This is the biweek-ly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:
1. Comment of the week: superkamiokande from the subreddit explains the structural and computational differences between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas.
2. There’s another SSC virtual meetup next week, guest speaker Robin Hanson. More information here.
3. As many areas reopen, local groups will have to decide whether or not to restart in-person meetups. I can’t speak to other countries that may have things more under control, but in the US context, I am against this. Just because it’s legal to hold medium-sized gatherings now doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I would feel really bad if anyone became sick or spread the pandemic because of my blog. I don’t control local groups, and they can do what they want, but I won’t be advertising meetups on the blogroll until I feel like they’re safe. Exceptions for East Asia, New Zealand, and anyone else who can convince me that their country is in the clear.
4. Some people have noticed that my toxoplasma post seems disconfirmed by recent protests, which reached national scale even though the incident was very clear-cut and uncontroversial. I agree this is some negative evidence. The toxoplasma model was meant to be a tendency, not a 100% claim about things always work. Certainly it is still mysterious in general why some outrageous incidents spark protests and other near-identical ones don’t. I think it’s relevant that everyone is in a bad place right now because of coronavirus (remember, just two months ago Marginal Revolution posted When Will The Riots Begin?), and that 2020 is the peak of Turchin’s fifty-year cycle of conflict.
5. Speaking of protests, the open threads have been getting pretty intense lately. I realize some awful stuff has been going on, and emotions are really high, but I want everyone to take a deep breath and try to calm down a little bit before saying anything you’ll regret later. I will be enforcing the usually-poorly-enforced ban on culture war topics in this thread with unrecorded deletions. I may or may not suspend the next one or two hidden threads to give everyone a chance to calm down. I hope everybody is staying safe and sane during these difficult times.
6. If you haven’t already taken last week’s nootropics survey, and you are an experienced user of nootropics, you can take it now.
Hi there! Are you finding yourself with a lot of free time and limited ways to spend it? Looking for a somewhat-cerebral distraction from, you know, *gestures at the whole world vaguely*? Ever wanted to try role-playing games, but never had the time/opportunity? Well, why not try the Endless Dungeon
I’m looking for more players to bolster the ranks of an on-going play-by-post dungeon-exploration game. It’s designed to be accessible for new players with little/no experience, without any hand-holding or limitations to tactics or creativity. The commitment required is minimal, a single post per day is plenty, and you’re welcome to give it a brief poke and abandon it as you like.
My guess would be that the killing of George Floyd reached a national scale by piggy-backing on the riots. Before the riots, it was something people might be vaguely aware of but wasn’t a national conversation. But “city riots over unjust killing of citizen by police” is exactly the sort of controversial issue that the toxoplasma model works with, with strong arguments in favor of both sides. So the left and right both took strong positions on the riots (“justice for George Floyd” versus “law and order”) and shouted at each other over them enough to make it a national issue, and then people mostly stopped rioting but George Floyd didn’t stop being dead, so the clear-cut, uncontroversial issue managed to become part of the national conversation.
Apropos’ed by DavidFriedman mentioning his Embedded Economics, here is a list of SciFi works with remarks on their economics.
First, thank you extremely much for the list!
It’s awesome.
Second, I notice that most of the books are science fiction as opposed to fantasy, and anti-market rather than pro-market.
I wish that both of those were the opposite.
FWIW I run an anarcho-capitalist D&D game online; and I intend to use the phrase “Capitalist Sorcery” a lot, starting immediately.
You are welcome!
The makers of that page have some discussions, maybe you can ask there.
Reflected sound of underground spirits?
That book persuaded me that Pratchett was not worth reading.
Fortunately my son eventually persuaded me to try one of the Guards books.
As my father said, none of the above. As a teenager I got along with my parents very well; I think when I was sixteen my mother was literally my best friend (I had a lot of friends, but my childhood best friend and I had drifted apart, none of the others were at that trust-implicitly level yet, and Mom shared practically all of my interests and was the one person I could always talk to). Being a teenager was pretty awesome for me – I had discovered online gaming, specifically MMOs, and it gave me a filter that for the first time let me find really compatible potential friends. I’m sure I must have had disagreements with my parents somewhere in there, but they usually sounded like “You should really put more time into studying for the SAT.” “Grumble grump OK.” Pretty much, for everything I was doing, my parents had my back and I knew they did. So why would I rebel?
So – zero for defiance. Probably zero for self-absorption; somewhere around fourteen was when I realized my parents’ friends (who were frequently also my friends’ parents) could be potential friends for me, and started deliberately cultivating friendships with adults, which I think hadn’t occurred to me in that sense as something I could do before. So in that respect at least I was less self-absorbed at that age. Definitely wasn’t moody. I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with status either, though I’m not sure I would have noticed because I was probably higher status then than I ever had been before – again, online games, being very helpful within a group small enough that you encounter the same people repeatedly turns out to be rewarded with status. (Also, it’s hard to be high-status when you’re painfully shy, and I was just getting over that.) But I remember more being shocked that anyone would treat me as high-status than feeling any particular need to get people to.
Risk-seeking, no way no how not my thing – then or ever. But note that facet of my personality is pretty extreme, so that’s probably not much data; I expect I’m well below the 5th percentile for risk-seeking.
Estrangement from and contempt for family… pretty firmly covered above; almost exact reverse of the stereotype. (Only almost because it wasn’t a change – I liked them before, too, I was just more able to do stuff with them as I got older and more capable. Like playing harp with Mom’s early music group, which I think I took up as a teenager, or sitting in on Dad’s classes at the university, which honestly was a lot of fun. Or learning how to do lapidary work from Dad… I had a great childhood, and most of it was due to my parents.)
The Sumerian King List survived to the present on baked cuneiform tablets. It often gives a terse clarification of who a king was by stating “the [occupation]” or “the son of [predecessor]”. So when it gets to the hegemony being in Kish for the third time (modern historians estimate the 2400s BC), we get:
“Kug-Bau, the woman tavern-keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kish.”
So my question is, what’s the minimum population at which, even without specific evidence, we can assume an ancient town had an inn where travelers could get liquid bread and lodging on the free market rather than having to negotiate personal hospitality?
(Cf. the dynamic between the two strangers, Lot and the town square in Genesis 19:1-3)
On an important enough trade route, I suspect you don’t need any more town than it takes to support the inn.
(Source: am near 3 trade routes of varying levels of ancientness. Lots of pubs.)
Yeah, I didn’t want to complicate things by mentioning rural inns. I’ve read definitions of the English word where it has rural connotations. If a petty merchant traveled by ox cart, they’d need lodging every 12 miles.
Caravanserai is a Persian word and given what else we know about their economy, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were well-established by the time of Cyrus or at least Darius.
To be clear: was the King a woman who kept a tavern, or was the King a man who kept a tavern for women? If the former, how many female kings are on that list? I wouldn’t have expected any.
According to the linked Wikipedia page, she was a woman, and she was the only queen on the list.
I’d ask: How small does a place have to be for a tavern keeper to become queen?
A tavern keeper becoming a monarch strikes me as even stranger than a woman. Maybe tavern keepers had higher status than we’d expect?
Hard to say, because she was such an outlier that she was eventually worshiped as a goddess in the Hittite Empire.
The relevant Sumerian nouns are not masculine, but specialists generally think she’s the only woman on the King List. However, there’s the intriguing case of Enmebaragesi, whose son Aga of Kish was defeated by Uruk. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, G. offers the forest monster Humbaba “my sister, Enmebaragesi.” Not sure if literal or sexist joke.
Tavern keepers often brewed too and brewers were wealthy and important in ancient societies. In a society that primarily produces grain, people who manufacture products from that grain have a lot of economic sway. And beer has the added advantage of being beer and also lasting a lot longer than bread does.
In ancient Ireland, a hospitaler, someone who offered hospitality to all comers, was high status — I expect Deiseach could give more details.
@DavidFriedman: Yes, I need more details than “high status.” Was every Hospitaler knighted?
@Chat:
I don’t think knighthood existed in ancient Ireland.
A hospitaler had nemed status, roughly speaking “noble,” and I think that was the only way of getting to that status in one generation.
@Le Maistre Chat
You may have had the Knights Hospitaller in mind.
Just got laid off, looking for job advice.
Background: I have a PhD in physics with a focus on computational work (ie simulations). Since then I have two years of experience working as a software engineer, mostly with Java, but some C# and a tiny bit of Javascript as well. I’ve also picked up some of the usual ancillary skills: git, jenkins, jira, etc.
To be honest though, I’m really looking for a job in anything but software development at this point. I don’t really like the work, and I’m not that good at it either. I feel like my actual comparative advantage lies more on the softer side of the skill spectrum: things like taking in large quantities of information, synthesizing it, writing up summaries for audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication, giving presentations to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication – or heck, even just explaining things to coworkers. I’m *really* good at those things, and even on my best day I’m just a mediocre programmer.
That being said, it’s not like I’m opposed to technical work, or even all work that involves programming. If it’s a job where I’m asked to *use* code in the course of doing my work, then awesome, sign me up. But a job where my actual goal is to *produce* code, as a product that the company will sell? No, not my thing.
In general I feel like I have a pretty valuable skillset, and I don’t really doubt that I could provide a lot of value to a lot of companies. But I also don’t really know where to start looking. My pitch is basically “well-rounded generically smart person with solid soft and technical skills”, and I don’t know what you do with that. I’ve heard “data scientist” from some of my friends, but I don’t know, that just seems like consigning myself to a life of using SQL to extract minute trends out of vast, inscrutable datasets. Which, ugh. But maybe I have the wrong impression of data science – or maybe working with vast, inscrutable datasets is more enjoyable than it sounds.
Anyway, all advice is appreciated, including straight-up job recommendations, outside-the-box advice, or advice that basically says “you’re looking at all of this in entirely the wrong way you idiot”.
(Oh, or just generic advice: stuff like how to write good resumes or LinkedIn profiles, what to do/not do at interviews, how to negotiate a salary, etc)
Have you considered becoming an actuary? That is one of the many professions that could fit your interests.
What kind of work/life balance and location are you looking for? I really dislike McKinsey, but you sound like the kind of person they hire–and their alumni tend to do very well.
Right, good questions. I live in a small-ish Canadian city, which I know is going to heavily limit my options. I’d prefer not to move if at all possible, but I won’t entirely rule it out (I’ll be staying in Canada no matter what though, so in practice moving would likely entail either Toronto or Vancouver).
Work/life balance: pretty damn important to me. Like anything, it’s negotiable to some degree, but only to a point. Again, I know this might limit my options.
Yeah, I don’t really like McKinsey either. Probably not the way I want to go. But becoming an actuary is an interesting idea, and one that I hadn’t considered before. That’s at least going on the list – thanks.
I am an actuary – but Canada is a very different market than the US for actuaries. I’m happy to answer questions–this name at gmail.
I’d also say don’t overlook the trades: if you prefer smaller cities and staying in one place, electricians and plumbers can make a good living–and being able to explain things clearly to people, figure things out quickly, etc are valuable skills there too. (My brother is an electrician.)
Have you considered quant finance? I think it’s one obvious option based on physics PhD, with having some ability to program being weak further evidence in its favour. Something else that would probably fit your pitch is product management.
Free-lance science journalism (Quanta, Nautilus, Science News, Science Daily, Wired, etc…)?
If your background was in the biological sciences I know of a person who works from home on medical write-ups for https://primeglobalpeople.com/ , I don’t know if there are similar agencies for people with a physics background.
What do you want to do? There’s a distinct lack of a goal or objective in this post. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going then every wind is bad.
Analytics management? Large companies have more data than they know what to do with, and somehow the same technically clueless MBA-types get put in charge of managing the analysts who do the actual coding with predictably silly results. Someone who knows enough programming to talk to programmers and enough business to talk to internal/external clients can be very effective.
Data science is what you make of it – there are people doing Excel manipulation on the output from a select *, and there are people writing ten thousand line nested-macro programs in R. YMMV, though; I do like working with vast, inscrutable datasets but you really have to like figuring out puzzles that could have been avoided in the first place with even ten seconds of critical thinking in the system design phase.
FWIW the data scientists I’ve known are more about R and machine learning than SQL.
Get a cozy position in some megacorp’s R&D department and hack away. I’ve never met a data scientist who was good at programming, so aversion to that should not be an issue.
I know a few (mostly life sciences) PhDs who ended up as patent attorneys. My understanding is that it’s a surprisingly interesting field to work in.
Some fields that are regarded as being hard:
Engineering, Law
But if you can manage it, I suppose there’s not too much competition.
Life sciences are highest demand, but physics is a second best because it is assumed that you’re competent at everything else.
Hey! I’m a Mechanical Engineer/Data Scientist who uses SQL to extract minute trends out of vast inscrutable datasets! AMA!
I LOVE data science!
You’re not in a client facing roll, so you’re working with professionals who value your time and expertise.
Coworkers from the CEO on down come to you with questions about their data, you’re the expert who is helping them. Its not just sitting in the dark at a computer, you need to understand your coworker’s needs and be able to communicate well.
Being the Data Guy means that you have deep, intimate knowledge of your data. You are your company’s expert, and, while I always had a boss, they can’t really micromanage me because what I do is as much art as it is science. It requires spending a lot of time working with your data and understanding it.
My job typically involves people coming to me with questions or problems they have, and its my job to understand their technical background, figure out how to leverage my data to solve their problem, or how we can get the data to solve their problem. Build a solution, Then I’ll use Power Point, Excel, or MATLAB and present or deliver the results to them.
When you’re doing data work, you become really attached to your data set. You know its strengths and weaknesses, you care about making sure good data is coming in, and you’re building your own tools to extract the data in a clear and concise way. I think of my data the way someone else might think of a potted plant, or sourdough starter… It takes on a character of its own.
Also, Data Science is a weird field in that you need technical skills, but having a background in something other than CS is a real plus. For example, if I had a chemistry dataset, I would want to hire a chemistry specialist with data experience over a CS major because understanding what the data means is more important to the job than just technical skills.
I am currently unemployed, have found that doing food delivery for an hour a day helps get me out of the house and feeling useful. Not sure if getting mopey/low-energy/straight-up depressed is an issue for you, but I’d recommend being very proactive about keeping adventure in your near-term future to ensure your overall health stays good. Unemployment can be a real drag otherwise.
IT-Consulting is a field which is the perfect fit for people with both technical and social skills, but who do not want get their hands too dirty with the actual work of implementing stuff (I am being a bit cheeky here, but fundamentally it’s true).
Not every consultancy requires crazy work hours, at least in Europe 40 hours per week are common, but travel is still required.
Regarding data science, your apprehension is not unfounded. The common saying is that 80% of the work lies in data acquiring and preparation, which is fairly boring on a day to day basis.
In time travel fiction, often the plot revolves around killing Hitler, since it would save the lives of so many people. However, this overlooks the fact that it would also butterfly away the births of many different people. For example, if WWII never happens, then there is no Baby Boom. The 1950 world population might actually be LOWER than it was in OTL. So even something as purely good as killing Hitler is a tradeoff.
If you wanted to maximize the utility of the human race, wouldn’t the smartest strategy be to use your time machine to go back to 64 million BC, and to set up a human colony on Earth, complete with all the knowledge and technology of the future? Knowing about the World Wars and other catastrophes would make the colonists less likely to repeat those mistakes, and if they had medical technology from the start, an inestimable amount of suffering and death will be prevented.
Returning to utility maximization, it might be the better choice to preemptively stop the 100 billion humans who have ever lived from coming into existence and mostly led lives of suffering, and to instead bring about an alternate reality where humans suffer little and don’t have holocausts or world wars. By the time the alternate timeline returns to 2020 AD, well over 100 billion humans will have lived and died, and in much greater comfort than those that have in OTL.
Have you met people? Since when do we learn from history?
Heh. Letting Germany know in advance how close they actually come to winning a war against the entire world might not be for the best!
Overly enthusiastic time traveler: Hey, you are going to lose this war, don’t start it.
Hitler: Ze Blitz does not work? How could it fail?
OETT: Oh the blitz is wildly successful, it over runs almost all of Western Europe! But England holds out until the US enters the war and eventually they land at Normandy and push to Berlin.
Hitler taking out notebook: So they land at Normandy huh?
OETT: Yeah, pretty big deal, lots of effort went into concealing that from you. You know it probably wouldn’t even have happened if not for Dunkirk anyway.
Hitler: Dunkirk?
OETT: Oh yeah, after you smash through Beligium over 300,000 troops are trapped near Dunkirk and it takes a massive operation by the British to save them. Without those troops a lot of historians think Britain has to capitulate.
Hitler: So Britain holds out on her own?
OETT: Oh of course not, its your war with Russia that costs the most in lives and equipment.
Hitler: I see, I see, and what mistakes do historians say I make there?
Not that Hitler was ever willing to take constructive criticism…
I found this hilarious.
Main risk in killing Hitler is risk of Nazism still appearing, but with more competent leader, resulting in III Reich actually lasting for longer time.
If Hitler had died in early 1941, he’d have gone down in history as one of the most skillful leaders in history.
Hitler sometimes seems to me like a kind of weird accidental savant. I think a rational leader in his position and with his values (if they’d somehow got themselves into that spot in the first place) would probably have made a lot of the same/similar risky, high variance, high upside (upside from his perspective) decisions, because when you’re in a bad spot you have to play to your outs. But I don’t get the impression that’s how Hitler thought about it at all. He really thought things were going to pan out the way he wanted.
Sometimes I think hitler should get credit for realizing that if he wanted to achieve his goals, a high risk high reward strategy was the only way out. Other times, I think he was just letting everything ride on black, unable to really conceive that he could fail if he mustered sufficient will. However much he was doing the former, he definitely shifted towards the latter as time went on, but in fairness there, the fall of France would have gone to anyone’s head.
The really powerful app would be to replace Nazism per se with a non-Communist militaristic dictatorship that Jewish German scientists feel comfortable working for (too CW?).
The interesting thing about this is apart from the raw numbers, as you point out, killing Hitler changes all the births after that point. So even if it turned out to result in an unquestionably better universe, you’ve still wiped everyone who was conceived after that moment out of existence, and replaced them with a whole different population of humans, for all of history following the moment you changed things.
There’s an interesting (and borderline unplayable) tabletop RPG called Continuum where the players are time travelers, that really tries to wrestle with the implications of the idea. One of the things they point out is that even if you could change history without wiping out reality due to a paradox, it would be the worst crime any being could commit – you’re eliminating every sentient being in existence from that point in history forward, not just on Earth but in the entire universe, committing a number of murders so large it needs to be expressed in scientific notation, in hopes of saving a few million lives lost in a war or to prevent some personal tragedy.
As a result, a lot of what the player faction does is try to prevent changes to history, which is pretty typical for a time travel game; it takes it to some unexpected places, though. Like the fact that so many attempts to kill Hitler or prevent his birth have occurred that there is no actual original Hitler – just time travelers from the future forced to have their appearance altered to fill the role of Hitler in history, to ensure his atrocities are committed and that the past doesn’t change. It’s a dangerous job, as other time travelers are constantly showing up and trying to kill you. There’s a whole faction of time travelers called the Thespians whose job it is to fill the roles of assassinated historical personages – whole guilds of professional Hitlers and Stalins and Ghengis Khans ensuring that history occurs properly.
This is a subplot in the novel Pastwatch. The future society that invents time travel realizes that it will wipe out everyone currently alive and everyone they’ve ever known personally. ultimately they vote to go ahead and do it in order to make the past a better place; the ecological catastrophes dooming their present world help make this plot a bit more convenient. They don’t choose Hitler, however, but Columbus as the pivot point.
It’s interesting how the book supposes erasing slavery from the past would be a fixation of future.
The concept of the side effects of time travel is why I would oppose every chance to travel back in time any more than 2012.
I don’t understand how this is fundamentally different from someone deciding to do or not do something in the present, culminating in lots of people not being born. Most choices aren’t going to be on the same scale, but what if for instance, we could cause another baby boom by fighting a world war right now? Basically anything we don’t do is wiping out possible futures, and I’m not sure why time travel would change the moral calculus here.
A lot of this depends on exactly how the time travel works, I guess. If there’s just one timeline, that can be changed by time travel, then it sort of has all those choices ‘baked in’ already – all the choices everyone in history ever made are already there, until someone with a time machine comes along and reshuffles the whole deck.
Of course, if that were the way it worked then all the choices the time travelers could make should really be baked in already too, so the idea that nobody has free will except for time travelers is weird.
This is why the only version of time travel that actually makes sense is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Predestination Paradox.
There’s an interesting discussion of this in Ted Chiang’s Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom. The story’s central premise is the existence of a technology to see into alternate branches of the multiverse that forked at the time of the creation of the device.
Because the weather is a chaotic phenomenon where even single-atom changes can ultimately propagate into radically different states, and because conception is a 1-in~300M effectively random event sensitive to extremely minute variations, even a single forking event (ie, a single atom difference) will ultimately lead to entirely different people (genetically speaking) being born in the forked timelines.
So, even if the time travellers faithfully recreated all the historical roles, they would never be able to fix history such that the same people were born.
Somebody here on SSC, way back when I first started reading it, posted some math showing that moving one gram of matter a distance of 1cm was enough to change the results of a lottery-ball-drawing on the other side of the planet just from its gravitational effect. I thought that was pretty cool.
Plausibly, the Baby Boom did nothing except compensate for the fact that fewer children than normal were born during the war. (I haven’t looked at the numbers though)
Everybody likes to talk about going back in time and killing hitler/stalin/wilson.
But how many QALYs would you save if you just stated studying the relationship between smoking and cancer several decades early?
This only has data from 1990 until 2016, but with some very rough extrapolation based on global population I got about 69 million deaths from lung cancer between 1960 and 2020.
The second world war caused between 70 and 85 million deaths, same order of magnitude.
However, understanding the relation between smoking and cancer will not eliminate lung cancer altogether and the deaths from lung cancer will on average be much older people than the people that died in WWII (which means you get fewer QALY’s by saving them), so my guess is that if preventing the rise of Nazi Germany is on the table and doing so doesn’t cause significant other disasters, that should still be the higher priority.
I think this caveat is, uh, doing rather a lot of work. It’s pretty easy to imagine a no-Nazi world involving a hot war between the USSR and the West, and if nukes are developed at a stage where the outcome is still in question – or worse, before the outbreak of said war – that could be really bad. We may well have got really quite lucky to live in a world where only two nukes were used in anger and the prospect of more is limited.
Is there any plausible early-mid 20th Century intervention that could leave us with a better regime in China, thus potentially alleviating both Mao’s lunacies and whatever nastiness the coming decades may have in store?
TIL that the KMT had soviet support till 1927. Chiang studied in Moscow.
Maybe weaken the Beiyang generals to make life easier for the KMT. I’m not a fan of one-party nationalism, but Mao sets a pretty low bar.
Chiang had deep bipartisan support in the United States (he and his wife were Christians) starting July 25, 1928. I guess that was a geopolitical turn away from the USSR?
Soviet Marxists in the 1920s thought that China was nowhere near ready for a socialist revolution at the time. According to the Soviet Marxists, the most realistic next step for China was a bourgeois democratic, anti-imperialist revolution that would do away with the semi-feudal influence of landlords and warlords, modernize the country, and achieve a progressive capitalist social-democracy…eventually setting the stage for socialism. Soviet Marxists therefore supported Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People,” which included a plank that people have translated as “welfare rights” or “social-democracy.”
That said, Soviet Marxists in the 1920s still supported Chinese communists, mainly because experience ever since the revolutions of 1848 has shown that bourgeois liberal parties tend to chicken out from fulfilling their own program at the last minute because usually, in order to overcome their ancien regime on the right, the bourgeois liberals have to mobilize the masses as allies, and the bourgeois liberals run the risk that the masses will, once mobilized, come forward with their own demands that infringe on the classical liberals’ own program. So, classical liberals will often make the revolution only halfway and find it preferable to reconcile with their former enemies on the right in order to guard against their old footsoldiers/new enemies on the left. So, the thinking goes, the left has to be organized to foreshadow to the liberals the futility of turning on the left and to pressure the liberals to follow through all the way on achieving the goals of the bourgeois revolution.
So, the official policy of the Soviet government in the 1920s was to support both the communists and nationalists and demand that they both get along with each other. The Chinese communists did not always share this view and had a more “ultra-left” adventurist view (influenced by Chinese anarchism, which was a powerful influence at the time) that China was ready for socialist revolution already in 1925, so you had the abortive Chinese revolution of 1925-1927 and the counter-revolution from the KMT and the Long March exile afterwards.
This would be earlier, but would eliminating Marx, or possibly Marx and Engels, be reasonably expected to have a good effect?
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The broad strokes of communism seem likely to be an inevitably appealing idea in an industrialising world. Getting rid of Marx might eliminate the bonkers world spirit stuff and various other specifics, but I doubt they change much about the overall thrust of the 20th Century political movement – certainly not in a reliably good way.
What if we sent Marx and Engels back to 1790, or 1646?
Well, yes, but that gets you into the normal discussions on whether killing Hitler is actually a good idea. Which I was trying to avoid.
People referred to cigarettes as coffin nails as early as the late 1800s, but a fast search doesn’t turn up what specific damage cigarettes were believed to do.
King James I said smoke was “dangerous” to the lungs, even secondhand.
Jeremy Bentham cited A Counterblaste to Tobacco as the sort of irrational antipathy utilitarianism opposes. Oops.
I’d say that if you’re going back in time to fix a public health hazard, do the research on lead and convince the government not* to use it in every critical piece of infrastructure.
At least the people who smoke do it to themselves; poor people in neighbourhoods full of lead pain don’t choose it.
*EDIT
Convince them not to use..?
Nah, go back in time and convince the Romans to use lead instead of something else cheap but safer. Muwahaha!
Not many. The relationship was established back in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, ironically, and they did wonders in suppressing smoking in the first anti-smoking campaign. But then the Nazis took power and ended it.
The links were also brought up in the 1950s by the British. But that led to little action. (Worth noting that the leadership of the UK during this period at this time were heavy smokers, which certainly played a role)
The mistaking you make is assuming that exposing such a relationship through science by itself will enable an increase in QALYs. It took many decades not because the science was missing, but the political will was missing.
Identical twins don’t have identical DNA.
I don’t know how much this means twin studies should be discounted.
The only differences will be de novo variations that arise during embryonic development. These will be a very small fraction of the variation expected between non-monozygotic twins. I do not expect this to make any difference for twin studies of heritability.
metacelsus is correct, but to the extent that there are meaningful genetic differences between twins, it means that genetic effects would be more extreme. If twins are only 99.5% the same genetically, and previous some trait such as eye color variation is measured as being 99.5 due to genetic variation, based on twin studies, we should instead treat it as being 100% genetic. And similarly for other traits. But in practice, the differences are going to be small enough that that we do not really need to do this. Measurement error in any trait is going to swamp this.
I would still expect that identical twins have much fewer differences between their DNA than two siblings.
But of course, many people will take this as evidence that identical twins are a social construct and genetics is pseudoscience.
Is the empty Inter-Korean liason office getting exploded CW?
You’ve got to admire their on-point messaging.
I realise I’ve lost track of the putative Kim Jong-un health issue story: is it significant that KYJ was the one making the statement? Is the consensus that KJU’s health was and remains impaired, and she’s taking a more prominent public role as a result?
I have a vague (and possibly wildly inaccurate) impression that authoritarian regimes often have a high ranking person, but not the highest ranking person, make such pronouncements as they can then be turned into a scapegoat later if (when) things go horribly wrong.
Kim Jong Un is not going to throw his sister under the bus. Almost everybody in North Korea is expendable, from the regime’s point of view, but KYJ isn’t.
Why not? Aren’t the vast majority of power struggles near the top of the NK hierarchy among closely related members of the Kim family? Like didn’t KJI get his position by murdering his uncle? Or am I misremembering here?
Based on my reading of The Great Successor, she’s the smart one, and KJU knows it. She has the diplomatic chops, the strategic skills, and the PR expertise. She just can’t actually take over due to her lack of a Y chromosome. That makes her invaluable.
No; those are just the ones you hear about, because “Kim Jong Un has random disloyal politician purged” is not newsworthy.
And, the non-Hollywood version of the Game of Thrones is not won by the ruthless lone-wolf psychopath what will kill anyone who gets in his way. In the land of Every Man for Himself, the man with one good ally is king. Kim Jong Un has one good ally, and her name is Kim Yo Jong.
And a whole lot of less-good allies, as well. But you can’t generalize from “he killed his uncle” to “he is a ruthless psychopath with no allies who will kill anyone”.
I’ll trust ya’lls judgment on this, but just to be clear, my model is less “ruthless psychopath who kills everyone” and more “calculated dude who will absolutely set up his most powerful rival/ally to fail just in case he needs a good reason to purge them”
Kim Yo Jong is also married to the second son of the number two guy after Kim Jong Un, which presumably makes the number two guy less likely to organize a coup.
In fact, I’d say that such prominent winners of the Westerosi Game of Thrones as Aegon I and Jaeherys I were notable, among other things, for having unshakeable allies in the form of their sisters.
Granted, they also tended to marry them…
@John Schilling says:
What about “He killed his uncle with an AA cannon” though?
Meh. East India Company was executing insurrectionists by canon over 150 years ago. And we’re not even regarded as the Bad Guys™.
Wait, there are people not considering East India Company as Bad Guys™?
Tyrion Lannister killed his own father; there were still plenty of Lannisters he would not have killed (whether for sentiment or strategy) even if he had the chance. “Ally” and “relative” are not synonyms.
And besides, it was only a quad-mount heavy machine gun. Stories grow in the telling.
No, that’s just the ordinary sort of war. Or at least a warning of such.
It’s a reminder that there’s still a whole lot of unfinished business between the Koreas. The Old Normal, pre-2018, was that the North Korean economy staggered towards oblivion under crippling sanctions, and everybody worried about whether the Kims would hold a nuke-fest in the final days of their regime. The New Normal is that the North Korean economy staggered towards oblivion under crippling sanctions, and everybody naively assumes that the Kims will negotiate away their nuclear weapons before that happens. Or at least not hold the nuke-fest, because look at all the happy fun openness since 2018, how could the North possibly nuke their cousins in the South?
North Korea, sensibly, prefers the Old Normal. If the happy fun openness of the New Normal isn’t actually going to lead to a relaxation of sanctions, then what’s the point of the liason office? If everybody assumes that North Korea is going to give up its nuclear weapons Real Soon Now, no matter how many times they explicitly tell people that this will not happen, then what’s the point of the liason office?
I wouldn’t read too much into KYJ being the one to make the announcement. There probably is a secondary agenda of boosting her political profile in case she does need to take over. But she’s effectively been House Kim’s minister of propaganda for nine years now, and she was the diplomatic force and public face of the 2018 thaw in inter-Korean relations, so this was basically her job.
I don’t know if people in general would be interested in this, but I strongly suspect that people who are also SSC readers would be interested in this.
I’m genuinely very excited to read this, thanks for sharing!
If you’re very excited to read about stoicism then I think you’re doing it wrong.
That’s only because he hasn’t read it yet.
I know you’re joking, but I’ve actually never quite understood this aspect of Stoicism.
Like… my sense of the philosophy is that you are in control of your own thoughts, and emotions, so don’t let sad things or bad things get you down. I think that’s very insightful, and a useful tool in building a good life.. but if you can choose to not be sad… why wouldn’t you chose to happy?
Linda Hamilton also wants to know.
I had always interpreted it not as being about choosing your emotions, but 1. being conscious of your reactions, so that you are able to realize when they are unproductive or stupid and 2. be aware of the instability of things and the fact that much of what happens is not in your control, in order to result in 3: the understanding that a lot of your mental tumult is unjustified and does not actually help with anything, which is a necessary prerequisite to 4: giving yourself permission to lay down your anxieties and get into a less freaked out reality tunnel. We won’t put down the burden until we see that we’re carrying it in the first place, and that it’s dumb and isn’t good for anything. All these little thought exercises in stoic writing are invitations to try and get this into our heads. But there’s no direct choosing of a target emotional state: rather, a choice of perspective and reflection which, ideally, results in the desired emotional change naturally over time
If you are overhyped about something, you will later be disappointed.
If you think something will make your life great, you may be sad when it is over.
…if you can be happy without making any of these mistakes, then of course, be happy.
Do we actually need a COVID-19 vaccine long-term? It seems to me that there is a steady state where COVID-19 is a pervasive disease. Most people catch it sometime during their lifetimes, typically quite early in life. Fortunately the disease is not dangerous to the young. It sometimes causes no symptoms at all, and other times has flu-like symptoms. So for most people it would just register as a flu sometime in their youth, and they would then be immune. Sometimes someone would catch a bad case of it, and would need hospital care. Very occasionally, someone would manage to avoid catching the disease until old age, would need hospital care, and might die from it.
If this is correct, then the problem with the disease is not that it is so dangerous in total, but that we are seeing it for the first time and getting the infections (and potential deaths) all at once. And in particular, old people are exposed to the disease without having had the opportunity to catch it (and build immunity to it) earlier in life.
Is this right? I’m only an armchair epidemiologist.
The other aspect is that a vaccine is less needed if more is known about how to treat COVID-19 so that it’s a less serious disease.
Probably we do. Just like with chickenpox. I had it as a kid, but vaccinations are recommended as I age in case of re-emergence. Strong B cell responses deteriorate over time for most viruses.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200521112613.htm
It seems strange that a vaccine could provide a subject with better immunity than actually having caught and fought off the disease. There’s not a lot of training that is better than actual experience.
I suppose a vaccine could be better than catching the disease if we include costs. Getting a shot every ten years for life might be cheaper than catching the disease once and dealing with the effects and possible treatment.
That was my understanding as well. That if it’s true that immunity for this disease fades in a year, that doesn’t mean “now we have to wait until an effective vaccine” so much as it means “there will be no effective vaccine.”
Isn’t most training better than actual experience? If you want to learn to play a sport for example, you don’t just go and play the sport over and over. You learn far more, faster with targeted training. There’s a reason practice isn’t just scrimmage.
Various parts of a virus are more amenable to mutation without having loss-of-function. If your native immune cells generate antibodies against an easily mutable viral motif then you will quickly lose protection as the virus mutates in the population. Good vaccines consist of viral motifs that do not easily mutate without rendering the virus non-dangerous.
Well, if I want to avoid death by avalanche then learning about how to avoid them is better than getting crushed under tons of snow and getting rescued.
From my poor understanding of vaccines – they deliver characteristic parts of infection, without infecting (or with extremely weak infection). That may allow to deliver bigger dose of identifiable material without going through infection.
This is my naive understanding, please yell at me if I am wrong.
They may also include nasty toxins called adjuvants that stimulate a greater response.
If the vaccine is just an attenuated virus, then almost certainly recovering from the actual disease would provide strong immunity (assuming it is a complete recovery, rather than one that leaves you systemically weakened).
But both the actual disease and an attenuated-virus vaccine will result in a broad immune response against any viral protein that the immune system can even recognize. A tailored vaccine, by any of several modern techniques, might narrowly target a specific protein that testing has revealed to be the most effective target. That could plausibly work better than natural immunity.
I guess it depends on your definition of “actually need a vaccine.” The world has survived with much worse diseases for a long time (measles, mumps, rubella) and we have diseases that kill more people than COVID will this year as well (malaria) that w haven’t beat.
It’s just that there will be a million fewer people this year without a vaccine while massive quarantines affect much of the globe, and I am getting really sick of never leaving the house.
+1
A vaccine means that a whole lot of the world can return to normal that isn’t going to return to normal (no matter how many politicians or media types say they should) when there’s a disease with maybe a 2-3% chance of killing them off. If you’re a healthy 70-year-old who’s retired and enjoys travel, you’re probably not going to be taking a lot of trips, cruises, etc., until either you confirm that you’ve had the virus and are immune, or you’ve gotten the vaccine.
My in-laws are pretty upset about this. They’re in their mid-70s, are still healthy and robust enough to travel, and love traveling. They’re worried that by the time C19 has been resolved (say, another two or three years if no vaccine comes out quickly), they will have burned through the last few years that they’ll be able to do much traveling.
You’re talking about the far future, but right now we have millions of people at risk of dying from Covid. They could be saved if a vaccine is developed soon.
Measles is about as deadly as Covid overall, although it kills more children and is more infectious. No-one questions that we should vaccinate against it. Chickenpox is like Covid in that getting it as a child is mostly harmless, although it can have long-term effects that cause pain. The vaccine can prevent that.
So Covid seems in line with other things we vaccinate against. I guess there is a hope that we can treat it like smallpox and mass vaccinate in areas where there are cases, so the illness will end up eradicated and we won’t have to add it to the standard vaccine schedule.
Also dangerous coronaviruses have appeared a number of times in the last 20 years, if we manage to vaccinate against this one that’s also good practice for the next one, which might well be worse.
> Do we actually need a COVID-19 vaccine long-term?
Yes. Somebody will object to a 7-fold increase of apoplexy (the “7” if from another source I don’t rememember) in young adults.
On the one hand, the base rate is low, no need to get agitated. On the other hand, this figure only catches the immediately clinically visible lesions, while micro-lesions that lower local brain function just a little have not been investigated (AFAIK).
No state worth its taxes / nobody aiming at reelection will tolerate a statistical dumb-down of their people/electorate before/in their most productive life period. Or at least will not want to be seen to do so.
On an unrelated note, did anybody else find it jarring to have people in their 30s and 40s described as “young adults”? Or is that normal nowadays?
In the context of covid, and often in other medical contexts, young just means “non elderly / pre menopause”. But even in other contexts, 30s and even 40s can be young, e.g. a 38 year old US president would be young.
Hell, at this point, a 60 year old president would look pretty young.
This is not true, for reasons given by other commenters, but also because a substantial amount of the population has prior chronic conditions that puts them at much greater risk.
At most, you could make the case that we don’t need a vaccine urgently (i.e., to solve the current epidemic). But long-term, we need it at least as urgently as we need insulin, beta blockers, etc.
You make some good points. There are some countries, however – notably Australia and New Zealand, that can/have eradicated the disease. It is doubtful these countries will fully open up to the world without a vaccine coming, or total eradication (which seems unlikely).
We have been assured here in NZ by our government that we definitely won’t open our borders to any country that hasn’t also eradicated until there is a vaccine, whether it is 2 years or whenever, because they don’t want the hard lockdown we went through to go to waste.
I think they need to be more flexible than that and not get attached to the sunk costs.
If immunity doesn’t last, then no. Elderly people will either stop being part of civilization or die.
I’m pretty sure that’s wrong– the death rate for elderly people would go up, but catching the virus or dying from it isn’t 100%.
One thing we have no idea about yet– there hasn’t been enough time– is whether being exposed to the virus and not catching it or not getting very sick from it means it will never give you serious trouble.
My understanding is that with other coronaviruses, you have near total immunity for about a year, but after a few years it fades to near total susceptibility.
For what little it’s worth, I don’t get nearly as many colds as I used to, but I used to get the same cold (similar symptoms and duration) three or four times, and then probably not get it again.
I think you lose sterilizing immunity (you can still get and pass along the virus), but you get less sick in subsequent infections.
If you assume that you can get it again on something like a yearly basis, and it isn’t less server after the first time, then I’d say both catching it and dying would be pretty much a given, barring extreme measures.
The world isn’t going to keep social distancing forever, and with the infectiousness of covid19 it will infect people way more often than the flu.
If you keep getting a sickness, where you have a 10% chance of dying every year (because you’re older) you’re going to die sooner.
If death + serious disability is in the 5-10% range, and if participation in normal social life makes it at all likely that one is going to contract COVID-19, that could well drive a norm that people retire from normal social life at 70 or so. So much for looking forward to joyful years of playing with the grandchildren post-retirement.
Or maybe the geezers fatalistically don’t care, or maybe it divides along tribal lines.
Yes. Society is fixed, biology is mutable. It will be much easier to develop a vaccine (or cure) for COVID-19 than it will be to convince moderns that sometimes lots of people die of deadly infections and there’s nothing you can do about it but that’s not reason to hide under the bed until the scary germ goes away. I’m not sure the latter is really possible at all. You can convince half the moderns, maybe two-thirds, but that way leads to really ugly culture-war issues.
Man it’s really going to suck when we run out of antibiotics for things not to be resistant to, assuming we can’t get phage therapy going.
Indeed. As a libertarian, this is one of those few coordination problems where government intervention makes sense as it doesn’t make a lot of market sense to develop a new effective therapy and then almost never use it. They’d have to price it at a million dollars a dose or something to recoup their expenses, and then would have almost no insurance company cover it.
Maybe I am misunderstanding something here, but isn’t the fact that it’s easier to develop a vaccine than to do that also evidence for the fact that there actually is something you can do about it other than just let lots of people die, and in fact an argument for hiding under the bed until we can make the scary germ go away?
John Schilling:
Getting to herd immunity likely means 30% or so of the population doesn’t ever catch the virus. There are ways of substantially reducing your personal risk of catching the virus that are actually doable right now, for many of us, which give us a better chance of ending up in the other 30%. That’s not “there’s nothing you can do about it.” Further, if a vaccine becomes available in a year or so, then that’s another point at which people who avoid catching the virus for the next year can avoid ever having to roll a saving throw against drowning in our own lungs. Even just better treatments coming along over the next few months can improve our odds.
Now, I’ll acknowledge that our inept leadership and dysfunctional government means that we as a country couldn’t do anything about C19, in much the same way that the Haitian government couldn’t do anything about its cholera outbreak a few years back. I wish we were a more functional society, and if I knew how to fix that, I would[1].
Still, I suspect I think of this the way people who are seriously into guns think about crime and social disorder. Sure, you’d *like* to live in a society where violent crime was so rare it was silly to feel the need for a gun, and where civil disorder/rioting/looting/arson just never happened. But since you live in a society that *isn’t* able to prevent those things, you’ll take what steps you can to protect yourself, recognizing that perfect safety isn’t available, but that you can avoid dangerous parts of town, carry a gun concealed when necessary, put good locks and lights and maybe an alarm in your house, etc.
In much the same way, I can avoid crowds, minimize my time spent indoors with possibly-contagious people, wear a good mask (KN-95s are attainable at this point) in public, use curbside pickup or delivery instead of going into stores, get carry out instead of eating in restaurants, etc. And I will definitely be advising my high-risk relatives and friends to do the same, as best they can. This isn’t some kind of inability to understand risk, it’s a recognition that there’s stuff I can do to lower my risk, and an unwillingness to volunteer myself as a human sacrifice to the dysfunction and ineptitude of my society.
And of course this will have broader social consequences. Just as an inability to get urban crime under control led to white flight and all its attendant social damage, our inability to protect our citizens from C19 will lead to a lot of businesses not surviving the next few years. The politically connected ones have gotten and will keep getting bailouts, of course, but many of the others will just collapse. But just as people in my parents’ generation saw the social damage but still moved to the suburbs after the third time they got mugged in their neighborhood, I can see that this will happen, be sad, and still not go risk my own life and health to support those businesses.
Or, I guess maybe I’m just hiding under my bed till the scary germ goes away because I don’t understand risk. That’s probably it, really–what else could explain why someone wouldn’t do the stuff that you wish they’d do?
[1] I think C19 is going to end up demonstrating, to anyone willing to look, how dysfunctional our society has become relative to a whole bunch of other ones. Taiwan and New Zealand and Australia and South Korea are all places that seem to have done very well with this virus, despite being substantially free, democratic, wealthy first-world countries. But somehow, they could pull it together whereas we couldn’t.
I find it interesting that all* the countries you point to as being actually competent are islands. Maybe that is the actual difference?
*I think its fair to treat S. Korea as an island given the impermeability of their boarder with N. Korea and Australia despite being a continent has all the features of an island which seem relevant to combating a pandemic.
New Zealand was successful mostly because we had more notice than almost anyone else. We reached 100 confirmed cases at least 10 days after almost every other country, and 20 days after the US.
That 20 days made a huge difference: when the US hit 100 cases it was March 2nd and nobody really knew what was going on. Italy was just in the news with 1800 confirmed cases.
March 23 NZ hit 100 cases, and Italy was all over the news with 64,000 cases and the hospitals completely overrun. NYC had locked down on March 20th (with 5600 confirmed cases), so there was now plenty of precedent for shelter-in-place. The NZ government announced on the 23rd that the lockdown would start on the 25th.
That’s the big reason why NZ was more successful. But that’s not to say that the NZ government doesn’t work a lot better than the USG: we aren’t anywhere near as rich, and we don’t have the economies of scale, but we have a lot less regulatory bloat.
To the people insisting on e.g. lockdown until vaccine, it’s close enough to nothing as makes no difference. All risks are either “Perfectly Safe” or “Intolerably Dangerous”, and private precautions against COVID-19 are not seen as effective enough to move it into the “Perfectly Safe” category. So they round to “nothing you can do about it”.
John:
I feel like you’re spending a lot of time responding to a weakman argument here.
Yes, there are pro-lockdown people who are innumerate. (Also anti-lockdown people.). Yes, the phenomenon of some of my Facebook friends condemning the “covidiots” for protesting the lockdowns/going to the beach one week, and cheering the BLM protesters for packing into big crowds and chanting for hours the next, was kinda embarrassing to watch.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done, or that sensible policies to slow or stop the spread of the virus aren’t possible. It’s hard to the the US having the institutional competence and coordination across administrative boundaries to handle this well, but it could be done. And if it’s not done, there are still sensible things people can do to reduce their own risk, which aren’t magic talismans anymore than carrying a concealed gun is a magic talisman against crime, but which are prudent risk-reducing measures.
If a single infection provides total immunity, or if catching it during the phase of fading immunity from a previous infection means that one doesn’t experience bad effects, then we don’t long-term need a vaccine. But if immunity fades, and reinfection as an old person is just as bad as first infection as an old person, then yes, we need a vaccine.
I was an extremely well behaved teenager. My biggest fallout with my parents happened not over acting out or relationships or other “typical” teenage drama, but over the fact that I wanted to go to the local state school instead of my dad’s religious alma mater. We compromised by setting my sights a bit higher (dad really hated the local state school) and I ended up applying to some Ivy Leagues.
Aside from that, my teenage years were filled with undiagnosed mental health issues–autism, depression, anxiety, and unhealthy levels of perfectionism. When people told me to enjoy my teenage years because they were the best years of my life, I thought “I certainly hope not because I already want to kill myself.”
I did go to prom, but only because I was coerced.
I think “did you go to prom or not” is the ultimate scissors statement that separates out the normies from the weirdos. (I did not).
That would be an interesting question to put on the next annual SSC survey.
Does it translate internationally? Do most countries have some sort of party at the end of high school that you are expected to go to as a couple? Canada does, but really, we’re America Light.
(I did not go.)
Do most countries have some sort of party at the end of high school that you are expected to go to as a couple?
Over here it’s the Debs (short for “Debutantes”) but I don’t think it’s as big a deal as the American prom, though I don’t know what modern attitudes are (we’re Americanising our culture so much, it could well be that Kids These Days do think of it as their equivalent of the prom). Held in the final year of school, age range 17-19 years old. Tradition in my day was “girl asks the boy, pays for the tickets, boy purchases corsage and other things”. That could be changed as well 🙂
I didn’t go to one because it was cancelled by the school due to a dispute between our Leaving Cert year and a new teacher; things got to such a pitch that the principal tried threatening us that we would not be permitted to sit the final year Leaving Certificate examination (this is a Very Big Deal) unless we backed down and formally apologised to the teacher (they probably couldn’t have done this, but they were relying on pressure from the school and from parents to make us back down), but “the people united will never be divided” and we said “Okay, so we won’t sit the defining examination of our entire school careers that we have been told is the making or breaking of us for the entire rest of our future lives depending on how well we do in it!” (because the teacher was definitely in the wrong and I was one of the witnesses to it) so they had to give in: no apology from us, continued firm backing of the accused student and belief that she was the victim, and we got to sit our state exam as normal. If you’re ever wondering why I’m pro-union, this is why 😀
In retaliation, they cancelled the Debs. But there is strength in unity, so those who wanted a Debs got together and made all the arrangements themselves and had one despite it all. I still didn’t go because I had no interest in going to any such social functions, and even if I had, the whole “get a dress/date/motivate yourself to attend” was impossible.
But non-attendance was not a big deal in the way I’m led to believe (if the movies and novels are telling the truth, and surely they would never lie!) that it is in American life?
Not going to prom qualifies one for the Social Failure Ribbon, Third Class.
Present day UK has proms taken from the US; most people go to them and you don’t really go as a couple IME.
Yeah. The American prom-specific stuff’s not here so it’s more like a crappy semi-formal do for people who don’t quite know their way around a bar yet. At least it was a good excuse for me to invest in a dinner jacket.
I am certainly a weirdo, but I went to prom.
My prom story:
I knew a girl who dated a boy for the sole purpose of getting a prom date. Then another girl started dating me a couple of months before my prom. I told the second girl what the first had done, and the second girl told me I was “evil” for suggesting that she might be doing the same thing. After prom I never heard from her again.
I had to miss prom because I was competing in the National Ocean Science Bowl that weekend.
I’d say my girlfriend was pissed, but that’d be a lie – she was team captain.
I didn’t go to my prom, but went as a junior to the previous year’s prom. Where does that put me?*
*I’m a weirdo.
Clearly you got a lot weirder from junior to senior year.
I’m a massive Weirdo, went to both Junior and Senior prom entirely because I was in a relationship at the time.
Being in a (romantic) relationship in high school is some evidence you were not a wierdo.
Oh I mean they were a huge Weirdo too. XD
I did not go to a prom. The first time I danced may well have been my wedding.
I didn’t dance at my wedding, more weird points for me.
Where else can you get applause for awkwardly shuffling from side to side?
At someone else’s wedding, of course.
The only time I’ve danced was at a friend’s wedding. My own wedding had no dancing because my husband hates it.
I did propose bringing in two DDR machines for my own wedding, mostly as a joke but also because I really enjoy DDR, and was told “absolutely not.”
I did, junior and senior. For the senior prom, one of the students organizing things paired me up with a girl who didn’t have a date, someone I knew but wasn’t particularly close to.
And I think I was a wierdo by most definitions.
Did not go to prom, but went to a pre-prom dinner with one friend group, attended the alt-prom event with a different friend-group, and then the after-prom party, flitting between both groups. Very satisfied with that choice, I wouldn’t make my breakthrough on pop music and dancing until a few years later, so prom itself would have been me annoyingly refusing to participate.
Did not go to prom, because I’d accidentally conned my way into skipping a grade and didn’t know anybody else who was going.
Biweekly Naval Gazing links post:
First, I finished up my series on the Tomahawk cruise missile, with a look at the blocks which have formed the mainstay of the US arsenal since the mid-90s.
Second, my series on coastal defenses continues with a look at the Third System, built by the US from the early 1800s to the Civil War.
Third, my extremely long-running series on Soviet/Russian battleships continues with the only ships to actually see metal on the slipway.
Fourth, merchant ships have returned, with a look at specialized tankers, most notably Liquid Natural Gas tankers.
Lastly, my tutorial for Aurora is close to wrapping up. Start here if you’re interested.
That link directs me to this page.
Proper link
Aapje’s link is correct. I messed up when putting it together, I guess. Oops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/health/virus-journals.html
One ot the themes of the article is journals saying that peer review shouldn’t be expected to detect fraud.
However, fraud happens even if it’s plausibly much less common that mistakes. Should there be forensic reviewers to check for fraud? What sort of knowledge, training, and temperament would they need?
I don’t think having “forensic reviewers” is feasible.
One of the reasons why you have peer review – rather than independent review – is because other working scientists are the only ones who (if you’re lucky) actually understand new research well enough to be of any use. (And even then, it can be really hard to find someone who’s a genuine expert on the exact subject matter, especially if the research is in any way cross-discipline.)
And if a large group of people with such an eclectic breadth of knowledge that they could conceivably carry out such a task actually existed, you’d probably want them putting their time to better use. (also, you probably couldn’t afford them)
That said, the actual editor that is assigned to handling a particular paper and the reviewers should be expected to perform basic sanity checks on what’s been placed in front of them. You should be able to tell certain claims are really implausible/seem too good to be true if you really are a qualified reviewer.
The check for fraud is replication. Granted this can’t distinguish between fraud and a mere failure to replicate, but scientifically this distinction is unimportant. If a big name has a bunch of papers that fail to replicate they’ll hopefully become less of a big name.
There is at least one journal which won’t publish results until an editor has replicated them. Of course this is very labour-intensive and doesn’t work for every field- and the journal in question has a very low impact factor.
Orgsyn is very well-trusted and well-regarded in the chemistry community. Impact factor isn’t a good measure of its impact.
Earlier rewrite provided link claiming the problem with peer review is the peers.
Sure. Peer review only works up to the standards in that particular field, it just means that your article has survived exposure to that particular echo chamber. For many fields, you have certain standards of evidence and reproducibility, and peer review will point out if you break them. Peer review increases the quality of articles a lot and improves communication of results. Review is a big effort, and often takes months or even years. I’m not sure it is worth it in general, and for cutting edge work, it’s all unpublished (and thus not peer reviewed) papers on Arxiv these days. Maybe we should spend our efforts on reviewing Arxiv papers with a certain number of citations?
