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Random coronavirus comment:
There’s apparently one lab doing RNA tests for C19 based on saliva, rather than nasal or throat swabs. The claim I’ve heard is that they’re about equally accurate.
If so, we need to get the saliva test into widespread use as soon as possible. As a practical matter, widespread screening with nasal or throat swabs is going to meet with a lot of resistance (it’s really unpleasant), and is going to require trained people doing the tests. Turning this into something anyone can do by themselves will make using the tests to screen people enormously more practical. If you’re imagining making everyone take an RNA test to come to work/school/etc., then the saliva-based test is going to just go about ten times as smoothly.
Who’s making the claim that “they’re about equally accurate”? If the nasal swabs are so deep, and still miss something like 30% of cases (which is what I’ve generally heard) then it would be surprising to me if mere saliva tests could work as effectively, unless they’re using a very different method of detecting RNA.
This article was the first decent source that popped up on my Google search. The test has been approved by the FDA.
> Who’s making the claim that “they’re about equally accurate”?
Christian Drosten, eg. in his podcast.
A question I’ve been wondering about due to the obvious recent current events is: is private enforcement of norms and even laws desirable? How much has this changed over time and due to what?
This covers a range of behaviors, and let’s allow for some exceptions, of course, but basically I think society is better when people attempt to correct minor infractions without involving authorities. The community norms should of course not be unjustifiably injurious to personal freedom, but that goes in any case.
Say your neighbor is playing their music loudly at night. Or you see some young boys throwing rocks at the windows of a vacant home. Or someone is ignoring the “please allow six feet in the store aisles” signs in your local store. Are we at a point where your only alternatives are “ignore it” and “call authorities”?
Manners and approach matter a great deal. Have we lost conflict resolution skills or respect for elders? The two newsworthy recent examples point towards to the former.
Or are we living under a patchwork of norms due to being a multi-cultural country? Supposedly one used to be able to discipline the neighbors kids upon catching them up to some youthful mischief. This seems wildly inadvisable now, all the more so if of a different race.
Or am I imaging a trend? In the past there was dueling and, it seems, a much greater acceptance of casual violence short of–but including the possibility of–injury. At the risk of having my testosterone levels questioned, I do appreciate going about my day with no fear or physical confrontation.
If I’m not imaging the change, I regret it. It would be preferable to have a response to the broad range of anti-social behaviors that don’t merit calling in armed agents of the state.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
Ok boomer. (I kid, but the question of who gets respect is essentially equivalent to the culture wars)
The novel solution is to use shaming on social media (aka twitter mobs), which even if everyone agrees on the principles (they don’t), are still subject to laws of network virality that dictate that punishment will be widely varying in an unpredictable way.
I think we absolutely still have this sort of thing in many cases. Most social norms work this way. You even get very clear private enforcement of illegal social norms. I think of how in Los Angeles, the social norm was that at a traffic light, when the light turns red, the two next cars waiting in the left turn lane would still go before the other direction started taking their green, and there was extensive debate in the local press whether two or three cars was the right number to do an illegal left on red.
I guess the question is whether these sorts of social norms persist due to *enforcement* or to some other sort of behavior modification. Maybe it’s shaming, or talking, or observing, or copying, or whatever. But the clearest phenomenon of the type you mention is that once we get to the level of applying physical force to someone to stop them from violating the norm, this used to be done by private citizens but is now done by armed agents of the state. I don’t think it’s so regrettable that this one kind of norm enforcement has been outsourced to government, given that we still have many other kinds that do lots of work.
Wow that’s fascinating. It was definitely the case in New Jersey when I was learning to drive in the ’70’s that it was a custom to allow the first left turner to go first before the people opposite would go straight. I remember mentioning this in the driver ed car when there were several kids in there and another teacher. The driver’s ed teacher was not at all pleased, and told me I should follow the law. That custom is definitely not the case now in Minnesota. I thought it had ended because of all the left arrows on traffic lights these days making it less necessary. But it seems it still happens in LA. Although you used the word “was,” is this no longer the case?
Private enforcement of norms is desirable, but only workable when it is also local. I can reason pretty well about what my local community will find acceptable. I cannot do so about every rando on the internet, who have contradictory norms anyway.
Totally agreed.
#Coronavirus
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/covid-19-patients-no-longer-infectious-11-days-after-getting-sick-research-shows?utm_source=emarsys&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ST_Newsletter_AM&utm_term=Covid-19+patients+no+longer+infectious+11+days+after+getting+sick%2C+research+shows&utm_content=24%2F05%2F2020
Could these non virulent fragments be having an affect on others’ immune systems, either contributing to asymptomatic cases or critical ones (or both one after the other)?
No. Viral RNA shedding is not going to cause any issues to anyone really.
This is not a new finding with respect to this coronavirus. Or most respiratory viruses really. Bit of a nothing article.
Huh.
Considering a country seems to changing its isolation durations, the study probably matters to some degree.
Sorry. Perhaps abrupt on my behalf.
I mean more studies are always useful and we never really change practice based on one study (with the exception of massive multi-centre RCTs or meta-analyses), so in a kind of tipping point sense at least for Singapore yeah it matters. But note that the article *does not* state they have changed protocols.
Since late February/early March we’ve pretty much had the clinical course of the disease reasonably well understood, especially with respect to the relationship between testing, viral load, symptoms and infectivity. As well as the clinical course in severe cases. We’ve also had the knowledge of rarely a person being an effective super-spreader and super-shedder. All the initial Chinese data on disease course and epidemiology has broadly held up and has been refined since. And I mean that in a very broad sense because we do learn a lot of new things everyday which can precipitate changes in management. The study the article mentions is broadly in line with what previous opinion on PCR testing in fully or partially recovered patients has been for a while now. I’m a bit glib perhaps because I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of exposure to that early data.
Fragmentary viral particles (probably) can’t reproduce, which makes it very unlikely that they would cause any kind of infection in others.
The practical problem caused by this is that a positive RNA test doesn’t mean you’re still contagious. That is, we will have people who have long since stopped being contagious but still aren’t allowed to travel/visit Grandma at the nursing home/come to work because they’re still shedding viral RNA and that means the test is positive and we don’t have a great way to tell if they’re still contagious. That’s not a *terrible* problem, but it will make life a little more difficult.
Does “two weeks after the end of symptoms,” for someone who was initially diagnosed with the virus, work as an alternative?
There is a long thin tail of infectious patients. Maybe three or four weeks to be safe?
I tried to watch “Fauda”, the Israeli TV series, and got through two episodes. I wanted to watch the series because seeing stuff set in Israel and hearing people speak Hebrew is something I enjoy, but I had to stop watching “Fauda” because the show is just so bad. OK, it’s not the worst show ever, but it’s at least one or two notches below what I consider good enough to spend my time on. The acting is pretty good, the action sequences (the few I saw) were reasonably well done, I don’t mind the shaky-cam look, the story is OK, the casting seemed fine, but the writing was predictable and cliche. And it just seemed like they kind of put it together on a very low budget and it showed.
So can anyone recommend an Israeli TV show from within the last 5 years that is (much much) better? Ideally it should be something that gives me a feel for what its setting is really like, the way “The Wire” gave me a feel for what the hood in Baltimore is really like.
I am surprised you thought Fauda was bad.
The writing is fairly realistic, in that it shows that there are good people on both sides but they are locked to a system that causes them to act terribly, and people become what they do. It conveys the atmosphere quite well.
You could complain about detail here and there, but overall the show is quite realistic in that no one ever wins, in fact there are no wins, both sides keep losing, all the time and the loses are bigger as time goes by.
I guess if you look at the writing as if it was a completely fictional show than it might disappoint. The reality is depressing and sad so the show is also depressing and sad.
Predictable and cliche is interesting, I’ve heard from a few people in (higher ranks of) the army saying that the show is about as realistic as can be without being a security issue.
Isn’t watched it myself
That’s cool to know. I just meant with the whole “legendary soldier gets dragged out of retirement and then gets obsessed with taking out this one bad guy” thing, and basically every bit of writing that hangs off of that.
If the U.S. violently split into two countries, and both got part of the nuclear weapons stockpile, wouldn’t MAD prevent a forcible reunification as happened in 1865?
Is there any reason to think that one side would risk nuclear annihilation to annex the other side?
The US nuclear weapons stockpile is very thoroughly, carefully, and expertly designed to be completely unusable to anyone but the Federal Government of the United States of America. No matter who has physical possession of the hardware. If you somehow break the Federal Government of the United States of America, the most likely outcome is that exactly one of the fragments retains the ability to use whatever nuclear weapons remain in that fragment’s physical possession. Two or more nuclear-capable fragments is extremely unlikely.
Well, you know, as long as no one actually breaks out the blueprints and starts bodging wires together. With physical access at best you’ve probably got a month or two before they’re usable as missiles (and probably sooner if you just want the warhead). That is assuming they ever actually changed the launch codes from 00000000, which they reputedly were for most of the Cold War. If that’s the case then you’ve got however long it takes to target Washington.
My understanding is that the whole “codes are 000000000” thing was in reference to a completely redundant system that was installed just for the sake of spending the money to install it.
But on the other hand, there was that one time a bunch of hippies just wandered in to the nuke warehouse…
If you “start bodging wires together”, the thermite charges embedded in the chips melt them to slag. I’m pretty sure that happens as soon as you open (or cut into) the case without the right codes, but of course the details are highly classified. If you think you’re then going to build your own trigger circuit with a bunch of Arduinos or whatnot, then that’s not going to work.
You could in principle completely dismantle the warhead and use the salvaged plutonium, etc, to build your own, but that’s more of a six-month project. And if you start down that path, the people with nuclear weapons that still work are going to stop you long before you finish. To the applause of pretty much the entire world outside your secessionist regime.
I highly recommend the plan where you instead make a point of not giving the other side any excuse to use its nuclear weapons against you.
But these devices have been probably been built no later than the 80s, don’t you think that somebody with government-level resources and modern technology would be able to reverse engineer them or defeat the tamperproofing within 6 months? Things that are supposedly secure usually aren’t given a sufficiently motivated and resourceful adversary.
There are plenty of still-unbroken ciphers that well predate the 1980s. More to the point, unexploded bombs with antitamper fuses are on every UXB expert’s “blow it in place, don’t even think of trying to defuse it” list no matter their age.
Things that are supposedly secured by experts are usually quite secure if the functionality and user base are sufficiently narrow, and the “anything can be hacked by a sufficiently motivated adversary” bit is an inappropriate generalization from experience with consumer-grade electronics and software. Which, yes, the military uses for a lot of things, but not for the innards of nuclear weapons.
Is this purely because you need the nuclear football to fire and there is only one nuclear football, or are there other mechanisms that also ensure this?
It’s not quite that centralized, because you don’t want the entire system to fail if a single-warhead decapitation strike takes out POTUS(*) and his football before they can react. But there are relatively few places that have the material capability to execute a nuclear attack independent of POTUS. All of them are strictly controlled, as are the communications channels by which they could deliver nuclear strike orders and codes. The two-man rule applies, and the men are chosen specifically for their absolute loyalty to the principles of “absolutely no nuking anybody without presidential authority” and “if in any doubt about who is president, clear that up absolutely unambiguously before unlocking the nukes”.
The most plausible case for this scenario would be the outright defection of an SSBN, as those have to operate with greater autonomy. But you’d need to have the defectors positively and unanimously agree to unlock their nukes for a specific antipresident rather than just sitting the whole thing out. And you’d also need all the other SSBN etc crews to not defect, not even the less drastic “sit this one out until the situation clarifies” version, otherwise it’s just the antipresident who gets working nukes. It’s all one navy with one culture and one very specific chain of command; you’re not really going to have some SSBNs defecting with the full nuclear option to the Second Confederacy while others just as decisively sign up with the NeoUnion.
Outside the SSBN fleet, things are much more centralized and it is even less likely that nuclear defectors would secure and maintain operational control over nuclear weapons.
* Defined here as “the guy who was president right before things went to hell”; there’s always going to be a Guy Who Is Legally POTUS for this purpose, but if it isn’t That One Guy he doesn’t necessarily have a football, etc.
The nuclear weapons on submarines can probably be fired by the people in the subs. Different subs might align with different sides.
Countries don’t usually split cleany in two like that.
Most civil wars are far messier than the ACW was.
I suppose in the short term it depends on the details of PAL. But those will be compromised with time.
In the typical civil war, I’d expect loose nukes to be used out of spite.
Why does MAD prevent reunification, but not the violent split?
Re: Amy Cooper in New York. Is there such a thing as suicide by social media? Kind of like suicide by cop, except you keep on living, and you can never find a job again?
I knew lots of Amy Cooper-type people when I lived in Manhattan, and I find the “instant karma” aspect of this story very bracing. It is my feel-good headline of the day.
I feel like Justine Sacco is the classic example.
I just looked Justine Sacco up. Apparently she has been rehabilitated–a couple years ago she was hired as corporate communications lead at Match.com.
What Justine Sacco did was stupid and careless, but I can imagine myself making a similar mistake (after quite a few drinks). What Amy Cooper did seems like an order of magnitude worse. Can you imagine if the police had shown up and the situation had escalated?
“Can you imagine if the police had shown up and the situation had escalated?”
Then that would be an issue with the cops. They should act to diffuse situations, not escalate them.
All I see is two random people having a minor altercation. Why that becomes national news, I do not know (well, I do, but you know…)
It *was* two people having a minor altercation, until one of them (out of what seems to have been some kind of reflexive white upper-middle-class assumed privilege) decided to call the police. So I don’t agree with your take on the situation.
Some people have a sort of default strategy in a conflict of “I’ll just get nastier along whatever dimension looks most promising till the other side backs down.” My uninformed guess is that this is the strategy she was pursuing–she thought “Ah, I’ll call the cops and claim I’m being threatened” because she thought this would give her an advantage that would force him to back down and leave. (Note that the stakes in this conflict were extremely small–maybe she needed to go walk her dog somewhere else. Either of them could have gotten up and left to end the conflict.)
I’ve occasionally run into people like this, and I’ve probably encouraged the tactic, because in a casual one-off conflict with someone like this, it’s better to just disengage than to end up in a dumb conflict over nothing with some nutcase who acts this way. I think the strategy usually fails when someone calls their bluff, and probably occasionally in some kind of hairball of dumb vindictive acts when two people committed to the strategy meet up. When it’s young men carrying out the strategy, the endpoint is usually someone shot or stabbed; when it’s women, usually the endpoint is lawsuits or false accusations to the police or calling your management to get you fired.
Right, this is what I was getting at below. When faced with conflict, people are given the choice to escalate or concede. Some people are just wired to never concede, regardless of how important (or not) the situation is, regardless of whether they are actually in the right, etc.
Fortunately that trait is rare enough that such people don’t actually bump into each other that often. But when they do, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. Often ending in physical violence.
I think there are ways she could redeem herself and get a decent job again, but it will involve major groveling on the public stage.
“Suicide” implies some level of actual intent, which I see no evidence of here.
I don’t know about that. As she dialed 911, I imagine there was some tiny corner of her mind harboring the thought, “You know, maybe this is not the best idea.” So I think it’s very possible that she knew exactly what she was doing, and used this event to engineer a dramatic break from her (presumably) unhappy life.
Remind me never, ever to ask you what your feel-bad headline of the day is.
I know it sounds harsh, but I’ve known a lot of Amy Coopers (and Andy Coopers) in my day. Let’s hope she gets the help she apparently needs.
I mean, Amy was clearly in the wrong on the initial issue, and clearly took it way too far, grabbing a political third rail in the process, but Christian seems cut from a similar cloth… The dude is carrying around dog treats and making vaguely threatening statements with the admitted intent of creeping out dog owners. WTF?
There’s a version of this story where he runs into a less hysterical but equally stubborn version of Amy and he’s the one who comes off as an asshole. So I have a hard time celebrating this as unequivocally just deserts when it completely vindicates Christian.
I found his explanation sufficient here. If you haven’t seen it, he says that this part of the park is on the Atlantic Flyway, and is designated for birds, and so they end up with a bunch of birds that land on the ground rather than up in the trees. Because of that, the rule is that dogs have to stay on leash. People who decide that this doesn’t apply to *their* dogs are a problem for the birds, and the people, like him, who like the birds. And, the cops very rarely enforce the rule.
So, what’s a bird guy to do? Asking people to comply with the rules (politely or rudely) isn’t likely to have a very good success rate. He’s found that carrying treats and feeding the dogs will almost always work, so that’s what he does. It probably does get him in a fair amount of arguments, and it’s more confrontational than I would be, but the dog walkers are abusing the commons and he’s defending it, so I’m inclined to side with him.
I mean, I sympathize with his motivations, and as a dog owner myself people who ignore dog rules annoy me, but he has no actual authority and he’s definitely playing the busybody here. He’s the “Karen”.
And calling somebody else’s dog over and offering them food in the middle of a verbal confrontation where he threatens to do something “you’re not going to like”? It was perfectly reasonable for Amy to take that as a threat to poison or otherwise hurt her dog, and this seems to have been what he wanted her to think.
It doesn’t excuse calling the cops and playing the helpless white woman card, but I don’t think Christian is a particularly good person here.
You can’t claim this when the video shows her approaching him with her dog and sticking her hand in his face (while he says ‘please don’t come near me). The whole ‘a person might legitimately feel threatened in this situation’ doesn’t automatically convert to ‘this person felt threatened and that explains their behavior’.
Outside the video (I think on FB) Christian admitted that he carries the treats regularly, and why he carries the treats (to attract off leash dogs to him so the owner has to come over and leash them, and presumably get a tongue lashing from Christian during this process). This is a guy that goes out of his way to start confrontations with dog owners in a way designed to be uncomfortable for them (and is open about the fact that this is his MO).
And I don’t know how you interpret “I’ll do what I’m gonna do and you won’t like it” as anything other than a threat.
Again this doesn’t excuse her actions at all – I think she was definitely playing up how “threatened” she actually felt. It just makes Christian kind of a jerk too. Amy certainly was the escalator but Christian was the initiator and I’m uncomfortable with how some are treating him as a put upon saint in the matter.
I am not entirely sure what would be better solution for that problem.
Based on my experience people letting their dogs run without leash where it is not supposed to happen are generally completely ignoring requests to change it.
While this strategy is problematic (threatening/scaring dog owner) I see no better solution to the problem. At least nothing what I tried worked.
What he is supposed to do? Call police? Are they really going to respond?
Though “I’ll do what I’m gonna do and you won’t like it” is totally not OK.
“This is a guy that goes out of his way to start confrontations with dog owners in a way designed to be uncomfortable for them (and is open about the fact that this is his MO).”
I’m afraid I’m outing myself as a bit of a hick, but do people in “the city” just not kick each others asses? This action, repeated frequently enough, would garner ass kicking in the rural area I grew up in (deep south.) Someone would be having a bad day, and it would just happen, no matter who was right or wrong. Obviously this is not the civilized way to handle it, but it’s the reality of taking a maximally confrontational route all the time. I cant imagine that he’s pulled this more than a few times without consequence. Perhaps he’s so clearly in the right that most folks take their deserved lashing and leave?
Maybe you can get in a fight with someone in your town where everyone knows each other and onlookers will know what’s going on and everyone knows who is and isn’t armed.
But getting into a fistfight with a stranger in a city is a really bad idea. Maybe his buddies turn up, see you beating the crap out of him, and shoot you or stab you.
Or maybe you run into a lady who is willing to cry damsel in distress and call the cops on you…
Again, I’m sympathetic to Christian’s motives, and maybe his methods are what is needed to be effective, but going out and seeking conflict should reasonably make it harder to play the victim afterward. To his credit, he seems not to be, it’s mostly the Twitter mob acting on his “behalf”.
Here’s the part of the Amy Cooper story that bugs me the most. In her attempt to defend her reptuation afterward, she said she’s not a racist. Man… if Amy Cooper isn’t a racist then she’s a fricking psychopath! That would mean she deliberately made a fake 911 call and deliberately lied about someone threatening her. Surely, she’d look far better if she instead claimed that actually she did what she did because she’s extremely racist and biased, so that she’d at least have an excuse? It’d still be awful, but less awful than the claim she did make. (Mind you it sure looks like she really did do it deliberately, but still.)
Agreed. Better to be some sort of crazy racist with an immense and irrational fear of black dudes than to be some sort of power-tripping nut who lies to the police to try to get them to mess someone else up after being called out for being a jerk and disobeying park rules.
The word racist has become synonymous with evil. Trying to excuse yourself by hiding behind it in lieu of a worse trait seems like a losing strategy.
It’s really unfortunate, because the word is a really useful way to describe all sorts of minor transgressions. But people put so much power on the word that they then insist that we stop using it for lots of situations that it clearly applies to.
@Kaeswaran:
That’s the opposite of the pattern as I observed it. To me, a racist is someone who hates or despises other people because of their race, and I think that’s what the word meant fifty years ago. There was a lot of power on the word, which is why people who wanted to attack racial views other than theirs labeled more and more of them as “racist.”
So from my side your “lots of situations that it clearly applies to” are almost all situations it doesn’t apply to, where its use is, to my ear, dishonest rhetoric.
Two simple examples:
Someone argues that black IQ’s are on average lower than white IQ’s and that the reason is genetic.
Someone says he would rather work for a white boss than a black boss.
Would you describe them as racists?
@DavidFriedman
Now that’s interesting. To me, a racist is someone who chooses to treat people differently because of their race(*), and who probably becomes distressed when encountering people whose race they can’t immediately classify. (How can I tell how to treat them, if I don’t know what they are…)
I picked up this definition at least 40 years ago. OTOH, my whole family is more or less autistic, and my definition is one that makes sense to anyone on the autistic spectrum – perfectly symmetrical, and doesn’t really care who gets favoured.
Also, the “probably becomes distressed when encountering people whose race they can’t immediately classify” was added later, by me, and probably comes from observing distressed reactions to inability to identify a person’s gender, since it appears that most people find it less difficult to assign a race label.
(*) ob footnote – advising someone with lighter skin to wear better sun screen, or making makeup suggestions and similar isn’t about race; neither is e.g. only advising genetic testing for inheritable diseases common in relevant ancestral populations.
Suppose someone has concluded, correctly or incorrectly, that blacks are more likely than average to be interested in basketball and east Asians in go. He happens to be interested in both.
So when he meets a stranger and wants to start a conversation, his first try at a subject of joint interest is basketball for a black, go for an East Asian.
Is he a racist?
Does someone being “racist” to you imply something negative about him?
I don’t think distress at being unable to identify a person’s gender implies anything on whether they would tread a man or woman differently.
It’s just important for people to know whether their new acquaintance is male or female. Can they confide in her, like they do with their girlfriends? Could he be a potential love interest? This information then gets filed away, while you treat the people in the same friendly manner you treat new acquaintances.
There are things where clearly discriminating by sex is warranted: changing rooms in gyms, for example. I don’t and never had a problem of getting naked in the public shower in front of women I’ve never seen before, I would have a problem of doing that in front of men I don’t know (I’m not German). But I’m sure that even in Germany, with their Freikörperkultur, there are some situations where discrimination by sex is warranted.
Playing the statistical odds is somewhat of a grey area. A person who ignores the “I love go” tee-shirt, or the locale of the meeting being a go club, and starts with basketball just because the person is black, is clearly racist. But what might be “obvious signs of interest in go/basketball” to one person might go totally unnoticed by someone else.
There are ways to play the statistical odds that aren’t grey at all – e.g. insisting “but you must like basketball; all black people do”. And others that are simply annoying, to black go enthusiasts and east asian basketball fans.
In practice, I don’t have a problem with someone who plays the statistical odds in a flexible way, and wouldn’t consider them racist.
He’s probably in the habit of ignoring evidence in favor of preconceived ideas.
For the rest, it depends on what he’s doing in a race-associated way. If he’s got a thing for girls of a particular race, that’s between him and the girls he’s attracted to. If he’s only hiring east asians, then I’ve got a problem with him. If he’s trying to create a diverse group by selecting people of whatever race is underrepresented, then I’ve got a different and more complex problem.
Then you need to refine your definition, since such a person fits it. Which is part of the reason I don’t like the way “racist” has come to be used.
I asked:
DinoNerd answered:
Doesn’t that assume, given your definition of “racist,” that he isn’t treating people differently on the basis of evidence? That could be evidence of statistical differences, it could be evidence of something more general.
To take one example of the latter, there are ethnic jokes that feel very different made to a member of the ethnicity by a non-member or vice versa than if made by a member to a fellow member. Someone who decides whether to tell such a joke about his own ethnicity according to whether the other person is or is not a member of such seems to fit your description. So does a black who uses the N word in conversation with another black but not with a white.
One might almost argue that your position shows you to be acting on the preconceived idea that there is never any rational reason to treat people differently according to their race.
Actually, my preconceived idea is that race is a social category.
But we’re way too deep in a dead OT to argue about which of us is irrational on this topic.
And while arguing/debating/clarifying viewpoints with you about it might be fun, yet another go round with all the usual suspects on this blog seems likely to be substantially less fun. So I’m not overly motivated to resume this in the new OT – though if you do, I’ll probably respond.
You are of course right that because of all the “social category” effects, people who’ve been treated as e.g. “east asian” have some common experiences and attitudes.
And people can reasonably form expectation based on these. E.g that a US-born “East Asian” is much more likely to have been complimented on their excellent English and asked where they really grew up, than a US-born person placed in a different racial category. Or more topically, and fortunately less commonly, is more likely to have experienced some wackjob blaming them for covid-19 – or be afraid of having such an experience.
I think the most interesting part of the story is if you watch the video she says
The first statement is much worse than the second. If she hadn’t said the first part, it just sounds like giving a brief description to the dispatcher.
What I find interesting is that she is still using the most benign term socially allowed while she is being a generally terrible person towards him.
I get the sense she is a typical Blue Triber, so she would probably genuinely consider herself feminist and anti racist and nod along to most of the related rhetoric. But she’s also an asshole, so she’s willing to play the female victim and use the supposed racism of the cops to her advantage. A weirdly toxic combination.
I would say rather a predictably toxic combination. Inevitable, even.
Ta-Nehisi Coates had a great bit about this back when he used to blog. (From memory) It was a recurring feature called “Because there are no racists . . .” In it, he’d pull up an example of someone doing something racist, being called on it, and indignantly objecting that they were definitely not racist and how dare anyone say that they were. My favorite example was that admin in the Ferguson police department who sent around the Crimestoppers joke, who not only stridently claimed not to be prejudiced, but said she didn’t really think the joke was racist, it was just, you know, a funny joke-type joke.
Anyway, the larger point was that in turning racists into cartoon villains, we’d made it so no one could ever acknowledge when they were being racist. Which is a problem, because . . .
I’ve known people like that too, but I don’t find anything about the instant-trial-by-social-media followed by summary firing “feel good.”
Or all the performative outrage about how she practically sent in the cops to shoot that black man.
Or all the reflexive op-eds calling on me to repent for vaguely being in the vicinity of being in the same demographic.
I find the idea that you can get fired if someone gets you to look bad on video and enough morons on Twitter agree far more disturbing than what this “Karen” did.
I agree with your point, but “gets you to look bad” doesn’t seem to apply here. It seems like she took care of that all by herself.
And I think you (and a couple of other people) are minimizing the main issue, which is that calling the police in this type of situation was way beyond the pale, and could easily have led to an extremely unfortunate outcome. She seems to have assumed that saying she was being threatened by an African-American man would result in the cops instantly appearing, with who-knows-what results.
@MilesM
I agree with Bobobob. This seems more similar to a SWATting than her being recorded making some nasty comment. If reflexive Op Eds are that bothersome, maybe don’t seek out outrage clickbait?
I don’t think I’m minimizing the issue. Yes, her calling the cops was beyond the pale, but the likelihood of it actually resulting in an “unfortunate outcome” was not meaningfully different from 0.
The (upper?)middle-class black dude watching birds in Central Park was not the jogger chased down and shot by some rednecks.
Statistically speaking, a woman in Central Park (even if she’s an idiot) probably has far more right to feel unsafe.
Even if that’s granted, she’s the one who decided to (attempt to) use state power coercively by lying through her teeth, with at best reckless disregard for the consequences. How safe she felt is irrelevant in the absence of even suspected wrongdoing. The beyond the pale-ness is precisely the point.
@Milo Minderbinder
How about we parse “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” according to your standards.
@MilesM
To clarify, are you equating her being asked to observe posted park rules with him being threatened by a false police report?
@Milo Minderbender
No. You don’t get to assume the best possible interpretation for “your” take on this (he was asking for her to obey the park rules) while assuming the worst possible interpretation of what she did (asking for cops to come and shoot a black man).
(and it’s emblematic of how fucked up this is – the whole trial by Twitter and feel-good busybodies – that I feel the need to say that on the balance of it, I feel she was in the wrong here)
I didn’t say she hoped they would shoot him. I said she called the cops without caring what would happen. Their testimonies both say that the dispute began with him asking her to leash the dog, and his video clearly shows her going for an Oscar, so assuming an untruthful report seems fair.
And now absolutely nothing happened to him, and she got fired from her job (and will soon lose her health insurance) in the middle of a pandemic, because whoever decided to blow this up (his sister?) spread it all over social media without any regard for what would happen.
Are we OK with this amount of blowback happening to everyone who does stupid shit and gets recorded, or just annoying middle-class women with bad haircuts?
But he didn’t just say that. He said that and followed up by producing… strategically prepared dog treats.
I disagree on this one. They were in an escalating conflict of the type I stereotypically associate with New York – she was refusing to leash her dog just to make the point that he wasn’t the boss of her, he was feeding treats to her dog that he apparently carries specifically to teach dog owners a lesson about leashes, etc.
Calling the cops and specifically informing them he was black is (in my best guess) an attempt to intimidate the guy into thinking that he was going to get harassed or worse.
It could have gone badly if cops had shown up and the guy had freaked out. Given that they were in an escalating conflict, I don’t see him freaking out as a close to 0 possibility.
The risk to her calling the cops in this situation was probably lower than to the black guy (both because he’s black and because he’s a guy), but the risk to her wasn’t zero. If you keep escalating a dispute until the cops arrive, you may very well get a ticket or arrested and taken to the police station. Indeed, this is the general problem with the strategy “escalate the dispute until the other side backs down.”
Statistics don’t come into this, we have undisputed video evidence of her walking up to him, sticking her hand in his face and threatening to call the cops and lie to them about what he is doing. It doesn’t matter if she could be afraid or even is she should be afraid, she clearly isn’t.
This is actually the part that makes me least sympathetic to him. She had no way of knowing that they were not poison. For that reason, he was quite probably correct that “she wouldn’t like it”, but that assertion could also have plausibly been construed as an overt threat.
She was clearly an asshole. The dog should have been leashed, she should probably not have called the cops, she should not have manufactured the break in her voice halfway through that sounded like she was actually in imminent danger, and her treatment of the dog throughout is just horrifying.
I grant that he is probably a legit birdwatcher and has a legit concern that loose dogs are bad in that environment. But I can’t help feeling he was looking for trouble himself.
The punishment isn’t deserved for being stupid. It’s for being dishonest and malicious. I’m ok with “maliciously lying to the police in order to threaten someone because they asked you to stop breaking the rules” being punished pretty severely. The twitter outrage mob isn’t that harmful on its own so it pretty much boils down to “should you get fired and ostracized?”. Something on that scale yes.
Ideally, rather than being dragged by twitter until you got fired, the state would prosecute you, and you’d eat a huge fine, a ton of community service, and/or maybe 1 week to 1 month in jail. But that might be more harmful to the perpetrator not less.
It’d be different if it wasn’t very clear that’s what she was doing or if she did something less bad.
I can imagine all sorts of ways in which the actual presence of police could have escalated the situation:
1) The police, at the time, didn’t have all the information we have now. All they have is a panicked call from a woman in the park, saying she is being threatened by an African-American man. One cop is having domestic troubles, he’s feeling stressed out, he’s worried he may have caught COVID-19, he sees an agitated-looking black man with what looks like a gun (really a pair of binoculars) in his pocket. The situation unfolds from there.
2) The police show up, and the man involved (perhaps goaded by the crowd) becomes unnecessarily belligerent. That cop who is having a bad day puts him into a chokehold, kneels on his neck, whatever cops do to get unruly people under control, and this is all caught on video for dissemination on social media.
3) The police show up and have a calm talk with the parties involved, but the man (who is 57 years old, remember) gets so agitated that he has a heart attack and dies on the spot. Once again, this is all caught on video. Repercussions abound.
4) The police show up, and everyone is so $&%# stressed out by the COVID-19 lockdown (black people, white people, Karens, etc.) that the situation degenerates into a mini-riot. Much press coverage, social media, etc. etc. Nobody is better off than they were before.
No one should casually call the police in a situation like this. That’s why I say it is beyond the pale.
All of those situations are really, really, really unlikely. The most likely result is, cop shows up, says “you, put your dog on a leash, you, leave her alone, both of you don’t talk to each other anymore” and everyone leaves.
And even if those situations did happen, 99% of the blame would rest with the police themselves, not with the woman who called them.
The police are supposed to be professional conflict mediators. That’s the image most people have of them.
Now some of us are in tune enough to realize that actually they aren’t very professional or very good at that sort of thing at all. But most people aren’t. To the average person “call the police” is the exactly correct social behavior you are supposed to exhibit when you are faced with conflict with someone that you don’t seem to be able to resolve on your own.
Agreed that these outcomes are unlikely, but analogous to COVID-19 discussions elsewhere…how much of a risk are you willing to take? One percent? One-tenth of one percent? Not calling the cops reduces the risk to zero.
This was probably not a “call the cops” situation.
But a policy of never calling the cops in borderline cases caries it’s own obvious unlikely but extreme risks.
Before asserting this stuff, try to estimate at least a probability of each of these terrible outcomes, because none of them is at all likely.
Yeah, but I don’t think any of this is about reducing minuscule risks, or punishing people for wasting police resources.
You said in your OP this was a “feel-good headline” and you liked the “instant karma.” Was the instant karma because she did something bad, or because she did something bad to a black guy? So, we’re all happy because we caught ourselves a
racistwitch, and now it’s time to get the boys together for a good old fashioned witch burning?I kind of feel like we’re living in Inverse To Kill a Mockingbird, in the “intelligence is not reverse stupidity” way. Yes, people used to unfairly judge and punish black people suspected of doing something to a white person. The lesson is supposed to be “don’t unfairly judge or punish people,” not, “oh, we were supposed to be unfairly judging and punishing white people suspected of doing something to a black person!”
But increases the risk that the guy will shoot, or otherwise do harm, to you.
Which is more likely? That the cops will murder this man for no good reason, or that this man will use violence on you if not stopped by an outside authority?
Yeah I hate the cops too. But 99.9% of their interactions with the public don’t end with them having shot someone.
@Conrad Honcho
Yeah, I should probably have dialed back the “feel-good headline” and “instant karma” parts. There is something about this woman (she reminds me of someone I used to work for) that pushed my buttons.
I’m reminded of my stock line when people ask me to get upset about a prisoner on death row: “It’s hard to be against capital punishment when you’re for summary execution.”
“Murder” vs “use violence” is not apples-to-oranges, it’s maybe grapefruit to peanuts, and I’m calling it out as an unwarranted attempt to slant the discussion by substituting emotion for reason.
Since we’re talking about how miniscule some of these hypothetical risks are, I’m going to put “guy murders woman in front of numerous camera-wielding witnesses because of dispute over dog leash use” solidly in the miniscule category. And if we’re bringing the police into this, then I’m going to wager that for any consistent level of violence, the odds of a police officer responding to a woman-in-danger-from-a-black-man call inappropriately escalating to that level of violence are higher than the odds of a man upset over a dog-leash violation inappropriately escalating to that level of violence.
And that’s before we include the possibility that calling the police would precipitate the violence that the woman allegedly (very dubiously allegedly) feared, e.g. the man trying to rip the phone out of her hands and throw it away because he’s as irrationally afraid of being shot by the police as she is of being attacked by the scary black man.
Not every dispute requires calling the police. Sometimes calling the police is a stupid move, and sometimes it’s dick move, and I’m pretty sure this is one of those cases. How much ridicule and censure the offender deserves is debatable, but trying to cast her as a righteous victim really oughtn’t be.
If calling the police is itself an irresponsible act, then you live in a failed state (and given that this is NYC, the failure is specifically at that city-state level).
(Punishing people for calling in the police maliciously and without just cause is a separate issue.)
As a blanket statement, that’s false. Even in a not-failed state, there are far more petty disputes where calling the police would be irresponsible than there are serious disputes that call for police intervention.
I’d say if you live in a place where calling the police for frivolous reasons is very likely to lead to some kind of catastrophe (rather than the cops rolling their eyes or yelling at you to stop wasting their time), that’s an indication that something is very wrong with your police department.
If you live in a place where calling the police has a very slight chance of causing a catastrophe, calling the police over a petty personal dispute is irresponsible. If you live in a place where calling the police has literally zero chance of causing a catastrophe, calling the police over a petty personal dispute still wastes their time and is thus irresponsible.
If someone can’t find a better way to resolve petty personal disputes than calling the police, then they need to stop pretending they are a grown-up and go back to living with a mommy and a daddy who can handle that for them.
TIL: The world is full of people who, by John Schilling’s standards, aren’t really adults.
Okay, thinking about that, I guess I’m neither shocked nor entirely in disagreement with him….
I’m sure I could phrase it more precisely. People upthread are talking as if calling the police is tantamount to trying to kill somebody, and it’s just not in any sane police system. Maybe our police system is indeed not sane, but I’m skeptical.
It’s not. 11.5 million arrests a year, probably 100x that many calls to the police (most calls to the police do not end in an arrest, but I don’t have a good source for # of calls to the police / year), and about 1000 people shot by the police per year.
Calling the police for this kind of thing is a waste of their time and an attempt to escalate a conflict that’s liable to backfire, but is not some taking some kind of serious risk with the guys life.
The fear is, probably, irrational. But she wanted him to feel it. She wanted the scare that black people have to rise up in him. And that’s offensive.
Scott has talked about feeling like some people have a superweapon pointed at his head. I know there are those who disagree, but there are definitely people who stoke those fears. And that’s offensive.
@Matt M how do you think society should censor this sort of action (assuming it’s a real problem)?
Prosecution if there was a significant risk that it provokes a violent police reaction against the man, that is justified assuming they believe her. A fine for wasting police resources if there was no danger to him, but it is prima facie obvious that there was no grounds whatsoever to call the police. No censure otherwise.
Indeed. The justice system should be harsher on people who make false reports with malicious intent.
On the other hand, trial by social media and summary firing are elements of a pathological culture. The stupid shit you do outside your workplace, on your own time, when not representing your employer, should not be grounds for termination, as long as it is not outright criminal. What this Karen did might or might not have been criminal, but the company should not be the one to decide it.
Something interesting I saw pointed on Twitter was the lengths her employer went to to publicly apologize for her behavior.
The question was asked, “Do corporations ever apologize when their employees commit actual crimes?”
Like, if this woman was arrested for felony assault related to an altercation at a party, would they be publicly apologizing for it?
The question answers itself.
Just for the record, the person you are responding to is MilesM, not me 🙂
But I’d say no, it’s not a real problem. A certain subset of the population is going to disregard minor rules. Another certain subset is going to call out those people. And a certain subset of the first subset is going to double down and refuse to comply.
Fortunately all those people are rare enough that they don’t actually encounter each other too often. But when they do, it’s going to be unpleasant, and there’s really not much we can do about it. Except choose not to get involved or care.
Oops
All’s well that ends well I guess 🙂
@MilesM I’d like to hear your thoughts too
There are all kinds of ways to ruin your career in a moment. Throw a punch at the wrong place and time and person and you get yourself a criminal record and become unhireable. Discuss some confidential corporate information with a friend over drinks and have him take advantage of it and you become unhireable. etc. I don’t see why anyone would get especially upset over this one.
I think the difference is who’s meting out the justice. Social media mobs aren’t looking for justice, they’re looking for blood, and are giddy to have an acceptable target for their viciousness. I prefer a dispassionate criminal justice system. I would also be disturbed by cops who really enjoy beating people and are happy when a criminal does something justifying a beating, or a judge who laughs and cackles when he sentences someone to death.
The twitter mob is not going to mete out justice. The employer is the one who is actually creating the real-life consequences for the mistake, exactly as in the other examples I gave.
But the employer’s only doing that so the twitter mob doesn’t come after them.
You don’t know that. The employer probably genuinely does disapprove of her behavior.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were red flags about her work behavior before this happened. Can you imagine how she must treat her reports (assuming she has any?)
I suspect that many times, whenever a person gets fired as a result of social media, there was a looooong paper trail of inappropriate conduct preceding the incident.
I can’t tell if this is the more cynical or less cynical take.
Nobody gets fired for getting into an argument with somebody and unfairly threatening to call the cops on them when they’re on their own time and not representing the company.
Do you honestly believe if this person had merely been observed doing this by her boss who was coincidentally strolling through the park that day, without the social media firestorm, she would have been fired?
She didn’t get fired for the thing. She got fired because of the social media reaction to the thing.
100% agree with Conrad.
If that video was taken and sent directly to her supervisor or the CEO of her company, without being passed around and getting 100K retweets or whatever first, do you think they would have suspended her? Have released a public statement denouncing her?
Not a chance.
She *lied to police*. Heck yes I can see getting fired over that. Especially since she was a portfolio manager. That’s a super-sensitive position where the employee has all kinds of opportunities to wreck their company if they feel they’re above the rules.
Portfolio managers who lie to police are the sorts of people who will lie to their company’s compliance department. And portfolio managers who lie to their compliance department are the ones who turn into rogue traders and run up billion-dollar losses, or who run insider trading schemes that destroy company reputations and bring down the wrath of the SEC.
That is…that is a really big jump from “will overstate her case to police” to “will ruin your company and cost you billions,” but all right. I try my hardest to avoid lying, but man I’m glad I don’t work for you.
I think I would probably just take her aside and say, “Amy, what was that all about? Think you overreacted a bit? Are you okay?”
She didn’t just overstate he case to the police she threatened another person to get him to do what she wanted and then tried to carry out that threat.
To leave her alone and not do/say vaguely threatening things about her dog? What she wanted wasn’t unreasonable. Her methods of getting what she wanted were.
Exactly, which includes the part where she walks up to a guy and says ‘I am going to call the cops and tell them you are threatening to kill me’. Just doing that on its own is shit behavior, but she then follows through on her threat (though she tones it down somewhat when actually talking to the cops).
Fairly straight-forward question from a prospective employers view: What do you do in 3 months if there is a conflict between her and a co-worker with no evidence beyond ‘he said/she said’? Or think about how impossible it would be to deal with it if she filed a sexual harassment claim against her boss.
So if you were her boss and you witnessed this unbeknownst to her, you would fire her?
If she had been a near perfect employee for a long time I would probably give it a pass but keep it in the back of my mind, if there was anything else in her history that now looks worse after seeing this interaction then I would be discussing options with HR.
I’d fire her from jobs where where dishonesty could make her a lot of money or cost me a lot of money. For not-so-sensitive jobs it would depend on performance, but I’d probably commit to never promoting her into anything important (which might imply that I might as well fire her now, depending on the position.)
Adding – there might be a difference in norms here, in that asset management is a high-turnover industry. People get fired all the time. Portfolio manager in particular can be a really unstable job, depending on the company.
Conrad.. there are jobs where “Above reproach” is reasonable standard, and not holding people to such standards is an error. It would be bad if the entire job market was like that, but if you want to be trusted with billions of other peoples money, it is not an unreasonable ask that you be an extreme exemplar of propriety
I don’t see this following amy cooper forever, if only because there are too many amy coopers (it was also weird how both of the people in the story were named cooper).
I’m torn.
Milo Minderbinder’s comparison to swatting is on point to me, albeit this is probably less likely to get someone killed. Abuses of state power should be seriously punished, probably above and beyond abuses of non-state power. Also she just seems vile.
But man, twitter mob justice is just the worst in a way that makes it really hard to feel schadenfreude here.
The police aren’t the Black Man Execution Squad. But SWATing is a good comparison in kind.
I think she’s a few wires short of a breadboard and I bet she did feel unsafe. (This is meant as explanation, not excuse. I hope that covers it and I don’t need to say that 5 times.)
This isn’t like swatting. Swatting is calling the police with a completely and entirely fictional account solely to punish someone over an otherwise unrelated personal grudge.
In this case, she threatened to call the cops and say “this guy is harassing me at a park” which was approximately true. Now maybe he had a good reason to be harassing her and maybe calling the cops isn’t the optimal method of resolving that situation. But it’s not even in the same ballpark as swatting.
Also, we really, really don’t want to establish any kind of a norm that says if you call the police in an ambiguous or threatening situation, you get in trouble. That’s a good way to convince people not to call the police even in situations where it turns out they should have.
It would also look kind of weird if she got in trouble, because that would require the cops to essentially agree with the premise that if she had called them, well yeah obviously they’d show up and immediately shoot this unarmed black man because that’s just sort of what they do…
And that the fault would ultimately lie with her for inappropriately dispatching the black man execution squad for an insufficiently good reason, rather than with the police themselves…
Except that she said “he’s threatening my life” in a panicked voice. She did attempt to elicit a disproportionate response by the state which could have put a person’s life at risk just because that person was annoying her (possiblly with good cause). I don’t know if she knew what she was doing or if she just went into lizard-brain mode and was not thinking straight, but in either case, the coercive power of the state is not something you should casualy summon.
I’m not sure why you’re surprised that a woman who has been told that all men are Schrodinger’s Rapist for the last 10-15 years in fact acts like a large man confronting her might pose a threat to her safety.
I am going to instruct my wife to call the police whenever she feels she is threatened regardless of what Twitter feels. If Twitter doesn’t like it, well, you know, we have quite a bit of FU$, so we have quite a bit of latitude to tell Twitter to fuck itself.
My biggest question is: is this the first time she’s used the threat of calling the police to browbeat other people into going along with her (wrong) demands?
If this was an isolated lapse in judgement, yeah, maybe don’t destroy her life over it, but she was a bit too quick on the jump there for me to think she’d never played this trump card before.
There’s a key difference here from swatting, which is that police approaching a park in broad daylight are much less likely to make hasty and fatal mistakes than police breaking into a home under false pretenses.
But what she intended is unclear and possibly quite sinister.
On the other hand, we often get messages like “If you see something, say something” and are told to call the professionals rather than take matters into our own hands (like was the case in the recent shooting).
What she actually says is ‘I am going to tell them there is an African American man threatening my life’, which (along with her closing the distance on him) changes the story from quite a lot.
You assume that what happens if that both parties stand fairly quietly and the cops show up and not any number of possibilities like
Man gets spooked and decides to get out of there asap, with cops getting a phone call reporting a woman’s life being threatened and then a man fitting the description fleeing the scene. That could easily end badly.
Nah. I compare my estimate of likelihood of various cases. But if you’ve got numbers they probably beat my priors for reliability.
Yes. But it seems much less likely that cops will shoot a fleeing suspect, unarmed in broad day light (and that he continues to flee after police warning) than a swatting-induced no-knock raid will end with a shoot-out and some dead kids.
I edited out the line “She was brandishing a weapon at him, just not her own” as being hyperbolic, but to be clear, it sounds like she was being reckless with his well-being in her phone call.
I am mostly responding to the phrase ‘there is a key difference’, the key difference appears to be only the level of the effect, more or less its an incompetent version of swatting.
Just to put this in perspective:
From this site, we get 11,205,800 total arrests in the US per year. (Most police calls do not result in an arrest.) From the Washington Post database, we get something like 1000 police shootings per year in the US. It seems fair to assume that the great majority of police shootings were in situations that would otherwise have resulted in arrests. So you’re looking at something in the neighborhood of 1/10000 probability of being shot given that the police want to arrest you. Some substantial part of that risk comes from your behavior, though not all.
I think an upper bound on the added risk of dying that this woman dumped on this man by calling the police is no higher than 1/10000, and probably lower given that a lot of the police shootings happened when responding to armed robberies or similar situations where weapons were out and being used when the police arrived.
I don’t understand what context those stats are supposed to give? Are we to think that the woman in question knew the stats and made a careful weighing of the outcome of her actions, or that the person being threatened should immediately know that the chances of this being a worst case scenario outcome are slim?
What is (or should be) appalling about her behavior is that she acted maliciously out of pettiness and her general incompetence at injuring him is of little defense.
I’m saying there is a lot of leeway between “being a confrontational asshole” and “trying to get this guy killed” or “SWATting,” and one way to see that is in the numbers.
Going on the little I’ve read, everybody behaved badly here.
Woman brings dog out, dog park is closed, she lets dog off leash in ordinary park – in the wrong.
Guy asks her to leash dog – in the right so far.
Woman still behaves like entitled bint – in the wrong.
Guy escalates by producing dog treats (? why is he carrying these around if he doesn’t have a dog?) and trying to call dog over – now he’s in the wrong, because there are people out there who will try to poison dogs, and for all she knows he’s going to poison her beloved pooch.
At this stage, both of them are in the wrong, and calling the cops is just the cherry on the cake (maybe she really did feel threatened, but it’s no excuse).
Can’t both of them be retrospectively Citizens’ Arrested for Being Idiots In Public? And take the dog away from her until she learns how to keep and manage a dog? And take the dog treats away from Mr Making Vaguely Sinister Remarks About “You won’t like what I’ll do (to your dog)”?
It does sound like that was his insinuation, but are there? Is this any more the case than poisoned Halloween candy?
Some people like dogs, and carry around treats to give to ones they encounter. I have run into such people walking my dog. The dog very quickly grows to recognize and like that person.
It’s also a good idea if you’re afraid of off-leash dogs. A misbehaving dog is more likely to listen if there’s a treat being offered.
He was probably carrying dog treats because he’s a Karen himself and he is used to start confrontations with dog owners who keep their dogs unleashed, so when they tell him to fuck off he pulls the treats to attract the dogs, forcing the owners to leash them.
This time he ran into a greater Karen who called the cops on the scay black man threatening her life.
1st rule for a paceful life: mind your own fucking business.
I like how someone explicitly breaking a rule and then telling someone else to fuck off rather than comply is completely ignored but a person who objects to their rule breaking is a ‘Karen’. I think the actual term you are looking for is ‘square’.
Because it was not his job to enforce compliance.
“Karens” are people, stereotypically but not uniquely middle-aged white women, who start and escalate confrontations with random strangers over inconsequential stuff.
Inconsequential is in the eye of the beholder. Can we amend to “perceived personal affronts”?
No, its you calling him a name and not insulting the people walking their dogs without leashes and then (in your hypothetical) telling him to fuck off. You are using a tiny amount of information to judge and insult the guy and it says a lot about you.
viVI_IViv’s comment regarding dog treats is almost certainly close to the truth. Nobody carries around dog treats to deal with an aggressive dog–it’s a TV trope, doesn’t work like that. You carry a big-ass stick to deal with aggressive dogs. Offering another persons dog food is analogous to someone feeding your kid without asking–it’s a total power play. A justified power play in this situation, but the implication is clear.
Most of the poisonings are accidental or people mistakenly giving what they think is a treat to their dog, but every so often you do get deliberate poisonings – somebody is fed up of dogs running loose and fouling their garden, someone just wants to kill animals.
So yeah, while I think she should have called her damn dog back and put it on the damn leash, when she’s in the middle of an argument with the guy who then says “I’m going to do something you won’t like” and pulls out the dog treats – that’s going to look like a possible threat rather than “Oh I just love doggies!”
Almost by definition, most conflicts that escalate to the point of drawing much attention are in some sense unreasonable people colliding, because most of the time, reasonable people respond to someone being a confrontational asshole by deciding life’s too short and moving on. The world is absolutely chock full of crazy people and assholes and nasty people who like causing trouble, but unless they back you into a confrontation, you’re better off just avoiding them, because there’s zero percentage in trying to fix some crazy asshole type you run upon who’s trying to make a point or get even with life by getting into a conflict with you. That’s especially true in a big city where you will almost certainly never see said crazy asshole again in your life. Spending five minutes interacting with such a person is five minutes too much.
I get “it’s reasonable to back down.”
But the reason aggressive people get away with shoving others around is because most people make the short-term rational calculation to back down. People who make the irrational decision to stand up for something can be key in our rights being protected.
Actually, I think there’s a prisoners’ dilemma situation here. My best strategy when dealing with someone who presents as a crazy asshole is to back down and avoid them. But it’s a better society when presenting as a crazy asshole is a bad strategy.
In a small community, this already exists–once everyone sees you as a crazy asshole who goes around picking fights, your neighbors won’t talk to you and you become a kind-of outcast, and any conflict you get in, everyone assumes you were at fault. But in a big anonymous city, the dynamic is different. Also, there’s a cultural thing–moving from the Midwest to the East Coast, I noticed that here there’s a much larger proportion of people who find presenting as crazy assholes (like this lady did) a good strategy. It’s still hard for me to adapt to that, since where I grew up, acting like that would definitely not pay off.
Guys, I’m not sure why we are speculating on why Christian had the treats. In his own words, they are for “just such intransigence”, i.e. to get off leash dogs to come to him so he can confront their owners. This is from his own FB post setting up the video – he called the dog to him, producing a treat as he did, immediately after making the “you’re not gonna like it” comment and that’s when she scrambled over to grab the dog, yell at him not to touch her dog, and that’s where the video starts.
To quote John Mulaney, “If you’re comparing the badness of two words, and you won’t even say one of them? That’s the worse word.”
In all seriousness, I find this claim really, really infantilizing and think it requires a willfull ignorance towards history.
The word you (and I, for that matter) won’t say to is one that has been used for centuries as a really derogatory way of referring to a people who started out as slaves, then evolved into a legally defined lower class. When they are identified as that word, they are being identified as victims of those statuses.
Karen, on the other hand, is a way of referring to a certain set of behavior that tends to correlate with a certain race, sex and socioeconomic level. It isn’t being used to refer to all members of that subgroup AND could be accurately used to refer to people outside that group. It also is way less bad in the treatment associated with that word. The word that shall not be spoken evokes slavery and oppression. Karen evokes people online making fun of you, with the occasional twitter outrage mob sprinkled in for fun.
Note, this doesn’t mean that calling people a Karen is a nice thing to do, or that the word isn’t mean; but jumping straight from “this is a word that I find mean” to “it’s as bad as the N word” is ridiculous and kinda revealing of some thin skin.
To quote John Mulaney, “If you’re comparing the badness of two words, and you won’t even say one of them? That’s the worse word.”
I disagree that “Karen” is as bas as &*%%#$, but this is not a good reason, and I hate the argument.
The original argument is “these terms are as bad as each other, but because society is messed up they over-react to just one of them.” The reason they can say one and not the other is not because of how they feel; it’s how other people feel, and other people should feel different.
(Again, I see the difference in terms, but wouldn’t use this argument to distinguish them.)
Its a valid argument, at least the original for John Mulaney is. The original argument goes ‘you can’t say midget, that is as bad as saying the n-word’, to which the reply is ‘you clearly don’t believe that yourself as you are willing to say midget in private but not the actual n-word.’
You can tell others “he just said the N-word” and everyone knows that if they cannot very convincingly say “I have never ever said that word” then it’s game over.
But this discussion isn’t happening in private. Neither was the one with John Mulaney. And if you think you are having a private discussion where this just happens to have come up, look for the smartphone with the camera running and keep your mouth shut.
And, in the privacy of your own head, quietly note that the person piously playing the John Mulaney role is too dangerous to trust and unworthy of your respect. He’s either trying to bait you into taking a huge reputational hit, or ignorant of the perceived risk, or using that risk to score a cheap point.
The point is in the other direction: The speaker is willing to say ‘midget’ and is arguing that is as bad as the n-word. The speaker is not arguing that the n-word ought to be used, but that midget should never be used just like that word they won’t use… except they will use midget and not a euphemism for midget.
This is the exact reason I have never said that word out loud, even in reference to it. I was having a discussion with my drinking buddies about Papa John getting shoved out the door because of what he said, and my friends (who are definitely not racists) said what Papa John actually said, and during the ensuing discussion I would not. One of them mentioned this, that there’s a difference between referencing the word and using the word and I said “clearly not; look what happened to Papa John.”
No one will ever be able to truthfully say, “I heard Conrad say the n-word.”
Maybe they don’t think either the m-word or the n-word should be an unforgivable curse, unable to ever be used even in reference. But you should still avoid calling people by the disrespectful word because it’s disrespectful and stop being an asshole.
And, now that I think about it, John Mulaney blasted the conversation to the entire world, so, yeah, not trusting John Mulaney, not even a little bit, was absolutely the right move.
Except that is clearly NOT the position taken here as they say ‘you can’t say midget, it is as bad as saying the n-word’.
And they are correct about that. Or, if they are incorrect about that, it isn’t because the Guardians of the N-Word are a bunch of powerful but trigger-happy bullies who randomly destroy the innocent while the guardians of the m-word are a bunch of impotent midgets.
There are some words that are offensive enough that they ought not be used in casual discussion among people who expect to remain friends. There are no words that should be off-limits in every context including meta-discussion of which words are off-limits. And there’s room for legitimate debate about where the relevant lines ought to be drawn and where the m-word falls on that scale.
In no case should the fact that people with strong feelings about one of those words happen to have greater destructive power than people on the other side be considered of any moral significance, of any relevance to the question of when or if such words ought to be used.
If every time some young black woman was filmed being confrontational and entitled, people called her a “LaTisha,” the issue would probably become clearer for a lot of people.
No, calling someone a Karen isn’t the same as calling them a n—-r. Yes, it still looks to me like racial stereotyping of a kind that’s both bad mental hygene (you make yourself dumber) and kind-of lousy.
Part of the meaning of the word is the reaction it generates.
Of course, people realize this, so the reaction is not necessarily instinctive. But it is still part of the meaning.
When I was in high school, there was a game students (not me) played on occasion when they were bored. It was called “make the retard say ‘fuck.'” [1]
The rules are kind of complicated, so I’ll lay them out.
1. Find one of the mainstreamed mentally-challenged students.
2. Bait him/her to say/write the word “fuck.”
When they told the teacher, nothing bad happened, because the teacher had the context and knew that the student was goaded into it by a larger group that understood the higher stakes.
The Internet doesn’t give a shit about context. Get someone to say the unforgivable word, and it’s game over. Time to go end that person.
Maybe some people worry that legitimate racists will hide behind the “I was just being retarded” excuse. And I bet some would. But we don’t tolerate the cops beating the shit out of some mentally or physically challenged guy with the excuse “well, if word gets out that people can just play disabled then our jobs get a lot harder.” Too bad. Maybe you don’t get to grind people up in your machinery today.
[1] Someone is probably more offended that I used the word “retard” than than I used the word “fuck.”
No, its the fact that you say ‘n-word’ and ‘Karen’ and not ‘N-word and K****’ that highlights the difference, not that you would otherwise say nig*ger and Karen if it weren’t for consequences.
If somehow the Karens took over and the K-word became an unforgivable curse, I would avoid saying it even in private.
But not because I respect the rule.
Because if there is a magic word that ends my life, I won’t say it. Just like Michael Rapaport’s character on Boston Public.[1]
[1] You might want to open this in a private tab over a VPN.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6l6i7q?playlist=x6jq2s Go to timestamp 7:44.
No, the quote is correct because the person talking to Mulaney is from standards and practices telling him what he can and can’t say on the air.
Dave Chappelle had a funny bit about this sort of thing in his most recent Netflix special… (offensive language warning, obviously)
The punch line is particularly poignant, IMO.
Karen is also a racial/cultural label, for a group that has been the target of a good deal of mistreatment.
That is who you were talking about, isn’t it?
Nearly every job relies on employees being trustworthy, discovering that an employee would lie to the police in this manner is pretty damning and should at least cast their employment history in a different light. If she had been a model employee to this point that might mitigate it, but there also could well be a history that looks benign if she is an honest person and terrible if she is a liar.
Why should there be a line in the sand? So you can justify specific bad behavior and avoid consequences for them? It is not up to the person behaving badly to tell other people how they are supposed to react to their bad behavior.
So people can avoid arbitrary consequences and we avoid having an unemployable underclass of people who can do a job but otherwise once or twice had a lapse of judgement.
