). But what we can pretty reliably say based on the studies is that any change based on generally affluent conditions and culture is unlikely to be enough to substantially erase the gap.
@uau:
This is sad for the children of high-IQ Africans who are brain-drained to rich high-latitude countries. It’s possible that the genetic factor is small but very dark-skinned people need optimal nutrition in the environment their ancestors adapted to to max out their potential.
I’m not familiar enough with regression studies, but modern adoption studies, particularly twin studies (which remove a lot of difficult variables) show that socioeconomic factors have impacts on the same order of magnitude as the IQ gap.
Again, twin adoption studies show that socioeconomic (and cultural, etc.) factors have large impacts on IQ. I don’t think the evidence available supports your position.
Childhood or adult?
This isn’t really particularly related to people moving recently from Africa. The studies I meant were about the existing US black population. So this isn’t about a family’s IQ dropping immediately after moving to the US or anything like that.
See here for a basic explanation of what was studied.
That you see differences between the best and worst socioeconomic levels doesn’t do much to explain away black-white differences, as the black-white differences exist even when comparing only within top socioeconomic status.
It’s not plausible that bad socioeconomic status would be almost 100% consistent across the US black population. Yet there is no identified subgroup for which the black-white gap would not exist. That’s evidence that any intervention like “give more money for better living conditions and better education” is unlikely to substantially close the gap – you can’t really expect the results of any such intervention to be better than what the blacks with already high SES have achieved, and that has not closed the gap for their children.
I agree that this improvement seems too large to be due to selection on genetics over a single generation (although I’m not sure what large effect we could expect – anyone?).
I think your conclusion – which I understand to be that it follows that the gap cannot be due to genetic factor – is too strong. Like Anteros points out, the observed improvement could be due to social improvements, but the remaining gap could be due to genetics. Also, there has been substantial immigration from Africa in the period, possibly of resourceful individuals, and also (I expect) an increase in mixed marriages.
And while social factors may explain why some individuals do poorly, I don’t think it explains why some groups do much better than the average. Unless there is some magic to koscher food, I think the case for a genetic difference here is stronger.
I understand what you’re suggesting here, but without careful statistical studies or experimental evidence, I don’t think the evidence for a genetic explanation is strong. I’ll go over your suggestions point-by-point:
Between 1965 and 2007, about 0.8 to 0.9 million African immigrants entered the US. Let’s assume that the tested population of African immigrants is roughly proportional to the tested population of native-born African Americans; e.g. 0.9 million out of ~38 million (in 2010). In order to increase the average IQ of the total African-descended population by 1 point, the IQ of the average African immigrant would have to be ~45 points higher than the average native-born African-American, about 3 SD above the mean for the population. Do you believe that’s true?
The statistical analysis here is more complex, but if we assume the tested population of children from mixed marriages increased from ~2% in ~1972 to ~10% in 2002, in order to produce a 1-IQ point increase, a child from a mixed marriage would have to have an IQ of ~12.5 points higher than those from a non-mixed marriage. This also seems equally unlikely to be true.
I don’t believe either of the effects you suggested are widespread enough or impactful enough to explain the ~6 point reduction in the black-white IQ gap over the cited 30-year time period; an explanation based on socio-economic, cultural and health improvements seems to be much more likely.
+1 for math
Yes, I agree. +1 for math from me too. 🙂
I could quibble with the specifics, for instance immigrants could perhaps be from the top 5% of an average genetic IQ 100 population, and today’s population also includes many descendants of immigrants – but that would still account for maybe one point out of the six.
A difference of 15 points is still a lot to attribute entirely to socioeconomic factors. I think the Flynn effect is estimated to be around 1 pt per decade. This means that blacks would live under conditions comparable to whites in 1870 or so. Is that actually reasonable?
Another interesting data point that doesn’t seem to be brought up is comparing adopted children to their new siblings. Yes, they score better than their non-adopted biological siblings, but if it’s all nurture, they should also have about the same IQ. Do they? I’m pretty certain that they don’t.
15 points of difference is easier to generate from a combination of non-genetic factors than you would think. Lead exposure alone produces at least a 2-point deficit, for example. The twin adoption study I mentioned previously shows around a 4-5 point deficit for socio-economic improvements associated with better child-raising conditions.
Ketil, have an argument for a cultural element which isn’t kosher food.
I have a notion that different groups have different ideals about what is pleasing to God, and this leads those groups to develop skill in that activity.
So, Muslims get calligraphy, Christians get choral singing, and Jews get arguing.
Seriously, while there are pro-intelligence people in all groups, I think Jews have a more consistent liking for intelligence than any other demographic I know of.
The world has shifted somewhat as nerdishness has become respectable.
What if it’s the opposite, and they’re driven by what is displeasing to God instead?
Many interpretations of Islam have forbidden depictions of animate beings, which is why their art focuses on calligraphy and geometric shapes. Christians have at various points thought that God did not approve of the use of instruments in worship, so they develop choral singing. And Jews thought that God did not approve of eating animals that chew the cud xor have split hooves, along with 613 other rules that interact in complicated ways, hence the arguing.
I’m probably just being a curmudgeon, but there’s something to the idea that cultures are best understood by what they forbid.
What’s forbidden matters, but it doesn’t specify what alternatives are chosen.
From Nisbett 2012. The latter notes that the adoptions were from extremely deprived situations, looking at the former, Locurto, 1990, it appears that the gains were 1) subject to selection effects, as mothers giving up children for adoption are disproportionately lower intelligence, and thus we would expect regression to the mean alone to contribute IQ gain, and more importantly 2) for childhood IQ, which we know from the Wilson effect can be extremely malleable – e.g. Bouchard 2004 which found that IQ heritability increases over the course of the lifetime from ~.2 at age 5 to ~.9 at age 28.
I don’t understand this – surely this effect would affect both children (the adopted and the sibling raised by the mother) equally?
If this is correct, the Swedish study on 18-20 year olds that found a 3-4 point increase would also be an exaggeration of the effect for adults. (How much of the .9 heritability at 28 is seen at 19?)
Doesn’t the Flynn Effect already show that IQ is highly environmentally determined? Either humans evolve stunningly fast, or a changing environment has dramatically changed IQ over the last few generations.
Flynn gains to IQ are not considered to be Jensen effects and appear to be hollow.
IQ is just a number, what it tries to measure (to varying degrees of success – the ‘loading’) is g. IQ does so fairly well within an era – more poorly between eras. It is highly unlikely that those in 1918 would have a g comparable to someone with an IQ of 75 today, though the secular trend suggests as much.
More worryingly, it actually appears that some amount of dysgenics may be taking place in modernity, as there has been a reversal of the secular trend more recently – and the reversal is not so clearly hollow as the original gains were (though it is too early to say for sure).
Indeed, this is kind of a big problem with the model.
a. We know IQ is substantially heritable.
b. We know higher-IQ people are currently having fewer children than lower-IQ people, and are having their kids later (so generations are longer for smarter people).
c. We should predict from these that IQ scores will go down a little each generation.
d. Instead, they go up a little each generation, and nobody is entirely sure why.
One plausible answer is that the intelligence distribution (g, not just IQ) shifts a little to the right every generation due to better environments, and to the left a little due to worse genetics, but that the right shift is bigger than the left shift. This almost has to have been true in the past, when we went from outdoor plumbing and limited schooling and no vaccines to indoor plumbing, universal K-12 education, and almost everyone getting all their shots. And more recently, it’s likely happened because of falling lead levels in the environment of small children. Perhaps this is still happening, as our technological world is a lot more cognitively complex than it used to be–maybe that’s pushing small kids to develop their brains a little more.
Another plausible answer is that the intelligence distribution is unaffected by environmental changes at this point (almost everyone’s got indoor plumbing and some schooling), but people are getting more familiar with the kind of tasks needed for IQ tests, so someone with the same native intelligence (g) now scores a little higher in IQ than they would have a generation ago. And there’s also a slow drop in g thanks to dysgenic breeding (smart people having fewer kids than dumb people), which is masked by the environmental IQ changes.
I don’t know whether either of these is the best model, or if there’s something else going on. But it does seem like a mystery that needs solving.
I’m not sure we do, do you have numbers? While there are anecdotes supporting this, there are also the converse – think about all the sad lonely incels, or (at least hereabouts) the successful female doctors having big families with a large number of children, or the successful men having a succession of marriages.
Here are some numbers.
It seems that the research tends to focus on the mothers, probably because it seems to have a higher impact on fertility and possibly also because paternity is more often ambiguous.
One problem with the Atlantic article that Aapje links to is that the measure of gender inequality used in the first graph includes labor force participation. That by itself would give the relation shown between gender inequality and fertility, since a woman who is bearing and rearing lots of children is less likely to be employed outside the home. How much of the effect that is responsible for I don’t know.
@Aapje: So in the US, 34% of women have a BA or more, and they produce 30% of the children. So there is a disparity, but it’s not all that great.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2019/demo/P70-162.pdf
Here, 60% of men are fathers, and between ages of 40 and 50, 25% are stilll childless. Notably:
This indicates that intelligent/educated/successful men having more children, I think. Also:
For women, fertility rates without a high school diploma is about 35% higher (from 1.8-1.9 to about 2.6 children), but for men it is substantially lower. And:
This pretty much supports my priors that women prefer successful (and thus intelligent) men. The question is whether this is sufficient to compensate for the propensity for successful women to have fewer children. Some of this can be deduced from the numbers above, but it also depends on the number of children involved – a man can have three marriages with three children in each, but very few women will give birth to nine children, and also the relative contribution from mothers and fathers to the child’s intelligence.
Galton’s conclusion from his research on very successful people, such as judges, was that there was not a large difference between the effects of paternal and maternal ancestry.
People are mostly arguing about the causes of variation in IQ between groups, rather than the causes of IQ per se.
Like, suppose that it turned out that there was some trace element in the air with radically beneficial cognitive effects. Like, for all humans, the more Xenon you’re breathing, the smarter you get. Suppose that you proved that the concentration of Xenon in the atmosphere had gone up by a few ppb and that cashed out to a global +1 StdDev worth of IQ. You might have proved in some sense that “IQ is environmental.” You would not have proved that the causes of the IQ gaps between racial populations were environmental, unless you could prove that one group lived in a higher-xenon environment and that the rate of change in the xenon concentration in both environments was exactly what you would predict based on the difference between them.
Right. Because IQ, being derived from chemicals built from the environment in accord with genetic plans, is 100% both.
Differences in populations may be more attributable to one than the other.
You might be interested in IQ patterns between races, but that’s absolutely not what the original question was about.
In fact, OP specifically said they didn’t consider this question as CW as it looked originally. That you immediately went there speaks to why these discussions really are so delicate to have.
There are two important reasons why not.
First height has increased dramatically. Secondly, the overwhelming majority of the variation in the current American population in height is due to variation in genes. All(?) traits are gene environment mixes, If you do not have the genes to make any hemoglobin you will die in utero, get conceived right before a nuclear blast you will die before reaching the two cell stage. The relevant question is in a given population how much variation is due to variation in 1 genes, 2 environment, 3 what looks like noise but might be ascribed to any number of things including free will, and 4 measurement error.
We know that environment has a lot of effect on height and that historically within some societies variations in environment had a lot of impact on height. We also know that within American society almost none of the variation in height is due to variation in environment. Intelligence appears to work the same way.
Secondly, the Flynn effects is complicated and weird. IQ tests are a decent measure of intelligence but are not perfect and the Flynn effect is strongest on the parts that are the least g loaded(valid). A better approach would look at a wide range of mental ability measurements that are all flawed but their flaws should be more independent. Vocab, sat scores, academic performance more broadly. These can be done relatively easily within one time period but it is hard to compare these things between time periods One issue is that anecdotally there seems to have been huge losses in practical ability to memorize things recently.
A general point about adoption studies– prenatal/pre-adoption nutrition probably makes a difference.
Does anyone have a theory/evidence about why there seems to be an improvement in IQ after some interventions followed by a decline. If this is real, there’s got to be a mechanism.
Most modern sci-fi is built on physics approximately like the real world – namely, it often acknowledges relativity and the speed of light as a “natural speed limit” – but usually adds in some technology to circumvent it. Call it a warp drive, hyperdrive, jumpgate, whatever. All these technically raise a problem; from certain reference frames, they constitute time travel. It’s up to the authors whether to play with this or not, but usually it’s just swept under the rug and ignored.
Suppose I wanted to construct a more robust fictional universe, one where this isn’t possible – we can have fun, galaxy-spanning adventures, but without the annoying edge cases we have to ignore. Would a Newtonian(-ish) universe but with infinite light speed work? Or does it introduce exploitable flaws I’m not thinking of?
Do we still get relativistic effects as we increase velocity? Either way this probably breaks something.
Nope. Kinetic energy and momentum go up just like your basic kinematic equations say they should. Time is invariant across the whole universe.
EDIT: To be clear, I’m fine rewriting the results of famous experiments from our history. A universe like this probably wouldn’t have wave-particle duality, and Maxwell’s equations would probably be useless. But I’m interested in whether or not a self-consistent universe can be made in this way, not whether it works as an alternate explanation of our universe’s observations.
just change michelson-morely a bit. Either
1) they do get differential effects at different directions because of an aether
2) they don’t but we discover them circa 1910 or wherever when more delicate experiments come about.
I think people won’t think too hard about the differences, especially if you infuse the whole thing with a slight aetheric steampunk vibe as a lampshade.
I don’t think you need an ether if the speed of light is infinite. Michelson-Morley comes out just fine: infinity + X = infinity – X.
Is there a way to do it without ether? I prefer to avoid the stuff.
At this point you’re doing science fantasy. In Star Wars, time is invariant across the universe and hyperdrive goes at the speed of plot.
I mean, I guess it’s fantasy technically, but I’m interested in a story that has the rigorous, logical rules-following of a hard sci-fi story, just with different rules.
Also you can see one planet exploding from another planet in TFA so light travels instantaneously.
Light travels instantly when JJ Abrams is directing. It’s a side-effect of all the light being shined on the camera.
Or is it that the sensor cells in your eyes quantum-entangle with what you “see”?
Given that people are watching screens, that also implies chain-entanglement. The eye sees the screen, entangling with it, but the screen is entangled with the camera, which is entangled with what the camera is seeing. Our senses as ansibles.
Disagree. Hard scifi can violate (or invent) scientific law, it just needs to be self-consistent. See Egan’s Orthogonal universe – a prime example of hard scifi, literally set in a universe with completely different laws of physics.
Intuitively, I think this kind of universe would be too broken to exist. Infinite light speed means instantaneous transport (not teleportation) – there’s bound to be a division by zero somewhere. Say you have a pair of (concave) mirrors and light bouncing between them. Try to compute the density of photons in the space between them.
There probably wouldn’t be photons, if that helps.
I was never good at imagining 6 impossible things before breakfast. I just get stuck at “instantaneous isn’t a concept the universe likes”.
A shortcut would be to just up the speed of light. Not as much as you’d think – newtonian is already pretty tough. You need very advanced tech to travel light years… pardon, parsecs. Add 3 or 6 or 9 zeroes to the speed of light, and go from there.
Do make sure to account for inertia as well, though.
I suppose it’s probably because conservation laws in continuum tend to give you hyperbolic equations, which have a number of finite characteristic speeds.
Thinking about it more, I first thought the problem you pointed out might still exist: instead of photon count, you could define *some* measure of radiation flux, and that would be infinite as well.
But thinking more, that’s not the case. If you have two parallel mirrors (not sure why you’d use concave), there’d be no way to “trap” light between them in the first place, right? You couldn’t stick a light source between them and move it away fast enough to not be blocking the reflection, since it’s infinitely fast.
@rocoulm
That’s why I said “concave” (would that work? I think that would work).
Yeah, didn’t bring that up because I thought you don’t want to go this way. But any point in space would receive a part of all of the radiation emitted in the whole universe, plus all the reflections of any radiation. Sky would be a lot brighter.
@Radu Floricica
Light reflection is still symmetric, though, so no matter the mirror shape it can’t get “trapped”; if it hits a second mirror after the first, it will either continue to reflect in a way that escapes from between them and off into space, or it will follow its trajectory back to you.
I don’t think there’s as much of a problem as you’re thinking. Locally, you generally don’t need to consider the speed of light to do optics (one way of saying this is that measuring the speed of light requires setting up a specific experiment). The q factor of a cavity (how well light stays trapped) depends on the energy dissipation, which does generally makes sense to think of as a per photon probability of escaping on each collision. So, you get rid of photons (which you probably had to do anyway), which messes up things like the photoelectric effect and our understanding of chemistry, but you’re already making up new physics.
Don’t make it infinite, then? Just multiply by 1,000 or so? That would let you travel between stars in a matter of days or weeks, which should be sufficient for galaxy-spanning adventures without zeroing out any inconvenient denominators.
Yeah, the time scale appears to be that planet-to-moon is intra-city travel (a couple of hours at most), planet-to-planet is inter-city travel (less than a day’s drive), system to system is multi-day roadtripping. After all, they are called ships, so they should follow naval travel timescales.
I’d imagine you’d just be shifting your edge cases from physics to chemistry. Without quantum mechanics, reconstructing our-universe-biology from our-universe-ish-chemistry is probably a monstrous task, and I’d wager (at low confidence) that it’s not possible at all.
To keep biology you might have to keep quantum mechanics, but I’d imagine trying to keep quantum mechanics without keeping photons is going to be tough. And if you try to keep photons but not keep relativity you’ll probably end up back at Einstein’s original(?) thought experiment of riding a light wave and immediately needing lorentz transformations again.
Or, you can just ignore the details of biology. Yes, even if you’re named Greg Egan – that was one of the things he really didn’t go far into even in Orthogonal or Dichronauts, though there he made it very different from our world’s version.
Yeah absolutely, but in the spirit of “can we create a properly self-consistent universe”, I think the answer should at least be possible, if not addressed. If it has to be ignored then we’re back to the original problem of sweeping problems under the rug.
Greg Egan did something like this in the Orthogonal trilogy – instead of light having ‘infinite’ speed it had variable speed. The different physics of the world have lots of other consequences, including the ability for energy to be created spontaneously. He talks about the basics of the system here link text.
If a Newtonian universe is not possible (or not able to evolve life), doesn’t that mean a genius in a cave could discover quantum mechanics a priori with minimal experimentation?
What is the most complete and consistent fictional physics?
I don’t think that jumpgates necessarily imply violation of the light speed limit, especially not if they are fixed and naturally occurring. That would just mean that the space has a weird(er) form/topology, without adding a possibility of time travel.
With a circuit of three jumpgates, you could have time travel back to the time that the first gate was created.
Edit: If you could MOVE the gates.
If the jumpgates aren’t all in the same reference frame, you can violate causality for sure. (I’m guessing that’s what you meant by “Fixed”- ie, they are all moving at 0 velocity relative to each other)
But I think that also makes them functionally useless, as any interesting real objects, like planets, stars, etc., are going to be moving relative to them quite a lot.
I think you can also violate causality even with two jumpgates stationary relative to each other if you have a third-party observer that travels at relativistic velocities and communicates with them… but it’s been long enough that I’d probably need to draw light-cone diagrams.
You’re right, but it is a lot easier to set up three gates than to have each traveler move relativistically.
Even if it works, it doesn’t help. The energy requirements for fast interstellar travel are beyond astronomical. We can imagine ways to travel to the nearest stars in a decade or two, consistent with known physics and not quite making our heads explode when we contemplate the engineering practicalities. It isn’t relativity and the speed of light that’s the problem; at say 0.5c that’s a relatively minor perturbation. It’s simple Newtonian E = 1/2 M V^2, with V = 1.5E8 m/s, that’s the problem.
To do interstellar travel in even weeks, is going to require energy sources five or six orders of magnitude more potent than nuclear fusion. And that’s probably going to break your universe. Those energy sources are going to have to be absolutely unattainable by any purely natural phenomenon, else every random supernova will sterilize the galaxy it occurs in. They’ll have to be understood by humans in spite of never being observed in nature, and they’ll have to be usable by humans in spite of operating at energy levels and behind barriers unreachable by any natural phenomenon. And if you somehow get that, you have to contend with the fact that the Millenium Falcon’s exhaust is now effectively a Death Star, and nobody is going to let a guy who works for Jabba the Hut have access to that.
We don’t need hyperdrives or warp drives to deal with relativity and the lightspeed limit. We need them well before that, to deal with the energy requirements of interstellar travel in a Newtonian universe.
You’re probably better off just bringing the stars closer together. Even in our universe, stars in the center of a globular cluster are typically only a few light-months apart. You could maybe bring that down to light-weeks or even light-days if you stick to low-luminosity red dwarf stars (which are still as hot and white as incandescent light bulbs). Maybe throw in lots of interstellar dust and gas to keep the starfield from getting too crowded and bright (at least in the visible; the background temperature will be well above 3 K). These can also serve as fuel for the interstellar ramjets you’ll be using to fly between them.
Hmm, a one-G ramship can cover a light-week in 100 days; a bit long for traditional space opera, but maybe you can still write exciting stories around it.
Does your conclusion still apply if the source of energy is external — a laser aimed at a light sail, say — or if the ship can pick up fuel and reaction mass by somehow funneling in interstellar hydrogen and using it?
I was assuming constant acceleration. One G is 9.8 m/s^2 no matter where you’re getting your thrust. You can cover a light-week in 100 days in comfort, or in a bit over a month on the edge of death the whole way.
Or, I suppose, imagine everybody is from a very high-G world, but to get travel times down to a week would I think break biology.
Fires in the Deep features, AFAICT, a variable speed of light, such that the speed of light we observe on Earth is a (basically) local feature to our region of the galaxy. Which doesn’t run into the same kind of issue, and as a generalized solution to the problem allows a lot of flexibility in terms of story-telling.
There was nothing about variable speed of light in AFUTD, that I can recall. There was definitely a hyperdrive, er, “ultradrive”, that seems to have worked by instantaneous jumps, and there were laws of physics other than the speed of light that determined whether or not ultradrives (or computers, or brains) worked in various parts of the galaxy.
The “FTL = time travel” problem is created by assuming that the reference frames of special relativity correspond to physical reality, rather than that physical reality supports them via some underlying process. That doesn’t have to be the case. There could be an objectively correct reference frame. As for the ether, that is just another name for the vacuum – to say there is an ether is simply to say that the vacuum has a state of motion.
Not spoiler protecting, because the book was published 35 years ago.
In Charles Sheffield’s Between the Strokes of Night he achieves this with a technology that slows down human perception by a factor 2000, and leaves physics unchanged. This also helps address some of John’s energy requirements.
Or have humans in hibernation for long times. The resulting world is the background of Schroeder’s Lockstep.
The problem with both of these is that they are exceedingly vulnerable to defection. If a group of people decide to live their lives at the normal rate, they’re going to wind up ruling the world while everyone else is “asleep”. And if everyone else waking up would threaten their newfound rule of the world, well, maybe they don’t have to wake up.
Defection comes with the cost of not being able to partake of the nifty space-operatic world of fast interstellar travel. You’ll have to content yourself with ruling just one measly little planet. Some people will still go for it, which means no one will be able to afford to not go for it.
This isn’t as big of a problem as you think. Whatever mechanism allows faster than light travel will have its own set conservation laws and hyperbolic equations that have a characteristic speed. What you find is that there are scenarios that seem to allow signals to travel backwards in time, but they have finite-time blowup if evolved backwards. In other words, although the reverse causal scenarios exist mathematically, there is no way to create them.
Replace Maxwell with a set of nonlinear equations that let us increase the characteristic speed to an arbitary extent?
Is the export-import bank in trouble? Their loan portfolio in 2015 was 48% aircraft and 15.6% oil and gas, neither of which are faring too well right now.
The loans are secured, but mostly with aircraft and oil wells and the like, so there’s a risk that the collateral won’t be enough to cover the losses since the entire sectors are losing money, rather than specific operators.
In financial news (paging baconbits), the $245 SPY put I purchased a few weeks ago, because I was so sure the market was going to collapse, has expired worthless today. So my venture into options trading is off to a solid start of -$350 or so in realized losses 🙁
I have some QQQ puts expiring worthless today as well. Such is options trading.
Any have any good insight why the market hasn’t collapsed? Or really moved over the last month? Sure, to my untrained eye it’s been volatile, but hasn’t really trended in any direction.
At this point, even if the quarantine ended tomorrow the after-effects would still be one of the most significant societal impacts in years, but after the initial correction, they seem to be just kind of holding steady. I’m sitting here expecting things to continue to deteriorate, but the market seems to indicate that the damage has already been done. What do they know that I don’t?
Markets tend to not collapse until they do?
I’m baffled too. But I kind of feel like Wile E. Coyote has walked off the cliff and just hasn’t looked down yet.
Why didn’t markets start to collapse until Feb 24th? They weren’t even going sideways into the 24th, the all time high on the S&P 500 was the the 19th and it was up ~5% on the year at that point with steadily increasing bad news about Covid coming out for ~4 weeks prior to the collapse.
The simple reason is that we have a massive cash stimulus combined with a massive reduction in the number of available investments. Not only has the fed massively expanded its balance sheet meaning there are fewer securities on the open market but there has been a marked reduction in spaces for people and businesses to invest. Who is starting a restaurant right now? Who is trying to get into the airbnb super host game? Oh, and consumption is way down but earnings (household) aren’t. While there is a 20% UE rate only a modest proportion of those people have seen a decrease in income with the extra $600 a week and the stimulus payment, meanwhile the majority of people who maintained their jobs got a stimulus check and have had major spending cuts (we got $3900 for our family plus we canceled what would have been $2-3,000 in travel spending if I was following standard advice that would be an extra $4-7,000 in stocks) So liquidity is being expanded, options are being limited and people are being given cash with few opportunities to spend.
I understand the “no other good investments” bit. But shouldn’t the smart call be “hold cash?” Why are people still buying stocks instead of stockpiling cash?
Some of us are doing both. I have nearly $10K I did not expect to have and about half of that is in cash the other half in stocks.
I suspect that’s a pretty common response among people who invest manually.
Just speculating but three main reasons come to mind
1. There is a wide swath of people who have bought into the ‘markets always go up, just buy and you will be fine long term.
2. There are a lot of people who are now in bad financial shape and near retirement, hording cash isn’t going to make up for 0.5% returns on 10 year treasuries. Their best chance at a decent retirement might well be to buy that big dip and try to hold on for 40-50% gains before they lose their income.
3. Complete gambling. total stocks owned via Robinhood trading app have almost doubled since the lockdown started. Boredom+cash = gambling.
How did I forget the largest reason?
There is a huge psychological factor at play, a few months ago everyone was being told that millions of Americans would die, then it was reduced to hundreds of thousands then it was reduced to 60-100,000. This gives the dual impression that things are getting better and that government actions are working to make things better, in the short run this is probably (dramatically) increasing people’s faith in government and government projections for reopening (which have been steadily getting worse, but are still way to optimistic). I have seen no one outside of SSC discuss the ‘what happens when the general public realizes that we haven’t beaten Covid AND we aren’t getting a good economic recovery’, and I have seen no one with the all important take that ‘the GFC was the worst crisis since the Great Depression, which makes the two seem equivalent which is why people are so blase about starting another Great Depression’.
This implies your expecting economic disruption greater than we saw back in 2008 and on the level with the Great Depression?
Not questioning your prediction here, just wanting to make sure I’m parsing your analysis correctly.
I expect this to be much worse than the GFC- it might not rise to the level of the Great Depression but I expect high (8%+) UE rates* in the US for 3 years at least. That would be 2-3x (or higher depending on the peak in UE) the recovery rate that we got after 2008 and still substantially more total UE for that duration, but well short of the GD, but that is my 2nd best case scenario, not my medium expectation.
I haven’t put any thought into how likely it is to be worse than the GD because that seems unproductive and terrifying.
*If I was going to formalize my expectations I wouldn’t actually use UE since there is a good chance we get a much larger non working caste which might lower the official UE rate while still having many to all of the problems UE creates.
Isn’t this the issue though? I’m willing to bet most people are going to be like you, even if they have extra money, they’re not going to put it in the market. I certainly am not. I’m pretty much down to matching my 401k at this point, and for a while there I was questioning even doing that.
If you are like us then you have basically pulled all of the money out of the market that you are going to, we aren’t currently influencing the market. Some people probably panic sold and then regretted it with the bounce, and I don’t think that most people believe this will cause a serious long term economic issue (ie really believe it and are acting on it) support for lock-downs is way to high for this to be a common belief.
yes
I’m not sure I understand this, although this may just be me asking the same question I did above. Are you implying that believing this could cause a serious, long-term economic issue and supporting lock-downs are contradictory positions, because that’s kind of where I’m at currently.
Not necessarily contradictory, but it seems very unlikely that the majority opinion is that exact combination. If everyone thought the economic implications were very serious there would be more people holding ‘Covid is scary, but outcomes of lockdown are more scary’ just because of how large the country is and the broad differences in preferences.
I put all my money in toilet paper.
Yes, but which currency did you choose?
I think a lot of investors are thinking that the point you mention about preservation of household income means that the recovery, whenever it happens, will be swift. Once people feel safe going to restaurants, traveling for vacation, or buying new loungewear (which they probably already feel safe doing), they’ll have the money to do so, and investors want to be in position to collect that money.
Well, my online acquaintance with ALS has emailed us all to let us know the disease is progressing faster than originally thought and he’s been told it’s now a matter of “weeks to months”.
I know there’s a lot of clucking online about the uselessness of “sending thoughts and prayers”, but nonetheless those of you who do pray, I’d appreciate if you kept him and his family in mind. And those who don’t, whatever you may do – be that hold positive cosmic vibrations in mind, shake your fists at the sky and curse death, or whatever.
Sorry to be bringing sad news to the table, but death is part of life. Community is the candle flame in the darkness. Thank you all.
Kyrie eleison.
I’ll be praying.
@Deiseach,
I’ll say a prayer and give wishes for your friend.
What did Slovenia do right? Or were they just lucky? NZ’s elimination strategy has been widely reported in the US but this is the first I’ve heard of Slovenia being successful. It’s especially interesting that they’re allowing travel from elsewhere in the EU without quarantine– perhaps betting that people will voluntarily avoid that anyway.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/new-zealand-slovenia-declare-coronavirus-pandemic-over-reopen.html
New Zealand – I’d chalk this up to being a relatively isolated island nation. When you’re 14 hours away from everywhere, it’s easy to screen arrivals. They also didn’t start getting infections until mid-late february, so they had time to prepare.
Slovenia – Hadn’t heard about this before, but it looks like they had their first case on 04 March and went into national quarantine only a week later on 12 March. I think their success might just be indicative of the power of early action.
If you are not as connected to the world travel network, you would have less initial spreaders. Without looking I am going to guess Slovenia is not a #1 tourist or business destination.
