This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. Some argument around the vegetarianism article. Some people say we can’t be sure cows aren’t an order of magnitude or two more “intelligent” or “conscious” than chickens. Other people point out that cows emit methane which increases global warming. At first I figured a tiny increase in global warming was far less an evil than the amount of animal suffering that chicken farming produces, but when I calculated it out the amount of money it takes to reverse one cow worth of global warming via carbon offsets is more than the amount it takes to reverse forty chickens’ worth of suffering via animal charities. I’m not sure how to deal with that morally except to say that I am much more confident that charitable offsets are an important moral good than I am that eating cows instead of chickens is.
2. My post on Daraprim got linked on Overlawyered, which corrected my underestimates on how hard it is to get a new generic approved – according to him (with Wall Street Journal as source) it can take as much as $20 million and four years. And Alex Tabarrok suggests an elegant partial solution – have pharmaceutical reciprocity with trusted European countries, so that anything that’s okay there is automatically okay here.
3. Steve Johnson is banned for reasons of total personal caprice. Let it be known that he has not broken any rules and the ban is not his fault. Also, this is the beginning of a Reign of Terror. Govern yourselves accordingly.
@ Ivlln
(Hope this nests right. My system really can’t handle such length, nor edit.)
I agree with you on most points here. I’m not critizing Scott for using the term that feels best to him. But I’m trying to invent some terms that other people on both sides might find useful.
Thinking out loud here, before this thread completely outgrows my system. I only just read a little on the First, Second, and Third Wave thing. They’d call me Second Wave. I’m not sure I accept those divisions, though they’re an interesting starting point.
I might call myself a ‘core-issues feminist’ or ‘classic feminist’, meaning that I’m still working on some of the same causes that the ‘First Wave’ wanted but didn’t finish getting. The Vote was only one of their causes; they worked for many but decided that “If we can get The Vote, then we can use it to get everything else.” The Second Wave continoued some First Wave things, did get some, or lip service to them, but did not get everything they wanted, so there are important Second Wavy things to finish. I’m sure some of the Third Wavers are working on some of these ‘core feminist issues’ also.
A distinction I think more important (which runs through 1st, 2nd, and Third,) is between ‘hard issues’ and ‘soft issues’. As with ‘hard sciences’ vs ‘soft sciences’, the hard issues are definite, objective things that affect all women: such as right to vote, right to divorce, right to a credit rating in one’s own name, percentage of women in Congress, contraceptives/abortions, etc.
‘Soft issues’ are things like wearing clothes to express one’s individuality, presenting as non-binary gender, etc, and some social attitudes I’ll try to fill in later.
Some issues have both hard and soft sides: jail or expulsion from college are hard things; details of customs that constitute ‘consent’ are soft things. Being able to get a job without high heels and pancake makeup is a hard thing (salary); what clothes express one’s feelings and how often they change is a soft thing (as is what the latest PC terms are).
Another distinction is means vs ends. SJW type tactics that polarize many observers into rejecting all ‘feminism’.
Of course I’d rather keep the plain unmodified term ‘feminism’ for us who work for the things we have in common with the Suffragettes and the Women’s Libbers and I’m sure some of the Third Wavers — and use a modified or special term for the ‘Radfems’ or ‘Berserk-hers’ or something like that.
Is getting a divorce or a credit rating really an issue in western civ these days? I mean, if you were talking about Saudi Arabia maybe, but I’ve found feminists strangely loathe to take the fight to where it might do any good.
Basically, they’d rather whine that CEOs are overwhelmingly male (and so are homeless people, lumberjacks, fishermen, garbage collectors etc.) than push for policies and changes that might result in women not being convicted of their own rapes, or forced into marriages, or stoned, or being doused in acid.
I wonder what effective altruism would say about that?
As a card-carrying aspiring effective altruist (and with the usual caveats that almost nobody in EA has heard of me, my views may not be representative, etc.), I agree that the problems most feminists worry about do not seem to be the most pressing or cost-effective. That’s why I really don’t like talking to feminists about them, and would much rather shift the conversation to bednets. However:
1)Scope insensitivity is a broad critique of American progressivism (and to some degree conservatism) in general. One could say the same thing about complaints about ableism, racism, gun control/rights, skilled immigration, most forms of trade, most forms of environmental protection, first world poverty, niceness in communication, etc. It seems odd to single out feminism in this regard.
2)It’s easier to see how tumblr-in-action or a Twitter lynch mob can effect change for an unfairly fired female CEO or whatever. Much harder to imagine the effects of Western netizens on the Saudi monarchy.
Shireroth’s dying /and seriously considering dissolution/, could you please come back? 🙁
Not my place to say this, but I _have_ been an administrative member of a dying hobby/work group before. It’s often difficult to tell from inside why a group is dying, and at least in our case reaching out to old members was not especially productive; each of them stopped participating for a reason, often unrelated to anything a group admin could control.
Some of those who came back found “the spark” again, but most didn’t feel motivated to participate.
Good luck, though! Micronations always sounded like a cool project. Even if the hobby has died down, it’s nice to see some people sticking at it.
Hi, I just discovered your site and I’ve really enjoyed reading through your posts on political philosophy, etc. Genuinely outstanding stuff! I have to admit, though — and I apologize if you’ve already discussed this so much that you’re sick of it by now — I’ve really been getting stuck on the whole feminism thing. Truth be told, I actually didn’t pay any attention to this site at all when I first saw it because I’d only ever seen links to it in anti-feminist contexts. And it’s a real shame, because I’ve found a lot to like here. But I feel like it’s probably keeping away a lot more potential readers too, simply because the definition you seem to be using for the word “feminism” isn’t the traditional definition that most of us are familiar with. According to most dictionaries (as well as most of the people I’ve talked to in the real world), “feminism” simply means, “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” How could any reasonable person be against equal rights for both sexes? But from what I can tell, you seem to understand it to mean something more like “militant female supremacy.” And I think the fact that so many of your articles use the word “feminists” as if it’s interchangeable with “the most fanatical female supremacists on the internet” is really contributing to a lot of misunderstanding from people who are using the traditional dictionary definition and can’t understand why (from an outsider’s perspective) you seem so vocally outspoken against something as basic as equal rights for women. I know from your “Words, Words, Words” piece that you aren’t a very big fan of people using their own different definitions for words, since it can lead to people talking past one another rather than coming to a common understanding. But I feel like the way your articles use the word “feminism” can often lead to exactly this kind of confusion.
For example, I remember one of your essays talking about how most feminists and social justice activists “don’t have the means to kill all white men, and probably there are several of them who wouldn’t do it even if they could.” Now, if you were saying this in regards to, specifically, the most militant female supremacists on the internet, then OK. Fair enough. But in the context of the actual piece, it seems very much like you’re describing feminists and social justice activists as an entire group — in which case… come on, man. There “probably there are several” feminists who aren’t genocidal psychopaths? Wow, how generous and open-minded. Maybe this was just a bad joke, but the fact that the whole paragraph was talking specifically about the failure of the “it’s just a joke!” excuse makes me think otherwise. And that kind of thinking really doesn’t do anyone any favors. As you yourself wrote in your Untitled piece: “How come it’s 2015 and we still can’t agree that it’s not okay to take a group who’s already being bullied and harassed, stereotype it based on the characteristics of its worst members, and then write sweeping articles declaring that the entire group is like that?” It really seems like a lot of your essays are doing exactly that with feminism. Maybe it’s some kind of sampling bias, I don’t know. Maybe you’ve been exposed to so much of the toxic, militant wing of the social justice movement that you genuinely perceive it as making up the majority of progressive/feminist thought. But if there’s any kind of actual polling data out there on this subject (not just possibly-biased internet polling), I somehow suspect that the vast, overwhelming majority of people who support feminism would NOT also support the persecution of white men. Something tells me that “equal rights for all” is what most people want and aspire to, and I really think that it’s crucial to recognize that fact rather than simply saying that most of the people who support feminism probably want to persecute men as well.
Anyway, this comment has gone on longer than I intended, but I just want to conclude by reiterating that I genuinely love a lot of the essays on this site, and the only reason I’m leaving this semi-critical comment is because I want to be able to share those essays without feeling like I’m linking to an anti-feminist site. Again, I apologize if you’ve already addressed this a thousand times. But either way, thanks for taking the time!
*EDIT: By the way, of course I obviously realize that you’re in favor of equal rights for women. You’ve made that clear in some of your essays. It’s just that the word that’s traditionally been used to describe that stance has always been “feminism.” Hence the confusion. Maybe it’s true that some of the more militant social justice fanatics have tried to hijack that word to mean “female supremacy,” but I’m just saying it might be useful for your essays not to go along with this conflation, but instead to refer to their ideology as some separate term like “militant female supremacy” or something like that. Just my two cents!
@Anonymous – “But I feel like it’s probably keeping away a lot more potential readers too, simply because the definition you seem to be using for the word “feminism” isn’t the traditional definition that most of us are familiar with.”
I am not Scott Alexander, but I might be able to provide some insight. I considered myself a staunch feminist up till about a year ago, and then the movement gave me a bunch of really good reasons to never, ever call myself one again, one right after the other. The movement is hemmoraghing, maybe even dying. None of that would be happening if the “traditional definition most of us are familiar with” matched the people claiming it. We are far past the point where the dictionary definition was a useful one.
“Now, if you were saying this in regards to, specifically, the most militant female supremacists on the internet, then OK.”
And I quote:
“”Catherine Comins, assistant dean of student life at Vassar, also sees some value in this loose use of ‘rape.’ She says angry victims of various forms of sexual intimidation cry rape to regain their sense of power. ‘To use the word carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don’t care a hoot about him.’ Comins argues that men who are unjustly accused can sometimes gain from the experience. ‘They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.'” ”
And there’s ohoHO so much more where that came from on the Title IX front. Then there’s how low female participation in STEM is a crisis, while worse outcomes for males at every level of education from first grade to college graduation is just the way things are. Bullying of women online is a crisis, while the between 3x and 10x greater suicide rate for males is just the way things are. Obvious differences in criminal and family law outcomes. Obvious differences in health outcomes. Obvious differences in violence victimization. The “wage gap”. The bald fact that women themselves are less happy now than they were 50 years ago. And on and on and on it goes. Feminism’s problems are not a militant fringe. Feminism’s problems are Feminism as it actually exists. Those problems are systemic, fundamental, and very possibly fatal.
“I somehow suspect that the vast, overwhelming majority of people who support feminism would NOT also support the persecution of white men. Something tells me that “equal rights for all” is what most people want and aspire to, and I really think that it’s crucial to recognize that fact rather than simply saying that most of the people who support feminism probably want to persecute men as well.”
You are entirely correct about this. The problem is that most people who call themselves feminists do not have a good understanding of what Feminism actually is. They are operating off the “equal rights for all” model, while the actual core of the movement is operating off the “Social Justice/Patriarchy/Privilege” model. As people are confronted by the gaping chasm between the two, they stop being feminists.
I think you worded this very well and I found myself agreeing in several areas. Except for one sentence that I found weird: The bald fact that women themselves are less happy now than they were 50 years ago.
This surprised me a little. Do you have reference for that? Are women less happy relative to men, or is everyone less happy? If it’s the case, can we establish causality? This period involves many massive changes that could be causal factors, I feel this is very flimsy evidence for anything. Otherwise I think you articulated your point well.
FacelessCraven is probably alluding to this study: http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969
I agree with Citizensearth that it is silly to blame this on feminism without more research into causality. Even if it turns out that this is primarily due to more women working outside of the home, we’d have to establish how much feminism is responsible for that, seeing as how economic development has resulted in more women working outside the home even in countries with very traditional gender roles like Japan.
Feminism doesn’t show the same reluctance to blame things on the patriarchy
Feminism doesn’t show the same reluctance to blame things on the patriarchy
But shouldn’t we try to be better than them?
The whole problem with politics at the moment (?) is that each side thinks their deceptive, lying, scummy tactics are justified by the deceptive scummy liars on the other side, ad infinitum. Regardless of my stance on the issue, I think I’ll personally be sticking to rational analysis.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
@Citizensearth – “This period involves many massive changes that could be causal factors, I feel this is very flimsy evidence for anything.”
@NN – “I agree with Citizensearth that it is silly to blame this on feminism without more research into causality.”
I think it’s plausible that feminism is actually making women’s lives worse, but I would happily conceed to that being mostly speculation on my part. A stronger argument, I think, is that Feminism’s narratives and policies have failed to address the actual causes of women’s unhappiness. Less “Feminism makes women unhappy”, more “Feminism doesn’t seem to make them happier”. If the stats on women’s declining willingness to identify as “feminist” are accurate, that would reinforce the point.
Either way, it seems to me that viewing Feminism as an unalloyed good that we just need more of is not a sustainable option. Something is wrong, and we need to figure out what and fix it.
“The problem is that most people who call themselves feminists do not have a good understanding of what Feminism actually is. They are operating off the ‘equal rights for all’ model, while the actual core of the movement is operating off the ‘Social Justice/Patriarchy/Privilege’ model.”
See, this is what I get stuck on though. By what standard are you defining what constitutes the “actual core of the movement”? To me, it makes more sense to define a movement by whatever the vast, overwhelming majority of its members actually believe, not by whatever its loudest and most disagreeable members believe. (Otherwise, you might as well say, “the Republican position is that Planned Parenthood employees should be executed,” or “the atheist position is that Christianity should be banned by law,” both of which I’m sure you would agree are unfair statements.) The “Untitled” essay I mentioned above seems to agree with this idea when it comes to men (specifically male nerds), but not when it comes to feminists or social justice advocates. That’s all I was saying. I actually agree with you that a lot of those other problems you mentioned are serious ones that also need to be addressed in a major way.
@Anonymous – “See, this is what I get stuck on though. By what standard are you defining what constitutes the “actual core of the movement”?”
The core of the movement are the people with actual power, control and influence. Movements exist to secure power, and they are judged by how they use that power. Bell Hooks’ views on feminism may differ from 85% of modern feminists, but that hardly matters if the 85% instinctively support the 15% who do agree with her, and who also have the majority of power, influence and control.
That sort of split between members and leadership exists in every movement. Feminism’s problem, I think, is on the magnitude of the split, and the leadership’s efforts to paper over it. The “equality” version of feminism seems fundamentally incompatible with the “patriarchy/privilege” version, and as the leadership makes progress on the latter, the conflict becomes impossible to ignore. Like it or not, it’s the leadership who get to determine what “Feminism” stands for, because they’re the ones setting and promulgating actual policy. The Feminists who think that men accused of rape should be denied due process are the ones wrtiting editorials in Time, setting administrative policy on campuses and pushing codes of conduct for organizations and industry. The feminists who disagree are not, and have no way of stopping the former from using their movement’s name as a shield. Maybe that will change, but until it does, Feminism as a political movement is defined by those who play politics.
“The “Untitled” essay I mentioned above seems to agree with this idea when it comes to men (specifically male nerds), but not when it comes to feminists or social justice advocates.”
Nerds are a lot less of a “movement” than Feminism or Social Justice, for the moment at least. Do they have a unifying ideology, theory, an agenda, leadership? I would say no. Certianly some nerds are more prominent than others, and some have a moderate amount of influence culturally, but I think it would be hard to describe a “Nerd social agenda” on anything near the scale of the “Feminist social agenda”. That hasn’t stopped Feminism and Social Justice from engaging nerds the way they would a rival movement, and perhaps their hostility is helping to create one. In any case, I think there is a fundamental difference between the two.
“The Feminists who think that men accused of rape should be denied due process are the ones wrtiting editorials in Time, setting administrative policy on campuses and pushing codes of conduct for organizations and industry.”
I guess this is where we depart then. If you genuinely believe that such extremism represents a majority view among “the people with actual power, control and influence,” then I will simply disagree and move on. I’m sure it probably represents a majority view among the tweets and blogs and articles you’ve read in your own personal experience, but until some hard polling data is produced to back that up, there just isn’t any way to verify that it’s actually true and not sampling bias or confirmation bias. I’ll just have to agree to disagree here.
@Anonymous – ” I’m sure it probably represents a majority view among the tweets and blogs and articles you’ve read in your own personal experience, but until some hard polling data is produced to back that up, there just isn’t any way to verify that it’s actually true and not sampling bias or confirmation bias.”
What about college administrations? Professional organizations and conferences? Corporate HR guidelines? The things I’m talking about are official policy in many places, not rando opinions on twitter or some person’s blog. Obama cites the wage gap in his speeches, and there’s a pretty strong consensus that it *does not actually exist*.
If you don’t have time or inclination to engage more, then by all means bow out. I know from personal experience how much time this site can eat. But please, don’t leave with the impression that this is some random minority we’re talking about. Last year there was a major push to change how we deal with extra-legal due process, more or less society-wide.
It’s certianly possible that the mainstream of equality Feminists can take their movement back, but first they need to recognize the scope of the problem. For what it’s worth, I wish you well in the attempt.
“It’s certianly possible that the mainstream of equality Feminists can take their movement back, but first they need to recognize the scope of the problem. For what it’s worth, I wish you well in the attempt.”
Agreed. Hopefully we can find effective ways to criticize and marginalize the unreasonable SJ feminists. But it’s difficult, because of the social taboo against attacking the people to your left.
@ Walpolo
Hopefully we can find effective ways to criticize and marginalize the unreasonable SJ feminists.
How have the reasonable >90% people done this in other groups (the NAACP vs the Panthers)?
Where the <10% did take over the whole, or at least get their way, how did that happen? The hunger striking suffragettes did get the vote, and the offensive Vegans and SJWs seem to be having success too.
I'm not sure that any of these terms (marginalize, take back) name the important factors, anyway.
“the most fanatical female supremacists on the internet” who also have columns in national newspapers and their own TV shows, yes.
Are you suggesting he shouldn’t address these… “people” when they attack his friends?
Of course he should be able to respond to people who attack his friends. Why shouldn’t he? I just don’t think it’s helpful or constructive to conflate “nasty people who attack my friends” with “feminists in general,” that’s all. (Unless the actual polling data supported this generalization — but like I said, I don’t think it does.)
It doesn’t matter what 90% of the members believe, because the other 10% are the ones producing and engaging with all the “content”.
Silent majorities don’t count unless they speak up.
But by that logic, you could just as easily say that it doesn’t matter if 90% of black people are decent and law-abiding; if there’s 10% of them committing crimes, we’d be justified in referring to black people in general as criminals because the silent majority isn’t out there fighting crime on their own time. Or that it doesn’t matter if 90% of political progressives want measured reform; if 10% of them are Occupy Wall Street hooligans breaking windows, we’d be justified in referring to progressives in general as rabble-rousing hooligans because a minority of them are acting outrageously and generating all the headlines and spreading all the incendiary hashtags. Come on now. The fact that >90% of feminists support reasonable, constructive dialogue and do not want to persecute white men IS relevant when we’re trying to decide how the word “feminism” should be used, for crying out loud.
No… you don’t know the 90/9/1 rule?
90% consume silently, 9% engage, 1% produce content.
You’re the 99%, sure. Amanda Marcotte is the 1%, and she speaks for you because she and the ones like her have the newspaper columns.
If 90% of X-ian people lived on Alpha Centauri VI, and the 10% here were all evil murderers, it would be pretty silly to say “but 90% of X-ians are perfectly nice people!”.
What 90% of any group silently wants doesn’t matter if the other 10% are the ones setting the terms of the discussion.
“If 90% of X-ian people lived on Alpha Centauri VI, and the 10% here were all evil murderers, it would be pretty silly to say ‘but 90% of X-ians are perfectly nice people!’.”
On the contrary, it would be factually accurate to say that. And it would be crucial to say that, too, because otherwise we might decide to launch a missile into space and blast Alpha Centauri VI into oblivion because we failed to make the distinction between the evil invading X-ians and the peaceful X-ians. That’s kind of my whole point.