I have a question about masks, and was wondering if anyone was aware of sociological research looking at the effect of wearing masks on social trust and how we relate to each other, especially as strangers. Specifically I started to think about it in terms of children, and if they have to return to school wearing masks and/or teachers and caregivers wearing masks, and what effect that might have psychologically. Common sense seems to indicate that wearing a mask will inhibit familiarity and trust and increase suspicion and paranoia; and in a context between strangers, hinders positive social bonding. Also would this be different in Asian countries where wearing masks is more normalized, versus here in the US where it’s been forced upon us in heightened circumstances?
No, but it’s been on my mind a lot these days, because I think an awful lot of people flinch when making eye contact with me, these days.
(A friend once reacted to a profile picture I posted with “Ah, yes, the piercing eyes of death!” and having a mask on seems to magnify the effect.)
I’m guessing this will be one of those situations where autistics do better than non-autistics overall.
Not autistic, but I actually enjoy wearing a mask out now, having never had a reason to do so before. It makes not socializing in supermarkets/on the street a lot easier, everyone minds their own business more.
What do we need to engineer in the world such that wearing capes again becomes a necessity?
If “cape” includes cloaks in general, I can think of two possibilities.
1. A climate where sudden rain or sharply varying temperatures is common, so you want a garment that will protect you if it rains or gets cold, but won’t be too warm when the weather is warm, something you can take off or put on in almost zero time.
2. A social environment where the ability to conceal what you are wearing when you want to is important. Perhaps one where certain sorts of garb send important signals about you, signals you want to be able to send or conceal at will.
When the lockdown started and we started taking walks in the neighborhood for exercise and stir craziness, I noticed that when we or somebody else veered off to maintain social distance, we all smiled and waved. It actually felt pretty good. When the move to homemade masks started up, you couldn’t see smiles any more, of course, but also people stopped waving. I stopped wearing a mask after that and now I sometimes get return waves from people in masks.
It might just be the effect of the lockdown getting older and older, but the difference was pretty strikingly correlated.
I live in Beijing and my reactions are almost entirely the opposite of yours. I associate masks with safety; it’s people who aren’t wearing them that seem dangerous and a little scary.
Background: Masks were compulsory in public places here from February until a couple of weeks ago and they’re still required in a lot of places like shopping malls, public transport etc. 95%+ still wear one on the street even though there haven’t been any new cases in the city for a few weeks now. Before the epidemic you’d occasionally see someone wearing a surgical mask but it wasn’t particularly common to wear one even if you had a cough (talking only about surgical masks, you’d also see a few people wearing N95 masks if the pollution was over 300 or so).
Slovakia; same here. I believe that people following one safety rule are more likely to follow other safety rules. So if I see you wearing a mask, I assume you are also careful about washing your hands, avoiding mobs, etc.
I think it’s worth seeing the social effects of masks in the context of the social effects on American life of most people being seen (if at all) only through windshields. Everyone is aware that people are much meaner to others that they see when in a car, and it seems to be at least in part because you see the other person as a machine or obstacle rather than a person. It seems that seeing an actual person in a mask would be less extreme than seeing a car with a barely-visible person hiding inside.
What?
Road rage. Leaning on the horn. That sort of thing.
As someone who has generally been on the side of ‘the virus and all it’s machinations are greatly exaggerated’, I found this report link text very sobering. A few different intensive care doctors describing the fact that they’d seen nothing like it in years of emergency medicine. It makes the Flu comparisons somewhat far-fetched.
ETA It’s a BBC report, if that makes a difference to anyone.
Yes, this is the kind of article that makes me want to hide in my refrigerator until this is all over. Let’s hope experts can identify the exact cofactors (preexisting conditions, genetic mutations, blood type, etc.) that make some people react so badly to COVID-19.
This matches up with what my cousin, an ER doctor (who got COVID) told me at the peak of the epidemic in NY.
There have been spikes in a few places in the US, which have overwhelmed local hospitals and such. And yet there’s also been community spread for several months in many parts of the country, with no obvious rush of dead people or pneumonia cases in the hospitals. ISTM that explaining this is still to be done.
I agree with this has the potential to be really bad and we needed a strong response. I do have to say I think provincialism is dictating the framing a little. A fair story, imo, would be “major east coast cities and Chicago botch pandemic response, local healthcare system overwhelmed.” Instead it’s, “Federal government botches pandemic response, nation overwhelmed.” when that very much is not the experience on the ground in the South or West and certainly not the Midwest or Southwest (which, you’ll note, is a majority of the population but a minority of journos).
I agree with all this. In an overwhelmed hospital system, COVID has the potential to be horrifying and we should not ignore that. But the experience described in articles like this is atypical, and that should also not be forgotten.
I wonder how much the collapse of local and regional media and the concentration of the chattering classes in NY and DC has driven polarization. Consider our current experience, where the entire country locked down and reopened based on conditions in New York. It’d be one thing if this were a centralized out-of-touch federal government doing this, but the feds had no jurisdiction here, it was all governors and local health officials reacting to Northeast-centered media coverage. Maybe if we still had local newspapers instead of one-page inserts in USA Today, or local TV news instead of prepackaged national content from anonymous syndicators, we might have gotten more reasonable measures than a premature national lockdown.
But reporting is unprofitable, so the collapse of minor to mid-level media outlets will continue unabated, while the worst of the national media are owned by deep-pocketed ISPs and will stick around forever.
This is a nice insight, and I suspect you’re right.
It’s clear now (and probably should have been earlier, but our screw-ups w.r.t. testing meant we didn’t have good data early on) that the distribution of this crap was very uneven, and also that people have very different levels of tolerance for lockdowns. Saying “we’re seeing a spike of cases, we need to put society into low-interaction mode for a few weeks until we get it under control” works a whole lot better when you’re doing it for a few weeks in a particular location, rather than doing it for a few weeks in Montana because of NYC’s spike, and then later doing it again when you actually get a big spike in Montana.
I think the lack of local media made it harder for local populations to distinguish what was happening on the coasts from what was happening elsewhere. But also I think the lack of local media drives a lot worse local government–nobody’s minding the store so nobody hears of day-to-day incompetence or minor corruption.
The line that stuck out at me most was
This implies that at least a quarter of people who die in ICU *aren’t* over 60. The way people here talk, you’d think the disease only affects 80 year olds.
Well they use an neat trick, they say over sixty or with previous illness. Ignoring that there are a LOT of people with said health problems.
I’d bet most middle-class people over 60 in the US are on at least one prescription medicine for something–commonly for high cholesterol and high blood pressure.
As someone who’s been frontline adjacent in a country which prepared really well then didn’t get hit (partially because of that preparation and partially because of luck), i’m glad those stories are getting out.
There are a few more around. I kind of hesitate to share them because people will make judgements about things they do not understand or have not properly thought through. I think SSC has a better handle on that than most places though.
There’s a really good series on the r/medicine reddit by a user called u/madfrogurt from NYC indexed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/g0ovry/one_day_of_care_in_new_york/fnata4g?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x.
And there’s a UK ICU registrar who’s done a blog here: https://icudiary.com/
To be honest, it is personally very frustrating to see people downplay the medical side of the whole thing. I understand discussions of the effectiveness of social restrictions and whether the economic impacts are worthwhile. They are reasonable if they acknowledge the disease burden and strain on the hospital system that we have seen happen in certain areas. There hasn’t really been much medical debate about whether this is bad or not. The data about R0, CFR and IFR have stayed broadly consistent and replicated pretty well country to country since the initial China data and early downward revisions of the fatality rates once we understood the disease course reasonably well in March.
I can say that I as a professional philosopher frequent the subreddit mentioned above, but not stackexchange, and I do spend a bunch of time on Quora but have somehow never ended up seeing a question about philosophy (mostly Game of Thrones and geography of cities).
I’m not a political philosopher though.
Hypothetical question:
Lets say you had committed a heinous crime (murder, or rape, or stealing life’s savings from widows). Then lets say you have a crisis of conscious, a religious experience, etc., and you’ve decided that you must turn yourself in, confess your crime, and receive the just punishment you are due.
What’s the best way to go about doing this?
I figure step one is hiring a lawyer and telling them what you plan on doing. But what exactly would the lawyer tell you to do? Our legal system is an adversarial one, and going straight to the cops and confessing everything is like going to a duel, bending over, and exposing your neck for a nice swift chop. I’ve read multiple stories of people who confessed to the cops with no plea bargain and were punished without mercy. So presumably your lawyer would want to arrange a plea bargain. But, given that you’re already committed to confessing, any plea bargain negotiation would be a bluff: you’re going to confess regardless of the deal. And wouldn’t the prosecuter know that it is a bluff? After all, presumably your lawyer would reach out to the prosecutor and say, what, “My client wants to confess a crime, but only if he gets a good deal.” Is that a real thing that happens? What exactly is the ideal procedure for a moral criminal who wants to do the right thing?
Like… you’re trying to use your guilty plea as some sort of bargain? Weird. /s
Okay, so my impression is also that plea bargains are usually proposed by the prosecution, but I think doing it in reverse would still fit the same general category.
The question is, what are you trying to get out of this?
Compensation to the victim? Give them an anonymous letter with all the moneys instead.
Trying to live free of the fear of police always knocking at your door? I guess the lawyer route might be the best option to settling up with society in general. I think you might be able to get some reduced sentence out of a show of contrition. It might also help to be able to offer something beyond your head on a plate, like knowing where the real or metaphorical bodies are buried.
I’m a Christian and as a child I was taught that if you did something wrong you needed to confess what you did and accept punishment for your actions. This was extended into hypotheticals about adult life. What if someone was a murderer, and then repented and became a Christian: what should he do? The answer was always the same: he needs to confess his crime and turn himself in. That’s the right thing to do. See also any number of books, movies, and plays where a priest or minister advises a man on death row or a criminal free in the streets that they must repent and confess what they had done and ask for forgiveness.
Given that framework, the question has since become “Whats the best way to do what is morally required?”
I get that. What would you do in the case where your idea of justice differed markedly from that of the state you lived in?
Cutting off the hand of the thief, say–presuming you don’t support this–or letting certain categories of murder off very light. Do you still feel your moral debt requires cleansing by the criminal justice system, or would you instead seek to make amends outside it?
That’s a question of ethics. Depending on the system, I could see someone deciding that Christianity required them to:
a) Confess publicly and try their best to make amends, regardless of the legal consequences;
b) Confess to their clergyperson and God, try their best to make amends, and leave the legal consequences to fate, or
c) Confess to their clergyperson, try their best to make amends, and instruct their lawyer to try to arrange the “just” punishment.
For what it’s worth, I used to do legal counseling for troubled people seeking help from a religious organization. From time to time, we’d meet somebody with a mountain of credit card debt that the companies couldn’t legally collect – we’d advise that “after X years, the credit card company doesn’t have a legal right to collect; but if you feel a personal obligation to pay something, we can help you make arrangements.”
This seems like a weird scenario. If your primary reason for coming forward is to assuage your newly-found guilt, you shouldn’t want a special deal, or some sort of advantage for having “gotten away with it” previously. If anything, you should want to be punished more than the typical person who commits such a crime, not significantly less…
No, I totally get it. Let’s say I did something wrong. I changed in the meantime, and not only I wouldn’t do it again, but it’s completely incompatible with who I am. Or maybe I went down some dark paths and didn’t like what I found there, and I instantly regretted. People do fuck up.
So you want to make it even with society, as much as you can. But I’m not a masochist. I just want a fair dealing, as much as anybody in my place would get. Definitely not the worst possible deal – I’d like to see the sun again, sometime. Question is – does the system provide for that? (IANAL, byt my answer would be: mercy of the judge).
Similar to what Radu said, you might feel contrition such that you want to accept the typical punishment for your crimes (as a proxy for the “just punishment”). But since plea deals are baked into the system, pleading guilty without receiving any benefits from a plea deal might subject you to much worse punishment than average for someone who committed the same crime and got caught. That might be a bad system, but it is very much the system that we have (speaking about the United States).
At least, that’s one of the points I would make if I were counseling a hypothetical contrite criminal about why he should retain an attorney to at least look into negotiating a plea deal for him rather than automatically throwing himself upon the (potentially very minimal) mercies of the justice system.
OP’s premise is that the wrongdoer wants to serve what they see as a “just” punishment, but that they are concerned that if they confess, they’ll get an excessive punishment because the state won’t need to plea bargain. (I think the implied assumption is that sentencing guidelines are excessive in an effort to discourage the guilty from using up resources demanding trials, and I wouldn’t argue with that.)’
I think that in most cases, if a wrongdoer turns themselves in voluntarily, the court would take into account both the voluntary surrender and remorse in the sentencing, but you never know.
Otherwise, if the wrongdoer is going to confess regardless but doesn’t feel compelled to tell the attorney that, an attorney might be able to work out some kind of plea bargain.
I guess what I’m getting at here is that the person in question has, in a certain sense, committed two crimes. The original crime in question, and the crime of covering it up and “getting away with it” for some period of time.
While the “just” sentence for the original crime might be less than you’d receive if you threw yourself on the mercy of the court, the fact that you evaded justice for so long can and should be held against you. If you commit a crime for which the “just” sentence is 20 years in prison, but you evade prison for 20 years, what is it you owe starting on year 20? Is it just another 20 years? Or do you have to apply a time value of not-being-in-prison discount rate? If you would have gotten 20 years for being caught immediately, shouldn’t you get more than 20 years for being caught after being free and clear and living a perfectly enjoyable life for 20 years, during which you by all rights should have been in prison?
I think it depends on what theory of justice / punishment you’re using. The four classic factors include (1) retribution, (2) deterrence, (3) incapacitation, and (4) rehabilitation.
Assuming that there isn’t a “correct” answer as between those four factors, then any particular answer is just going to depend on which weighting you assign to each of those factors.
For instance, maybe a retributivist view would require punishing you more, since you “got away with” the crime for a longer period of time. But a view focused on rehabilitation might feel fine applying just probation if we felt like we had sufficient evidence that you had truly changed as a person.
Fall in love with a prostitute, dissuade your sister from marrying a wealthy rake then make sure the sun only rises once on the morning you turn yourself in.
The answer to this question is going to depend on a bunch of different factors:
1. Can you afford a good lawyer?
2. Is the crime still recent enough to still be taking up current police resources? (IE, is it still being investigated?)
3. Is there a good chance you’ll get caught without confessing?
If the answer to 1 is yes – you should immediately get a lawyer. They will likely tell you to come with them to the police station where you will confess to the crime and not say anything without your lawyer telling you to.
If the answer to 1 is no – either wait until you can afford a lawyer or confess then immediately ask for a court appointed lawyer. Don’t say anything to anyone after confessing until your lawyer shows up.
If the answer to 2 is yes – still get a lawyer, but prioritize confessing as fast as possible. Not making the cops waste time/effort will reflect better on you down the line.
If the answer to 3 is yes – still get a lawyer but prioritize confessing as fast as possible even more than before. You only have until they catch you to turn yourself in, after that you lose that leverage.
If the answer to 3 is no – wait until the statute of limitations runs out, then go and confess.
This is a decent guess at what would be a good decision, but I think the statute of limitations isn’t something you’re likely to care about much if you *want* to turn yourself in, and while it will *dramatically* change the leverage you have for a penalty you may face (IANYL, but I’m guessing everything but civil restitution is waived at that point), waiting will also tend to negate whatever good you accomplish by turning yourself in. (e.g. the widows you robbed will live more years impoverished before you make restitution, the society you harmed will go longer without the restoration of trust you accomplish, etc.)
So if your religious experience was pretty profound, I think you’d turn yourself in right away, at least once you get a laywer.
I wonder how the perceived or real barbarity of the punishment plays into this. For my whole life, it has been a commonplace that people sent to prison for child molesting basically spend their entire sentence being raped and brutalized in prison. (I don’t know how accurate this is, but it’s certainly what I have always heard.)
There were a lot of cases over the years of people (I’m thinking in the Catholic church but also in schools and scout troops and other religions) who either were found out as having had some kind of sex with minors (for Catholic priests it was usually teenaged boys, I think), or who confessed it to someone else. I wonder if the widespread belief about how brutally they’d be treated in prison changed the willingness of their friends, associates, superiors, etc. to report them to the authorities.
Suppose I live in some brutal horrible place where the penalty for accidentally killing someone in a drunk driving accident is crucifixion. If someone comes to me and confesses that they killed someone in a drunk driving accident a decade ago, I’m not going to the police with it in that place, and probably won’t encourage them to go to the police, either. The brutality of the punishment matters.
I also wonder if this has to do with the reluctance of the whole justice system to sentence policemen to prison. I think everyone knows life inside prison is going to be very bad for an ex-cop, and that may make everyone extra-reluctant to see the ex-cop actually go to prison.
Yep, I agree with all of this. It’s a topic for another thread, but this country really needs to invest in jails and prisons where it’s the laws and judges, not the inmates or jail guards, who mainly determine the severity of a punishment, and where everyone (including juries) knows the investment has been made.
I am a criminal defence lawyer. I know a guy that did this. He shouldn’t have, since his victim wasn’t aware of the crime (which had happened when the victim was a child) until he confessed and all it did was fuck his victim up more. And the victim had enough problems.
In short, doing this is quite possibly massively selfish, and were a client to come to me wanting to do it I’d suggest they not. If you want to compensate your victim, there are better ways. Plus, the criminal justice system is highly unpredictable, and there’s no way you can predict what will actually happen to you. Way too many judges give way too little credit for remorse or for actually helping the justice system.
This reminds me of the advice Dr. Laura would give to people who called up asking about how to confess to their spouse they had a one-time-only affair. And she would tell them, no, your wife is blissfully ignorant, you’re not telling her to make her feel better, you’re telling her to make yourself feel better. Telling her will only make her miserable. Your punishment for the affair is you have to carry that guilt around inside of you.
Yeah, there are three reasons to tell your spouse you had an affair: you are leaving them; they asked you a direct question; your lover is a nutjob who is blackmailing you. Having sex with strangers in open relationships does not count as an affair.
If you feel guilty, go talk to a priest or psychologist or something. Some things, it’s better not to know.
I strongly believe that if a woman gets pregnant by another man but somehow fools another man into raising the child with him, she should never tell neither him nor the child about the lack of biological parentage. Some things, you should carry to your grave.
With you so far
Still on board…
Nope, I’m off this train. I honestly can’t think of a crueler “trick” to pull on someone than this. Yeah, in the short term you’re making their life worse by telling them, but in the long run you’re saving them so much heartache and misery.
Note that nowadays it is becoming more and more likely that DNA testing will reveal it sooner or later.
So I am not convinced that it would be a good idea.
When people suspect an affair, do they usually seek confirmation?
It may be that this is to resolve an uncertainty and absent that they are better off not knowing. But it may also be their revealed preference to be informed on the matter. I do think I’d rather know than not know–even though I don’t now suspect anything.
Maybe. But it seems to me that if it is something more than one tragic mistake it makes more and more sense to officially leave rather than continue pretending.
Sure, which is why I said “one-time-only affair.” On a business trip, out of town, woman you’ll never see again, that kind of thing. Her advice if it was an ongoing thing was a divorce.
@Aftagley
I’m referring to the stage when the kid has grown and is 18. Why ruin the father’s delight in his grandkids by telling him his son/daughter is not biologicall his?
I don’t see how telling somebody they’ve raised a child that’s not theirs (and that they might have missed the train on raising a child that is biologically theirs) is improving that person’s life. They’ve already invested their everything into raising that child.
The only time to tell such a secret is before the father becomes really emotionally invested. After that, he’ll be torn. And not being the biological father may not even free him of child support payments for a child born within a marriage (there’s a kind of statute of limitations on denying paternity).
Telling a man a child is not his before he raises it, that’s the decent thing. But once you’ve tricked him (which I don’t think is the decent thing to do, to be clear), and it’s too late to change anything, you carry your secret to your grave.
You harm the child by not telling. Not only do they (and their potential children) not know their family medical history, but instead they are supplying confounding information to their doctors.
@ana53294,
So, this thread is more or less dead and you may not see this, but in case you’re checking, as a counterpoint . . .
This is my no-kidding life situation. I found out at twenty-three that my biological father wasn’t the father that raised me. I think you’re forgetting someone in your consideration of the situation. The bio-dad, who, at least in my case, never knew about me and never had the chance to do the right thing – or not.
For me, very slowing, starting around age thirty, I’ve developed a very good relationship with my “other father”. Had my mother taken this to her grave, I would never have had the chance.
One famous/infamous instance of this was Albert DeSalvo’s eventually “successful” attempt to confess to the Boston Strangler murders in 1965. There is a good account of this in Bill James’s wonderful book Popular Crime. DeSalvo was already institutionalized (but not yet convicted) following his arrest for a series of unrelated sex crimes when he started claiming to be the Strangler. F. Lee Bailey negotiated a deal for DeSalvo to confess in exchange for immunity from prosecution for the murders; the police would prosecute him for his other crimes instead, and Bailey would introduce the confession to the murders as the basis for an insanity plea.
This did not quite work out — DeSalvo ended up being convicted for the rapes after all — but it did accomplish the basic quid pro quo of the cops getting to clear the case without DeSalvo having to face the death penalty. (Aside from the part where DeSalvo’s “confession” was probably mostly just grandstanding.)
Obviously this is unlikely to generalize to more mundane cases with a less bizarre confluence of circumstances. But it is possible in principle to offer the police a confession ex ante in exchange for some form of immunity.
UW takes race out of an evaluation formula for renal function.
I don’t know enough to know whether this is a sensible or dumb decision. It has plenty of markers of being motivated by ideological / moral reasoning rather than by factual reasoning, but I don’t have the relevant expertise to know. So, I’m curious about whether anyone here does know about whether this is a good or bad decision.
If using race gives more accurate answers, then it seems negligent to stop using it. It looked like there were some dueling studies about whether race gave more accurate answers, but I didn’t try to dig into that. Anyone know more?
There are other variables which might provide more accurate fits to the available data. Race is, in and of itself, a very condensed summary of a range of genetic and socioeconomic factors. A good summary of the other parameters which could be used for a new formula is available here.
Well it’s complicated and in some cases including a race term in the equation makes it less accurate. But in some cohorts it has been validated.
The good news is that most decisions are not based solely on GFR. If it’s borderline, it doesn’t matter if the GFR is 30 or 35. If we are talking about chronic kidney disease, then the changes in GFR matter as much as the number itself. If it’s getting lower that’s bad, if it is stable then that’s good. Clinical symptoms and electrolytes are also used in the decision making process. And if it comes down to important decisions (such as if to transplant) then we can use a nuclear medicine study instead which don’t require the use of proxy variables.
I followed the twitter thread a little – it appears that with a creatinine test, one can do a better correction than simply by noting that the patient is black. If that’s true, it’s probably good. (I didn’t see a reference I could actually read about that, and I don’t really care enough to check.)
For routine medical work (as opposed to research) the question I’d want to see answered is whether the increased accuracy was worth the cost of the additional test, assuming the creatinine test isn’t already routinely done.
Peter Watts, the SF author, has published a new story on the web: The Last of the Redmond Billionaires.
Watts is known for writing gloomy stuff. He takes a maximalist view of global warming, including secondary effects, and therefore expects everything to get much worse real soon now. And he blames the wealthy, which by world-wide standards includes people living quite ordinary first-world lives. This story is very much in that vein.
I hope I never hate anyone as much as Watts hates rich people.
One thing I kind of hate, is reading books written by people who hate me. I’m a person living a life within spitting distance of “ordinary first world”, as I suspect are you. Why are you still bothering with Watts?
As if that weren’t enough, stories told in the present tense have almost always struck me as too precious to bother with. Pass.
There’s something annoying about present tense, right? I could never figure what it is, but it irks me terribly. Even more than the pretentious hating the rich part.
Interesting you two hate present tense so much. I find that when writing fiction I usually default to present tense and it takes active effort to switch to past tense. To me present tense is the most natural tense for describing things as they are unfolding, and that’s how it feels to me when I write fiction, like a reporter on the scene recording events. It might be related to the fact that most of my fiction output has been in the context of roleplaying games, where present tense is used as a matter of course.
And that might put your finger on why I don’t like it. I want to believe I am getting a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the present tense undermines my faith in that. If it’s just the writer’s stream of consciousness, then I have no reason to suppose that anything that happens will matter in the long run.
Do you actually notice the tense of stories you’re reading? Maybe you only notice it when the story itself doesn’t interest you?
Is the Hunger Games precious?
Are Dorothy Sayers chapter titles precious?
I remember when starting Hunger Games “this is weird” in the story-telling, and I resisted it. The story got good enough quick enough to have me hooked and I quickly stopped noticing.
But it puts a hurdle up for the reader, and I have enough things to do with my life that I might just quit and do one of those things instead.
I finished the hunger games but I never got used to the present tense. It just seems strictly worse to me. I’m not sure what the point of it is.
Don’t know, haven’t read it — and now I know I don’t need to.
Chapter titles are a different matter. I don’t object to book titles that are not complete sentences either. I’m not an animal.
I suppose that might have been true decades ago. And to be fair, I’ve read one or two stories where being in the present tense mattered to the story and the technique was used effectively. The rest of the time it just seems like a tired way to (try, and fail, to) make it seem immediate or suspenseful, and the story would have worked just as well or ill if they had told it conventionally.
For what it’s worth, I usually have a similar disdain for stories told in the second person.
But in full candor, my late brother-in-law’s book Tilt, which I’m now preparing for release, has a frame written in present tense and second person, and I just love it. So feel free to ignore me. If you didn’t before.
Walter Jon Williams often writes in the present tense, and I enjoy his stuff a lot. Present tense is tough to do well, but it can pay off. (Second person is even harder, but I’m sure there’s a great work out there that uses it.)
Bright Lights, Big City is second-person.
Halting State isn’t great, but it’s done well enough that I found the mechanic interesting.
If on a winter’s night a traveler is in second-person.
It is a book about reading books. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading books.
Yeah, I quite liked If on a winter’s night a traveler. One of very few second person stories I have liked.
Neal Stephenson uses present tense sometimes, to good effect IMO. In Snow Crash, the tense seem to be a stylistic choice to contribute to an “actiony” feel to the book. It’s a bit jarring at first, since it feels a little wrong due to the departure from the normal practice of writing fiction in the past tense, but that also works because the story is set in a moderately dystopian world and the sense of wrongness helps set the tone for the story. But that’s a matter of taste, so I won’t argue too hard if you found Snow Crash’s tense overly precious.
And in Cryptonomicon, the narrative covers two interrelated stories, one set around the time of WW2 and the other set a short but unspecified time in the future relative to when the book was written. The two stories are interrelated both thematically and in terms of the long-term consequences of the WW2 story having plot-significant consequences for the near-future story. The WW2 story was written in past tense, and the near-future story was written in present tense, making it trivial to keep track of which story track you’re currently reading when it isn’t 100% clear from context. There are a lot of reasons that people may dislike Cryptonomicon (*), but I haven’t heard tense brought up as one of these reasons.
* The rambling style (exemplified by the notorious Captain Crunch scene), the abruptness of the ending, and the length of the portion of them book where you need to take on faith that things get interesting and the two stories make sense to be interleaved. I really like the book, but I’m a fast reader, I gave Stephenson a lot of leeway on first reading because I’d read and enjoyed several of his previous books, and I enjoyed most of the rambling digressions for their own sake. I didn’t like the ending, but I’m prepared to forgive that for the sake of the middle.
If you genuinely believe we exist in a cold, indifferent universe then a nihilism of the sort espoused by Peter Watts becomes inevitable. No doubt, his sniping against middle-class values is fairly jejune, and especially his sentimentality about pets relative to his hatred of children. Nevertheless, I find these minor narcissisms to be forgivable when taken next to his puncturing of the anthropomorphic self-regard that fuels so many of the toxic religious and political fictions we binge on.
We are a species, just like any other, and Watts exposes that clearly.
Might one dispute just like any other there though? As far as I know were the only species capable of creating the SSC open thread for a start….
Sure, but I expect that just about every species are the only species capable of doing X, so long as X is allowed to vary across evolutionary specialisms. In which case, we’re a species just like any other.
Chesterton put it better than I can:
@FLWAB:
Sure, but if all of these innovations are subject to evolution (which they are, directly or indirectly) then I don’t see what difference it makes. We are not disembodied spirits; we are not intelligences that run beneath the substrate of space and time; we cannot reproduce or survive far outside the limits that constrained our Palaeolithic ancestors. Given the space of possible variation, we’re still slumming it with the animals––and there’s no shame in it.
@Nick was just saying to me elsewhere that reading how the author hates you and how you deserve to be miserable is probably bad for your mental health.
So I’ll note, @Lodore , that puncturing of the anthropomorphic self-regard that’s toxic and false if we exist in a cold, indifferent universe is something I already get by reading Lovecraft, which doesn’t harm my mental health. 🙂
If we live in a cold, indifferent universe then we might as well have regard for ourselves, because no one else is going to.
The point isn’t to be miserable, it’s to not be delusional. It’s to accept that we will perish without record from the cosmos and that that’s OK––even preferable––to imagining some implausible paradise in this world or the next that will redeem it all.
@Lodore
LMC isn’t depressed by the nihilism, which as she says we can get from Lovecraft without issue. She’s depressed by what you call the “minor narcissisms,” which suggest what Watts lays bare elsewhere: that he hates the outgroup and wants them to suffer, and that he plans to use his writing to tell them that. You say the minor narcissisms are forgivable, but if nothing else they are hampering Watts’s ability to get across the message you value.
ETA: Sourced the “elsewhere”
@Lodore says: “The point isn’t to be miserable, it’s to not be delusional. It’s to accept that we will perish without record from the cosmos and that that’s OK––even preferable––to imagining some implausible paradise in this world or the next that will redeem it all”
Yeah, please just nope! As I don’t see how a cold eyed view of truth doesn’t lead to miserable despair, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport”, The Book of Job and Ovid get it right about how much control we have of our fates.
I’m going to reference two films and an anecdote: at the end of 1985’s Brazil the protagonist escapes…
…in his mind, his body is still strapped to the chair in a torture chamber.
In 1937’s Make Way For Tomorrow a granddaughter tells her grandmother “Why don’t you face facts, Grandma?” (that he husband will never get a job again that may house both of them) to which the grandmother replies: “When you’re seventeen and the world’s beautiful, facing facts is just as slick fun as dancing or going to partis, but when you’re seventy… well, you don’t care about dancing, you don’t think about parties anymore, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there ain’t any facts to face, so would you mind if I just went on pretending?”, and decades ago when I was still more boy than man I dated a women who tried to end her life by jumping in front of a moving BART train (our local subway), her injuries did kill her a few days later but before she died some evangelists converted her and she didn’t die in despair, and despite my not believing in their message I’m glad she did, people need delusions to thrive, being fully rational is unhealthy.
Then you must not be doing it right 🙂
@Nick. Yes, fair correction, duly noted. Man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest etc etc.
@Plumber:
At a certain point, one just has to plead difference of temperament and say “that’s not how it feels to me”; maybe this is one of those points.
The only real contentment I’ve ever known came with renouncing the sense of myself as being in any way significant at all, and the universe being part of some bigger plan. Part of this was recognising and rejecting the consoling fictions centred on personal survival; another involved renouncing the personal vanity of believing that I had some purpose to fulfil in my present life.
I don’t see that this should lead to despair. I try to bring pleasure and avoid pain, both for myself and those around me. And it’s more than enough.
Whenever someone does the whole lovecraft “humans are like ants to these greater beings” stuff I think about how 30 people die from ant bites each year in the US.
Ditto when they talk about “higher dimensional beings”, I find flatworld a good way to think about these things, there was an Arthur C Clark story, Firstborn, it’s pointed out that being “higher dimensional” doesn’t mean you’re safe.
The beings of flatworld could still string a lasso around an errant finger straying through their domain and trap a roundworlder…
or even cut off the limb straying through their domain and if flatworlders did that to a roundworlder human then they could easily bleed out from the wound.
While it’s true that our deicide number is lower than insects homicide number, our killings of ants and other squishy things is many orders of magnitude higher.
Yeah, we’re awfully lucky ramming Cthulhu with a boat worked, because if it hadn’t, the world would have ended.
Like others said, Blindsight is pretty damn good. Among many other things it got right it has a credible scientific explanation for why vampires hate crosses – and it’s a hard sf book about first contact. Also “intelligence without consciousness”. And also: most people will become useless in the future, with comparative advantage going under whatever minimum wage/UBI we’ll have then. This makes me want to read more.
I loved blindsight but I found the sequel kinda boring.
Blindsight was full of interesting ideas and well thought out concepts but I was disappointed with the sequel who’s name I don’t even remember.
Echopraxia. I know because I removed it from my reading list yesterday.
Yes I rather enjoyed Blindsight but found Echopraxia to be considerably weaker. For me a big objection was the treatment of the vampires, I am guessing Watts just really fell in love with them or something. In Blindsight they felt like creepy kind of dangerous half-humans with boosted IQ, in Echopraxia they are Worth the Candle devils and demons rolled into one and feel about equally magical.
Eh. With great power comes great responsibility. You can’t accrue power and then whine when people point fingers at you. Or I guess you can, it’s just that no one will care.
If I were to only read people who I don’t vehemently disagree with politically, my reading list would be several times shorter.
I don’t think Watts would hate you as a person, from all his convention stories he seems like a pretty chill guy. He may hate your demographic in the abstract, though.
Sort of a George Wallace for the modern era, then?
@Paul Zrimsek
See my reply to Deiseach below. I’d call his snark about conservatives, corporations, capitalism, and the stupidity and shortsightedness of the average consumerist individual as pretty bog-standard left-liberal, just with the volume knob and the vitriol cranked rather higher than your average Mother Jones or NYT op-ed.
I read it. I don’t recommend it.
Same. All the flaws of Watts without much redeeming value. He should stick to the space stuff, his underwater books (Starfish etc) are also filled with shitty things happening to people for no reason.
Shouldn’t Watts hate himself by that metric?
I think he does, but he’s expecting to be done in by one of many troubles in the coming years. One of the sources he cites in a recent post on his blog is predicting social collapse in 10 years.
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433
I did finish “Blindsight”, but after getting a load of this
I decided not to waste my time on any of his writing again. Is there any reason to think that Watts’s ideas on global warming or political economy (or pretty much anything, really, except maybe marine mammals) are worth paying attention to?
Johan, if memory serves you are from Toronto, right? Are you reading him as a form of support or involvement with local SF scene?
I enjoyed Blindsight a lot — the idea that consciousness might be unnecessary for intelligence, such that the core aspect of human experience might be atypical and even suboptimal was new to me and fascinating. I don’t have any strong opinions on whether it’s true, but I found it thought-provoking, and I genuinely enjoyed the story.
That said, I don’t put any stock in Peter Watts’s ideas on the likelihood of civilizational collapse. He can be kind of a fun read for how things could happen — if somehow everything turned out much, much worse than I expect — but I don’t get why anyone would view him as authoritative on those topics, rather than as simply a fiction writer who happens to write stories set in (one possible) near-future era.
So Peter Watts uses a metaphor you don’t like and you use it to dismiss his ideas? As I assume you know that dimensionality reduction is a thing in statistics and machine learning, the logic of your objection isn’t clear to me. Care to clarify?
Uncharitable there. The natural reading of Algirdas’s comment is checking whether it is worth reading Watts for his ideas as he dislikes his style and wouldn’t read him without good reason.
I’d recommend that you parse a comment two ways before making an accusatory reply. As I know all too well it avoids making you look foolish or combative…
I appreciate that it’s a helpful move to point out what you see as a misinterpretation, but I don’t buy what you say. When Algirdas says:
after making a negative ascription to Watts’s writing style, the most obvious inference is that it’s a rhetorical question. The parenthetical “or anything really” copper-fastens this. If he didn’t mean this, then he needs to be clearer.
Yes.
Wrong assumption. I know nothing of statistics or machine learning. Does Peter Watts? More importantly, does dimensionality of problems in statistics, and reduction thereof, have any connection to page 49 of Blindsight from which I chose the quote? Or to Blindsight novel as a whole? How about another gem, on page 25: “but there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable.”?
To clarify: I don’t think these are successful metaphors. It’s technobabble, and all technobabble is a form of cargo cult. Intellectual content of theoretical physics and mathematics is among the highest achievements of the humankind (perhaps the highest). I wish I were intelligent enough to study and to understand it. Alas, I’m not. And I’m not alone in this. It happens quite frequently that scholars from fields low on the purity scale have a bit of inferiority complex regarding purer fields. (This is not helped by arrogant theoretical physicists calling other sciences “stamp collection”, but: a) they are largely correct; b) it’s not relevant to present discussion.) If I am engaged in mundane biological or chemical research, no matter how useful it may be, it still is an intellectually lightweight exercise compared to proving Weierstrass theorem, or studying general relativity. But those fancy mathematical terms are so darn inviting when you are writing about some boring biology!
So I read Blindsight, and thought that the main idea was mostly ok. But when the author repeatedly tries to distract me by inserting irrelevant technobabble into his work, I can’t help but think “if you have nothing to say, keep your mouth shut”. And I don’t trust such author to possess intellectual discipline or rigour while writing on other topics.
Watts is using dimension reduction as a metaphor to evoke what Siri Keeton does–namely, take difficult concepts and make them explicable. The cognitive frame he uses to do this–dimensionality reduction–is extremely common and far from the prerogative of theoretical physics or pure mathematics. Even psychologists–lower on the “purity scale” (note quotes)–than biology use principal components analysis all the time. Most science fiction readers, for that matter, will have encountered projective mappings of tesseracts (4-dimensional analogue to a cube) into 3-dimensional space.
Now, you concede that you know nothing of machine learning (fair enough) or statistics (less fair enough) and yet you police the use of terms from physics and mathematics with the zeal of a bulldog. Are you sure you’re motivated by rational concerns here, or is actually maybe a covert theology that bristles when the god is profaned?
@Lodore
I don’t know any psychologists, but if biochemists (of which I know great many) are any indication, I suspect you may be vastly overestimating fraction of the psychologists who know what PCA is.
As to zeal, etc: thank you for making me feel young again for a moment. Philosophy 101 was mandatory in my undergrad. After a particularly fruitless argument with a prof one day, an exasperated friend proclaimed that I “worship science”. Perhaps she read the mammalian surfaces of my topology better than I do myself? 😉
You asked for clarification on why I consider Peter Watts not worth reading. I provided one to the best of my limited ability, and have nothing more to add, so I think I should take my own advice regarding shutting up. I’ll leave you to analyse covert theology at your leisure.
What’s wrong with that quote? I’ve read a lot of scifi and most of it is mediocre. Everything I’ve read by Watts has been well above average, at least in terms of what I look for in scifi.
Would you mind sharing what you look for in sci-fi and which Watts works successfully provided it?
I read the linked story that started this thread and came away with a very negative impression, but this was my first exposure to Watts and I try to avoid writing off authors based on a single work (especially a single short story). If someone can point me at his better work, I would appreciate it.
You can find the entirety of Blindsight online.
He has a lot of material available here:
https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
Blindsight is probably his most famous novel, and it’s available on that page. For something shorter, try ZeroS. It’s a high-tech zombie story.
His bio on Amazon:
That reads as “I am such a Big Swinging Dick that I shouldn’t have to do this”. Well, it’s simple then, Peter: tell your publishers not to make your books available on Amazon.
Author bios don’t make much difference to me when I’m looking for something to read, although they can be helpful: “okay, so this novel is about a 30-something Eng Lit graduate who has broken up with her long-term boyfriend and the author, by coincidence, is – you’ve guessed it. Okay, that saves me having to read 200 pages of whining about how hard it is to be middle-class today”. Ditto Mr Watts’ potted bio: I wasn’t impressed by Blindsight, if I want to read nihilist skiffy I’ll stick with China Miéville, and this saves me time and energy in considering if I want to try something else written by a guy who thinks “doing what you need to do for the job*” is just too onerous because damn it, if you want the privilege of buying his book, you should be putting in the spadework to track down his blog and follow him there. No thanks!
*You’re a professional author. There are sixty squillon writers of all degrees out there. If you want to make a living by writing, then it’s your job and part of that job is doing what your publisher tells you will sell books, which yes includes putting them up for sale on Amazon and providing a potted bio for the author page. If you don’t like it, change careers and go get a job working down the sewers.
I don’t think it’s arrogance, I think it’s more a matter of making a show of how very much he dislikes “Big Tech” corporations. And yes, it’s showy and performative virtue signalling, since if it bothered him THAT much he would just not have a bio on there.
Mind you, I actually quite like some of Peter Watts’ output (Blindsight, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Echopraxia less so), but his non-fictional communication like that author blurb and blog are chock full of that sort of performative snark about the manifest wickedness of corporations, the greed and venality of humanity, American Conservatives are basically the Taliban in Red White And Blue drag, blah blah blah. He comes across as a deeply unhappy person, though by all accounts he’s more friendly in person, so perhaps he simply gets off on using bile for ink, as they used to say.
Great story. Reading Watts’ Echopraxia and the Foundation trilogy really clarified for me why Pinker’s numbers are meaningless:
1. The real gauge for the health of an empire is how the frontier (for Rome, Britannia, for Trantor, Terminus) is doing. In Puerto Rico, no one thinks we have a bright future. Hell, most Americans expect life to get worse by 2050. Do numbers really trump instinct? It occurs to me there is a ridiculous amount of situations where you would be a fool to try to stick to numbers. Most of what humans value remains unformalizable, and that includes civilization.
2. Trends can be reversed rapidly and permanently when dealing with any complex system. See this, or this. Civilization is unimaginably more complex than either of those two machines, and there are no experts at civilization building/mending. Echopraxia shows a disturbingly (or reassuringly, if I channel Heidegger or the Unabomber) plausible collapse of technological civilization.
The Roman Empire lasted at least 800 years after the loss of Britannia though. The fall of the old ceremonial capital (which wasn’t actually lost to the Roman Empire till about three and a half centuries after the loss of Britannia) was not the end of the Empire. The number of people who fail to grasp this and use the Roman Empire’s ‘fall’ in the fifth century as proof of their hypothesis is staggering, and their hypotheses are almost certainly wrong.
And of course while the Empire did to some degree “decline” this had as much to do with its surrounding neighbors becoming powerful proto-states in their own right and hacking off bits and pieces of autonomy from Roman Europe and North Africa. And it was always in ebbs and flows. There was by and large not the sort of apocalyptic collapse people like to imagine. Frankly the British Empire fell apart faster, but few would say the British Isles (or more to the point, India) have fallen into a cataclysmic Dark Age because of this.
that depends where you were. Some places were pretty cataclysmic.
“The internal conflict in Myanmar is a series of primarily ethnic conflicts within Myanmar that began shortly after the country, then known as Burma, became independent from the United Kingdom in 1948. The conflict is the world’s longest ongoing civil war”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_conflict_in_Myanmar
Thank God we have billionaires to blame for everything that is wrong with society and the world. 90 years ago we had the Jews for that, but Hitler kinda spoiled it for all of us.
If the billionaires have a problem with it, it’s very easy to stop being a billionaire – just give away enough money that you’re a mere millionaire, and you’re off the hook. Though I wouldn’t advice it. The benefits of obscene wealth are enough to offset any number of public image problems.
IDK – every time I see someone write about “billionaires” I replace it in my head with “Jews” and see if it still sounds reasonable. It rarely does. This works because the same type of animus is at work, I think. Distance and envy, really.
I wish people would stop saying things like this. Animus towards Jews really, really was not just “jealousy”, or a sense that Jews were “doing too well”. Poor Jews were murdered in the Holocaust just as much as rich Jews.
Depending on the flavour of antisemitism, Jews were regarded as deicides, as parasites, as infiltrating aliens who by their very nature degraded the culture of their host societies, and so forth. There are a few strands of antisemitism that bear some resemblance to some of the things people say against billionaires, but the idea that Hitler’s rhetoric against the Jews is comparable to anti-billionaire sentiment in general is just absurd. There would be no logic for a Nuremberg laws against billionaires and the concept of “race-mixing” between billionaires and non-billionaires is completely empty.
The Holocaust was one of the most spectacular atrocities in human history, built on centuries of prejudice and mistrust directed against a caste-like minority who were forced to dress differently, live apart, who suffered periodic expulsions and government-enabled murders, and who were never regarded as fully part of the political community based on their identity.
The idea that this compares to some mean things said in a short story is frankly obscene, and you can easily disagree with Watts’ assessment of billionaires without making the ludicrous comparison to a long-lasting dangerous prejudice that resulted in probably the worst single act of mass murder in human history.
Thanks for making this comment.
That’s the point. Hatred towards billionaires doesn’t comprise only envy, they’re a scapegoat – just like Jews have been for a very, very long time. You don’t have to admit to yourself the unconvenient truth that you’re responsible for your decisions if you can blame “the billionaires”. Are you buying cheap crap from China? Doesn’t matter, it’s the billionaires’ fault that your country is losing blue collar jobs. Are you driving an SUV and burning tons of natural gas to heat your home instead of properly insulating it? Doesn’t matter, climate change is the billionaires’ fault. Are you voting for politicians that give favors to a small subset of people to the detriment of society at large? Doesn’t matter, it’s the billionaires’ fault that your government is corrupt.
The selection by a larger group of a scapegoat-subgroup is a complex sociological phenomenon which I won’t pretend to fully understand, but envy, the right combination of distance and familiarity (Jews had a different religion and their own communities, but they were still a part of the same society), and some “bad apples” that were – unjustifiedly – taken to be representative of the whole subgroup, are some of the factors.
Parasites? People who hate billionaires absolutely think that. Degrading the culture of their host societies? Check. Deicides? People who hate billionaires blame them for all sorts of things; remember that it was the Romans who crucified Jesus, not the Jews, yet the Jews got the hate for it.
I didn’t imply that, nor did I imply that there might be a Holocaust against billionaires any time soon. That’s why I wrote “90 years ago”: There was some anti-semitism in 1930, but it was far from the extremes to which Hitler and the Nazis drove it.
Addendum: It is not my intention to come to billionaires’ defense. They’re probably the most privileged group on Earth, and many of them are rich precisely because they’re unethical and ruthless. My point is that using them as a scapegoat to avoid taking responsibility for one’s own actions and decisions is cheap, immature, and counter-productive.
This is partly a response to you and partly a response to Garrett; he claimed that it was primarily envy and distance.
None of this really compares, and I think a cursory check of the history of Jews in Europe will show this comparison to be specious. For over a millenium, Jews were semi-regularly murdered for having literally killed Christ–not like a wacky, “look at all the loopy things people have said Jews do!” but a very serious multi-century, many-hundreds-of-dead bodycount. Jews were absolutely not regarded as part of the same society: hence why they were regularly expelled, forced to wear distinguishing badges when they went out to mark them out from others, were forbidden from holding public offices, and forced to live in special parts of the city away from the rest of the population.
None of this has any parallel when looking at billionaires.
As to parasitism, Jews were regarded as being literally biologically different, which is why not only were Jews accused of financial and economic parasitism, but also of “polluting the blood“; again there is no comparison. No one worries about “miscegenation” with a billionaire, or asserts that someone with a billionaire grandparent should be forbidden from having sex with a non-billionaire.
Again, there are some superficial similarities, but the hatred against Jews was deeper, more sustained, more virulent, and many orders of magnitude more destructive.
There just really is no comparison, and you can make essentially the same point without this rather outrageous hyperbole.
I entirely agree.
But I find it mildly concerning that this story has found as much of an audience as it has, since expressing that hate seems to be the only thing it brings to the table. Certainly the world-building, characterization, plotting, and use of language all fall well short of the standards set by the rest of the genre (or any other I’ve read).
Is this something you shared because you enjoyed it, because you found it interesting, because it illustrates a trend in writing/publishing that you want to draw attention to?
I tried you warn you all, and you didn’t listen….
And you were right. Please enjoy your well-earned “I told you so”.
Next time I’ll pay more attention.
They don’t call you the skeptical wolf for nothing! 😉
I shared the story because I have enjoyed Watts’ work in the past, and I know he has fans here. I figured y’all would be interested in something new from him.
I agree the story isn’t much fun. But, then, not all worthwhile art is fun. I recently rewatched “Platoon”, a really celebrated film, and was struck by how much not fun at all the experience was. “Bracing” is more like it.
What’s his beef with biohackers? Just seems awful random to single them out. I’ve never run in to a biohacker who didn’t seem like a pretty cool guy, and usually fastidious about safety.
The story appears to me as an early ‘seed’ from which a novel may grow. The type that went into magazines in the good ol’ days; later the reader would find it again as a scene in some long piece. Hence loose threads and pointers to unexplained material.
From a health correspondent for the BBC (echoing the conversation about existential risk further down):
Those with pre-existing health conditions are most at risk. Deaths among under-65s with no illnesses are “remarkably uncommon”, research shows.
Perhaps the easiest way is to ask yourself to what extent you are worried about the thought of dying in the next 12 months.
What is remarkable about coronavirus is that if we are infected our chances of dying seems to mirror our chance of dying anyway over the next year, certainly once we pass the age of 20.
For example, an average person aged 40 has around a one-in-1,000 risk of not making it to their next birthday and an almost identical risk of not surviving a coronavirus infection. That means your risk of dying is effectively doubled from what it was if you are infected.
And that is the average risk – for most individuals the risk is actually lower than that as most of the risk is held by those who are in poor health in each age group.
So coronavirus is, in effect, taking any frailties and amplifying them. It is like packing an extra year’s worth of risk into a short period of time.
If your risk of dying was very low in the first place, it still remains very low.
As for children, the risk of dying from other things – cancer and accidents are the biggest cause of fatalities – is greater than their chance of dying if they are infected with coronavirus.
During the pandemic so far three under 15s have died. That compares to around 50 killed in road accidents every year.
While I think this is obviously very important to keep in mind, I’m consistently frustrated by this framing for (A) not being at all clear as to what “no illnesses” means and (B) kinda of disregarding those people who do have illness. It’s written as if everyone reading it is in the below-average risk group. That most people are well below 1-in-1000 means the above-average risk group is well above 1-in-1000, so it’s not really encouraging. And then it’s unclear as to which category most people fall into. I’m obviously healthy but I have mild asthma. How concerned should I be? We probably don’t truly know and I’m not particularly concerned for my own health, but the article seems to be pretending to address my concerns without actually doing it and managing to seem a bit smug about it.
Death isn’t the only risk. I have a friend who got permanent lung damage. She’s in her twenties and was in reasonably good health. I suppose if she had already been in poor health she would have died.
And I’d think, though am not sure, that our data on that sort of outcome is very poor right now. It wouldn’t shock me if it turns out that chance of life-altering damage was many times the chance of death.
But that’s true of everything, including all the things we’re explicitly or implicitly comparing COVID-19 to, including the generic “shit that could happen in an ordinary year” category.
Deaths are easier to measure than disabilities, so unless there’s some specific reason to expect that [X] has a higher disability-to-death ratio than normal risks, it’s reasonable to use the death toll as your comparative metric and remember to correct for disabilities where the absolute harm is at issue. It turns into apples-vs-oranges if you count the disabilities on only one side of the equation, so don’t count them at all unless you’re going to count them on both sides.
I’m sure this has been discussed here before, but what was the death rate for polio, vs. the rate of people with permanent paralysis?
I think we also need to quantify what is meant by “disability.” There’s a lot of territory between a 10 percent reduction in lung capacity and spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair…
It’s a really hard question but we have worked out estimates for the QA part of QALYs. (and DALYs)
Disability risk is present in many things, but not everything. In particular, it’s not particularly present for influenza, which is the very most common thing that covid-19 is compared to.
And below Douglas Knight linked to a study of Diamond Princess passengers showing lung damage to a solid majority of people infected; this is suggestive that the ratio of permanent impact to deaths may be very high indeed, though as always we need more data.
@Chalid
It’s true that Covid is often compared to Flu, for obvious reasons. But it’s overall mortality could be compared to many things, some of which also have very high disability risks.
We could compare the virus deaths to those from Malaria, and we’d want to include 400 people that live with the disease for every one person that dies from it. Or if we wanted to make a comparison with the 1.5 million who die in road traffic accidents, we’d probably want to include the ten times that number who survive traffic accidents but who have serious injuries.
I’d reiterate John Schilling’s point – it’s the apples to apples that’s important.
I don’t think anyone is really disagreeing here.
If someone is comparing covid deaths to flu deaths, then bringing in long-term health consequences is absolutely fair for someone arguing that covid is much worse.
If comparing to car accidents, not so much.
I think that the flu (or similar disease) comparison is made at least as often as every other comparison combined, though.
But only if we also include long-term health consequences from the flu, which are not zero. If there’s quantitative data saying that the long-term consequences of influenza are significantly less (normalized to mortality) than those of COVID-19, that would be good to know. If it’s just a matter of us not worrying about long-term consequences of influenza because we’ve always considered it to be an ignorably small risk before, then note that we’ve pretty much always considered influenza deaths to be an ignorably small risk once we’ve done a bit of nagging to get people to take their flu shot.
If there’s no quantitative data to work with, I would argue that we should use the baseline assumption that viruses which attack the lungs badly enough to sometimes kill people, will have similar ratios of not-dead-but-really-messed-up outcomes. In which case, apples to apples, deaths to deaths, and then see if we can do a better job of counting the oranges across the board.
I would argue that we should use the baseline assumption that viruses which attack the lungs badly enough to sometimes kill people, will have similar ratios of not-dead-but-really-messed-up outcomes
This is should be a *really weak* prior. Clearly there is a ton of variation in this ratio across different diseases – multiple orders of magnitude. And coronaviruses are a whole different family than influenza viruses.
Isn’t that the kind of thing that is only possible to know with certainly with the passage of time?
We only just managed to get confident in the death rate a few weeks ago. Disability rate is going to take a lot longer, unfortunately.
We “should” know that in the sense that we “should” have an effective medical data-gathering and sharing apparatus. But unfortunately we do not seem to have that; and arguably the countries that do have such a thing used it to suppress the outbreak in the first place.
When you say we are confident in the death rate, what is that rate? The CDC just updated their IFR estimate to .3%:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
Huh, well, everyone else seems to be converging to something in the rough neighborhood of 1%, maybe a bit below. But of course it depends on demographics and conditions and the like.
I’d guess this supports the point – if we still can’t all agree on a death rate to within a factor of 3 then the error bars on disability rates are going to be enormous.
Given that 29,000 of the 19 million people in the state of New York have died of covid, the only way 0.3% IFR works if if 50% of the population of the state of New York has been infected. I haven’t heard anyone postulate 50% attack rate for even Queens, let alone the City or State.
It is hitting different places differently, that’s for sure. The CDC is not just making up these numbers and there are lots of places way below .3% like Singapore and Sweden.
New York could be extra bad because they required covid positive patients to be sent into rest homes, or it could be because their hospitals got overloaded. Or maybe they have a more deadly strain, or maybe they count their statistics differently.
For another example of inconsistency among data sources, the CDC estimates that about a third of infected people are asymptomatic. There was just a story about some people who were on a ship with a lot of infections, and by their count more than 80% were asymptomatic.
@DavidFriedman
Now that’s interesting. Last I heard, there was some question whether asymptomatic cases really existed, or whether the supposed asymptomatic cases were all examples of (a) no symptoms yet (but contagious+testing positive) and (b) false positives.
Your information sounds like it’s more recent than mine, and probably trustworthy. (I don’t think the CDC is perfect, but this isn’t the kind of thing they’ve been making public errors about.)
On the optimistic side, from SARS-1 we know that most people healed their lung damage with time. And rather in months than in years.
On the pesemistic side, do we know anything of the long time effects of the heart and liver damage yet? Or what the virus does in the brainwater?
What about all the pro athletes who had COVID? IMO that’s when we’ll see if this is real or not.
Kevin Durant was one of the best basketball players in the world. He supposedly had COVID. If his lung capacity is permanently diminished at all, his career is effectively over. Same with all the baseball and soccer players who caught it, right?
Some nonzero but extremely minor damage would not be career ending.
At that elite level of competition? Are you sure?
By analogy, athletes play with incompletely healed injuries all the time.
I mean, Michael Jordan can play with food poisoning, but he is the GOAT.
Temporarily. At reduced effectiveness. And then they get surgery in the offseason.
I’m not as familiar with basketball, I mostly watch hockey. It’s pretty common in the NHL playoffs that people will notice a star player is suddenly much less effective than expected. Then usually it comes out they were playing through an injury that wasn’t disclosed to the media and are immediately getting surgery to correct it.
So maybe career-ending is a bit of an exaggeration on my part, but career-altering seems to be certain. Kevin Durant is an elite player, but he’s not so elite that permanent lung damage extensive enough to be measureable/noticeable wouldn’t dramatically lower his effectiveness, IMO.
Seeing news stories about China’s impending crackdown on Hong Kong, I wonder if some politician could make the obvious proposal — invite the citizens of Hong Kong to come here. All of them, or at least as many as want to.
It’s a radical proposal, given current attitudes on immigration, but there are two things that might make it a little more popular than one would at first think. The first is that it’s an elegant counter move to China. The U.S. can complain all it likes about what China is doing, but China can and will ignore our complaints. Offering refuge for the oppressed inhabitants is something we can do unilaterally. And it is something that not only frustrates China, it hurts them, since it means a lot of skilled and able people, and a lot of wealth, leaving their control.
At the same time, this proposal should largely answer the worries of people who see immigration as letting in lots of very poor people to undercut the wages of the American poor. Hong Kong is the one part of China with per capita incomes at western levels. It’s famously full of able, hard working, entrepreneurial types, the sort of people who start companies, create jobs, make the country they live in richer.
I’m not optimistic enough to think that either Trump or Biden would do it. But it’s at least an interesting thought.
Is it even legally possible to have different immigration rules for Hong Kong and the rest of China at this point? But even if it is, I’m not sure that “pissing off China” is something a US government would like to do. Trump might like it, but he’s not a fan of immigration (unless it’s from Norway).
And hard working entrepreneurial types from visibly different ethnicities have historically not been very popular.
Yes
A lot of Hong Kongers have different passports- there’s the HKSAR passport for Chinese citizens with permanent residence in HK, as well the British National (Overseas) passport which they could register for in 1997, which a few hundred thousand people hold, and the somewhat rarer British Overseas Citizen passport.
Many countries already treat holders of HKSAR passports differently from holders of mainland Chinese passports- 170 countries allow them to enter without a visa, compared to only 74 for a mainland Chinese passport.
The BN(O) passport has been in the news recently- the British government has previously stated that the Sino-British Joint Declaration forbids it from allowing BN(O)s to move to the UK, but has apparently just received legal advice to the contrary…
But isn’t that a bad idea because if it succeeds, then the people who have to remain in Hong Kong will be in deep trouble, because most of the good workers have left?
They might have competition*.
(This doesn’t apply to all HKers though).
I think quite a lot of HKers moved to Canada and Australia around 1997 too. I would’ve thought this generally increases the chances of such a scheme.
*Having read further down the thread properly, I think this might be what AlphaGamma is referring to?
Too little, too late. The UK should have offered British citizenship to all the HKers who wanted it back in 1997 if they were serious about pressuring China to respect the agreement.
It’s not that unthinkable. On a smaller scale, the US already did this with Iran. It was surprisingly easy for well educated Iranians to immigrate to the US despite there being no US embassy in Iran. Also the population of Hong Kong is only 7 million – it should be possible for Canada, the US, the UK, Taiwan and perhaps South Korea to absorb all of the Hong Kong natives who want to leave within a decade. I don’t know if that level of international coordination is feasible though. And obviously I’m assuming this plan is for after the current pandemic is over. It’s also not obvious that China should be upset – obviously they would raise hell about it, but they could easily replace the Hong Kong population multiple times over. They are already trying to increase the number of mainlanders in Hong Kong who are sympathetic to the PRC government.
Apart from the political difficulty, there is another issue though. Do Hong Kong residents want to leave? I don’t think they do – the ones who value political freedom that much already left. The ones that remain love Hong Kong and it’s easy to see why. It was a modern metropolis with political freedom, Chinese food culture, night markets, high quality public transport, a strategic location (with respect to international trade and finance) and a subtropical climate.
> this proposal should largely answer the worries of people who see immigration as letting in lots of very poor people to undercut the wages of the American poor
I don’t think the people with those worries are actually very influential in setting up immigration rules. It seems to me that the larger influence is upper middle class people who see immigration as letting in lots of educated people to undercut the wages of the American upper middle class. Some countries, like the UK and Canada, do a lot to make it easy to immigrate if you have money or skills and hard to immigrate if you don’t, but in the United States, I believe that the majority of immigration is through family reunification and other methods that are primarily used by unskilled poor, rather than through the H1B program (which tends to run out very quickly every time it’s opened up).