To a rough first approximation, the whole world locked down when Lombardy made the global news. If you already had a big supply of hidden spreaders, it was too late for you to completely stop it easily. But if you only had a few, you could do it.
Isn’t it also too early for anyone to have declared victory? If there’s no vaccine, no herd immunity in your population, and the virus still is circulating anywhere in the world, you could catch it again and have to re-quarantine or deal with a second wave.
Yes I’m sure both NZ and Slovenia have systems in place they are confident will stop that from happening. But they might not.
Agreed. “Cut ourselves off from the rest of the world completely” is not a viable long-term solution.
But it is interesting to see that “nations should isolate themselves to protect national purity” is in the process of undergoing a tribalism-flip!
From a recent tourism industry report:
The government is adamant that they won’t be reopening the borders except to maybe Aus until there is a vaccine. There is a lot of pressure to allow businesses to operate and open the borders though, and that pressure will only increase.
The Labour government’s plan is to spend A LOT of money on job creation. Some of it seems alright, other parts I worry will be unproductive. For example, the wage subsidy of $585 per week is extended from 12 weeks to 20 weeks, with the qualification that your business is down at least 50% revenue from last year. That’s great for our company but it will extend the life of a lot of zombie companies and keep people from being productive.
Part of it is free retraining to work in the trades and manufacturing, which I’m not sure is a great idea given that construction is likely to fall off. In the US the democrats would probably default to free university education instead of trades, so it is kind of refreshing to see that as an example of how undivided NZ is, culturally.
The Foreign Minister is intent on pissing off China, but that’s a story for another day.
At the point when I cancelled my European speaking trip, the next stop was going to be Ljubljana.
So what puzzles me is that Slovenia didn’t have more hidden spreaders at the beginning of March given that they are literally right next to northern Italy. And while they are not a first-tier tourist destination, they are a not-inconsiderable-for-their-size second tier one (nice wine regions, Lake Bled etc).
I might speculate that it’s far enough off their tourist season that they had unusually few travelers from outside Italy, and that Italy locked down too late to save themselves but early enough to keep infected Italians from going to Slovenia in large numbers.
> And while they are not a first-tier tourist destination, they are a not-inconsiderable-for-their-size second tier one
Yes, but nobody goes skiing to Slovenia between april and october inclusive.
Slovenia may not be a big destination, but it’s a tiny country, with probably a lot of people visiting or commuting to/from neighboring Italy and Croatia.
NZ is also very sparsely populated, which ought to keep R down.
Is New Zealand actually that sparsely populated? It’s misleading to take the total population of a country and divide by the total land area, because most people don’t live on most of that land. And it looks like New Zealand has a greater percentage of its population in urban areas than the United States, Canada, UK, France, Taiwan, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, etc.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
(Japan, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, etc. are among the few countries that are more urbanized than New Zealand.)
It’s probably true that Auckland and Christchurch are far less dense than places like Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Amsterdam, or even New York. But they’re likely denser than the vast majority of cities in the United States.
Slovenia is a pretty cool little country overall. Not one to get in the news, true, but somehow I’m not at all surprised.
Trump recently signed an executive order encouraging commercial mining of asteroids and the moon. Specifically the order clarifies that it is the opinion of US Executive Branch that the exploitation of resources in outer space is legal and not prohibited by any US law or treaty that the US is party to.
The EO specifically points out that the US is not a signatory to the 1979 Moon Agreement which prohibits the exploitation of resources from outer space without the oversight and approval of an international regulatory body.
Some speculate that this order is meant in part to shore up the US’s legitimacy in it’s long term plans to place base on the moon and at minimum mine frozen water to help maintain it.
So this is what the space force is really for. Securing our territorial rights to exploitable space resources!
I predicted this as soon as the Space Force was announced. Someone has to protect the platinum shipments coming from the Belt!
From who? Russian space pirates?
I’d watch that movie.
I doubt this will accomplish much, but thumbs up anyway. Kind of a shame that the whole rest of creation* is just sitting there*, useless*.
*Hyperbole and simplification, obviously.
At minimum it says “Assuming I get re-elected or that Joe Biden doesn’t disagree with me on this particular issue, space mining companies can feel confident that the US won’t shut them down for violating international treaties and will most likely let you keep all your moon helium or whatever.” Which is nice I guess. Good to have slightly more legal clarity on the issue.
But I think the bigger thing is that it is establishing our position on moon mining in advance of Project Artemis which intends, in part, go to the Moon to “find and use water and other critical resources needed for long-term exploration.” In other words, Trump is making it clear that despite international mood or consensus, the US does not consider the Moon “the common heritage of all mankind” but rather belongs to anyone who can take and hold it. Which if you ask me is a good stance to have if we want to someday colonize space.
By ‘we’ do you mean Americans, or mankind generally? If the latter, how does it help to have a free for all like the gold rush? If the former, that explains why Trump’s relationship with the Chinese has been so good for humanity.
I mean mankind generally.
Let me give you an example from a different area: Indian Reservations.
Indian Reservation land is held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of the entire tribe. The purpose of this is so that the land belongs to the entire tribe and not any one particular person. Perhaps most importantly it means that outsiders can’t come and buy up all the tribe’s land. The land forever and for always (in theory anyway) belong to the tribe.
This has some bad practical effects, however. Since the land belongs to the entire tribe and can’t be sold to outsiders, that means if you want to build a house it’s extremely difficult to get a mortgage. Why? Because normally if you take out a loan to build a house the bank can use the land as collateral and take it if you default. But banks can’t take reservation land, so they rarely give out loans unless you can come up with some form of collateral they can take. Which most people can’t: that’s why we use mortgage’s in the first place. The same is true of building a factory, or a mine, or a power plant: who is going to give you a loan to build something if they can’t repossess? As a result, many reservations are poor, economically undynamic, and have a serious housing shortage.
Now lets say the Moon belongs to everyone. What this means in practice is that it belongs to nobody. Who is going to invest billions in building, say, a Helium-3 extraction operation on the Moon if they can’t sell the Helium-3 when they get home? Or if they have to worry about an international committee deciding to confiscate their equipment? Who is going to invest in the infrastructure to develop resources in space if they can’t be assured that they’ll be allowed to keep those resources? Private ownership and the assurance that the government will back the claims of private ownership are essential to development anywhere, space is no exception.
To put in another way: the US was highly successful in settling the Great Plains (a region so unappealing it was referred to for decades as the Great American Desert) by promising people that if they developed the land they could own it. People made huge sacrifices based on that promise, because they could see themselves as profiting in the long term. Do you imagine the US would have been more successful at settling the plains if they set up an international committee who would regulate all economic activity in the plains region, stating as it’s purpose that the Great Plains are the heritage of all mankind? An organization whose charter stated that “the Great Plains should be used for the benefit of all states and all peoples of the international community.” and that “the resources of the Great Plains not subject to individual appropriation by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Your reasoning seems compelling, though I wonder if Trump is using the same logic. And, to be fair, it’s not exactly in his job description (or disposition..) to be thinking about what is best for mankind. Should the Chinese announce that tomorrow afternoon that they’re going to open a couple of large factories on the moon, I doubt he’d be applauding their entrepreneurship or celebrate the utter lack of any international (or US) oversight.
And to be even fairer, I’m not sure how I’d feel about it myself.
FLWAB – I think the question I would ask is whether “settling the Great Plains” was actually a good idea. Over the past century, the Great Plains have been depopulating, which suggests that the subsidies in the previous decades for populating the Great Plains may have been causing deadweight loss by encouraging too many people to relocate far from urban areas.
The analogies to space seem relevant – is it actually a good thing to encourage people to exploit the resources of space, or would we just be encouraging waste that people would retreat from later on?
Yeah, I don’t think Trump does much of anything to help “all mankind.” But I imagine he does see this as helping Americans, particularly Americans who would be willing to seek to mine the Moon, provided they believe they’ll be able to own the mine. And in helping particular Americans, I think he will help the world. I personally would prefer that most or all of the Moon belong to the US rather than China. But if we’re going to colonize space it needs to belong to somebody: not just some particular country, but to particular people who are willing to do the work required develop the land. And this is a step in that direction.
@keaswaran
Isn’t that related in large part to how much more efficient farming has become in the last 170 years? If the plains were never settled, would the urban areas have been as populated as they were?
Because the alternative is to not settle California until the United Nations decides who it’s going to give settlement permits to.
Seriously, if a group of US Citizens with the approval of the United States Government can’t build a settlement on the Moon or Mars or whatever, what’s the alternative other than asking the UN? And what’s the incentive for the UN to ever say “yes”?
@keaswaran
That’s a good argument not to subsidize space development. But allowing ownership of space resources is really just step one of letting any development happen at all. The homestead act might have been a bad idea in certain areas (I’m not convinced, but it very well could be). But I think we can agree that the Plains would never have been settled at all if people weren’t allowed to own pieces of it.
@John Schilling
I think you’re right. In that I also can’t see it working any other way.
I guess I’m overly worried about avoidable conflict.
@Randy M
My great grandfather and great grandmother came to America from Norway in order to have land of their own in South Dakota (the world’s second most desolate Dakota). They had a lot of kids, who had a lot of kids, one of whom had me. So even if the food provided didn’t increase the population, the Homestead Act at minimum increased the US population by increasing immigration draw.
As an aside, the 1979 Moon Agreement is a stellar example of useless international agreements: no country that has the capability to send large objects into space has signed it. So it’s just a bunch of countries that can’t go to space solemnly agreeing that they won’t exploit it. I’m sure they also have agreed that they should allow the sun to rise each morning, and are considering a treaty that would bind all member states not to divide by zero.
I see what you did there.
I would go so far as to call it lunacy.
This is nothing new; it’s just a more explicit statement of the consensus understanding of international law since the adoption of the Outer Space Treaty and the rejection of the Moon Treaty. I don’t expect the “encourage” part to amount to anything beyond feel-good statements like this. Making it explicit may be somewhat helpful, so long as the fact that it came from Donald Trump doesn’t cause Joe Biden to explicitly renounce it next year. But I expect that he’ll have too much else on his agenda to get around to that.
I’m a little confused about the word “commons” here. I think individuals should be allowed to exploit space because it is a commons. Kind of like the ocean — we are allowed to fish there because it belongs to all of us. Yes I know there are now lots of treaties that limit fishing in the ocean, but those are laws that just limit the default that anyone can use the ocean. It is still the general case that anyone can exploit the ocean.
But I did see some discussion above about the right to sell space property that one has exploited. So are people thinking a mining company would set up operations on the moon, and maybe someday selling the mine, which effectively means selling the land on the moon? And I suppose the mine might put up a fence to keep others out, which sounds like land ownership. Does this mean that following this principle means that ultimately land ownership (and asteroid ownership) will go to those who got there first, or maybe the one who first stuck a drill into it? If this is so, I suspect we will need more specific rules than this to explain what constitutes a claim.
My guess is polarization, combined with some pretty breathtaking medical/health illiteracy. Masks are being touted as a “necessary” by the same despised outgroup that is promoting the lockdowns, so they get lumped in with the other “freedom curtailing” measures, despite their actual purpose/efficacy being pretty obvious (never mind the more reasonable anti-lockdown voices who understand masks are a crucial part of opening up).
I suspect tribalism / polarization is partly to blame, but I’ll also note that the anti-mask people are holding the same position as mainstream health authorities in the US held three months ago, so it’s not like they’re obviously exhibiting medical/health illiteracy.
Which in turn exposes another kind of tribalism – a not insignificant portion of people in our commenter community were either fine with those authorities saying “don’t wear masks” or in the “don’t wear masks” themselves camp and nobody found it objectionable until it was perceived republicans/old people/Karens doing it.
Less of this, please, or cite your examples.
I’ll contradict that: Please don’t cite your examples. This is less contentious overall if we don’t punish people for changing their minds by bringing them up.
It will be less contentious if people don’t get to insinuate that their outgroup in this commenting community are politically mindkilled and make sneering insinuations about their beliefs, no matter what they actually said.
You know what? You’re completely right. I went back to find all the examples I was sure I had seen and they aren’t there – there hasn’t been a single person on either side in the hidden or visible open threads saying not to wear a mask. The closest is one guy saying, as a joke, that the only benefit to the mask was it kept you from touching your face.
I was being a dick. Withdrawn.
One possibility is straight up selfishness. Wearing an improvised mask won’t protect you from catching covid-19, or even reduce your odds much, but it will protect others from you if you happen to have it.
If we assume some of these people are either sociopaths, or so polarized that they don’t care about outgroup deaths, then their behaviour becomes completely consistent.
Others then conform to the acceptable views of their in group, and/or have a consistent position that having 1-2% of the population dead is better than the lockdown, inevitable, or both, and masks (for whatever reason) won’t help enough to matter.
[Edit: re outgroups, this would include those who “know” that only old folks are at significant risk, are not themselves old, and don’t have anyone they care about who is.]
The stories I have seen on this involved people who were demonstrating against the lockdown not wearing masks. Insofar as not wearing a mask risks contagion to those near you, it’s their ingroup, the other demonstrators, mainly affected.
If we assume some of these people don’t believe that COVID-19 is a major threat because it’s no worse than the flu, their behavior becomes completely consistent. If we assume some of these people don’t believe COVID-19 is a major threat because only the jet-setting big-city elite is at great risk of getting it, then their behavior becomes completely consistent. If we assume some of these people believe that COVID-19 is a major threat but that improvised masks don’t effectively prevent anyone from being infected, their behavior becomes completely consistent.
If there are many blatantly obvious hypotheses that are consistent with someone’s observed behavior, most of which are do not involve sociopathy, then saying “hey, these people’s behavior is consistent with their being a bunch of sociopaths” is extremely uncharitable.
I would add that if we are talking about people participating in a mass protest, I totally applaud their willingness to go unmasked. Masked protesters are scary as hell.
@Doctor Mist
I’d rather have them masked and unarmed, than unmasked and armed. Armed protestors are much more scary.
(Do I need to find an article to cite about the Michigan state house protest, to substantiate my claim that some of the anti-lockdown protestors are armed? It seems like common knowledge to me.)
The group of people who do not believe masks are needed are going to include those who think the virus’s infection and/or mortality rates are exaggerated. These people will naturally also be against other restrictions.
This doesn’t establish that there isn’t a group that thinks the restrictions are unnecessary if we wear masks. But this is a more nuanced position that might not show up as readily in protests/media/twitter.
Even more nuanced would be the (imo, correct, but potentially risky) belief that some things need to be restricted (like, say concerts or indoor sporting events), some need to be opened with required masks (like, say, shopping), and some should be open without mask scolding, like walking through the park. Also, private establishments should be able to set more restrictive rules, and these should be followed out of courtesy, given litigation risks.
Never a good idea to assume a limited supply of idiots negates the need to idiot-proof. The biggest argument for eliminating restrictions is their indefinite nature and the fact that various non-essential activities become essential with time. My kids’ friend is in considerable pain because of postponement of his surgery, and should they go ahead and reschedule it, only one parent will be allowed with him and won’t be allowed to leave and return. (although the latter makes sense during the time they are actually opening him up, granted)
And the people who feel the risks are exaggerated probably dominate in the group of people who oppose the lockdowns strongly enough to bother with a protest. I’m in favor of reopening, but not enough to bother to attend a protest, but I’m also fine wearing a mask to the grocery store.
I’m a little personally conflicted on masks. On the one hand, I respect the private property of a grocery store and their right to declare whatever rules they see fit. On the other hand, I’m 99.9% sure they’ve done zero independent research, and are just blindly doing what Fauci tells them to do because they think that’s what’s best for PR purposes, which is a practice I definitely do not support.
I’ve solved my moral dilemma by just using instacart.
> I’m 99.9% sure they’ve done zero independent research, and are just blindly doing what Fauci tells them to do because they think that’s what’s best for PR purposes, which is a practice I definitely do not support.
Are you saying that people shouldn’t ask others to practice good hygiene unless the people doing the asking have done independent research on the medical value of this hygiene?! It seems reasonable that at least some people might legitimately just trust medical authorities to have some useful information, and therefore ask others to abide by regulations proposed by these authorities, without having to develop the expertise to conduct independent research.
Given recent events, this no longer “seems reasonable” to me.
These authorities have proven unworthy of our trust.
Hell, even in this exact specific case. Three months ago, they were saying “masks don’t work.” Were they wrong (or lying) then, or are they wrong (or lying) now?
Now I get your point. I don’t necessarily think it’s of great societal value for Target to have its own pandemic division and to be conducting its own peer-reviewed studies on homemade cloth mask efficacy. That said, I do want them to do something, a little bit, more than “whatever Fauci says must be right.” I think a whole lot of problems in society, well beyond the scope of COVID/lockdowns/whatever, can be traced to large, powerful, often private, organizations blindly following the self-appointed expert class without offering any sort of pushback or independent analysis.
@Matt M
I understand you mean this in a general sense, but in the specific sense of COVID, large, powerful, private organizations (big tech) listening to the experts and sending employees to work from home early seems like a (if not the) key reason that CA and WA have manageable outbreaks compared to other early-infected epicenters.
That’s not quite how I remember it.
How I remember it is that the large tech companies started social distancing measures before the experts recommended it, and were made fun of at best and accused of covert racism at worst.
Someone at those companies was doing their own research – and was willing to go above and beyond “We will do exactly what the government says when they say it.” And good for them. I wish the individuals involved would stand up and shout on social media about it so I could recognize them personally.
The New Yorker Article about WA suggests the Seattle tech companies didn’t do mandatory WFH until they got the suggestion from the King County health executive. (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not)
I don’t have similar articles on the SF ones, but it wouldn’t surprise me either way.
I think the differences in actions by the private companies likely boil down to the NY public health people were either silenced from making a suggestion to the private companies (because DiBlasio seems like one of the two least competent people in the country at this response), ignorant of the prevalence of infections (because they lacked ‘experts’ like the Seattle flu study) or ignored by the companies (because investment bankers must be in the office 12 hours a day, goddamn it!)
I think health authorities are allowed to learn and get smarter and make better recommendations, just like everyone else.
+1. This exactly matches my thinking.
Part of the problem with police shootings seems to be that it is very difficult to come up with norms for when it is appropriate for police to use lethal force (pistol round to center of mass). I can not come up with formal norms that remotely match my intuitions and are not massively subjective or incredibly long. One complicating issue is that in these sorts of prudential matters there should be middle grounds like, probably should not have shot the guy but he should not have run, but me saying those things seems monstrous to myself. If one person can not come up with standards to match his intuitions, then what hope do we as a society with widely varying intuitions have of doing so in a way that does not just paper over differences which then leads to officers breaking the written law and then having that winked at? Thus even before the huge difficulties in applying these standards in rushed high stress settings we seem to have a huge problem.
I don’t like to say it, but one issue is that the US has a lot of guns. If most people aren’t armed, the cops have much less worry that this is the One Guy who is going to kill them.
Google says that 38 police officers were killed in the line of duty in 2019 (uh looks like that wasn’t quite full year, that was part way into Dec), with 31 states being completely free of officer deaths. There is no realistic headway to be gained in reducing police anxiety via disarmament.
Unless, of course, the number of deaths are that low because police tend to shoot first, in which case reducing the amount of deadly force police use may increase their death counts.
But that’s mostly me playing devil’s advocate.
We made the point elsewhere that, perhaps, black people are over-emphasizing how in danger they are.
I suspect cops are doing that, too.
My impression is that cops in other countries don’t really shoot much. If you don’t worry about people being armed, you are more at easy to talk for a while.
My impression here might be completely wrong. I admit that. Counter-evidence to dispel that would be appreciated.
I think that might be because they don’t have guns.
Cops in just about every country that isn’t the United Kingdom, routinely carry guns.
And the police in the UK also have guns, they’re just not carried for certain types of duties.
Honestly, I saw more “guys in police/military looking uniforms standing in public places prominently displaying military weapons” when I visited several European countries than I ever did within the US.
US cops are well armed, but they don’t show it off publicly. They wait until you’re asleep and show up at 3 AM with the tank and the machine guns. They don’t stand around holding them in Times Square.
The french police default way of being in public providing security to some function, even deeply boring stuff is to have assault rifles. Italy has similar things for anti terrorism stuff in Rome but that at least has the excuse of being anti terrorism and looks more military. This was a humorously contrary to expectations culture shock for me the first few times I saw it.
Yep, the world is way more ‘policeman-armed’ than I realized. Apparently only 19 of 197 countries don’t routinely arm their police force, and almost all of those are tiny islands. Norway, New Zealand, Ireland and Iceland are about the only sizable countries apart from the UK. link
@Edward Scizorhands
My impression is that Dutch cops no less prone to shooting if they think that a person has the intent to use lethal force against them, but they are much less likely to believe this.
However, this is merely based on news stories, so apply lots of grains of salt.
Sorry, but the whole ‘cop isn’t a particularly dangerous profession’ angle really bothers me. It just doesn’t add up. Your cited source has cops dying at 12.9 per 100,000 workers. But the overall workforce in America was (according to a quick google) 153.34 million people, with 5147 workplace deaths according to that USA today link. That (assuming I haven’t screwed the maths up, and it’s late, so I might have) works out to an overall death rate of around 0.3 per 100,000 workers. Making cop around 43 times more dangerous than ‘generic baseline job’.
Also, cop is correctly viewed as a more dangerous job because danger is a core component of doing the job. Facing dangerous people and events is expected of police. The military doesn’t even feature on that top 25 list, but nobody ever claims ‘being a soldier is not a dangerous job’.
Being a farmer is an incredibly dangerous job, and thinking otherwise demonstrates substantial naiveté. Farmers are constantly around dangerous machinery, dangerous animals, dangerous tools, and dangerous structures. Go look up ‘PTO shaft accident’ on youtube if you want to understand the kind of injuries farmers routinely suffer.
Yeah, this interpretation is bizarre.
Yes, fishers and related fishing workers (1/1000 of them dying in 2017) have more dangerous job. Seriously, 1/1000 death rate? Is it some outlier year?
“Being a cop is not a particularly dangerous profession.” is still bizarre misinterpretation of data that you presented.
Yes, policeman overreact, gardeners underreact.
“Being a cop is not a particularly dangerous profession.” is still not true.
It is both significantly more dangerous than a typical one (though it seems caused rather by large amount of driving) and its danger is significantly overestimated by nearly everyone.
So being a cop is both dangerous profession and much safer than expected.
…wait, cops have a x20 baseline fatality rate from things other than confrontation?
How? From what? Are donuts that bad for you, or is there an epidemic of cops pocketing drugs on raids and subsequently ODing? Terrible driving?
STYLE GUIDE: NOT SOUNDING LIKE AN EVIL ROBOT, Continued
* Realize that people consider deaths deliberately perpetrated by a human as being worse than deaths that happen by machinery/animals/weather/accidents.
This isn’t style, this is substance.
@Scoop
Again, do you say the same things about Soldiers? The important thing is that the job of cop involves confronting danger as a core component of the job description. If a cop is shot by a suspect, that’s a known risk of doing the job, you’re confronting potentially violent individuals in extremis. That both makes it inherently dangerous and increases perception of danger even further (‘I can do everything right and still die because the suspect decided to come out blasting’ can’t be a pleasant thought to dwell on).
Sorry, but ‘”Specific thing” X isn’t that dangerous, it’s only in the top 20 of ‘most dangerous X’s nationwide’ is not a very compelling argument.
So what if cop is ‘only’ the 18th most dangerous job in the US? That seems like a solid argument in favour of cop being an overall dangerous job, not against.
Plenty of driving is one of primary ways that make jobs significantly more lethal than average.
Police often drives in emergency mode, is less respected than ambulances, they are often leaving vehicles and standing on a road shoulder…
I found statistics for my country and deaths on job for police was primarily various kinds of traffic accidents.
“shot by someone” is still important cause for death, but not a sole one.
Traffic cops spend a lot of time on the road, and a lot of time standing by the side of a busy highway writing tickets. It’s not so hard to see how you’d get a fair number of traffic related deaths from that.
And 14-16 hour shifts are not that unusual. Driving + Fatigue is a dangerous combination.
If you work longer hours your chance of dying on the job also increases simply by virtue of working more often.
Or just the fact that actual risk of getting shot plays very little impact on how policy train and respond to situations.
This is, ironically, a parallel of the below argument on people getting shot by police. The fact that the statistical risk is low doesn’t necessarily imply that people are going to not treat it as a significant risk. Especially if training, popular culture and professional standards all tell you to assume that everyone you see could be armed and dangerous.
ETA: Yeah, what scizorhands said.
To provide another important number alongside “38 police officers killed in line of duty,” roughly 1000 (I believe it’s 996) people were killed by police officers in 2019. I provide this number just to help everyone calibrate. I’d love if every news report ever began with a list of absolute numbers, and that goes double for SSC discussions, but I have no dog in this race (besides a pitiful old mutt named Barks-at-Newsmedia.)
He must be hard to live with: I imagine these days he never shuts up!
Eh, it’s a little higher than 38.
Some of those are hell to read, but browsing around randomly one stood out as kind of weird: died 38 years after being shot from complications during surgery and the death is ruled a homicide.
Like, I get why you might want to say that especially if you’ve known the guy your entire career and in the sense that there’s nobody to slap the homicide charge on it is mostly symbolic… but it still seems a little off, in the truth in advertising sort of way. At the limit, if every cop that has been shot or stabbed or punched in the line of duty is homicide when they die decades later from age-related reasons——because you can squint hard enough to claim their injury is also a factor in every circumstance if you’re sufficiently motivated——it makes talking about the issue (or even getting good statistics) difficult.
ETA: Without going through the entire list, it is possible that the number 38 is for the number that have so far died from an injury sustained during 2019, and the discrepancy with those that have died during 2019 is through the addition of those that died from injury sustained during previous years (with varying amounts of connection to the injury).
@Conrad Honcho
I had a look at your link – it includes things like death from heart attacks. Is this generally what is meant by ‘In the Line of duty’? I’d always assumed it meant a death that was caused the nature of police work, rather than just dying ‘at’ work.
When a said “a little” I wasn’t being sarcastic. But just the gunfire ones are 48, and then you’ve got things like “struck by vehicle” (which could also be unintentional…remember, if you see a traffic stop on the right side of the interstate, move into the left hand lane as you pass), or traffic accident, which can include pursuing suspect, or rushing to the scene of a crime.
The number is still relatively low. I’m mostly being pedantic.
And, how many of the shootings were clearly immoral/improper, or even unclear?
At the risk of being the asshole in the room, I’ll go ahead and lay my cards on the table: I don’t feel particularly bad when a police officer kills someone in the line of duty in self-defense or defense of others unless there is reason to believe based on the evidence available that it was a bad shoot.
I think a lot of people are coming at this from the exact opposite direction, where every shooting is presumed immoral/unjustified, or at the very least a tragedy, unless proven otherwise.
Part of my priors for this is that while there are bad/violent/immoral cops out there, they are in the minority, police training heavily emphasizes the continuum of force, and the overwhelming number of confrontations that the police have with the public do not end in shooting, even though many of those confrontations are acrimonious and hostile.
Police should not be shooting people unless they, or someone they are protecting, is under imminent threat of deadly force.
After a shooting, the justification is inevitably that the officer had a reasonable belief that they had reason to believe that they were under immediate threat of deadly force.
A 26 to 1 kill ratio is at least somewhat suggestive that the police officers’ judgement of whether they are in immediate danger of being killed before pulling the trigger is skewed.
Cops may be slightly better shots than the average crook, but not 26 times better.
I think your naive intuition is leading you astray here. Between training, body armor, and the actual legal and moral standards for the use of lethal force (as opposed to the ones that people tend to presume exist), I don’t find that ratio surprising at all. I mean, actual combat between trained soldiers in wartime often produces ratios just as skewed, if not even moreso.
Does this apply to e.g. lawmen in the Old West if we imagine Hollywood Rules apply? The good guy wins in the final shootout, probably 26:1 integrate over all Western movies, because it conveniently holds that the good guy can shoot just fast enough and just straight enough to wait for the bad guy to draw first and still win.
This doesn’t mean he isn’t really in immediate danger of being killed. It just means he’s really good.
If you are called upon to engaged in armed confrontations a lot, and you win almost all of them, that means you’re really good at winning armed confrontations. That’s it. It doesn’t mean that you’re going around picking fights, and it doesn’t mean that you’re not really in mortal danger while you do so.
Cops are really good at winning armed confrontations. And at not dying when they lose, for that matter. It’s a big part of their job, more so even than for criminals, and they’re professionals. They’re professionally trained, they’re organized, and they’ve got first-rate equipment and nigh-infinite backup on call. And they’ve now got body armor, that stops a minority of bullets but a majority of those aimed at vital organs.
So obviously they’re usually not going to be the ones who wind up dead. But that’s mostly because they usually make the other guy end up dead first. If they stopped doing that, they’d die a lot more often.
Except that winning armed confrontations is not a “big” part of their job, most police will never discharge a firearm in anger. Certainly they have more training than a random crook, but not exactly special forces level.
Point taken on the better gear and backup. You would need to include injuries in the total to get a clearer picture.
But ultimately, if police win 95% of gunfights, that suggests that they can afford to be sure they are actually in a deadly force situation before engaging. You should not see “he reached for his waistband” or “he had something I could not identify in his hand” as fully justifying unloading a magazine at a guy, and yet even in those scenarios where that is the justification and the subject turns out to be unarmed, we do not see cops get punished.
One more anecdote possibly relevant to this discussion. At one point in the seventies in Philadelphia I was witness to a shooting, and as a result had friendly conversations with some cops. One piece of advice one of them gave me was that if I shot a burglar in my house, I should make sure he was dead.
That was arguably good advice, since if he is dead he can’t dispute my account of what happened or sue me. But if police apply the same policy in their own case, it might be a reason why, after firing the first shot, they keep shooting.
@DavidFriedman
I can’t speak for the US, but in the UK (as I understand it) armed police are trained to shoot and assess continually, IE keep shooting while you determine whether your shots have had the desired effect (negated the threat of lethal force by the target) and only then stop shooting. Given the time it can take for people who have been shot to drop their firearm / collapse / even notice that they’ve been shot, and the use of semi-automatic weapons, this almost invariably results in multiple discharges.
Firing one round and waiting to see whether it worked (headshots notwithstanding, of course) is an excellent recipe for getting shot by a criminal whose adrenaline-soaked brain hasn’t got the message from their body yet.
As I said to Bobob down thread, the perception of risk is absolutely higher than the statistical risk. I’ve had mirror-images of this discussion with both friends in law enforcement and with black friends, acquaintances, and coworkers.