Again, though, I’m just repeating myself now, so I’ll respectfully leave it at that if you don’t mind. I appreciate the conversation but I didn’t expect it to go this long (naive, I know) and I’ve got other stuff to do, haha.
@Echo:
I’m almost positive you would not apply that 90/9/1 rule to your own ingroup.
I don’t have a blog or newspaper column where I get to broadcast my views on the issue, but I do (sometimes) engage as a commenter. I guess that puts me in the 9% here.
I’m still an insignificant voice that would hardly register in a survey of, say, retweets. No matter what I say, a certain tweeting duck outweighs my contribution a hundred thousand times over.
I am a 1% content creator in a number of art communities, and in those limited areas my opinions actually mean something. But outside of them I can’t claim to be a representative of any movement.
@Echo:
In-group, not merely group. (There was an inadvertent space above that I edited to clarify).
What’s the distinction?
@Echo:
Are you prepared to take responsibility for everything the 1% of “conservatives” say?
You seem to be talking to someone else here who is making different claims.
I cannot claim to speak for conservatives, because I do not produce conservative content.
Rush Limbaugh speaks for conservatism because he’s got the most(?) popular conservative radio show, just as the Vogons speak for feminism because they run the wildly popular “BitchMedia” and you don’t.
You are claiming that #notallfeminists, and telling us to ignore the majority of content produced by your movement in favour of… your blog comments, which represent True Feminism written by a True Scotswomyn?
I’m not telling you to ignore the various shocking deeds of Donald Trump the way you want us to ignore the mobbing of Tim Hunt.
I’m not making the same claim to represent True Conservatism, or any movement other than “perspective composition in amateur art”, as that’s the only one I produce widely-seen and discussed content for.
@Echo:
Do you identify as conservative? Do you believe your conservatism is authentic? Does Limbaugh or Pat Roberson speak for you? Do you think Limbaugh’s speech is representative of most conservatives?
Yes with a but.
Yes.
Not really. And if people criticize them, I’ll probably join in.
Yes, as I’ve said several times, because they’re the ones speaking.
So, does Amanda Marcotte speak for you? Do you get upset at people criticizing her and her movement?
Amanda Marcotte does not speak for me.
She says some things I agree with, and many things I don’t. But I also don’t think she speaks for all of feminism.
I honestly don’t believe that you would have said, outside the context of this conversation in this sub-thread, that you are not a conservative. Perhaps that is uncharitable of me, but it feels like some very short term motivated reasoning.
I… just said “yes with a but” to “are you, or have you ever been a conservative?”
The “but” is a 20k word spiel on the nature of conservatism and another (profanity-laden) one on modern movement conservatism, but it started with a “yes”.
I accept that Marcotte doesn’t speak for all of feminism. But do you accept that she speaks on behalf of much, much more of it than the reasonable feminists who mostly post here?
It doesn’t upset me that people criticize mainstream conservatism, as represented by bloviating talk radio hosts. Why do you seem personally offended by Scott criticizing feminism, as represented by scum like Marcotte?
@Echo:
The fact that you used the word “scum” has made me update in the direction of “not worth talking to”. This is perhaps not fair, but, especially here, that kind of loaded term doesn’t inspire confidence that discourse will be reasonable.
The difference hear is apparently not obvious but crucial: “Nerdy white man” is a description of a person, just as “black”, “fat”, “charming” and so on. Those all specify more or less actual properties of an appearance or the habits of a person. Contrary to this, “feminist” describes an ideology, i.e. roughly describes which ideas someone endorses and also implies an identification to a specific group, just as “socialist”, “islamist”, “christian” if you want (though this is more subtle), “separatist”, “environmentalist” and so on. When 10% of your movement really cross the border of good taste you can just stop to associate with them. If 10% of nerdy white males are horrible people, well, what is one supposed to do if you belong to the rest?
I thought placing destructive trolls like Marcotte firmly outside the realm of “reasonable discourse” was the one thing everyone here agreed on, and the problem was that you felt people were unfairly associating you with her?
Rush Limbaugh is a mad druggie. Milo is the worst kind of narcissistic opportunist, and his hair isn’t really that pretty.
People criticizing my “in-group” for perfectly good reasons doesn’t make me feel threatened.
Why does it upset you so much to see Amanda Marcotte criticized, especially when putting her outside of your in-group would really help you?
@Echo:
It is dehumanizing language. I don’t think we should refer to Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Dick Cheney, Pol Pot, Stalin, [Godwin] or anyone else that way. There various spaces where I hang out less often than I used to, and the employ of dehumanizing language was a signifier of the overall tenor and quality of the conversation that could be expected.
And this is especially true when the language is employed against ideological enemies. Dehumanizing language isn’t an argument. It’s essentially just ad hominem.
I find it interesting that you both seem to say that one can only be a “true with no caveat” feminist if you support Marcotte and now say I could put her outside my in-group merely by using language like “scum” to refer to her.
Calling her scum puts her outside my in-group, but disagreeing with actual arguments does not?
“Calling her scum puts her outside my in-group, but disagreeing with actual arguments does not?”
I haven’t been following the thread, but that bit struck me because I think it is true. People routinely argue with other members of their ingroup, at least in a political/ideological context. I devoted a whole chapter in the third edition of _Machinery_ to arguing with Ayn Rand—possibly unfair, since she isn’t around to defend herself.
Calling people hostile names, on the other hand, pretty clearly marks them as not in what you see as your ingroup.
The term “feminist” could mean so many different things, though, that it becomes very easy for a dozen different people to have a dozen different definitions, positive or negative, when they use the word. It should also be noted that Scott Alexander has admitted to getting freaked out by feminism, for personal history reasons.
“It should also be noted that Scott Alexander has admitted to getting freaked out by feminism, for personal history reasons.”
I was going to mention this. Then decided not to, but as long as it has been brought up…
It seems like it would be fair to critique Scott’s writings on “feminism” as suffering from coming from a place of personal harm. Some people, identifying as feminists, harmed Scott and he can’t (or, I suppose, won’t) put that aside when he analyzes feminist thought, at least not fully.
His writing on other controversial topics can’t have this blind spot. I wonder how Scott would write on the topic of research if he was publishing (he doesn’t, does he?), especially if his research was subjected to the kinds of ideologically based criticisms that some of what he writes on does.
Mind you, this in no way applies uniquely to Scott, nor is it any sort of blanket invalidation of anything he has written.
“Mind you, this in no way applies uniquely to Scott, nor is it any sort of blanket invalidation of anything he has written.”
I don’t think it’s any kind of invalidation of anything he’s written, any more than feminist activists’ moral and emotional investment in their cause invalidates what they write.
You have to take the arguments at face value. Not that I think you’re suggesting we shouldn’t do that, but then I’m not sure what you *are* saying.
“suffering from coming from a place of personal harm”? I thought suffering personal harm made a person’s analysis infallible and unquestionable?
What about listening and believing when he talks about his “lived experiences”?
Funny how being emotional is only “liberating performative rage” when the right people are doing it.
Oh, I don’t think Scott’s lived experience should be denied. Clearly he was harmed by an outraged mob and that story should be listened to.
If that was all he was doing I would have no critique. But he also wants to analyze things from a completely sober and rational perspective. This is his stated goal. And I think he tends to miss that mark on this topic.
I expect this answer won’t satisfy you, but, c’est la vie.
Ah, I see what you mean. It hurts his argument by his own rational standards. That makes sense, and accounts for a lot of his frustration at his attempts to grapple with the issue.
Although perhaps he should embrace post-rationality in an attempt to reach across the isle?
“The term ‘feminist’ could mean so many different things, though, that it becomes very easy for a dozen different people to have a dozen different definitions, positive or negative, when they use the word.”
This is all too true, which is why I think it’s best to err on the side of sticking to the dictionary definition, and making a note of the fact that it’s being used differently in cases where it is. Not just for feminism, but just as a general rule. Seems like the easiest way to avoid confusion and needless arguments over semantics.
I wasn’t aware of the personal history stuff though. Thanks for letting me know. I’m really sorry to hear that; I hope things are getting better now.
I think I agree with your main point, as far as it goes. Scott might be better off using a term like “radical feminists,” “activist feminists” or “social justice feminists” rather than just feminists period. The unpleasant militants have become a bigger part of the movement than they used to be, but that doesn’t mean everyone else needs to be tarred with the same brush.
‘radical feminist‘ already means something, and while it has some overlap with modern internet feminism, it departs in some rather large ways – in particular, radical feminists tend to really, really not like trans people. They see male-to-female transitioning as “horrible rapist men pretending to be women to get into female safe spaces” and female-to-male transitioning as “selling us out to get some male privilege”.
From “Radicalizing the Romanceless”:
I just don’t see how “hey look, I can find a bunch of really nasty feminists out there” translates to, “therefore feminism is a nasty philosophy in general, and feminists are nasty people in general.” You can find a lot of unpleasant radical elements within just about every political or social ideology if you want to. There’s no denying that there are a lot of nasty political progressives out there, for example, or a lot of nasty black people out there, or what have you. And if you as so inclined, you can have very little difficulty finding “two thousand five hundred examples” of members of these groups — including “prominent and well-respected” ones — saying and doing really awful things. But does that therefore mean it’s correct to start talking about progressives or black people in general terms suggesting that their entire group or ideology is defined by these worst examples? I don’t think so at all. And again, neither does Scott in his “Untitled” piece regarding male nerds. These are all points he himself has specifically advocated for in defense of men. But that quotation you mention is almost exactly the kind of thing that Scott would accuse “the feminists” of saying when they dismiss his points about how male nerds aren’t villains. Just replace the word “feminists” with “male nerds” and it sounds exactly like the kind of thing Scott is expending so much energy trying to argue AGAINST.
I promise, generalizing about an entire group of people based on their worst members — even if these worst members are trying to dominate the conversation — isn’t helpful or constructive. If anything, all it’s doing is giving them what they want by saying, “yes, the fact that you’re loud and aggressive does mean that you get to speak for your entire group, and I will respond to you under the assumption that you speak for your entire group.” It’s just counterproductive, you know?
If Scott kept pointing out murderous cardiologists and nobody could present a counter-example who hadn’t murdered anybody, he would have a pretty good case.
That’s exactly what he’s done in this situation.
You’ve really never encountered a single example of a feminist who doesn’t want to bully or persecute men?
If that’s true, then that explains your perspective quite a bit actually…
We’re talking at cross purposes here, because you and Scott are talking about very different things.
“I have no desire to” doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, but until you have a column in The Grauniad or even a popular blog, you’re not one of the people speaking on behalf of your movement, just as I don’t speak for mine.
Remember how we were told Laurie Penny was the “reasonable one” in that whole Scott Aaronson mess? Apparently it’s perfectly reasonable to call us scum who should be afraid to walk the streets.
If you can start pointing to sensible, non-evil ones with an actual voice, I’d love to listen.
‘Remember how we were told Laurie Penny was the “reasonable one” in that whole Scott Aaronson mess? Apparently it’s perfectly reasonable to call us scum who should be afraid to walk the streets.’
I must have missed the part in that Laurie Penny article where she called you scum, but you literally called feminists scum in this very thread. If constructive dialogue really is what you’re after, you’re not exactly helping your case here.
I called Amanda Marcotte scum in this thread, simply because “Vogon in a skinsuit” has been overused.
Are you saying that criticizing Amanda Marcotte is the same as criticizing all feminists?
We can go with that, but it works against the claim that Marcotte is a vicious outlier who doesn’t represent Real Feminism.
‘Are you saying that criticizing Amanda Marcotte is the same as criticizing all feminists?’
No, YOU’RE the one saying that, that’s my point. You’ve been saying Marcotte represents feminists, and Marcotte is scum, so what conclusion are you wanting us to draw here other than that feminists are scum?
Look, here’s the thing. You guys in this thread keep talking about how the nastiest feminist blogs are the ones most representative of feminism because they’re the most well-known or whatever. But I’d never even heard of “Pandagon” (Marcotte’s blog) in my life prior to today, and frankly I don’t think I’m alone in that. What I (and I dare say the great majority of other people who claim to support feminism and social justice) think of when I think of social justice activists are the people like John and Hank Green (around whom practically half of the internet revolves, and who also happen to be nerdy white males), and Anita Sarkeesian (who anti-feminists inexplicably seem to think is the second coming of Hitler for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on), and others like them. These are sane people expressing reasonable opinions, and you may not agree with these opinions, which is fine, but the point is that they aren’t coming anywhere even remotely close to saying that they want to persecute white men, or that all men are scum. And this matters, because it’s people like them who the great majority of us (i.e. the “normal” 90% of people who don’t spend all their time on angry blogs) think of when we think of social justice and feminism. They’re the ones who actually are popular and influential in a broader sense than the smaller echo chamber of a few extremist leaders and a bunch of nasty bloggers. I’m sure you disagree. That’s fine. But the central point, and that point that originally launched this whole comment chain in the first place, is that it’s not helpful or constructive to refuse to make any distinction between these different shades of gray at all. Simply crossing your arms and saying “feminism is evil” or “social justice is evil” is little more than a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that there is more to a movement than just its nastiest elements. Like Scott (and the original comment) said, “How come it’s 2015 and we still can’t agree that it’s not okay to take a group who’s already being bullied and harassed, stereotype it based on the characteristics of its worst members, and then write sweeping articles declaring that the entire group is like that?”
You miss the main point. These horrible feminists you don’t agree with have those columns and blogs for a reason. That reason is that so many of those silent feminists you claim don’t want all men to die in fires* apparently want to be told that all men should die in fires.
Rush Limbaugh isn’t representative of every conservative, but he’s a pretty good bellweather of the middle course of conservatives, because he is the sort of guy most of them want to listen to. And if you take the average of Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity, you’re going to have a pretty good idea of the policies favored by conservatives.
So too is Marcotte, Double X, and all the rest a pretty good average for feminists in this country. They wouldn’t have the platforms they do if people didn’t want to hear this stuff. Most feminists will SAY they don’t hate men, and that they “just want equal rights”. But the media they consume says something different.
*exaggeration for effect, don’t go shouting “strawman” at me
@AmandaMarcotte has 38k followers. There are 57M Americans who self identify as feminist.
The Rush Limbaugh Show has 13.25M weekly listeners. There are 120M Americans who self identify as conservative.
It isn’t an apt analogy.
Apples and oranges: followers vs content reach.
According to The Guardian, 42 million people read their online paper that they’ve given Marcotte a column in.
Limbaugh has 315k followers, which is a surprising amount, but compare the number of retweets he gets to Marcotte. Suspect his manager bought a bunch of followbots when they made the account.
Did you really just try to compare a twitter feed directly to a radio show?
Man, debating feminists is easy, but it shouldn’t be this easy.
If one wants to get granular, I’d say Limbaugh is an aggregator of opinion, mostly gleaned from others in the conservative movement. Marcotte is a generator, and her stuff is picked up by people like Rachel Maddow, who serves something of Limbaugh’s actual role for the other side of the spectrum. And yes, Limbaugh is bigger than any of them. He doesn’t kick people out of college, or send them to jail. The devotees of the likes of Marcotte do.
@Echo
The newspaper where Marcotte had a total of 47 columns from 2010-13 in isn’t similarly situated to a 5x/week radio show entirely devoted to Limbaugh views. Also, it’s a British paper.
Maureen Dowd has a better claim. But she doesn’t make as good a weakman.
>How could any reasonable person be against equal rights for both sexes?
As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. “Equality” is enough of a sacred cow that anything involving it is good by relation, but what’s good varies from person to person. If I’m for equal rights for both sexes, am I a feminist?
For example, is equal rights meaning I should give women preference in job applications or college admissions? Or is equal rights meaning such preferences are bad? Would that inequality mean such preference are anti-feminist?
Is it anti-feminist to select men over women because I have too many women?
If I think women should have rights men don’t, am I a feminist? Or an anti-feminist?
Am I a feminist if I want both men and women to have severely reduced but of course equal rights?
If I want no living thing to have any rights, I’m a feminst?
No two people will ever give you the same definition of “equal”, let alone “feminism”. Platitudes like “equality for both sexes” are great for showing others you’re a Good Person, but don’t you ever dare ask someone how they plan to implement it.
Eliminate all inequality #smod16
https://twitter.com/smod2016
You’re right that these are complicated issues, but that’s really a whole other conversation. All I’m talking about here is whether it’s good and right to be equating the word “feminists” with “female supremacists who operate primarily through shaming and harassing their perceived enemies.” To me, it seems clear that doing so is counterproductive to the goal of constructive dialogue.
I have no desire to persecute men, any more than I have any desire to persecute women. And again, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the vast majority of people who support feminism feel the same way. I just don’t get what’s so wrong with acknowledging this (as opposed to tarring everyone with the same brush, as walpolo put it).
I feel like I’m just repeating myself now, though, so I guess I’ll leave it at that.
true? kind? nescessary?
Useful, even? Not everyone who disagrees with you is acting in bad faith.
It would be nice if “(operating) primarily through shaming and harassing their perceived enemies” was a behavior limited to people espousing bad causes, but it appears in reality to be nearly universal. In this specific case, there’s certainly no shortage of anti-feminists taking the same approach.
This is a very simple tribal matter. We all have our tribe. If you are a feminist, then eventually, you will be supporting people, institutions or narratives that target men and non-feminist women for harassment, shaming, job loss, curtailment of civil rights and violence. You can protest the “equality” thing as long as you like, but as we have demonstrated so many times, feminist are only interested in “equality” which advantages women.
No feminists are calling for a reduction in the workplace death gap, only the fake, false “wage gap”.
@ anonymous
It’s just that the word that’s traditionally been used to describe that [equal rights for women] has always been “feminism.” Hence the confusion. Maybe it’s true that some of the more militant social justice fanatics have tried to hijack that word to mean “female supremacy,” but I’m just saying it might be useful for your essays not to go along with this conflation, but instead to refer to their ideology as some separate term like “militant female supremacy” or something like that.
As a real feminist, I agree that the SJW types are hijacking our flag. A new label for the hijackers is a good idea — maybe we should invent it ourselves. Several terms, start using them ourselves, and see which ones catch on.
Anyway, brava and right on.
@ anonymous
Are you familiar with the terms “second-wave feminism” and “third-wave feminism“?
The first wave of feminists mainly fought for women to have the right to vote. They won that battle. They won so decisively that if “feminism” still meant “women should have the right to vote” it would describe approximately everybody. We are all feminists now, if that’s what feminism means. But the battle line moved elsewhere, so “women should have the right to vote” is no longer what feminism means.
The second wave of feminists (in the 1960s and 1970s) fought for equal consideration in the workplace and in college admissions. They won too. They won so decisively that if feminism still meant “women should be allowed to do any job they are capable of” or “most women should be encouraged to attend college and get a real job and support themselves” the term would describe approximately everybody in the US. But a term that describes everybody is not very useful, so once again the battle lines moved on.
It’s true that most of the second-wave feminists are still alive today (albeit they tend to be in their 60s and 70s) and those people still believe approximately what they did then. But since everybody else believes it too, their beliefs no longer constitute a useful definition of what it means to be “feminist”.
The third wave started in the 1990s with what was then being taught in “feminist studies” departments. This group takes for granted the progress already made and is no longer fighting those battles hence is not about those battles. Modern feminism is fighting a new set of battles. The battle lines aren’t terribly clear – that happens in war – and not all the new subgroups are even on the same side.
The people holding the banner of feminism today aren’t fighting for equal voting rights or equal admission to the workplace or equal admission to academia – that ground is already theirs. They are fighting for new concessions on top of what has already been won. And some of the new demands seem unreasonable and based on weird or ridiculous premises. Some of the new tactics seem objectionable.