+1
Nearly 25% of my graduating MBA class was facing having to get out of the US within one year, despite most of them really wanting to stay. And oddly enough, most of my socially-progressive American classmates saw no particular problem with this.
I suspect MBAs (even socially-progressive ones) are more willing to view their classmates as “competition” rather than “friends” than the general population.
I think that’s more the peculiarities of the MBA population. Academia is very international, but most everyone supports increased immigration, and increased immigration for their competition specifically.
I know many people who have been through the immigration process in the US and in Canada. It is true that the US takes in a lot of people through family visas. It is not true that the US makes it particularly hard for high skill, high wage immigrants to move here. If you are low skill, and you have no family then you’ll be hard pressed to immigrate to either the US or Canada. There are a handful of visas you could get but they are scarce and go very quickly. If you are high skill – physician, engineer, lawyer etc. and your education was in the US or Canada then immigration is not guaranteed but there is a good chance. If your education was not in the US or Canada, then you are screwed unless you are a physician and you are willing to work in say rural Kansas. I don’t have as much familiarity with the UK but my impression is that it is more difficult to immigrate to the UK than the US. And if you are truly exceptional – a nationally recognized expert or specialist – then immigration is very easy. There is even a separate type of visa to make it faster for you.
Also in defense of the US immigration system, including the family visa, it’s not just a matter of ethics – it’s a matter of practicality. A major reason for the specific restrictions is to ensure that someone doesn’t move here, not realize what they signed up for, and then end up destitute. Having a family support system reduces that chance. And obviously having an in demand skillset also reduces that chance – hence the work visa system. Now obviously it isn’t perfect but I don’t think it’s as bad as is often stated.
There’s a political tract called A Time For Audacity from 2016 on post-Brexit options for tighter ties (including free movement and a common defence force) between the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It envisioned that holders of BN(O) passports and other Hong Kong dissidents should be admitted almost automatically.
Not sure a common defense force is what we need, but I’d be up for freeer movement between CANZUK (and closer ties with other Commonwealth countries dependencies, dominions, suzerainties etc, if they want them).
invite the citizens of Hong Kong to come here. All of them
I very much like this idea – though it should be done as a US-UK joint action (given the history) or even an Anglosphere joint policy with CANZUK participation. I think it would be both good policy and good politics. Western policy-makers have mollycoddled the PRC for much too long.
Quarantine Hotels
Has anyone suggested, or implemented, the idea of having hotels that specialize in quarantining people who have the coronavirus but are not sick enough to require hospitalization? Most hotel rooms include bathrooms, and hotels routinely provide in room food service. Someone who already has the disease is not at risk of catching it, so the fact that the person in the next room over also has it isn’t a problem — indeed, guests could socialize with each other if they wanted. There is no need for any of the hotel staff to ever come within six feet of a guest, or anything close, until the guest is well and checking out. At most, it would be sufficient to clean the room and change sheets and towels once a week or so, with the guest somewhere else and the cleaning done by someone in protective garb, after the room had been adequately ventilated. Or by someone who had already had the disease an so was presumably immune.
Obviously you would need testing to determine that someone had the disease, and either testing or a sufficient period without symptoms to determine that he no longer had it. But the cost of providing such facilities for free would be small compared to the costs we are currently absorbing, and making it easy and even attractive for individuals to quarantine should substantially reduce the risk of transmission.
What benefit does that provide over just having people quarantine at home?
The assumption that if one person gets it, the rest of their household will before they become symptomatic is a fairly sound one.
I do not think that this is the case. Transmission in households is clearly prevalent, but still it is not the case that when one member is infected all others always get it. And if those infectious could be quickly quaratined outside, that would help consideraby.
The claim I’ve read is that people are the most contagious a day or so before they start showing symptoms. But that leaves a lot of time during which they’re still contagious that they could be avoiding giving their family the virus if they stayed in a hotel once symptomatic.
Also, for contact-tracing quarantine, you get people before they’re symptomatic, but you then get 50 people of whom like 5 will ever get sick. I doubt the local health department has the budget to put hundreds of people up in hotels per week, though.
It seems like increasing budgets of local health departments in the middle of the global pandemic should be a no-brainer…
You find 50 contacts, you test them. *Then* you quarantine the ones who test positive.
I’ve heard of this in a number of foreign countries, primarily catering to citizens who were living abroad and have decided to return to their family, but don’t want or aren’t allowed to join their family until quarantine completes. I know people who have done this in South Korea and Australia. Googling “quarantine hotel” and the name of a country gives hits in lots of other places. Here is an article with reviews of some quarantine hotels. The only place I can find doing this in the US is New York City.
Matt Yglesias has been frequently arguing on twitter that there would be a market for this within the US for US residents, even with no law requiring people to use it. I agree with him — if I had a positive test and had not been symptomatic long or at all, I would want to get out of my house before I infected my family (particularly if I could get an AirBnB style apartment, so I could cook for myself.) Unfortunately, here in Michigan, hotels are legally restricted to health care workers, although there are plenty of rooms.
Yes, lots of other countries are doing this.
It’s relatively cheap, since hotel rooms are currently available for a steal.
New York City has gotten around to it, after too long https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/05/07/hotels-across-new-york-city-will-offer-rooms-people-with-mild-covid-19-cases/
The failure to set this up is one of the things I’m saddest about the government dropping. Even though you should have thought of it ahead of time, it’s not that hard to bootstrap.
On thinking about it, I’m mixing the concepts of hotels for people with unknown status who want to quarantine with hotels for diagnosed people. Presumably, this should be two separate locations, but both seem like sensible markets.
Another good service for such a hotel to offer would some sort of daily video check in with their guests, and a phone call to EMT’s if the guest didn’t respond.
I think you want 4:
1) Hotels for people working with vulnerable populations. Your nursing home workers. You work hard to keep the virus from being anywhere inside this place. Maybe monitor the sewage system daily.
2) Hotels for people who work with exposed populations. Your doctors and nurses. We don’t want them going home at the end of their shift. They are necessarily at risk so they can’t go in category 1. You expect a portion of these to turn positive.
3) Hotels for those you think have reason to be exposed, but you don’t know it. Like if you find out your coworker came into the office and was a spreader. You can go here until we decide if you are sick or not.
4) Confirmed sick, but not needing medical care.
Maybe you could combine 2) and 3) if you had a shortage of buildings.
I’m not actually sure why you would want to separate 2 and 3, unless you also feel like separating some other classes of exposure. But in any case, the housing for 2 and 3 would want to have lots and lots of internal separations to prevent infection, while the housing for groups 1 or 4 would presumably not need this.
That’s more or less what they’re doing here, albeit involuntarily. We have “isolation”, which is usually at home, and “quarantine”, which is in designated places – and often (usually?) this means hotels. Given how public money is being spent here, this occasionally means some pretty fancy hotels. But I can’t tell you how successful it is.
Also a complication is that you’re not 100% sure everybody there is infected. For example if you’re caught breaking isolation, you’re moved to quarantine. But you’re still likely clean.
I’d appreciate people poking holes in the following idea.
Since 50%+ of Covid-19 deaths occur in nursing homes, some people have proposed only locking down nursing homes and reopening the rest of society. The issue with this idea is that if Covid is running rampant in society, it’ll get into the nursing homes through the caregivers and staff.
In order to fix this, suppose we levy a small additional tax in order to massively fund nursing homes. Nursing homes would be given enough money to hire caregivers willing to live on campus until the pandemic is over, pay a generous severance to staff who leave because they’re not willing to live on campus, set up extra-safe food/supplies deliveries, etc. Benefits: prevents over 50% of Covid deaths, way cheaper than keeping the economy shut down and spending trillions on economic stimulus.
I think this is essentially a good plan, but since you requested hole-poking:
1) The biggest issue: it’s not clear the pandemic will totally end anytime soon, if ever. That doesn’t invalidate this plan, but would make it more of a commitment.
2) Do we have enough people willing and able to do this work and live that isolated lifestyle? I imagine if the salary and accommodations were good enough, we’d find them, but paying for it won’t be popular. I have to imagine many who currently do the job have children they aren’t willing to leave behind. In general, we seem to avoid dealing with the issue of paying adequately for elder care, and while this provides an impetus to do something different, I don’t know if the political will exists. (One can see that this problem has also become evident in several other countries, which have had nursing home scandals).
3) Do the patients want to put protection from COVID-19 over visits from relatives and others who may come in to do activities? I’m sure this varies by person, but some of these people could end up with a very poor quality of life in exchange for a little more quantity.
4) Most of the people big on lockdowns really aren’t mainly worried about nursing home deaths, even if they are a major portion of the deaths. Maybe the issue could have been framed differently at the beginning and the fear and expectations would not have become so great, but they have.
Re (1) and (2): yeah it would have to be pitched as “we’re doing this mildly expensive thing in lieu of the massively expensive and inconvenient alternative.”
Re (3): I agree, but in the current state of things they’re not getting visitors *and* they might die from Covid anyway. Among the options (a) do what we’re doing now, (b) enact this plan, (c) reopen nursing home entirely, I’m not sure how to tell which of (c) or (b) is better, but it seems that (b) is certainly better than (a).
Thanks for the hole-poking!
2) The tour of duty doesn’t have to be “as long as the epidemic lasts” – you could either test people on the way in for a new rotation if you were confident that you could eliminate false negatives, or just quarantine the new shift in relatively small groups for 14 days or so before bringing them into your campus.
And they can leave the tour at will.
I would tend to recommend this over trying to force someone to stick around. [1] If someone is itching to reunite with their family, let them do it. The get paid out their bonus at that time[2], they go, and decide if/when they want to cycle back in.
[1] One of the worst COVID policies was a meat-packing plant that decided to give bonuses for perfect attendance.
[2] Holding the bonus in arrears until the end gives us a good enforcement mechanism. If you cheat, you don’t get paid.
This is essentially what Florida did and they were relatively very successful at keeping it out of rest homes.
I’m interested in hearing about this. Did Florida really funnel extra money into nursing homes to fund stay-on-campus caregivers, or some other sort of radical program? Also, my sense is that Florida is opening up more quickly than other states, but is by no means completely open.
You can read about it here:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-ron-desantis-florida-covid-19-strategy/
They didn’t go to the extremes that you lay out, but they focused very hard on protecting rest homes.
Yes, the governor sent money to support their isolation from the rest of the population and encouraged municipalities to do so as well. The governor also forbade nursing homes from re-admitting patients that had been diagnosed (which they wanted to do because of reimbursements), including threatening arrests. He also put restrictions on people traveling from hotspots, though these were hampered by freedom of movement. (The infection spread to Florida not through its ports but from New York, as many New Yorkers simply dodged the quarantines.)
The governor followed a regional approach. Some rural counties didn’t lock down at all. My county, one of the most urban, did have a real lockdown but there was never much restriction of movement aside from certain sensitive areas. There was a curfew but it was relatively lax. Aside from restaurants and some tourism establishments, most places stayed open but with reduced business and social distancing measures. This still led to less business and fewer workers though.
There was an economic hit. Businesses closing, unemployment, that kind of thing. But my understand is we’re doing much, much better than the rest of the country. Last I heard, our unemployment rate had more than doubled but was still less than half of that of the country generally. And we had 1/15th the deaths of New York and much less than the national average on a per capita basis. The governor has been bragging about how our rates are slightly lower than California’s despite the fact we have very close ties to Italy and New York and California doesn’t.
Anecdotally, I live fairly close to a few prominent business districts. Of the roughly four hundred businesses in the one closest to me, maybe about two dozen have shuttered, all of them restaurants or personal services like hair cutting (mostly high end). Maybe there’s more that haven’t announced it but that’s how it stands right now.
One thing that annoys me: Florida was constantly accused of “doing nothing” or “not enough”. The reality is that Florida had a plan from the beginning and executed it. It just wasn’t the lockdown certain people wanted. The Governor actually started meeting with experts once it hit Europe because we do so much trade with them.
Not that I doubt the overall conclusion, but how much of the difference in unemployment statistics can be explained by the fact that Florida’s UI system is designed to make it as difficult as possible to claim benefits, while California’s is the opposite?
Those numbers are unemployment statistics, not unemployment insurance claims. So the ease of applying would be irrelevant. The numbers on state assistance look “worse” in the sense more people are on it but some of that is due to impact payments, where employed people still get some aid money.
What is Florida doing now to protect nursing homes, now that the stay at home orders are over and people are circulating again?
Same mostly, at least as far as I know. I regularly play at nursing homes as a charity kind of thing (I do get paid, but not very much). They’ve not invited me or anyone back for the duration and as far as I know are still cordoned off. I believe there are still police officers barring people from going to them, but I haven’t seen that with my own eyes. (I saw they did it at the beginning, but no idea if they still are.)
According to Federal Reserve numbers, this isn’t true: Florida UR was at 12.9% for April, while the national UR was at 14.7%. Even states with relatively limited lockdowns still experienced spikes in unemployment – Wyoming, AFAIK the least locked-down state, was at 9.2% in April.
Perhaps I’m out of date then. Though I will say, I didn’t say there hadn’t been an unemployment spike, just that last I’d heard it wasn’t as bad as it was nationally. Or possibly in New York, since our politicians compare us to them a lot.
Wait, why was there a curfew at all?
That’s fair. I just can’t resist an opportunity to post FRED links.
Prevention of petty crime and to prevent people from having private parties that violated social distancing rules. It was pretty lax, really. You could walk your dog if you were alone, for example.
Maybe it’s that I’ve only ever been under dumb curfews, but I’m not seeing a curfew as super useful for either of those. Sure, being able to stop anyone who’s walking around at 3 AM means you’ll have fewer break-ins at 3 AM, but any large city isn’t going to have the police force to enforce that anyway. And there’s basically no way to know if there’s a social gathering going on if they stay reasonably quiet. You could have, say, a DnD group going on until midnight or early morning with 5-6 players sitting around a table and no one outside the house would notice unless maybe they’re paying attention to what cars are around. All a curfew does in my experience is make sure people stay overnight instead of returning home, which if anything would increase the exposure time.
You underestimate the number of people willing to stay the night. Compare the admission by several DC politicos and Democrats (who were caught by their party) violating social distancing for regular dinner parties. This would have stopped them.
And it was mostly focused around preventing long distance travel, which in turn would mean any outbreaks were more geographically contained.
@Erusian:
And the number whose Fate it is?
I think we’re operating on different definitions of staying the night, and perhaps different definitions of a curfew. I was using “stay the night” to mean staying overnight at a place other than one’s own residence, which I’m pretty sure is a bad thing in this case as it gives several more hours to spread. And the curfews I’m used to seeing only cared about whether people were out on the streets (or in the barracks hallways). Staying at someone else’s place, or a hotel room, or wherever, would not count as a violation.
Few caregivers will be willing to live in permanent quarantine, or go through 2 weeks of quarantine every time they return from holidays or urgent outside trips. Real world people will not keep the discipline to comply for long. And we are still in the first 50 meters of a marathon.
You don’t have to make it permanent.
Say “we will give you a 100% bonus at the end of your term, which you can end whenever you want it to end.”
Turn up that “100%” number if you need to. Money machine go BRRRRR.
Let them start their term by housing them in a hotel for several days with daily testing, to make sure they start clean.
You may not be able to have them all live on campus, but you can house them in hotels. Obviously these would not be the same hotels you store your covid-positive-but-not-needed-ER-service population.
You asked for finding holes, but in fact it is a good idea; many places are moving roughly in that direction. Only “downside” is that it will take some time (at least many weeks) to implement, and if Covid is already running rampant in the country, you still need to have a lockdown during that. Or face a large death toll.
Something along those lines imho should be done even if Covid problem disappears quickly. But I am not optimistic that political resolve to do that will remain in place.
I presume if 50% of the deaths occur in nursing homes, that’s not because 50% of the high-risk population actually lives in nursing homes, but because the infection spreads more easily in nursing homes. If we choose a path were most of the population will eventually get infected, old people living outside nursing homes will also start getting it and dying from it; nursing home residents just get it earlier. So we would be preventing much less than 50% of the COVID deaths overall, compared to having no quarantines either in general or for nursing homes.
Given the CFR-by-age data, I’m pretty sure it’s either the former or both, not just the latter.
Keep in mind that nursing homes don’t just select for “old” but also for “old and infirmed in some way” (with “some way” likely being a comorbidity).
While it’s true that a lot of old people don’t live in nursing homes, the population of old people not living in nursing homes is going to be significantly healthier overall than the population of old people who are living in nursing homes.
+1
Basically nobody wants to go to a nursing home. Retirement communities are different, but a nursing home is where you go when you can’t take care of yourself anymore and the alternative is dying. Quite often, your kids are deciding to put you there because they don’t see how to care for you themselves.
So nursing homes are going to be full of people who are exceptionally sickly even among people their age.
Sadly, my experience of nursing homes is that they are terrible places. I hate being in them, even just to drop off patients. It’s only the top tier of places which don’t permanently have a foul odor about them, and things go down from there.
I’m not entirely certain that having the residents die from Covid-19 is actually decreasing Utils – theirs or others.
Some studies found that the average COVID death loses more than 10 years of life; underlying conditions were supposedly taken into account. The median nursing home stay to death is something like 5 months. If these data are correct, nursing home residents can’t be anywhere near half of the high-risk population.
That’s not the way anyone would do this. If you’re going to do this, you hire several different crews to work six weeks on, four weeks off, with two weeks of quarantine at the start of the “on” period. They can do most of their mandatory training, paperwork, handover briefings, etc, during the quarantine period, and probably some restricted duties, so it’s not a pure deadweight loss. And you’ll get far more volunteers, at a cheaper price and with better long-term mental health, than you would insisting on a year-plus of total isolation.
The other problem is, it isn’t just the staff that brings infections into nursing homes, it’s the visitors. And if the plan is to keep nursing-home residents completely isolated from their families for a year or more, I’m going to start half-seriously wondering whether it might be more humane to just euthanize them up front. The objective is not to keep the meat warm and breathing, it is to alleviate suffering.
It is or should soon be technologically possible to test visitors on COVID just before their visit.
I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that promises a same-day guarantee of noninfectiousness. And I’m guessing that basically all nursing homes will deal with that shortfall by banning all visitors “just to be safe”, until they get something they can convince themselves is a guarantee of safety.
There’s no perfect safety, but you can probably go pretty far by:
a. Requiring guests to be on a list who agree to testing.
b. Get a test the day before you visit, with the negative result coming in before you are allowed into the facility. Add in a symptom screen on arrival, just in case.
c. Visit in some environment that isn’t optimized for transmission–say, on a shaded veranda outside, or in a room with three or four HEPA air cleaners running.
d. Do the visit with whatever infection-control measures make sense. This has to be tuned to the person–masks don’t work if someone needs to read lips, six feet of distance isn’t all that great for emotional support and isn’t so easy to enforce when the 4 year old *really* wants to hug grandma, etc.
e. Visitors also get tested a few days later, and if they’re positive at least you know you may have had an exposure.
@albatross11:
Sadly, most nursing homes are stretched thin for resources in the first place and everything in healthcare is designed to make this as difficult as possible. In regards to your points:
a) A nightmare which will probably require an additional full-time person to try and maintain. That’s a lot of people for a lot of patients. That means getting the patient (or their healthcare power of attorney) to provide you a list of people who may be permitted to be informed of their presence (HIPAA) in order to be put on the list in the first place.
b) This requires actual planning by people which won’t happen much. Even if it does, it requires the test to be performed and results obtained in a timely fashion. But sending “results” to “the facility” doesn’t exactly work like that. Systems are set up to return results to an ordering provider. Sure, you can ask that copies be sent places, but that isn’t on the top of the list of verifies features. And that still requires the receiving facility to process that paperwork in a timely fashion, correlating with the names for the specified patients. Getting a random fax stating that “John Smith” is negative for Covid-19 isn’t going to be easy to manage when there’s no facility account number, either.
c) You have a much better model of nursing homes in mind than I’ve experienced. What you describe may exist, but there certainly isn’t a lot of outdoor space like that available which is accessible to a large number of residents concurrently. Doubly so if you include “and it doesn’t require extra staff to manage them”.
d) Compliance is going to be very difficult. It only takes 1 entry path for the whole place to get infected. Hard rules and separation like prison plexiglas/phone meeting rooms might be the best option available.
e) How do you ensure follow-up? We can’t even get people to take medication reliably when failure to do so might kill them, let alone when it’s merely after they’ve seen grandma.
Maybe US nursing homes will ban all visitors until safety is 100 % guaranteed due to your “safety first” culture, but over here, visitors are allowed since 25 May. I.e. government order banning visits was lifted and I had googled that some facilities indeed will allow them, with some conditions.
@John Schilling
I would guess that too, considering lawsuits by those wonderful family members who would so dearly love to visit, over deaths by coronavirus.
Or considering that staff members because visitors can’t be told to keep out during a pandemic, is not something most employers are okay with.
Or that when the above happens, staff leave work and you can’t take care of the remaining residents.
Or that one person with the virus can kill off the revenue that makes the building able to run.
Coronavirus is really, really bad in nursing homes, wanting/demanding guarantees make sense to me
I think the “several different crews” idea is a really good one. The biggest complaint people have raised is that not enough people will be willing to sign on for the extent of the pandemic, and this seems to fix that.
You and others have raised the issue that for many (most?) people in nursing homes, life might not be worth living if they can’t have visitors. This seems like a bold claim, and I’m curious why people think that. My sense has always been that most people are horrible at visiting their older relatives in nursing homes, perhaps so horrible that Covid hardly changed their visitation rate. Did many (most?) of these elderly people not have lives worth living before? That seems possible, but it also seems possible that nursing homes provide enough social interaction and activities to keep their residents non-suicidal.
Agree crews are a good idea, but I can’t imagine there are huge numbers of people interested in this type of work who are willing to live this way even for a few weeks (for example, many may have young kids). If the pay is high enough, you’ll get them, but it will be expensive an the system isn’t set up for it.
I don’t know what the stats are on visitation. I’m sure many don’t have visitors already. I generally feel like nursing homes are pretty rough places, in some ways inevitably—I was relieved that none of my grandparents ended up being in one more than a week, so I don’t have a ton of experience. My great-grandmother was at one for a while, maybe only a year, and was very unhappy about it. We visited fairly often. But it depends. Some are better than others. Some have happy patients. Some have frequent visitors. I’m thinking about those people, since they’re the only ones for whom it will make a difference.
I don’t think people are looking at this on a proper timeline, and I’m afraid that might lead to questionable policymaking. Most people in nursing homes are unlikely to outlive the pandemic, and even if it quiets down, the risk is so high in nursing homes that it will be hard to relax things without almost total eradication. Especially when they want to hug grandchildren who can’t be super careful. I also agree with what is said above that there is nothing close to a guarantee of sufficiently reliable rapid testing in the near future.
Banning visitors seems to me like horrible violation of human rights. It honestly haven´t occured to me that it is a part of your plan. But you can easily solve that by adding to it that visitors should be tested short time before their visit and are required to wear PPE, plus maybe other precautions like interaction with them being mostly outside, as long as summer lasts. That will not guarantee 100 % safety, but it will go a long way.
Again, aren’t visitors already banned in most places? If this is idea works, you’re trading a slightly stricter isolation for a significantly shorter duration.
Yes. I guess what people are getting at is, “Is it worth it to focus to keeping in COVID-19 out of nursing homes at all costs, given this will likely last years?” This may seem like a no-brainer, but I think it depends on whether the person has visitors. There’s no good reason to think this will be a significantly shorter thing. For the average nursing home patient, their stay is so short that I do not at all expect them to outlast the pandemic. Splitting them into visitor and non-visitor homes may make sense, but probably won’t happen.
The original premise here was, instead of having a years long semi-lockdown (which is still miserable for the infirm since they have to be VERY careful and have no visitors), have a months long bacchanal where the at risk are locked up tight and the virus spreads rapidly through the basically invulnerable population, burning itself out by herd immunity.
@gbdub
I definitely think this makes sense if we are willing to openly pursue herd immunity among lower-risk people over a period of a few months. This requires more than lifting lockdowns, I suspect, and there’s a lot of resistance to it. There’s also the issue that herd immunity isn’t perfect and will probably vary by region for a while, and while that’s generally manageable, it is so disastrous in nursing homes that it’s harder for them to lower their guard until outbreaks become very uncommon.
Also, “herd immunity” doesn’t mean that new infections immediately stop, it just means they decline exponentially. Barely exponentially, at first, and there’s going to be a long tail at the end. If you’ve got a bunch of isolated populations with no immunity and unusually high vulnerability, and a long list of people waiting to come visit them to make up for lost time, that’s a recipe for new outbreaks if you open up before complete eradication.
@John Schilling,
Is that necessarily true? I am hoping that the dispersion factor of COVID-19 is sufficiently high that the disease could basically disappear rapidly. And that the long tail that we are seeing in Sweden for example is only because different areas have reached herd immunity at different times, or haven’t yet reached it.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I would think that if the non-homogeneity was a big factor then your R value would start out very high and then decrease rapidly. Instead of, in a more homogenous scenario, where R would stay the same as time goes on.
John Schilling,
Given that in many locations, the curves are roughly declining at the same rate they originally accelerated, does that mean those places have herd immunity?
It’s not any kind of immunity if it comes from transient behavioral changes. If the Black Death returns and I decide to lock myself in a hermetically-sealed chamber for the first two weeks, I won’t catch the plague in those two weeks but I am not in any ordinary sense of the term “immune”.
Part of the problem here is that herd immunity depends on behavioral as well as biological characteristics of the population. If, to take the simplest example, we shift to a culture where anyone with a cough wears a mask when in public, as I gather is fairly common in some East Asian societies, then R0 goes down and herd immunity becomes easier. R0 is supposed to be defined “without any interventions,” but what counts as an intervention?
You could have visitors with saran wrap dividing them physically, or at a distance outside/ through the window, special wings for visitor accepting-residents that alternate on a few week basis, so it won’t spread through the building, there should plenty of workarounds, the issues aren’t really visitors as long as you can regulate it… if someone really can’t deal with it maybe they should go home… I doubt all residents have loving family that actually visit often in normal times, putting whole buildings at risk is an ongoing atrocity
I live this plan and have begged for it.
But one problem is that if you “lock down the seniors” you have locked down a surprising part of your economy. From my various informal (and unscientific) discussions with restaurant workers, people over 50 make up a big part of their clientele and are often the best tippers.
I don’t think anyone proposing to “lock down seniors” is defining the term as 50+. The more conventional definition is 65+, or retired. That still gets you a fair portion of the clientele of some restaurants, etc, to be sure, but I also don’t think the plan is to go around rounding up everyone born before 1955 and putting them in special camps. Realistically, a “lock down seniors” plan would mostly involve seniors in nursing homes and retirement communities, while leaving the ones still living independently do do pretty much what they like.
And a fair number of those will be curtailing their restaurant visits for the duration, but they’re going to do that by choice regardless of society at large’s choice, so it’s part of the base rate of economic damage, not part of the cost of “isolate the seniors”.
I’ll be clear: this was all voluntary. In fact, if some seniors in nursing homes insist on having visitors, then fine: move all of them into facilities without those rules, as long as everyone in the new facility is making that choice.
My concern is that “let the rest of the economy open up” won’t be as big as we might think if everyone with health concerns still isn’t going out to eat.
It’s also worth considering that anecdotally (both what I’ve seen myself and heard from friends as well as social media randos), a lot of the “most vulnerable” people (particularly senior citizens) are the ones least concerned with obeying lockdown rules and most eager to get out and get back to life as usual.
The notion that all the old folks need to be locked away and protected seems to be coming… not mainly from old folks themselves.
+1
I also noticed that old people are the ones who most talk about wanting thing to go back to normal.
Part of it is that they don’t get the crap about: “So you’re OK with risking other people’s lives, while you’re in a low risk group.”
Not only that, but it’s perfectly reasonable that people who know they don’t have much time left might prioritize enjoying their remaining time as much as possible over extending it as long as possible. Most of these people don’t have careers anymore. Most of them aren’t big into video games or the latest Netflix shows or other hobbies that are easily done indoors without socializing. They enjoy travel and socializing and being with their friends and family. That’s literally what they are living for, at this point.
The notion that all the old folks need to be locked away and protected seems to be coming… not mainly from old folks themselves.
This struck me as wrong, based on, well, friends and family and social media randos.
I thought it should be easy to find a poll to settle this, but it turned out not to be. In the five minute time-box I allowed myself, this is the best I could find – “By a nearly 6-to-1 margin, people 65 years old and older say it’s more important for the government to address the spread of coronavirus than it is to focus on the economy.” But I don’t see the underlying data, and it’s from a month ago, and I don’t see a comparison to what the rest of the population thinks. Maybe someone with more time or motivation can do better.
I looked into a few polls and didn’t find evidence that young and old people have different views (on average) about when the lockdown should end.
In this Yougov poll (specifically questions 17/18), old people were less likely than young to say both that the lockdown can safely end before June 1 and that the lockdown needs to extend past June 1. Sound impossible? The trick is that older people were more likely to answer “don’t know.” Same trend if you replace June 1 by Sept 1.
In this Fox News poll (question 34), people under 45 and over 45 were nearly equally likely to say that the coronavirus response went too far (20% vs 21%).
“Over 45” doesn’t really capture the demographic I’m talking about though.
I’m thinking like, over 70. For me and my fiance, convincing our parents to stay home was fairly easy. Convincing our grandparents to stay home was nearly impossible. They were literally the last people we knew who agreed to start making an effort. Despite being the most vulnerable. Even once they “agreed” they were still going to the grocery store like every other day as opposed to once a week or whatever…
But you surely know that “ask my grandparents” is not a good technique for getting a representative sample?
FWIW I have opposite anecdata. The most paranoid people I know are over 75.
I’m a grandparent and over seventy. Some time back, I think I posted about my experience, which is relevant.
When things began to look serious, I was on a speaking trip in Europe. My younger son urged me, via email, to cancel the remaining talks and fly home. My initial response was that he was exaggerating the problem and I should give the remaining talks.
Thinking about it, I remembered what I had thought and written about the distinction between fluid and crystalized intelligence. The former is figuring out the solution to a problem. The later is remembering your past solution to the problem and using that. As people get older, they shift from fluid to crystalized, in part because they have more solutions in memory, in part because they have less time to take advantage of new and better solutions, in part possibly for biological reasons.
I realized that I was running on crystalized intelligence. I had done similar trips multiple times before, had never faced a pandemic serious enough to be a reason to cancel one, so assumed I wasn’t facing one now. I recalculated, canceled the last two talks, and flew home.
Similarly for your grandparents. They know, from past experience, what the normal pattern of behavior and nature of risks are, have not readjusted to the new circumstances.
Also consistent with my experience and explanation. Once you readjust, realize that this situation requires a new analysis, the higher risk for older people is a good reason to be very cautious — as we are now being. Part of that is my very paranoid younger son, but part of it is me being almost as paranoid. When we had a plumber come to deal with a blocked sink yesterday, the whole family stayed upstairs, never being anywhere close to him, and we waited an hour to reenter the kitchen after he had left.
Matt M, that’s a valid criticism of the second poll. But take a look at the first one – it breaks down people into 18-29, 30-44, 45-64, and 65+.
Another possible critique is that these polls might not be reaching people in nursing homes. Nevertheless, I think these polls give evidence against the narrative “young people are emotionally blackmailed into caring because they’re not the vulnerable group, whereas old people face no such blackmail.”
My wife works in a locked down Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF). The patients and their families really hate the lockdown. This could potentially be overcome but… Lots of people dying alone with very angry families makes for pretty strong negative press.
Forget whether to lockdown the rest of society.
This should have been done. Nursing homes knew this was coming, and so did the governments.
[Added: nothing the nursing homes could really do, the governments could have done a lot]
Why do people say “incentivize” instead of “incent”?
Because it’s a new word, coming from “incentive”. https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-Home-Forum/2008/1010/p18s01-hfes.html
At least with me, the words are different. For example: “I incentivize people giving me ice cream.” vs “I incent people to give me ice cream.” The object is different. For example, you can say “I incentivize giving me ice cream.” but not “I incent giving me ice cream.” Meanwhile, you can say “I incent people.” but not “I incentivize people.” (Well, you can say that but it changes the meaning.)
Another example: performance is incentivized means that we have encouraged performance. Performance is incented means we’ve somehow motivated the concept of performance itself.
No idea if that’s grammatically correct but that’s how I use them.
Just echoing what everyone else said already, but for predictions on Feb 7, this just seems… accurate?
Quora is hit and miss, by subject area. It was much better years ago. I still have the occasional good experience there w/ technical subjects or dry history questions distant from the culture wars; I have *not* had a good experience with much else. Might be worth a try, if “dumb political philosophy question” is very far toward “what did Bismark think about unification of Germany circa 1850” on the spectrum between questions like that and questions like “how should I feel about Donald Trump’s governing philosophy”… then you might get some help out of Quora.
What’s the question?
Can anyone recommend a good channel about history on youtube? The periods and regions I’m most interested in are, in this order: pre-columbian and early post-columbian Americas (<1600), the ancient world outside of the Mediterranean Sea and China, and whatever was going on in Subsaharan Africa when it wasn’t being colonized by the Europeans. Ideally I’m looking for something similar to Ben G Thomas, only in history instead of paleontology.
ETA: while I’m at this, also soliciting recommendations of reading or watching or listening material on evolution of urban wildlife.
Epimetheus is good for covering history outside the usual mainstream topics.
That’s great, thank you! Maybe not quite as much details about how do we know this and that fact and how much scientific controversy is there around it as I’d wanted, but otherwise just perfect.
I do hope you’re aware of PBS Eons as well as Ben G Thomas! I find they usually give a much more detailed understanding of the types of scientific evidence we do and don’t have, while Ben G Thomas sometimes feels to me like someone reading out the Wikipedia page while adding nice illustrations.
Really? In my experience PBS Eons give much more simplified and, so to speak, popularized view. E.g. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them going over a cladogram more than 2 levels deep.
That’s right – they’re not doing detailed phylogeny. But they’re spending a lot of time helping us understand what fossils have and haven’t been found, and in which cases competing interpretations of them might both be plausible, while in other cases they were plausible at one point but not any more. Ben G Thomas gets you lots more detailed facts, but Eons gets a much better understanding of the scientific process, in my experience.
A bit belatedly, but I’ll just leave these here. Another case in point is that Ш don’t remember ever seeing Eons linking to any paper.
This looks good, I’ve been looking for similar things. Thanks.
Short of deliberately trying to infect people, couldn’t they select as testers health care workers who are very likely to be exposed? Do they?
Yes, they did.
Unless there is literally no place on earth with active breakouts, it seems like they should be able to find people to test even without challenge testing.
I heard they were planning to test it in several other countries as well. I wonder what changed – or is it just that those tests are expected to take longer, and the Herald is blowing things out of proportion?
As someone with a fair bit of math + CS background but no epidemiology background, I have the following naive concept of how I’d expect pandemic spread modeling to be done, and I’m interested to know if this sounds right to more relevantly experienced folks.
At the highest level, you want to execute a bunch of simulation runs on a population with a bunch of randomly distributed attributes that affect spread, and see what results and dynamics you get out of those runs on average. At each timestep of each run you generate random spread and disease evolution events that cause members of your simulated population to move among the states SIR or SEIRD or whatever.
In more detail, for each person p in your population P, you’d have static attributes SA_p that are set up at the start of each simulation run and don’t change over the course of the run, representing things like:
— the type of social role they play: child, retired person, adult working at home, adult working outside the home, health care worker, etc
— their base level of vulnerability to infection, to spreading given infection, and/or to morbidity/mortality given infection
And you’d have a graph SG with labeled edges, or a series of unlabeled graphs, representing different durable forms of social connection between people, e.g.
— these two people are in the same household
— these two people work together
— these two kids go to the same school
And you have dynamic attributes DA_p(t) representing the state of person p at time t (infected or not, and for how long? symptomatic or not, and for how long? tested or not? quarantined or not? hospitalized or not?)
And you have some global state variables like “what day of the week is this timestep” and so on.
And your basic algorithm for running a simulation run looks like:
At time 0:
1. Randomly generate SA_p for each member of the population based on known distribution data about types of people and best guesses about vulnerability levels of different classes of people.
2. Randomly generate the graph(s) SG based on known data about household size distribution, business size distribution, fraction of people who work outside the home etc.
3. Pick some random starting condition DA_p(0) where you e.g. randomly choose some smallish subset of people to be index patients.
Then at each timestep t (say one timestep = one day) till some end condition is reached:
1. Generate a new connection graph DG(t) based on a simulation of what connections people would make that day given SA_p, SG, and DA_p(t-1). So people in the same household will have household interactions, health care workers will come into contact with hospitalized patients, people in the same workplace/school will have workplace/school interactions on weekdays, some people will randomly be next to each other on transit, some people will go shopping and randomly be next to each other in the store, some people especially on weekends will randomly choose to go to parties of randomly distributed size, some people will stay at home because they’re quarantined, etc. The edge weights in DG(t) would be based on best estimates of disease spread probability in those interaction situations.
2. Execute one day’s worth of random disease spread, disease process evolution, and testing dynamics (and contact tracing dynamics too if you want to get fancy) based on DG(t), SA_p, and DA_p(t-1) to produce DA_p(t).
And then the interesting and actionable part is the part where you tweak the large number of implicit parameters to the steps above and see how that changes the average simulation run results. If you increase the fraction of people tested who successfully quarantine away from their household, what happens? If you change the rate of tests that are false positive/negative, what happens? If you close the schools, what happens? Etc.
Is this a reasonable approximation to how Real Professionals ™ actually do this? If it’s more complex/heterogeneous than any actually existing models, in what ways is that so, and why? Is it computational complexity constraints? Constraints on humans’ ability to think through how to tweak so many parameters? Other ways in which increasing complexity would actually make it less representative of reality?
The IHME models that sometime get cited for their death predictions seems to have all their source code on GitHub. The core model seems to be a simple set of differential equations.
Thanks. If this is typical of models of this kind, then I guess my question narrows to: why use ODEs rather than discrete random-graph-based models, given that people are discrete entities [citation needed] and random graph parameterization ought to let you more intuitively encode assumptions about social interactions and disease spread probabilities?
I think the Imperial model did use random graphs and the like.
Good luck fitting a graph that models every single American in RAM. Imperial’s model took 20 GB for the UK.
An ODE only has to store a few high-precision floating point numbers.
But you don’t need every single American to get a reasonable sense of the dynamics. Or do you? Is there some reason why a graph with tens or hundreds of thousands of vertices wouldn’t work well enough?
Hetzner has 256gb dedicated iron for 168 eur/month (I have one, it’s pretty cool to keep all db in cache).
@Nicholas Weininger
As Knuth sayeth, “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. I doubt it takes more than 1kb per node, so you can get away with 1Gb/million. You can probably fit even US in the machine above. Or you can just buy one and fit it with 1Tb of RAM and play.
As for why… at a guess, having a 1node=1person model makes it pretty damn easy to change your model and test different parameters. Once you start optimizing you’re stuck with whatever assumptions you used to optimize.
Even if you were trying to model every American, you could do it city-by-city or region-by-region, right? And if you are simulating “Boston” you just, say, model the top 50 other cities as single nodes each that people visit to/from.
Would you simulate individual air molecules when designing an airplane?
Would you treat the entire air mass as one undifferentiated thing with a single equation describing its behaviour?
If we were just copying how CFD simulations work, we’d be dividing the US into as many chunks as the computer could handle and still give us answers in a reasonable time. The reason we stop short of simulating every molecule of air is entirely “computational complexity constraints”.
“Would you treat the entire air mass as one undifferentiated thing with a single equation describing its behaviour?”
As a matter of fact, chemists do this routinely: PV = nRT (the Ideal Gas Law) works quite well and breaks down chiefly when gases are either very dense or very cold. It works because individual gas molecules move so fast that it’s roughly correct to assume they don’t interact at all — the type of gas doesn’t matter at all either, provided there aren’t actual reactions that can occur.
There are improvements to the equation if you really want to be accurate, but PV = nRT is a very reasonable approximation with very realistic assumptions.
AIRPLANES
I have a deep-thinking friend who thinks there is a significant likelihood that the 2020 US Presidential will not occur as scheduled. More specifically, he thinks there will be enough state and local irregularities due to the COVID-19 crisis that the election results will be sufficiently disputed to cast the nation into chaos. What are the chances that he’s right? If the scenario he worries about was to take place, what’s the most likely pathway?
My predictions:
Election happens on the day when it’s supposed to happen: 90%
Election is a clusterfuck worse than the hanging chads: 60%
Conditional on the clusterfuck:
Losing side claims the other side cheated: 99%
Losing side fails to recognize the winner’s legitimacy in any way that actually matters: 5%
So, basically 2000 and 2016 repeated?
Like 2000, sure, or even more so, but not really 2016, I think – after 2016, the left was furious and appalled when Trump won, but there was no serious attempt to challenge or question the outcome the way there was in 2000.
The next most contested election in my memory of US politics (2000 and onwards, basically) was 2004, when a small number of Democrats suspected foul play in Ohio; 1992 might be worth referring to as well, but at the time I was barely aware of even UK politics.
But running an election under Covid conditions where the loser doesn’t claim they’ve been cheated, possibly in the courts, strikes me as a tall order.
There was the rather ludicrous attempt at holding recounts in three states; I guess you’re not counting that as “serious”.
That was basically just a scam run by Jill Stein though.
Holding recounts isn’t challenging or questioning the outcome. Many states have laws that automatically trigger recounts whenever an election is as close as the ones in those three states were (and those automatic recounts have happened for several governor, senate, and house races in nearly every election).
I’m picturing like 2000, but with more than one state contested, and a lot more yelling.
The election is about six months away. We’re consistently seeing reductions in new cases/deaths and even if there was a new wave in the fall, we’ll be much better prepared to handle it without the lockdown hammer. There will also be more systems in place to handle electronic voting. Let’s chill out on the “end of democracy” talk.
I don’t think it will be any kind of “end of democracy” but the way to make sure that it isn’t is for as every state to make a bunch of contingency plans.
The Feds should be throwing money at this. There is a low likelihood of a disaster but a disaster would be, uh, a disaster. So money printer go brrrrr.
> We’re consistently seeing reductions in new cases/deaths
Is that right? It’s true that New York and the surrounding area has had some drastic reductions, but aren’t states like Texas, California, Illinois, and possibly Florida, having steady increases?
> There will also be more systems in place to handle electronic voting.
This seems very unlikely. No state allows electronic voting, though many allow mail-in voting, while many other states are fighting hard to prevent the setup of mail-in voting infrastructure.
Texas just recorded its fewest daily fatalities since the end of March. Approximately two weeks from having began reopening.
Which seems very strange to me, because Brazos county (where I live) has been above 10 cases nearly every day since May 1, while it only hit 10 cases twice before then, and we’ve even been having days as high as 20 and 50 in the past week. I suspect the statewide improvement is mostly just that some clusters in Houston and possibly Dallas have died down, though I haven’t looked across counties to see which have been going in which direction.
In any case, I don’t think aggregate statistics over geographically diverse areas make a lot of sense – you have to look at the local area that encompasses 90% of daily travel (and perhaps more, while people still aren’t traveling so much).
The nice thing about statistics is that there are so many to choose from!
A flat or even slightly increasing number of cases is not a big deal if you are starting from a low level. Slight decreases are not enough if you are starting from a high level.
And “number of cases” is often dependent on “number of tests.” Punishing people/regions/states for increasing their number of confirmed cases is counterproductive because we absolutely want more tests.
Exponential growth.
A doubling time of 50 days isn’t as big a deal if we expect to see treatment advances in 6 months and we only have 10 cases. It’s a bigger deal if we have a million cases or a doubling time of 3 days.
Similarly, even a static number of cases (so infections=recoveries) or a slight decline (e.g. a halving time of 50 days) is a big deal if you have a million infected.
Those are two different predictions; has your friend thought deeply enough to reconcile them into a coherent whole?
There will almost certainly be a vote held on 3 November 2020 in every state of the Union. There’s no basis for the legal or popular legitimacy of any specific alternative, so any State governor or legislature who tries to block that process will essentially be nullifying his state’s vote in the Electoral College and ceding the field to states which do hold the vote as scheduled. If forty states elect slates of electors on 3 Nov 20 and ten do not, the forty states’ worth of electors will decide the next President of the United States.
Lots of people will whine that this is unfair, because some of them were afraid to go to the polls that they think should have been cancelled, some of them tried to get absentee ballots but were confounded by the red tape, some of them voted just fine but are afraid that other people in their tribe were blocked from voting, etc. None of them will do anything about it because nobody who matters is going to sign up for the uncertainty of standing behind an Antipresident. That’s way more scary than going to the polls in the middle of a milquetoast plague like this, so anyone with the hypothetical balls to fight for an Antipresident is going to be standing in the ranks of the people who just elected the actual President.
Also, judges and anyone else with a position of power or authority in the Federal government, has far more to lose by delegitimizing the Federal government from the top than they do from suffering four years of the “wrong” president.
There’s a long shot possibility that Donald Trump decides to postpone the elections indefinitely so that he can continue ruling “until we get this under control”. I’m pretty confident that most of his support within the government would evaporate if he did that, and would not be replaced by MAGA-hatted AR-15 bearers. But I’m even more confident that Trump isn’t going to do anything that involves preemptively admitting he would lose an election and/or that he was wrong about claiming that the country can be safely reopened for at least the important things.
So, like Albatross11 says, 2000 and 2016 all over again.
If forty states elect slates of electors on 3 Nov 20 and ten do not, the forty states’ worth of electors will decide the next President of the United States.
The Constitution requires a majority of the total electoral votes, not a majority of the electoral votes of the states that passed some burden like “voted successfully.”
If those 40 states can give 270 electoral votes to one person, problem solved. If not, lots of gnashing of teeth and things possibly fall to the House.
“The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed”
– 12th Amendment
Only electors who are appointed, count. If a state somehow doesn’t bother to appoint electors, tough for them but history is made by those who participate.
Huh. I could have sworn I remember some Democrats in 2000 arguing to just toss Florida out, because reasons, but gave up because it still wouldn’t leave Gore with a majority.
The best “authority” I could find was on the politics.stackexchange, https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/13661/what-will-happen-if-wisconsin-cant-finish-the-recount-in-time where a majority (if slight) agrees with John Schilling over me.
thats the wording the founders used for ‘majority’?? no wonder nobody can agree on what this thing says.
@Edward Scizorhands-
Note that there is even precedent: in 1864 (after the Civil War) the eleven states of the former Confederacy did not cast electoral votes. Even in 1868, Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas did not. See wikipedia.
@meh-
I may be dim but I don’t understand your objection.
What alternative wording would you chose to specify exactly which majority you are talking about?
Consider the following case: At current levels of congressional representation, the 50 states are allowed and expected to appoint 538 electors. Because of coronoavirus snafus, only 412 electors are appointed by 40 states. Of these, only 397 actually cast ballots on 14 December 2020; the rest are hiding under their beds in fear. Of the 397, 342 cast ballots for one of the two major-party candidates, 49 cast ballots for minor-party candidates, and five cast blank ballots in protest.
How many electoral-college ballots does a candidate’s name have to appear on for them to be declared the winner, and what is the wording that makes this the clear and unambiguous answer?
@John Schilling
@Doctor Mist
it’s redundant. there is a weaker condition, and then a stronger condition that includes the weaker condition.
For example:
A person having assets over $500,000 shall be a millionaire, if such assets are also over $1,000,000.
You’re assuming there are only two candidates receiving electoral votes. That’s been true most of the time, but not always: it’s happened as recently as 2016 thanks to faithless electors, though the last time a third-party candidate outright won a state was 1968, when George Wallace took most of the Deep South. And it’s a situation that the writers of the Constitution thought would be a lot more common than it turned out to be.
With three or more strong candidates in the mix, it’s quite easy — likely, even — for the person with the most electoral votes not to carry a majority.
It’s redundant the other way around: a majority is necessarily also the most electoral votes for any candidate.
You’re assuming I’m assuming there are only two candidates receiving electoral votes.
Above from 10240
meh-
It sounds like you would like it to say simply, “The person receiving votes for President from the majority of Electors appointed shall be the President”, which might suffice but I keep feeling like there is an edge case where that’s different. The fact that each Elector casts independent votes for President and Vice President makes it a little complicated — my first draft neglected the phrase “for President”, which made it wrong.
I suspect the convoluted wording of the Twelfth Amendment might result from the fact that originally each Elector cast votes for two people, which meant that there could actually be more than one person who got votes from a majority of Electors.
> has your friend thought deeply enough to reconcile them into a coherent whole
Presumably. He’s an aspiring pundit and pitching this is the thesis of an article he’s pitching to some major media outlets. I fear the answer might be that the “no election” summary is designed as the rhetorical headline attention grabber, and the “local issues” is down in the details of the article that are more solidly reasoned. Or more likely is just that I phrased the question in a way that doesn’t reflect his thinking.
> There’s a long shot possibility that Donald Trump decides to postpone the elections
I think this is the direction he thinks is most likely, although again, that might be because he’s aiming the piece at the left-aligned media. I tend to think this a low probability, for the “Trump doesn’t want to appear weak” reasons you give. He’s also assuming a sufficiently harmful second wave of COVID-19 will be happening around election time, which might change the logic here. If Trump or Biden themselves are stricken, would people judge the probabilities differently?
My initial reaction is that “of course” the election will happen as scheduled, and that the loser will ineffectually complain that this was unfair. But as I thought about it more, I wasn’t sure. If there is a continuing raging epidemic, maybe there will be a large state or two that moves to “no in-person voting”, followed by a successful legal challenge regarding this? Or maybe there’s a sufficient faction of states to bring the totals below 270 who think they can pre-negotiate something with the House? Maybe, thus my open-ended question here. Thanks for offering your thoughts.
The President has no authority to tell, say, the State of Georgia, “you may not hold an election.” By what mechanism is he expecting Trump to postpone the election?
I understand that this is technically true, and I don’t have a good answer to your question.
But I do feel like it’s worth pointing out that in recent years, respect for the various authority of different branches/levels of government seems to be at an all time low. Generally speaking, it’s something they make up as they go along.
In any case, I am very much in favor of Trump demanding the election be postponed, solely because I believe it will cause the mainstream media to shift away from COVID panic-porn and demand a return to normal (not the “new normal”, the old one) which will be quite beneficial to society at large.
Whether the election actually gets postponed or not is almost irrelevant, IMO. Trump just has to signal hard that this is what he wants, and that will force the hand of every anti-Trump person to then adopt the opposing position.
It’s not just technically true, it’s absolutely true. The executive branch of the federal government has nothing to do with the holding of elections (and no, the FEC doesn’t direct elections, they just enforce campaign finance laws).
If nkurz’s friend wants to be a pundit, he needs to talk about things that could actually, sort of maybe happen, or understand how the government works. The President has nothing to do with holding elections.
What’s going to happen? Trump is going to issue an executive order that…states may not hold elections? Based on the authority he is given to do this by no law or the constitution? I’m pretty sure the governors of the several states will say “who are you again?”
The governor of Georgia is a Republican, so it’s at least possible that Trump could talk him into going along with a plan where every Red State postpones its elections and they collectively double-dog-dare the Blue States to try and legitimize a president elected only with Blue State votes. That would be messy, to say the least.
He could also at least in principle use federal emergency quarantine authority to shut down the in-person polling places as posing an unacceptable risk during a pandemic emergency. Do this too late for a state to shift to 100% vote-by-mail (if they haven’t already) or for courts to definitively intervene, send Feds with Guns to make it so, and, again, very messy.
For reasons already noted, it is highly unlikely that Donald J. Trump would do this, but it may be worth figuring out how we’d stop a future president with a different agenda from making the attempt.
@Matt M: The opposing position Trump’s opponents would converge on is doing as much vote-by-mail as possible and putting the winner of that vote in office on 21 Jan 2021. If Trump’s opponents then vigorously work the logistics of mail-in ballots within their states while Trump’s supporters imagine there isn’t going to be an election at all, Biden is going to win a mail-in landslide. And it will be legal, recognized as such by the courts and the bureaucracy (and by the Secret Service when it comes time to pry Trump out of the Oval Office and lock him up for trespassing). It will not result in so much as one small business, beach, or church being opened one day earlier, nor any reduction in “COVID panic-porn”.
@Matt M
And force (for exactly the same degree of ‘force’ that you’re using) every Trump supporting person to adopt a supporting position. This is a dangerous idea, with dangerous consequences.
ETA: Replaced ‘terrible’ with ‘dangerous’ as it’s more accurate.
More dangerous than placing the country on indefinite house arrest for a disease with a 99% recovery rate?
Please spare me any takes of the “not having a new presidential election on time is a threat to freedom and democracy” variety while we’re living under this “new normal” where I’ve been assured by all the smart, correct, prestigious experts that of course my individual rights don’t mean anything when “lives are at stake” and of course the Supreme Court has already ruled that the government can literally do anything it wants so long as there’s an infectious disease emergency going on.
Whether or not these lockdowns are allowed to continue indefinitely is about 10x more important to the course of freedom and liberty than whether or not Trump or Biden is President.
As long as his target audience thinks he knows what he’s talking about, he’s golden.
That’s not actual authority. He can’t order them to do it. The blue states would be stupid not to call the bluff and say “hey, the rules are the rules. If Georgia wanted a say in who the next president is, they should have appointed electors.” I’ll tell you right now, if every blue state decides to sit out the election I will laugh my ass off as Donald Trump brags about being the “only president to ever win the electoral college by unanimous vote! Highest % ever! Can never be beat!”
I don’t believe this authority exists. According to the CDC website, federal authority to isolate and quarantine is limited to the borders and between states. Maybe he could prevent people from traveling between Florida and Georgia, but unless I’m mistaken, there is no authority for the federal government to isolate/quarantine areas within states.
The President cannot cancel elections. Only the states can, individually.
Yes, by a huge margin. If Trump decides to order the elections cancelled, it either fizzles out ineffectually, or it puts the United States pretty solidly in the failed-state category, with the collapse of its currency and economy and a very substantial increase in tribal violence. I’m pretty sure it will be the “fizzles out ineffectually” state, but the idealistic version you seem to have where everybody says “Oh, OK, I guess instead we have to end the lockdowns” and that’s the end of it, is a hopelessly naive fantasy.
Why? Why is “Trump remains President despite no election” such a nightmare doomsday scenario that will lead to absolute and utter collapse whereas “the government has ordered the economy closed indefinitely” is just some perfectly normal thing we can shrug off and will totally have a V-shaped recovery as soon as Fauci decides to allow it?
Because for just about everybody who holds dollar-denominated US debt, an person sitting in the Oval Office and claiming to be POTUS without having unambiguously won 270 electoral votes on 14 Dec 2020 is a Schelling point for “I really need my holdings to be in something Euro- or Yuan-denominated until this gets cleared up”.
And because for too many people with guns, including very big guns and the organization and logistics to use them, that’s a Schelling point for “It’s OK to start going out and shooting the Other Tribe now”.
The zeitgeist is clearly moving in the direction of return to the old normal. It’s not as fast as you or I might like, but it’s no longer plausible to call it “the economy closed down indefinitely”. There are times when judo is the right approach, but this isn’t one of them, especially when it involves normalizing something as abnormal as that.
Fortunately, I don’t think it’s likely. I think Trump values being elected much more than he values holding the office. Partitioning his supporters between those who will now applaud postponing the election because Trump espouses the idea and those who back away because it is a bridge too far is not the way to get reelected.
@John Schilling
This didn’t happen with President Ford.
I somewhat agree with your second paragraph, except that everyone would know the repercussions of cancelling the election months in advance, because the media of all stripes would be reporting it. People would be pissed at their state governments for giving the Presidency to the other side. And in general the majority political demographic of each state elects the majority of the state assemblies (or at least the secretary of state who is responsible for the election), so the majority has no one to blame except someone in their own party.
Yeah, that could lead to intra-tribal shenanigans, but not to inter-tribal war.
Ford wasn’t the first Vice President to take office. That started with Tyler.
Cancelling the presidential elections entirely on the other hand is something that hasn’t happened in the entire 231 year history of the US constitution. It would be a huge deal by anyone’s standards, and likely the worst crisis since the Civil War.
I’m going to keep pushing back on this, because this is not a thing that can happen.
Who exactly does Trump issue this order to?
In my state, each county has a Supervisor of Elections, which is an elected position. There’s a state Division of Elections, which collects all the results from each county Supervisor of Elections, tabulates them so the Secretary of State (of the state, not the United States) can certify them. The Secretary of State reports to the Governor. Then the electors go to a joint session of Congress, who convenes the electoral college.
None of these people have the President of the United States in their chain of command. None of them work for the President or the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. There is no one who can cancel an election that takes orders from the President.
Is the President going to issue an order to my Supervisor of Elections to cancel our elections? On what authority? She holds an elected position, and is responsible to me, the voter, not to the President. Is he going to issue the order to the Division of Elections in my state? Their boss is my state Secretary of State, whose boss is my Governor, who does not take orders from the President. Is the President going to order Congress not to convene the electoral college? The President is in charge of the Executive branch, not the Legislative branch.
This whole “president cancelling the election” thing is not possible, because no one involved in conducting elections in the United States takes orders from the President. It’s not possible not just because of some kind of political calculation, but because there does not exist any person in his chain of command to whom he can give an order to cancel the elections.
Trump has never been one to let a lack of legal authority stop him from trying to do things. That being said, I would be extremely surprised if he even attempts to cancel the elections for a number of reasons, some already discussed.
Twitter, Fox News, and a bunch of state governors and other officials he has no legal authority over. If it comes to that, which again it almost certainly won’t but it’s maybe worth engaging the hypothetical regardless.
Why not? It’s not like Trump has exhibited scrupulous respect for division of powers so far.
If this happens, it will be because Trump doesn’t understand that he can’t legally do this, or doesn’t care (subdivided into, thinks he’ll get away with it because enough of his followers don’t know/care, thinks he’ll get away with it because all Democrats are wimps, thinks that going out with a bang beats going out with a whimper).
The probable result would be that state officials mostly do their bit to hold something that looks an awful lot like a presidential election anyway, a majority of electors thus appointed cast their ballots for Joe Biden, some federal judge swears in Joe Biden on 1/20/21, and Trump is still sitting in the Oval Office the next day saying that the thing that looks like a presidential election wasn’t because he officially cancelled it and so the federal government still has to do what he says.
And probably fizzles out not long after that, with the only question being how many Trump loyalists do things daft enough that we can’t ignore it and have to arrest them. But with a few trillion dollars in T-bills being panic-sold in the meantime.
Can you give me an example?
Edit:
Again, examples please?
As far as I can tell, Trump is one of the only people who seems to know exactly what the powers of the Presidency are. He just uses them in ways his political opponents don’t like.
Do you understand that “but the President could just issue orders to people he doesn’t have authority over to do things he doesn’t have the authority to decide” is loony stuff to worry about, right? I would file nkurz’s friend’s punditry right up there with thoughtful articles on how Obama was going to make everyone gay muslim socialists. This is all “the guy I don’t like might go crazy and do evil stuff!” material. It bears no resemblance to things that can or do happen in the real world.
I’d amend that to “Trump has never been one to let a lack of legal authority stop him from threatening to do things on Twitter, or arguing that he should have legal authority in the courts, but once a court actually rules he can’t do something, as far as I’ve seen, his administration doesn’t do it.”
It seems to me that:
a. Conrad is right that the president has no actual power to do this. If he made a public announcement that he was cancelling the election, most likely every blue state (and probably nearly all red states) would ignore him and have the election anyway. It seems to me that the only people who would stay home on election day as a result would be Trump loyalists, resulting in a huge landslide for Biden that would probably also hand Biden some extra seats on Congress.
b. Some dumbass public comment or tweet about this would probably not trigger a huge crisis, since everyone expects this sort of thing from Trump by now. But John’s right that an actual serious attempt by Trump to cancel the election would cause a political crisis, and could actually end up with widespread violence and a financial crisis, as well. I think the most likely outcome would be Trump spending the rest of his life in a federal prison somewhere.
@Loriot
I misrembered thinking that Ford went straight from the House to the Presidency. Still, unlike Tyler and all preceding VP->P people he was not elected by the country as a whole.
@Matt M:
> I am very much in favor of Trump demanding the election be postponed
Thanks, this is an interesting response. I think it would qualify as 4D chess if Trump were to strongly signal intent to postpone the election until the country is re-opened. 5D, though, would be to figure out how to have your opponents make the same threat and achieve your goal for you. That is, can Trump stake out a position such that some number of state governors make the same declaration of postponement until recovery? It does make the analysis tricky that 3D and 1D look identical from the outside.
