Open Thread 154.5

Posted on May 24, 2020 by a reader

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1,201 Responses to Open Thread 154.5

  1. albatross11 says:
    May 27, 2020 at 2:25 pm

    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.

    • keaswaran says:
      May 27, 2020 at 4:00 pm

      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.

  2. Randy M says:
    May 27, 2020 at 10:44 am

    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.

    • zzzzort says:
      May 27, 2020 at 2:13 pm

      Have we lost conflict resolution skills or respect for elders?

      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.

    • keaswaran says:
      May 27, 2020 at 4:05 pm

      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.

      • Mark V Anderson says:
        May 27, 2020 at 5:27 pm

        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.

        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?

    • Jaskologist says:
      May 27, 2020 at 7:31 pm

      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.

    • Cheese says:
      May 27, 2020 at 5:07 am

      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.

      • Purplehermann says:
        May 27, 2020 at 5:40 am

        Huh.

        Considering a country seems to changing its isolation durations, the study probably matters to some degree.

        • Cheese says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:01 am

          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.

    • broblawsky says:
      May 27, 2020 at 7:52 am

      Fragmentary viral particles (probably) can’t reproduce, which makes it very unlikely that they would cause any kind of infection in others.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 2:21 pm

        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.

  4. Well... says:
    May 26, 2020 at 6:01 pm

    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.

    • Yair says:
      May 26, 2020 at 6:51 pm

      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.

    • Purplehermann says:
      May 26, 2020 at 9:33 pm

      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

      • Well... says:
        May 27, 2020 at 4:56 am

        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.

  5. proyas says:
    May 26, 2020 at 3:18 pm

    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?

    • John Schilling says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:28 pm

      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.

      • fibio says:
        May 26, 2020 at 4:12 pm

        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.

        • toastengineer says:
          May 26, 2020 at 4:33 pm

          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…

        • John Schilling says:
          May 26, 2020 at 4:42 pm

          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).

          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.

          • viVI_IViv says:
            May 26, 2020 at 6:48 pm

            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.

            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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:46 pm

            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.

      • ottomanflush says:
        May 26, 2020 at 5:15 pm

        Two or more nuclear-capable fragments is extremely unlikely.

        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?

        • John Schilling says:
          May 26, 2020 at 5:49 pm

          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.

      • James Miller says:
        May 26, 2020 at 5:43 pm

        The nuclear weapons on submarines can probably be fired by the people in the subs. Different subs might align with different sides.

    • Lambert says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:35 pm

      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.

    • meh says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:55 pm

      Why does MAD prevent reunification, but not the violent split?

  6. Bobobob says:
    May 26, 2020 at 3:01 pm

    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.

    • qwints says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:13 pm

      I feel like Justine Sacco is the classic example.

      • Bobobob says:
        May 26, 2020 at 3:20 pm

        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?

        • Pepe says:
          May 26, 2020 at 4:30 pm

          “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…)

          • Bobobob says:
            May 26, 2020 at 5:21 pm

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 5:58 am

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:00 am

            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.”

            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.

    • proyas says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:20 pm

      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.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:22 pm

      “Suicide” implies some level of actual intent, which I see no evidence of here.

      • Bobobob says:
        May 26, 2020 at 3:28 pm

        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.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:40 pm

      Remind me never, ever to ask you what your feel-bad headline of the day is.

      • Bobobob says:
        May 26, 2020 at 3:58 pm

        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.

        • gbdub says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:33 am

          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.

          • JonathanD says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:30 am

            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.

          • gbdub says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:32 am

            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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:56 am

            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.

            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’.

          • gbdub says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:17 pm

            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.

          • matkoniecz says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:31 pm

            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

            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.

          • anon-e-moose says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:35 pm

            “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?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:43 pm

            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.

          • gbdub says:
            May 27, 2020 at 1:43 pm

            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”.

    • Sniffnoy says:
      May 26, 2020 at 4:59 pm

      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.)

      • quanta413 says:
        May 26, 2020 at 6:17 pm

        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.

        • Randy M says:
          May 27, 2020 at 7:43 am

          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.

          • keaswaran says:
            May 27, 2020 at 4:09 pm

            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.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:54 pm

            @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?

          • DinoNerd says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:03 pm

            @DavidFriedman

            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.

            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.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 28, 2020 at 12:07 am

            To me, a racist is someone who chooses to treat people differently because of their race

            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?

          • ana53294 says:
            May 28, 2020 at 1:20 am

            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.

          • DinoNerd says:
            May 28, 2020 at 7:35 am

            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.

            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.

            Does someone being “racist” to you imply something negative about him?

            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.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 28, 2020 at 5:29 pm

            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.

            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:

            Does someone being “racist” to you imply something negative about him?

            DinoNerd answered:

            He’s probably in the habit of ignoring evidence in favor of preconceived ideas.

            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.

          • DinoNerd says:
            May 28, 2020 at 5:47 pm

            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.

      • baconbits9 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 9:28 am

        I think the most interesting part of the story is if you watch the video she says

        I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,

        There’s a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet, she says. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.

        • gbdub says:
          May 27, 2020 at 10:41 am

          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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:59 am

            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.

          • gbdub says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:24 pm

            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.

          • cassander says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:56 pm

            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.

      • JonathanD says:
        May 27, 2020 at 9:48 am

        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 . . .

    • MilesM says:
      May 26, 2020 at 5:00 pm

      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.

      • Bobobob says:
        May 26, 2020 at 5:18 pm

        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.

        • Milo Minderbinder says:
          May 26, 2020 at 5:26 pm

          @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?

        • MilesM says:
          May 26, 2020 at 5:49 pm

          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.

          • Milo Minderbinder says:
            May 26, 2020 at 6:26 pm

            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.

          • MilesM says:
            May 26, 2020 at 6:32 pm

            @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.

          • Milo Minderbinder says:
            May 26, 2020 at 6:36 pm

            @MilesM

            To clarify, are you equating her being asked to observe posted park rules with him being threatened by a false police report?

          • MilesM says:
            May 26, 2020 at 6:45 pm

            @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)

          • Milo Minderbinder says:
            May 26, 2020 at 6:57 pm

            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.

          • MilesM says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:02 pm

            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?

          • Creutzer says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:33 am

            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.

            But he didn’t just say that. He said that and followed up by producing… strategically prepared dog treats.

          • J Mann says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:41 am

            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.

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:44 am

            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.”

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:20 am

            Statistically speaking, a woman in Central Park (even if she’s an idiot) probably has far more right to feel unsafe.

            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.