So when you see “feminists”, try reading it as referring to “third-wave feminists” or perhaps “one of the noisier factions of third-wave feminists” – does that make your objection go away?
@ Glen Raphael
So when you see “feminists”, try reading it as referring to “third-wave feminists” or perhaps “one of the noisier factions of third-wave feminists” – does that make your objection go away?
Better the writers should try writing it that way.
Offhand I call myself a ‘real feminist’ because I’m still pushing for real things: 51% of Congress being women, quotas for women as heads of state and CEOs, ‘equal pay’ rules with real teeth, equal outcomes in tech and other fields, accessible abortion on demand, free quality contraception, etc etc.
Realz vs Feelz you might say. As anything called ‘Creation science’ isn’t real science, anything called ‘feminist studies’ isn’t about real feminism: courses about real feminism in the real world, are called ‘feminist issues’ or ‘history of feminism’.
[Edit: Damn ninjas…]
How would a quota on the gender of elected officials work?
If too many districts elect men does someone retroactively cancel enough of the elections to even it out? Or would there be someone who makes a list of allowed candidates for each election beforehand? Who is this someone anyway?
I’m not trying to pick on you here, it’s just that you listed this goal twice, or three times if you count the CEOs as being “elected” by the shareholders. I have absolutely no idea how this could work within a democracy and it seems like an odd one to pick given that those kinds of ultra-high-powered jobs are very far from realz at leat as far as I understand the term.
My favourite is that it’s 51%, rather than 50. As the population ages, the proportion of male voters will drop even further due to them suffering disproportionately from murder, worse health care, workplace accidents, ect.
The obvious solution will be to remove even more men from office, to “ensure equality” with less male representation.
Do those pushing for 51% female CEOs push for 50% male homemakers/stay at home parents?
More equitable distribution of domestic work seems to be a frequently discussed desire of feminists/feminism. Specifically asking men to stay home? I think that cuts against another stated goal, which is to make sure that household domestic needs are met while allowing for professional advancement .
49% 😉
They absolutely push for more men to do more chores. What they don’t push for is equal representation for men in the teaching profession, or among college grads, and they certainly don’t push for women to be equally represented among miners, garbage men, and those eligible to be drafted.
@jaskologist:
Feminists have been working really hard to get women eligible for combat positions. Honestly, I don’t think the liberal position is in favor of the draft, male or female. (It also feels like something of a dead issue. The prospects of draft call up seem very slim to me, for a variety of reasons).
And sure, they are going to try and push for those things where women are seen as on the short end of the stick, as they see a plethora of these opportunities, and believe that the weight of disadvantage falls far more on women than men.
You can only fight one battle at a time.*
*Obviously this isn’t true, strictly speaking. But opening a war on multiple fronts is generally ill advised.
What I’m curious about, on the proportional representation of women in congress etc., is why the rule only applies to gender. If 80% of the population are Christian, should Congress have to be 80% Christian? Italian American? Ethnic or racial classification? Do you want to generalize the approach, and can you seriously imagine approving of the result?
Come to think of it… “Kick the jews and catholics out of the supreme court and replace them with protestants!” doesn’t sound very… good at all.
The Senate and Electoral College already disproportionately represent one minority, viz. those living in low density states. If not gender, eye color, etc. why that one?
@ Mark Atwood
I’d also like to see different space colonies put up by different nations and ethnic groups: SpaceSteading, Safe Space Colonies for everyone. Different groups would do different things differently at different times. What’s reasonable now is to support the general idea, and donate to people who are making tools to make the tools to make some tools that may come in handy.
What’s reasonable to me now, is to support individual women like … well, I’d better not name names .., who are so famous for the Realz-world things they do, that few people count them as feminists (though I’m sure they vote that way).
Do you think that 51% of workplace deaths should be women?
Do you think 51% of murder victims should be female?
Do you think 51% of incarcerated felons should be female?
Do you think women should suffer 51% of heart attacks?
Or is it just the good stuff you want to make sure women get their share of?
What percentage of the male standards do you think women should have to achieve to be allowed into a profession?
Woops, looking up the thread, I see that it began by talking about our host, whom I certainly was not thinking about when I wrote this comment.
@ houseboatonstyx
“Offhand I call myself a ‘real feminist’ because I’m still pushing for real things: [various things]”
Okay…I guess my question is: why? What makes that particular set of weird beliefs representative of “real feminism”? Where did you get the idea that those particular goals were either (a) feminist, or (b) a good idea?
Houseboat:
> > Offhand I call myself a ‘real feminist’ because I’m still pushing for real things: 51% of Congress being women, quotas for women as heads of state and CEOs, ‘equal pay’ rules with real teeth, equal outcomes in tech and other fields, accessible abortion on demand, free quality contraception, etc etc.
Glen Raphael:
> What makes that particular set of weird beliefs representative of “real feminism”? Where did you get the idea that those particular goals were either (a) feminist, or (b) a good idea?
This is very interesting. Thinking them impossible or undesirable I can understand, but why do you think that they are not feminist?
In asking the question you highlighted I was just trying to figure out who/what your influences are. Did you invent the set of ideas you call “real feminism” yourself or did you read them in a book or hear them in a speech or what? Knowing some context as to where you got these ideas from might make it easier to understand them. And possibly cut down on some of the need for clarifying back-and-forth discussion.
I would like you to illuminate me in the specific ways how you would accomplish your anointed vision.
If you’re asking how a quota system could work in elections, here are a variety of ways they do work in other countries.
http://www.quotaproject.org/aboutQuotas.cfm#different
If you’re asking how I personally work toward getting the US to adopt such a system for high-level offices, the answer is, “Not very hard; directly not at all.” For the US it would be one very far off and unlikely result of my kind of feminism — Realz Feminism? — a feminism which I lazily help by supporting certain women politicians who are already breaking glass ceilings by their accomplishments in the real world.
As for your strawmen, if a nation wrote into its own election laws some provision about X, then violated its own law, the UN might have something to say about that. If a trade organization noticed that its woman-run companies were more successful, they might make some agreement among themselves that men should have at least 49% of the posts.
@houseboatonstyx
If woman-run companies were consistently more successful, stockholders would want ALL companies to be run by women. Given your premise, why would anyone stop at 51% female? Why not 100%?
I’m not Scott, and I don’t share his overdeveloped sense of fair play when dealing with defectbots. I don’t think Scott is anti-feminist in the general sense. I am.
I’ll be sweeping, and correct.
There are two kinds of feminists. Hate-filled female supremacists and well-intentioned folks who don’t know much about feminism. I’ll be as charitable as possible and assume you’re in the second group. Claiming to be a feminist in the presence of non-feminists is a bit like claiming to be Hamas in a synagogue, then wondering why people back away. You are claiming a terrible, terrible ideology that has adversely affected the lives of millions upon millions of people. Some of those people post here.
Now, this is SSC, where NrX and communists can come together to create mathematical representations of moral dilemmas. If you want to come in, as a feminist, and debate the policies and principles of your ideology, by all means, pull up a chair. I’ll be across the table.
But don’t attempt to shut off criticism of one of the most malignant cesspits of modern society. If you like, I can recalibrate your offense-meter for you, so Scott will seem positively bunny-like by comparison. Take it from me, we all have a story or fifty about how we came to this place. I called myself a feminist once too.
Gee, that’s too bad for all those poor reasonable feminists, getting lumped into the same category as the loud maniacs with genocide fantasies who they make no effort to disassociate themselves from. Maybe if these reasonable people want to be taken seriously, they should put the slightest bit of effort toward differentiating themselves from Streicherite psychopaths who happily chatter on at length about such topics as how my entire family deserves to be brutally murdered? Just a thought!
What if they don’t agree with your assessment of who the psychopaths are? Maybe they’re tired of listening to their ideological opponents blow every perceived slight out of proportion to maintain their righteous outrage buzz.
Wait……..the feminists are “tired of listening to their ideological opponents blow every perceived slight out of proportion to maintain their righteous outrage buzz”?
You mean perceived slights like advocating our genocide and curtailing our civil rights?
Yup. Both the left and right are tired of the other side’s persecution complex. Subjectivity is an amazing thing.
Feminists (extreme or otherwise) are pretty much the last people on the planet who are entitled to be tired of that.
Which is more or less the line of ‘reasoning’ used to dismiss any complaints nerdy white guys have about feminists.
At a tangent to the main point …
You write “How could any reasonable person be against equal rights for both sexes?”
The problem is that reasonable people can disagree about what rights people ought to have–not what rights women ought to have, but what rights everyone ought to have.
I, for instance, do not believe that anyone has the right not to be discriminated against in employment, renting, and similar transactions. To me, the right everyone has is freedom of contract, freedom of association, which means that transactions such as hiring, selling, renting happen if and only if both parties are in favor. To me, the alternative approach, embedded in much current law, is a slide of the society a little bit in the direction of slavery, of people not being free to turn down offers unless the authorities approve of their reason for doing so.
Am I in favor of women having the right not to be discriminated against in employment? No. But that has nothing to do with women, everything to do with rights. I don’t (in my view) have that right either.
As a feminist, I’ve never been bothered by arguments within Scott’s essays criticizing feminism, as it’s clear to me that he’s not using the term to refer to people like me, i.e. the so-called silent so-called majority of feminists who support equality without supporting the exclusive use of the privilege/victimhood model that the loudest, most influential people under the feminism banner such as Marcotte, Penny, et. al. support.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to make this distinction in a concise and clear way, in a large part due to how the loudest, most influential people under the feminism banner have sought to obscure the meaning of the term through the Motte & Bailey tactic of defining feminism as equal rights for all genders while making under that banner political/societal moves that do not actually support equal rights for all genders. The 1st/2nd/3rd wave distinction doesn’t quite fit. I like to use the term Social Justice Warrior, but I know a lot of people have qualms about using that term as they perceive it to be derogatory. I know some people also use “equality feminism” or “dictionary feminism” (along with CH Sommers’s “freedom feminism”) to distinguish themselves from the SJW strain of feminism, but I find adding a descriptor to be an unreasonable concession. I’m a feminist. I don’t want to give away that word to SJWs.
So in this imperfect state of terminology, I’m OK with Scott using “feminists” as short-hand for “feminists who use dishonest tactics and are the loudest/most influential under the feminism banner.” Just like I’m OK when some feminists use “men” as short-hand for “men who act as if they feel entitled to women’s bodies.” I have grounds to take issue with either case as both “feminists” and “men” accurately describe categories in which I fit, but within their respective contexts, I see no problem with extending enough charity to the author so that I’m not included.
But maybe that’s a load of motivated reasoning to justify my own abuse.
This is extremely trivial, but maybe someone here can explain this: there are a series of Twitter users with handles such as ‘Content of Media’, ‘Deity of Religion’, ‘Allele of Gene’, ‘Hole of Black’, ‘Curl of Gradient’ etc. Most have a byline “{word/phrase related to handle}, THIS”. Most seem to be real people, but post extremely similar items: mainly cryptic, cynical rationalist soundbites. A lot of them of them are gimmicks, some are not. See any of these: https://twitter.com/ContentOfMedia/following. Their posts keep popping up on my Twitter feed, and it has been winding me up in an I-don’t-quite-get-the-reasoning-behind-this-meme way
That sounds like weird sun twitter. E.g.:
https://twitter.com/grognor/lists/weird-sun-twitter/members
Aaah, thank you. And I’d assumed some of their posting was semi-mechanised, I get some of the joke[s] now.
I have a new question, something I’ve been kicking around in my head recently. Apologies for its vagueness, but here it is: is there such a thing as productive ignorance? If so, when and how (in art, science, everyday life…etc) does it apply? Can ignorance, strategically applied, make you happier/smarter/better at decisions?
Well, if there’s something you know 1. is likely to upset you but 2. is unlikely to harm you, ignoring it is a good option.
Take social media If you don’t want to see posts by annoying people or posts by your ex or similar things, you can unfollow them, unfriend them, block certain tags, etc based on the platform and so on.
Consider this:
You have a question, for which the answer is knowable (ie, yes/no, or some point on a gradient.) You know the question. You don’t know the answer (ie, you are ignorant.) Finding the answer will require time/effort/money. Before asking the question, you ask yourself: “Will the answer to this change what actions I take over the next day/month/year/lifetime?”
If your actions aren’t going to change, based on the answer, why go through the bother of finding the answer to the question?
It is sort of counter to our emphasis on education and learning, but for the most of us, it really doesn’t matter if the earth goes around the sun or around and round the garden like a teddy bear.
Accepting that you don’t know these things can free up all sorts of time.
Alternatively: when we look up what experts have said about XYZ, instead of constructing our own research about XYZ, we are engaging in a sort of productive ignorance, in that we haven’t *learned*, but have accepted the statements of others.
Rational Ignorance is the common term for what you describe I think. Most obviously its applied to ignorance of politics. To be clear I’m not advocating it though.
For some people, in some scenarios, absolutely. An example: I tutor people in math and physics, and I have found that with some students it is more productive for me to say (for example) that yes, Galilean relativity always applies, because these students don’t need to know anything about special relativity, and if I mention it at all they will get hopelessly confused and not learn how to add up velocities and fail their test.
(I suppose it’s possible that I am simply bad at teaching, but I prefer to think otherwise)
Edited, because I was thinking about this and I might not have made my point clearly and it’s a slow day at work:
These students seem to have a really hard time with the idea that you can make approximations and can , for example, ignore relativistic effects when you’re talking about trains travelling at 100 kph. If they find out about special relativity, they’ll think they always have to consider it just to be safe and fail their tests, whereas if they don’t know about it they’ll happily add up the velocity of the train and the tennis ball and get the correct answer.
Learning art is a lot easier when you simply ignore what you’re not ready to deal with. Break the task of learning into manageable parts and forget some of them even exist until you can actually address them productively.
truth.
It seems to be the prevailing opinion on SSC that genetics have a stronger effect on human behaviours (and perhaps intelligence), relative to environmental factors, than is commonly held in public opinion. While I find it basically impossible to untangle people’s political agenda from this kind of topic, even in supposedly objective academic studies, I do have a casual objection to the genetic-heavy side of the debate that I’ve not been able to answer.
The objection is this : gaining behaviours through genetics seems to be less advantageous from an evolutionary perspective than learning behaviours from the environment. This is especially the case for humans who, much more than most other creatures, experience rapidly changing environments (culturally and physically) in which a set of behaviours can go from useful to a deadly liability in a generation, or even over a few seasons. It seems that we could expect humans that were not very very attuned to adopting cultural norms of behaviour, albeit in novel ways, would probably be mostly extinct by now given the vast cultural and physical changes humanity has undergone since it has begun to live in large groups. If so, shouldn’t we expect most behaviours, apart from rare constants like wanting to court/mate, to be mostly matters of environment, because that is what is required for fitness in the human evolutionary environment?
Yes.
I find it questionable how variable the environment actually was.
Imagine a farmer in 5000BC and 1800AD. His life consists of 1) hard physical labor 2) family stuff 3) some community stuff incl. religion. The technology is different but generally both easy to learn but hard to do. Social rules are not so different: be reciprocally altruistic to people inside the village / tribe. OK, there is a difference, in 5000BC he can go raiding the other tribe, in 1800AD he is going to have only drunk bar fights with guys from the other village, at the very rare occasions they see each other. Sounds similar to me.
I mean, let’s try to make an inventory of what actually changed in the environment. Technology, sure. Food available, sure. But wait – the basic genetic heuristic of go for high-calorie fat / carbs + get protein if you can worked well enough in 5000AD, 1800BC and broke down only recently.
Or focus on raising kids. Since when is it so that most boys actually sit in a classroom all day? Depends on the country but hardly more than 200 years. Before that, 5000BC to 1800AD, it is usually the combination of hard physical labor and perhaps some fighting. The life of girls, before the classroom, was similarly unchanging – learning stuff like sewing.
The variable LOOKING environment is only something a small elite cared about. Surely building cathedrals is different from building mud huts! But only for the engineers. For the laborers? They mostly just supplied muscle.
You can look at it this way: everything boils down to engines for moving things. That is what work means on a basic level. What are the engines available? Animals, humans, machines. Before the steam engine, about 200 years, it was animals and humans. Most humans were meat machines for moving things and it did not change much.
Beyond work, what is there? Social life, cooperation, competition, fighting, mating, raising kids and similar things. Social life is not about dealing with the environment, but with humans. A bar is a bar in Iceland and in Ecuador. Socializing in a bar is recognizable similar. In a church, too.
So humans deal with the changing environment with work, and work used to mean being muscle machines up to about 200 years ago. The rest of life is social life, which does not depend so much on the environment.
In Ancient Minoa, trade was important. Shortly after in Ancient Mycanae, individual warrior prowess was important. Shortly after in Sparta, warrior comformity was important. Shortly after in the Hellenistic age, trade became important again, along with alliance making and then adaptation to foreign rule. All these things happened in what today we call Greece. I think environmentally dependent traits would have navigated those shifting sands better than genetic ones.
In tribal societies, men often leave camp to hunt. In rural socities, family units work together at home as a team for production with some division of labour. In early industrial socities, men and women are often separated as men are away from home virtually all day. In today’s society, men and women both leave the home for most of the day to engage in economic activity. These things drive big cultural changes and attitudes that seem again to be better navigated by adapting to the environment.
I get what you’re saying that there are certain constants, and I get the last century or so isn’t enough to count for a lot, but I don’t think you can look at human history and say cultural practice is mostly constant or even say its skin-deep unless you squint a whole lot when you look.
But those peoples, despite all living in the territory which roughly corresponds to modern Greece, were in fact different.
The Minoans were displaced by the Myceans, likely former trading partners who eventually invaded and conquered Crete along with the rest of Greece. The Myceans were displaced by the invading Dorians and/or Sea Peoples who then centuries later became the classical Greeks. Except in, according to their own history and our best guesses today, Athens which maintained largely Mycean heritage and had a strikingly different form of society.
And that provides a great example of what we’re talking about. The Minoans, Myceans and Dorians were different peoples and their civilizations developed along different lines despite having the same resources available and some degree of cultural continuity. They were all capable of adapting to their circumstances, but the nature of those adaptations were distinct.
You seem, if I follow, to be arguing not only that genetics are important, but they exist largely as racial/ethnic groupings. This seems to be a somewhat different claim again. It’s not clear to me how such groups would be rigid enough against individual or internal evolution to prevent change that undermined defining genetic behavioural qualities of a people. Regarding the fate of a narrower genetic line (eg. family), I think you have a fair point which does give me pause, but I also understand that mixing of racial/ethnic groups is common in the case of a long term civilizational change of power such as the types you mention. Again, wouldn’t adaptation to the cultural environment be quite useful in that case? Like adapting to a conqueroring culture or adopting the local culture in a occupied area? Almost every group was conquered or destroyed at some point in history, so rigid traits seem like they’d be really running the gauntlet.
Barbarian invaders who sweep in and kill very nearly everyone outside of a few pockets were reasonably common in prehistoric times. Invaders who set themselves up as a nobility and had limited intermingling with the natives due to assortive mating are something that you can still see today in many parts of the world. We have pretty genetic good evidence of both, I’d refer you to Gregory Cochrane.
You are right that ethnic groups aren’t totally distinct or totally rigid. But that should be expected: we’re talking about different populations of the same species. Genetic drift and adaptation to different environments have a lot of opportunities to introduce or magnify differences.
You should expect migrants from different areas to be genetically distinct from the natives to begin with. With enough close contact you might see them blend together or you might end up with castes stable for centuries or millenia or one might just wipe the other out.
IIRC neither the Romans nor the Angles/Saxons nor the Nords nor the Normans slaughtered most of the local Britons/Celts they conquered – genetic mixing occurred in each case. I’ll take a look at your hypothesis/G. Cochrane next but at the moment as I’m not even convinced that individual genetics are as powerful as say Scott feels they are, I feel that’s a prerequisite for belief in your hypothesis, and I haven’t been convinced as yet. My politics don’t really rely on this debate either way so I’m hopeful I can remain objective.