I do not think that forensic reviewers would need much specific knowledge of the field. (I’m basing this partly on having worked as an auditor in a financial services context.)
Peer review is designed to detect “this question is ill-formed/there’s an alternative explanation that should be considered.” It seems to me that forensic review would be designed to detect “this data is made up/this data and this analysis don’t produce the stated results.” That doesn’t require nearly as much understanding of the specific field.
I share a first name and initial with one of the people banned from SSC meetups. (I assume I’m not actually banned, because the worst thing I’ve done is this.) Since I peripherally participate in the in-person rationalist community, I’m mildly concerned about the reputational effects of being mistaken for being on a list with some terrible people.
It would be easy to include a hash of the individual’s last name, so as to prevent this sort of error from damaging reputations
What if you get a SHA256 of 9F542590100424C92A6AE40860F7017AC5DFBCFF3CB49B36EACE29B068E0D8E1 ?
Since idioms change so often in real life, it is jarring to read modern phrases in some scifi/fantasy. For example, one would not have a horseman “roll up” to a battlefield. (Or maybe you would; I was surprised when first learning Latin that “circiter” -> “around” has both of the meanings it does in English: literally surrounding, but also that one amount of X might be around the same as another. Maybe a lot of phrases are older than I think).
Some authors do good in creating their own phrases. I like how GRRM uses “Bannermen” instead of “Vassals”, and when a character “Calls his bannermen” it feels natural.
Compare with The Lensmen series, where the author for some reason thought that it would be futuristic for people to replace “OK” with “QX”. See also anything with “cyber” in it.
People of SSC, do you have any examples of surprisingly old, good, or bad phrases or expressions?
I remember years ago looking at reviews of some fantasy book I was reading, and one was complaining about how the words used were too modern for the sword and sorcery setting. The one that stuck out to me was “backpedal”. That seemed like a perfectly natural word to me, but apparently it’s quite new. It only rose to popular usage in the last ~50 years.
Presumably it relies on the existence of semi-modern bicycles, which is pretty recent.
“paddle” wheel ships have been around for at least 1500 years. An in-universe argument could be made that the word derives from this usage.
But yes, the online etymology dictionary traces this word to bicycles in the late 1800s.
Bannermen/man is a pretty old word for more or less the same thing we use ‘vassal’ to mean, with an emphasis on those vassals who provide strictly military service in return for land.
It’s also what we translate the term for soldiers of the Qing dynasty Eight Banners Armies into.
I’m still annoyed at pre-medieval fantasy Age of Decadence for using the phrase “carbon copy”, which refers to a nineteenth century precursor to photocopiers (hell, carbon wasn’t even named that until the late eighteenth century).
Every use of “quantum” everywhere ever is terrible. It’s the technobabble equivalent of those people who treat the word “lol” like punctuation, it’s not just that it doesn’t have meaning but that the text would be more readable if you deleted the word entirely, with no replacement.
The setting details of Age of Decadence provide a plausible path for the people of its current time to be saying “carbon copy”, but you do have to assume some degree of linguistic longevity for that phrase.
Nineteenth century? I remember carbon copies! Still in use in the 1990s, and maybe the next decade too.
I was surprised to see the phrase “decked out” in Moby Dick. A ship was decked out in … I don’t remember, whale bone or something.
I presume the phrase originally referred to ships with stuff out on the deck.
I figured that might be it. We also have the song “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly” whose English lyrics were written about the same time as Moby Dick, so it’s possible the “deck” thing is just a coincidence.
I’m sure there’s an easy internet search to find out for sure, but wild speculation is supposed to be the point, isn’t it?
In the American military you will quite frequently hear the phrase “smoking and joking” used to refer to groups of soldiers loafing or “standing around bullshitting”. Imagine my surprise when I found a contemporary account of a successful Union attack against a Confederate depot during the Civil War where the author described the Federal soldiers as literally “smoking and joking as they walked” onwards. This might even be where the phrase came from.
Not quite what you’re talking about but I was shocked at the similarity to modern tactical language used in Antoine de Jomini’s Art of War from 1838 (though the definitive English translation, from which the US Army ripped off all of its terms, was from 1854). I specifically remember the use of the term “decisive point”, and the names of different troop formations were identical to modern use.
Neither one of these is that old, I suppose, but they are older than I would have thought.
Telling archers to “fire” in settings where nobody has heard of gunpowder.
Funny thing is, though, that you don’t see this bent towards historical accuracy when it comes to subtitle translations. Localisation for immediate audience understanding is so much higher priority that replacement of idioms with local language versions is the norm, regardless of class/character connotations. Like a Japanese or fantasy character saying “let’s bury the hatchet.”
Not fantasy, but there’s some wacky slang in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I seem to remember John Hughes wanted to avoid using 80s or recognizable slang so the film wouldn’t feel dated. So they made up their own. In my mind it makes it sound immediately dated, so I wouldn’t say he was successful.
Wow, it’s possible I watched it and assumed it was using actual period slang. I can’t recall any examples though.
See also: A Clockwork Orange.
Not even John Hughes could make “Fetch” happen. Gretchen Wieners never had a chance.
Man, I love that movie.
“So, you’ve actually never been to a real school before? Shut up! Shut up!”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Tangentially related:
While most of Brandon Sandersons setting specific idioms are quite bad (Calamity, not every rusting thing a culture does has to be related to the blustering local magic system in some starving way!), but I’ve noticed that some of those idioms have slipped into my personal vocabulary.
Specifically, storms/storming as a replacement for fuck/fucking and not by a breeze or a stormwind for ‘not nearly’.
Airsick lowlanders is also quite fun to say, but it hasn’t caught on to the point that I find myself using/thinking it unintentionally like the other two.
T-mobile outage prediction thread!
I’m officially abandoning my usual conspiracy-mindedness and going with “some guy hit a button wrong, like that one time with the stock market”.
I have no clue if anyone else is experiencing this bug, but apparently any text message sent within a 10 minute window are being infinitely repeated.
I’ve received ~100 copies of the same 2 texts today. One is “cool beans” the other is “you shouldn’t disrespect your aunt like that.” Ever 10 minutes. All day. To borrow a site metaphor, imaging a boot stamping on a human face forever saying “COOL BEANS YOU SHOULDN’T”T DISRESPECT YOUR AUNT LIKE THAT”
This made me audibly laugh.
T-Mobile says they’re experiencing a widespread routing issue effecting their voice and text services. What, specifically, that routing issue is? Who knows. But a particularly bad config can lead to cascading problems just from the very nature of routing protocols. If it’s specifically their voice and text networks, it might be some kind of problem in their MPLS-TE config.
I’ve accidentally built circular networks, and they are hell on routing, and would have the result you see here.
I am worried about the state of the network as a whole. Wednesday we had national comcast outages, servers from clients overseas not connecting, AT&T slowdowns (though these might be local) and now T-mobile. Perhaps the BGP routing tables are getting too long? Any other ideas that would account for all of this in such a short time?
Matthew Prince (the Cloudflare guy) says that, like so many other complex distributed system outages, this was a bad config push.
I’ve spent my COVID getting into baking and had the same realization I did when I first started home-brewing – I can make stuff with very little difficulty in my home that is roughly 100x better than what I’d get in the grocery store for maybe 1/3rd the cost. It’s crazy. A loaf of bread that I’d have to pay $5-$8 dollars for in a fancy bakery costs maybe $1 + around 45 minutes of work. I find this shocking because I always assumed I was missing something, that there was some vast chasm of experience or equipment between your average dude with an oven an a professional baker, but (at least for bread) that’s apparently not the case.
So my current list of “High-Quality Stuff that’s Fun and Easy to Make at Home” so far consists of Bread and Beer. What else, in your opinion, am I missing?
Hummus. And face masks.
I read that as “Humans. And face masks,” and agreed. I agree about hummus, too.
Dave Barry has a book “Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have Around the Home “
The bread gap is really truly huge, and I can’t agree with you more on it. I’m doubly blessed in that my wife does it, so for me it’s like magic perfect bread just appears on the counter every few days in a way unassociated with covid free time I won’t always have.
If your bread-making skills follow the same improvement curve my wife’s did, then you are in for a treat – it got to fantastic quick, and then kept mysteriously rising to this very day.
This legitimately got me exited.
$5 for 45 minutes of work does not sound like a deal
You leave it in the oven and sit there reading a book/watching tv/work your actual job from home/anything else?
Right, what Belisaurus Rex said. It’s the most low effort 45 minutes of work I’ve ever done. I put on a podcast, I weight out some flour, sourdough starter, salt and water and stir. Then I cover it and wait for a while. Maybe I knead if if I’m feeling especially fancy.
All in all, the time investment of making a loaf is pretty equivalent to me getting in the car, driving to a bakery, waiting in line then driving it home.
If you’re in the mood for jacking up the effort, I highly recommend trying this: Every half hour, stretch and fold the bread in half four times. Do this ~6 times total. *much* better bread in my experience.
(yes, I know this totally contradicts the point of it being low effort, but meh. I work from home nowadays anyway, so getting up for 2 minutes every half hour doesn’t really bother me)
ok, makes more sense. i wouldnt call that 45 minutes of work then. 10 minutes of work.
Huh, every time I do bread (usually steamed buns) I have to budget like 3 hours on a weekend. But that’s always doing from scratch, I don’t have starter.
Your process sounds closer to the convenience of making rice.
For weekday bread I use Jim Lahey’s No-Knead bread recipe (modified for a sourdough starter). It is literally as easy as cooking rice, you just need to start 24 hours in advance to allow time for the slow fermentation.
It doesn’t result in the best bread I’m capable of producing, but it’s up there with anything you could buy in a bakery. Call this 95% perfect bread. For more complex bread preps, it can take up to an hour or so of actual work.
You’ve got me interested, can you link me a good recipe?
Er, so I’ve been using a recipe for my dough that was meant for baking, but it’s been fine steamed, too. Worked with both sweet and savory fillings. I just use the steam basket accessory that came with my rice/slow cooker.
I also tried this recipe, which worked out pretty well.
Otherwise, I have not actually tried this page yet, but it seems promising for a dough that’s a bit more customized to the task.
And I think this is why bread baking took off during the pandemic. The issue isn’t spending a lot of your time doing the work – it’s spending a long period of time close enough to your kitchen to do the 30 seconds of work that are needed once in a while.
When your social and work life used to involve going to different places at different times, the one-time cost of going to the bakery on the way home is much less than the cost of being tied to the home for several hours. But now that your social and work life take place on the computer at home, the time in the kitchen is no longer a problem.
Marmalade: you can make incredibly good marmalade really easily.
Start in the evening. f you like the slightly bitter English-style marmalade, use 1 lemon, 3 oranges, and 1 grapefruit (if you want it just sweet, leave out the grapefruit) . Take out the seeds (just cut in half and squeeze with your hand), chop in a food processor or by hand the pieces are no bigger than grains of rice. Add 2 parts water for each part fruit, soak overnight, bring to a boil in in the morning and each morning for the next 2 days (3 boils altogether). Add equal parts sugar, boil until it gels. You will have about 8 pints of the best marmalade you’ve ever eaten.
Just so I’m clear (I’m totally doing this recipe) I boil it in the morning, then (I assume) put in a container and refrigerate until the next morning whereupon I boil it again? Three questions:
1. Do I add any more water at any point? I assume not, but I’d like to be sure.
2. Do I bring to a boil, then immediately remove from heat or do I let it boil for a certain amount of time?
3. Do I add the sugar before the third boil or do I boil it three times then add sugar and boil it again?
You can refrigerate, although I don’t bother–I just leave it in the same covered pot (so the inside is disinfected by the steam) the whole time and have never had any problem.
You do not need to add water at any point.
The third time you boil it, you can either let it sit again for up to 24 hours, or add the sugar once it’s up to a boil. Unless you have a huge pot, though, I’d do final boil for half of it at a time.
Details of how I do it: I have a 10-quart stainless steel pasta pot (do NOT use an aluminum pot). I generally grind the fruit Wednesday night, bring it to a boil every morning while making coffee, and make the jam sometime on Saturday. For the final boiling with the sugar, I do about half of the fruit and sugar at a time, in a 10-quart pot–it foams up quite a bit. I just ladle the boiling marmalade into clean glass canning jars (widemouth pints) and put the lids on–I put the lids in a bowl of and pour boiling water over them a few minutes before. It will keep for at least a couple years that way.
Thank you! I’ll make it and let you know how it turns out!
Re-reading, I’m realizing that I’m assuming you’ve made jam or jelly before.
It isn’t hard, but a few tips in case that’s not the case:
The final boiling with sugar will take 10-20 minutes at a full rolling boil. You can stir or not–not stirring lets the bottom layer caramelize slightly to make “amber marmalade”–I prefer to stir it. It will foam wildly, so you want a pot that’s no more than 1/4 full when you start. When you stir there will be a burst of steam and foam, so use a long spoon and don’t put your face nearby.
To test for doneness, put a spoonful on a plate–it should thicken.
Salsa. Throw some peppers, tomatoes, and onion and garlic if you want in a blender and blend it up- better than from the grocery store. Use bell peppers for mild salsa, Anaheims for hot, and Jalapenos for an in-between.
If you don’t have a blender than it is actually significantly more work.
I started doing a drier kind of salsa in the food processor.
– 1/4 of a white onion
– 1 or 2 fresh jalapeno peppers
– a dozen sprigs of cilantro
– juice from half a lime
– salt to taste
(Scale that however you want)
I very coarsely chop the onion, peppers, and cilantro into pieces that are about an inch long so I only have to do a few pulses in the food processor to get them down to finely chopped. That way it doesn’t get soupy.
I make a bunch of this and just keep it in the fridge. I can take it out any time and dip chips and stuff in it, or I can heat up a small buttered tortilla in a skillet, add shredded cheese and a spoonful of the salsa to the tortilla, then fold it over and brown it on both sides for a quesadilla snack.
So basically pebre? You’re missing tomatoes and a dash of oil though. Garlic optional. vinegar instead of lime is up to you.
You haven’t lived until you’ve tried this. Good on bread, with sausages, in soup, etc etc.
I used to make it with tomato but decided it just made it soupy without adding much. Never made it with garlic; not going for that kind of flavor profile.
Well… you should only use the firm fleshy part of the tomato, and throw away the seeds and the liquid.
My cheap self won’t let me throw away any significant quantity of something I know to be edible under normal circumstances; if I must have tomatoes I just chop them separately and use them as a garnish.
Back when people did things, someone used to regularly bring tortilla chips to the DC meetup, but not salsa. I was never able to find out who and punish them appropriately.
Cakes.
While wedding planning, I tried every cake within a 30 Mile radius, most of which were priced in the 100+ dollar range. At least half of them were no better than a box mix, and another quarter were no better than a good magazine recipe.
Edit to add: aside from the winning bakery (which cost close to 500 dollars), I did not find any cakes that I liked better than my own apple spice recipe, stolen from a magazine a decade ago.
It’s shockingly difficult to buy decent baked goods for money. I bake, and when I do, people always are surprised and usually say something like “You don’t seem like the sort of person who would like baking.” I don’t like baking. I don’t mind it, but what I like good cake and it’s not that hard to make.
Bakeries work on the principle of pleasing their regular customers (like almost every other business), which means predictable, consistent production of a handful of high margin goods. Standard cakes are incredibly high margin for their ingredients (flour, water, sugar, salt, leavening) and skill level. If you want high quality baked goods you need to find a place that has high effort high volume goods (a french bakery that makes it own croissants and doesn’t buy partially frozen ones to
baketoast every morning).It is my opinion that almost all eating out and purchasing of cooked goods is to avoid cleaning up after and has little to do with the time and effort of actually cooking.
I basically agree with you. The only things I don’t bother cooking are:
-Fried goods: just not worth it. Too much difficulty to do this on a stove top.
-Asian/African Ethnic Food: If i could buy single-use spices I would cook more, but I don’t need a whole jar of say, star anise that I’ll only use once a month.
I don’t mind cooking and cleaning, I mind shopping for groceries and then watching them go bad. I eat out to get variety that I can’t get in my home.
Funnily enough the lockdowns have made me hate grocery shopping. I used to take the kids with me so it was just an errand, but now its an errand that I have to use my kid free time to do.
The kind of sweet baked goods that I am willing to buy, because they are too much effort (baklavas, layered cakes, etc.) tend to only be sold in specialized stores. The exception is in Russia (at least, in Moscow), where you can buy really, really good complex cakes in any supermarket. I always buy them when I visit.
Sadly, stores in the UK and Spain never have cakes more complex than simple spongecakes, brownies or apple pie. And I can make a very good brownie myself, thankyouverymuch.
I only ever buy panettones, croissants and the Spanish King Cake (that one is quite laborious to get right, and, since it’s only eaten once per year, totally not worth figuring out). They’re mostly too much time and effort for comparable or even inferior results. Everything else, homemade is better.
Basically any food you can prepare well that isn’t a huge pain has the potential to be high-quality, (at least somewhat) easy, and fun.
We’ve taken our recycling to the next level and now are filling those plastic bag recycling containers in the front of supermarkets with stuff we would have thrown in the regular trash a year ago.
We also discovered that a lot of products’ packaging can be very useful if repurposed. The biggest winners are jars and plastic tubs for obvious reasons. Plastic milk jugs can be washed, cut, and reused in a variety of ways, especially in the garden and garage.
“Easy” means different things to different people but I find woodworking both easy and hard at the same time. I make and/or repair a lot of stuff around the house, and as my skills have improved so has the quality of my work, in everything from bird feeders to furniture.
Along those lines, I don’t know if this counts as “making at home” but there’s a lot of DIY home & auto maintenance and repair stuff that’s easy and fun, much of which people normally pay a lot of money for someone else to do. (Though I do think there are some situations where calling a pro is warranted, even for the brave and motivated individual who’s normally willing to learn to work on his property by reading a forum or watching a Youtube video.)
Here’s an anti-recommendation: Chicken Paprikash.
My GF demanded we try this amazing new recipe she discovered. It was not very good.
Pie crust. Use a recipe with vinegar in it; I think Pioneer Woman’s was the same as the one I’ve been using for years.
Beer bread.
I think the best one I made was with some brown Leffe I had lying around, but stouts work well too.
If you want to make it even easier, take a look at the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The title is an exaggeration, but it really is a way of having fresh baked bread at very little cost in time. And some of the breads are quite good — I’m particularly fond of the rye.
Pizza is the obvious next step. It’s easy to make truly awesome pizza. Two tips:
-if you’re using premade pasta sauce, there are lots of brands to choose from. Choose the one with the least amount of added sugar.
-You may need to bake the crust by itself for a bit before putting toppings on unless you have a wicked pizza oven.
Even better, deep dish pizza! High effort, but SO good. I’m a chicago native who used to nearly only eat deep dish when I visited because I missed it so much. Once I found my current deep dish recipe, but competes with every real deep dish place and beats a lot of them, I no longer bother. I follow this reddit post (not mine): https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/272ycb/chicago_style_stuffed_pizza/
This seriously borders on CW, but Detroit style is the best. And it’s easier to make than Chicago style.
Definitely culture war and disgustingly wrong.
But I’d be interested in a recipe so that I can prove you’re so wrong.
Food Wishes has it.
Here’s the recipe of the year from King Arthur Flour. It is definitely a winner (at least when made by my boyfriend).
Link?
Pesto. Different types of chutney. I hear homemade ketchup is also miles better than any commercial stuff, but I haven’t tried it since I am under the (possibly wrong) impression that all ketchup is disgusting.
I have not had success with bread yet, but I have not tried very hard.
-Stocks, both chicken and especially beef. I do a lot of whole chicken, though, so I tend to have leftovers.
-Home made tomato sauce
-Cakes, very easy to make at home, very good
-Simple cocktails
-Home-made pizza is pretty solid. It doesn’t beat every pizza, but it’s damn close for how little it costs.
Hummus is surprisingly easy, so long as you have a food processor of some sort. I have an immersion blender that came with a chamber accessory that turns it into a food processor. Bonus points, adding white miso paste to my otherwise plain hummus made my tongue register it as cheese spread.
You can also make tahini at home for super cheap, because it’s basically just sesame butter. Buy sesame seeds in bulk from a grocery, toast them on the stove. Blend with oil in the proper ratio.
You can make fritatta in a slow cooker, though the texture may be unsatisfactory compared to baking methods.
I’ve also used my slow cooker for braising, which is great. (And as per above, making stock. Speaking of which, miso soup is fairly easy to make at home.)
Finally, use a slow cooker or stew pot thermos for hong/lu dou tang, a sweet mung bean soup, which you basically can’t find in grocery stores at all (only the ingredients), and only higher end Chinese restaurants offer at the end of a multi-course meal.
Things I’ve made myself that are worth it:
Beer (although the explosion in the last two years of nano breweries has reduced some of the variety advantage)
Bread – particularly sourdough
Mayonnaise – this is a 3 minute process, is very customizable, and is delicious. I’ve started making an eggless version that is indistinguishable.
pizza dough – i live in an area with not great pizza, so this is worth it for me. wouldn’t be in other places.
Traditional recipes that have been commodified, are superior when made at home, and are relatively easy to make – caesar dressing, hollandaise, alfredo, buffalo wings,
Things I’ve made myself that are not worth it:
yogurt – turned out exactly like good whole milk greek yogurt from the store. No money saved here.
Things I haven’t decided on yet:
kombucha (still brewing)
Strongly second mayonnaise and hollandaise. And with mayonnaise comes aioli, basil mayo, etc.
Granola.
I am currently on a low glycemic index diet, as one of the recommendations from Bredesen’s book. I once got, I think from Whole Foods, a version of granola that had no grains and not much carbohydrate, but I don’t think they always have it — and we have been quarantining since mid-March, so I’m not shopping there or anywhere else, other than delivery.
My daughter in law pointed me at a webbed recipe for something similar. It’s easy to make and very tasty. I modified it by adding coconut chips and omitting the Erythritol, which is a sweetener. All of the ingredients can be ordered online for delivery.
It’s very good. I mix it into fruit salad as well as having it with fruit and milk.
Fancy cocktails- it doesn’t take much work or expense to make cocktails better than what you’d get in 95% of bars, for a fraction of the per-drink price. I often recommend people start with brandy sidecars, fancified gin-and-tonics, and manhattans, depending on what they like- but if you have more developed tastes already, just buy the bottles necessary to make the thing you like, save tons of money compared to buying them out, plus you impress your house-guests.
If it’s that you like the “going out with a date / friends” experience, do dinner out and retire home for the cocktails- impressive, classy, less worries about getting home tipsy, and so on.
I’ll second this as well – pick a cocktail you like that’s not tiki, and you can probably buy everything you need to make a dozen of them for what 3 of them would cost in a bar–and it’s easy to make them serious cocktail bar quality rather than random neighborhood bar quality.
Regarding toxoplasma, I think that your thesis still holds up. Uncertain evidence about a dispute’s flashpoint event is not the only thing that can create a toxoplasmic situation. Toxoplasma can also happen about uncertain evidence over the validity of various responses. Here is how I would state it: As you mentioned originally, in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, the debates were mostly over whether the killings were justified; clear-cut in one case and more dubious in the other. You, and the public debate, found the debate focused around the killings, rather than their aftermath. Mainstream opinion about appropriate response was fairly unanimous: have a debate, allow nonviolent protests, condemn riots.
In the George Floyd case, the evidence is as clear-cut as the Eric Garner case. But now the public debate centers more strongly on whether the protests are justifiable, whether police should be employing tear gas and nonlethal ammunition to disperse them, whether ‘abolish the police’ is an effective slogan. The right to protest has become more politicized because of COVID-19 and public figures and institutions being inconsistent in their responses to anti-lockdown protests and Floyd protests. More media time has been given to justifications of anti-state action, and an abandonment of the unquestionability of nonviolent doctrines. All the same phenomena exist as before: nuance-destroying incentive gradients, debatability being a logical precondition to debate, the arms race nature of oppositional escalation. The sides are just fighting over different strategic ground.
Yes, the fact the model failed to predict wasn’t “people are hotly debating the protests”, it’s “there were lots and lots of protests over this”.
I would think it’s still relevant to toxoplasma that Floyd was the centerpoint and not, say, Breonna Taylor. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 7 reasons why she would be a more sympathetic victim than Floyd, and none in his favor, yet Floyd was the one who triggered everything.
Still, it would seem this case is mostly about the power of visual media, since we have a video with Floyd and not with Taylor. But it’s absolutely true, and worth pointing out, that our controversy cycle never does seem to highlight the most clear-cut cases, even if sometimes the cases it highlights are more clear-cut than others.
+1. Toxoplasmic effects may be relevant at the margins, but having such an evocative primary source available is going to drown out other factors even if most won’t watch it themselves.
I’m also quickly coming to the conclusion that “chokehold deaths” are far more outrageous to the public at large than shooting deaths.
It seems a little counter-intuitive… but in the case of every shooting death, the cops basically make the following argument: We were entering a situation where it wasn’t clear if the person was going to be violent or not, despite our warnings to the contrary, they made a sudden movement that, in a split-second, we interpreted as a threat to us, so we fired. That “split-second decision” (or lack thereof) is what’s key and what drives many people to sympathize with the officer, and therefore produces less outrage.
Even in the worst shooting (say that of a fleeing, unarmed victim) a cop can nearly always plausibly claim that the victim said or did something that caused the cop to momentarily feel unsafe and choose to use lethal force. And I think even the most generally anti-police person can empathize with that feeling. One split second bad decision. That sucks and we want to hold them accountable, but it’s not necessarily deliberate and intentional.
However, in the case of a chokehold, it’s not one momentary split-second decision. It’s a continued decision that plays out constantly over several minutes. Rather than “99% of this interaction I kept peaceful and then in one moment used lethal force and even if in hindsight I wish I hadn’t it seemed reasonable at the time,” the opposite is now true. 99% of the interaction is force and violence and an intentional deprivation of oxygen from the victim. It would have taken a split-second of the officer feeling differently to save George Floyd, not to kill him. This is what causes the public to suspect a callous indifference to human life. Someone in a chokehold is already incapacitated. There was nothing George Floyd could have conceivably done in minute two of being choked that represented a threat to the officer such that continued application of the hold was justified.
I don’t really know whether or not banning chokeholds makes officers less safe, or will reduce the number of people killed by cops, but I do think it will probably lead to less rioting and unrest, because of what I just described above. Even if we replace every chokehold death with a shooting death, the public will be less outraged, IMO.
Philando Castile and Justine Damond were both shot, and people were pretty upset about those.
In the last year or so, the internet has noticed that some people lack an inner voice (where you are able to hear your thoughts literally vocalised in your mind) or a mind’s eye (where you are able to literally see things that you imagine).
Does anyone have an inner nose or mind’s touch and taste? I certainly don’t but apparently we shouldn’t assume that our experiences match those of other people. Do people with who are blind and deaf have inner versions of these other senses?
Taste and touch, yes, if I understand you correctly. Not so sure about smell, but my sense of smell has never been particularly strong.
I can call up smell, taste, touch, body position and tension.
I can’t exactly imagine scents on command, but memories of scents can accompany other memories or even strike unbidden.
Now, I’ll be impressed if anyone can imagine a smell they’ve never smelled before, the way one might imagine a picture never seen.
I can imagine any scent I’ve smelled, but am helpless to imagine a smell I’ve never smelled before. However, I don’t think it’s comparable to imagining images. I can certainly imagine a scene I never saw before, but I can’t imagine a color I’ve never seen before no matter how hard I try.
True, the senses are really not in any way symmetrical in their resolution.
What do you mean by “hear”, exactly? I am very, very verbal inside my mind, but I don’t think I’m hearing a voice as it would be if I was hearing someone talking. More the concept of words. Similar to reading to myself.
I can definitely mentally simulate any sensory input that I haven’t forgotten about already, it just tends to be a little “low definition”.
Touch definitely yes. It’s pretty detailed as these things go, but not vivid. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that it’s projected by default onto a sort of inner body map, which just floats around wherever in my consciousness. The sensation only overlaps my actual body (in “real” space, where my proprioception is) if I concentrate. I had never consciously thought about that, so thanks!
My inner sight is very easy to call up but usually lacks detail and emotional impact. Very washed out in a weird way, almost as if every visual pattern was replaced by an abstract marker for it until I deliberately focus on it to “unpack” it. The “body map” I mentioned above is kind of visual if that makes sense. For example, if I want to feel the touch of a steel knife against my palm, I’ll imagine a hand and a knife (visually, free floating), and then make the knife touch the hand. But I have to remember to place the sensation on my literal palm, or it’ll be somewhere else (in empty space where I imagined the hand).
Smell and taste seem to be much weaker. I can recall my reactions to e.g. bad smells, but the memory of the smell itself lacks any substance. Sound is a bit stronger, but still not as strong as vision.
I can easily pull up a smell or taste, but it’s not nearly as ‘real’ as an imagined sight or sound.
I think maybe vision and hearing carry a big linear bit-stream, and that data component is just as real whether it’s coming in by way of the senses, or you conjure it from imagination or memory. While the more subtle qualia of things like the scent of a rose, for example, have to stand by themselves.
If you imagine the sound of your mother’s voice, maybe you can imagine it just as sound, but there will be meaningful words attached to it as well in the imagined sound.
If I’m thinking about what to cook for dinner and not really sure what I want I’ll run through the imagined taste/feel of each option until I hit on one which seems to hit the spot.
That or when I’m cooking and a dish doesn’t seem quite right I’ll do similar tweaking it a bit with each of the things I could add to it.
I can certainly do something similar with smell but typically don’t much.
Touch, a little but as others say, it’s not very vivid.
One I think is a bit unusual is my feel for numbers. I was a bit math obsessed as a small child and one of the long term effects of that is a feeling of “wrongness” when numbers don’t add up or make sense without having to apply conscious effort to it. Like a faint mental version of nails on a chalk board.
Which makes me wonder how the erotic fantasies of people who can’t visualize or imagine touch look like. Or is it that people just watch porn instead of fantasyzing? Or they can’t fantasyze?
I can imagine all senses in my mind, although more weakly than when I’m really experiencing. The one that is most vivid is proprioception: imagining myself standing, walking, etc.
How well can y’all hear inner voices with different timbres and accents? Like for example if you’re remembering lines spoken in a movie by a foreign character, or something a foreign coworker said, or something your mom said, etc.
Foreigner’s accents, or national dialects are very, ah, pronounced.
Pretty accurately, I think. I’m an actor, and generally fairly good at voices and accents even by the standards of other professional actors (though not exceptional within that group). I’m guessing I’m probably naturally better than most people at this – it’s not something I’ve ever really had to work on.
I’m good at doing accents too but I’m not sure this has anything to do with how well I can recall them in my head (which I’d also call “pretty accurately”), since I can also pretty accurately mentally recall the voices of people I cannot convincingly imitate out loud, like those of small kids, most women, or Barry White.
Very easily, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as I read “y’all” in your comment my mind read the rest of it in a pronounced southern accent. And when I reached “timbres” I tried to change the voice and it instantly became Larry the Cable Guy.
I have inner imaginative versions of all my senses. If I’m coming up with new cooking ideas I’ll call up the smells and tastes of different ingredients and mentally combine them to see if they go together. Oddly enough, I think I never even tried to imagine a smell until maybe 10 years ago when I started cooking – it just never came up.
I can imagine smell and touch, somewhere close to real. (Complete with mild physiological responses.) I don’t have an inner voice at all, and have almost no mind’s eye. I do think with words, but I can’t answer questions like “was the voice male or female” – the answer would be “what voice?”. And it’s fairly easy for me to switch the language and continue the thought, so this is not quite thinking in words.
I think I’m much better at touch than many of the others. I can barely imagine any scent, except maybe some very strong and distinctive ones, like lemon, or skunk. Sometimes a scent comes to my mind unbidden, but it’s hard to intentionally imagine.
The other thing I find is that I can’t imagine what pain feels like when I’m not currently feeling pain.
I know that the third amendment has often been described as the “runt piglet” of the US constitution, because it’s hardly ever litigated.
But if you were to rank the other amendments in order of importance/how much they matter to you, what order would you put them in?
(I really want to phrase this as “if you were stranded on a desert island and could only take seven amendments with you, which ones would they be”…)
Only Bill of Rights amendments, or everything?
And does the 27th Amendment count as a Bill of Rights amendment, or are we only counting 1-10?
The whole caboodle – 1 through 27. Although you can make 18 a special case if you want.
Incidentally, am I the only person who worries regularly that I’ll get 18 and 19 mixed up and say something that implies that I support the repeal of womens’ suffrage?
You can’t drink at 18, but you can at 21. …but glancing at state laws, that mnemonic was never as broad as I thought while still losing steam by the day.
“Repeal the 19th” is a relatively common meme in far-right internet circles, and yes, plenty of women participate in it too. I think they’re only about half-joking.
Electoral maps of “Here’s how it would be if women didn’t vote” do, in fact, look favorable to Republicans…
She wasn’t alone and their arguments were surprisngly compelling.
How many non-landowners want the franchise reserved for landowners?
@Matt M- here in the Netherlands there is a political party, with representation in Parliament, that favours restricting the franchise to male heads of households.
They now allow women to join, and in fact have female representatives at local level.
They were a bunch of legal challenges that pretty much forced their hand, though.
They get about 2% of the votes in national elections.
Interestingly, they have a pretty good reputation for keeping an eye on the constitution (they don’t just pay very good attention to what the Bible literally says), having experienced representatives and not being opportunistic, but rather consistent.
I would think the 3rd amendment is hardly ever litigated because it’s so clear about what it’s proscribing. Its only case law, Engblom v. Carey, involved a very particular setup that caused the NY government to violate the 3rd amendment in a non-obvious way. Still, I definitely wouldn’t want the government to forcibly quarter soldiers in my house, so I like that it’s there.
There was a 3rd amendment case a couple years ago in Nevada regarding police that had set up in someone’s house in order to surveill some neighbors. The state court rejected that claim as “despite what they look like, police don’t count as soldiers”. I get that line of thinking but I wonder if it could theoretically go the other way.
10th
2nd
13th
6th
4th
1st
5th
9th
14th
With importance dropping off sharply from there. That precedent has rendered the 10th a dead letter pisses me off to no end, up there with the creep of “interstate commerce”
I’m struck by the absence of e.g the 15th and 19th amendments.
I still haven’t come down firmly on the topic one way or the other, so I’m OK defaulting to universal suffrage by default, but I’m at least partially sympathetic to arguments for at something like the conditional franchise of Heinlein’s Terran Federation. Under ye olde “disparate impact doctrine” and arguments of the sort, any sort of preconditions or requirements for earning the franchise are the next best thing to presumptively invalid per those sorts of amendments, thus I bite the bullet and they get lower billing.
First the Bill of Rights, from most important to less:
1, 13, 4, 6, 5, 9, 10, 2, 8, 7, 3. Juries have lost most of their importance IMO as they’ve lost most of their original powers, so I rank those amendments further down.
14 is an oddball because it incorporates all the Bill of Rights. If pushed, I’d have to rank it really near the top since it applies the great and glorious First Amendment against the states – but I really don’t like having to put it in the same spectrum as the others.
Then the other beneficial amendments, still from more to less important: 15, 17, 19, 22, 21, 20, 25, 24
Then the ones I don’t really care about: 23, 27, 12, 11
Then for the actually harmful: 26 (the voting age should be slightly over the age of majority so voters have some experience), 18 (a bad idea as well as invasive), 16 (drove the growth of government power).
Not that it’s the absolute most important or anything, but I think the 17th amendment was a mistake and its impact drastically understated. It fundamentally changed the US from a federation of states into a centralized government of the whole of the people. Now instead of the US federal government having body representing the people and another body representing the states, we have basically two houses of representatives, just with slightly different apportionments. And it led to people today complaining that the president is not elected by popular vote.
I think the 17th is much more a symbol of that transition than a cause. The ability of state houses elected every 2 years to control senators appointed every 6 was inherently minimal. Had the 17th never been passed, the senate would look more like the supreme court today than it currently does, but federal power wouldn’t be fundamentally altered.
Perhaps, but it freed state legislators to be elected on the basis of state issues rather than on national party affiliation. For decades, state legislators had campaigned prominently on the basis of who they would support for Senate; the Seventeenth Amendment freed state legislatures from those concerns.
Keep in mind that before the 17th Amendment, it wasn’t unusual for Senate seats to remain vacant for years as a result of partisan gridlock in state legislatures. I think that problem would be even worse today.
What do you constitutional scholars think of the adage “The second amendment ensures all the others?”
To me it seems intuitively correct but I don’t see that reflected in anyone else’s answers. What am I missing?
Why do you think I ranked it just under the 10th?
It didn’t stop the North from ultimately preventing Southern secession.
And I didn’t see the British overturning the Magna Carta during the last 800 years (though Cromwell was whatever).
Heck, the lack of a 2nd amendment didn’t prevent the colonists from successfully rebelling in the first place. Much of that was thanks to alliances with European powers.
More recently, her boyfriend being armed didn’t prevent the police from illegitimately killing Breonna Taylor (and likely did the opposite).
I think people taking rights seriously is what keeps rights as rights. Abolishing them is outside of the Overton window. Guns may play a roll in keeping them out of the Overton window, but guns are not the primary reason for this. Tradition is. Stare decisis is. Oaths taken and firmly believed in to protect and defend the Constitution are.
Your first and third points contradict each other, especially when you factor in that in fact English Common Law laid out protections of the right to bear arms (which the 2nd Amendment is basically just a stronger and more expansive version of) and the role that the culture and practice of firearm ownership and use in the colonies had on the formation of American units, their employment of skirmishers, and the early portions of the rebellion. I’m not going to say that it was decisive, because it wasn’t, but it played a non-trivial role.
The fourth point is a pure non-sequitur.
If you’d like to take this up in the next CW thread, I’d be happy to oblige you.
No. I don’t want to argue with you or anyone else about this. Just pointing out examples that seem to me to show that the 2nd amendment does not “ensure” the others. Though it may *help* support the continuing existence of the others (as does the 1st amendment).
You do know that most of the Magna Carta has been repealed and superceeded by newer laws?
The system works then? The fundamental limitation on the King did not revert.
I did not know of the early history of the Magna Carta, but it strikes me as not too different than the overturning of the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution.
I concede that this is not a good example, as arms were ultimately used to help “ensure” the Magna Carta (along with foreign allies).
I still think that my other four observations stand as indicators that the right to bear arms does not “ensure” the other rights, but at most merely supports them.
I would think that the 1st amendment and 4th amendment are far more important for actually protecting other rights than the 2nd. At least, in recent years, it seems that far more rights have been won by people assembling peaceably and speaking in public than by people using guns, and far more rights have been threatened by authorities unreasonably searching and seizing than by actions that would have been stopped by a gun.
Speech and peaceful protests indeed have a greater history of expanding/securing new rights for people who did not have them before. But I think that’s different from ensuring rights you already have on the books.
Knowing that your populace is armed doesn’t make infringing on their rights impossible, but it makes it very costly both politically/logistically/etc. and in terms of actual money. Yes, unreasonable searches and seizures are a big thing, but I imagine they’d be much worse without a 2nd amendment.
I truly don’t know. I thought the major impediment to unreasonable searches and seizures is that the judge throws out the evidence, and in extreme cases throws out the entire prosecution- with prejudice. At the trial stage guns are definitely not involved.
4th amendment could help you hide guns if the second goes away.
Speech and peaceful protests mostly work in two scenarios:
1) The government is unable to bring effective force to bear due to lack of political control. E.G. liberal democracies with relatively robust civil rights norms and/or lack of popular political support for the use of force to maintain the status quo. In other words, where you’re already most of the way there, reform wise. E.G. 20th Century India, 20th Century US. 18th to mid 19th Century Alternate Timeline Gandhi gets ignored or militarily crushed.
2) The protesters or third parties acting on their behalf can make a credible threat of force to check an attempt to crush them outright. E.G. the threat of US or NATO reponse providing top cover for the early stages of the Soviet Union’s breakup and the Color Revolutions, until it progressed to the point where scenario 1 took over.
S-tier: 1st, 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th, 26th
Freedom of speech\press and universal suffrage are the cornerstones of actual democracy. Without those, everything else falls apart.
A-tier: 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th
Making sure that criminal and civil trials are implemented fairly is also essential. The 9th amendment is just a good idea on the basis of future-proofing the Constitution.
B-tier: 16th
It’s almost impossible to implement a modern state without an income tax; there’s no other good way to raise sufficient revenue.
C-tier: 12th, 17th, 20th, 22nd, 23rd, 25th
Essential modernization for having a functional state. None of these are necessary, but they are useful.
I’m not going to list what I consider F-tier to avoid CW issues.
I interpreted these as the Support tiers from Fire Emblem games.
You can’t marry the 1st, 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th.
I will take that fight straight to the Supreme Court.
Maybe the “toxoplasmosa” isn’t between the right and left arguing about George Floyd, but between the cops and protesters arguing about the protests.
In the early days, George Floyd was just another name, not necessarily bigger than Eric Garner. For some reason, the cops didn’t immediately charge the cops involved in an appropriate way (most everyone agrees on that, even Trump). The protesters respond by burning down the Minneapolis police station (why didn’t the cops acquiesce before it got that bad?). Now that the police station has burnt down, cops in every city in America are on edge, which causes them to crack down on (possibly small?) protests more than seems necessary, which causes the protests to grow, which causes the cops to crack down harder. I’m basing this on my own city, based on the account of the chief of police. When asked to explain videos of police violence, he responded that after Minneapolis, protecting the police station was considered a top priority.
Personally, I’m much more interested in reading news about police brutality against protesters than news about police killing black men, so maybe I have a non-representative view of what’s fueling the protests. My news feed has plenty of apparent villains continuing their villainy as a direct result of how upset I am at their villainy, i.e. toxoplasmosa.
When it comes to risk of coronavirus transmission, “outside” is better than “inside.”
One could imagine this being due to better air circulation, or the effect of UV in sunlight, or greater spacing between people, or probably other things too. Any chance that we have any idea what actually matters?
Larger personal distance plus dilution through more, and more turbulent airflow would be my guess.
I turned my rebellion on myself. I’d say it’s not unusual for the types of personalities (plus socioeconomic status) that predominate here, see e.g.: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
Anyone know where I could find a (preferably searchable) list of all books published by Penguin Classics? Their website is pretty atrocious, and the closest thing I could find was a pdf catalog that’s already several years old.
Does the Congress Library allow a search by publisher?
There’s this: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/23770.Penguin_Classics
Although it’s fan-made so may not be exhaustive.
Thanks! That’s certainly better than anything else I’ve found so far.
Penguin has a what they call a Complete Annotated Listing on their site.
It’s a wonder I passed from age 13 to age 20 without going to prison or the grave or getting anyone pregnant.
Well, I did get arrested once at 18, but I was legally an adult and didn’t live at home anymore. That was kind of a culminating event. In the years that preceded it I cheated on tests, played hookey and took the train downtown, I bought alcohol while underage, I loitered and trespassed, I got drunk in public, I drove drunk, I did whatever drugs my friends handed to me (which fortunately were all things that grew out of the ground), I committed pranks on unsuspecting strangers. I got into fistfights with my brother that on a couple occasions escalated to the use of improvised weapons. I stayed over friends’ (and girlfriends’) houses all night without telling my mom where I was. I had unprotected sex.
I don’t know how my mom survived it. I guess it drove her a bit crazy. I don’t think I would have done as well in her shoes.
How are you doing now? Most of those things correlate with poor life outcomes but my very low information guess would be that you are a reasonably adjusted/successful adult.
Happily married, 3 kids, own a nice house in a good school district, I love what I do for a living and it pays really darn well, I have lots of friends because I make friends easily and tend to keep them, … yeah I’m not the right guy to trot out in front of your kids as a warning.
@Well… a couple months ago I asked about the vulnerability of the power grid to intense solar flares and you said you’d ask a contact who might know. Did you ever get an answer?
Sorry if this is a repost, but these posts at GiveWell (in particular the fourth in the series) may be helpful.
Thanks. That was also posted last time I asked and I thought the series was helpful.
I did not get an answer. I gather that my contact was busy and I didn’t want to hassle him, and by now he’s probably forgotten about it (as I admit I did until I found your OP) and we don’t have the kind of relationship where I’d bug him about it again after all this time. I apologize.
No problem, thanks anyway
I have a strange question, but this might be the place to ask it.
If I’m a 1950’s mad scientist, but specifically a mad sociologist. What popular 1950s ideas might I base my inventions on?
Ideally they’d result in tangible creations. For example, one idea I had was town planning. Creating an idealised white picket fence suburb that due to the power of mad science mentally influences everyone living there until it turns into pure Stepford Wives; at least until some do-gooder comes to thwart the mad scheme.
Psychohistory, although not tangible, would be the ultimate pay-off.
Anyone have any info on whether Assimov considered that possible or just an interesting plot device?
Psychohistory is a good idea. I wonder if there was a real world equivalent, some actual sociology professor with some new method for future predictions I could crib terminologies from.
Any others? The more ideas the merrier.
The Snowball Effect by Katherine MacLean (1952). A sociologist discovers what makes organizations grow, and loads a small knitting club with maximum growth factors.
Nice. This story occurred to me, but I couldn’t find it.
Dr. Spock was a big deal in the 50s and 60s; there may be something you can do with some of his childcare advice.
Or any of the other more radical behavioralist psychologist, of the “give me a child…” school.
A power-generating Hula Hoop.
It’s technically from the early sixties, but the Milgram experiment seems perfectly on-theme here. Perform enough variations on the experiment that you discover exactly what components of authority people respond to, and then the right tone of voice plus outfit will have people launching nuclear missiles at your command just because you seem like you’re in charge.
Though that might segway into a heist movie pretty quickly.
Thank you everyone. Though the lack of ideas for tangible creations means I may have to go back to the drawing board :/
More nominative determinism: for five years, the manager of German football club VfL Wolfsburg was one Wolfgang Wolf.
Consider three things:
1. Anatolia and Constantinople are very defensible territories
2. Gunpowder tilted the playing field away from nomadic horsemen and towards centralized states
3. The settling of Anatolia by the Turks led to the downfall of the Byzantine Empire
So if the Byzantines had won the Battle of Manzikert, then it’s not implausible that we could have had a Rome well in to Modernity.
Imagine that they won and made a deal with the Sultan to keep Turks away from Anatolia and the Caucasus. The emperor puts out all the other fires around the empire. If they can hold on for a bit, the Seljuk Empire will decline in the next century. After that comes the Mongols. They don’t have a chance in hell of beating them militarily but maybe they can survive by becoming vassals while the Mongols deal with other matters. Wait for their empire to disintegrate. Then if they survive the Timurid Empire and the Mamluks, maybe the Safavids as well, they get to the 15th century, gunpowder becomes prominent and the threat of nomadic empires lessens dramatically. And then after that, it’s hard to say, since it was the Ottomans that became key during this time. How plausible does this sound to you? What other surprises would they have to watch out for? And if they make it the early modern period intact, how much longer do you think they’ll survive?
I thought that the actual Byzantine response to Mongols was to pay them to go away, which seems to have worked tolerably well in lots of other places too. Constantinople is probably the most fortified city anywhere on the planet across this whole time period and easily supplied by sea; unless you’ve got heavy siege artillery or happen to be technically allied to the defenders taking it isn’t really a viable option even if you are the Mongols.
Sure, but if the Mongols overran Anatolia, then they have the exact same problem of nomads in their backyard but with Mongols instead of Turks. To survive, they would need to prevent that from happening. Constantinople is very defendable but not impregnable. If that is the only territory the Romans have, then it’s only a matter of time before someone manages to take it. After all, that is what happened.
Very true. I thought we were positing that Rome keeps Anatolia, Thrace, and Greece at least up until the Mongols show up – I could be wrong about this, but my recollection was that the Ilkhanate expansion stopped somewhere in eastern Anatolia rather than going all the way to the Bosporus, so I’m picturing a stronger Empire keeping them at least that far away from the capital. Possibly not if they end up having to fight the Golden Horde in Bulgaria at the same time, but this Empire has more political and financial capital and might possibly be able to coordinate somewhat with the rest of Eastern Europe.
What will be really interesting is what Russia and Northern Europe look like with significant religious and cultural influence coming up from Constantinople, and how Constantinople no longer being tied into the Indian Ocean trade networks so tightly changes the development of world trade patterns. I could imagine Orthodox Baltic states and Egypt as the center of gravity for the Muslim world.
I have no idea what happens when the colonial expeditions start up, my impression is that a lot of that was down to basically chance – possibly some Italian adventurer ends up talking to Thomas Palaiologos and South America speaks Greek in the new timeline, who knows?
History could potentially diverge quite a bit during the modern period. With the Byzantines still functioning as a bulwark against Middle Eastern expansion, you don’t have any groups like the Ottomans conquering Eastern Europe and terrorizing Western Europe. I can’t imagine that the Byzantines would end up powerful so its history could play out like a longer version of the Ottoman later history. We could be talking about Rome as the sick man of Europe.
I don’t know about that – my read on the Ottoman decline is that they ran into the same problems holding a multi-ethnic empire together in the face of proto-nationalist sentiment that Austra-Hungary did, but sooner and more severely because there was even less common identity holding things together (by design, which was very adaptive in the Renaissance and abysmally maladaptive in the modern era). Byzantium will never reach the fantastical heights of wealth and power that the Ottomans did, but I think they’d never get as low either – ‘literally the Roman Empire’ is a solid cultural bedrock to build from. Plus they won’t have to deal with anything like as much territory, which will help further.
The Byzantine political system and culture was broken. They were low in asabiyyah, and even by medieval standards their transitions of power were extra messy. That seems to me like the reason why they went away. Manzikert by itself wasn’t even that big a disaster; Anatolia was lost because the internal response to Manzikert was to accelerate the internal chaos, instead of banding together to defeat the common enemy. It would be like if the Romans had responded to Cannae by starting a civil war, and Carthage consequently emerged victorious and rendered Rome a rump state. Would it really be Cannae that won the war for Carthage?
So I really have to think that if Manzikert hadn’t done it, something else would have. Perhaps there still would have been something like a Fourth Crusade. But I guess if the ERE lasted far enough into the modern era, the terminally ill Byzantine state still would have been propped up by great power political calculations, just like the Ottomans were.
But unlike the Ottomans, who were a real threat to Christian Europe in the 16th century, the ERE would have already been a punching bag for Catholic Central Europe by this time, and I don’t know that anyone (Russia, France) would have been able to prop them up. I have to think, amid one of their civil wars, they basically end up getting partitioned.
My suspicion is that ‘teenager’ as a distinct stage of development humans go through is ~50% aping of teenagers on TV and in movies, ~45% legitimate problems that young-but-not-infantile people face in today’s world, and only ~5% actual underlying biology (numbers not based on anything rigorous). Historically people aged about 12-20 seem to have been lumped into a broad ‘youths’ category and are basically treated like small adults who don’t know a lot yet (modulated across the category as you’d expect); apprentices or farmers’ children don’t seem to have been anything like as displaced or depressed as modern teenagers are.
I didn’t have anything particularly like a ‘normal’ teenage phase, nor did my younger brother. Our close friends didn’t either, particularly, or at least not that I noticed – I think even a moderate amount of genuine parental involvement plus outlets for real competition and mastery and/or productive work are enough to let teenagers skip to being junior adults. Treating school as a vaguely silly day-job you still have to work at rather than the be-all-and-end-all of existence helps immensely, too.
Generally agree with this. People mostly act the way they think people expect them to act. Grow up being told “when you’re a teenager, you’ll be a rebellious jerk” and sure enough, when you become a teenager, you’ll find yourself being a rebellious jerk.
As a farmer’s child, growing up in a community of farmers’ children, I will assure you that some mix of
was fairly common across my peer group. And yes, while we did participate in the public school system which may indicate some distance from that agricultural society, we also were involved in day-to-day farm/work operations from around the age of 11.
Japan/China also have 反抗期 to describe “the rebellious age,” so it’s not just a Western concept.
For me, I didn’t go out much (having friends over/going out to hang with friends” were special occasions. I did break some of my parents’ rules, but all under their noses, and then I was living dorm life for half of high school (special dual-credit program). From my perspective, though, it was a particular parent that got super moody in a way they hadn’t been before, while the rest of us in the family were pretty chill.
Looking for an alternate-history or scifi book with a specific premise: What does the industrial revolution look like on a planet without accessible fossil fuels?
I was talking to a friend about how industrialization might proceed under different assumptions, and it occurred to us that there’s no obvious reason you need to have lots of coal underground, and possibly no need for oil either. If a planet doesn’t have easily accessible energy-dense fuels, my first instinct was “maybe you just never industrialize”, but that feels too pessimistic about human creativity. I’m interested in reading a book (or essay or short story or whatever) that explores how you might develop a ~modern society without coil/oil/gas. Thanks!
It probably doesn’t quite fit your request, but Paolo Bacigalupi’s work should probably be on your radar: https://windupstories.com. I think he posits a post-fossil-fuel world rather than one that never had them, but he creates an intriguing picture of a society based around the mechanical storage of energy produced by caloric inputs to genetically modified animals.