          • Doctor Mist says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:35 am

            strategically prepared dog treats

            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.

          • quanta413 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 4:10 pm

            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?

            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.

        • Bobobob says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:19 am

          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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:30 am

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:33 am

            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.

          • Bobobob says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:37 am

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:44 am

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:48 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:49 am

            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 racist witch, 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!”

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:50 am

            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.

            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.

          • Bobobob says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:59 am

            @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.”

          • John Schilling says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:19 am

            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?

            “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.

          • Jaskologist says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:21 am

            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.)

          • John Schilling says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:47 am

            If calling the police is itself an irresponsible act, then you live in a failed state

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:26 am

            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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:36 am

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:27 pm

            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….

          • Jaskologist says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:48 pm

            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’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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:20 pm

            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.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:45 pm

            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.

      • Purplehermann says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:40 pm

        @Matt M how do you think society should censor this sort of action (assuming it’s a real problem)?

        • 10240 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:25 am

          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.

          • viVI_IViv says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:03 am

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:07 am

            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.

        • Matt M says:
          May 27, 2020 at 5:46 am

          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.

          • Purplehermann says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:51 am

            Oops
            All’s well that ends well I guess 🙂

            @MilesM I’d like to hear your thoughts too

      • Chalid says:
        May 27, 2020 at 6:21 am

        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.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:50 am

          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.

          • Chalid says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:21 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:31 am

            But the employer’s only doing that so the twitter mob doesn’t come after them.

          • Chalid says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:10 am

            You don’t know that. The employer probably genuinely does disapprove of her behavior.

          • Bobobob says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:15 am

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:21 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:35 am

            You don’t know that. The employer probably genuinely does disapprove of her behavior.

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:53 am

            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.

          • Chalid says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:52 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:00 am

            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?”

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:02 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:12 am

            she threatened another person to get him to do what she wanted

            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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:22 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:23 am

            So if you were her boss and you witnessed this unbeknownst to her, you would fire her?

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:29 am

            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.

          • Chalid says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:43 am

            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.)

          • Chalid says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:56 am

            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.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:
            May 27, 2020 at 3:15 pm

            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

    • zzzzort says:
      May 26, 2020 at 5:42 pm

      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).

    • ltowel says:
      May 26, 2020 at 6:04 pm

      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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 26, 2020 at 8:49 pm

        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.)

        • Matt M says:
          May 27, 2020 at 5:40 am

          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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:06 am

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:10 am

            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…

          • viVI_IViv says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:30 am

            In this case, she threatened to call the cops and say “this guy is harassing me at a park” which was approximately true.

            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.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:27 am

            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.

          • Aftagley says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:44 am

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:57 am

            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).

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:46 am

            In this case, she threatened to call the cops and say “this guy is harassing me at a park”

            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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:49 am

            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.

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:01 am

            You assume

            Nah. I compare my estimate of likelihood of various cases. But if you’ve got numbers they probably beat my priors for reliability.

            That could easily end badly.

            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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:12 am

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:26 am

            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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:41 am

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:01 am

            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.

        • Deiseach says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:31 am

          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)”?

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:59 am

            there are people out there who will try to poison dogs

            It does sound like that was his insinuation, but are there? Is this any more the case than poisoned Halloween candy?

          • Jaskologist says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:27 am

            why is he carrying these around if he doesn’t have a dog?

            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.

          • viVI_IViv says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:55 am

            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.

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:10 am

            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.

            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’.

          • viVI_IViv says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:24 am

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:32 am

            inconsequential stuff.

            Inconsequential is in the eye of the beholder. Can we amend to “perceived personal affronts”?

          • baconbits9 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:45 am

            Because it was not his job to enforce compliance.

            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.

          • anon-e-moose says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:13 am

            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.

          • Deiseach says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:15 am

            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!”

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:54 am

            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.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:05 pm

            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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:25 pm

            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.

          • gbdub says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:42 pm

            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.

    • Aftagley says:
      May 27, 2020 at 10:39 am

      Terms like a Karen are racist slurs. They are just as bad as #$%^^& and &^&%$#.

      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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 27, 2020 at 11:48 am

        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.)

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 11:53 am

          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.”

          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.’

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:08 pm

          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.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:26 pm

          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.’

          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.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:28 pm

          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.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:31 pm

          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.

          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.”

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:35 pm

          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.

        • baconbits9 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:49 pm

          Maybe they don’t think either the m-word or the n-word should be an unforgivable curse,

          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’.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 27, 2020 at 1:54 pm

          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.

          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.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:09 pm

        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.

      • Randy M says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:19 pm

        it’s the perceived consequence to yourself

        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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:30 pm

        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.”

      • baconbits9 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:31 pm

        It’s not the perceived badness of a word that prevents you from using it; it’s the perceived consequence to yourself. If you genuinely think two words are equally bad but you know writing one of them would end your career and alienate all your friends whereas writing the other will have no affect on you at all, you will avoid writing the first but not avoid writing the second.

        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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:54 pm

        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.

      • baconbits9 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 1:01 pm

        The only difference that highlights is that society would crush me for saying the one word and do nothing whatever to me for saying the other. That has nothing whatever to do with my belief about the innate offensiveness of the words. The quote is wrong.

        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.

      • Matt M says:
        May 27, 2020 at 1:16 pm

        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.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        May 27, 2020 at 3:25 pm

        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…

        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?

    • baconbits9 says:
      May 27, 2020 at 10:48 am

      You should not lose your job over things that have nothing to do with your job and are not felonies.

      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.

      • baconbits9 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:45 pm

        Yes, and yet all of us have done things that would indicate to our employees that we are not trustworthy. If we are to protect ourselves in an age of ubiquitous cameras and social media, there needs to be a line in the sand: it should be a felony or job related.

        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.

      • Randy M says:
        May 27, 2020 at 1:14 pm

        Why should there be a line in the sand? So you can justify specific bad behavior and avoid consequences for them?

        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.

  7. kenziegirl says:
    May 26, 2020 at 1:50 pm

    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?

    • MilesM says:
      May 26, 2020 at 2:27 pm

      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.)

    • DinoNerd says:
      May 26, 2020 at 4:16 pm

      I’m guessing this will be one of those situations where autistics do better than non-autistics overall.

      • Milo Minderbinder says:
        May 26, 2020 at 5:29 pm

        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.

        • Garrett says:
          May 27, 2020 at 5:37 am

          What do we need to engineer in the world such that wearing capes again becomes a necessity?

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:21 am

            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.

    • Doctor Mist says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:15 pm

      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.