@Conrad Honcho:
> If nkurz’s friend wants to be a pundit, he needs to talk about things that could actually, sort of maybe happen, or understand how the government works.
Charitably, let’s assume that he understands how the US government works. I haven’t actually seen the article, and was trying not to grill him too hard on the details. Apparent gaps in logic are probably my fault. He’s a good writer, and the article will presumably include such details in a way that will sound convincing to the majority of the targeted readers. If it gets published, I’ll try to post a link.
What might be worth knowing is that his analysis is based on his media analysis research. One of his logical starting points is that COVID-19 has so dominated the current news cycle that one could easily forget that we are in the middle of what would normally be the peak of election season. Within that, Trump coverage is (by his numbers) something like 6X that of Biden. If one wasn’t paying close attention, one could easily forget that Biden is running for president. Personally, I think this makes it more likely that the Democratic side will seek a delay, but he reaches the opposite conclusion.
@nkurz
All right. But ask him to be sure to answer the following questions in the article:
1. Who are some of the specific people to whom Trump would issue orders to delay the elections?
2. If these people were to disobey Trump’s “order,” would he be able to fire them?
> maybe there will be a large state or two that moves to “no in-person voting”, followed by a successful legal challenge regarding this?
Is this meant to be a problem scenario? There are already at least three states (WA, OR, CO) that have basically no in-person voting, and a few other states could easily adopt their system (particularly states like California that already heavily use absentee balloting). There might be a bigger issue if some health official in Texas orders polling places closed while the governor legally challenges the interpretation of “disability” as including “vulnerability to coronavirus” and tries to throw out the resulting mail-in ballots.
“No in-person voting” surely can be legal and constitutional. But those systems got put in place carefully over years, and they probably had legal challenges along the way where the stakes weren’t as high and the in-person voting system was available as a back-up if the challenges won.
There may be certain states where their existing caselaw makes “no in-person voting” a serious problem that cannot be overcome in a way where you don’t have a Judge come in at the last minute and say “no, I decide there must be in-person voting for people who want it.”
I think people dramatically overestimate the likelihood that Trump will try to delay the presidential election, and I can’t understand why anyone would support it. Conditional on Trump attempting to postpone or prevent the election and attempting to stay in office past January 20, 2021, I think there’s a 99% chance he is promptly impeached and probably a 95% chance he is promptly removed by the Senate. I’m a firm Republican (and an actual Trump supporter — albeit mostly “for the courts”), and I’d support criminally prosecuting anyone dumb enough to support Trump were he to make a move like that (which I’m confident he won’t, because it would be monumentally stupid in a way that I don’t think he is, even with all of his other failings). Hell, if the Senate somehow failed to remove him via impeachment and the courts systematically refused to intervene, I’d potentially support the military deposing him as long as we then promptly held elections (which is a VERY dangerous game, but less dangerous than letting the President unilaterally declare that they were going to suspend elections and remain in office). As John said, “We’re suspending elections until further notice” is the realm of failed states — I think anyone who seriously advocates that is finished politically in the US, and the same is true for anyone associated with them.
We held elections during the Civil War. We held elections during WW2. We can hold elections now. They’ll likely be under suboptimal conditions and people will complain about how they’re run, but there’s no way anyone (much less Trump, given the nature of his opposition) can maintain popular legitimacy while trying to postpone elections now. Even attempting it would surely be political suicide for a generation.
EDIT: FWIW, I also don’t see how Trump would get his own staff to support him. They’re smart enough to realize that they have better prospects taking their chances with the 2020 election happening as scheduled against Biden (and maybe working in private industry until 2024 or 2028), rather than potentially spending January 21, 2021 through the end of their lives inside a federal prison. If Trump declared that he was suspending the elections because he was going to be “dictator for life,” then I think he gets removed instantly. If he doesn’t declare that and says he’s just postponing the elections for a little bit, then I don’t see why any of his staff have a sufficient motive to stick with him on that course of action — the tradeoff is maybe a few more incredibly fraught months at the risk of destroying their careers (and maybe their lives). Who would make that trade? It seems like you’d be taking much of the risk of launching a coup but with none of the upside.
I think there’s a lot to be concerned by given the state of our national politics. But I’m 0% concerned about this particular issue.
On top of all that, let’s say Trump does somehow manage to postpone the election indefinitely. According to the Constitution, his term still ends on January 20th, 2021, as does the term of his Vice President. If a new President and Vice President haven’t been elected at that time, then the position will simply go to the next person in the Presidential line of succession by default. Since the next person in line would be the Speaker of the House, we’d likely end up with Nancy Pelosi as President, unless the Republicans retake the House (or the Democrats suddenly decide to replace her for some reason, or she dies or steps down or otherwise vacates the office, but those are less likely). Even if it the Democrats lose the House and we do end up with another Republican President, it’s not going to end up being a Trump-style Republican who appeals to the nationalists and right-populists and Tea Partiers, it’s going to be an establishment suit like Kevin McCarthy or Steve Scalise. Would Trump or his die-hard fanbase be satisfied by that outcome? Probably not, I’d imagine.
If no elections were held, then Pelosi wouldn’t be in the House either since her term also ends in 2020 and she would equally vacate her office automatically. So it would actually fall to Senator Grassley (R), third in line, whose term ends in 2022. Otherwise I believe it’s a fair interpretation, at least de jure.
“No elections” being held is rather unlikely, given that several states are well-experienced with universal Vote By Mail. Worst non-ludicrous case, we get Representatives and Presidential electors chosen from Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii. Having a Democratic majority, they would most likely then proceed to impeach President Trump for unconstitutionally trying to postpone the election – and I would be cheering them on.
I’m not sure if that is entirely correct. If the House all vacate their seats due to their terms being up, then so do the Class 2 Senators. 21 of those are Republicans to 12 Democrats, so the remaining Senate would have a Democratic majority, and the president pro tempore would probably be Patrick Leahy.
We’re getting into a somewhat silly scenario. Still, I’d say that depends on how the terms for the President of the Senate happens. If his term lasts for his tenure (ie, until 2022) or a vote then he would still be president because the succession would trigger before the vote. But I don’t know the exact law.
@Erusian: Except that Senate terms end on January 3, while the President’s term ends on January 20.
Except the President Pro Tempore has no set Constitutional term and doesn’t even need to be a Senator (just an officer of the Senate). So it depends on whether Grassley is elected for his time in the Senate unless he’s removed or whether he stands every two years. I think it’s the former.
The President Pro Tempore is presumably elected whenever the Senate wants to elect a new one. Which given Byrd-Thurmond-Byrd and the most recent two terms of Orrin Hatch appears to be every January 3rd (approximately), or whenever the Senate changes hands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_pro_tempore_of_the_United_States_Senate
Agree with others that the election will happen, but it will be a huge mess.
The PM of Singapore is debating postponing next year’s elections, but says he thinks it is important for the government to have a mandate from the people as to how to approach the pandemic. I agree with this sentiment. Unfortunately, I feel like this election will provide us with anything but a mandate. Both sides will probably try to avoid taking a strong position or laying out a specific plan, and will instead obscure the issues so that they can effectively weaponize them against the other side. It will probably be a close vote, and whoever loses will feel the election was stolen, and that they were the victim of unfair circumstances related to the pandemic. But I guess a lot can change between now and then.
Trump will never cancel or postpone the election; the idea of victory is the only thing he truly cares about. However, between problems associated with counting mail-in ballots and the very serious risk of Trump disputing a defeat via any means necessary, I fully expect a multi-week disaster.
+1. Trump doesn’t want to be a real authoritarian, it’s too much work.
I have to be honest that this whole discussion sounds like a bunch of people that have never actually met any MAGA hat wearers. I would honestly say that if he actually tried postponing the election, at least 30% of them would drive down to Washington and shoot any mother fucker that got in their way of road hauling the bastard on a 50 state ‘Murica, Fuck Yeah! Tour. No matter how much they may like pwning libs on 4chan, or whatever, by rubbing his boorishness in people’s faces, they don’t actually like him that much. Plus it’ll be the one chance they’ll ever get to water the tree of liberty with the blood of an honest to God tyrant. Which is way cooler than pwning libs.
A common trope in Sci-Fi, is meeting an alien civilization and either start to cooperate or start a war with them. In reality, civilisations develop so quickly, that meeting another civilisation equal to us or just slightly more or less advanced, would be an incredible coincident. They are much more likely to be at least thousands of year behind or ahead of us. Both cooperation and warfare then seem hopelessly lopsided. The more advanced species can benevolently teach the lesser one some useful things, but not too much I would think. They don’t want the more primitive civilisation to catch up and surpass their own level, which they could do if they were innately more intelligent (how much faster would the industrial revolution have happened, if the average human IQ was 15 points higher?)
Would we even want to meet an alien race?
I would think the odds of that essentially zero, humanity fuck yhea tropes none-withstanding. “Genetic” engineering seems much, much easier than starflight, anyone capable of interstellar travel will not have natural intelligence, they will be engineered ones, even if biological. Thus at the upper bound of what nature permits
Yeah, it seems unlikely that a civlisation could catch up with a more advanced one. Unless some cultural thing kicks in, like complacency or hedonism. What happened to the “Islamic Golden Age”?
“The Mongols”. That was not an internal decline, it literally got ground under the heel of a horde.
It was a small number of scholars patronised by an aristocratic elite for whom the fashion es to spend money on scholars not say warfare?
It’s like all pre-modern historical moments, a thin veneer over a structure of agricultural exploitation, and therefore inherently unlikely to last.
One alternative is that the interstellar society is extremely static and conservative, like the aliens in Turtledove’s _Worldwar_ series. That is, there was a lot of innovation and conflict until the lizards conquered their home planet, then all that noisy disruptive change got shut down and now innovation is very slow and looked-upon with great skepticism. You can iteratively improve things like ergonomics, but nothing fundamental. The lizards have interstellar travel and coldsleep and fusion power, but also tanks and fighter jets at a 1980s technology level–basically the tech level they had when they conquered their own world and consolidated it under their emperor.
You could imagine a society so locked down that any new technological progress gets stamped out as a threat to the existing order. A few centuries of that, and the whole social mileu people grow up in will regard innovation as pathological and nasty.
But, there’s no reason we’d expect such a society to freeze conveniently close to our technology level. In _Worldwar_, 1980s-era military technology meets 1940s technology, which is nice for storytelling (close enough for a fight, and we can have a lot of confidence about 1980s-era military technology) but it seems more likely it would be 2050-era military technology or 2300-era military technology, against which the 1940s-era stuff would stand no chance. And even so, there’s internal dialogue that indicates their initial probes saw humans around 1000 AD, against which any modern technology is going to be unbeatable.
And IIRC developing coldsleep is easier because they are, well, lizards.
I think this is a potential counterpoint to the idea that any starfaring species will be unimaginably advanced- some species may simply be able to develop space/interstellar flight earlier. This could be because of their biology, or because of the nature of their homeworld. Imagine a species on a planet with a mountain similar to Olympus Mons, such that it’s possible to build a road (or possibly even a railway!) up to a spaceport that’s above most of your atmosphere.
EDIT: Or what albatross11 said…
The upper bound of what nature permits might be different for very different life forms.
After a dozen recursive reworkings? Think not. Once you start reworking your own substance, that process will keep going until you hit fundamental limits and total self-satisfaction. That is, to eschew that tool kit, you must have exhausted it, and have the pride of the dawnstar before his Fall.
– That is, someone stepping off a starship will not just be an alien engineered to the upper bounds of what an extremely implausibly lucky freak of nature specimen of their ancestral origin species might be like – that was version 2.0, 200.000 years ago. 3.0 was what got built after the impact of every member of their species having 200 alien ip shook out, and the being stepping of the space ship is v 23.19a2, and most accurately described as a pile of picotech.
This assumes tech is infinitely developable, tho.
If interplanetary travel is possible, it may be around the top of the “tech tree”. Propulsion, shielding for radiation, some kind of hibernation for the life forms are the main problems each civilization would have to solve before interplanetary contact is possible. Either the contactee has those or not. If the contactee has those, well, it will be one sided. If both have them, I don’t see any guarantee one of the civilizations will have versions of those techonologies way
more advanced than the other. Maybe it will have a group of tech that’s more advanced but the other side would have preferred to develop a different side.
Which brings us to differences in local resources that could be critical too. Imagine a spacefaring civilization for which plastic was super expensive. They would have had to make do with just metals and ceramics and rubber. If it contacts a civ which has cheap plastic, each will receive a ton of information on, either how to use a resource they don’t have, or how to make do without that resource. Each could benefit, even the one without plastic, cause it could go looking for it.
If a bunch of said civilizations keep meeting, their science/tech standard would soon cover a lot of possibilities, and in that case, new civilizations arriving would only be in the receiving side of the tech exchange, but that doesn’t really hold for a bunch of first encounters.
One other thing: our biology determines how advanced we must be to do interstellar travel. Imagine an intelligent species with 10,000 year lifespans, or who can go into some kind of deep hybernation during which they don’t age and consume minimal resources. They can do interstellar travel with much less technology than we can, because they don’t need to worry about generation ships or inventing coldsleep or something. They just need to figure out how to get to another star in a couple thousand years with an intact ship. That’s still hard, but it’s not nearly as hard as getting humans to another star within a generation or two.
Alternatively, you might have intelligent species that evolve in very low-atmosphere, high-radiation environments, who find being in space sort-of like we find being at the south pole–uncomfortable, but you don’t need insanely high technology to survive there. So getting into space is not so hard, and maybe you can colonize your solar system without a lot more hardship and danger than, say, the Polynesians colonized islands in the Pacific. If humans were as robust as, say, bacterial spores, we could launch them into space with some kind of giant gun and no space suit and they’d be fine.
On the other side, maybe your lifespan is 100 days so interstellar (or even interplanetary) travel provides much harder tech challenges. Or maybe your species is naturally very fragile w.r.t. acceleration, so it’s super-hard to even get manned ships into orbit.
Whatever explains the lack of visible aliens and alien structures has to apply to all these kinds of species, unless there’s some reason why super-long-lived, deep-hybernating, or extremely robust creatures can’t develop intelligence.
But that also means that it’s hard to know just how high-tech you need to be to get to the stars. Humans need a lot of technology that maybe the 10,000-year species and the tough-as-spores species don’t need. And super-fragile short-lived species probably need even more than we do. So if we imagine some society that freezes its technology just after getting interstellar travel, it might not be all that advanced compared to humans who encounter it in 2100, say.
Yeah, I ignored even those possibilities. It’d lead to different technologies too, yeah. Tho I dunno if the long lived aliens would find an use to hibernation technologies. I guess even them would want to sleep for a long time and wake up in the future.
Another point may be just plain old the mass on the original planet. It cannot be too light, or the atmosphere may escape, but probably a planet with less g than Earth but more than Mars, would be more amenable to spaceflight. Their rocketry may not be that advanced.
Some of that is happening in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, which I have mentioned before. Humans from a colonizing starship that has gotten lost arrive at a planet occupied by Atevi, humanoids with a steam engine technology. A lot of humans end up parachuting down — the spaceship doesn’t have landing craft, and the people in charge of it are opposed to humans going down. The spaceship goes off, the humans interact with the Atevi. Initially relations go well, something goes wrong, there is a war which the humans, technologically superior but vastly outnumbered, lose. The Atevi agree to evacuate a New Zealand sized Island for the humans to live on, with the humans feeding the Atevi technology slowly enough not to disrupt their society.
Two centuries later, when the story really begins, the Atevi are approaching technological equality with the humans. Atevi are much better natural mathematicians than humans, possibly somewhat higher IQ in general, so once they learn about computers they make better designs than the humans. The series is now something like eighteen books long, there is complete technological equality, including some tech from the starship which has finally returned — and persuaded the Atevi to build shuttles and get the orbiting station back functioning, in cooperation with the human population on the planet.
Interesting books, and the issue of societal disruption through technological change is one of the multiple themes, along with the issue of interactions between two intelligent species with somewhat different emotional hard wiring. Also very interesting characters. Cherryh is one of my favorite sf writers.
It is available in the archive.org library! I will read it.
The scenario where I could see some meaningful exchange is in the case that physical interstellar travel is hard/impossible. Military conflict is a non-starter. Letting slip some tech wouldn’t be the end of the world, because the aliens would be assured that humanity is not likely to develop effective interstellar capabilities when they haven’t with an extra 1000 years or whatever of trying. They aren’t going to learn any new physics or engineering principles from us, but they would probably want to learn more about our planet/biology/culture.
One of the many cool things about babylon 5 was that the major civilizations were very clearly at different tech levels and this sometimes mattered for the plot. The idea wasn’t explored in serious depth, but it was there.
And when they became advanced enough, they disappeared “beyond the rim”.
I think that it is quite likely that there is a ceiling to technological advancement. The space of possible techs includes very smart AI’s, and rearranging a solar system into computronium could plausibly be done in a few years with good self replicating nanotech. I think that there probably aren’t any technologies that are physically possible, but so hard that they can’t be invented in 1000 years by a super-intelligence that has converted the solar system into computronium. (This is a weak bound on a highly uncertain quantity. Maybe technological development is really easy to a superintelligence, and it invents every possible tech almost the moment its turned on.)
Cooperation or warfare could be viable if there were multiple alien actors, similar to the way client states in the Cold War could play the superpowers off each other for their own benefits. See Vietnam or Afghanistan for successful examples of warfare one power bloc provided military weapons to an underdeveloped country to prevent a rival’s conquest. Alternatively, numerous countries received significant economic and scientific aid from the superpowers to prevent them from falling into the enemy camp.
This could even happen, although it would be more limited, within a single alien race. For example, the Indian Independence movement exploited internal divisions within Britain, as have numerous modern actors under the US sole-superpower.
I would also no longer require two powers that somehow were at a similar level.
I somehow own a book called “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cartoon Animals,” published in 1991. This is an amazing artifact, because the author tries to include ALL cartoon animals up to the date of publication—in movies, cartoons, TV commercials, comic strips, and comic books (mainstream and underground), both U.S. and foreign. (Sample entry: “Hong Kong Fooey: kung fu cartoon dog,” followed by an 800-word exegesis.) There are 2,000 entries.
It’s a monument to the human spirit. Who would even try to keep track of cartoon animals, and who would be foolish enough to publish an (instantly outdated) softcover book? (Prentice Hall, FYI.) It’s like counting grains of sands on a cartoon beach.
Anyone, one fascinating thing about “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cartoon Animals” is that it captures the moment when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were at their peak, with the result that other publishers issued these knockoffs, all of which have their own entries:
Mildly Microwaved Prepubescent Kung-Fu Gophers
Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters
Cold-Blooded Chameleon Commandos
Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils
Naïve Inter-Dimensional Commando Koalas
Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos
Can you tell I have too much time on my hands lately?
I have a terrible sarcasm detector, but you have got to be making some of these up. Especially the gerbils.
OTOH, I looked up the book. It currently has a single, 1-star, review on Amazon; I kind of feel like you should go over there and defend it on “monument to the human spirit” grounds.
4.5 average from 4 reviews on Good Reads, though, so there’s that.
I expect all of the Ninja Turtle ripoffs are legit. If you’re rip off something as ridiculous as the Ninja Turtles, you need to go as stupid as possible.
Reddit r/askphilosophy
I’m a fan of the stackexchange Q&A sites, and it does look like there’s one for philosophy:
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/
Some of these sites are better than others but it seems like it’d be worth a look.
With regard to scrupulosity and lockdowns, a statement optimized for humor and not truth:
The government makes rules at the modal citizen, not the model citizen.
Over on the Online Go Server, I am running into some low-ranked players who open the game by playing the center point (as black). The books I have about the game consistently advocate opening in the corners and then expanding toward the middle. The goal of the game is to surround territory. You need fewer stones to surround an area if it is in the corner. Hence corner points are more valuable and should be grabbed first. That makes sense to me.
Is opening on the center point just a clueless play, or is there some logic to it I am missing?
Both!
There is an opening called the great wall that involves move 1 at the central star point in some variations, but it’s kind of more theoretical than real. The general idea is to weird people out and to make a big, powerful shape at center you can fight from, as opposed to build territory from.
It seems to be a little trollish, in that a big part of using it seems to be relying on your opponent to not know how to respond to it.
Looking at playing the central star point initially as black as a pattern at Waltheri (play “6” as the initial move”) shows very few pro games in which it’s used, but it seems rare and especially rare lately – the most recent game I see is from 2018. It wins in their records a surprising amount of the time, at 47%. Go look at those games to get an idea of optimal response, but be careful treating winning responses from white as “good”, since the sample size is small.
There’s three games in which it was used at Go Siegan! He lost one of them, then the same guy tried it again and got beat real hard. It’s kind of the same plot as “The Great White Hype”!
From a super amateur perspective:
In the first several moves, playing in the center is giving up corners; this is inherently sub-optimal in terms of territory-building efficiency, so if the game didn’t end up having a bunch of fights that black then won, white is going to win. In real low level play, it seems to me that white wants to avoid mixing it up with black’s weirdness, take whatever extra corners black will give, and then build territory without provoking a bunch of fights. From black’s perspective, he’s praying that white fights with his big thick wall and provokes those fights if he doesn’t.
Summary:
There are apparently semi-legitimate pro reasons to open there, most of which boil down to “make shit weird for white and hope he can’t cope”. From an amateur perspective, you can assume black doesn’t know what he’s doing or is cheating from Waltheri’s. Just play normal conservative corner-building stuff and you should win most of the time.
I’m a pretty lousy player (maybe 10k at best) but if you’d be interested in a go partner, let me know.
Do you know about the SSC Go group we have set up on OGS?
https://online-go.com/group/3859
I did not, thanks!
It is essentially a cheese. At low levels you should be able to beat it while just playing a little more solidly than normal, but besides that you shouldn’t need to completely change your strategy to beat it. Adhering to the principles you are already familiar with, and patient play is sufficient.
From a really low-level player perspective: Playing the center point allows to mirror the first moves by white. (But I suppose you would have noticed if this were happening?)
If you’re talking about players who are so low-ranked that they play on the 9×9 board: There, the center point makes a lot more sense.
About mirroring, this probably doesn’t make sense because of komi. Apart from making the game boring.
Other than that, I (also rather low-ranked) agree that this is basically throwing the move away, because except for some ladders possibly working your way, it doesn’t do very much.
That’s why “first moves” :P. I think it is a sensible way to explore the game if you are just starting with “these are the rules. go!”. At least that’s what I often try when learning about a new (abstract) game. When the mirroring breaks you are often already in a more interesting game situation than the opening and how the mirroring breaks can reveal interesting properties of the game.
Given how little anybodyy knew at the time, it was a defensible assessment.
Plenty of people who were paying attention knew in January. I had a pretty good idea. I came here to talk with people who were smart enough to actually get things right rather than have excuses for why they didn’t after the fact.
One of the things that surprised me about the UK was their comparatively well-preserved historical heritage, and that they manage to do it without huge government subsidies.
The standard narrative I’ve been told by British people is that it’s thanks to the National Trust, and some front-loading of money by the government into it, after which the National Trust works by their more commercial side, while maintaining the more important buildings and managing tourists.
I thought at the time it’d be nice to have a National Trust equivalent in Spain, but now I’m starting to think that what makes conservation possible in the UK is less restrictive laws. In the UK, historical sites, churches and other buildings get converted into homes, and people buy them and live in them. The Spanish National Trust would not be able to restore and then sell a church as a home, making money on it.
In Spain, the whole issue with the churches is a nightmare. Even if we ignore those that are owned by the Catholic Church (and that would be the majority), I don’t think you could buy a private or community-owned church as a home. So, obviously, there is no interest from anybody to buy those churches to restore them.
Anecdote: a church was having a restoration, and they were overhauling their altarpiece. They had an art piece, that according to the Church, had no historical, artistic, or sacred value* that would warrant its restoration, so they were going to throw it away. So a contractor saw the painting in the garbage, and asked if he could take it and restore it on his own. Some time later, this guy gets arrested for trying to sell the painting. The Church says they gave the painting to this guy, and they say that. But it turns out, you can’t sell religious art to anybody but another religious order or the government. Was the government interested in restoring this worthless painting? No, or the Church would have given it to them. The Spanish government already has a lot more sacred and historical objects than they can restore and maintain.
France also keeps trying to sell some of its castles for 1 euro. But they are in so much need of restoration, and the conditions are so strict, that nobody bothers. Meanwhile, the UK’s castles and palaces are used to film movies, celebrate weddings, banquets, company dinners, and all kinds of things, since you’re allowed to put modern plumbing.
*Spain is full of those. The infamous Spanish Ecce Homo was fresco one such piece, made by an artist who manufactured identical paintings in huge quantities.
If you’re praising the UK for its lack of restrictive historic housing regulation, then I don’t want to know how bad Spain is.
I know people who have owned Listed buildings and it’s an absolute faff to try to get the Council to sign off on any renovations or alterations. But I suspect this is the sort of thing where there’s a minority of power-tripping planning inspectors that generate most of the horror stories.
Well, at least when it comes to churches, it is a lot less restrictive.
Although most churches are owned by the Catholic Church in Spain, there are quite a few community-owned churches (cofradias) in Spain.
My aunt inherited our family’s part of the cofradia in Spain. The community has been trying to donate the church to the City Hall for more than a decade, and the City Hall only accepted it in the end because it came with a bit of land and forests (which, back in the day, where enough for church maintenance).
In the UK, you could sell it to a person who would live in it. Somebody would pay actual money for that place they can’t get rid of for free! And it’s not that nobody would like to live in that place – there are new houses that are built in the area, and older houses and barns get restored and converted into homes. It’s just that you can’t live in that church.
So yes, it appears to me like the UK’s laws on listed buildings, at least the religious ones, are much less restrictive than Spain’s.
Ooohhh some of these are very reasonably priced*.
https://www.churchofengland.org/more/parish-reorganisation-and-closed-church-buildings/closed-church-buildings-available-disposal#na
I don’t think people tend to live in deconsecrated churches (old rectories are another matter) so much as use them as commercial spaces. Like there’s one up Leeds way that’s a Costa coffee now and of course Adele’s recording studio.
But I suspect that’s more a matter of very different religious history than a reflection of secular building conservation.
*ok I’m actually too southern to know what ‘reasonably priced’ looks like.
Buying a church building (of the Established church) to convert into a house in England (remember, the UK has 3 separate secular legal systems, and the Church of England also has its own laws) is still a very complicated process. Churches can only be deconsecrated by Act of Parliament or Measure of the General Synod, and this still doesn’t affect any protection the church may have as a Listed building.
Is there no legal way for a church building in Spain to stop being a church?
I’ve searched, but I haven’t found either the established procedure, or cases of it happening. But then, I couldn’t even figure out the word for it in Spanish, either.
Spain was very religious until very recently; about fifty years ago or so. And then, when people didn’t have to go to church, they stopped going there, and the process was like an avalanche.
Most people in my parent’s generation got church marriages; even my atheists parents got married in the church, for complicated paperwork reasons. Civil marriages have become a lot more common for my generation.
Everybody in my school was bapthised, and everybody went through confirmation. Now, they don’t seem to do it as much, either.
Getting permission for fixing something may be as easy/hard in the UK as in Spain.
The main point is, once you’ve invested the money, the uses you can get out of a restored building are more permissive in the UK than in Spain. And that is the difference that makes restoration profitable or not.
If you’re praising the UK for its lack of restrictive historic housing regulation, then I don’t want to know how bad Spain is.
+1 to this. Things like this bring out my inner libertarian. Hyper-restrictive rules about historic buildings must I think be motivated by the belief that using a building (in some way different to its original use) degrades it; which actually tends to be true; but the missing term in the calculation is that not using a building degrades it faster (on average).
It seems to me like the UK also has its share of idiocy. I remember when I was in Edinburgh, it just seemed so dirty; when I asked why they don’t clean the buildings (some of them where quite fancy hotels; they could afford it), I was told that since the center of Edinburgh is UNESCO World Heritage, they can’t clean it.
I understand not cleaning in cases like the controversial Black Madonna in Chartres, but I do think that scrapping the soot from the Industrial revolution from historical buildings is good. It makes things better, and it helps conservation.
The UK still makes it work better than Spain or even France (so it’s not about money).
Cleaning the soot off seems to be a latitude thing.
I can’t find any photos but the older generation informs me that the houses of Parliament used to be all brown and nasty, before restoration in the 80s. And Brimingham looks less sooty than you’d expect of the heart of the dark satanic mills.
But stuff seems to be less likely to get cleaned once you reach Yorkshire.
I’m going to speculate that this is a geological thing, rather than the question of local political finances that might seem the most obvious explanation. Stone is heavy, so old buildings were predominantly built out of what could be quarried locally. In the south, that’s mostly limestone. In the north, mostly sandstone. Limestone is easier to clean without causing structural damage.
From what I can tell, the big problem with cleaning Edinburgh is that the buildings are overwhelmingly sandstone. It’s porous, so the stains run deep, and soft and easily dissolved, all of which means that it’s very difficult to clean without doing structural damage that will lead to further degradation over time.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that it was discovered that 10 Downing Street was actually made of yellow bricks and that the black color was from soot rather than paint.
The building is now painted black.
Next you’re going to tell me our ancestors didn’t really make pristine unpainted statuary and architecture… and thus the White House was actually in technicolor.
Quite a long time ago, we visited Penhow castle in Wales. The owner, who I think was a historian or archaeologist, had restored different parts of it to their conditions at different parts of the castle’s history. The original part was just a single tower, room above room — every time they changed the guard on the roof, the men went through the castellan’s bedroom. The most recent part was the Victorian section, where windows had been cut through several feet of stone wall. There was a recording you could listen to as you went through.
I remember elsewhere in Europe staying in “castle hotels” in a variety of countries. All of that would have been something like thirty years ago, so things may have gotten more restrictive since.
It’s not really regulation versus lack of regulation. The UK has strict regulations about altering or demolishing old buildings, and without them , there would not be so many.
The National Trust is better seen as a symptom of the British attitude towards heritage than the reason for it: it has never been part of government, being a private charity, and has mainly acquired its portfolio of historical properties and obscene amounts of land through donations, almost always in wills. The reason for this is that almost all heritage sites in the UK are relatively expensive as properties, and death taxes will therefore be applied to them (levied on the heirs at the owner’s demise). Chsrities do not pay tax, so if someone was concerned leaving their children their stately home would bankrupt the children but wanted it ‘preserved’ (whole can of worms around what that means that is best not opened here) then the National Trust or other charities existed to take the property. Of course, it was possible to avoid the death tax by selling the place instead, as the buyer will then get the tax incidence, or by setting it up as a business yourself (tax law being fun but insanely complicated), so this meant the UK has a reasonable market for heritage properties and inducements to exploit their commercial potential: marketability in both cases suggests preservation is worth more than modernisation.
In effect, therefore the National Trust is a beneficiary of an unintended consequence of the UK tax system. I don’t think there’s any particularly unusual love of heritage in the UK, but the way inheritance and taxes worked served to create a culture where heritage preservation was prominent. This probably relates to the political stability since about 1745 meaning that so long as landowners had income they held onto their houses, and these houses were not being destroyed in conflicts so exist in large numbers. This culture then influenced other sites such as churches or industrial heritage which might otherwise gave been protected/demolished.
Probably worth noting I’m not a fan of the National Trust, but hopefully I’ve not let my biases influence my writing here. And incidentally, it’s worth emphasising that the government did set up National Parks and other heritage schemes which are separate from, distinct from and often at loggerheads with the National Trust. I suspect that from outside the difference is very unclear though, especially as the National Trust often owns much of the land in National Parks which themselves other than things like car Parks don’t actually own much at all.
I am really curious why.
Yes, even WW II damage was relatively small compared to what happened elsewhere.
Is there any reliable source for COVID death numbers by polity (country, state etc) that allows slicing both by age and by “nursing home patient” vs “not nursing home patient”? (Inspired by the recent MR post about Swedish nursing homes.)
“It just turned out we weren’t compatible at all!” said his mother’s sister, antithetically.
Another history of religions question – the universal trend is for religions to split into sects, and the sects split further, and you get these branching structures if you graph them. The only exception I know of when 2 sects came together and united is the Uni-Uni’s (Unitarians and Universalists) in 1961. Are there any other examples?
The Anglicans/Episcopalians and Methodists are making progress towards reunifying (random link I googled for a source).
Right, but at the same time the Methodists are fracturing.
There are any number of united Xs and even more groups that were the result of a merger. This is quite common. These are generally small to medium protestant denominations without huge doctrinal differences.
It’s not that uncommon, really. For example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) formed as a union of three earlier organizations (ALC, LCA, and AELC) in 1988. The United Church of Christ formed when the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches united in 1957. The United Methodist Church formed when the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church united in 1968. The United Presbyterian Church of North America merged with the PCUSA in 1958 to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA). These are just a few examples of such things, and these are just from the USA.
Depending on how much union you want, the ELCA, Episcopal Church (USA), Moravian Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), Reformed Church in America, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist Church are all in full communion with each other, and their clergy regularly fill in for each other.
The Protestant Church in the Netherlands is the product of a 2004 merger of the Dutch Reformed Church (Hervormd), the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Gereformeerd) and the (tiny) Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The graph of Dutch Christian denominations has a few other loops as sects merge…
There is, in fact, a whole Wikipedia article about the phenomenon of Christian denominations merging.
The United Church of Canada was formed by the merger of three major protestant denominations in 1925 and has since absorbed a few other denominations and individual congregations.
Each of the three major churches that joined in 1925 was itself a product of earlier unions.
I expect there will be more of this, as liberal Christianity continues to collapse.
There are lots of smaller Protestant denominations which, when sufficiently fissioned off from parent bodies, were too small to independently survive so they merged with other small denominations.
Other, somewhat larger, bodies came together (ironically) as a result of splits, see one of the three Lutheran bodies in the USA:
Or the Presbyterians in the USA, who also have divided into two major blocs:
I’m slightly surprised any presbyterian church would accept it.
Several Eastern formerly-Orthodox Catholic churches have reunited with the Roman Catholic church:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Catholic_Churches
You might also consider whether you want to count conversions from one sect to another as “merging”. Various edge cases like this might then be in play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_ordinariate
UU suggests another example. The Unitarians were the most liberal of the New England Puritans, splitting off around 1800. The Universalists were the most liberal of the German-American Calvinists, splitting off around 1800. The rest of the Puritans, known as Congregationalists from 1800, merged with much of the rest of the German Calvinists to form the United Church of Christ.
I often read stories about internal government documents remaining classified for a very long time. For a recent example, files related to the JFK assassination were supposed to finally be declassified in 2017, although some of those files were subsequently held back until 2021. From what I can tell, the general standard is 25 years as per this executive order, where extensions can be made for one of nine reasons listed in section 3.4 of the link.
I’m having trouble imagining specific examples of secrets the government needs to hold for that long. What serves the national interest to be held secret for 25 years? To take it further, are there any things that serve the national interest to be held secret for 50 years? Or longer?
Do the above lists mainly consist of secrets that when revealed would cause reputational harm? In terms of national security, the first things that come to my mind don’t seem to be issues after 25 years. Any war plans are probably obsolete after 25 years, any secret technology must have leaked after 25 years, or at the very least is so far behind the curve that no one really cares about it anymore. Maybe information on spies needs to remain secret until the spy is dead? I feel like I must be missing some large group of secrets.
The United States is still using a great many weapons systems that were developed a quarter of a century ago, some of which have capabilities that are kept in reserve only to be used in wartime. Intelligence sources and methods are particularly sensitive in that regard.
And, yes, anything about human intelligence sources is particularly critical, because they are likely to have family members in the countries they were recruited from and which may not be particular about exactly who they exact vengeance against.
The CIA memorial wall still has an unidentified star from 1965.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Memorial_Wall#First_fatality
“Killed in action during the Vietnam War in South Vietnam or Laos.”
And another from 1978 that just lists “unknown” for when/how/why they died in the line of duty.
Missile silos do not move. I imagine we do not want NK to have 1995 US nuclear missile blue prints. A lot of hardware is that old and we do not want everyone to know everthing we know about it, even if it is a bit dated and slightly upgraded now.
I imagine we had some foreign assets, who do not quite qualify as spies, who helped us in the nineties who still would be prosecuted for their actions and even more who care about their reputation. Also if we bribed someone their children should not be able to be identified. I imagine in many countries even grandchildren of the soldier who sold secrets to the evil Americans so he could pay his mistress to keep silent would suffer somewhat reputationally.
If, in 1985, the CIA found out that the mayor’s aide of a medium-sized Russian city regularly committed unspeakable crime X and could be blackmailed for it, (or whatever) then they probably did so. Said mayor possibly moves up the ranks and in 2010 is in the Duma or a cabinet minister or whatever, the information (and its secrecy) is even more valuable. Even if the guy dies in 2015, we don’t want the Russians to know that a major reason why ‘Russia’ decided that third party Mr. Z from Ukraine is reliable was because the CIA had their blackmailed former mayor vouch for him to Putin. And Mr. Z and his people are still valuable assets that we want the Russians to continue to trust.
I think you want to protect stuff like this forever, because if you’re doing it correctly, the foundations of today’s important secrets are built on decades-old secrets.
Also, if you’re recruiting agents, you’d like the assurance to be “we’ll never tell anyone this,” not “we won’t tell anyone this for 50 years.” You or your wife or kids might still be around in 50 years and able to suffer consequences, ranging from scandal and ostracism to midnight knock on the door.
One of the more plausible JFK conspiracy theories is that either Oswald was working with the Soviets, or at the very least parts of the US government thought he was, and that the cover up was to prevent World War III if that information went public.
(Fun fact – there is an audio tape from the LBJ presidential library of LBJ telling Senator Richard Russell that Earl Warren repeatedly refused to head the assassination investigation committee until LBJ revealed the then-secret information that Oswald went to Mexico City to have a meeting at the Soviet Embassy right before the assassination; LBJ claims Warren broke down crying and agreed to head the commission on the spot to prevent a nuclear war.)
On the one hand, you can see how they might want to keep something like that secret even now.
On the other hand, what I find weird is that although it hasn’t raised too much attention, the JFK files that have already been declassified include a surprisingly large amount of potentially damaging information- including a lot more stuff about Oswald’s Mexico City trip, the CIA’s attempts to cover it up (even from other parts of the government – one of the best declassified docs is Hoover losing his shit at the CIA trying to keep him in the dark about it), all kinds of fun stuff.
So if they can release all that already, it’s kind of hard to figure out what they are still sitting on.
Not even remotely. Say you’ve written a new algorithm to help a radar system sort out targets from the background under heavy jamming. This one has a very specific vulnerability, but so long as nobody knows what it is, you’re fine. (And there are a bunch of similar algorithms, with different vulnerabilities, so they can only exploit this if they know which one you picked.) That radar is likely to stay in service for decades. Why should we declassify?
High-level conceptual stuff like stealth isn’t going to stay secret forever, but there’s a lot of detail stuff which can stay secret in the long term and will be heavily compromised by disclosure.
The Census usually keeps information sealed for 72 years, for the general sake of privacy. I would think that national security secrets would involve at least some information that should be as secret as Census information.
1) as noted, many still in use weapons systems and other sensitive military hardware (including our entire nuclear triad) are older than that… and still more advanced than those of most potential rivals. So declassifying would be a risk both for proliferation and vulnerability reasons.
2) this isn’t technically a legally valid reason for keeping them classified – but what is the national interest in declassifying most of this information? A lot of classified information is of a highly technical nature that’s not particularly interesting, valuable, or even legible unless you’re a technically proficient person designing or trying to defeat a piece of US hardware. It’s basically only useful to people who already can access it, and the bad guys. I think a lot of people assume that most classified information is a lot juicier than it actually is.
Seems like there’s folks here more expert than me about the history of religions – a question.
The big 3 Abrahamic religions are described as war-like, and history has a lot of wars between any pair of them – Hitler (Christian vs Jew), the Crusades (Christian vs Muslim), the current Middle East (Jew vs Muslim and Christian vs Muslim). Also some intra-religious wars – Catholics vs Protestants in England and Ireland, Sunnis vs Shia (and vs the often overlooked Sufis). But I don’t know of any intra-Jewish wars – are there any? If not, why not? I know the reformed and orthodox (and there’s others too) don’t always get along but do/did they ever come to violence?
I’m not an expert, but Jews are not just a religion but a tribe, at least for the early history, which precludes warring other than civil. Depending on how you incorporate biblical events into your idea of history, the new testament describes intra-Jewish conflict: between the elite who rule at the behest of the conquering Romans, and the zealots who reject their authority as they have compromised their religious purity. I think this takes a reading of Jesus in which he is more political than how he is often depicted now; after all, Roman politics don’t have any direct bearing on us today.
I don’t know that it’s entirely relevant, and maybe not even well sourced since I don’t remember where this is from, but I remember once seeing the interesting argument that the “Render unto Caesar” thing was actually just a rejection of the Roman coinage; essentially an argument for Jewish sovereignty, that they should have their own coins, and paying for sacrifices at the temple with Roman coins was religiously unacceptable. Thus, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s means Caesar can have back his dirty coins with his face on them, render unto God what is God’s means legitimate Jewish coins would be used for religious purposes. I find the dynamics of Judaism under Roman rule to be quite interesting as they were uniquely unsuited to being incorporated into the Roman empire in the way pagan cultures were; it demonstrates how monotheism is such a powerful cultural technology, making Judea kind of ungovernable until the Romans dispersed them, then an offshoot captures that same empire and is still going strong today, and all the while Jewish identity hasn’t died out. With pagan cultures you could just capture their gods along with the people and territory; Roman attempts to do the same with the Jewish religion are so uncomfortable and don’t quite work right, but they still tried their strategy of letting people keep their religion but making it subordinate to imperial sovereignty.
Not quite – the Jewish religious authorities were leading Jesus into a trap by asking him if it was lawful (under Jewish law) to pay taxes to the Roman empire. If Jesus says yes his zealous Roman hating followers desert or turn on him. If he says no he gets arrested. So he gives a clever answer instead.
It’s true that 1st century Judea had its own coinage, and that was what was required to pay temple tax in. It was the Roman to Jewish money changers that Jesus drove out of the temple – the face value reading is that they were turning a house if worship into a marketplace and taking advantage of worshipers, but I’ll admit to not knowing if there was another political motive to this as well or not.
Are we taking about the last 1000 years? Obviously, there’s plenty of intro-Jewish wars depicted in the Jewish scriptures
“Catholic vs Protestant (and vs the often overlooked mystics).”
Sufiism isn’t a sect in the sense in which Sunni an Shia are — a Sufi can be Sunni or Shia. The third group in the split were the Kharijites, but they were never very important after the very early period.
And the Shia have several splits over who the legitimate successor to one of Ali’s descendants is. A majority (I can’t find an exact number) and the Iranian theocracy are “Twelvers”, meaning their twelfth and most recent religious leader is officially an 1150-year-old man who may be entirely ficticious. The minority (but apparently the majority of Pakistani and Indian Shia) are Ismailis, who trace the hereditary succession of imams through the elder brother of the Twelvers’ seventh, through the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt and then India to the Aga Khan IV.
I can’t figure out what’s up with the Fivers, Seveners, etc.
The ibadis are still.around, though they resent being classified as kharijites
There has been some small-scale violence between Orthodox and more secular Jews in Israel- AFAIK largely taking the form of Orthodox Jews throwing stones at buses that drive through Orthodox areas on the Sabbath.
Incidentally, no Jewish denomination describes itself as reformed (past tense). The older secular/modernising tendency is Reform.
Confusingly, in the US Reform is the most secular denomination, while in the UK it’s not. A reasonable approximation is that Reform Judaism in the US would be called Liberal or Progressive in the UK, while Reform Judaism in the UK overlaps with Conservative in the US.
Because Jews didn’t have a lot of territory to fight over, and you can’t really call it a “war” if you don’t hold territory. There are some possibilities from Biblical times – the Samaritans, various wars between the tribes (such as the war between the Gileadites and Ephraimites, which gives us the word “shibboleth”) – but they’re so far back that we don’t have great historical records. Heck, it’s a bit murky if “Judaism” as an identity actually stretches that far back!
Once you’re out of Biblical times, Israel is constantly occupied by one empire or another, so any hostility is mostly directed outwards. Although there are some cases of violence towards Jews who sympathized with the occupying regime.
As others have said, for most of the last two thousand years, Jews haven’t held enough organized political power to wage anything you would really want to call “a war”, but in pre-Roman and Roman times there were plenty of examples: the Maccabean revolt was at least in part also a war against Hellenizing Jews; the origins of modern Rabbinic Judaism come from the Pharisees, who warred with their rival Sadduccees (championed by the Hasmonean dynasty) in the Judean Civil War; the Great Revolt against Rome featured plenty of factions of Jews who were happy to use violence against each other.
And of course, early persecution of Christians by Jews had a lot of the character of an intra-Jewish dispute until Christianity fully branched off and became its own religion.
By all means correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t it sort of end up going that way in South Korea and Taiwan? And wasn’t Vietnam more or less ok?
In early February, how are you supposed to know whether your country will look like an Italy or a South Korea? Fear was warranted.
He qualified the prediction though. And even if he hadn’t qualified it, it wasn’t in an arrogant tone or anything.
I’ve reported your post because it is a blatant ‘gotcha’ type post, unhelpful in every way. It would have been fine if you asked him about why he got the prediction wrong, and what he thinks of it now, in a polite way that could start a good discussion about prediction in general.
I’ve been thinking lately that I want a physics professor I can bother with a dumb question, and then I realized there are probably people here qualified to answer this. So, I have just been apprised of how electricity and magnetism are united by relativity. I have a cursory understanding, I don’t actually know all the math that makes this stuff work, but I guess there’s a nice neat way in which they balance out when relativistic effects can make things like net charge or current look different in different reference frames. My understanding (after going through the apparently common fallacy of wondering if this meant magnetism was just a consequence of relativistic effects on charge; I guess magnetism is just weird and everyone’s subconscious desire is to make it go away) is that basically relativity means that charge implies magnetism, magnetism implies charge, you can’t get one to work without the other, and this allows for charge invariance between reference frames. Without one or the other, you’d get cases where in one reference frame a particle should undergo a force, but in another frame the force just disappears.
My question, for someone who knows the math on this stuff better, is: can you create a framework in which the general principles of relativity hold, charge and electrostatic force exist, but magnetism doesn’t? I feel like maybe if you get rid of charge invariance and allow for different reference frames to measure charges differently, you could get a mathematically complete system; and of course this might just break more stuff, and how that stuff breaks would give a satisfying answer as to why magnetism must exist. Then again, if the speed of light is the fixed point for conversion between reference frames, and light is an electromagnetic wave, maybe it’s fundamentally flawed to try and come up with a relativistic framework at all, at least based on light, in which magnetism doesn’t exist.
I would find it edifying to know how much has to change, or even whether in the end you’ll never quite get such a system to be consistent. The more things are intuitively implied by how the math behind them works out, the less arbitrary and mystifying these phenomena seem; e.g. inverse square laws aren’t at all arbitrary, they’re clearly implied by three dimensional space, and you can see how they would change in a space with more or fewer spatial dimensions.
Btw, apropos of nothing, my very imprecise back of the envelope calculation says that if 0.00000000000000009% (16 zeroes right of the decimal) of the masses of the sun and earth were each unmatched protons (i.e. no electron so each has a certain charge as a proportion of its mass), then the gravitational and electrostatic forces would balance out.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by magnetism not existing. You can certainly imagine there being no ferromagnetic materials but that’s more of a chemistry/condensed matter thing. But as far as a vacuum goes I don’t really see how. The Maxwell equations just jump out of relativity as soon as you assume an electrical charge
There is also a misconception here regarding the speed of light: There is nothing inherently special about light in relativity, it’s just that any massless field propagates at the maximal possible speed. This speed in relativity would still exist and make sense if photons had some rest mass and would not be able to move at it.
I like thinking/referring to it as the “speed of causality”
No. You can’t have instantaneous propagation of the electrostatic force in relativity, and without magnetism, this causes problems.
Imagine two electrons sitting side by side, one on the left, one on the right. They should experience a 1/r^2 force repelling them, which points directly to the left and right respectively. With the finite speed of light, the magnitude of the force is dependent on the retarded positions, but it always points directly to the left and right respectively, because they’re always directly to the left and right of each other. In this frame, you should always see them accelerating away from each other, but they should remain motionless in the orthogonal directions.
Now, transform into a moving frame, so that you’re moving downward with respect to the two charges. The retarded position of the charges in this frame are always a little bit below their current positions, so the direction of the two forces is up and to the left and up and to the right. This means they should be accelerating upward as well as away from each other.
If they’re accelerating upward in this frame, that means they would have to be accelerating upward in the original frame as well. Obviously this doesn’t work.
Besides, electromagnetism is described so beautifully under relativity as either a vector potential or tensor fields that transform according to the Lorentz group. Why would you want to change that?
Thank you ksteel and mcpalenik for your replies and for indulging my crankery. I’m going to take your responses as a recommendation to actually work through the relationship between relativity and Maxwell’s equations (might have to learn some math for a change). ksteel, thanks for clearing up my confusion regarding light; mcpalenik, that is an elegant and simple counterfactual, I will have to try to work through exactly how magnetism corrects it, but it’s pretty clear that no model of relativistic charge is going to fix a simple, symmetrical case where switching reference frames causes a force to appear.
A really good simple example to get started thinking about this is two parallel wires carrying a current. Parallel wires carrying current generate a small amount of force between them. The force can either repel the wires, or attract them together, depending on whether the currents are running in the same direction or opposite. This is an easily verifiable physical fact, though you need quite a lot of current to make it obvious to feel with your hand, so probably don’t try it yourself unless you know what you are doing around large amounts of electricity.
How do we explain this phenomenon if we are allowed to use magnetism? Easy! One of the rules of magnetism is that current flowing through a wire generates a magnetic field. Another rule of magnetism is that a wire with a current inside a magnetic field feels a force. We have two wires with currents, each creating a magnetic field and being pushed/pulled by the magnetic field from the other. Thus we expect a force between the two wires. Done!
But can we explain this phenomenon without using magnetism, and only using electrostatics and relativity? Yes, but it is harder. We need to explain this force in terms of electrostatic repulsion, so lets refine our model of a current carrying wire. A current carrying wire is made out of positively charged metal ions mixed up in a sea of negatively charged electrons. There is one negative electron for every positive metal ion, so there is no net electrical force. This is easily verifiable in the lab reference frame where we live; we can measure the static electric field around a current carrying wire, and see that there is none. So a current carrying wire is a density-balanced set of positive and negative charges when viewed in the lab reference frame, and we expect to see no force whatsoever, and are confused when we measure a force between these two current carrying wires.
But so far, we haven’t thought about relativity at all. Lets do that! The electrons are moving. What do things look like from their perspective? If we want to talk about the forces acting on the electrons, we have to switch to their reference frame, which is what relativity is all about. When we shift to a moving reference frame, space contracts; that’s one of the fundamental features of relativity. But if space contracts, so does electric charge density! We know that positive and negative charge density are equal in the lab frame. But as we move to the electron frame, the positive metal ions and the moving current-causing electrons get different Lorentz contractions. Which means that their densities change by different amounts. Which means that the wire is no longer electrically neutral! There is now a net electrical charge on the wire, and since there is a net electrical charge on the wire, in the electron reference frame we see an electrostatic force between the wires.
So in the lab frame, from the perspective of the positive metal ions, everything is charge balanced, and there should be no force between the wires. But the negative electrons aren’t living in the lab reference frame, because they are moving, so in order to model them, we have to switch to their reference frame. And switching into their reference frame causes the previously balanced positive and negative charge distributions to become unbalanced (because they get different Lorentz contractions). So the electrons live in this world where the electrical charges are not balanced, and there are electrostatic forces pushing / pulling them around. Thus the electrons end up getting push/pulled toward one side of the wire. They pile up on that side, and eventually start exerting a force on the wire itself, which we can then measure as the force exerted between the two wires. And so we can reach agreement. There should indeed be a force between the two current carrying wires. Even though we didn’t talk about magnetism at all!
So… Everything about magnetism can actually be explained by special relativity and electrostatic forces. Magnetism is always about something moving. And when something is moving, you have to switch reference frames to the moving thing’s reference frame to see how it will react to forces. And when you switch reference frames, you get Lorentz contractions. And Lorentz contractions will cause previously balanced positive and negative charge densities to become no-longer balanced, because the Lorentz contractions occur in different directions, or at different speeds. And where you have un-balanced charge distributions, you will have electrostatic forces. And these forces must persist as you change reference frames back into the lab frame. These persistent forces are called magnetic forces.
So you can think about magnetism as being un-fundamental – it’s just a derived phenomenon that arises when you apply special relativity to electrostatics. But it is vastly easier to use the derived laws of magnetism than it would be to stick with electrostatics and keeping track of all these damn Lorentz contractions. And as mcpalenik says, the mathematics of the magnetic vector potential / four-potential are elegant, and much more practical for solving problems.
This example of Lorentz contraction changing charge densities was actually the example that I first encountered that put me down the road of thinking about this. But when I looked this up I did see the caution in a couple places that in no case will a reference frame switch ever turn a purely electrostatic force into a purely magnetic one or vice versa, it can only turn it into a mixture.
That doesn’t seem right.
Consider a charge moving next to a wire and experiencing a magnetic force. Then, shift to the frame where there charge is still. Since it’s still, there can’t be a magnetic force, so the force must be all electric.
Maybe you meant “switch a purely electric field into a purely magnetic field”? I don’t know that’s right, but I don’t know it’s wrong either.
There are two invariant quantities in the relativistic theory of magnetism: E*B (dot product) and E^2 – B^2, in units where c=1. These appear as invariant scalars that can be derived from the Faraday tensor and its dual.
So, if you start with a purely electric field, you can’t turn it into a purely magnetic field, because E^2 – B^2 > 0 in any reference frame. Likewise, if you start with a purely magnetic field, E^2 – B^2 < 0 in any reference frame.
Yes! This is a great question and leads to some really deep physics. If you have a theory describing a field, like the electromagnetic field, then for it to be compatible with special relativity you need
1. An equation that says how the field looks different if you move to a different reference frame [For example in electromagnetism an electric field in one reference frame will look like a combination of electric and magnetic fields in another reference frame, and there’s a equation that tells you how to calculate this].
2. A proof that, while the field looks different in different reference frames, the field obeys the same *equations* in all reference frames [because in relativity all inertial reference frames are supposed to be on an equal footing, and the same laws of physics are supposed to hold in each frame.]
The requirement that the same equations have to hold in all reference frames is a strong one. Physicists have used group theory to carefully enumerate the possible equations that satisfy these requirements, and basically came up with 4 possibilities.
1. Maxwell’s equations.
2. The Klein-Gordon equation. It’s simpler than Maxwell’s equations: just one equation instead of 4! The Klein-Gordon equation sounds like what you want: it describes a force that has something like electrostatic attraction but no equivalent of magnetism. A popular image of its field is that it’s like a soft mattress. “Charges” are like weights that pull down parts of the mattress, and so charges are attracted to each other because they want to roll downhill.
3. The Einstein field equations for gravity. These are more complicated than Maxwell’s equations, so kind of the opposite of what you were asking for.
4. The Dirac equation, which mathematically is similar in complexity to Maxwell’s equations but is conceptually much weirder.
It turns out that nature uses all four of these. Electromagnetism is described by Maxwell’s equations, and the strong and weak forces are also described by versions of Maxwell’s equations. The Higgs boson is described by the Klein-Gordon equation. Gravity is described by the Einstein equations. And particles like electrons and quarks are described by the Dirac equation.
In quantum mechanics you can prove some deep theorems about these various kinds of fields. I’m not an expert on them but they roughly say:
– These four are the only possibilities.
– There can only be one field obeying the Einstein equations, and it has to be gravity.
– It’s very unlikely to have a field obeying the Klein-Gordon equation that is strong at long distances; for example the Higgs field produces a force between any two passive particles but it decays exponentially with their separation past about 1e-18 meters.
The last point is why the forces we are familiar with, electromagnetism and gravity, obey the complicated Maxwell and Einstein equations instead of the simple Klein-Gordon equation. Klein-Gordon fields like you asked for get hidden at very small distances because of quantum mechanics.
Wow, this is really helpful! One thing I notice is that one of the forces which works over long distances is mediated by a massless particle (electromagnetic force and photons), and gravity as far as I know doesn’t have a well-understood carrier particle but the graviton would also be theorized to be massless. I’m assuming that’s not a coincidence. I vaguely remember that the nature of EM waves as self-propagating is a consequence of Maxwell’s equations, is that necessary for photons being massless? I imagine that any construction of electric charge without magnetism under the Klein-Gordon equation would behave very differently.
Also, I looked up the Einstein field equations…they seem nasty. I haven’t gotten my head around whether they’re incredibly difficult to solve, or in some cases actually unsolvable, or maybe proving whether a case is solvable or not is itself incredibly difficult. And in any case, if we can’t figure out one of the terms in the equation (cosmological constant), how can we possibly have ANY solutions? I guess maybe they’re the solutions under a particular value of the constant?
Yup!
– Fields mediated by massless particles correspond to forces that fall off like 1/r^2, like the electrostatic force and the gravitational force.
– Fields mediated by massive particles correspond to forces that fall off roughly like e^(-r/L) where the distance L is roughly h/(mc) [h=planck’s constant, c=speed of light, m=particle mass].
Just having propagating waves doesn’t by itself mean that we’re dealing with a massless particle. The Klein-Gordon equation has freely propagating wave solutions, similar to electromagnetic waves, and when you bring quantum mechanics into it those correspond to a moving *massive* particle (e.g. the Higgs boson).
But in any case it’s not an accident that photons are massless: I think it’s hard to modify Maxwell’s equations to make photons massive and still end up with a sensible theory.
Well the cosmological constant is very small; the only case where its effects are noticeable is when you’re looking at the expansion of the universe as a whole over billions of years. So if you’re just looking at the solar system or a black hole or something you can pretend the cosmological constant is zero.
Even so, the equations are indeed annoying to solve and only the simplest cases have analytic solutions: for example a black hole with no other masses nearby, or the expansion of the universe filled with a uniform gas. If things are actually *happening*, then you need to use approximations (which can work well for cases like the solar system where nothing too crazy is going on) or numerical simulations (for cases where gravity gets very strong, like black hole collisions).
There is a sensible way to modify Maxwell’s equations to make the photon massive, in which case it is called a Proca field. (For experts: you simply add a term like A^2 to the Lagrangian of your theory, which breaks the gauge-invariance but doesn’t spoil consistency of the theory.)
However, this adds an extra degree of freedom to the system since the number of possible polarizations of the Proca field is 3 (corresponding to the 3 directions of space in the frame of reference of the massive photon), compared to a Maxwell field which has 2 (corresponding to the transverse plane to the direction of motion of the massless photon).
This is the essential reason why the photon is automatically protected from acquiring a mass due to quantum corrections.
Unfortunately, the analogue of the Proca term isn’t renormalizable if, instead of aiming for a massive photon, you try to use it to describe the massive weak force bosons W-, W+ and Z0 which interact among themselves. That’s why the Higgs mechanism is necessary to get the Standard Model to work. The Higgs field is a set of 4 scalar fields, of which 3 get “eaten” to become the extra polarization modes of the W and Z, while the remaining 1 is the “Higgs boson” that was detected by the LHC.
I suppose my “no” that I gave you earlier could maybe become a *very* qualified yes, but not in the classical (meaning non-quantum) limit, because the reasoning I gave still holds. The electromagnetism-like thing that Anatid described involving scalar fields is called the Yukawa interaction–which I did honestly forget about when I wrote my first reply, because I haven’t really thought at all about that type of physics since grad school.
The non-relativistic, classical limit of the Yukawa interaction is usually given as something like -e^(-mr)/r, where m is the mass of the scalar field that carries the force.
The problem is, when dealing with classical particles, the acceleration has to be orthogonal to something called the 4-velocity, which includes not only the the spacial directions but a time component as well. The reason for this is that the magnitude of the 4-velocity is the mass of a particle and always has to be preserved. In electromagnetism, this works because of the nature of the vector potential and the fact that the fields are described by an antisymmetric tensor. The Yukawa potential is scalar, however, and in short, this means that the interaction *doesn’t* classically preserve the magnitude of the 4-velocity.