Edit: Here’s a sample: http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/WINDUP-STORIES.htm
Food is just a fancy kind of biofuel.
If you can feed it to your GM oxen, you can throw it in the recieving end of a fluidised bed gas turbine.
Cool thanks! I have a much easier time imagining post-fossil-fuels than never-fossil fuels (probably because people often discuss the former), but that still sounds like an interesting question to explore. And I could totally see biofuels being the answer to my original question anyway. I was assuming no fossil fuels meant no energy-dense-things-to-burn, but biofuels totally fill that niche too. Hell, maybe you can industrialize on wood alone.
You could probably get to 1750 or 1800 level England with charcoal instead of coal. Not sure whether bessemer-smelted steel would make economic sense, so you might not get much of the 2nd industrial revolution.
I daresay forestry would be much more important. You’d see the Amazon and the Congo felled for fuel. I’d not want to be any kind of whale in this timeline either.
“Harvesting the Biosphere” by Vaclav Smil has some stats on just how much wood would be required for industrialization. To use charcoal (with modern conversion efficiencies) to make the amount of steel used in 2010 would require doubling the amount of wood harvested annually.
I love the windup girl, it’s a wonderful novel, but the science is nonsensical. People seem to have forgotten that nuclear power is a thing, and one of the main plots revolves around an algae that somehow makes springs stronger. I also have a very hard time imagining that genetically modified animals can power factories more efficiently (in terms of carbon emission per unit of power) than small motors.
But it’s still a wonderful novel that everyone should read. I wish there was more stuff like it out there, and I especially wish that Bacigalupi would spend less time on YA stuff and more time on books for adults.
What’s wonderful about it? I was so pissed off at the stupidity of the concept (85% of what people eat just produces heat) that I gave up on it.
I love the aesthetic even if it’s totally nonsense. The world building is internally consistent, and the details are fun. I’ve read it a couple times, and have always found it compelling all the way through, even if parts are patently silly.
Slower and/or with more inequality, but probably about the same in the end. There’s nothing you can do with coal and oil that you can’t do with biofuels, charcoal for metallurgy in particular. You just can’t do as much of it, so the advantages (and disadvantages) of industrialization propagate rapidly through the population.
The major industrialized nations might wind up looking, in this hypothetical world, like the colonial possessions of the major industrial powers did in our own history – an elite with all the fancy toys, defended by soldiers with all the fancy guns, but the rest of the population is still agrarian peasants. Some of whom will be aggressively growing biofuels rather than food.
I wonder how feasible would be to heave small scale metal processing (via charcoal), primarily for military use. And limp till harnessing of a nuclear power.
That’s mostly how things were till they developed coking during the first industrial revolution. The chinese even had blast furnaces relatively early.
Good luck separating the enriched uranium, boron-free graphite or heavy water needed to get a reactor going.
Why would e.g. gas centrifuges require fossil fuels?
If you heard somewhere that the energy requirements are so massively immense that only a major industrial power can dream of such things, that really only applies to first-generation enrichment techniques like gaseous diffusion and (especially) electromagnetic separation. So the no-fossil-fuel world might develop nuclear energy a technological generation or two after our own, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t get there in the end.
What metals can be worked with wood-fired furnaces?
Go read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Late in the novel it features a space program run without access to fossil fuels reserves.
Windmills, hydroelectric dams, and concentrated solar power would still exist. Eventually nuclear power and solar panels too.
Iceland is the first nation to industrialize on the back of its geothermal resources? Or Japan? They also have a ton of geothermal potential. There is even a town where you can cook your dinner in the hot water that bubbles out of the ground.
Scott, I am surprised that you take Turchin seriously. My understanding of his theory is completely based on your review, and based on that, I concluded that it is total bull§hit.
Do you mean his message at the top of the page? I thought he was joking.
He mentions it in the body of this post, too, under point 4.
The structure of the first amendment has always bugged me. It seems like a couple of disparate concepts lassoed in together. I realized why it makes sense to group freedom of assembly in with freedom of speech.
The sharing of information is necessarily an act of communion. If I decide to share information with you, this is to form an association with you. To say that I may not associate with a person is to say that I may not share information with them, and vice-versa. Therefore, freedom of association and freedom of speech are inseparable.
This means that espionage is a form of unlawful involuntary association. It is not simply that one has accessed privileged information – it is that the information-holder’s right to determine their association has been violated.
Everything in the first amendment is about Freedom of Thought. It lists a variety of tools that 18th century governments would use to control the beliefs of its citizens and bans them. Religion and press are kind of obvious, speech and association are tools used by disorganized groups to coordinate and signal-boost.
Suppose the government has laws against homosexuality, and a couple people think this is wrong. In a democracy, the opinions of the citizenry should affect the laws (by definition), but what steps lie between my thoughts and the law? First I need to be free to say that I believe what I do, and others need to be free to hear me. Then other people who believe the same thing as me should create a mailing list and then have weekly meetings and figure out how to advance our movement. Then we should be able to tell the government what we believe and ask them to draft a law about it, so that we can vote out the people who vote against it.
Everything in the first amendment is about making it legal for voters to decide for themselves how they will vote.
It’s more poetic than legal, but Akhil Reed Amar’s book on the Bill of Rights describes the First Amendment as a sort of roadmap for policy change: ideas and morals originate in houses of worship, then the people can write or speak about the ideas, then get together, and petition the government for those changes. (And he also notes that if the government fails, the next amendment protects the right to “alter or abolish” the government through arms.)
The 14th amendment is in many ways even more varied. Birthright citizenship and the due process clause in a single amendment?
I’ve reported most of the posts in this thread. This is, like, the quintessential culture war topic. You people are BURNING THE COMMONS.
So, SARS-CoV-2 has killed 8800 Indians, most of them over 65.
46,000 Indians, mostly young people, die every year from cobra bite.
Half a million people worldwide die from malaria.
1.6 million annually die from TB, mostly due to B3 deficiency.
At least in equatorial countries with young populations, I think at this point we’re seeing some seriously Ineffective Altruism. Not sure what vitamin is good for cobra bite though.
I heard Thain hammer massage, also known as tok sen is effective against cobra bites, when applied pre-emtively directly to a cobra.
How much do you trust those numbers, though?
Wikipedia puts it at 11,000 fatalities per year from all snakes, but I understand there’s some difficulty getting good estimates. That said this is ludicrously higher than I would have guessed. The US has had 25 fatalities in the last 10 years. Several of those are exotic snake keepers or religious snake handlers who refused treatment. I know we don’t have many venomous species compared to India but still those numbers are ridiculous.
Medical treatment is much worse in India than it is in the US. That and there’s more dangerous snakes I guess?
That said, I’m pretty sure some of the Indian victims are handling snakes for religious or entertainment purposes as well.
This is a great phrase, and I intend to steal it from you and apply it liberally 😉
Looks like the most recent numbers put this at 9.5k, and wikipedia’s conservative estimate of snakebite deaths is only around 11k. I’m confident COVID will surpass this by the end of June.
Which is a number not too far off from how many people have died from COVID (450k). Again, in only a few months.
You think we’re going to see less deaths than that internationally from COVID in 2020? I’ll take that bet.
It’s not altruism though. If India becomes a reservoir of COVID-19, then it will eventually reinfect other countries. Snakebites aren’t transmissible*, so no matter how many snakebites occur in India, it doesn’t affect the first world.
*Unless the snakes themselves were inadvertently transported, say perhaps on a plane…
Is there any hope of eliminating COVID-19 faster than for example polio?
Yes!
Unlike polio, we have decades of experience working on sort-of similar viruses. In addition, there are a lot of endpoints which would be acceptable which weren’t acceptable with polio. For example, if we could mitigate the disease so that people who caught it “merely” felt lousy for a week or so, it would no longer matter if large amounts of the population were exposed to it. Indeed, cutting deaths down to “comparable to the flu” levels would probably do it.
Alternatively, a vaccine or treatment which drastically reduces transmission rates, even if individual incidences of the disease remain as dangerous would also be acceptable.
Finally, should a vaccine with a good safety profile and even moderate effectiveness be produced/certified, the mechanisms to quickly and widely distribute it already exist.
Hope abounds!
People still travel to countries where polio, yellow fever, etc are endemic. They just get vaccinations first.
You have to look not at total deaths from each cause to estimate the effectiveness of the measures, but rather at total deaths prevented divided by effort spent preventing said deaths. Infectious diseases spread exponentially, so it’s quite plausible that a *lot* more deaths have been prevented than the number that have occurred. Snake bites and lightning strikes and car crashes spread linearly, so it’s not plausible that the number that have been prevented is hugely more than the number that have occurred.
Don’t look at the stock; look at the flow. Every day in India is worse than the day before. Wait 6 months and then you can tell if they over-reacted. If it does seem an over-reaction then, I will literally take it as a miracle.
The first Italian died of Covid around Feb 28th, and by the last day of Feb, they had 1000 deaths a day (near).
So apparently there are Opinions on how to cut a sandwich?
It seems a little one-sided, that the diagonals are the ones preaching while the straight cuts don’t care, but are there benefits to slicing a sandwich to begin with?
Yeah, I always ask Subway to refrain from cutting my foot-long in half. Cutting in half makes it more difficult to eat when rolling the wrapper back while eating (though presumably it’s easier to eat when taking the sub all the way out of the wrapper to begin with – given this is unhygienic in that you have to touch the bun you’re going to eat with your bare hands, obviously I am right 😀 ), as you suddenly have to deal with a cut off chunk that can easily fall out of the wrapper when you get near the half-way point.
Cant’t they wrap the two halves separately?
If you asked them to, sure. But that would mean more effort for me in that I’d have to unwrap the second one after finishing the first.
A secondary consideration to asking them not to cut it is that this avoids cross-contamination of mayo or mustard from the knife (yes, you can ask them to use a fresh knife).
Can’t you cut the paper so as to have two separate halves and eat them sequentially? Half a long sandwich is easier to handle than all of one.
I have relatively large hands (~XL).
I concede that this is a better alternative for those with smaller hands.
FWIW when I get a foot-long sandwich from Subway I ask them to cut it into four pieces (and when a get a 6″ sub I ask them to cut that into two pieces) because it’s much more convenient for me to hold and eat a smaller piece.
I’ve never understood it. My mouth is not small enough for any sandwich to be too big to bite, and the only way for one to be would be for it to be extremely thick, in which case slicing it will definitely get an awkward result. Better to make normal sized sandwiches and not slice them, because there’s no point.
If you don’t cut a sandwich, then the only way to start biting onto it is through the crusts. When it’s sliced, you can start biting into what was originally the middle, and then perhaps even leave behind crusts. I can totally understand why it wouldn’t be a big deal to some people to just start eating from the crust, but the preference against crusts is pretty commonly attested.
+1
I want to have crusts be a supplemental feature to my sandwich bites, not have it be all crust right away.
Are we talking about normal sliced bread sandwiches here? Not some fancy thing made with a crusty loaf cut horizontally? In stereotypical sandwich-bread-made sandwiches, the crust is so innocuous to me that I don’t even notice it, so it never came to my mind to try and avoid it.
Depends whether you’re wanting to hold it with one hand or two, I guess. I find holding an uncut sandwich in one hand awkward. The filling tends to want to escape.
I don’t care, so long as all three parts of the sandwich are divided equally by a single n-1 dimensional hyperplane.
I’m a bit of a messy eater, and corner to corner cuts result in a triangle shaped sandwich.
The benefit of this is I can bite off each corner of the triangle sandwich, and this results in less bite-cross section for food to drop out of.
You also tend to have a more horizontal bite profiles with a triangle sandwich, whereas with a square sandwich you have a semicircle bite mark. the problems with this include less structural integrity, and having to take many small bites instead of 3-4 regular ones.
My estimation, is that a triangle cut sandwich made on standard bread requires 6-8 bites, whereas a square cut requires 12-16 bites.
Doesn’t a straight cut have more corners, though? (Assuming a rectangle slice to begin with. For an oblong-shaped slice straight cuts and diagonals alike would have the same number of “corners.”)
Yes, but I would need to either take an uncomfortable small bite of each corner, or take a normal size bite and leave a tiny peninsula of sandwich that is likely to lose foor
I was going to take a break from SSC but dammit you had to go and write this.
You don’t have to be a messy eater or have a small mouth or hate crusts to find that if you bite into one side of a squarish sandwich that the two flat sides on either side of your mouth have touched your cheeks, and possibly deposited dabs of wet ingredients onto them.
A straight cut gives you crisp 90˚ corners to bite into, which is an improvement, but a diagonal cut gives you 45˚ corners which is even better. Then, once you’ve made that first bite, you have created more sharp corners you can bite into. Your cheeks stay clean.
But of course it’s also just aesthetically pleasing. Slicing a sandwich lets you see what awaits you inside, and nothing can hide in the middle that way. And it looks nice. Easier to pick up with one hand, etc.
PS. As for Subway, I imagine if you asked them to wrap the two halves separately they’d have to charge you for two 6″ subs.
Well… I sure feel called out!
Not liking the sides to touch my cheeks is also a good point
[Edited to fix your being called out]
Well… To be honest I actually just wanted to use your name to start my comment, No actual offense taken!
A normal square sandwich gives you four inviting corners to bite, so you don’t have to mash your face directly into one of the edges!
I don’t want to know what kind of bread you’re using that comes with actual sharp corners.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=slice+of+bread&t=i
@jeremybub: I don’t report your comment only because I don’t want to waste anyone else’s time with it.
I don’t know about sandwiches, but for my son’s toast I settled on triangles based on the overall density of crust being more even. If you cut into squares you end up with a corner on each piece that is all crust, reaching peak density of crust on presumably your final bite, which made him less likely to eat all the toast. By going with triangles, the amount of “crust-per-surface area” is more evenly distributed, making him less likely to give up at a given point based on getting a mouthful that was entirely crust.
As for myself, I stick with no cuts unless it is a toasted sandwich, and then its usually a rectangle cut to let a bit of heat out of the middle while minimizing spillage from things falling out of the corners.
I honestly didn’t realise I had put this much thought into how I cut my bread…
Eric Garner was pretty gruesome, too. But people didn’t have lots of free time.
Even if everyone agrees on the basics, people will make their own controversial statements to thrive in their in-groups. I can think of examples for both left- and right-wing groups, but this is CW free, so post them I shan’t.
I feel like police reaction to Eric Garner protests was much less, ah…as well.
An admonition for no culture war posting and right near the beginning a large, anti-protester thread.
Which one? Not jasmith79’s thread surely? Did it already get deleted?
Can you link this? I can’t find it.
Think it was a thread started by blacktrance, and it seems to have been deleted.
Probably got report-bombed.
I agree with your post, and I also think that a country at 14.7% unemployment is more likely to experience protests and riots about any given outrage than a country at 3.5% unemployment. Unemployed people are starting from a higher base level of uncertainty, fear, and anger, and also they have a lot more time on their hands.
Two quotes I’ve been trying to track down.
Criticism, at its best, is an effort to identify the qualities which accompany success.
I love this quote and I remember the shock of seeing it. The modesty is so good because it’s about trying to understand what works rather than focusing on what’s wrong by whatever standard. It’s also modest because it accepts that it may not be possible to fully understand success.
The other quote is approximately: A man should consider revolution as cautiously as he would consider doing surgery on his father.
I thought this was Edmund Burke, but searching doesn’t turn anything up.
I found a quote by Rashid al-Ghannushi online (can’t find the source, unfortunately) which reads:
Is this what you were thinking of?
Thanks, but I don’t think that’s it.
The image of a man doing surgery on his father is very vivid.
If the first quote is not exact, it sounds like something from one of C S Lewis’ essays (not An Experiment on Criticism, though) where he talks about the dramatic unities.
ETA: corrected the name of the essay.
The first quote is almost certainly not exact.
I’ve read a fair amount of Lewis and and strongly influenced by An Experiment in Criticism, so it might be from Lewis.
Thinking it over further and looking at my bookshelf–might it have been from Dorothy Sayers “A Note on Creative Reading” (quoted by Alan Jacobs), or somewhere else where she made a similar point.
Thanks. I’ve read a good bit of Sayers, including The Mind of the Maker.
I had the self absorption for all of middle school, and right after that ended, switched to moodiness all through high school. I never had any of the other qualities you listed, and only had a brief period of being rebellious from my family when my parents were getting divorced while I was already in college. Because I was already out of the house, my parents didn’t even notice that I was mad at them beyond the fact that I decreased my calls.
Scott, re: meetup timing, do you have any idea of what criteria you would use to determine that it is safe to meet again? Seems to me we should make the decision based on local data, not country-level (at least for a large country like the U.S.).
I’m guessing that part of his assumption is that, although local data will diverge from national level data, it is unlikely that any locality will reach a level deemed safe unless most other localities that people can easily travel there from are also deemed safe.
Card game update:
On the advice of some/many of you, I went out and purchased a Keyforge starter set. Played two games this weekend with my fiance. First impressions are as follows:
Pros:
Was easier to learn than Magic, although still a little more difficult, complicated, and less intuitive than I might have liked.
Fiance seemed to enjoy it more
I do like the “declare a house” gimmick and the fact that the multiple different houses sort of have you in a “many different fantasy genres/settings collide” framework
Cons:
Our two decks are *very* unbalanced. I think you guys did properly warn me about this but I didn’t fully appreciate the implications. Yes, I understand that chain bidding can partially mitigate this, but one of the decks is simply not fun to play. It’s not the sort of deck any halfway intelligent person would ever intentionally design, it has multiple cards that are basically useless (more specifically, the cards themselves aren’t necessarily useless, I can see how they might be useful in specific contexts or combinations… but the deck doesn’t have the right other cards to enable that). In a normal CCG, we could mitigate this by taking like the 3-4 worst cards in the bad deck and subbing in almost anything else, but in this game that isn’t allowed. I went ahead and ordered a couple more decks in the hopes of getting something decent, but overall it strikes me as kind of lame that there’s a decent possibility any particular deck is just bad. And by “bad” I don’t mean “not fully optimized” but I mean “has combinations of cards that just don’t go together and that no sane person would ever assemble.”
It’s not quite the money pit MtG is, but it does want to keep you buying more, for sure. IOW, the easy solution is to buy another couple decks… hoping to get a more even power level. If that’s within your budget and you don’t mind, great, but it’s understandable if it’s a turn-off.
And if you took out a couple cards from each deck, well, that’s not exactly playing as intended, but it might do the trick.
Or it’s possible you need to understand the game better to see the nuances of the bad deck, but I’m not doubtful of your ability to grok it quickly.
Yeah, I’m definitely considering that as an option. Neither of us are ever going to play competitively. So nothing’s really stopping us from treating this as a normal CCG and assembling two custom-built decks from our common pool of cards…
I mean, that’s fine and all, but did you get a silly deck name?
None that hilarious!
My most interesting one is “Woewax of the Jailer’s Marsh”
Sadly, the naming process was modified to prevent this kind of thing after the first printing.
Note that some cards have non-obvious uses – pay special attention to the rule that you execute as much as you can. E.g. a card that lets you “ready a creature and fight” can be used to ready a creature and let it do whatever if it has no targets to attack. This can be your main aember engine in e.g. some combat-heavy Brobnar deck. In general, the decks require some exploration to bring out their strengths.
I haven’t played a deck without viable win conditions yet – the imbalance is mostly in how fast and reliable the condition is, and how good the deck is in disrupting the opponent.
One intersting thing you can do to divine bad decks from good ones is to use the Website Decks of Keyforge. They’ve created an algorithm to judge Keyforge deck quality through a SAS (Synergy and Anti-Synergy) score. It works surprisingly well in my experience. Plus if you find out you have a deck that gets an 80+ SAS score then you should consider selling it online: tourney players will pay big bucks for quality decks. 60ish is a normal deck, <50 is a bad deck, 70< is a great deck. If your bad deck scores higher than 60, you might just not know how to play it. Some decks are weird but powerful once you understand how they work.
You could also balance things out by playing with some of the tournament rules. For instance, you play Adaptive rules where the first round you play with your deck, then you swap decks with your opponent and play a second round, and if you need a tiebreaker round then you each bid chains for which deck you want.
Interesting. My “good deck” got a 63. My “bad deck” got a 50. Which is about in line with my expectations. That the good deck is essentially a decently balanced normal starter sort of deck, but that the other one is notably poor and lacking in many key areas.
I very rarely post to the comments on SSC, but some time back I asked for recommendations for popular mathematics books with a good blend of mathematics and history of mathematics, in the vein of John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession and Unknown Quantity. I want to thank whoever recommended Euler’s Gem, by David Richeson. I finally got around to reading it, and it was exactly what I was looking for.
If anyone has any further recommendations, I’d love to have them. My level of mathematical ability is probably at the level of 1-2 years of college mathematics.
Godel’s Proof, by Nagel and Newman
This book does a really good job of unpacking the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, though it lost me toward the end when it got into some deep mathematics:
Elliptic Tales: Curves, Counting, and Number Theory
Also interesting (if a bit more philosophical):
Where Mathematics Comes From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being
There’s a well-written chapter toward the end where the authors unpack the Euler equation.
You could try What is mathematics?. If I remember correctly it has only little history, but a lot of nice mathematics…
I liked Poincare’s Prize by George Szpiro.
It made me very interested in algebraic topology, and then I took a class on it and found out algebraic topology fucking sucks. To this day (despite 10 years of math education since), the only algebraic topology I actually understand is what’s covered in this book, and yet still I am praised for knowing more algebraic topology than most analysts. That’s either high praise for the book, or a strong indictment of analysts. I choose to believe it’s both.
FWIW I also found algebraic topology extremely difficult to understand when I took a course in it, until I read Allen Hatcher’s book on it on the recommendation of a friend; I found Hatcher’s explanations much, much more intuitive than either the prof or text of the course.
To the OP’s question, I’d also recommend Ribenboim’s _Fermat’s Last Theorem for Amateurs_ (though you need to be an amateur who really likes number theory to enjoy it) and David Bressoud’s _Proofs and Confirmations_, about a fascinating conjecture (now theorem) in algebraic combinatorics.
Asimov’s “realm of numbers” is very readable, and nicely small and well-organized, and goes from counting numbers through calculus and geometry and more, all at the readable English level. It’s probably lighter on history than you want, if memory serves. Also good is “Indra’s Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein”–that’s great for number theory, again not so much history though.
I don’t recall ever being particularly difficult for my parents. It’s not a huge surprise, though, mum asked almost nothing of me and left me to my own devices (in the most positive possible way), so I would have had to try hard to have a problem with her.
I always regarded the romantic drama my class mates were up to with incomprehension. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in romance, I very much was; but the associated drama was completely foreign to me. Needless to say it took a very, very long time for me to even have my first partner, and when I did, it was by converting long-term friendships I had online into romantic relationships.
(…you’ll notice I mentioned my mum in that first paragraph, not my dad. To explain: I did and continue to have a problem with my dad, but that’s been a permanent thing, from before my teenage years, and we are not on speaking terms now. I formally cut him out of my life in a very angry email in 2014, i.e. when I was around thirty. I probably should have cut him out of my life when he tried to scam me out of money in 2009 (yes, literally!), but I forgave him a lot of antisocial behaviour.)
If a vaccine against coronavirus comes out, how soon do you think you’ll try it, assuming availability?
Not until well after it becomes officially mandatory and some sort of checking/verification process is fully in place.
I can’t explain why without waging CW.
Hopefully you are able to explain it soon, I would be interested to know. Would ‘t challenge you.
I expect it to be rushed, perhaps for political reasons, and want some guinea pigs to try it first. Things like thalidomide have happened before, and having millions of people get vaccinated with something untested all at once is not ideal.
Personally, I’d participate in a stage-3 trial if it were available in my area, and I’ll be first in line to get a vaccine when it’s available.
If the FDA approves it, and I don’t have good reason to believe the FDA’s process has been corrupted, I’ll take it ASAP.
I would think that I’m somewhere low down the priority list of people who need it (after people in vulnerable medical groups and people who work in industries that require physical contact), and I would treat that low priority as the main reason to delay, rather than prudential concerns about unknown safety issues.
On one hand, I’d prefer to wait a year or two simply because it will be an unknown vaccine and unknown process and the FDA etc., haven’t shown a large amount of competence recently. (I don’t have a problem with the annual flu vaccine because the same process for the same virus family has been used year after year).
OTOH, I’m immunocompromised and volunteer in healthcare so I’m at higher risk of exposure, morbidity and mortality overall.
I thought the problem most people have with the FDA was that it puts too many barriers in the way of drug approval. But wouldn’t that mean that an FDA-approved vaccine is highly likely to be safe? The tradeoff they’ve made is that they leave more good drugs off the market to improve the safety guarantee of the drugs they do approve.
The usual complaint, is as you noted, is about the FDA delaying the approval of medications for various reasons. This is especially maddening in cases where the approved treatments aren’t effective for a condition and a drug has been approved for use elsewhere. At the same time, there are very few proposed drugs which might be such a significant improvement over the existing therapies as to be worth a huge amount of money. A drug which treats Alzheimer’s disease might be one.
In this case the incentives swing the other way. The cost of the pandemic in the US is on the order of a trillion dollars per year. I worry that in this case the FDA will be coerced into approving something which otherwise wouldn’t meet its normal safety threshold while trading on its historical reputation. And I have no idea what unknown-unknowns might be missed.
My feeling is that I’d wait two months just to get more information about safety and efficacy. This is a feeling, not a thought-out position.
One of my friends said he wanted to wait three months, but he doubted he would actually wait that long.
I’m at fairly low risk for either contracting or transmitting COVID-19, so I don’t feel any personal urgency. Exactly how long I’d hold off is going to depend on the source and nature of the vaccine. Several months, almost certainly.
But then, most of the people who are desperately eager to run out and get themselves vaccinated are going to be waiting several months as well; it’s not like three hundred million doses are going to poof themselves into existence just because the FDA issued an approval.
Is it ridiculous to say – given my age and health, I’d rather catch Covid-19 than be vaccinated against it?
I don’t think it is ridiculous at all. Depending on your age and health, the risks for COVID-19 are extremely low. There are still unknowns regarding COVID-19 effects long-term, but the short term effects are well known at this point. A vaccine potentially will have more short-term unknowns and the same long-term unknowns as COVID-19.
So the choice is definitely getting the vaccine or maybe getting COVID-19. If the risks are equal, then not vaccinating is better. It is only when the risk for COVID-19 is higher by some amount that getting the vaccine is better.
What are some comparable cases where a vaccine was found to be worse than the disease?
Worse is hard to measure, but a vaccine for Dengue fever possibly caused the deaths of children. It’s likely that’s a special case due to known complications of dengue itself.
I’m laying out my thinking here in a concrete way in case it’s helpful to see where your reasoning might differ. I don’t presume to having any right answer about any of this.
My understanding is that the potential long-term effects of getting Covid-19 pertain to organ damage as a result of the disease running its full course on the body. There’s no reason based on what we understand about how vaccines work to imagine that a Covid-19 vaccine would pose anything like an equal degree of risk of harm as that. The processes in the body are not the same.
Some small percentage of people do have out-sized reactions to vaccines that have been in circulation for a long time and because this is going to be a rushed and very widely used brand-new vaccine, we can imagine there will be a larger percentage of adverse events than say the flu or tetanus vaccines.
But if the vaccine undergoes multiple tests for safety in a large number of people (which it will), it seems unlikely that the percentage of adverse events will be anywhere near the proportion of harm the disease itself can cause to people who are nonetheless young and healthy.
The CDC estimates broadly that one in a million vaccine doses will produce a severe adverse event. A couple of large studies of Covid show that of people in their 20s-mid-40s, about 14% who get it are hospitalized, 2% in the ICU, and 0.1% died.
A vaccine that produced death in a tenth of one percent of people given it, would not be approved — that would mean the vaccine would kill 300,000 of people in the US, for instance.
Evidence so far seems to be that people who wind up in the ICU for Covid-19 do suffer long-term health consequences, so that’s 2% in the younger age group compared to adverse vaccine events of .0001%. Even if we multiplied that one in a million rate several times, it wouldn’t come close to 2%. We also don’t how many of the people in the 14% hospitalized who don’t go into the ICU also suffer from long-term health consequences because we don’t have the research yet to tell us, but we can imagine some of them likely will. I have also heard now a number of stories of young healthy men who have gotten Covid-19 who were not hospitalized (ie, categorized as “mild” cases by the statistics) but who months later cannot run or do other aerobic activities they previously enjoyed. Maybe they will eventually recover 100%, but we don’t know that yet.
So if I imagine myself as say a healthy 30 year old, I think I have an over 2% risk of long-term health damage if I get Covid and maybe 0.0002% chance of having a comparable degree of adverse outcome from getting the vaccine. That’s a pretty big spread in risk difference.
If a Covid-19 vaccine has some totally other long-term mystery effect like causing permanent organ damage in significant numbers, I think that would be a surprising result given what we know about how vaccines work generally. But of course there’s a lot we don’t know.
Another factor to weigh, however your own moral calculus weighs it, is that getting the vaccine helps protect vulnerable people you come into contact with while just waiting to get the disease eventually will likely entail you infecting other people who couldn’t yet get the vaccine.
In any population, there are a certain number of people who cannot get a vaccine at that time — maybe because they’re going through chemo or radiation for cancer or have some other immune-impairing condition. So there’s an important public health dimension to having as many people who can get the vaccine get it, all else being equal (ie, if the risks of each path to you personally were literally equal).
There’s the risk (probably not large) of an adverse reaction, and the other risk of thinking you’re protected when you’re not.
The CDC estimates broadly that one in a million vaccine doses will produce a severe adverse event
I was going to complain that this was wrong, but I checked and the CDC does say that.
Some vaccines are more dangerous than others, but I think those are for really dangerous diseases, like smallpox.
Yes.
I got infected with Covid-19 in April, as a healthy man in his mid-twenties with no risk factors at all. It was still the nastiest cough in my lifetime, I developed shortness of breath, and I feel like my actual stamina has taken a hit since then – I can’t cycle or run quite as far as I used to. If I had a chance to retroactively make myself not catch it and get myself vaccinated within a year, I’d take it for sure.
Note that if you are healthy man in his mid-twenties with no risk factors at all and you had so bad reaction, then you are unusual.
The question of unusually bad side effects of that not-yet-created vaccine remains open.
For most who catch this, the effects are minimal, but the number of people who get it bad, even those young and healthy, is nontrivial. (To be open, my feeling for the odds is influenced by a couple of quite healthy people in my extended family who got it bad: A 20-something who ended up in the hospital and a 50-something endurance athlete who said it was the worst lung disease he’s ever had. Anecdata, of course, but I can’t unknow it.)
I didn’t get hospitalised, and didn’t even quit working, but I definitely can’t recommend trying to get the virus early just to ‘be done with it’. People my age getting hospitalised are rare, I agree, but is it that rare for them to just have a bad case of symptoms?
Probably after there is a clear consensus among public health agencies and academic institutions that it is safe and effective. I would be extremely suspicious of any vaccine approved by the FDA this fall, as there is a strong incentive for Trump to push them to rush it out at that time.
I’ll wait at least a year after the first million people are vaccinated. I am not an anti-vaxxer and get my yearly flu shots religiously, but I’m not enthused by the notion of being injected with something that will be the product of a rush job.
Fortunately, I have the luxury of doing this since my age and good health make me almost immune to the worst effects of COVID-19, and because I have no old people in my social circle that I could infect.
OTOH, whatever is eventually approved will probably be the product of the most closely-watched vaccine trials since the polio vaccine. There are going to be a lot of eyes on this.
I agree with this, that how much scrutiny there will be on this vaccine balances somewhat the “rush job” aspect. Also, seems like there will be multiple versions of this vaccine made and manufactured in multiple countries. It would be devastating for a pharma company that produces one of the vaccines to wind up killing thousands of people, quite apart from what Trump wants.
I’m a tad anemic or something and always have a comedown when I get a regular flu shot. So in this high risk case, I wouldn’t do it immediately. It would be nice if I could wait at least a month.
As soon as it’s easily available, I’d roll up my sleeve for the needle. (For example, I would not drive or wait in line for hours. I would make an appointment or pay a few hundred dollars out of pocket, per person in my immediate family.)
+1
+1
I’d probably do it as soon as I was asked, which would be after they had gotten all the (1) necessary and (2) eager people out of the way first.
I would probably give it at least a month, to see if any problems appear due to mass use.
I really don’t know. I’d really like immunity, but I was reading that the normal delay for something like this would make it available in 2038. It makes me really nervous to think about accelerating the process from eighteen years to one or so.
The mumps vaccine took four years and this one is being tested and trialed by many different entities at once, so it’s unique that way. In this case, multiple simultaneous trials replaces slower sequential work over time. I hear you though, anytime a process has this much urgency behind it, there’s reason to worry something important may get screwed up. Part of what time does is allow problems to surface and get addressed one at a time and so it does seem like we can’t entirely substitute for time.
After looking at the approximate risk levels for typical phase 1 vaccine trials and comparing to risk of death or serious lung injury from COVID should I contract it given my age, sex, weight etc even phase 1 seem like a decent bet but wasn’t fully certain.
So definitely happy to get it from phase 3 onwards. Probably phase 2.
Serious adverse events are pretty rare to the point that even throwing in some cynical multipliers for rushed projects it still looks like a decent payoff.
What exactly is “pretty rare?” Because if you’re young and healthy, serious damage from COVID also seemingly qualifies as “pretty rare.”
Are there any audio tools that I could use to capture pitch, word speed and tonality of an actor in a movie, TV show, other recording etc.? Like, I’d be playing a movie on my computer, and the application would capture that data for everyone speaking. I’m aware of basic pitch, speed analyzing apps, but I think they’re typically meant to be handheld recorders for a person and wouldn’t really track a recorded film. Is there anything out there? Preferably open source?
Word speed could be captured if you can get a hold of a closed-caption file that includes the time stamps of each line, and do a basic word-count/time calculation.
Pitch could maybe be done with just a fourier transform analysis.
Tonality is completely subjective, so no idea there.
My wife and I went to Barnes & Noble yesterday, our first book-buying excursion in three months. I’ve never been so glad to be in a large faceless corporate chain store.
It’s difficult to find science books that venture onto unfamiliar ground, but I was intrigued by The True Creator of Everything: How the Human Brain Shaped the Universe as We Know It, by Miguel Nicolelis (he’s a Duke University neuroscientist and the imprint is Yale University Press, which satisfies my “not total bullshit” priors). Maybe if a bunch of other people here can read it, we can compare notes a few weeks down the line. Heck, maybe even Scott can read it, and post an essay.
The Amazon blurb: “Renowned neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis introduces a revolutionary new theory of how the human brain evolved to become an organic computer without rival in the known universe. He undertakes the first attempt to explain the entirety of human history, culture, and civilization based on a series of recently uncovered key principles of brain function. This new cosmology is centered around three fundamental properties of the human brain: its insurmountable malleability to adapt and learn; its exquisite ability to allow multiple individuals to synchronize their minds around a task, goal, or belief; and its incomparable capacity for abstraction.”
Are you tempted to review it for Scott’s book review contest?
Actually, I hadn’t thought of that. Is there a specific deadline?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/05/book-review-contest-call-for-entries/
Deadline is August 5th.
Awesome! I’m in.
Reminds me a little of Prometheus Rising. The short version is that whatever anyone calls ‘reality’ is to a large extent constructed by themselves. Everything sentient is in a reality-tunnel, so to speak, with the ‘rational’ (George Gurdjieff, who was quite influential in this book, calls what we consider rationality the False Intellect) and ‘objective’ viewpoint being just another reality-tunnel.
I like to imagine the ego tunnel as a sealed room, where instead of windows its all TV screens. You have no way of knowing if what you’re looking at is what’s really out there, or how much it has been edited.
I second Anteros’ request that you review it, because the second I see “revolutionary new theory” on a pop science/pop anything book, I know to pull on the wellies because they’ll be slinging the bullshit soon.
Blurbs are terrible at the best of times, but I am raising my eyebrows so high at “organic computer” and “explain the entirety of human history, culture, and civilisation” that I’m getting a free facelift. Not helped by the tendency to compare the human brain to Latest Snazzy New Technology; had people been writing such blurbs back in the day, doubtless we’d have breathless enthusiasm about how the human brain has evolved to become an organic abacus/wireless telegraphy pole/punchcard sorter.
Three fundamental properties to explain the history of life, the universe and everything, huh? Tell me more! Can I do it in yoga pants? Does it come in multi-flavoured smoothies? Somebody please review this because I have a burning need for snark and anybody decent and civilised would do a better job of being fair to this production 🙂
OK, now I am *definitely* going to review it, because I can’t let “yoga pants” and “smoothies” be the last words about this guy’s life work.
Excellent! My Evil Plan has worked! 😁
I thought the toxoplasma was about the riots in minneapolis/making exceptions to social distancing for BLM/the dozen other controversial issues going on with it, not George Floyd itself.
I live in a pretty red bubble and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think the officers should be arrested and charged, but there were plenty of toxo claims with the initial protests/riots(were there police provocateurs involved? Who started the looting? Is antifa there? etc., etc.). To say nothing of having thousands of people at memorial services when it’s still illegal for churches to meet rubbing a whole lot of people the wrong way.
I wasn’t an “ordinary” teenager but oh boy, when I hit 14, all the teenage moodiness, yelling, door-slamming etc. kicked in with a vengeance.
Hormonal changes do have a lot to do with it, the body and brain are growing and changing and nothing is the same as it used to be and it hasn’t settled down yet in the new configuration.
In this case the toxoplasma is not that what happened to Floyd was wrong, everyone agrees with that, but that it is representative of how black people are treated by police and society in general.
I went from age 12 to age 30 pretty much overnight and stayed there for a while. Causes can be speculated about. Ultimately, this limited my development of ability to form interpersonal (especially romantic) relationships. My adolescence and early 20s was mostly comprised of me trying to wall off everything in order to make it *through* to the other side.
My parents were excellent people, though in many ways the wrong parents for me. My mother and I had personalities which clashed continually and I only learned ways of effectively managing that shortly before she died. My father and I have always gotten along okay, but are sufficiently different people that we have very little in common and so it feels like there’s a gulf inbetween us, though I suppose we both continue to try.
I had a disagreement with a friend on intellectual property, and am looking for more perspectives.
Is intellectual property a good thing, a bad thing, a mixed bag?
Is it unethical to pirate books, videos, etc?
Intellectual property in the sense of attribution – very good thing.
Intellectual property in the sense of monetary rights – a fossil of a bygone era when information could not spread freely. Between Patreon, Kickstarter and digital distribution platforms (where you just pay for convenience and support for the authors) I think you could just axe most copyright laws and the culture would adapt without much issue. Perhaps you’d get less AAA games and blockbuster movies, but that doesn’t sound like much of a loss.
I’m going to come down on the other side of this. The copyright/patent system isn’t perfect, but creators and innovators deserve to be compensated for their innovations, and if you remove that right, you’d remove a lot of the incentive to innovate which makes everybody worse off. And yes, I think it’s wrong to pirate content same as stealing any tangible item. If it’s not worth the price to you, don’t consume it.
Does your opinion change where the creator is dead for 90 years?
When stealing tangible objects, the other person now is worse off – they’ve lost that item. Content doesn’t work like that. Why isn’t this an important distinction?
It is, that is why it is useful to distinguish “piracy” and “theft”.
JohnNV seems to think there isn’t much of a difference, at least morally.
I would sign up for a coalition whose mission it was to reduce the length of copyright, unless that coalition was full of people who couldn’t stfu about wanting to end all copyright.
So I have not been able to find a coalition.
Yeah, I agree copyright is broken, but I don’t think the solution is no copyright at all, I fully agree that 90 years beyond the death of the creator is too long. But on the second point, I’m not sure that there is or should be a distinction. If I shoplift something from a store with a price tag of $10, that’s what we say the amount of the theft was. Nobody asks how much it will cost to replace the item, it’s not relevant. Even if the store got the item for free as part of a promotion with manufacturer, it doesn’t mean it’s OK to take it, and I don’t think you’d find many people arguing that it is.
@Edward Scizorhands
I’d join your coalition.
@Edward Scizorhands
I’d join your coalition.
Not really because almost no innovations are once offs who are perfectly complete. IP laws serve to protect first movers at the expense of people who would have improved on those works. In fact it isn’t the innovators who typically benefit the most, its the management who does. Record labels are advantaged more than musicians, the founders of Microsoft more than the coders, and the owners of Marvel and not the actual writers and cartoonists making the comic books.
I’m not happy that the labels are taking such a big cut, but i’d rather the artists get something rather than nothing.
It is a false leap to go straight to ‘without copyright then artists make nothing’.
They make nothing from selling their creation. Some people may choose to pay when they could otherwise get it for free, but that’s charity, or tips. Look, I wrote a book – I get 15% of the sale price of each book. The cost of printing and distributing it is (I’m guessing) another 40% so that means the publisher is making more than me on each sale of the book. And you know what? I’m OK with that. I have no idea how to print, market, and distribute a book. And it’s not like I could find someone else to offer me a better rate on a debut book. If it sells well (it didn’t), I could potentially negotiate a higher rate for subsequent books. With no copyright at all, I don’t bother writing it, the publisher has nothing to publish, and the government loses out on the tax revenue they would have gotten from my income. But honestly, if the instant I publish something, it could legally be copied and pasted for free, people who do it as a hobby (like Scott) would be OK with that, but people who do it to earn a living will find something else to do.
@Lambert
Musicians make most of their money from live shows, festivals, etc. Without copyright, they would still earn that money.
How? You have leaped from ‘I create something’ to ‘someone else has a copy of it and is distributing it for free’, there are a whole bunch of steps in the middle you are skipping to get to your assumed answer.
If it takes skills and knowledge to print, market and distribute a book how come it is the words on the paper that deserve the copyright? ‘I wrote a book, I deserve money if someone wants to read it’ completely falls apart if you say ‘someone only wants to read my book if it has been professionally distributed’. Now it is not clear how much ‘value’ your book has because of the quality of your writing vs the quality of everything else that went in.
Additionally how did the publisher get a copy of your transcript? Why are you giving it to them without an agreement to get a portion of the sales?
Without copyright, they would still earn that money.
You would still need some other IP right to stop me from performing my Billy Joel tour. And without copyright I could sell all the Billy Joel T-Shirts and CDs live at the event.
“Artists make most of their money through live performances” strongly selects for artists whose audiences are middle-aged empty nesters and have boatloads of disposable income to recapture their youth.
Even Taylor Swift sold the rights to her world tour to Netflix and that would not have been possible without copyright. Netflix could just film it themselves and broadcast it for free.
… I think this is putting the cart before the horse.
Back in the 90s, before pirating music was widespread, musicians made the vast majority of their money selling their music. Sure, they made some of it from live shows, but selling records was the primary revenue source. Once it went away, basically nothing stepped up to replace it.
I think you’re trying to draw too much meaning from the hellscape that is the post-2000s music industry. It’s not that touring is the primary revenue source, it’s arguably the only revenue source unless you make it mega-big.
They could? They can tap into her mic feed and set up multiple cameras and perform sound checks, etc, etc, etc at her concerts without her permission?
Prior to the invention of vinyl almost 100% of an artists income came from avenues that were not related to selling records. If someone is putting the cart before the horse it is those who are starting in the 50s and extrapolating from then.
Ok, let me make sure I’m following you – so you’re claiming the horse was originally before the cart, then the 1950s / recording era started and the cart was put in front of the horse. This cart -> horse situation managed to hold on for a half century, but was eventually destabilized by music piracy whereupon the natural horse/cart order reestablished itself?
Jokes aside – you’re probably correct here, but it certainly looked like that 50 year period had an atypically high amount of amazing music.
Your system only rewards people who can both write great music and have the abilities/desire to tour and perform music live. I’ve seen multiple artists I love either quit the music industry or fade back into the more-stable nether world of production and ghost-writing because they don’t enjoy touring. Is there any way to compensate people who enjoy creating, but not performing music in a world with rampant piracy?
Why? You think people who write great music and people who can preform great music can’t come to an understanding under normal contract law?
How do you distinguish this from survivor-ship bias due to the fact that way more music made it to the present from that era than normally would have?
UBI plus the ways any internet influencer makes their money off of un-copyrightable content?
@Aftagley
Piracy is not a counter-argument, because we are discussing the merit of the current system (which doesn’t stop all piracy), not the merit of a perfect system. If some consider the laws to be unjust and they are broken, then this is just as much a consequence of the system you are defending, as the actions of people who do follow the law.
People also don’t get to defend our current drug laws by arguing that zero drug use is the best outcome. That is not actually the result of those drug laws.
Either you need to defend different drug laws/enforcement (and their consequences), or you have to accept all the consequences of the current laws, including those that result from lawbreaking. The same goes for copyright laws/enforcement.
—
Also, to what extent is the fairly low income from streaming and such, a result of increased competition (not just in the music business, but all entertainment, of which there is now way more available than in my youth)?
Copyright around entertainment media may be the most visible but is not the only important part – and may be the least important part.
For example, what about software? Losing AAA games is not so important but harming Windows and Linux and MacOS and every single other OS not licensed under MIT/PD sounds dangerous.
I’d argue it’s too much of a good thing.
Copyright lasts too long and patents are too broad. Ceterum autem censeo DMCA esse delendam.
+1. I’m strongly negative on tech/IT patents (lawsuits over round edges on a phone and a zillion other idiot cases that stifle innovation and only benefit lawyers), agnostic on patents in general, and for pharmaceuticals in particular, and moderately positive on trademarks.
Trademarks is as close to a perfect system as you can get in the legal world. It’s not very exciting though because the concepts are so fundamental/obvious.
The real problems with Trademarks are that the Trademark Office is underfunded and has to deal with thousands (millions?) of bootleg Chinese application per day.
In my opinion, Copyrights are too easy to get for how much of a pain in the ass they can be to the party on the other side. At least with patents and trademarks, you need to put in some effort to get protection.
Why do you think copyright shouldn’t last forever?
There’s the huge, existing problem of orphan works. No one knows who the owner is now but everyone is too scared to produce the work because if they do someone may pop up and claim statutory damages of $150,000, attorney’s fees, etc.
Also the only reason copyright exists is to incentivize the production of artistic works. Infinite copyright duration is certainly not necessary for that.
I don’t think this is true. Arguably, the thought that your grandchildren could benefit from collecting royalties might be a motivating factor for an artist, but factoring in future extensions of the copyright term is getting preposterous. Yet, time and time again copyright has been extended retroactively to cover works by artists long dead and buried.
I think the main reason copyright exist – at least in their current form – is that powerful organizations and individuals lobby in their favor.
I really doubt this. Most people who create content for money are doing so so that they can get paid. Unless you’re already massively successful, the chances of your grandchildren getting paid for anything you do are minuscule, and if you want to benefit them, you’ll put some of the money you get from immediate royalties in a savings bond or something.
The big issue with long copyrights is that nobody has the time horizon where they’ll write something with 100-year copyright that they wouldn’t with 50-year copyright. Corporations certainly don’t, and neither do individual human authors/artists/whatever. At which point, the long copyright terms are just rent-seeking by Disney and others with holdings from long ago.
If I buy and develop a piece of land, I assume that it will generate rents 50 years from now. Maybe I won’t be alive for all 50, but my ability to sell it in 10 years depends on the next person being able to generate rents as long as they want.
If there is a jubilee that undoes property ownership every 49 years, I’ll be less likely to develop land. (Particularly close to the 49th year.)
(PS: I don’t like old copyrights being extended. And I think copyrights are too long.)
This is a stereotypically masculine-centered understanding in that permanence of labor is assumed (vs. the impermanence of stereotypically feminine-categorized labor).
People still decorate their homes and offices even though they know the work will be transitory. Likewise various renters perform minor maintenance and major landscaping on their rental properties. They do this despite not profiting at all when their tenancy ends (and possibly owing money from their security deposit to undo the modifications they’ve made).
10 years from now the next person can pay the depreciated rate plus the underlying land value, and you’ll still have made a profit from the 10 years of rent.
Even though patents expire, the unpublished research (e.g. all of the dead ends and promising leads not followed) leading up to that patent are still valuable.
Also regarding land ownership vs. copyright
Land is a physical thing. The arguments for land do not follow for copyright. In fact, I would argue that current copyright law decreases artistic output because people are not able to build off of other’s works. It would be like if patents lasted 100 years. Instead of innovation building off of other technology to the benefit of everyone, more stagnation would happen as only the original inventors could build off of their innovations.
Edward Scizorhands was not talking about land. He was talking about developing land, which is much more closely analogous.
There are a few different questions going on.
1. Why do we need ownership for thought-stuff?
2. Why doesn’t ownership of thought-stuff last forever, like it does for land?
1 is because we want people to develop thought-stuff, the same way we want people to develop land, and the regime of private property has been effing awesome for wealth creation so we go with what we know works.
2 is because ownership of land is simpler than ownership of thought-stuff to discern.
Permanent land ownership is reasonable because if I want to build something on a particular piece of land, it’s trivial to find out who owns it. If someone designed a system of “finding out who owns this land?” 200 years ago there’s a good chance it would still be perfectly functional today. Lots of developed land is still extremely valuable 50 or even hundreds of years later, and we reward people who a good job at creating something long-lasting by letting them capture that value when they sell it to others.
(And if land went “free” it would actually go to the government, not public domain for the public to do whatever they want.)
Every state has a property tax so if someone abandons land you can easily buy it from the state. And land is unlikely to be subdivided into thousands of tiny pieces such that you have to negotiate with everyone to build something — and even then we have eminent domain.
Things built out of thought-stuff can be composed of things that were originally built by tens of thousands of other people and we often have no idea who those people are, and IMO the only significant downside that IP law has for innovation is that there can be major uncertainty about someone showing up to claim ownership of one of those tens of thousands of pieces of thought-stuff.
(So while I significantly support the concept of IP laws, but would like reforms. Ideas include shorter copyright terms, compulsory licensing, a requirement to actively register works to get the full length of terms, or safe-harbor provisions that allow someone to claim abandoned goods by giving notice of their intent to use.)
Because ownership of thought-stuff is a contractual right, and contractual rights basically never last forever even if you do trade them from one person to another. See e.g. stock options. The right to buy 100 shares of XYZcorp for $50 a share any time prior to 1 January 2021 is a valuable thing that you can own, buy, sell, sue people for defrauding you of, etc. It is property. And on 1 January 2021, it is worthless property that no court will bother with. So too with copyright. So too with any private IP contract you might negotiate in place of the default copyright – you can negotiate any terms you like, but courts won’t enforce “forever” or “until hell freezes over” or any other such thing.
For that matter, even property ownership usually doesn’t last forever. It lasts for life and until probate has been cleared up, then the heir has their own new and independent interest in the land, independent of whatever interest their dead ancestor had. About the only eternal possessions are real property and material goods owned by corporate entities, a special case that is much easier and less disruptive to deal with than e.g. eternal copyright.
Intellectual property rights are a vital part of every modern economy and one of the cornerstones of the innovation industry the Western World favors. That said it is a very broad term and it’s enforcement is rather behind the times, with both patents and copyrights having long tail effects that are neither beneficial to the world at large or the rights holder.
I personally believe that it is unethical to pirate media, especially these days when streaming is so prevalent that it’s basically free. I’d put it in the same moral area as shoplifting. Technically wrong but generally meaningless to both the victim and the perpetrator.
+1. The modern economy depends on people making thought-stuff. The amazing things that happen over the next 50 years aren’t going to be people making socks or collecting bars of gold.
Then we shouldn’t be hamstringing 99.99999% of the population.
Depends.
If it is outright impossible to legally buy something in your country? I see no problem with piracy.
If you pirate just to avoid paying, while book/movie/whatever costs 0.4% of your monthly income? Then it sounds like you should pay.
In between there is plenty of gray area for “author died 90 year ago, copyright is owned by massive corporation” where piracy may be illegal but I see nothing clearly unethical. Or “Spotify pays author basically nothing” where it may be legal but I am not convinced that it is ethical.
And there is plenty of fun legal cases where either legal or ethical status is not clear – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_copyright_dispute or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Also, what you mean by “pirate”? For example in Poland AFAIK it is perfectly legal to download copyrighted music, images, text – though sharing it is illegal.
Mixed bag as everything else. There is plenty of bad behavior (patent trolls, copyright extending over 50 years past death of author (“The Mickey Mouse Protection Act”), absurd DMCA takedowns).
But someone copying a book that someone else made? And without any agreement or permission selling it without giving anything to real author? That should be illegal. The same for images, software, maps and other works.
There is additional problem of that rules are often hard to enforce against major corporations (for example Facebook maps are breaking copyright due to insufficient attribution of real source of data – and it is basically impossible to enforce that).
I’m specifically interested in personal download and usage.
If it’s actually property, why shouldn’t copyright extend forever?
Legality depends on a country. In Canada “the downloading of a song for a person’s private use does not constitute infringement.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/p2p-downloading-is-it-legal/ (though it was state in 2009).