    • Kevin_P says:
      May 27, 2020 at 8:52 am

      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).

      • Viliam says:
        May 29, 2020 at 2:26 pm

        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.

    • keaswaran says:
      May 27, 2020 at 4:12 pm

      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.

  8. Anteros says:
    May 26, 2020 at 11:35 am

    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.

    • Bobobob says:
      May 26, 2020 at 12:22 pm

      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.

    • broblawsky says:
      May 26, 2020 at 12:53 pm

      This matches up with what my cousin, an ER doctor (who got COVID) told me at the peak of the epidemic in NY.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:02 pm

        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.

    • Erusian says:
      May 26, 2020 at 1:15 pm

      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).

      • gbdub says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:59 pm

        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.

      • BBA says:
        May 27, 2020 at 11:53 am

        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.

        • albatross11 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 11:59 am

          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.

    • Loriot says:
      May 26, 2020 at 5:08 pm

      The line that stuck out at me most was

      More than two thirds of those who have died in intensive care have been over the age of 60.

      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.

      • DarkTigger says:
        May 27, 2020 at 1:18 am

        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.

        • albatross11 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:09 am

          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.

    • Cheese says:
      May 27, 2020 at 6:59 am

      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.

  9. keaswaran says:
    May 26, 2020 at 11:31 am

    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.

  10. FLWAB says:
    May 26, 2020 at 10:32 am

    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?

    • Randy M says:
      May 26, 2020 at 10:43 am

      “My client wants to confess a crime, but only if he gets a good deal.”

      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.

      • FLWAB says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:23 am

        The question is, what are you trying to get out of this?

        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?”

        • Randy M says:
          May 26, 2020 at 11:46 am

          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?

        • J Mann says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:49 pm

          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.”

    • Matt M says:
      May 26, 2020 at 10:53 am

      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…

      • Radu Floricica says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:05 am

        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).

      • Mycale says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:09 am

        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.

      • J Mann says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:11 am

        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.

        • Matt M says:
          May 26, 2020 at 11:21 am

          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?

          • Mycale says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:55 am

            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.

    • Lambert says:
      May 26, 2020 at 11:16 am

      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.

    • Aftagley says:
      May 26, 2020 at 2:21 pm

      What exactly is the ideal procedure for a moral criminal who wants to do the right thing?

      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.

      • yodelyak says:
        May 27, 2020 at 12:07 pm

        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.

        • albatross11 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:19 pm

          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.

        • yodelyak says:
          May 27, 2020 at 12:23 pm

          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.

    • Simulated Knave says:
      May 27, 2020 at 6:05 am

      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.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        May 27, 2020 at 6:45 am

        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.

        • ana53294 says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:56 am

          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.

          • Aftagley says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:51 am

            Yeah, there are three reasons to tell your spouse you had an affair….

            With you so far

            If you feel guilty, go talk to a priest or psychologist or something. Some things, it’s better not to know…

            Still on board…

            she should never tell neither him nor the child about the lack of biological parentage.

            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.

          • matkoniecz says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:03 am

            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.

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:04 am

            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.

          • matkoniecz says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:06 am

            Some things, it’s better not to know.

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:26 am

            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.

          • ana53294 says:
            May 27, 2020 at 9:02 am

            @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.

          • Dack says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:58 am

            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.

            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.

          • JonathanD says:
            May 28, 2020 at 8:06 am

            @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.

    • Jacobethan says:
      May 27, 2020 at 6:36 am

      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?

      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.

  11. albatross11 says:
    May 26, 2020 at 9:37 am

    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?

    • broblawsky says:
      May 26, 2020 at 9:57 am

      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.

    • alchemy29 says:
      May 26, 2020 at 10:09 am

      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.

    • Anthony says:
      May 26, 2020 at 12:15 pm

      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.

  12. johan_larson says:
    May 26, 2020 at 7:11 am

    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.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:37 am

      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?

      • Doctor Mist says:
        May 26, 2020 at 8:13 am

        As if that weren’t enough, stories told in the present tense have almost always struck me as too precious to bother with. Pass.

        • ana53294 says:
          May 26, 2020 at 8:20 am

          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.

          • Lillian says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:34 pm

            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.

          • Doctor Mist says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:20 pm

            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.

            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.

        • Douglas Knight says:
          May 26, 2020 at 11:07 am

          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?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:10 am

            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.

          • Jake R says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:20 am

            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.

          • Doctor Mist says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:07 pm

            Is the Hunger Games precious?

            Don’t know, haven’t read it — and now I know I don’t need to.

            Are Dorothy Sayers chapter titles precious?

            Chapter titles are a different matter. I don’t object to book titles that are not complete sentences either. I’m not an animal.

            Maybe you only notice it when the story itself doesn’t interest you?

            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.

        • J Mann says:
          May 26, 2020 at 11:13 am

          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.)

        • Eric Rall says:
          May 26, 2020 at 2:02 pm

          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.

      • Lodore says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:37 am

        Why are you still bothering with Watts?

        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.

        • Watchman says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:32 pm

          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….

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:42 pm

            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.

          • FLWAB says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:51 pm

            we’re a species just like any other.

            Chesterton put it better than I can:

            If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 3:42 pm

            @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.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:58 pm

          @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. 🙂

          • Paul Zrimsek says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:14 pm

            If we live in a cold, indifferent universe then we might as well have regard for ourselves, because no one else is going to.

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:45 pm

            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.

          • Nick says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:10 pm

            @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”

          • Plumber says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:55 pm

            @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.

          • zzzzort says:
            May 26, 2020 at 3:07 pm

            get by reading Lovecraft, which doesn’t harm my mental health.

            Then you must not be doing it right 🙂

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 3:19 pm

            @Nick. Yes, fair correction, duly noted. Man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest etc etc.

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 3:31 pm

            @Plumber:

            Yeah, please just nope! As I don’t see how a cold eyed view of truth doesn’t lead to miserable despair

            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.

          • Murphy says:
            May 27, 2020 at 5:08 am

            “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport”

            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.

          • Randy M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:08 am

            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.

            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.

          • Nick says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:13 am

            Yeah, we’re awfully lucky ramming Cthulhu with a boat worked, because if it hadn’t, the world would have ended.

      • Radu Floricica says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:59 am

        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.

        • Murphy says:
          May 27, 2020 at 5:11 am

          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.

          • Nick says:
            May 27, 2020 at 5:47 am

            Echopraxia. I know because I removed it from my reading list yesterday.

          • Spookykou says:
            May 28, 2020 at 4:29 am

            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.