The part that complicates things from the LE end is that unlike “random law abiding black male” who is not engaging in any risky behaviors, a police officer is as a matter of course inserting themselves into potentially dangerous scenarios every day. Note that I say potentially. Statistically, the vast majority of these scenarios will be resolved without any sort of violence, either on the part of the officer or the part of anyone else, but they all have the potential to. Here are a short list of factors which can help reduce the risk to the officer, all of which are already usually part of police training:
-Maintaining high situational awareness, being on-guard and ready to react to potential threats quickly. Complacency kills.
-Being willing to use the continuum of force to control a situation before it escalates.
-Having the training in verbal and emotional skills to de-escalate confrontations without having to use force at all, if possible.
-Having equivalent or superior armament to anyone hostile you are likely to meet.
-Having body armor.
I could keep going, but as you can see, 3 of the 5 criteria I listed just off the top of my head are positively correlated with both “police officer uses force or lethal force” AND “police officer is at lower risk of injury/death”. It’s probably true that you could trade off police shootings against police officer deaths/injuries, but that’s a hard sell to most law enforcement officers and agencies, especially when to them the more relevant question is how many of those shootings were actually unjustified.
EDIT: And Edward, I’d say it’s absolutely fine to bring up, but it’s just as fine to point out as Baconbits did (though his numbers were low) that there isn’t a lot of headroom to reduce deaths by disarming the populace, and that based.
Hmmm, on the other hand, I just checked some numbers, and they’re interesting. The rate of violent, intentional death for UK police officers seems to hover somewhere between 1 to 3 per 100K annually over the past decade or so. For the US, we’re looking at more like 8-9 per 100K (note that this is roughly twice the US murder rate). Whether you want to frame that as “Three times more dangerous being a british cop” and “Risk of being murdered is twice as high for a US police officer as for the general population!” or “the level of risk is extremely low relative to the number of officers and the number of non-violent encounters with the public” is up to you.
Being willing to use the continuum of force to control a situation before it escalates
How necessary is it that cops always stay “in control of a situation”?
Every time I see a video of some encounter between cops and civilians go to shit, it looks like the cops are making absolutely sure that they are keeping the high-status in the situation, so no one gets away with disrespecting them.
When met with someone who is not responsive to this, like on drugs, or mentally disturbed, or autistic, that doesn’t work at all and someone gets their ass beat. For the last two of those categories, that isn’t helping anything.
I’m not seeing all the other times this occurs without incident, of course. Is keeping the officers highly respected in each encounter an essential part of staying safe?
Your average cops job is “find people who aren’t complying and get them to comply.” When everything’s going well, this doesn’t require force, but as a society we’ve given cops the exclusive right to use force to achieve compliance.
The normal and optimal state of affairs is for cops to be high status and controlling the situation, because that means that people are complying without the cops having to use force. It’s only when verbal commands don’t work that force is utilized.
So when cops are dealing with someone who is mentally retarded or autistic and doesn’t respond to the cops demands to be high-status, what’s the way forward?
EDIT: Also, I worry that by making sure every encounter is high-status for the cops, we either (a) select for people who fervently want to be high-status (b) train existing cops to always demand being high-status, or (c) both. And I’m not really sure those are good things. Maintaining high-status in a situation is often the opposite of de-escalation.
You’re conflating “in control of a situation” with being high status.
I admit, they look similar, but there not the same. You’ll likely piss off a cop by telling him to F off, but 99 times out of 100 they’ll act like proffesionals and let you keep walking if they don’t think you’ve done anything.
Sure, that last time in a hundred isn’t going to be fun for you, but that’s the likely result of telling any group of 100 people to f off. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
My one relevant experience does not fit that. I was arrested for the crime of aiding and assisting in asking a police officer for his badge number. The official statement of the charges, eventually dropped — I missed my plane and I think ended up spending the night in jail along with my fellow criminals (a long time ago so I don’t swear to that) claimed we had refused to move when told to, which wasn’t true. But it was clear from conversation that the officer who arrested us did not pretend that to the other officers, such as the one who drove us to the police station.
On the other hand, that was a long time ago and in the New Orleans airport, so not good evidence of the present situation, at least in California where I live.
Well. Poland has nearly 0 problems of this kind – noone is worried about being shot dead by police.
I am curious whatever number of dead policeman is substantially lower. Country is about 10 times smaller.
Page from 2010, but first that I found: http://www.policja.pl/pol/aktualnosci/59384,dok.html
2010 – incomplete, skipped (1 dead policeman, attacked with knife)
2009 – 0 policeman dead during work
2008 – 4 dead in traffic accidents, 1 shot – by other policeman
2007 – 4 dead in traffic accidents, 3 shot – by a prison guard “for unknown reasons”
2006 – 6 dead in traffic accidents
2005 – dead from tropical illness (during UN mission), 1 shot in head by other policeman
2004 – 4 dead in traffic accidents
2003 – 1 shot by criminals, 2 dead due to unspecified reasons during arresting someone
2002 – 4 dead in traffic accidents, 4 shot by criminals
2001 – 1 drowned during attempt to rescue drowning person, 4 in traffic accidents, 1 shot during a struggle to stop psychically ill person, 1 in train-car collision, 1 was found dead, assumed to be murdered (suicide was considered but rejected)
2000 – 1 fall from stairs, 5 in traffic accidents, 1 drowned during patrolling frozen lake (fish poaching prevention)
1999 – 1 found dead shot, 1 heart attack, 3 traffic accidents, 1 shot
1998 – 1 knifed, 5 traffic accidents, 1 bomb attack, 1 dead during evacuating building with faulty gas installation that exploded
1997 – 1 stroke during a fitness exam, 1 dead in helicopter accident during UN mission, 8 traffic accidents, 1 train-car accident, 1 died from unspecific illness
1996 – 5 traffic accidents, 1 dead in a bomb attack, 1 fall through roof window during a chase
1995 – 1 dead in Iran on UN mission, 5 in traffic accidents, 1 accidentally shot by policeman pushed by someone getting arrested, 1 died during parachute competition due to a faulty parachute
I am not entirely sure where I am going with it, but I expected much lower number of policeman in my country dead due to a shooting.
Still 17/15 years, scaled to USA would be about 11 policeman killed by people that are not police/prison guards/army/similar what is lower than USA.
But I expected more significant difference.
Is it viable for the cops not to have guns? Hella kevlar defenses, hoses, tear gas, swords, spears, tasers, etc, are fair game, just no guns? If criminals know that the police have everything but guns, does that significantly change the calculus?
Not if non-cops have guns, I would guess. Is there any country where they’ve disarmed the police(or some/most of them) where they haven’t also disarmed the populace? My intuition says that whatever law enforcement need there is for guns now increases as soon as still-gun-having criminals find out they can do whatever they want now.
How does “we have guns, they have a whole lotta things that are not guns but can still do some pretty bad things” come out to “can do whatever they want now?”
My intuition is that this deescalates the arms war. Criminals can stop at whatever is just one level above what the cops have, even if that doesn’t really give them a huge advantage over the cops.
But them Cops either just escalate to having one level above what the criminals have (resulting in criminals escalating again) or you now have a society where your average criminal is confident they can take your average cop.
The second society either results in a whole lot more or a whole let less cops. Neither of which is great.
I don’t believe that cops need to have guns to have sufficient power to subdue criminals. Just because the criminals can kill them, doesn’t mean that they have to kill criminals.
A more compelling counterargument is that the arms race is against escalating cop defense ability (they get better armor=criminals get higher firepower), but I don’t think that’s necessarily true, either. If the cops become werewolves, that doesn’t necessitate that criminals escalate to silver bullets, when disabling scent bombs will do.
In fact, it may be better for cops to have an obvious weakness that funnels criminals’ efforts towards, so that their tactics are predictable. (This is a theory people have put forward on why Superman doesn’t do a big sweep for any Kryptonite on the planet, or wear a lead suit. A villain that thinks they can get the better of Superman with a green rock is a far easier situation than someone who tries detonating a nuke because they have no clearer options.)
In RPG terms, the criminals are going for a high-ATK/SPD strategy, and I’m wondering why the police can’t take a lower-ATK/high-DEF strategy instead (slow and steady, after all), which reduces casualties in less intense or false positive conflicts. Currently, if the situation only needs 1000 damage dealt to resolve the situation, the cops have either the -10hp or the -10000hp weapon.
Barring magic sci-fi “stun guns”, which don’t exist, it does mean they have to use a level of force which will hurt people real bad and thus will sometimes kill them. That’s what guns are for; we’ve spent a century conspicuously failing to come up with anything better.
Also note that you’re going to get a lot fewer people willing to be cops, if criminals are going to be shooting at cops with deadly weapons and cops can’t respond in kind. Any proposal for police reform that assumes there will always be an adequate supply of good cops waiting to be hired, needs a serious rethinking.
@John Schilling
This is still assuming that cops can only counter offensive power with offensive power. If they have sufficient defense, they should be able to subdue criminals just by, say, smothering them with a large rug.
What this will result in is far more injured criminals than dead criminals, but perhaps the optics of that are worse, more lawsuits, healthcare system burden, etc.
The other counter would be that guns really are just about speed (gdi Virilio). Without being able to disable a criminal with a bullet, criminals can always just flee whatever countermeasures are left. Again, this reduces deaths, but creates status problems with the level of apprehensions down, as another thread discussed.
It all comes down to how much we want to trade off against cop-caused deaths vs. cop-caused other outcome. Clean death vs. cruel-and-unusual punishment. I’m not convinced that the US is currently on the right side of that balance.
“Defensive power” is largely an illusion when it comes to firearms though. Bulletproof vests are a mitigation, not an absolute defence.
AG:
Serious question: What kind of “defense” are you talking about here? Like I get the RPG concept of just being a big endurance/armor points monster, but I’m trying to figure out what you think this is going to look like in terms of something that could be consistently worn and consistently effective against small arms, knives, and rifles.
Actually it’s not. It’s about how willing we are to accept cops dying. The current answer is “very much not” and we’ve backed up this preference by being, as a society, mostly ok when cops use their overwhelming force and end up killing non-cops.
The problem, like everyone else has pointed out, is that the current best defense against someone with a gun is a cop shooting said person before they can shoot the gun. Find me an alternative and we’ll talk but until then, well, armed police.
You’re going to have to start being a lot more specific about what you mean by “sufficient defense” here, and I don’t mean describing what the defense should do, I mean describing the specific things that will accomplish that and how they relate to things that exist in the real world.
Because if we’re ignoring reality, then let’s do away with the cops altogether and just have kindergarten teachers who can make sure nobody ever grows up to be a villainous criminal. But if we are limited by reality, then I’m pretty sure the “sufficient defense” you are talking about does not exist in any fashion compatible with the general duties of a police officer.
Kevlar isn’t actually bulletproof, but it is an amount of mitigation, which gives them more options to not go straight to “death to the opponent.” Full riot gear would also be less intimidating as the norm if it wasn’t paired with matching offensive power. The mitigation allows them to perhaps first try things like nets, electricity, or rugs.
Kevlar actually is bulletproof, although the extent to which it can stop more powerful bullets obviously scales with the amount of kevlar.
Unless there is a huge disparity, there is usually some blunt force trauma, but the definition of bulletproof merely requires that prevents penetration, not that there is no damage. However, body armor standards may specify a maximum amount of back-face deformation.
A common Western standard is IIIa, which stops the most common handgun rounds: 9mm, 40cal, 45cal. In Russia, they have a stricter standard because they have a common handgun round that has better armor penetration.
Bullets fired from rifles tend to have a huge increase in penetration ability, because the longer barrel allows for better transfer of energy to the bullet. At one point kevlar needs to be so thick (and therefor stiff) & has relatively high back-face deformation, that it is more efficient to use ceramic plates in addition to kevlar. These plates are stiff and heavy, so often merely used to protect the core (lungs & heart). Wounds outside of that region (and the head) tend to be far less imminently dangerous and tend to keep the person functioning, if they refuse to be overly impressed by their injuries.
An important consideration, especially for the police, is that more capable armor is going to be less comfortable and is more likely to be left in the trunk of the car, which doesn’t help very much if the cop is shot at.
Anyway, even if the opponent uses a handgun for which the armor is rated, the head is still at risk. Armor that is hit may also be compromised. Furthermore, bullets can do all kinds of weird things, like ricochet from the hip into the heart. You really don’t want to let a person just shoot at you, even when wearing body armor.
Thanks for the elaboration, that was interesting stuff.
I do remember that the ceramic reinforcement plates are one-offs. They get hit with a bullet, they break up to disperse the energy, and they’re done. I don’t know if they’re easily replaceable or not.
Actually, IIIA and III will stop quite a bit more. The roman numeral levels are a US Government standard developed by the National Institute of Justice. It basically goes:
IIA – Stops 9x19mm and .40 S&W rounds fired from short barreled firearms.
II – Stops 9x19mm and .357 Magnum rounds fired from short barreled firearms.
IIIA – Stops .357 SIG and .44 Magnum rounds from longer barreled firearms. (This is the minimum level of body armor in common use today).
III – Stops 7.62x54mm FMJ.
IV – Stops at least two rounds of .30-06 M2 Armor Piercing.
Modern high velocity, intermediate caliber rifle ammunition like 5.56mm and 5.45mm can be stopped by Level III or IV plates.
In short, modern soft body armor (which can be in the form of a concealable vest, or a modern tactical vest which doubles as load-bearing equipment) will stop pretty much ALL handgun caliber/barrel length combinations you are likely to see short of novelty/dangerous game hunting revolver ammo, but once you have moved to realm of rifle cartridges you need to have hard plates, and that generally means either a plate carrier (does just what it says on the tin, carries a III or IV plate or front and back pair of plates but offers little to no soft armor supplementation) or a full-up armor vest that combines kevlar or similar textile armor with strike plates.
And hard plates will stop more than one round (and in fact they have to in order to be certified), but not necessarily in the same location. Exactly how many rounds and how close together is going to vary by plate material, plate condition, impact locations, the type of round used, the range, and a million other factors. This means that if you’re in the middle of a combat situation you can still have some confidence that your armor will protect you from multiple hits, but each hit to the plate increases the chance that the -next- hit will go straight through by an unknowable percent. Thus, it’s usually policy to replace any struck plates as soon as possible.
Replacing an armor plate in modern body armor and plate carrier systems is extremely easy. Most have a pouch held shut with heavy-duty velcro. Just open the flap, pull the old plate out, shove the new plate in, done.
That’s really cool information. I hadn’t realized how far armor ceramics had progressed! Imagine going back to the chain mail days and telling them that fabric and pottery will be able to stop rounds that fly faster and harder than a longbow arrow.
They’d be more amazed by the ceramics. Arguably, kevlar is just a high tech evolution of cloth armor like the gambeson. Layered fabric armor was both way more common and way more effective than is generally appreciated outside of military history/re-enactment circles 🙂
Although I should take this opportunity to note: Kevlar is armor optimized to diffuse the kinetic energy of a bullet, NOT to resist a sharp object! Ballistic armor IS NOT necessarily Stab armor (though you can buy armor that is rated for both).
There are some (mostly “professional” robbers) who want the gun to enforce compliance but don’t want to shoot anyone. For most of the rest (mostly gang members and drug dealers), it’s for self-defense and to defend territory/reputation (to kill other gang members/drug dealers, to kill informants, to kill those who publically challenge you so as not to lose credibility, etc). I would argue that it would make the latter, who are the majority of armed criminals in the US, significantly more willing to take their chances of starting a shootout with the cops.
Restricting police to less-lethal weapons only makes sense in a context where: A) the population has already been fairly effectively disarmed and B) police with guns are still available on call. As others noted, even in most countries where the populace is largely disarmed, the cops still carry guns.
But there are countries where the cops don’t carry guns. Or do those cases have “needs to have homogenous culture” prerequisites?
A homogenous, high compliance to state authority culture helps immensely, but what are you thinking of for examples where civilian gun ownership is anywhere near US levels and the cops don’t carry guns?
A grand total of five of them, from what I can tell. The United Kingdom, and four others whose combined population is one-quarter that of the UK. And that just means the normal cops don’t carry guns.
In the UK, the deal seems to be that if you use a gun, basically all the cops who do use guns will hunt you down (and possibly shoot you down on sight). If you don’t use a gun, the cops will turn a blind eye to levels of criminal violence that wouldn’t be tolerated in the United States – which is a sufficiently good deal that almost all the criminals go for it, so the UK’s modest number of gun-wielding cops can concentrate their efforts on a very small number of gun-wielding criminals.
I think there are insurmountable cultural and path-dependence problems to implementing that policy in the United States. Which is good, because I don’t want that policy implemented in the United States.
@John Schilling:
But we don’t see “if you use a gun, basically all the cops who do use guns will hunt you down” police behavior in the US, either. In other threads, people are advocating for cops using guns against someone without a weapon as justified because fists and feet can be deadly force. US police use guns for a far wider class of crime, even after ti’s established that a gun is not present.
Seems like we have a bit of “penalty for being late and treason” situation that might account for criminals picking up guns far more than they would otherwise.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. As stated, that’s correct. A criminal who uses a gun in the United States, even one who kills someone with a gun, will be the target of a relatively brief and modest police effort. A criminal who goes around beating people up and maybe even to death, will also be the subject of a relatively brief and modest police effort. The deaths will get more attention than the rest, but either way it doesn’t matter whether there was a gun involved.
This is different than the way it works in the UK. In the UK, a criminal who uses a gun even without killing anyone, is I believe the focus of the sort of investigation the US applies to actual cop-killers. On the other hand, beating the crap out of people is given broad latitude on “yobs will be yobs” grounds, and respectable folk are supposed to avoid the places where yobs are beating people up.
In the United States, the police response is the same, but guns are more effective for some sorts of crime, so lots of criminals use guns. In the UK, using a gun make it somewhat more likely that you will successfully commit the crime but much more likely that you will get caught afterwards, so they mostly don’t.
That’s a way of saying “more bloody noses, fewer deaths”.
Also, much harder to get hold of a gun, to the extent that criminals have to rent them, and armed robbery attracts much higher sentences. Having harsh sentences for everything does not differentially suppress violent crime.
@John Schilling
And that doesn’t bother you, that a hugely variable magnitude of crimes are all given relatively brief and modest police effort? From the criminal POV, that should strongly incentivize committing crimes that require guns (because they probably have higher payoff).
In fact, broken windows policing is the exact opposite of what you’ve descibed the UK does, wherein police prioritize lower-magnitude crime (easier to resolve/enforce, better for the statistics). And we’ve seen the efficacy of that system.
Yes, but the justice system isn’t entirely stupid, so this incentive is countered by the fact that committing a crime with a weapon is almost always punished much harsher than committing a crime without a weapon. If two criminals commit nearly identical robberies, but one uses a gun, he’s getting at a minimum, 3-5 more years in jail because of it.
More yobs getting in fights?
There’s an ex-mafia jewelry robber whose YouTube channel I’ve been following a bit who said that he only used airguns because using a real gun flips the sentences from being served concurrently to consecutively.
Didn’t studies show that a higher chance of being caught is the better deterrent than harsher sentence?
It is if the civilians don’t, but I don’t think that’s what you were asking.
Focusing on solving this problem with rules and written norms seems like bringing a scalpel to a duel. Very precise, but not the right tool for the job.
I would agree, but how else does a society set and enforce norms and not have periodic fights about complicated judgment calls.
Should we just shame people who talk about controversial use of force outside of police review boards and the jury room?
From who’s perspective? From an LE perspective (at least when I went through training) we used the use of force continuum. Basically it’s an escalating amount of force we’re allowed to use based on the situation around us. A rule of thumb is that we always go one level up from whatever situation we’re faced with.
Here’s how it works:
Stage 1: Officer presence – Your mere presence is necessary to keep the situation under control. Think of this as, people are having a loud argument then a cop walks up; without even the cop saying anything, people are likely to back off.
Stage 2: Verbal commands – Just being there didn’t work, you now have to use verbal commands to control the situation. These should be short, simple and easy to follow. Stuff like “Sit down,” “Stand up,” “Get away from the car.” That sorta shit. You use this when there’s no immediate threat, but you need to control the situation.
Stage 3: Control tactics – Joint manipulation, pressure holds and other actions that will cause pain, but no lasting damage. This is what you use on people who are passively resisting in order to gain compliance. Use when there’s no threat of violence, but verbal commands were not sufficient to get compliance.
Stage 4: Punches, kicks and stuns – what is sounds like. This one’s kind of rare, because you’d normally only use this when someone is violently resisting… but it’s almost always better to just get out your weapon and go to the next stage in this case. Only really used if you are clearly a better fighter than the other person and are very confident you can take them without getting injured yourself.
Stage 5: Less-than-lethal – use of weapons to subdue. This is what most LE officers would go to if someone comes at them with fists. Use your baton, OC spray or whatever to hopefully incapacitate the attacker.
Stage 6: Lethal force – use of either a firearm or other weapon (IE baton aimed at the head or spine) Default reaction if someone is coming at you with a weapon or if you’re in stage 5 and losing. Also, firearms are always lethal force (at least how we were taught). There is no “well, I’ll just wing him” when it comes to guns, it opens you up to too much risk if the miss and the person takes it in the head or chest.
So, as I said, at each stage you base your current posture off of what situation your in and then go one level up. If people have their fists out, you go non-lethal. There are some edge cases, such as a very small officer could conceivably justify lethal force if their attacker was massive, or known to be an amazing fighter, but in general you try and stick to the continuum.
Is it ever OK for the officer to lose? Where by “lose” I mean that the littering suspect gets away, the disorderly people yell insults at the officer with impunity but refrain from causing property damage, or similar, rather than that the officer has a real chance of winding up injured or dead?
If so, is there a continuum? I.e. how bad does the potential damage have to be before escalating is justified?
If not, why not?
Yes, the above assumes that no one initiated an attack on the officer, but that they may have defended themselves from whatever force the officer brought to bear on them.
I’ve also picked trivial offences not because they are the only ones that exist, but because common sense says that people shouldn’t be shot for trivial offences, even if they also disobey a police officer, attempt to run etc. (Some people are idiots, or panic, or don’t understand the officer’s commands, or have heard about stories of perps impersonating officers to gain access to victims, or …)
Do you want the littering laws and the disorderly conduct laws enforced?
The neighbors are having a loud party at 3AM. You can’t sleep. You call the police to enforce the city anti-noise ordinance. The party host opens the door, the cops ask him to turn it down, he yells “f*ck you, pig!” slams the door and cranks the sound up. The cop comes to your door and says, “Sorry, DinoNerd, I tried, but they were mean.”
If that’s okay, then, sure I guess the cops can lose.
Sometimes there are alternate solutions. If a house party is too loud you could cut the power. Or issue a fine.
Generator. Batteries.
“lol no not paying.”
Isn’t there some libertarian fable about how if you keep saying “no” to the government you wind up dead?
> Do you want the littering laws and the disorderly conduct laws enforced?
Presumably it’s not so much enforcement as compliance that we care about. Enforcement is a way to either ensure compliance by violence, or at least punish people despite their continued lack of compliance.
In any case, we know for sure that we won’t achieve 100% compliance with things like noise complaints regardless of how we do enforcement. The question is just how much cost in terms of police violence we are willing to pay to get any particular increase in compliance.
I think the majority of people who think pigs shoot too often would be fine with someone who has a noisy party and thereafter refuses to cooperate with the police in any way and turns all confrontations with them into armed standoffs getting shot.
Once it becomes widely known that when the police tell you to knock something off, you can ignore them and they’ll just go away, there will be a lot less compliance in any case, including the ones where the police can’t just leave and let things sort themselves out. (Or at least where we really don’t want that to happen.) I am not at all convinced that the result will be *less* violence.
Plus, if the police are unable to enforce laws against noise, drunken and disorderly conduct, trespassing, littering, etc., word will get around, and we will have a *lot* more of those things. People who don’t like it will either find a way to move to a community that doesn’t allow that stuff (see “white flight” for an idea of how this worked out last time we tried it), or they’ll take their own measures to try to avoid it. Again, it’s not clear that there will be less violence as a result, nor is it clear that any resulting violence will be under any kind of social control, even the not-so-great level of control we have over cops.
@thisheavenlyconjugation Who said anything about armed standoffs? DinoNerd’s question was specifically about situations where the officer’s safety is not under threat, i.e. no one is pointing a gun at them.
@The Pachyderminator
Conrad Honcho, when he posited disorderly partiers who refuse to obey the pigs persistently thus necessitating force.
Yeah.
The cops whole job is to use escalating levels of force until they achieve compliance. It’s very easy to get compliance from people who are not resisting, so over any time frame longer than a few minutes there’s a pretty strong correlation between “people who are not complying” and “people who are using active force to resist.”
Or not! But that means you don’t get to sleep, despite having established a government that set rules you like about acceptable noise levels at night.
When the libertarians say stuff like “government is done at gunpoint” they’re not wrong.
Indeed, but I’m not sure who would disagree (or disagree that this is the way things should be). There’s a big difference between pigs having guns as a last resort, and pigs breaking up parties by shooting people. Objections are usually only to the latter in my experience (modulo toxoplasma).
But in this case it’s both. No, the cops should not no-knock raid the party and blast everybody inside. But if the partygoers are respectfully confronted by the authority figure representing the collective will of the community as expressed in their city ordinances and they do not comply…what do?
I want the noise to stop because I want to go to sleep so I can go to work in the morning. I live in a community where I voted for “no loud parties after 10pm” laws. I’m paying my property taxes and I’m playing by the rules. I’m not saying “blast ’em,” but if you disagree with the rules, either 1) lobby to change them or 2) disobey them, understand the consequences. Those consequences will eventually include blasting.
Yes, eventually. Most people think “eventually” should come quite a lot of steps further down the line. Probably if the policy is “ask partiers to turn down, if they don’t then fine them, if they don’t pay the fine arrest them, if they resist arrest use non-lethal force, if they resist with a certain level of force blast them” rather than “ask partiers to turn down, if they don’t then it’s time to start shooting” then the number of noisy partiers will be somewhat larger. But I don’t think you will find a lot of people who want to join your community that uses the latter policy because the costs are widely regarded as outweighing the benefits.
This exists; in some jurisdictions police won’t pursue someone who is fleeing in an automobile, depending on what they’ve supposedly done.
The big difference there is that pursuing someone who is fleeing in an automobile puts unrelated people in danger, so there’s a major potential downside to winning. Nobody wants a car to crash into a daycare to catch a shoplifter.
Once we leave that “other involved parties” distinction, I think the next logical line for “we can lose here, I guess” would be everything under a clear and present danger to other people. After all, is a guy who steals jeans worse than a fraud guy? Is a drunk with his dick out worse than a car thief? We need a bright line of some kind for when it’s OK to beat the piss out of a cop and have him let you go.
Maybe there’s a better qualifier than mine, but eventually you draw your line wherever you are going to draw it, and now you have a list of crimes for which your legitimate best move is “fight and run no matter what”. Since “violently resisting lawful police orders” doesn’t trigger the “we must win” condition here by definition (or else this conversation wouldn’t be happening at all), so long as you can consistently beat the piss out of a policeman you are immune to punishment so long as you don’t threaten someone else with serious danger or pull a gun.
One thing I’m absolutely sure would happen here is that there would now be a lot more physical altercations between police and potential arrestees, since “punch a cop in the face” is now a lot more viable of a tactic for getting out of trouble. I can imagine a world where “so long as I can put up a good fight before he sees my ID, I’m fine” being more popular doesn’t result in more police shootings, but I’m not sure I consider that world likely.
I see this said all the time, and it’s true, but it should always be followed up with, “Instead, the cops just put out an APB on the automobile, try to follow at a non-threatening distance and set up roadblocks.” The dude doesn’t get away, the cops just try and avoid the incredibly dangerous high speed chase.
Right. In much the same way, it’s a good rule that the police don’t get into a shootout with bank robbers if there are a lot of bystanders around. That doesn’t mean they’re not planning to use whatever level of force they need to to arrest the bank robbers, just that they’re not going to do it in a way that stupidly exposes a lot of innocent bystanders to extra risk.
You don’t want your cops losing. Both for the reasons that have been outlined before and because, on the whole, cops are way more trustworthy than criminals. Lets imagine you’re a bystander to a situation.
In one case, a cop thinks a perp has pulled a knife on them and shoots. The perp is now dead. In the other case, a cop isn’t sure if a perp has pulled a knife on them and doesn’t shoot. The cop is now dead.
Both of these situations suck, but one has a cop alive and hopefully controlling the situation, the other has a knife-wielding perp alive, who is going to likely not improve the overall stability of our society.
As sad as it sounds, we need to optimize for scenarios then end up with the majority of cops alive at the end of interactions, because the people who “win” versus the cops are almost certainly going to do more damage.
Also, the cops are the ones implementing the escalation-of-force policies, and they’re definitely 100% clear on whether or not it’s okay for them not to come home tonight….
You forgot the scenario where the cop is right, the guy didn’t have a knife, and now no one is dead. Of the three, this is the most common situation. Only considering the other two won’t lead you to good policies or decisions.
That’s why you train cops to be good at figuring out if the other guy’s got a knife.
How does officer(s) outnumbered with a not terribly complaint and physically strong group work? I imagine that is not an edge case and closing to us use 3, 4, or 5 does not seem wise.
Technically, drawing and brandishing your firearm is still level 1 – officer presence, albeit a version of it that is either going to achieve rapid compliance, or result in a pretty immediate jump to level 6.
In practice, if the officer was aware of a group of people doing something bad and they didn’t respond to verbal commands (but weren’t actively threatening the cop) they’d wait for backup and achieve compliance through the lowest possible level once they had the requisite amount of force.
But, if the officer gets attacked in this case, well, you’re at lethal force here. The justification needed for using it is the belief that the current situation will result in the officer being in danger of losing their life and/or suffering grievous bodily harm. That’s an easy justification to make when you’re being rushed by multiple assailants.
Thanks, that’s really interesting to read.
I think this gives a very clear insight into why America has more problems with police treating people badly than a lot of other countries do: American police training and culture places more emphasis on winning confrontations, and less on avoiding or de-escalating them, than that of, say, British police.
If I were given the brief of reducing the frequency with which American police treat people – especially black people – like shit without increasing the crime rate, the most important thing I would do would be to try to change that – to emphasise to police that, for example, the default approach to someone who is shouting at you angrily should be to try to calm then down, not to shout back angrily and force them to acknowledge your authority, and that confrontation, escalation and force should be last resorts.
I think there plenty of police in America who get that, and some police in the UK who don’t, but that the ratios and the mindset emphasised by the training and predominant culture are pretty different.
As a Canadian, that’s what I was getting at with my question about whether the cop has to win, except nowhere near as clearly as you just put it.
Living in the US, I’ve never been treated by the cops in other than a respectful way – but I exude middle-class, middle-aged, etc. I get addressed in terms of respect even when they are pulling me over for a busted taillight. But I’m not sure that’s the common experience.