Effectively, this means that in the classical limit it has to vanish, as Anatid pointed out.
A lot of physics can’t really be solved analytically, including analytic solutions for the regular old 1/r^2 interaction between particles. For example, you can’t solve the Schrodinger equation analytically with 3 or more interacting particles.
The Einstein equation is particularly nasty because it’s non-linear, but as with all things, the it’s sometimes tractable when you can exploit symmetries. Finding the Schwarzchild (stationary black hole) solution, for example, isn’t trivial, but it’s easier than you’d think. Easy enough that it can be assigned as a homework problem, anyway.
Wow, I see that my desultory layman’s reading of the news about Higgs was pretty spotty. I understood that “the Higgs boson was what creates mass”, in some sense, and I guess I just sort of assimilated that as meaning that it “explained” gravity. Is it fairer to say that Higgs mediates inertial mass, or is that wrong-headed, too? What about the Einsteinian equivalence between inertial mass and gravitational mass?
Or should I just give up now?
Yes, it explains “inertial mass”, although that’s kind of an old terminology that’s not really used in physics anymore. What they used to call inertial mass, we now just call mass, because other definitions like “the thing that gets multiplied by velocity in momentum” aren’t really rigorous or consistent.
IIRC, since again, I haven’t thought much about this since grad school because it’s not really my area of physics, the Higgs mechanism is only needed to give mass to gauge bosons. That is, it’s a way to give mass to a certain kind of particle that has a gauge symmetry because the “normal” way of doing it breaks this symmetry.
But it’s possible that all particles in the standard model have such symmetries for reasons going beyond what I learned/remember, so take that last comment with a grain of salt, I suppose until someone comes in with a more complete answer.
@mcpalenik
I think you are a bit mixed up. Einstein showed that inertial mass (aka relativistic mass) is the same thing as energy. Hence the most famous physics equation: E = mc^2. Or E = m in units where the speed of light is 1.
But it turns out it’s kind of redundant to have two different names for the exact same concept. Therefore, particle physicists eventually began using the term “mass” to mean rest mass, defined as the energy that the particle would have if it were at rest. This has a different relationship to the energy E and momentum p, namely E^2 = p^2 + m^2, which ironically makes it look like Einstein was wrong with his equation (but it’s a different definition of m).
The Higgs field (spin 0) explains why particles have *rest mass*, not why they have inertial mass. So, nothing very much to do with gravity (spin 2), since even if all particles in the universe were massless there would still be energy/momentum which would still source gravity. In fact even without the Higgs mechanism the proton and neutron would be almost as heavy as they now are, because most of their mass comes from QCD effects, and not from the masses of the up and down quarks which compose them.
In the Standard Model there is also a symmetry keeping quarks and leptons from getting masses, except via the Higgs mechanism. It’s called chiral symmetry. For example, an electron spinning left actually has an different electroweak charge from the electron spinning right. A mass term would convert between the two types of electron spins, so it would violate electroweak charge conservation. Hence it is not possible until the symmetry associated with electroweak charge is broken.
Unfortunately the Standard Model does not actually *explain* why the quarks and leptons have the exact masses that they do, because their mass is proportional to how strongly they interact with the Higgs field, and these are arbitrary parameters in the model.
Great comment! The four options Anatid laid out are classified by a number called the “spin” which works as follows:
spin 0 = Klein-Gordon scalar fields
spin 1/2 = Dirac spinors (there are also a couple variants on this e.g. Weyl spinors which are inherently massless because they can only rotate in one direction relative to their direction of travel… this is only consistent if they travel at the speed of light since otherwise you could go faster than them and it would look like they were rotating the other direction relative to their direction of motion.)
spin 1 = Maxwell or Yang-Mills (a nonlinear version of Maxwell which describes the strong and weak forces)
spin 2 = gravity
It is also possible to have a spin 3/2 massless field, but only if the universe displays supersymmetry (a hypothetical symmetry relating each field to another field whose spin is different by plus or minus 1/2). In this case the associated particle is called the gravitino since to be consistent it needs a supersymmetric partner, which it turns out can only be the spin 2 graviton.
There are a few exotic theories which have particles with spin greater than 2, but such models only seem to be consistent if you have an infinite number of fields with arbitarily high spins. In such cases you might be tempted to think that you are actually dealing with the vibrational modes of an extended object—and this is one possible way to motivate string theory.
(There are also a bunch of other mathematically consistent options if you don’t make the simplifying assumption that the fields are weakly interacting at some energy scale, for example “conformal field theories” where the laws of physics look the same at every energy scale.)
Does anybody speak Hebrew? The concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world, is an important idea in Judaism. What do you call someone who does that? What’s a “tikkun-er”? Google translate gives the answer in Hebrew letters with no transliteration. Thanks to anyone who can answer this admittedly bizarre request.
Not a speaker of modern Hebrew, which is more relevant. But I do read the Hebrew Bible well enough to get by.
In Biblical Hebrew, the word shows up in Ecclesiastes 3 times.
1:15, What is crooked cannot be made straight. (so, making straight metaphorically, in the context of everything under the sun being messed up.)
7:13, Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked. (same)
12:9, Weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care (so setting a text in order).
I’m leaving out the Daniel 4 use because I think that is Aramaic, and I don’t actually know that language however much it sort of looks like Hebrew.
Outside the Bible, I’ve seen rabbis use it for everything from prayers to make up for some breach in the covenant to what to pray to make up for a wet dream. But the use you are looking for is from early Jewish sources, describing legislation intended to protect vulnerable classes in society. That use is, so far as I know, the one that got picked up and modified last century. Also, it came with a different form of the word olam.
A completely different way of saying this is that the tricky word in tikkun olam is not tikkun.
They’re both tricky for me, as I don’t speak a bit of Hebrew and I know conjugation is somewhat confusing (from an English speaker’s perspective) in Semitic languages.
Mi-takken olam is how I’d say it.
מתקן עולם
Thank you!
I think this is probably the best answer; there are some Hebrew nouns that take various suffixes that sort of function like “-ist” or “-er” in English, transforming a noun into ‘one who performs that noun’. But the prefix “me-” I think is more common and more regular than any of those prefixes. Though I would pronounce it more like “meh-takken” than “mi-takken”.
However, I want to throw in a quick pitch for Tikkunnik, which would be the Yiddish version; the “-nik” suffix is pretty close to “-er” in English, and is pretty commonly used today (see Likudnik for supporters of the political party Likud).
Tikkun, as a word, is associated with concepts of social or metaphysical repair as much as its with physical or corporeal repair. You might try something like רֵפוֹרמָטוֹר, or reipormator – e.g., a reformer.
I’m going for something like “the one who makes right,” intentionally referring to the theological concept.
I’ve been looking into what the Earth’s future climate might look like and what the net effect will be in terms of arable land opened up from added warmth vs. closed down due to heat and drought.
I found this gif that nicely toggles back and forth between the current Koppen climate zones vs. the forecasted ones from 2071-2100 (although I’m not sure which IPCC scenario this gif is using). And then I found this diagram which closely aligns with the previous and which happens to mention that this is based off 4C average warming.
Eyeballing the two, here are the changes I notice:
Pros:
*Large parts of Alaska and Canada and Siberia become like modern-day New England.
*Taiga expands into the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and parts of northern Siberia that are currently tundra.
*Iceland becomes a lot nicer.
*Tibet and northern China become a lot more hospitable.
Cons:
*In India, the hot arid Aw zone (savanna) encroaches into the temperate Cwa zones there.
*The Amazon rainforest shrinks substantially.
*Southern Africa becomes drier.
*Australia’s desert enlarges slightly; the coastal humid zone gets squeezed, albeit not eliminated.
*Northern Mexico and West Texas become drier.
*The Sahara desert enlarges slightly, especially in North Africa around the Atlas Mountains.
*Steppe and desert encroach into southern Spain.
*Iran and Turkenistan become noticeably hotter (although not necessarily drier—their current warm dry zones become hot dry zones).
Neutral to slightly bad:
*Most of Europe between Spain and Scandanavia gets a Mediterranean climate (although this could be a plus depending on whom you ask, other than the fact that agriculture in those areas would need to adjust. In any case, it’s not as if these areas are going to become uninhabitable or even uncomfortable, unless you consider modern-day Italy uncomfortable).
Overall, what I’m seeing is that the Earth loses some arable land, but also gains a bunch of arable land. If I knew how, I’d use a program to count the number of pixels that change in that gif for each color to see exactly how the two compare. That said, we all know that land is not easily fungible, and there will be geopolitical winners and losers, and conflict as a result. But I’m not quite seeing how this is going to be the end of the world, unless the methane in Siberian permafrost really does trigger a runaway greenhouse effect. It doesn’t even look like total global agricultural productivity would go down; if anything, it would go up from the new arable land at high latitudes. Am I missing something?
Lots of missing pieces here: massive loss of biodiversity being one of the larger items. If all you value is growing more food then are probably better ways of doing so without gobbling up the last acre of arable land. I, for one, place a much greater value on wilderness and the beauty and diversity embodied within it than I do on growing more cheap food to feed a rapacious civilization. We’re closing in on what…8 billion people….? Probably way more than enough to ensure our continued advances in knowledge while preserving human diversity. We could probably shed a few billion and still have good results if we ensured those 5 billion had a good standard of living.
So what you’re missing is that the essential ingredients of truly living include much more than just having enough to eat. For me one of those ingredients is the high value I place on wild places that includes putting on a pair of skis and skiing into a place of solitude and beauty. I also value the things we benefit from in a very bio-diverse world. We are still discovering new species and no doubt we’ve lost countless ones before they were even ‘discovered.’
A local farmer that farms ‘naturally’ has discovered without the advice of scientists the benefits of a bio-diverse land to the health of the plants he grows for food. It was a Eureka Moment for his family to discover the interconnected nature of the animals and plants that ensured the health of his soil.
We should learn to take a bit better care of this rock we call home if we want anywhere close to the current 8 billion souls to have any sort of a decent life.
On the practical side, energy usage would have to go waaaay up unless you think all those swampy Floridians are going to give up their air conditioning. Already, homes built just a decade ago in my area were usually built without central a/c. Now, no builder in their right mind would build a home in central NY state without it. I don’t have the figures but should be easy to determine how much of the energy savings from more efficient appliances, lighting, and insulation was gobbled back by the need for a/c.
I suppose you’d just tell them all to move to Canada where it will (in your scenario) be a temperate place. I’m sure the Canadians will be all fine with that or will the massive disruptions to culture and national identity be so effectively erased as to cause us all to fall in on the One World Govt? (ok that’s a bit snarky).
I think we also very much discount the upheavals likely to occur even in a mild climate change scenario. As has been noted elsewhere over and over: ‘you can change the org chart all you want but culture change is very very difficult.’
I like the world the way it is and am willing to give up quite a bit to keep it that way. I’m hoping to convince more of my fellow humans to take up the cause as well.
That’s a good point about biodiversity. One thing I’d be concerned about is whether plant and animal species can migrate and establish themselves over such geographical distances over the span of a few decades. I wonder how much manpower it would take to shepherd plant and animal species to the new climate zones and get them established over transition periods lasting decades…
I don’t think a few decades is likely to have enough change so that all of a species’ range becomes uninhabitable for that species. The most likely problem, in my view, is immobile species with long generations, i.e. trees. That aside, unless movement is blocked by geographical barriers, I would expect the range of species of plants and animals to gradually shift towards the poles.
And those species already effectively at the poles (or as close as is possible given what they feed on) to be driven extinct.
How much of that do you do at present in northern Siberia, northern Alaska, and similar places?
When temperature contours move towards the poles, one result is that areas that were wild because the climate wasn’t suited for agriculture get turned into farmland. Another is that places where essentially nobody went become warm enough for people who like visiting the wild but still not warm enough for agriculture.
Or in other words, I think your attitude reflects a large conservative bias, thinking not in terms of wild lands suited to skiing on but of the particular wild lands where you now ski.
So far as I can tell, most of the loss of biodiversity isn’t coming from climate change but from human land use.
There’s an implicit upper-middle class bias to your statement. The regular middle class can’t easily afford a trip to Alaska, Siberia, or even northern Canada/Scandinavia/southern Africa/southern South America/Antarctica, but they can afford a day trip to the local mountain. Most people rightfully don’t care if those richer than they are have an expanded pleasure portfolio.
True. But X + Y is greater than X alone.
And once the temperature contours shift towards the pole and population adjusts, what used to be distant places for rich people to visit become the local mountain.
Why would you expect the shift to result in wilderness being farther from people than before?
Wilderness will not move, it will be damaged/die.
Trees are unable to move and take about 80-100 years to look like a serious forest. And some were growing for far longer.
Animals/short lived plants may be able to move but migration is frequently blocked by human-created obstacles.
And many interesting and local plants of animals will be simply unable to move – their current habitation areas are protected, but new potential ones are not.
And many species are special in many ways making “just move” unfeasible, coral being the most prominent example.
I asked:
You answered:
It isn’t the wilderness that’s moving, it’s the people. There is a great deal of wilderness with nobody skiing in it in northern Alaska and similar places. Much of it has trees in it.
If areas that are currently a little too cold for people to live in them but not too cold for nature lovers to visit get somewhat warmer, they become populated, and the areas a little further north or higher up become accessible to the nature lovers.
So far as your more general point, have you made any calculation of how fast the temperature contours move? For anything more mobile than trees, the range shifting north (or south) by a mile or two a year isn’t likely to be a problem.
That assumes that animal and plants are able to move freely.
This is no true in many places, with pockets of nature blocked by roads/settlements/fields.
Lets say that a plant lives in https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0113&mlon=20.3563#map=11/50.0113/20.3563 that is capable of living in forests and needs to move toward North (or in any other regions) due to climate change.
Its population will disappear as it will be unable to move.
It applies to all species unable to migrate freely due to human pressure.
AFAIK any serious projections are not in range that would cause big cities to move.
Yes, maybe more people will live in Alaska, but most people will not move.
And change is sufficient to signficantly harm scraps of wilderness that are preserved in Europe. USA may different here, AFAIK your wild areas are far more continuous and less fragmented.
Regular people, if they move at all (and thus abandon part of their support network), move to where jobs are.
Are the major job creators incentivized to take those first leaps to a new location with currently few people? The principals behind those major job creators can usually afford the travel expenses to go anywhere they want, and even afford a second or third house anywhere they want. What they can’t afford is an expensive boondoggle that risks their company.
Anti-trust, and more general pro-small business, will likely be required to move masses of people on a timely schedule (or the obvious massive government subsidies). And that’s not even mentioning international borders.
the high value I place on wild places that includes putting on a pair of skis and skiing into a place of solitude and beauty.
Which you are disrupting by strapping on your skis and tromping all over it, not to mention (a) the necessity of the technical civilisation to manufacture your skis (unless you’re strapping chunks of wood to your feet), the roads to get you there from where you live to the wild place, the resorts that you inhabit before/after skiing (unless, again, you’re only driving out to the mountain for a day’s skiiing and then driving back home) – you would do more for the biodiversity and integrity of the wild place by staying at home than turning it into a facility for your enjoyment.
Mankind has reached everywhere, and your attitude towards the (accessible) “wild places” is one of exploitation: they exist on sufferance so long as tourists like you can extract a sense of the sublime from them. You are as much complicit as the rest of us, and I’m going to quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” at you:
I like the world the way it is and am willing to give up quite a bit to keep it that way. I’m hoping to convince more of my fellow humans to take up the cause as well.
Will you give up your skiiing trips?
Since much of my enjoyment of my outdoor environment occurs right outside my back door…..
Without a doubt tourism in many places is a scourge which is why I keep my ‘footprint’ as light as possible. No, camping and hiking isn’t for everyone but for me, it’s worth a great deal. As I’ve said elsewhere, I was lucky to grow up in Europe and the military took me all over the world. I’ve been in lots of the ‘great’ buildings and cathedrals of the world but nothing compares to an old-growth forest and the serenity of a wild place. We’ll just have to disagree on the value of that.
I don’t think you’re disagreeing about the value of that. The question is whether predicted global warming will have result in even a fraction of the damage caused by the fact that all these “wild places” are readily available to seven billion people.
While wandering through the woods near my home growing up, I would often come to some secluded place, where the trees were as thick and tall as cathedral pillars and all was still, and silent, and even my footfalls were muffled by the thick layers of dead fir needles carpeting the forest floor, and I would wonder…has any man ever stood where I am standing now? Like, exactly?
Of course this kind of gets into a “step in the same river twice” scenario (what do I even mean by “here”? This particular clump of dirt I’m standing on?) but I think the question can be made meaningfully. At the time I thought that there must be at least some spots in the woods that nobody had ever trod upon: a few square feet here or there, or perhaps acres of untouched ground. Now I’m far less sure I could find even a square inch. But I was always tickled by the fact that there was no way to know.
Where would you go on Earth to trod where no man has trod before? How much of, say Antartica has been walked on? It can’t be the majority of the landmass, can it?
> Where would you go on Earth to trod where no man has trod before?
If the ‘on Earth’ is not meant to be too literal, some large caves have not fully been explored.
I don’t think that would work. The map projection distorts the size of land closer to the poles, which would exaggerate the amount of arable land we are gaining. Better to look for the numbers they are basing it on.
Do you know if the analysis included the effect of increased CO2 on plant life? It reduces the need for water, which ought to have the opposite effect on desert expansion from the increase in temperature.
That looks like a plate carrée projection to me, so areas near the poles look larger than they actually are (though not as much as on a Mercator projection).
As I understand it, the big problem with climate change is that it’s a change. If we had a new planet to settle having it be a few degrees warmer than here would be fine, maybe even better. But here we have a planet with established farms and infrastructure, and having the arable regions move is a big problem. Likewise rising sea levels aren’t bad because there’s anything particularly wrong with the new coast, it’s just that we have a lot of people living on the old coast.
That would be a big problem for rapid change. Warming so far has been about a tenth of a degree C/decade, sea level rise about an inch a decade. The IPCC believes the rate is going to be higher for the rest of this century, but still slow relative to the speed with which humans adjust their behavior — farmers changing crop varieties, for example, or increasing or decreasing irrigation. It isn’t as if we don’t know how to deal with climates a little warmer than they now are — roughly speaking, we’re talking about warming Minnesota to the current temperature of Iowa.
The rule of thumb for the U.S. east coast is that a foot of SLR shifts the coastline by a hundred feet. The high end of the IPCC projection as of the most recent version of the report, on the (designed as an unlikely high) RCP 8.5 emissions scenario is about a meter. Shifting the coastline in by a hundred meters over most of a century is not rapid change. There are a few places, such as the Nile delta, where the result is considerably larger and others where it is smaller.
The argument is a more persuasive one for non-human species. Trees can’t shift their range very fast, and we don’t know how fast oceanic organisms can adapt to the ocean becoming less basic.
There’s no topsoil in most of those northern places, and they tend to be either wetlands or extremely rocky. Neither works well for agriculture.
The extremely short days in winter also suck. A lot.
Well you improve the soil, right?
Like, start with cover crops like clover to dump organic matter and nitrates into the soil. Then start with dwarf crops and stuff that doesn’t care too much about root structure. And keep building things up till you can grow things like imperator carrots.
…look up some pictures of Northern Canada and get back to me.
Hell where I live most people’s lawns struggle, and I’m only at like the 56th parallel.
57.3N (yes, yes the gulfstream’s cheating)
But is the reason for lack of development of a good topsoil the climate? If the area warmed up, would plants grow faster then die, adding organic matter? Yes, this process takes an incredibly long time, but we’re learning how to speed these things up. Most of the old colliery mine spoil in the UK is being reclaimed by cover crops.
It’ll take a long time to get former tundra fertile enough to grow crops, but converting it to pasture for livestock will be faster (especially if we seed it with the correct moorland flora).
“Despite a generous harvest from the sea, the land in Plockton at this time was not considered to be of very good quality. A letter of the time says, ‘The excellent quality of Highland Milk is well known but it is not to be expected from cows on such poor feeding as can be found in Plocktown’.”
From what I believe is the town website.
That was in the nineteenth century.
I’m not saying it would be impossible to adapt it ever. But it would be a huge undertaking, involving clearing a lot of forests or creating a lot of soil where there presently is none.
My understanding is that during the last ice age giant sheets of ice literally bulldozed huge sections of Canada, scraping what soil they had previously into New England and the Plains and such. Once the soil is gone, it’s hard to get it back.
Of course I know that huge sections of Alaska have plenty of soil: it’s just locked in permafrost. Of course many of these areas may turn into swamps once warmed up, but we know how to deal with swamps. I don’t think we have yet figured out how to efficiently create soil in places where there is just hard rock.
>I don’t think we have yet figured out how to efficiently create soil in places where there is just hard rock.
You shovel up the swamp muck and dump it on the rock. (assuming that we’re already destroying the peatlands to make farms so we might as well strip mine them too.) That stuff’s full of organic matter, because it can’t decay.
Throw in some perlite for drainage.
I did say efficiently. How expensive is that swamp muck and what are the transportation costs? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that farmers currently move soil to place where there is no soil so that they can farm there. They generally stick their farms where the soil currently is.
Given the challenges involved in building roads and railways across these same pieces of land, I think you guys are really, really, underestimating the scale of the work involved.
I don’t think that farmers currently move soil to place where there is no soil so that they can farm there
They had to do it in the Aran Islands; lack of water and soil means conservation measures to protect the biodiversity present, created by human labour:
We’re not going to be farming the tundra. We’re going to be farming what is currently the southern fringe of the boreal forests, while the northern fringe of the boreal forests expands into what is currently tundra.
Has somebody posted this highly entertaining half hour video of a guy solving a seemingly unsolvable Sudoku yet?
Hadn’t seen this before. This is a pleasure to listen to.
Other than the peaking audio on the high notes of the Mozart he put at the beginning…
But yeah, I’ve seen this guy’s videos before. I appreciate clever variant sudoku puzzles, I might check this out and pause the video to solve it myself; I did this with a previous one which I really enjoyed, but he’s got so many on the channel I don’t think I could find it again, and I can’t remember the gimmick. An early programming assignment had me writing a program to solve sudokus which pretty well inoculated me against wanting to solve them by hand, but killer sudokus were interesting until they became rote, so now I occasionally look for a nice gimmick one to play with.
I’ve often thought it would be fun to build a sudoku solver. This comment just might make me do it!
It could be if you make it smart, but I recall mine would just start with everything being tracked as possible in all the squares, strike the obvious ones which were in the same row/column/cell, fill in whatever it could at that point; then it didn’t do anything clever, it just guessed from top to bottom number by number, going down each chain until it hit a contradiction, then backed up the tree of guesses and tried something different. So, a decent introductory programming exercise, but not too interesting from the puzzle aspect. To this day though if I can’t actually fill something in on one of these puzzles by being clever, and I would have to guess and see if I run into a contradiction, I’ll just stop, I never feel like finishing after that; not that the puzzle necessarily turned into that, but I’d rather give up than solve with guessing if I can’t figure something out.
It can be if you are beginner. Writing, as a child, program that could instantly solve any Sudoku is one of my favorite memories.
AFAIK it used the same, not very complicated, algorithm.
@matkoniecz I guess I just wanted to caution that if you program it the basic way it’s not so interesting from the perspective of someone who likes doing the puzzles and might disillusion you on them, but definitely a good basic programming challenge.
Speaking of childhood programming memories, I remember when I was doing a similar depth-first search algorithm to figure out the shortest route between two points in a sokoban-like (block pushing) game, and having a terrible bug that made the output totally chaotic. I spent a couple days debugging it, and I didn’t know how to use tools so I just put in increasingly verbose print statements and tracking the variables. Basically, I learned the difference between pass by value and pass by reference the hard way; I was passing this array (well, the reference to it) into a function recursively and doing a bunch of stuff to it, then expecting it to be the same when the program returned a level.
Yes, both descriptions of a situation are valid.
I made my comment because I am unfamiliar with k10293 situation and whatever it is closer to what I or you described. Not because I think that yours is invalid or something 🙂
I’ve been following this YouTube channel for a while. When he (Simon Anthony) gets frustrated, he can start using strong language. He says “Bother!” and in the comments you can read “He used the b-word! It must be a hard one”.
I actually did solve this puzzle myself; it was ok. I think it was sort of geared towards looking crazy at first and having very little filled in. I don’t think you have to think about it very hard to realize that given the setup, the rule about sequential digits which works both up and down is actually only going to work in one direction, and basically the puzzle’s over if you can figure out where the 3s go. At one point I was thinking that this puzzle might be more interesting if you had numbers filled in from both the high and low points, but I also started to notice a pattern to how the numbers were being filled in. I haven’t taken the time to fully work through this, but it’s like those simple math tricks where you let someone think of a number and then do a bunch of arithmetic to it and guess what they end up with, but no matter what they start with they end up with the same result. Essentially the ruleset is so restrictive that one number being filled in almost implies all the other ones, but there are two possible ‘orientations’ for the result, and any second number locks in which is being used; probably the fact that it’s solvable from only two numbers proves that, but again I didn’t work through proving all this. Anyway, it’s definitely not an interesting ruleset for more than one puzzle.
tl;dr my review is that it was fun to figure out the ruleset, tedious and trivial to apply it once I figured it out, and there isn’t a way to make a more interesting puzzle using these rules
I’ve been thinking about posting it. The puzzles they do are very cool and it’s gotten me back to sudoku after a pretty long time away. (I’ve mostly been entertaining myself with the daily New York Times puzzles.)
Can I, uh, ask a really dumb question, based on my total lack of scientific understanding? (Background, I have a college degree in the social sciences, but didn’t take physics in high school or any hard science in college). How do proposed spacecraft propulsion systems actually work in space- with no atmosphere to ‘push against’?
My naive physics/probably totally invented mental model of how propulsion systems work on a planet is that the chemical explosion or what have you is ‘pushing’ against the atmosphere. In the void of space- if you generate any kind of propulsion, whether it’s chemical or a solar sail or nuclear thermal explosion, or what have you- so you’ve created a powerful controlled reaction, so what. Without anything to push against…. Does that make sense? Can anyone explain the basic idea to someone at my level of scientific education?
It’s not about pushing against the atmosphere. It’s about action-reaction. If you stand on a skateboard (or some other low-friction surface) and throw a weight backward, you and the skateboard will start moving (accelerate) forward. A rocket throws burning gas backward in order to accelerate forward by the same principle.
If I were in the void of space, let’s say with my feet strapped into a skateboard, and I threw a weight backwards- would that accelerate me forward, in space? Because my intuition (probably totally wrong intuition, just thinking out loud here) tells me that it would not
Yes, it would. The effect is not dependent on being in an atmosphere.
You can test it if you want to. You don’t have to use a skateboard. Roller skates, ice skates on ice, or a canoe in still water are all systems with low enough friction to illustrate the principle. Just use a hefty weight, like a medicine ball or 10 kg sack of rice.
If you’re in space, you can even take off the skateboard and throw that too, it’ll propel you a lot better that way!
Or fire a gun, and notice the recoil.
Yes, because you are pushing on the weight – that means you are pushing OFF the weight as you throw it.
A rocket’s fire isn’t pushing on the atmosphere; it’s pushing on the rocket. All you need is rocket/stuff rocket is pushing out of it for this to work.
OK thanks, yeah I can comprehend that. Explosion is pushing rocket forward, no atmosphere required.
In that case- it must actually be more efficient in space, right? With nothing to slow the rocket/craft, no friction or atmosphere
The specifics of that are better explained by a legit smart person, but yes – my understanding is that the only substantial thing keeping you from getting to light speed at that point is the thing where it takes infinite amounts of power to get there even in ideal situations. Basically besides some relatively small effects you get to keep most of what you put in.
One of the practical upshots of this is if you are going somewhere in space you have to keep half of your fuel to slow down with or you end up bashing into whatever you are visiting real hard.
From a relativity perspective, going at light speed is basically like dividing by 0. It doesn’t even make sense. Light speed is the ruler by which all else is measured.
The current tech for our interplanetary missions and retrieving anything from orbit is definitely bashing into whatever you are visiting real hard. Carrying fuel is a pain.
Seems to me if you want to get anywhere interesting at any decent rate, you’re definitely going to come out poor in such a collision. Surely some deceleration beats arriving in an extinction event?
I don’t know when the last time we actually recovered something intact from orbit was. Most launches these days are for satellites, and those are there to stay. The space shuttle missions and the MSL mission that delivered the Curiosity rover to mars both slowed down by slamming into the atmosphere really hard. Neither of those could have carried nearly enough fuel to shed their orbital velocity. Instead they carried heat shields.
I’m not sure about the Apollo missions, since the moon has virtually no atmosphere. Presumably the moons reduced mass means lunar orbit can be maintained at a much slower speed than Earth orbit, so it took less fuel to drop out of it.
Landing on the moon takes goddamn enormous delta v.
Apollo 11 orbital parameters say the ascent from the surface back to orbit required 1.85 km/s of delta-V. Descent would be in the same ballpark (somewhat higher because a perfect suicide-burn on landing is extremely dangerous). Lunar-orbit rendez-vous, and the split ascent/descent systems of the Lunar Module, helped a lot with reducing the propellant mass requirements. Even then the fuel used in descent (not counting the fuel used to return to orbit) was ~60% of the Lunar Module’s total mass.
They call it “Tyranny of the rocket equation” for a reason.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_deltav_subway_map_of_the_solar_system/
Lunar landing only takes about 1.7Km/s but you can’t aerobrake.
If it’s a body with moons, you can often shave some delta-v off with slingshot maneuvres.
The simplest answer is, they push against their own exhaust. Note that in most cases, the mass of stuff that will eventually become exhaust, is substantially greater than the mass of the spacecraft that will arrive at its destination.
Another way to think about it, that my intuition says is true but I haven’t done the math on, is that the center of mass of the entire system (propellant + dry mass) does not move. Imagine a rocket filled with propellant on an infinite 2-D table. If you light then engine then it starts throwing mass out of the nozzle at very high speeds. If the CM (of the rocket and all of the propellant mass as well) is to stay in the same spot, the rocket must move forward. Stop the engine and the rocket stops accelerating (it still will move forward, and the propellant exhaust gas will still be moving backward, forever). The speed of the exhaust gas molecules will be different than each other, but if you take the average speed multiplied by the total gas mass, you should get a value that’s the same as the rocket’s speed times it’s remaining mass.
If that satisfies your intuition, re-imagine it in 3D. Real rockets don’t do exactly this because even in space they and their exhaust gases are acted upon by outside forces, particularly gravity.
If your rocket was in very very deep space and not in orbit about a star or the galactic core, (or if it was the only object in the universe) then the entire system would behave like this – you could exit the rocket, theoretically fix yourself at the CG of the system and watch the exhaust gas fly past you and disappear in one direction and the rocket disappear in the other direction, continuously throwing new exhaust gas past your location. As a system, though, it doesn’t move. It just gets really really stretched out.
Note that this is with Newtonian physics only – it would break down as you approach relativistic effects.
I think this is conservation of momentum, but it’s also rather late here and the last time I brought up conservation of momentum here I recall saying something embarrassing, so…
Yes this is conservation of momentum.
If you’ve never played Kerbal Space Program, it’s a fun game and helps build physics intuition on questions like this.
EDIT: replied on the wrong place.
Does anyone know how to set up a basic blog with Jekyll on a Github project page? I expected everything to just work, but after hours of troubleshooting, I still haven’t been able to get it to work. And even more frustrating, none of the documentation I’ve been able to find suggests anyone might have the slightest difficulty setting it up, let alone how to fix the issues that come up.
The current status is that the index page containing the list of posts will load. However, there is no CSS and all the links to posts are broken. Everything 404s. Based on my research, it seems like this might be an issue with baseurl, but I have no idea how to fix this, because this is A) something that literally every user with a project page will run into and thus presumably something that should already Just Work, and B) it’s not like I touched anything anyway. As far as I can tell, all the relevant urls are just magically generated by Jekyll somewhere, and I have no idea how I could even change them.
Do you have a link to the repo?
ETA: I’m not sure what you were following, but I set mine up with this tutorial: http://jmcglone.com/guides/github-pages/
The tutorial you linked is for creating a user site. How would you do it for a project site?
As for a link to the repo, that would reveal my real identity, so I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
I can help, I use jekyll for my website, I’ve also used github pages.
If you’re familiar with R, I’ve found blogdown to be pretty painless.
In a previous OT, Aftagley said:
This describes my understanding of the TV and print media landscape in the early 1990s. They weren’t explicitly trying to be “left-leaning”, but most of these institutions ended up with some degree of left-leaning bent because that’s just how most of the folks who worked there viewed the world. Editorial decisions get made, and people trying to be authentic manage to be authentic, and, even without a centralized desire to be left-of-center, the result is that “the media” leans left.
These were the conditions that birthed Fox News (which did have a specific goal to be right-of-center), allowing it to find a gap in the market because everyone else was trying to be “down the middle” but ending up a bit to the left.
Do people generally agree with the above? Folks on the left? The right? The biggest disagreements I can imagine are, “The media wasn’t biased before because the news profession didn’t lean as heavily “left” before everyone in a news room was required to have a BA or more” or “Of course those media outlets were pushing left-wing agendas! The notion that they tried to be impartial is absurd. They had power and they used it for their own political purposes.” (I’m more sympathetic to the first of those, but I’m not sure if they’re just strawmen I’ve concocted.)
I have no personal knowledge of the matter, but it seems plausible to me.
In trying to answer your question, I’m first asking myself what the most consistent right- wing vs left wing values are, but I’m finding it difficult to answer that.
It’s often said the left is for change whereas the right wants to thwart change, but that doesn’t hold for the past half century, at least not literally. Trump was a candidate for change much more than Hillary. Reagan was for change.
Conservatism is like obscenity, you know it when you see it. Nixon was a conservative, but he was also a price- fixer. Gun rights was a left-wing position when it was the Black Panthers brandishing arms. I wanted to say democracy and a free media are inherently left-wing, but the Soviets weren’t right wing. Michael Savage, the most right-wing radio host of the aughts used to frequently say that John Kennedy was the last true conservative president. I never understood that, but the Qanon movement, which is clearly conservative, wants to believe Q is JFK Junior, so Savage wasn’t the only one who sees it like that. Free trade was considered conservative until recently.
I wanted to argue to myself that religion is inherently conservative, yet Trump isn’t religious nor is Mencius Moldbug.
The only eternal conservative issue I can think of is pro-family, whether that means nuclear family, extended family, clan, or race. Left- wingism seems consistently less pro-family. Plato was maybe the original left-winger. (Although I bet someone here smarter than I can come up with someone before Plato.)
Now that I’ve answered that, back to the media bias.
I place myself left of center, in case that disclosure matters. I think a free media in the US is going to be inherently on the left because the US is a melting pot of clans, races, etc. which makes it anti-family at the margin. I don’t mean the US is a melting pot in the “all agree the US should be a nation of immigrants ” sense, what Steve Sailer calls “The Zeroth Amendment”. I mean it as a matter of fact, a matter of history, whether you like it or not, we are a nation of immigrants, and a free media is going to play to its audience. I agree with the idea that the first priority of any institution is to defend its existence. An institution, after all, is something that is very good at replicating itself.
Left and Right change definition all the time. Lots of stuff that is considered Left or Right now would go somewhere else in the past. Some wasn’t really a thing to be considered in the past because technology just wasn’t there.
The way I see it, right now, “Left” believes that people’s needs should be met, unconditionally and free of charge. “Right” do not believe this can or should be done. The “Right” is immediately diverse – if you think people need to be worthy of nice things to get them you are right-wing, but there’s countless different ideas of what does it mean to be worthy – and different ideologies wear those ideas on their sleeves. The “Left” seems more uniform but also have a lot of division when they discover that people have conflicting needs – they fight over whose needs are more important.
The “Left” appeal seems to be both for people who have lots of resources or social standing and can take a hit of being forced to take care of others – or think they can swing public sympathies in their favour, and people who don’t have any hope of getting by on their own merit – that makes for somewhat weird demographic makeup of them.
IMO, there are no grand underlying principles. Left and right are sort of like Scott’s description of the Sunnis and Shias: groups that are divided because they were divided, and the actual positions taken are just a matter of cultural affiliation, which is in turn a matter of historical accident and evolving circumstance.
Trying to come up with broad philosophical principles is a bit like looking at genes to figure out why one person has a broken arm and another a nose ring.
I have aknowledged it, and my post effectively described what I believe them to be right now. A belief that entitlement comes from need and that failing to fulfil this need (Or worse demanding concessions in exchange for fulfilling this need) is oppression – followed by fight over whose needs should take precedence and hate and ridicule of those who needs something from you vs belief that people should be able to control what is rightfully theirs – followed by equally vicious fighting over what is rightfully whose.
I look at the political landscape in two dimensions. One is an axis going from solidarity to egoism. The other is from centralism to libertarianism/individualism. Since we can’t organize society on everyone voluntarily showing solidarity, political ideas tend to align along a diagonal line from solidarity/centralism to egoism/freedom. That line is my definition of left to right in politics.
For policy positions, yes. but not the motives for those policy positions. The basic leftwing impulse is leveling, tearing down corrupt hierarchies. The basic right wing impulse is upholding virtuous ones. For example, the draft is a leftwing policy when it’s about equal sharing of military burdens, it’s right wing when it’s about building up national strength.
This doesn’t explain the media being left of the population average.
The entertainment industry is somewhat even more of a melting pot, with everyone leaving their bio-families to try and make it in the industry.
The problem is using local partisan parties as proxies for the underlying values. Since Republicans are “conservative”, Americans tend to associate any standpoint embraced by Republicans as “conservative”, even when they want radical change.
More well-defined axes would be: conservative vs radical, liberal vs authoritarian, market economy vs planned economy, isolationist vs globalist, populist vs technocratic.
These can perhaps be further deconstructed into (or correlated with) personal traits, like social vs individual, or loyal vs independent.
(There are correlations between these, of course.)
Back when I first met David Friedman (a long time back) a mutual acquaintance was explaining to me that David’s father was conservative and David was even more conservative. I said, “Conservative? The man’s an anarchist!” And then I got to listen to the guy trying to explain that by “conservative”, he didn’t mean conservative…
Technical point, but in poli-sci terms one of the axes you are looking at is incrementalism vs. revolutionary change. Conservatives tend to be incrementalists, but you could also imagine a case where you had some people who legitimately wanted to restore the US to the rule of hereditary descendants of King George which would technically fit the definition of conservative but it would be a revolutionary change. Whereas increasing the top marginal tax rate by half a point might be a left-wing idea, it’s certainly an incremental change.
I would label this as (radical) reactionary, not conservative. Quibble for sure, but you did start bringing up technical points 🙂
It’s certainly not the model held by the socialist or anarchist left which typically agree with the model presented in Manufacturing Consent.
Media left shift is really something. I still miss McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies and Boars, Gore and Swords, and I hope they’re doing well, but they both saw a big chunk of their original content crowded out by earnest repetition of the creators’ political opinions.
One major difference is that the mainstream media just represents the standard liberal views one gets from education (which is really enculturation into the historical global upper middle class) while Cracked got an actual leftist perspective, on the basis of a distinctive founder effect. I don’t think the generic liberal slant of the mainstream media was particularly different in 1990 from 1950, except that by 1990 a liberal slant had a partisan angle to it, while in 1950 liberalism was a cross-party movement that didn’t have as much of a tribal valence to it.
In the previous OT, I wrote about the Dutch government abusing their powers while going after childcare subsidy fraud.
In more recent news, reporters found evidence of substantial fraud with integration courses for foreigners.
The law is that people from outside the EU have to pass the NT2 exam (an exam for Dutch as the second language). The government provides €10.000 in subsidy to pay for courses. These courses used to be given by proper schools, but they were privatized to allow anyone to start such a school and collect the subsidy.
The scam is that the schools cooperate with the student to collect the subsidy, where the student gets a cut. No courses are given. This works because the requirement to pass the NT2 exam is waived if the student studied for 600 hours and failed the exam three times.
Interestingly, the reporters note that these (mostly Syrian) people come from a culture where trust is low and defrauding is seen as more acceptable. This may also be why in the childcare subsidy fraud case, the government committed ethnic profiling: the government noticing that non-natives defraud more.
Anyway, the seesaw to stricter policies is probably set in motion by this story, which will then result in (legal or illegal) strictness that will cause outrage stories about how hard it is to get subsidies, which will then cause the seesaw to go back up.
Perhaps one day the people involved will be able to wrap their heads around two things at once (easy access to those who get the subsidies for valid reasons and keeping fraud low).
What’s the rationale for letting people in after failing the exam three times? That seems like it’s selecting for all the wrong people.
And this fraud was an obvious outcome of that.
It’s not intended to select who can stay, but to force people who are allowed to stay to integrate. If they were to start deporting people, it would undoubtedly result in the media campaigning against it by presenting the most sympathetic person who has to leave, which they have done repeatedly in the past.
Besides, some of these people will be refugees, so who is going to deport those back to the war zone?
Most of these people get welfare, so instead, they can sanction these people by reducing their welfare. However, they don’t want to punish a 60 year old illiterate woman who has only ever cooked & cleaned for her family, so there is an ‘out’ for people who can’t be taught.
We deported Yugoslavs who fled the draft back to their home countries in the thousands back in the nineties. Unclear to me that we can’t do so again, but with Syrians instead.
I wonder how they came up with that flowchart, as opposed to putting them in a mental institution or something. I joke, and I guess maybe the exam is really hard or something. I suppose they just want people to put in an effort but don’t actually want to turn anyone away. Honestly, though, this is the kind of thing where I almost don’t feel that anyone who defrauded this program seems at fault. It’s like when you have an obvious vulnerability in an online platform, of course someone is going to exploit it, even if it’s not for material gain but just to prove they can; the results of the security vulnerability being exploited feel like they’re totally on those who created it, not those who exploited it. The government comes up with such a plan, and people will ask them to define “hour”, “course”, and “exam”, then exploit the hell out of whatever they can because they’ve essentially been told there are no stakes, therefore none of it matters.
I wonder how they came up with that flowchart, as opposed to putting them in a mental institution or something.
I would imagine the short answer is court cases. Immigration lawyers and activists taking cases on behalf of C who has been in the country, can’t pass the language exam, but is (held up as) working and contributing/being a special case of needing asylum or refuge, and it is Wicked And Evil of the government to try to deport them or refuse them entry or permission to stay.
It also looks like it has to do with “the implementation of the convention relating to the status of stateless persons across the EU”, especially if Syrians are the particular group mentioned here.
As to “private enterprise is not the solution to all problems”, yeah I’d expect that if you outsource a government programme so as to “let the free market solve this”, then you will get scammers and fraudsters whose first instinct is “free money!” rather than “by competing efficiently with other service providers, we will ensure a quality and economical provision of this desired end!”
the results of the security vulnerability being exploited feel like they’re totally on those who created it, not those who exploited it
I’m of the opposite opinion; if you’re looking for loopholes to enrich yourself at the expense of the rest of the community, you’re a thief and a robber and I have no reason to trust you or deal with you in any other way than as a wolfshead. I certainly can’t live with you as a friend or colleague or other social relationshiop on terms of mutual assumption that you won’t try stealing my stuff, cheating me, or things like identity theft to empty out my bank account, because you’re proven you are that type of person.
I think if the whole thing was pretty well monitored and there were ways that you could “do an hour” and for some reason that didn’t count towards your total (e.g. you spent that hour in a classroom but obviously playing phone games and someone is actually keeping track) then you would have a system like this that did what it was supposed to, but absent that, you have a vulnerable system. If you tell someone, “We want you to learn our language as a requirement for entering this country,” but then you give them this set of rules, then you’ve really only told them, “You have to waste 600 hours, then come in three times to freeform scribble on this piece of paper, then you’re in.” Why be anything other than results-oriented dealing with bureaucracy? Why put in effort to try and determine the spirit of the law?
To put it another way, let’s say there are two countries, A and B, which are equivalent other than A has this system, and B has some much stricter system (maybe you can stay, but citizenship and benefits depend on actually passing the exam). If someone in A complains that an unusually high proportion of the refugees they receive lack conscientiousness and are only trying to game the system, I’d think it was counter-productive to fixing their problem and they possibly haven’t understood their predicament very well. I appreciate that a more bottom up perspective is good for actually putting together communities that work and maybe we should shun those who try to abuse our systems (I think more likely we should just ignore those and use personal ethical codes to determine how we want to judge people in our communities), but immigration/citizenship stuff is necessarily going to be a bureaucratic system, and badly designed systems systematically give you bad results.
@danridge
These courses used to be given by proper schools with credentialed teachers. I think that certain politicians & bureaucrats wanted to cut the costs by privatizing it. These people seem to lack holistic thinking ability, where they consider multiple aspects, rather than just optimizing for one thing and then getting surprised when the major loophole they never considered gets exploited.
This seems like one of those unholy Baptists and Bootleggers alliances between small government types that want the system cheap and private and bleeding hearts that don’t want any sympathetic refugees turned away?
Reminds me of a similar scam in Thailand, where anyone could open up a school claiming to teach foreigners Thai and get them student visas. The foreigners pay the tuition and don’t bother showing up, so nobody has to teach. The government wised up when immigration officials noticed that people have been studying Thai for years but could only speak a few basic phrases.
It’s the flipside of that case mentioned in the previous Open Thread about the parents of the New Yorker writer, who were involved in visa fraud.
There they soaked the people who wanted to enter the country by pretending they could facilitate their immigration by getting them visas and jobs, and charged them an eye-watering fee for it. The girl may want to think that her dad was unfairly treated just because he was trying to help out folks from the old country, but it was the same kind of money-making scam to exploit a loophole, just this time round they were exploiting the immigrants and not the government for money.
Who fixed the Dutch fixed expressions?
‘Boter bij de vis’ = Butter with the fish
Getting paid directly, rather than buying on credit. Refers to cooking a fish right away (by putting it in a pan with butter), rather than let it get old.
‘Boterbriefje’ = Butter letter (as in the piece of paper)
Marriage certificate. The original butter letter was an exemption to fasting, allowing someone to eat/drink milk products. This probably got applied to marriage, because it:
– is permission by the authorities to do something that is otherwise forbidden (sex)
– is something that people don’t necessarily believe that the authorities should have a say over
‘Het botert niet (tussen hen)’ = it doesn’t butter (between them)
They don’t get along. Originally meant more generally that something isn’t going well. Comes from farmers trying to churn butter.
‘Bot vangen’ = Catching bone
Failing at achieving your goal. Probably comes from rowing fishermen, where a rower who doesn’t lower his oar in the water, will skip over it and hit the oar of another rower. In old Dutch, ‘botten’ was used for what is now ‘botsen’ = colliding. In modern Dutch, ‘botten’ = bones.
‘Boven het hoofd hangen’ = Hanging above the head
Something bad seems to happen soon. Probably comes from seeing dark clouds in the sky, not the fable of the Sword of Damocles.
‘Boven water’ = Above water
Out of trouble/no longer in debt. The equivalent of ‘keep one’s head above water’ is also a Dutch saying.
‘(Dat staat) als een paal boven water’ = (That stands) like a pole above water
Without a doubt.
etymology of the day:
Sardonic: in the manner of Sardinia
Laconic: In the manner of Laconia (Sparta)
Ironic: in the manner of iron.
Iambic: in the manner of dog food
Apparently the Greek term sardonios (meaning “Sardinian”) ended up being confused with the Homeric Greek sardanios (meaning “of bitter laughter”, of unknown origin). The Greeks believed that eating a particular plant they called sardonion (because it came from Sardinia) caused some sort of convulsions of the face that sort of looked like laughter.
The Greeks believed that eating a particular plant they called sardonion (because it came from Sardinia) caused some sort of convulsions of the face that sort of looked like laughter.
That’s the sardonic smile of poisoning (you learn a lot from Golden Age mystery novels!)
Reade-Biden epistemic status thread
I’m currently leaning towards “unfounded but unimpeached” – all the negative stories about her spending last years in financial distress, stretching credentials and trying to taking advantage of people and even the pro-Putin medium posts are just as compatible with the accusations being true and her not complaining previously to try and maximally leverage her association with Biden for professional gain as they are with this being a grift or attention-seeking.
Is there anything else to update upon ?
There is also the possibility of a Monica Levinksi situation recontextualized as assault – has Biden directly addressed or was asked whether any sexual contact took place between them ?
It seems almost impossible to determine what happened all those years ago. I have no idea, and don’t see how anyone could come to an answer they have confidence in. Same as with Kavenaugh. And it was pretty obvious this would be the situation very early on.
This was my read of the situation a few weeks ago.
But when I found out that Reade sat down and made a conscious pre-meditated decision — repeatedly — to lie on the stand for the prosecution to put people into jail, I moved her at least 50-50 into the “deliberate liar” category and would take 1:10 odds that Biden never inserted his fingers into her (assuming there was some Oracle that could fairly adjudicate the bet).
A Quillette article compared the records from her divorce proceedings with more recent statements she’s made about that relationship. They found that she has repeatedly revised her account of that relationship over the years, in the direction of making more serious allegations about him than the ones she made under oath during the legal proceedings. https://quillette.com/2020/05/14/tara-reades-dubious-claims-and-shifting-stories-show-the-limits-of-believewomen/
When selling a car on Craigslist, if people email you through the anonymous relay asking you to email them at a gmail address which they include in their message, is this a red flag for a type of scam? I’ve gotten two or three such emails (out of four) in just one day.
When I bought my car, the guy I bought it from said I was the first legit buyer who contacted him (I texted the number he had listed). Everyone else was the classic “cashier’s check” scam, and he’d gotten like twenty or so in the first few days.
So big red flags I know about are: a) Wanting to pay with check; b) Not wanting to see the car before buying; c) anything else that’s too enthusiastic and isn’t what a reasonable adult acting in their own interests would do. If you or me were buying a car, we’d want to be sure it was good; if a scammer’s buying a car, he wants to get the deal done as quickly as possible.
It’s hard for me to figure out whether the email thing is a red flag, because it sounds like a reasonable thing. People want to use their own emails. Do you have a cell number listed on the Craigslist ad? Probably a high proportion are scammers anyway, so it doesn’t hurt to be on your guard.
It’s a red flag for two reason. For once, it leads you away from Craigslist, so Craigslist support can not help you any more. And secondly, it makes you engage with them instead of them engaging with you, so you let your guard down and start buying into whatever situation they are creating, since nominally you are in control of the situation.
That makes sense. Plus why would so many people have the same exact request?
Another quirk is that multiple people asked me to “text” them at an email address. Do native English speakers really say that? Does anyone?
No one I’ve ever heard of says that!
It’s not normal, really. If someone emails you through the craigslist relay, it goes to your email; if you reply to that email, it goes back to theirs. So there’s no reason to want it, and there’s no logical reason I can think of off the top of my head to come to the mistaken conclusion you want it.
With that being said, car sales are pretty easy to avoid being scammed on – you either accept cash or a cashiers check you personally watched them get at the bank. Fill out your bill of sale documents; disclose all damage in writing if your state has a fuck-the-seller lemon law set-up. So there’s no real reason not to engage people until it turns out to be a clear scam, so long as you are careful.
I’ve now received three emails, supposedly from different people, which are identical and follow this template:
I’m not worried about being scammed exactly, since I know how to not give away money or a car, but I don’t want to waste my time.
If it’s any kind of a template it’s a scam full-stop.
I tend to play the outside on that stuff because right now I have limitless time, I want to use theirs up for external utility(saving other people) and I like to be knowledgeable on fraud for different reasons, so it’s in my general benefit to run out the clock.
Since you are in a different situation and want to avoid the pain in the ass parts of it, I’d say there’s just no good reason to want to work outside of craigslist relay and you can ignore all of those without any probable loss.
I’m continuing to get the same emails from people. It makes me curious: how does this scam work? What is it about emailing them outside the Craigslist relay that allows a scam, I wonder…?
Understand that there’s different levels of scam, and somebody might be trying to move through them.
If I say “text me at this number! My email doesn’t work right!” and you do, I get both A. your phone number and B. confirmation that you are a rube. So I get some minor gain in adding your email or phone to a scam list (robots can handle everything up to this point, so it’s efficient enough) and permission to move on to C. where I try to scam the pre-qualified naive for their savings.
Something I ran into was people requesting a background report on my car, but wanting it from a specific site. The site looked pretty much legit, but of course it wanted you to pay for the report by credit card, and when I checked the domain name it had been registered like a week prior to something sketchy sounding.
Which Founding Fathers were most likely to be practicing occultists, and why?
Jefferson designed his own house. It follows he could—mind you, I said could—have built in a secret room full of tomes of eldritch lore and idols, knickknacks, fetishes, gewgaws, and baubles from myriads of occult practices.
Agree with Jefferson. Why study Arabic in 18th century Virginia if you’re not trying to read the Necronomicon?
Ah, the room where he Christian Grey’d Sally Hemmings.
(Deist Grey?)
There’s only one shade of gray, and it’s transcendent and unknowable.
I assume there were also some original-meaning fetishes (fétiche), which could be used to call upon Yog-Sothoth, etc.
[insert Colour out of Space joke here]
Yeah, this works pretty well for what I have in mind. Thank you.
That’s a fascinating way of putting it. Can you elaborate?
Which of them were Freemasons? Early Masonry was (in its Continental form) very anti-Church (the Catholic version anyhow) and it being the time of Esoteric Wisdom From The East, there was a lot of quasi-occult/magical rituals and symbolism incorporated (which is why the Catholic Church is down on it).
Modern Freemasonry may be about charitable work and networking, but the early stuff was more “we know the secret history of the world”. Heck, even our good materialist atheist friend H.G. Wells wrote a couple of tongue-in-cheek ghost stories where the narrator has studied the higher degrees of Masonry and Knows Occult-Type Stuff. From “The Inexperienced Ghost”, where the person telling the story to the assembly is demonstrating how the ghost he swears he saw last night managed to do the trick of vanishing to the other side:
Most of them were Masons. The secret is revealed at The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, formerly known as the National Heritage Museum and the Museum of Our National Heritage a museum located in Lexington, Massachusetts.
I’ve been there several times for concerts in their auditorium.
A good case has been made for Jefferson, but there’s artistic evidence that George Washington used Freemasonry to become a god.
Stealing this. Not gonna apologize.
I applaud you getting back to the sort of questions this blog was founded to answer.
Honestly, this does seem a lot more interesting than arguing about hydroxychloroquine.
Last thread I asked about lawschool, and received cautions that I would be better off getting an MBA. Concurrently, my ultra-cynical boss advised me to get a masters in whatever-the-fuck from the most prestigious post secondary institution I could get into. Seeing as I picked lawschool because the LSAT seemed like fun and I had a series of good experiences with lawyers, I am open to the possibility that I should widen my options beyond lawschool/no lawschool. Meanwhile, my wife advises me to seek out a career counselor or admissions counselor whose practice has enough throughput that they would be able to contextualize my strengths and deficits sufficiently to make recommendations.
So, my question: does anyone have any experience with independent (as in not employed by your school) career counselors? Googling has so far turned up mostly therapists, who don’t look like they have the kind of throughput I’m looking for.
Alternatively, does anyone have any advice as to how I could get sufficient information to feel I am making a well informed decision?
It may be worth checking the total price in time/money against a few other non-grad options, including:
1. Staying the course, but having a less highly leveraged next couple years. If you are working extra hours to manage both work and school, or putting work on hold on the assumption schooling will be worth your full attention, and the economy changes in a big way… there is risk to committing all your slack to a set educational program, even for people who don’t have to borrow. For borrowers, the risk is higher.
2. A direct-investment of the money for monetary return. E.g., buy bitcoin and land, or something.
3. Combine a few smaller-cost educational/credential investments for a total boost > the cost of the grad program you’re looking at. For a non-math smart person, one bundle worth looking at is to take the $200k you’d spend on a high-end MBA, and instead spend $15k (I think?) on a one-week training at the Harvard Negotiation Project, plus write a book and advance buy enough copies to ensure it’s a best-seller. (Which I think costs >$100k, but less than $200k, but I looked into this last almost a decade ago.)
Theory: “Harvard-trained best-selling author ___” is, for people who weren’t after quants-related employment, > “___, M.B.A. from not-Harvard.” For a mathy person, maybe a 6-month coding bootcamp, a 6-month linear algebra/data science training, and spending $1k on a very nice resume-website will have as good a return as a MBA. It’s very much not a decision I would recommend outsourcing. One other thing that is hard to achieve independently, but a direct investment (a la immersive bootcamp) can get big results: language immersion. If you can afford to keep your current job but spend a significant amount of time in an immersive foreign language environment, you can go from “knows the words” to “speaks fluently, non-native” potentially in a month or two.
This was…an extremely useful comment. This attacks some angles that really were outside my frame. I actually have already taken linear algebra, I am fluent in German and have potential in Mandarin, and am interested in data science. Seems like maybe I should brainstorm various scenarios.
I’ve taught courses for a couple of on-line data science/statistics masters programs. If that’s a route you’re interested in going down and have questions, you can email me at my user name @gmail.com. (General thought: They’re more worthwhile to you if you have an existing employer pay for them instead of going out-of-pocket.)
Not if what you’re after is fluency to any level that would be useful in business.
It should also be noted that the monetary returns on speaking a foreign language middlingly* are null, and even those for speaking it very well are small.
*I mean this as a subcategory of “fluently”. Everything that isn’t fluent is, for most purposes, equivalent to not speaking the language at all. Fluency is a really low bar.
Find a career counselor for a school you aren’t considering attending (so no conflict of interest). Ideally a friend of a friend who will do it for free. Otherwise, offer to pay them on the side for X hours of guidance.
Just because they are already employed by a school doesn’t mean someone won’t be willing to help you out on the side. They’ll probably be flattered that you asked. If not, ask another one. Plenty out there.
I suggest looking into the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation. They do about a 2-day assessment of abilities across the board. I learned some interesting things about myself (eg. I’m at the 80th percentile for pitch discrimination but 10% percentile for memory of pitch so when I sing I’m off-key and reliably know it). And at the end the provide some great information about different types of careers and how well you might fit into them.
Woah. Everything is crazy appealing about this except the price. How able were you to take actions with that information to pursue different careers? And was there any aspect that was packagable into a signal that would communicate to potential employers that you have a relevant aptitude for an open position?
What is the evidence this works though?
At the end they quite literally provide you a list of careers in which they think you would best use your aptitudes and thus find satisfaction in your career. If you are looking at taking a master’s degree and aren’t particular about which one, it would make a lot of sense to select one which might lead you into a field at which you’d be good and find satisfaction.
In my case, they provided me a list which mostly lined up with my existing life and training. (I was going through a post-college “self-discovery” phase trying to figure out what might lead to happiness. Regardless, it also provided a bunch of additional information and career guidance which I found useful.
As for evidence? IDK. I went there on the recommendation of someone I trust. I found it valuable.
My parents had my siblings and I take their test between high school and college. I found it about 80% interesting and maybe 20% useful. Most of what it said I was good at I already knew, but it was nice to have confirmation.
All three of us graduated college with degrees in the same major we started in, so that’s some anecdotal evidence at least. Although my sister is not employed in a field relevant to her major.
$750 is a lot if it’s going to tell you that you’re right, law will make you happy. $750 is nothing compared to the cost of law school and 5 years of your life (2 years for school, 2 years to decide you really do hate law not just being a junior employee, 1 year to pivot).
So ask yourself what the odds are? You’ll have a different expected value if it’s a 1% chance you don’t want law or if it’s a 50% chance.
In my case O’Connor just confirmed that I’d be happy as an engineer…but then I pretty much only did it because my sister was doing it. She ended up with useful information that both helped her choose a career and helped her understand some studying style changes she needed to make to get there. She’s happy with her career now, and it definitely wasn’t one that my parents thought to suggest.
I don’t think they’re in the credential business, they don’t give the kinds of results that would go well on a resume. That said, choosing the right credential to aim for makes it easier to acquire said credential.
Does it work for sulky teenagers?
Yes! That’s what my sister was at the time. Turned out that being unaware that it’s possible to have a well-paid career that isn’t pure suffering…causes quite a bit of sulking.
Before the aptitude testing/career counseling, my sister had been under the impression her choices were McDonald’s and poverty, or engineering cubicle farm, and she didn’t want either. My parents hadn’t even realized they had taught her that, it wasn’t a conscious lesson. But they and all their close friends were engineers, so that’s what it seemed like to her.
Let me try that again without all the double negatives.