      • CarlosRamirez says:
        May 26, 2020 at 12:00 pm

        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.

      • a real dog says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:07 pm

        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.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:
          May 26, 2020 at 1:15 pm

          Sort of a George Wallace for the modern era, then?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:37 pm

            @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.

    • Nick says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:38 am

      I read it. I don’t recommend it.

      • a real dog says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:48 pm

        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.

    • Two McMillion says:
      May 26, 2020 at 8:06 am

      Shouldn’t Watts hate himself by that metric?

    • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:
      May 26, 2020 at 9:58 am

      I did finish “Blindsight”, but after getting a load of this

      Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons

      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?

      • Mycale says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:18 am

        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.

      • Lodore says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:23 am

        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?

        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?

        • Watchman says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:41 pm

          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…

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:35 pm

            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 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:

            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?

            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.

        • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:
          May 26, 2020 at 3:31 pm

          So Peter Watts uses a metaphor you don’t like and you use it to dismiss his ideas?

          Yes.

          As I assume you know that dimensionality reduction is a thing in statistics and machine learning,

          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.

          • Lodore says:
            May 26, 2020 at 3:54 pm

            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?

          • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:
            May 26, 2020 at 4:52 pm

            @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.

      • sidereal says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:43 am

        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.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:
          May 26, 2020 at 1:08 pm

          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.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:
      May 26, 2020 at 10:31 am

      His bio on Amazon:

      About Peter Watts
      This is awkward and a little creepy. They tell me I have to do it for promotional purposes, but I’ve already got a blog. I’ve already got a website. Being told that setting up an author page on fcuking *Amazon* is essential to success? A company that treats us all like such goddamn children it doesn’t even allow us to correctly spell an epithet with a venerable history going back 900 years or more? That just sucks the one-eyed purple trouser eel.

      Still, here I am. But if you’re really all that interested, go check out my actual blog/website. Google is not your friend (any more than Amazon is), but at least it’ll point you in the right direction.

      • Deiseach says:
        May 26, 2020 at 12:54 pm

        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.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:30 pm

        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.

    • CarlosRamirez says:
      May 26, 2020 at 11:15 am

      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.

      • Watchman says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:25 pm

        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.

        • gbdub says:
          May 26, 2020 at 5:01 pm

          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.

    • Adrian says:
      May 26, 2020 at 12:54 pm

      The Last of the Redmond Billionaires

      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.

      • Baeraad says:
        May 27, 2020 at 1:10 am

        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.

      • Garrett says:
        May 27, 2020 at 5:49 am

        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.

        • Eugene Dawn says:
          May 27, 2020 at 7:45 am

          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.

          • matkoniecz says:
            May 27, 2020 at 8:10 am

            Thanks for making this comment.

          • Adrian says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:38 am

            Animus towards Jews really, really was not just “jealousy”, or a sense that Jews were “doing too well”.

            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.

            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

            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.

            but the idea that Hitler’s rhetoric against the Jews is comparable to anti-billionaire sentiment in general is just absurd

            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.

          • Eugene Dawn says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:20 pm

            That’s the point. Hatred towards billionaires doesn’t comprise only envy, they’re a scapegoat

            This is partly a response to you and partly a response to Garrett; he claimed that it was primarily envy and distance.

            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

            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.

    • Skeptical Wolf says:
      May 26, 2020 at 1:16 pm

      I hope I never hate anyone as much as Watts hates rich people.

      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?

      • Nick says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:22 pm

        I tried you warn you all, and you didn’t listen….

        • Skeptical Wolf says:
          May 26, 2020 at 1:39 pm

          And you were right. Please enjoy your well-earned “I told you so”.

          Next time I’ll pay more attention.

      • johan_larson says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:38 pm

        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.

    • toastengineer says:
      May 26, 2020 at 4:37 pm

      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.

      • noyann says:
        May 27, 2020 at 3:38 am

        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.

  13. Bobobob says:
    May 26, 2020 at 5:53 am

    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.

    • tgb says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:06 am

      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.

    • bullseye says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:10 am

      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.

      • Chalid says:
        May 26, 2020 at 7:20 am

        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.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 26, 2020 at 7:29 am

          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.

          • Bobobob says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:51 am

            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…

          • Lambert says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:27 am

            It’s a really hard question but we have worked out estimates for the QA part of QALYs. (and DALYs)

          • Chalid says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:08 am

            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.

          • Anteros says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:22 am

            @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.

          • Chalid says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:24 am

            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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:34 am

            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.

            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.

          • Chalid says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:08 am

            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.

      • Loriot says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:25 am

        Isn’t that the kind of thing that is only possible to know with certainly with the passage of time?

      • Chalid says:
        May 26, 2020 at 11:33 am

        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.

        • Chalid says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:27 pm

          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.

        • LesHapablap says:
          May 26, 2020 at 3:13 pm

          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

        • Chalid says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:24 am

          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.

        • keaswaran says:
          May 27, 2020 at 4:16 pm

          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.

        • LesHapablap says:
          May 27, 2020 at 6:17 pm

          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.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          May 27, 2020 at 7:59 pm

          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.

        • DinoNerd says:
          May 27, 2020 at 11:12 pm

          @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.)

      • DarkTigger says:
        May 27, 2020 at 2:22 am

        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?

        • Matt M says:
          May 27, 2020 at 5:49 am

          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?

        • matkoniecz says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:11 am

          If his lung capacity is permanently diminished at all

          Some nonzero but extremely minor damage would not be career ending.

        • Matt M says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:21 am

          At that elite level of competition? Are you sure?

        • Chalid says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:23 am

          By analogy, athletes play with incompletely healed injuries all the time.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:34 am

          I mean, Michael Jordan can play with food poisoning, but he is the GOAT.

        • Matt M says:
          May 27, 2020 at 8:47 am

          By analogy, athletes play with incompletely healed injuries all the time.

          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.

  14. DavidFriedman says:
    May 25, 2020 at 11:59 pm

    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.

    • Kaitian says:
      May 26, 2020 at 12:28 am

      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.

      • AlphaGamma says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:04 am

        Is it even legally possible to have different immigration rules for Hong Kong and the rest of China at this point?

        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…

    • b_jonas says:
      May 26, 2020 at 2:00 am

      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?

    • NostalgiaForInfinity says:
      May 26, 2020 at 2:01 am

      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?

      • viVI_IViv says:
        May 26, 2020 at 5:44 am

        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.

    • alchemy29 says:
      May 26, 2020 at 6:16 am

      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.