If that’s the impression your walking away with, then I didn’t do the best job explaining it. Cops aren’t trying to “win,” they are trying to achieve compliance as quickly as possible.
Cops cannot go up the chain on their own. It is entirely based off of what the perp is doing. If verbal commands are working, they never have to go hands on.
This is the default response. Most cops are professional, you shout at them, they’ll just take it in stride; they’ve all been called way worse.
This is a reactive reactive process – they only use force if force is coming at them. At ever level, the cop is also trying to deescalate – no cop who is just using verbal commands wants to go hands on.
It’s useful to remember the availabilty bias of information here. The 99.9% of the times when a policeman deals with a drunken and belligerent guy in a way that ends up with nobody shot, bashed with a nightstick, tazed, or maced will never turn up as a media story or a social media outrage. The US is a very big country with a lot of people, a lot of crime, a lot of cops, and a very wide range of different kinds of city and county governments. Given those two facts, I think it’s very easy to have two things be true at once:
a. You observe many cases where the police beat someone up or shoot them or otherwise behave in nasty, brutal ways.
b. Nearly all interactions between the police and the public are no worse than the cop being formally polite while writing them a ticket/telling them about their tail light being out/telling them to turn down the stereo and quiet down their party.
And it’s going to be quite hard to tell, given those facts, whether unaccountable and brutal police are a big nationwide problem or a small problem involving individual sociopaths or criminals who manage to become cops, or an isolated problem involving a few out-of-control police departments.
I’ll take a swing at this, with the initial caveat that there’s hardly a one-size-fits-all answer, and that “mask skeptics” are a diverse group with highly specific individual reasons for their opposition. That said, I think there are two primary factors in play.
1. General COVID skepticism. This has a pretty big range from “entirely fake conspiracy so that the Democrats can beat Trump” to “very serious but the costs of lockdown will be slightly worse on net than the benefits.” Even if you’re in the latter group, and even if you believe masks might help, you can feel a strong reluctance to engage in anything that might even possibly be interpreted as endorsing or agreeing with the mainstream position re-COVID. If the general logic in society is something like “masks are needed because COVID is very bad” then not wearing a mask is a good way to signal “I don’t think COVID is as bad as they are saying.”
2. Completely independent of that, I think you have a subset of people who are very serious about their rights and object to the general notion of being told, by the state, what to do. Even more specifically, I think people object particularly to the ultra-common framing as seen on social media that goes something like “you hate the lockdowns right? well don’t you understand that if we just wear the masks we can end the lockdowns sooner?” Um, no. I object to this logic 100%. Putting aside all the merits of masks, you cannot take my rights away, then offer to sell them back to me in exchange for a different right. If I point a gun at you and say “give me your money or I’ll kill you,” yes, logically speaking, you probably should give up the money, because being killed is worse than being robbed. But the robber is still morally wrong, and you’re still right to be very upset about this choice, and to resist it if possible (run away or defend yourself from the robber if you can). If you complained about the robbery to the police, it would be very weird if they reacted by saying “I don’t see what the problem was, I mean, you didn’t want to be killed right, and giving the money stopped you from being killed, so why would you even complain about that?”
I think most “mask skeptics” have a little bit of both of this going on. They’re very skeptical about the dangers of COVID, and want to publicly communicate their skepticism. AND they’re very concerned about government overreach and want to communicate that their individual rights are non-negotiable. Refusing to wear a mask is a very good way to signal both of these beliefs at once.
The choice of which clothing to wear in public, or not do so at all, is a question of free expression and frankly one of the things the Supreme Court is up its own ass about. You’re extremely unlikely to get them to reverse on it because of stare decisis. That doesn’t make it right.
Nobody wants to see your genitals. And the “nobody” in this example is close to 99.9% of the population rather than the 70% or whatever are pro-mandatory-mask.
Even if the government made it legal, every piece of private property on Earth would ban you from having your junk out on their premises. This isn’t the case for masks.
Hell, my understanding is that there are a non-trivial amount of small hippie towns where it’s technically legal for women to go topless. And yet, most women choose not to go topless, because they themselves don’t really want to. I suspect that even if your employer said “OK, technically speaking, you can come to work naked if you want,” you’d still probably opt not to.
But not only does nobody want to see your genitals, nobody wants to display their genitals either.
If the government passed a law that said “Nobody is allowed to feed a banana smoothie to a monkey on Wednesday nights at any time after 11:30 PM” I don’t think anyone would vigorously protest that law. Would it be a violation of rights? Sure. I can feed my monkey whatever I want at any time I want on any day I want. But it’s also something I’m not ever planning on doing, so I wouldn’t really care.
The notion that since I don’t object to that, I shouldn’t object to a “No meat on Fridays” law does not necessarily follow.
It’s a fish and water thing. If your liberty has been uniformly restricted the same way your whole life, it doesn’t count and isn’t even noticed.
I’d be required to attend a lot fewer meetings, I reckon.
> I’d be required to attend a lot fewer meetings, I reckon.
If that worked, I’d intentionally start showing up to work naked just to get out of the meetings.
@Matt M
I have had a hell of a time with certain friends being actively hostile to my social distancing. I suspect this is the reason. Calmly explaining my reasoning doesn’t always work, and I have had to manhandle a few people who tried to make it a game (have to nip that in the bud early, or it will get out of hand quick). Seems to be a new ingroup/outgroup and it’s not necessarily mapping to the previous CW sides. At least not in Houston where I live. The thinking is strangely black-and-white. Saying “the lockdowns were a bad idea but we still need to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed” often results in blank stares. And several of the never maskers are life long Democratic Party voters.
A friend was talking about not wearing a mask yesterday. I asked him why and he said because they had made it mandatory. I pointed out to him that I knew he had masks in the car and before the lockdown. I pointed out that he didn’t wear them then. I further pointed out that it was no longer mandatory. Back to the blank stare. Now some of this is the crowd I hang out with. Very diverse and rough around the edges. Some of them aren’t that bright. But I have been getting the same blank stares from suit and tie professionals in the group. Not all of the ones I had considered more-or-less bright, but most. There is some psychological principle at play that I can’t identify. Call it lockdown fatigue, I guess. Most of these people were wearing masks at the store before the lockdown.
(edited to add)
I should add that during a bad flu season I’ve been known to forgo physical contact, and it was never reacted to with hostility before this.
Hey, me too! Send me your address so I can come hug you! 🙂
Two annecdotes without really a point between them.
My wife, who is back home as of a few weeks ago, is immuno-compromised and so being extra cautious. My mother, who’s a bit over 60, has a hard time with the social distancing my wife prefers our immediate family keep when possible. My mother is also not one to trust experts. (I will give her this, apparently she was right, if somewhat paranoid in the reasoning, to be skeptical of the use of ventilators.) It’s causing some friction.
At work, we’re given fresh masks every week. … I realize that efficacy of a five day old (KN95) mask is rather suspect to begin with. Anyway, over time usage has started to get much more sporadic as people get complacent and uncomfortable. I still eschew the taking lunch in the break room, but that’s just preexisting anti-social tendencies and wanting to listen to podcasts.
Along with your objection to this argument on human rights grounds, it falls apart on purely logical grounds. The lockdowns are currently too effective almost everywhere in the country. Universal masks makes them more effective, which just delays the point where proponents will decide that the lockdowns can be removed.
Now I’m really confused. I was unhappy to see a mask requirement added on top of a lockdown that appeared to already be working effectively, and doubly so since it was added without any explanation of what had changed(*).
We (Santa Clara county) don’t need it unless/until something else changes. and the PTB have never explained why they imposed it (or in the case of Santa Clara, strongly recommended it).
My best hypotheses are:
1) some quantity of essential workers feel safer if the customers wear masks, and the goal was to address their concerns/head off bad publicity about throwing the mostly low income and/or minority essential workers to the covid-19 wolves
2) masks are part of their reopening plan(**), but they wanted it in advance for some reason, perhaps to find out what % would comply, or whether improvised masks actually did any good at a demographic scale, rather than in research simulations.
(*) Nothing from the PTB about the effects of homemade masks; plenty on the internet, mixed in with half a ton of varying grades of rubbish.
(**) This is close to what those PTB said, except for the idea of a live experiment to find out if people could and would use the masks, or if that would have any net effect. I discounted that statement because it didn’t come with any significant (to me) reduction in the lockdown. (A couple of things that should probably never have been forbidden in the first place were permitted.)
Unless the PTB are (still?) trying to get to herd immunity before reopening, which never did make sense, making the lockdown more effective shouldn’t bias them in favour of increasing its duration.
Presumably what had changed was that the evidence in favor of mask wearing had become clearer. You could certainly find many people on SSC arguing such. I don’t really understand why you’re confused.
Scott had a post here on the evidence, well before the CDC changed its position, from which it seemed clear that mask wearing could be expected to reduce the chance of transmission, probably substantially.
What new evidence did the CDC have?
Denial explains a lot.
“If this turns out to be no big deal — or if just getting it as soon as possible turns out to be the right idea — then my earlier behavior will turn out to have been perfectly right.”
It’s easier to recognize bad behavior in the outgroup, so here’s an example of a Democrat doing it. You can watch Governor Cuomo urgently defended his nursing home policies, even as they got worse and worse. Because as long as there was a chance where something might come out of the fog of war that shows he was right, he instinctively wanted to stick with it.
Ah, I forgot, I meant to address this in my above post.
Yes, anyone in the group of people who believes that the ultimate “answer” to this problem is “herd immunity” and that their local hospital system is not at immediate risk of being overwhelmed, should see virtually no benefit in mask-wearing. And possibly even a net harm, because if herd immunity is the answer, then the best case scenario is to achieve it as quickly as possible so long as you don’t overwhelm the hospitals.
Universal mask-wearing reduces R_effective and therefore lets you achieve herd immunity faster.
Ah, this is a useful point of potential confusion to push on a bit, that I hadn’t noticed before! People talk about “herd immunity” as though there is some specific level of infection that provides “herd immunity”. But as you note, the “herd immunity” level depends on R_effective. If you think “herd immunity=60%”, then anything that decreases R_effective slows down the approach to 60%. But this ignores the fact that degreasing R_effective also decreases the infection level that is needed to reach “herd immunity”.
I suppose if all you care about is the time it takes to get to herd immunity, the fastest strategy is to keep R_effective high for a period, and only later decrease R_effective so that the infection level you’ve achieved is “herd immunity” for this R_effective.
(Others will of course note that if R_effective can get below 1, then you have *already* achieved “herd immunity”. Which I guess points out that people who like the “herd immunity” strategy must be imagining some societal behavior that they’d like to preserve, and then asking us to reach “herd immunity” for the R_effective that we would have with those behaviors. But they haven’t told us whether that behavior level is the behavior of typical Americans as of Feb. 1 2020, or of typical Japanese people as of March 15 2020, or something else, maybe involving masks.)
Only if that behavior continues. Lockdowns might reduce R, but they don’t lower the herd immunity threshold because they are going to be lifted.
Only as long as mask use is enforced, tho; you’d have to wear masks until a vaccine is developed.
Which is not a bad idea, really.
Not necessarily. The fastest way to achieve herd immunity will also mean that when you reach herd immunity, there are still a lot of infectious people, so you overshoot. Herd immunity isn’t some magical threshold such that when you reach it, no more people will suddenly get infected.
There are a number of parameters that can be tuned to change the infection rate.
A big one would simply be telling people “hey, we are going to hit herd immunity soon. If you don’t catch it soon, you have a good chance of never catching it at all. So be safe.”
This isn’t a recommendation for or against trying for herd immunity.
You want to overshoot. Otherwise, as soon as the high risk people come out, or people ease off on social distancing, you are back above herd immunity.
My model of human beings does not predict this announcement to cause everyone to change their behaviour in ways that radically drop R_t. For one thing, it’s going to make people thing precisely what they shouldn’t think: that herd immunity is a magical threshold after which suddenly no new infections occur.
You want to reach, and not overshoot, the [herd immunity threshold in the default state of your society]. Sure, that means overshooting the [herd immunity threshold given the measures you’re currently taking], except if you’re taking no measures – but I don’t think “herd immunity threshold given measures” is what people usually have in mind when they speak of herd immunity.
@Creutzer:
I interpreted the comment of yours I was responding to in the context of something like the Swedish model, where vulnerable people are protected and other people adopt enough distancing to avoid overwhelming the hospitals. The overshooting you get there is overshooting what is herd immunity under those circumstances, not as overshooting what herd immunity would be under ordinary circumstances.
If smart generalists are better than experts, why do we have experts at all? Couldn’t one just send the rationalist community to tackle the (any?) problem?
Maybe I don’t understand the definitions of experts or generalists. Would generalists beat physicists? Can generalists design a “better” jet than engineers? Don’t generalists depend on the data generated by experts?
There are more experts then there are smart generalists, and an expert is better then a random nobody (most of the time). You can create a new expert through training, but you can’t create a new smart generalist.
On questions about physics? No.
On questions about physics funding, and the prestige and deference that should be paid to physicists on public policy issues related to physics, yes.
Gelman Amnesia doesn’t mean that the expert has amnesia in their own field. However, I think we should say that expertise applies very narrowly, and that “disease specialist” is not narrow enough, so amnesia was certainly in play for those survey results.
Smart generalists aren’t better than real experts. But in some fields we have far more fake experts than real experts.
Pandemics in first-world nations may be one of those fields, because they don’t happen often enough to generate substantial direct experience and aren’t sexy enough for people to support efforts to maintain expertise in the off years. So instead of real experts in the field, we get experts in writing theoretical papers for high-impact journals, or studying non-pandemic infectious diseases in first-world nations, or studying pandemics in developing nations, none of which are really what we’re looking for.
In which case, maybe the smart generalist who knows he doesn’t know much about pandemics can outperform the guy who dealt with the last five pandemics in the developing world and doesn’t know how much of what he thinks he knows is really relevant in the new environment.
Yeah, my hunch is that what we need isn’t so much to replace the experts with generalists, but to establish an edifice where the important work of experts is routinely vetted by smart generalists to evaluate the quality and potential biases of the experts’ claims.
That’s basically what Scott does here, and I consider it an invaluable service.
Very good point; I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before.
I’d just say that we only accord deference to a group of individuals insofar as they are willing and able to make good predictions.
Eh, this is negated by “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Just look at the people who predicted the 2008 crash.
I’d expect it to lead to good results with Scott doing it, and smoking ruins with Yudkowsy doing it. But they are both “smart generalists”. And who do you think is more likely to volunteer?
Goodhart’s law
—
I can accept that people generally good at making estimates are outcompeting experts in making predictions, even in their field.
But as soon as question is open ended they will be lost.
Generalist may be better than surgeon at predicting whatever operation will succeed, but surgeon will outperform in category of cutting through body of ill person, removing tumor and keeping patient alive.
Generalist may be better in predicting number of dead from epidemic but will be worse at operating ventilator and keeping ill person alive.
Generalist may be better in predicting how much time I will be writing adapted A* pathfinder for continuous areas, but I will be much better at writing it.
If you see abstraction levels as a sliding scale instead of fixed, you can translate this as: “on a given topic, being on a somewhat higher abstraction level relative to that topic is better”.
So you do have specialists, of course you do. It’s just that you want their knowledge to cover slightly more than strictly necessary.
An example in my field: you want a software made. You could go to a technically brilliant programmer. Or you could go to one that has the same total years of experience, but invested about 20% of that in project management experience, and also played with a startup at some point. There’s just no contest which is going to make the better product.
Because not everyone is smart? Your question would make sense if the premise were either “If smart generalists are better than smart experts”, or just “If generalists are better than experts”.
I agree with most of the other answers, and have a couple additions:
– forecasting is a specific skill. Tetlock’s ‘smart generalists’ are experts at forecasting at least as much as they are generalists. Experts in other fields sometimes must make forecasts, but it’s often not core to their expertise.
– the experts are an input for the smart generalists (to varying extents depending on the forecasting arena). Similar to how (human+computer) ‘centaurs’ are stronger chess players than either in isolation (at least before Alpha-Zero, I don’t know whether this is still true). Very few subject-matter experts would consider estimates by Superforecasters when making their own predictions – that’s not really what they do… in many cases I’m not even sure they’d call their results predictions of reality as much as output of a model.
– and, incidentally, in most of Tetlock’s recent work, the best forecasts are actually algorithms whose input is the forecasts made by the smart generalists (though for the Superforecasters, the algorithm doesn’t need to adjust much)
Pretty much the same reason people who are lobbying against bans on late-term abortion are simultaneously railing against the petty restrictions on early-term abortion? Or vice versa, of course.
I don’t see that at all.
First off, nobody has offered them that deal. I haven’t seen anyone in a position of authority say, “If we get to 80% mask usage in public, the lockdowns can end”, never mind the “80% less railing against masks on Twitter” version.
Second, if somebody did offer that deal, it would be foolish to trust them, in the same way it’s almost always foolish to trust a “compromise” offer where the other side proposes thatt you give them half of what they demand and offers nothing but letting you hold on to the second half for a while longer.
Third, every ethical system that isn’t consequentialism, says that if you think a thing is wrong you don’t cynically trade it against other wrongs. You don’t let people get away with a thing you think is wrong, just because you think it improves your negotiating position w/re some other wrong thing that they’re trying to get away with.
And fourth, the math almost certainly doesn’t work out. Consider the possibilities:
1. COVID-19 is a minor threat. In which case neither the masks nor the lockdowns are a rational response to the threat, they are the result of petty bureaucrats using a thin excuse to seize power. Or, more charitably, of people overestimating the threat and applying the logic of case 3, below.
2. COVID-19 is a moderate threat. Which breaks down into three subcases:
2A. Masks are at least moderately effective, enough to reduce COVID-19 to the ignorable minor-threat category, but lockdowns are not. But if the lockdowns are not effective, the fact that we have them anyway means case-1 logic still applies to lockdowns and the power-hungry and/or panicky bureaucrats aren’t going to give them up as part of some utilitarian calculation, they’ll have to be forced into it.
2B. Masks and lockdowns are both moderately effective, such that either one alone would do the job. In this case and this case alone, your argument works at least at a utilitarian level.
2C. Lockdowns are at least moderately effective, but masks are not. If this is understood up front, nobody will give up on the effective lockdowns just because you agree to the stupid masks (and again see case 1 for the fact that they are making you wear the stupid masks in the first place). If it is not understood up front, and you somehow convince people to trade lockdowns for masks on consequentialist grounds, the lockdowns will return as soon as the masks are seen to be ineffective.
2D. Neither masks nor lockdowns are effective. See case 2C for the expected result, except that more people die while we figure out what is effective.
And, case 3: COVID-19 is a major threat, such that we’re just going to have to muddle through until we get to herd immunity on the far side of a megadeath or so. In which case, the lockdowns and the masks are coming from people in denial about this and going full-bore on “Something must be done, these are some things, therefore these things must be done”. Consequentialist arguments are useless against this.
Only in one of four subcases to one of the three major cases, does your proposed trade even theoretically work. Mostly, it fails because the people in power mostly aren’t rationalist consequentialists (nor, of course, those opposing them).
That the issue has become a matter of political tribal identity for both sides doesn’t help, and works against the trust needed to make such a trade work. But the trade mostly doesn’t work in any event.
Question for those with an informatics / computer science background :
Imagine three finite objects (such as computer files) : x, y, z.
We know that there exists a shortest-length program that transforms x into y on a universal Turing machine. The length of this program is the information distance between x and y, ID(x,y). Similarly, there exists a shortest-length program that transforms x into z, and the length of this program is ID(x,z).
What if we want to know ID(y,z), but all we know is ID(x,y) and ID(x,z)? Is ID(y,z) equal to |ID(x,y) – ID(x,z)| ? Or is it some vector sum? Or something else?
TIA!
I’m not a computer scientist but I doubt you’d be able to figure it out from just that information. You can’t, for example compute the distance from point a to point c if all you know is the distance from a to b and b to c.
You can on a number line.
If |a – b| = 2 and |b – c| = 5 you could have |a – c| = 7 (e.g. (3, 5, 10)) or |a – c| = 3 (e.g. (7, 5, 10)), so that’s still ambiguous.
Ah yeah. Of course. Thanks!
I think we can assume that the length of ID(A, B) should be the same as the length ID(B, A). The information distance between the two is symmetrical. In that case, the upper bound would be ID(x, y) + ID(x, z) — because you can append ID(z, x) with ID(x, y).
[EDIT: Oops, should be ID(y, x) + ID (x, z).]
[EDIT 2: Actually they aren’t symmetrical, so ignore everything I said. The answer is: the ID(y, z) is not related to ID(x, y) or ID(x, z).]
The lower bound would obviously be 0. In that case, y and z are identical.
Right, you can’t just invert an x -> y program to get an identical length y -> x program, and information distance is a multidimensional, not a one-dimensional quantity.
I’d look in a textbook on Kolmogorov complexity if I wanted to try and find out more of what’s known about these distance relations. Li and Vitanyi seems to be popular.
Yeah, I got ahead of myself.
On an unrelated note: did you know Apple TV is creating a series for Foundation? My all-time favorite series (though in fairness, I’m not well-read.) I’m cautiously optimistic.
That’s going to be a tough adaptation. I liked Foundation too, but even Asimov himself said (after rereading the first three books before setting off to write a sequel decades later) that “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did.” It’s so heavy on ideas and conversation that I can’t imagine the adaptation will be particularly faithful.
Indeed, if the transformation distance were symmetric the situation would I think be exactly analogous to distances in Euclidean space, where Abs(|AB|-|AC|) <= |BC| <= (|AB|+|AC|)
But the transformation distance is not symmetric.
A specific example to demonstrate that distance is not symmetric: x is a low-complexity message (e.g. one symbol repeated many times), while y is a high-complexity message (e.g. a long, random message), independent of x. The distance in either direction is (approximately) equal to the Kolmogorov complexity of the target, which are very different.
No.
A: “0”
B: entire dump of OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia databases with a full history, xml encoded
or if you want the same length, just make A string of zeros as long as B
I don’t think that’s enough information to compute it. To prove this, we can find two sets of X,Y,Z that have equal values for ID(X,Y) and ID(X,Z), but ID(Y,Z) is different.
Consider:
X = 0000
Y = 0011
Z = 0110
ID(X,Y) = “flip the last two bits”
ID(X,Z) = “flip the middle two bits”
ID(Y,Z) = “flip the first bit, and the third bit.”
So it seems like ID(X,Y) = ID(X,Z) = ID(Y,Z). I’m not writing real code, but it seems like all three of these can be done by the same program with different inputs.
Now consider these bitstrings:
X = 0000
Y = 0011
Z = 1100
ID(X,Y) = “flip the two lowest bits.”
ID(X,Z) = “flip the two highest bits.”
ID(Y,Z) = “NOT the whole string.”
ID(X,Y) = ID(X,Z) (flip two bits, same as before), but ID(Y,Z) is shorter than both – a single operation!
I haven’t rigorously defined any of this, but this should sketch out the core of the problem – Y and Z may be connected by some simple pattern that they don’t share with X (such as being inverses), meaning that they can have a large ID from X but a much shorter distance from each other.
This is a very good start, and is most of what I intended to post. As a small addition, consider this: you can’t guarantee the files are all different. if X=Z, then (X,Y) and (Y,Z) will be the same, but (X,Z) is length 0. However, there are plenty of chases where (X,Y)=(Y,Z) where XZ. Therefore, there is a trivial case where you can prove that it is impossible to determine (X,Z) from (X,Y) and (Y,Z)
I think the only thing we can say is ID(y,z) ≥ ID(x,z) – ID(x,y) (at least approximately, depending on the implementation details). That’s because you can always write a program that transforms x into z by combining a program that transforms x into y and one that transforms y into z.
ID(x,y) and ID(x,y) definitely don’t determine ID(y,z). If, for instance, each three are the same length, and they are random and independent of each other, then each distance will be roughly proportionate to the length. On the other hand, if x and y are random and independent, but y==z, then ID(x,y) and ID(x,z) are proportionate to the length, but ID(y,z) is 0 (or a small constant, depending on implementation details).
Maxim Lott has put up a web page that shows Covid deaths per capita both for the world by country and for the U.S. by state.
Florida: 89 deaths/capita (with a heavy retired population)
NY: 1417 deaths/capita (with more international travel)
Yet if you just watched the mass media over the last few months, you’d think Florida’s governor handled it terribly and NY’s wonderfully.
There is no way you could watch media coverage and think New York has done a good job handling this. If you’re on twitter, you might think Floridians are all about to die from Covid-20 (you might be wrong or not) but do not believe there is any media coverage suggesting NY has handled this well.
I present to you the first news article in response to my Google search:
Siena Poll: Cuomo’s Job Performance Rating “Best Ever” Amid Ongoing COVID-19 Response.
Notice I did specify “over the last few months”.
I think there is a good deal of coverage suggesting that New York state is handling it well, the governor having gotten a lot of good press. The mayor of New York City has gotten a lot of bad press.
I think the implication of a lot of the coverage is that Covid is particularly bad in New York state for some reason, but that it is being handled well.
Yep, I think I framed this incorrectly. NYC has done an embarrassingly poor job of handling COVID, which has for some god forsaken reason translated into the idea that the governor of New York did an acceptable job of handling the disease even though the vast majority of people in the state have the NYC executive as their executive.
People who think Cuomo is competent are ignoring the thousands of people Diblasio let die.
Or they’re just doing a relative ranking, which is how people often process things.
Actually, slightly less than half of them.
There are two additional confounding factors at play here. The first and obvious one is population density. The second and less obvious one is different strains of the virus. We know New York was infected from Europe and has European strains. Much of the rest of the US probably has the strains that came from China via the West Coast. Strains are known to differ in pathogenicity, and it seems plausible (I don’t know if that’s been conclusively ascertained yet) that the European strains tend to be deadlier.
Sure, there are plenty of additional factors. I included two myself above.
New York City is about 2x denser than Miami. In terms of the strain, Spain is 3x better than NY, so as the worst country in Europe, that’s probably about the outer bound for how much difference the strain could make. We can speculate about other things.
But one fact is that NY State government apparently handled nursing homes terribly, while Florida apparently handled them extremely well, despite (or because?) the fact that they have a high population of them (People in NY tend to retire to FL). I say apparently, because I mostly have media reports to go off of in those regards.
It’s still tough to reconcile a 16x death rate per capita difference as representing the State with the lower rate being a failure, though, unless you want to suggest that the government’s actions had only minimal effects. That could be true, but should also take much of the blame and credit away from both.
All these things can be true:
1. New York was going to get hit hard no matter what policy they did, which means you can’t compare outcomes simply by deaths.
2. New York did some bad policies and was excused by the media, which enabled those bad policies to continue.
3. Florida did policies which the media decried, but which turned out to be reasonable.
On (3), the coverage of the beaches thing always baffled me. I thought it was a risky move that might end up okay when they initially happened, but the science that I’ve seen since then has broken about as far in favor of opening beaches as you could hope. As longs as you don’t have wall-to-wall people, a beach is probably as safe or safer than anywhere else.
I also think the centrality of NYC to the media didn’t do COVID coverage any favors. Most coverage emanated from the worst-hit region of the country, which made it even more alarmist than the media is already predisposed to be.
If you’re only counting deaths rather than all infections, “heavy retired population” and “more international travel” are going to be pulling in the same direction.
The interesting question is whether NYC is worst, or just first. Is it that the spread is going to happen everywhere, but it spread fastest in NYC, and now that things are settling down there, the rest of the country will go through the same basic thing, just later? Or is there something about NYC (density?, public transit?) that explains why they had an explosion when most other parts of the US have so far had a fizzle, including places that have had community spread as long as NYC?
Albany, Georgia seems like a useful point of comparison, since it doesn’t have the size or density or connectedness of NYC.
Anyone else think that if a Democrat was the US President the left and right would be completely flipped on their views of Coronavirus lockdowns?
I doubt it. The current Republican president was sufficiently AWOL during the first month or two of the crisis that the current response has been led largely by Democratic governors. I’m pretty sure a Democratic president’s policies would have been aligned with those of Newsom, Cuomo et al, and the Republican reaction would be similar as well. Only difference is that POTUS wouldn’t be one of the ones reacting.
What about Bill de Blasio completely shrugging off the Coronavirus?
He’d have done that no matter who was the President, because he didn’t want to see NYC’s economy grind to a halt and he wasn’t willing to accept the inevitability of that.
And Cuomo would have responded the same way to de Blasio’s idiocy, etc.
My point is that it’s can’t just be an issue of “Democrats would always have pushed lockdowns, Republicans wouldn’t”. Much of this is contingent.
Imagine that everything had indeed been flipped and Republicans were pushing lockdowns and Democrats were opposed. How easy would it be to “explain” this outcome. Very easy, because we already have a well thought article on the subject. It’s not that hard to image how differently people would react based on a different president and partisanship is one of the strongest predictors of political positions in America right now.
I can do that, but why? The question you asked was what would happen if we had a Democratic president. To which my answer is, the Democrats would still be the ones pushing for the lockdowns and the Republicans would still be the ones opposed. I offer as evidence the general behavior of the politicians who are not the president, at a time when the president was offering little leadership. I can offer other arguments if need be.
You may believe differently, but you’ve offered no evidence or reasoned argument to support your belief – you advanced the premise, asked if we agreed, and now ask us to imagine you are right.
Your argument was based on the idea that Democrats were pushing lockdowns and I said look at this Democrat who wasn’t pushing for a lockdown. Albatross suggested an example where a Republican did. You say look at what the governors did when Trump did little, but he was obviously still pushing his viewpoints and that’s what counts when it comes to people’s reactions. His lack of leadership doesn’t disprove the partisan effect.
It’s called a thought experiment. I didn’t say it because I thought it definitely proved my point. It’s to get you to see things from my perspective.
That’s it? One counterexample on each side, and you’re going to A: put everything down to tribalism and B: posit that the party with the White House will automatically be the anti-lockdown party? I consider that to be an argument so weak as to not be worth engaging, and I’m not sure why you think it is worth raising.
Oh my god, John. I never said either of those things. Look, I get it. Your whole schtick is to be as combative as possible but I’m not interested.
Ohio’s governor was an early adopter of a lockdown, and he’s a Republican.
Yes. Call me a cynic, but I think there’s at least a strong possibility that the incumbent party in an election year will always have an incentive to say that Things Are Fine. And some elements of the right took the disease seriously well in advance of the left — Rod Dreher, bless his apocalyptic little heart, was worrying about this as early as late January, when most respectable opinion still said that worrying made you a racist. It’s not inevitable that the tribes would take the positions they did.
Exactly. That’s why it’s so strange that everyone implies some kind of psychological difference between the right and left when back in early February, it was mostly right wing internet accounts that were concerned. Everything changed when Trump tweeted out his position.