Before the O’Connor testing, my sister had been under the impression that she didn’t have any options in life that would make her happy. The career paths of which she was consciously aware were either corporate engineering and management, or retail. That seemed to offer the choice between well-paid difficult boredom, and ill-paid boredom. She couldn’t see any path in life that she might enjoy. Hence, she sulked.
The O’Connor testing and counseling session helped immensely. It helped both her and my parents understand why engineering wasn’t for her. More importantly, it suggested several alternate paths that were much more in line with her aptitudes, paths that could be well-paid and not boring. That meant she could see hope, and it meant my parents could research ways to help her qualify for those careers even though they didn’t have first-hand experience.
She had been a square peg unhappy to be hammered into a round hole. Afterward she was a square peg gently pushed through a square hole.
In the last open thread i tried to drop some John Schilling bait about whether it is a good idea to renew the START treaty, but it didn’t work. Perhaps I made it too CW, or perhaps it was bad timing given that that OT is now effectively obsolete.
Anyway, this is the thread for expressing opinions and dropping information about START. Please, not everyone at once.
And what about INF?
(this is more Bean bait, considering recent Navalgazing footnotes)
It was time for the INF to go.
The INF banned land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5500km. The treaty was intended to address concerns over the possibility of these weapons being used to conduct first-strike strategic nuclear attacks with far less warning than an ICBM or air attack (I don’t know why naval weapons were excluded, maybe because SSBNs are understood to be for second-strike). It was a bilateral treaty between the US and the USSR because the area of concern was Europe.
The US has exploited its intermediate-range Tomahawk missile to the hilt, and while Russia has a similar weapon limiting missiles like this to naval launch obviously favors the US somewhat since it has a stronger navy.
I imagine this is rather annoying to the Russians, but I don’t think they made much of a fuss about it. However, missiles have gotten more accurate in general since the treaty was signed in 1987. This means it’s more feasible than in the past to field non-nuclear intermediate-range missiles. A missile that previously required a nuclear warhead to destroy its target because it would only land somewhere in a 500m radius might not need one if it can now hit in a 50m (or even 5m) radius. Russia seems to see these new, accurate intermediate-range missiles as a substitute for strike aviation, at least partially. Previously you could assume that your intermediate-range missiles were either nuclear delivery systems or relatively ineffective (think Saddam’s Scuds); now that is no longer the case. You could modify the treaty so that it only banned missiles carrying nuclear weapons, but it would be difficult to verify.
So much for Russia. What about the United States? Well, the Chinese didn’t sign the INF (bilateral, remember). And they’ve been freely developing their own intermediate range, land-based missiles like the DF-17 and DF-21. While these have been around for a while, the US has shown increasing interest in countering these using their own land-based missiles. For instance, the USMC recently released a rather interesting document stating that it saw its ability to forward-deploy land-based missiles as one of its major missions in the future.
So you have both sides of the treaty having a) pretty good reasons to build weapons banned by the treaty as a result of subsequent improvements in technology which b) don’t really pose much threat of nuclear escalation in Europe or anywhere else.
Russian testing of an extended-range Iskander missile was cited by the US as being the specific reason for withdrawing from the treaty, and it’s as good a reason as any, but like I said I think it was time for the treaty to go. I also recall some grumbling from the Russian viewpoint that having an armed UAV take off and fly 2000km or whatever, release munitions, and (usually) fly back home isn’t really much different from a missile with the same range making a one-way trip, when you think about it. That also would have been as good an excuse as any to withdraw from the INF in order to develop the missiles they wanted, but I’m sure they would rather have the Americans actually go through with tearing up the treaty to make themselves look marginally better.
I must have missed the last-OT version, sorry. Taking yours and Lambert’s questions here:
Pulling out of the INF treaty was a pure loss for the United States. The INF treaty did not restrict the United States from doing anything it would want to or even profitably could do in the post-Cold War era. The INF treaty restricted only land-based intermediate range nuclear weapons, and there is no longer any land on which the US can usefully base intermediate-range missiles. Germany, Britain, etc, are not going to allow us to base nuclear missiles on their soil to deter Soviet aggression. In the Pacific, Japan is right out, South Korea probably so and only needs short-range (by treaty standards) missiles. and putting US nukes on Taiwan would basically start a nuclear war straight off. There’s Guam, but it’s too small for useful dispersal; anything we base there goes bye-bye in a multi-megaton fireball at the outset of any nuclear war involving China. American intermediate-range missiles are air- and sea-based, for good reason, and we can have as many of those as we want.
Yes, Russia was violating the INF treaty. As long as the INF treaty was in place, that gave us the moral authority to say “Putin is the baddie for violating the INF treaty by building forbidden missiles”, which was diplomatically useful. Now Putin is building the same missiles, but they’re not forbidden and he’s not violating any treaty and we look like the baddies for abrogating it.
START is probably going to be more of the same. The only reason to ever build or deploy more nuclear weapons than allowed by START is if you want to squander trillions of dollars building useless and unnecessary weapons, or if you expect to wage the sort of all-out Global Thermonuclear War where “only” losing twenty million of your people counts as a great victory. And there’s nobody else who is going to get into that sort of arms race if they can possibly avoid it (Russia can’t afford it, China doesn’t want it), so it’s entirely up to us. START doesn’t stop us from doing anything we want to do, and it is a useful tripwire against some things we don’t want other people to do.
A renegotiation or replacement of START, possibly to include China and possibly to include new classes of weapons like intercontinental nuclear torpedoes, might be a minor improvement. Going START-free so that we can build lots more missiles would be a stupid dangerous waste. Going START-free in hopes that our potential adversaries will come begging us for a new treaty, isn’t going to work so long as Donald Trump is president. So let’s not do that.
Thanks!
The INF restrict the intermediate land based non-nuclear missile systems that the army and marines wanted to develop, right? I’m not claiming that the trade off was worth it, given our superiority in sea launched systems, but I can see why the idea of repudiating the treaty was bubbling up and wasn’t pure Trump pique.
I don’t think the Army’s desire for 500+ km missiles was ever really that strong, and even if it is – the Army works for us, not the other way around. Deep strike isn’t a good match for anything else the Army does, and the heaviest launch platform they envision for the near future (the M270) would be quite marginal for that mission. Plus, again, the political problems of basing.
The desire of hypersonics nerds to build Mach umptysomething intermediate-range missiles for anyone who will give them the time of day is definitely real and sincere, but also not to be indulged for its own sake even if generals in green sometimes do give them the time of day.
The Air Force has been doing that a lot, too. We’re actually getting some of them on aircraft these days, but those aren’t restricted by INF either.
Was there anything stopping either party from mounting a nuke-tipped cruise missile on a helicopter and using that instead of a TEL? Or a moored ship?
Maybe basing Pershing IIs onboard HMS Heron and calling them sea-launched would be a bit too far…
Payload capacity of helicopters would have been a severe constraint. And a moored ship would have neither mobility nor hardness, thus too easy a target for preemptive strike.
Are there countries which view the INF violation as a comparable or greater issue than
the invasion of Georgia and Ukraine so that the treaty abrogation would make them change their policies towards Russia in any noticeable way?
I’m more skeptical that the current numbers under START are good from a strategic standpoint. But given the PR hit of “building more nuclear weapons”, it’s probably not something we should do.
Does anyone know of any start ups or labs working on synthetic milk and/or eggs? By which I mean genetically modifying something so that it produces lots of dairy/egg proteins and fats. Is it even feasible? Clean meat gets a lot of press, and seems reasonably inevitable, but has the problem of texture/scaffolding: an amorphous blob of cells is not quite meat. Milk and eggs seem to avoid that problem, although at the cost of it presumably being a lot harder to produce the proteins and fats at the required scale because they don’t just reproduce themselves like cells do.
These people claim they have a working prototype of synthetic dairy they are bringing to market.
This livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiWnygcYsiQ
Milk sounds easy, it could probably be done with yeast or even bacteria + some additions mixed later. As long as you’re not particular about it being identical to real milk, just having a similar taste profile and basic ingredients.
I think there are some going the Impossible/Beyond route of trying to synthesize dairy or egg in a non-biological way (with various biological feedstocks) rather than the vat-grown way.
My guess is that it is much easier but the practical gains are much smaller. Eggs and milk does not kill the animal and cows are pretty efficient at turning grass-feed into milk.
Also vegans are rarer than vegetarians.
I recently came across this paper by Mark McMenamin (of hypersea and Triassic kraken fame), where he advocates the creation of ‘hypertopias’ as a solution to global heating. In a nutshell this involves the creation of new communities in marginal land areas (deserts, mostly) that are explicitly enjoined to hand-cultivate forests and other flora until such time as these become self-sustaining.
I really like this idea. It’s heroic-with-a-small-h, it’s manageable, it ticks both liberal and conservative boxes the use of the environment, and it’s smart. Or so at least it seems to me.
I’m not an ecologist; is it a viable proposal?
Dune ripoffs are traditionally fictional but ok…
Where does the money come from? Were it viable to irrigate the desert, people would already be doing it to grow crops. If we want to spend money on increasing the number of trees, we should be paying people not to slash and burn the rainforest.
Where does the water come from? Do you end up burning more oil to run the desalinisation plants than you sequester? Yeah, there’s a bit of a forest microclimate but all that water comes from transpiration.
Yes, we should be geoengineering arid and semiarid areas to be more productive. We should be modifying crops to be more drought tolerant, to fix their own nitrogen and to use C4 fixation where appropriate. But the smart way is to grow crops and fodder on marginal ground to reduce the need for deforestation in other areas.
It needs an explanation of the part where any actual person would want to do this. If McMenamin wants to recruit a bunch of his like-minded colleagues and go show us how it’s done, great. Otherwise, it looks like the sort of thing where lots of people think it would be a great idea if other people went out and did this, but everyone looking at their own options will see locally-superior options and e.g. continue to farm their lands the way they always have in the community of the neighbors they have always trusted. Or, if they can’t do that, become refugees and shoot for the “refugee working as a taxi driver in New York / Munich / Stockholm / wherever” path rather than the “refugee in someone’s newfangled ecotopian commune in the middle of nowhere” path.
the creation of new communities in marginal land areas (deserts, mostly) that are explicitly enjoined to hand-cultivate forests and other flora until such time as these become self-sustaining.
Okay, and who are you going to get to work 12+ hour days in the heat hand-cultivating? And who pays them? And what crops do they live on while they’re waiting for the trees to grow? And what is “self-sustaining” and who gets the benefit of it? Because I can see this splitting off into “just above subsistence earnings peasants toiling in the manner of their great-grandparents until the project becomes viable, then it’s the guys in suits in the air-conditioned offices who take over to exploit it, and the peasants get packed off to where they came from”.
I am very cynical about Utopian ideas, and extra-cynical about ones that require somebody else to do the heaving and sweating. Real-world desert farming projects like this are what Israel is doing – and this takes a lot of technology, a lot of finance, and needs to produce a marketable product in the end. An idealistic commune-type project is not going to cut it.
Well, that snail got well and truly salted! Thanks folks; this is the corrective I was looking for. I guess the idea was always that it would be government funded as a climate change mitigation action, but that of course just kicks off another contest of values.
I imagine that it’s something I’d like to do, except that I make my living by studying language and haven’t done so much as climb a tree in 30 years.
How about we start with the Qattara Depression Project, which is a natural place to apply this sort of thinking, and see how that works out and go from there.
This project has a number of advantages:
1. Creating more habitable land area in Egypt (one idea during the Eisenhower Administration was to donate the eventual new seaside land area to Palestinian Arabs for resettlement).
2. Improving the local climate.
3. Mitigating sea level rise somewhat (would probably counteract several years’ worth of global sea level rise from climate change).
4. Generating hydroelectric power.
Is there any way to do that such that salinity doesn’t climb too high? Otherwise you’re just making a load of rock salt, in the long run.
EDIT: Some sort of big semipermeable membrane?
Couldn’t a section of the depression be closed off occasionally (perhaps with walled sections built ahead of time and gates), and the area allowed to dry out and the salt mined and exported? Then the area of the depression could be hydrologically re-connected with the rest of the depression and allowed to fill back in, thus allowing the salt concentration of the rest of the depression to re-approach the salt concentration of the new ocean water coming in to fill that section of the depression back up (of course it wouldn’t ever get back to the original salt concentration of seawater, but it might help). Of course, this area could be made off-limits to any settlement other than temporary settlement for the purposes of industrial extraction of the salt. I don’t know how much time this would buy.
Alternatively, I wonder if a smaller proportion of concentrated salty water could be continuously pumped back into the Mediterranean compared to the amount coming in, and whether that would allow the salt concentration to be stabilized at some level while also keeping the hydroelectric generation net-positive.
Salt concentrating basins looks really cool from an aerial view: https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.3844582,4.7400997,13z/data=!3m1!1e3
I have been a bit addicted to r/TruFemcels. As the name suggests, it is a community of “female incels”, so women with low self esteem talking about how horrible dating is for them.
I have encountered a new word from it: the “fuckzone”. It’s when there’s someone (a guy) who will have sex with you, but not want to be in a relationship with you, much as you might want that.
I’m interested to hear any thoughts people have in relation to this.
Personally, back in 2014, I ruminated about the “friendzone” a bunch, and paid attention to war between “the friendzone model tells you a lot about male/female relations” versus “the friendzone doesn’t exist and leads to a distorted view of people”. At the time I agreed with the second, but grew to think that a better model was somewhere in between.
The “fuckzone” to me seems precisely like the friendzone, in that there’s a person whom you get some intimacy from, and you want more, but they’re already giving you everything they want to give. This is interesting because under the traditional model that men want sex and women want commitment, it’s unsurprising that the fuckzone is what femcels complain about and the friendzone is what (male) incels complain about… although the men-sex/women-commitment model at best only tells you statistical averages! As a man, I have been both zoner and zonee for both fuck and friend.
Maybe this is my very male mind at work, but “unable to get sex with anyone” seems to me like a much worse problem than “able to get sex, but not also emotional connections with sex partners that they expect to follow.”
It depends on how much you value sex vs. a relationship.
someone who has one of those things is, by definition, better off than someone who has none.
As I understood throwaway2306’s formulation, the situation is symmetric. The “friendzone” situation is “able to get a relationship, but not also the sexual connection they expect to follow.”
We can all agree (I think?) that either a relationship without sex or sex without a relationship is better than nothing — but may be very frustrating and may be not very much better.
Well, if you are a typical man, a friendzone “relationship” where you put in committment and resources but get no sex is arguably worse than nothing, because committment and resources are a cost and, to be honest, sex is the main thing you are after. At least, that’s my perspective as a man.
I can’t know for sure how the typical woman thinks about it, but I guess that her view is pretty much symmetric: a “fuckzone” relationship can be very easily worse than nothing.
The “friend zone” is not “I have a girlfriend but she never wants to have sex” (that would be “relationship without the sexual connection”). “Friend zone” specifically describes the case where you want to be sexually, but also romantically involved with someone who only wants to be platonic friends with you, and is often romantically involved with someone else.
The desire for sex isn’t purely a physical drive. Someone who is having sex but not emotionally connecting with sex partners might not be happy, but they are, almost by definition, better off than the person who is not having sex and not emotionally connecting with their (non-existent) sex partners.
Someone who is having sex but not emotionally connecting with sex partners might not be happy, but they are, almost by definition, better off than the person who is not having sex and not emotionally connecting with their (non-existent) sex partners.
But the corresponding zone is not “not emotionally connnecting with their non-existent sex partners”, it is “friendzone versus fuckzone – in friendzone, you get the emotional connection of friendship but this does not translate into physical connection of sex” while “fuckzone – can get physical connection of sex but not emotional connection of romance”.
If it’s frustrating to be “No Horace, I can only be a sister to you” (see linked cartoon) then it’s equally frustrating to be “I can only think of you as somewhere to dump my seed when I’m horny”. One-night stands are probably frustrating for both parties but better than nothing if that’s all they can get; a guy who only wants to have access to your bits but nothing more and will stick around as long as he gets the free milk without having to buy the cow is just as frustrating for women as “she likes having me around to cry on my shoulder about other guys but won’t take the step to the next level” for guys.
That assumes that the women being fuckzoned want sex.
I know women who enjoy sex on its own; they get sex with the guys of their choosing, and never need to beg, because they know they can find a guy willing to have sex with them in a couple of minutes on Tinder.
So the women getting fuckzoned are like the men who pay for the movies and restaurant meals for the girls who are friendzoning them. Do they enjoy it on its own? Sure, it would have been enjoyable if it was part of a relationship. But on its own, without the relationship, it’s not that enjoyable.
There was a conversation about demisexuality in a previous thread; the consensus seemed to be, that’s how a lot of heterosexual women work.
@Deiseach
I don’t think those emotional connections are so comparable. I don’t mean to downplay the importance of platonic friendships, but the emotional bonds you (or at least I) form with lovers are very different.
@ana53294
They don’t want only sex, but how many of us that aren’t 14 do?
Less enjoyable, perhaps. Not entirely unejoyable. And presumably more enjoyable than the lonely misery of “no one will ever want to fuck me.”
One of the elements I see as core to the “friendzone” need-not involve sex. It involves the man doing all of the emotional labor associated with being in a relationship without actually being in a relationship. That is, not only are they not getting sex, they aren’t even getting a capital ‘R’ Relationship which might (theoretically) one day lead to sex.
Yes, a capital-R Relationship, even a sexless one is NOT the same thing as being platonic Besties (and as Garrett notes, the “strong” version of friend zoned implies a certain one sidedness).
If I go through a dry spell with my girlfriend, this is not my favorite thing, but it is a fundamentally different experience to being “friend zoned”
*Probably* the first one is a worse problem, but your male mind is still affecting your perception of them. Be aware that if you don’t fancy casual sex, the second situation may be only a teeny tiny bit better than the first, as the sex is a miniscule consolation that you do not value.
And we will never quite know, but it may well be the case that the negative feelings felt by the femcels over the lack of relationship feel nastier than the negative feelings of the incels over no sex.
It *may* even be that casual sex is *less* than a consolation but can seem in fact like an extra indignified gut-punch.
> can seem in fact like an extra indignified gut-punch
Fair, but they can elect to not participate, correct?
You’re missing the part where not having friends is a real problem and it doesn’t go away just because someone sticks a penis inside you. If we’re comparing a “friendzone” with a “fuckzone”, the people in the friendzone by definition have friends.
Do femcels have friends? Given the difference in population size, it could be that they are quite a bit more to the left of the bell curve in terms of social skills/personality/social context.
Or, a completely different hypothesis, the whole problem could be of mismatched expectations. Maybe femcels are willing to sleep only with men that are too good for them.
I’m not really curious enough to go there and make an opinion…
I knew a lady once who constantly bitched about how she was fat and ugly and men didn’t want her. She was overweight, she wasn’t ugly, but that attitude was extremely unattractive.
It was a good life lesson for me, at least. Don’t be that person.
That is indeed a good life lesson. There are lots of people who would be happy to be in a relationship with a person who is physically not that attractive but has other nice qualities.
There are very few people who want to deal with an ugly person with a shitty personality.
And there actually aren’t that many people who will stick around if you’re hot but have a shitty or dull personality. (A crude but truthy saying: “for every beautiful woman there is at least one man bored of fucking her”)
the subreddit is a dumpster fire, but a very quick read of it doesn’t seem to reveal a lot of people claiming that their issue is that no o one wants to spend time with them, but that they are having trouble getting relationships that are both sexually and emotionally satisfying. And I agree that’s a hard problem to solve, but not one that is worse, or or even on a level with, someone who can’t even get to that first step.
I don’t think having friends or getting laid or not is the problem, but that the relationships you are in are unbalanced – or worse, exploitative. You get to hang out with your dream girl, but she only hangs out with you as long as you fix her car or helps her with her homework. There isn’t any romantic commitment in the friendzone either, as I understand the term. “I love you, and let’s be together but wait with sex until we’re married” is not the friendzone.
One thing I think is highly unproductive for both incel and femcel, is the vitriolic lack of respect for the other sex. How can you expect to get the relationship you want with a member of the other sex when your baseline is that they are all worthless, evil people? A community of this just becomes a tarpit of self-pity, where you get (almost) all the social reinforcement you need from collectively hating the outgroup.
And consequently, the solution is advice on how to trick somebody into giving you what you want. Admittedly, I didn’t read much of the reddit, but – how can you even think this is a way of starting a romantic relationship?
Key word: semi-satisfied. If your right hand worked as well as a woman, nobody would ever bother with paying prostitutes. Even with the prostitute, I imagine there’s a fair amount of dissatisfaction due to the obvious artificiality of the situation; the feeling that a woman chose to be yours is something quite distinct from deep, long-term emotional commitment.
You can hire a prostitute. And sometimes that even solves the problem!
But usually what people “unable to have sex” mean is “unable to get the social validation of a person wanting to voluntarily have sex with me.” For a femcel, it would be “unable to get the social validation of a man wanting to be in a relationship with me.”
I don’t disagree. A substantial share of the joy in sex is the knowing that there is someone who wants to have sex with you. But a very quick read of the femcels seems to suggest that they aren’t having issue with maintaining friendships generally, but that they are having trouble getting relationships that are both sexually and emotionally satisfying. And I agree that’s a hard problem to solve, but not one that is worse, or or even on a level with, someone who can’t get to that first step.
I’m not so sure about that. Let’s imagine a couple of guys who have trouble with platonic friendships.
Adam has always had trouble making friends and doesn’t have any friends now. He spends all his time alone and miserable and he’s not sure if things will ever get better.
Bob has “friends” but none of his so-called friends really value him very much. They hang out with him only when they don’t have a better option, or they call him up under pretext of friendship when what they really want is some kind of favor. Bob lives in a state of partly successful denial about this. Sometimes he’s able to convince himself that his “friends” are real friends, and other times the delusion is pierced and he’s left feeling sickened, ashamed, and used.
I’ve spent time as both, and as miserable as it is to be Adam, I think it’s better than being Bob. I imagine getting fuckzoned is something like being Bob.
No, but your genes will die with you, which from an evolutionary point of view, makes you as good as dead.
Women have a nearly symmetric problem, or at least used to have it in the enviornment of evolutionary adaptation: before the age of paternity tests, mandatory child support, comfy office jobs and daycare, it was very hard for a woman to raise a child without the resources provided by a man, hence the focus on partner commitment. On a first-order approximation, men extract resources from the environment (or seize them from other people) and women turn resources into the next generation of the tribe.
It’s unclear that the evolutionary point of view is remotely appropriate for this discussion; someone who is in a loving, satisfying, sexual relationship but is infertile is clearly in a much better position than someone stuck in either the friendzone or fuckzone by pretty much any standard you could imagine that is relevant to the above discussion, and yet from the evolutionary perspective the person I hypothesize above is equivalent to them.
Yes, because our preferences didn’t evolve to directly maximize evolutionary fitness (which is hard to estimate and can be accurately measured only a posteriori), rather they maximize things that were proxies of evolutionary fitness in the EEA.
Sex with anything that looks like a fertile woman is a proxy for evolutionary fitness if you are a man, it’s rather easy to figure out whether you are getting it or not, so that what our preferences evolved to maximize. Similarly, women try to maximize a combination of sex with high genetic quality men and commitment from high resource men (who may or may not be the same person).
Well, it’s the best theory that we’ve got.
Masturbation and prostitution have existed for a long time and they are not very successful reproductive strategies. Masturbation results in no children, and while in principle you could impregnate a prostitute before reliable birth control was a thing, they usually aborted or abandoned their children.
Men who completely satisfied their sexual urges with masturbation or prostitutes instead of pursuing women who were likely to raise their children had their genes selected against.
Masturbation in men probably serves the main purpose of flushing the genital organs in order to prevent pressure build up and accumulation of dead sperm cells, which can cause pain and eventual infertility (this is the reason why vasectomies can cause chronic pain and eventually become irreversible, and vasectomies only block the testicles but leave the prostate and seminal vesicles, which produce most of the volume of the sperm fluid, free to drain). Thus masturbation is only evolutionary beneficial to the extent that it preserves genital health for sex at a later time. If you are never going to have sex, you could well let your balls burst, as far as evolution is concerned.
Prostitution can provide marginal evolutionary fitness on its own, but less than mating with a stable partner (not necesarily your own stable partner, as impregnating the wife of another man is also evolutionary successful).
viVI_IViv, If incels are unhappy because masturbation and prostitutes aren’t good mating strategies, then people who have regular sex but use birth control should be equally unhappy. And yet that isn’t the case.
I agree with everything in your response to me, but still don’t see why the evolutionary perspective matters at all for the discussion at hand. This is an argument about peoples’ subjective preferences: is it worse to be celibate but have a platonic relationship, or have sexual relationships but otherwise be socially isolated?
Reliable birth control is recent so we are not adapted to it.
Birth control is quite recent from an evolutionary perspective, not enough time for selection. Condoms have been around a bit longer, and many men have an aversion to those, to the point of paying hookers extra to not use one, in spite of the greater risks.
It’s different for different people, mostly correlating with gender. And you can’t do intersubjective utility comparison (sorry utilitarians).
Alternately, people (women) who use birth control are unhappier, and that’s why alcoholism is so sharply on the rise among young women.
> makes you as good as dead
And, if you are as good as dead, you might as well try and take some of those who “killed” you out with you, right? Much like a last stand in war when about to be overrun? You might be on to something.
Right – and this is exactly why there’s a problem. (Almost) everyone acknowledges that a fulfilling relationship is ideal. But in terms of what’s “second best” women prefer “platonic with no sex” and men prefer “sex with no commitment” and there’s sort of a double coincidence of wants problem.
This is precisely why it’s near-impossible for single men and single women to be friends…
If the comparison is with a friendzone that’s like a relationship between two people who are remaining celibate till marriage then yes, but my understanding is that that is generally not the case.
Prostitutes resolve the “can’t get sex from anyone” problem for cash. It’s not so easy to pay someone to be your friend and get actual friendship and emotional closeness.
To repeat from further upthread, a substantial share of the joy in sex is the knowing that there is someone who wants to have sex with you. But a very quick read of r/femcels seems to suggest that they aren’t having issue with maintaining friendships generally (or aren’t saying they are, at least), but that they are having trouble getting relationships that are both sexually and emotionally satisfying. And I agree that’s a hard problem to solve, but not one that is worse, or or even on a level with, someone who can’t get to that first step
I agree with your first sentence, but not sure how “paying for sex” is really different from “some rando wants to come over for a booty call when he’s horny but wouldn’t want to make me his main sexual partner”. In both cases, you know the other person doesn’t really want you; it’s just that men (in general) want more casual sex and are less picky about it.
@Jitters
Again, “can only get casual sex” seems, by definition, less of a problem than “can’t get any sex that isn’t paid for”. Not a small problem by any means, but less of one. especially if we’re assuming that, for both incels and femcels, they do have some emotionally satisfying non-sexual relationships.
In the US, at least, the government has basically made that kind of transaction illegal. Yes, there are a few legal brothels in Nevada, apparently in counties which are sparsely populated. But that doesn’t exactly make such services readily available, and requiring that people go through limited government designated middle-people drives up costs and further restricts availability. To the extent that this is a solution, it’s one which everybody is *also* attempting to crush.
I agree this is dumb–in my preferred world, prostitution would be legal as long as everyone was a mentally-competent adult–basically the same requirement as taking a job on an oil rig or in a coal mine. But I’ll also point out that there is a thriving prostitution business in every state in the US, in every major and minor city, etc.
That community seems…inaptly named.
Why aren’t incels and femcels dating each other?
Because the fuckzone and friendzone are incompatible? Transaction costs? There exists a large space of mutually beneficial events that fail to occur due to lack of negotiation/communication skills necessary to bring them about.
Yeah, I get those exist and could think of several reasons myself. I’m curious what the most salient one is, or folks’ best guess at it.
This is something that gets talked about a lot over in that community, and the question does have an answer: it’s because femcels consider incels to be very nasty people.
Probably because the incels aren’t willing to settle. They expect to be cheated on by women who merely settle for them. They expect women who reluctantly accept them as husbands will prefer to (and be able to) get pregnant by more desirable men. If you settle, you settle for cuckoldry, at least where the incels are concerned.
Sounds like neither side is willing to settle.
https://local.theonion.com/man-woman-refuse-to-lower-standards-for-each-other-1819565591
Why are there unemployed people if there are job vacancies? Why are there people who starve to death if food gets thrown away?
One of these is not like the others
How so?
I don’t identify as an incel, but I have the same problem. What it boils down to is my standards are too high for my own attractiveness. Any woman I find attractive can do better than me. If I settled, I’d be with a woman I’m not attracted to at all, and that wouldn’t be good for anybody.
Isn’t it as simple as mutually too high standards? Neither incel nor femcel can meet the other’s standards, as they see the other as beneath them. I know nothing about fences, but from what little I know about incel culture, there seems to be a lot of looking down on women for a large number of reasons.
Even really ugly socially awkward people can get into relationships if that’s what they want in the “is willing to do what it takes” sense of want; after all, there’s other very ugly socially awkward people with accessory problems as bad or worse than their counterpart potential partner.
In most cases if that’s not happening, it’s just a case where the standards are higher than the available capital. There’s nothing wrong with this; there’s a point at which some people could afford a really crappy car, but despite the fact that the car barely runs still consider taking the bus to be a better option.
You’re thinking like mail order bride or something?
No, not that. Think of it this way:
Good looking people tend to end up with other good looking people. If they don’t, there’s usually some other factor that makes it make sense – maybe the uglier partner is really funny, very successful or very good at guitar. This isn’t absolutely true in 100% of cases, but it implies a rule of thumb I think is valid: people will generally try to secure the highest-value person they can for their significant other. Their definition of value might be looks or piousness or loyalty – it’s not all shallow, but a lot of it is.
Since both parties are looking for high value, that means the value any person can secure is correlated to what they themselves are and can offer. This is what I referred to as “capital”; it’s what they have to get with.
A person with low capital can virtually always secure a significant other(at least in a large enough population center). But to do that, they have to drop their expectations of what they can get to match what they can give.
If you goal is “have a romantic partner” and you will accept faults sufficient to find a person who will accept yours, it’s no huge impossible thing. This is what everyone who is with anybody has already done.
Some people choose not to do this, because the people they can get don’t seem to them to be worth having. I don’t think this in and of itself is a bad choice. Any time someone says they are “waiting for the right person”, this is essentially what they are talking about.
Yeah, there’s some people–or anyway, I can picture hypothetical people, not thinking of anyone in particular–who aren’t good for anyone, even other people who aren’t good for anyone, in an “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me for a member” kind of way.
But that’s probably rare, and a lot of people’s standards are probably way higher than is useful for them due to media, social or otherwise. We’re constantly surrounded by representations of people at their best, often the best people. Carefully groomed and sculpted actors playing heroes and heroines, for instance. While it might be helpful aspirationally, it surely skews our perception of what an average person is like.
I’m a little skewed because I was in this situation – for a long time(from the young-me perspective) what I could consistently date were people I wasn’t attracted to for physical and non-physical reasons.
I concluded then that I should probably hold out for someone I particularly liked, especially considering that I wanted to get married and it would be sort of terrible to trick somebody into a “well, I don’t like you much but I’m sort of terrified of being alone” reasons.
This worked out for me and I found someone who vastly over-values my few strong points who is overall much better than me in most ways.
I do agree with you though – there has to be a bad version of this where there’s an unimpressive person who won’t settle for anything under demigod. I’m not sure how you fix that, though.
I don’t know about the standards thing.
It’s certainly true that media has a very high standard for beauty in general, but it’s also true that a real person of the preferred sex in real life, can be a lot more sexy than a model on a screen, even if the real person would never be accepted on the set of a tv show.
I mean, obviously the friendzoned people must be not only asking out TV-level girls, simply because they aren’t that common. I assume the “real girls aren’t as pretty as the girls on screens so what’s the point” people are a very small minority.
I wasn’t thinking primarily in terms of looks; you should probably keep lowering expectations until you find the person of similar level who would also appreciate some romantic interaction.
But someone who is, say, a compulsive spender deep in debt should probably not get with the alcoholic just because neither is a good match for responsible people; they’ll just make each other’s lives even worse.
This is also made worse by our democratic government. One effective mating strategy for the ugly and acerbic male is to be sufficiently good at something(s) so as to be well employed and have resources. But with voting, progressive taxes, redistribution, etc., that mating strategy is significantly blunted. This is both because a disproportionate amount of their money is taken by progressive taxation, but also because women are disproportionately likely to be the recipients of transfer payments.
I think both incels and femcels could be seen as being part of a “mutual misery society”, possibly as a result of learned helplessness. Its a lot easier to commiserate with others that the world is biased against you, than it it to recognize that things may be tough but that you can get better with effort.
I’m not familiar with femcels, but in my observation of incels, they seem somewhat obsessed with genetic reasons for their hopelessness. Hence, the focus on height that seems to keep coming up in their discussions. Similarly, “wristcells” seem to believe that their wrists are genetically too narrow for them to be attractive.
In a twisted way, I don’t think that they want to date, since that would prove their worldview to be a lie.
…
Woman here, just want to note that I have never to my knowledge even noticed a man’s wrists (although slender hands on a man are very elegant and sexy, and would presumably correlate with slender wrists).
Yes, that has always been my impression.
I think for a lot of people describing themselves that way, their problems really aren’t just external factors/what it says on the tin. They have issues with themselves and the way they view relationships/sex, both what they want and what they think other people have. I’ve heard stories of incels having a casual hookup and then continuing to identify as incels because “it didn’t count” for one reason or another. If that can happen, clearly it’s not a problem with a simple, straightforward solution.
Yes, the general model is that in a relationship men trade committment for sex and women trade sex for committment. So the suckers at this game are men who give away commitment without getting any sex (friendzone) and women who give away sex without getting any committment (fuckzone).
There’s certain line of thought that the latter is an instance of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Women used to be able to insist on commitment because they mostly all did, because pregnancy without a partner was Very Bad, but then widespread birth control and female employment reduced both the probability and the penalty of that outcome. So some women could defect, which pushed more to defect, and here we are.
Is there a symmetric analysis of the “friendzone”? It’s probably fair to say that once upon a time most men could and did insist on sex as part of a commitment. Are men defecting from that?
Lots of benefits that women get from their husband are now provided by the government or bought with money they earn with full employment. You decide if this is for better or for the worse.
Yeah, but isn’t that the first paragraph? It helps explain why women are suddenly willing to have sex without getting a commitment. The question is why men are suddenly willing to commit without getting sex.
Doesn’t the friendzone concept kind of imply they thought they would get sex out of it? I don’t think it is sudden. Demonstrating commitment requires an upfront investment of resources of some kind in the hope it would pay off in sex. Plus, people are generally social, and some are willing to get pretty invested in others just to have something to do or feel good about themselves. It also sounds less noble to demand sex than it does to demand commitment, in general, so most people find it more awkward. Also, even though historically wives were generally expected to be regularly intimate with their husbands, demanding sex in the era before contraception could threaten a woman’s health. There has always been some level of ethical discomfort surrounding the demand for sex.
I’m going to question the premise that the past was so very different here. Othello, for example, gives us an incel (Roderigo), a femcel (Bianca) who is in Cassio’s fuckzone, and a man (Cassio) who is no mere unsuccessful suitor but instead in love with a woman (Desdemona) who he makes no open attempt to woo but whose troubles he hears sympathetically and whose existence is probably the reason he rejects the option of a serious relationship with Bianca – prototypical friendzone.
Older, mostly non-fictional example: Catullus poems about his Lesbia. E.g.
“Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia,
that Lesbia, alone whom Catullus loved
more than himself and all his own,
now, in the crossroads and in the alleyways,
she peels the grandsons of great Remus ”
/r/incel – 55 BCE
Jokes aside, yes these things always existed, but they became much more prevalent in modern day hookup culture.
My intuition is that you are wrong, that social status/approval are ways of getting relationships/sex, and so if we consider the arrow in the opposite direction you are at best only slightly right. The Pope and Barack Obama have a lot of status but there are people who have much more status than them. And if someone told me they were dating someone else that I respect a lot, my respect for *them* would go up only slightly.
I think sex and relationships are extremely fun and an end unto themselves. There are other animals that do pair-bonding, and promiscuity, they are objectively good reproductive strategies. They do not do it that do not care at all about social status.
I’m willing to be persuaded though…
It’s about status. Well, at least for the incels. The femcels…harder to say. Likely still, I think.
There is a LOT of social stigma around being a male virgin. Around being unattractive. Around not being able to find an attractive woman to have sex with you and tell you you’re valuable to someone/society/the world.
Look at what the incels go for – it’s not “no one at all will have sex with me” (though there’s a component of that. It’s “the attractive women don’t have sex with me.” That’s a status complaint. They don’t want sexual release. They want a partner (or series of partners) who they consider valuable (ditto the femcels).
Especially it’s a status thing because of the social stigma surrounding being a male virgin, or being unable to find a relationship. Lone men are stigmatized and told there’s something wrong with them (as are lone women). Lone men who have a lot of sex are still validated, mind you.
It is toxic to the self-esteem to feel unloveable and unattractive. But it’s a status issue – it’s not that you can’t get sexual release. It’s that the group rejects you. It’s like complaining people you don’t like don’t invite you to parties – on one level, it’s irrational. On another level, it still hurts not to be included in things, because humans want to be part of the group.
It’s not necessarily a status complaint. People don’t only prefer attractive partners for status. Many people would find a partner below some level of attractiveness worse than nothing, in terms of personal enjoyment, not only status.
The incel obsession with hierarchical ranking of both men and women does suggest that at least part of the issue is status. Also, the fact that there are incel groups at all, and that they have a name for themselves, and their own distinctive terminologies and shared beliefs–it’s the construction of a community for people who feel themselves excluded from the broader society. If it were just about the sex, forming a community of other un-sexed men would be kind of a pointless response to the predicament. If it’s about social stigma, forming a community is exactly what you would expect.
(And yes, probably ditto for the femcels.)
I think the purpose of these communities is just for the members to vent their frustration. They aren’t organizing any sort of collective action to better their position, so they are not activist groups, and they don’t share tips on how to solve their issue at the individual level like the redpillers do (in fact, redpillers and incels hate each other guts, even though their view of the sexual dynamics of the society is essentially the same).
Anyway, incels, femcels, MGTOWs, redpillers (do they actually have sex?) and so on are just the tip of the iceberg of herbivore men and cat ladies. 28% of American men aged 18-30 have not had sex in at least one year, over half Americans aged 18-34 don’t have a stable partner. I’m pretty sure the numbers are the same ballpark all over the Western world. Japan and Korea lead the way, of course. There is an unmistakeable trend in the developed world towards sexlessness and lovelessness.
A huge part of the issue is status. I think a whole lot of self-identified incels would readily admit this. What they want isn’t just the physical act of sex, but they want to not be seen as low-status because of their inceldom. They don’t like the fact that their lack of sexual prowess causes them to be seen as lesser-men.
Eh, yes and no. See above. I think a lot of what these groups do is sort of a fumbling attempt at drawing attention to and pushing back against the notion that men ought to be judged by the number of their sexual partners, and that sexless men are somehow “not real men.”
My understanding is that they think this themselves, and they are bitter about it. Because, even if you removed all the social stigma against sexless men, being sexless still intrinsically sucks if you are a man with a normal libido.
Of course they think it themselves. They’ve been conditioned to think it by society at large since they were small children. Even child’s cartoons and PG sitcoms proudly reinforce this dynamic.
Even when I was five years old, I knew that Steve Urkel was a loser. Not because he dressed funny and talked weird – but because Laura didn’t want to go out with him. And even when he won the science fair or whatever, that didn’t change things – because she still didn’t, so he was still a loser. It’s hard to overcome that sort of conditioning from a young age.
The physical urges of being sexless can be overcome, or at least partially mitigated, through various other means. But the status hit of being an incel is so widely conditioned into society at large (and is arguably getting worse, even, perversely, in an era where everyone is having less sex in general) that it’s almost impossible to fight.
But fight it we must, at least, if we want to even pretend that having these men become valued and accepted and functioning members of society is something we actually want. If we want to pretend the end-state is helping them overcome their problems (either by accepting themselves despite female rejection, or finding a way to transform themselves into something females actually want)
What percentage of people plausibly described as incels participate in incel communities for any length of time?
Not everyone is political, even if they vote, and many people don’t vote, some of which are political.
Obviously social status awareness is going to be a big deal for some people. But not only are there other kinds of status beyond the social, but varying types of status are going to be of varying importance to people who can’t get the kind of relationships that they want to get.
Animals are completely about social status and dominance hierarchies, though. And dominance hierarchies dictate who has access to sexual partners.
Even in non-social animals there is e.g. territory, which you cannot keep if you’re a pushover. I expect a territorial animal that can’t defend its territory to have poor sexual prospects, but maybe I’m projecting from social animals too much.
I stand by the stance I had a while back: these are real phenomena but not something that everyone experiences. They’re also being gendered in a way that, while typical, is not the universal experience. The lack of discussion about this is pointing to a dysfunction in gender relations/dating culture, one that doesn’t necessarily have to be solved by going back to ye olden times but which does require serious thought and solutions. One at which both genders and many subcultures have a seat at the table.
Anyway, friendzoning happens when you have a more attractive personality/social qualities than body/sexual qualities. Fuckzoning happens in the reverse. And they both happen to men and women, but the general nature of society (particularly among young people) is that women are more likely to be in the second situation and men in the first. (PS: Keep in mind, this says nothing about their absolute qualities: a woman can be extremely attractive and have a very good personality but that gap will still create men willing to have sex with her but not date her. Likewise, a man can have an okay personality but be ugly as sin, which will still mean there are women willing to be his friend but not date him.)
The solution is really simple: You need to increase whichever attribute you’re deficient in. Ideally both. If you’re getting friendzoned, get in shape, dress better, learn to be more charming. (All of these are learned skills.) If you’re getting fuckzoned, work on being a better partner, more interesting to spend time with, more capable of sustaining the non-sex parts of a relationship. You don’t need to give up anything about yourself unless you define your personality by being out of shape or boring at conversation. You can be a handsome, charming Star Wars nerd or a beautiful, attentive woman who likes to do MMA without issues.
And frankly, this sort of thing will prepare you for the real world. It’s very, very common socially to have to navigate relationships where you’re trying to feel out what the other person wants. Setting boundaries and making compromises and all that is important in everything from romantic relationships to business deals to international treaties.
As a male, I think the problem is that all directions in which the culture pushes you are extremely unhealthy. The correct route to self-improvement you mentioned is pretty much hidden. The recommended options are either a narcissist macho breathing toxic masculinity or a pushover “feminist ally” nu-male with no opinions of their own, depending on who you ask. Some people just opt out and become socially oblivious nerds.
If you are a young boy in the 21st century, nobody will show you how to be confident without being an asshole. I wasted a good part of my 20s bouncing between “redpill” angry misogyny and confused, empathic supplication. Despite many problems with traditional cultures, I think they at least attempt to teach this to each generation – as a man you are expected to be a pillar of your community, neither a doormat nor a selfish parasite. This memetic current is pretty much dead now.
I wonder how the female perspective looks like. I think the current cultural emphasis on sex and body image is doing nobody any favors, and makes the femcel self-esteem problems a lot worse.
Yeah, I look back at my youth and I see how a lack of role models to demonstrate upstanding ways to successfully navigate social situations in an upstanding manner really lead to a lot of unnecessary hardship for myself and those around me–not to mention academic carnage unfortunately. Luckily I was fundamentally disposed to treat people nicely, but if someone had taken me under their wing and been kind to me subject to my donning a toxic ideology? I could have become awful.
Something my father once told me: “Your success in life is going to rely on your ability to understand what’s really going on when people are trying to make sure you don’t.” One of the better pieces of advice I’ve been given.
I’ve found even when you find something out and tell people they’ll often not believe you. I can pretty definitively tell you I’ve figured out how to get in a relationship or make more money because I’ve both done it myself and helped dozens of other people do it, male and female. Most people still don’t listen to my advice on those topics. Which makes sense, since I’m one of many competing voices and not a particularly shout-y one.
Anyway, I think the conservative answer (“Here is a script, read from it.”) works better than what liberals currently have (“Write your own script! No rules except for the ones we made up yesterday!”). I think more liberal rules could work but I’d frame them as something like choices with consequences. A man who spends all day in his basement or a woman who never puts on makeup is making a choice, a completely valid choice, but they also don’t get to complain about the choices other people make. Like not dating them. And so they should be encouraged to price that into their choices.
My understanding is that they feel a lot of pressure to somehow simultaneously conform to a set of extremely progressive values, traditional realities, and pursue their own desires.
For example, the feminist insistence that women matter more than their looks combined with the fact that (in terms of social prestige and attention) focusing on their looks gives a young woman the biggest ROI. This combines with the “have-it-all” mentality of not talking about downsides to create a false but uncomplicated message. Rather than hearing, “You don’t have to look good if you don’t want to. Men won’t pay as much attention to you, but you can choose whether you care about that.” They hear, “You don’t have to look good if you don’t want to. Do what you want!” And then they get pissed at “Staceys” when men go for more conventionally attractive women. Some of them respond by constructing elaborate coping mechanisms that delegitimize male choice, just as some men do for women.
+1 to all of this.
Well said.
There’s an analogous situation for men (I know this has been beaten to death) where we are told that it is what is inside that counts, that superficial things like money and cars and clothes don’t matter to worthwhile women, just be yourself. Most men naturally ignore that but if you take it to heart you end up wondering why the rewards go to men that play that game. Then you start getting resentful of successful men and the women that date them because they don’t behave the way they are ‘supposed’ to.
What is really going on is that women want a guy that they can be proud to show off to their friends and family. Framed that way there is nothing untoward or devious about women’s behavior: it is completely relatable. And yet a lot of people try and make sure you don’t understand that. Maybe because they think the world would be better if people cared less about status, or maybe because they feel you are a competitor and they want to discourage you from gaining status.
Is that close?
Now I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger…
@LesHapablap
I think that for most people there is a disconnect between what they say and what they do, which is usually not a problem because most people learn by observing what others do instead of listening to what they say (unless they are learning what to say). Actions are mirrored by actions; words are mirrored by words; these are two separate magisteria. People on autistic spectrum are easily confused by this; they listen to other people’s words and use them as a guidance for their own actions. Which is absolutely not how this is supposed to work.
If the popular person with money and cars tells you that money and cars don’t matter, the correct lesson is that you should also get money and cars and then also talk about how money and cars don’t matter. Not having money and cars is low-status. Talking about how money and cars actually matter is also low-status: it demonstrates lack of social skills.
A more charitable interpretation is that when people give advice, they omit the obvious (for them, not necessarily for you) parts. Suppose that “X” has 5 points of value, and everyone recognizes that immediately; and “Y” has 3 points of value, but most people think it is zero. If you ask people for advice, they tell you “remember that Y is important”, because ignoring Y is a mistake many make, so this feels important to mention. They do not mention X, because it is obvious. What they advice really means is “do not settle for mere X, because X+Y is much better” (8 points are more than 5 points). But it would be a mistake to conclude that you should focus on Y alone, and ignore X.
So it is true that “it is what is inside that counts”, with the caveat that it only counts at the second round of the interview, which only happens after you have passed the first round.
I think part of the problem is that post-Sexual Revolution, the ideal presented is “have lots of fun sowing your wild oats while you’re young – teens to twenties – then settle down into a long-term relationship/marriage in your thirties”.
For young men to have a constant stream of fun, sexy partners for the “sowing wild oats” requires that there is a population of young women who also have bought into the “sowing wild oats” model, that they won’t nag you into a relationship or committment or expect anything more than no strings attached mutual enjoyment.
But if you persuade women – with the advent of the Pill, feminism, women entering the workforce and all the rest of it – to adopt the male model of sexuality, then they’re going to adopt male attitudes. And we’re seeing the fruits of that now – the pressure to be sexual/romantic at earlier and earlier ages (seriously, what the fuck – pardon the language – is up with the notion of thirteen and fourteen year olds dating/having boy and girlfriends?) so that the bar gets constantly lowered about “if you’re not doing X by age Y then you’re a failure and a loser”, the expectation of moving on to a series of conquests and then being able to find a spouse and transition to that level of adulthood with creating a family, except that now it’s getting pushed to later and later because of the ‘two-income trap’, the necessity for woman as well as men to work on their career so fertility is pushed to later and later (average age of first time mothers in the USA is thirty, so that means that while some women are having children at a much earlier age, some women are having children at a much greater age), and everyone thinks everyone else is having the ideal life of fun and then committment.
And when women, in the name of empowerment and a range of other reasons (remember, early in the Sexual Revolution it was to the benefit of men to get women to break the expectation between committment and sex), start behaving like men – demanding a certain level of physical attractiveness in potential sexual partners, engaging in short-term encounters, being picky about when and with whom they will settle down – then men don’t like it either being on the receiving end of “good enough to fuck but not marriage material”, much less “not even good enough to fuck”.
TLDR: Sexual Revolution sucks; I concur.
Doesn’t track with the reality that people have been having less sex over time.
@AG
Could it somehow be both?
Imagine a person who spends 5 years alone, and 5 years in a monogamous relationship. Now imagine another person who spends 10 years having three one-night stands each year. The latter has greater sexual freedom and considers themselves more experienced; but the former probably had more sex.
I’m a 30-year-old woman, and I basically agree with this, and with Deiseach said below. Erusian also makes some good points. Young people now don’t have functional social templates for these things, and both sexes struggle in different ways. Most people can’t easily figure this stuff out entirely on their own, and the culture has gone beyond allowing more options to making it actively hostile to figure out working arrangements. There were a lot of issues with older systems, issues that IMO made the sexual revolution inevitable, not something we just roll back. (In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom talks about how the sexual revolution caused major dysfunction among young people, but instead of counseling a return to tradition, he kind of leaves it hanging. Like he admits that what happened kind of appeared as the only rational, decent response to many at the time, but that it seems unsustainable, so something will have to give.) And if we could roll it back, that doesn’t mean we should. But the status quo is increasingly dysfunctional (trends that have been around a while accelerated rapidly and combined with other trends) and this will become more evident. There is no perfect system, but we need change.
There are a lot of ways to go about that if we can accept change is needed. People’s expectations are too high, but in many ways this is because those expectations are fundamentally contradictory–it is more complicated than people just got more shallow or entitled or whatever. It’s more about the “having it all” aspect that permeates a lot of areas of modern life, and that has caused a lot of unsustainable trends.
Digressing, this thread was interesting in relation to the essay where Scott talked about subgroups who have never experienced certain forms of subgroup specific oppression: https://www.reddit.com/r/Trufemcels/comments/gnsxr0/does_anyone_elses_lack_of_universal_female/
I had those exact thoughts when I was in college. I didn’t even want sex or a relationship at the time, just proof that I wasn’t completely worthless. Because when you’ve been told that EVERY girl experiences that kind of harassment, regardless of how attractive she is, it can get warped into a bizarre self-loathing for those who haven’t experienced it.
When I finally got catcalled it was frightening but also kind of a relief. (That happened on the same night when I discovered why my doctor warned me to stay away from alcohol. It was an unpleasant but very eye-opening night.)
What I find interesting is that she wouldn’t like to be hit on, stared at or sexually propositioned even though it never happens to her, and even though she would like to feel attractive. I’ve long assumed that women who are annoyed by these things are annoyed because it happens all the time, while people to whom these things rarely or never happen (i.e. most men and some women) would either enjoy them or at least wouldn’t mind them.
I never even got propositioned all that often when I was younger but in 80% of the cases they’d blow right past my ‘no thank you –> actually, I’m busy, so no –> I really have to go now –> no, I don’t want your phone number for later –> I have a boyfriend (‘I won’t tell him if you won’t, wink wink’) –> look, really NO’. The other 20% were just the people awkwardly fumbling towards connection, and that was generally fine if not necessarily a high point in my day.
If that’s what people think of when thinking ‘hit on, stared at or sexually propositioned’ (instead of ‘flirted with’, which can be thoroughly enjoyable), there’s really no upside. It’s not like you’d expect the average femcel to have the social skills to send those boys off skedaddling with a wink and a saunter, so the experience ranges from intrusive to actively scary. (‘OK, I said ‘no’ 4 times, which he doubled down on. He looks to be about 50 pounds heavier than me. We’re in a busy street but mostly cars and few fellow pedestrians, so if he turns out to be handsy and not just pushy this could be bad. Not exactly likely but screw you for making me have to do this calculation. Ehm, what would be the nearest place I could go to if he decides to end up following me if I left, like that dude last year?OK, here goes nothing.’)
Oh, I understood ‘hit on’ with a broader meaning, I’m not sure of the exact connotations (not a native speaker).
Hit on doesn’t have a very specific connotation of aggressiveness AFAIK. When I hear the phrase, it conjures anything from a guy flirting shamelessly–sometimes even as a gag–to the scenario described by March. I mostly think of the milder stuff, but I’m not a woman so all I have to deal with is pleasant mild flirting.
I don’t want to denigrate ‘hitting on’ as some kind of problematic thing in itself. But it is if you don’t have any social confidence or experience and you only attract approaches from boors. Socially adept people hit on people skilfully and receive approaches skilfully, so the interaction quickly turns into mutual flirting or a graceful ‘thanks but no thanks’ (both of which are very pleasant) rather than one-sided pushing.
‘Hitting on’ is stereotypically the main male flirt initiation after all, just like the main female flirt initiation is stuff like obvious hair twirling, glances, signaling that she’d like it if a certain person would come over. So it can’t really be wrong as a category. If the other person never says ‘yes’ to that first ‘hit’, though, the interaction turns sour quickly. Just like with people who ‘stare’ instead of ‘glance’.
Nah, even if it’s rare it can be unpleasant. If you’re an unattractive woman, you won’t suddenly get hit on in a charming way by an attractive guy. More likely it’ll be:
The drunk guy at the party who has been rejected by all other women before getting around to you.
Some homeless, ancient or otherwise very repulsive guy yelling “compliments” at you on the street.
Someone who has read on the internet that ugly women are easy, and who gives off the attitude that you should be grateful for his attention and owe him reciprocation.
I guess these can still be a bit validating, at least you know someone would fuck you if given no better options. But it’s unpleasant as an experience: who knows if the drunk, homeless or desperate guy will accept a rejection gracefully? And sometimes “only this gross guy wants me” feels even worse than “nobody wants me”, although it’s not really rational.
I’m inclined to agree with you Zephalinda because your problematization matches my personal experience; I was much more motivated by the esteem and acceptance indicated or caused by sexual activity than I was sex itself. That being said, I’m not sure how generalizable that is. I’ve spoken with other human beings, and by and large they seem to like sex a lot. Those for whom it is a compulsion without a pedestal seem to be the minority rather than the herd.
I think being a male virgin, or being the girl who never had a boyfriend, is highly stigmatized. Being single but with a couple of relationships or at least sexual experiences behind you, less so. Many divorced people of both sexes will claim to be better off without a spouse.
As a smart, tall male I never was aware of any stigmatization of my then chosen virginity. But maybe various people who did correctly surmise that I was a virgin did stigmatize me for that in their heads?
I think if you are known to care about something, and are known to not have the ability to get that thing, then people are likely more inclined to stigmatize you for your lack of that thing. But if you are known to not want something, then people are less inclined to stigmatize you for your lack of that thing.
The fuckzone has the same problem as the friendzone: the other person is stringing you on with promises of a possible future relationship. There are ways to let a person go, by either saying quite harsh truths, or, for those who can’t do it, you can just ghost the person.
Being friendzoned/fuckzoned prevents a new relationship from forming, because you don’t go looking for another one, since the mental headspace you dedicate to relationships is dedicated to that. But fuckzone is worse, since sex creates pair-bonding, and can reinforce feelings unilaterally.
I’d prefer to be friendzoned than fuckzoned.
Same, if I get friendzoned, at least I have a friend. If it’s the stereotypical friendzone where she always complains to me about her male partners, maybe I can also get some advice from her about my attempts to get a partner.
But if I regularly have sex with someone, that’s actively an obstacle to dating anyone else. So I’ll just have to ditch them to have a chance with another person.
But I think in neither case is the “zoning” person actively stringing the other one along. They know what they want from the zoned one, it’s just that the zoned person thinks this level of intimacy on one level should go with intimacy on the other level.
Having casual sex with someone is absolutely no obstacle to dating another person, for either sex.
For your third paragraph, ‘actively’ is doing a lot of work. If you change it to ‘knowingly’ then I’d say that’s most often true, for both zones.
I’d like to see the “friendzone debate” address the idea that a friendship between two people, one of whom would like to be in a romantic relationship with the other, can still be a real friendship.
I’ve had an unrequited crush on a close friend before. It’s not pleasant. But it didn’t make me want to terminate the friendship (although certainly for some people in some situations pulling away a bit is the only option for their mental health *cough cough Werther*). And it didn’t mean one of us was using the other.
But the two perspectives seem to be either:
a) The woman is using the man for favors and support, the man isn’t getting anything out of it. He should leave and find a woman who won’t take advantage of him.
or
b) The man is being an asshole by pretending to be the woman’s friend when really he only wanted sex.
Is it that uncommon that, in a genuine friendship, one party can develop unrequited feelings for the other? Or is that not considered to be the friendzone?
There are people out there (redpill/pinkpill) who say that having a man feelings for a friend indicate that he’s only friends with them because he wants to fuck them. Such people are cynical about men in general, and in the communities they move in, they benefit from signalling that cynicism. They don’t offer much insight into people that they have no firsthand experience of. And personally I would find it sad and unfulfilling to live a life resembling theirs.
This has been my experience as well. There were several guys throughout my high school and college years that I had unrequited crushes on. It occasionally sucked, but being able to hang out with them as friends still beat the alternative of not getting to hang out with them at all.
The hardest part was trying to be supportive when they were having relationship problems with their girlfriends, instead of saying “you know, you wouldn’t have these problems if you were dating me instead…”
I think it’s variable. In high school one of my good friends was a pretty, smart, kind, accomplished girl, and I did rather like her, but I felt that she could do better and didn’t want to make things go sour by forcing her to awkwardly turn me down. I wasn’t, as far as I can recall, bitter about it at the time–and I was bitter a lot of the time.
If it had been a more powerful infatuation, I think dealing with it would have been too painful and I would have found myself resenting the girl. In the event, I was a very lonesome young man and all the girls I pined after got pined after from afar, and friendship was out of the question. That would have required me to talk to them.
Then I met a girl, fell in love, got married, and we’ve lasted ten years so far so yay.
The thing about a and b is that they are neither discrete nor mutually exclusive. I would say that in the vast majority of such cases, both are partly true to varying degrees – and usually not to an extent that really makes either party a bad person, but often significantly enough that the friendship is intrinsically unhealthy and it would be better for everyone concerned if they saw less of each other, which is a difficult thing to achieve given both parties’ short term incentives.
They can certainly be unhealthy friendships. But in my limited experience, I’ve never seen a.
For me, and there was really only one friendship I had where my unrequited crush on the other person made it unhealthy until I withdrew from the friendship a bit (which I didn’t manage to do on my own, physical separation did), it went like this:
We meet, become friends, spend more time together / talk about more personal things, I realize I’m falling for her. At that point she tries to continue it the same way as a normal friendship, with normal ebbs and flows of how much time we spend together, while I get more needy and insecure, probably not making me a better person to spend time around. None of this involved favors/support becoming one-sided.
You could certainly argue that I was being disingenuous in some way by continuing to spend time with her as a friend and fantasizing about a relationship, but that’s not the same as only pretending to be her friend in the first place. And since usually my unrequited crushes just settle down to normal friendships again, I usually consider it a good idea to just ignore them if I don’t see them going anywhere. In the situation I’m talking about, perhaps I felt too strongly for ignoring it to be a realistic option and I should have tried harder to withdraw from the friendship.
Maybe this relates to the whole demisexuality conversation from the other thread …
[EDIT: I do believe that the “classic friendzone” setup exists, and is mostly as you say, though. Just that when people talk about it they ignore that sometimes the friendship does come first or have more reality to it.]
I think I’ve been on both sides of favours/support becoming… not entirely one-sided, but substantially imbalanced. If someone is willing to do basically unreasonable things to help you out, it’s pretty difficult to always have the willpower not to ask them to. It’s also really easy to kid yourself that the situation isn’t really what it is long after there’s any other plausible explanation, and thus avoid an awkward conversation and potential bad feeling.
What I really hate about a lot of framings of the subject is the tendency to depict very ordinary human failings in basically decent people as the monstrous behaviour of contemptible creeps/manipulators.