    • keaswaran says:
      May 26, 2020 at 8:39 am

      > 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).

      • Matt M says:
        May 26, 2020 at 8:43 am

        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.

        +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.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:09 pm

          I suspect MBAs (even socially-progressive ones) are more willing to view their classmates as “competition” rather than “friends” than the general population.

        • zzzzort says:
          May 26, 2020 at 6:42 pm

          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.

      • alchemy29 says:
        May 26, 2020 at 12:20 pm

        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.

    • Tenacious D says:
      May 26, 2020 at 9:04 am

      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.

      • Lambert says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:15 am

        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).

    • spkaca says:
      May 27, 2020 at 4:35 am

      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.

  15. DavidFriedman says:
    May 25, 2020 at 11:43 pm

    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.

    • Lambert says:
      May 26, 2020 at 1:02 am

      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.

      • AlesZiegler says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:48 am

        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.

        • albatross11 says:
          May 26, 2020 at 6:09 am

          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.

          • AlesZiegler says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:03 am

            It seems like increasing budgets of local health departments in the middle of the global pandemic should be a no-brainer…

          • Anthony says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:27 pm

            You find 50 contacts, you test them. *Then* you quarantine the ones who test positive.

    • David Speyer says:
      May 26, 2020 at 6:45 am

      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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:31 am

        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.

      • David Speyer says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:44 am

        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.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 26, 2020 at 10:54 am

          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.

          • keaswaran says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:17 am

            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.

    • Radu Floricica says:
      May 26, 2020 at 7:07 am

      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.

  16. saprmarks says:
    May 25, 2020 at 7:58 pm

    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.

    • mtl1882 says:
      May 25, 2020 at 8:16 pm

      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.

      • saprmarks says:
        May 25, 2020 at 8:49 pm

        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!

      • J Mann says:
        May 26, 2020 at 6:47 am

        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.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:23 pm

          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.

    • LesHapablap says:
      May 25, 2020 at 8:37 pm

      This is essentially what Florida did and they were relatively very successful at keeping it out of rest homes.

      • saprmarks says:
        May 25, 2020 at 8:41 pm

        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.

        • LesHapablap says:
          May 25, 2020 at 8:44 pm

          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.

        • Erusian says:
          May 25, 2020 at 8:59 pm

          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.

          • Loriot says:
            May 25, 2020 at 9:53 pm

            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?

          • Erusian says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:02 pm

            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.

          • broblawsky says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:18 pm

            What is Florida doing now to protect nursing homes, now that the stay at home orders are over and people are circulating again?

          • Erusian says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:26 pm

            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.)

          • broblawsky says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:33 pm

            Last I heard, our unemployment rate had more than doubled but was still less than half of that of the country generally.

            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.

          • Erusian says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:43 pm

            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.

          • Dynme says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:50 am

            Wait, why was there a curfew at all?

          • broblawsky says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:07 am

            That’s fair. I just can’t resist an opportunity to post FRED links.

          • Erusian says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:37 am

            Wait, why was there a curfew at all?

            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.

          • Dynme says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:35 pm

            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.

          • Erusian says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:13 pm

            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.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:21 pm

            @Erusian:

            You underestimate the number of people willing to stay the night.

            And the number whose Fate it is?

          • Dynme says:
            May 26, 2020 at 4:20 pm

            You underestimate the number of people willing to stay the night.

            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.

    • noyann says:
      May 26, 2020 at 12:26 am

      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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:39 am

        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.

    • AlesZiegler says:
      May 26, 2020 at 1:43 am

      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.

    • 10240 says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:32 am

      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.

      • A1987dM says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:06 am

        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.

        Given the CFR-by-age data, I’m pretty sure it’s either the former or both, not just the latter.

        • Matt M says:
          May 26, 2020 at 9:09 am

          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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:30 am

            +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.

          • Garrett says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:22 pm

            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.

        • 10240 says:
          May 26, 2020 at 1:18 pm

          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.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 26, 2020 at 5:28 am

      Nursing homes would be given enough money to hire caregivers willing to live on campus until the pandemic is over,

      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.

      • AlesZiegler says:
        May 26, 2020 at 8:14 am

        It is or should soon be technologically possible to test visitors on COVID just before their visit.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 26, 2020 at 8:43 am

          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.

          • albatross11 says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:21 am

            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.

          • Garrett says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:36 pm

            @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.

          • AlesZiegler says:
            May 27, 2020 at 12:56 am

            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.

          • Purplehermann says:
            May 27, 2020 at 1:23 am

            @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

      • saprmarks says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:41 am

        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.

        • mtl1882 says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:24 pm

          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.

        • AlesZiegler says:
          May 27, 2020 at 1:06 am

          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.

      • gbdub says:
        May 26, 2020 at 9:51 am

        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.

        • mtl1882 says:
          May 26, 2020 at 12:11 pm

          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.

          • gbdub says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:24 pm

            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.

          • mtl1882 says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:20 pm

            @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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:52 pm

            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.

          • LesHapablap says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:16 pm

            @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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 5:37 am

            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?

          • John Schilling says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:08 am

            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”.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:07 am

            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?

      • Purplehermann says:
        May 27, 2020 at 1:13 am

        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

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      May 26, 2020 at 9:41 am

      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.

      • John Schilling says:
        May 26, 2020 at 10:00 am

        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”.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 26, 2020 at 10:59 am

          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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:03 am

            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.

          • ana53294 says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:13 am

            +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.”

          • Matt M says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:23 am

            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.

          • Chalid says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:38 am

            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.

          • saprmarks says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:50 pm

            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%).

          • Matt M says:
            May 27, 2020 at 5:27 am

            “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…

          • Chalid says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:11 am

            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.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            May 27, 2020 at 10:18 am

            Even once they “agreed” they were still going to the grocery store like every other day as opposed to once a week or whatever…

            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.

            The most paranoid people I know are over 75.

            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.

          • saprmarks says:
            May 27, 2020 at 11:39 am

            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.”

    • Elementaldex says:
      May 26, 2020 at 4:10 pm

      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.

    • Purplehermann says:
      May 26, 2020 at 10:07 pm

      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]

  17. proyas says:
    May 25, 2020 at 6:31 pm

    Why do people say “incentivize” instead of “incent”?

    • andrewflicker says:
      May 25, 2020 at 7:03 pm

      Because it’s a new word, coming from “incentive”. https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-Home-Forum/2008/1010/p18s01-hfes.html

    • Erusian says:
      May 25, 2020 at 8:40 pm

      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.