Perhaps this is selection bias but I saw plenty of concern about COVID-19 on twitter back in Jan/Feb, and exactly none of it was from “right wing internet accounts”. It was mostly doctors/virologists/journalists-I’d-never-heard-of getting re-tweeted by a variety of different sources including media and non-media.
YMMV, I suppose.
It would have taken a lot more than simply flipping the party in the White House to change things.
The primary people hurt by the lockdowns are small-business owners, so they would always have been the primary opponents. Their employees are getting very significant direct economic aid in ways we and they can see. The PPP is probably doing a lot to help small businesses but it’s very hard to target aid at such a varied group.
Still, I can imagine a world where Republicans supported lockdowns and Democrats opposed. I just think of my Republican friend who is largely in favor and has been for months. It involves some leaps in logic, but not ones that are completely implausible. It involves the sitting Democratic President ignoring calls to close the border, the virus getting in, the virus targeting old people who lean to the right. And a “look at what you made us do!” nagging against the hippy President who couldn’t bear to do anything that might harm our economic trade because we’ve made ourselves so dependent on China.
This seems like the strongest argument for why lockdowns would always have more opposition from Republicans than from Democrats–businesses of all sizes are being clobbered by the lockdowns.
Indeed, this also tracks passably well with why some Republican sources seem more inclined to go with the “It’s just like the flu” or “It’s a hoax” line of BS. The problem for businesses isn’t just the lockdowns, it’s the public not wanting to go to businesses where it seems likely you might catch COVID-19 while sitting down and having your hair cut or sitting at a table with half a dozen friends at a restaurant or whatever. Ending the lockdowns won’t fix *that* problem.
One of the things I’m finding with thisk whole lockdown thing, is that ideas seem to get tainted by association. And I have a lot more in common with people I thought were the polar opposites to me in values than with my friends, who belong to the same social class and broadly share most of my values.
Because the only people who are vocally against the lockdowns are anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, potheads, the alt-right, the extreme right, a few other types of wackos and a few principled libertarians (who are a small minority), I feel afraid to speak up. I can feel the guilt-by-association tarnishing my reputation.
I’m a single-issue voter on the lockdown: if we have an election before this is over, I’ll vote for whoever is against it, even if it means discarding all the rest of my values. I also intend to punish all the politicians who supported the lockdown when it’s over, by voting for whoever has the highest chance for winning among the anti-lockdown parties. But it is deeply frustrating for me that there doesn’t seem to be a non-extreme party which is against the lockdown.
Similar here, though I’m not willing to go quite as far in voting behavior– I still think Trumpists are not worth voting for even to reject lockdowns, and of course even most Trumpists don’t. I think you could get a few non-libertarian thinkers like Peter Singer and Ezekiel Emanuel to see the force of an argument like:
1. Realistically, stricter-than-Sweden lockdowns vs Sweden-level measures might at best save somewhere in the range of 0.1-0.5% of the population from dying of COVID.
2. Each COVID death averted saves about 10 QALYs on average, so that’s about 0.01-0.05 QALY/person: in round quantities, the equivalent of extending everyone’s lifespan by somewhere between four days and three weeks.
3. The reduction in quality of life imposed on the whole population by stricter-than-Sweden measures is large enough that extending such measures for several months costs more than that. Would you give up 4-20 days of your lifespan in order to not have to be subject to lockdown orders for an undetermined but probably large part of 2020? I know I would!
Sadly, I think most of the population is unable to accept that sort of argument for just the same reasons they are unable to reason about the lives saved (or rather lack of lives saved) by anti-terrorism security theater.
Thanks, I stand corrected. And of course that only makes the anti lockdown case stronger!
This is an awful set of arguments.
1. Saving 1 out of 1000 to 5 out of 1,000 people in the country from dying seems pretty good to me. About 8-9 out of 1,000 people in the US die every year. So according to your numbers, we save the lives of literally half the people who would die in a normal year?
And since you’re comparing to Sweden, you should note that they limited gatherings, recommended school and workplace closures, and placed restrictions on domestic and international travel. The US peaked at 71.6 on Oxford’s Stringency Index. Sweden at 47.4. The US is about as close to Sweden as we are to Italy (94.6).
2. Everyone only looks at the costs of death and ignores morbidities. Suppose 1% of COVID cases result in severe lung damage. How many additional QALYs is that? I have no idea, but you’ve uncritically decided it’s irrelevant.
3. “Lockdowns” are already over in over 60% of US States. Hell, they never took place in any meaningful sense in 99% of the country. I know no one who’s been unable to leave their house when they wanted to.
I don’t even think that the current mix of policies/restrictions is optimal. (People should be encouraged to do more things outside, and policies should focus reducing instances of people in a single location for a long period of time with poor air circulation.) But these are not good arguments.
Yes, I could have emphasized more strongly that Sweden’s restrictions are definitely not business as usual. I’m not arguing for business as usual. I’m arguing against orders that literally say you’re not allowed to leave your house except for “essential” reasons or operate your business unless it’s an “essential” business, where the definition of “essential” is made up on the fly.
These orders have in fact been imposed in most US states AIUI, and again AIUI many of the loosened versions from the past few weeks just enlarge the definition of “essential” (certainly e.g. California’s Phase 2 does this). Enforcement has varied widely, but making lawbreakers of people going to visit their friends for dinner, or sending their kids over to the neighbors for a playdate, doesn’t become less offensive to a free society because it’s spottily-at-most enforced.
You are right that there is a QALY cost to long-term morbidity. I also wish we had better data on this– but the estimates I’ve given are generous enough to allow for a pretty significant fudge factor (see e.g. Scoop’s comment that 10 QALYs per death is probably a large overestimate).
And unless I’m doing the math wrong, wouldn’t 8-9 deaths per 1000 people per year imply an average lifespan of over 100 years?
Only if you assume a uniform age distribution among the population and a stable population size.
Speeding is also illegal, so most of those folks were already “lawbreakers” when they made the drive to their friends’ house. *shrug* I don’t think “lawbreakers” is a useful category beyond rhetoric.
Yes, I was responding to your “lockdown orders for an undetermined but probably large part of 2020”. Since most were already altered or ended, I didn’t understand “undetermined” and “large part of 2020”. Of course anything can happen, but it seems like “probably about 2-3 months in April-June of 2020” is more reasonable today.
In “undetermined but probably large” I’m implicitly including the threat/prediction that any uptick in positive tests later in the year will cause a resumption of lockdown orders.
In that case, California never imposed the kind of order you’re talking about. I don’t know of any states that did. Maybe Michigan?
@loriot
From https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/, right at the top of the page:
“All individuals living in the State of California are currently ordered to stay home or at their place of residence, except for permitted work, local shopping or other permitted errands, or as otherwise authorized (including in the Questions & Answers below).”
Did you read the Q&A?
Even at the height of the lockdowns, you could leave your house as often as you wanted to, so it is highly disingenous to claim that the orders said “you couldn’t leave your house”. California isn’t Spain.
I claimed that the order says– as the plain language right at the top of the page corroborates– that you’re not allowed to leave your house unless you have an “essential” reason. I don’t see how a Q+A giving a bunch of “essential” reasons contradicts that. The part I find objectionable is the part where a government official arrogates to themself the power to decide what counts as an “essential” reason. California has not in practice enforced their version as strictly as Spain has, but the principle is the same.
The headline isn’t an accurate description of the actual policy, but that doesn’t mean that it is useful to radically mischaracterize the actual policies.
Can we just agree that in the US, the modal state government said “No going out except for essential activity!” and then defined most of the reasons people would want to go out as “essential”?
I guess that is a reasonable take. I just want to push back on the idea that governments here were literally forcing people to stay inside all day, because there are some countries where that actually happened, so it is easy for outsiders to be misled.
If anything, my neighborhood has been *more* lively during the pandemic than before, since people aren’t away from home working now.
Seconding Loriot: I live in Massachusetts, my sister lives in Spain. I could at all points go to the grocery store, the hardware store, the dry cleaners; I could walk in the park (but not play a group game–the police were breaking those up) or jog on the sidewalk. My sister could leave her apartment once a week to get groceries.
These are very different sets of restrictions.
It’s not just my lifespan. I haven’t canvassed other people to find out how they feel about dying prematurely as a result of my actions, but I have good reason to think they don’t want to.
Let me rephrase: I think most people would be happy to give up that number of days of their lifespan to not be subject to these orders, and if that’s the case, in aggregate they cost more life-satisfaction among the population than they save.
But have you asked them?
This depends strongly on where those hours were coming from. Taking them from when I’m 80? Sure, go ahead… but don’t take them from me now.
The problem is, now is when they would get taken from me if I catch this stupid thing.
In Wiley Coyote physics terms, we have already walked off the cliff. Our decision now is about when to look down.
– If we keep civilization shut down for the years it would take to develop a vaccine, the resulting collapse is likely to be more dangerous than COVID-19, and we may not even retain the capacity to make vaccines.
– If we reopen any time before then, then that’s when we fall. The acceleration curves are different, but we’ll fall from the same height and hit the ground just as hard.
Sweden seems, on the evidence so far, to have found a tolerable compromise. Deaths per capita are a little higher than in the U.S. but not enormously so, most of the economy seems to be functioning, and it looks as though, at least in the hardest hit region, they have reached herd immunity — numbers going down, not up, according to an article I linked to a little while back.
The main problem is that I don’t want you to take away the remaining QALYs of my grandma and my grandpa and probably my mother too, and I am not sold on the idea that overall QALYs are falling down enough to compensate that.
If I’m being purely selfish, the people who want to rush to herd immunity and helping my elderly parents, because they are sheltering in place and the sooner this is over the sooner they can relax.
I’m not purely selfish and neither are my parents, though.
Yes, I acknowledge that many of us have at-risk relatives we care a lot about. That is not a good argument for the justice of trampling the liberty of the entire population to save a few tenths of a percent.
I’m old and male, hence in the vulnerable category. The very best result for me, from a narrowly selfish point of view, would be constraints so strong that the virus went extinct in a couple of months, but I don’t think that is at all likely in the U.S. The second best would be no constraints at all, so that the virus could burn through the vulnerable population in a few months while I and my family self-quarantined, as we have been doing. That’s assuming that neither a cure nor a vaccine is going to happen at all soon.
The best more or less realistic option, from a less narrowly selfish point of view, one that gives some value to the lives of strangers, is something like the Swedish policy, restraints sufficient to keep the medical system from being overwhelmed but not much stronger than that, to get to herd immunity with a minimal death count as soon as possible.
But all of that is conditioned on the fact that my circumstances make a strict self-quarantine — I do not think I have been within six feet of anyone but family or more than a few feet from my own property for the past two months — practical. There are lots of other vulnerable people for whom that is not the case.
This paper suggests that Sweden will suffer a loss of 2-3 years of life from COVID-19
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20096909v1
Current excess mortality corresponds to a decline in remaining life expectancy of 3 years for men and 2 years for women
The argument for the Swedish policy is precisely that the higher death rate represents deaths that would have occurred any way, just a little later.
What is your reasoning for being against the lockdown, if it isn’t one of the crazy ones?
I value the freedom of assembly and movement higher than the risk of death. I want people to be able to go to church, I want to take my mother to a restaurant on her birthday, I want to travel, and I want everybody to be able to do whatever they want.
And I don’t believe the deaths we’re seeing right now in countries like Sweden outweigh the rights of people to be free.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because stay-at-home orders and the like don’t just stop you from endangering your own life – they stop you from endangering other people’s by spreading the virus to them once you get infected. It isn’t just you at risk.
You endanger others’ lives every time you drive a car. It doesn’t follow that the government is justified in banning driving except for “essential” purposes.
But the government does regulate driving on public property to reduce risk, and outright bans it on some public property.
Which, in hindsight, we should not have allowed the government to get away with. Because sooner or later some smartass was going to use it to justify an indefinite total lockdown of the entire “economically nonessential” population in the name of public safety. And here we are, locked down indefinitely.
The government has, so far, regulated cars in a way that preserves 90+% of the total utility of a car while picking a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit in the area of accident prevention. And, in previous disease outbreaks, the government implemented selective closures and quarantines that left 90+% of public life largely untouched while blocking the easy superspreader opportunities.
These are wholly unlike what is being done today, and using what we let you all get away with in the past to justify what you are doing today is A: not justified and B: highly destructive to public trust. Which we don’t have enough of and won’t be getting more of any time soon.
How do you know they aren’t vulnerable? People with immunodeficiencies don’t usually hang signs around their necks. Or are you saying you haven’t come into contact with anyone at all?
@Scoop, people following the stay-at-home orders still might come into contact with you at places the orders allow them to go like grocery stores, takeout restaurants, and walking trails.
On the other hand, since there are alternatives for all of these, I think the onus should be on them to quarantine themselves to a greater degree. There might also be more creative solutions, like how my usual grocery store’s setting aside several hours a week just for elderly customers.
Yes, the argument of: “Your rights end where other people’s rights to start.”
I disagree. Other people’s right to safety end where my God-given inalienable rights to liberty start, dammit.
This isn’t a minor cooridination issue, it’s an economic depression rivaling the big one and a complete suspension of a good chunk of the 1st Amendment.
@ Scoop*: Are you forgetting that essential workers exist? You say you “haven’t come into contact with a single vulnerable person in two months who hasn’t consciously taken a risk by coming out”; what about the grocery store clerk? The risk he’s running may be conscious, but in a lot of cases it’s not really voluntary. Some of us don’t want to be in public, but don’t have a choice.
* Sorry if there’s a better way to reply more directly, but I can’t find a reply button on the relevant comment.
This. If it were feasible to divide the country into two groups – one group who has chosen to take their chances, and one group who has not – and guarantee that the former never endangers the latter – we’d all be better off.
But this requires providing essential services to those not voluntarily taking risks, in a manner that’s as unlikely to infect them as at present. So there’d be seperate grocery stores, veterinarians, medical offices, public transit (for those working the essential jobs on the low risk side), etc. etc.
Otherwise Mr. I Accept the Risks is going to infect Mr. Immunocompromised at the grocery store, possibly indirectly via the family member who fetches their groceries etc.
I’m personally soft distancing – we wind up visiting some essential service almost weekly, and we’re still walking our dog every day. Those trips to essential services are our major risk, IMO. We’re not as vulnerable as David Friedman, and we accept those odds – given the current low rate of infections in our county under the social distancing rules.
My current expectation is that we’ll be coming out of mandatory lockdowns too soon, and there will be another spike in cases, possibly a huge one, leading to a greatly increased risk for anyone soft distancing. Fortunately we’re in a position to go full quarantine for a month or more, when the spike gets high enough to worry us – at least if accurate reporting continues.
Of course a lot of people aren’t as privileged as David Friedman or myself, and some of them are a lot more vulnerable than I am.
I only ever interact with essential workers when I go to the store, and I try to space it, because every visit to the store is a nightmare queue situation, with weird schedules and a very long time to do so.
So, basically, I only interact with essential workers who aren’t putting themselves in danger voluntarily as frequently as everybody else who still does their shopping.
And everybody else I briefly interact with in the streets is there voluntarily taking that risk.
But the point isn’t about me: I’m a lot more upset about the children being jailed and the economy being destroyed than the effects of this on me personally. And while I don’t disobey the law, I will vote against everybody who made those unfair, unjust and unconstitutional laws. As is my constitutional right.
If we legalize drunk driving, anyone who dies on the roads will have chosen to risk driving around (even more than normal) drunk drivers. That doesn’t make legalizing it a good idea.
Obviously the quantitative details matter here, along the lines of salvorhardin’s argument above.
Does the word “drunk” add anything useful here, other than an implied moral judgement.
Legalizing any sort of driving, places pedestrians, bicyclists, etc, at elevated risk. A risk to which they did not consent, and a risk that is actually quite large unless they constrain their behavior to reduce the risk drivers pose to them. Yet we legalized driving, and at lethally dangerous speeds even in crowded residential areas.
Not just that, but once ‘everyone’ drives, everybody else has to drive in order to function in society. So anyone who doesn’t want to take the risk of driving, too bad, you need to get to work. And anyone who can’t drive because they are disabled is in for a very difficult time.
And yet we still condone driving
@John Schilling
Drunk driving is an example of a specific behavior that a vast majority of the country is on board with banning (though a sizable minority would prefer increasing the threshold that counts) due to the risks it imposes on others.
As you pointed out, we legalize imposing risks on others in many circumstances and ban it in others when the negative externalities are deemed too large. The concept is mostly not controversial. Whether to ban or de-incentivize specific behaviors is a quantitative question (though often, unfortunately, undertaken without that understanding).
You might judge lockdowns to be a too-severe response by orders of magnitude, but qualitatively they’re comparable to much less controversial restrictions like banning drunk driving or having speed limits.
And if you think society as a whole has made the wrong decision about lockdowns, breaking them individually isn’t the right way to change things, any more that speeding is a good way to change the speed limit.
Same problem: you death or someone else’s? Who gave you the right to affect someone else’s chance of dying?
Anyone who is quarantineed but still has to go out and buy groceries from time to time.
Essential workers.
Health workers who now may have to treat another sick person for no good reason adding to their already overloaded job.
Some people have to leave home. That’s not choosing to put yourself at risk unnecessarily.
My liberty or someone else’s safety? Who gave them the right to affect my liberty?
Safety without liberty is like Asimov’s nightmare scenario of a country with robo-nannies that take away everything that could be dangerous: a jail. And at some point, such a life is much less worth living.
And yes, my death. I’ll do what I can to avoid somebody else’s death, but it has to stop somewhere. And that somewhere is much further than it is now.
My parents, when they caused me to exist in a universe where it is physically impossible for me to not affect someone else’s chance of dying. Try harder, and preferably without the bit where everything gets divided into “Perfectly Safe” or “Intolerably Dangerous”
If you need to go out, you are allowed to, and if you don’t nee to, you, don’t have to. Therefore, ignoring lockdown,etc is imposing an unnecessary risk on others.
The extreme of safety without liberty is a nightmare, and so is the extreme of liberty without safety.
So, when you so frequently respond to proposals to increase liberty with some simplistic variation of “but that would be irresponsible because it would cause a finite reduction in public safety”, you’re being an extremist of the sort that generates nightmares?
How often is “frequently”, how much increase in liberty, and how much reduction in safety?
I think the argument people are offering against Ana depends on the assumption that we are going to get either a cure or a vaccine, or essentially eliminate the virus, before we reach herd immunity. Absent that assumption, the worst she is doing is shifting the risk on someone a little earlier.
The other problem with the argument has to do with the size of the risk. Anyone who drives is imposing some risk of death on strangers without their consent. We accept that happening as long as the risk is sufficiently tiny.
In order for Ana’s decision to go out of her house and do things to kill a grocery store clerk, we require the following string of events:
1. Ana catches the disease.
2. While she is asymptomatic — I assume that once she shows symptoms she either goes to the hospital or self-isolates — she interacts with the clerk.
3. The clerk catches the disease from her.
4. The clerk dies.
Current estimates are a mortality rate for those who get the disease of between .1% and 1%. The clerk will not be in the high risk group, so probably below .1%. Given reasonable care by the clerk and store, his chance of getting the disease by one interaction with a contagious person is (I’m guessing here — someone else may be able to offer something better) at least that low, so the combined probability is below one in a million. Multiply that by the probability of steps 1 and 2, and my guess is that we are talking about a combined probability of less than 10^-9. Assuming the clerk has sixty years left, the expected cost to him comes out to less than two seconds of life.
Someone else may be able to do a better calculation, but I think it’s the sort of calculation you have to do to decide whether Ana going out imposes the sort of costs on others for which it might be reasonable to restrict her freedom, or the sort of costs that we take it for granted that we are free to impose on each other.
The lockdown in Spain was already a nightmare for six weeks. Especially for kids living in apartments.
The goal of the lockdowns isn’t primarily to reduce individual risk, like a law requiring bicycle helmets. Nor is it primarily to prevent you harming someone else, like laws requiring you keep your dog on a leash in public. Instead, the point is to accomplish a kind of collective goal–to lower the reproductive rate of the virus sufficiently to get the outbreak of Covid-19 under control. The eventual goal may be simply to prevent overwhelming hospitals, or to actually get the outbreak under enough control that we can more-or-less eliminate it via test-and-trace. But the goal is collective.
This is something that can only be done by acting together in large numbers. It’s not clear that the {federal, state, local} government properly has the legal authority to require that, and it’s not clear that we can accomplish that goal given our means, but that’s the point of the lockdown, and also the point of stuff like allowing limited reopening, requiring masks and social distancing, etc.
Probably the closest analogies to this are stuff done in wartime, like requiring a blackout and dusk-to-dawn curfew to prevent enemies from seeing your city from the air and bombing it.
ETA: The biggest problem I see with this is that it requires centralized coordination and control, and the people in a position to do the centralized coordination and control (the federal government, specifically CDC and FDA and DHS) have done a fairly shit job responding to the pandemic so far. Having inept centralized control seems likely to make things worse, not better.
Nobody knows that the chance of a vaccine is exactly zero, so nobody should be reasoning “absent” a vaccine.
Also, lowering the reproductive number as we approach herd immunity means we get less overshooting of that number, so fewer total people infected/killed.
Someone who uses the roads is knowingly exposing themselves to a certain level of danger, and that level is limited by the duty of other road users to follow the rules. They have given their implicit permission to be endangered. People who legitemately leave their houses under lockdown are likewise endangering themselves, and likewise expect the level of danger to be capped by other people following the rules. Breaking the rules of lockdown is therefor equivalent to speeding — it’s exposing other people to a level of danger that they have not agreed to, even implicitly.
@David Friedman
What I’ve heard based on recent serological studies in France and Spain indicate a CFR between 0.6% and 1.5%. Of course, that’s highly dependent on risk factors and whether you’re able to get treatment.
Edit: These folks say 0.5 to 1.0% “with significant heterogeneity”.
Also:
Your chain of events only includes direct transmission. It ignores the scenario where she gives it to someone, who takes it home and infects their family, etc. etc. etc., then N steps later, some clerk somewhere gets the disease and dies. Thinking only of single-step chains in disease transmission misses the point.
The reason you stay in is so the disease doesn’t transmit as much in your community. The clerk interacts with hundreds of people a day, any one of which could’ve become infected indirectly through Ana’s actions.
I’m a little bit confused by this. Are people in Sweden exercising the sort of freedoms you’re talking about? For instance, my academic colleagues that live in Sweden, although they are still occasionally going to restaurants, definitely aren’t doing so at anywhere near the rate they did before, and are most definitely not doing anything near the amount of travel they would have done. Is it important that they have the *freedom* to do it? Or is it the actual travel that is important? Because it seems to me that it’s the actual doing of it that provides the value, while the supposed “freedom” to do so is of no use if you don’t choose to do it.
Having the freedom to do it means that you will do it when doing so is on net valuable to you, won’t if it isn’t. Having the restaurant closed means you won’t do it at all.
I will be a single issue voter in our upcoming gubernatorial race on the lockdown if and only if the continued legal restrictions prohibit single people living alone from seeing their friends. (I know that this is not enforced, I don’t really care). I believe that this level of restriction is a significant harm to mental health which vastly exceeds any public health benefit, and I can’t in good faith vote against my interest on the single issue that affects my life the most.
If the restrictions have loosened, I will evaluate all the candidates holistically, however, I think the incumbent has mostly done a good job, and the potential opposition in our state seem unlikely to have any policies that align with my preferences.
If the restrictions are gone, I will wholeheartedly vote for our incumbent.
It’s interesting to me how much differing places have differing restrictions. Here. gatherings must be less than 10 people – which means that getting together as families with children is illegal, but getting together with friends as a single person would be fine.
FWIW, That seems more similar to what our state had before we were told to “stay home, stay safe”, and matches with what I feel like reasonable but strict restrictions would be. 3 4 person families seems basically as likely to lead to spread to me then 3-5 20 somethings who live alone. I’d like for gyms to be open too, but it seems like heavy breathing is particularly unsafe.
@ltowel, I agree with you that restriction is the single most egregious. If it doesn’t quite qualify as torture (since you can still have contact with other people over the internet), it at least comes close.
But if it’s the same candidate who supported the stupid measures in the first place, when the next flare up happens, won’t he do the same things?
That’s why I want a burn-the-house, punish-all-sinners contrary vote: so when we have a resurgence of the coronavirus in winter, the elected candidate is the more reasonable one.
This, and I’m planning to do it on the state level because they’re the ones responsible for the stay-at-home orders. I’m currently planning to vote for candidates I wouldn’t have considered five months ago, because they’re the ones who aren’t currently in office ripping up the Constitution and sending us into depression on top of it.
So far we haven’t seen suicides skyrocket so it seems you are wrong.
Because anyone who doesn’t promptly commit suicide, has suffered no mental harm?
We seem to be evaluating the merit of COVID interventions based on deaths to the exclusion of other types of harm caused by the disease (long-term lung damage, extended hospital stays, comas, etc.), so for the purposes of this discussion, it’s not unreasonable to apply the same standard to mental health consequences of government interventions.
It’s also worth asking how being surrounded by death on the scale of NYC or Lombardy would effect people’s mental health.
Mostly I’m just saying “it’s complicated” here.
What you mean “we”, Kemosabe?
People who are doing this should be either ignored, mocked. or rebutted, depending on context. Doubly so in a rationalist-adjacent forum like this one. If someone here says that a thing is causing “significant harm”, don’t assume they only mean death and don’t respond by counting only the deaths. Even if that’s what the chattering classes in some other places are doing.
@matthewravery: I was going to say the same thing (though in a snarkier and more concise way).
Epistemic status: Gross speculation
We’ve seen a surge of people quietly dying at home. The prevailing word is that most of them died either of COVID, or of heart attacks that waited too long for support because they didn’t want to go to hospitals. But among this surge, I wonder, how many suicides could be missed?
Suicides don’t generally die quietly.
True, that car slamming into a bridge abutment at ninety miles per hour probably made quite a racket. But if a cacophonous suicide happens to an apathetic audience, does it make a sound?
Suicides that are recognized as suicides, make enough noise to signal “hey, suicide here”. That’s a tautology. But there’s a large category of behavior that includes some number of suicides (single-vehicle car accidents, overdoses of recreational drugs, getting into shootouts with the police), but are almost never categorized as suicides unless someone explicitly states “yes I am in fact trying to kill myself”.
There’s very little data about how much of these are suicides even under normal conditions, never mind pandemic conditions. If there are enough of them, they’ll show up in the overall mortality statistics. And probably be categorized as undiagnosed COVID-19, I expect.
I think you’ve just discovered that you value conformism a little less than your friends; this doesn’t have to provoke any drastic reassessments of all the other values you share. You certainly don’t sound like you’re exulting in being a dissident per se, an impulse whose indulgence is probably the quickest route into that other camp you can now see more clearly.
On the other hand, it might make her a little less confident in her rejection of other views she considers nutty.
Our beliefs are largely built on second-hand information, since nobody has adequate first-hand data. If you conclude that what you thought were sources of information that could be trusted are confidently wrong on one issue, that should lower your trust in them, which then lowers your confidence in other things you believe because of them.
The Internet probably makes that process more common by making it easier to substitute a new source of information, one that agrees with you on that issue, for the old.
Nah, I still consider anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists as nutty wackos. The way I see it, they’re the broken clock that’s right for a change.
I don’t think the sources of information are wrong; the number of deaths is what it is, the R0 is ~what they say, etc. I just disagree with the policies they come up with as a result of that data.
I do think they highlight the information they want, not presenting the information that would make people more critical. From the latest figures I could find, ~18,000 people died of coronavirus in elderly care homes, out of a total of ~27,000, or 67%. 95% of deaths are for those over 60. 67% were over 80. But the media highlights the case of the 40 year old nurse or whatever, like they do with other anecdotal information, making it seem a lot more prevalent than it is.
Most of the lockdown measures are useless in preventing deaths in elderly care homes: the workers there are essential, they have to travel home and back, and, with such a vulnerable population, it’s almost inevitable they will catch it.
So, I believe you need to put even harsher measures for elderly care homes, and let the rest of society have a freer life, basically. Make deliveries of food for those over 60, and let people get an early pension at 60 (the pension age is currently 65, 63 for early retirement; I think you could lower it for those who are over 60 and at risk, since it’s unlikely they’ll be able to work anyway).
Basically, I favor voluntary self isolation, and letting people do it.
That translates to a steadily rising number of cases, until the virus is universal (i.e. ~70% of people have had it; not all still infectious, but a substantial proportion are). Which guarantees that nearly everyone in elderly care homes will be infected, because various workers still need to come and go. Right now only a small proportion of people are infected, so the chance of an elderly person meeting them is smaller. In essence you are calling for isolation, but making it impossible for vulnerable people to actually isolate.
On the contrary. If having had it confers immunity for a substantial length of time, which is what the herd immunity concept assumes, that ends up with almost none of them still infectious, and the number who are going exponentially down, since herd immunity means that each contagious person causes less than one new infection.
Sure, but what do anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis really have in common besides “dissent”? Mistrust of authority? I doubt ana is as likely to substitute her previous second-hand information with neo-Nazi sources of information as principled libertarian ones.
My experience is that a significant percentage of mainstream Republicans are against continued government lockdowns (as opposed to voluntary measures).
That’s in a big city (so Democratic Party run) in a traditionally GOP State with a Democratic Governor who hasn’t been as dramatic as some of the other Democratic governors.
So I’m not sure what environment or circle of online friends he’s in where only those extremes are currently willing to speak against it.
Welcome to the dark side. The cookies are over there.
You know, there’s a fair chance some of your friends think the same but also hesitate to be open about it. Also there’s a fair chance quite a lot of your friends never even took the opposite view seriously – they think what they’re supposed to, just because they have no reason to question it. Open and very gentle discussion might do a lot of good. Still very risky for your social status, though.
In Spain. I really don’t meet people who are vocally opposed that much. Most people pay at least lip service about the need of the measures.
Are you in Spain now? I thought I remembered your saying that you were from Spain but currently in the U.K.
Yeah, but all the people I interact with (through Skype and Zoom) are in Spain. I don’t have that many acquaintances here.
So, even though my body is in the UK, it feels like I’m in Spain, because I mostly interact with people there (like 3+h of phone talks a day).
for the nearly everyone who a few months ago doubted this would happen
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/mike-bloomberg-plots-spending-blitz-to-back-joe-biden-campaign.html
The first thing that came to my mind was “Is this him auditioning to be the VP pick?”
The second thing was “Trump attack ads write themselves”.
huh?
@Deiseach
Unless he gets a sex change or Biden breaks his promise, he has no chance at being picked for VP.
Bloomberg already promised to support the eventual nominee, whoever it was. Noone should reasonable be surprised.