@Citizensearth
I would look into the Harrying of the North. IIRC, contemporary writers describe about 5% of the population of England being killed in a year, by slaughter and famine. And the Doomsday Book records a 10% drop in the population between the reign of Edward the Confessor and the compilation of the book, concentrated in the areas wasted by the Harrying.
Historians disagree about the accuracy of the figures, blah blah, but it was still a pretty significant extermination of the locals.
Hopelessly vague. What kind of farmer are we talking about here, and where?
Not by the definition of “environment” that is commonly used when people make the genetic/environmental distinction. Under that definition, social life is absolutely part of the environment. Perhaps even the most important part!
This argument seems reasonable, but I don’t think it should inspire any more confidence than other evolutionary psych just-so stories.
In other words, if the experimental evidence seems to count against it, I’d go with with the experimental evidence.
AntiDem activist is reviewing Friendship is Optimal. This whole situation is extremely lulzy. Given what he’s written so far, I say the chances that he realizes that CelestAI is unfriendly are about 25%.
He mentions that this is a sponsored post. Which one of you glorious, glorious people put him up to this?
I swear that whatever he posts, it won’t change the chances of me writing pro-monarchist, neoreactive My Little Pony fanfiction.
That would be me. You can see my name if you look at the previous post, which is a preview of the review. I did it partly to support AntiDem, who is one of my favorite neoreactionary bloggers, and partly because I genuinely wanted to see this. As for AntiDem’s reasons for agreeing, he explains his motivations a bit on his ask.fm account.
By the way, I did not sponsor him to write a review of Friendship is Optimal. I sponsored him to write a review of the Optimalverse. That’s what the compilation I was putting together a while ago was for. So get comfortable; this is going take a while.
Mind if I ask how you found out about this? I did not take you for the type who reads alt-right blogs. In any case, you are clearly enjoying AntiDem’s review, so I hope this makes up for that time I got a thread locked in the Optimalverse forum. Speaking of, do you want to be the one who makes a thread over at FIMFiction, or should I?
Why would you ever believe that? My favorite TV show is a sympathetic portrayal of a God-empress monarchy and follows the adventures of the natural aristocracy!
😀
By being a kibozo. You can’t literally grep the internet anymore but Google restricted to sites changed in the last week comes close. I don’t read AntiDem’s blog but the name is familiar from Chaos Patches.
hey. hey you.
You wrote one hell of a story, sir.
Friendship is Optimal is the reason I started watching FiM, I figured there had to be SOMETHING to all the hype after reading that. <_<
I enjoyed Friendship is Optimal, but it is not much like Friendship is Magic. Equestria Online borrows the aesthetics of Equestria, but it’s organized along very different principles.
I got the impression that CelestAI was supposed to be *somewhat* unfriendly but far far more friendly than most of the possibilities.
My hobbies keep overlapping in such strange ways…
I know people might not respond to this, but looking for a bit of help from a problem. Disclaimer: I’m emotionally a bit devastated right now so I might not be thinking straight.
(SUMMARY: My questions are:
-How objective are claims that what happened was due to horrible luck? The idea is good for my self esteem but I don’t want to believe a lie.
-Should I give up and resort to prostitution behind my parent’s backs or not, given my utility or what is and is not worth it?
-If I do give up, how do I stop my parents pressuring me into the December scheme to move out that is now pointless and get out of the university which is worthless? If I don’t, how do I bounce back now I’m banned from the Morroco speed dating club?)
(NOTE: My parents are fairly rich, and in principle I could live off their money. They promised to have a fund aside as a contingency, and none of us dispute that if I fail to get a job that’s fine. I was planning to get a job, but all as part of my plan to ensure I was impressive enough to date one day.
People will probably need clarifying questions, and I promise to answer them.)
I tried speed dating at the Morocco club, but there was a bit of a disaster- I failed to get there and now I am suspended for six months. People assure me it was horrible luck but they might not be objective.
The first screwup that happened was my fault- I was worried about brushing my teeth and took a little long. I can’t remember precisely when I got to the train station.
The event was at 7:30. I missed a train which happened to be leaving as I walked into the station, then another one (which had a door open for some malfunctioning reason)- I remember because I wanted to tick my card off, press the button to get on, but it didn’t work because I didn’t know there was a time limit on that. If I’d just gone, the mechanics of Melbourne trains would have deducted more money but I would have gotten there.
The train I actually went on left at 6:59, and I was assured by Mum (who thinks it’s just a social event) that getting to Prahan in that time would be easy. It turned out the Sandringham train I was going to use was nothing of the sort, and I was forced to give up (and cracked at the train station, almost getting kicked out by security because I’d spent the entire day preparing for speed dating only to be undermined by lateness) when I realized I would be 20 minutes late and probably couldn’t get in.
My frustration with failing to progress has come through and I’m thinking of giving up. Honestly, the only two reasons that really motivated me were trying to get out of a Roman Catholic environment, possibly getting to drop out of university, and potentially being socially skilled enough to get a date on my own merits. Mum and Dad have promised me I don’t have to go to Church any more and accepted for practical purposes I’m an atheist, and dating is just looking unrealistic. This could be just pessimism but some studies say somebody is more objective when depressed.
Mum and Dad are pressuring me to go through the scheme I had originally insisted on, to move into a friend’s place in December for a while. But now that dating looks unrealistic, pressure to stay on at Melbourne university exists anyway, and I’m assured I can be an atheist the whole scheme is pointless and feels, like Melbourne University, like a self-esteem crushing waste that shows how pathetic I am because my parents can pressure me into it.
I need some realistic advice- I want people to ask me appropriate questions, so I figure out if I should just give up and go for prostitution behind my parent’s backs. I already know where and I know I can lie well enough to make it work. If I can’t get proper dating until I’m 30 then the idea is so shameful it isn’t worth trying. Even 26 or 27 would feel humiliating enough (I’m 23 now) as to not make it worth the bother.
EDIT: I have Aspergers, and I am the same person as the now very unpopular Yadal once on Alicornutopia (and incidentally gave up on my fic ideas for that). I was stressed from being home alone and not coping well when I did what I did, but the way I see it I still don’t get how it’s supposed to make sense that ‘sexist’, which once was used against those who saw genders as having set differences, is now used against those who deny gender differences.
In the real world I tend to be able to put on a superficial gloss of sociality when well-prepared, but it’s an act. The way I tend to act on the Internet reflects the ‘real me’ as judged by my subjective thinking a lot better, but I’m told people don’t see through my act easily unless I’m stressed and cracking.
On that note, it is a major berserk button for me when people tell me to revise my goals and conceptions of what is and is not worth trying. This has always been so, not just when I’m stressed.
Please don’t bother, and concentrate on the realism of achieving goals instead.
I feel like I’m missing some context. Here is a stream of rapid-fire questions (I am honestly curious about all of these, no snark/sarcasm/etc intended, and yes I am a little sad I need to qualify my questions with that, I’m working on it).
Questions:
What is the significance of whether this was luck? If it turns out to be avoidable, are you somehow unable or unwilling to use that information to make a better attempt next time?
By luck, do you mean “not reasonably foreseeable”? “completely out of your control”? “likely/unlikely to happen again”? “due to/not due to a general inescapable failure-causing trait”?
You say you’re suspended for 6 months – from the club? If so, did you actually check? I only wonder because it sounds like you never made it to the club.
Is the Morocco club the only one that meets your requirements for speed dating? If you could find another speed-dating location, would that be acceptable?
Have you considered that university students often meet and date other university students? Or have you been attending for some time already and find that not the case in Melbourne?
I hear you. I genuinely trust there is no sarcasm or snark intended, so we can go from there.
1- Despite the rationality objections I know of, I tend to have less a moral right/wrong view of these things and more a pride/shame view of them. Intellectually I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s more about how much I take it as a personal failure.
2- I honestly didn’t think it that far through because I was feeling more emotional when I posted. But looking at it now I think the first one fits the spirit of what I was saying best.
3- The club emailed me.
4- No. But the Morroco club is one I’ve researched and heard of, so it’s a setback. It’s also the major one. I’m 23, so I’m worried I might be too young for most speed dating.
5- The problem is how I operate. I’ll use an athleticism metaphor as I don’t know how else to put it- I’m as good or better than others at a sprint, but absolute crap at a marathon. It’s also true that my multitasking is crappy, and that I cannot multitask on matters of social skills for crap.
Actually, maybe another way- my brain is tunnel-minded. I can’t focus on university work and trying to find a date simultaneously.
In that case I’d put it as “moderately bad luck” – definitely foreseeable, but if you had time to miss two trains and end up only twenty minutes late, you probably allowed a reasonable amount of time for delays. Unless Melbourne trains are famously terrible or something.
My experience is being a student gives you access to a lot of sprint-like events where you can focus on socializing. Clubs, parties, sporting events, etc. Are you saying the coursework keeps you too occupied to keep track of and attend those? If so, I understand how it would be much less useful for your implied goals. It does still keep you in contact with a large number of people your age, which is something, I suppose.
If you haven’t lived away from home before, I strongly recommend trying to do that for a while (that’s what the December plan is about, right?). It’s significantly different from living with your parents in many ways that are not all obvious until you do it, and most people like it.
I am unsure what values you have that make prostitution attractive, and so I cannot at present recommend it.
For what it’s worth, I meant using prostitutes, not being one. Will clarify more a bit later.
It’s possible that they banned you because they inferred from your non-attendance that you weren’t taking it seriously, or something, and that if you explain to them that you did indeed make a good faith effort to get there, but were impeded (giving very brief details of your train troubles), they might revise their decision.
I feel like just missing one train and something going wrong with another is bad enough luck that you aren’t obliged to feel ashamed of it (though you still might want to remember to allow sufficient time for such things when going to important appointments in the future).
Thanks. I don’t think I have the tact to fix the situation myself, but I know somebody I can trust enough to tell about the speed dating who does. I’ll try that just in case.
Sounds like you’re going through a fairly typical if quite intense set of issues that occur around the time before leaving home, perhaps slightly sharpened by some kind of philosophical crisis. I don’t quite follow what your references to prostitution are, but I’d stay away from that above all else if you mean it literally (EDIT – seems like you’re talking about using, still not good plan I think). It may not seem like others have similar dramas but people you know often won’t let on about their problems in full, giving a false impression that most people are never in crisis. You’ll get a date no worries once you’ve got yourself in a stable situation, so focus on that. Honestly the best thing rather than trying to get answer on the net from us nerds (not exactly a bastion of good people skills to be honest) might be to talk to a councillor who knows what they’re doing (just the regular psychologist at uni might be an option because they shouldn’t have a philosophical agenda, and at uni I think its free), whose job should basically just be to help you work out your own preferences and develop your own realistic plan. I think you’re smart enough to make good plans but it sounds like the stress is making it hard for you to exercise your normal good judgement. A good councillor is good at helping you (especially if you’re honestly looking for answers) with this sort of thing without actually just telling you what to do, which is not what you need when you’re discovering your independence. Don’t stress too much its tough now but this is also a good challenge that will help you grow as a person and gain crisis skills that many people lack. Good luck.
Agree with most of what you are saying. I’ll have to fight a bit with Mum about going to see the DLU psychologist (Disability Liason Unit, as I have Aspergers Syndrome, at Melbourne Uni), but by my calculations I can get my way.
What I don’t understand is your belief I will get a date once my life is settled down. I’ve never even kissed a girl at age 23, I have Aspergers Syndrome, and judging by how unpopular I got on Alicornutopia as Yadal when I say what I actually think I get ostracised. This leads me to question your idea that prostitution is a bad idea.
I’m not disputing prostitution has it’s flaws, as it doesn’t really fullfill intimacy needs. But I figure it has to be better than never getting a date ever, or the sense of humiliation of accepting involuntary celibacy even into my 30s.
Only 23? Plenty of time. The main risk is not running out of time, its getting anxious, errors, and not playing a long-term game. I’m guesssing you can solve the problem if you stay calm about it and work at it long term. Of course you have to decide that, no-one including me will have to live with the consequences of our advice to you, so take your time and choose wisely only when you feel calm and ready 🙂
You’ve said living with your parents, who are very conservative on such matters, has specifically made it much harder for you in terms of relationships, so I think you should consider that your independence may give you new confidence and opportunities in time.
If you’re taking your time to find someone for whatever reason (voluntary or not), its none of anyone’s damn business. Don’t feel humiliated. You can be guaranteed nobody spends serious time thinking about who you are or aren’t sleeping with, they’re too busy worrying about who they are or aren’t sleeping with, or why they’re in a divorce or at the STD clinic or whatever. Life is slapping them around too, they just try to hide it most of the time. Focus on playing your own hand the best you can.
I noticed that after hearing comments and arguments therein to see a prostitute decreased but did not go away. Honestly, given how much Scott Alexander’s comment mattered I suspect it’s a social status instinct at least partially.
I reflected on it, and although internal reflections aren’t exactly reliable this is my best self-understanding.
There’s a difference between an entirely internal standard and fear of external humiliation. There’s some of the latter, yes, but there’s also the internal standard.
Right now, I’m feeling frustrated and helpless. My life is like a cage- my parents still make me go to Church (we’ve agreed I can stop after December, but knowing them there will a barrage of a final attempt to persuade me otherwise and I can’t get away with not going until then), they still pressure me to go university (the most I’ve got them to do is agree to me deferring it next semester, but that’s difficult and they’re going to make me go back), and my attempt at speed dating got me banned from the club.
Sure I’m moving out in December. But the cage is still there, and even if it doesn’t make sense logically my failure to speed date still feels like the cage locking in around me. Besides, it doesn’t help emotionally that Mum and Dad are pressuring me to keep to it whether I want to or not.
In addition, I feel like I’m an artificial manchild and a pathetic little nerd. Mum and Dad pressured me to go to university, they pressured me to do it halftime when I wanted to get it over with (saying I’d get too stressed), they held me back on learning public transport, they pressure me to go to Church, and more. Due to my childhood I’ve missed out on so much, and that adds to the feeling of hopelessness and powerless.
I’m unsure about the prostitute thing, but it’s feeling like the one thing I can actually do about all this because Mum and Dad won’t know. I want to do something, SOMETHING, to fix all this faster and I can’t bear to be patient for much longer.
Keep in mind that sex is not something you can “get out of the way.” Once you’ve kissed a girl, holding hands will no longer satisfy like it did. Once you’ve seen one woman naked… you want to see the rest of them naked, too. Abstinence post-virginity is harder than pre.
How do you feel about physical contact with strangers/friends/family?
Up until now, mostly like a normal person. I don’t have a touch phobia like Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory, and although I am unusually reserved most of the time I’ve been force-of-willing so much lately I think I can manage this.
Well… being honest – from the story above it seems that something as simple/everyday as missing a train (granted, to an event that was really important to you) provoked some kind of emotional break-down. I don’t know much about the practicalities of prostitution, but I suspect it is highly likely it won’t go exactly as you plan, and that if you end up getting overly emotional, it is possible you might be putting yourself in a dangerous situation (security for prostitutes less understanding than security for train stations). So, I would recommend you are really careful about that – check out what is going on, do some research, maybe ease yourself into it, make sure you are comfortable with what is going on. Find a friendly prostitute?
Second point. I don’t think you should have sex with a prostitute for social reasons (“the sense of humiliation of accepting involuntary celibacy even into my 30s.”) unless you think that having sex with a prostitute is going to make it easier for you to have a normal relationship (I have no idea if it will or not – I would imagine that depends how hung up on sex you are).
Is sex just something you need to get out of the way? Is it just a need you have to satisfy? I think these are basically good reasons to go to a prostitute – but I strongly suspect that going to a prostitute won’t really do anything to improve your self-esteem.
Don’t feel it is something you have to do. (BTW your celibacy isn’t involuntary – a man presented with an unappetizing meal can’t claim he is being prevented from eating.)
Now, apologies – talking about me time. When I was 23 I had a similar issue – in the end I decided that it would be wrong to have sex with a prostitute (it’s just something that doesn’t appeal to me on a personal level – I think it is wrong and I don’t particularly like touching strangers)…. and actually, that act of nailing my colors to the mast of life, so to speak, resulted in me having a better social time of it and getting a girlfriend. Since that’s where I’m coming from, it would be difficult for me to recommend that you have sex with a prostitute, but then your circumstances may be entirely different.
So, my advice is to live beautiful.
Sorry.
I noticed that after hearing comments and arguments therein to see a prostitute decreased but did not go away. Honestly, given how much Scott Alexander’s comment mattered I suspect it’s a social status instinct at least partially.
I reflected on it, and although internal reflections aren’t exactly reliable this is my best self-understanding.
There’s a difference between an entirely internal standard and fear of external humiliation. There’s some of the latter, yes, but there’s also the internal standard.
Right now, I’m feeling frustrated and helpless. My life is like a cage- my parents still make me go to Church (we’ve agreed I can stop after December, but knowing them there will a barrage of a final attempt to persuade me otherwise and I can’t get away with not going until then), they still pressure me to go university (the most I’ve got them to do is agree to me deferring it next semester, but that’s difficult and they’re going to make me go back), and my attempt at speed dating got me banned from the club.
Sure I’m moving out in December. But the cage is still there, and even if it doesn’t make sense logically my failure to speed date still feels like the cage locking in around me. Besides, it doesn’t help emotionally that Mum and Dad are pressuring me to keep to it whether I want to or not.
In addition, I feel like I’m an artificial manchild and a pathetic little nerd. Mum and Dad pressured me to go to university, they pressured me to do it halftime when I wanted to get it over with (saying I’d get too stressed), they held me back on learning public transport, they pressure me to go to Church, and more. Due to my childhood I’ve missed out on so much, and that adds to the feeling of hopelessness and powerless.
I’m unsure about the prostitute thing, but it’s feeling like the one thing I can actually do about all this because Mum and Dad won’t know. I want to do something, SOMETHING, to fix all this faster and I can’t bear to be patient for much longer.
I’m going to break with the consensus here a bit and suggest that if you want to hire a prostitute and can afford to do so, go ahead. In the Australian state of Victoria, prostitution is legal and regulated. So unless I’m missing something, I don’t see how you have anything to lose by going that route. Even if it turns out that you don’t like it, at least you’ll get a chance to practice talking/flirting with a woman.
1. Was there context to this in a previous Open Thread, or something? If there wasn’t, a general rundown of your situation would be helpful. If there was, and if anything I’m posting is redundant, refer me to it.
2. You say you’re better in person than online, but I’m going to rely on vast personal anecdotal evidence, and say that online dating is better than speed dating: less time and energy expended (you can do it on your phone on the bus) so lack of success stings less. Plus, a profile on OKC is a better way to say “look at me I’m interesting” than 3 minutes of conversation and move to the right. Just pretend it’s real life? If you’ve tried online dating, I don’t know, the first time I tried it blew and the second time was way more successful.
3. I’m not sure how to give advice without either telling my life story or saying things that sound like platitudes when presented without context. Especially lacking (or not having seen) context on your end. Suffice it to say that the person I was shortly before I was your age would think that the person I am now is pretty nifty, and it’s only been a few years.
4. What is your goal in this – what do you think that kissing a girl, getting laid, getting a girlfriend, whatever, is going to do for you? Why do you think that?
5. OK, this is totally gonna sound like a platitude, but “impressive enough to date” and “impressive in general” have a lot of overlap. I don’t think anyone looks at someone who is a capable adult, has a job, is in decent shape, dresses nicely, etc and thinks “well but they’re not doing that to attract other people, so doesn’t count”.
I noticed that after hearing comments and arguments therein to see a prostitute decreased but did not go away. Honestly, given how much Scott Alexander’s comment mattered I suspect it’s a social status instinct at least partially.