  18. yodelyak says:
    May 25, 2020 at 4:38 pm

    Just echoing what everyone else said already, but for predictions on Feb 7, this just seems… accurate?

  19. yodelyak says:
    May 25, 2020 at 4:20 pm

    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?

  20. AlexOfUrals says:
    May 25, 2020 at 2:33 pm

    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.

    • Wrong Species says:
      May 25, 2020 at 3:52 pm

      Epimetheus is good for covering history outside the usual mainstream topics.

      • AlexOfUrals says:
        May 25, 2020 at 8:21 pm

        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.

        • keaswaran says:
          May 26, 2020 at 8:44 am

          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.

          • AlexOfUrals says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:41 am

            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.

          • keaswaran says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:22 am

            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.

          • AlexOfUrals says:
            May 28, 2020 at 10:35 pm

            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.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:
        May 26, 2020 at 1:29 am

        This looks good, I’ve been looking for similar things. Thanks.

  21. DavidFriedman says:
    May 25, 2020 at 10:13 am

    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?

    • Lambert says:
      May 25, 2020 at 10:21 am

      Yes, they did.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      May 25, 2020 at 11:51 am

      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.

      • Evan Þ says:
        May 25, 2020 at 10:50 pm

        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?

  22. Nicholas Weininger says:
    May 25, 2020 at 9:00 am

    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?

    • Christophe Biocca says:
      May 25, 2020 at 9:08 am

      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.

      • Nicholas Weininger says:
        May 25, 2020 at 9:50 am

        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?

        • Lambert says:
          May 25, 2020 at 9:54 am

          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.

          • Nicholas Weininger says:
            May 25, 2020 at 11:03 am

            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?

          • Radu Floricica says:
            May 25, 2020 at 11:06 am

            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.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 25, 2020 at 11:41 am

            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.

        • A1987dM says:
          May 25, 2020 at 12:08 pm

          Would you simulate individual air molecules when designing an airplane?

          • Christophe Biocca says:
            May 25, 2020 at 12:28 pm

            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”.

          • ProfessorQuirrell says:
            May 25, 2020 at 2:35 pm

            “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.

          • Cliff says:
            May 25, 2020 at 9:28 pm

            AIRPLANES

  23. nkurz says:
    May 25, 2020 at 8:34 am

    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?

    • bullseye says:
      May 25, 2020 at 8:57 am

      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%

      • albatross11 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 9:09 am

        So, basically 2000 and 2016 repeated?

        • Tatterdemalion says:
          May 25, 2020 at 9:21 am

          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.

          • Noah says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:34 pm

            there was no serious attempt to challenge or question the outcome

            There was the rather ludicrous attempt at holding recounts in three states; I guess you’re not counting that as “serious”.

          • Loriot says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:09 am

            That was basically just a scam run by Jill Stein though.

          • keaswaran says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:47 am

            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).

        • bullseye says:
          May 25, 2020 at 10:14 am

          I’m picturing like 2000, but with more than one state contested, and a lot more yelling.

    • Wrong Species says:
      May 25, 2020 at 9:37 am

      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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 25, 2020 at 11:50 am

        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.

      • keaswaran says:
        May 26, 2020 at 8:52 am

        > 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.

        • Matt M says:
          May 26, 2020 at 8:59 am

          Texas just recorded its fewest daily fatalities since the end of March. Approximately two weeks from having began reopening.

          • keaswaran says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:24 am

            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).

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
          May 26, 2020 at 9:44 am

          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.

          • DinoNerd says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:46 pm

            A flat or even slightly increasing number of cases is not a big deal if you are starting from a low level.

            Exponential growth.

          • J Mann says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:51 pm

            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.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 25, 2020 at 9:40 am

      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.

      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.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        May 25, 2020 at 11:48 am

        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.

        • John Schilling says:
          May 25, 2020 at 12:19 pm

          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.”

          “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.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 25, 2020 at 12:47 pm

            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.

          • meh says:
            May 25, 2020 at 1:59 pm

            thats the wording the founders used for ‘majority’?? no wonder nobody can agree on what this thing says.

          • Doctor Mist says:
            May 25, 2020 at 3:06 pm

            @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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 25, 2020 at 3:59 pm

            thats the wording the founders used for ‘majority’??

            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?

          • meh says:
            May 25, 2020 at 4:46 pm

            @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.

          • Nornagest says:
            May 25, 2020 at 7:53 pm

            it’s redundant. there is a weaker condition, and then a stronger condition that includes the weaker condition.

            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.

          • 10240 says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:53 am

            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.

          • meh says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:02 am

            You’re assuming there are only two candidates receiving electoral votes.

            You’re assuming I’m assuming there are only two candidates receiving electoral votes.
            Above from 10240

            a majority is necessarily also the most electoral votes

          • Doctor Mist says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:40 am

            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.

      • nkurz says:
        May 25, 2020 at 12:26 pm

        > 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.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          May 26, 2020 at 6:58 am

          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?

          • Matt M says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:48 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:53 am

            I understand that this is technically true, and I don’t have a good answer to your question.

            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?”

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 8:56 am

            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”.

          • ECD says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:16 am

            @Matt M

            In any case, I am very much in favor of Trump demanding the election be postponed…
            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.

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:22 am

            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.

          • bullseye says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:23 am

            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.

            As long as his target audience thinks he knows what he’s talking about, he’s golden.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:28 am

            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.

            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!”

            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.

            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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:44 am

            More dangerous than placing the country on indefinite house arrest for a disease with a 99% recovery rate?

            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.

          • Matt M says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:55 am

            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?

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:08 am

            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”.

          • Doctor Mist says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:27 am

            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.

          • anonymousskimmer says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:28 am

            @John Schilling

            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”.

            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.

          • Loriot says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:09 am

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:17 am

            If Trump decides to order the elections cancelled

            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.

          • Loriot says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:24 am

            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.

          • John Schilling says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:40 am

            Who exactly does Trump issue this order to?

            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.

            Is the President going to issue an order to my Supervisor of Elections to cancel our elections?

            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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 26, 2020 at 11:51 am

            Trump has never been one to let a lack of legal authority stop him from trying to do things.

            Can you give me an example?

            Edit:

            It’s not like Trump has exhibited scrupulous respect for division of powers so far.

            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.

          • J Mann says:
            May 26, 2020 at 12:42 pm

            Trump has never been one to let a lack of legal authority stop him from trying to do things.

            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.”

          • albatross11 says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:34 pm

            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.

          • anonymousskimmer says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:44 pm

            @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.