Maybe noone should be, but if you back to the OTs during the primaries, this was doubted by a lot of commenters, who speculated it was ploy to get more votes, and he would take his money and walk if he lost. Some even went as far as saying he would give money to Trump if Sanders won.
I don’t think Bloomberg’s actions with Biden as nominee tell us much about what he would’ve done if Sanders had won.
Sometimes governments mandate that people *don’t* cover their faces.
How much of this is weighing the relative risks of criminal prosecution? If the State in question makes wearing a mask illegal, despite your governors completely contradictory order to making wearing a mask mandatory, you’re in a real bind if you want to go to a protest. With even a tiny bit of anti-alt-right media coverage there is a non-negligible chance of the police deciding to call it a riot and busting it up.
AFAIK, anti-mask laws make it illegal to wear a mask at a political demonstration (e.g., reconstruction era laws to combat the KKK) or to wear a mask while committing a crime (most other anti-mask laws). If demonstrating without a permit, e.g., carries a $100 fine, but committing a crime wearing a mask makes is a mandatory minimum 10 years in prison, there is no fucking way you’re going to wear a mask at a demonstration.
It is really bad PR to come right out and say you’re not willing to do a dime over this, and since you are already protesting parts of the governor’s order already, you might as well go all in and call the whole thing wrong. The nuance will get lost on the media and you’re going to be called an anti-mask-boomer-murderer anyway, so you might as well go with the simpler messaging yourself.
Like most of America, I struggle with my weight. Like most of America, I have tried a few different diets, lost about ten pounds, couldn’t keep the diet up more than a month or so, and ended up gaining 10+ pounds.
After a period of just eating whatever I want without any plan, I decided to get back on the horse again. But this time I’m trying a new diet. I invented it myself, and as such if it works it might only work because I’m me, and at some level I understand myself. I call it the Sanity Diet. It is extremely simple, though it requires attention and some discipline. I can sum it up in one sentence:
I can only eat if I’m hungry.
That’s the core of it. It’s not about counting calories or balancing proteins or encouraging ketosis or anything like that. Just paying attention to my body and only letting myself eat if I can say with sincerity that I feel hungry. The hard part is identifying that. I’ve discovered that despite the fact that I’m a big eater, I don’t actually get that hungry. I just want to eat food. I desire the food, but it’s not hunger per se. I’m used to just noticing that I want to eat and chalking that up to hunger. I’ve gone through more than a couple diets that intended to reduce my hunger (avoiding carbs, for instance) and they never worked for me. I believe that they didn’t work because hunger was never the driving problem in the first place, just desire to eat food.
I’ve had to add a couple of sub rules as I’ve tried it out. Sub-rule number one is no eating seconds unless I’ve let some time pass to see if I’m really still hungry or if I’m just on a roll. And while I haven’t made a rule against eating, say, donuts and cake for every meal, I am trying to eat good foods that are good for me. I am trying to be sane, after all.
It’s surprisingly easy. Sure, it’s hard not to eat when I want to eat but I’m not hungry. But I think a lot of my eating came from fear: fear that I would go hungry unless I ate at mealtimes on the dot, and ate a lot. Fear of being deprived. I spent a lot of my childhood wishing I had more to eat (I wasn’t starving, just a kid growing into a six foot frame at rapid speed) so I think I learned to eat as much as I could whenever I had the chance. Now when I feel that fear, I can say “If I get hungry, I can eat. If the worst happens, I will be fine.” In other diets I would get worn down by the fear: “What if I never eat cake again? What if I’m hungry all the time? What if I have to live like this forever?” But with this diet I can calm my fears. Yes, I can have cake if I’m hungry. I won’t be hungry all the time, because if I’m hungry I can eat. If I had to live like this forever, that would be an improvement in overall happiness.
That’s why I named it the Sanity Diet. I’ve come to realize that my eating habits are completely detached from my eating needs. Eating when you’re not hungry is, from a certain perspective, insane. Not delusional insane, but still divorced from reality, much like a person who eats hair or rocks. I want to be more sane than I am. I would prefer to align with reality. So even if the diet fails to lower my weight, if I can keep it up long enough for it to stop being a diet and start being a lifestyle I will call it a win.
During my time at fat camp when I was a youth, we talked about boredom eating. It’s one of the reasons keeping a food journal can help people lose weight even without changing diets – it adds some friction to bored eating if you have to write those things down.
Good luck with your sanity diet! I hope it is sustainable and aligned with the things you love in your life
There is this thing called mindful eating where you’re supposed to focus on the sensory experiences of food instead of grabbing a quick bite before the computer screen. It’s supposed to help with with mental health (it’s part of MBSR), but should be a nice complement to your method.
This is a bit of a tangent A Real Dog, but I’ve been noticing over the past few weeks that I find your postings cool. I suspect you are a cool person whom I share interests with.
Happy to hear it, thanks!
This is one of the legitimate biggies for me. I can easily pound down a 16 inch pan pizza without working up a sweat. It’s uncomfortable, but I have to impose “eat till you’re no longer hungry” rule, which is quite different from my normal “eat till you feel like it was a feast!” satiation point.
Also, I stress eat. I suppose this is better than stress fast, because stress fasting ADBG would probably be dead (see thread on coworker stupidity below, compound with $1.4 million in annual savings now being gone on a major strategic project, where’s my chick-fil-a to make me feel better?)
I’ve been successful at controlling my weight for a few years now. And this is still a big issue.
I’ve eaten what I objectively considered a fair portion that keeps with my diet. And, while sitting at the table, my body is saying “eat more, eat more, eat more!” I’m sure that I will be hungry for hours unless I eat more, then and there.
20 minutes later, I’ve forgotten all about that. A few hours later, I might think of how hungry I currently am, and realize I have no real desire to eat.
African Development Bank Group?
A Definite Beta Guy, his username.
“But a 16 pizza isn’t that big…. I also e… wait, inches?!”
There are quite a few behavioral tricks you can apply, and one of them is that we tend to eat everything in front of us and only then stop and reconsider.
Unfortunately that’s the environment we live in. Unless and until we manage to change it, as a society, we do need personal effort in managing things.
My favorite trick lately is focusing on food density first. Under 1 calorie per gram for weight loss, under 2 calories per gram for maintenance.
I often confuse hunger and thirst. When I think I’m hungry for some snack, I can fix it by drinking some water.
People who do fasting diets tend to observe that their body hits them with intense hunger a little ways into the diet, but then the hunger eases off once the body transitions. As previous discussions have noted, the hard part is changing that metabolic setpoint.
So I’d suggest powering through the hunger a couple of times a week.
This happened to me when I transitioned to a no-breakfast schedule. I had a few days where I got hunger pangs in the morning, but now I don’t. I’m basically doing a 14 hour fast every day.
I’m a firm believer of “the best diet is the one you can stick with, preferably as a long term lifestyle change.”
Also, as several others have pointed out, your sanity diet is just good practice in general. I ran across a lot of the same advice during my own foray with dieting (though I mostly focused on counting calories because I’m just anal enough to enjoy tracking portions with spreadsheets).
I’m trying to teach this to my kids early, by being mindful not to stress that they eat the rather arbitrary portions we give them. “Eat ’til you’re full and then stop,” is the motto when they ask if they can be done.
It helps tremendously to not introduce junk food at a young age so they will actually fill up on more healthy food.
I definitely notice times when I myself graze out of want of something to do, rather than being hungry. I find carrots are great for this; I’ll get some jaw exercise but can’t binge them like I could chips or something, and even if I did, it’s just carrots.
Sometimes I’ve used raw oatmeal for the same purpose. It’s not very tasty or pleasant to eat, and it’s very healthy.
Kimchee has the highest ratio of taste to calories of any food known to the mind of man.
This sounds related to the idea of “intuitive eating”, which I think of as careful introspection to see if you really want a fatty/proteiny meal or really want something salty or something else, assuming that your internal senses will give you a better idea of what you are currently slightly deficient in than following some specific diet.
My guess is that most people here are at least somewhat familiar with the concept of demisexuality: of only being capable of sexual attraction to a person if you’re romantically involved with them.
One of the criticisms I saw multiple times of the concept is that it’s actually just normal heterosexuality. This always struck me as odd, and I always assumed the critic saying that didn’t really understand the concept, but tonight I happened to think of it and it occurred to me: what if it is normal?
That is, what if there is, and has always been, a large percentage of the population who are genuinely incapable of being “turned on” outside of the context of a romantic relationship? What if non-romantic sexual attraction was an experience that a large number of people were missing out on without realizing it? It seems to me that that would actually have huge implications for understanding the evolution of sexual mores and sexual jealousy.
For example, imagine being demisexual but married to a non-demisexual partner, and genuinely not understanding why your partner would be sexual attracted to other people, unless their romantic interest had also shifted toward them.
I’m curious if anyone else has had thoughts along these lines, or know of any data that might corroborate the idea.
I’m not very familiar with these concepts but if I’m understanding you right then the popularity of porn would seem to indicate a significant majority of people don’t have trouble separating romantic and sexual attraction.
Right. What I’m saying is: what if both demisexuality and non-demisexuality were normal and present in large numbers in the general population? Let’s say the split is something like 30/70 demi/nondemi, or maybe even closer to 50/50.
I think we’d hear much more than we do about demisexuality if it were the persuasion of a substantial part of the population.
I don’t think we necessarily would. Demisexuality could maybe be easily confused with just be unusually chaste/prudish/frigid.
And as I understand it, it never really got accepted as a category within the LGBT community, so there’s no real incentive to claim it to be a member of that community, if that’s what you’re referring to.
We also didn’t hear a lot about aphantasia until recently. And even color-blindness wasn’t really recognized until Dalton published on it.
You really have to find a way around porn – I’d bet on well over 90%, at least in young single men. And I’m also pretty sure both sexes find classically attractive people to be attractive.
But if you move to a weaker position: not sexual attraction, but “enjoyment of sex with”, I really think you’re on to something. And percentages may be about what you suggest. And yes, there’s no awareness of this in the zeitgeist.
According to this study 60% of women never watch porn, and those who do, watch it far less frequently than men.
On the other hand, women comprise most of the audience and authors for fiction like Twilight, 50 Shades, or really any romance novel. This is consistent with most women being pretty much “demisexual”.
According to that study, 25% of casually dating men report that they never watch porn. Which seems ridiculous to me. Are these uber-Christian Americans or something? Who are these guys?
@Imsoindiethatmyblogdontfit
Men who prefer masturbating without looking at porn. Men who masturbate to still images or written erotica but don’t count that as porn. Men with very low libidos, or conversely, men with so many sexual contacts that they have no desire to masturbate. Men who have some strong religious or feminist objection to porn. If anything I’m surprised that these groups are only 25% of single men.
@Kaitian
Good points. My thinking was too constrained there.
@Radu Florica
One possible confounder is that strictly speaking nothing prevents a porn viewer from injecting the premise of having a relationship with the person into the fantasy while viewing porn, or choosing porn where that is part of the scenario.
That said, I don’t think that’s likely.
According to that study, 25% of casually dating men report that they never watch porn [...] Who are these guys?By definition, these are men who are casually dating. Which implies that they are having sex with actual girls. And remembering having recently had sex with actual girls, and anticipating having sex with actual girls in the near future.
@John Schilling
Dating doesn’t necessarily imply sex, even these days.
In addition to points raised by Kaitian – also, people may simply lie.
Iago has a point – PwP in a fanfiction context means “porn without plot,” but in practice, someone seeking out pwp fanfiction is seeking it out for characters/relationships they already have an interest in.
A true case of reading porn with a minimal amount of demisexual implications would be someone going into a fandom they have never seen, and picking out pwp fic which has little to mention of people having romantic feelings for each other. Which, to be fair, is a situation that exists. People go into the tags for specific kinks and read whatever is there, regardless of fandom.
There is, however, evidence that women as a population seem to be more demisexual than men in some regards. There was that study that found that women showed signs of physical arousal (getting wet) basically looking at any kind of images, but there was a disconnect with what they reported. As in, a woman could get wet, but not actually feel aroused.
I think we should differentiate between two different ideas that could be implied by the “demisexual” concept:
1) Never actually wants to have sex with a person they meet unless they already have a close relationship. I’d imagine this is quite common. The opposite — feeling a strong desire to have sex with some person you barely know and haven’t been romantic with at all — doesn’t seem like something the majority of people would feel often, though I might be typical-minding here.
2) Never gets turned on at all outside the context of a close relationship. This is what I think the other comment is getting at with its discussion of porn. I think this is probably not very common, although there are a lot of people who only get turned on by porn if there is a backstory of romance and relationship involved. Stereotypically these people are women, though I’d bet at least some men are like this as well.
I figure most people who call themselves demisexual would be capable of getting turned on by things like porn, or other obviously-sexual situations, even if they don’t involve their romantic partner. They just don’t have a big desire to seek out sex with non-partners in real life and might be turned off by the situation if it actually came up in real life. And this is indeed an extremely common experience among heterosexual people, though it may be more common in women than in men.
The part about sexual jealousy in your post goes in a bit of a different direction — it’s generally accepted that, after having sex with a person a bunch, you would almost certainly also develop feelings for them. This is pretty much regardless of what initially attracted you to them. So that’s why many people see an admission of sexual attraction to other people as a warning sign that your romantic loyalty will also shift.
“Wants to have sex” is an unclear proposition as well – what are the logistics of it? How much effort is required and how many strings attached? Will it cause complications within my existing relationship(s)? Trivially, if you could press a button to realize an erotic fantasy of yours, then never have to think of it again, you’d probably do it. I know I would.
I think demisexuality as not being aroused by non-romantic interests is the only way to have a workable definition.
Some people are promiscuous and take as many sexual encounter opportunities they can get, consequences be damned. Other don’t.
It’s all shades of grey, of course. Clearly there are some people who are really eager to have sex with strangers and go to great lengths to achieve that goal. On the other end there are people who wouldn’t find the idea appealing at all even if you guaranteed a pleasant experience with no negative consequences. And most people fall somewhere in between the two extremes.
But that’s true about pretty much any human behaviour, and we don’t say “men only count as gay if they are completely unable to find a woman arousing under any circumstances”. I don’t see why we wouldn’t apply the same standard to other sexualities:
“This man only seeks out sex with [men / his romantic partners], and he describes himself as [gay / demisexual], therefore he is [gay / demisexual].”
Whether that definition is useful certainly depends upon what you’re talking about. If you’re talking about married middle-aged normies, it probably doesn’t matter whether they’re not hooking up with randos because they don’t want to pay for a divorce or because they don’t find the idea appealing.
“feeling a strong desire to have sex with some person you barely know and haven’t been romantic with at all” underlines entirely too much of our pop culture to not be significant. Entire swaths of masculinity are all about bagging sex partners with little to no intention of an accompanying romantic relationship, and this is supported by the statistics on cheating, even in cultures where monogamy is supposed to be the thing. And even if it’s not permanent, it seems that adolescence is a hotbed of non-demisexuality, as raunchy teen comedy films/tv wouldn’t have been successful at all.
Finally, the stereotype about the Olympic village being a big orgy either defines Olympic athletes as a separate populace from the norm, in terms of libido being linked to emotional connection, or a significantly strong form of demisexuality is not common at all.
Bullshit hypothesis: demisexuality is anti-correlated with testosterone levels, and Olympians are likely to have unusually large amounts of testosterone.
Also, going to the olympic games is an extremely emotional moment for all the athletes, and it’s a shared experience. So they might be able to bond to a level where even people on the demisexual end of the spectrum are comfortable having sex in an evening or two.
Bonding with whom, though? They’re not going for their teammates or rivals, they’re going for the hot piece of ass right over there. Heightened emotions seems to actually confirm that most people do not experience attraction dependent on emotional intimacy, if the atmosphere alone can bypass the need to get to know someone.
Of course Olympians are way way off from the norm. That’s the whole point.
Or just, when you get a bunch of 20 somethings together with not-that-much to do, sex happens.
How does the amount of sex that occurs at the Olympic village compare to that taking place at your average college dorm? I’d wager it’s not too far off.
The age bracket of Olympians depends on the sport. It would be interesting to see if the stereotype is correlated with age, such that categories of athletes compete and then go home to their families.
In which case, that still seems to support the hypothesis that the young are less than demisexual as the norm.
@AG
Surely that behavior would occur primarily among young men, who are actually less likely than women to cheat according to the GSS. To me, it looks more like the main factor is relative attractiveness and opportunity.
Of course, the validity of this data may exhibit the same bias as studies into how often people have sex, with men exaggerating and women underreporting it.
My guess is that cheating is correlated with status, not age or gender. The cougar bedding the pool boy, for example.
Maybe I’m typical-minding here, but this seems to be very gendered. I would expect “demisexuality” to exist almost entirely among women.
I would guess almost all single men (>90%) would have opt in to have sex with a hot stranger if given the opportunity. I would expect those men who decline this to be motivated by insecurities, phobias, performance issues etc., not by “demisexuality”. Any demisexual men who wants to tell me I’m wrong?
I would expect a large group of women to be “demisexual”. This would be a pretty broad cluster of things like “I can only enjoy sex with persons I trust”, “My sexuality is entirely reactive”, “I’m only turned on by my partner and no-one else”, “My sex drive is not strong enough to motivate me to have sex outside of relationships”. These patterns can be quite dissimilar. and there’s probably significant overlap between them. I would expect maybe 10-30% of women to follow these patterns strongly enough as to never/rarely desire sex with strangers, even in fantasy. But this should be a spectrum and many women would be in the grey area (women are a lot less interested in casual sex, after all). Putting all of these patterns under the label “demisexuality” doesn’t make much sense to me but I guess fine if it makes you happy.
But I’m just a random dude speculating on the mysterious nature of women. Things like the stuff above is what women have personally told me though.
> “I can only enjoy sex with persons I trust”
This pattern stands out to me a little. It seems to be a natural consequence of, well, life. Enough bad experiences (not with sex, necessarily) and trust becomes a much more important feature of everything.
The others are all “this is what my sex drive does, why it does that I don’t know”.
I would not dismiss so easily other issues like religious limitations, potentially life-ruining consequences if things will go wrong etc. IMHO putting it into “insecurities” is a poor idea.
I’m not demisexual, but there have been a non-zero number of times in my life where I have chosen to not have sex with a hot stranger because I was pretty sure the negative consequences of doing so outweighed a night or two of fun. Contrary to popular opinion, men can still think with their main head, even when the other one’s active.
+1
(Not demisexual, but I’ve definitely decided against sex that was on-offer because I didn’t think I would like the likely consequences, or I thought it would make me feel bad about my choices the next day.)
+1
I’m a demisexual man and I’m telling you that you’re wrong. Why would I want to perform an act of great intimacy and attachment-formation with a stranger? I may find them physically attractive, but that’s only one prerequisite of actually being sexually attracted to someone – I wouldn’t feel fond of them, and without that, sex wouldn’t really be appealing.
does your etc. include ideals and commitments, or only negative parameters?
But yes, of course it’s gendered.
“Demisexuality” sounds like something a guy came up with to convince his suspicious wife that he wasn’t having an affair.
“No, honey, I’m a demisexual. That means I literally can’t be sexually attracted to a woman that isn’t you.”
To me it sounds more like what someone would think up when his offer of an affair got rejected. “What, she won’t cheat on her spouse with me? She doesn’t even sound one bit tempted? She must be so weird it’s some new sexual identity!”
As I understand it, the actual history is supposed to be that some people thought they were asexual until they got into a romantic relationship and found they had sexual feelings for their partner.
I would say it’s more likely that it was invented by someone who desperately wanted to be able wanted to identify as anything that wasn’t as boring as heterosexual. See also sapiosexual.
I had to look that one up.
I like to claim that I heard Betty explaining calculus to a fellow folk dancer and fell in love on the spot.
I don’t care if this is true or not, that’s absolutely adorable.
Agreed with Aftagley; this is heartwarmingly adorable.
Sapiosexual describes my romantic/sexual interests better than any other model I can think of.
I’ll accept sapiosexual as a meaningful category when I hear someone who identifies as the opposite.
@cassander
Bimbofication porn would like to have a world with you.
@cassander
That kind of sounds like saying “I’ll believe foot fetishes exist when I hear someone say they’re into girls who don’t have feet.”
There are, in fact, people who are into girls who don’t have feet.
uggcf://jjj.cbeauho.pbz/ivqrb/frnepu?frnepu=nzchgrr+srgvfu
I suspect the average person who knows about the term ‘demisexuality’ is disproportionately likely to be a young adult, sex positive and generally in a society where casual sex is common.
In more traditional sex negative societies, demisexuality is just how everyone’s ‘supposed to be’ (especially women).
That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Maybe a reason that’s how everyone is “supposed to be” is that a significant portion of the population is that way already. If you assume demisexuals are less flexible about their preferences than most non-demisexuals (which seems likely to me), you would expect to get an “intolerant minority” effect of the sort Nassim Taleb has described, and demisexual standards would become the sexual mores of the society as a whole.
Of course the history of sexual mores is a lot more complicated than that, because this isn’t the only factor. There’s an intolerant minority with the opposite preferences, for one thing.
Doesn’t seem to match the majority of history, though, where the modern concept of romance didn’t necessarily exist, and there’s a whole lotta expectation that someone not married to someone they love still has sex with their spouse to reproduce.
I don’t think demisexual people are literally incapable of sex outside of a romantic relationship, they just don’t want/enjoy it.
Plus, while marriage may not have been what we consider romance now, there was potentially some kind of bond or connection between two married people which maybe would have sufficed in context.
Isn’t this true for every sexual identity?
Of course. Which is why I don’t think @AG’s point really tells us anything.
@acymetric
The scenario I’m more thinking of is the husband who still enjoys schtupping his wife while maintaining an actual love for his mistress. He has sexual desire outside of the context of romance.
This roughly corresponds to the behaviour/attitudes expected of men (omni-sexual, as it were) and women (only for love) in some recent cultural settings.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a continuum, or if the average position on that continuum were different in a gendered way, if only because of the evolutionary advantages (offspring of females do better if the father stays around to help her raise the baby; males can have lots more offspring if they don’t help support all of them).
OTOH, it would be hard to research, because of social pressures to pretend a cultutrally appropriate reaction, or even talk yourself into believing that’s what you have.
I assumed I was asexual for almost 15 years. Then I started dating, and after 4 months of dating my now-husband, I realized “oh, I can be sexually attracted to someone after all.” It was like a switch flipped in my brain one day, turning on that specific form of attraction. It was 100% subconscious, and it only applied to the person I was dating.
The argument that demisexuality is just normal heterosexuality has always confused me. My personal experience seems vastly different from most other peoples’, and also vastly different from portrayals in modern media.
Also, just to be clear, asexuality/demisexuality is about feeling sexual attraction. It says nothing about someone’s desire to have sex. Some ace people want no sex, some are indifferent, some like it for various reasons.
Thank you for your perspective!
The argument that demisexuality is just normal heterosexuality has always confused me. My personal experience seems vastly different from most other peoples’, and also vastly different from portrayals in modern media.
That’s what confused me, as well: you have people saying demisexuality sounds normal, but it absolutely doesn’t sound normal. Certainly it’s not the standard narrative about how sexual attraction works. That’s why I assumed those saying that were confused about the concept.
That said, I’ve seen multiple random people say that it sounds like normal heterosexuality. It’s quite possible that they all had the same bizarre misunderstanding — I’m not discounting that — but it occurred to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they were demisexual themselves without realizing it, and were typical-minding.
Some ace people want no sex, some are indifferent, some like it for various reasons.
IIRC, Scott has said that he doesn’t feel sexual attraction but enjoys certain aspects of sex enough to do it. I might be misremembering, though.
My thoughts:
“True” demisexuality (the kind described in Lord Nelson’s comment) is rare. By “true” demisexuality I mean “usually asexual, but experiences sexual attraction after falling in love with someone”.
However, a significant proportion of people are not interested in sex outside of relationships. They can walk down the street and rank people on a hotness scale, but they fundamentally don’t want to have sex with people they’re not romantically interested in. This may be more common in women, but does include some men, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the gender differences are less pronounced than how pop culture portrays them.
The people saying “just normal heterosexuality” are talking about the second category.
I’m in the second category. I have a sense of which random strangers I find attractive and which ones I don’t find attractive. I just don’t care. I mostly swipe left on dating apps. When I’ve fantasized about having casual sex, it’s only been about people I already know and like, which makes it really only kinda-sorta casual. I can only ever recall really desiring sex, like lying awake at night thinking about it, in the context of a crush.
So I’ve read in a lot of historical fiction (and sometimes real history) about this famous figure or that son of whatsit joining the military and becoming an officer. But they’re not fighting, or not most of the time. Often (at least when I’m reading a Russian novel) these are wealthy young men who are flitting about high society while also a decently ranked and rising military officer.
What were these people’s actual jobs? Were they responsible for the men they commanded in any way? Did they have day to day tasks? Half the time that we see the soldiers they (nominally?) command, one is just a friend tagging along to the tavern or fancy dinner party. Honestly, the men who joined the military don’t seem that different from the ones who are secretary to old Prince Such-and-so in the government, except that the latter sometimes have duties. Can someone explain to me what’s going on? Are my favorite books misleading me? Is rubbing shoulders with the elite* just what the noble ones did, and if so, why on earth are they joining the military instead of being Idle Rich? Is it a sinecure, in a way government posts aren’t? I mean, I can guess—their family expects them to rise to high office somehow, or their allowance isn’t enough to live the life they want to right now—but I’d like to hear the answer from someone who knows.
*sorry, Aftagley
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky did plenty of staff officer type stuff between the wars of the Third and Fifth coalitions, didn’t he?
I read Anna Karenina, I’m afraid, not War and Peace. And though we follow Vronsky for a good bit of the story, we rarely see him do any officer type stuff. But what is this officer type stuff that Bolkonsky was doing, anyway?
Bolkonsky writes a note proposing the reform of army regulations, modelled on the French, but they’re rejected by the Brass.
Kutuzov later offers him a position as a member of his personal staff, but Andrei declines in favour of staying with his regiment. (out of Tolstoyan disdain for the ‘great men’ perspective of history)
For a long time, military commissions could be purchased by the aristocracy, IIRC. Many of these folks expected to “lead”, not get dirty. And often times these commissions would be commensurate with their social standing, so not low-level lieutenants but majors and colonels and such. Most of what folks in these stations today do is receiving briefings, telling subordinates to go do a thing, and autographing pieces of paper. I doubt it was much different then. And like most things in management, you can typically delegate these to adequately competent subordinates.
Plus, if you’re reading books, I imagine the authors would rather spend time on things like taverns and parties than paperwork.
If they had a regular commission in a line unit, their nominal job would be to train and administer the men they would be commanding in wartime. Historic armies didn’t much go in for the sort of realistic training exercises that modern armies have found necessary, but making sure everyone could march in formation, load and fire a musket three times a minute, etc, were important preparation for the type of battles they had to fight. Also, somebody had to e.g. requisition all the food that the men were going to be eating.
If they had a staff position, then they were either a gofer for a senior officer or holding down a desk doing the same sort of things a civilian office worker would do.
And if they had a reserve commission, they were collecting half-pay while standing by to do one of the above in the event of war. Ideally with occasional training, but for e.g. a reserve cavalry officer that may just mean getting together with your buddies to ride horses and get drunk when nobody is looking. That’s a great gig if you don’t really want to do anything, Daddy’s money is enough that you don’t have to do anything, but you don’t want to look like you’re not doing anything.
The moral of the story
International edition
Some people complained that Dean Martin is too much of a straight man to be partner of Jerry Lewis. They presented an alternative: Some random kid they picked up from the street. Others disagreed, and there was a big discussion:
Kid or Dean?
* * *
(Before this story, I have to apologize that I cannot do the accents very well. Please bear with me.)
Two people met on the dining car of the Transsiberian Railway. The first one said:
“Howdy pardner, my name’s Bill. Nah, I dunno nuthin’ ’bout that tea they’re servin’ here. Back home on the range, we drink only coffee. Here’s my coffee recipe from the west: Take a pound o’ coffee, moist it slightly wit’ water, let cook for half an hour. Then do the horseshoe test. If the horseshoe don’t float, ’twas too little coffee. Oh, lookit them trees outside! Fall is comin’, the leaves are turning red and brown. Looks awesome!”
The second answers: “Cor blimey! Nice to meet you, I’m Colin. I don’t have the slightest idea about coffee, sorry about that, mate. I love this tea! The Russians make them in a samowar. Of course it’s not like at home. I usually drink Earl Grey tea in the morning and Darjeeling in the afternoon. On special occasions I have some of the vanilla-flavoured tea. And if I have some hard work to do, I go for some Assam tea, nice and strong. Oh yes, autumn is very nice round these parts, look at these splendid red and brown leaves!”
Moral: Know tea, say “autumn”.
* * *
When Ovid had a child, he decided to call it Ovid B, thus creating a generation-long familiy tradition. Eighteen generations later — the Ovid family had long ceased to be poets –, Ovid R proposed to introduce passports in the Roman empire to have some social distancing and flatten the curve of the pestilence. People laughed at this silly idea and always called him Passport-Ovid R.
Unfortunately, Ovid R was also a terrible antisemite. He tried to convert Jews by torturing them, but his method was not very effective: He used to poke them with their kippah into their low stomach. None of them betrayed their religion.
Moral: Low kippah’s a poor torment, Passport-Ovid R.
* * *
Many people have problems telling Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard apart. But in fact it’s very easy, because Bryce Dallas Howard has a very special hobby: A housefly zoo! Just like Lucky Eddie used to go on a walk with his butterfly collection, wherever she goes, she sports a halo of her pets. Jessica Chastain does not have a housefly zoo.
Moral: Ohne flies kein Bryce.
Are these puns? I don’t understand any.
They’re all puns, but multilingual ones. That’s why the phrases aren’t familiar.
There are links to the solutions on the concluding punctuation marks.
Why does Sarkozy eat only one egg for breakfast?
Because one egg, it’s un oeuf.
Hey, does anyone know anything about regaining diagnoses? Are you assumed to have a diagnosis forever if you’ve had it in the past? I was diagnoses with ADHD as a teenager, and I stayed on various ADHD medications until I decided I was happy enough and functional enough without therapy, psychiatry, or psychiatric medicine and discontinued taking meds. These days, I’m still fairly happy and whatnot, but I’m studying for the LSAT and I’m realizing that Vyvanse + extra time might increase my score outlook and thus my career outlook. So, my question: how difficult would it be for me to reactivate my diagnosis as it were and get back on Vyvanse and extra time? Also, how much could I expect this to cost (I’m uninsured)?
Given that all the benefits of a higher LSAT score are positional, why do you deserve those benefits more than whoever you’d displace? Do you think “willingness to cite a possibly-irrelevant childhood diagnosis in order to gain an advantage” is a quality our legal system should select for?