I reflected on it, and although internal reflections aren’t exactly reliable this is my best self-understanding.
There’s a difference between an entirely internal standard and fear of external humiliation. There’s some of the latter, yes, but there’s also the internal standard.
Right now, I’m feeling frustrated and helpless. My life is like a cage- my parents still make me go to Church (we’ve agreed I can stop after December, but knowing them there will a barrage of a final attempt to persuade me otherwise and I can’t get away with not going until then), they still pressure me to go university (the most I’ve got them to do is agree to me deferring it next semester, but that’s difficult and they’re going to make me go back), and my attempt at speed dating got me banned from the club.
Sure I’m moving out in December. But the cage is still there, and even if it doesn’t make sense logically my failure to speed date still feels like the cage locking in around me. Besides, it doesn’t help emotionally that Mum and Dad are pressuring me to keep to it whether I want to or not.
In addition, I feel like I’m an artificial manchild. Mum and Dad pressured me to go to university, they pressured me to do it halftime when I wanted to get it over with (saying I’d get too stressed), they held me back on learning public transport, they pressure me to go to Church, and more. Due to my childhood I’ve missed out on so much, and that adds to the feeling of hopelessness and powerless.
I’m unsure about the prostitute thing, but it’s feeling like the one thing I can actually do about all this because Mum and Dad won’t know. I want to do something, SOMETHING, to fix all this faster and I can’t bear to be patient for much longer.
For what it’s worth, on a strictly logical level online dating seems to make sense. The problem is my own emotional issues- I tried it, and although logically speaking I know it would be different the whole experience of last time I tried makes it so tough to ‘get back in the game’ there that I have problems.
“If I can’t get proper dating until I’m 30 then the idea is so shameful it isn’t worth trying. Even 26 or 27 would feel humiliating enough (I’m 23 now) as to not make it worth the bother.”
For the record, I was never able to get a date until age 27. I don’t think I was mature enough until then and I felt like there were very definite steps of my social progression that took about that long. Now I am better at it. There is no shame in it taking longer to reach the point where you can do this and once you reach the point it becomes easier. I don’t know how to speed it up but I think that you are doing the right thing.
I noticed that after hearing comments and arguments therein to see a prostitute decreased but did not go away. Honestly, given how much Scott Alexander’s comment mattered I suspect it’s a social status instinct at least partially.
I reflected on it, and although internal reflections aren’t exactly reliable this is my best self-understanding.
There’s a difference between an entirely internal standard and fear of external humiliation. There’s some of the latter, yes, but there’s also the internal standard.
Right now, I’m feeling frustrated and helpless. My life is like a cage- my parents still make me go to Church (we’ve agreed I can stop after December, but knowing them there will a barrage of a final attempt to persuade me otherwise and I can’t get away with not going until then), they still pressure me to go university (the most I’ve got them to do is agree to me deferring it next semester, but that’s difficult and they’re going to make me go back), and my attempt at speed dating got me banned from the club.
Sure I’m moving out in December. But the cage is still there, and even if it doesn’t make sense logically my failure to speed date still feels like the cage locking in around me. Besides, it doesn’t help emotionally that Mum and Dad are pressuring me to keep to it whether I want to or not.
In addition, I feel like I’m an artificial manchild and a pathetic little nerd. Mum and Dad pressured me to go to university, they pressured me to do it halftime when I wanted to get it over with (saying I’d get too stressed), they held me back on learning public transport, they pressure me to go to Church, and more. Due to my childhood I’ve missed out on so much, and that adds to the feeling of hopelessness and powerless.
I’m unsure about the prostitute thing, but it’s feeling like the one thing I can actually do about all this because Mum and Dad won’t know. I want to do something, SOMETHING, to fix all this faster and I can’t bear to be patient for much longer.
I’m in favor of doing something that your parents don’t know about just for the hell of it. Doesn’t have to be prostitution. It’s an important step to take in maturing as an individual IMO.
If you do decide to see a prostitute, do some research first; there are internet sites where clients of sex workers talk about what they’re like. That will increase your chances of seeing a good one considerably (and there are a number of good ones, who take their job, namely to make you feel good, quite seriously and are skillful at it). Though it is worth noting that they are expensive, and if you do see a good one you may well end up wanting to see her again, or wanting to see others, which could become a financial problem.
Sounds like your biggest problem is your parents. Seems you need to become as independent of them as possible as soon as possible.
I am going to second everyone saying that it sounds like the issue is your parents. The more independent you can be, the better. If that means relying on them for financial help while living on your own until you can fully support yourself, that’s better than being under their roof.
Becoming more independent will help you get a girlfriend more than getting a girlfriend will help you feel independent. If you’re thinking of paying for sex because it’s secret and it will make you feel less dependent and less like a “manchild” and “nerd” as you put it, I don’t know if that will really work – I mean, presumably, you will be spending your parents’ money. Using your parents’ money to do something to feel more independent seems kind of self-defeating.
It seems to me like you think that either attracting or paying a woman for sex will be the “something” that fixes everything, rather than things you want for their own sake. If you’re the main character in one of those movies with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, maybe.
In my experience though, the reward of a relationship is being in a relationship (which can be not so much of a reward if the relationship is crappy), and the reward of sex is that it feels good, among other benefits – few of them existential. Trying to make these things into keys to other things has the potential to make things worse, and isn’t really taking the other person into account.
It would also help all of us to have more context, if it hasn’t been provided elsewhere.
I think that seeing a prostitute won’t really make anything better, but I think you should do it anyway. I think you’ll find that sex is not a huge life-altering experience – afterwards you’re still going to have basically the same issues, but you’ll be able to attack them more productively and patiently once you’ve got this hangup out of the way.
If someone goes into something thinking it’s going to be a life-altering experience, and it isn’t, that is potentially bad though.
I mean, leaving aside prostitution, a person thinking getting a romantic partner will fix them could turn out to be … not so good. “You were supposed to fix me, you didn’t, you failed” is a potential reaction, and not good for a relationship.
I mean, there are good reasons to do it (when he ends up hot and heavy with a girl, if she isn’t a virgin, being able to say he isn’t either* without lying would be helpful). But doing something for bad reasons is generally bad.
*no expanding on how, any questions answered with something like “a gentleman never tells”, etc.
In support of this, gaining independence, confidence, etc. will help you find a girl faster than finding a girl will confer independence or confidence.
The good/bad thing about being a man is that if you are successful and independent and confident women will come to you. If you are none of those things, you can go after the women, but they will tend to run. The good/bad thing about being a woman is that if you are hot, men will coming running even if you are an awkward, unsuccessful recluse; the disadvantage is that if you are not hot, no amount of success or confidence will make men substantially more attracted to you–at least not if they wouldn’t have been somewhat attracted without those things.
Being attractive doesn’t hurt a guy, though. And being in decent shape and decently dressed certainly helps with confidence.
Additionally, independence, attractiveness, etc are “guaranteed” in a way attracting women isn’t. Working out and eating right will have a guaranteed payoff when it comes to looking better, as will dressing better. Becoming more independent is its own reward.
In comparison, you cannot control the actions of others. There are all sorts of things that have the effect of making a person more desirable, but where being more desirable is not the only effect.
O.K, maybe I need to clarify. Sex won’t change everything, but it will reduce my frustration in the short term, and make me feel better for the symbolic value of breaking with my parents one step further, plus not feeling so ashamed of being a pathetic little nerd.
As I mentioned, if I’m going to be some celibate little nerd forever I may as well give up trying.
Finally, noting that it is very hot here at the moment. Aspires are VERY heat sensitive. I had an emotional crack-it episode last night. I didn’t self-harm technically, but I scratched a plastic knife over my skin. I also screamed in frustration at the fact that not only could I not sleep I couldn’t even masturbate.
Finally, I did try other solutions. I tried having wine or beer in controlled circumstances to feel less like a man child, but to my disappointment neither actually tasted any good. So that’s out.
I feel powerless to address my own life, as until December I can’t do anything about anything. At least prostitution is a symbolic step. I’m going to do it.
@Carinthium
I was in the same situation as you six months. I’m not a pick up artist but I did lose my virginity and go on a few dates. My advice would be to either get an internet dating profile and/or simply approach more random women. If you get rejected, you won’t have to worry about any consequences and you’ll realize rejection sucks but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Getting rejected is far better emotionally than obsessing about someone and never doing anything about it.
“Additionally, independence, attractiveness, etc are “guaranteed” in a way attracting women isn’t. Working out and eating right will have a guaranteed payoff when it comes to looking better, as will dressing better. Becoming more independent is its own reward.”
I would consider this part of the “working on oneself” which I think is attractive to women. My point is not that women only care about your career success, but that you can do more to make yourself attractive to women by working on yourself (getting in shape, pursuing your career goals and/or passions) than by specifically trying to pick up women (PUA, etc.).
The PUA-type thing might yield some short term results, but I think it is less likely to lead to the sort of long-term results most men want. That said, the PUA thing can be helpful in terms of understanding attraction. I went through a period years ago of reading a lot about PUA. I didn’t put a lot of it into practice directly, but I do think it helped me indirectly become more aware of certain common male-female romantic dynamics.
Carinthium: Most alcohol is an acquired taste. I used to hate beer – thought it tasted like soap. Really got into it. I don’t drink now, but (good) beer is definitely the thing I miss most.
I imagine that regardless of what you do concerning prostitution, you still want to attract romantic partners in the long run. It might help us/you out to provide some context – how much effort do you put into dressing, what is your physical appearance, do you or do you not even lift, etc.
Onyomi: It appears we are in agreement. I suppose what I was saying is that even if somebody got independent, dressed nice, got into shape, etc, and it didn’t get them any individuals of their desired gender(s), well, they’re still independent, dressed nice, and in shape. Those things are good because they’re good in and of themselves. If I decided this afternoon that I was going to become celibate, I would still go to the gym, stick to my diet, and wear colourful socks.
If I remember correctly from the last open thread, you viewed university as a path away from your parents rather than as something unpleasant they were forcing you to do. And several people suggested you contact university counseling office for assistance in living independently. Why the about face?
Either you misremember, or I misworded. I always viewed it as an imposition, but because of comments suggesting I could take advantage of it tried to go with such ideas.
Actually, ideas from this very blog contributed to my decisions. University is good for employment I don’t need, and status which is useless in my psychological black hole.
For what it’s worth, Mum has a tendency to put up a big fight about seeing the DLU as it’s more trouble which interferes with my studies.
Is there any way of testing how far the structure of reality is determined by the mind?
take lsd, go to art gallery.
Isn’t that, like, what optical illusions do? E.g. things like this video of the Flashed Face Distortion Effect remind me that reality as I know it is a total cartoon.
Well, the solution is to donate to research into how to efficiently and scaleable-y cultivate insects as livestock instead of cows or chickens.
A question for advocates of donation to organisations such as MIRI to reduce AI risk.
We are are a long way from creating AI that could do anything dangerous in the a way MIRI worries about (pursuing goals not identical to our own in a way that has disastrous side-effects).
It seems likely that AI safety research will be much more efficient when AI is closer and we have a better idea about how it will be achieved.
Therefore, wouldn’t it be much better to invest money in a fund to be spent on AI safety research when the consensus is that AI is, say, 10 years away, than to invest in current research that no-one knows the usefulness of?
It’s far from clear how far we are from AI. I think there’s already a non-zero chance of human level AI coming into existence within the next ten years.
There is a non-zero chance of everything.
By “when AI is 10 years away”, I meant “10 years away” in the same way that a mission to Mars is 20 years away – i.e. that there is a programme to achieve it that will take approximately 10 years to complete. I am not aware of any programmes like that currently.
I think AI is a lot more like the Manhattan project or Google or iPhones than it is like a Mars Mission. 10 years before iPhones, or even 1 year, the vast majority of people had no idea of the possibility or what it would entail. 10 years before google was founded, Search engines weren’t even a concept that people had. The nature of software and accelerating technological change, and the different incentives for secrecy vs publicity for NASA and private entities means both that AI projects may be kept secret until they come online (or indefinitely), and that new technology may enable AI well within a 10 year window.
Related: DARPA is publicly (http://www.artificialbrains.com/darpa-synapse-program) funding a project to achieve cat level intelligence within THREE years, and I doubt most people have heard of it. I’m not particularly worried about this cat-bot being dangerously unfriendly, but it’s also a very clear step toward a dangerously smart and efficient kind of brain.
Discussed in 3 & 4 here https://intelligence.org/2015/07/27/miris-approach/
As a communist, my views could not be more diametrically opposed to Steve Johnson’s, and I’m sure he believes people like me are responsible for everything wrong in the world. (The distinction between Lenin and Luxemburg, and that I take the latter’s view, will of course be lost on him.)
But annoying posters I can ignore. Mods and admins taking the “purge people I disagree with” route I can’t, especially when they’re making up the rules as they go along.
Hearing about this is disappointing. Hope I’m not next.
I’m pretty sure a bunch of people here that haven’t been banned are well to Scott’s right, including, if I’m not mistaken, you. I might even put myself in that category, although I don’t think I’m very far to Scott’s right if so.
And I’m also pretty sure that the left doesn’t have a monopoly on imputing evil to its opponents.
“And I’m also pretty sure that the left doesn’t have a monopoly on imputing evil to its opponents.”
I do think that it is much more prevalent among the left, though, for entirely understandable reasons. Consider that what ‘left-wing’ seems to amount to is things that are directly and obviously about being nice and making nice things happen; while ‘right-wing’ is things that are about making necessary sacrifices that serve to bring about nice things indirectly or in the long run. If a left-wing idea is wrong, it is probably because it does not take into account the consequences of the nice thing, does not notice that implementing it causes side effects that are more harmful than the nice effect it purports to create directly. If a right-wing idea is wrong, it is probably because the sacrifice it makes is large and the benefit it brings is either small or nonexistent.
Wanting to do something nice, that in fact hurts more than it helps, is stupid. Wanting to do something that hurts short-term, and which you claim has positive effects long-term but doesn’t, is evil. Which I think matches the observation that the right’s usual complaint about the left is that it is stupid and naiive, while the left’s usual complaint about the right is that it is selfish and evil.
“I do think that it is much more prevalent among the left, though, for entirely understandable reasons.”
OK, this is piffle. The right wing (in America) regular refers to the entire left wing as literal murderers and murder apologists (see, abortion). The strongest member of the right wing coalition is the evangelical, fundamentalist, Christian right, which regularly and without a scintilla of hyperbole refers to Satan and evil as driving forces of anyone who is not with them.
Right wing thought on SSC does not model broad based right wing thought.
I did mean to add that ‘right-wingers as stupid fundies’ seems to be an exception to this. I can’t speak for other countries, but this phenomenon doesn’t really exist in my country, the UK. The stereotypical right-wingers over here are seen as selfish rich people, not fundamentalist Christians. There is an undercurrent of “screw those stupid right-wing creationists!” here, but it’s almost exclusively the realm of a particular kind of science fans who have a general anti-American ire.
Also, I think strong Christianity, and religion in general, fits my description of right-wing: short-term sacrifices (you don’t get to do things that are fun but sinful) with the justification that doing so provides long-term benefits (a healthy society).
Right wing thought on SSC does not model broad based right wing thought.
Baldly, I agree with this. However, I do not agree that broad-based right-wing thought includes regularly labeling political opponents “evil”. (The standard label is “idiots”, in my experience.)
In my own experience, I have interacted with different cross-sections of the American socio-economic spectrum, based on political leanings.
On the right, I have had the most interaction with rural farming/blue collar workers and families, and with military-associated professionals (ie, working adults, about 50-50 with college education.)
On the left, I have interacted with salesmen, educators, writers, and academics (college students and professors, and researchers, both under-graduate and graduate).
I have also interacted far more superficially with numerous impoverished people, and largely am unaware of their political leanings. Of the ones I know, they *mostly* self-identified as liberal.
I have interacted with Christian and Jewish religious types on both sides, and with liberal atheists. I have been run off boards for being too liberal and off others for being too conservative. I have close friends who are extremely progressive and others who are markedly conservative.
Based on this, it is my experience that left wing thought lends itself to demonization, bigotry, and prejudice against ideological opponents to a breath and depth not seen on the right.
My only caveat to this is that imo the bias gets worse the more education the liberal has. It is possible that if (somehow) I met a number of academic conservatives, I might revise my opinion to find more of a balance of assholes.
“Based on this, it is my experience that left wing thought lends itself to demonization, bigotry, and prejudice against ideological opponents to a breath and depth not seen on the right.”
I rate rightwing thought pretty high on demonization, bigotry, and prejudice against ideological opponents.
Turn on your radio.
Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Beck, Bob Grant, Mark Levin? And with guests like Ingraham, Coulter, Malkin, Palin, Drudge, Geller, Napoliatano et al?
When they’re not pedaling gold or stroking listeners, they’ll pretty reliably be demonizing and blaming their ideological opponents, and its everywhere you go in flyoverland, and its non-stop.
There just isnt that level of high-profile, day in day out, white-hot hate coming from the left.
@ Aton Rex –
1) If I made my assessment of the tone of different political groups based on media expression, I would have said so. Please go back and re-read my comment, where I emphasized that I formed my opinion based on lengthy interaction with everyday “normal” people.
2) Media can be devastatingly poisonous, and I don’t recommend a steady diet to anyone. On the positive side, FOX and most talk-radio are frank with their biases, and have never pretended (unlike NPR, CNN, et al) to be “neutral” and “only reporting the news”.
3) If you’re basing your assessment of different political groups on talk radio, then God help you, sirra, there is nothing I can do for you.
@kerinah:
I don’t think you will actually get most talk radio or Fox to admit to bias. They will say they are right, not biased. Heck, Fox News has “fair and balanced” as their tag line, and a frequently invoked argument is that they are the ones who are actually unbiased, unlike the “mainstream liberal media”.
In addition, the existence of the media indicates a market for it. The left has tried to go with the white hot hate media route in the U.S. and that has been, mostly, a failure. The market seems to be not nearly the market that exists on the right. Not to say that their is no market, but evidence indicates it is smaller.
@Daniel Kendrick:
The Labor party in Australia, which is the Standard Left Wing Party here (the right-wing party are, somewhat confusingly, the Liberals) started off life as a very Catholic organisation. Had a split in 1955 over communism that led to the Catholic wing breaking out into its own party, which has historically voted very conservatively.
Autonomous Rex: Turn on your radio.
Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Beck, Bob Grant, Mark Levin? And with guests like Ingraham, Coulter, Malkin, Palin, Drudge, Geller, Napoliatano et al?
I listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, and Levin, as well as Tom Marr (Baltimore area), for brief periods when I happen to be driving. They’re commentators, and highly opinionated. Levin seems most disposed toward vituperation, and is admired at least by Hannity (and I’ll assume by Limbaugh as well). Hannity’s views are only presented in light of something he’s witnessed on the left; he doesn’t come hateful out of the gate. It’s easy to tell Levin is taking a large body of the left’s wrongs for granted when he’s ranting. Limbaugh just seems bemused most of the time.
In other words, most of what I hear from right wing talk radio isn’t prejudiced (it’s based on earlier events), and none of it is bigoted (I’ve heard all of them except Levin take on dissenting views without dismissing them out of hand, spirited though their responses may be – I’ve never heard Levin take callers, so I don’t know his deal). That leaves demonization, which I hear a lot, and I don’t like, though again I notice it’s based on past events.
On the left: Randi Rhodes, Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Arthur Chu, and most of Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, DailyKos, Alternet, Firedoglake, and Jezebel are some of the mouthpieces I think of OTTOMH. Demonization is as rife here as in right-wing talk radio (and websites). Prejudice is in evidence – they believe things about right-wingers that I know aren’t true in many cases. And bigotry is in evidence here – there’s a pervasive assumption I see among the left that the right wing viewpoint is simply unserious, borne out of emotional “clinging to guns and religion”. This is particularly vexing to me when it comes out of professional news outlets such as NYT and NPR.