Is it a serious question? Also, why it should?
Yes, I would like an explicit reasoning.
If it is property, why should property last only so long? When I buy a painting I expect to own it unless I sell it (or lose it etc).
In short: overall benefits of copyright depends on copyright length, and “infinity” is certainly not an optimal position.
For start, have fun with deciding who owns copyright to original Bible text. Or works of Homer. There is no benefit in this absurdity.
Because it is a special kind of property I see no problem with special rules for it.
As others have said, the issue with copyright is not the person is owning a concept or artistic rendering of something. For example, it is against copyright to take the painting you bought and upload a picture of it on the internet.
Simple answer? It’s not property. The basic logic behind IP, at least in the US, is laid out in the Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
We give people rights to their creations to encourage them to create more. That’s it. It’s a utilitarian decision, because we want more books and movies and patentable innovations. It’s not because of any moral right the creator has. And after we’ve given the creator long enough to pay back their initial investment, if they can, we have whatever it is enter the public domain. The patent system is the best at implementing this, while copyright has been grossly extended.
Because the downloader has not taken the author’s property? They’ve duplicated it.
If you own a painting, and someone else creates a duplicate of it, you still own the original painting.
So if Edison copied your painting and then told everyone it was his, and started making merch and selling T-shirts with your painting on it, you’d be ok with that because you still have the original?
Yes? I don’t buy things just so I can sell them, I buy things so that I own them. I buy a DVD, I don’t care if my neighbor buys the same copy of the DVD.
What about pirating things you’ve already bought? For instance, I buy a show on Amazon Prime, they let me stream it but not download it, I’d prefer to have my own copy, so I pirate it anyway. Well, ok, maybe I never paid for the right to download it, so what if I bought it on iTunes, and now I can download it, but can’t freely copy it to another device when I want?
Or what if I own a physical copy of a console game from 15 years ago, but today I can play the same game on an emulator at higher resolution, perhaps with texture packs?
I find it increasingly common that a pirated version of something gives me more freedom or ease of use than the paid-for version.
My reading of I David D. Friedman’s book is that he would probably say that it’s a good thing, with a lot of caveats. One caveat being that intellectual property grants a kind of monopoly, and so the usual downsides of monopolies apply. Importantly, production of copies will be below the optimum level (you’ll need to read the book to understand the terminology; sorry).
The other caveat is the practicality of enforcing the digital copyright. So, he might say that: if intellectual property was enforceable at a reasonable cost, it would clearly be a good thing (with some caveats, but still). But what’s the correct trade-off in a world where it can’t be enforced at a reasonable cost? Well, that’s harder to answer.
I’ve read lots of impassioned arguments for abolishing intellectual property. They make a lot of good points, but in my opinion none of them do a good job of explaining why anybody would bother to make my favorite video game or write my favorite book. That’s a deal-breaker. That said I am against the indefinite extension of copyright, where congress grants a ten-year extension every ten years. The authors death +50 years standard seems more than reasonable to me, and I have no ethical problem pirating anything outside that window.
Do you think differently on areas that will get created regardless, like philosophy, art, science etc?
Here anything funded by government should be obligated to be published on open license, in open access journals.
Abolishing copyright is not needed to do that.
I don’t think “will get created regardless” is a boolean quantity. Some people will make art and science without financial incentive, but more people will make more and better if someone is willing to give them $1000 to do it.
Because you hire someone to do it? While I’m as much a sucker for novelty as anyone, it’s not like I can manage to hear/read/watch even one percent of one percent of the available music/books/films that exist. I can’t even over my lifetime manage one thousandth of the books that get published in a single year. Do we really need an artificial government monopoly to ensure that we get more? And if yes, could we imagine other ways to ensure this?
The Witcher 3* had a budget of $81 million. I don’t have $81 million. If the answer is “Kickstarter for everything” I’m on board, but even then there is a gap. The number of people willing to invest money after seeing a proof of concept or some general ideas and then wait years before receiving a product is pretty small. The most successful kickstarter ever was a little over $20 million, so at best I would expect to get games 1/4 as good as Witcher 3. Generally I think there’s a lot of value left in the model where people can create a thing and then sell it after it exists. I don’t see how that works without some sort of intellectual property protection.
*My favorite game ever is not Witcher 3, but I couldn’t find budget numbers for Shadow of the Colossus.
As with most everything there are trade-offs both ways. While witcher 3 may or may not have been made without copyright protections, witcher 3 mods will for certain never be made with copyright protections. While witcher 3 mods are not likely to be much good and maybe not worth the risk of witcher 3 never being made in the first place, the same thing can’t be said (from what I have heard) of steam engines. So it’s not clear to me on the balance which option is better.
That’s only because kickstarters have time limits. Crowdfunding can continue long after the initial kickstarter page is over with.
Star Citizen looks like a traditional on-going game that calls all its sales “crowdfunding” for PR purposes, and I would do the same thing if I were in their boat and could get free headlines.
(It also seems to tilt the market in favor of established creators, but I’m not sure this is a good argument because only established creators would be able to raise $85 million in venture capital.)
You can hire people, right now, to make your favorite video game or your favorite book.
IP regimes are not stopping you. Just like capitalism allows communism to exist within it. You can create your project and pay for it and put it in the public domain to show others how it’s done.
I can’t even over my lifetime manage one thousandth of the books that get published in a single year
You don’t want most of them, but other people do.
Because people already do even though IP law currently exists?
Cave Story. Cory Doctorow novels. Worm, Unsong, Northern Caves, etc. Fan films. Freeware. All pop culture from before IP law was put into effect (the Iliad, operas, Shakespeare, folk mythology).
I think it’s great when someone is willing to spend thousands of hours producing something for my enjoyment with no compensation, I just don’t think it’s very reasonable to expect it of them.
I also can’t help but notice how everybody is jumping on the book example without giving much regard for video games, which frequently have 8 figure budgets.
See the freeware link.
@AG
I feel like the quality of the games on that list largely prove my point. CD Projekt Red spent $81 million and 3.5 years developing Witcher 3. Even if they did that out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they thought it was fun, or for whatever reason Scott wrote Unsong, I still think it would be unreasonable to expect them to.
A glance at the Steam charts show they’re dominated by free-to-play multiplayer games. Epic is… unlikely… to be different. IP is effectively a non-issue in those models.
Would IP protections disincentivize your Witchers? Undoubtedly, though now you’re talking about what is (unfortunately*) an increasingly narrow market segment. Something will inevitably be lost no matter what one does, though I bet your Stardew Valleys and maybe even Disco Elysiums will be fine. Dwarf Fortress, of course, soldiers on regardless.
*For of all sad words/ of tongue or pen/ the saddest are these/ Freespace 3.// It might have been.
Some of the greatest, most enduring, pieces of art of all time were created under the patron system, before IP law was significantly implemented. Even today, opera houses making lavish productions of entirely public domain works don’t make up their money in ticket sales, and so are basically funded by patrons.
So it could also be how your big budget video game still gets made, because a billionaire simply wants to play a big budget video game, or reap the status benefits of getting a big budget film made.
The logic behind ad revenue/sponsorships still applies in a world without IP, so content would also continue to be produced with that level of support. It would be easier for some kinds of content, too, since said producers wouldn’t have to wrestle with copyright strikes anymore.
Most of ‘all time’ happened before IP law became a thing.
It’s unfair to compare 3500 years of literature before the Statute of Anne with the 300 years after.
We probably lost several works of Shakespeare because the lack of IP protection meant that he kept his works hidden. People would try to memorize his plays and put on the same play at competing theaters. It’s the same way guilds worked hard to keep their inventions secret and tried to monetize them through second-order effects.
We want these things public! We want them published! We’ve probably lost some incredible things because they were hidden and ultimately died with their creators.
The things we lost, or that were never created, are Bastiat’s unseen.
@Edward Scizorhands
OTOH now that copyright (in the US, at least) is immediate with the creation of the work and doesn’t require publishing anymore, works can still be lost by dint of never being published.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
Today wouldn’t Brod have been breaking the law in publishing these works whose copyright was still owned by Kafka’s estate?
Now you are assuming that the works we got would remain in a world where Shakespeare spends decades in a legal battle with the heirs of Saxo Grammaticus over Hamlet. Likewise we wouldn’t have the Iliad if Homer had to go back and get permission from every storyteller he had heard a version from before preforming his variation.
Today wouldn’t Brod have been breaking the law in publishing these works whose copyright was still owned by Kafka’s estate?
A copyright violation, but, yes. He’d still be allowed to retain ownership of them, sell them, make them available to others to study and describe, and once the copyright had lapsed they could be openly published.
Or the estate could have been paid money. They don’t necessarily have Kafka’s same interests.
I think if someone wants their private unpublished writings destroyed, they ought to be destroyed. We encourage creators to contribute to the public domain, and IMO this is more ethical than forcing them to contribute to the public domain. But destroying all the copies should be something Kafka took care of doing before he died. A will isn’t some magic computer program that you unleash as a doomsday weapon after your death.
where Shakespeare spends decades in a legal battle with the heirs of Saxo Grammaticus over Hamlet
Even the US copyright terms, which I think are too long, would not last for over 300 years.
No, but Shakespeare would have to pay François de Belleforest, and the author of Ur-Hamlet.
The point is that almost all of Shakespeare’s works are derivative to some significant extent, you can’t claim that copyright would give us more Shakespeare without considering this.
No billionaire wants to play a video game badly enough to pay serious video-game development money just to make it happen. If he did, he wouldn’t be a billionaire.
Paying for propaganda wrapped in serious video-game production values, that’s another matter. I don’t think it is an improvement if all big-budget video games are some billionaire’s professional propaganda, even if the message is just “Billionaire X is high status”. Which it often won’t be.
Now that Disney has leveraged their extended monopoly sufficient to purchase rights to Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe, etc… they have no need to lobby to extend their mouse monopoly anymore. The extensions therefore will probably end.
We know that intellectual property can be created without IP laws because it has been. Consider all the works written before copyright law existed. For current examples, consider fanfic, open source software, and blogs. SSC is one example of very useful intellectual property whose creation does not depend on IP law.
There are a lot of different ways it can happen. Some people write books for the fun of it, or to spread their ideas, or for the resulting status, which can take pecuniary forms. One result of being a novelist may be a job teaching at a university. One result of my books and articles is that people pay my expenses to go to interesting places around the world and give speeches, and sometimes pay for the speeches as well.
Historically, one way of supporting authors is patronage. English books from a few centuries back sometimes start with a glowing tribute to some noble you have never heard of — who has probably been feeding the author for the last few years. The Orlando Furioso, one of the great works of Renaissance Italian poetry, includes a scene predicting what a wonderful person the descendant of one of the characters will be. Her name will be Lucrecia Borgia — which suggests who Ariosto’s patrons were.
One modern version is Patreon. Another possible one, that I don’t think I have seen, would be for a firm such as Apple to sponsor the production of popular works — which would contain the artists’ thanks to the sponsor.
Another way is first mover advantages. Back before the U.S. had a copyright treaty with the U.K., British authors got substantial royalties for U.S. sales, in part because the fixed cost and time lags in the printing technology of the time meant that the authorized publisher, who got the text from the author long enough before the book came out in England to have type set and books printed when it did, got all the early sales, which were typically most of the sales. If a pirate edition came out, the authorized publisher, with its fixed costs already paid, could bring out a cut rate fighting edition to keep the pirate from ever making enough to cover its fixed costs.
That approach doesn’t work with modern printing technology, but there are still advantages to coming out first.
None of this implies that we wouldn’t have less IP without IP law, but it’s clear that we wouldn’t have none at all.
And in some ways, IP law hinders the production of IP, because old IP is sometimes an input to new. My current non-fiction book project is a collection of short works of literature that contain interesting economic insights, each to be accompanied by an essay of mine exploring the economics. It currently exists, in draft form with only some of the essays, as a web page.
I probably can’t produce it as a book, because that would require permission from a large number of different copyright holders, requiring a lot of time and effort finding them and negotiating the permission. I can do most of it as a webbed page because most of the works are already webbed.
One of my favorite pieces, a Poul Anderson story obviously written to make the economic point, used to be webbed in full, is now webbed only in part. If the author were still alive I expect he would be happy to give me permission to include it in my book for a proportional share of the royalties, as two other authors I have communicated with were, but unfortunately he isn’t and I haven’t had any luck with the agent who currently controls the rights.
The chapter on property in my Hidden Order discusses the tradeoff between property and commons. One of the costs of treating something as property is the transaction cost of letting someone other than the owner use it.
So that particular book would be easier for me to produce if there were no copyright law.
Great Merlin’s ghost!
(For SSC readers who haven’t read the poem, the prophecy that Ariosto’s sponsors would be amazing is put in the mouth of Merlin’s ghost. Having encountered it in his tomb, the warrior woman Bradamante takes it as an order to convert Ruggiero to Christianity and marry him.)
We see this on the regular with public broadcasting and live performance contexts, like symphony orchestras, operas, theater, and other large scale events. “This program was brought to you by/made possible by generous support from…”
Wait, but after all that — what’s your hunch? In balance, is intellectual property good for the world or bad?
I don’t know. Levine and Boldrin make the argument for one side, and they could be right, but I haven’t looked into the historical evidence myself, or seen any attempt by someone else to debunk their account of it.
I think it’s clear, for reasons I explore in Law’s Order, that traditional copyright makes more sense than either patent or the ways in which copyright has been expanded in recent years, because it covers something that works better as property. But whether it works well enough so that, given zero marginal cost, it is better as property than as commons I don’t know.
The answer probably depends on a lot of details of the setting, such as how large first mover advantages are — hand set lead type vs photocopying, to take one example.
I think that for scientific research, copyright is definitely a bad thing, and I think pirating is ethically warranted.
The research would still be made, the papers still written and peer-reviewed, even if copyright on the papers did not exist.
As for other forms of copyright, I favor a life + 25 years term.
For patents & miscellaneous, more flexibility on derivative work (EU plant variety laws allow a lot more derivative breeding, whereas Americans patent a lot of plant varieties, thus making step improvements impossible).
Thus, I think that substantial and significant improvements on somebody else’s patent should be exempt from the previous patent, as long as the improvement is substantial enough.
I want a solid term of years, not an amorphous “life +”.
Say X and Y marry. X works their butt off supporting Y through school and while writing their novels, while going further and further into debt. Y finishes a novel that gets best seller status and then dies immediately thereafter from a bus accident at the untimely age of 25, but not before incurring even more medical debt. X uses the royalties to pay off the debt incurred by X and Y, but then has nothing left. X spends the next 25 years treading water on the royalties and their minimum wage jobs, but then at the age of 50 the royalties end when the copyright ends. X ends up on the streets.
Make the copyright 50 years or 60 years flat and X has less of a problem.
+1. Making copyright length depend on the creator’s life is just weird. 50 years? Great, fine, let’s do it..
Yeah, but with a solid 60 year term, you could get Y, who wrote a book, and at age 80+ is living in a super expensive care home, while Warner Bros. makes a super-duper expensive blockbuster based on their book while Y gets nothing.
I don’t see why X, who didn’t write the book, should be prioritised over Y, who did.
If you want to have a fixed number of years, make it an even 100 since publication. Then we won’t get situations like that. Plus, it’s easy to calculate.
I learned recently that Beverly Cleary is still kicking, at 104! She’s been writing children’s books since 1942. So yeah, 60 years really wouldn’t do it.
If something is still quite valuable IP at year+60, it was very likely to have been quite valuable and generating rents during the intervening years.
Most 100+ year olds aren’t relying on their current income to support themselves. Is the point to allow the creator to make maximum profit off the work or to have exclusive creative control during their lifetime?
It’s not like Beverly Cleary will be 101 and then suddenly realize “oh, shoot, all my royalties disappear today.”
(I mean, I assume if we made copyright length 50 or 60 years, we would do that going forward, with some reasonable grandfathering for people who didn’t expect the expiration of their rights to happen in the next few years.)
This is reasonable, but I would amend it to “Life or 50 years, whichever is longer.” I don’t have a very rational argument for this but it seems weird to me that under your system if Jane Austen had lived long enough she’d have had no say in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Plus I doubt the difference actually matters all that often.
Yeah, this seems a good compromise.
Though theoretically it could incentivize assassins, the copyright holder could avoid this by giving up copyright, or making licenses available to nearly anyone for a nominal amount.
Doesn’t need to be a traditional assassin, since you’re playing the long game.
You could bribe the chefs at the restraunts they like to add extra salt and saturated fat to their meals. Or stand next to them while puffing on a cigar.
Statistical assassination! I love it.
In theory, I agree, but I think some form of “life +” is probably a political/PR necessity, to avoid old and sympathetic authors whining about stuff. I’d go with 50 years or life + 5, whichever is longer.
Let them whine?
Futureproofing! We really do not want copyrights to become perpetual again just because someone cures aging, after all.
Books that still sell after 50-60 years have at that point made their author so much money that if they have problems, that is on them. Actually, same goes for 20. Most books are pretty ephemeral, and as far as actual earnings go, any term beyond a decade is almost entirely about making Hollywood pay up when they do an adaption.
25 years would more than suffice
I’m rather skeptical on curing aging, but that’s a reasonable point. Less sure on 20 yrs vs 50. There are lots of long-running series that are more than 20 years old, and where, because it’s a long-running series, the author is still making money off the early books.
Would that it were so.
My first book will be fifty in a few years. It still sells — 53 copies of the paperback in the past month, a similar number of the audiobook, and I’m not sure about the kindle. But it never sold enough to make me rich, or even come close to supporting me at the average U.S. salary.
And I expect there are a fair number of other books like that, selling something on the order of a thousand copies a year for many years.
I think we tend to think of “intellectual property” in too monolithic a way. Even under current law, there are important distinctions between trademark, copyright, and patents (in terms of both duration and rights granted). It may well be natural to subdivide these further (perhaps software should be classified differently from either copyright or patent? perhaps copyright in musical melodies should be treated differently than copyright in text? perhaps visual trademarks should be treated differently from slogans and brand names? perhaps pharmaceutical patents should be treated differently from business processes?) And all of them could naturally have the set of rights changed (the duration extended or reduced, mandatory licensing).
Some copyrights and patents could also naturally be replaced by automatic purchase by the government at some fixed price (some people describe this in terms of prizes, like the one for the invention of a means to measure longitude several centuries ago).
All of this is just to say that intellectual property can be just as heterogeneous as other kinds of property, and could be subject to many modifications, just the way that real estate has easements while chattel property like furniture and clothing generally doesn’t.
Companies are using all forms of IP Law in coordination to prevent anyone from investigating the software.
With regards to law enforcement software
“Such overlapping protection is problematic because it interferes with the carefully developed doctrines that have evolved over time to balance the private property rights in intellectual creations against public access to such creations”
It is unethical to pirate books etc.
But it is not because the victim has lost physical property – they haven’t.
Nor is it because the pirate is withholding money that they definitely would have provided if not for piracy – every person has first rights to their own mind. Empirically punishing thoughtcrime is a gross violation of ethics.
Nor is it because of the downstream effects on the arts industries. It may be that art was in a state of artificial scarcity, and the digital era has punctured a bubble. If people only value art to the degree that they would pirate it but not purchase it, this may be unwise, but it is simply the invisible hand moving.
Piracy is unethical because it is espionage.
Could you expound a bit more on exactly what makes piracy espionage?
Piracy is definitionally espionage : unlawful access to privileged or confidential information.
That is its only undeniable criminal aspect.
Any of its material effects may be imaginary, may be simple bubble deflation, and/or may be an opportunity to compensate artists in a more risk-healthy fashion.
That is nonsense. Copyright protects the way in which something is expressed, not what is expressed.
It’s perfectly legal to write a book that contains all the information contained in a copyrighted book, if it is expressed differently.
Writing a book that contains all the information of another book, just expressed differently, is called plagiarism.
And it is certainly illegal according to copyright law.
link text
I stand corrected about plagiarism vis-a-vis copyright law.
But you have helped to show how copyright law is essentially a legal framework for regulating aesthetic, to the exclusion of ethical concerns regarding content. This means copyright law is conceptually irrelevant to 1. the OP’s question of the ethics of piracy, rather than the legality thereof, and 2. my idea that piracy is an informational crime, rather than an aesthetic crime.
If anything, this increases my certainty that our definition of and legal approach to piracy are misguided.
An example of a case where the difference was relevant was a court case about phone books. This is publicly available information, but the claimant alleged their phone book was copied by the accused. The evidence that was presented, was that there were the same errors in both books. Therefor, the claim was upheld.
Aapje,
This seems to indicate that copyright protects what was expressed, rather than how it is expressed.
People may value art enough to buy it, but they value having the art AND their money more than having just the art, and thus pirate anyways. Rational buyers don’t always pay the price they think an item is worth, they pay at most the price they think the item is worth.
That is true for some acts of piracy.
But there is a class of items that you would partake in or enjoy, but would not willingly pay for. This is easy to see if you enlarge “enjoy but not pay for” beyond “piracy,” noting all the times we all do this. For instance, I will never pay for the New Yorker, but I will read it in the dentist’s office. And yet this is not piracy. Thus, for some acts of piracy, the pirate is fully justified in claiming “I would not have paid for this, even though I would pirate it.”
You may contend that it is impossible to determine whether that is the case. It might even be impossible for the pirate! But we are not allowed to say “Regardless of what the market says, this work is worth $X, therefore the artist has a right to your money and your mind.” We are not permitted to convict the pirate by a priori voiding their rights to their money and their mind.
Piracy is unethical, but the reason is not “The artist has not gotten sufficient material benefit, therefore the consumers are delusional.”
I don’t think that there is any moral reality to “intellectual property”–as someone points out upthread, my having a recording of a song doesn’t keep someone else from having it, which is different from tangible property where you either have it or you don’t (I can’t remember the technical economics term for this).
You should still, however, not lie. So in the absence of laws, I would say:
1) Publishing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by boylermaker: wrong; this is a lie
2) Publishing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling (but not paying her royalties): fine
3) Making a movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, based on the novel, again not paying J.K. Rowling: fine
4) Publishing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: A reimagining, under my own name, a reimagining that makes it clear it is a different book from the one J.K. Rowling wrote (think Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality): fine
5) Publishing 2 Harry 2 Potter, my sickkkk Harry Potter fan fiction, under my own name: fine
I think that piracy is wrong because laws have moral force even when their content is morally neutral, and so I don’t do it.
I think that there probably should be some, maybe even a lot, of IP. It is a legal fiction that is useful because giving people temporary monopolies over ideas incentivizes them to spend time coming up with the ideas. But I think the position that maximizes the common good is probably less IP than we have now.
Patents are great, but should probably be a bit shorter. I am confused by the situation with patenting genes and bioprospected molecules and don’t have an opinion on that.
Copyright is a bit iffier. Authors should be able to copyright their works, and I’m willing to be talked into the idea that the copyright should last past their lifetimes, but probably by only a couple of decades. They should not be able to copyright their characters or worlds (i.e., for-profit fan fiction, like The Aeneid or the works of Shakespeare, should be fine).
EDIT: I had forgotten about trademarks; my instinct is that using other people’s trademarks tends to fall into the category of lying, so I am more favorable to trademark-protections than I am to copyright or patent protections.
This isn’t really the moral argument though. IMO, the moral argument is thinking of it in terms of a contract. The creator of a work makes said work available conditionally, and one such condition is “you can consume it personally, you can even sell it or give it away, but you can’t copy it, retain the original, and give the copy to someone else.”
Issues like whether it’s tangible or whether the person buying the copy would have bought an original are completely beside the point. The person making the copy is violating their agreement with the creator (or the creator’s agent). The person benefiting from that violation is in a moral position roughly equivalent to someone buying stolen goods. Or purchasing blackmail secrets. Or something like that. You are directly benefiting from someone else’s clear moral/legal violation.
I find this to be a compelling argument that you shouldn’t pirate under the current legal regime.
I don’t think that in the absence of any IP law, the contract would be there by default, though. To give an example of what I mean, I think that if there were no laws against taking physical property, and you invited me to your house and left me alone in the room, it would be immoral for me to take your stuff: there is an implied hey-don’t-wander-off-with-my-sofa that comes along with your invitation to your house.
But in the absence of any IP law, if you sold me a book, or told me a story from your past, or showed me a painting, and didn’t make me sign an explicit contract beforehand, I think I’m morally in the clear to publish an edition of your book, or make a movie based on your story, or a copy of your painting.
I dunno, I think in current western society, this part of the contract is pretty implicit and does not need to be explicitly stated. But part of that is because in current western society, we generally assume the law reflects commonly held social values.
I.e. in a society that was exactly like ours except IP law didn’t exist, you may be right. Except that it’s a contradiction because a society exactly like ours would have IP law.
It’s like the classic libertarian philosophical question: In a world just like ours but Ron Paul becomes President, can he solve all of our problems? No. On the other hand, any world in which Ron Paul becomes President is a world that looks very different from ours and is well on the way to solving most of the problems we’re currently complaining about…
One more case: publishing HP by JKR, but with errors.
Hmm, well, if by “errors” you mean typos, then I guess I would say that if you are doing #2, you should make a good-faith effort at error-correction. All editions have typos, though, so I wouldn’t find their presence to be morally suspect.
If you mean things like changing Dumbledore’s opening speech to “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! By the way I am straight as an arrow and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!” … I think I would consider that to fall under #1 (it’s a lie to say that J.K. wrote that).
The obvious case is sloppy OCR.
The annoying example I know of is a Russian copy of Sheckley’s “Protection”, which unfortunately damaged the last line by correcting the final word.
Decent news– that one didn’t turn up in a fast search.
Here’s a copy without that error:
https://lingualeo.com/es/jungle/robert-sheckley-protection-49722
Sheckley was a clever writer with some rationalit or rationalist-adjacent topics who seems to be pretty much forgotten.
Some stories: the misfortune of getting therapy from a mind machine designed for aliens. Being unable to sign a (grossly unfair colonialist) contract with aliens because their language changes so fast. Dealing with a make-anything machine which won’t do duplicates.
He’s probably best remembered for “The Prize of Peril” a story about “reality” tv where the contestant is being hunted.
Well, I definitely think there is some degree of sloppiness where it becomes immoral to present OCRed text as that of the authors. I think there is probably some gray area, and it’s pretty context dependent. So if you are presenting text as OCRed to people who know what OCR means and can see the original images if necessary (like the Biodiversity Heritage Library project, say), I think you can get away with a lot more garble than if you are doing OCR to print out a book for your grandma.
It probably varies by text, too: the amount of garble needed to pervert the original meaning is higher for Harry Potter than for a collection of epigrammatic poetry, which is higher than for a calculus textbook.
If you intend your list to be exhaustive, you should include translations, which are an interesting case in themselves.
I tend to think that translation is so difficult that all translations fall under #4. But I don’t feel so strongly about this that I would object to a separate category.
what about the following?
Occultist classics collection, volume 7:
The Satanic Bible, by A. LaVey
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling
The Equinox of the Gods, by A. Crowley
I’m OK with it. What do you see as the potential problem? Is it that the publisher is making a public statement that Harry Potter is occult? That doesn’t seem to be a problem, as it is a very expensive way of making a statement that is so common and easy to make in other ways that there is a whole wikipedia article about it:
Or am I missing the point?
The “long” term of patents is actually quite short for drugs. Your R&D, FDA approval, building factories, etc all eats into the patent term.
I just wanted to mention the book “against intellectual monopoly” by Boldrin and Levine:
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
They argue that patents are not necessary for companies to make profit of their inventions, because the inventing company has a massive first-mover advantage over the competition.
Some call this the MySpace effect…
Myspace sold for $580 million dollars.
Yes, it’s unethical to pirate books, videos, etc. Perhaps not on the ultimate, fundamental level, but in the time and place we currently inhabit it is illegal and immoral. Someone is harmed, indirectly many more people are harmed, etc. You are effectively making an isolated demand for rigor to justify theft. You don’t demand all rights hold up to the standard of strict ethical scrutiny on a society-wide basis when it comes to (for example) your identity. You do so with intellectual property because you expect to be in a position to steal it and unlikely to possess it.
The main virtue of intellectual property is that it incentivizes the creation of intellectual products. If you take it away without substituting some other form of allowing workers to profit from their intellectual labor in line with how much other people want it, then you have done a net negative (plus or minus some fiddling on the edges). It does this at the expense of your right to freely use knowledge but only with knowledge you would not have otherwise, so the harm is relatively minimal (and you eventually get the right to use the knowledge after it expires).
The answers people have provided so far are intensely problematic. If it’s something people do for love, you’ll get a loss less intellectual property and it will almost exclusively come from the rich. If it’s something that requires people to purchase, then you’re going to see much greater control of the wealthy over intellectual products and effectively a return to the patronage system. If it’s something that only works with first mover advantage, then it can only be done by well resourced companies and not individuals and opens a whole bunch of loopholes a well resourced company can smash the little guy with. Intellectual property concentrates power in the hands of artists relative to other systems. Even if they sell their rights to a corporation, at least they’re getting paid, and they have the option of doing it on their own if they can.
There may be a better system but simply abolishing intellectual property would be a huge net negative.
I would believe this a lot more if copyright terms weren’t already in the ballpark of the average lifespan.
In that case, how do you explain the plethora of fanfictions freely available online without any compensation for their writers? Surely not every fanfiction writer is a member of “the rich” (except perhaps by a global scale where we all qualify too).
Now, if you’re saying high-quality works, or works with higher startup costs than text, will almost exclusively come from the rich – then I’ll believe you. The world without copyright will lose some works, but let’s not overstate the case.
In my ideal world, copyright would last somewhere between ten and thirty years, and not prohibit fanfic. In the current world, I don’t view fanfiction as unethical, and I don’t view it as unethical to make copies of out-of-print works older than thirty years or so. It remains unethical IMO to make copies of more modern works. Yes, there’re a lot of grey areas.
What other property rights expire ever? Do you eventually get to live in a mansion because it exists today? Can I eventually assume George Washington’s identity because it’s very old?
You do realize that fanfiction relies on works that are produced under the intellectual copyright regime by definition, don’t you? Citing works that only exist because of a system is a funny way to criticize that system.
Yes, the copyright system does indeed encourage people to produce work and then eventually let other people play with the characters after it runs out. That is a benefit of the system. And some people get antsy and violate the law, meaning another benefit of the system is there’s plenty around for them to use. How is that an argument against it?
That’s nice. Why? What’s your consistently applied moral/legal calculus and what would its effects be.
Copyright is not property, but a monopoly right. That propagandists came up with the word ‘intellectual property,’ doesn’t mean that it is actual property. It means that they were good at spreading their propaganda.
I don’t understand your comparison to the identity of George Washington. I can change my name to George Washington. What I cannot do, is defraud people by misleading them, so they think that they are dealing with the other George Washington. However, this has nothing to do copyright.
For example, imagine a world without copyright, where I voluntarily want to give the writer Hunter S Grease Gun a billion dollars. It would still be illegal for someone else to mislead me into believing that he is Mr Grease Gun, so I give my money to the wrong person.
How is it not property?
Do you own your identity or not?
I outsourced arguing it.
No, identity is a set of (perceived) traits that I have, not something I own. I can’t buy the identity from an old woman and then replace my identity with hers, collecting social security from the government.
I think that you have an extremely weird and unworkable idea of what property is.
Question for the people who argue for a right “to profit from their intellectual labor” that is more than just a legal fiction:
I see the popularity of mousetraps, so I spend some time creating a better one. The patent allows me to profit from my intellectual labor by preventing somebody else from coming around and using my idea to make their own competing line of shiny-new-mousetraps just like mine. This is right and just.
I see the popularity of coffeeshops, so I spend some time figuring out where exactly in my city is the best place to open one. Why should anyone who likes be able to put a coffeeshop across the street? This will reduce or even eliminate my ability to profit from my intellectual labor! And yet no one (I think) argues that the second-coffeeshop-owners are in the wrong.
What is the distinction between the two types of intellectual labor such that one merits protection and the other does not?
(I agree that there are lots of good consequentialist reasons, but some people on this thread seem to be arguing for a moral basis for IP, and it’s their responses I’m mostly interested in.)
You’re responding to me so despite not arguing for a moral basis, I will point this out.
No, it can’t just be a better mousetrap to get a patent. It has to be something new and innovative. You have to invent an entirely new way of trapping mice. You can get patents on specific devices in the mousetrap instead, but not the whole mousetrap then. Because this doesn’t give you a right to your intellectual labor but the product of your intellectual labor, which is the invention etc.
You have a right to the research. If they stole it, you have a case. But that’s not a patent. Further, you have a right to the coffeeshop you designed in all its particulars. The person across the street cannot copy your shop exactly. They must content themselves with supplying coffee of their own recipe under a logo of their own design etc.
You do not have a right to coffee (which is a natural product) or buildings or the concept of a coffee shop (which wouldn’t be patentable in the first place) or a location. And that gives them space to compete. They still aren’t allowed to do something like call their coffee shop by a similar name or steal your secret coffee recipe.
The proper analogy here is someone seeing a mousetrap in action and inventing one entirely different. In which case they’ve created their own intellectual property.
None. Your position is a strawman. You have changed “a right to own the product of my intellectual labor” to “a right to profit from the product of my intellectual labor.” You can put in the labor to create Burrito On A Stick (real patent, look it up) but if no one buys it you have no right to make money. Likewise, if you solve cancer and then the next day someone comes up with an entirely unrelated cancer cure you both get patents and then get to compete with each other.
Aha, maybe we’re getting down to the root of things!
I don’t understand what the difference is between “a right to own the product of my intellectual labor” and “a right to profit from the product of my intellectual labor”.
If I own a car, and somebody takes my car, then I don’t have it any more. But if somebody encounters my idea, or my research, or my new invention, so that now THEY have the idea/knowledge/understanding/concept/etc, I still have that idea, or that research, or that new invention; they just also have it now. Presumably it is OK for somebody to see my revolutionary mousetrap and understand how it works, no? That isn’t theft in the way that their gaining my car would be. What IP prevents is NOT them having the idea, it’s them to profiting off it.
So I don’t understand what it means to “own” an idea that is different from simply “monopolizing profit from that idea”.
What don’t you understand? I don’t understand your contention.
I can register a patent right now for an innovation no one wants. It will be mine and I will make no money off of it, unless someone wants it in the future. Likewise, I can make a paper airplane right now and it will be mine yet I will make no money off it unless someone comes and buys it.
Perhaps here’s a more intuitive way for you to think about it. Imagine I own a chicken. The chicken lays an egg and it immediately grows into an identical chicken. Someone steals the new chicken. Have I been robbed? How can I be robbed when I still have the chicken? I still have the chicken they just have an identical chicken now.
To the chicken point, I think I would say that you have clearly been robbed because a moment ago you had two chickens and now you had one.
Whereas if you have a great idea for a Specific Revolutionary Device which you patent (Your Number of Specific Revolutionary Device Ideas = 1), and I come along and read your patent, Your Number of Specific Revolutionary Device Ideas is still 1. But mine has gone from 0 to 1.
This isn’t just true of patents, it’s true of all mental concepts, whether they be inventions or ideas or strategies or theses or whatnot. Your having it is independent from whether other people have them. This isn’t true of chickens: two people can’t both eat the same chicken wing, for instance.
But only some small subset of the mental concepts count as Intellectual Property, for which we award people with monopolies on the ability to profit from them. You’ve outlined pretty well what the boundaries are between something-that-is-patentable and something-that-isn’t. But what I want to know is more meta, I guess.
1) Does the difference between something-that-is-patentable and something-that-isn’t reflect a moral difference between ideas-that-I-cannot-profit-from-without-permission-regardless-of-what-the-law-says and ideas-that-I-can?
2a) If yes to 1, what is that moral difference?
2b) If no to 1, doesn’t that mean that we are doing an injustice to all the people who do intellectual labor to produce non-IP-able ideas for which they have a right to a monopoly which the cannot legally attain? Because our society certainly doesn’t act like it, if we do.
Whereas if you have a great unique idea for a Specific Revolutionary Device which you patent (Your Number of Unique Specific Revolutionary Device Ideas = 1), and I come along and read your patent, Your Number of Specific Revolutionary Device Ideas is
still 10.You seem to be confused. You can profit from the idea of the patent all you want. If someone makes a bold new innovation and you read the patent and have a separate innovation, you can profit from that. You simply cannot profit from their innovation. Further, I’m not sure what you can’t patent if it’s a true innovation. I mean, technically it might be a copyright but I assume you consider those species of the same bird. What would some examples be?
The key thing of a copyright/monopoly/whatever is that it needs to be an innovation, something that would not exist if you had not done the intellectual labor. Indeed, this is why you cannot patent things retroactively. You already created it and distributed it so the patent is not needed to incentivize you to create it and distribute it. It’s also why you can’t patent things you discover, like a plant. It already existed. I’m not sure if they’re morally different but they practically have an obvious reason.
Who does intellectual labor to produce non-IP-able innovations? If you write an original story you automatically have the IP to it, for example.
@Erusian
Some things are non-patentable because based on prior art they are obvious, but possibly thanks to the sheer amount of prior art no one thinks to try them.
I know of one instance of this at my workplace (from before my time). A person proposed a known technique as a possible solution to a problem with using commercially available tools for a particular important use case, this idea was tried, it worked, they published, and all of the commercial companies thanked them very much for publishing the solution with respect to these kinds of tools. The specific solution was already known as an idea though, and the particular application to these particular tools was simply something no one at the companies making these tools thought to try. As such it couldn’t be patented (though could have been retained as a trade secret had my workplace been a private company and not a government agency).
Techniques are patentable. The fact that no one had done it and it could be retained as a trade secret is effective proof it was non-obvious.
Not according to the supervisor who told me about it. My agency would have patented and licensed this if it was patentable.
This wasn’t invention of a new technique, this was a novel application (and testing) of a known scientific fact.
I see. So there was no innovation then. You were simply making use of what had already been invented, so you were not doing labor that produces intellectual property. Similarly, someone who discovers an unknown plant and then uses it to heal a disease cannot patent that.
1) There was no guarantee it would work.
2) You have to do labor to publish a paper. This involves expense and time.
This labor has simply been deemed non-patentable.
(This was application of scientific fact, not application of a prior invention. Scientific facts are non-patentable.)
Yes, even though this discovery took time, effort, and risk. It has been deemed non-patentable by our system. Though at least in this medicinal case there is some protection of profit via the expense of the FDA regulatory process.
Yes? I’m not sure what you’re gesturing towards here. Surely every effort isn’t worthy of a monopoly.
As a patent attorney I can tell you many things about this:
1) There are many things that have been done, but nobody does now because they were not popular or industrially plausible at the time. An example is a rubber technology a client brought to me that he thought would make a good tennis surface made from old tires. Done in the 50s, abandoned, now prolly a good idea. Not patentable.
2) Things that were speculated about but never done. If the person speculating was right about what your final product would do, you are often toast.
3) Things that are indeed new combinations of old products that happen to make the examiner grumpy. So you don’t get a patent.
4) Which may be the example: Laws of nature/Abstract ideas. AKA Section 101. No patent attorney can credibly claim to understand this jurisprudence.
OK, I’m starting to understand.
So in a world without IP law, you would still say (it sounds like), that if you come up with a new idea (invention/technique/short story, etc), that you have the right to profit from it (assuming the idea is actually profitable, of course). If I see your invention/observe your technique in action/read your short story, there is no IP law to prevent me from profiting from it myself by making knockoffs/using your technique/adding your story to an anthology without consulting or reimbursing you. But you would still say that it would be immoral for me to do so, correct?
Is that also the case if I independently come up with your idea? It seems very unlikely that I would write the same short story, but history is lousy with people who invent the same device or technique simultaneously. Does one of us have the moral standing to forbid the other to use the independently-arrived-at idea, just because one of us had it a few minutes or days before the other?
I suppose? I’m less dealing with morality than consequentialism. If you have a world without IP and people can knock it off freely, you have a hugely reduced incentive to innovate.
If you invent the exact same thing? No. The chances of that happening simultaneously are tiny to the point the default is to assume some form of theft. If you invent a different thing that has the same effect? Yes, and in fact that is the case under current patent law. For example, we could both invent devices that through separate mechanisms trap mice and get separate patents and then compete with each other on the mouse-trapping market.
@Erusian
boylermaker said:
Erusian said:
I’m kind of gesturing toward this. Someone decided on the fundamental (but amorphous) boundaries between protected art and non-protected art. Why is this division morally right when I can show an example of unpatentable work that probably would have gone on for many years being uncreated had it not been for the intellectual labor in linking a scientific fact to an application? In terms of morality I think you’re limited to claiming a utilitarian balance between restraining monopoly over every minor modification versus freedom to steal any idea. David Friedman’s third type of morality.
So there is no moral difference between these ideas, the morality is focused solely on the expected effect of a particular patent and copyright framework on the speed of generation of useful novelty.
Yep, there we are: Erusian said:
@boylermaker
Under current patent law I believe the second party/company has the right to personally use the invention, but cannot sell or license the invention to other parties without a license from the holder of the earlier patent application. OTOH simultaneous invention may be considered possible evidence that an invention does not merit patent protection: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/14/simultaneous-invention-secondary-evidence-obviousness/id=106272/
What is non-protected art? We have one vague anecdote that the person said was just applying known knowledge in a new way and which they admitted they could have kept as a trade secret (another form of Intellectual Property!) if they wanted. Where is this boundary you have repeatedly claimed exists but have not shown?
You have not proved the conclusion you state.
This seems like you’re trying to use something I’ve openly said from the beginning and reiterated multiple times as a “gotcha”. I’ve said that I am defending it in consequentialist terms. And elsewhere I’ve argued property rights generally make mostly consequentialist sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager
Since you cannot precisely define where the neck is distinct from the head, you cannot take someone’s head.
@Erusian
I didn’t quote you as a “gotcha”, just as an acknowledgement that I now understood where you are coming from. This unfortunately means that you and boylermaker/me are talking at somewhat cross-purposes.
I’ll state the non-patentable invention clearly (as clear as I can make it having heard this second-hand): Single-cell DNA amplification (necessary for single-cell genomics) ran into an issue in that trace DNA contamination of the enzymes used for DNA amplification overwhelmed the femtograms of DNA present in the single-cell. Thus the preferentially amplified DNA was garbage: carryover from the DNA amplification reagents.
Someone mentioned in a meeting that UV light is known to cross-link DNA, and that UV treatment of the DNA amplification reagents might eliminate the contaminating DNA as substrates for amplification. This turned out to be the case. The work was published, and Qiagen (the maker of one of the phiX kits used for DNA amplification) thanked them for publishing this information, and used that technological insight to make their REPLI-g single cell kit (as did other companies making competing DNA amplification products, and presumably single-cell RNA amplification products as well).
@anonymousskimmer
What is your purpose then? As someone who basically thinks patent law is a net positive, I’d be happy to talk on your terms. However, be warned we might get somewhat deep into what the concept of “property” is.
@Erusian
My purpose was attempting to answer the question posed by boylermaker in the negative: “Does the difference between something-that-is-patentable and something-that-isn’t reflect a moral difference between ideas-that-I-cannot-profit-from-without-permission-regardless-of-what-the-law-says and ideas-that-I-can?”
No, this does not reflect a moral difference between the ideas. It doesn’t necessarily even reflect an “obviousness” difference. It merely reflects a handful of rules-of-thumb that law-makers decided to codify into law in an attempt to crudely optimize between monopolies that hinder advancement of the “useful arts”, monopolies that further advancement of the “useful arts”, and complete freedom to use ideas however you want without compensating anyone for the ideas.
I should say, I’m on board with the idea that patents are beneficial, and if that’s enough to give IP moral weight, then great. What I was more interested in is the idea that maybe IP reflects some moral reality independent of that. Getting somewhat deep into the meaning of what property is was my hope, because it seems to me that our intuitions from physical property are useless, and I don’t currently have any way of thinking about “IP” except in a legal positivist way.
But it sort of sounds like everybody on the thread thinks that respecting IP is moral mostly (solely?) because of the beneficial effects of the laws that enact it.
Re: “isolated demand of rigor”
Piracy is normal. Social convention seems to be that we treat thieves differently than pirates (of IP, for personal consumption). Most humans seem to be pretty much ok with others who pirate.
“Theft” as understood intuitively by a lot of humans, isn’t normal or ok at all.
Driving 5 miles above the limit seems to be considered just fine, regardless of legality.
So based on societal norms, piracy looks more like going a bit above the speed limit than stealing.
The question is what piracy is morally more similar to.
It seems fair to say that calling (personal consumption, IP) pirates immoral is holding them to an isolated demand to obey the law if anything.
Social convention is not a rebuttal to an isolated demand for rigor. The specific example from the article is someone who holds one standard of ownership of cows when it’s in their favor and another when it isn’t. You can easily imagine a society doing so at scale that is still committing the sin. Ancient Greece, for example, where stealing your cows was terrible but stealing other people’s cows was heroic.
No. I require you not steal intellectual property or any other form of property. This is consistent. You require that I not steal any form of property you possess but reserve the right to steal intellectual property. This is inconsistent. It may be justifiable, but it’s not consistent.
You require that I keep the law in regards to pirating, but not (I am assuming) that I keep the law with regards to the legal speed limit. This may be justified, but is inconsistent.
I require that you keep laws that are considered, by social convention, real laws, but not those which aren’t. This is consistent.
Ah, there we go. Your assumption is wrong. I require you not to go over the speed limit or else to suffer the fine. That the law is often broken might be a reason to revisit whether the law should exist but it is a law.
No, it’s not. Saying, “I require X except for Y” means that Y creates an inconsistency. Doubly so when Y is not a clear line but something as vague as social convention. That isn’t to say it can’t be justified but it does need justifying.
Again, isolated demand for rigor. When you like a law or you (and there is no book of social convention so it’s a personal judgment on your part) consider it “not real”, it’s real and everyone should follow it. When you don’t like a law or decide it’s not “real”, you demand it be justified extremely thoroughly.
“Or else to suffer the fine”
Only if a police officer sees and decides to enforce the law (which they generally don’t in this case).
When you write require, do you mean you consider it a moral imperative on my part?
‘I require X but not Y’ is more accurate and not inconsistent.
For example, i require you to eat apples but not oranges.
(Obey “real” laws but not “legal fiction” laws.)
This is not an isolated demand for rigor.
A personal judgement being required (though you could ask a few random people to get a feel for societal opinion) to discern whether something belongs in category X or Y is orthogonal to an isolated demand for rigor.
You’re operating from a premise that all laws are equal, despite the normative view being different from yours, and because laws are based on what society thinks is right this seems like an odd stance to me.
As for a consequentialist justification of differentiating between laws that are considered real and those that aren’t:
Following the law is generally a good thing, as breaking the law can a) cause harm to you, if indirectly and b) damage the general strength of law (because of others’ perceptions)
If a law isn’t considered real then your chances of a) go down a lot and because you didn’t break a “real” law people don’t look at this and generalize to “real” laws that it’s ok to break the law. (Schelling points I guess).
Piracy isn’t stealing though. It’s more like when Jesus fed 1000 people with 2 fish.
Sure. And that probably means it’s a bad law but it’s a consistent position to say “follow the law” whereas “follow the law except X, Y, and Z” is inconsistent. Now, it might be justified but it is inconsistent.
Yes. I mean, obviously the punishments aren’t equal and you prioritize enforcement but all laws are laws. Care to make the case they’re not? (Not being snarky, I’m actually curious to your position.)
You can make a broader case about the majesty and respect for the law, which I do. However, rather than coming down on the police state perspective my feeling is there should be less law. I’d like a world where every person who’s fined for dangerous driving has social sanction because that only happens in severe cases. I absolutely do not like cops acting as arbitrary tax agents under the aegis of law.
Do you wish to expand further on how it’s not stealing?
Anything the state says is a law is a law technically, but that doesn’t say anything about whether you should listen to the law.
If the moral case for following laws hinges on there being negative consequences to not following the laws because they are laws, then where those consequences don’t exist then there is no imperative to follow them (at least not due to their being law).
If it is based on a societal contract that everyone will keep a law, and society considers a law ok to break, you don’t have to keep that law (at least not due to their being law).
Laws that are generally not taken seriously by society can be broken without the usual negatives that come with breaking a law (due to its status as a law). These are “fake” laws. Technically a law, but without the grounding of “real” laws.
If you accept this, then requiring justification of a law considered “fake” by society on its merits before obeying it, while at the same time accepting a general case for “real” laws and obeying them based on their being (real) laws is perfectly consistent (or justified if you prefer the term)
For those who support intellectual property/oppose piracy, does “can I get this otherwise” make a difference?
For me it does: if it’s available on reasonable commercial terms, I will try to get it legally–but if the producer won’t sell it to me, I have no objection to copying it.
No, it doesn’t. The right to disallow people from accessing your property is part of owning property. Whether the person continues to assert claim does matter, though. If it’s an out of print book and the author gives up claim to their rights then it’s not theft. And I imagine it weakens it if they’ve made mention they don’t mind, no matter what the legal technicalities are.
But copyright is to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts”; copyright-holders should not have the right to impede that progress by refusing to make their works available.
What would you say about a politician who published a too-revealing book some time back, but now wants to keep it out of the public discourse by asserting his copyright claim to keep it from being reprinted or even excerpted?
Copyright justifies a government monopoly (which is otherwise forbidden) in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. It’s not a system where whatever will in that specific moment in the judgment of that specific judge will promote science or art best and it never has been even intended that way. That standard would be far, far too arbitrary to be useful and actually be counterproductive to its stated purpose.
I’d agree with it. I also don’t think being a public official means that I get the right to snoop around Barrack Obama’s basement, looking for evidence about the IRS tax scandal.
Without IP protections, every distributor of thought-stuff has to homebrew their own crazy enforcement system, or keep their best works hidden and try to profit off the second-order things it can generate. This was the problem the founders wanted to deal with: guilds kept lots of things secret for decades because that was the way they had to make money.
As comparison, we have “theft of services” where society has agreed to enforce a common and simple set of rules instead of requiring everyone who makes a living providing services to bodge together their own expensive way of stopping people from getting their labor for free.
Yes, and I’m arguing that the government should delineate the borders of its monopoly to better serve that end. You’re right that a case-by-case judgment would be arbitrary; Congress should make this exception up front.
I’m surprised. What if the book revealed political views which would be very pertinent to the election? Suppose Wilson was running in 1916 on a platform of “Keep us out of European wars,” but someone turned up a ten-year-old book where he’d written that the US joining European wars was a wonderful idea and politicians should lie to get in office so that they could bring the country into them – would you still be fine with letting Wilson ban people from reproducing or excerpting that book then?
I’m not against specific reform, fully considered. For example, I believe this purpose is partly served by the fact patents are public. But I’d be interesting in hearing the specific reforms before I say I’m for or against them. I am certainly not arguing the system is perfect or couldn’t use reform.
Yes. I’d also be fine with arresting thieves that broke into his house to steal the manuscript. Standards do not cease to be standards just because they are inconvenient. And a politician does not lose their rights by stepping into the public arena.
I do not, as a voter, have a right to know anything I want to know about a candidate. Indeed, such a standard is incredibly impossible. The moment Clinton stepped into the Presidential race did the public gain the right to scrutinize every action of hers as Secretary of State? No, of course not, that would have violated a fair number of laws. It would have presented huge practical issues too.
Certainly, I’d prefer candidates that didn’t lie and if a candidate lied I’d prefer to know. I’d prefer to have Trump’s tax returns too. Alas, they have rights too. Perhaps we could carve such exceptions, if we chose, but we have not.
From a deontological perspective, I’d attach no moral weight to intellectual property claims. People’s right to do what they want with information they know outweighs any moral interest a creator might have in controlling their creation, and the contractual argument fails because do-not-redistribute contracts are a class of antisocial and obnoxious contracts that shouldn’t be enforced, like noncompetes.
From a consequentialist perspective, the evidence is mixed but suggestive that there’s significant social welfare benefit to granting creators financial compensation to incentivize them to create more. So the question is what’s the least restrictive way to do that. I would suggest it would be something like making all IP rights have the character of standards essential patents: limited in term to <= 20 years and must be licensed to all comers on fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory terms. So you can demand uniform royalties from licensees during the patent/copyright term but exert no other control over them. Note that this would remove one important current way in which IP rights *decrease* innovation and creative work production, namely that rightsholders can use their discretionary power to deny people licenses to remix, build on, adapt, etc their works.
You might be interested in Against Intellectual Monopoly, a book arguing that both copyright and patent are bad things. True to the authors’ principles, it’s available online for free.
(I am not against IP Law entirely, but think that at this point burning it all down and make new laws from scratch as situations arise would be more efficient)
For pro-IP people:
Why does IP Law not apply to food recipes, and should it?
It’s the kind of thing that falls under patent law. It’s just that most recipes are unoriginal or obvious. Also trade secrets are a thing.
Coca-cola, KFC, etc are all trade secrets.
If Coke was patented, it would’ve expired by now.
But other things, like using vitamin C to make bread quickly from soft flour, were patented.