What I really hate about a lot of framings of the subject is the tendency to depict very ordinary human failings in basically decent people as the monstrous behaviour of contemptible creeps/manipulators.
Yes, this exactly.
My ex had a guy who was functionally friend zoned in the manner described in A, but I don’t think she was really intentionally exploiting him(or she was and just successfully lied to me about it). He would do anything she asked him to do, drive to her house, pick her up, take her to a nice restaurant, pay for dinner and take her home, etc(while she was dating other men). She enjoyed these things, and I assume honestly conflated those feelings with the concept of friendship. When I pointed out that she never spoke to him outside of the context of him doing her a favor and how wildly that varied from any of her other friendships, she acknowledged that something was wrong with their ‘friendship’ and broke it off.
ISTM that there are way, way more ways for a friendship/dating interaction/relationship of some kind to *not* lead to a sexual or romantic relationship than for it to lead to one. That can be about lack of sexual attraction on one or both sides, or lack of romantic attraction[1], or not really geting along/liking each other much as people, or prior commitments (maybe he’s married), hard-to-reconcile obstacles (religious or cultural differences, income/social class differences, one wants kids and the other doesn’t), practical issues (he’s in school and will have to move away in another year, she’s got a kid already and he doesn’t want to be a parent), etc.
[1] I dated a woman for awhile with whom I was (and am) good friends, and we were very sexually compatible. But I just didn’t feel much romantic attraction toward her. (I wouldn’t have phrased it that way back then, but that’s what it was–I liked her but didn’t love her.)
I have heard this referred to as the “slutzone” rather than the “fuckzone”, but, yes, it is definitely a real phenomenon, the equal and opposite situation to the friendzone. Men and women are different. Sperm is cheap, while eggs are precious, so women are the gatekeepers of sex while men, who provide resources, are the gatekeepers of commitment.
This is even more obvious when you look at homosexual communities; liberated from the gatekeepers of their respective wants, gay men engage in astounding levels of promiscuous casual sex with one another while lesbian women move-in with each other at the drop of a hat (then promptly suffer lesbian bed death). Hence the joke:
@throwaway2306 says:
Not sure if there’s anything more to this than that, finding someone to love who loves you back was hard in the ’80’s/early ’90’s and from all accounts still is despite computerized “match making”.
I had been in both sides of both zones, and I remember being eager for a “long-term-romantic-relationship”, me and my future wife had been “just friends’ for over a year before I kissed her and when we finally got to the “fourth night stand” stage and she wanted me to stay every night I still insisted on spending time at “my own place” some nights (she would never stay the night at my much less private place) as I was romantically shell shocked and distracting, but eventually I moved in with her when I was 24 and she was 28, and with a few separations we’ve been together almost 30 years.
When I was 20 there had been a girl who wanted to move in with me, but I didn’t have my own place, so projecting from my past my guess for what would help both sets of “cels” to have romance would be:
1) Subsidized housing that had some privacy.
2) Subsidized motor vehicles to court with.
3) Plentiful discos/malt shops with jukeboxes/night clubs/etc.
4) Incomes with free time.
I suppose “free college for all” proposals come close.
In thinking of my past girlfriends FWLIW an older girl (29) that I dated when I was 21 I had heard she committed suicide, and I had hoped that the story was false, sadly this week I found the memorial program, but I did find the detail that while she died of complications from her jump some days later, in-between she converted to Christianity and was happy for some days, another old girlfriend is a lecturer at U.C.B., another got married in 2015 and moved to the U.K. (we still correspond), and the last girl I dated before I moved in with my future wife married one of the customers at the motorcycle shop I worked at for seven years, and we’re still friends. From my experience I’m well convinced that moving from one “zone” (friends only or sex partner only) to both is easier than finding someone to get to one of the “zones” in the first place, but what worked for me was 1) volunteer work, 2) interest in music, 3) a lot of time in night clubs. For other friends amateur theater did the trick, and I know @DavidFriedman met his wife via folk dancing, all of these take unpaid time, so unlikely if you work many hours.
So, I recently got a new laptop. Very abruptly, because the old one died and I needed to get the new one set up before class on Tuesday. I wound up buying the only available model of laptop Best Buy had. It’s much nicer than my old one in terms of specs … but it came loaded with “Windows 10 S.” I had thought that MS could not make a worse mistake than Windows Me or Vista. But nope. They actually made a version of Windows that locks you out of using any software not made by Microsoft. Fortunately they seem to have abandoned their original policy, when this abomination came out, of making people update to the more functional Windows 10 Pro for fifty bucks–basically holding your device hostage. I was able to liberate my copy for free by downloading Firefox, trying to install it, and clicking a box that said “Yes, I want to switch out of this POS so I can use software I actually want.” It did warn me that I would be unable to switch back, which is a bit like “warning” someone that if they order the brownie, it will come warm from the oven with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.
Anyway. Microsoft is obviously not quite what it used to be in terms of market dominance. I still wonder, how has it retained as much dominance as it has? It keeps making terrible unforced errors like this. Does it just require prohibitive amounts of pooled skill to make and market a good OS? Or is it sheer inertia?
As obnoxious as this is to you or me, I can imagine it being a good idea for schools, people who only use their computers for spreadsheets and word processing, etc. It’s like a Chromebook: you trade liberty for safety.
Anyway I suspect the window to take the world by storm with a brand new OS closed about twenty years ago. Today, 99% of users demand an OS with the polish and “it just works” of Windows or MacOS, and since even popular Linux distributions still can’t quite deliver that, I assume it requires BigCorp-level resources to make and maintain such a thing. Also, there are network effects. Most software is distributed in Windows and Mac versions. People want to use the same software as the people they work with.
So it’s technically impractical to make a Linux build that plays nicely with software designed for Windows? I use LibreOffice, which is the metastasized mutant descendant of the long-dead Corel WordPerfect. I don’t suppose the day will ever come when MS goes belly-up and we’ll see OpenWindows. But it would be lovely if they’d give up on Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft can pay professionals to make Office not play nicely with Linux; Linux depends on amateurs to make Linux play well with Office. And, while Linux’s amateurs have technical skill and may want to make the Linux/Office combination work well enough for their own purposes, they’ve never been very enthusiastic about making any part of Linux play well with non-nerds. So I expect Microsoft’s professionals will have the edge in this arms race.
I don’t know how much it applies to the specific discussion, but it’s important to remember that an absolute ton of Linux development is done by paid professionals, too, these days. Most large software companies have a division that contributes to large open source projects either as a specific focus or as a side effect of their real focus. Some companies that’s almost all they do.
Linux Kernel Developer is a pretty well compensated job.
I can imagine Linux-Windows interop is pretty fruitful work for many large companies. Indeed, some of the very best work being done on the matter right now is being done by Valve in support of Steam’s ability to run most of its games on any platform.
How much of that development work is on desktop linux?
If you’re throwing money at linux development (to commoditise your complement), shouldn’t you focus on servers/embedded computing/kernel for android as appropriate?
But it’s nice that most of my steam library runs on linux.
> Linux development is done by paid professionals
Sure. But that also means that the stuff which gets worked on is the stuff which is beneficial to the underlying sponsors. If you try and stray off of the beaten path you quickly discover whole elements of the Linux ecosystem which are just utter trash. I say this as a software developer who’s been using Linux as my exclusive non-corporate-provided OS for 15 years now.
Beneficial and not too risky. At some level, trying to break open the Windows ecosystem to make it play nice with Linux gets into DMCA-adjacent territory that will probably have deep-pocketed corporate legal departments saying “no don’t do that” in ways judgement-proof basement hackers will ignore.
I think it depends on MS’ attitude: do they actively support it, actively try to hinder it, or remain agnostic?
.
LibreOffice is the descendant of StarOffice (via OpenOffice), I believe it was developed from scratch by Star Division to resemble the interface and be interoperable with files from the then current version of MS Word. I don’t think it is based on WordPerfect (which I think was made available for Linux at some time).
… huh. I could’ve sworn I got to OpenOffice, and then LibreOffice, when I went hunting for a copy of WordPerfect and read that Corel had gone bankrupt and released the code open-source. Maybe I read an erroneous Wiki entry?
Microsoft has essentially given up with Edge. The latest version is built on Chromium and is actually probably better than Chrome in some respects.
I recently bought a surface pro, and I have experienced a milder form of this problem; it’s the first OS where I cannot easily get app versions of google products. To be fair, I’ve used Android and Chromium for years, but the realization that I couldn’t get Google Books and download Thinking and Deciding came as a shock.
Network effects. People do not buy computers to use the OS, they buy computers to use software, and thus the best OS is the one with the most software available that people want to use.
Building a better-than-windows OS is fairly trivial. Building an OS which has an entire software ecology associated with it is very hard.
Which of course means that a version of windows that locks itself out of its own supporting software ecology is not just an unforced error it is a completely worthless version of windows.
For nontechnical people above certain age switching an OS is not really an option so they are a captive audience, also most of big corporate environments are 100% Windows without much competition.
People keep saying that, but windoes isn’t thus unchanging thing. ..windows users are forced to relearn things every thing me there’s a new version.
Yup, but the changes are either gradual enough compared to adopting a new OS or they lose habits or stick with unsupported versions – even developers who can get away with it often stick with win7 past its end of support.
The nice thing about Unix is that I can whip up command lines that I learnt more than twentyfive years ago, and they work as expected.
But nobody cares about Windows users. Microsofts announces end of line for some product, and corporate IT departments plan unrolling replacements with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Very rarely does anybody think about alternatives, and while there’s a ton of frustration with major changes (like ribbon menus in Office, new file formats, or getting entangled in hidden features windows 8), users in general treat updates as force majeure, some kind of natural phenomenon or act of God that they just have to accept.
Microsoft makes more sense if you realize that you are just a collateral customer. They aren’t selling to you. They don’t make software for you. They make software to sell to organizations; businesses, nonprofits, governments.
You are mostly useful to their bottom line only insofar as your familiarity with the software encourages organizations you work with to purchase Microsoft software.
Makes sense, I suppose. Their customers being bureaucrats would explain their general style.
I mean, when the alternatives are Mac (which I personally loathe, for philosophical and practical reasons) and Linux (which can’t support most of my art programs)…
Could you elaborate on the philosophical ones ?
In retrospect, philosophical may not be the right word. This is why I shouldn’t post comments at midnight. I’ll try to explain what I mean.
Every Apple product I’ve used has seemed less user friendly than their competitors, and the vibe I get from Apple is that this is an intentional design choice. My iPod won’t let me transfer music from itself to the computer. Every time I’ve replaced my computer, I’ve had to download a third party program to move my legally-purchased music from my iPod to the new computer’s hard drive. Likewise, my iPhone won’t let me transfer photos by plugging it into my computer; instead, I have to download iCloud on my desktop and then manually move the photos over. And heaven forbid that something goes wrong with one of your Apple devices. The last time I was at an Apple store, I had to wait for 3+ hours, and see 3-4 different employees, and the entire time, I was thinking “you know, I could have maybe fixed this on my own if you people hadn’t built your devices to require special tools to get into.” And then there’s the forced password changes (I’ve been locked out of my account more than once because Apple decided to reset my password), and the fact that every time I update to the latest iOS, Apple returns all of my settings to the defaults without even asking.
It feels like Apple doesn’t trust their customers to be competent… or even law-abiding, in the case of the locked music transfers.
My experience with Apple’s computers has been marginally better than my experience with Apple’s mobile products, but that just means their computers crash once a day instead of two to three times in a row like the iPhone.
So, um… speaking as someone who recently had a philosophical objection and quit using Macs, after having used them all her life…
That experience sounds very atypical?
Even with a PC, I can plug my iphone in and access the pictures on it easily; I assume music too, although I haven’t yet tried. With a Mac, iTunes was always asking me if I wanted to sync, or if I wanted to download photos* – to the point where it got a little annoying. After an early software update in my teens, my Apple computers stopped crashing – ever, period. (A program could crash, but you could always access the force-quit menu, or later on reset the system if it was the problem – for all I knew you could do that early on too, only the system was never the problem early on.) I think they may have stopped being crash-proof a couple years before I quit, but they were never anywhere near every day.
Also, Apple has never decided to reset my password, what on earth, that is obviously extremely bad behavior but I’ve never experienced it. And I’m still using an iPhone. I don’t think they even fret at me to change my password regularly.
It may be that I was closer to their model user (not a programmer/without the skills to build or repair my own computer, not generally using unusual programs, etc.) than you were? Or possibly something else. But, speaking as someone who quit using Apple computers in grand dudgeon, your description sounds much worse than my experience ever was.
*Edit: Although I just recalled that a few years before I quit, I wanted to download photos and couldn’t figure out how – I think I ended up by emailing them to myself. I assumed that was my ineptitude, not their bad design, and indeed it’s quite possible I accidentally told them I never wanted them to load the phone as a drive, but it’s still a point against my general impression of user-friendliness. I think that was a mac.
Yeah, echoing Rebecca Friedman, my initial experience with macs seemed miraculous. Got my first Macbook in college, after ten years of fiddling with desktop pcs daily over issues with freezing, crashing, and internet outages. I experienced virtually no difficulties in that line ever again. iTunes could be annoying, and in recent years especially, the Apple experience has gone down hill…Apple Music and all that. To the point where I considered just buying a pc instead of another Macbook Air last year, given the expense. Went into Best Buy to play around with the options, and immediately encountered all kinds of weird glitches. Bought the Macbook Air. For the manner in which I use laptops, Macs have been worth every penny for that comparatively smooth experience.
Beyond office software, they’ve been the only real gaming option for awhile now. That’s why my personal computer is Windows; if I want to play, say, League of Legends, then Microsoft is the only game in town. And if LoL doesn’t have a Linux port, nothing does.
I’m not sure how to interpret this statement. As a casual Linux gamer, I can play from a fair sized catalog of native games on Steam, and some Windows games are reported to work with various compatibility layers. Sure, not every top title is available so it’s not for gamers who absolutely need to play any specific game. But “nothing” is way too strong here.
Metaphorically
But I want to play specific games. I don’t want to play any game, I want to play the specific game I want to play. Saying there are many Linux games is no better than offering me Monopoly when I want to play D&D.
League isn’t on Linux, World of Warcraft isn’t on Linux, Rocket League was on Linux and then got discontinued. If big blockbusters don’t get ported over, then the odds are extremely low that the game I want to play will work on Linux.
Dual boot or use a windows VM?
Today’s New York Times front page: bold gesture, or unconscionable grandstanding?
I consider myself a reasonably rational, well-informed, scientific-minded person, and I still don’t know what the $&#$ to think about COVID-19. I don’t know if we’re overreacting, underreacting, or reacting at exactly the appropriate level. One trend I have noticed, though, is that every time it seems things just might be loosening up, psychologically and/or politically, I see a bunch of stories circulate on Facebook along the lines of, “I was a healthy 45-year-old woman, and coronavirus almost killed me,” or “‘I’m 30 years old. I didn’t die from COVID-19, but I will suffer the aftereffects for the rest of my life.”
This strikes me as unfair. Unfair to the people involved, certainly, but also unfair in that it singles out COVID-19 from other diseases. Lots of 45-year-old women get breast cancer. Some of these cancers are less aggressive, and are easily cured; others are super-aggressively metastatic and kill the person horribly within six months. I’m not saying COVID-19 is like the flu–I believe that it is worse–but some people barely suffer from the ordinary flu, others wind up in the ICU. It seems that the vast majority of people who contract COVID-19 sail through unharmed, but a small, extremely unfortunate percentage get hit by the 10,000-ton Coronavirus freight train (yes, I know, mixed metaphor). Life is a crap shoot (further mixing the metaphor).
I may be rambling here, but…it increasingly seems like our national goal in confronting COVID-19 is to completely eradicate existential risk. NO ONE is allowed to die. It’s like wanting to take your family out for a drive, then reading about a horrible wreck on the highway that killed a family of six, including an adorable toddler and a litter of puppies, and deciding to stay home for the rest of your life.
Like I said, I don’t know what to think, and I am not an epidemiologist. I certainly don’t want to be that person who boldly goes out, lives life to the fullest, and turns out to have the exact genetic composition that allows COVID-19 to turn my internal organs into day-old scungilli.
I know Matt M. has been making this argument for weeks now, but it is only now starting to sink in with me. How many more deaths are we willing to accept from COVID-19? If the answer is ZERO, we are seriously heading down the wrong path.
I’ve been privately agreeing more and more with this over the last few weeks. Also privately feeling more and more guilty I didn’t give Matt a +1 a few times. So here’s a +1 to you and a +4 or 5 to him. =/
I believe anyone who feels this way should do their best to spread this idea to their friends in the real world.
According to opinion polling, we are still deep in, what I believe to be, the most damaging moral panic of my lifetime. The only way out is to try to allay people’s fears and get them to look at the relative risks and costs rationally.
As far as I have seen, this kind of thing is entirely anecdotal. Any numbers of non-lethal but serious outcomes from COVID-19? Ages and percentages?
On the Diamond Princess, half of asymptomatic infected people had lungs that looked like ground glass on a cat scan. From SARS1, it will probably clear up after a year, but it is serious damage and if you can get the disease again, it will probably accumulate.
Added: Wuhan used CT for diagnosis, but no one noticed.
Whistling in the dark, but might that have been a virus-load thing? The passengers were in close proximity for a number of days, which is not the sneeze-in-the-street mode of transmission most folks are concerned about.
They were still asymptomatic. It would be surprising if lung damage depended on viral load while symptomaticity is independent of viral load.
I’ve been wondering a lot about all the discussion of “asymptomatic” people. After two weeks of carefully monitoring myself I hardly even know what’s a symptom any more! It would not be surprising if people in a new life situation (whether on a cruise ship or in home isolation) are substantially worse (in both directions) at identifying symptoms, either because they aren’t doing activities that would have made them notice symptoms, or they are noticing differences that aren’t really symptoms, or whatever.
On the other hand, if you were penned up in a cruise ship, mostly locked in your cabin, you’d expect to lose a lot of conditioning and muscle tone unless you were doing jumping jacks every day in your cabin. When they finally let you out and you’re out of breath after climbing a flight of stairs, do you think “wow, Covid got me and this is the proof” or just “Damn, this quarantine has gotten me really out of shape!”
Nope. The lack of hard data on anything that isn’t “confirmed positive test” or “dead” is extremely frustrating.
Part of it is because, well, it’s impossible to know what the long-term effects of a disease are before you had a while for those effects to manifest. Are people who’ve recovered by experienced lung damage going to recover fully in the next 6 months? Maybe! But we don’t really know.
The best we can do now is probably to look at whether people who didn’t die from things like H1N1 and SARS Classic experienced long-term health problems. Here is a 15-year follow-up study on SARS patients who recovered. It looks like a mixed bag, with many folks experiencing long-term health issues but others mostly recovering fully. The trend the authors identified (at least w.r.t. lung damage) is that people tended to slowly recovery for a while and then eventually level off with some amount of degraded function.
Here’s an older study that finds similar results. Folks get better for a time but don’t recover completely, and are generally worse off than the public at large.
Of course, this is a different disease, so perhaps all of this is meaningless.
People have a lot of mental filters to block out the bottomless pits of suffering all around them.
The biggest one I’ve encountered is aging – after being converted by Aubrey de Grey and his ilk, I’m constantly amazed at the mental contortions people put themselves into to not see it as the biggest cause of suffering that is, finally, almost within the reach of science.
I think a lot of people within the SSC commentariat may feel similar about their pet issues, especially the EA movement. Then again, it requires a bit of soul searching to stop being paralyzed and depressed by the newfound suffering all around you, so I do have empathy for people who just block the entire thing out.
Aging is awful. It’s statistically worse health outcomes over time. I’m in my late 20s, and I already can look back and see health goals that were once easy that now require strong intention to shape my life around them.
Presumably he’s talking about muscle gain, fat loss, cholesterol, blood pressure — typical metabolic-type stuff. Late twenties is when a lot of people realize that keeping that stuff looking good requires active measures.
Spoiler alert: none of this gets easier as you advance into your 50s.
With respect to the nyt headline, I think mourning people that died in a collective, unusual event is natural and good. If your argument is that we should accept some amount of risk as the cost of doing business, then I would agree, and we can argue about what level of risk is appropriate. After 9/11, I thought the changes to security procedures were ineffective and actively corrosive, but the minutes of silence and very similar newspaper remembrances were entirely appropriate.
One of the unfortunate questions that (ETA: in my opinion, of course) has to be considered is the role of media attention in support for those procedures. Like, analogously, we all accept that children being kidnapped by strangers is a tragedy, but whipping people up into a panic about stranger danger for at least a generation now is plausibly a major cause of the ineffective and corrosive procedures.
Would we do this if we lost 100,000 in an usually bad flu year?
I think it’s pretty clear that if a strain of flu caused 100k deaths it would get its own name, and the fluvid-19 coverage would be more or less indistinguishable from covid-19 coverage.
Yes! Exactly. The one complication I see is that “a very deadly flu” might not be identified as fast as covid has, because we wouldn’t be collecting all data for it as quickly and as thoroughly. But after a few weeks, things might look much the same. In fact, I believe that a lot of the pandemic measures in effect now have originally been developed with the intent of treating a flu pandemic.
We had 80K deaths in 2018.
You can say 100K is a big milestone, and sure, but 80% of the deaths didn’t get 80% of the coverage, or even 80% squared or cubed.
https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/
The 80k number was later revised down to 60k, somewhat highlighting the relative squishiness of the flu estimates. I still don’t think you could have something go from flu levels of deadliness to corona levels without something novel going on. The deaths of despair narrative might be a good example of a cause of death suddenly becoming more important, and it also generated a lot of news coverage and profiles of individuals.
I don’t think this is true. 100,000 deaths isn’t *that* much more than a bad flu season. But 100,000 deaths even when everyone in the world is doing everything they say they can to prevent the transmission of respiratory illnesses is *much* bigger.
At least, I assume so. Does anyone have any idea how flu numbers this April and May compare to normal April and May flu numbers? I would assume they are orders of magnitude lower, but no one’s really reporting on this.
@keaswaran
This is Canadian data, not US, but:
the flu season effectively ended in mid-March; from Apr 5 to May 9 (the most recent reported period) the percentage of positive tests “remained at the lowest level recorded for the past nine seasons”.
I am too lazy to do a full comparison, but this year since Apr 5 the percentage of positive tests has been .13%, last year in the same time period they report values of 11% to 20%.
Probably not, because the flu already has vaccine and known treatments and well known behavior.
It’s completely possible that, once (if) we get a COVID19 vaccine, we still will get 100k death yearly, but at that point without closing off the economy.
The main thing that caught my attention with the NYT thing is just how old (almost) everyone who has died was. I knew this already, but still, seeing it on a list like that made it very noticeable. This people were old. Really old. Makes it harder to worry about the virus, if anything.
Harder to worry for myself.
I’m also worrying for my grandmother, though.
The simple answer is that we don’t know. It’s clear that COVID-19 does weird things to the human immune system, along with other parts of the body, and that we haven’t had nearly enough time to figure out what the long-term consequences of surviving COVID-19 infection are. Older economic analyses suggest a 16% decrease in quality of life for elderly patients surviving a pneumonia infection, along with a substantial (~5X) increase in indirect mortality risks; COVID-19 is probably worse in terms of its overall quality of life impact. The overall impact on younger patients is probably lighter, but anyone who requires hospitalization probably has a tough road ahead, regardless of age.
As it happens I support easing of lockdowns, for various reasons. But I disagree quite a lot with what I perceive to be the gist of your comment. Correct me if you think I got it wrong.
Covid is not like cancer in two very important ways:
1. You currently have very few ways of preventing cancer. What you eat, your genetic makeup, pollution in the air, 100 different cancers… it’s all just a big mess. Covid on the other hand is by comparison crystal clear: avoid a virus and you’re good.
2. It’s very hard for a supervillain to double total cases of cancer. You need a lot of work to do this, even on purpose. Covid on the other hand has an exponential pattern, which makes doubling to be trivial, and 10x fluctuations in cases relatively easy.
So all in all, Covid is still a very low hanging fruit.
Now, should we all stay locked in our houses for the rest of the year? The answer varies. I’d strongly suggest that for my father (or David here). They’re in a risk group, and have quite comfortable conditions in their home. My dad has an almost obscenely-sized garden – he can literally grow all his vegetables there if he’s so inclined. Little downside and quite a big upside in staying in.
Should I stay in the rest of the year? That’s going to be a predictably different answer for a very different set of conditions – starting with 40yo in good health.
And to get to the core of the matter: should we, as a society, force people to stay in? If not, should we strongly encourage them to do so? If yes, how strongly?
It’s not an easy question, especially because it has some big problems: some people will make the wrong decisions – would you trust all elderly people to properly judge the situation and risks involved? How about people that have to work? How about inherent discrimination, like the 65 year old that very much wants to go to work tomorrow, but is caught between a rock and a hard place? Is it fair to him to let “everybody” go to work, when for him it’s likely a 5% risk of death?
I liked a lot your introduction, about not knowing “what the $&#$ to think”. You’re very right here. The problem is pretty complicated. Beware of simple answers.
+1
Given the measures being taken to “avoid a virus”, I think you may be burying the lede here.
Yeah, wasn’t very nice of me.
While we’re at it, I don’t think Covid situation is all that clear. Like, yes, if you lock yourself away from literally everyone you’ll be safe, and if you choose now to join a choir in a major city, you ought to bring more cough drops than normal, but in a wide swath of gray areas there are very conflicting advice and recommendations that aren’t that far from “just avoid everything unnatural” strategy that we might resort to to avoid cancer.
@Randy M
Nah, the comparison stands. They just don’t compare. As far as we can tell, and after decades of research, best you can do is change your cancer risk by around 20%. And some advice is literally choosing between different cancers, like birth control pill.
Covid on the other hand is all about small changes – big impact. Stay-in-home strategy works about 99% on an individual level. But there are many things you can do society wide to get to 80% – we’re arguing on which are best and which are worth it, but it’s pretty clear a combination of masks/hygiene/testing/avoiding groups can get us to 80%.
Actually, no, scratch that. Given the exponential nature of epidemics (vs cancers), that 80% reduction in infection risk is actually over 99% reduction of effects, society-wide. Your actions move R, and R changes effects.
The case for panic and lockdown is unfortunately crystal clear. Like I said, I’m not supporting it, but the argument chain for easing it is necessarily longer and needs to be stated carefully.
@RandyM
Well we’ve had COVID19 for less than a year.
Maybe in 2021 we will just notice kids don’t trasmit it too much so they can go to schools, restaurants have to half capacity, theaters have to cut capacity in a quarter and choirs and singing in church are verboten, but everything else is cool and we make the necessary economic adjustments.
Just as at some point we decided to start putting warnings on tobacco and stop selling radioactive glass because of Cancer. That was the low hanging fruit.
I think the main obstacle to reopening is to get people in the mindset that masks are here to stay, regardless of other adjustments to society we have to make otherwise.
Huh? I can reduce my cancer risk somewhat by say, cutting bacon out of my diet. To get a big impact for COVID I have to quarantine myself from society. On a society level we apparently need to voluntarily enact a global depression. These might be “big impact” but they are not “small changes”.
Actually on a personal level, nothing I do for COVID is big impact because intentionally infecting myself today is probably an order of magnitude or two less likely to kill me than cancer.
Yes. It is just astonishing to me how little distinction is made between “what a person should do” and “what society should do”. These are two very different questions.
Thought this might come up, but didn’t want to bloat the comment. I have what I consider a “sane” lifestyle – no smoking, eat the occasional veggie, exercise moderately, not overweight, yearly checkups. For me, there pretty much isn’t anything I can do for a dramatic change.
Sure, if you’re an obese sedentary smoker – you can do things that cut your cancer risk in half, or more.
FWIW, I agree with your sentiments. Wanting the risk of death to be zero is not an acceptable way to live, and it confuses me that so many people are advocating for this. I’ve been in contact with several people emotionally suffering a lot recently due to the lack of normal social interaction, mostly young people. Apparently this counts for nothing.
For me I mostly feel this with children: I think we need to be much more risk tolerant with children in order to build better humans. Where it is possible to minimize the risk of catastrophic injury, great; but children must be enabled to endanger themselves so they may learn care.
obviously I’m super biased. I grew up rurally and my favorite activities, stick fighting and tree climbing, could readily result in death or disfiguration if practiced injudiciously. I look back and I had an unusual amount of agency and autonomy for my age, and I think a big chunk of that can be attributed to being encouraged to take responsibility for my own safety where practical. Clearly there failure modes and pathologies to this sort of sentiment, but I think it’s a sentiment we could use more of.
How old are you? I grew up in a suburban area, felt myself to be by no means anything other than ordinary- certainly my parents were not unusually permissive as I was quite limited on screen time, desserts and the like- yet I roamed the forests with my friends for hours unsupervised, climbed the back of stadium bleachers, climbed over barbed wire fences, crawled over streams on fallen logs, etc.
I grew up in a city, but we spent summers in New England. I shot a bow, BB gun, and .22, all unsupervised, probably all by early teens at the latest. Melted lead pipe over a fire and poured it into molds to make toy soldiers. Wandered by myself in the woods.
That would have been in the 1950’s, and I don’t remember seeing it as unusual, aside from the fact that our summers put me somewhere those things were practical.
As a much more recent data point compared to David’s, I was born in 1990 and grew up in suburbs, and I also shot a (cross)bow, fought with sticks (and actual swords strapped into their sheaths) and melted lead and pewter into toy soldiers. While I was supervised the first few times as a <10 child, I quickly grew into doing these things on my own or in groups of other same-age children with little to no adult presence.
I didn't fire a gun on my own, but that's more because I wasn't remotely interested. My brother was, and he did (again, after receiving instruction on safety and showing he was able to follow those instructions)
We don’t want the risk of death to be zero, we ideally want the risk of getting covid to be zero. And that’s a goal that theoretically could be achieved by locking everyone up for a month and then aggressively tracing any cases that do pop up (as demonstrated by China). Whether that’s acceptable to you is a different question, but the infinite rolling lockdown exists precisely because we’re willing for the risk to be greater than zero, but not as great as it would be without lockdown.
Assuming all goes perfectly after that one month, you also have to indefinitely seal your borders (impose a 2-week quarantine on arrivals).
I’ve been wondering for a while—how did the people of Wuhan eat during all of this? And get essentials?
One major overlooked thing that is done in South Korea and a few other places is that when they put people in quarantine, they deliver or provide meals and essentials, I think at government expense. It appears that is how China was handling much of the Wuhan situation, since they were forcing so many into quarantine, where they were presumably fed by the government.
It seems to me that the kind of lockdown required to get anywhere close to eradicating this in a month, where the virus is widespread, requires exempting virtually no “essential workers,” and directly providing supplies. (This will generally mean that some regions of the country have to be open and providing resources for those locked down.)
I’ve been wondering for a while—how did the people of Wuhan eat during all of this? And get essentials?
There was an Irish fella in Wuhan who did a series of reports back for Channel 4 news in Britain, he’s a bit of a gobdaw but if you want scenes right from the city back in January, here you go.
Looks like they had no problems keeping the supermarkets stocked.
It seems like something MADD would do to promote stricter DUI laws.
I don’t want to say national goal, but definitely on some parts of twitter, reddit (r/coronavirus is the worst) and possibly in the heads of some politicians. I don’t get it – but then again, maybe it’s easy when you’re young, feel invulnerable and know you aren’t going to infect anyone you love.
I was going to say that! It sounds like the issue of having the interest group most effected dictate policy. On covid I, like Bobobob, am uncertain, but the notion that there must be an acceptable threshold of harm seems valid to me.
On the flipside, I have this theory that those who have the greatest stake in the continuation of the economy, i.e. capitalists in the old sense of “owners of capital”, are most prone to opposing the lockdown because their incentive matrix differs from those who do not own capital.
I’m not young, just shy of 60. But reasonably healthy and fit. My parents are both 90 and sheltering in New York, and I would not visit them if there was any possibility of getting them sick.
Both your parents are 90? Good genes.
Biological mom, stepfather dad. Biological dad died of cancer when I was a kid. So maybe *half* good genes…
I always find it worthwhile to consider the big picture in cases like this.
Checking the CDC’s numbers, there were 2,839,205 deaths in the U.S. in 2018. This works out to 236,600 deaths monthly.
Going by Wikipedia, the first U.S. COVID-19 deaths were recorded on 13th March, which means just over two months have passed. Based on 2018 data, we would expect ~473,200 people to die over two months, so the 100,000 COVID-19 deaths account for roughly one fifth of deaths expected over that period.
How many of those are excess deaths? I don’t have any good data. Given that risk of COVID-19 death is positively correlated with both age and co-morbidities, it’s a fair bet that some aren’t.
The headline annoys me because of what is absent: the much greater number of people who died of causes unrelated to COVID-19 during this period. Those deaths aren’t an incalculable loss, presumably.
Oh wait, no. It’s simply the NYT editors going for the low-hanging emotional blackmail. This is why we can’t have nice things.
If I could single out one villain in this whole pandemic saga, the media is it.
the much greater number of people who died of causes unrelated to COVID-19 during this period
The sixth person on the list, IIRC, was killed in a homicide. Bad computer grepping (that failed to be caught by editing) made it look like a coronavirus death.
If the NYT printed the names of the people who died from 9-11 (it wouldn’t surprise me if they did), is this also emotional blackmail since they didn’t mention all the people who died from non-terrorism-related-causes that day?
I think printing the names from 9/11 would at least have had informational value, since there were people thinking, “hey, my neighbor used to work at the World Trade Center, I wonder if he’s OK?” Devoting the entire front page of the New York Times to a thousand names of people who died of COVID-19 (grandstanding gesture or not) seems like a purely emotional gambit.
@Scott Alexander:
Yeah, probably.
Given that the ostensible purpose of newspapers is to inform the reading public, just what would you say is the informational value of printing the names of all the people who died of X?
Bobobob has a point about a singular disaster scenario like 9/11, where “did someone I know who was on site survive?” is an understandable question. Even then, I’m not at all certain the NYT front page is the best place for disseminating such information.
In the case of “ill person died”, there’s simply no excuse. How many patients died in your hospital during your internship? How many of those made the NYT front page? How many should have?
Yeah. If it’s on the front page, it’s there to make a point. You might agree or disagree with the point, but you can’t argue that it’s just disseminating the information.
You mean the NYT that ran editorials like ‘An Iraq War Won’t Destabilize the Mideast’?
@Lambert
This is arguably true, but in a misleading fashion. There is indeed an op-ed with that title by Reuel Marc Gerecht, at the time (as far as I can tell, his bio is unclear on timing) a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. There is a difference between an op-ed, intended to allow a broad range of views to be published and an editorial, intended to convey the opinion of the editorial board.
The only editorial my quick search could find on the topic in 2002 says:
“It is time for Mr. Bush to level with the nation about his intentions and to talk candidly about why he feels military action against Iraq may soon be necessary, and what the goals, costs and potential consequences of a war would be.”
And:
“Military victory in Iraq would leave Washington temporarily responsible for guiding the future of a major Arab oil-producing country in the heart of the Middle East. The first challenge would be preventing Iraq’s dissolution. The country’s volatile mix of Shiites and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds has been held together only by brute force. A splintered Iraq would tempt Iran, frighten Turkey and perhaps lead to regional war. Remaking Iraq through prolonged American military occupation, on the model of postwar Germany, seems unrealistic. Yet too rapid an American pullout could allow a new strongman to emerge, rearm and seek revenge.”
Consider some other lists they could have published instead:
“Those who have died in NY nursing homes from COVID” (and then maybe some articles about how Cuomo sent COVID-positive patients into the nursing homes. Mention how he helpfully sent body-bags along with them!)
“Those who died in NY from COVID before subways cleanings were instituted” (they didn’t start that until this month!)
“Those who have died from opioids” (not quite the annual death toll of COVID, but close, recurring, and hits a much younger population)
All of these wold be true lists. All of them are hoping to weaponize the empathy circuits of your brains to turn them toward a specific outcome. Care about this specific thing, they say, or you’re not a good person.
Do you recall, a while ago, how some of us, myself included, reacted negatively when you expressed concern about Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs? I look at unit of caring’s post about that, and I see that mistreatment of Muslims disturbs them in the much that same way that massacres of Christians don’t. That demand that people care on cue, selectively, is what is so maddening. I believe such people are sincere when they care on cue, but most others just round it off to insincerity, because it’s functionally equivalent.
Isn’t this just the dictionary definition of whataboutism? How dare you complain about when there’s that you’re not complaining about.
I’m not sure whataboutism is actually invalid.
My wife had a boss a while back who, in their first meeting, when on at length about how important it was to be on time to meetings, as a matter of respect. After that, he was rarely on time to their one-on-ones. What message did that send?
If I declare that I care deeply about corruption in government, but somehow only ever talk about instances where Democrats were corrupt, what message have I sent? Do you conclude that I at least care 50% more about corruption than the guy who doesn’t talk about it, or do you conclude that I don’t really care about corruption at all, except as a club to beat the other side with?
If I make a big show of caring qua caring, but conspicuously avoid any of the readily available cases where I could care about people like you, the actual message sent is that I don’t care about you.
Whataboutism is IMHO not that helpful of a concept because it requires mind reading the speaker.
– If I complain that somebody is outraged about the treatment of Purpletonians while ignoring the ongoing mistreatment of Violetonians (or even mistreating Violetonians themselves!), I might:
1) Be arguing that the pro-Purpletonian cause is an isolated demand for rigor, and that my preferred solution is preferable when you consider the big picture.
2) Actually be upset about the treatment of Violetonians and want to draw attention to their cause.
3) Just be concerned that the speaker is a big hypocrite.
I don’t see how calling my response “whataboutism” is helpful at all.
Steelmanning the whataboutism argument, I guess someone is saying something like: “I don’t believe J Mann really cares about Violetonians, and you have to start somewhere, so him raising Violetonians is just derailing the conversation” but (a) how does this steel person know what I think and (b) this is going to cause them to ignore a lot of potentionally useful points about inconsistency or hypocrisy. If my argument is wrong because Violetonians deserve their abuse, or that your Purpletonian advocacy program is part of a larger strategy that will lift boats of all shades, then say that, and then you’ve enagaged with a challenging argument.
If you say “whataboutism,” you probably haven’t even thought about why the argument is challenging.
The NYTimes has been doing a lot to push the opioid story in the past few months and years. Obviously this is something where you *don’t* want to publish the names though, because these are highly stigmatized deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/opioid-epidemic
In case anyone was concerned, Voiletonians are allied to the Purpletonians, and neither group considers itself particularly mistreated 😉
@Purplehermann – LOL!
Listing names is IMHO advocacy and not news. (I wouldn’t call it blackmail.) If NPR decided they were going to have a feature every week where they read off the names of people who died in motorcycle accidents or who were killed by immigrants or whatever, I think we would understand it to be advocacy.
I guess the counter case is that it’s just a very specialized USA Today chart, but a chart would need to have comparison bars with the names of people who died from other causes.
Years ago, there was a news station that ended every broadcast with a list of names of soldiers killed in Iraq.
Didn’t some conservative site do something like this with the names of citizens killed by illegal immigrants?
This is exactly where I stand on this subject. (I was going to post the same thing about the normal death rate in the US, too.)
This is a somewhat extraordinary claim. The urge to memorialize events where lots of people died does not seem confined to situations where there is a policy disagreement about the response. Did the New Zealand government build a memorial to blackmail people into increased earthquake preparedness? Did Reagan give the challenger speech to evangelize thermal testing of o-rings? Listing people’s names is about as neutral and common a memorial as you can get.
Given that the shelf-life of a daily’s front page is – quite famously – one day “memorial” doesn’t seem to be a very appropriate term.
Leaving that aside, to memorialize a person or event is always a political choice, but doubly so in this case.
The examples you quote were one-off extraordinary events. More people die on the roads on an average day than died in the Challenger. Does the President address all of those? With Challenger, the matter is at least understandable in that Challenger was the U.S. Government’s responsibility. It’s pretty much the President’s duty to step up and say something when a high-profile government project goes horribly wrong.
I am unfamiliar with the New Zealand example. How many earthquakes does New Zealand get? What makes this one special?
COVID-19 is simply a specific case of “sick people sometimes die”, so we need to explain why we care about this particular instance and not all of the other ones. It doesn’t appear considerably more deadly nor infectious than a bunch of other diseases we’re dealing with. Just the fact that we can begin to consider such a “memorial” should be sufficient evidence of this (if it were as deadly as the early models made it out to be, there’d be too many bodies by now).
Even if we assume that some memorials can be politically neutral, it does not follow that all memorials are, much less this one.
Hmmm, let’s check the editorial: The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do Right Now. What could that possibly be?
One of the ways you can tell that the response to the coronavirus is based on mass hysteria more than logic, is that if the response is justified here, then all sorts of horrible things become justified under the same rationale.
Like mandatory exercise programs, or state control of people’s diets. Or banning smoking, alcohol, drugs. Making the speed limit 40mph. Banning risky activities like motorcycles, and perceived risky activities like skydiving. Tracking collars. Whatever horrible distopian ‘for your own good’ thing you can come up with, you’d have to go pretty far before it crosses a line we haven’t just crossed here.
I thought that was the point.
I see the current situation not so much as something that may lead us to further bad things down the line, but rather the culmination of a many-year effort to bring such a state about. This year’s pandemic response is the first time it really worked.
Of course it’s going to be used as justification for other things. It’s already happening. Proposals for the “new normal” are a dime a dozen and entirely predictable because they all inexplicably happen to be the proposing party’s hobby horse.
I guess I’m not seeing how any of those things compare. Some of those government policies might plausibly save 20,000 lives a year at the most extreme. But saving 20,000 lives from covid just takes a little bit more handwashing. The activities that have been taken so far have clearly saved at least several hundred thousand lives, unless people think that they were completely ineffective.
Covid is a novel disease that went from causing 0 deaths to being one of the leading causes of death. That certainly seems like a one-off extraordinary event. Comparable pandemics seems to happen around once every 50-100 years. It seems newsworthy to me. And people who die in newsworthy events have always gotten more than ‘their share’ of public remembrance.
And yet almost every newspaper has an obituary section. That, yes, covers people who die of the flu or heart disease or cancer. They’re sometimes even called ‘In memoriam’. It was also memorial day weekend, a holiday dedicated to memorializing people who died. Humans really like talking about dead people.
There’s a bit of motte and bailey between “not politically neutral” and “simply emotional blackmail”. Nothing in a major newspaper is ever likely to be perfectly politically neutral. You don’t have to assume that everything is in good faith, but stating that it’s not in good faith requires some amount of justification.
@keaswaran
Think of the long-term consequences! If the government can make you wash your hands today, tomorrow it might require you to wear a seatbelt. And before you notice, shitting on streets will become illegal, and there will probably be government regulations about bathrooms. This is how we lose liberty, step by step.
keaswaran,
The obesity epidemic kills 300,000 people a year at least according to google. Making it illegal to be obese could save 300,000 people a year, cost almost nothing compared to the covid response. You could do it by mandating a weight check when you get your driver’s license renewed, and if you don’t qualify, you are banned from restaurants and grocery stores and you get assigned a diet officer who will control your diet for you, with delivered groceries and regular checkups. For the worst cases we can mandate time on a government subsidized treadmill.
This would be orders of magnitude cheaper to implement and doesn’t cross any new freedom lines. And the benefits are a lot more clear: instead of only theoretically saving lives if a vaccine comes out before everyone is infected anyway, we would definitely be saving lives. We might even save money if it relieves some burden on our health care system.
That is just one example, and one that many people with an authoritarian bent would love to see.
If you think the outcome of actually implementing that policy would fall into the “cost almost nothing” category, you’re smoking the really good stuff.
Without doing the math, I think that compared to the COVID response it would be less than 1/100th the cost per life saved.
Do the math. I’d be interested. And amazed.
I figure that the program would be similar to parole and probation. Which from here costs 1300 per year per person for probation and 2800 per year per parollee. A parole officer typically handles 100+ cases with overworked parole officers taking up to 300. So that makes sense, about $195k to $420k per year per parole officer, which allows for a good salary and lots of program overhead and the usual adminstrative bloat.
There are, however, 70 million obese people in the US. Sweet jesus. Let’s assume we need to spend $2000 per obese person per year, halfway between parolee and probationee cost. That’s 140 billion dollars per year. And a workforce of 466k obesity officers.
Now the savings: let’s say we have a 2/3 success rate. From CDC, obesity related costs in 2020 dollars are 181 billion per year. If we can reduce that by 2/3rds that’s a savings of 120 billion per year.
And, because this analysis is going to be very sensitive to the success rate, let’s try a 15% success rate as well: that’s a savings of 27 billion in health care costs and productivity.
So our cost if we have 66% success is 20 billion dollars, and if we have 15% success is 113 billion dollars. Lives saved are 200,000 in the first case, for $100,000 per life. In the utter failure scenario, $2.5 million per life.
Now for COVID:
The choice here is whether to use the worst case scenario numbers from Imperial College in March, or to use the better numbers that we have with hindsight. Since we are still choosing today to do lockdowns, and I’m complaining today, I’ll use hindsight adjusted numbers.
CDC now estimates IFR at .3%, and it is clear that we don’t need lockdowns to prevent hospitals from being overrun in most cases. If 70% of the population gets infected that’s 700k deaths. Lockdowns only prevent infections if they are held until a vaccine or treatment is available, so how many deaths will lockdowns prevent here? Less than a hundred thousand to be sure, maybe none? Let’s move on.
So costs of the lockdown early on were estimated here: at 16.5 trillion, given that the lockdowns were only going for a short while and recovery started pretty soon. That’s with -2% GDP for 2020 with no lockdowns or controls, and -6.1% GDP for 2020 with lockdowns. Goldman Sachs has adjusted their GDP estimate to -6.5% so it will be more than 16.5 trillion but I’m not going to do the math again.
100,000 lives saved by the lockdowns, which is probably way too high estimate, for a cost of 16.5 trillion is 165 million per life saved. If we use 500,000 lives saved (assuming it would have been 700k deaths, and we will only have 200k deaths thanks to our great leadership) brings that to 33 million per life saved.
So in the realistic scenario for each, cost per life saved is 2.5 million vs. 165+ million. In the optimistic scenario for each, it is 100,000 vs. 33 million per life saved.
Shouldn’t the cost for the obesity program be lower, to account for the people who are deterred from being obese by the fact that it is now illegal? The prospect of having a government weight control officer hounding you sounds motivating as hell.
Les,
Can I copy-paste that and post it on social media? Will either give you credit or not, depending on what you desire.
a. Note that nobody has a 2/3 success rate in treating obesity for anything short of surgery.
b. I know it’s fun to wave away difficulties with “yeah, but we’ll mean it and really get the job done,” but that trick rarely works.
c. Your program will only survive to the next election, at which point you and your political party will all be voted out of office, and will be permanently unelectable. I don’t think that’s remotely true for Covid-associated restrictions.
More generally, we’ve all been around for awhile, so one more exercise in cost-benefit accounting where you choose every parameter to maximize the costs of the option you don’t like and the benefits of the option you’re comparing it with aren’t actually all that convincing.
Thanks for giving numbers. I’m going to criticize them, but it’s much better to have numbers to criticize that to just shout at clouds.
So costs of the lockdown early on were estimated here: at 16.5 trillion, given that the lockdowns were only going for a short while and recovery started pretty soon.
The US GDP is $20.5 trillion a year. We’ve wiped out 3/4 of the US economy this year? Something is off there.
And I guess, is that compared to the economy that wouldn’t have been hurt just by people normally reacting to a virus overwhelming various hospital systems and taking out meat-packing plants and nursing homes?
100,000 lives saved by the lockdowns, which is probably way too high estimate,
This one is tougher to know, but saying “we are just delaying most deaths, not stopping them” assumes a bunch of things we don’t know. 700K deaths [1] was “people don’t react at all” figure, but if I wasn’t using “people don’t react at all” as our counterfactual for the economy I can’t use it here, either. So I guess you are thinking, like, 250K total deaths with lockdown, and 350K total deaths with just people naturally backing off on their own?
We can at least put a maximum, for now, on lives saved via lockdown: 600K.
(If we’re discussing “was this a good idea or not” that “600K” wasn’t necessarily knowable a few months ago. Some data out of China suggested the IFR could be over 2%. We also bought ourselves time to learn better treatment regimes.)
@albatross11,
a. I did also include 15% success rate and called it the realistic rate
c. The political impossibility of the thing is the whole point! It would be absolutely insane to propose this because it would never be accepted by anybody.
Even using the optimistic scenario for lockdowns and the realistic scenario for obesity (15% success) the obesity response is still 1/9th of the cost per life saved (to say nothing of quality of life).
@Edward Scizorhands,
I was going to add a bunch of caveats in there because without a well defined question here it is hard to stick as close to an apples-to-apples comparison. What exactly are we comparing? The decision to keep lockdowns going today? Whether we can rightfully call the original response mass hysteria? Whether we can call the current attitudes and decisions being made today mass hysteria?
If we use that last one, we get to use CDCs .3% in our death calculations. But then, the economic impact will be all wrong because we have to use today as a decision point. And there’s no way I can calculate that.
So if we use “can we rightfully call the original response mass hysteria?” we have to use the original 1MM deaths that Niall Ferguson predicted, even though it assumes no voluntary social distancing or other government measures. But is that work, or does the Niall Ferguson report count as part of the mass hysteria because it should not have made that assumption?
I’ll just let that go for now.
The paper that came from is here: The Benefits and Costs of Using Social Distancing to Flatten the Curve for COVID-19. It was linked in one of Scott’s posts and I critiqued it there. Since that critique they have revised the paper incorporating the updated Goldman Sachs GDP estimate of -6.2% over -3.8%. Somehow they still conclude a +5 trillion benefit to lockdowns though (using 10MM per life saved value). They’ve also incorporated a lot of caveats about their results, and removed all the graphs.
The report finds that with 1.24MM lives saved by lockdowns:
To your GDP question, the report finds the net present value of the losses with lockdowns as 13.7 trillion because it takes time to recover. Unclear if that is with the -6.2% or -3.8% original estimates. (the estimate from GS now is -6.5%) Since the end conclusion was the same then something else must have changed somewhere.
They assume -2.0% GDP with no lockdowns.
@Matt M,
That’s fine with me but please no credit. Might be a good idea to change the cost of the lockdowns to 7.25 trillion to match that report above since that is more robust than my ramblings.
I was completely with you until the last four sentences. If 20% of all deaths in a month are due to a cause of death that literally didn’t exist four months ago, then that absolutely deserves its own very special recognition. You seem to be thinking that 20% of deaths is a small number, while I’m thinking that 20% of deaths is a very large number.
I’ve had this concern from the beginning.
FWIW, I don’t think the people making the decisions have a goal of zero deaths; I think they are afraid to admit that some amount of deaths are acceptable, let alone explain what amount they have in mind.
There was – theoretically at least – the possibility of eradictating the disease, as was done with e.g. SARS, if the whole world had done in Jan/Feb what it instead did in March/April, and if it had done so without holdouts like Brazil. By the time we actually locked down, that possibility was gone, though we didn’t yet know just how much community spread there had already been. The only reasonable goal was to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Since then, it looks like there are many people in favour of reducing the total deaths by keeping the rate of infection low enough that it doesn’t make it through all/most of the population before an effective vaccine is developed. I’m not a virologist, but I’ve never believed that was possible; there’s just too much work that has to be done outside of isolation bubbles in order to keep people fed and otherwise healthy that long.
That leaves isolating (or self-isolating) the extremely vulnerable. On the one hand, we’ve already dropped the ball on that – for every David Friedman, there are several folks in long term care facilities, and handling those facilities has been badly botched just about everywhere. In many jurisdictions, actively harmful policies were pursued with regard to such facilities well after a prudent person would have considered them too risky, though they were sometimes stopped after they were proven to be actively making things worse. And on the other hand, solitary confinement is regarded as a severe punishment for a reason – people living alone aren’t in good shape even after the amount of lockdown we’ve already experienced.
On the other hand, I appreciate the drumbeat pointing out that even babies can die from Covid-19. I’ve seen too many people calculating that the deaths of older people don’t really matter, and I’m old enough to identify with those who would be sacrificed to the “common good” in those net.commentors’ vision of a desirable response.
Also, of course, the news is probably just “man bites dog” – grandfather dies of covid-19 -> not newsworthy, unless he’s famous for some other reason. Baby girl dies -> very newsworthy, since it doesn’t happen often.
+1
It’s hard to articulate this, but I believe there is just so much that is at risk of falling apart in ways that we can’t really see. The conditions required to support what seem like sensible enough steps are likely unsustainable, and we won’t see it until it’s too late.
Kind of related to this is the Midland Dam thing. It’s easy to see situations where impending problems go overlooked in the pandemic because nobody is at a certain warehouse or whatever, or a certain machine that requires constant use or maintenance sits idle and then malfunctions when turned on. But even ignoring that possibility–I know the dam’s problems long pre-dated this issue–imagine the situation of the people in that area. They have been staying home, probably suffering some level of economic damage, in the hope of a vaccine. Now, overnight, the social distancing efforts of thousands of people have become untenable, as they have to go to shelters or move in with elderly relatives. They are now in much worse economic shape, with little room to maneuver and a pretty unpredictable future. Relying on friends and family is especially difficult — many of them are economically distressed. People are being placed into a vulnerable position, which is manageable if nothing else happens and it is short-term. But it probably isn’t very short-term, and if so, we absolutely can’t count on nothing else happening.
So celebrate this NYT front page for printing ages and not cherry-picking.
If it bleeds, it leads.
It doesn’t have to be zero, it just has to be enough to flip the risk from “Intolerably Dangerous” to “Completely Safe”. That’s well above zero, but it’s a highly subjective sliding scale rather than a fixed number.
Unfortunately, one of the subjective factors is “how much would it cost us to make this Completely Safe, if we decide it isn’t so already?”. That’s why e.g. automobiles are Completely Safe so long as not driven while drunk, even though things with much smaller body counts are Intolerably Dangerous. And right now, part of the cost of putting COVID-19 in the “Completely Safe” category is giving up a culture-war cudgel that Blue Tribe can use to bash Red Tribe as being lethally dangerous uncaring idiots.
It would work a lot better if there were a “Manageable Risk” category between the two, but that’s more of a Red Tribe thing. And Black and Brown tribes, of course, from long experience being stuck dealing with shit that was no way near “Completely Safe”.
Yes, this is what I want. It’s not that COVID-19 isn’t dangerous, but it’s a Category 3 plague and we’re doing the Category 4 response. The correct answer is not the Category 2 response, but the Category 3 response.
Why is “manageable risk” a Red Tribe thing? Aren’t the Red Tribe the ones who say “abstinence only” on sex ed because premarital sex is an intolerable risk? While Blue Tribe is all about harm reduction on things like sex and drugs. (Given the weak association of greater lockdown with Blue and loosening with Red, I think it’s a useful tribal scrambler to draw direct analogies with the responses of the two tribes to the HIV pandemic that, by the way, is still going on, even though we’re now in a later stage with good treatments and a good understanding of pharmaceutical and barrier method prophylaxis.)
That’s a moral purity issue, not a pragmatic safety issue, and you know it. Trying to predict Red Tribe risk mitigation behavior in general from this is not going to work, and the gotcha-points from exposing Red Tribe hypocrisy in this are aren’t going to be worth much here.
Blue Tribe has already categorized all of these things as “Perfectly Safe” in the normal sense of the term. Nobody says “marijuana can kill you, but if you follow these precautions you can use it safely within limits”, and I’ve lost track of the number of Blue Tribers who have in all seriously assured me that HIV is no big deal now that it just means you have to take some different drugs all the time. Condoms and “safe sex”, sure, but I think that’s now more about not accidentally creating life than accidentally ending it – and, again, is assumed to make sex Perfectly Safe(tm), not acceptably risky.
Risk mitigation is a Red and Black and Brown tribe thing because it is Red and Black and Brown tribes that work all the jobs that have a significant mortality rate, and Red tribe that broadly partakes of hobbies like off-roading and hunting.
Are you so certain these are entirely distinct categories? Thinking about your examples of sex and drugs, it seems to me that while these can be seen as pragmatic safety issues, human nature tends to gravitate towards all-or-nothing deontologies. We’re just really bad at fractions and risk management, and prefer to have clear proscriptions or prescriptions – at which point the issue devolves into moral purity.
More or less what you wrote upthread.
Less of this, please? I think there is plenty of blue tribe sentiment that drugs are undesirable but not so bad that prohibition causes more harm than good.
Why are you talking about marijuana? Opioids is the relevant thing to be talking about here, and again it’s clear that things like needle-exchanges are Blue Tribe ideas. I know you have *said* on several occasions that the Blue Tribe doesn’t understand risk mitigation, but I don’t understand what the evidence is, other than pointing to a few kinds of risk where Red Tribe people are more likely to understand mitigation. Why isn’t the default assumption that everyone is bad at understanding mitigation of risks that are unfamiliar, and classify most things as “perfectly safe” or “perfectly dangerous”, but *everyone* has the ability to get better about this when it intersects an issue they care more about.
Undesirable, yes, but mostly in the sense of impeding people from accomplishing better things. Lethally dangerous, I almost never see from Blue sources except in the contexts of A: only because the Drug Warriors stop us from buying the good stuff and/or B: opioids killing those Red Tribe losers, whose lives we nonetheless feel obligated to protect. Not the risk-management version of “yes, this might kill you even if you do everything right, but with the proper precautions it’s worth the risk”.
As keaswaran points out, things like needle exchanges and safe injection sites are reasonably popular among blue tribe; I think almost every blue triber I know believes both that opioids are incredibly dangerous and also that there are ways to mitigate the danger that should be supported.
I think you need to back this up with more than your anecdotal impression of blue sources; when I search “Vox opioid epidemic” I get articles like this from the bluest of blue sources that admits that prohibition raises the cost of various drugs, while also discussing the value of addiction treatment, safe injection sites, and other possible ways of mitigating drug addiction. I don’t see any sneering at red tribe losers in it, either.
I tried again with another blue sources, NPR, and got this, which sympathizes with rural populations who genuinely need something to help manage their pain, and who don’t have good access to addiction services.
So, I don’t think anyone should be prepared to accept your sweeping generalizations based on your own assessment of “what you never see”.
Needle exchanges are not risk mitigation, they are treatment for addicts. Completely avoiding something entirely is not “risk mitigation” in the sense JS is using it anymore than not drinking bleach is “risk mitigation.”
So here’s what it means: It means that I am going out on to the factory floor, which is dangerous. The Guidance Counselor can’t make it safe. Neither can Barrack Obama or his army of OSHA inspectors. It’s dangerous. You need to take certain precautions and not be an idiot. It’s not completely safe and it never will be completely safe, and if you refuse to use the brain God gave you, you’re going to get hurt and it’s your goddam fault, and I will not be feel bad for you.
Blue Tribe is much more “wrap everything in bubble wrap and assert that it’s 100% safe.” I wouldn’t say it is totally devoid of risk management: Blue Tribe will still tell you not to drink too much or you will get liver damage, and definitely don’t drink and drive, and I still remember the anti-STD messaging for safe sex.
But, yeah, the general attitude is that the world is a playground. The Vox article is pretty pointless, because it’s leaving out recreational drugs like MDMA and marijuana. Perfectly safe, enjoy the world Blue Tribe Children.
John:
I think the problem we’re running into is that a lot of blue-tribers, particularly media-class types, have adopted a moralistic, purity-taboo version of C19 response. And honestly this is probably because moral outrage at the outgroup is a lot more fun than trying to understand epidemiological models or dynamics of the spread of droplet-borne virus or any of that other boring confusing stuff with big words and math. Even people I know who are capable of handling the boring big-words-and-math discussion often seem to fall back into outgroup-bashing.
I think I broadly agree with Conrad here. I think the lockdowns were a good first reaction, especially in places where we knew there was a lot of community spread. People were responding to an immediate crisis, and the best thing they could think to do was hit the panic button. But they could never be more than a quick emergency response–both the economy and lots of people will start to fall apart if we do that too long. We need to transition to smarter things that still try to slow the spread of the virus until we can either get better treatments or a vaccine, and that are consistent with the size of the threat.
It seems to me that our political process and our media are supremely bad at the kind of discussions and weighing-of-risks that we need to make sensible policies here.