Deserve has nothing to do with it. Also “ability to use edge cases and quirks of procedure to achieve goals” is exactly what our legal system selects for.
The question was not what it does select for but what it should select for.
“Deserve” has a lot to do with both whether it’s morally acceptable to do this, and, insofar as this person is asking for help executing this plan, whether others choose to help.
What do you think they should select for Dr. Friedman? Also, I would be interested in your views on this moral calculation.
It’s unclear if you are coming at this from a belief that ADHD either doesn’t exist or is drastically over-diagnosed and stimulant medications are somehow unnatural, unethical or harmful in some fundamental way.
But if not, I don’t see what your beef is with someone who has a medical condition, taking the appropriate medication for that condition.
I…had never gone that deep with the idea. The legal profession is intrinsically mercenary; pursuing one’s ordinal success is mercenary–> Pursuing one’s ordinal success is proper to the legal profession.
I am unsure how to respond to this, because it seems to closely joined to the question of “in a world of scarcity, why do you deserve resources? To respond to it as posed though, to an extent I considered how I might act to my advantage within the existing social equilibrium rather than considered how I might act to improve said equilibrium; it was previously decided on the basis of cognitive testing that I was generically justified in receiving this advantage, and advantages enable my goals.
Respond to the more general question, I have little: I am more pro-social than average, probably significantly; and I tend to make those around me happy. This is banal virtue, but other than merciless self interest, that’s what I’ve got to justify my right to thrive.
I’d be interested in your perception though. What character traits would make me more deserving than the whoever I displace? Laddering up, what are the traits of a human being that make them worthy of advantage?
It shouldn’t be that hard. Contact your parents, your high school, and the doctor you saw as a teenager and ask for any paperwork they have about the diagnosis. If you go to any primary care physician and be honest with them, saying that you have managed your ADD without medication but are planning to enter law school, which requires extreme amounts of focus, they should put you back on it without too much trouble. People go on and off mental health medications all the time, and it isn’t at all unusual to restart or adjust medication when experiencing significant life changes.
This is not my experience. A lot of doctors are much more defensive with ADD/ADHD medication than they were in the 90s and early aughts. A lot of colleges–my law school and the attached undergrad, for one–used to let their own in-house psychiatrist prescribe adderall etc., but now require an outside verification of your diagnosis from a shortlist of doctors they’ve vetted for being sufficiently defensive about diagnosing for ADD.
I think that’s all to the good–I should probably have never been put on adderall by my primary care doc when first diagnosed. What I really had was more akin to depression-related-attentional-deficits, and treating the attentional-deficits but not the depression was not healthy for getting me to face up to having a depressed outlook on my life, and changing it. And adderall changes your body in some noticeable ways (I’m a bit more robotic, a worse dancer, or I enjoy dancing less, and I tend to need to pee about 2x as often as I used to). I would recommend you consider the reluctance of a doctor to prescribe adderall unless clearly indicated as a very strong selling point that they’re good at what they do.
I’m not a doctor, but my sense is that the clear clinical indications for prescribing adderall are where a) a.d.d.-like symptoms have already caused a *significant* negative event, such as being fired or being broken up with by a serious long-term partner and b) the symptoms continue and other less dramatic interventions have been tried. I guess all I’m saying is, maybe consider whether it’s a better idea to get a great doctor and approach the question of whether you need add meds with an open mind, rather than going in with a pre-rehearsed set of lines in order to guarantee you get the diagnosis you think you need.
I’m not arguing that you can’t get the drug separately, *if you can get the drug separately*. But you pretty much can’t get the school’s own medical folks (who are much more affordable and available, particularly if you’re on the school’s healthcare plan, which is opt-out, not opt-in).
To be clear, my law school requires students to buy school-provided insurance, or prove they are sufficiently privately insured, and that school-provided insurance won’t cover any adhd-type medication not prescribed by an in-network doctor, nor cover any out-of-network doctor. My school was pretty serious about not letting ADHD meds become as standard a study-buddy as redbull or caffeine pills, which were something I think >20% of the student body used in dramatic doses (up all night borderline dissociative–I mean, a *lot* of caffeine) at least once a term.
For another anecdote, a professor I’m friends with at my undergrad recently admitted to me that he’s started scheduling a 3-min break into his one-hour-long class periods, because so many students were asking for bathroom breaks in the middle of class. It’s definitely a side-effect of adhd medication that folks need to pee more.
I actually did some of this last night after posting. I spoke with my mom and she informed me she a) still had the documentation and b) had given it to my college, so they should be able to advocate on my behalf.
I’ll look into getting a psychiatrist at some point, but I’m less concerned with the Vyvanse than the extra time. I actually found some old vyvanse a few months ago, so I’ll test it out and see if I perform substantially better medicated–but it’s not a primary concern.
The same reason why people opposed to abortion are more likely to be opposed to contraception too, I guess.
My two cents take on this is a combination of four factors.
1. Polarization. It’s the guys on the other side saying this and the untrustworthy mainstream media.
2. A real sense of indignation/desperation at the current situation, which is hurting a lot of people in the middle America
3. Being self centered, in the sense that they are still thinking of the disease in terms of how it’s affecting themselves, not how it would affect others. It’s really evident from the way their argument goes, which usually centers around how a normal mask doesn’t provide much protection from getting the diseases, citing the particulate and filter size. Which is true, but when the question is framed in the other direction, then it becomes very clear how wearing masks, even makeshift ones, helps in suppressing community spread.
4. The institutions themselves are to blame for their dishonesty. I think it’s important to remember that in the early days, the CDC was saying wearing masks was bad. The sudden reversal, as well as the myriad ways the WHO had messed up, had severely eroded trust.
This result on cross-reactive immunity:
https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/1261053426475003904
makes me wonder whether we should try common cold variolation– literally giving people colds on purpose, because hey, it’s just a cold– as a COVID mitigation measure. Am I missing a reason that that’s not worthwhile? Or is it infeasible to get appropriate samples of common cold virus to variolate people with?
Is there that much sticking out except for the spike proteins?
First, we’d need to confirm that immune response stems from the common cold coronaviruses. They’re one likely culprit, but we should get more evidence before making plans based on that assumption.
Haven’t we all had common colds already? This doesn’t sound like it would help much.
There are something like 200 different viruses/strains that cause something we call a cold, and it’s plausible that only some of them would confer cross-reactive immunity. At any given time a person who’s not, like, a kindergarten teacher is only going to have immunity to a certain number of those, possibly not including the most relevant ones.
My understanding is that the immunity you get from a common cold only lasts 6 months or so. After that your body forgets about it, and you can be reinfected with the exact same thing again. So the question is whether we’ve had a recent cold.
Incidentally, my sister-in-law is an ER doctor, and a month back or so she mentioned to me that her colleagues thought maybe one reason kids do better with Covid is that they have so many colds, and maybe there was some cross-immunity; and then I didn’t hear any more about the idea for weeks. Be encouraging if it’s true.
The new complication seems to be affecting children, I’ve seen news reports about England, France, Italy and New York.
So now it’s not just a case of “it’s only serious for the really old, the rest of us can risk it” anymore.
On the positive side, Kawasaki (even the SARS-Corona-2 induced variant) seems to be easily treatable, with cheap, well understood drugs.
No, the opposite. If its true then holding R down for months via lockdowns while cold immunities deteriorate would mean a much larger surge as lockdowns are lifted.
With all the talk about whether or not the Supreme court is slowly working to overturn Roe v. Wade, I realized today that I’ve heard no talk about overturning obergefell vs. hodges. Not “no talk” as in “it’s only a fridge position” but literally I’ve seen no serious discussion about whether, the supreme court, if it goes fully conservative, should or would re-ban gay marriage. Sure, I get that it’s not quite that simple, but I’m not even hearing it discussed as a talking point on the right anymore.
Am I just missing some undercurrent of conservative thought, or have we really gone, in less than a decade, from gay marriage being mostly illegal to being nigh-on completely unremarkable?
Part of the problem is the ratchet effect. You can allow States to ban new abortions without having them go back and arrest people for performing abortions last year.
It’s much more difficult to untangle homosexual marriages in the sense that in order to no longer have any, you’d have to undo lots of them.
Plus, lots of people believe babies are being killed in the one case, while the ongoing impact of homosexual marriage is more of a signaling issue. Where it’s really going to be fought is that, given two guys are married, what does that require of people around them who don’t support homosexual marriage, such as landlords, cake bakers, churches, etc…
Not really, you’d just have to let, say, the state of Alabama say, “No more gay marriages.”
Right, but pre-2013… it really wasn’t. People expressed what they claimed to be legitimately-held beliefs that allowing gay marriage would be harmful to society as a whole.
I just find this interesting because this means that either those beliefs were largely not sincerely held (i don’t think this) or in the last decade we’ve had an absolutely massive shift on what seemed like a pretty locked-in issue.
Maybe… but that’s rear-guard action and everyone can see it.
I remember being in these arguments pre-Obergefell, and even then there was a feeling of inevitability to it. You could see it in the rather pathetic way that Ryan T Anderson (to take someone very much in the public square on this issue) defended his position; his arguments were fine and all, but he just came across as so damn milquetoast about it sometimes. It felt like rear-guard action even before we lost.
Obviously a lot of the people who changed their minds about same-sex marriage did so by meeting gay people or discovering they knew gay people and considering whether they were harming them by not recognizing a right to same-sex marriage and so on. I don’t want to minimize the role that played or plays in changing social opinion, especially before the law changed our opinions for us. But a lot of folks were basically shamed into silence or simply exhausted by the debate in a way I never really saw among the pro-life crowd, for instance. I’m not really sure why. I think part of it is that marriage had already changed so much by the time the same-sex marriage debate came along—as a matter of law, but especially as a matter of how people thought about it—that it was hard to argue against it without expanding your argument to, say, no-fault divorce. Which of course some of us were willing to do. But realizing only just then that you already lost the key battle decades ago is not exactly reassuring, either.
How much did individuals change their minds and how much did the people who held other opinions die off?
That’s part of it, but I don’t think enough people died off for it to be most of the effect.
I mean, we’re talking about a topic that was politically controversial only 10 years ago. For everyone who cared to have died off means that the average supporter for this cause would have had to have been near the end of their life, which doesn’t match my recollection of events.
If SCOTUS overturns Obergefell, what happens to the gay marriages Alabama has already conducted? What happens if a gay-married couple in Alabama wants to get divorced, except, oops, now their marriage is no longer recognized by the state?
In the least extreme version, previously conducted marriages are still recognized as valid, as are marriages performed out of state, but the state no longer conducts new ones.
Most extreme version, the marriages aren’t recognized anymore.
@cassander
The change happened too fast for fuddy-duddies dying off to be a major part of it. The percentage of Americans supporting gay marriage doubled, from a minority to a clear majority, in 13 years.
Anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage here. I think there are a couple of meaningful distinctions that I see:
I’d go further and say, anti-abortion cashes out at “abortion is a wrong thing and people shouldn’t do it” whereas anti-gay-marriage cashes out at “marriages between people of the same sex aren’t really real.”
There isn’t any second-best option for me for abortion other than fewer (ideally none) happening. But the second best option for me for gay marriage is that I (and the landlords, bakers and churches who agree with me) don’t have to collude with the fantasy.
In a liberal society that kind of co-existence feels like it should be possible, and away from the internet (at least here in the UK) it feels like it mostly is: I know gay people who have got married, I haven’t gone to the weddings but I don’t feel the compulsion to go round telling them they are wrong. As Nick implies downthread, the kind of traditional marriage that perhaps once would have affected all social relations around it is pretty rare nowadays, so this causes few problems.
In other words, I’m not outraged by gay marriages happening (from my POV, they aren’t happening), and while I’d like my culture and the laws I live under to to agree with me, I’m mostly reconciled to the fact that they don’t, as long as they don’t oppress me and those who agree with me.
The abortion equivalent for me might be a situation where everybody had the right to an abortion but for some reason it was physically impossible to kill a baby in the womb. In that case I’m not outraged by abortions happening (they can’t) but I would have to live with an immoral law. I could probably live with that, as long as I didn’t have say that I thought it was a moral law.
This is exactly my position and I suspect that it is pretty common.
+1
Question for you as an anti-abortion person. What are you personally doing to ensure care for abandoned unwanted babies?
I’m pro-choice, but I don’t think this is a helpful kind of comment.
I don’t know what the figures are on “abandoned unwanted babies,” but the legalization of abortion and the widespread availability of contraception were followed by a striking increase in the number of children born to unmarried women — precisely the opposite of the effect that proponent of those policies had claimed would occur. There is an old article by Akerlof and Yellin arguing that it was a causal relation. The effect was not small. From the article:
Assuming that you approve of both those changes, what are you doing to take care of those children?
That seems as fair a question as yours.
Is it actually a major problem in USA? AFAIK there is quite long queue for adoptions of infants.
I am not doing anything with specific issue (primarily because according to my knowledge it is not a major issue in Poland), but monastery closest to my home has a baby hatch accessible from a street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_hatch
There are no abandoned unwanted babies*. The number is 0 in developed** countries. There are huge queues of willing parents who have jumped through hundreds of hoops waiting for the first unwanted baby. A baby doesn’t stay unwanted more than a day, or the time it takes for the expecting parents to hop on a car and drive to take their new baby home. Of course, this process is slowed a bit by social services, so babies are left in temporary foster care for a couple of days before the family can take them. But, if it were up to the adopting family, the time lag would be as close to 0 as possible.
If there’s a baby that is clearly adoptable and is below 3 years old, it will be adopted regardless of length of life left or disabled status, much less race or sex.
*To clarify: while babies are unwanted by their mother and thus abandoned, somebody wants those babies, proved by mile-long lists in adoption agencies.
**And it seems to me that in non-developed countries, babies literally abandoned unwanted are a small minority too. Second-world countries like Russia can’t keep with internal demand for babies; China doesn’t seem to have many babies in orphanages anymore, either. Some countries have a few, but that’s because they banned international adoption for human trafficking reasons. There is so much demand for babies, that the amount of actually unwanted babies can’t keep up, so some companies have engaged in snatching wanted babies from mothers.
Some people think “oh, sure, people immediately grab babies, but only if they are white and super-healthy.”
But a baby of any race gets adopted pretty much instantly. Even normal health issues, like “deaf in one ear,” are no problem either.
There are problems for babies with extreme health issues. Like, will need a feeding tube their entire life.
Not relevant to the discussion per se, but I’d like to insert a reminder that once they exit that age the chance of adoption drops precipitously. A very young child is highly likely to be adopted but regardless of their disabled status an older orphan is highly unlikely to be adopted.
So is this intrinsically a class thing then? The concern is not that people who don’t want babies will be stuck with them or babies will be left uncared for, but rather that people who don’t want babies will be sufficiently attached to them that they care for them poorly and the babies grow up to become people we don’t like?
@Dragor: I think it’s mostly just about being able to attack the other side as lacking virtue. Caring for unwanted children is almost universally seen as a maximally virtuous thing, abandoning or killing them the opposite. So, from the conservative side, we can point to a bunch of new mothers who have gone and created children, and would rather abandon or kill them than care for them. Clearly these are Bad People(tm), and we need not take their views into account. From the liberal side, we can point to a bunch of people who have piously demanded that these children be born alive, who are now hypocritically willing to abandon them. Clearly these are Bad People(tm), and we need not take their views into account.
That none of these children are going to be less than adequately cared for because there’s a third group of actually virtuous people lined up to take on that task with adequate margin, is irrelevant. The goal is to accuse the other side of being Bad People(tm), and there are always people on the other side who aren’t exhibiting this particular virtue when there is a clear opportunity to do so. Point them out, denounce them, imply that the entire group is guilty by association, and presto, you’re done.
DinoNerd:
I’d like to ask exactly the same question of people who are opposed to infanticide.
Well enough said I don’t have anything to add.
I think your perception is correct — there is effectively no one seriously working to overturn Obergefell. If nothing else I think this is tactical: the people who would have been working to prevent same-sex marriage from winning in the courts are now working to preserve people’s ability to disagree with same-sex marriage in their personal / business lives (e.g. Masterpiece Cakeshop).
And because they’re the same people, they are less credible when they say “all we’re trying to do is preserve the freedom of religious people to live by their own beliefs in their private lives.” We know what these people did back when they were in power, we can reasonably infer that they’d do similarly (not just getting rid of same-sex marriage but e.g. reinstituting sodomy laws) if they ever got power again, regardless of what they say now, and so part of the reason to deny them even victories like Masterpiece Cakeshop is to make damned sure they never get anywhere near power again.
FWIW I say this as someone who very much wants Jack Phillips to be able to decide for himself who he wants to bake cakes for. I want mutual tolerance to be a stable equilibrium. But it’s hard when so few people on either side sincerely believe in it and can credibly commit to it.
How does Masterpiece Cakeshop prevent them from getting power?
salvorhardin:
My guess is that the overwhelming majority of people prefer live-and-let-live. I think it’s a smallish subset of activists who aren’t okay with that.
They wouldn’t be banning gay marriage, they would be permitting states to do so. Dealing with the transition would then be up to any state that chose to do it.
Point acknowledged and accepted. It doesn’t change the larger thesis that this topic seems to have dropped off as a major political issue, right?
Right.
What I find interesting about this is that it’s the only significant issue I can think of where, in my lifetime, the libertarian position has gone from fringe crankery (I think the LP platform had a same-sex marriage plank in it in like the 70s, and everybody else laughed at them) to overwhelming social consensus. Marijuana legalization is close, and may yet get there, but I don’t think it’s inevitable.
I’d love to be able to take this as a strategic example of how libertarianism can win overwhelming support more broadly, but my sense is that this is probably a special case because of the lack of downsides: it’s just unusually easy for non-gay people to see that gay couples being able to get married doesn’t have any material negative effect on their lives at all.
How was that saying? It takes 20 years to turn from a reformist to a conservative, without changing a single idea.
Plus quite a lot of people did a lot of very smart work to promote libertarian ideas. It makes sense to see change.
I’d hasten to point out that you’ve picked the two positions where libertarian goals closely line up with liberal goals.
A third, at present, is immigration. Practically no Democratic politician says he is in favor of open immigration, which has been the usual libertarian position for a very long time. But, as their critics sometimes point out, that’s pretty much the implication of the policies they argue for. Bernie Sanders is an exception, but he isn’t really a Democrat or a liberal.
If, at some point in the future, the Democrats hold the White House and both houses, it will be interesting to see if they really go through with it.
It seems that the liberal positions have shifted towards the libertarian ones on this matter. Wasn’t Obama against gay marriage as late as 2008?
His personal opinions? Unclear. He didn’t personally support it enough to risk making it a campaign issue in 2008.
But, Obama =/= liberal, at least wrt this issue. The far left has been active in support gay rights for decades now.
I would say that Obama is a much more central example of liberal than the far left.
And btw, even the far left wasn’t in support of gay rights until the collapse of Soviet Union.
@Aftagley fair point. I’ve omitted earlier libertarian victories that were the product of more right-wing alliances, but those at least look more fragile right now, e.g. until recently there was a similarly overwhelming consensus that we should not go back to the pre-Carter regulatory regime and tax rates.
Deregulation of the airlines was a libertarian victory under a Democratic president.
Reality is more persuasive than arguments.
The anti-gay marriage crowd had two classes of arguments: The explicitly religious (Which the courts may not consider) and arguments about consequences.
The second set of arguments were comprehensively disproved by the lived experience of gay marriage being legal. Lots of people appear to be fully argument immune, but denying your own lived experience is a far rarer level of insanity.
Also, you cant divorce people against their will by judicial fiat by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Or, rather, you technically could, but even the most fevered conservative recognizes that would set the moral authority of the courts at -9000 and likely result in hilarious constitutional amendments on the form of “The Federalist Society is Hereby Proscribed”.
I’m not sure which arguments about consequences you have in mind, but the only clever ones, which have to do with the status of relationships and of friendship and the social fabric as a whole, the disintegration of which gay marriage was denounced as being conducive to, never made any predictions that would be clearly falsified or verified within a few years. In fact, they’re going to be awfully hard to verify or falsify in general, because they all just say that gay marriage would be a contributing factor in a wider development.
So these arguments were not disproved, but they will never be disproved – or proved. It will always look like gay marriage became legal and nothing happened.
Eh. No. Lots of people made “predictions” which were far, far less restrained than that, and thus entirely falsifiable. They just dont get brought up anymore, because they are mortally embarrassing in retrospect.
Surely the increased hurricane activity falls under “explicitly religious”?
I keep reading about abortion in US, and since I’m not really up to date, could someone please enlighten me? I understand some states are occasionally trying to ban it or make it harder – that’s a whack a mole game that’s decades old, as far as I know. But other than that, is there anything new? Are people seriously arguing for a full country wide ban? That’s a bit… absurd, from my cultural background. Or only late(er) term abortions?
Also I understand the left is going a bit overboard with abortion mania. “I want to have your abortion” was shocking 20 years ago, but less so now. Is that the cause?
No one is seriously arguing for a country wide bad – rather a repeal of the Supreme Court ruling that prevented statewide bans. They want states to be able to ban abortions – usually at the 6 week mark.
I mean, they may not be arguing for that very loudly now because they know it’d be unpopular, but there’s little question that if they had the power most anti-abortion activists would vote for a federal ban, no? Sincere federalists are rare on most issues and I’d wager they’re even rarer on this one.
Sure. Bias warning, this summary is coming from a liberal perspective.
The current approach from the conservatives to ban abortions is twofold. On a long-term meta level, they are trying to get a supreme court majority appointed that would overturn Roe v. Wade. If this happens, the states could go back to decided whether or not they want abortion legalized. Multiple states already have laws on the books stating the second roe v. wade is ever overturned, abortions are illegal again, so this isn’t a hypothetical. If the case is overturned, you can likely expect most of America’s red states to make abortions illegal. It would likely be a full ban, but only in our rural/southern regions. Blue states would almost certainly not have abortions banned.
It’s unclear what the current status of this plan is. While there is currently a conservative majority, most court watchers think it’s unlikely Roberts (our current chief justice) would let the court do something as controversial as this… but who can say? Suffice it to say, it’s unlikely to happen within the next year, although I guess it’s a possibility if we see another Trump administration.
The other way that they’re trying to “ban” abortions is by adding regulation to providers and facilities of abortions. Stuff like, updating building code requirements in ways that the existing facilities can’t accommodate, adding licencing requirements that current providers don’t need/can’t get, stuff like that. Basically keeping abortions “legal” but effectively making it so that they can’t be performed. Again, this is only happening in Red States.
It’s also working, kind of. As far as I remember (can’t immediately find a good source) there are now around a dozen or so states where you pretty much can’t get an abortion in-state. Sure, if you have money you could travel, but that turns access to abortion into a class issue, which only pisses people off more.
So, the current state of pro-choice activism is, trying to oppose the states efforts to “soft ban” abortion, trying to ensure that the supreme court doesn’t overturn Roe V. Wade.
This hasn’t been my perspective, but maybe I’ve got blinders on. I can say for a fact I haven’t heard anyone saying “I want to have your abortion.”
If I had to critique the left’s recent abortion activism it’s that they draw their primary support (funding, political support and volunteers) from blue states where there is no serious chance that abortion efforts will ever be imposed. This means that the overall feeling of the movement is less, “we’re working together for justice” and more “we can’t let those evil fundies accomplish their goals.”
The other way that they’re trying to “ban” abortions is by adding regulation to providers and facilities of abortions. Stuff like, updating building code requirements in ways that the existing facilities can’t accommodate, adding licencing requirements that current providers don’t need/can’t get, stuff like that.
That’s true. On the other hand, there is a risk (even though very low) of mortality with legal abortion, and if your patient is the 1 in 100,000 who gets complications after or during the procedure, being able to get them out of the clinic and into a hospital is vital.
I think you underestimate the effect of the Kermit Gosnell case on pro-life opinions, where the hideous conditions his clinics were permitted to operate under, because nobody wanted to investigate too closely in the name of “we need to keep abortion provision going”, really shocked a lot of people.
Looking at the various tables (which don’t completely line up with each other), it appears that the greatest risks are for “dilation and evacuation” with gestational age greater than 13 weeks. Another chart shows a much higher risk for those with gestational age of greater-or-equal-to 18 weeks of age. But this involves a lot of co-founders. For example, if DnE isn’t performed on lower gestational ages, maybe it’s the procedure. Or if it is, it’s the gestational age. And this doesn’t separate the cases of “abortion because I decided pregnancy is crimping my style” from “abortion because I’ll die if I don’t”.
Another issue: I’m uncertain exactly how “admitting privileges” are supposed to actually address these problems. The biggest issue for providers is to recognize a problem and address it in a timely fashion. For example, about half of the deaths listed are from infection. Infection isn’t going to kill someone in 30 minutes. This involves some combination of malpractice, bad follow-up and bad luck. Someone who develops an infection can go to pretty much any emergency room for evaluation and treatment. But those are risks which are associated with *any* procedure. And keeping everybody in the hospital for a while probably increases the likelihood of mortality from acquiring other infections.
Exactly the same thing happens with regard to gun rights where I live. The city of San Jose imposes rules designed to make it more expensive and less convenient to own firearms, and the people who come to the City Council meeting to testify in favor offer arguments against gun ownership that have nothing to do with those rules.
It depends how far you are from a state where they are not trying to suppress abortion. Even poor people in the U.S. are likely to own cars, or have friends who do.
There are definitely some on the right, including possibly myself, who think that the equal protection clause means that murder laws can not differentiate by the age of the victim, (particularly so as to make penalties lighter for murdering victims that have more time expected to live). Thus any states that outlaw murder, must outlaw it for all classes of victims regardless of age.
This position however is far less common than one would expect.
I have an old article on the general issue of characteristics of the victim, not in the abortion context, that you might find of interest.
That was quite interesting thank you
Think of California and the problems there. Gay marriage was legal, and then it wasn’t, and then it was again. In the interim, all the protests were about people who had gotten married when it was legal and now what about them – were they still married, weren’t they married, what was the situation?
If civil same-sex marriage is declared illegal, then does that nullify all the marriages that took place in the meantime? What about divorces, child custody, and so on? It’s too much of a mess.
From a religious standpoint, if gay marriage is only a civil contract, then gay couples are no better or worse off than they were before; they are still living in sin by co-habiting whether that has the civil contract or not. The legal effects can be thrashed out in court (civil partnerships, for example, could still exist). EDIT: As pointed out in other comments, the main problem would be that okay, gay marriage is civil marriage like same-sex civil marriage, if that is what the State decides is legal, that’s fine. Just don’t go around shopping for legal cases to force bakeries or churches to declare they recognise your marriage when they don’t on religious grounds – going to a string of different bakeries until you find the one that says “sorry, we don’t bake wedding cakes for gay weddings but we’ll sell you any other kind of a cake” and then taking them to court seems too much to contradict the pre-legalisation argument that “gay marriage will have no effect on you at all!”
Abortion can’t be undone in the same way – you can’t “un-abort” by making abortion illegal. You can only prevent future abortions. And this is a matter of ‘what is the greater evil? murder or sexual immorality?’, so “why don’t conservatives still fight over gay marriage as much as abortion” is (a) that battle has been lost with the greater losses on marriage and sexual morality (b) pick your battles (c) abortion is seen as much graver than legal permission to live together (d) it’s entirely possible for someone to be pro-equal marriage rights and anti-abortion.
EDIT: And if I’m being snide about it, I’d like to ask the reverse question: why are liberals coming out as “I don’t care if Candidate is a sexual harasser/abuser/rapist as long as he keeps abortion legal”? Why the sudden silence on rape being the ultimate evil? What is so special about abortion as a cause?
The thing is, the perspective you’re describing here doesn’t match what I see on the ground and I’m trying to figure out if I’m just blind to it or if it doesn’t exist.
I’m not asking the question, “why don’t conservatives still fight over gay marriage as much as abortion” – if I saw conservatives fighting at all go back to disallowing gay marriage, or even acknowledging it as a goal they’d like to eventually achieve I would perfectly understand why they would still choose to prioritize abortion over it as a topic. That’s just simple prioritization/strategy.
In fact, your addition kind of makes this point. Even people who think a certain candidate has a bad past are normally walking into it with eyes open, “A yes, this person did/thinks/is bad, but he’s a necessary evil.” I don’t see this from the right on Gay Marriage.
I guess my question boils down to, if conservatives won every election, packed the supreme court and could implement and societal changes they wanted, would banning gay marriage or changing it into a state-recognized civil contract that’s equivalent to but explicitly not marriage still be a goal, or has that dropped off the dream list?
would banning gay marriage or changing it into a state-recognized civil contract that’s equivalent to but explicitly not marriage
I don’t know about American conservatives. My own opinion, for my own country as well, is that civil marriage is civil marriage and I’m cynical enough about the state of marriage that my view (prior to the legalisation campaign in my own country) was “sure, why not permit civil marriage? marriage as it has been rendered now is so weakened that it’s just legal shacking-up with some tax advantages, and as long as nobody is arguing that this is sacramental marriage or that churches should be forced to officiate same-sex marriages, I don’t care”.
The legalisation campaign in my own country changed that “meh, whatever” indifference to boiling hatred “HELL NO!” because they were pushing not for the ostensible reform of the law they claimed to want (“extend civil marriage to same-sex couples”) but were very much phrasing it as “this new form of marriage is totally and completely the same as traditional marriage and if you say otherwise it’s because you’re a bigot and a hater and a homophobe” and mawkish appeals to “it’s about love” where the implication was no gay person would ever be permitted to fall in love and have a romantic partner if they couldn’t get married. The fact that nothing was stopping Steve and Barry from living together just like Jane and Terrence were didn’t get mentioned; this was trying to use the cause of marriage equality as a bludgeon to change societal attitudes and crowbar acceptance of homosexuality as normal and ordinary and Just Like You Straights and that annoyed me. EDIT: Let me clarify something; I never denied that Steve and Barry couldn’t go down to the council offices and have a registry office civil marriage the way Jane and Terrence could if they decided to regularise their situation, and I’d have been happy if it was no more than that. But the campaigns on TV, radio, outdoor advertising, etc. were relentlessly “Steve and Barry are doomed to loveless celibacy and loneliness for life if they can’t get civilly married! Not even a hand to hold or a kiss!” which made me go “Oh come the fuck off it”.
To be fair though, basing an appeal for change in the law on romantic grounds rather than rational ones was an appeal always doomed to failure when it came to a staunch aromantic 🙂
(It particularly annoyed me because the same activists were running off at the mouth about how much better, more talented, more everything LGBT people were by comparison with straight people, but I understood how that worked; when you feel that you are a disapproved minority, you need to do the “ACKSHULLY all the great geniuses and creative people you admire were ONE OF OURS not ONE OF YOURS” thing in order to prop up your psychic economy).