@Lambert:
While I do find a few patents for adding Vitamin C to bread, and while it is sometimes used as a dough conditioner, I don’t think it ever was a big thing. Perhaps you are confusing “carbonic acid” (CO2 in water) with “ascorbic acid” (Vitamin C)? Making “unfermented bread” by adding pressurized CO2 to a special bread making apparatus was a big thing in the late 1800’s: Bread for the million!.
It’s added to at least 80% of bread in the UK, where wheat doesn’t produce much gluten for whatever reason.
For adding vitamin C to bread dough, the key thing to look for is “Chorleywood process”.
But how is a recipe different from software code, which can be copyrighted?
Software IP is an utter mess.
In roughly the sense that it is unethical to purchase stolen property, yes. It is reasonable to assume that whoever purchased the book or whatever in the first place, did so under at least an implied contract to not put it up for downloading on a pirate site. Now on to the broader issues:
1. I think most of Team Abolish Copyright vastly overestimates the amount of high-quality information that will be generated in the copyright-free
utopiadystopia of their dreams. Books will look like bad fanfiction, or late-period “too big to edit” Weber or Clancy, or be released on the schedule of The Winds of Winter. Software will have the “user-friendliness” of the worst sort of open source. And lots of stuff just won’t be made at all.2. What is created, isn’t yours to do with as you please just because there’s no IP law. Some of it will be trade secrets, never released to the public. What is released, will often be released under very restrictive licenses. The first five pages of every book will be tear-sheet contracts for you to sign in blood and send in to the publisher, when you buy the book and if you dare sell it on. Movies may not be released outside of theaters for years. Most things digital will come with DRM From Hell, will not run on general-purpose computers and will give the creator the ability to remotely brick your expensive specialized hardware. Code will be obfuscated, and user interfaces cryptic enough to require paying the creator for expert training.
3. Even with IP law, participation is voluntary. As a creator, you can make your work open source or public domain, or you can negotiate whatever restrictive license you want with your customers. As a consumer, you can go open source or try to negotiate a better deal with the creator. Or, you can go with the standard contract. Mostly, it’s easier to go with the standard contract.
4. I don’t think any ethical system, or any legal system this side of anarchy, bars the government from saying “most people who enter into contract X (say, buying a book) will if left to their own devices come to an agreement something like Y. Negotiating that every time, and enforcing it using kludgy private methods, imposes huge transaction costs, so we’re going to say that unless both parties specify otherwise standard contract Y applies. And then use our reputation and our efficient court system to enforce it so you all don’t have to bother with the DRM”. This leads to much better results for most people.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the greatest surge of human innovation and creativity ever, roughly coincides with the adoption and broad adherence to intellectual property law. If you break it, you may not like what you find on the other side but you will definitely find it very difficult to rebuild.
Actually the exact opposite happens, we get long and drawn out periods from movies to DVDs now because of copyright, without it the first mover advantage is to get your production into the hands of as many people as quickly as possible to mitigate against the copiers.
Did IP Law assist in the standardization of USB or headphone jacks at all?
Of USB? Definitely. You cannot put the USB logo on your own “looks like USB but isn’t” port.
Every cell phone and music player had their own proprietary plugs and ports, and Apple continues to defy USB standardization with their lightning connector nonsense. We also have a ridiculous number of charging adapter tips.
That’s what I’m talking about.
A lot of the legwork for standardising on microUSB was done by the EU.
Headphone jacks are just a smaller variant of what Ma Bell used back in the day. The 1/4″ jack on professional audio equipment is the same as what the operator would plug in when you asked to be connected.
Standards like USB make sense because they let you commoditise your complement.
I suppose trademark law might stop people from passing off inferior technologies as USB or USB compatible, but that’s a different thing from the core idea of IP law.
As per the above wrt charging adapter tips, I can easily think of a world where every manufacturer decided to force a monopoly on which cables were compatible with their specific speakers/guitars/etc. Does IP Law help or hurt this kind of thing?
I’m okay with Patents as a concept, 20-25 years seems alright as an incentive to gain a short term monopoly but there is a *lot* of screwing around which makes the system unhelpful (trolls, patents which don’t actually give the information required to replicate, etc.). It definitely needs some kind of reform, but not necessarily tearing down.
As to copyright, I think most of my thoughts are covered in comments above, but to add some further nuance: 80 years after death is crazy, Inter Vivos Trusts in Australia and the UK have a vesting date of maximum 80 years after creation. It seems weird to me that the business world can deal with this artificial limitation on structures which often contain entire businesses and investing strategies, but when it comes to the ownership rights of a creative work we have to factor in things like lifespan, etc.
I will acknowledge, I’m not sure what trust vesting law looks like in the US and from a quick glance it is managed at a state level so I’m too intimidated to be honest.
Gonna go with mixed bag.
Some good, some bad, probably mostly good on average over the long term.
Copyright definitely 100% has an unreasonably, insanely long term.
Patents are definitely 100% badly implemented. In theory they’re supposed to be about revealing how the invention works but if you ever try to implement something from a patent, they’re mostly useless jibberish. If you could take 2 independent teams of engineers, 1 with access to the patent and one without, tasked with re-implemting the thing and either the team without access implement it very closely or the team with access cannot implement it, both cases should be strong grounds to invalidate a patent entirely either for reasons of being obvious or reasons of the patent itself being useless. but that doesn’t happen because they’ve just become a way for corps to exercise speculative invoicing.
Also re: patents, there also needs to be some kind of system brought in to neuter people who pick some popular app/product/item and wall in the real innovators with patents, the kind of companies that pick a recent popular product then have a few people sit round for 20 minutes playing “what would it be cool for this thing to also do” and lodge 50 patents on every vague idea they think of without implementing it. I don’t mean “neuter” figuratively, I mean we need a system whereby such people are abducted by sinister teams of people in dark vans, taken to dark sites and physically neutered/spayed.
A little bit, sure, roughly on the level of letting someone into a pay bathroom without them paying while you’re exiting.
Are you coming from a virtue ethics, deontological, consequential or other value system to reach the conclusion that stopping these people from reproducing is the correct response?
Who said anything about the main point being to stop them reproducing?
it comes from a basis of detesting such parasites. for it’s own sake. It’s also acceptable if the sinister teams of people in dark vans just never bring them back or just bring back enough to serve as a warning to others.
Intellectual property makes sense in general. Regarding the particular issue of “piracy,” no it’s not immoral. Rather, current copyright law is immoral in the sense that it outlaws normal behavior. The law doesn’t reflect reality, and laws that are as divorced from reality as current copyright law serve only to turn regular citizens into criminals. Copyright law, in many particular facets of its current form, lacks the consent of the governed. Remember, it’s not just books and movies, many memes are illegal under current copyright law (many of them include copyrighted images used without permission). Like half of youtube is illegal. Basically all technically feasible means of watching movies with friends during the Coronavirus quarantine are illegal.
Consider the case of a copyright on the poem The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens” That was the entire poem, and I may have broken the law by typing it here. In any case, I wouldn’t pay money to read that poem, because I memorized it in high school. No law can change that fact. It’s simply not a reasonable thing to charge money for. In a world where people own computers and have the internet, very few copyrighted works make more sense to buy or sell than The Red Wheelbarrow. The concept of buying and selling books and movies and music just becomes untenable.
In many cases this can be overcome. Spotify saved the music industry, Netflix has saved TV and Movies (and created entirely new categories of narrative moving image). These services offer a better user experience than piracy, and they allow for the continued creation of content, which is very good news. What if an industry can’t adapt? Consider the parable of the 4-hour movie. Many artists want to make 4-hour movies, it’s a rich art form, but theaters won’t show them, and neither will TV. It’s effectively impossible to monetize 4-hour movies, so very few people make them. We don’t need a law requiring theaters to play 4-hour movies, and we don’t need a law requiring people to pay for music instead of listening on youtube. Some formats aren’t economically viable, and they die. If something is nearly viable, you can create laws to deal with rare edge cases, but you shouldn’t use laws to prop up industries which don’t actually supply a product worth paying for.
I’m looking for sources on some half-remembered quotes, intensive googling was no help because it apparently never is these days, so I’m hoping these happen to ring a bell for someone.
One is a paragraph I think was from a rationalist-adjacent source, along the lines of “when you hear a rumor that someone you hate did something truly horrendous, and it turns out to be false, ask yourself if you feel relieved or disappointed.”
The other, I saw quoted in some context about humanity’s long history of anthropomorphizing, an ancient philosopher(?) saying that we like cats (or maybe animals in general) because we see them as little versions of ourselves.
I don’t know if it counts as rationalist-adjacent, but as for the first:
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952
Ah, that’s it! Now that I have an exact quote, I found out that it was quoted in a post on the SSC subreddit. I completely forgot the context aside from a vague association with SSC, but that idea has been stuck in my head since then. Thanks!
We have quite a few discussions about time travel and what you would do if you wanted to change history. Can anybody recommend fiction books on the topic?
Specifically, time travel with alternative history explorations. I quite like Eric Flint’s several book series on that (although the quality of his 1632 series is quite uneven due to all the newbie authors).
I prefer earlier than twentieth century, as I don’t want to read the different versions of world wars re-fought over and over. Especially not if it involves saving comrade Stalin (this is a fascination of the Russian self-publishing alt-history) or other morally dubious characters.
I really liked Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card.
Seconded.
How do they save Comrade Stalin? He wasn’t assassinated, he died of a stroke. Do they travel back in time 50 years and tell him not to eat so much pickled sturgeon?
Not save his life, but save him from Hitler’s betrayal and Zhukov’s incompetence. I’ve never read one to the end, but that’s the general type of story.
Uh, just how was he supposedly incompetent?
These are basically Stalin fanfics. Do you really expect the authors to have any contact with reality whatsoever?
They tend to blame Russian losses during Operation Barbarossa on Zhukov’s incompetence, basically.
Also, what bean said.
Who’s Timoshenko?
Poul Anderson’s The Man Who Came Early, set in Norse Iceland is interesting as a practical critique of the concept of bringing modern technology to the past, and makes a very quick read.
Once upon a time Scott recommended Island on the Sea of Time and the Emberverse by SM Stirling and The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.
A strong ‘yes’ for The Years of Rice and Salt!. One of my favorite novels.
I remember The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Neil Stephenson and Nicole Galland being really good.
Agreed, though it turns out very little history is actually changed due to the constraints of the particular time travel method posited. It was a good example of the classic hard-SFnal problem of “assume X is possible with constraints Y; what will people actually do with that?”
And it doesn’t ignore the issue of what happens when people in the past figure out that time-travelling secret agents are meddling in their present trying to control their future. Which results in things like N ohapu bs unvel anxrq 9gu-praghel Ivxvatf yrq ol n pyrire 12gu-praghel Inenatvna thneqfzna fnpxvat n 21fg-praghel Jny-Zneg, naq abg ybbxvat sbe gur boivbhf fbegf bs ybbg.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, published in 1889 so you can probably find a free copy
IMO as a Russian (who read only two of those time-travel thingies, so that O is based mostly on the hearsay) there is one thing with which authors are even more obsessed than saving Stalin: introducing an intermediate cartridge. Even True Communists who would like to overthrow Stalin for not being True
ScotsmanCommunist or Russia-that-we-lost Types who travel before the Revolution to save the monarchy introduce intermediate cartridges.Harry Turtledove wrote a story (“The Guns of the South”) about time-traveling South Africans supplying the Confederacy with AK-47s — which does use an intermediate cartridge! I haven’t read it, only looked up the plot on Wikipedia after seeing the cover of Robert E. Lee clutching an AK when I was a boy.
IIRC, Silverberg’s _The Men Who Killed Mohammed_ is one part of an alternate history fix-up in which the Roman Empire survives until the present day.
There’s an Alfred Bester story called “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed”. Are You Sure you’re got the title right?
I must have substituted Bester’s more famous title. The Silverberg is called _A Hero of the Empire_ and is part of the _Roma Eterna_ collection.
I wonder if the explanation for the riots might be simpler: the collapse of a pluralistic ignorance. Suddenly everyone realizes that it’s not just PoC who are afraid of the cops. The Wikipedia article on no-knock warrants mentions:
So unlike a few decades ago, people who don’t think of themselves as already marginalized now understand that what happened to George Floyd could happen to them. There is now a backlash against police militarization, non-accountability, etc. It’s not just racism, it’s recognizing a condition of police-vs-everyone else and realizing that affects us no matter who we are.
(CW?) But if not, what is your evidence for linking no-knock warrants to the riots? I would worry about getting swat’ed too, and try not to offend, well, certain kinds of people. But Floyd didn’t die in a no-knock raid, nor did the guy in Atlanta, nor any of the other high-visibility cases (as far as I know). While there is clear opposition to police violence most of the slogans and other messages seem to be racial. I don’t think we would have these protests at all if not for the widely held perception that cops are racist, and that the System at large (from the prosecution and judges to politicians to unions to hospital doctors forging autopsies) protects their transgressions.
This is the high-visibility case in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor
Right, I forgot about that one – thanks for reminding me. I still think my main point stands – but will leave discussion to a fractional OT.
Although not strictly falling under the “no-knock raid” definition, the other high profile case in the same vein OP was talking about is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Atatiana_Jefferson
(and possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile, although it was in a car, not house).
Louisville (where Breonna Taylor was killed) has now passed “Breonna’s Law” banning no-knock warrants, I think some other cities are working on similar things, and there is now a bill in congress to ban them nationwide. Also, reading between the lines of the Wikipedia article, it looks like their recent expansion may be a result of SCOTUS decisions from 1995 and 2006 weakening the “exclusionary rule” against allowing illegally gathered evidence to be admitted in trials. That is, they are part of an erosion of traditional civil rights.
Maybe good to move this discussion to the next fractional open thread.
Taking a deep breath and calming down – perfume recommendations.
I don’t wear perfume very often and I don’t know anything about brands or popular ones at the moment, but this website has things I like. Link to American site here, for us Europeans here.
Right now I’m trying their Ceci n’est pas un flacon bleu No. 1.3 and I like it (so far). I don’t ordinarily like patchouli as I find it too overpowering and musky in a bad way, but this formulation while present is not flagrant.
You can get small tester samples at a reasonable price.
I have nothing to offer to your quest for an perfume, but think it’s funny you don’t like patchouli. Around here saying a women “smells like patchouli” is code for “she’s an esoteric hippy type”.
I was a child to mid-teens during the 70s so yeah, patchouli did linger around from the hippy era and it was that kind of person who wore it and I just found it objectionably strong. It’s described as having a “musky, earthy aroma” and it was too much for me.
This one though is a lot better, however it’s blended; it’s got that woody, spicy notes but none of the civet-cat muskiness I normally associate with patchouli.
Right.
I don’t even know what Patchouli is or what it smells like, I just know it correlates to hippy-dom.
I don’t even know what Patchouli is or what it smells like
My own personal reaction is that it smells like a mommy cat and a daddy cat have been loving each other very, very much, but that’s only my own olfactory reaction 😀
So… it’s perfume people wear to attract cats?
Awesome, that clears up all my confusion.
I am feeling my responsibility as a teacher and guide very heavily right now. 🙁
Do not take me as an expert on anything (apart from being a cranky late middle-aged rural Irishwoman).
A more better site describes it as such:
To me (and I strongly stress this is me only) it doesn’t have that wet-soil aroma (I adore petrichor) but it does smell very heavily musky in an animalistic way. Plainly other people don’t find it so, since it’s so popular, and that’s why this particular scent I’m trying now is a pleasant surprise to me because it doesn’t have that animal musk but is spicy/earthy.
@Deiseach
This doesn’t affect your point, but it doesn’t have to be only you who experiences patchouli like that; with some such differences, it’s because you have different olfactory receptors, which is down to genetics. It’s why some folks say cilantro tastes like soap.
Ha! I’m sorry, I should have properly marked my above post as being firmly sarcastic.
I have pretty much total anosmia, so I always find it funny and weirdly interesting when people try to explain subtle smells. It’s just so far outside my normal sensory experience.
Nick, I do get the “soapy coriander” taste so it may well be something there.
Aftagley, don’t worry, I realised you were joking but I did want to clarify that this was idiosyncratic on my part 😀
I’m starting to wonder how hard it would be to build a steam still and formulate my own cologne from various herbs and spices.
Looks like you can get myrrh for a not unreasonable price on Amazon.
On leaving the teen stage – it’s kinda funny because I was told by my parents that the defiance is just a phase after which you become a normie. I’m still waiting over a decade later.
On entering the teen stage – I’d say it’s the age when you realize that the world makes no sense and people are doing a lot of stupid things, but still have a feeling that someone, somewhere has a clue. Obviously you rebel, you’re unstable emotionally and you’re just oscillating wildly between strange ideas. Your 20s are when you realize that you’re supposed to have a clue now but you don’t, and nobody else does either.
Also, the awakening sexual drive has quite an entrance in a young person’s life. Lots of confusion and embarassing anecdotes and you’re mostly left to yourself to figure it all out. 6/10, wouldn’t really recommend to an alien visiting Earth.
The status obsession is definitely a teen thing, though. I’d kill to have as much confidence as I have now in my teens, when I meet people in late teens / early 20s now they just seem like a big ball of insecurities, sometimes covered by excessive showmanship. At least this part gets better over time.
It took me fifty years, but apparenty I finally made it to my teens.
I don’t know if I have much useful to contribute, except that the teens is a turbulent and difficult period for most, and the combination of raging hormones, physical and mental development, liberation from parents and other authorities, and an outsized influence of peer pressure from other teenagers is obviously a receipt for chaos.
I think it has gone pretty well for me both as a child and as a parent. But maybe it’s just the genes, choosing good neighborhoods, or dumb luck? If you ask for advice, I would suggest maintaining mutual trust at (almost) all costs, have a high standard for honesty over other transgressions, being constructive and supportive of their problems and actions, and critical only when strictly necessary.
Regarding the increasing size of open threads, can the resident SSC PHP wizard consider creating an alternative, mobile-friendly view with pagination?
Even reading the thread to the end is sometimes impossible on mobile as the tab may get evicted from browser cache and you lose the place you scrolled to. Writing a response in those megathreads has an input lag of literally 1 second between pressing a key and seeing the letter appear on my iOS.
Agree. My work laptop also has issues loading the pages when they get too big.
I’d formally request Scott, that if you want to put the kibosh on CW for a bit, to still create the fractional open threads, but just to add a “no CW on this one” rule to them, so as to prevent this one OT from getting too huge.
You have to scroll to the end of a comment, but there is a hide button. How is that different from what you want?
Long-time lurker, new poster here asking random people on the Internet for a mental health advice. Or maybe a life advice.
I’m not sure how much background to include but I’ll try to list everything relevant. I’m from Russia. since 2012 I am suffering from some sort of brain cooties (Depression/apathy/anxiety surely, but some underlying issues are certainly present – but is it a personality disorder? Asperger’s? Schizophrenia? State doctors disagree with private ones). It has negatively affected my life in a major way. I’ve dropped out of the university, came back, dropped again, got a job, lost a job, and finally for the last 2 years has gone pretty much full NEET. Therapy helps me to feel better but not to be functional, drugs are either causing significant adverse effects or doing very little (ok, there was one drug which helped a lot, but it is impossible to obtain). I’m losing the last shreds of hope – especially since in the last 2 years I have trouble communicating with people and quickly and coherently articulating my thoughts (worsening illness or merely lack of socialization? Who knows).
I have also been interested in rationality since 2010, though rarely engaged in commenting or discussion. Read the Sequences, some of the works which came after. Also knew about transhumanusm and considered it a good thing even before that (though before LW it was on a much more naive wow-basis). Again for the last two years I pretty much ignored everything mentioned above.
Finally, after the brief engagement with Russian politics in 2010-2012 I have been mostly avoiding local news wherever possible, because the course seem to be set, opposition is not able to do a thing, and… it’s too fucking depressing. I have read, watched and played significantly more English-language things than Russian-language things for the last 6 or 7 years
It seems that in the last 2 years or so I suddenly can’t handle much greater variety of depressing topics. Well, not every depressing thing but a lot of stuff which causes me to believe a future would be worse than I thought. A lot of it is CW (I’ll need to note that analysis or trying to comprehend the tendencies myself hurts more than any single example of bad behaviour no matter how unjust or destructive). But there is other stuff too – e.g. a lot of rational writing about Moloch and the like.
Trying to avoid information doesn’t seem to be working. It is weird for me – for all my formative years I behaved as if there is no such thing as negative-value information, and while I acknowledge it in theory to behave that way conflicts with my perception of myself. It also leads to lost opportunities – e.g. had I not avoided news about China (because Chinese politics are depressing) I would likely prepare much better in the masks-and-sanitizer sense. Even though I never browse Twitter, Facebook, Imgur, Tumblr aimlessly anymore, nor do I follow anyone you still find links there sometimes. Never reading anything from those platforms seems like overreaction. Finally this stuff is out there to get you. Trying to get book recommendations on reddit this winter often ended up with books which are nothing like what was requested but were recommended nevertheless because how worthy they are in the eyes of redditors. A few days ago I tried to reconnect with my Ukrainian friends – who were entirely understanding of the fact that I dropped out of conversation for two months, but all they were talking about was current events un the United States. I am not sure whether I can explain how insane this seems to me.
Would anyone here care to give some advice? It seems as if I have a choice between desocialization and depression and this is not a good place to be.
P.S Maybe I should have waited till the fractional thread to post but this is the third time I try to write this down, I should have posted that a week ago. I have tried to remove suspect stuff, but it is necessary to mention it even when not discussing it.
P.P.S. If anyone is interested in discussing mental health beyond the posited problem of managing my information intake I am open to further questions.
You probably want to fill your life with more positive interactions with people and your environment. The mainstream position of “why are you depressed, go run a bit” is not exactly helpful but has a grain of truth in it – you really, really need to be grounded in reality, otherwise abstract scaremongering on the internet will eat you alive.
As a fellow Slav I certainly sympathize with the feeling that everyone around me is complaining all the time, that’s just how our societies are built I’m afraid. Still, go ride a bike, visit some friend you haven’t seen in a while, go camping as it’s finally summer. I believe the technical psychiatric term is “behavioral activation”, and it works.
Positive interaction with environment I am trying to do though it feels hard. Positive interaction with people boils down to “which people ?”. Even before the illness I have been pretty asocial (I got along with people just fine but don’t really needed them all that much). Now it’s even hard to talk with new people, and my old circle of the online interaction was somehow co-opted by Anglosphere CW.
I feel the same way as you on most of the things you discuss, although it doesn’t seem to be affecting me quite as badly.
My advice may feel like a cop-out, but it is this – find things to distract yourself. This won’t necessarily be easy, especially as CW absorbs more and more hobbies that in theory should be neutral distractions (don’t worry – soon the NFL will be back and you won’t have to think so much about protests anymore, LOL!)
In a best case scenario, this probably involves religion (although I’m told finding a non-CW church is increasingly difficult), friends, and family. The worst case scenario might be crippling videogame addiction. But that’s probably still better than whatever you’re going through now. Find stuff that can occupy your mind and spend as much of your mental energy on it as possible.
FTFY.
Well, in Russia any CW in church would likely be coming from the other side than my Internet bubble so it’s a nice balance, but… meh. As long as I can remember myself all that formal religion stuff seemed silly to, and even on the fundamental question of existence of God I went straight from not thinking about it to the full blown atheism (though later). I was exposed from the crib to both Orthodoxy (I still can recite a few prayers in Church Slavonic) and sort of agnosticism, so it’s not like I was either brainwashed into atheism or reacted with atheism to attempted religious brainwashing.
Even though I feel that faith can be a great comfort (I am less sure about religion), I do not see what could result in me getting one.
Family is one of significant stressors in fact, so no help there. Friends as I said are bombarding me with CW, and I do not make friends easily – in fact the current group was acquired mostly because one of them wanted to be friends with me and practically forced me to interact ( I am glad that he did).
Videogame addiction it is, then!
I suggest MMOs. You can waste all kinds of hours on those!
Edit: On a more serious note, something like “constructive hobbies” is probably worth looking at. Can you get into gardening? Or homebrew? Pretty much anything where you “make” something.
As an avid homebrewer, I don’t recommend homebrew for people who want a hobby to occupy their time. Home-brew will maybe fill 3-4 hours of your time maybe one Saturday a month. Less if you invest early on in kegs.
I mean, it’s great in that it ends up with you having beer, but it really isn’t something you can spend a bunch of time on.
I probably will not go that way, but just in case – would anyone here care to recommend an MMO? I never cared to spend more than a year in a single MMO, usually less. What I enjoyed in the past: Lineage 2 (long time ago on weird heavily modified private servers), Rising Force Online, Granado Espada (this one is probably the best), Aion, WarThunder. WarThunder and the like are right out now – I do not think that session-based all-combat no-story would be right distraction. What I am probably looking for is probably something to distinguish it from the others either stylistically or gameplay-wise, preferably both. maybe some action elements. I do not think that I can remember every game I installed and dropped within a week, but two of them are Perfect World and EVE.
Though I theoretically can swing a subscription, I would probably spend too much worrying about money spent, so probably only f2p.
I mean, World of Warcraft is almost certainly the biggest in terms of “most amount of stuff to do overall” and “widest variety of stuff to do” and is the one I’m most familiar with, but is definitely not free…
@Gwythyr: Guild Wars 2 is pretty neat, should be right up your alley if you enjoyed Lineage 2. The pros include an interesting combat system, pretty deep customization and no chasing exclamation marked NPCs. The cons include atrocious crafting and said interesting combat turning into a chaotic clusterfuck when more than 2-3 players are involved.
The base version without addons is f2p, too.
A few thoughts.
1. “Never reading anything from those platforms” isn’t an overreaction in my opinion.
2. If politics gets you down, avoid it. It is rarely useful, and individuals rarely matter on the scales.
3. You don’t mention physical activities. Personally martial arts classes, hiking fore a few days, and running up and down a staircase 10 times are all tools I use to feel more alive and generally better.
4. If you can find a chess club, martial arts class, or anything else where you will socialise around non-depressing things that would be helpful. The hobby itself is also good.
5. I have a friend who went NEET for a while, getting a job that wasn’t too demanding (was part time too) but did require him to go to work was helpful for him.
This is an observation and a request for advice rather than advice.
Feeling bad and having trouble with doing things are pretty separate even though they’re both filed under depression.
I’m fairly capable of enjoying hobbies, but doing things– and especially doing useful things– has a high risk of making me feel worse. The pattern of being able to take action, but not for taking care of oneself (the level and type of dysfunction varies a lot) is pretty common in sf fandom.
Any ideas about what helps? I’m especially interested in what people have seen work rather than in what sounds plausible.
Acquire a habit or hobby that involves physical exercise. We are machines of flesh, physical fitness helps just about everything. Preferably something which you find fun, and is not solitary, because having to expend will power to stick with it means it will fail, having it be part and parcel of your recreation and socialization in some way means it persists much better.
If you have already done this, I.. am very much at a loss to what other broadly applicable tips I can give. “First, clean your room”? That is from my mother, and also pretty solid.
It’s more that exercise falls into the category of things that are good for me which are difficult for me to get myself to do.
Sometimes qi gong (which is movement but not exercise) is very hard for me to get to, even though it reliably makes me feel better.
That is why I said “Not solitary”. Disappointing yourself by not sticking to your exercise routine is a very weak motivator. The obligation to show up for a group or duo activity you have scheduled has far more teeth, and if you enjoy it once you are doing it, you wont remove it from the calendar either.
I’m not sure if it is relevant to your problems, but my solution to feelings of generic blah, many years ago, was to assign myself two hours a day, seven days a week, of work on writing projects. That’s enough so I feel I am doing something, enough to actually accomplish something, and little enough to leave most of the day free for talking with people here, reading good books, etc.
All play and no work doesn’t work for me. But it doesn’t take much work to solve the problem.
That would be unnecessary for someone who had a regular eight hours a day job, but I didn’t, and am now retired.
For some reason reading “real nonfiction” was what did it for me. Not that I was avoiding pop-science or pop-history, just stuff that I felt like I was learning at least a little bit from, even if I didn’t know how the learning would ever be useful.
Writing time, for me, includes research for writing. My most recent nonfiction book required a lot of reading.
I experience something similar, and it has always seemed to me like a dissociative issue. When I’m conscious of myself, and doing actions that require me to assess myself and my goals in reference to the future, I develop an aversion to my own actions. This is because I now have trouble imagining a future or experiencing strong preferences for what happens next or how to get there. I don’t identify with my decisions. With hobbies, it feels like my self isn’t in play, and just the intellectual part of myself is operating, and it requires less justification. Since I began experiencing this, I can do really elaborate research projects and then fail to do the most basic stuff required of daily living. It functions as a form of escapism. Not quite sure what caused the split between myself and intellect, or how to fix it. If it is common in SF fandom, could it be related to having a capacity for elaborate imagination? I definitely feel that plays a role in my case–it’s like ideas are so fast and vivid in my mind, and actions disappointing and comparably meaningless when I go to act them out. What I’ve personally experienced as helpful is structure—concrete tasks imposed upon me, a schedule, etc., which I don’t have to justify. Something that turns off the monitoring/deciding/optimizing part of my brain for a bit.
Where are you in Russia? To be frank, large swathes of Russian society are not socially healthy. I know Slavs like to joke about this kind of thing but Russia, especially certain parts of Russia, suffer from deep social pathologies that make the Ukrainians look downright functional. It might be good to leave. I know a lot of happy Russian expats. Statistically, more middle class Russians live outside Russia than inside it. Maybe you should join them.
More generally, I can only give broad advice. I’ve been in very, very dark places before and very, very bad circumstances. My suggestion: set a goal, a modest goal, to do something that will improve your life at least a little. And achieve it. It doesn’t have to be anything grand. Write a diary. Learn how to make coffee and start making yourself really nice coffee each morning. Clean your room. Doesn’t matter. The important thing is to regain a sense of potency: you will have changed your world a little and for the better. Then do it again. And again, until you don’t feel as bad. And then make a big goal. Something that would change everything for the better. And start to make a plan of these little steps that can get you there. You can endure a lot, terrible jobs or depressing news, if you know that just waiting it out and working hard tomorrow gets you closer to your goals. It clarifies your decisions, including those about information intake. Is your goal to start a coffee business? What does watching about Putin’s next move have to do with coffee? Is it to leave? Then why are you reading domestic news at all? And so on.
I’m here if you want to talk.
I’ve had a great deal of contact with Russia and Russians, and I think this is unfortunately true. Russians are fundamentally lovely people held back by widespread neurosis and fatalism stemming from a bunch of complex and messed up events, and the happiest Russians I’ve known are the ones who have left it! (Aside from a few who remained but are wealthy enough to have a great life anyway.)
A small city (if for some reason precise information would be helpful – then not on the public forum). Economically there is little promise but socially probably above the 50% for Russia as far as both general public goodness and alignment with my values go.
Regarding emigration – yeah, that would be nice. In fact it is probably about the second position in my Big Dreams. Doesn’t seem to be readily achievable from the current position (I am not merely unable to see how to do it tomorrow or this year, but unable to formulate a concrete plan for any length of time which would result in that).
That I am trying to do currently (with variable success).
And that is where everything breaks down. I used to be very rational and efficient about this and nowadays I feel like I cannot overcome momentary impulses at all. When I am to depressed to get out of bed or, contrawise when I am enjoying a game (which is rare nowadays – I can have free time and end up doing nothing with it, without doing anything at all for myself) I sometimes cannot find any will (or strength. or energy. or spoons or whatever) to stop what I am (not) doing and do what is necessary.
As I said I in fact did mostly successfully avoided local news for 7-8years and retreated to Anglosphere web (call it escapism, call it inner emigration, whatever). Now it is also not a good place to be (specifically hobby\entertainment communities which seemed 10 years ago to be much less politicized than Russian ones are more politicized nowadays).
Also planning. If you plan emigrating you kinda need to know where you see yourself in 5 years, and for that you need to know how the place looks in 5 years. Again, I can see the idea “you’d never emigrate if you continue to read toxoplasma and then going to bed to sulk”, but going in blind is not going to succeed either. And distinguishing between useful and harmful information before reading is in fact one of the aspects of my initial question.
Leaving Russia, I’d recommend that you emigrate to another big country like Canada, the US, or Australia. You wouldn’t want to forget your Dreams.
I’ve spent some time researching emigration options and came to the conclusion that Canada is marginally better than Australia wrt to the ease of getting a PR. Other consideration like proximity to the US or the climate certainly add to that. I should mention that I have concerns and patterns of behaviour very similar to those of the op (I’m younger and located in Ukraine, though).
Could you maybe obtain it in the black market?
It seems like you’re going through some really bad times, so I would say if something helps, you could try to get it outside normal channels. I’ve heard a lot of the nootropic community gets stuff from India and whatnot, and it works for them.
Or is it that the drug is expensive?
Expensive, yes, though not absolutely prohibitive. But you can go to jail for it now (and then never have a chance to emigrate anywhere with narcotics conviction even though it’s not a narcotic anywhere else).
Numerous online outlets do offer it. At least some of them are honeypots. I even suppose that you can with sufficiently high probability make sure that supplier is genuine by collecting information from people, but I was not able to get myself organized enough to do that research (and I really did not want to self-medicate so idea of going outside of official channels occurred to me only in the last couple of months).
Some communities have far lower CW density than others. My main community is a group of adult epee fencers and we have CW related conversations less than monthly despite spending ~10 hours per week together. We spend a lot of time gossiping about fencers from other clubs and whining about what good actions someone keeps beating us with. Maybe hunt for a better community?
Hmm, so you’re saying your group of epee fencers is unconcerned about the right (of way)?
That was a stretch. Almost a lunge, even.
While that is an excellent guess. We actually spend untold hours complaining about how horrible right (of way) is even though we are not personally subject to its whims.
I see right of way as an attempt to make up for the fact that in fencing nobody minds dying.
It’s a problem I’m familiar with in SCA group combat, where we don’t have any equivalent rule. We are all heroes, which eliminates a large part of real world tactics.
From what I’ve heard, the transition from duelling with cut-and-thrust swords to rapiers ended up with a lot of situations where two novices would run each other through at the same time and die.
Think of it as evolution in action.
I’ve experienced something that sounds similar over the last few years, getting suddenly sensitive to negative information followed by worsening confusion and apathy. It definitely feels much harder to socialize without getting pulled into a jarring current events-related discussion, in almost any situation. I can’t tell if that’s true or if I just feel that way, but I also dropped a lot of current events reading altogether and was surprised to find it didn’t help as much as I expected. I suspect information intake in general is an issue for people who like learning, regardless of the type of information–my brain can’t be running in that mode all the time, and the Internet makes that a possibility. But I was a news junkie, so I figured the problem was mostly that I just paid too much attention. Yet it seemed like around the same time, everyone else started talking about it more, and I’m an introvert with few other topics to put forward. Increasingly, my family and extrovert friends didn’t seem to have other topics, either, even though they have more exciting lives than I do. It’s just constant talking points. I know socialization is key to improving, but it is so hard to meet people who are not draining in this way, especially if you are introverted.
Some sort of structure is probably needed—is there some sort of activity where the conversation is structured that you could do? For example, teaching somebody something? (or taking a course?) Working on some sort of project? I find this helps a lot. As someone else said, I think restoring a sense of being able to take action in in the world, in small ways, goes far. Assisting someone else with a real task provides a ready topic of conversation and reason for interacting, as well as a feeling of capability. And it provides its own momentum, whereas goals you set to help yourself are easier to discard. I find that even giving directions to someone from out-of-town briefly stabilizes me.
If you wanted to find the most effective education for your children (i.e. you are not saving the world or trying to design for the whole population), which is neurotypical, parents are “rationalists” with slightly above average income, how would it look like (from pre-K onwards)? (Full question posted on LW)
I’ve heard good things about Montessori.
Probably any alternative education scheme that emphasizes individual interests and initiative, instead of being optimized for creating an obedient 19th century Prussian factory worker, would put your child far ahead of the mainstream.
Montessori and similiar styles can be great but can have pitfalls.
IMO, based solely on personal experience for myself and in the family, it can be great for earlier stages of education. It allows kids to skip far ahead based on their abilities, stopping them getting bored and allowing them to move at their own rate. However it has less of an emphasis on forcing them to work on areas of deficiency, so you can end up in a position where they may need remedial work in some area to catch up to their peers. I have seen this to be very teacher and school philosophy dependent.
Option the first: “Move to Finland, send them to public school”.
Option the second. “send them to public school, spend money like water on one on one tuition”.
A lot of the usual things people advocate and do are just goddamn useless, or expensive in ways people fail to count properly.
Homeschooling – assuming one partner has the qualifications to do a good job of it, is costing you at least 40 grand a year in foregone earnings, and probably more.
Private schools generally do no better than public schools in the districts they exist in, once you control for socio economic status – they just get to cherry pick a student body and fleece parents, complete waste of money.
(and sending your kids to a distant private school imposes enormous time and social costs on them, and likely on you, too. It is very, very inconvenient not to live near your kids school in all sorts of ways)
But Finland genuinely appears to just.. have better schools. And spending money on tutors works.
Option 3, for the very cheap parent: Just damn well teach your kid how to use Anki.
Re #3, Anki seems way overhyped. For languages, I’m told that controlled exposure to living examples of the language is considered superior. For anything else, like e.g. biology, you want to understand what you’re talking about instead of regurgiating trigger-response pairs on demand.
I’ve seen some people use Anki to prepare for exams on bio/med topics and it just seems like a more sophisticated way of cramming – even if they preserve the “knowledge” they can’t really use it or reason about it. I also know people who spent years learning a language as an adult via spaced repetition and they still suck at fluent speech or writing.
I have friends who used Anki throughout undergrad, and they remember the topics much better than I do just because their Anki cards still come up. The real question is whether memorizing any of that stuff was useful to begin with.
However, I’ll agree that it isn’t sufficient for languages.
Option between tutoring and homeschooling: Take an extremely active interest in their education.
I feel like my parents unschooled me on top of me going to actual school.
If your account of the benefits of private school doesn’t include the value of the social connections made there, it’s very incomplete. This value may not be that great at a typical private school, but at the elite ones it’s enormous. Even if you don’t think Eton offers a superior academic education (or you think the direct benefits of such an education are not lasting) it would be foolish to disregard the social networks formed there.
… You do realize you just entirely agreed with some of the very reddest critiques I have ever heard of private schooling? That is, that they are no better at education than the public system, but are effective transmission mechanisms of class privilege?
Or in other words, the argument you just made is not an argument for attending Eton, it is an argument for legislating Eton out of existence.
Why should you limit yourself to looking at schools that shouldn’t be regulated out of existance?
>(i.e. you are not saving the world or trying to design for the whole population)
Well, mostly I think those red critiques are just wrong. – that is, I do not think the course of your life is actually set by who you were friends with in middle school, so I consider them wholly scams. I am just.. a bit flabbergasted to see marxist analytics be taken for granted.
I’m in no way, shape or form a Marxist, but I don’t think I need to accept any political theory of any kind to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of my lying eyes that old boy network nepotism is a source of career advantage in many fields, including my own (I am certainly a beneficiary of it). The notion that who you know socially makes no difference to your professional prospects seems so incredible to me that I can barely imagine an actual resident of this planet holding it.
As it happens, I think most elite private schools actually do offer an appreciably superior education, and selection effects, increased human capital and networking are all important factors in explaining the success of their alumni. Most private schools are a waste of a ton of money. The top few are excellent value for even more. See also universities.
Weird for this to be a private school critique when the current public school system does the same thing on a wider scale.
I think that describes at most expensive prep schools, which are a very small part of the total world of private schools.
That assumes it’s a full-time job. For couples with the traditional pattern, husband earning money and wife running the household, it isn’t. Actual teaching doesn’t require much time spent by the adult, although adults can choose to spend more — the main constraint is that there must be an adult present in the house.
Also, there are some jobs that can be done from home and don’t suffer too much from being interrupted from time to time.
Is that gross earnings, or net? We’ve discussed the two-income trap here before. If A: the expenses associated with a second full-time wage-earner consume a significant fraction of the gross income added, and B: what’s left goes mostly to buying a house in an expensive neighborhood with good schools, then it’s quite possible that you come out financially ahead if you home-school in a cheaper neighborhood.
Taking ten years out of your career has long term costs rather exceeding the immediate calculus.
Further, money poured into the mortgage is not generally lost barring very bad luck. Not an investment with a huge return, but you do get the money back on the back end assuming there is still, well, an economy, when you retire.
Bailing on the good school district and extracting that premium value is one reason why people in the US retire to points south, yes? (The European version is “To Spain”, which.. honestly, better deal than Florida)
That’s…what we’re paying for…
You are paying for an education. If the individuals who make up the student body of the private school would have learned exactly as much scattered around n public schools instead, then you are gaining nothing at a very high price. And that is the favorable case – sometimes they are simply worse schools once you control for SES.
And I need to make this point again, if you are willing to spend this kind of dosh on your child’s education, sending them to public school and hiring tutors would be vastly, ridiculously more efficacious use of your funds. Tutoring damn well works, and ten thousand dollars worth of tutoring per year through primary school and twenty thousand per year through high school is a whole lot of tuition hours.
You’re paying for a better peer group for your kids, which almost certainly matters more than how much they actually learn.
You may also be paying for the school to teach your children according to your values (many religious schools), or for a pleasant environment for your kids with a nice peer group.
I think a lot of it is being a household that actually values learning (the kids should notice their parents learning new things at least occasionally, parents should indulge the kids’ interest in how things work, there should be books in the house) and making learning accessible (show them how to use Wikipedia themselves, find sites for them that will interest and teach them, etc).
Beyond that just send them where they’ll have good friends, make sure they can read and do basic math.
Yes, parental support is critical, since school isn’t going to do it. My parents sent us to more technical summer camp/classes, but ones where we still got to pick the specific classes we wanted to attend. Later, they wholeheartedly supported the extracurriculars we chose to pursue, both financially and in transporting us where we needed to go (whether that be attended practices or competitions).
Finally, our vacations were all oriented around museums, nature/hiking, and concerts, and I still have zero interesting in shopping-oriented vacations or events.
It’s like enabling an unschooling environment outside of mandatory schooling.
Also, the ability to see that your kid is miserable or struggling in one environment and move him to another is really valuable. Doing this at one point in my oldest son’s education made his life enormously better and seems to have worked out well.
If you’re looking for a drastic alternative to mainstream education, Waldorf or Steiner schools. Due to circumstances, my two nephews did their pre-school/junior infants schooling in one, then integrated into mainstream schools at a later date with no difficulty (the elder is going on for an MA in English and the younger is currently doing a B Sc, so I have an Arts Nephew and a Science Nephew) 🙂
Pros: child-centred learning, at their own pace, a lot of arts and crafts as well as academic subjects.
Cons: arose out of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, so depending on the school it may be very hippy-dippy. If you’re a Richard Dawkins-type parent who would be extremely uncomfortable about your kids making friends with the fairies at the bottom of the garden, this is not for you!
Secondary con: many Waldorf parents are anti-vaxxers, so there won’t be herd immunity there.
As I said, it depends on the school and parents; over here in Ireland they’re not that far gone, but certainly in Germany/other places very much into the whole biodynamic ball of wax, that’s a risk.
My sons went to a Waldorf school here in New Zealand, although this was mostly to keep them out of the school my oldest son spent his first year at, which was a total nightmare. The Waldorf school was excellent, we have nothing but good things to say about it.
I’ve been trying to answer the same questions, and here’s where I am so far (mine are 3 and 1, so plans are still in development. I was homeschooled, so I know that homeschooling works just fine).
Pre-K: I hear good things about Montessori as well, but I’m planning on just keeping the kids home at this stage. We have a great support network of adult relatives around who are very active and responsive, so we read to the kids, build things with them, engage them in conversation, answer their questions, etc. My main focus right now is to make learning fun. I’m trying to answer questions ‘bigly’ and not over-simplify, and if I can demonstrate the answer I do that before I talk about it. Playing outdoors, building with legos, reading with them (and by myself, to show how much I value it; great point earlier in the thread), exploring… We’re blending in some counting and letter recognition but only with positive reinforcement, songs, games, that sort of thing. If I weren’t so lucky in the support network my kids have then I would be looking at Montessori.
Post-K: Check out Acton Academy. I’m going through their on-boarding right now; they seem like a great blend of Montessori principles updated with modern tools and informed by the lessons of the past millennia or so of societal experience with ‘classical’ education. In stage 1 of their on-boarding process they have a neat ‘recommended reading’ list; I read the entire list and recommend everything on it as well. My current plan is to start a micro-school (think halfway between homeschooling and private schooling: age-mixed classes of ~5-15 kids, semi-self-paced and guided). I have a few concerns about Acton’s method I haven’t been able to address yet, but I’ll be resolving those before I decide. The biggest one, as another comment in this thread noted, was how to handle lack of interest in core subjects. I’m honestly not all that concerned about whether I can handle that as the teacher; I’m a big believer in the importance of the “3 R’s” and I know how to make them all compelling and fun until their value is self-reinforcing. I also know that it’s OK to wait for the ‘teachable moment’, even if it doesn’t come in any given school year, because once you find the right one the learning is self-reinforcing and occurs at light speed. I just need to figure out how that might blend into the Acton system.
If any of this sounds compelling to anyone else, or other people are going through similar discovery processes, PM me and I’d love to start a group discussion in a more suitable format.
On reddit or keybase, that is.
I don’t think there is anything beyond reading, writing or (nowadays) typing with a computer, and possibly arithmetic, that everyone needs to learn in K-12. If a kid never gets interested in biology, he can always learn it later if he finds he needs it. Similarly for physics, algebra, history, economics, … . The important thing is that they are learning something interesting, not that they learn some list of core subjects.
When our home unschooled kids approached college age and wanted to go to selective colleges, they studied the things necessary to fill in holes before taking the relevant exams.
I would add from my experience very basic knowledge of the scientific method – not in the fully worked out sense, but in the “observe, hypothesize, test with a control” sense.
I can kind of see a “Lottery of Passions/Interests” kind of reasoning behind mandatory subjects, though. I wasn’t uninterested in STEM things, and can imagine a world where I pursued those things with much more ambition than I did in my actual life, where my focus was often “waylaid” by superstimulus arts and fandom things.
Or, it’s unpredictable what subjects someone might be interested in if they’ve never been exposed to it. I had a classmate who was a total slacker until joining competitive debate on a whim, and that lit a fire under them to research all sorts of things they had zero interest in before that moment.
Besides the 3 R’s, I think most of the best learning K-12 is meta-learning. Learning how to research something, how to think critically about information, how to become an expert at something useful, and how to grind out something that isn’t quite as exciting are all skills that will serve you well throughout your life.
That’s why I like the unschool method, with the caveat you noted about the 3 R’s being necessary for adulting. My plan is to focus on the 3 R’s regularly, and help the kids learn meta-learning techniques on whatever other projects interest them.
My old example of that was all the time my kids spent playing Pokemon on their Gameboys. The skill they were learning was a useless one. But the skill of being dropped into a strange world and figuring out how it worked and how to accomplish things in it was not.
That’s a good description of the benefit of video games in general, and any other interactive creative media. I expect I’m going to work pretty hard to limit my kids screen time though, not because things like Minecraft and Factorio are useless, but because of the opportunity cost.
My cousin & her husband are homeschooling/unschooling their kids and they are big gamers, and they have pretty much allowed unfettered screen time as long as the stuff that has zero merit is limited to an hour or so a day. In practice, the kids are glued to one game or another pretty much constantly, and when I compare their capabilities, interests, and personalities to another homeschooling friend’s kids they fall very short, having not developed any significant interests due primarily to the low bar for access of mindless entertainment.
On the personal side, I’ve had a tough time breaking free of video games but no trouble with avoiding TV and movies. TV and movies are too passive for my tastes, and we never even had a TV in the house growing up. I’d binge at friends’ houses, but by the time I got to college I just had no interest in it. Video games…. I’ve probably spent around 25-30,000 hours playing video games over the past 30 years, and opportunity cost was high. I’m going to be trying really hard to figure out a way to allow my kids access to games, but I’ll be working hard to minimize psychological addiction pathways, and if they end up showing addictive behaviors I’ll be getting rid of the games pretty quickly.
It’s not that video games are useless, it’s just that compared to other things kids can learn if they don’t have dopamine-enhancing, stimulating escapism available at all times… the cost is too high.
Yes. “the skill of being dropped into a strange world and figuring out how it worked and how to accomplish things in it” is also something that could be accomplished by getting started early on science fair projects or spelling bee competitions, or other things that could go on the resume. This is also why I’m very unimpressed by the claims of English Majors that they learn/teach critical thinking or other soft skills.
Our current college applications process rewards picking a “useful” passion early on and focusing on it so as to have meaningful accomplishments in it. Playing Pokemon doesn’t get weighted as much as being in the school band/choir, which doesn’t get weighted as much as doing an internship somewhere. (But, ironically, no points for working blue collar part time jobs.)
Insufficiently.
I enjoyed math, but I very much did not enjoy the way the SAT did it, and my final score was only 690 – even agreeing it was important, I don’t think self-directed learning is a good way to study something you dislike. If I knew then what I know now, I suspect I would find a good SAT prep place and see if I could get a set of classes/focused tutoring/whatever on just the math; that would probably have gotten me a better score. Given how well Dad did, 690 was rather a disgrace. (Even if, yes, the other sections were 800s. They don’t count; they weren’t holes.)
That said, it worked a lot better for the subject tests; I picked American History because it looked easy to study for, read 2-3 test prep books, one lengthy and detailed history book, and the wikipedia pages for all the presidents (with a bit of editing for typos along the way), and got 770. Mind, I’m pretty sure I was also pulling answers out of general knowledge, historical novels, and at least one folk song – American History was easier to study for than World History, but History-in-general I picked because it fell under my interests.
Are you still in college? Have you found that you have been limited by lack of early exposure to things that build up a significant body of knowledge? Not so much for the SAT; I’m sure a 690 in math and a few 800s got you into whatever school you wanted, but in other studies?
My cousin’s example: She was unschooled, and while very smart, she didn’t have the math necessary to get into her first choice of veterinary school. She ended up studying chemistry and doing well, but she felt held back by lack of early and regular schooling in math.
No and no; that was some time ago, but if anything I think I was better prepared than most of my peers. The thing is, suppose you land in, say, an astronomy and astrophysics course which uses a bit of trigonometry, and you never took trig. The course is giving you the formulas anyway, so you just need to look up a couple concepts and you’re home free. Now that was a core class (a really awesome core class), so it didn’t have very high math requirements, but in general I found that being able to quick-research and supplement class materials if necessary for your own learning was a really useful skill, and in my experience more valuable than having learned the standard curriculum – given how I did vis-a-vis everyone else. (Either that, or everyone else just didn’t care, in which case Thinking Learning Is Awesome is the key skill; I got that from homeschooling, too.)
Now, a couple of caveats: I didn’t actually have a very math-heavy discipline I wanted to go into, I did find classes where most people had an extensive background and I had no background harder, though not impossible (chemistry) and most of the classes I was taking were ones where I either had a useful background* or where no background was needed since most people would first encounter it at the college level anyway. (Geology, for example – though I did have some background there. Or linguistics, where I had almost none.) The thing is, “writing effectively and grammatically” “reading effectively and remembering what you read well” and, again, “genuinely being interested” are skills with incredibly wide utility that my unschooling background supplied me with in abundance. I was kind of horrified when other students’ reaction to a class** being canceled was “oh good.” And I was much more willing to go to office hours/raise my hand and speak in class than most other students, which definitely benefitted me, and in hindsight was probably because I was raised to think teachers were not scary, and in fact, were on the same side as me – the side of Knowledge and Learning!
The big things I found myself lacking were mostly practical things like “how to juggle four classes at once of homework” (I’d previously taken college-level classes, but they were summer classes so it was one intensive instead of four normal, which makes prioritization easier), and various things about how I learned/did best in class, but I worked that out all right; the worst consequence was one D. (Note to anyone reading this who has problems with procrastination: even if you get badly sick in the middle of a semester, never never never let the kind professor tell you your deadline is completely gone; you will not actually ever write the paper.) And it was in a 2-credit class, so I don’t think it even ended up on my eventual transcript.
(Also “how to socialize with other students.” That one, uh, didn’t get fixed, but I’m not sure high school would have helped; long story.)
… but yeah. I think avoiding bad habits, staying passionate, and developing writing/reading to the extent I did was more use than the standard classes would have been. Also the independent study skills thing.
Oh, and thanks for the compliment, but no; that SAT score, plus a 770 and an 800 on SAT subject tests and some presumably glowing teacher recommendations from local university faculty (I took Italian over the summer at SCU; the teachers liked me), got me waitlisted and then rejected from my top choice, rejected from most of the others…
… except for two, both of which offered me merit scholarships. Not being able to submit high school grades makes your results really swingy. It’s the big cost to unschooling, in terms of getting into college; I might have done better with 800/800/800, but even then I’m not sure I would have. I was prepared, but they could not tell I was.
* Singing in early music choir = having lots of memorized latin texts, which makes learning latin much easier; it also provides memorized texts in a bunch of other languages, in case you want to learn Italian or Spanish or German instead. And just being widely read gives you an effective background in so many different things.