In neither case is it nonstop; I see these voices write about other things. It can certainly feel that way though, when it’s all you seem to see on your Facebook feed.
@ HBC
I don’t think you will actually get most talk radio or Fox to admit to bias.
Hmmm. What would it take to convince you otherwise?
a market for white hot hate
I would not describe most right-wing commentary as “white hot hate.” I would describe NPR as exceptionally disdainful and spiteful towards conservative thought. (It goes so very, very far beyond “dismissive”.)
YM, of course, MV.
I think both the supposed fact you’re trying to explain and your explanation are false, or at least overstated.
As HeelBearCub points out above, many people on the right do characterise their ideological opponents as evil. As an additional example, consider the Republicans who say that the GOP is the stupid party, while the Democrats are the evil party.
I also don’t think the classification of left vs right in terms of short term benefit with possible adverse consequences vs short term pain with possible positive consequences is accurate. Consider for example such left wing rhetoric as “soak the rich” (sometimes even “eat the rich”), or such Twitter hashtags as #killallmen. Or the standard far-left trope of a violent revolution to overthrow capitalism, the patriarchy, US imperialism, or whatever the currently popular boogeyman may be. All of these are far from being nice, but will, according to their adherents, bring about beneficial long term consequences to make up for the short term nastiness.
Conversely, consider such warm and fuzzy right wing ideas as tradition, God and Country, family values, the American Dream, and cheering on the brave troops protecting us from terrorists and foreign invaders. All these of course do have their downsides, but they are “nice” ideas.
The left doesn’t have a monopoly on it, no — five minutes of listening to Rush Limbaugh should cure anyone of that impression — but I think the left is more likely to frame political issues in terms of moral urgency, while the right thinks more in terms of tragic trade-offs. Thomas Sowell articulated this difference in A Conflict of Visions, as the “constrained” and “unconstrained” views of history. An unconstrained mindset is more likely to impute malicious or self-interested motives to those who stand in the way of progress.
I like to simplify my life wherever possible. I’m interested in peoples’ experiences doing away with things commonly thought necessary. A preliminary list of some of my successes/failures:
Really not necessary (to me):
Underwear (for men, at least): I kept trying to find softer, more breathable, more flexible underwear that wouldn’t create uncomfortable moments requiring of adjustment until I finally just stopped wearing underwear altogether. At which point I was like… “why does everyone do this?” I can understand doing it for warmth, but usually we want testicles to remain relatively cool, which is why they’re outside the body in the first place. Why do they need to be constantly wrapped up? Maybe this means one should wash pants slightly more often, but the lack of underwear to wash more than makes up for it. Women are more apt to “excrete,” especially at a certain time of month, so it makes more sense for them, I guess. This may apply to bras, though I understand large, unsupported breasts may be a source of discomfort for some women.
Regular Meals: people say you need regular meals to “keep your metabolism up,” that breakfast is the most important meal, etc. My personal view is that most people in developed countries already eat way more than is necessary for functioning or health, and many obviously eat so much as to be a detriment. I find I function perfectly fine on no breakfast, and that, in many cases, I can think more clearly without a bunch of food digesting. Moreover, I have found a lot of benefit to going on longer fasts, though those do necessarily slow you down somewhat.
Vitamins, Minerals, Supplements: I’ve found they area usually mildly, temporarily helpful at best (with no real, longterm benefit), downright harmful at worst, and most just give you expensive pee.
Fancy razors, shaving cream: I just use beard trimmers at various lengths depending on how I want to look. It can get closer than an electric razor, and offer other lengths in between. Admittedly nothing beats a real razor (ideally a straight razor) shave at a barber shop with hot lather, etc. if you want a super baby face look, but otherwise, it seems a big waste of time and money, especially buying all those “mach 3” cartridges and 120 dollar electric razors (when a good set of clippers is $50 or less).
Not dispensable in my experience:
Regular showers, soap: some people (http://abc13.com/business/this-man-hasnt-showered-in-12-years/972009/) say it’s better for your skin and microbiome not to wash so much and I’m sure it wouldn’t actually hurt your health not to do so, but if I want to smell pleasant and not have greasy hair, I need to wash regularly. Eating a vegan diet (which I sometimes but not always do), does seem to reduce body odor, but I also am broadly sympathetic to the aquatic ape hypothesis and like to swim a lot, so even if I weren’t intentionally showering a lot, I’d still be getting wet, stripping off natural oils, etc.
Sleep: admittedly I’ve never tried modafinil, etc. and I do find I can get a lot done during short periods with less sleep, and there does seem to be a benefit of less sleep to some people with unipolar depression, but I find I eventually have to make up for it with more sleep later and/or reduced functioning now. I do find I can feel good on less sleep at times when I’m not exercising and/or meditating a lot, but the health benefits of exercise are clear, and, though meditation has other positive effects, it’s not really a time saver to say “you can get by on 2 fewer hours of sleep if you sit quietly in darkness for 2 hours every day.”
Underwear:
Given that Japanese style, wash and dry your nether regions, automated toilets are not available anywhere except Japan, this seems like just asking for embarrassment. In addition, using a urinal, their is always the risk of post put-away leakage. The wearing of certain pants or shorts will go right out, as most people don’t want have their business on public inspection. Finally, I hope you never experience a “zipper incident”, which is definitely more likely without underwear.
Edit: And chafing/discomfort issue is also for men, probably especially the circumcised.
Vitamins:
I take Vitamin D for depression and it helps. I take Vitamin E because I am a fat bastard in my 40s and it has been shown to protect liver function against the damage done by fatty liver disease. My wife takes Magnesium in high does as a migraine preventative.
Take them for specific things, not as an all purpose cure-all.
Food:
I get really, really, really cranky if I let my blood sugar get too low.
Razors:
Using a beard trimmer without a guard leads to irritated skin in my case. I found that, before I started wearing a beard, using Mach-3 or Mach-4 razor with a first coat of Noxzema and Edge shaving gel over the top lead to an far more comfortable day and eliminated 90+% of the nicks I used to suffer from. I think individual mileage is going to vary greatly on this front.
Shower:
I feel so much better if I take a shower. Otherwise I feel like I am oiled up for some sort of Roman wrestling match. My scalp starts to flake badly if I don’t wash it thoroughly ever day.
Sleep:
Eight hours of quality sleep (I now use a CPAP machine) has done quite a bit for my depression.
I think many of the objections to no underwear are based on the assumption that, when one removes the underwear which used to cling to one’s private areas, that same real estate will then be occupied by the inside of one’s pants. This is not really the case. What is usually adjacent to my private areas is air, not the inside of pants. Further, I feel it is gross to leave significant amounts of fecal matter on your butt regardless of whether wearing underwear or not, though I do really, really wish Japanese-style washlets would catch on in the US.
“Further, I feel it is gross to leave significant amounts of fecal matter on your butt regardless of whether wearing underwear or not”
Yes, I’m sure most everyone agrees with this. Yet, just as one intends to fully empty the entirety of the urethra at every urination, but does not always succeed, so to do unclean butts happen, for a variety of reasons.
But, it is not merely fecal matter. Take a sniff of your used underwear sometime. Unless you launder your pants everyday, the results seem likely to be pretty ripe. I’m going to assume there is some sort of pheremonal thing going on there, much as with the underarms.
And I highly doubt that your pants and your skin do not meet even when sitting down.
I think the need or lack thereof for underwear may also depend somewhat on the degree to which one sweats a lot in that area. I rarely wear shoes without socks, for example, because my feet tend to get sweaty without them. The socks are, therefore, acting as mini sweat absorbers, in addition to cushioning my feet, preventing chafing, etc.
I suppose, for those who feel the need for underwear, the analogy is feet:socks::crotch:underwear, but I don’t find my pants in such close contact to my crotch when I walk as my shoes are to my feet, nor do I personally find the latter area to be as productive of sweat in need of absorbing.
Further, I find underarm smells to be more prone to wafting outward, and others are more likely to find themselves in somewhat close proximity to your armpit on, for example, a subway, than they are to your crotch in a non-sexual situation. In other words, if you are close enough to my crotch in public to smell it through my pants, you are either a dog, or else seriously invading my personal space (or both).
@onyomi:
Sure. But there is a reason those who don’t wear underwear don’t wear them two days in a row.
I might wear a pair of jeans for 10, even 20 days before I need to wash them. No way I get away with that if I don’t wear underwear. Now, even with an undershirt, I won’t wear a shirt more than a few times, so that part of what you are saying seems relevant.
If you are lucky enough that you can detect no order on the inside of your pants after going commando for 16, 32 hours, good on ya, mate. But I’m doubting you are going 160 hours. And I ain’t going even 16.
Underpants: Most pants have a prominent crotch seam, and most pants cut to fit women have very little extra room in the crotch, so without underwear this seam can cause very unpleasant chafing. Underwear with skirts, when you’re not menstruating, is presumably only needed so that nobody sees your genitals if eg you have to climb a ladder. Either way I find these not dispensable.
Bras: Increase comfort when running, obligatory at work for purposes of decency which I don’t fully understand. Usually uncomfortable though, and dispensable outside work and certain exercise. (I did have a proper bra fitting so fit is not the reason I find them uncomfortable.)
Shoes: Uncomfortable and often dispensable, but required inside most businesses. Ideal solution is to carry a compact pair around and put them on only when needed.
Smartphone: Dispensing with this has begun to be annoying but it’s still workable.
It is true that the inside of some pants can be chaffing, so there may be certain pants which are uncomfortable to wear without a layer of padding, but that does not apply to most pants, in my experience.
Of course, for women there is the additional issue of privacy when wearing a skirt; if I wore a kilt I’d probably wear underwear for modesty’s sake too (though I hear that goes against the ethos of the kilt and I wish people were a little less worried about all that in general). In fact, if not for issues of modesty and fashion, the comando kilt would probably be my preferred version of pants.
If you wear shorts, you may experience the same issue, depending on the matter of “shower” vs “grower” and state of “relaxation”
Yes, though boxers do not solve the problem, being, in essence, shorts you wear under your shorts. And briefs I don’t much care for for reasons stated above.
Hanes Boxer Briefs. Preferably the ones that have a small bit of Lycra in the weave.
There is nice underwear for men that doesn’t have this issue, and indeed is significantly more comfortable than going without. Look for underwear that has a front pocket, into which you will fit (you may have to look on men’s lingerie sites) – it will prevent chafing/rubbing, and helps evaporation/coolness. It also has certain social advantages (many women do, in fact, enjoy looking).
I see that AI progress is right on track, at least to the level of a human four year old.
Next headline to be “Researchers report full-blown tantrum throwing over not being allowed to watch cartoons, having to eat yucky vegetables instead of candy”? 🙂
The real problems will come around 2026 when it wants to start dating.
AI causing no end of consternation to its creator when it wants to start dating? Seems like I’ve heard that one before.
“But Daaaaad, all the other AIs are allowed go to the concert!” 🙂
“No ifs, ands, or buts. Now finish up with your paperclips.”
“Never” X-D
Many people like to base their moral positions on a group of things that include stuff like consciousness/suffering/happiness/rights etc. I’m wondering if there is anyone here who sees *biology* or biological processes as relevant to the normative part of their moral positions/philosophy? I exclude biology as a justifcation for amoralism in this question.
For example, in seeing that there is a biological phenomenon of altruism or cooperation at work in humans, does anyone here hold views that there is logic connecting that with normative views on how we view the world or treat other people?
I endorse doing so in theory, although in practice my virtue ethics are much more arbitrary and boring.
You can get a decent teleology from evolutionary biology. Niches aren’t exactly clean and neat but you they give a good sense of what the purpose / essential character of a given creature is. And since you can actually calculate fitness scores, this approach provides reasonably objective lists of virtues for any given species in its current environment.
I haven’t done the work of actually going through the data to generate a set of contemporary human virtues properly but I would like to someday.
Interesting. Is there any writing that you’ve done or seen that expresses this idea in more detail? How would it apply to human virtue? Would we derive our virtues from our niche (part-time dominant apex predator part-time protector/sybmiant?) If I may, can I also pose a critical question on this method… If a cat gains evolutionary fitness points through behaviours that cause prolonged suffering to its prey, such as playing with its food etc, could that be judged as virtuous under this idea? I’m not so much disagreeing with you as prodding for more details 🙂
I haven’t done much writing online, aside from delurking every so often on SSC, but it’s not unique to me or even a terribly new idea. Aside from the bit about fitness scores anyway, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else take that tack. Anyway I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it elsewhere before, mostly with a Catholic spin on it though since they’re the last big group that cares about teleology.
As for cats playing with their food and similar cases, I think this is a case of me defining things poorly. To me, virtue is closer to the Latin root “vir” meaning potency or the Greek word for virtue which meant excellence. Virtuous behavior isn’t something you do out of obligation or a desire to be nice, it’s about cultivating your best traits. If you read the Enchiridion or Meditations or even the Republic it’s pretty explicit that the motivation for attaining eudaemonia is fundamentally a personal rather than a social one. So I don’t see any contradiction between virtue and inflicting or enduring suffering.
When it comes to actually figuring out which traits are virtues to be cultivated and which are vices to be overcome, that’s when understanding niches becomes important. If you know what strategy you are using then you’ll see pretty clearly what sorts of things are helpful or harmful. And you’ll also see when you’ve moved outside of the environment where your particular virtues are proven to be useful.
Interesting! IIRC all Ancient Greek philosophy sees it in a similar way regarding personal vs social. I guess the question I have now is: are we using “virtue” in a way that implies some sort of morality? It seems like the cat might be virtuous by this standard, but still amoral.
Well, if you’ll excuse a bit of Nietzsche, what you call amoral he might call “master morality.” You don’t need a concept of sin or a dichotomy between good and evil for a moral system, that’s just the most popular way to do it.
Morality is supposed to be a guide to behavior. A guide that tells you to be something that you aren’t is useless. A morality that doesn’t allow cats to exist has no purpose.
Well the cat would be amoral, not immoral, and it would still exist, even if we prevented it from playing with its food 🙂
Nichomachean Ethics would be the go-to. Bernard Williams provides some useful meta-ethical background for us moderns; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on him is good.
Thanks, will read more.
anyone here who sees *biology* or biological processes as relevant to the normative part of their moral positions/philosophy?
Yes. (But you’re not going to like it.)
There is an innate morality to Creation. Biological processes, which are foreseeable (*) results of basic physical properties of Creation, reflect the will and purpose of the Creator, who created the moral underpinnings of the universe when God made atoms with the property of gravity.
(*) to the Creator, who has a very unfortunate habit of not leaving adequate footnotes.
While I don’t share your view please don’t feel I “dislike” it. Few people share my own specific moral philosophy so I’m pretty used to that! Ok so does this mean that you feel your creator’s moral intentions for you can be inducted from patterns in nature as well as the common theist method of scriptures etc? Could that inform a moral decision that you make? I’m interested how?
so does this mean that you feel your creator’s moral intentions for you can be inducted from patterns in nature as well as the common theist method of scriptures etc?
Yes. I was taught that there were four broad schools of Catholic spirituality, roughly divided along methods for determining the Will of God. (Augustine, Ignatian, Thomasian, and Franciscan) Franciscan, following the example of St Francis of Assisi, emphasizes considerations of natural forces.
Could that inform a moral decision that you make? I’m interested how?
Yes. Poise a question, and I’ll give it a try – while acknowledging that the broad principles of natural forces under lie more specific guidelines for humans.
I’m not sure I know enough about it to construct a salient question. does it influence opinions of how non-human species ought to be treated? What about relationships and courting? Finally perhaps it informs economic or political opinions (I will avoid debating the specific opinions)?
does it influence opinions of how non-human species ought to be treated?
Treated by what – the sun? Other non-human species? humans? (I’m guessing the last one. 😉 There are frank statements in Scripture regarding a herdsmans’ care of their flocks, a farmer’s legal responsibility for their animals, and the overriding power of the Will of God to upset fundamental laws of nature, which are themselves forces beyond the ability of humans to fully control. Given these overt messages, I can only assume that they are in Scripture in order to prevent humans from drawing too much inspiration from nature, red in tooth and claw.
What about relationships and courting? Again, there are overt statements in Scripture. In the Christian traditions I was raised in, relationship & courting were strongly related to “go forth and multiply” – and it’s very hard to find lessons in nature that counter that impulse. There are also some questionable lessons that one might decide are found in nature – that each sort of thing pairs with another of its sort, and does not pair with outsiders.
Finally perhaps it informs economic or political opinions (I will avoid debating the specific opinions)? IMO, a study of nature leans towards a socially conservative, technologically-hesitant stance, which is largely the stance of the Church. In terms of economics, nature pushes both a competitive, selfish approach and an anti-materialistic stance (accepting the ebb and flow of resources with the season) and an acceptance of want and deprivation that is currently out of fashion in the world as a whole.
I could go into particulars of reproduction, euthanasia, care for the impoverished, and the importance of agriculture, but I am not sure if that’s where you meant to go.
OTOH, if you’re willing to listen to me blather more, ask me about transferon and the lion lying down with the lamb.
Ok thanks for sharing. It’s true that is quite different from my own perspective, which focuses on the trajetory of biological development from its starting point of unrestrained competition to increasing biological cooperation, which I see as desirable.
I understand the concept of “stewardship” is also a Christian thing that drives a certain amount of conservationism within some Christian denomonations. Ie. looking after and respecting God’s creations. Is it a matter of focus/interpretation that determines whether that is prominent?
By all means give me a quick summary of transferon and the lamb/lion thing. I had a quick look around for the latter, but found wildly different interpretations of its meaning.
The economics perspective you mentioned, regarding all-on-all competition, is that something humans should follow or reject in your beliefs?
No, because this commits the is-ought fallacy. Why would the existence of animal altruism mean that I should be altruistic?
Obviously I’d be mad to consider such questions without considering the is-ought separation 🙂 But I included the phrase “logic connecting that with normative views” as placeholder where people could offer their chosen solution to the is-ought problem or a reason why it wasn’t relevant.
For example, given a subjective personal preference for morality, combined with an assumption that morality is not innately known in completeness, a factual investigation into morality would yield objective information that would inform “ought” style decision making. If an investigation concluded morality was a biological phenomenon, then maybe biology could inform moral reasoning.
Checks out, SSC’s comments are completely empty of right-wing sentiment.
They’re nearly empty of right-wing sentiment as it exists in mainstream American political discourse. There used to be a few non-NRx right-wingers hanging around, but they seem to have gone. (I’m terrible with names, but one dude — Mark, I think? — struck me as an extremely typical conservative Evangelical.)
The “right-wing” sentiment on SSC is much more Grey than Red.
I’m not sure if “rightwing on SCC” =/= “FOX” actually means much.
IMO SCC is more tolerant of expressions of right-leaning values than any “inclusive” or “tolerant” platform I’ve been a part of.
Well, yeah, any platform which claims to be “inclusive” or “tolerant” has a high prior probability of being just the opposite. Think of it as the “fair and balanced” of the left 🙂
I think “right-wing = FOX” is probably a decent 0th-order approximation (in as much as “leftwing = NPR” is). NRx, despite its name, comes from the left; you won’t find NRx in Peoria. And most of the libertarians around here are from the left (if you want to find libertarians from the right, try the Sad Puppy associated blogs).
Mostly the right and the left simply do not engage in discourse in the US. The left has their strongholds where various left-wing factions fight among themselves (and often call each other “right wing”), and the right has their strongholds where right-wing factions fight among themselves (and claim the others are really leftists, or “Republicans In Name Only”).
“And most of the libertarians around here are from the left”
I don’t match anarcho-libertarianism to “left” but I think it might be the most prevalent type here.