          • nkurz says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:36 am

            @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.

          • nkurz says:
            May 27, 2020 at 6:46 am

            @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.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            May 27, 2020 at 7:04 am

            @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?

        • keaswaran says:
          May 26, 2020 at 8:57 am

          > 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.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            May 26, 2020 at 9:49 am

            “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.”

        • Mycale says:
          May 26, 2020 at 11:41 am

          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.

      • LadyJane says:
        May 25, 2020 at 3:08 pm

        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.

        • Erusian says:
          May 25, 2020 at 4:08 pm

          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.

          • Evan Þ says:
            May 25, 2020 at 10:47 pm

            “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.

          • AlphaGamma says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:09 am

            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.

          • Erusian says:
            May 26, 2020 at 10:41 am

            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.

          • AlphaGamma says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:47 pm

            @Erusian: Except that Senate terms end on January 3, while the President’s term ends on January 20.

          • Erusian says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:08 pm

            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.

          • anonymousskimmer says:
            May 26, 2020 at 2:56 pm

            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

    • mtl1882 says:
      May 25, 2020 at 11:05 am

      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.

    • broblawsky says:
      May 25, 2020 at 3:10 pm

      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.

    • Another Throw says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:56 pm

      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.

  24. Brassfjord says:
    May 25, 2020 at 6:53 am

    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?

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      May 25, 2020 at 7:13 am

      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

      • Brassfjord says:
        May 25, 2020 at 7:22 am

        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”?

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:
          May 25, 2020 at 7:43 am

          “The Mongols”. That was not an internal decline, it literally got ground under the heel of a horde.

        • Watchman says:
          May 26, 2020 at 3:33 pm

          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.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 9:19 am

        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.

        • AlphaGamma says:
          May 25, 2020 at 1:06 pm

          The lizards have interstellar travel and coldsleep and fusion power,

          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…

      • DavidFriedman says:
        May 25, 2020 at 10:25 am

        The upper bound of what nature permits might be different for very different life forms.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:
          May 25, 2020 at 11:36 am

          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.

    • JPNunez says:
      May 25, 2020 at 7:20 am

      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.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 9:33 am

        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.

        • JPNunez says:
          May 25, 2020 at 11:48 am

          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.

    • DavidFriedman says:
      May 25, 2020 at 10:24 am

      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?)

      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.

    • zzzzort says:
      May 25, 2020 at 10:30 am

      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.

    • cassander says:
      May 25, 2020 at 11:23 am

      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.

    • Donald Hobson says:
      May 25, 2020 at 12:10 pm

      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.)

    • WoollyAI says:
      May 25, 2020 at 1:31 pm

      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.

      • matkoniecz says:
        May 25, 2020 at 2:36 pm

        within a single alien race

        I would also no longer require two powers that somehow were at a similar level.

  25. Bobobob says:
    May 25, 2020 at 5:38 am

    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?

    • Derannimer says:
      May 25, 2020 at 6:52 am

      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.

      • Tarpitz says:
        May 25, 2020 at 8:20 am

        4.5 average from 4 reviews on Good Reads, though, so there’s that.

      • bullseye says:
        May 25, 2020 at 8:59 am

        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.

  26. TheAncientGeeksTAG says:
    May 25, 2020 at 5:06 am

    Reddit r/askphilosophy

  27. bv7bd says:
    May 25, 2020 at 5:05 am

    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.

  28. zero says:
    May 25, 2020 at 4:56 am

    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.

  29. johan_larson says:
    May 25, 2020 at 3:14 am

    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?

    • GearRatio says:
      May 25, 2020 at 7:10 am

      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.

    • cassander says:
      May 25, 2020 at 7:25 am

      I’m a pretty lousy player (maybe 10k at best) but if you’d be interested in a go partner, let me know.

    • BenChaney says:
      May 25, 2020 at 8:00 am

      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.

    • tomlx says:
      May 25, 2020 at 8:49 am

      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?)

    • Robin says:
      May 26, 2020 at 3:39 am

      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.

      • tomlx says:
        May 26, 2020 at 6:14 am

        About mirroring, this probably doesn’t make sense because of komi. Apart from making the game boring.

        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.

  30. Lambert says:
    May 25, 2020 at 2:50 am

    Given how little anybodyy knew at the time, it was a defensible assessment.

    • chrisminor0008 says:
      May 25, 2020 at 5:09 pm

      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.

  31. ana53294 says:
    May 25, 2020 at 1:32 am

    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.

    • Lambert says:
      May 25, 2020 at 2:37 am

      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.

      • ana53294 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 3:44 am

        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.

        • Lambert says:
          May 25, 2020 at 3:58 am

          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.

        • AlphaGamma says:
          May 25, 2020 at 4:00 am

          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?

          • ana53294 says:
            May 25, 2020 at 4:08 am

            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.

      • ana53294 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 3:55 am

        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.

      • spkaca says:
        May 25, 2020 at 4:12 am

        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).

      • ana53294 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 4:21 am

        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).

        • Lambert says:
          May 25, 2020 at 4:43 am

          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.

          • Tarpitz says:
            May 25, 2020 at 8:55 am

            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.

        • Tarpitz says:
          May 25, 2020 at 8:49 am

          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.

        • Brendan Richardson says:
          May 25, 2020 at 9:12 am

          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.

          • Nick says:
            May 25, 2020 at 9:41 am

            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.

    • DavidFriedman says:
      May 25, 2020 at 10:37 am

      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.

    • TheAncientGeekAKA1Z says:
      May 25, 2020 at 10:40 am

      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.

    • Watchman says:
      May 26, 2020 at 5:00 pm

      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.

      • matkoniecz says:
        May 27, 2020 at 8:20 am

        Probably worth noting I’m not a fan of the National Trust

        I am really curious why.

        This probably relates to the political stability since about 1745

        Yes, even WW II damage was relatively small compared to what happened elsewhere.

  32. salvorhardin says:
    May 24, 2020 at 10:29 pm

    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.)

  33. GearRatio says:
    May 24, 2020 at 8:59 pm

    “It just turned out we weren’t compatible at all!” said his mother’s sister, antithetically.

  34. Dino says:
    May 24, 2020 at 7:18 pm

    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?

    • dodrian says:
      May 24, 2020 at 7:37 pm

      The Anglicans/Episcopalians and Methodists are making progress towards reunifying (random link I googled for a source).

    • edmundgennings says:
      May 24, 2020 at 7:58 pm

      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.

    • littskad says:
      May 24, 2020 at 8:02 pm

      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.