**OK, my favorite class that period. Still.
Interesting about the need for high school grades. Did you ever consider going to a junior college first, or would you try that route if doing it all over? I also didn’t have any official high school transcript due to homeschooling (I think my mom might have written a long list of the things I studied and wrote “4.0” at the top of a page, but maybe not, it’s been awhile). I did get an AA in liberal arts at the local JC, and then it was easy to get into my top choice as a transfer student with a 3.85 GPA and 1470 on the SATs.
I’m not sure whether the JC grades or the time difference was more important though; my college applications were back around 2002, and based on your dad’s blog it looks like yours were closer to 2010 and I heard things got rougher for college admissions in that intervening decade.
I agree entirely about the importance of developing a love of learning and ability to teach yourself; no question that anyone who has those and a few basic academic skills at 18 will do just fine in college and beyond.
I’m very much on the fence about how formal to make my kids’ education when the time comes. The different facts I’m trying to balance are:
1) I know that formal math, reading and writing and informal everything else works great, and renders the student completely capable of doing well in a demanding degree, because I experienced that type of homeschooling and then sailed my way to a 3.3 in mechanical engineering without needing to study outside of class.
2) I strongly suspect that unschooling with some effort to build a interest in learning important math concepts like arithmetic and statistics would work just fine as well, based on several people I know or have chatted with online
3) I’ve studied classical education a moderate amount, and I feel like it would be a mistake to dismiss any of the parts I don’t really get the purpose for, like the early rote memorization, simply because of the length of development and depth of the classical education system that we threw out and replaced with the Prussian model in the late 19th century. It’s hard to argue against the fact that some students brought up with the classical model had outcomes far superior to even our modern home- and un-schoolers.
I’ve got some balancing to do. I expect I’m going to build a continuum reaching form unschooling to classical, and let each kid find the place that they can learn the most on that continuum.
Junior college… Like community college, an associate’s degree? I’d have to do more research, but my instinctive reaction is negative; my first choice was Vassar, and I don’t think they would have approved. Now, taking some classes at a local community college while I was high school age, purely for the transcript, and not worrying about the Associate’s degree, sure; quite possible I should have done that. But I would, perhaps naively, have expected a college like Vassar or Stanford to turn up its nose at someone who got an Associate’s degree instead of applying at 18 – think how snobbish Stanford already is about transfer students of any kind – unless they had an obvious, sympathetic justification (ill family member, poverty, etc.), and I didn’t.
(Theoretically the grades from the classes at Santa Clara University should have helped, but apparently not enough.)
As far as the general question of homeschooling goes, a few general thoughts:
– For encouraging an interest in statistics, may I recommend How To Lie With Statistics? The companion volume, How To Take A Chance for probability theory, is also really fun.
– We didn’t have formal math, reading or writing. I was slightly disadvantaged in math, though I think just leaning on it a bit more would have solved that – find some fun books of exercises and offer to check them for the kid, or something. Maybe a good math-teaching game; those worked wonderfully, but we didn’t have any for high-end math. Obviously would depend on the kid, but I think that would have worked for me. I was extremely advantaged in writing and reading. I think my reading lessons consisted of:
“Becca, would you like to do a reading project?”
“OK!”
Followed by going through several Dr. Seus books that I already had half-memorized (Mom read to me a lot) with me typing the words into the computer (I was better at typing than writing at that age), and then Mom making sentences with them and our names, for me to read. When I read the sentences I got to color in the pictures that went with them. (I recently found a few of those, they’re actually quite cute. Mom will claim she isn’t good at art, but she was very good at the useful-skill-for-a-homeschooling-mother level.) For the fourth book she bought a new Dr. Seus book that I had never read before, we started going through it the same way, and then she had to go do something else, and when she got back I had finished the book. That was my last reading lesson (although I did sometimes ask her how to pronounce words after that, especially when I started reading Elizabeth Peters, who was doing historical mysteries and therefore had somewhat archaic language.) And Mom did frequently hand me books – any time I asked, or had a cold, or of course that was my default birthday present. And I think we sometimes talked about books, though more as I got older – not a lot as a younger kid, not beyond “this book is great! Does the author have any more?”
My writing lessons consisted of (at around the age of 15) “Hey Mom, look at this thing I wrote for my game!”
“Hmm. Have you considered paragraph breaks?”
“… Ah-ha! I knew something was wrong! Thanks, Mom! <3"
… plus a whole lot of practice. It helped that I had a strong interest in writing, both stories and essays, and I sometimes showed things to Mom for comment, but mostly not – I mostly just got better by doing it.
So in terms of your 2) my experience would bear that out.
– I would be a bit wary of comparing "students brought up with the classical model" with "modern home- and unschoolers" just because of the numbers involved, unless you're being careful not just to notice the stand-outs. A method everyone is using is much more likely to provide exceptional, well-known prodigies than a method very few people are using. That said, if you've controlled for that, I'm certainly not in a position to tell you you're wrong. And "let each kid find the place that works for them" sounds like a really, really good idea – kids are different and need different things, and if you've figured that out and have a good idea of how to be flexible with it, you've already got the most important insight and should be just fine.
Have you thought a lot about socializing? That was probably where our model had the most trouble; I was painfully shy, so I'm not sure what we could have done better, and introverted enough that just spending much less time than average with unrelated other children worked out fine for me, but a more socially-inclined child might not have done as well with it. It's certainly something I'm thinking a good deal about for when I have kids – how does one find a good community for child-rearing?
I did the JC route and completed my AA at 18, which didn’t negatively impact my college admissions. Home/Un-schoolers have the benefit of being able to shift to a JC before they turn 18, and perform just fine.
I’ll address the socialization out of order because it ties into the above. There was a tiny group of families when I was just starting homeschooling (~1990) in our local area. By the time I switched to exclusively JC at around 16 there were about 80 families that socialized together, did a few co-op classes, etc… Homeschooling networks are very much a “if you build it they will come” thing. There are a lot of strong networks already extant. Excellent homeschooling networks are one of the main reasons we ended up settling my family in South Texas; our city has 3 major homeschooling networks, including (somewhat paradoxically) an unschooling organization.
I ended up being better socialized than my public school peers, because I had lots of experience working with people of all ages, including adults and younger and older kids. Even these days (I’m in my mid-30s) it seems like most of my peers are poor at socializing with people who are significantly older or younger than them, which is a problem I’ve never had. Sorry I can’t be more help; the lack of socialization is just never something I experienced.
As far as the stats and math and such, I’m definitely planning on hitting complicated board games hard, possibly even to the point of making projects out of optimizing them. I’m huge on board games and over-analyzing them; one of the first python scripts I wrote while I was teaching myself python was a Monte Carlo simulator that brute-forced the odds of success for Risk Legacy battles. Since then I’ve done lots of similar work on D&D, specifically trying to figure out exactly when players should choose to use skills that lower the chance of hitting in exchange for higher damage output if they hit.
There are tons of real-world ways to show the usefulness of all different levels of math; I’m not remotely worried about a “but when will I ever use this?” situation.
Okay, my first post buried the lede too deep. Most of the things people suggest, both here, and basically, always, are very, very expensive. In the 10-40 thousand dollars per year range. Potentially higher, if it is “have a university graduate homeschool the kids instead of working”.
Tutoring does not cost that much. So, before you go wait-list at “Fancy-pants wallet Vampire Academy”, consider the alternative of spending that amount of money on one-on-one tuition instead. Because the academy is not going to teach your kid more than twenty thousand dollars worth of tutors per year. That level of hothousing is the kind of thing that lets you hammer 4 or five languages into the vic.. childs head by graduation at the customary age, or gets them into an ivy at 16.
I’m really tempted by the idea of a small school with 4-5 students modeled on the “teacher on one end of a log and student on the other” ideal. LOGos Academy? Something like that. Micro-schooling is an under-developed concept, and obviously there are newly rediscovered benefits to reducing overhead and indoor time.
George Stigler said that, after many years of teaching, he had concluded that it might be just as effective to sit on the student and talk to the log.
Yup, that’s the quote I was thinking of, thanks. Oliver DeMille’s series on leadership education (beginning with “A Thomas Jefferson Education”) is focused on the classical system coupled with great mentorship.
Mostly unschooled. Talk to them every day about what they learned from the day.
Lots of PE and team sports to develop social integration and physical health.
Long undirected periods aimed at making them bored and forcing them to master it.
Traveling around our country to see nature and history.
Chores, both in maintaining our home, but also giving them projects that require some persistence.
Intermittent tutored short courses or seminars in subjects that require directed instruction and graded practice.
Require them to read broadly and to take notes on every single thing they read.
Ad hoc Stoicism.
In principle, I would want to teach them curiosity, self-mastery, and Rao-ian mediocrity.
This seems like a good way of avoiding the modern-day attention-deficit that forced task-switching can create.
We’re homeschooling our 4 kids, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and one thing that I believe is drastically underrated is whether kids *want* to learn. Most discussion of education systems focuses on what adults should do to kids day in and day out to get them to learn. But they basically all assume that education happens for most of a day, for most of a week.
But, when the kids are younger, especially, a single weekend spent obsessively on a single topic can cover as much ground as weeks or months of a school’s coverage of the same topic. This also tracks with my recollection of my own education, where I would easily speed ahead of the class in anything I was remotely interested in, and it wasn’t until college that the daily reading actually reached the quantity of “things I’m interested in”.
And then there’s actual retention of material. My own mental model of this is something like if the kids aren’t interested in something, but you teach it to them anyway, they’ll retain 20% (or less) of it. It they are interested, they’ll retain 90%.
Combining the fact that kids can cover so much more ground on their own if they’re interested, and the fact that they retain so much more when they’re interested, the vast majority of our educational effort should be spent trying to make them more interested! And if they’re not interested, we shouldn’t try so hard to teach them that we make them resentful, because it’s far more important that they *eventually* become interested than it is that they learn any particular thing *today*.
An oversimplified version of this is – If they never become interested in learning, they probably won’t learn anything in school anyway. If they do become interested in learning, school will be almost unnecessary.
Anecdotally, I work in an office with people whose kids are the same age as mine and in public school, and I am surprised by both the quantity of work they do and how little ground they seem to cover.
Yeah, I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is virtually impossible to teach anyone (including adults) something that they don’t want to know.
You can sort of game the system by incentivizing them to want to know the things you want them to know (i.e. your boss tells you to learn a new software system, you don’t really “want” to, but you want to get fired even less, so you learn it), but this will only last for as long as the incentive remains in place (i.e. you begin to forget everything you learned about Biology the second you pass the final exam, unless you either really like Biology or will continue taking courses on it or working in the field).
When our kids were in a very small private school on an unschooling model, before we switched to home unschooling, some of the kids decided they wanted to learn math. The class started assuming no knowledge at all, got into algebra by the end of the year.
This sounds like the culinary school model, or other “teaching professionals” classes. They assuming zero preexisting knowledge, but the students are entirely self-selected (and with a clear incentive+application structure of helping their careers), and that enables covering topics at a greater density than primary or even secondary schooling.
Interesting! I’ve also often wondered something like – Assuming a person learned basic literacy and arithmetic (or maybe assuming they didn’t?), and assuming they cared, how long would it take to teach, say, a 16 year old, everything from each year of the average school curriculum.
Reading through the first grade curriculum when my oldest was that age, I just kept thinking “We can work on that every day for a month…. or I can wait a few months until he’s older and teach it to him in a few days…” And this has worked without fail, going on a few years.
I have this weird feeling in my gut that we could actual fit the whole 13 years of K-12 into a few years between 15 and 18 (mostly because the vast majority of stuff that is taught for the first several years could be learned in a couple weeks by an attentive young adult). And the reason this *feels* like a bad idea is because the only experience we have with people who make it to that age without completing that much school are almost perfectly selected to not be diligent learners.
But then everything is made much more complicated by our… privilege is the word that comes to mind? Not all children have parents who are as attentive as my wife and I. I cannot imagine my kids not being literate, even if I never made an effort to teach them anything, because it’s basically impossible for a person to exist in our house without learning to read through osmosis. We just do too many activities that require reading. The same goes for basic math, and numerous other things, I’m sure. This makes a lot of schooling feel redundant because, “Why wouldn’t you learn to do that anyway?” and that’s just not an option for a lot of people.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/13/why-do-test-scores-plateau/
A twelfth-grader’s brain is more mature than a first-grader’s. Louis Benezet experimented with teaching children no math until seventh grade, after which it took only a few months’ instruction to get them to perform at a seventh grade level. It would sure be awkward if that was how everything worked.
I remember in elementary-through-high school being constantly annoyed about how math concepts I’d learned in lower grades were constantly being revealed as useless, incorrect or kind of harmful to my current understanding of math.
I could normally adjust pretty easily, but I remember that starting in 8th grade or so, most of the people who struggled to understand new concepts were mostly having trouble not because the new concept was more difficult, but because it seemingly contradicted something they’d previously been taught.
I think a significant number of people in my classes would have been substantially better off just learning math from first principles at say, age 15, than they were having to trudge through 9 years of traditional education.
I don’t remember anything in math through middle school or high school directly contradicting anything that came before.
What are some examples?
Contradict might be a bad word, but it definitely established certain principles of understanding that I saw people struggle to overcome.
Take for instance the basic math problem: 3 + X = 5; solve for X
I think I started seeing questions like this maybe in second or so grade. Definitely by fifth grade they were pretty common, and had been applied to operations other than addition, and had even moved past whole numbers so that you might see 4x=26, solve for X.
This created a pretty strong association in my classmates’ minds that X wasn’t really a variable so much as a mask obscuring another number. Once you see an X, you use the rest of the equation to figure out what X is. Even when you start getting into quadratic equations, it’s still all about trying to solve for X.
Then, at a certain point, you get to algebra, it’s revealed that no, actually f(x) is a function, x can be anything and it’s all about trying to model how the function behaves. Solving for f(x) = 0 is somewhat useful, but the purpose is no longer to solve for x.
I know multiple non-stem people who basically never made that jump and “solve for x” comprises their total understanding of math. I kind of feel like if they’d been taught from the very beginning that variables can, and in fact do, stand for anything in functions they would have been much better off.
Huh, I never noticed any confusion between those two uses of X.
My wife taught our daughter to read, largely using Doctor Seuss books, in particular a subversive text entitled “Hop on Pop.” Her brother, three years younger, observed the process and taught himself.
Hopping?
@Randy: Hopping on his father, David Friedman. Like he said , it’s a subversive book.
I would take my kids to at least a couple of educational psychologists (preferably with different backgrounds and education themselves) and ask them to figure out what seems like the best ideas for each of my particular children.
Periodically during their education I’d have them re-evaluated.
You might end up disappointed with the quality of the educational psychologists’ insights. Observing your kids yourself and just bothering to try to figure out stuff that works with them will yield plenty of fruit.
We will probably end up doing public school for basically social interaction and reality-check services, with actual learning handled by private tutors (there are lots of colleges in town to source affordable tutors from) and our own efforts. Teaching the children to think about school as basically a silly day-job and learning as what you do on your own when you’re interested in something or want/need to master a skill will be the goal.
In an ideal world, some kind of group home/unschooling effort with other interested parents, but I’m not sure how easy that would be to do here.
Legal restrictions notwithstanding, most areas in the US have very active homeschooling co-ops these days, and if there isn’t already one you might be surprised at how easy it is to start one if you’re willing to reach out to people.
Thanks! I hadn’t looked at this as we don’t plan on having kids for a few years, but I have to say the HSLDA website may actually be the most intuitively useful one I’ve come across recently.
Yeah, they do great work. We’ll be getting a lifetime membership when the kids are of age. Their research was also critical to my decision to move to Texas over Tennessee a few years ago.
In our case it was unschooling, with a lot of interaction of the kids with us. We alternated who put each of the two of them to bed, generally spent half an hour doing it, telling stories, or reciting poetry, or giving them simple math problems to solve in their head (two equations in two unknowns rigged to have simple integer answers), or talking about something. Lots of conversation at the dinner table. Encouraging them in what they found interesting. Unlimited internet access when the web became available and interesting, unlimited computer use, subject to available resources (initially only one computer in the household that all of us shared, later each of us had one).
For more on the subject, see the articles on my blog.
Initially they were in a small private school run on Sudbury Valley lines (unschooling), then when that developed problems done at home.
If one happens to be *cough* unusually lucky *cough* have their retired grandparents who live 40 feet away, have homeschooled four children, both have masters degrees (one in education, and desperately want to be involved in their education homeschool them.
That seems like it would work.
I’ve written a paper about how content policing on social media tends to penalize neutral and unbiased news instead of extreme points of view and misinformation (at least the way it’s implemented now): “News on Social Media: It’s not Real if I don’t Like it” http://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=1816
Right now, Facebook uses this crowdsources flags: users flags and stuff that gets flagged a lot is passed to expert fact checkers. From real Facebook data, I can see that most of the fact checkers get handed mainstream information. So I built up a model that can explain the data, and uses a mix of confirmation bias and homophily (= echo chambers). The model shows that extreme news don’t get out of their bubbles, thus they don’t get flagged, while mainstream news can percolate easily through the network, and so the extremists flag it.
I have only been censored once by Facebook, and it was for linking to inappropriate content, i.e. factual information in a forum I would very much describe as an echo chamber. One of the more enthusiastic participants also tried to cancel me by messaging my FB friends about how I was a nazi troll or something like that.
So while N=1, I think the flagging method only serves to eliminate contrary or unpopular views, and doesn’t serve any real purpose of eliminating false information.
(In this forum, I think the ‘Report’ button is mostly clicked by accident – hopefully in a uniformly random fashion 🙂
Were you censored by Facebook, or by the admins/moderators of a particular group?
One can argue that if the admins censor using tools provided by Facebook, then Facebook is a party to the censoring. It’s Facebook that ultimately decides what gets posted’ admins are just advising Facebook what they want censored.
It seems to unnecessarily muddy difference between “content banned sitewide” and “content banned in a specific group”.
@mathkoniecz
If you want to make that distinction, then I think you should ask “Was it banned sitewide or within a specific group?”
Places like Facebook really need meta-moderation, where you can flag flags, and people who are inappropriately flagging things get a timeout. And of course at some point actual Facebook employees need to be involved; any peer system can be rigged.
I recently had to rewrite a message to a friend, because without thinking I’d written “thank you for your concern”, but what I meant was “thank you for your concern”, not “fuck off and die in a fire”.
Internet-speak is weird.
If I’ve parsed you correctly that predates the internet by decades, if not centuries and flourishes all over.
“Thank you for your valuable feedback” from anyone in retail/customer service means either exactly that or “For the love of god go away”, for example.
Or my favorite, the many and varied meanings of “Yes, sir.” in the military.
Hey Eric T:
If 40 years from now my kid asks me what the social justice movement was about, what should I tell him?
I don’t see a decimal point in the thread number.
Yeah, I’m specifically only asking for the pro side here. I think that makes it fall short of the line.
I figure the future of the social justice movement definitely counts as a hot-button topic and should therefor go into the fractional threads.
Only asking for (and thereby allowing) one side of the discussion is incredibly frustrating for the people on the other side of that discussion.
@toastengineer
It’s the topic that is CW. Scott specifically says
Interesting you say “was”
There are two possible ways for that to happen. First, people will lose interest. Second, in my opinion more likely, a newer variant will appear under a new name and young people will move there. Either way, in 40 years words “social justice” will mean “what old people did back in 2020s”.
I’ll try to avoid any CW topics and just give a sort of generic answer:
It’s a bunch of people seeking for more equity in and fairness in a society we think is deeply lacking in those things.
Another hypothesis as to why the stock market has been going up in the face of the pandemic is that gamblers who normally bet on sports have put money in the stock market.
The always-excellent Matt Levine has coined the term Bored Markets Hypothesis for this theory, particularly with respect to specific stocks/sectors (e.g. bankrupt stocks that are suddently worth 100’s of $millions again). “You could have a model of bored retail traders as the ultimate value investors: When no one else ascribes any value to a company’s stock because it is literally bankrupt, they will buy it for the lulz.”
Can you toss a link to where he describes this?
That particular quote was from his June 9th column https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-09/the-bad-stocks-are-the-most-fun
I can’t find his first reference to BMH, but he’s talked about the theme a lot, e.g the first half of this column: here https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-30/if-you-re-bored-you-can-trade-stocks
Thanks!
Turns out it looks like it’s some crazy reddit thread of day traders.
I’m still not sure whether wallstreetbets is serious and/or ironic.
Well I think it’s safe to say it’s not serious.
This is one of those stories that sounds plausible to a layman, but is absolutely laughable to someone in the field. The premise that mom n pop retail investors are driving share prices of anything but bottom-barrel/unlisted/pink sheet equities is insane, and can be discounted immediately by looking at a depth of market book. “Volume” doesn’t get mentioned once, and that’s about all you need to know.
A very, very brief explainer: When someone talks about “moving a market” they’re generally referring to making a purchase so large that it gobbles up the existing float or liquidity and sends the price higher. Simple concept. Moving the market in a (very) thinly traded security might be $500k purchase. The percentage of (non-professional) investors who make $500k purchases is really, really small. And that’s for a thinly traded security. “Moving the market” on something listed on a major exchange is millions upon millions. A big pension buy might be $50m. And professionals don’t trade like directly like that–you’re going to shop an order that large around to other dealers and try to get that filled off market if you can–precisely to prevent running up the price.
TL:DR: This a bad analysis written by someone who’s never actually done the thing they’re writing about. I can push $1mm lot though pretty much anything in the S&P500 and a market maker will gobble that up with very little issue.
I agree that it’s mostly nonsense for this kind of retail flow to be driving the market as a whole. But I think it’s pretty clear that collectively they are driving a few stocks like HTZ that they pile into en-masse. Options also allow them to have outsize impact relative to their “investment”.
Can you provide a link to that HTZ detail? I still haven’t see any evidence that retail is driving anything except the usual retail shit, but I’ll admit I haven’t looked very hard. Not a big matt levine guy, so very possible I’ve missed something.
Matt’s article on HTZ is the only specific thing I’ve got handy to link to https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-12/if-you-want-hertz-have-some-hertz
The stock is extremely hard to borrow and was up 10x off its lows after announcing their bankruptcy plans.
So the debtors are asking permission to issue more shares and sell them in the open market (to put the proceeds towards a larger recovery payment on the bonds).
Beautiful, thanks! My prior comment reads more accusatory than I intended, so sorry for that. Part of the reason I dislike Levine so much are PopFin stories like this one.
The logical question here is: what % of transactions in HTZ are from “small dollar” traders, vs what’s being picked up on an big inst’l arb play vs what’s % distressed debt funds. He doesn’t even try to go there, it’s just an article about what might be a wHaCky cApITAl StAck! What about the 96k open positions on RH, is that the common? weeklies or leaps? What’s the short float? Why is there such a huge disconnect on the debt vs the equity pricing? (we know, but if you’re writing for the general public, they might not)
He’s a good writer, but so half-ass.
You seem to be requiring that the market be moved by individual, large size orders, which is a rather odd requirement.
I wanted to mention this too. Yes this is pretty CW, but Scott started it in the blogpost.
The event that started the protests seems pretty clear cut. Kneeing on somebodys neck until he is dead, is simply unexcusable, even if that person would be a violent criminal.
But some of the rethoric you get isn’t. For example I read several times Journalists writing “that could happen to me” and all I could think about in that moment was “oh, you get arrested for check fraud often?”
Seems pretty toxoplasmic to me.
I also don’t want to get into the CW but I will say one thing. You can argue with facts but you can’t argue with fear. If people tell you they are afraid of the police then it’s not rhetoric, they are afraid. And when otherwise innocent people are afraid of the people who are supposed to keep them safe then that’s a sign of a deep failing somewhere along the line regardless of the specifics.
That’s the point of Toxoplasm of Hate, isn’t it? When a educated middle class woman writes she is afraid to be killed during an arrest, that’s sounds pretty unrealistic to me. But it’s not at all what that sentence is about.
@DarkTigger:
> I could think about in that moment was “oh, you get arrested for check fraud often?”
In the interest of accuracy, I think it’s worth mentioning that the arrest involved the passing of counterfeit bills rather than check fraud. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the owner of the grocery store explaining the events that led up to Floyd’s death:
https://youtu.be/Lb70j0bNQQM?t=84
While most journalists probably commit check fraud, and while it’s not clear if Floyd was knowingly passing a counterfeit bill, it does seem reasonable that a journalist might fear unknowingly passing someone a counterfeit bill.
For non-US readers who aren’t familiar with the terminology, checks pieces of paper that typically prefilled with the name, address, and bank account details of the payer. The amount and name of the payee are typically written in at the point of sale, then the check is signed, with many establishments requiring a picture ID to prove identity. The payee deposits the check to their bank, and several days later the funds are taken from the payer’s account. Check fraud would typically involve either using someone else’s check, or writing checks on account in one’s own name for which one knows sufficient funds are not available. Counterfeit bills are imitations of the official government currency, and range from easy-to-identify fakes made on at home on a color printer with plain paper to extremely realistic versions printed by other nation-states that are almost impossible for an expert to distinguish from real bills. While the “bad fakes” are probably only passed intentionally, it’s quite possible that one might receive a “good fake” as change and pass it on accidentally.
Oops, a last minute edit messed that up. Please read that as “While most journalists probably don’t commit check fraud”.
Paging @Well…, here’s another item to add to your list of things to dislike about journalists.
ETA: ninjer’d by OP. I’m leaving it anyway because it’s funny 🙂
It wasn’t check fraud. It was a counterfeit, or at least suspected counterfeit, $20 bill.
Promising drugs against Covid-19 in a simulation? Sciencedaily, preprint
Abstract: [ … ] We applied a workflow of combined in silico methods (virtual drug screening, molecular docking and supervised machine learning algorithms) to identify novel drug candidates against COVID-19. We constructed chemical libraries consisting of FDA-approved drugs for drug repositioning and of natural compound datasets from literature mining and the ZINC database to select compounds interacting with SARS-CoV-2 target proteins (spike protein, nucleocapsid protein, and 2’-o-ribose methyltransferase). Supported by the supercomputer MOGON II, candidate compounds were predicted as presumable SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors. Interestingly, several approved drugs against hepatitis C virus (HCV), another enveloped (-) ssRNA virus (paritaprevir, simeprevir, grazoprevir, and velpatasvir) as well as drugs against transmissible diseases, against cancer, or other diseases were identified as candidates against SARS-CoV-2. This result is supported by reports that anti-HCV compounds are also active against Middle East Respiratory Virus Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. [ … ]
How are past experiences to give estimates that the found drugs will be effective in vitro and in vivo? And if so, what would be a realistic time estimate for production increase, and deployment, first to hospitals, critical personnel and vulnerable groups, later, given that some are already approved and have passed the required safety testing? There will be no clear numbers, sure, but still — any experts with a feeling of a well-trained gut? 🙂
Drug development is a very difficult field to make any strong predictions for. Having a list of drugs that might interact with the infection is a good start but it’s very much at the start of the process. If nothing else you have little evidence from the discovery phase whether the drug will have a positive or negative effect on the patient outcomes.
From all these drugs you’ll first have at least a initial trial to detect whether there’s an obviously negative outcome, and hopefully it’ll be sensitive enough to also demonstrate a positive outcome. A large percentage will fail this step, either by being harmful or not measurably beneficial, and be dropped. However, these trials tend to be relatively cheep to run and can be performed scattershot. Note that, if you’ve got a completely new molecule there will also need to be a number of safety trials to prove that the drug is not harmful to animals or people, in that order.
Once a company has a molecule that looks to be effective in the initial trials, they’ll move on to a full clinical trial. This will aim to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in patient outcomes over a wide population, generally hundreds to thousands of patients. A fair number drugs will also drop at this step, failing to replicate the initial success and having no measurable impact. This happens a lot in new drug development and a lot of these drugs will go on to be candidates for other uses, but that’s getting off topic and not very helpful for specifically COVID-19
Finally, now that they drug has been proven, it has to be also cost effective. This is beyond my knowledge as it’s getting into the production side, but the effect has to be greater than the cost to procure. While this is rarely an issue with infectious diseases which tend to be quite binary whether they help or don’t, it can still pose a limiter if you don’t have a good candidate. If survival is only increased by 1% after a $30,000 dollar therapy then healthcare providers are going to be a lot less keen to take up the final product.
The length of time this will all take is very elastic. Companies will be throwing bundles of money at their infectious disease pipelines right now, so it’ll definitely be faster than normal, but that doesn’t mean quick. Each trial takes a couple months to set up, run, analyse and then respond to. They can be performed concurrently but there’s an upper limit based on staffing (note, generally it’s nurses running clinical trials… they’re a little busy right now). If a drug breezes through all the trials and has an accelerated regulatory filing due to the pandemic it might be as little as a year from discovery to commercialization. If a company has to fall to the backup a few times, effect size is hard to demonstrate and the FDA gets persnickety, then it could be five.
FWIW, I think that a number of these issues are what made hydroxychloroquine especially appealing. It was a known drug with decades of widespread use, and it is cheap to manufacture and administer. The only thing which really needed to be evaluated was effectiveness, where trials could be performed very quickly.
Yeah, it was a reasonable idea. It was just a shame it became famous. There’s really no point talking up a drug on a national stage when the initial trials are still going on. The failure rate is so high that you’re almost certain to look like an idiot by the time the actual results are in.
And this lovely little factoid is what we have to thank for the countless conspiracy theories regarding how this drug is almost certainly super effective but they(big pharma and/or the politicians whom they control) don’t want you to know it – because then they couldn’t sell a much more expensive vaccine!
I’m sure it’s just because conspiracy theories in your own area hurt more than those about someone else’s, but every time I hear this one I just want to scream: “No they wouldn’t want you to know. That is why the market is set up to stop people from doing it!”
Right, because the people who own the one effective treatment/cure for COVID-19 would never raise the price once they learned that’s what they had.
Oh sure they will raise the label, but if its a reasonably well known generic then there will be twenty companies in India making it within the month for half the original price. Gouging is a serious problem in the Pharmaceutical world, but it is generally something that you only see in narrow markets where the cost of entry is much higher than the potential profits. See Valiant and Shkreli.
Considering the whole ‘we ran computer simulations that show that spike proteins kinda sorta look like they might bind to a haem group therefore SARS CoV 2 is obviously infiltrating red blood corpuscules’ study, I’m not overly optimistic.
I have a little bit of experience with Autodock from about 6 years ago. Docking programs are pretty hit or miss. Forget about whether this actually extends to in vivo. Even in the simple system that is being modeled, which is drug/protein or drug/part of protein, the interactions are modeled with so many approximations, that it’s not even clear that you’ll get a meaningful answer. So, basically what we get out of a docking algorithm is a list of drugs that have a slightly higher probability than average of doing something.
I also work with someone who is exploring machine learning for synthetic chemistry (not quite what they’re doing here, but related). It’s riddled with problems, but you can certainly make it look like it’s doing a good job.
Does this raise the question of how likely we are currently in a COVID-treatment-simulation?
I just read the the Turchin/”Ages of Discord” review, which I hadn’t seen before. Wow. The review expresses a reasonable understanding of how things get worse in the downward part of a cycle, and a lack of understanding of how they get better in the upward part. Pikkety is mentioned as a possible explanation: events like wars decrease inequality by destroying existing wealth. There’s another book I’ve been wanting to read, which seems to say something similar: The Great Leveller, by Walter Scheidel. There is an author Q/A and some excerpts from the book in The Economist, here, which begins:
Scary stuff. And the current pandemic seems to be making inequality worse rather than better.
I don’t think I’ve read the review you’re referring to, but based off your comment you may be interested in this? https://www.peterleeson.com/Human_Sacrifice.pdf
Praise be to george mason for this kind of thing
I meant Scott’s review of Turchin’s book, that Scott linked at the beginning of the post. I should have been more clear about that. I’ll look at the pdf you linked tomorrow, as it’s past my bedtime right now. It sounds interesting–thanks!
I haven’t read Turchin. But my impression from Scott’s review is that his theory doesn’t necessarily require some kind of exogenous wealth-destroying shock (e.g., a war) to reverse inequality; it’s entirely possible for this to be something elites “choose” to do in a rationally self-interested way as the tide of discontent rises. I gathered, at least, that that was basically Turchin’s explanation for the post-1890s reversal: Progressive Era reforms enabling a more widely shared prosperity. The problem is fitting that sort of homeostatic mechanism in with the other components of Turchin’s theory, like the notion of elite overproduction.
The other thing to mention is that the interest in Turchin’s having predicted the US reaching a high point of instability right now is tied to the “short” radicalism/moderation cycle, not the “long” inequality/equality cycle. And the mechanism regulating the former is a lot easier to conceptualize (whether you think it actually describes anything in reality or is just a neat model to play with).
As I understand it (again, from Scott’s review), in periods of relatively high consensus and low conflict moderation starts to look like complacency and lack of imagination, and gradually radicalism starts to win over more and more converts as people look to more extreme solutions to society’s problems. Eventually this reaches a local maximum of instability, at which point people start to associate radicalism more with its excesses and begin pulling back toward moderation as a proactive, rather than merely passive or inertial, stance.
This dynamic is essentially the subject of the 1983 film The Big Chill, which concerns a group of friends whose social life revolved around student radicalism in the years before 1970, but who now reconvene to discover that they’ve all since become to varying degrees actively pro-status-quo. And there’s a sort of quasi-Turchinian determinism to the way their attitude to this change is universally like, “Huh? How the hell did that happen to us?”, rather than chilling out being presented as a fully conscious decision at the individual level.
There is a strong assumption here that inequality is a problem, and it should be rectified. In particular, the view that the rich getting richer is a problem in and of itself, even if the poor is also getting less poor (as implicitly espoused in that interview) drives me up the wall. What’s so scary about the pie getting bigger and bigger, but the rich’s slice getting bigger faster than the poor’s?
The core assumption is that most people care about relative wealth more than absolute wealth. That is to say, that they’d oppose a plan where their neighbor gets $100 and they get $10 even if the alternative plan was that both you and your neighbor get $5.
I’m not really sure if that’s right or not, but that’s the base logic underlying any and all complaints about inequality.
That’s precisely what drives me up the wall. Especially when thoughtful middle-class political/economic theorists endorse rather than condemn that approach.
The origin of why I’m annoyed by it so much is that I grew up in a post-communist country. It was made very clear to me early on how capitalism works better for everyone (including the poor) than socialism even though it has more inequality.
I guess the reason many people care about inequality and relative wealth is that for a fixed total, more relative wealth translates to more absolute wealth, and less inequality translates to more total utility due to the decreasing marginal utility of money. So people focus on (in)equality, and sometimes they get so used to it that they forget that it was originally an instrumental value (useful only to a point) towards the terminal value of welfare, rather than a terminal value.
For some of these people, increasing their relative wealth (if they are taking a personal view) or equality (if taking a societal view) actually transforms into a terminal value, and they won’t go back to using absolute welfare as the terminal value even if they recognize that relative wealth was originally just a heuristic. For others, welfare (personal or overall) remains the terminal value, they just got so used to thinking in relative terms that they say silly things like that the rich getting richer is bad—but they may return to thinking in terms of absolute considerations if reminded that when total wealth is not fixed, relative wealth is only an imperfect proxy for absolute wealth.
I suppose it eventually reduces to ‘it’s a zero sum game’ but people complain about using money to buy power in zero sum games e.g. megacorp lawyer armies, regulatory capture etc, which seems like a different thing to people just wanting to keep up with the joneses.
Yeah, but caring more about relative wealth means that you don’t really care about wealth at all, you care about status.
Or you don’t trust that your neighbor with their new $100 won’t use it to pay someone to kneecap you, since you and your neighbor were competitors for something. One has to defend against other people who care about relative wealth.
Equality is insurance against defection.
Here in America we have the Second Amendment for that.
If wealth is a synonym for utility, and people derive utility from status, then status is a component of wealth.
Plus, status can be used to secure wealth.
Having read The Great Leveller, I will say that it’s argument is so well balanced that it doesn’t really present a strong end position in the end. The main thing I got out of the book was “the unending resilience of inequality”, sure the Black Death reduced inequality the first time it really hit Europe hard, but inequality bounced back within a couple of generations and the second and third time the plague hit the impacts weren’t nearly so pronounced. Similarly, China massively levelled out inequality (in a bad way!) during the 20th century revolutions, but it has sprung back very quickly.
I would expect the pattern of inequality over time to be different in a society where income was largely from property than a society where it was mostly from labor. In the U.S. at present, as I understand it, income inequality is mostly driven not be wealthy people clipping coupons but by doctors, lawyers, and other high priced professionals.
In that situation, inequality could increase relatively quickly if the relative payoff to uncommon skills increased quickly, perhaps as common skills, physical strength, say, became more and more replaceable by machinery.
It could also increase, perhaps more slowly, due to assortative mating.
I was a late child, and my puberty overlapped my mother’s menopause. Yeah.
Didn’t do stupid stuff other than lots of arguing and occasional yelling, but I did have recurring fantasies of being away from home one way or another. Was _extremely_ happy to be off to college and to live alone. Ironically, when I got older and managed to see things in perspective I realized I had/have a very good relationship with my parents, both subjectively and statistically.
Does anyone know if there are any studies on an individual’s ability to read comprehensively and quickly? I want to know if this skill is reliably measurable, and if so, if it’s permanently trainable, and if so, what the best methods for training it are. Currently, my reading speed is about the same as that of your typical third grader, which makes me kinda hate reading things. I’d be interested in increasing this, but I also want to make sure I’m not wasting my time practicing methods or tactics that won’t get me anywhere.
Studies: no. Anecdatum: yes! My brother and I are pretty similar in a lot of ways–and he doesn’t have dyslexia, or anything similar like that–but I’m a way faster reader than he is. The difference we’ve been able to suss out is that he pronounces each word in his head as he comes across it, whereas I don’t. I basically treat each word as a hashcode that maps to a concept, and don’t need to pronounce it in order to understand it.
This site (with which I have no affiliation) is a good way to practice reading without internal vocalization. Just relax your eyes/mind and see the words. Once you can do that, the only remaining trick is being able to do that by moving your eyes instead of letting the page do that for you. At that point, you can blaze through paragraphs with ease.
I suddenly realize that, despite focusing a lot on my internal monologue, I must be doing something close to hashcode reading, because had to force myself to mentally pronounce everything while reading The Name of the Wind (I wanted to savor it. It’s a really good book).
On the other hand, I often get stuck writing things because I’m looping through pronouncing each bit instead of actually writing.
Agreed! It blows my mind that the conversation about the moon in the Fae section of Wise Man’s Fear is made up of rhyming couplets, yet the formatting of the text does not highlight this in any way, and I didn’t even notice it on my first read.
I just hope to be able to read Doors of Stone before I die.
As I recall, Jo Walton has mentioned sneaking sonnets into her prose fiction.
A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson is set in a universe where everything Shakespeare wrote is literally true. The chapters end with rhymed couplets. For all I know, there might be some stealth sonnets.
That summary undersells the weirdness. Because everything Shakespeare wrote is true, including the anachronisms, the Industrial Revolution is starting during the English Civil War and the Puritans believe the English-speaking people in 13th century BC Athens were Israelites on their way to Britain. These are the bad guys and the good guys are Catholic and High Anglican Luddites trying to save the fairies.
There’s also a cameo by Holger Dankse in an interdimensional pub.
Does that site actually help you read faster? I’ve always been told that reading fast means that (in addition to not subvocalizing) you’re using information from surrounding sentences/paragraphs to more quickly decipher the intended meaning of a word. Training to read word for word seems like it would be harmful for that.
Also, I’m a pretty strong subvocalizer (I basically can’t read anything without hearing the words in my head), but even at 400 words per minute, the maximum that site allows, I can easily follow along with the text. So if the idea is to break you out of the habit of subvocalizing by forcing you to read really quickly, it’s failing at least on me.
It looks as if the underlying technology/app for that page (a program called spritz) allows for as much as 1000 wpm, and that page itself seems to allow 800 wpm if someone is logged into spritz. I was too lazy to actually verify this works, but if so 1000 wpm seems pretty respectable for anybody.
That’s the idea of the site, but I don’t know why they limited it to 400wpm. Could’ve sworn that it let you do 800wpm before…
Regarding word-by-word, I’m not an expert on this by any means, but there are definitely limits on how fast you can read if you do it that way. According to this paper, our eyes perform about 3 saccades per second, meaning that if comprehension time is not an issue, we max out at about 180wpm if reading each word one-by-one. Googling “average reading speed” gives 300wpm, so quick readers definitely do not just look at each word in order, but chunk by chunk. This is evident by the “Paris in the the springtime” phenomenon, where we skip the second “the” automatically; anyone evaluating each word one-by-one would not make that mistake.
I just don’t see how I could read like that and still retain as much.
practice reading without internal vocalization.
I can do this fine. Until I realize I am doing it! Then I can’t stop vocalizing the words in my head!
A lot of the other comments are about learning to stop subvocalizing, but I say lean into it, and simply work to read aloud faster. As a part of competitive debate, we had to learn to read evidence excerpts as fast as possible, and that ended up making us able to read and think even faster.
So: Read aloud with a pen in your mouth. Read excerpts aloud backwards. Read excerpts aloud, but only every other word. Read an excerpt but say a one-syllable filler word in between every word. Do those two drills, but reading backwards. Do drills again but with a pen in your mouth. And then a regular reading, just as fast as you possibly can.
This eventually forces you to be able to comprehend the next word while saying the current word.
In my own experience, I get a check for defiance towards the law (I pirated things online and occasionally trespassed with friends), a check for self-absorption (I overestimated how moral of a person I was, and I had a small sense of entitlement at times), and a check for risk-seeking (I took up skateboarding, did some more heavy-duty martial arts, plus the whole trespassing thing). But I wasn’t very moody (I never have been), I wasn’t interested in my own personal status (I was introverted and already felt fairly comfortable in my friend group), and I largely respected my family (my dad, at least).
My prediction is that some of these natural changes are more prevalent in people with certain personality types. Readers of this blog are probably more introverted, and I think it’s mostly extroverted people who manifest status obsession during their teenage years; so I don’t think you’ll see as many testimonies of this trait in the people who reply to your comment. Introversion will probably also make some risks less accessible to people (like having sex and buying drugs), so others may report that they were less risk-seeking as well.
How bad is just suppressing the hell out of bad memories/intrusive thoughts/bad emotions really? The psychiatric establishment takes a dim view of it, but then they would wouldn’t they?
The best seems to be to rewrite the memories in a way that neuters the emotional impact. The second best to suppress them. The worst is to merely relive them, which is something that psychiatry has historically favored over suppressing memories.
I’ve always thought of emotional trauma as being analogous to physical injury. If it’s severe enough, best to leave it alone for a while. Eventually it should be (gradually) exercised to aid healing.
What does it even mean to suppress them, in practice? I don’t feel like I have any control over when they arise, and while I have some ability to choose between giving in to the urge to reject and fight them, and mindful acceptance, which is less painful but requires more metacognitive awareness and effort, neither option feels like it’s successfully suppressing the intrusive thoughts, in the sense of causing them to arise less often or go away faster.
Therapist here, love this topic.
I would echo [Thing]’s question what does it mean to suppress them in practice? What we mean by suppress tends to not be very precise and there’s an important distinction between traumatic re-experiencing and ruminating on negative or obsessive thoughts.
There’s not really a one-size-fits-all answer to “what’s the best way to handle this icky stuff that comes in”? Partly because the icky stuff has different origin stories and partly because we all vary a bit in what forms of “handling” feel most possible for us.
A huge amount of the tools and tactics of therapy revolve around this question of what helps this person deal with the icky content in their head? Very mainstream modes of therapy do sometimes advocate for simple “thought-stopping” or “distraction” techniques in the face of chronic worrying or self-critical thinking or other negative content that circles back and back. Those could be considered suppression techniques.
There’s a world of tools beyond that — replacing thoughts and images, mindfulness practices, working with the thoughts creatively, bringing other internal voices to speak back to the thoughts, using body-based techniques to dismantle “rumination” as a self-protection habit, and on and on.
An important factor for many people it seems to me is awareness of what’s going on so that a person’s default mode doesn’t just keep running in the same way. A person can have a self-shaming thought running in the background (maybe triggered by something or not) and in suppressing the thoughts, they simply become irritable and defensive in their interactions with others, which leaves them feeling isolated and less capable, which makes the shame voices louder. So in that case, suppression may be kind of like a person with a chronic headache taking Tylenol over and over again when maybe they have really high blood pressure or are having a stroke. It’s not getting to the source of the problem and the problem will just keep showing up and proliferating adjacent problems.
A person who has brought their self-critical voice into awareness and sees what makes it louder and quieter, how it plays out in their life, what kinds of expectations or beliefs feed it, and has decided they don’t want that voice driving the bus of their life quite so much — when that person hears the self-shaming get loud, they can say to themselves, “this voice isn’t helping me, I’m choosing to ask it to be quiet, and I’m going to actively work to give it less real estate in my head.” That person is more likely to notice when they are feeling more irritable or defensive with loved ones and to ask whether that’s happening because they’ve been running a self-critical default mode in the background more that day. They’re more likely to then ask why that’s happening — tired, hungry, stressed, some recent difficulty? And they are more likely to opt to cut themselves some slack as a result of that examination. And the practice of cutting themselves some slack (or getting rest or food or whatever) is likely to quiet the negative thinking rather than to have it amplified through unskillful interactions with others.
So a person’s degree of self-awareness when encountering unwanted thoughts has a big impact on what suppression means and how it plays out.
Traumatic re-experiencing is related to but somewhat different from unwanted negative thoughts we can ruminate on. In my own practice, I would say tending to traumatic re-experiencing requires additional pieces of work and that suppressing painful memories without a larger treatment plan or understanding about what this material is about is problematic.
In general, if a person is repeatedly re-living either the experience of or the painful emotions associated with a trauma (and I would include things short of life-threatening, like school bullying or experiences of humiliation in here), then just continuing to suppress the feelings when they re-surface is not going to help them recover. There are tons of ways for a person to productively “process” a traumatic memory so that it doesn’t keep intruding and none of them is inherently better than another. But just “stuffing it” is more likely to lead to depression, substance abuse, and other problems.
Pure guesswork, but I’d worry that once you start suppressing bad memories, you’ll get used to it and start suppressing ever more trivial bad memories until you’re just ignoring any negative information that comes in.
Yes, and it also tends to cause emotional numbing at the other end as well and so tends to reduce the capacity for joyful feelings.
There is a substantial cost in evasive behaviour, flashbacks, being permanently tense and cramped, bad sleep, maybe more in the areas of relationship and work. Anxiety also has a tendency to generalize.
No comparison to the serenity after shedding that burden though long and gentle and/or intense moments of kathartic therapy, from before of which it is nearly impossible to imagine what the difference will be. The psychiatric establishment position is a Chesterton’s fence.
In 2010, Santa Fe art dealer Forrest Fenn hid a treasure chest filled with gold somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He made a poem with clues leading to its location and, through a book and various media appearances, invited people to hunt for it. About a week ago he announced that someone had solved the clues and found the chest, ten years after the treasure hunt was started.
Since then things have gotten a bit crazy. There has been no word on who the finder was, or (more interestingly) where it was, and Fenn himself has been unresponsive to requests for more info. Not so much as a photo of the chest or of its location have been revealed. It’s only been a week, but many people are warming up to the idea that the whole thing was a hoax. Various even wilder theories have been proposed on the big forums about the treasure hunt. (And I mean wild. I think people with crazy far-fetched ideas end up overrepresented in these online communities. Some solutions to the poem I’ve seen over the time I’ve been following this are pretty bizarre.)
Since the treasure hunt was declared over, multiple people have claimed to be the finder, though none particularly credibly. There is a woman suing Forrest Fenn and the anonymous finder because she believes her computer was hacked and her correct solution was stolen. There’s also a mysterious website claiming the treasure was found already in August and auctioned off in May.
I got into this too late, just a few months before it was found, but even now that it’s been found I’m still enjoying following the rabbit hole. Any fellow Forrest Fenn treasure hunters here?
I’ve watched it from the sidelines, I never got involved.
Yeah, I’m not sure why, but the online portion of this crowd was really bizarre. My first exposure to the site was a reddit thread where someone posted about how they knew their “solve” was correct because they’d found a special message from Fenn while out looking. The message they’d found was a particular pile of stones that couldn’t have formed naturally. The person posted a picture of the stones, then said they’d cleared it to keep other’s off their tracks.
The picture the person posted was of a trail cairn; something that hikers leave for eachother to mark a trail path that’s not super obvious. This person had not only not known what it was, but had also destroyed it, potentially making the path harder for fellow hikers. That’s an extreme example, but that same kind of basic ignorance when it came to the outdoors seemed to be endemic in the community.
I am very confident it’s either a hoax, or that he fed the solution to a friend.
The question whether the whole thing is a hoax interests me; I’m reminded of a very different and very similar puzzle, the epitaph from Umineko, which despite being cruelly geographically specific did have a solution, and one person, apparently, hit very close to it. Gwern discusses the story on his book reviews page, if your browser can handle it. The relevant quote is from fn. 1:
Gwern himself calls it “the equivalent of a Sherlock Holmes mystery.”
If you’re suffering from Gender Dysphoria or work with people that do, live in California, and are trying to get insurance to approve related health care expenses, I recommend you look into Independent Medical Reviews at the California Department of Managed Health Care.
An Independent Medical Review in CA is when you insurance does not approve a procedure, you can appeal to the state and an independent group of state experts will review the case and either uphold or overturn your insurance company’s decision. If they overturn it, the company is required to pay for it. The state has provided a wonderful dataset on this for every case in the past 20 years, https://data.ca.gov/dataset/independent-medical-review-imr-determinations-trend1.
I was doing some unassociated research and was surprised to discover that Gender Dysphoria is one of the best predictors of whether a decision will be overturned or not. There’s been 132 cases regarding Gender Dysphoria and in 116 of those cases, ~88%, the insurance company’s refusal was overturned. This means that people suffering from Gender Dysphoria looking to get insurance to cover facial feminization surgery, mastectomy, breast augmentation, or other services have a great likelihood of forcing their insurance to cover these procedures by appealing to the state.
I don’t have the background or connections to look further into this but I’m posting this in the hope that someone with a personal or professional interest in this can get some utility and help some people with this.
This is cool to know!
How’s everyone’s meditation practice going? Is it unusual if, after about 20 or 30 meditation sessions, I don’t notice any difference in my day to day life at all? Everyone keeps saying that I will notice benefits like greater focus or mindfulness outside of meditation and I…. haven’t, at all, even a bit?
Overall I’ve gotten a bit better at focusing during the meditation itself, but not much better, and I still have a ton of random thoughts bouncing around. And, if I’m worked up or excited about something prior to meditation, I literally cannot do it at all and have to stop early. Is any of this unusual? Would love to hear what benefits, if any, more experienced practitioners have gotten out of it
Regular meditation has made me better at recognizing intrusive thoughts as intrusive in and of themselves. I’m not sure it’s made me any better at dealing with them, but knowing they’re not part of my normal, healthy internal monologue is a big step forward for me.
I’m sure I will get mocked endlessly for this specific admission…
I find the Headspace app programs moderately beneficial (I know, I’m sure there are better options). I use the app maybe 85% successfully every morning as part of my wake up routine.
I don’t know if would say I’m more focused, but i would say that i am more able to be objective and rational throughout the day
Probably no.
For me it took about 6 months of daily practice before I felt any difference in my daily life. I suggest learning to enjoy the process itself (as unpleasant as it is) and to be reallly fucking patient with this.
As for benefits, for me personally they are fucking incredible
1)Pleasure from sensory inputs increases three times
2)Control over my thoughts and mental states
3)very heightened ability to focus in work and social situations
So it did wonders for me, but this isn’t controlled study so YMMV
I like to use the analogy of meditation as “internal weightlifting”. It’s very rare to see progress after 20-30 actual weightlifting sessions — it takes months to see progress for many people. Now imagine that weightlifting is invisible and going on inside your head — how long should it take?
At 3x/week, 20-30 sessions is 7-10 weeks. I would expect to see noticeable progress in 7-10 weeks of focused lifting, particularly in someone who was also paying attention to diet and who was new to lifting, coming back from a break, or ramping up to a peak.
hey, I’ve been meditating pretty regularly for the last 3 years, including a couple 10 days retreats. I was meditating irregularly for many years before that.
I saw an impact of meditation on my life a few times, especially after periods of intensive practice or when I pickup a practice after a break, but they quickly wear off and in general I don’t see any sustained effect on my life. I think value of meditation (and many other things – psychotherapy, psychedelics) is greatly exagerated. You will always find a few people who swear by it, but for most people, if they have an average level of self-awareness to begin with, meditation will not change much.
But neither will any other hobby, so I still meditate. I love the moments of deep peace of mind that I find when I practice regularly. I think it’s better to sit on the cushion than to watch another netflix show. I don’t hope for a radical betterment though.