Libertarian left, to me is all about eliminating criminalizing victimless behavior and combatting state oppression of “non standard” behavior. Privacy concerns yes, but not concerns about government providing free healthcare.
For what it’s worth, I would more probably associate myself with the Reds than the Greys.
I read just about every single post and all the comments, but almost never comment myself. My own observation is that SSC is vastly more tolerant of right-of-center ideas than most places on the Internet, yet the sort of thought that I would consider to be “mainstream” right-wing (exemplified by, say, NRO) is pretty much absent.
Then again, mainstream left-wing thought isn’t exactly commonplace here either. Best just conclude that SSC’s politics are weird and move on.
To be fair, though, there doesn’t seem to be very much “mainstream left” either, as defined by, say, the left wing of the Democrats (admittedly, not very left).
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at towards the end there, “Then again, mainstream left-wing thought isn’t exactly commonplace here either.” We have actual communists cheek by jowl with neoreactionaries, but probably not a whole lot of people debating the relative merits of Joe Biden versus Hillary Clinton or weighing the finer points of Carson against Rubio.
Vote for Jim Webb, guys, he’ll let you keep your guns.
Not sure how I missed that last paragraph of your post. Or maybe I’m just not hitting refresh enough.
What strikes me is that, here at least, the communists and the neoreactionaries, for example, seem less antagonistic than I’ve seen very, very mainstream left and right wingers be.
Could be that the standards here really are good, or that there’s no point in getting really vitriolic when not a great deal is immediately at stake.
I think there is a decent overlap between grey tribe and red tribe here. One thing I’ve noticed is that SSC has a very large number of people who were libertarians at some point. Some of those people are still consistent libertarians. Some of them are NRx. But there are some people(myself included) who are somewhere in between, who still have a libertarian mindset but are increasingly supportive of those conservative positions they used to scoff at.
My overall impression of the SSC comments section, even though I don’t post here very often, is that it has a stronger right-libertarian consensus than it used to. Not only are a lot of the neo-reactionaries gone, but quite a few of the really strident left-wingers (e. g. Multiheaded) don’t post as often as they used to either.
Probably also has something to do with Bryan Caplan and Glenn Reynolds linking to here more often.
Grays are subset or breakaway of Blues. Just because you are a libertarian doesn’t make you gray. It is a subculuture not a political stance.
It is going to be very rare for someone from a middle America, church going, NASCAR watching background to morph into someone that drinks Soylent and calls American Football sportsball. It’s far more likely to start off from a background of drinking bottled water, eating arugula and “feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it”.
On the other hand I can’t agree with the grandparent (great?) that SSC is all blue and gray. You only need to look at the gun control subthread to see people passionate about guns, and there’s nothing else that’s as strong a red tribe marker.
I disagree – I fit better under Grey than Red, despite the strong gun support.
Grays are subset or breakaway of Blues
The actual Libertarian Party, is rather explicitly a breakaway faction of the Republican Party. And while it is true that “libertarian” doesn’t map explicitly to “gray” or “republican” to “red”, those are certainly the way to bet.
If you want to try and define grays to be a subset of blues, you’re going to need yet another identifier for the broadly libertarian-aligned people who are clearly ex-reds. And there are enough of us that, if you tell us all we can’t be grays, you’ll find there aren’t actually all that many grays for you to hang out with and you probably don’t need a separate tribal identifier for them.
@Lupis42
Strongly supporting gun rights, with arguments and charts and statistics, is not the same thing as being passionate about guns. That’s more about lusting after the new model, spending time down at the range and/or hunting, CCWing, etc.
Maybe I’ve missed what’s going on in that subthread, because I don’t care that much about the issue and so only skimmed, but it was my impression that there were at least some gun enthusiasts, not just gun rights supporters.
@John Schilling
I’m going by Scott’s definition in “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup”. The Grays as a subset of Blues point was made explicitly.
As for libertarian leaning republicans or Libertarian party members, if they are part and parcel of red culture (football, church, guns, country music) then I don’t see any need for a different identifier. Ideology was only a subset of what the tribe thing was getting at (at least I understood it).
—-
Of course the world is messy and doesn’t fall perfectly into neat little categories. There are always going to be exceptions.
Scott Alexander is not infallible. He described a group of people with a social and political identity distinct and cohesive enough to identify as a “tribe”, and asserted that they are primarily blue-tribe refugees. He was correct in the first part, and wrong in the second – likely due to sample bias w/re the tiny subset of gray tribe that he, as an ex-blue, hung out with.
You can, I suppose, explicitly incorporate “ex-blue-tribe” into the definition of “grey”, but that’s as pointless (and pointlessly limiting) as saying that gray-tribe members must have blue eyes.
@brad
There certainly are – I’m one of them. That’s kind of my point.
The “gun nuts” circle overlaps heavily with both blue and grey tribes.
Remember that in a previous Open Thread, someone expounded on the difference between Blue-spawned Greys and those spawned from Red.
In my personal interactions with the more alternative libertarian right, I’ve encountered a similar culture clash, though I don’t think the American “political tribes” correspond that easily to other countries.
@John Schilling
So are you saying that there are lots of ex-red tribe members that are well described by:
?
Or are you attempting to rewrite the concept to just be about libertarian politics? If you want to throw out the whole sociological part and just talk about politics, why not just use Democrat/Republican/Libertarian?
@Lupis42
No there aren’t.
There aren’t a whole lot of gun nuts in there. Though like I said there are always a handful of exceptions.
There are some parts of the Democratic Party coalition that have higher rates of gun nuttery but they aren’t well described by the vignette above (e.g. blue collar union workers). Even with a strictly partisan definition, Republicans are more than twice as likely to live in a gun owning household than Democrats. That’s a larger gap than in weekly church attendance.
@Brad: Yes. That is almost exactly what I am claiming, modulo a bit of obvious hyperbole – e.g. gray tribe whatever its origin has the general distaste for American-rules football, but calling it “sportsball” is too specific to be a good general marker.
If it pleases you to deny our existence, whether because you don’t hang out with many of us or because you don’t recognize us when we’re right here talking to you, then go form your own damn tribe. A tiny, lonely one because even most of the bluish greys aren’t going to be joining you there.
Fair enough then. That’s not my experience. To pick one example from that list — Dawkins-style atheism — I find that many red tribe background libertarians are either themselves religious or at very least respectful of the religious. Hence the massive internecine fighting over the issue of abortion.
But admittedly I haven’t really be involved in that scene for around 10 years. So maybe my experiences are outdated, or maybe they weren’t representative to begin with.
@brad
I live in the liberal northeast. People like that aren’t a big percentage of blue tribe members, but there are enough of them that I recently saw someone proposing to open a gun range specifically catering to them. I’d estimate ~1% of the gun nuts (at least around me) are blue tribe, another ~30% are red tribe, and the rest are either grey or hybridized.
FWIW: given the definitions I’m seeing here, I would probably qualify as gray tribe from a red tribe background. I grew up in rural Texas; learned to shoot guns and be fairly comfortable around them, but I dislike maintaining them enough to not shoot avidly (i.e., I am definitely not a “gun nut”); family is Roman Catholic, while I’m agnostic; I like classical, classic rock, and techno, rather than country; I don’t follow popular American sports, but I do enjoy playing volleyball and ultimate. I came here by way of Eric Raymond’s blog, LW, and Caplan; I never read Instapundit these days (no time).
Gun control is a bit weird as a red marker. I have a lot of liberal friends, who are curiously pro-gun rights. (Admittedly, they tend to favor relatively subtle restrictions, such as background checks, mental health checks, clip restrictions, etc., and they have close friends who are very much for gun bans.) Lots of liberals seem to favor both general gun ownership rights and collectivist economic policies.
TLDR: most libertarians I know are from the red side; I know enough blue “gun nuts” to treat RKBA as only a relatively weak indicator of tribe, although gun control advocacy is a strong indicator of blue.
I think there are plenty of rightists around here who think the left is evil. I definitely don’t think the banned poster would remotely qualify as our host’s friend. I think our host does care a little too much for the opinions of mean Tumblr people who mistreat him, but I don’t think you need a whole big social dynamic to explain the banning of that poster. He was a no-good troll deliberately derailing threads, banning him is just a matter of good governance.
> 3. Steve Johnson is banned for reasons of total personal caprice
I appeal for the ban on Steve Johnson to be revoked. I’m not sure if this is kind of a test of the audience or what is possible for an author. In any case if a ban can be set for arbitrary reasons it should equally easy be revoked for such reasons. Here are a few:
– The audience appeals for a revoke of the ban (I havn’t found such an appeal in the comments yet so I just do now)
– Scott just decides that the experiment is over and lifts the ban.
– A reign of terror could be seen as a mental illness that has befallen Scott and to avoid that impression the ban is lifted.
What is the most useful programming language to learn if one wants to be able to contribute to FOSS projects, especially Linux-based ones?
The useless but true answer is “whatever language is used by the FOSS projects you’re interested in”. A more useful but possibly false answer is C++, and its not-quite-subset C (which is what the Linux kernel itself is written in). Once you’ve got C++, the other likely things you’ll need will be cake.
Acedia doesnt say, but if its their first language (which i assume), then i would strongly recommend they did not start with c++ its big, complex and hard.
it depends 🙂
i suspect you could find a FOSS project based on any language you care to choose. so i’d say pick the project you like then learn the language it uses.
however, if you really want to learn the language that is most often used then pick c. not that i have any numbers for that assertion, just 25years of programming experience using FOSS on linux and various other *nix’s.
Python, C, and C++ are very popular. C++ is big, huge, complicated and dangerous, and is used for a lot of applications. The kernel and similar bits tend to be in C, which is small but difficult to do anything in. Python is a very high-level scripting language and it is often used for applications that don’t have any performance implications. It’s probably the hip new thing on the block in this list; it’s likely going to be easier to learn than C and C++ as well.
Picking up some very basic shell scripting would be a good idea too.
This is possibly the wrong question to be asking. If you want to learn to program, pick an easy language. Python is very popular, and frequently used in scientific computing. Alternatively, you can start with web development (although this involves learning things like HTML that aren’t actually programming languages).
On the other hand, if you want to contribute to FOSS projects, but can’t program, learning to program might not be the best option. There is a big difference between the level of programming that lets you make nice and useful things, and the level that lets you create code that can be added to large projects. It will take a long time to get to the second stage from scratch. However, FOSS projects are permanently desperate for volunteers to do non-programming things – writing and translating documentation for instance. If you have skills in these areas, they would be much appreciated by most FOSS projects.
TheNybbler’s useless but true answer is largely correct. Note that C is widely used by FOSS types, as to a lesser extent is C++, partly for historical reasons (founder effects, you might say). (Go and Rust are more modern languages targetting a roughly C-like territory, I think, and are for some reason fairly hip among hacker types at the moment.)
But that aside, I’d say that in broader terms, Ruby or Python are good candidates for first general-purpose programming languages. I’d second C++ being a poor choice for beginners because of its complexity. C is old-fashioned and bare-bones enough to be painful in some respects, but in a way that can be a good learning experience that teaches you how to think about how computers think.
Ok, so, can somebody shop talk with me about depression inventories?
I reliably BLOW THROUGH them. Like, scoring “severe” on the Beck is just trivial.
By QALY ratings, “severe depression” is, like, a really big deal, ranking as just barely less bad than anencephaly, or literally not having a head.
Are these ranked by different measures? Are some instruments more prone to inflation than others?
The Beck depression inventory is considered very reliable. Consider the possibility that most people you know live significantly more enjoyable lives than you for brain-chemisty reasons, and that you merely have not noticed.
Alternately, do you have a physical disability or chronic diseases? Wikipedia suggests that this is a significant confounder that can inflate scores.
Either way, you should probably see a therapist or doctor or both.
QALY and DALY ratings are typically calculated by surveys where correspondents are asked what amount of lifespan or risk of death they’d be willing to exchange for time in perfect health, either ranked by experts (WHO 1990) or by a combination of experts and public survey (WHO 2010). As a result, any condition featuring suicidal ideation or poor time discounting will have more severe QALY ratings, as will any condition where patients have a lot of experience with treatments that involve health risks. (Conversely, congenital conditions tend to have less severe QALY ratings than you’d expect). This leads to bizarre results when disparate conditions are compared.
That said, the depression inventories are reasonably accurate, since they’re pretty much asking whether something is shaped like itself. Regardless of the QALY/DALY impact, if you’re personally experiencing significant workplace, personal, or social limitations because of the behaviors you’re seeing show up on depression inventories, I’d strongly recommend looking to a psychologist and the Things That Sometimes Help (especially the “see a shrink” and “fix sleep habits” sections) on the topic. The costs of treating depression are significantly lower than the costs of treating even many conditions that I am confident are similar in personal impact.
I don’t dispute your explanation, but it is incomplete. Depression also significantly reduces life expectancy:
One possible reason for this is that depression can be a side effect of many other health issues. Another is that depression can make one slow to seek help, including when a serious medical issue arises.
I emphatically agree that depression inventories are trustworthy.
I’m not sure how the QALY lists do it, but there are some cases in which there’s confusion between “severe depressive symptoms” and “severe depressive episode” – see Part V here.
Ok, this explains the confusion. GOD psychiatrists do not NAME THINGS CONSISTENTLY. But thank you!
This isn’t what you asked about, but it’s related, and I think it’s important:
You don’t know what normal feels like.
(I’m assuming you’re actually depressed, based on your depression inventory experience.)
If your depression is a long-lasting thing, with either no sharp onset or one confounded by major life changes (e.g. new school, going off to college, divorce, death of a loved one), you don’t really have much of a basis to compare how you feel now with how normal feels.
I’ve had chronic depression with anxiety since junior high school.
Once I started taking Lexapro (escitalopram), I felt different: negative spirals, which had been a constant background part of my thinking and feeling, became much weaker and much less constant. “Woah,” I thought, “so this is what it feels like to be normal!”
Nope.
Once I started taking Wellbutrin (bupropion), I felt different: it’s as if I’d spent my whole life with a gas gauge stuck on Empty, regardless of actual energy level, and now it was fixed. I’d think, “Hey, I should put away X right now before it gets lost,” and instead of some energy-conserving part of my brain kicking in and stopping me, I would just get up and put X away. “Okay,” I thought, “so this is really what it feels like to be really normal!”
Nope.
I recently experienced some kind of breakthrough (maybe just the hockey-stick blade of an exponential curve) where I have little enough anxiety that I actually feel it, and can tackle it head-on: “Hey, I’m anxious. Well, is there any good reason to be? No? Then it’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK….” That kind of self-soothing self-talk would not have worked a year or more ago. Things aren’t perfect now, but they’re better than they were even just a few months ago.
I kind of wonder what it would be like to feel normal. If it’s better, I’d like to keep progressing in that direction.
(My point here is not that meds are awesome; they unfortunately don’t work for everyone, and I’m fortunate to be someone they work well for. It’s that self-diagnosing depression is hard, and possibly impossible absent a suicide attempt. Even months after I started seeing a psychologist, I didn’t think I had depression; I was somewhat surprised at the diagnosis.)
Scott has a good article on things that sometimes help if you’re depressed: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-help-if-youre-depressed/
Read it. Go talk to somebody (psychologist or psychiatrist or therapist). If that doesn’t help, go talk to somebody else. Don’t rule out medication in conjunction with talk therapy or cognitive-behavioral therapy.
I feel like I owe all you kind people a reply;
yes, I am depressed and yes, I am getting treatment, of precisely the kind Scott recommends.
A question for committed impartial utilitarians:
You find yourself holding a device with two buttons. If you press the left button, the person closest and most important to you – maybe your partner, your child, your best friend, someone similar – dies. If you press the right button, two random people around the world, who you have never met and will never meet, die. The two people chosen have similar characteristics to the person who would be chosen by the left button, such that the expected remaining lifetime utility of all three is similar. If you don’t press either button, everyone in the world will be sent to Hell and subjected to eternal torture.
Obviously, you should press a button. Which button would you press? Which button should you press?
EXTREME MODE: the right button now causes one person to die and one person to stub their toe. If you thought you would press the left button before, would you still do so? Should you still do so?
EXTREME MODE THE OTHER DIRECTION: for people who would press the right button, how many people would the right button have to cause to die before you would/should press the left button?
I’m sorry if this question is silly or naiive in some way. I’m an intrigued onlooker, not someone at all well versed in moral philosophy.
In practice, I’d save the person important to me, but I think this is basically moral weakness. Certainly if such choices were common we’d want to establish a norm that you have to choose the option that causes the least total harm.
“Certainly if such choices were common we’d want to establish a norm that you have to choose the option that causes the least total harm.”
If such choices were common then it would be a different issue. If everyone in the selection pool were to agree with one another that whenever picked, they will press the button to kill the one person close to them rather than two other people, they would still each be acting to save the person they care about most – halving the chance that that person will have to die, assuming everyone is given the device at an equal rate. In that case, “helping the person you care about” and “helping everyone” have become the same thing, which is a less interesting problem.
Well, a few ways to look at this:
– This sort of choice really is common. What charity should you give money to? Should we approve drug X? Should we invade country Y? What penalties should be imposed for emitting chemical Z? In each case, depending on which choice you make some people die and other people live, and some of these people will be closer to you than others.
– If we ever find ourselves saying, “man, wouldn’t it have been great if we had all made some group pre-commitment beforehand?” then maybe we should all just behave *as if* we had made that group pre-commitment? If we would all have pre-committed beforehand to be utilitarians, maybe we should all just be utilitarians? (I think Scott discussed such ideas here).
I like that post of Scott’s. But, it doesn’t seem to me to be a defense of utilitarianism in the sense of treating everyone’s utility as equally important, so much as for making your own utility and everyone’s utility converge. As Scott says, in many situations there are lots of barriers to actually being able to do this.
The problem – what I was trying to create with my hypothetical – is what to do in these situations, where you cannot make the necessary enforceable prior agreements. In situations where coordination is impossible – say, a situation where a device is sprung on you out of nowhere, a device that nobody thought to make an enforceable contract about because nobody expected this kind of device to exist – and you have a choice between disutility for someone you personally care about a great deal, versus a bit more disutility for people you don’t personally care about, would and should you choose the first over the second?
I don’t think it’s useful to say “well, if you had coordinated beforehand…”. Yes, if you had coordinated beforehand then everything would work out better. But, in this situation, you didn’t. Lots of situations like this exist, as you point out. In those situations, if possible we obviously ought to move in the long run toward a state where everyone including ourself is better off. But what about in the short run?
I think part of the “point” of morality is to serve as a basis for cooperation between people who didn’t explicitly draw up binding contracts beforehand, since in *most* cases you can’t or haven’t drawn up such contracts.
If you say, “in the long run we all ought to do X, but in the short run I will do the opposite because it works out better for me right now at the expense of everyone else” then I think you are confessing moral weakness, as I did above.
“I think part of the “point” of morality is to serve as a basis for cooperation between people who didn’t explicitly draw up binding contracts beforehand, since in *most* cases you can’t or haven’t drawn up such contracts.”
If we’re going to talk about the ‘point’ of morality – presumably you mean why we evolved to have it? In which case I can’t see how it could possibly be to cause us to help out others over ourselves in situations where we are not able to use “see, I helped you, now you should help me or I won’t help you again” as leverage to encourage reciprocal cooperation. If an animal helps out others over itself when there is no selfish gain from doing so, its genes will not be very successful. It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you say is true: that morality probably evolved to encourage us to help others in the kind of situations where we can get them to help us back, and that if people are wanting to help others rather than themselves in situations where doing so will not lead to gains for themselves too, that is, evolutionarily speaking, a bug not a feature.
“If you say, “in the long run we all ought to do X, but in the short run I will do the opposite because it works out better for me right now at the expense of everyone else” then I think you are confessing moral weakness, as I did above.”