I don’t understand this at all: one of the risks of needle drugs is the possibility of contracting various diseases that are shared by bodily fluids. Another risk is the possibility of overdosing. Setting up needle exchanges and safe injection sites seems to me exactly a risk mitigation strategy: “we can’t stop you from doing this harmful thing, nor can we make it completely safe, but here is a program that can at least moderate some of the worst risks”.
I don’t see how needle exchange is treatment for addiction, when it doesn’t make any attempt to, you know, treat the underlying addiction.
As to Vox leaving out marijuana: Googling “Vox marijuana” returned this as the second link; I also found this and this on the first page.
Both you and John are long on assertion and short on evidence. I will free concede that a handful of Vox articles doesn’t decide the matter, but it’s a lot better than the literally no evidence whatsoever you and John have given for the view that blue tribe views the world as a “playground”. Plenty of blue tribe people drive to work, but wear their seatbelts; ski but wear helmets; drink but in moderation; have sex but wear condoms; etc. etc. etc.
The idea that only one political community is familiar with the idea that some things are inherently dangerous, and you need to take precautions even if you can’t make them totally safe, strikes me as requiring a lot more support than just repeated evidence-free assertion.
@Eugene, keaswaran:
In hindsight, I was remiss in not explaining what I mean by “risk mitigation” means, before asserting that Blue Tribe doesn’t generally do it. Risk mitigation is a term of art in my field, but I should not have assumed it was broadly understood.
Risk mitigation, is an attempt to reduce the risk of an activity without reducing the activity itself. Or, for imperfect real-world implementations, with the smallest practical reduction in the base activity so as to get the best possible cost:benefit ratio. It implies that the base activity is sufficiently beneficial that you will and ought to do it in spite of the risk, but don’t want the risk to be any higher than it has to be to achieve the benefit.
It is not an attempt to eliminate risky behavior, even if you hedge your bets by focusing on the most-risky versions first and acknowledge that you’ll never get them all. If your plan is to first get rid of the extra-risky shared-needle drug abuse, and then drive down the remaining drug abuse to zero if you can and to the lowest possible value if you can’t, then that’s not a risk mitigation plan – or at least it’s a highly noncentral one.
Risk mitigation, is taking a hunter-safety course and then going out into the woods with a loaded gun and the intent to shoot and kill something. It’s making sure your shirt is tight-fitted and tucked in, and then going out to run a combine that might rip off your arm anyway even though you could just learn to code instead.
In both of Eugene’s cited examples, the focus is on types of drug abuse that the authors believe should ideally not happen at all. The second at least allows that some use of opioids might be necessary for pain management, but at every step indicates that this is a last resort, and implies that if opioids were used only as part of appropriate pain-management programs the risk would be negligible (which, FWIW, I think is true). The risk focus is on opioid “abuse”, which the authors would like to see driven to zero.
Which is why I talk about e.g. marijuana. Blue Tribe clearly believes that at least some of its members should use marijuana, because look – real medical benefits here. Or maybe LSD because of the spiritual benefits. But it doesn’t say “…even though it could kill you”; virtually all of the messaging paints appropriate marijuana/LSD/etc use as having negligible mortality risk. To Blue Tribe, some recreational drug use is seen as Perfectly Safe, the rest as Intolerably Dangerous.
What is missing in Blue Tribe, is pretty much the entire middle-ground category of things that have a significant chance of killing innocent people, that will have a significant chance of killing innocent people even when we’ve mitigated the risk as best we can, but that Blue Tribe believes that it’s members should do anyway because it’s worth the risk.
Hi John,
Thanks for the response. I still think you’re asserting too much: most blue tribers I know do not want to get rid of driving, but do think wearing seatbelts, not drinking while driving, etc., are good ways to make a dangerous but still desirable activity a little bit safer. They feel the same way about wearing helmets while doing any number of enjoyable but potentially dangerous activities, like riding motorcycles or skiing.
It’s true that the negligible mortality risks of marijuana play a large role in justifying legalization, but these are usually compared to the rather higher risks of alcohol–and yet few blue tribers support prohibition these days.
You’re probably right about the most dangerous occupations being more conservative, but I’m much less convinced in the case of hobbies: I can’t find any lists of dangerous hobbies that look particularly rigorous, but I don’t see hunting on any of the ones I can find. I do see mountain climbing, hang gliding, diving, surfing–none of which I stereotype as being more associated to one tribe than another. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I think the burden of proof falls on people making sweeping generalizations about different tribes to go digging up statistics on the partisan lean of surfers, or whatever.
Finally, I think you’re cheating a little bit to say that the opioid example doesn’t count because while no one in blue tribe wants to get rid of opioid use, they do want to get rid of opioid abuse. If you just get to create a whole new activity for “particularly risky use of an otherwise acceptable activity”, why isn’t this generalizable? Why don’t I get to define “hunting without having taken a hunting safety course” as “hunting abuse” or something like it, and then say that all those hunters who you claim are mitigating hunting risk are actually doing no such thing: they are trying to completely wipe out “hunting abuse”?
I don’t see a principled reason to draw the distinction you do.
Okay, just to make it clear:
1. I am not saying that Blue Tribe has no risk aversion whatsoever.
2. Yeah, sure long on assertion, I’m fine with it, but:
3. You aren’t grokking this concept and it’s pretty clear you are not grokking this concept, which is why I am okay sticking to my prior that Blue Tribe does not grok this concept.
The Blue Tribe answer to heroin is not “sure, heroin is fun, just make sure to use clean needles.” It’s “drinking heroin is like drinking bleach, don’t do it.”
The closest you can get to risk mitigation is “sure, casual sex is fun, just make sure to wear a condom.” But this still isn’t anything compared to:
“Yes, working on an oil platform makes you a lot of money. But make sure you take the proper precautions or you are going to get everyone killed.”
Few people jump into a car and think they are about to pilot a multi-ton death machine at speeds far beyond what evolution has prepared them for. They jump into a car, slap on a seat-belt, and then turn on metaphorical auto-pilot (and increasingly actual auto-pilot) because the process has been certified Perfectly Safe.
This is not the attitude you want to bring to a table saw.
Similarly, I cannot speak for everyone on casual sex, but I’m pretty sure most guys are not thinking “I am about stick my dick near a metaphorical table saw.”
The closest analogues would probably be healthcare jobs and pregnant mothers.
The blue tribe answer to heroin is: “I think it’s like drinking bleach, but you seem to think it’s fun, so at least use clean needles”. This is not risk management on an individual level, certainly, but I think it counts at a societal level.
Few people think this way because they have already gone through driving training courses, and have tons of experience. Everyone understands that cars are multi-ton death machines when it’s snowing out, or you’re driving on a narrow one-lane road on the side of a mountain with no guard rail, or whatever. And everyone understands that driving without attention, or driving tired, or driving drunk are dangerous precisely because these are the circumstances in which it’s particularly unsafe to be behind the wheel of a multi-ton death machine. I recently completed a drive across about 3000 km of the Trans-Canada Highway. I drove through the Rocky Mountains in a snowstorm, and drove long hours at night on one-lane roads with poor lighting in the midst of forest. I assure you I did not think what I was doing was Perfectly Safe.
What I did do was drive slowly, keep my attention very carefully on the road, and make sure to stop if I felt too tired. I await your explanation for why actually, this too, and the countless similar trips blue tribers undertake doesn’t really count.
I genuinely do not see the difference between your oil rig example and “sure driving is fun and convenient, but pay attention and wear a seatbelt and don’t go too fast or you’re going to kill everyone”.
Or, “this powersaw is dangerous, but useful: I better wear goggles, be careful with my fingers, and not have any loose material that can get caught”. As far as I can tell, people operating power saws use similar amounts of caution and attention as people driving in non-ideal conditions. What’s more, plenty of blue tribers in fact…own power saws! And use them!
I understand your point clearly. What I don’t do is agree with it. I think you are setting things up so that any dangerous activity blue tribers engage in, you get to declare that they actually don’t think it’s really dangerous, while never doing the same for any comparable activity you assign to red tribers.
John Schilling:
One obvious example of risk mitigation that seems mostly blue-tribe to me is helmet laws for motorcycles and bicycles. This is exactly what you’re talking about, right? You still do the thing you love (riding a bike or motorcycle) but you have to wear a helmet to make it a little less risky.
I think you’re strawmanning here. As an example, here is a paragraph from Planned Parenthood, which is about the most blue of public organizations you can imagine:
This seems to me to be exactly what you’re talking about with risk mitigation. You’ve decided to take a risk in order to have some fun, so here are ways to mitigate the risk while still having the fun.
ETA: I think when you try to apply risk mitigation to some broadly disapproved behavior at a social level, you end up with harm reduction poilicies. As best I can tell, these are mostly supported by a subset of blue-tribers and by many/most gray-tribers, with very little red-tribe support.
It’s much closer, and a better example than any of the drug or sex ones. But…
If we’re talking helmet laws, then it’s not you still doing the thing you love; it’s other people still doing the thing you love. You were presumably doing the same thing the same way, with the helmet, before the law was passed.
Implicit in risk mitigation is understanding that the cost:benefit analysis involves competing values and so won’t have the same answer for everyone. The fact that you’re even thinking about making it a law, means you know full well there are people who won’t do this thing if you just ask them and explain the risks. For whatever reason, they consider riding a bicycle without a helmet to be a more rewarding experience than riding a bicycle with a helmet.
If you inform these people of the risks and of the quantifiable offsetting costs (price of the helmet, reduction in peripheral vision), then say “now you’ll have to assess the non-quantifiable costs like comfort yourself, and we hope you will make a sensibly informed decision regarding helmet use”, then you grok risk mitigation. If you make it a law that everybody has to wear a helmet, then I kind of suspect that you’re trying to make riding close enough to “Completely Safe” that you can mentally round to zero and ignore the issue, and I’m quite sure that you’re putting helmetless riding in the “Absolutely Intolerably Dangerous” category.
I’m pretty sure most of the red-tribe-heavy dangerous jobs you’re talking about require using the protective equipment, and you’ll get in trouble with your boss for *not* wearing it.
Really, there are plenty of people who push a “perfectly safe/perfectly unsafe” narrative about things, but I don’t think the split is especially along red tribe/blue tribe lines, except inasmuch as most of the media are both blue-tribe and innumerate so they often push this kind of narrative. But the people who support safer sex and morning after pills and harm-reduction policies w.r.t. drug use are mostly blue-tribe, and they very clearly understand that we’re talking about gradations of safety for different activities. Similarly, I’d say that skiing and mountain climbing and adventure tourism are pretty blue-tribe-adjacent and yet have substantial risk of injury, which you accept and mitigate as part of the package.
I feel like there’s some other axis of political/social thought here that better describes this split. My best guess is that it has something to do with puritanism as applied to risk instead of to morality. But also with a certain flavor of activism which finds it more productive to focus on absolute statements instead of risk-mitigation. It seems to me that a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the war on terror in the Bush years (largely but not entirely from the red tribe) had a lot of this flavor (“fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” is an example), even though the sophisticated thinkers of both tribes fully understood that the best we could do would be to mitigate the risks of terrorists hijacking or bombing a plane, setting off a bomb in the US, etc.
I think Blue Tribe vs Red Tribe is probably a good split because Blue Tribe mostly lives in urbane, civilized, sanitized existence and makes efforts to continue to make it so. There are still Blue Tribers that do thrill-seeking stuff, but most Blue Tribers are not mountain climbers (I don’t know any).
However I will say a lot of Red Tribers (and adjacent Brown and Black Tribers) are just complete idiots when it comes to risk, exposing themselves to unnecessary danger that can be mitigated rather easily.
Winter driving might be a good example. Blue Tribe wants more public transit and work from home. Red Tribe wants to do donuts and doesn’t want to pay to plow the roads. Blue Tribe TEENAGERS and other young men might also want to do donuts: my Dad, sporting the same Dale Earnhardt hat he’s worn the last 30 years, is going out to do donuts. I work from home.
Very much agree with your general points. Whatever we should be doing about COVID-19, I am very bothered by the dynamic you describe. It seems horrifically oblivious to reality:
Right before this started, an acquaintance lost a college-aged relative to cancer. We keep pretending like COVID-19 is some new horror show giving people what they don’t deserve. It may be a greatly increased threat for some groups, but the occasional 30-year-old dying is both awful and not at all a new thing. 30-year-olds get cancer and other horrific conditions all the time. Some people get a raw deal. This isn’t a preventable thing. We should acknowledge this. We should also acknowledge that every day, people watch loved ones of all ages die painful deaths of cancer and other diseases, which often strike healthy people seemingly out of nowhere. Ignoring this reality, treating it as a matter of choice and beyond comprehension, just disturbs me on many levels, even if the response will be that they’re only trying to stop the same from happening to others. The implicit or sometimes even explicit question in much of the discussion is: “Stop being complacent and ask yourself, ‘What if your healthy grandmother suddenly died a horrible death when you didn’t even think of her as elderly?'” And my natural reaction is, “That happened to me 5 years ago, so I am well aware it could happen and is extremely devastating.” Obviously, it’s not a personal provocation on their part, but the obliviousness and the assumption of obliviousness in everyone else nonetheless provokes something in me. It invalidates people’s lived experience, or whatever the term is. This seeming commitment to the eradication of existential risk indicates a dangerous detachment from reality on a lot of levels. And we’re being encouraged to think that way, even though it is transparently absurd and anomalous.
Definitely relate to this as well. And I don’t think anyone can know exactly. But whether or not we’re reacting with the right level of concern, I’m pretty confident we’re not reacting the right way. We don’t have control of this, and probably won’t have “satisfactory” levels of control of it within any reasonable time frame. We aren’t asking some of the biggest questions. I have felt similarly to Matt M. from the beginning, and certain things are making this clearer for me.
We have to look at the big issues here, and it is easier to orient once we do. These are just two things I think have major implications that we are not discussing very seriously:
1) It is a mistake to count on a vaccine to save us, though of course we should try for a vaccine and pray for a miracle. If we pull it off, I cannot believe it will happen in less than 3 years at the absolute best. Creating one, making sure it is safe (you *don’t* want to rush this too much), manufacturing it, getting it distributed to this many people at once….we must stop centering our conversation around this longshot. I might be wrong about the odds, but I see no situation in which it is smart to act as if this is guaranteed. Sufficiently accurate tests also seem a long way off, which means 14-day quarantine rules have killed global travel anywhere that adopts a strict containment strategy. Singapore, South Korea, and New Zealand are expecting enormous, long-term economic problems as a result.
2) Talking and singing seem to be pretty high risk. The obvious response is “no super spreader events.” This seems like an easy answer. Too high risk, and who will go? But phrase it this way: Are we willing to give up parties, funerals, sports, concerts, gyms, office interaction, conventions, travel, school and church, and the jobs associated with this, for a minimum of three years? After this sinks in a bit, I think very few Americans would answer yes to this. Even high risk Americans, particularly the elderly. It’s not realistic or desirable. Some more vulnerable people would still choose to isolate themselves, but I think most would resign themselves to the risk. That is just not sufficient quality of life for most people, but most people are still thinking they only have to wait a bit longer. Making the priority minimizing spread isn’t as sensible as it looks when you lay it out more realistically. I’m not even sure what to do about nursing homes: on the one hand, clearly it can’t be allowed to enter in the first place, and we have to somehow come up with the resources for a staff that never leaves. On the other hand, how many of these people want to maximize their lifespan if the trade off is no visits from family members?
3) Once tradeoffs are acknowledged, we will see rapid shifts in expectations, and things that seemed unacceptable will be accepted. Until then, it will be hard to make sense of a lot of this. Judging what we’ll accept in relation to how much it diverges from the pre-pandemic status quo will be less and less useful, because that status quo is gone. I can’t predict anything specific, other than that eradicating existential risk is definitely not on the table, and never was.
I’m terrified the line is going to come around Novemeber/December, with potential lame duck president/governors who realize that the political winds don’t bode well enough to “cancel” Thanksgiving or Christmas and we’ll wish we’d kept the curve a little fatter as hospitals around the country are flooded with parents or grandparents seeing their loved ones for the first time in months, right after those loved ones hopped off planes.
I think you’re right that a shift might happen then, but I also don’t think you can blame it mostly on self-interested politicians. I don’t think canceling Thanksgiving or Christmas is a realistic thing to do. People should be bluntly informed of the risks and how to mitigate them; hospitals should prepare for a surge. I have no doubt holiday travel will be way down this year, especially visitation with grandparents–a lot of people will probably avoid flying if they can, and stay home if they have any sign of illness. But there will definitely be a lot of people who aren’t willing to give up holidays.
To me it is making a political statement that these deaths of this type are more important than other deaths. And that we should do all we can to prevent more.
For the last few years I’ve given 2% of my salary to givewell.org for schistosomiasis or malaria. I feel like the guy who was a fan of the band when they were small, and now that the band is a big hit, everyone has jumped on board. Suddenly everyone gives a shit about saving as many lives as possible no matter the cost. But just as they call themselves fans but can’t even name a song on the first three albums, they act like this is the first time it has been possible to save human lives with money. And when we want to do cost-benefit analysis this time, they act like they are the first people on earth who ever gave a damn about saving lives.
Even though they have spent their whole lives ignoring charities and scrolling straight past their friends of friends give-a-little pages. And trading their own quantity of life for extra quality, with alcohol and delicious food.
You make that sound negative. Surely, you should be happy that more people have come to see the light, and are contributing effectively? And maybe pat yourself on the back for being ahead of the curve, without being arrogant or condescending about it?
I don’t think they are contributing anything personally, and I don’t think the interventions they are advocating for are effective.
Yes, I will admit that I am being an arrogant jerk. I wouldn’t post this under my own name or say it out loud.
Not what I meant! But I think I misunderstood this:
…to mean that your friends are now suddenly also donating to GiveWell, which sounds like a win for everybody. After are-read, I think you mean they suddenly (pretend to) care about saving lives in the context of COVID-19, which is something else.
I don’t think the things you are describing are the same kind of thing.
The effective altruism movement is very much about putting a $ amount on a life. They then check which lives can be saved for the least $, and focus on that. EA very much does not focus on citizens of rich countries; they focus on the cheapest value of $ per life.
This whole coronavirus bondoogle is about refusing to put any $$$ on a life, and measuring whether it’s worth it. It’s completely different.
I just don’t like being lectured to about valuing human lives by people who have never given to charity. It is easy to advocate for spending huge amounts to help people when it isn’t your money.
That really isn’t being very fair though. I know most people just don’t have the context to think about the costs, the media is not providing it, and it is a complicated and ambiguous thing anyway. GDP, government debt and unemployment numbers and all that are very abstract, and human lives are concrete.
Why think this is about stating that deaths of this type are more important than other deaths? Isn’t it really stating that deaths of this type are more easily preventable than other deaths, given that these deaths result from an exponential process?
This is a pretty big assertion that doesn’t seem to be true as far as I can tell. The costs of preventing COVID deaths are huge, specifically because it’s an exponential process.
I don’t understand. Preventing covid deaths is *cheap* because it’s an exponential process. Reducing the average person’s dangerous car trips by 10% reduces car fatalities by 10%, but reducing the average person’s infection opportunities by 10% reduces infectious disease fatalities by far more than 10%.
Notice that many of the interventions proposed for covid are also ones that are relevant for preventing other kinds of deaths (like reducing car travel to reduce traffic fatalities). But the amount of reduction of covid deaths from these measures is far more than the amount of reduction of traffic fatalities from these measures.
You might be complaining about Jevons’ paradox here – when some good becomes cheaper, we sometimes end up spending a lot more on it, because a lot more spending is now cost effective. His example was that moving from needing a ton of coal for an industrial process to needing only a few pounds of coal for that same process ends up increasing the amount of industrial activity, so that we burn several tons of coal. My example is that if cutting travel by 10% only saved 3,000 lives from traffic fatalities, but saved 100,000 lives from covid, then we might end up cutting travel by 60%, because that’s where the marginal return in lives saved equals the marginal cost of cutting more travel.
We have shut down large portions of the economy for 2 going on 3 months and still 100,000 people have died. In what world is that “cheap”? And it’s not even clear yet how many deaths we have “prevented” vs. “slightly delayed” since “low cost social distancing / masks / hand washing isn’t enough, vaccine takes too long, this thing is just gonna have to burn itself out” is still very much on the table.
One problem here is that there are both factual disputes (how much can we do to slow the spread of C19, can we eradicate it or control it until a vaccine is available, how much damage vs benefit is done by various countermeasures) and moral/values questions (how to value the lives of mostly older and sicker people vs the freedom of everyone, are the proposed responses even things the government or private individuals are allowed to do, etc.). Many conversations about C19 responses start out with the participants having very different moral and factual assumptions, and that leads them to having a hard time finding common ground.
We have shut down large portions of the economy for 2 going on 3 months and still 100,000 people have died
I could swear, like a month-and-a-half-ago, on this very blog, someone was complaining “we are doing all this shutdown stuff. And only 25K people have died! Why did we bother?”
Now we are getting the exact opposite complaint.
I have many complaints about the way lockdowns happen, particularly in places like Michigan, but if there are going to be bitching from the anti-lockdown crowd that completely switches polarities, I can see why Whitmer is just ignoring them entirely. They’ll be pissed no matter what, so ignore and move on.
Much less of this please.
First off, the other commenter was not me – it turns out if you combine making multiple arguments into a homogeneous “anti lockdown crowd” and then further lump them with people protesting Gretchen Whitmer, there may be some inconsistencies
Second, I was specifically arguing against the proposition that anti-COVID interventions are low cost and high impact. My point was that the interventions we have actually implemented are demonstrably very high cost, and the high death toll despite this might cause us to question the effectiveness (at the very least, they indicate that we’d need to spend even more to bring the numbers down much further)
I think it is about both the bolded items, and that both are wrong. NY Times is saying the deaths are more important and that if we don’t listen to naysayers (which now include Trump) that they could be preventable.
Shutting down the economy is an extremely expensive response. On the order of 10-40 million per life saved, assuming that shutting down the economy saves 1 million US lives. And at this point it doesn’t look likely that the lockdown will save even 200k lives, with revised IFR from the CDC and the results of voluntary social distancing in other countries.
It costs about 2500 USD to save a life in Africa, and much less than that to make massive improvements in their quality of life which would improve longevity. For the cost of saving one old American we could save about 10,000 African lives. In terms of QALYs, you’re talking about 100,000 to 1.
So if the interventions here are really based on rationality and not mass hysteria, then we have rationally decided that saving a year of an American’s life is worth more than 100,000 years of African lives.
Cool, now do US environmental regulations, policing in US cities, lead remediation, Obamacare, etc.
To a first approximation, *no* public policies at any level of government *unrelated to C19* meet the criteria you’re using to judge C19-related policies.
If the cost to GDP for the lockdowns is 7.25 trillion, that’s equal to the entire US federal and state government spending.
If the american government had wanted zero deaths, they could have done what South Korea or New Zealand did. Those got as close to zero as possible.
They clearly chose not to and went on to sacrifice some people. Which is fine, nobody wants to spend infinite money to save one life. Hell, they’ve said what was the death toll expected with their strategy, 100k to 200k deaths, and so far, they seem to be on target.
Saying that the gov wanted zero deaths is not accurate.
That’s like saying that if Poland hadn’t wanted to be conquered by the Nazis, they could have done what the Russians did. The United States didn’t have the efficient, practiced infectious-disease control service that South Korea and New Zealand did, and it didn’t have the geographic isolation of New Zealand in particular, so no, the United States could not have done what South Korea and New Zealand did.
Probably we should askl why we couldn’t, and how we change that. I’d prefer my society (the one my kids and grandkids will probably grow up in) to be reasonably efficient and functional. I’m not thrilled to have so many different lines of evidence that the US isn’t either of those things anymore.
Because being good at the things the government should be good at isn’t a vote-getter. Instead, people want bread and circuses, which governments tend to be terrible at with a few exceptions. So we have politicians who devote their efforts to bread and circuses because that’s the vote getter.
Yes, that’s my take, too. Alas.
Well, that’s another way of saying “USA accepted a lot of possible deaths under a flu-like sickness, while SK/NZ did not”. Preparedness is a choice and a cost countries bear too.
But even then the USA could still have gone into lockdown earlier on to give time to the CDC to realize their tests weren’t up to par. Trump did start to close the country early on, so it’s not like the USA did nothing. Just not enough.
Even if they couldn’t follow the same playbook as SK/NZ due to geographical situation, they chose not to act early on. And geography may not be as critical as you think; Uruguay is next to Brazil, a country whose president has decided to do literally nothing about the virus -and is fighting its own government to keep that position- and is largely free of covid deaths. 22 so far. Without closing the economy as much as its neighbours.
Maybe you think geography matters because the USA is large while NZ/SK/Uruguay are tiny? but there are few countries as big like the USA. I’d say there are 4 (USA, Russia, Canada and China) and they are too few to make generalizations.
But I want to point out that the country that had the less warning about the sickness and a similar size and waaay more population than the USA, China, has done way better than the USA so far. So size may not be an excuse either.
You go to war with the army you have.
I wrote up a bunch of things a competent government could have done back here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/13/open-thread-153-75/#comment-897873 It’s not like I don’t have a long list of things most Western governments could have done to prepare better.
But a lot of things were limited by what the population would have accepted or tolerated the need to pay for.
China, has done way better than the USA so far
There’s no reason to put any faith in China’s numbers.
Even assuming China is lying about its numbers, how much it is lying? Is it worse there than in USA? seems doubtful.
China has what? 4x the population of the USA? they’d have to have 400K deaths to put it in “as bad as the USA” territory. They’d have to lying 100x.
NZ went into lockdown March 23rd with 100 cases. At the time, the US had 50,000 cases and Italy had 63,000. NZ was only successful because they had three weeks more warning than the US. NZ was not prepared at all: we didn’t have any testing in place, or any masks, or any contact tracing, or any culture of worrying about this stuff. We just got our government contact tracing app two days ago.
What we did have was plenty of advance warning and competent government, both the current leadership and the long term systems which are much more flexible than the US. The most crucial factor though was the advance warning.
EDIT: It also came up in the last week that NZ wasn’t actually trying to eradicate at the start. They switched to that strategy when it started to look feasible.
NZ of course has the huge advantage that it is a literal island (well, two big ones and some small ones) to which most travel is “nonessential” stuff that people were probably already canceling before the official lockdown occurred.
And Poland could have been prepared for a Nazi invasion – would have been bloody expensive and condemned a generation of Poles to poverty, but that’s a choice and so the analogy holds.
“You should have been better prepared” is so much more persuasive in hindsight than in foresight, that it should almost always be dismissed out of hand when someone offers it in hindsight. There’s lots of things that one can be prepared for, most of them will not actually happen, and the preparations are expensive. In the case of the CDC, politically expensive more so than financially, but that’s still a very real constraint.
The analogy with the polish/russians is silly and won’t entertain it.
But the truth is…you should have been prepared. Other countries were prepared. This is not space aliens with ships the size of moons taking away our cars. This was a real threat, people warned about something like it happening years ago, and instead Trump tried to defund the CDC.
Choosing to have a non efficient disease control as part of the government was a silly decision. Yes, it is assholish to point it out in hindsight, but the point here is that the government decided to act that way.
And in that decision it said the government is ok with 100k deaths and the stoppage of the economy.
The original point was that people were acting as if 0 deaths was acceptable. That is not true. The government accepted deaths before hand (by not investing enough) and afterwards (by reacting slowly and setting themselves their acceptable deaths target).
It wasn’t any sort of decision. Non-efficient government isn’t a choice, it’s the default. It is not only what you get if you don’t make a choice, it is what you get if you “chose highly efficient disease control” (or whatever) and don’t follow that up with a substantial commitment of political capital that cannot be sustained across the whole of possible government activity.
Actually achieving highly efficient disease control, requires choosing some other substantial thing the government might do, and either not doing that thing or allowing it to be done poorly. I am certain you can think of candiates for that sacrifice, but for every plausible candidate I can posit a scenario where a hundred thousand people die because of it.
@JPNunez
To back up what john schilling said, imagine that 2 years ago trump got up on the stump with a report about unsanitary conditions in wet markets in china and started campaigning on the vital importance of disease preparedness. Do you really think that would have gone well for him? or do you think that he would have been called a fear mongering fascist?
Given than Trump cannot really do much about chinese wet markets even now that everyone knows they are bad, that would be a silly platform and people would be right in calling him out.
But given that Trump fans will defend literally anything the man says, I do not think it would have gone bad for him.
I feel this attitude is part of the problem, though. If voters think the government cannot do good, if the president says that the government is the problem, well, this is what you get.
Besides, what government duty do you think the South Korean government is not doing that America is doing right? Or New Zealand? What part of the government of America is doing so great to pay for the good disease control of SK/NZ?
@JPNunez says:
So, in other words, even if he predicted exactly what happened 2 years ago and took steps to stop it, he would still be wrong, because trump? Look, I don’t like the guy, but don’t you see how what you just does is just a mirror image of what you accuse his supporters of doing?
The claim here is not that the government cannot do good, it’s that the amount of good it can do is not infinite.
Oh wait, I misread. Ok, no, you are right. Me bad.
If Trump had done everything right and he had deaths in the hundreds (as proportional to the populations of successful countries predicts) then that’d be great, yeah. And we’d have the UK/parts of Europe to compare and tell he did right.
But that’s not what happened.
Ok, but I feel that still the American government is particularly bad at … a lot of things … in comparison with other developed countries. I do not think that government-potential-good is a zero sum game. On the contrary, doing well in some areas may help other areas. If we somehow divided the NZ/SK government in areas comparable to the american one, I suspect the former would come out on top overall in evaluation to the later.
@JPNunez says:
And what I and John are saying is that that wasn’t possible. there was nothing trump could have done to achieve that, because the US has no tradition of a the sort of public health service mentality that you would need to achieve that result, and if trump had tried to create it, he would have been shouted down as a fearmonger. If any other president had tried it, he’d have been shouted down a little more politely, but no less completely.
The US is also a lot bigger and less homogenous than the other developed countries. that makes everything harder. new zealand is an island with population smaller than the average state, and south korea has 150 miles of border and half a dozen international airports.
Eh, dunno. Bush Jr, a republican, seemed worried about this kind of problems and worked to prepare america for it, and Obama, of the opposite political side, seemed to continue that legacy. But Trump arrived and seems to have undone some of that advance, and put John Bolton in charge (not exactly an epidemiologist).
Of course we cannot look at the counterfactual world where President Clinton bungles the COVID response to know, but it is clear that american presidents _could_ prepare the government, without being accused of fearmongering. Because two presidents of opposing sides just did.
Eh, there will always be excuses. The size, complexity and hetereogenity of America helps it be one of the biggest economies of the world, but somehow cannot coordinate to get a good government going. But when America decided to put a man on the moon, the size and complexity of the country did not matter. On the contrary, it helped. Which means its government clearly can coordinate to do great things, but I think something broke in America at some point and now it cannot do that kind of thing anymore. And part of it may be that people think their government is the problem.
Bush did care, but he and Obama didn’t meaningfully prepare for it, in a way that would have made a massive difference. They prioritized other things. Pretty sure Trump’s changes had basically zero effect–these were just groups writing the same reports that had been ignored by early administrations. Virtually no one in the U.S. leadership class took it seriously in a way that would have allowed a mass mobilization. I agree with you that the U.S. has weaknesses here, but they weren’t mainly Trump-related. They were mainly CDC, FDA, WHO etc. problems, and it wasn’t due to lack of funding, but the institutional mindsets. But almost no countries were really talking about total eradication—back in February, the NYT was publishing pieces in which the international consensus seemed to be the virus could well be with us every flu season. That came later.
What NZ and S. Korea and others did that we did not do, above all, was catch the early cases before there was significant spread, by intercepting airport arrivals and restricting travel. S. Korea had also prepared after SARs, and had some good systems in place, which neither the U.S. nor NZ did. This is where one can criticize the U.S. response–not acting early, or thinking much of SARs. Most countries made the same mistakes. Once it is widespread, there won’t be eradication absent a vaccine. I won’t comment on China because I don’t know whether to trust them. I agree it seems more under control than elsewhere, but they are still having outbreaks and Chinese scientists today said they thought it was probably endemic. They seem to have gotten it under control by placing people into monitored quarantine centers. Most other countries weren’t willing to do that.
JPNunez,
Just to reiterate, New Zealand wasn’t successful at eradication because they were prepared at all, which they weren’t. They succeeded because they had a full three weeks of extra time to shut down the borders compared to the US. Italy was a total shitshow by that time so it was a lot more obvious March 23rd that drastic action was feasible and maybe a good idea.
That doesn’t invalidate your point at all and I agree that the US has institutional problems that hampered their response. But you can use Taiwan and South Korea as your good examples instead of NZ.
he had some commissions, set up an office or two, and made some recommendations. he didn’t do the serious work.
Yes, being large and heterogeneous makes you big and powerful, but it makes coordination hard.
the size of the US is irrelevant to the problem of putting someone on the moon. It’s not irrelevant to the problem of coordinating a plague response.
Large government bureaucracies are good at problems that (A) they are organized around and dedicated to and (B) have solutions that are straightforward and require few tradeoffs between stakeholders. Neither of those applies to covid in the US, and USG could not have been realistically reshaped to make it so.
The last time “America” decided to put a man on the moon, it dithered about for most of a decade without launching any relevant hardware even into Low Earth orbit. The time before that, it failed utterly. The time before that, it failed utterly. You have to go back fifty years to find a time when “America” could decide to put a man on the Moon and make it stick. Please, find another example.
The Apollo program means the government could coordinate to do great things. Please, find another example.
OK, let’s use your chosen example. For as long as I have been in this business, I’ve seen “America” decide that it’s going to put a man on the Moon, again, for real this time. And every time, I get the distinct sense that everybody outside the aerospace industry takes it for granted that this will happen. Some of them are mildly enthusiastic about it, some of them think it will be an enormous waste of money for a silly stunt, but when I tell people I expect it to fizzle out and die without another set of lunar footprints the most common response is disbelief, because of course American can put a man on the Moon.
In this arena, the American people sincerely believe that the government is competent and capable, and yet the government still fails every time.
You are correct in observing that, in other areas, the American people expect the government to be incompetent. But if your chosen example is any guide, it isn’t their expectation that causes the government to become incompetent. It is the repeatedly demonstrated incompetence of the government that causes people to expect more incompetence, in the areas they are actually paying attention to because they are more important to them than moon-launch stunts.
And, for reasons that should be obvious if you look at them without those stupid “It’s all the haters’ fault” glasses, the CDC’s infectious disease fighting mission is an area that is likely to see extraordinarily high levels of government incompetence. It will be interesting to see if you can figure that out, or even care to try.
Believing in putting-your-hands-together-so-the-government-will-work is not an sufficient condition to make the government work, but it is def a necessary one.
It is clear the american government is sabotaging some of its own attempts at having a working government. Take for example the artificial limitations imposed onto the ATF databases. It’s reasonable to think that even incompetent government employees could create a global searchable database of gun sales. But instead the government put limits on itself because the interests of gun owners don’t want the government to be efficient, and those interests managed to put people in office to sabotage the government.
Or the postal service. Sure, it has problems, but the government itself has defunded it and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. Why can’t it work normally? Because parts of the government want to self sabotage.
Health care. Even Obamacare was a huge compromise, just because the government itself does not want to get involved and do what other countries can do, and instead leave the problem to get worse. And even the small advance that Obamacare was, has been attacked and dismantled slowly by the Trump administration. Self sabotage.
I don’t doubt there are cases where government incompetence cause expectations of more incompetence. But the solution is not to keep defunding and putting artificial constraints in the governmnent. People complain about the government putting constraint on the private sector, but the government self constraint and sabotage in the public sector may be just as bad. And it’s not like the private sector does not fuck up 9 times out of 10. Back in the space race area, the Challenger disaster’s direct cause was a _private_ company covering their asses and not letting their engineers to speak to NASA. Sure, NASA was wildly reckless, but had Morton Thiokol been honest, chances are NASA would have stopped the launch and corrected the problem and kept on their lucky streak until Columbia.
I understand that the CDC bungled their initial testing methods, but the real fatal mistake was not enacting lockdowns nationally earlier. Yes, that would have damaged the economy, but the economy got destroyed anyway so having it happen earlier would have saved some of the 100K deaths America has today.
I don’t know what caused this delay, but it seems clear that part of the problem is the difference in state response and a lot of government bureaucracy. I’ve mentioned before that a piece of the problem may be the double government bureaucracy that the USA has, state and federal level. A united front on this area would have been better, although with Trump at the helm it’s hard to say if it would have enacted a national lockdown earlier than individual states did. I’ve seen the argument here that Trump is actually pro lockdown, or at least not anti lockdown, so I hesitate to say either way.
And if we blame the “deep state” here, then what did Trump do to stop the deep state? defunding CDC and letting their head go clearly did not fix the problems it may have had. Just diagnosing a problem is no good if you don’t take the right measure. Trump seemed content with putting Bolton in charge of the CDC, and this was what, his third year in government? He could have done better if he thought the CDC was incompetent.
We can blame the deep state, but Fauci is still at the government, looking competent, so clearly Fauci is not the problem. On the other hand, Bright was ousted for contradicting Trump on HCQ treatment, and time seems to have proven Bright right, so the case against the deep state seems to stay at the bungled tests.
The deep state made some mistakes, but the crucial problem, the one that would have made a strong difference, aka not being able to declare lockdowns earlier effectively, seems political, and probably self inflicted, maybe caused by the eternal fight between state level and federal level policies, maybe caused by the people at the helm not wanting to take those measures.
Is it, really? It seems to me that the two countries that were in position to have done it, America and the USSR, were actually very big and that size gave them the resources and budget to pursue those objectives.
Maybe today smaller countries can attempt putting a man on the moon, but back then it was in the realm of the bigger players only. Hell, even today, nobody has done it again.
And since nobody is actually defunding the government, the fact that you insist on including it in your list of complaints makes me seriously doubt that you A: understand or B: seriously want to discuss, the actual problems. Feel free to believe that you know the true problem and the rest of us are too stubborn to admit to it, that our unwillingness to argue every point of your laundry-list of complaints means that we secretly agree with them. Take the last word, if you want it.
I’m not sure you’re working with a correct set of facts here. You might want to check your sources if that’s something that’s informing the rest of your opinion.
As for locking down sooner, I am against the lockdowns and think the response to COVID-19 has been a drastic overreaction, so I’m not much swayed by “the government should have done the wrong thing faster and harder.”
@JPNunez
not really, no.
Take for example the artificial limitations imposed onto the ATF databases. It’s reasonable to think that even incompetent government employees could create a global searchable database of gun sales. But instead the government put limits on itself because the interests of gun owners don’t want the government to be efficient, and those interests managed to put people in office to sabotage the government.
The post office was losing money before the pension funding, and is losing money after. And the pension funding rule only existed because the post office, as a government agency, ran up enormous unfunded liabilities
All legislation is compromise, that’s what we keep saying.
The ACA IS what most other countries do.
Assuming facts not in evidence….
they had neither the authority nor ability to do that. And the democrats would have screamed bloody murder if trump had tried it.
the CDC budget is up, not down.
the single thing that could have done the most good pre-lockdown was more masks. the CDC came out against that idea. that’s not “some mistakes”, that’s the single worst decision in the whole process. And it was entirely self inflicted.
Putting a man on the moon is expensive, yes. You need a certain minimum. But it’s not twice as hard if you have twice as many people. Plague response IS twice as hard if you have twice as many people. More than twice, actually, the problem scales geometrically, like most problems of scale, especially when those people don’t get along well.
This is not “the US sucks” even though some people look at everything through that lens. This is “the US failed to lead.”
There is a lot to criticize about the US government’s plans/reactions. There are things to criticize about Trump’s response plans/reactions, in particular. I have a list.
But the US response has been typical of that for Western nations. The #1 reason so many Asian countries did really well is that the public was already primed to respond to a possible pandemic with all sorts of proper hygiene behavior. They didn’t need to be taught about exponential growth and that just because you can’t see the virus doesn’t mean it’s there.
Governor Cuomo and Bill de Blasio each did a number of big screw-ups that should have them lined up against a wall. But there was no scenario in which New York doesn’t have at least 10K deaths. It’s just a city too plugged in to the rest of the world with crowded subways. Comparing the death rate in New York state to Florida isn’t a valid way to compare how well they did, but if someone is lazy and/or determined to decide that New York sucks, there’s no shaking them from that narrative.
This is…demonstrably false? Off the top of my mind the ACA budget for new sign ups was slashed? Trump in his new budget proposed a ton of cuts in different agencies? This kind of sweeping statements that are basically false are not interesting.
Good day, sir.
I admit that I am not completely of top of the organigram here, but the fact is that Trump disbanded a unit created by Obama to prepare for pandemics. The other claim was that preparing for pandemics would receive political fire, but when Obama did it…it wasn’t really all that polemical? The disbanding happened under the watch of national security advisor John Bolton and Bolton himself has appeared defending the decision.
Which may be the right or wrong decision, but the claim made here
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/24/open-thread-154-5/#comment-902058
is patently falsified by the office created by Obama and dismantled while Bolton was sitting near the White House. I welcome precisions and corrections about these details, but I think this shows the idea that preparing for a pandemic before covid would have been called “fearmongering” is clearly false. Obama was accused of a lot of things, justly and injustly, but “fearmonger about pandemics” probably sits very low in that list.
Dunno. If you were gonna lockdown the country and kill the economy anyway, it was better to do it late february to give the country time to correct the defective testing, and implement contact tracing to stop the virus from killing 100k. After having contact tracing in place, reopening or partial reopening is a much easier proposal.
If you come from the position that the lockdown was a mistake, yeah, you are right, but if you assume that sooner or later the lockdown was going to happen, it would always be better to do it as early as possible.
Eeeh. It’s somewhat similar to other legislations, but has a bunch of provisions and exceptions and runs parallel to a number of health systems that makes me think that, yes, the ACA is similar to other systems in other countries, but _no_, the American government in keeping the rest of the systems and disorder on top of a hobbling Obamacare is definitely not doing what other countries are doing.
The individual mandate has been effectively repealed, which is a big part of the ACA. That’s a huge blow to Obamacare.
This is also not true. The units that respond to the pandemic are at the CDC, and were not disbanded. The National Security Council does not respond to pandemics. The NSC is a body that advises the president and helps create policy related to national security. It has, however, become rather bloated, and in a streamlining effort, Bolton combined the jobs of the guy who advised about pandemics with the job of the guy who advises about bioterrorism. Which mainly means instead of having one guy who says “nope, no natural plagues going on” and another who says “nope, no man-made plagues going on” we have one guy saying “nope, no natural or man-made plagues going on.”
More here:
> they’ve said what was the death toll expected with their strategy, 100k to 200k deaths, and so far, they seem to be on target.
I’m not quite sure how this is “on target” unless we imagine that the next four months are half of the death toll of the past two months, and the virus disappears entirely thereafter.
Death toll seems to be slowing down? In the end I think the USA will get to ~200k. I am giving Fauci/Trump some legroom of, say, 20%, so up to 240k deaths I think they were “slightly above the target “, and 240001 I say “off target” and 300k I say “failure”.
Of course the cutoff date is murky. I don’t think Fauci mentioned one? Gonna say end of 2021. Otherwise we may have to count deaths for basically ever and then, sure, it easily goes above target.
Entirely on point this morning in the WP (no paywall for the covid-related material), Mitch Daniels (President of Purdue U) makes the case for re-opening higher-ed campuses in the Fall because the risk to the students is low – here
My primary talking point from the very beginning was that we seemed to just assume away our ability to protect those most at risk and focus our resources on doing that. Instead, we made 100% of the population a ‘priority.’ Which brings to mind a very old axiom for strategists and planners: If everything is a priority, then nothing is. I kind of look at our response as exactly that: Everyone was a priority, therefore no one was.
I hope other universities look at Daniels’ statements and make an informed decision. Yes, it might mean that the son/daughter will not get to see the family for weeks on end if there’s an outbreak in the dorm but I don’t think the students are going to be particularly saddened by that possibility.
Over the weekend, my parents related to me the story of friends (friends both in their 70s so a bit younger than my parents) who had recently tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies and after further testing found that their adult children and grand children also had the antibodies. None had experienced symptoms beyond a day or two of stomach upset and the likely source was eventually traced to a grandchild that apparently was exposed in school (based on the dates of symptoms so hardly rock-solid). This suggests what the scientists have been saying about our lack of knowledge of how the virus varies in its effects across humanity but clearly there are vast differences and we need to pin those down so those most at risk will be the ones on the receiving end of protective resources. To do otherwise and continue this policy of everyone receiving precisely the same attention will just breed resentment in the majority and bode ill for those most at risk from the disease.
Is he planning on having all classes taught by undergraduates and all buildings cleaned by undergraduates and all administrative offices filled by undergraduates? Because I’m not sure why low risk to students is particularly significant when 20% of the people on campus are not students.
Good thing there’s a PHD glut, such that any old 65+ professor who doesn’t want to come back and teach can be quickly and easily replaced.
On a campus, cleaning staff typically work the night shift. And transfer from surfaces is a low risk, says the CDC.
And we can take steps to reduce the risks. I could list those steps but I think it would be a waste of time.
I don’t know what Mitch Daniels is proposing, but teaching a college class is one of the things that can be done pretty well virtually. I actually taught a class over Zoom a couple of months ago.
What Mitch Daniels is proposing is *not* teaching classes over Zoom, if I understand this. He doesn’t say specifically what he plans, but he explicitly rejects the idea of all or mostly online instruction in that op-ed.
sounds like a good way to move people (even if they’re not the most infectious) all across the country a few times a year. I can see it kicking off a bunch of outbreaks when all the students go home for the holidays.
UC San Diego, IIRC, is starting their fall semester early, so it ends before Thanksgiving.
Wouldn’t this require that the students in question catch COVID within a very specific 1-2 week window just prior to leaving for the holidays?
If they go back to school in August/September and catch COVID anytime before early November, they’d have already recovered from it by the time they return home.
Maybe. And if that’s a concern, one way to address it is to only allow local residents to attend school. That means people who either live locally or who’ve taken up permanent residency within commuting range. It won’t eliminate home-for-the-holidays spreading, but it would drastically reduce the scope.
There are multiple steps available between completely open and completely closed.
While sci fi and fantasy come up more often here, I imagine I’m not the only SSC reader who enjoys espionage novels. Has anyone got any recommendations for contemporary (21st Century, not Cold War) spy fiction set in East or South-East Asia?
Reamde
meh. And I love Stephenson elsewhere. Reamde and Fall: or, Dodge in hell are both kinda meh.
Reamde is a mediocre Stephenson novel, but it’s a really spectacularly good Tom Clancy novel. Don’t bother expecting payoff from the virtual world, but the terrorism parts are A+.
(Just don’t read Fall. There’s about 20 good pages.)
Seconded that there’s a pretty good Tom Clancy novel in there. But I really wanted the payoff from the virtual world. The Apostropocalypse and the epic battle between the Earthtone coalition and the Forces of Brightness were ideas worthy of a Neal Stephenson novel, and I never really stopped feeling cheated about that whole plot being dropped.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I am very disappointed. But OP asked for a Clancy novel and this is quite a bit better than Clancy’s so…
@Andrew — very off topic, and I’m not a SSC Open Thread completist, but I seem to remember you being a frequent poster and then more or less disappearing. Am I right about that? What’s brought you back, lockdown-related boredom?
I moved to NYC and stopped hating my life. Uh, not that I dislike hanging out here or think it’s actively terrible, but I prefer having a job I enjoy working at and lots of fun productive things to do in my spare time to spending tons of time commenting.
Quarantine tweaks this a bit, of course.
I’m glad to hear that.
I’ll second the request, but admit I’ve not found any espionage novels that fit the bill. If your tastes extend to mysteries and police procedurals, I’ll recommend John Burdett’s Bangkok 8. It’s expanded to a whole series of Det. Sonchai Litpleecheep books but I haven’t read more than the first two.
You could try Charles McCarry’s “The Shanghai Factor”. Some of Alex Berenson’s “John Wells” books are set in the region, too.
One thing I’ve often wondered: is there much spy fiction written by Koreans and set in Korea/China? I assume that in reality there is quite a lot of spying going on around there.
The Inspector O series are police procedurals set in North Korea, with a fair bit of espionage-adjacent stuff. But written by an American Korea hand rather than a native.
@ John Schilling
I’ve only read the first couple of those. Does the quality hold up as the series goes on?
I haven’t gotten around to finishing the series myself, but colleagues who have say it continues to hold up.
I’m a biased source, but read Techno Ranger. It’s billed as a military techno-thriller, but maybe Ludlum meets Clancy plus technological accuracy would be closer. Begins in San Diego, but 90% set in North and South Korea.
Free via Kindle Unlimited, if you have that. If not, get two months of KU free.
Those Doritos you were craving? They’re gone, man. Just gone. There are no Doritos in this world, now.
The aliens with spaceships the size of small moons are back at it. This time, they’ve taken all our food. They’ve left all unharvested plants and livestock on the hoof, but they’ve taken all the grain and produce that has already been harvested and all the animals that have been butchered. And of course they have taken all the finished and processed food-stuffs. The farms, farmers, farm-equipment, and inputs such as fertilizer are all still in place.
We’re pretty screwed, right? How many of us will still be alive six months from now?
I’m guessing the people still alive are a rounding error. Maybe a few of the most rural preppers who actually have their own gardens. Possibly one or two amish/mennonite communities? I’m guessing it would depend on when this happened. If it was close to harvest time the chances would be a bit better.
Depends when it happens. If it’s just after north hemisphere harvest time, then we’re screwed. If it’s May 24th, then I think most people survive, but we’ll be eating a lot of fish. Deaths will be concentrated in areas that are already food insecure to begin with, of course.
Barely anyone survives, maybe some remote groups of hunter / gatherers, certain types of subsistence farmers, and people who mostly live off fish they catch.
In most places, there might be enough food-plants and animals around to keep a minority of the population alive until harvest time, but I expect there’d be a lot of fighting over it. So it won’t exactly be distributed in a rational manner. There will be places where everybody dies.
I guess our main hope is that the aliens forgot to take things that are edible but not strictly food as such, and we’ll all be eating starch packing nuggets and cardboard for a few months. Maybe it’s even possible to make petrol edible?
Basically, we need to keep things going until the next harvest, whenever that will be. Different places and different crops have different harvest times.
International trade for food will probably be impossible. Some countries might actually raid others for food.
Living livestock can be slaughtered. That’s a once-only contribution, but it will buy time.
We can catch fish, and we won’t worry about sustainability. And we won’t just catch the usual palatable/popular varieties. We’ll catch whatever we can get.
Any hope for industrial synthesis of food from inorganic chemical sources? Glucose isn’t a particularly complicated molecule.
My neighbor counts as food.
https://twitter.com/SirajAHashmi/status/1256241308701724680
The easiest trick on these lines is Cellulose to sugar, which can be done on industrial scale by fairly straightforward rejiggering of paper manufacturing facilities. It is *just* sugar, though. How long can you live of a diet of literally nothing else?
We could probably eat some machine oils for fats, and paper, wood, cellulose in general for fiber. The main problem is protein, but since animals are still around, we might be able to consume eggs and milk (assuming society doesn’t break down). If we run out of food for the animals, we can slaughter them. For micronutrients, there’s supplements, if the aliens didn’t take them. All that might allow us to survive a few months until the next harvest.
So I guess in theory this could just be a “major worldwide famine” if we react smartly and quickly. Maybe the majority of people could survive.
Do we get to eat the seed corn?
There’s a billion cows. Each has about 200kg of retail meat and some amount of offal.
Beef contains about 10kJ/g of energy. 4MJ/day is starvation rations.
That works out to about 71 days.
EDIT: fungi might be a way to convert biomass to a form humans can eat. Cut down the forests and cover them with mushroom spores?
At 400g meat per day (which I get from your numbers), a human should keep another human alive for maybe 80 days, which would be the half-life of the population.
We have enough people for about 33 halvings, so it takes around seven years until the last cannibal dies. I think we can manage to get food production back on track by then, so…no worries, I guess.
If the short term is important, I’d suggest putting some of the seed corn into the seed corn converter – the ones that take the corn in one end and push out chicken eggs from the other. Good conversion ratio, too.
Looking around, the other thing that might save us here are our cherry trees – absolutely laden with ripe cherries at the mo’.
Cherry omelettes anyone?
These people (two links) have done calculations and claim that there should be enough biomass to feed all humanity in a situation where crops are lost, the Sun is obscured, and worldwide industrial infrastructure is destroyed. The main plan seems to be:
1) tear out all vegetation you can find; grind, press, and coagulate non-woody plant matter to extract concentrated proteins as food for humans;
2) feed the leftover liquid and partially decomposed wood to chickens for eggs and meat;
3) feed all cellulose-based solids to rabbits or rats for meat;
4) feed wood and animal waste to insects (termites, beetles), or use it to grow mushrooms;
5) throw everything else to bacteria, use chicken dung to fertilize water to grow fish and seaweeds.
Cockroaches would also have a good potential to turn anything even vaguely organic into concentrated proteins and fats. I say once they’re dried, ground, and finely sieved, most people won’t mind too much.
Based on wikipedia, the biomass of cattle, sheep, goats and chickens is approx. 1.75 times the biomass of humans.
xkcd What if? made calculations about how long (some of) humanity could survive on cannibalism only. According to it, a human would need to eat approx. one another human per month. (Source is not too reliable and not available anymore; we may last longer on meager rations.) Assuming the aforementioned livestock is about as nutritious as humans, they would be enough for approx. 1.75 months. That doesn’t include pigs and some other livestock, plant based food available to harvest, and fish. In order to be able to eat said animals, we need to be able to feed them (has animal feed been taken?), or enough capacity to freeze them.
A lot depends on the time of the year. I don’t know how worldwide production at different times of the year relates to the minimum amount of nutrients needed to keep most people alive and capable of working.
Grains that are harvested in a narrow part of the year and then stored for up to almost a year do not dominate our diet anymore, at least in developed and middle income countries. Also, the Southern hemisphere produces food when the Northern hemisphere doesn’t, and vice-versa. Parts of the tropics produce year-round, I guess.
I’m less pessimistic than most of you townies. Where I live, almost all of the food is either a) In the ground , or b) walking around on top of it. At this time of the year everything is growing like mad and harvest time, for a lot of things, is already upon us.
Sooner or later I guess some of the people who live in the foodless urban environments are going to come out to the sticks to see if they can get their hands on some of our sheep, or chickens or potatoes – of which we have a plentiful abundance, as do all our neighbors. The good news for us is that here in France, it’s only country folk that have the guns. So if it all gets a little bit feisty, we’ll probably be all right.
Seeing as the aliens have presumably emptied all our freezers, I guess the first thing we’d do is go out into the woodland and and kill enough deer and wild boar to fill the freezers up again.
And it might turn into a time of plenty – our next door neighbor has a herd (well, 15 – it’s rural France I’m talking about, so what local farmers live on is ‘subsidies’) of milking cows. If, as I expect, the big Lorry that comes every two days to collect his milk fails to turn up as infrastructure has started to break down, he’ll be looking to offload his now worthless surplus milk. Perhaps to be exchanged for some venison and a few chicken eggs. We’ll therefore also be sorted for cheese, butter and yoghurt. Things are looking up!
The army and police are still there (and are getting hungry), they are not impressed by farmers with shotguns so food will be collectivized one way or another.
Some of your previous posts refer to these aliens as our friends. I’m starting to think that isn’t accurate.
It’s just the communication gap. They’re friends, they just sometimes have a frat boy sense of humour. It’s their idea of a good prank.
Armed forces (army, police, national guard) take over and probably fight over hoofed animal farms and fields.
Robin Hanson’s calls for controlled cannibalism based on a carefully calibrated index that weighs economic potential and overall social desirability against nutritional value are ignored.
Elon Musk’s last tweet is a photo of him being eaten by Tesla factory workers.
Russia’s population mostly survives on a diet of carbohydrates distilled from trees and the populations of Ukraine and Poland citing moral debt over WW2.
I’m…optimistic. For one thing, all infrastructure is still standing, so whatever solution we find, it’s there to scale it up. Let’s make it challenging – say it happens on Nov 1st – so nothing to harvest in the northern hemisphere.
People die pretty slow from starvation. I’m pretty sure most people can shed about 10kg and be healthier than when they started, so that’s about a month and a half. True, that’s for the average person, so we do have to take care of the skinny ones somehow – especially children and elderly. If we fix this, we have about 2 months before A LOT of people die. It’s gonna be pretty busy holidays.
How do we fix the short term problem? Eggs, milk and meat. A bit of googling says about 1kg/month/person just for eggs. Mmm. That’s like 50 cals/day. About 10 times as much milk but lower caloric content, so say 150 cal/day. Meat is somewhere in between, say 2 kg/month minimum and… damn. It’s gonna be tight – just an extra 100 cals. BUT – we will definitely not be saving meat for later while starving, so by butchering long lived animals early, we can easily double the monthly output for at least a couple of month. Probably triple. So 350-450 cal/day/person short term. If properly distributed it would keep kids and skinny people alive, but I don’t trust efficient distribution so we’d better hurry.
There’s also import from the south – I’m a bit hesitant here, because the south will be hungry for at least a week or two until the supply chain gets fully refilled, so they’ll be hesitant to export. But I doubt they’ll let billions die, so in a few weeks we should see some stuff flowing from there as well. Impossible to tell how much – 100cals/day? 500? Not enough, certainly.
How do we fix the long term problem?
I see three directions: greenhouses, oil and making cellulose digestible.
Greenhouses have the benefit of being tested technology. We can make them everywhere – either from glass on open land, or by taking a bunch of dirt in existing warehouses. Some (admittedly not appetising) crops can be grown in under a month. But there’s a big difference between first crop and proper scaling, so I’m guessing at the very least three months before proper production. Not good. Hopefully in about two months they’ll add a bit to the calorie deficit, but either way, still a full month missing there.
The other two options, namely oil and cellulose, are pretty interesting. They could probably ramp up production in a matter of weeks instead of months, but unfortunately I have no idea of the details involved. Maybe somebody else has? All I can tell from google is that 1. yeah, it’s possible, at the very least alcohol from oil and glucose from cellulose. And 2. nobody in their right mind would normally consider it. But well… alien friends.
Interesting. I hadn’t known it was possible to grow edible plants in just a few weeks. I though it took months. That makes it easier, at least if the foodpocalypse happens during the growing season. And with greenhouses and artificial lighting, we just might be able to grow food during the northern hemisphere winter. It would be expensive as heck, but the alternative is mass starvation.
Most of those plants are not terribly good staples.
And sprouts are getting most of their energy from the seeds.
But stuff like parisienne carrots, first early potatoes and dwarf legumes should be good.
We might also be saved by the practise of leaving fully grown root vegetables in the ground during the winter. (it’s as cold outside as it would be in a fridge, so why bother harvesting them before they’re needed?)
Both China and the US are bewildered to discover that half the foodstuffs in their stores and warehouses were not taken by the aliens as their teleporter targeting systems failed to recognize them as food, if for different reasons.
Neither admits this to the other while accusing them of secretly hoarding food.
I think you win the thread
Does expired food count?
Does pet food count?
Do edible seeds count?
Do beverages count?
Do condiments count?
Because for every one of those that counts, the problem shrinks significantly. On a “if you ate only that for supper, would your mother tell you it wasn’t food” basis, humanity’s quite well-provisioned to get through a short-term crisis until we do a lot of fishing, dairy and a slaughtering.
I actually think we’d be alright. For one thing, you can go a LONG time without food. A lot of sick and elderly people are going to die/be allowed to die/be encouraged to die. But all of the above have a strong argument not to be food and would be attainable in quantity relatively easily. Even without those, the pipelines for supplying meat and dairy are fairly short. Grains and vegetables are where things get a lot dicier. Fortunately, a lot of weeds and other such things are technically edible.
There are the greenhouses, but everybody would also start growing spirulina: it apparently has quite a bit of protein, and it’s easy to grow. I’m pretty sure it’s not that hard to produce it on an industrial scale.
Damn, these aliens are getting assholish.
Any chance we had word of this beforehand and decided to poison our food in hopes we kill some aliens?
Preemptively I am putting dead man switches nuclear bombs in all my possessions. Computers, cars, food, paper, clothes, houses. Everything goes boom if it doesn’t hear me sing “I love to singa” everyday at midnight.
…then those aliens with moon-sized ships take away our voices. How much trouble would we be in?
*leaves house and drives to the next city*
It’s fine.