To your question about focus during the session – 20 or 30 meditation sessions is really early, especially if these sessions were shorter than an hours and spread through 20-30 days or longer. The minds learns to settle if you allow it, but it takes time. My best sessions are usually on days 3/4/5 of an intensive retreat where I meditate for 8h a day.
I meditated on my own for about 6-8 months and didn’t notice any real changes, and dropped the practice.
Recently however I tried the “Waking Up” guided meditation app by Sam Harris, and it’s pretty great. I’m about 24 days in and I’ve definitely noticed significant benefit. The first 6-7 days are free and after that there’s an annual charge, but if you want a free month Keybase or Reddit-PM me your email address; as a paid subscriber I can share a free month.
Hmm. Call me an anecdote for the other side- I agree with the model of meditation as internal/mental weightlifting, and just like weightlifting, you can see some results quite quickly if you don’t have a great deal of strength built up already.
When I first started meditating (in high school), I noticed differences outside of active meditation within about 1-2 months, but only when I made a deliberate effort to “exercise” the same mental routines/skills/metaphorical-muscles that were used during active meditation. This was encouraged- my meditation began from a martial arts instructor who was trying to get people to take the mental attitude from meditation into sparring matches. Eventually, over longer periods of time, some of the focus/clarity/acceptance benefits bled out into larger parts of my life, even without deliberate attention to them.
A decade or two later, how much I can get that effect in the rest of my life correlates pretty well to how much I’ve been meditating lately- it’s very frequent and noticeable in my day-to-day life if I’ve been engaging in serious, regularly scheduled sessions (3-5 times a week). When I get lazy and don’t do it, or do it for short, rarely scheduled sessions, I notice less day-to-day effect.
I try to pray a Rosary daily, which is a kind of meditative practice among other things.
What I find is that I can see the effects when I look back at my week, but am almost never aware of them in the moment. It’s not “I feel more focused”–it’s “huh, I didn’t do {random impulsive thing that I try to avoid} nearly as much as usual this week”, and “someone was rude and aggressive and it didn’t leave me angry all day”.
I don’t think I changed very much in any of those ways during my teen years. I am 30 now and would probably rate myself as higher on all six now than when I was a teen. Though I will note that I started puberty very late compared to my age cohort, and my life isn’t going as well now as it was then.
If you’re in Philly, we’ll be having an outdoor SSC solstice gathering at our home on June 20th. We can host up to 10 individuals or households while remaining comfortably socially distant. Details on our Groups page!
SSC Philadelphia
True or false: People have been heedlessly taking down Chesterton’s Fences for hundreds of years, so they must be doing it for a good reason, and unless we know that reason, we shouldn’t try to make them stop.
Interesting thought experiment. It reminds me of an objection to pragmatism I came up with when I was an undergrad where it seemed to me that rejecting pragmatism as a theory of truth was a useful belief for anyone who was interested in learning more about the real world.
I think Chesterton would argue that “heedlessly taking down Chesterton’s Fences” isn’t really a fence, since nobody propped it up in the first place. It’s not a part of our societal creed that we routinely take down fences that don’t serve an immediately apparent purpose: it’s just something that naive people happen to do when they lose respect for their current societal creeds.
You could also argue that we actually don’t have a history of taking down Chesterton’s Fences. We just have a history of people wanting to do it, then failing to do it when they can’t meet their burden of proof. I’d need to think about this some more.
Like many philosophical principles, Chesterton’s Fence is just a more sophisticated defense of ‘common sense’, e.g. the stuff you thought was obviously true and correct when you were growing up.
True in general, still need to beware in each individual case. The general argument against fences in modernity is that things have changed dramatically, and since (for example) agriculture moved from a 99% of population to under 4%, chances are good the bull is somewhere in a bull factory, and not in front of you. This is true.
But when you find yourself in front of a fence, you still should ask yourself the question. Not understanding the purpose of the fence is a potentially dangerous situation. Yes, if the fence looks old the prior HAS changed to pushing it down, especially if you do it from a bulldozer. But don’t forget, even at the height of modernity it still turned out AIDS was god’s punishment for homosexuality.
There’s also another phenomenon here. Many of the bulls left are very slow running these days. You could actually talk about a generic “bull debt”, akin to technical debt. You take down a fence and cure disease, feed people, make them more free and happier. And 30 years later you have depressed, fat, single unhappy people.
Was it worth taking the fence down? Hesitantly, yes. Should we strive to understand where the bull was? Hell yes. And if we manage to catch the next ones before they slowly gore us, even better.
10 points to Slytherin!
The changes in our culture layer rest on a base layer. The base layer is something about energy – physical processes.
If you were to cook a food the choice of heat application could be yes or no at time points. The business has a start – an end. There would be a bound – not too slow not too fast to prevent poisoning or burning. Inside a range the process might be preference.
We’re trying to not give the Universe indigestion.
I’d say “heedlessly” and “for a good reason” are mutually exclusive. Also cows knock over fences when they can, and they’re not smart enough to have good reasons.
We can also check historical revolutions, and compare the results of the ones with post-revolution plans going in to the ones with “we’ll figure it out as we go” attitudes, see which ones work out well and which ones turn into tyrannical bloodbaths, and extrapolate that into how important it is to understand the purpose of the fence.
I’m afraid you’ll have to prove this. Then, you’ll need to prove that things didn’t go wrong when they have, as opposed to when they’ve been *carefully* taking down Ch’s Fences.
I think the answer is hidden in the construction of your question and of the Chesterton’s Fence thought problem itself.
Background assumptions:
A Chesterton’s Fence has implied knowability of purpose, and once someone knows that purpose they are cleared of CF objections. The point is to fill out one’s knowledge of purpose, and to then justify one’s taking down of the fence based on that knowledge. The point is to prevent good, useful fences from being taken down and the risk of this is thought to be enough to justify the increased responsibility of the reformer.
The fence in the thought problem is not the only fence in existence. Each fence has or lacks it’s own justification for existing; defeating a single fence does not justify tearing down all fences. It’s probable that the a foolish reformer actually sometimes comes into existence by seeing other fences needfully taken down and creating a false algorithm of “fence tearing = good”, and that this over-simplification is the failing of a reformer. On the obverse, a successful defense of a single fence doesn’t defend all fences from knowledge-based destruction, and a “fences = good” oversimplification is the failure mode of a conservative.
A Chesterton’s fence-taker-downer states that he “really doesn’t see the use of it” and wants to pull it down. He doesn’t have implied knowability of purpose; we know his purpose, which is to destroy things he doesn’t immediately see the use for.
Implications:
1. Your reformers aren’t the same as Chesterton’s reformers, or your question has already answered itself.
If your reformer is “known heedless” and would answer as Chesterton’s does, we already know his reasons; he likes tearing shit he doesn’t understand down. He thinks that’s a good idea under a general algorithm. We are justified to block him from doing so if we deem his stated purpose to be harmful against useful fences.
If your reformer is “assumed heedless”, and we don’t know his purpose in tearing down fences, then we need to figure out if our assumption was right, but we also have a guy who doesn’t fall under CF’s assertions in the first place.
2. Heedless Reformers are a monolith, Assumed Heedless Reformers are individuals.
All heedless reformers have the same motivation: they don’t like things like fences and unless they are somehow forced to know a justification for a particular fence will, unchecked, wander around tearing down all fences regardless of purpose. They are thus resisted as a group – if you run into a heedless reformer, you don’t let him tear down fences at all until he proves himself heedfull.
Assumed heedless reformers cannot be assumed to be a group that can have done things for “hundreds of years” as you state. Like fences, they each have a potentially unique purpose, and like fences each reformer’s purpose is individually contained and is not necessarily justified or condemned based on defeating the purpose of another reformer.
3. Reformer-defeaters have a lesser responsibility to ask the purpose of reformers, assumed-heedless reformers have an greater responsibility to tell.
If I see a guy tearing down fences, I need to ask him why he’s doing that, but I’m justified in stopping him until I can find this out if I’m currently using the fence or know that others are. The fence already exists and might not be easily rebuilt; he is proposing the change. I can’t be justified in resisting him forever if he turns out to have well-reasoned justifications for tearing down the fence, but I get to know why he’s doing it before he causes irreparable damage. Building is expensive; demolition is cheap. Wandering livestock cannot always be recovered.
On the flip, the reformer has to inform people of why he’s tearing down the fence unless his purpose is self-evident and immediately necessary. If he doesn’t, anyone who knows or suspects the fence has a purpose is justified in stopping him.
Stories:
Heedless:
Assumed Heedless, Justified, non-immediate:
Assumed Heedless, justified, immediate
Assumed Heedless, unjustified, unimmediate
Assumed Heedless, unjustified, immediate:
Assumed Heedless, non-informative:
I feel like Scott had a post with this thesis a few months ago? Or maybe it came up in the comments?
This seems to be the center of the argument for and against the Enlightenment.
You have misread Chesterton. There is sure to be (or have been) a reason, but there’s no guarantee that it was a good one.
This is correct. We shouldn’t try to make them stop until we know why they are doing it. Fortunately, we’ve known why they are doing it since at least Chesterton’s time. And it isn’t a good reason. It’s wanting to think of themselves as cleverer than their parents, and wanting to change the world without all that bothersome “due diligence” that keeps one from making the world worse. Reason understood, determined not to be good, get on with tearing down that particular fence.
> without all that bothersome “due diligence”
One thing comes to mind is that the “due diligence” itself has a cost to perform. And it’s not possible to compare the cost of the due diligence itself to the costs and benefits of the action being taken. Sadly, it’s very possible for the due diligence costs to dwarf the net downside (or upside) of tearing down a particular fence, and you won’t know until after that cost has been absorbed in the first place. There’s probably an argument to be made here for exactly the opposite of Chesterton’s Fence.
This seems a little intense considering that the due diligence being asked for is “don’t merely assume that anything you don’t understand is counterproductive”.
Chesterton’s fence doesn’t demand absolute proof that intervention X creates better results than Status Quo Y; it demands and you at least sort of have any idea why Status Quo Y exists in the first place before you burn it down because “old things are bad, new things are good” or similar.
It’s called “Move fast and break things”.
@ArbitraryRenaissance
I find it useful to separate truth and usefulness.
I was a very mild teenager with almost no typical teenage problems, part of this is surely that my social life largely did not extend outside of school, which seems fairly a-typical for other people/teens, but also matches my experience at the various jobs I have had. I had friends at school, people I would talk to in all of my classes, people who I would eat lunch with, etc. We would joke and laugh, and I think most of them would call me ‘friend’ without hesitation. Then school was over, and I went home and played video games and such and largely did not communicate with my school ‘friends’ until I was back at school. I could get good grades without doing any of my homework or studying so the fact that all I did was play video games and watch TV didn’t actually create much friction with my parents. I was a latch-key kid as well and would simply lie if pressed and claim to be doing my homework first thing when I got home, instead of just not doing it/doing it at school. I had a bit of a problem with skipping school, but this was during the rise of the cell phone but before it was standard, and the confluence of my parents getting all of their communications on their cell phones but the school still holding our home phone, plus something was wrong with our home phone such that the schools auto-dialer absent report function did not work. All together these things prevented my bad habit from ever actually being known to my parents, which potentially headed off a classic ‘teenager fight’ a few other things like that, and all and all I would say I got through middle school and high school with only a handful of conversations that needed a raised voice.
I am a second child, and I would say my older sibling had a more typical but still milder than media presented, teenage life.
Well that explains everything.
Making the next couple of fractional threads CW-free might be an option. Though I’d understand Scott not wanting the extra moderation burden.
I’ve thought for some time that we would be better off splitting up the discussion a bit. Current American politics, in particular, tends to bring out some of our most vehement posters, and it just goes on and on. If we had one CW-allowed thread per week, and one non-CW thread per week, both those of us who want the politics and those who don’t would always have a fairly current thread to use for our discussions.
Or if we really don’t want to reduce the number of CW-allowed threads per cycle, we could switch from 3+1 every two weeks to 3+2 every two weeks.
A third option would be to split the threads by topic area, rather than CW/non-CW. If we had four areas (Politics&Philosophy, Science&Technology, Art&Entertainment, This&That), most of the “CW” would be in Politics&Philosophy.
What exactly is the problem we are trying to fix? As far as I can tell, people have been generally civil in these threads. Is it just volume? If so, isn’t it better to split threads by topic, so have one fractional thread dealing with American politics, and another for everything else, for instance.
I take that as a ‘yes’, and that you agree that having separate OTs for specific topics would solve this?
@Ketil: I’m just amused by it. If it were me, I’d be happy to get so many comments. It’s Scott’s call how he feels about getting 2,463 comments to hidden blog comment threads if and only if people are allowed to discuss the CW.
> 2,463 RESPONSES TO OPEN THREAD 155.75
Like you had anything better to do.
2,463 RESPONSES TO OPEN THREAD 155.75
😀
There are three parts to the problem: volume, lack of selectivity, and tone.
Volume is simple: this is a very active forum, with a lot of posters saying many things. Lack of selectivity is about the interface: this system makes it hard to read selectively. If you want to follow along, you get exposed to pretty much everything that’s said. You don’t have to read every post in detail, but you do see all the posts. Finally, there’s tone. There are some posters here who seem to be angry all the time, and the topic of American cultural politics is where I see them at their worst. There’s just no end to the perfidy of those darn leftists, is there? Wading through the resulting vitriol just gets tiresome. It’s fine that they are saying what they are saying. I am not calling for them to be kicked out. What they have to say is sometimes interesting. But I could stand to see a lot less of it.
This combination of factors (volume, lack of selectivity, and tone) are why I am suggesting splitting up the discussion somehow. This wouldn’t be a problem if we had an order of magnitude less volume, or we were using a more sophisticated system that made it easy to read by thread, or the discussion were being carried out a bit differently.
>There are some posters here who seem to be angry all the time, and the topic of American cultural politics is where I see them at their worst.
I’d argue that the problem is not the ones who are angry all the time. It’s the ones who are perfectly pleasant so long as they stick to non-CW topics.
There’s just no end to the perfidy of those darn leftists, is there?
‘Tis yourself that said it! 🙂
Look, we are getting very nearly close to finally having a government in my country after the election four months ago, and I don’t trust any of the three parties concerned, including my own.
I’m equal-opportunity perfidy, me!
Y’all named a Party Fail.
In a satirical Irish TV program from decades ago (Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, on RTE) that party was named “Feel and Fall” which is fairly close to the correct pronunciation.
The volume of the open threads has become overwhelming, and I don’t have anything cogent to say about policing or social justice. I would love science/technology and arts/entertainment threads to further explore my own particular indulgences with intelligent people.
The volume is certainly voluminous, but the upside is that connections can be made between very disparate ideas coming into conflict that lead to pleasing, intriguing and enjoyable rambles down by-ways.
If the problem is strictly volume, let’s have daily OT threads. (Yes, I mostly appreciate the CW material, and prefer threads where I am free to discuss current events.)
OTOH, I can certainly understand people wanting at least the same proportion of non-CW threads as currently (1 of 4). So Let’s say the Wedn and Sunday threads are non-CW every week, and all the new threads are CW-OK.
Or some vaguely similar concept – 14 threads a week replacing 4 might be excessive, though with 3300 comments in a single thread, perhaps not ;-(
Or auto-spawn a new thread whenever the total comments on a single thread exceed some magic number. With the same CW-properties as the parent.
Or – spawn a non-CW thread when a CW thread gets oversize, and vice versa (if the latter ever happens), so those frustrated by the prior thread get some of what they want. (But don’t be surprised if the folks having a nice CW discussion just stay in their thread, ignoring the fresh minty non-CW thread.)
And automate the whole thing, because otherwise Scott will just laugh at all these propsals for giving him extra work.
I would second this proposal, but I realize what my vote counts for.
With HBO Max now launched, the streaming wars have reached a new level of complexity. No reasonable person can pay for Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, ESPN +, and all the others, so what is the stable state that shakes out? I don’t think that, in the end, there are going to be 3/4 that everyone subscribes to, but I do think the current number is larger than is probably sustainable. Some of the niche ones will stay, and some will die off. Based on their launches, I think the CBS and HBO services are in a lot of trouble unless they rapidly adjust, for instance.
the pirate bay dot org + a VPN
you don’t need a VPN if your neighbor has an easily guessable wifi password!
Exactly; this is a solved problem. Netflix had a huge impact on piracy rates because it was cheap, convenient, and mostly has all the content. Media companies took exactly the wrong lesson in thinking people paid for Netflix because it was a streaming service. Making the streaming market as fragmented and expensive as cable tv is just forcing people to revert to well known and well developed alternatives.
I think people on forums such as this overrate how much tech saavyness exists in the world. VPN + Pirating is a personal solution for some 10-15% of the population. But there is a reason a bunch of kids on Napster got tracked down and faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Most people, even young people, are not tech savvy. Its distinctly not generational. I know a 70 year old with a cracked firestick. I also know 20 year olds who don’t know to “try turning it on and off again” before calling IT. My cousin is in IT for a hospital and its a disaster.
Young people use technology a lot. But they don’t KNOW technology in large numbers. In many ways the evolution of computers since the smartphone was popularized has increased this problem. It has definitely not expanded knowledge of tech. Kids know that Insta and Tik Tok are cooler than Facebook, but they don’t (generally) know anything about how they work.
If you did “try turning it on and off again” it’d still be off and not work.
Although yes. My youngest could use the internet before she could read (so getting to sites by positional information of menus). Still say’s ‘the wifi doesn’t work’ if there’s no onward connection and can’t sort out any IT at all.
Amazon Prime streaming comes with faster shipping of products, the company’s core competency. So that stays.
Disney+ and ESPN are both Disney. They’re not going away unless sports stay banned by law or their own public health decision long enough. Hulu is also tied up in this (Disney became majority shareholder upon the FOX buyout).
Netflix has first mover advantage, but that doesn’t mean Amazon and Disney couldn’t eat their lunch in the future.
CBS and HBO are looking like dumpster fires.
Psychologically, I’d predict there’s room for 1-2 streaming service bills in anyone’s life. Most people will only pay one general-interest streaming bill, and they might have Amazon Prime on top of that.
As sfoil noted, these companies are competing with piracy. Netflix was convenient moral salve when it had everything.
I think I’d estimate there will be 2-3 that win rights for live events like sports. I know people pirate live sports, but the quality is much lower than other content. There is a delay to rebroadcasts that makes it lose something, and also there are huge stability issues with it.
OTOH, one thing live sports and the equivalent of might be able to do is live only on live ads. So they could remain free?
It’s interesting. I got rid of my Amazon Prime subscription some months ago. And I’m buying off of Amazon more than ever due to the pandemic.
I also got frustrated with their streaming video when they went out of their way to avoid supporting the browser I was using.
what is the total monthly cost of all of them combined, and how does that compare to premium cable tv costs 25 years ago?
Netflix $13
Hulu $6
Disney $7
CBS $6
Apple $5
HBO $15 (this and starz, showtime, etc are actually similar to their costs if you wanted them added to cable back in the day, so these are sustainable if they can keep the subspace of customers that would have subbed to them with cable).
There is also the cost of internet, which here is $80 or so. Now, this isn’t 100% an entertainment cost. I need it for work as well.
You’d have to tell me what old cable cost. I know my dad would, basically annually, see a change in the price and then yell into the phone for 2 hours to get his cable price back down to whatever “introductory rate” he had been at before.
You don’t even have to yell anymore, or threaten to cancel. This sort of thing has become so routine you literally just call and say “My bill went up, can you move it back down?” and they do it.
That said, even the introductory rate is still pretty damn high…
Like Matt M says below, the prices seam to be pretty reasonable compared to the cost of premium cable.
Yeah, I’m paying over $100/month for cable TV and I already have about half of these services, so I call BS on the “nobody can pay for this” notion.
Now “nobody will want to have to manage 10 different subscriptions and get 10 different bills just to be able to watch a bunch of shows” is a different case entirely. Part of the reason I’m willing to pay so much for TV is because it’s just one bill and just one thing I have to worry about and once I pay it, I can watch basically whatever I want.
Broadcast television eventually consolidated down to three big commercial networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), one non-commercial network (PBS), and a bunch of independent stations here and there. I seem to recall something similar happened during the heyday of radio. So maybe three is the magic number.
Personally, I have Netflix and Prime Video, plus I sometimes use iTunes rentals if neither streaming service has what I want. I would be reluctant to sign up for a third streaming service, but I tried Disney+ for a while. I eventually concluded it’s too kid-oriented and cancelled.
Interesting theory. There are also 3 major Cable news channels, but Fox has also proven that a 4th National Broadcast channel can be sustained. Amazon, Neflix, Disney, Comcast (with one taking over CBS) might be a stable point. With some other niche offerings that know they will have way less subscribers still being around.
> what is the stable state that shakes out
Serial subscriptions?
A month here, binge, a month there, binge their stuff…
Maybe apps or reminders to help people pull this off.
What’s the cost for media? I’m not talking about simply making a copy, that’s bandwidth. But couldn’t it be that Netflix was actually subsidizing this cost with VC money, and the real cost to bring _all_ the media on a TV screen is closer to $100 than to $7?
Well, real problem being this “all” – I’m still pissed that the current streaming services seem to be doing a lot of the choosing in our place. Spotify is a lot closer to what we want – searching for a random song has much better outcomes than searching for a random movie on Netflixes.
AFAIK most of the cost is licensing media not delivery of data, so it is hard to talk about “real” cost.
As a thought exercise, I wonder what it would cost for one individual or organization to buy out all the major studios etc., so that you owned the copyright to pretty much everything?
Google tells me that Disney is worth $130b, so I guess that sets a lower bound.
Warner Brothers is T (AT&T), which has a market cap of 217.3 billion (very similar to Disney, so I don’t know where you found that low market cap). Comcast and Sony are then tied for third-largest share of pop culture copyrights. Comcast has a market cap of 181.8 billion, while Sony… is Japanese, so good luck buying them out from an American start. Maybe USG would let Sony buy Disney. AT&T and Comcast? Its total assets are ~21 trillion yen, so only about 210 billion USD.
Speaking of Sony, there’s a lot of copyrighted pop culture outside of the major studios, the biggest probably being video games. Gotta merge with Nintendo at the very least.
ViacomCBS is in a private holding company owned by the Redstone family, so not for sale. It owns copyrights like everything by Nickelodeon and Star Trek.
Rotate subscription over channels, mostly using free periods. Account sharing. Outright piracy.
The current solution practiced by my bubble is a bunch of subscriptions here and there, “family plan” accounts among people who are not exactly family, and lots and lots of crimes on the high seas.
This is a shame because Netflix could have easily been the Steam of TV series, their user experience is really good compared to torrenting. Apparently the industry is too eager to divide the pie to the point of unusability.
We just switched to Google Fiber, which is about $130/month when you throw in the subscription to YouTube TV. Before, we were paying Time Warner/Spectrum $200 per month for TV, internet, and phone (the last of which we never used). So I feel like we have plenty of room to expand our streaming options–we currently have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.
I’m sure next up will be Disney, because my kids will insist on seeing Hamilton.
In every new industry, the first wave of increased competition is viewed as a downside for the consumer. This never pans out. I think people are underestimating how much a cable subscription costs.
That said, my strategy has been to sign up for a month, watch the one or two shows I want, and then cancel. Often I can get a one month free trial and do it for free, but if not I’m paying ten or fifteen bucks for multiple seasons of a show, which is still a pretty good deal
I think sharing passwords is going to be the new stable state, unless streaming companies try to crackdown on it. It is too expensive to pay for all of them, but it is easy to pay for one, and trade that password for the others. That’s how it works in my family. The four different households each subscribe to a subset of services, share them around, and I have access to everyone of the ones you listed. I’m expecting that to be the new norm.
Data point: I have all the services you named, although I don’t pay for “others”. I have Netflix for the usual reasons, Prime as a side effect of of the delivery aspect (although the streaming was a selling point as well), HBO Max because I have HBO and it comes automatically from most cable companies, and the other 3 (Disney/Hulu/ESPN) in the Disney bundle, which turned out to be useless on the ESPN end the last few months obviously. (I find that I’ve been watching a fair amount of Hulu, though.) Oh, and Peacock, because it’s free with Comcast.
I’m a big believer that if we some how time-warped from 2005 to 2020 everyone would be amazed at how much better things are in television – it’s an amazingly better service – you’re not at the mercy of broadcast schedules and don’t have to watch ads – and even if you buy all of these subscriptions and keep them going 24/7 it’s still cheaper than most introductory cable packages.
(And it not only replaces your cable subscription, but also largely replaces the habit of DVD buying, which has dropped ~85% since 2007, IIRC, so it’s saving even more money than just a straight “cable vs. streaming” comparison.)
Rip Van Winkle would be absolutely ecstatic about the state of television if he woke up today. (Which is good, because frankly, he’s probably going to need the distraction from everything else…)
But of course, the rest of us didn’t time warp from 2005, instead, everyone remembers the “golden age of Netflix” where companies drastically undervalued their streaming rights and sold them to Netflix for pennies on the dollar. That was never a sustainable model: eventually companies were going to realize what they were essentially giving away, but it set people with sky-high expectations about what streaming service “should” be priced at.
But given that recreating the “golden age of Netflix” just isn’t economically viable, I think people’s sky-high expectations are going to have to cool over time, rather than expecting that somehow companies are going to choose to not compete in a lucrative market just because letting some other company have all the profits would be more convenient for the other company’s customers.
So to the point: I think the current model is much more sustainable than cable, and that seemed to do okay, so I’m guessing it’s not going anywhere, in a broad sense, though we may still see some shake-ups in which particular services survive and what price points settle on, of course.
This seems right.
My one modification is that I think eventually somebody will figure out how to package products for streaming based on subject/style rather than who happens to own the copyright – a universal documentary streaming service rather than Netflix and Hulu both having a documentary section, say.
What we had was cable TV, and a few premium things (HBO, Cinemax, Home Surgery Channel, Showtime) were available as add-ons, and easy to add/subtract those when you wanted.
We had this same discussion about subscribing to newspapers for paywalls: subscribing/unsubscribing is a major pain, because each are their own portal who want to be reselling you other stuff and want you using their stuff. As much as we hated Cable TV, it’s amazing that it really did bundle the stuff in a convenient way that made adding/subtracting convenient.
Fair point – everything old is new again.
The thing I would point out is that, besides ESPN, none of the channels had carriage fees (aka what cable paid to them) over $5. Most were much below $5, which seems to be the minimum price any of these streaming services is trying to charge.
Scott,
I think we should enjoin and wish that others “be safe” which implies not exposing others to risk, rather than just “stay safe.”
My wife’s comment on teenagers was that she had been younger than that and older than that, but had not been that age. I think that’s true of our children as well, although I haven’t asked them. Probably of me as well.
One obvious common factor is that I got along well with my parents, my wife with hers, and our children with us.
That’s a very good way of describing my experience as well.
I did go through a phase where I basically decided that other people’s drama wasn’t worth the effort and just chose not to have friends at school or hang out with other people that weren’t related to me.
Turns out that was not a great life decision and something I’ve really wanted to punch my teenage self in the face for, but I think it was too detached and reasoned out a decision to really count as typical teenage behavior.
It seems like now matter how well educated and intelligent a native speaker of English is, they can’t be relied upon to get the who/whom distinction right 100% of the time. (I mean, maybe someone like Mary Norris does, but it’s striking how many smart anglophones don’t.) “Between you and I” is another common mistake (Mary Norris even wrote a book called “Between You & Me”); so it seems there is a more general difficulty with keeping track of the subject/object distinction. As a typical monolingual American, I wonder whether this is particular to English speakers, because we only have to do that for pronouns, or reflects some inherent difficulty with that feature of language production. Do native speakers of languages where most nouns have distinct subject and object forms make analogous mistakes all the time, or do they make such mistakes much less frequently because they get more practice, like Guugu Yimithirr speakers developing a strong absolute sense of direction, or speakers of tonal languages having perfect pitch?
Also curious if anyone has other good examples, English or otherwise, of language rules that frequently trip up even very proficient speakers/writers (where there is an unambiguously right answer; e.g. I wouldn’t fault someone for not using “whom” when they’re “supposed to,” because it’s been falling into disuse for a long time, but using “whom” when “who” is correct is pretty indefensible). I just think it’s interesting how language is such a basic, fundamental skill, but at the same time complex enough that full mastery stretches us to the limit of our cognitive abilities.
English dropped case markings for nouns except for possessive a long time ago. There is no reason it could not do so for pronouns. It’s in the process of dropping gender markings
As for mistakes in other languages, I’ve noticed that people Spanish frequently “misspell” some of the very few homonyms in the language. Since almost all words are spelled as they sound, they fail to learn well the few exceptions. “Has,” “haz” “as” are all pronounced the same but mean different things, “does” (familiar) “do” (as a familiar command) and “ace.”
Ah, the “has”/”haz”/”as” example is interesting! You do see people make analogous mistakes in English, of course: your/you’re, its/it’s, their/they’re, etc. But certainly English speakers get a lot of practice with differently spelled homophones, so maybe proportional to the increased number of opportunities to mix them up, well-educated writers of English do so less often than those of Spanish?
That reminds me of something I thought about adding just after posting my comment: Not only does language mastery stretch us to our cognitive limits, it often does so not because of the inherent complexity of the ideas we use language to express, but rather because of incidental complexity built into our languages by historical accident. I don’t think it would be controversial to say that, in the case of English, our only marginally phonetic and highly unpredictable orthography is the primary example of this phenomenon, but it seems like every language has at least one thing it does in an unnecessarily complicated way. In Spanish I guess it would be grammatical gender, although that’s still not so bad compared to all the different declensions and conjugations in Latin.
Nah, Native Spanish speakers don’t struggle with grammatical gender. Except for edge cases like the heat and the sea (which are both male and female), most people don’t struggle with gender. Because you just know by the sound of the word, in most cases (words that end in a are feminine, words that end in o are masculine).
No, what Spanish people struggle with in spelling are the accents.
“Calor” and “mar” were feminine in Middle Age poetry, btw.
Yes, I know, but I’ve met people who considered the feminine form incorrect. They were Latinos, but I’m not sure that matters. In Spain, it’s very common to say la calor (mostly in the south), and quite common to say la mar among sailors/fishermen.
Not sure which parts of Latin America it’s used in.
I don’t agree with the RAE that la calor is vulgar.
I think it’s like ships in English, which are obviously feminine, but many style guides are starting to use it for ships. Which is obviously wrong.
I feel accent marks are 99% unnecessary.
Can’t even think of a counterexample right now so I am not putting it at 100% just in case.
@JPNunez
Accents are what make Spanish a more phonemic language. I.e., a language that’s pronounced how it’s written, even if it doesn’t work the other way around.
Thus, in English, I frequently read a word and have no idea how to pronounce it. I never have a doubt in Spanish, and it’s partly because of the accents. As soon as I read a word, I know how to pronounce it, and I know on which syllable I should put an accent on.
In Russian dictionaries, for example, you will frequently have word – word with accent to tell you how it’s pronounced. I don’t want to check the dictionary while I’m reading a book, and it does make it more convenient to read.
If you are reading a book, and meet a word you don’t know, you still gotta go to the dictionary anyway, so Russian sounds fine to me.
There are many words in Spanish which the accent mark is needed to distinguish meaning. For example, “hable” is the verb hablar in the 3rd person subjunctive, so it means roughly “may/would s/he speak”, but “hablé” is the 1st person past, so it means “I spoke”. Since it is acceptable in Spanish to omit the noun/pronoun from a sentence, the accent mark can be the only way to distinguish them even in context. Similar things happens for most verbs, not just this one.
One interesting place this comes up is in songs. Ones that started out being written in Spanish seem to line the accents up with the beat of the music in a way that sounds right; ones that were translated usually don’t.
Redundance. You add stuff to the message, so that it’s easier to decrypt and error-correct on the receiver’s end. The rules evolved through mass usage, over many years, so they seem chaotic. When something seems stupid, but has been working for many years for many people, it’s not stupid.
T pt t nthr wy, y cld sy tht vwls r nt strctly ncssry – bt thy d mk txt mr rdbl.
I rot13’d this.
Yep, I think a lot of grammar and pronunciation works as a kind of error-correcting code–if you mishear something, your brain corrects it to the nearest correct thing.
Same.
Say, you wouldn’t know how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton, would you?
English verb tenses are also very complicated. In my experience, they are the last thing speakers of English as a foreign language master.
Try explaining, clearly, the difference between:
I lived in Richmond.
I have lived in Richmond.
I had lived in Richmond.
I was living in Richmond.
I have been living in Richmond.
I had been living in Richmond.
I used to live in Richmond.
And you will see what I mean.
Even native speakers often get the subjunctive wrong. It’s “If I were a millionaire”.
The subjunctive in English is weird because it exists, but we usually don’t think of it. And Spanish verb tenses are similarly complex.
I have heard that the subjunctive used to be common in vernacular English, but if it were, it at least had started to disappear sometime before 1963: the narrator of California Dreamin’ muses about being “safe and warm if I was in LA.” I like the subjunctive, but if it’s too ancient to appear in the pop music of my grandparents, I have no choice but to concede.
Just as a note of syntactic pedantry – nouns in English don’t get possessive case marking either. The particle ” ‘s” that we use for possessive doesn’t attach to the *word* but rather to a whole *phrase*. This isn’t often clear in writing, but in speech we often say things like “the guy next door to me’s dog got out last night”, while we definitely *wouldn’t* say “the guy’s next door to me dog got out last night”, which is how it works in languages with actual case marking.
There’s a weird thing that sometimes happens if a pronoun is conjoined with either another pronoun or a noun, where it’s unclear whether we use the ” ‘s” on the phrase or put the pronoun in the possessive case. Both “my mom and me’s dog” and “my mom’s and my dog” sound really awkward to me. Something like “my and his dog” sounds like it refers to two separate dogs, while “me and him’s dog” sounds like one dog belonging to both of us.
And as for gender, while English is in the process of replacing masculine and feminine gender with a generic animate gender, there is no movement away from the distinction between animate and inanimate gender. “He” and “she” are being supplemented by “they”, but “it” is in a clearly distinct class. You can only refer to an *animate* being with singular “they”, where things like babies and animals are sometimes ambiguous between animate and inanimate (so that you can refer to them either by “he/she/they” or “it”). I’m not sure if anyone refers to boats with singular “they” the way they used to refer to boats with “she”. Countries, which also sometimes got referred to as “she”, would naturally be interpreted as plural “they” rather than singular animate “they”.
I always mentally hyphenate those types of sentence-as-noun-stand-in – exactly like that, actually.
I occasionally notice that “whom” would be correct in a situation (spoken or written) and decide to go with “who”. It’s passed the tipping point of common usage; “the wrong way” mostly sounds fine to my ear and “the right way” often sounds highfalutin. Ditto for “they” where the last generation would have used “he or she” (or just “he”). “Between you and I” on the other hand continues to horrify me, as do all other I/me conclusions… except “it’s me” where I follow the “wrong way”.
Not sure what makes the difference. Maybe some combination of popularity and the degree to which “the right way” would stick out in various constructions?
My favorite difficult rule in English (which I will fight for to my dying day) is the number/amount distinction: we have less time, but fewer hours, because hours are things you can count.
There are quite a few that go the other way, wrong usage that is incorrectly thought to be more formal, the obvious one is the use of myself/ yourself when it should be me/ you. Seems epidemic amongst call centre workers here in UK – “we will send yourself the contract, sign it and send it back to ourselves” (never quite that ridiculous)
I interpret the use of “I” instead of “me” as in “He gave it to John and I” as coming from the idea that “me” is often misused for “I” by the uneducated. So an attempt to signal education.
I think the “between you and I” has been seeping into “acceptable usage” – and maybe even promulgated on purpose. I’ve been seeing it in recent movies, and it really, really frustrates me.
In German, mixing up the non-nominative forms of nouns and pronouns (accusative, dative, genitive) is relatively common. But it’s perceived as an expression of dialect (Berlin sometimes uses dative for accusative), or of a low-class idiolect based on immigrant speech patterns. I think everyone who “speaks good” and has a reasonable amount of formal language education knows what the proper form should be in any case, there’s no confusion about the very concept of case like there is in English. But some people choose to use the forms differently.
A friend who came back from the US told me how one of his American acquaintances said to him in amazement:”You don’t know x,y and z (words every American knows), but you use who/whom correctly.”
I would say that the who/whom distinction is quite easy for speakers of languages with case markings.
One thing that often trips up foreigners is the placement of the dollar sign. It goes before the number, unlike most unit markers.
I pointed out one such error on another forum, and got called a pedant’s pedant, an appellation I will treasure for a long time.
That’s an interesting point. The € sign goes after the number in almost every European language. It goes before the number in English (as does the £ sign). Cyprus, Ireland and Malta also follow British usage for understandable reasons.
For some reason, it also goes before the number in Dutch (as did the old ƒ symbol for the guilder). This means that Greece and Cyprus, and Flanders and the Netherlands, put the Euro symbol in a different place despite speaking the same language…
(The Greek drachma and Belgian franc abbreviations went after the number)
The subjunctive mood is oftentimes forgotten about by proficient speakers of the English language. Hypothetical tenses augment the verb tense, changing things like, “if he was” to “if if were”.
There are small things in writing that trip up proficient writers. “Everyday” vs. “Every day”, “oftentimes” and not “often times”, “altogether” vs. “all together”, etc.
The past perfect tense trips native speakers up a lot. It can be unclear when you should say “He joined right after he had turned eight” or “He’d joined right after he had turned eight” or “he joined right after he turned eight.” I would probably chalk this up to genuine language ambiguity, though: sometimes two different options can both be considered correct.
I don’t think I’ve ever properly understood how the subjunctive mood is supposed to work in English … I just play it by ear, but my impression is that most people don’t follow whatever the rules are very consistently, so it feels like I’m learning from a corrupted data set.
I’m pretty sure that in the entirety of my ~11 years of English language classes in the English school system, the term “subjunctive” was not once used by any teacher. (That was a good many years ago now, so things may have changed, but at least at secondary level those teachers were completely hostile to any attempt to even mention the existence of formal grammar let alone teach any of it.)
Most of my understanding of English formal grammar comes from reapplying what I’ve learnt in foreign language classes.
Non native English speakers: do you get the same thing going on?
The first time I heard that English had a subjunctive was in French class.
I do get the impression — no idea whether it’s justified — that there’s a lot more confusion about formal grammatical categories among native English speakers, e.g. what exactly is a pronoun, a verb, etc. Maybe anglophone countries have a different method of teaching grammar? (Or maybe I just read more content from there?)
The worst case is certainly the passive voice, which so many people hate with a fiery passion despite not being able to recognize it at all.
For those seeking quality entertainment this afternoon, linguist Geoffrey Pullum has several pieces on this phenomenon, e.g. here.
Could it be that the native English speakers in your sample are more likely to be monolingual? Studying a foreign language would be one reason to learn something about formal grammar, but if your native language is English there’s less pressing need to, since you already know the international language of business, science, diplomacy etc.
I have the impression, though, that English speakers are taught especially little about the grammar of their own language in school. I learnt how to analyze simple sentences in my own language (Spanish) with parsing trees (actually a different, but equivalent, kind of visual representation) in middle school, and I don’t think my school or my country were extraordinary in this, but I don’t think this is taught to American kids.
Might be. I recall my lessons of (native) Italian grammar insisting heavily on definitions, tables, formal sentence analysis, etc., though I suppose they could have been planned keeping in mind the necessity to eventually learn other languages.
I’m American, and I learned formal grammar (including “sentence diagrams” resembling parsing trees) in English class. Maybe it depends on what school you go to? I went to a high-quality public school.
We did this in grade school and in high school. Also, I went to a rural high school that was not very up-to-date on teaching methods and fads, where the English teachers required proper grammar on assignments. At that time, I think many of the more up-to-date public schools had moved on from worrying about grammar to whatever other thing they wanted to teac instead.
When I went to the state university, freshmen were given entrance placement exams. I was put in the most advanced English class (the honors section of the sophomore-level composition class). After the first assignment, the professor started reviewing basic rules of grammar because so many of the students had turned in assignments full of incomplete sentences and such.
There are two things that are described as subjunctive in many languages. English definitely has one and only sorta has the other. The one English definitely has occurs most commonly in conditionals.
The indicative/subjunctive distinction is the distinction between the sentences “If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, then someone else did” and “If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, then someone else would have”. The former is indicative (and most of us accept it as plainly true), while the latter is subjunctive (and one’s judgment of its truth value, and even well-formedness, depends on whether one accepts various conspiracy theories – if one accepts that Oswald was part of a conspiracy that was strongly aiming to get Kennedy, then one might accept it as true, but if one thinks that Oswald wasn’t actually the one that shot, then one would reject the sentence as ill-formed). The indicative conditional is used for expressing correlations among your uncertainties about what did happen, while the subjunctive conditional is used for expressing one’s beliefs about the causal structure of possibilities other than the real world. For most people a subjunctive past tense looks identical to the pluperfect tense of the verb, though many people preserve a slightly older version where “were” is used in places where “was” would normally be used. (You can also get a distinction between indicative/subjunctive in the present/future tense of a verb: “what will you do if I sing out of tune” vs “what would you do if I sang out of tune” – the former is an indicative that emphasizes the possibility, while the latter is a subjunctive that makes it seem a bit more remote, and looks identical to the past tense, again with the was/were distinction.)
The other thing that often gets called subjunctive is a construction like this: “he directed that the land be sold after his death”, where we use the infinitive “be” rather than “is” when it occurs in clauses with certain verbs of indirect speech, like “command”, “direct”, “require”, etc. I think this one isn’t consistently used by a lot of people. In languages like German and French, this construction is also used with verbs like “say”, which means that newspapers don’t have to use a word like “allegedly”, and can just state things in the subjunctive, and readers know that this is what someone is saying, and not necessarily what is actually true.
Both of these constructions mark a distinction between what is actual and what is counterfactual.
While only relevant when writing, native speakers quite frequently use the wrong form of blond/blonde — the latter is feminine.
In theory, Italian makes a distinction between a “proximate past” tense for recent events, and a “remote past” for distant ones (roughly equivalent to the English present perfect and simple past, respectively; e.g. sono andato vs. andai for “I went”). In practice, people from Tuscany tend to be the only one that do so out in colloquial speech; everyone from farther north uses only the proximate past, and everyone from further south uses only the remote past, regardless from the actual timing of the action. Written Italian is more likely to keep the distinction intact.
I am not a professional linguist or editor of English, so epistemic status of everything here should be “suspect” at best.
I have heard that English is somewhat particular because many of the people responsible for determining the “prestige dialect” of English (in both the UK and the United States) had a great an fetishistic fondness for all things Latin. These people decided to lift all sorts of rules, which were real rules of Latin, and apply them to English regardless of whether this contradicted current practice or made sense. The most famous of these is probably the spelling of “aisle,” (cf. Latin ala) whose spelling was changed to match “isle” (cf. Latin insula). The grammar oddity that I can make the best case for being improperly lifted from Latin is the rule against split infinitives. My 16th edition of Chicago Manual of Style has this to say:
In Latin, splitting an infinitive is literally impossible because of how verbs are conjugated. I don’t have good sourcing for this, but I assume that English has many more apparent traps for the insufficiently educated because only English suffered a 75 year period where the best way to seem educated was to speak and write in a grammar that didn’t quite follow the usual rules of human language.
With another epistemic leap, I would further argue that Marry Norris is right and the correct form is “between you and me.” I believe this to be true, because conjunctions in English seem to bind far more tightly than is taught by grammarians. The usual advice of “pick the pronoun that would make the sentence work if the rest of the conjunctive phrase were to be discarded” is wrong because you can’t just discard the rest of the phrase. In particular, I think that “and” can absolutely bind two subjects into one object and that’s what’s happening in the “between you and X” utterances.
Regardless of exactly how far I get to walk on this particular epistemic tightrope, I feel confident in claiming that English is by far the most advanced language at making it’s speakers feel incorrect and dumb for following real and true vernacular rules that happen to contradict the preferences of 19th century necrophiliac grammarians.
Yeah, I didn’t understand where this rule came from at all until I learned Spanish.
I’m interested in the “wokeness as secular religion/religion substitute” angle. I know Scott has written about it, though I don’t remember which blog post. John McWhorter also brings it up on occasion.
Are there other worthwhile texts on this?
Or, for that matter, any texts arguing against this concept, and/or how other ideologies are equally affected.
Asking for recommendations is not necessarily an invitation to debate the topic. It might be neat to see a back and forth that is just people recommending articles and books and counter articles and books without actually adding any commentary of their own. Not regularly though, as I don’t like following links.
It would be CW-ish to discuss in detail, but the post you’re thinking of is this one. See also here with regard to your last point.
Here is a leftist perspective: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/.
If you’ll take a podcast, this discussion with an ex-Scientologist might be of interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwXkXNd7yO4
The thing in it that was new to me is that one of the ways of hooking people into cults is telling them that it’s their obligation to save the world, but this is impossible.
Actual discussion of the topic might be better in a CW thread, possibly 155.75.
I have no intention of debating this, just looking for references.
I can see how it’s getting a little close to the line though…
Just thought folks here might find this interesting – the most recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show is an interview with D.W. Pasulka, a professor of religion who decided to do an ethnography of UFO believers as an emergent new religion.
Link: https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast
This is already a pretty interesting idea, but what made it much more interesting is that, as she describes it, this process exposed her to enough evidence that there was something actually going on with UFOs that she went through what she describes as an “epistemic shock” and revised her own view of UFOs, even though someone in her position is generally not supposed to weigh in on the truth claims of the believers she’s studying.
She wrote a book called American Cosmic based on all this, which has been getting a lot more attention lately since the US Navy started just openly talking about all the UFOs their pilots keep encountering.
I found the interview interesting enough to buy the book; I am still only in chapter 1, so I can’t say much about that yet.
Maybe she just thinks the “there’s something going on with UFOs” angle is a better marketing pitch for her book than ethnography alone.
Very possible! And she must have been so jazzed when the government decided to go “Screw it, UFOs are real. We have no idea what they are, but check these videos out!”
> “epistemic shock”
Is there something akin to an intellectual Stockholm syndrome, where you get captured by a subject you study intensely? Investment (of time, energy, social costs,…) turning into belief and identification?
I think it’s less investment and more that as you get exposed more frequently to basically decent and reasonable people who happen to believe things that you think are purely outlandish, this creates a certain cognitive dissonance, that can only be resolved one of two ways.
Method 1 is to update your views on the people – they simply aren’t decent and reasonable because they believe this outlandish stuff.
Method 2, which seems nicer and easier, is to update your views on the beliefs – that even if you don’t agree with them, there’s probably “something to it.”
I think this is how most agnostics and even less-extreme atheists view religion. Not that it’s right, but that “well clearly some people benefit from it and sometimes it does some good” etc. Because a worldview where lots of people that you know and like believe things that are completely and utterly false and entirely without evidence or merit is unsustainable.
You’d think this would be baked into the job description of “Professor of Religion”, though. That kind of person must study a lot of people who believe a lot of things, and they don’t all get converted.
I think this is the origin of the extreme anti-realist relativism that many people associate with certain kinds of sociology/anthropology/humanities. If you’re studying a bunch of people who believe different religions, and you don’t want to say they’re mostly mistaken, you end up saying they’re all “the truth relative to this believer”.
Honestly, I’m okay with thinking that people can be both decent and reasonable and still believe silly things. Even if I’m convinced that my own brand of reasoning can rule them out.
Or they could be trolling you for what they see as your own good…
This. I know many religious people, but their beliefs make very little sense to me. I’m sure they feel the same way about my atheism. I’ve just had to accept this as a fact, and it doesn’t reduce my respect for them as rational and reasonable people in general, nor does it make me think that maybe there is something to supernatural or “spiritual” thought.
It also makes it easier to accept that other hold strong beliefs that I find nonsensical (typically things I could list in a fractional thread).
I imagine Method 1 applies mostly to beliefs you are not exposed directly through, typically by living in an in-group echo chamber. I suspect religious people who argue that without a belief in God everybody would rape and pillage ad lib don’t know many atheists.
You can find tons of people who believe weird things in every area of life, not just religion.
Was “purgatory” originally a cave in Ireland where people would go for 24 hours of penitential meditation?
Is it that easy to interpret St. Frances’ stigmata experience as a UFO encounter?
What would you do differently if you knew there would be overt contact with aliens in ten years?
My answer to that one surprised me. It was that I would learn to write poetry– the one thing I’m sure of, assuming we survive, is that the contact will be poetry fodder.
Yeah the Purgatory thing was fascinating, I had never heard of that before.
I just started playing Deep Rock Galactic with some friends. If you enjoy co-op shooter games and find the idea of a co-op shooter with a strong emphasis on terrain traversal and manipulation and Space Dwarves appealing, you should give it a try.
Seconded. Fun mix of exploration and shooting, good times.
Some old friends and I are starting up a D&D game, and we’re experimenting with some higher stakes rules. One of the open threads here had a great comment (or a link to an external article) with a catch phrase along the lines of “make torches last 15 minutes and weigh 2 pounds” about how getting characters to pay attention to some more mundane details of torches, henchmen, animals, etc. heightened the tension in the games they were playing and forced more interaction with the in universe world. I’d like to show it to my group, can anyone remember where it was and link me to it? My google-fu is failing me.
Doesn’t the Light cantrip (and Continual Flame spell) make that rule almost pointless?
Yes. 5E has no mundane resource management unless the players end up picking an unusual combination of classes.
Cantrips like light, Goodberries (Druid), a Ranger’s existence making it impossible to ever get lost or run out of food overland…
What edition? I’m not trying to start an Edition War (especially not in a non-CW thread!) but this kind of thing is a lot of what the Old School Renaissance has been about; I have been messing around with it and have been surprised by how much I enjoy original-flavor D&D and its retroclones like Labyrinth Lord. This sort of thing is a big part of it.
That said, 5E does go a long way to trying to recapture the old school feel in a way the last couple versions didn’t, so I think this is totally doable with 5E. I can also strongly recommend Five Torches Deep, which is a set of additional rules for resource management in 5E that make things like this matter a lot, but which don’t add an insurmountable amount of bookkeeping.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/264584/Five-Torches-Deep
Playing 5e with the extended rest rules (1 day = short rest, 1 week = long rest) is a lot of fun! Combine with the Shadow Rules and Travel Rules from the Adventures in Middle Earth and a couple house rules (like making the spell goodberry consume its material components) can make for a really gritty resource-management/survival style game.
5e is the plan, largely by default. I’ll check out 5 torches deep, it looks interesting, but I’ll need the post to sell them on the concept of counting torches.
I really, really hate 5e. Sorry 🙁 I understand what the system is designed to do — it’s designed to let you quickly roll up a character and jump straight into roleplaying, without bothering with too many details. It does achieve this goal, but in the process, it completely locks you into a specific build based on your class selection. One Fighter is going to look pretty much the same as another Fighter, etc. This makes things much easier for the GM, admittedly; but as a player, I find this incredibly boring.
If you don’t care about combat mechanics and just want to do RP, there are other systems that are way better at it, such as FATE (which is a lot of fun to play). If you want to play a more detailed tactical simulation, then there are lots of other systems for that, such as Pathfinder 1e. But IMO D&D 5e does neither of those things very well, and as the result, I just find it infuriating.
My fighter multi-classed warlock at level 2, whoa whats next! Less flippant, fighter gets a lot of it’s play pattern from it’s subclass, a ranged battle master and a crit-fishing champion polearm master/dual wielder have totally different play styles.
Also I disagree that Pathfinder 1e had more tactical depth, the problem with 5e is that the tactical depth is hidden, in pathfinder and 3-3.5 system mastery lets you make OP characters(A serious problem if you want to play any kind of tactical game actually), in 5e system mastery mostly serves to increase your tactical options.
Those other systems also have a problem with, more choices means less choices, yes there are a ton of feats, and that mostly cashes out as either stupid minor feats that do almost nothing, or a math feat +1 to something, or a feat chain that heavily incentives you to do the exact same thing every round and always use the same kind of weapon. (5e has this a bit, with polearm master being too good 1-4, but in general it is not as bad, and polearm master does open up tactical choices that you wouldn’t have without it, instead of just making you really really good at charging every round)
Finally it seems like you offer two extremes and say 5e is not the best at both, (while I disagree with
oneboth actually(FATE and other ‘heavy RP’ systems A. Offer some sort of mechanical reward for RPing your character, which never works because people don’t fail to RP their character for that kind of reason, and 5e actually does that also. B. Have few rules so the rules don’t get in the way of the RP! At which point you are mostly paying for a setting book for your improve nights, again I feel that there is a value in restrictions for driving creativity and player interactions. A player who needs to can lean more heavily on their character sheet in RP situations while others can go off sheet and rule of cool with their DM.) and think it does offer one of the best tactical table top game experiences) which still opens it up to be a happy middle ground, with support for RP and support for a tactical combat here and there, in a way that at least FATE does not.Aren’t torches more a trope because they look good in films than because they’re the best pre-edisonian way to light up a cave/castle at night etc?
If you let your eyes adjust, a candle or oil lamp throws out enough light. They were used in mines before the invention of the davy lamp (which is really just a sort of oil lamp).