An appeal to natural justice for equitable treatment? I was willing to entertain that and even vote “yes”. A beating-over-the-head message that LGBT was the superior lifestyle and this new form of civil marriage was exactly the same in every detail as forms of marriage up to now, and if you don’t agree that 2+2=5 when Big Brother tells you this is so, you are the bad person who needs to be shunned? That raised my hackles.
Would I, if the balance of power shifted, roll it back so that there is no same-sex civil marriage? The vindictive part of me goes “yes” but the centrist (horrors!) part of me says “c’mon, we have to live together, let them have the civil form so long as nobody has to offer the pinch of incense to Caesar about it”.
@Deiseach
Yet it implies that the losers don’t deserve that kind of treatment, which…a lot of people probably actually believe, even if they would never say so.
There’s a considerable difference in urgency and immediacy between the two issues. If you’re an abortion opponent it’s clear to you in each instance that the killing of this child is an evil, regardless of anything else that happens. While with gay marriage, all you’ve got is a vague intuition that allowing them will undermine “real” marriages somehow. I suspect that the opponents were ultimately no more able to articulate the somehow to themselves or to each other, then they were to the rest of us.
While with gay marriage, all you’ve got is a vague intuition that allowing them will undermine “real” marriages somehow.
It’s certainly one more step on the way towards legal polygamy (polyandry/polygyny, take your pick). If sex is not relevant to marriage, what is sacred about number? If now same-sex couples can marry, and it’s the same as opposite-sex couples, why the restriction to the magic number of two?
Divorce, etc. has weakened “real” marriage, but I don’t think it can be denied that legalising same-sex marriage meant a real and huge re-definition of what marriage was or how it is constructed, so that as I said, what’s so sacred about the number of spouses now?
You take it for granted that there should be something sacred about number of spouses.
Polygyny was an accepted part of the other two major Abrahamic religions for a very long time, although Judaism eventually abandoned it. It was, I believe, openly part of Christian practice in the early centuries, and de facto for much longer. Polyandry is much rarer.
What are the strong arguments against either?
As I’ve said on SSC before, polygyny is not strictly contrary to the natural law the way that same-sex marriage is. But it does seem to be a bad idea, because it’s impractical and tends to have bad effects on society and on the marital union itself. It is, you could say, in tension with natural law, so it’s not surprising it was eventually prohibited.
(For Catholics at least marriage as a sacrament is exclusive, by analogy to Christ’s relationship with the Church. So the Church will in any case not be practicing polygyny. Therefore it is literally true there is something sacred about the number. 🙂 )
The spousal exemption to the inheritance tax.
Yeah, the necessary adjustments to institutions plural entails is the big hurdle for me. Aesthetically Thrupples and beyond seem very cool to me, but I’m cautious surrounding legalizing plural marriage simply because I’m not sure how that would work and what loopholes that would open. Seems calloused when I talk to my friend who is in one, dealing with the ramifications of only being able to marry one of her partners, but that’s how I feel.
Indeed, I’d say easy divorce has done far more damage to traditional marriage than gay marriage could ever do.
+1, I say as a Christian who opposes both.
My impression from being an active member of a fairly liberal Catholic parish (blue state, English-speakers mostly from the educated professional classes) is that there is *way* more deep and widespread moral opposition to abortion than to gay marriage.
When talking about any Supreme Court case, there’s two separate issues which are rarely separated in the public discussion: the outcome of the particular case, and the logic of the particular case.
When people are talk about “Roe v. Wade”, what they usually care about is “abortion is legal” (yes, yes, Casey is controlling). But the best arguments against it aren’t policy arguments, they are that the internal logic of the case is basically an incoherent mess. And it’s not really possible to come up with a narrow result mandating access to legal abortion on other grounds while not vastly reshaping legal frameworks.
Obergefell vs.Hodges is *also* a logical mess (though a much smaller one with fewer wacky implications. However, it would have been just as easy for SCOTUS to have come down and said something like: “Adam can’t marry Steve on account of Steve’s sex. That’s sex discrimination which we’ve long held is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Ergo you have to allow Adam to marry Steve under the same terms as you’d allow Adam and Eve to get married.” The intellectual part of the social conservative movement would likely have accepted that argument. And since that’s an otherwise limited decision which accomplishes the same result it’s not really worth it.
But Roe is just plain trash and needs to go in one way or another.
The one issue is safe (if distasteful) to discuss in most settings. The other one can get you fired.
I don’t think any further explanation is necessary, though some good points have been raised above.
Conservative commentators don’t get fired for opposing gay marriage, I presume.
Their haste to surrender helped kill their credibility with the base, with the consequence that when they banded together to stop Trump, nobody listened. it also helped make the alt-right less outside Overton Window.
With the benefit of hindsight, what should societies have started doing five years ago to prepare for an incoming pandemic?
There are plenty of things we can point to but the bigger issue is that we’re not able to handle disasters. 100 years ago, the US dealt with it’s worst epidemic ever while simultaneously dealing with the fallout from a world war. We then had the Roaring 20’s. You can’t prepare for every contingency but some societies are more dynamic than others.
IMO, we’re much better able to handle disasters than before.
The coronavirus pandemic is not notable at all as far as historical disasters go. What makes it notable is how *rare* disasters are nowadays. We have much higher standards than in the past.
You’re mixing up two different things here. Yes, right now we are facing lesser threats than we did before. But we are less resilient to the disasters that do happen and there’s no guarantee that it won’t get worse. The US basically shrugged off the Spanish Flu. The relatively tame Covid 19 could very well cripple us*. We aren’t as dynamic as we used to be and that’s going to cause more problems down the road.
*I don’t think it ultimately will but it’s not that unlikely.
If the US “shrugged off” coronavirus the same way it dealt with Spanish Flu, ~2 million people would die.
No, I agree with you. We have better technology and systems to prevent millions from dying and we should absolutely take advantage of that. It’s just sad that we have a harder time bouncing back from disasters.
China for example shut down the country but they’ll probably emerge from this in a better position than Italy, because they are a more dynamic society. And that’s even with them completely botching their initial reaction.
And then we had the great depression.
Edit: Also it wasn’t ‘influenza then the roaring 20s’ it was ‘influenza then one of the sharpest recessions on record from 1920-1921, and then the roaring 20s’.
I like to describe that as the Great Depression that didn’t happen. Somehow, the popular perception of history doesn’t include the fact that the government took almost precisely the opposite policies to those followed first by Hoover and then by FDR, and employment was back up within two years.
We don’t get to do controlled experiments, and circumstances always differ from one case to another, but that’s at least some evidence.
This sounds interesting! Could you elaborate or point us somewhere where more information about this juxtaposition can be found?
I summarized the relevant data on my blog. I published another version in the Washington Times.
Thank you!
From the United States perspective:
Abolish the FDA. That way, we would’ve confirmed community transmission and been able to take action much sooner.
Bring PPE factories home to the United States. That way, we wouldn’t have gotten the short end when China (sensibly) appropriated its PPE production for its own needs.
At my airline we are required to have emergency action plans that dictate what actions to take in the event of an overdue aircraft, or any other common emergency. We run table-top exercises to refine it, but we try and make decisions before the real emergency, because in a real emergency it is difficult to think straight and easy to make bad decisions. The minutes after an aircraft is overdue are extremely important, with phone calls that have to be made on time, information collected, or people could die. So we have flow charts and checklists for what to do and we practice and refine them with mock scenarios.
I understand the military has scenarios like this that they run though all the time in order to be prepared for any eventuality. You don’t need to follow the plan, but planning for it gives a much better result.
My point here is that you need to plan your decisions before the crisis actually happens. For example, how contagious and damaging does a virus have to be before you close the borders? Before you declare martial law? Before lockdowns? Are you going to recommend people wear masks? These are things you want to figure out in quiet, unhurried rooms with no pressure from the media, terrified people, upcoming elections, politicians worried about saving face and their careers or foreign relations. And then you need to practice: get an epidemiologist and some smart people in to create a detailed scenario, try and use your response plan and see where it fails and where it works.
That’s important stuff that we are required to do in order to run an airline. So why aren’t politicians required to do it? Why is that if you fly a few thousand passengers a year you are required to take preparation for disasters seriously, with plans in place and training records to verify that everyone in your organisation has been through the training, but politicians in charge of much bigger things don’t need any training or response plans at all?
I guess for the same reason that getting a DUI disqualifies you from being a teacher but not president.
Why is that if you fly a few thousand passengers a year you are required to take preparation for disasters seriously, with plans in place and training records to verify that everyone in your organisation has been through the training, but politicians in charge of much bigger things don’t need any training or response plans at all?
An airline is expected to prepare for disasters involving air travel. You’re not expected to prepare for plague, famine or everyone working in tulip growing losing their jobs. If the creek rises and Louisiana gets flooded, that’s not your problem. There’s a discrete set of problems that can be assigned to “this will harm airlines” that can be set out and prepared for.
Politicians would have to prepare for a range of disasters from fire, flood to meteor strikes, and if you prepare for every single one of them, it will take up time and money. People are complaining about “why weren’t there stockpiles of masks and PPE sitting in government warehouses from the last pandemic?” but I’m sure that if we had such stockpiles sitting around since 2010 and the swine flu, by at least five years in people would be complaining about the expense and lack of need, and somebody would be accusing the sitting government or the previous one of using this as an opportunity to funnel lucrative government contracts to friends/clients “and instead all this money spent on warehousing masks that nobody wants or needs could be going to [pick cause of your choice – housing, education, trans rights, clean water for Flint, etc.]”.
Now, if anyone can forecast to me what the next Big Disaster is going to be and what we should be doing for it, go for it! In 2010 swine flu was going to kill everyone, and then it didn’t, and then a little while after that we all forgot about viral pandemics and worried about other problems. We could prepare for “another Covid-19” but what if the Big Disaster is something different?
Covering the big X-risks would be a good start.
This is all largely the CDC’s job of course, but it seemed many of the decisions around the world fell to politicians.
Governments have public health agencies/departments for exactly this reason. You don’t expect the Pentagon to plan for pandemics; that’s the CDC. You don’t expect either one to plan for floods–go talk to the Army Corps of Engineers. And so on.
I can’t speak to America, but here in the UK we absolutely did have pandemic plans, and they had been relatively recently wargamed. For various reasons (including the assumption that the pandemic would be a flu not a coronavirus) that does not appear to have translated into a very effective response. I imagine the French Army wargamed the Dyle Plan, too.
Copy whatever Taiwan did after SARS. Mask stockpiles, creating infrastructure for contact tracing, airport screening and quarantining. Creating a standard response plan in advance to avoid the chaos of 50 independent states each with their own plan.
More speculative – have a coordinated novel vaccine development team? It seems really silly to have 20+ different plans going at the same time. Maybe 4 – 10 is reasonable since we don’t know which one will work, but with better consolidation I wonder if we could get a vaccine on the order of months instead of years. It will be frustrating if they are so late that we never know which approaches were even effective.
Fully fund the Global Virome Project and efforts to create broad-spectrum antivirals and platform vaccines.
Fully stock the strategic national PPE stockpile. Assess and correct places where strategic equipment production lacks redundancy (i.e. identify “single points of failure” where one or two key suppliers becoming unavailable would lead to mass-life-threatening shortages). Redundancy and buffer stockpiles, not insourcing, are the important goals here.
Strip the FDA of enforcement powers; make it a research and advisory agency only.
Invest heavily in mechanisms to reduce viral transmission in large indoor spaces: everything from copper-coating high touch surfaces to using UV to disinfect air in the ventilation loop.
I’m going to start with things that are useful even without knowing what specific virus would be coming and which year.
ECONOMICALLY
1) Every company submits, along with its annual taxes, a list of what they need to be put on life support. At a minimum, this is rent + payroll. When we have to shut a business down, we can give companies this much money. Some companies might be plausibly turned to half-strength, so see what’s necessary for that as well.
2) Be prepared to shift employment significantly across sectors. We might suddenly not need a hundred thousand waiters at the same time we need a hundred thousand nursing home workers. Think of how we shape curves to encourage/reward people working in those essential positions. (It might be enough to say “the free market will do it” but recognize that and make sure you aren’t stopping it.)
3) Companies over a certain size or where outbreaks more likely (prisons, meat-packing, nursing homes) are required to have plans to move workers into shifts. If someone on shift A gets infected, you know for a fact that he only interacted with workers on shift A, so you send all the workers on shift A somewhere (see below) to get tested and bring in another shift. You can’t use a time-shift model for nursing homes because the elderly are a vector, but you can pool workers to elderly. Something like this for schools, too.
4) As much as we can, pre-categorize companies based on what we need them to do in certain kinds of shutdowns, so we can target aid at them better. This helps with all the above.
MEDICAL SYSTEM
5) Every hospital needs to have, on hand in immediate physical possession, a 7-day supply of all the PPE they would need if some serious virus hits.
6) Make sure each state has their own back-up supply.
7) Hey, restock the Federal supply.
SCIENCE
8) Study the ever-living hell out of each novel coronavirus and flu virus, since those are the most likely candidates for a new pandemic. Come up with vaccine candidates and treatment candidates, even if the disease is under control or gone by the time they are ready. Do what you can in computer simulations and animal testing. We want to increase the total medical knowledge here.
9) Do the above for Ebola and MERS, too. They are unlikely to be the next pandemic but they are vicious enough that you want to study them.
10) Notice that Asian countries use face masks and do whatever science is necessary to study this.
STOPPING SPREAD
11) Have a plan for how you can quickly activate medical screenings at the border. You need to be able to activate this quickly. The worst case is telling people “the border closes in 3 days, so please surge the border now.”
12) Have a plan for how you can announce that every incoming foreign national goes into some kind of quarantine for X days, while US citizens get put into home quarantine. Like the previous item, you don’t want a giant fucking queue of potentially sick people at your border, so figure out how you can put them in rooms while you sort things out.
13) Share these methodologies with other countries. If we slow Europe from catching something from Asia that slows us from catching it from Europe.
13.1) Consider outbound health screens. They won’t help the US directly, but if we show how to do it right we can pressure other countries to follow suit,.
14) Prepare hand sanitizer stations or portable hand-washing stations, so we can put them in any place people gather. If I’m at the airport, I shouldn’t have to go into a bathroom to wash my hands.
15) Figure out how to designate certain hotels as “very clean” and others as “mostly clean” and others as “dirty.” Obviously don’t use those words. But we want workers in places where things are very sensitive (like nursing homes) to have a place where things are kept very clean and these workers can go home for the night and get fed. “Mostly clean” is for places like meat-packing plants, where we are working to reduce the likelihood of incoming contagion but the other mitigation steps mean they aren’t super-critical. Or maybe for people where “they are suspected of having had contact, but we don’t know what the test is yet.” (This might need a 4th category.) “Dirty” is for people who have tested positive but aren’t sick enough to be in a hospital. Send them there so they don’t infect family members. You obviously pay for these people to have room-service meals. Figure out, ahead of time, a way to thoroughly clean and indemnify any hotel that housed sick people when this is all over, so that hotels feel the least pressure possible to resist holding sick people.
16) The above but especially for nursing homes.
17) Well before any problem occurs, emphasize that people should be stocked up on emergency supplies. Everyone should have enough to live without public utilities for 3 days, whatever that means in your area. Look at things that have long shelf-lives when coming up with lists of essentials for a variety of disasters.
TECHNOLOGY
18) Standardize on one proximity-tracing app. Have the privacy people look at it closely, while we have time to calmly analyze it. Be prepared to roll it out.
All that is before you even realize “hey, there’s a novel virus going around in some foreign country.” Once you get that, you can start turning up the dial on specific mitigations. Many of these should get activated every few years just for ordinary flu season.
Thought of a few more, unsorted
19) Look at global supply chains. Ask “if it hits the fan, not necessarily due to anyone being hostile but tragedy hitting, and other countries will not / can not supply us, what essentials do we need in this country?” Build up stockpiles and build domestic factories. Find some way of dealing with the extra product we make that doesn’t further destroy markets (i.e. no dumping it on Africa).
20) Encourage a bit less just-in-time-ness for the economy. There is probably some tax lever that can be adjusted to make inventories slightly less expensive to maintain.
21) Create a universal sick-time benefit, even if we only activate it at certain times, to make sure that people are staying home if ill from jobs with significant contact with other people.
22) Like Secretary Azar tried to do early this year, fund the ability to do random sampling at airports and other transportation hubs. This should probably run all the time anyway.
23) Have a plan for how we screen for domestic air travel.
24) Make airplanes have more personal airspace to stop viruses from spreading inside the plane. (This one may pay off just from reduced flu cases.)
25) Do the controlled research into how coughs/sneezes/colds spread. (Might get rolled into #10.)
Longer attention spans for politicians, among other things. Probably a derivative of median voter attention spans.
The Feds had the Strategic National Stockpile (under a couple of names) since 1999, used and then added to after 9/11, then expanded again in 2005-2006 to add large numbers of N95 respirators (at which time the Bush Administration published a pandemic report which encouraged States to create their own stockpiles as well, which many States did over the following year or so). “75 percent of N95 respirators and 25 percent of face masks contained in the CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile (∼100 million products) were deployed for use in health care settings over the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response” – From a 2017 study. Some were also used for Ebola in in 2014 and Zika in 2016, and for various hurricane relief efforts over the years, but after various budget battles, the Obama Administration never replenished the Stockpile contents which had been used up.
For example, after the Avian flu in 2006, Schwarzenegger in CA (while the State had extra cash) spent hundreds of million off dollars preparing for pandemics by creating mobile hospitals and stockpiles of emergency supplies: 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds. Some were used for the Swine flu in 2009, but in 2011, facing deficits post-recession, Brown cut the $5.8 M/year required maintain it all from the budget.
This is almost an illustration of the problem with elected political leaders making policies with long-term costs and short-term benefits. Why not burn through the stockpile and never replenish it–not likely it’ll come due on *my* watch. Why not negotiate with civil servants to have lower-than-market salaries but extra-generous pensions? Some other governor decades from now will have to come up with the money for that.
At this point, calling yourself a conformist is one of the most rebellious things you can say. Who does that?
Does reciting a creed on Sundays count?
It doesn’t have to be uncritical or habitual, obviously, but it can be.
The kicker is that almost everything we do is about conforming but you aren’t supposed to admit that. It’s the label “conformist” that really sets people off.
According to Aristotle, the ancient Greek word for “ambition” was considered a bad thing, but so was the lack of same. The translation I read uses “proper ambition” as the virtue term.
I think this could be one of those situation where a term names both the appropriate and excessive tendencies in some area.
I’m seeing “centrist” being used as an insult/disparagment; apparently being in the centre is just the same thing as being right-wing/conservative which is exactly the same as fascist/alt-right!
At this point it’s mainly stupid kids saying it (note: to me, if you’re 20+, you are still a kid) but the trend worries me. Moderation is now a bad thing? Not being gung-ho for the progressive side means you are Evil? Who is telling them this, because the shift to making “centrist” = “not on the right side of history, quisling, fellow traveller, doer of bad” has to be initiated and coming from somewhere. I may suspect it’s socialist activists doing it, but I don’t have anything more to go on there than “spider sense is tingling”.
Anybody else seen this?
Not convinced this is either a new or a one-sided thing as you make it out to be – DINO and RINO have been terms of abuse for decades, and the Democrats have just selected a centrist presidential candidate while the Republicans have very much not.
Yes, there are people on the moderately-far left who despise the centre left. In the UK, there are probably more of them than there are people on the moderately-far right who despise the centre-right, but in the US, I think it’s probably the other way around.
And, of course, there are plenty of people on the centre left/right who despise those further out than them.
This looks to me like singling out your outgroup for a criticism which, while it accurately applies to a lot of them, accurately applies to a lot of everyone else too.
This looks to me like singling out your outgroup for a criticism which, while it accurately applies to a lot of them, accurately applies to a lot of everyone else too.
Well, my lovey, when I see people on the right side of the discussion using the term in the same way, I’ll certainly mention it. How else would you describe, save as liberal or even progressive, people who use “centrist” as a criticism and who have an entire laundry list of Good Causes You Need To Be On The Right Side Of History Of, which is why they are complaining about centrism and centrists as Insufficiently Zealous For The Cause?
It stood out to me precisely because it was “centrist” the term being used. Give me right-aligned examples of “centrist” used as meaning A Bad Thing and I’ll happily add them on to the list.
My outgroup is not the same as what you may think it is. My point is that “centrist” or “centrism” is what used to be called temperate or even moderate, and moderation is a good thing. Political polarisation of all stripes, extra right or extra left, is not good. We have to live together, so being able to compromise and be temperate is a good thing, save that now amongst some youngsters it seems that that is not understood.
Not gonna speak on what you’re taking umbrage here about, but rest assured, the part you’re not getting umbered over is very true: what you’re observing is both real and almost entirely a result of very straightforward resentments coming out of the Dem Primary. It doesn’t tell you anything about any cultural trends that you couldn’t have already learned from that primary’s trajectory (namely, that there is an overwhelmingly young dem-soc/soc-dem movement in America that views the center-left-liberal Democratic Party establishment as political rivals, the feeling is extremely mutual, and then when the factions came into conflict the former lost)
Different words take off in different subcultures. The extremely online far-left likes to call the moderate left “centrists.” The extremely online far-right prefers to call the moderate right “cuckservatives.”
Don’t be silly. Why would the right side of the discussion use the term “centrist”? That’s what they invented the term “cuck” for. As in:
The white alpha male must spread his seed! But his sacred duty to do so is being hindered by the evil baby-killing feminists and the evil insidious islamists! And our useless politicians won’t lift a finger to stop them, because they’re CUCKS who secretly get off on being demasculated!
Are you seriously going to tell me that that doesn’t sound familiar? Jesus, Donald Trump ran and got elected mainly on the basis of him being a REAL MAN who was going to piss vigorously on the weasely liberals trying to feminise red-blooded American society and all the morally inferior foreigners trying to sneak in and steal Americans’ stuff, as opposed to all those cucky mainstream Republicans who only pretended to be against that sort of thing.
Because if you missed all of that, I hereby submit the theory that your spider sense is actually more of a liberals-doing-things-I-can-get-in-a-snit-about sense.
I thought the whole “cuck” thing was more like “if you’re going to give away your country to foreigners, might as well let them fuck your wife while you’re at it.”
Why would the right side of the discussion use the term “centrist”? That’s what they invented the term “cuck” for.
Let’s do this one last time and then I’m calling it a day.
Yes, I’ve seen people using the term “cucks”. However, the people I’ve seen using it were people like you, doing a mockery/parody of “there are people out there on the right going on about cuckservatives”. I thought such usage was stupid, whether it was by mockers or by actual far-right people.
What I wanted to know was “has anyone else seen ‘centrist’ used as a pejorative?” and, as a sub-clause of that, “I’ve sseen it used by what I’d broadly term the left”. I was curious to know if it was in wider use.
So what you are tellilng me is “No, only the left use ‘centrist’ as a pejorative”. Thanks for that, it’s all I wanted to know.
Based on your expressed values, I would have thought you’d consider the emergence of “centrist” as a positive sign, or at least much preferable to the likely alternatives.
Suppose that we could take a census of just the people you’d describe as “reasonable” or “moderate,” and we plotted their positions on on a left-right spectrum. We’d get a spectrum from “moderate left” to “moderate right.” In American terms, it would go “Mainstream Democrat, Marginal Democrat, Equipoise, Marginal Republican, Mainstream Republican.” Taking the Outside View, some people might argue that “equipoise” is almost certainly the best place be. Personally, I think there’s something to the idea of “moderation in everything, including moderation.” On the Outside View, I think there’s about an equally good chance that any of these positions could be the sweet spot. They certainly all deserve a voice in the conversation.
On the Inside View, though, I have to live in the spot where I am, which is “Mainstream Democrat.” Looking around from where I actually live, I see that there are some people who are too far to the left, but there are also people who are not, in my opinion, Left enough. It’s inevitable that I’m going to need a way to describe them. Whatever I choose will end up feeling pejorative, because from my perspective it’s not good to be too moderate.
It seems to me there are logically only two possibilities, here — I can either precisely call out just our point of disagreement, or I can imagine up other defects and try to associate them with moderation. I could call the marginal democrats “Democrats In Name Only,” implying that moderation is a form of disloyalty. I could call them “Democucks” to imply that moderation is a form of weakness or inadequacy. I could call them “Yellow Dog Democrats” to imply that moderation is a form of cowardice.
It seems to me, on balance, that when I encounter someone who seems to me to be too moderate, that I pay more honor to the virtue of moderation by naming precisely the point of disagreement between them and I — that they are, in my opinion, too close to the center of the public (and thus too far from the center of my party).
Baerad:
What fraction of Trump voters/supporters do you think would agree with your characterization of their principles?
That’s not what “Yellow Dog Democrat” means.
@David Friedman
True, but I’ve come across multiple young progressives of my acquaintance using the term in the sense of “cowardly and excessively moderate/compromise-ready liberal”, so it’s entirely possible it’s starting to shift.
The same way you have a ton of left-wing folks these days using “neoliberal” as a sneer word in a way almost totally disconnected from its original definition.
The most prominent examples of this which regularly show up on my radar are a product of the socialist left.
See for example: https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1229208843336507397?lang=en and the replies. Or maybe do yourself a favor and don’t look at the replies. 🙂
How about a song about a guy who doesn’t want to be a conformist but acknowledges he is one, and justifies his conformity with some pretty good excuses?
Actual conformists will call themselves whatever you tell them to call themselves, and all you have to do is to call yourself average (while simultaneously thinking yourself above average in the important ways and dismiss the ways in which you are obviously below average).
This is fairly normal in societies where the nonconformist side of things wins out. For example, after the Whigs dominated British politics in the 18th century it became fashionable among certain youth to imitate the non-resistance movement and obedience to authority popular with the royalists of the 17th.
My mental model is that there are a certain number of natural conformists or non-conformists: people are mostly on a spectrum of conformity. These usually conflict and one usually wins, which makes the other one “edgy” regardless of which one wins. This makes it more attractive to young people seeking to be edgy. This is true even if the nonconformists win, in which case conformity will become countercultural.
And of course, conformity and non-conformity don’t map well into political philosophy. Liberal conformism is absolutely a thing as is conservative nonconformism.
I don’t actually see it as conformism vs nonconformism. Non-conformity is a homeless guy jerking off in the subway. It’s about aesthetics. The 60’s won, and we’ve been living in that shadow since. They were actually rebelling against something, and we’ve taken the aesthetic of that decade and rolled with it. It doesn’t actually make any sense anymore but that doesn’t prevent people from play acting. Call them the cargo cult revolutionaries. No one likes edgy for the sake of edgy. It’s about respecting who we think has the proper authority and disrespecting those who don’t.
“I’m a nonconformist, just like all my friends.”
@Wrong Species >
Aspiring conformist (if conformist = “Square”)
As I said elsewhere (responding to a piece by a friend of decaded ago comparing “Hippies” and “Punks”):
And on that note;
Q: What’s the difference between a ‘punk’ and a ‘hipster’?
A: Around five to eight years.
Q: What’s the difference between a ‘hipster’ and a ‘square’?
A: Around fifty thousand dollars a year.
Getting to be a square was damnably hard, “hip” was far, far easier.
I’ve seen lots of criticism of “hipsters” lately and I’ve never understood it, AFAICT they’re just making the best of limited options and engender pity in me.
> square
I prefer to think of myself as a Platonic quadrilateral.
> hipsters
Better referred to as poverty-chique?
Don’t forget, it’s hip to be square 🙂
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-bizarre-species-twitter.html?fbclid=IwAR1VuRbT9rtKSDmPlU-hF3n1sr5G8v4oAM8oThGiD-PwrPcy4pnv0Y_axyA
This is really cool– someone posted a picture of a millipede on twitter. It had little dots which a scientist thought might be fungus, so she checked preserved millipedes in a collection. Behold! A previously unknown parasite!
This is remarkable for social media leading to checking stored data to get more information. Also evidence that we still need humans in the loop– we’re not even close to getting computer programs which can look for significance to that extent.
How far would AGI have to get to have some ability to notice anomolies?
Just a note on how my brain works and wondering how true this is for others on this board:
I can rarely listen to someone talking about a subject that I have an opinion on without my brain cranking up the internal monologue and I quickly tune people out (or have to turn what I am listening to off if its digital), but once in a while I can listen to something and have my internal monologue on and processing along with the audio and I almost feel high for that brief period.
Sounds like flow. Is the high similar to what you can get in e.g. rhythmic games (guitar hero) when running through a difficult section, or an arcade game when you get far further than usual, you’re on your last life and you just keep going despite the odds?
FWIW, I can’t listen to lectures/talks because they are inevitably too slow and my thoughts go off on a tangent. Sometimes they are too fast and instead I lose track of their train of thought and the outcome is the same. Haven’t unlocked your secret of flow yet :/
There should be something like those 1x / 2x / 4x game speed buttons (e.g. in Stellaris or Crusader Kings) but for real life.
I’ve been recording audiobook versions of some of my books, mostly using Sound Studio, a free audio program. I discovered that one of the things it can do is to slow down or speed up speech, without changing the tone. So if I notice that I was speaking a little too fast in a passage, I apply a tempo of .9 and it slows down a little.
You should be able to do the same thing with a recording of a talk. I doubt that changing it by a factor of two in either direction would work, although I haven’t tried it, but more modest shifts should.
1.5 is usually listenable, unless you’re watching a horse auction.
Youtube has this feature, and it’s quite useful, especially for catching up with livestreams.
I’ve been watching pretty much everything at 2x speed ever since Youtube added that feature, and I wish they would add higher settings. In my experience 2.5-3x seems to be about the limit where people become difficult to understand. It also depends on how fast and information dense the video was to begin with of course.
I can’t stand listening to people lecture at normal speed. It’s just so slow.
We need a plugin that implements Carykh’s idea of speeding up or completelt removing the silent bits. SO it’s still compreshensible but there’s no pauses.
Yeah I’ve been doing that with recordings, but it’s still pretty inefficient – above 1.3x-1.5x it’s getting difficult to parse speech sometimes. Pitch correction helps a bit. Still, I’d rather just read it, which is easily 3-4x speed compared to listening to a lecture.
Also it’s impossible with live lectures and conference talks. Covid has been a blessing in this regard, as finally everything is recorded.
I speed up Youtube and noticed that it (rather logically) depends on the speed tempo of the speaker. Some speak very fast naturally, while others speak really slow normally. The latter at 1.5x feels like many people at 1x.
I’ve never gotten this from music (I was terrible for a few years and gave it up asap) or sports (slightly less terrible), and not really video games (only ever played SC and SC2 and was not very good though much less terrible). I can remember one night of chess, and several nights of poker (but not many) when I used to play where I felt that sort of immersion.