    • AlphaGamma says:
      May 25, 2020 at 2:02 am

      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.

    • johan_larson says:
      May 25, 2020 at 3:28 am

      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.

      The United Church was inaugurated on June 10, 1925 in Toronto, Ontario, when the Methodist Church, Canada, the Congregational Union of Canada, and 70 per cent of the Presbyterian Church of Canada entered into a union. Also joining was the small General Council of Union Churches, centred largely in Western Canada. It was the first union of churches in the world to cross historical denominational lines and received international acclaim. Each of the founding churches had a long history in Canada prior to 1925. The movement for church union began with the desire to coordinate ministry in the vast Canadian northwest and for collaboration in overseas missions. Congregations in Indigenous communities from each of the original denominations were an important factor in the effort toward church union.

      The United Church continues to be a “uniting” church, and has been enriched by several additional unions since 1925. In 1930, the Synod of The Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda became part of The United Church of Canada’s Maritime Conference. The Evangelical United Brethren Church became part of The United Church of Canada in 1968. In addition, various individual congregations from other Christian communions have became part of the United Church over the years.

      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.

    • Deiseach says:
      May 25, 2020 at 5:14 am

      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:

      The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is the product of a series of mergers and represents the largest (3.6 million members) Lutheran church body in North America. The ELCA was created in 1988 by the uniting of the 2.85-million-member Lutheran Church in America, 2.25-million-member American Lutheran Church, and the 100,000-member Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches. The ALC and LCA had come into being in the early 1960s, as a result of mergers of eight smaller ethnically-based Lutheran bodies.

      Or the Presbyterians in the USA, who also have divided into two major blocs:

      The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America was joined by the majority of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, mostly congregations in the border and Southern states, in 1906. In 1920, it absorbed the Welsh Calvinist Methodist Church. 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).

      …An attempt to reunite the United Presbyterian Church in the USA with the Presbyterian Church in the United States in the late 1950s failed when the latter church was unwilling to accept ecclesiastical centralization. …Attempts at union between the churches (UPCUSA and PCUS) were renewed in the 1970s, culminating in the merger of the two churches to form the Presbyterian Church (USA) on June 10, 1983.

      …The merger essentially consolidated moderate-to-liberal American Presbyterians into one body.

      • Watchman says:
        May 26, 2020 at 5:07 pm

        An attempt to reunite the United Presbyterian Church in the USA with the Presbyterian Church in the United States in the late 1950s failed when the latter church was unwilling to accept ecclesiastical centralization.

        I’m slightly surprised any presbyterian church would accept it.

    • boylermaker says:
      May 25, 2020 at 11:11 am

      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

    • Douglas Knight says:
      May 25, 2020 at 3:39 pm

      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.

  35. k10293 says:
    May 24, 2020 at 7:18 pm

    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.

    • John Schilling says:
      May 24, 2020 at 8:03 pm

      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.

      • anonymousskimmer says:
        May 25, 2020 at 9:42 am

        anything about human intelligence sources is particularly critical, because they are likely to have family members in the countries they were recruited from

        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.

    • edmundgennings says:
      May 24, 2020 at 8:10 pm

      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.

    • Matt says:
      May 24, 2020 at 9:40 pm

      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.

      • albatross11 says:
        May 25, 2020 at 9:42 am

        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.

    • MisterA says:
      May 25, 2020 at 1:30 pm

      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.

    • bean says:
      May 25, 2020 at 6:29 pm

      any secret technology must have leaked after 25 years

      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.

    • keaswaran says:
      May 26, 2020 at 9:04 am

      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.

    • gbdub says:
      May 26, 2020 at 10:30 am

      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.

  36. Dino says:
    May 24, 2020 at 7:11 pm

    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?

    • danridge says:
      May 24, 2020 at 7:37 pm

      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.

      • danridge says:
        May 24, 2020 at 7:52 pm

        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.

        • dodrian says:
          May 24, 2020 at 8:24 pm

          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.

    • qwints says:
      May 24, 2020 at 7:41 pm

      Are we taking about the last 1000 years? Obviously, there’s plenty of intro-Jewish wars depicted in the Jewish scriptures

    • DavidFriedman says:
      May 24, 2020 at 8:16 pm

      Sunnis vs Shia (and vs the often overlooked Sufis)

      “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.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        May 24, 2020 at 9:59 pm

        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.

      • zzzzort says:
        May 24, 2020 at 11:45 pm

        The ibadis are still.around, though they resent being classified as kharijites

    • AlphaGamma says:
      May 25, 2020 at 2:07 am

      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.

    • beleester says:
      May 25, 2020 at 6:00 am

      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.

    • Eugene Dawn says:
      May 25, 2020 at 7:47 am

      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.

  37. marshwiggle says:
    May 24, 2020 at 6:50 pm

    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?

    • chrisminor0008 says:
      May 25, 2020 at 4:19 pm

      In early February, how are you supposed to know whether your country will look like an Italy or a South Korea? Fear was warranted.

      • LesHapablap says:
        May 25, 2020 at 5:51 pm

        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.

  38. danridge says:
    May 24, 2020 at 6:50 pm

    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.

    • ksteel says:
      May 25, 2020 at 1:24 am

      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.

    • mcpalenik says:
      May 25, 2020 at 5:33 am

      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?

    • danridge says:
      May 25, 2020 at 10:17 am

      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.

    • mustacheion says:
      May 25, 2020 at 3:06 pm

      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.

      • danridge says:
        May 25, 2020 at 4:50 pm

        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.

        • AlexanderTheGrand says:
          May 25, 2020 at 4:56 pm

          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.

          • mcpalenik says:
            May 26, 2020 at 3:49 am

            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.

    • Anatid says:
      May 25, 2020 at 4:17 pm

      can you create a framework in which the general principles of relativity hold, charge and electrostatic force exist, but magnetism doesn’t?

      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.

      • danridge says:
        May 25, 2020 at 5:28 pm

        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?

        • Anatid says:
          May 25, 2020 at 6:44 pm

          One thing I notice is that one of the forces which works over long distances is mediated by a massless particle

          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].

          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?

          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.

          if we can’t figure out one of the terms in the equation (cosmological constant), how can we possibly have ANY solutions?

          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).

          • Aron Wall says:
            May 26, 2020 at 7:46 am

            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.

        • mcpalenik says:
          May 26, 2020 at 4:32 am

          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.

          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

          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.

        • Doctor Mist says:
          May 26, 2020 at 10:46 am

          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?

          • mcpalenik says:
            May 26, 2020 at 1:40 pm

            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 s