Apparently olive oil burns ~90% as long as modern lamp oils. That works out to 16.5 ml for an hour of light. (my Old School D&D players here: that’s 363 or 364 hours of light from a 6-liter jug)
You need to cut or change cantrips and some spells and a few class/background features (or restrict class/background choices) to make 5e a resource tracking game.
You can also change the way rests work, but this should largely change the pace of the story you are telling, not the pace of the action. The combat resource game is balanced around the ‘adventuring day’ which takes standard rests into account, and unlike the other resource management aspects of 5e, the combat one actually is pretty tight, if you are hitting their recommendations. If it works in story for your characters to only get into 5-7 fights then take a week off before they fight again, then make long rests take a week, if it doesn’t, well, casters become a bit of a trap choice. (Important to keep in mind that 5e caster to martial balance is very good and you mostly do not need to nerf casters)
There’s a game built entirely around that concept called Torchbearer. Never played it but seems like an interesting idea.
Personally I noticed that the mundane stuff – making camp, crafting consumables, hunting, keeping watch – is great for both immersion and opportunities for roleplay/character interaction.
I had originally wrote a lengthy description of the protests in Canada shortly following the death of George Floyd, explaining why they were, at the start at least, significantly more toxoplasmic than what happened in the USA.
I’m editing my post to remove all this to keep out of CW territory. Instead, and in the spirit of keeping tensions low, I will just say summarize by suggesting that the situation in Canada adheres to Scott’s theory much more closely. Either that, or protesters were angry over George Floyd, and were ready to protest over the next domestic incident, regardless of what it was.
If you’re interested, the incident I am referring to is the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet.
If you post it in the previous (or next) fractional thread, I’d be interested in reading it.
What is the scientific view (or the full-fledged Scott view, or the rationalist view, or the informed-person view) of the Turchin cycle theory (or similar theories about social cycles)? I have seen some vague commentary about them being discredited. But then I keep seeing them referenced in credible places like here (and also some economic stuff I admire).
Basically, has anyone reviewed the literature on this and can provide a shortcut?
I don’t think they’re precise or scientific, in the sense you can’t use them to predict exactly what will happen and in what year, but I think some of them identify actual recurring social patterns in organized societies. I’m most familiar with Strauss and Howe, but have also read Turchin and others. If you have specific questions, I can try to answer them.
Ok sure. Do the various cyclical models make similar predictions? For instance, i believe Strauss-Howe suggest the 2020s are likely to be Very Bad. Do the other models say something similar?
The Long Wave cycle. The down cycle is on the front cover of an old book I have and it starts 2020-2021.
Ray Dalio has been posting his cyclical view of super-powers on LinkedIn recently. His graphs of power level give successive empires ~125 years on top, with a total length of 220 years including time for their rise and decline. So by his theory, the US is on track to be eclipsed by China around 2040. And the years leading up to a transition like that are expected to have debt, political, and other crises.
Yes, many of them converge on the 2020s. I don’t know if their models were of exceptional quality or if they just had a sense of this. I don’t think this is purely a generational/social cycle thing–there are other major trends going on that accelerate the issue. But it’s related to it. A younger generation reaches adulthood and slowly realizes things aren’t working as expected. As this persists, it reveals the existing instability of the system (institutions/expectations etc.) that has built up. The pendulum eventually swings. The overlooked incompatibility usually takes about 80 years to build up to this point.
Turchin’s model predicted that “social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s.”
Strauss and Howe said around 2021, climaxing around 2025, and now Howe says “I think we entered [the crisis era] in the time of the GFC [Great Financial Crisis] 2008-2009 and I think we’re gonna be in it all the way until around the year 2030 right so that’s a good 22 years so we always predicted that in the 2020s we’d see an acceleration.”
The Storm Before the Calm (George Friedman) also gets into this, but it was published earlier this year–pre-COVID (this seems to be similar to economic historian J. Bradford DeLong’s argument made years earlier). Looks more at institutional cycles, but it’s not unrelated—U.S. “regimes” probably have shifted about every 80 years because that’s how long it takes for generations to lose sight of the original trade-offs (which were crisis-induced and often don’t make intuitive sense in more stable times, especially if tech and other things have evolved). They take the system for granted, stop maintaining it, and try and optimize parts of it until it is out of balance–they treat the parts discretely instead of systemically. This relates to elite overproduction.
The next generation then has to “rewire” everything so that it functions again. Post-WWII, we were increasingly able to build particularly sophisticated and extensive systems, which are causing their own problems and worsening the generational cycle issue. There’s less room to maneuver, and everything is interconnected.
Howe recently said, “many others have written about this and that is the tendency of societies like ours to have huge Civic and institutional turning points periods of
rapid transformation occur about the length of a long human lifetime about every 80 or 90 years and and guess what here we are right we’re right back there again and and the basic insight there and this would be Arnold Toynbee sort of generational forgetting thesis…”
I don’t know how scientific it is, and it certainly isn’t exact, but I definitely felt my understanding of the world increased after I read the Fourth Turning and The Calm Before the Storm.
I took Scott’s reference to the cycles as tongue in cheek given his somewhat skeptical book review. TL;DR: Turchin’s research seems sound, but given the shortage of data (especially clean data) and the flexibility in defining cycles there’s a decent chance that he could just be picking up random noise. Scott also mentions that his attempt at a literature review came up empty.
I think any vaguely plausible version of the theory is going to have to say exactly what the possibility of external shocks to the system is. Something like the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t seem like it should be more or less likely at any point in the cycle (unless the frequency of human interactions with animals reliably changes in a particular way along a cycle?) and it seems like a big enough external shock to the system that it should disrupt the existing cycle. If a shock like this happens to disrupt one in ten cycles, that’s not so bad for the theory, but if external shocks of this magnitude are likely to occur within every cycle, then you should wonder whether the cycles would have much explanatory power at all.
Most claim there is a defining crisis in every cycle, because they are regular parts of human experience. Big pandemics happen at least every 100 years—they just weren’t disruptive in the same manner because living with high disease risk was considered part of life. Something incredibly deadly like the plague no doubt generally disrupted things. Strauss & Howe said the Civil War majorly warped the timeline on that cycle led to a generation archetype being skipped over—that event was much more disruptive than disease, but I think most soldiers actually died of disease in camp outbreaks. Soldiers not from the south were vulnerable to malaria.
Pandemics happened regularly at the time, and the attitude toward death was wildly different—if you are used to having several kids die in childhood, a COVID-19 type illness is not going to be a big shock. People didn’t live much past 60 on average–it would barely have been noticed among all the other things that were killing people. I’m not sure COVID-19 will look like that big of a shock in hindsight—it accelerated things that were already happening. To an extent, it was more of an internal shock—the response and conditions/expectations in which it took place were very unusual historically and unique to our system. It is impossible to know for sure, of course, and we still don’t know how it will affect us in the next few years.
The value of the cycles is in explaining how people respond to the crises, and how societies change as they move away from it.
In The Fourth Turning, they propose some possible crises for our time (writing in 1991):
Did pandemics actually happen *regularly*, or just *frequently*? The difference is whether there’s an actual period to the occurrence (which could then underlie part of a cycle), or if they’re just as likely to recur after 10 years as after 110 years (by some sort of poisson process) so that they would disrupt whatever process was occurring cyclically.
They don’t happen regularly, but I’m not sure why they’re being singled out. Most pandemics aren’t going to be the defining feature, or even have a huge influence on, a generational cycle. The 1918 flu, even combined with all the War deaths of young men, did not fundamentally warp the cycle, and was less significant in social trends than the war itself. Other pandemics have also occurred at times where more significant systemic changes, like wars. COVID-19 hitting even a few decades ago would not have been a huge systemic shock—definitely not 100 years ago.
The cycles have to do, to a large extent, with social roles or scripts becoming incompatible with existing resources, opportunities, values, etc. External shocks matter if they cause an internal crisis under the circumstances. COVID-19 certainly will be a big deal internally, and could end up being the defining crisis, but that will largely have to do with the fact that the system, and people’s expectations and roles, are built based on an interconnected world without the threat of this kind of contagious disease, and that the modern system is uniquely complex and fragile and has an active older population. It’s likely a disruption would have come soon anyway, and it will accelerate it, but IMO it is unlikely to fundamentally change the trajectory of things.
I’m not sure if this is a deep question or a dumb one, but is there actually any “conservation of value” when there are crashes in the financial markets? That is, there’s a general belief that stocks and bonds are anti-correlated to some extent, such that when one does poorly the other does well. And it’s often believed that precious metals tend to do well after a market collapse. Is it reasonable to think that when stock market falls by some significant percentage in a short period, that there exists some other asset that has increased in value over the same timeframe? Or does the decrease in stock market value mostly just evaporate?
I ask because in most of the recent stock market downturns, it frequently seems like everything is “down”, or at least, that nothing is “up” enough to offset the losses. But maybe this is because the size of the market components is nowhere near equal? Perhaps a 1% increase in US Treasuries does offset 10% drop in major indexes? Or maybe the “value of cash” has gone up, whatever that might mean? Or perhaps in a major drop, there really is just a loss of value: anything salable is liquidated to make margin calls, leading to lower prices for everything salable.
On a practical level, I’d wonder what practical investments for individuals might exist that would be counter to another market crash like the one earlier this year. In that, it looked like basically everything was down: stocks, bonds, REIT’s, treasuries, TIPS, gold, silver, other commodities, you name it, it dropped. Different things recovered more quickly, some now showing overall gains, but in the moment, I think everything was down. Besides short positions in stocks (and various options strategies) is there anything that seems likely to anti-correlate to another similar drop if one occurs?
Rotations (from stocks to bonds, or from one stock sector to another) conserve value. Panics, like what we just saw this year, do not.
Is there a named metric for the percentage of loss of different events? It seems like it would be useful for distinguishing “panics” from “rotations”, but in the popular press I don’t feel like I’ve ever seen this being discussed much less measured.
Not really; I’d argue that a correction (>10% from a new high) is at least partially panic-driven, but like so many things in finance, these definitions are arbitrary.
There’s no conservation, no. Everything can go down.
There are countercyclical assets, most famously gold, which is countercyclical largely because a bunch of people put their money there in a downturn. This inflates the price but doesn’t increase the return (it often decreases it). Also, US/Swiss/etc treasuries or secure bonds tend to go up in bad times because if those governments stop paying their debts the world is basically ending. (Gold had a very brief crash but is up, for example. US treasuries didn’t in this crisis because people preferred corporate bonds, implying fears of inflation or the US debt.)
The issue is that countercyclical assets are countercyclical: they go down when everything else goes up, so if you just sit in them you’ll be losing money. This is usually because they’re more certain but have a lower yield, so volatility makes their value go up but in decent times there are better investments.
You can tell the best place to put money if you know what sort of crash is going to happen. But that’s predicting the future. If you knew the coronavirus crash was going to happen, the best place to put your money would have been tech and pharmaceutical (PayPal is up like 50% since January). If you just knew a crash was coming and not the kind, gold or other commodities would still have worked. Most of them behaved normally.
If you’re just looking for a general long term strategy, the answer is largely to ride it out. Even if you have a bad year, it’ll bounce back eventually. Usually in a few years at worst.
The short answer is no…there is not conservation of value.
To be really mathematical and precise, the value of a financial instrument is a function of only two inputs: the estimate of future cash flows, and the required rate of return used to discount those cash flows to the present. That’s all. End of story.
The cash flow for bonds are really predictable – you get set coupons. The cash flow for stocks are are really volatile (you get only what’s left over). In a garden variety mild recession, two things usually happen: the value of the cash flow for stocks goes down (because the economy tanks), and the required rate of return declines (because the Fed lowers rates to stimulate). Lower required returns equates to a higher price. Thus, in a garden variety recession, cash flow for bonds is usually fine but rates go down, so bonds go up. For stocks, rates going down should push them up, but the reduction in cash flow often more than offsets the rates, so they go down.
I’m a major crisis like the great financial crisis or the corona crisis, the cash flow for bonds is also at risk (bankruptcies everywhere), so they can also go down. But more pertinently, when uncertainty about cash flows gets very high, everyone just wants cash, so they liquidate, putting pressure on prices of assets. This is why you see “correlations go to 1” as traders like to say.
Why is there not conservation of value? At a meta level it’s because cash flows for the entire economy (ie GDP roughly) can and do permanently change. Also, required rates of return for the economy can and do change.
I’ve never liked the “value has disappeared” story that comes with stock market drops. The value might not be conserved in some other obvious stock-adjacent market, but surely every person that doesn’t own stocks has had their purchasing power increase by some (small) amount?
Disclaimer: I believe most advanced economic principles are essentially witchcraft, and not to be trusted.
When GDP declines, the decline has to come out of something. And even when it doesn’t, money can move from investment to consumption.
For the stereotypical day to day stock market shift when the president makes an unnerving remark or whatever and speculators panic there’s a sort of conservation of value in that the number of factories owned by each company or whatever hasn’t changed, it’s just that either speculators overestimated the value before or now they underestimate the value; in that case the value of cash absolutely does rise or fall when stocks drop or rise as you can buy more of a company with your cash.
But it’s of course possible for the size of the entire economy to change, as in factories shutting down during quarrantine or conversely new technologies being invented; after something like COVID appears your dollar might buy a larger percentage of the world economy but not get you any more value because the whole economy is slightly smaller.
What a complex question! I’d say the answers are no/no/only-slighlty.
But we can imagine a situation in which the answer to the third question (does value just evaporate?) is a clearer ‘yes’. At one time you had people willing to pay $X for a stake in the market, but later now they will only pay, e.g., 0.9 $X. Has 10% of the value been lost? In each case – IF the investors are wise and rational – the price is supposely some expection of future (discounted) cash flow. But what if the change is due to coronavirus? People are out of work, the economy is hurt, there’s lots of disruption, people are dying; it’s really reasonable to suspect that mankind truly is worse off economically (not to ignore other ways) due to this virus. Perhaps companies can be legimitately expected to earn less. And so perhaps a fall in price really reflects a rational valuation of a _real_ loss in humankind’s expected wealth. If that’s what’s going on then – at least in aggregate – no financial instrument can paper over this real loss of wealth.
To address your practical question for individuals: what’s wrong with just investing less in the market in the first place? What do you have against shorting/options? Are you hoping to hedge against the downside but still keep the upside if the market gains? Are there tax reasons? There’s not going to be a reliable (i.e. robust against a wide-ish range of possible futures) hedge that keeps give you most of the upside but limits the downside; at least not that anyone here knows or that you would have access to. (Though even without these caveats: you can safely assume that there’s not one.)
Thanks for your thoughts. Answering only the “practical” clarifications in the last paragraph:
> what’s wrong with just investing less in the market in the first place?
Selling and holding cash equivalents until things calm down is certainly a reasonable strategy. The downside is that it’s hard to determine when to get back in, and in an inflationary environment you might end up losing value over time. My guess is that the aftereffects of the COVID pandemic will be short-term deflationary on paper as measured with CPI, but inflationary with regard to most household expenses other than housing.
> What do you have against shorting/options?
Probably mostly lack of skill and knowledge, but I’d also like to avoid things that have unlimited downside if unattended. Right now I’m interested in learning more about things like the “options weaving” strategy described here: https://www.lynalden.com/precious-metals-investing/. Essentially, chose something (like gold or silver) that you’d be happy enough owning on a price drop and selling the upside gain in return for income.
> Are you hoping to hedge against the downside but still keep the upside if the market gains?
I’m happy to trade off most of the upside on a market surge in return for better performance during an eventual market drop. I’m personally willing to bet that there will be some exceptionally poor earnings reports over next couple years, but I lack confidence is the timing on which the market will react to this, and on the time scale that will be involved. My guess is that at some point in the next 18 months we’ll see further drops of the sort that happened in March, and I’m wondering how to position for this.
> Are there tax reasons?
Sure, but not incredibly important. I sold my broad-market index mutual funds about half-way down during the March drop in a way that leaves me with a significant percentage of short-term losses that can offset most of what would otherwise be a poor tax-wise strategy.
> There’s not going to be a reliable (i.e. robust against a wide-ish range of possible futures) hedge that keeps give you most of the upside but limits the downside; at least not that anyone here knows
There’s a lot of smart people here, and a lot that I don’t know, so it seemed worth asking. There may well be easy to access hedges that I don’t know about that others here do. For example, when recently trying to learn about inflation protected bonds (TIPS), I accidentally found out about Series EE Savings Bonds. As a public service notice, if you are an American less than 60 years old, if you can afford it I think you should strongly consider the maximum limit of $10,000 per year: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4289926-ridiculous-fact-ee-bonds-are-now-stellar-long-term-investment. It makes me suspect that other such hedges exist as well, but that I just don’t know about them.
My biotech fund has gone up massively. Might well prove to be transitory, when the ‘winner’ emerges (C19 vaccine) everyone else will drop back
The super-literal answer to your question is short-selling, or inverse-funds.
For every $1 the S&P goes up, an S&P inverse fund goes down $1, and vice-versa. Now that’s not a “real investment” as such and it doesn’t really represent “market value” but it is a completely 100% anti-correlated thing that you can invest in.
> completely 100% anti-correlated
The cities are rubble and radioactive glass. Bands of humans roam the shattered landscape looking for food. Warlords fund their activities using the infinity dollars they got from their inverse ETFs.
/snark
Hey, if “everything will be fine so long as you have infinity dollars” is considered a viable economic policy when the fed does it, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t apply just as well to the warlords!
There are 3 types of anticipated economic collapse:
Buy Inverse ETFs
Buy Gold
Buy vegetable seeds and shotgun shells
Probably buy the seeds early.
All the mail order companies were utterly flooded back in march/april. Half the time I’d check their websites and it’d just be a static page saying ‘please come back later’.
Yeah I’m glad I didn’t wait until March this year to get seeds, I grabbed everything in January. Also got lucky with Internet service — Verizon did an equipment and bandwidth upgrade for me in February; by the end of March I was hearing they were majorly backed up and new service requests weren’t being scheduled until the fall. Also had a pound of yeast in the freezer already too.
Some non-obvious things to think about keeping a supply of for the next plague, I guess.
A market crash means that the value of stocks relative to dollars has gone down. But that also means that the value of dollars relative to stocks has gone up. That’s the offset. Dollars are relatively more desirable, and stocks less desirable.
If you want to anticorrelate, stick your money under the mattress, or less figuratively, in a bank getting whatever low fixed interest rate they are willing to give you.
Are prescription stimulants and SSRIs nootropics for the purpose of this survey? They certainly are cognitive enhancers.
This seems to be a pretty good discussion of the problems of peer review, especially in the ‘Social Sciences’: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/11/bla-bla-bla-peer-review-bla-bla-bla/
On a cheerier note, let’s talk about eccentrics. Does your metropolitan area have one? I’m talking about Emperor Norton type figures, men and women who live outlandish lives in public view and are generally adored for it.
I live in Bay County, Florida, and we have a man named Decaris Hunter. Mr. Hunter’s exact background is not clear to me, but he spends a tremendous amount of time hanging out at busy intersections holding up signs that say “Spread the Love” and getting people to honk. As in, hours on end. I believe he treats it like a full-time job. We are not talking about a shoestring operation with crappy signs here. He has a number of snazzy custom-printed shirts; I’ve heard that he has corporate sponsors as well. He once pulled in behind me at a gas station, driving a big white Ford pickup with a bunch of Spread the Love stuffed animals on the dash and deafening Gospel music blasting out the open windows. He danced to the music while he was filling up, completely un-self-conscious about the crowds staring.
When I tried to look it up, I found a news interview where he said he was an ex-con who wanted to turn his life around. Whatever the case may be, Bay County is very much behind his Spread the Love mission. Until COVID hit he did lots of selfies with random people. A year or so back a local mall drove him away for “loitering.” They felt the wrath of God for that, and quickly backpedaled. You do not accuse Decaris Hunter of loitering, he is a civic treasure.
Richmond Virginia has “Happy the Artist“; he gave hugs to anyone who asked, drove very oddly decorated cars, and painted amazing murals.
Present-day San Francisco has Frank Chu, although he’s less “adored” and more a curiosity.
He’s clearly a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. Sad.
I once encountered such a person over the phone when I was a receptionist for a government agency. What he wanted was extremely unclear, though he was loud and passionate about it. He kept insisting that I visit his website. After three calls I checked it out, and there he laid out the whole story. Apparently he wanted to start a recycling plant and his many and varied enemies who were afraid that his recycling plant would put them out of business had conspired with his psychologist to falsely give him a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The website went on for many pages explaining in detail about how this diagnosis was just the cherry on top of a long history of people in power conspiring against him. He seemed incapable of recognizing that his paranoid ramblings did not help his case that his diagnosis was inaccurate.
Boston has Keytar Bear if that counts.
OrI had a few conversations once in central park in NY with Blackwolf the Dragonmaster (once featured in humans of new york):
https://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/60121187995/last-week-i-sent-an-email-to-blackwolf-the
He’s a super kind person, from my brief interactions. He dresses like a really old wizard, and has a dragon puppet on his shoulder that he does ventriloquism for (though he doesn’t really try to make it look like he’s not moving his own mouth)
Hm. The dragonmaster’s own site is down, his Facebook hasn’t been active since 2014 it looks like. I feel sad to have missed this phenomenon.
Not my metro area, but Madison has Thong Cape Scooter Man.
Have you seen Errol Morris’ “Vernon, Florida”?
I recall seeing Matthew Lesko’s (the question mark suit guy) car a lot growing up. It’s unclear to me how much is legitimate eccentricity and how much is marketing.
It’s only legitimate eccentricity if the legal system institutionalizes him for fighting Batman.
Portland has the unipiper, who is frequently seen with his bagpipes (often with flames coming from the pipes), a darth vader mask or other full-head mask, and a unicycle. On May 4th he always does his conventional Vader mask and plays Star Wars songs, because (say it aloud) “May the 4th be with you.”
He does other holiday-themed things, and event/news-related ones too, like this bit re: covid-19.
My older brother and I both wore an apple bucket with suspenders to cross-country meets in which we (not having made the varsity team) didn’t compete. We did so in imitation and appreciation of “The Barrel Man” –wearing a barrel somehow made his fandom feel wholesome and fun, rather than the weird loser-fascist vibe that some mega sports fans give off.
So yeah, the barrel man was a Denver Broncos phenomenon until 2009.
Not an answer (not metropolitan, mostly not contemporary) but maybe interesting for someone who follow this subthread, the biographical sketches of British people with rather peculiar habits or lifestyles in Tales of the Country Eccentrics.
Bristol has a sixty-something who rides around and around the harbour on a bicycle fitted out to look like an oversized Harley Davidson or Honda Gold Wing. He has an enormous speaker on the back that belts out 70s rock so loud that you can hear him from several hundred yards away. He does this all day and (as far as I can tell) every day.
Philly Jesus https://www.phillymag.com/tag/philly-jesus/
Los Angeles has Angelyne.
Berkeley has a whole listicle’s worth.
Many universities have Brother Jed, and I think there are other individuals that are a lot like him, but are in fact distinct people. (The Wikipedia page doesn’t mention all the universities he hangs out at, because Texas A&M is definitely on the list.)
Although, on re-reading your description, I think Angelyne is the only one of these that is generally loved for the eccentricity.
Fellow Bay County, Floridian here, and I will confirm that the Love must Spread!
Before FL, I lived for a time in Albuquerque, NM, and one of the eccentrics was the naked thrifty guy. He’d walk in front of the UNM campus all the time wearing next to nothing, pulling a radio flyer red wagon with his stuff, holding up a sign that said something like, “I lived on $11,000 last year, and you can too! Ask me how!” I never asked, I assumed his lifestyle and fulfillment was self-evident.
There is a guy in Jacksonville, NC (a military town that hosts US Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune) who is known as the ‘Jacksonville Ninja’ who spends hours doing martial arts moves on the side of the road. No links because of spam filters but the news did a segment on him because he has been a local fixture for years and there is a video on youtube so you can see his moves yourself.
And associating police brutality with race, side-by-side condemnations of unrelated protests/gatherings during COVID-19 with excuses for these protests, releasing arrested looters, declaring that remaining silent is taking a position, declaring that opposition to one particular movement means opposition to black people… all this seems like the most concentrated example of toxoplasma we’ve seen yet.
*Cough cough* CW *Cough cough*
I’m a bit confused as to the rules regarding CW. Is the rule that CW should be discussed in the fractional open threads and not the whole numbered open threads? If so, what if Scott himself talks about a CW topic (like this one) on a whole numbered open thread? Are we allowed to discuss that topic?
Yes, doesn’t matter, no, respectively. The doesn’t matter is because the thread post body != the thread itself, and Because Scott usually uses the post for various announcements, general responses, administrivia, and so on.
This is pretty esoteric, but hoping there’s > 0 people here interested in this. I’m fascinated by the theory of music scales, tuning systems, intervals/ratios, tempered vs non-tempered, etc. My question concerns the birds (cuckoos as the canonical example) that sing 2 notes that are a descending minor 3rd. Is it a tempered interval? or maybe using just intonation? Maybe some scientists have measured the actual frequencies, but I don’t know how to search for that data. The measurements would have to be pretty precise because the difference between a tempered minor 3rd (ratio = 1.1892…) and a just minor 3rd (ratio = 6/5 = 1.2) is pretty small (< 1%).
For those who share this interest, I've written a software app – a tool to explore scales, intervals, ratios and intonations. You can use it to, for example, hear the difference between the 81/64 3-limit ratio major 3rd and the 5/4 "just" major 3rd and the tempered major 3rd, or find out that the "pure" 3/2 5th is 2 cents sharper than the tempered 5th, or that 60hz hum is 49 cents below a B. You can download it from DropBox using this link –
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gfzvo9r0crgcobj/AAAKj1BcKMpUbMJyYecbfJioa?dl=0
I am not much of a musician, but it sounds from eg this recording that the upper note is not a single pitch. To me it sounds like a slight downward glide, with the initial pitch higher than an equal-tempered minor third. This site I just found has some interesting experiments with transcribing birdsong, and the author seems pretty clear that birdsong is both microtonal and liberally ornamented with glides.
I have one of my degrees in music theory. I used to have similar questions, but not this one exactly. Can I ask why you got so intrigued by it.
My prior, based on everything I’ve read in the past, is that an interval occurring naturally (like with birds) is likely to not be tempered. Tempering is something that happens artificially to accommodate the chromaticism that developed in Baroque music. If you ask people to sing chants from the Middle Ages, or if you look at some a cappella music today (barbershop quartet music comes to mind), I’m thinking it might not be tempered (that’s how barbershop quartets can achieve a really “ringing” quality that is fun and attractive).
Basically, my prior is that natural things are going to be untempered. But I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I spent any time with it.
Barbershop quartets not only use non-tempered (whole number ratio) intervals, they use the 7th harmonic (7/4 ratio) in their 7th chords. Famously dreaded by horn players, that’s 31 cents flat from the tempered 7th.
The problem with that is that choirs sometimes sing stuff that includes a comma pump.
Isn’t it the opposite? While musicians think in terms of untempered in order to read music, in practice, they play D-flat and C-sharp in minutely different ways to harmonize with what they’re hearing (if the instrument allows them to). Singing should have even more leeway to do that.
I’ve done some sampling and manipulation of bird calls while producing electronic music, and my experience was that the birds were all really pitchy. So my guess is the question is not really answerable because birds’ pitches are not that consistent.
You got an audio file or a youtube video of the bird?
I’ll try and feed the samples through a fourier transform.
Because of @DavidFriedman’s recommendation I’ve been taking vitamin D3 pills, I’ve also seen some recommendations for some flavor of vitamin B (which one? B2? B12? I’ve no idea).
Any other recommendations of supplements?
(Preferably those that can be bought brick and mortar, I loath shopping “on-line”).
Vitamin B12 is commonly recommended for those that eat no or reduced quantities of animal products. It is surprising how few vegetarians and vegans know about this, as the consequences of vitamin B12 deficiency can hit fast, unexpectedly (often years after making dietary changes) and cause serious long term consequences.
If the goal is to consume well-researched supplements that are safe, effective, promoting of long-term health, and often lacking in developed diets, I would also look at magnesium, zinc, and omega-3 – all of these are very easily to obtain.
Another benefit of B12, just like vitamin C and unlike vitamin D, is that nothing bad happens if you supplement more than you need.
At very high amounts over a lengthy period of time there can be some problems.
I’m the local B12 advocate. My gut is only reluctant to absorb it even from a meat-rich diet and I made the mistake to try and go vegetarian to “help with my health issues” and skidded narrowly past dementia (narrowly by my measure; I was still entirely functional, just utterly miserable and palpably declining).
Since it’s over the counter I generally recommend people who have symptoms that are remotely like mine were (sound sensitivity, light sensitivity, problems concentrating, poor sleep quality, catastrophic memory issues, frequent constipation; severe depression thanks to all of the preceding issues) to try B12 supplements for a week or two. For reference, I take about 20µg a day, though I’m going to be upping it to 30µg a day because I’ve had to switch suppliers; but the “ideal amount” I am trying to go for, personally, is 20µg.
If you do try this, dear reader, be careful not to get a vitamin B combo product, while B12 is next to impossible to overdose on, the other B vitamins aren’t.
(Also, methylcobalamin may be better than cyanocobalamin, but I’m happy with latter.)
I’ve heard the claim that it’s hard to get the required vitamin D from supplements and easier to get it from sun, but I don’t know enough to be sure.
@DavidFriedman – Now that we’re not talking about Culture War stuff, do you want to have that discussion about general Moral Philosophy?
Sure. I think I sketched the problem earlier.
The starting question is what people deserve. One approach, the one that seems to me to be most workable, is that the question is what this person as he is deserves. If you are a kind, honest, honorable, productive person you deserve to have good things happen to you. If you are a cruel person who goes around being nasty to people and lives by swindling people you deserve to have bad things happen to you.
My point is not the specific list, and I’m not talking at this point about how a just society will work — I don’t think institutions that reliably give people what they deserve are an option. My point is that what you deserve is a statement about you as you now are.
The very tempting alternative is to ask whether you deserve to be as you now are. If the reason you are a nasty, hostile person is that you were abused as a child then you don’t deserve to be such a person, so don’t deserve to get worse outcomes than the person lucky enough to be reared by loving parents to be a kind, generous, honest person.
One problem with this approach is that if you push it back far enough nobody deserves anything, good or bad, since every characteristic of a person can be traced to things that are in some sense not his fault, his genes as well as his environment. One could try to get out of this by introducing free will and claiming that some things are the result of voluntary choice rather than causal chains starting outside the individual, but it’s hard to know how to turn that approach into a coherent moral theory.
What got me thinking about that was something you said about Asians, that (my summary from memory) if their talents should give them a ten percent higher than average income but, due to discrimination, they only ended up with a five percent higher income, things should somehow be fixed to get them back up to ten percent.
So you were distinguishing between one subset of characteristics relevant to desert that people were entitled to and another they were not. I didn’t see on what basis you did that, given what seemed to be the logic of your r/Racism approach.
Two other and briefer points. First, my basis for moral philosophy is intuitionism. For a long version, Michael Huemer has a book with that title. For a short version, see this draft chapter from the third edition of my first book.
Second, an alternative criterion to desert, one that I think better suited for building a legal system on, is entitlement, a distinction I borrow from Nozick. You are entitled to something if you got it by a legitimate chain of transactions. Seen from that standpoint, one could argue that a current West Coast Japanese with an above average income was entitled to transfers to compensate him for property lost due to the imprisonment of his family during WWII, because such transfers undue a past illegitimate transfer. That’s the line of argument sometimes offered to justify transfers to the descendants of slaves.
My point here isn’t to argue for any particular application of the approaches. It is that there is a fundamental difference between saying “someone should get something because he deserves it” and “because he is entitled to it.” Both might be used to argue for the same conclusion, but they are fundamentally different arguments.
And the “deserves” version raises the problems I described above.
What of the matter that these chains turn out to start with a conquest?
English property rights are a strong thing resting on Weberian legal-rational authority, which every private party upholds because violations are punished in courtrooms.
A property owner might even be able to trace their legitimate chain of transfers to 1067, with the decree of William the Conqueror that every acre of land was his property.
William took the land from the Saxons, who took it from someone else (the Celts or something), who surely took it from someone else.
I think every entitlement started out with conquest of some sort, so in a way. Turtles all the way down, just like for deserts. I think the solution is how the system of justice usually deals with these things: having an expiry date on claims¹.
For actual conquest (i.e. between states) we don’t really have that, so in principle, occupants like Turkey, Morocco, China, Israel, Russia, etc should return the land they occupy. In practice, the claims are only treated as nominal, except when vocal political factions keep them current.
¹ Or do we? Maybe this is only for criminal cases? I know that you have a much weaker case if you complain about a transaction (buying a house, say) if you don’t field your claim as soon as you become aware of the issue. Similar for things like trademarks, I’m pretty sure – if you don’t maintain your claim, you lose it.
Re: Footnote
I recently looked up it up on Wikipedia, to learn how this is handeled in th US. Prescreption exists in the US for both criminal as well as civil cases.
This is my understanding of the general rule for the US as it pertains to land:
For squatting to translate to actual ownership of the land, the Adverse Possession has to be ‘open and notorious’. In other words, the owner of the land, if they were using that land in the first place, should be able to tell that it’s happening. This is true, even if it’s a small infraction, even if it’s unintentional, and even if the land owner does not – in fact – discover the adverse possession during the time they could legally assert their claim. The idea is that if someone is relying on a claim of possession – even an adverse one – for long enough, the law should treat that reliance as actual fact if the claim goes unchallenged.
I seem to recall some case about a property owner building steps that encroached on a neighbor’s property, going over the property line a few inches. It was there for years, but the neighbor didn’t think anything of it, until for some reason they surveyed the land (wanted to pour a driveway, I think? Sorry, it’s been over a decade since I studied the case) and discovered that the steps were built too far over. They sued, thinking they could reclaim their property and build the driveway.
They lost. The court decided that the adverse possession was open and notorious, and that had the legitimate land-owner wished he could have discovered the error any time in the intervening years, but didn’t do the land survey and so tacitly accepted the adverse possession.
All land on the East Coast goes back to King George III iirc
I should point out that “legitimate chain of transactions” is just one theory of entitlement. Alternative theories of entitlement are based off of distributive justice (i.e. the outcome, who ends up with what) rather than procedural justice (i.e. the process, how transactions occur).
Not sure I understand this. One problem is what constitutes a “legitimate transaction”. I think a government deciding to collect tax and redistribute it would be considered legitimate (at least in as much as the government itself is legitimate).
Entitlement based on distribution sounds like it would be fair for me to take some of your money if you have more and I have less. While rarely explicitly stated, I think this is a common pattern, many seem to contrast e.g. the wealth of Bezos with their own – it is “unfair” that he is rich (from the work of others, even!) and they not. But aren’t this an argument from desert, that Bezos doesn’t “deserve” to be so much richer than me, who after all am a hard working and competent individual who by no means spends too much time in online forums doing philosophical hairsplitting…
As another meta-level hairsplitting aside:
Is it justified to treat income as synonymous with wealth in these calculations? Perhaps if we treated all methods of monetary gain identically, we could make that distinction?
What of the multimillionaire who retired at thirty? That person is unemployed, according to labor statistics. Depending on how you calculate ‘deserts’ they could be deserving of government aid based on an income model*, while clearly being on the opposite side of the equation based on a wealth model.
*You could calculate investment gains as income, but in a bad year for the millionaire’s investments, they could post significant losses while still having their personal chef cook up steaks every night. Could this same millionaire who loses money one year apply for – and receive – significant government aid because the system inappropriately judges their income situation to mean they’re deserving of assistance? (i.e. that they’re poor)
@Ketil
Arguments for redistributive taxation don’t have to be based on desert, although many people like to go that rhetorical route. One immediate road-block for someone arguing for taxation/transfers via work-based desert is that many people in our society just cannot or should not work (children, the elderly, the disabled, ect). Desert-based justice leaves them out in the cold.
I was careful not to specify the details of a particular theory of distributive justice, since I wanted to leave it open ended. Total wealth equalization is a theory of distributive justice, but certainly not the only one. I mainly just want to draw a contrast between “things that are good because they followed a certain process” vs. “things that are good because they achieved a certain outcome”.
@Zephalinda
I suppose you could phrase it that way. But the most common desert formulations involve a person having completed some sort of choice or action in order to “earn” their just desert, with the desert being a “reward” or (if negative) a “punishment”.
If you want to communicate that you think people should have things, but not because of any choices or actions they take, I think it is more clearly communicated as they are “morally entitled” to the things, rather than they “morally deserve” the things.
@DavidFriedman & Eric T
A closely related problem is that what people can reasonably have from others depends at least in part on what they do for others.
For example, let’s say that there are two hunter-gatherers who live in an environment with little food: Mary and Bob. Mary is great at catching fish. Bob is great at cooking it. Alone, they would be barely able to feed themselves if they spend all day on feeding themselves, because while Mary can catch fish relatively quickly, her poor cooking means she can barely cook enough edible fish for herself. The opposite is true of Bob, who can barely catch enough fish, but once he catches one, he cooks it quickly and well.
If they work together, each specializing in what they are skilled at, they have time left over after feeding themselves, that they can use for increased prosperity. Making a hovel, clothes, having children, etc.
Now imagine that Bob gets into an accident that makes him unable to fish. One might argue that Mary has an obligation to care for him, because she is relatively privileged by not having that accident. However, even without caring for Bob her prosperity has been greatly reduced by Bob’s accident. His ill fate made her much worse off.
If she does try to feed him, they will both die, as she alone can only feed one person.
So my point is that there is a feedback-loop. In the scenario without the accident, Mary can only provide certain benefits to Bob, because he provides benefits to her (which he can only do, because…).
The same is true if you look at modern society, although it is much less visible and direct. Still, employers can only pay their workers as much as they do, because the workers do work for the employer.
—
Another example. Scott smashes the car window of Alice, to steal her car radio, to sell for drugs. The police catches Scott before he can sell the radio and it is returned to Alice. However, this doesn’t undo the harm of her smashed car window. We now have the choice to:
– Let Alice pay for the car window, so she is still worse off than if the theft hadn’t happened
– Let Scott pay for the car window, so he is worse off than if he hadn’t done the theft
– Let a third party pay, so they are worse off than if the theft hadn’t happened
– A combination of the above
There is no option to undo the harm, so no one is worse off, compared to the situation without the theft.
A key aspect here is that the harm that was done comes in two variants:
– reversible (taking and returning the car radio)
– irreversible (smashing the window)
Ultimately, if we have two possible realities, Utopia and Harm, where in the latter someone was harmed, then the only way we can turn Harm back into Utopia is if the harm that was done, is reversible. If that is not the case & it is almost never entirely the case, we can only redistribute the harm that was done.
But at that point, we have an issue, because while many victims don’t deserve the harm that happened to them, we often also don’t have others who (fully or at all) deserve that harm.
—
A third example. Hank and Anne have a loving relationship. Anne gets attacked by a drunk person and suffers brain damage that makes her violent & that cannot be undone. Hank dislikes being beaten (and having his children be beaten), so he wants to leave her.
If we only consider the harm that happened to Anne and want to make her as much whole as we can, the logical thing to do is to force Hank to stay with Anne. For Anne, this is the closest we can make her life to the situation where she wasn’t harmed.
Yet if we make that choice, it means that others will in turn be severely harmed.
—
So based on these examples, I would argue that you cannot just look at what people’s lives would have been without harm. You have to figure out what is most fair in the situation where the harm happened. If you want to go beyond merely undoing the harms that were done, which is only possible to a very limited extent, you have to accept that you are throwing the switch in the trolley problem. You are causing a harm to innocents, which you may consider the most fair (or least unfair) solution, but it is not what they deserve to happen to them.
The ‘reversible/irreversible’ scheme you outline above is closely related to the legal principle in tort law called ‘conversion’. If you steal my dog, you can still give it back. If you shoot my dog, you’ve ‘converted’ the possession in a way that it cannot be legally recovered through direct means. It has to be converted into some other kind of compensation, which is often difficult to calculate. (And in practice is based on statues and years of legal precedent about what it means to make the situation right.)
The story of the addict brings in another legal principle. Once upon a time, if you were too poor to pay when a legal judgement went against you, the person you owed money to could accept non-payment in the form of prison time. This is what Jesus means when he says you’ll rot in jail if you owe money you can’t pay back (Sermon on the Mount) or how the debtor’s debtor threw people in prison for non-payment even after he got forbearance (parable). We abolished that practice years ago, such that today the drug addict who is stealing to support their habit will not pay anything to fix the car window. They are what we call ‘judgement-proof’; meaning that a judgement would not be able to collect anything against them because they don’t make anything. And since we’re no longer willing to throw people in prison for monetary damages (probably a good thing on balance, given the history behind the practice) the law can’t do anything to recover the judgement. The judgement becomes a piece of paper that conveys no promise of restitution by legal means. So Alice’s insurance pays to fix the window. Not because we’ve decided she deserves to pay the price, but because Scott is incapable of making restitution, and we’re unwilling to send him to a work camp to make him pay for it.
This in turn creates interesting scenarios. OJ Simpson was acquitted of criminal charges for the murders of his wife and Ron Goldman, but he lost the subsequent civil case brought by the Goldman family. The criminal standard is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, and the evidence didn’t quite fit well enough to convict based on that requirement. But but the civil standard is a ‘preponderance of evidence’, so of course OJ lost (I want to say it was wrongful death?). Simpson was loaded, but he declared the Goldman family would not get a dime of the judgement against him. He moved to Florida, where the law prohibits recovery of damages from assets, only from income. OJ stated he was purposefully NOT going to work so he didn’t have to pay anything to the judgement. Despite his millions, he’d rendered himself judgement-proof.
Later, he was preparing to publish a book called “If I did it” where he all but confessed to the murders. The Goldman family discovered this fact and successfully sued to have the book included as part of the judgement – it was new ‘income’ from OJ. (I think it helped that the publishing house was located outside Florida, but I can’t remember the details.) The Goldman family published it, shrinking the word ‘if’ in the title down to insignificance, and added a lengthy foreword of their own about their perspective of the murders.
@David Friedman
Your description of moral nihilism seems like an outside-description of morality. My rebuttal of it would be that when people are asking about moral philosophies, they are asking for internal (actor) descriptions.
Is this adequate?
It occurs to me, looking at the responses, that there is a third category of moral theory that doesn’t fit either of the ones I described, a theory such as utilitarianism which hold that one should do whatever best achieves some objective, such as maximizing total utility. It isn’t allocating on the basis of either desert or entitlement, although I suppose one could cram it into the desert category with enough effort.
I’d consider myself like 2/3ds consequentialist/utilitarian. I do think that giving people what they “deserve” or maybe what they are “entitled to” is a net good on utility for a bunch of reasons.
-People feel much happier when they receive what they think they’ve earned
-Solving for inequalities increases efficiency
-It is more likely to help the least well off (marginal utility)
-When people believe justice will be done they act in a better way
Stuff like that.
There’s yet another alternative here, that mostly turns up in a religious context. This is the idea that everyone is of equal worth, and deserves the same good treatment.
This may be impractical – various arguments for this are obvious and well known.
But it returns again and again in religious argument. (As an example, to many Christians, all are sinners, and deserving of ultimate bad, with small differences essentially irrelevant compared to the goodness of God.)
It’s present in some versions of communist/socialist ideals, without the religious backing.
You can argue this is not moral philosophy per se, because it’s not providing moral context for the recipient. But it’s telling all people, in their roles as givers/actors towards other people how they ought to behave, so I think it qualifies.
I also think it’s lurking behind a lot of modern intuitions, just rarely stated as baldly except by a few religious writers.
Also, FWIW, this can show up as entitlement – any time you hear “xyz is a right”, they’ve headed down this path. You don’t earn rights; you have them simply because you exist.
It’s just that most people, unless they aspire to be or describe saints, stop before going all the way down that path.
Sorry for not responding! Real life caught up for a bit 🙁
I think I can “get out of this” in two ways: First I think we can all acknowledge, even me, that the further back you go the less directly causal actions are on you as you are now. So probably like 100+ years ago we can only really discuss pretty major stuff, and even then I think the impact is diminished. I tried to in my other posts stray away from reparations from say slavery because of this very issue.
Second I think we can introduce a pragmatic element here. It is pragmatically good for society if people have some degree of responsibility for their actions no matter what. I think if we offset responsibility 100% that does breakdown stuff in a meaningful way.
Look – I’m a causal determinism. I don’t think that morally anything is anyone’s “fault” so to speak, we’re all gears in a machine. But I do think adhering to the principals of justice makes society better.
I posted this earlier but I’ll repost it here, to breakdown what I think kind of broadly:
Like perhaps if there was a way to ensure everyone was born exactly equally without massively decreasing overall happiness, I’d be interested in it.
This is a really cool distinction and I’d love to talk more about it, but I feel like I should read Huemer or at least your draft chapter. Give me a bit, and I’ll circle back on this.
I guess to me it seems like you could always run into this infinite regression here too right: couldn’t you go back far enough and find a transaction that is illegitimate. Below people brought up conquest. Is conquest a legitimate means of transaction? Why is it ok, but stealing/mugging isn’t for example?
But is merit predicated on what they now are, the position I argued for, or on what they would be if not for … ?
Does my nasty person who is nasty because of his terrible upbringing deserve failure on the basis of his (present) merit?
That’s a potential problem. The best solution I can come up with is that it’s a matter of relative entitlement. If one could actually find out who the property was stolen from (assuming an initial just “mixing labor with the land” claim) a thousand years ago and trace his inheritance down, the heir would have a legitimate claim against the current owner. But you can’t, and the current owner got the land through a chain of legitimate transactions through people who continued to mix their labor with the land in various ways, so has a much better claim than a random person.
You might be interested in my not very successful attempt to resolve the initial ownership problem in another chapter of the same book.
Among other things, the whole moral argument for outcomes based on merit got a lot less convincing to me when I started understanding how much of intelligence is inherited.
If you don’t get your dose of Dutch fixed expressions, send a ‘brandbrief’
‘Brandbrief’ = Fire letter
A letter with a strident request for help and/or a complaint about misdeeds. This used to mean a letter that proved the damages caused by a fire, that one could give to the insurance company to get paid. Later, the meaning broadened to any demand for help or change.
‘Ergens een broertje dood aan hebben’ = Having a dead little brother of it
Really disliking something. The sentence literally means that one’s little brother died of it, referring to a time when many children died of diseases. So a common explanation why someone disliked talking about a disease was that their little brother or sister died of it.
‘buigen of barsten/breken’ = Bending or bursting/breaking
It will happen, one way or the other.
‘Goedschiks of kwaadschiks’ = Well arranged or bad arranged
Same as the above. Either you cooperate or it will happen against your will, with force or other bad means.
‘Buiten de pot piesen’ = Peeing next to the pot
Cheating on your partner or making a mistake. The former meaning seems on it’s way out. Goes back to at least 1615.
‘Een slippertje maken’ = slipping
Cheating on your partner.
“Brandbrief” again exact same word in German.
Welcome to our discussion of “The One I Love”, which is #40 in Rolling Stone’s Top 40 Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century.
Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass play a bickering couple (Sophie and Ethan) who are sent to a country retreat by their therapist. There they discover two copies of themselves. This is initially intriguing, since the copies actually seem like better versions of their real spouses. Later they discover that the therapist actually plans to replace them by their copies, while trapping them in the retreat. The therapist has done this multiple times: he traps a couple at the retreat, transforms them into better versions of another couple, who he in turn traps at the retreat, while sending the replacement couple to take over their lives in the outside world. Later, Ethan and Sophie escape from the estate, and it turns out Ethan actually escaped with the copy of Sophie rather than his original wife.
You can find a more detailed plot summary here.
In the film, we see Ethan I (the original) return from the retreat with what turns out to be Sophie II (the copy). Was this the therapist’s plan all along, or was that something he had not expected? Also, Ethan I recognizes that he returned with Sophie II. And she knows she is Sophie II. Does she know that he knows? Does the therapist?
The part that doesn’t make sense to me is why the therapist would set up this elaborate scheme. He has one couple trapped in the country retreat. He physically transforms them into another couple, and teaches them to behave like the other couple, in order to have them replace this other couple in the real world. And he traps the other couple in the retreat, so he can keep repeating the cycle. Why? What is he trying to accomplish?
If it was all a plan to find better matches for Ethan and Sophie, without having the couple visibly spit up, he could have been much more straightforward. People divorce and remarry all the time. He could just have told them they should both find other partners, and here are a selection to try. Easy. No weird magic needed.
Bottom line, this film has a really cool concept. This notion of going somewhere to meet a slightly better version of your spouse (and yourself) is really neat. But I don’t think the setup for the idea quite makes sense. And the ending seemed a bit strange.
Finally, a question for y’all. Is this actually a science fiction film?
(Next week, we’ll be discussing Rolling Stone’s #39, “Another Earth”. )
I haven’t seen the film, but I agree the plan doesn’t make sense. Why not turn each couple into a better version of themselves? Wouldn’t that be easier, and also sort of what they signed up for?
Based on the ranking, I’d consider watching the whole movie. {Spoiler alert: That opinion changes by the end of this post. I am fickle.} My memory is that I got bored and went on to something else. This may simply be a hazard of our modern streaming world, where I place a pretty high value on the expected enjoyment I’ll get out of the average replacement movie or television show.
The positive (from what I remember): Watching Duplass and Moss perform variations on the same characters and relationship. The negative: They were so good at playing low-level awful people that I wasn’t invested in what happened to them.
Is it science fiction? Mmmmaybe. Speculative fiction can be pretty broad, and I’d hate to limit a genre that’s given me so much enjoyment. That said, I thought the premise there to be forgotten in service of letting the actors do interesting things. Worse, the premise wasn’t good enough to make me ignore that I wasn’t into the story, and the story wasn’t good enough to make me ignore that I wasn’t intrigued by the premise.
“Writing is a process of discovery,” I’ve heard and I believe. In writing this, I’ve discovered that I won’t be attempting to fully watch this movie. I’ve also discovered that I’m grateful to @johan_larson for shining a light on this list.
Question: are we 100% sure it’s Sophie II? I thought it was meant to be just slightly more ambiguous, although I agree that’s the most obvious conclusion. But maybe I’m importing more ambiguity than was meant.
Given that there is a scene where someone runs into, essentially, a force-field, I do think it is science-fiction, although of the “let’s use tech as the justification for creating a thought-experiment world” rather than “let’s use tech and explore the ramifications of the tech” sci-fi. I suppose your mileage may vary about whether you think that’s sci-fi.
I thought it was a good movie; I’d say ignore the plot holes about the plan, and enjoy it for the very solid Duplass and Moss lead / dual performances and the questions it raises about people and relationships.
I’m pretty sure it’s Sophie II. They made a big deal earlier in the movie about how Sophie I hates making bacon and Sophie II being ok with it. And at the end of the movie the Sophie who escaped is making bacon. Ethan certainly stops and highlights the significance of it. So I think it’s Sophie II.
This makes total sense. I was trying to remember why I thought it was ambiguous, and finally remembered: I read the scene as, Ethan hears about the bacon, and wonders if it’s Sophie or Sophie II, and is uncertain as to which, but then realizes that either he doesn’t care or it doesn’t matter (or both). (Again, I may be trying to force more ambiguity into it than is there in a “Deckard–is he a replicant?” kind of way.)
Yeah, YMMV, but I agree this isn’t really exploring the ramifications of the tech. The therapist might as well have been a wizard or puckish demon. Honestly, I think puckish demon might have approached an explanation, since at least they have a history of this sort of thing. Drop hints at the beginning that the therapist doesn’t really practice therapy and has strange tomes on the shelves of his office.
I’m just realizing that since Ted Danson plays the therapist, in light of his current TV show, “puckish demon” might well be the explanation!
To me it sounds more like horror than science fiction (the way “Alien” was horror in space, not SF). It’s “psychological thriller/horror”, the SF trappings make no sense other than to ‘explain’ how the couple are trapped in the house (forcefields) and how strangers can be perfectly physically altered into your doppelgänger.
It might be fun to do a ramble through horror-flavored sf. A lot of Egan, a lot of GRRM….
I recommend Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
Sounds to me more like Magical Realism than Science Fiction. Everything is just like the actual world, except one weird thing that functions as a McGuffin, and that doesn’t need a magical or scientific explanation. I think the genre term is usually associated with Latin American literature (and also some other developing world literary writing, like Salman Rushdie) but it also seems to fit things like this, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Invention of Lying, and so on.
That’s a good name for a genre that I like.
Every work of fiction get to have one improbable thing happen. In this one, that’s the therapist’s ability to transform people. Transforming people is pretty standard stuff in the fantasy genre, though I would be willing to call it Magical Realism since this film is set in contemporary times. There’s a therapist (not a wizard) who turned people into other people (not frogs). Sure.
That still doesn’t explain why he did it. Was there some sort of hint? Did I miss something?
Sounds faintly similar to the film Coherence, which is about a dinner party that gets shuffled around to alternate dimensions in various combinations.