I intentionally distinguished between ‘should’ and ‘would’ in my original post. If you think you should be altruistic in this situation but you would be selfish in practice, that sounds like moral weakness; if you think you would be selfish in practice and also think this is perfectly fine, or even morally good, then I don’t see how that would be moral weakness.
Also: I made the hypothetical scenario about helping someone else you care about rather than helping yourself for a reason: I’m not sure if my objection here is based on egoism, or deontology in the form of something like “you have a greater obligation to those you have agreed to help out in times of need than you do to strangers”, or maybe a combination of the two. All I will say is that the utilitarian answer seems to me to be repulsive.
I’ve seen that Twilight Zone. After you press the right button, a random person somewhere in the world, who you have never met and never will meet, is offered a choice…
(I push no button, but I’m not an impartial utilitarian and am an athiest, so I find the whole Hell thing is unmoving…)
If a hell doesn’t exist, one will be created as needed.
Right button.
I did not.
After the button starts killing people I know.
Not a utilitarian, but someone who has had to make choices somewhat similar.
Imagine, if you will, the people who are closest to you, your family, in a hostile area. You don’t speak the language or understand local customs. The local population includes a large but unknown number of people who want to kill you. You have a button that kills people. Exactly how much of a threat is necessary before you push that button?
Needless to say, there are no utilitarians in the Infantry.
The uncertainty is what gets you though. Especially with things like car bombs. Is that taxi careening toward your checkpoint loaded with explosives or just late for dinner? How close are you going to let him get to find out?
The moral choice is easy. My brothers have infinite value. The hard part is judging the actual risk. For instance, a local custom is that as a sort of wedding celebration, the locals like to load up their cars with machine guns, drive past everyone’s house, and fire wildly up into the air. So when forty cars pull up and start pouring automatic weapons fire in your general direction, do you wait to see if anyone gets hit?
Utilitarianism assumes the hard part, then makes silly choices based on not being tribal people. In the real world, there are no utilitarians, tribes matter, people are irrational, and no one is ever sure if what they are doing is correct until after the fact.
A few thoughts
1. The utility calculus needs to include YOU. I.e. even if I think that morally I should value my friend and the randomer equally, I might recognise that I would feel more guilt over killing my wife, child, family, best friend than I would killing the randomer
2. I suspect the decision is massively vulnerable to trolley-like issues and how ‘real’ the randomers are. E.g. if I could see two people tied to one train track and one person I cared about tied to a second, I think I’d feel more responsibility to the two than if there was just a button.
3. If this was turned into a cheap parable, you’d press the left hand button to save your first-born child and the random slaughter angels in the mechanism would just happen to kill your second-born child
http://www.16personalities.com/personality-types
A friend of mine told me about this recently. It is a project which tries to categorize people into 16 categories based on their personality traits. I have not really tried to dig into the research behind the classification but the thing is that it seems to work amazingly well. My friend told me that he tried the test and completely recognized himself in the group he was assigned to by the test. Of course, there is the “horoscope effect” where you just identify yourself with whatever you believe that works (in this case “sciency stuff”) gives you. So I tried to read the descriptions of all the 16 categories, find one that fits best on me and then do the test. I got exactly what I found as best fitting (I was wavering between two and in fact my final score was only mildly towards one of them) and my friend told me he would also assign me the same category (actually that he would hesitate between exactly the same two that I would and that were both very close to what my result was).
Now, if you have time, I would like you to try the same thing. Read all of it and then take the test, see if it fits your image of yourself (and that of your friends). I know this is not proper testing an has a lot of problems but since I do not intend to do a serious analysis, this is still better than nothing.
Also, tell me what you thing about the whole thing.
The MBTI’s been around for a while. While it hasn’t seen too much actual research (psychologists generally prefer their own special-purpose test batteries, which it must be said aren’t too hot either), the general consensus seems to be that it’s capturing something but that something might not be too stable or have too much predictive value. I certainly wouldn’t hang anything important on it, nor put too much stock in what the test predicts you’ll be good at.
I’ve taken probably a half-dozen equivalent tests over the years, and while I consistently score as NT, the E/I and P/J subtypes vary quite a bit. This seems typical.
Yeah… as you say, I don’t know if it’s just some kind of “horoscope effect” but I took the test last year, and the things it told me seemed so accurate… it was actually kind of amazing for me. Things that I just thought were my own personal, weird mental problems were actually a legitimate personality type.
I have a personality! Finally!
(INTP/ INFP)
This is Myers-Briggs, right? It’s crap. The only things it’s good for are telling you how introverted you are (which, presumably, you knew already) and maybe signaling to nearby con artists that you’re an easy mark.
See: Forer effect
Thanks for the comment. I will look at the criticism in more detail. But I think that the Forer effect does not apply here. The reason I read all the 16 type description was to also see whether I can fit myself to just 1 type or say 9 types. All the non-NT types really bad fits though (sometimes there was something in which I would recognize myself, but the majority was wrong), the NT types were all reasonable fits, INTP and ENTP were almost perfect (ENTP slightly more). And then I had my friend pick a category for me and that matched too. Of course, this is an extremely biased sample of size 2, but I think this is generally a right way to exclude the Forer effect (it is also part of what I would call the “horoscope effect”, I didn’t know it had a special name 🙂 ). If I people consistently end up (strongly) identifying themselves with one or two types and so do the people who know them, then it is a strong evidence against the hypothesis that “it is just written in a way that you identify yourself with whatever comes up”…which is of course the way horoscopes and fortune telling with their vague statements work.
The way you set this up almost guarantees a false positive– you know ex ante which profile you should have and that the profiles are supposed to be mutually exclusive. Suppose an October-born friend of yours reads through a list of personality traits associated with each star sign, and finds, sure enough, that only the Libra profile accurately describes her. What is the most likely explanation for how she arrived at that conclusion? What’s different about her case compared to yours?
The difference is the personality test. At least in theory, I don’t know which answer leads to which result at the end. In practice it is not always like that and one can easily recognize for example the questions that measure extroversion vs introversion…then it depends on how honest you are with yourself as opposed to picking the answers that give you what you want. it is harder to pick the answers that give you the one category in 16 though, when the categories are made up by 4 traits and when (like me) you did not study the exact trait combination of the category you found as the most likely for yourself. And then you have the confirmation from someone else. If I arrive at the “Libra” while someone else say I am “totally a Taurus”, then that this raises doubts. But if 10 people independently told me “yeah, Libra fits” then it suggests that whatever it the definition of Libra, it probably is a better fit than the other signs (that does not mean that horoscopes work…in order to support that you would have to show that consistently people born in the Libra sign are assumed to be Libra by people who do not know when they were born).
Also note that my prior was rather that they are in fact not mutually exclusive and I expected to be able to identify myself with something like 4-6 of them.
I just set out to answer the questions in such a way as to end up with the Logistician-type personality, and smashed it on my first try. A feathered touch on the scales is all it takes to secure whatever outcome you subconsciously desire. This is why actual studies are properly blinded and controlled, and have an n greater than one.
I’m afraid you are underestimating, as people commonly do, your own vulnerability to confirmation bias and wishful thinking. So like a Gemini.
Earthly knight: You are probably right, though when I tried I was not able get an entertainer (which I aimed for – ended up with campaigner instead…I have not read the description too carefully though). I am Taurus by the way 😀
You are of course right that proper studies are many many times better…but you also present good arguments for that this “pseudochecking” might be even worse than I thought it was, giving disinformation as opposed to anecdotal evidence.
@Earthly Knight
But…isn’t that the point?
I mean, if you subconsciously want to identify as thinking vs. feeling, one good reason for this might be because you are more thinking than feeling.
It’s not crazy to think that people might be fairly reliable reporters of their own personality traits (although it’s hard to see what use a personality test could be if it’s not more reliable than naive self-reports). That won’t help much here, though, because thinking and feeling aren’t personality traits and the Myers-Briggs scales don’t hold up under factor analysis.
The complaint I hear from people who are actually into MBTI about MBTI tests is that you’re not supposed to test for I/E and J/P: the abbreviations unpack to orderings of N/S and F/T, so ‘INFP’ actually means “dominant Fi, secondary Ne, tertiary Si, inferior Te”, not “introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceptive”.
Myers-Briggs always ends up ascribing a bunch of virtues to me (like selflessness) that I definitely do not have, even when I try really really hard to answer honestly. I don’t trust it at all.
I’ve found that, when there are long-form descriptions of the types, the one that I am assigned based on the answers usually does not fit (I notice some things, both good and bad, which feel correct, and others, both good and bad, which do not), but one of the closely adjacent ones does, where the flaws feel like a reasonable assessment of my flaws, and it doesn’t impute me to have any good qualities that feel out of place.
This is considered pretty much normal.
If you want to look at a more scientifically established personality spectrum I would recommend the Big Five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Anecdotally, my MBTI results have remained stable throughout my life, and descriptions of my MBTI type resonate strongly with me, while my Big Five results fluctuate constantly and never ring true much at all. Completely unscientifically, I’m therefore inclined to dismiss the Big Five as a useful test, but I’m curious about other people who’ve had the opposite experience.
Descriptions of your MBTI type also resonate strongly with me (except the stuff about photography, I hate photography), which is bad, because I am at present ostensibly an ESTJ.
I know the Forer Effect says that everyone sometimes feels [foobar] and other times feels [foobaz]. But each behavior described in the link, I exhibit pathologically [0]. To a point I’m confident most others don’t exhibit. E.g. I can easily spend 6 hours optimizing a videogame strategy such that I achieve ABSOLUTE PERFECTION. The slightest screwup, and I reach for the reset button again even though I could easily have beaten the level on the first try. This behavior is not the exception for me, this is the default. And I know this isn’t normal for others, because others don’t have the patience to even read the manual.
That the description fits me is unsurprising, since my MBTI returns INTP. And no, the other type descriptions don’t resonate with me nearly as strongly.
[0] Except photography. wtf.
I expect that min-maxing/completionism and posting in the SSC comments section both correlate strongly with conscientiousness. Pity that Myers-Briggs does not have a conscientiousness scale.
lol. My most recent Big 5 quiz results placed me in the ~6th percentile for conscientiousness. Whatever the force driving my min/max behavior, it’s definitely not conscientiousness.
People say MBTI is unscientific, but I feel completely comfortable predicting that the community here is disproportionately NT, just as my engineering school was. The fact that I can do that surely means something.
Exactly my thoughts.
Scott has touched briefly on this before. I’m surprised, because I’d have expected someone to link to it by now. iirc, nerdier types disproportionately fall into the INTJ and INTP camps. And yes I am an INTP. From the Lesswrong 2012 Census:
Expressed as percentages of those who answered, in parentheses:
MYERS-BRIGGS
INTJ 163 13.8% (37.4%)
INTP 143 12.1% (32.8%)
ENTJ 35 3% (8.0%)
ENTP 30 2.5% (6.9%)
INFP 26 2.2% (6.0%)
INFJ 25 2.1% (5.7%)
ISTJ 14 1.2% (3.2%)
No answer 715 60% (163%)
(Is there any way to do tables, or even just preformatting, in comments?)
You can use <code> tags to get a monospaced font for alignment, but you can’t use multiple spaces for alignment. (though you can use and other tricks)
INTJ 163 13.8% (37.4%)
INTP 143 12.1% (32.8%)
ENTJ 035 03.0% (08.0%)
ENTP 030 02.5% (06.9%)
INFP 026 02.2% (06.0%)
INFJ 025 02.1% (05.7%)
ISTJ 014 01.2% (03.2%)
blnk 715 60.% (163%)
In London, a student diversity officer who tweeted with the #killallwhiteman hashtag has been charged with “sending threatening communication.” Thoughts:
• It’s ludicrous to say that this kind of nonspecific griping is a threat. There’s no way this would pass muster under US law.
• But promoting division and hatred is probably not a good activity for a student diversity officer.
• But charging her is totally unjust and adds way more fuel to the fire than her tweet did.
• Why does no one understand the concept of blowback?
To recap, dismissing her as an SDO was justified, but charging her is baseless and Draconian, and I expect the whole issue to blow up into a horrendous flame war in 3, 2, 1…
Didn’t basically the same thing happen in the US a couple months back? I don’t think any charges were filed there, but other than that…
That being said, speech protections are far stronger in the US than the UK. It would not surprise me if #killallwhitemen was prosecutable over there, though it would surprise me if it came to anything more than a headache for all involved.
Except that she wasn’t dismissed as an SDO: “Mustafa remained in her position as welfare and diversity officer after a petition for a motion of no confidence fell short of the 3% of union members required to trigger a poll.”
Yeah, I should probably be more outraged than amused by this. But I am not.
Wait, how did I miss that before?
I’m inclined to chalk this up to the usual student indifference to student government, and not to any particular sentiment on either side of the issue.
The UK does not really respect free speech, this is sad but unsurprising. I guess it’s at least nice to see them exercising consistency in their authoritarian crackdown on people making mean tweets – if you’re going to arrest people for saying “kill all blacks” you should arrest them for saying “kill all whites”. But you really shouldn’t arrest them for either.
Article is not clear that the “threatening communication” was just the “#killallwhites” hashtag, and I don’t trust The Guardian not to lie with implication. So unless you have more specific information, let’s not get ahead of ourselves saying that there was no threat. On the other hand, the article says she’s also being charged with “sending a grossly offensive message via a public communication network”, which definitely seems on firm ground but should not be a crime.
Interestingly, Bahar Mustafa recently tweeted encouraging people to attack delegates at the Conservative Party Conference currently taking place in Manchester, saying that they “should be afraid to walk the streets” (a retweet from an anarchist group) and that “any violence that happens to [them]… is self-defence” (her own words). She’s since deleted those tweets but screenshots can be found in a few minutes.
She was not arrested for these, but I wonder whether they have something to do with the fact that the police decided to arrest her now…
Am I the only one who finds this case, and the implicit concept of race at work, utterly surreal? Consider:
–Bahar Mustafa is white. Source: I have seen pictures of her.
–She is a Cypriot, and so European. Cyprus is part of Europe. Not even a poor part, either: it has a higher GDP per capita than the Czech Republic, Portugal, or Poland.
–Her ancestors were Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Empire, recall, was a brutal colonial power. If her ancestors were also Cypriots, there’s a high chance they were involved with the slave trade, seeing as how Cyprus was once a major point-of-entry for traffic in slaves from East Africa.
–In videos she speaks with (what my untrained Yankee ears hear as) a perfectly typical working-class English accent.
–If she is muslim, as most Turks are, she does not appear to wear a headscarf or any other identifying sign of her faith. Consequently, any discrimination she has faced on account of her ethnicity or religion will be solely in virtue of either a) her name or b) her identifying herself as muslim or Turkish to others.
So how in the blue blazes can a white, European descendant of colonialist slave-traders qualify as a marginalized minority? When she talks about killing all the white men, does she mean to include her immediate family members?
She’s trans-Arab, in the same way that Rachel Dolezal was trans-black. White dudes like ourselves are not allowed to question her experience or self-identification.
Yeah, I really can’t take seriously anyone raging about white people who is whiter than my white self. And she is. I don’t agree with her arrest, but I do take guilty pleasure in it.
I’m pretty sure “#killallwhitemen” is never (or pretty much never) used seriously.
Like telling the joke about “Why are women such bad drivers? (There are no roads in the kitchen.)” It’s so over the top that you can’t possibly mean it, so the audience assumes you don’t, and it’s interpreted as “I think that women, on average, drive less well than men” but funnier. (And it wouldn’t even mean this if you hedge properly.)
If you’re into social justice and hanging out on Tumblr with your SJ friends, and you hear about a white man who did something racially or sexually insensitive, “#killallwhitemen,” means “Wow, isn’t it frustrating that white men are often insensitive to less privileged classes?” but funnier.
Neither go over well with the wrong audience (and I actually feel that the latter’s worse, since it joke-endorses violence instead of merely joke-endorsing an oppressive gender role, but I’m a white man so of course I would), so if you don’t think it’s funny, you probably aren’t the intended audience.
I think this description makes a lot of sense.
However, for a movement whose theme seems so often to be avoiding incendiary humor precisely because there are groups out there you’re not aware of who will be offended, I’m compelled to wonder why SJWs are apparently according themselves special privilege to use this type of humor.
I think it comes down to more emotion than dedication to ideals. Social Justice makes a lot more sense if you think about it like a holy war. They have a noble stated purpose (salvation of souls/ending all discrimination), achieved through less-noble means (mass violence/mass harassment), and a tendency to turn on fringe ingroup members (4th crusade sack of Constantinople/the backlash against “white feminism”). The rhetoric is violent and righteous, too: “Social Justice Warrior.” “Fight the patriarchy.” But “the patriarchy” is best understood as a historical system of class relations, continuing into the present, which are not the fault of any specific living persons. It’s a lot easier to feel righteous fury at whoever has the most privilege than against abstract concepts.
Also worth noting, though, that most of the feminists I know would sooner chide their fellows for saying such a thing than say it themselves, even the ones who are into social justice. They just aren’t the ones shouting the loudest.
Something it’s important to keep in mind is that “SJWs” look at the world through a specific (if unclear) hierarchy of power and privilege, and people’s words and actions are judged based upon where they are in that hierarchy. This is where the whole, “punch up not down” line comes from in comedy.
Basically, there’s two parts to determining whether a joke is offensive.
A) What wrongthink is behind the joke?
B) How much is this person/group of people having this particular wrongthink going to matter in the lives of others?
So the, “no roads in the kitchen” crack is basically just tasteless if you’re telling it to a couple of your buddies over drinks. But it’s pretty concerning/offensive if it’s someone in senior management at a large corporation. In both cases the wrongthink is the same (woman can’t drive/should be domestic) but in the second case, those beliefs could well impact peoples careers/livelihoods.
Now if you apply this framework to the #killallmen tweet and you get.
Wrongthink: men, as a class, are assholes
Will this negatively affect others: little if at all
And the joke is, if dumb, largely okay.
Now there is definitely some motivated reasoning going on in the social justice movement about who is powerful when, but that’s a start on answering your question.
Also, as a reminder to everyone: Social Justice Warrior and SJW both became popular as slurs, anyone self-identifying as one is doing so to reclaim a slur, and using “Social Justice Warrior” as an example of the violent rhetoric of the social justice movement is silly as all hell.
@Patrick Spens:
Thanks for explaining about privilege hierarchies. I was going to give a crack at it myself, but I always tie myself in knots over inferential distance concerns when I comment on here and I wasn’t sure it was necessary.
Also, I didn’t realize “social justice warrior” was originally a slur, though I suppose I should have picked it up from context. Got to be more careful about using that from now on.
How does that hierarchy of power and privilege jibe with “there is no Oppression Olympics”?
If every person can be ranked and placed on a totem pole, with the lowest at the top punching “up” at everyone below…
@Echo
These are slightly different concepts. Someone playing Oppression Olympics is using the suffering they’ve experienced to either A) claim that someone else’s suffering didn’t exist/doesn’t matter or B) grant themselves some moral/factual authority. Its basically “Oh, you think you have it bad” with an extra level of moralizing smarmyness.
Some level of comparing suffering can be useful, but it usually just wastes everyone’s time. Also, hierarchy ain’t exactly the right word, it’s more fluid than that. And can depend on which “hat” you’re wearing at the time.
It sounds a lot like keeping too many hens. There’s always a pecking order, but it’s fluid enough that it has to be constantly reinforced by ripping some feathers off the one below you.
What she’s actually being charged for:
https://i.imgur.com/Kio2BsO.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Wh4k3QD.jpg
Pretty clear cut under english law, by my limited understanding. At least if she’s treated to the same standards as anyone else would be.
The police are only giving her what she demanded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_yJdpzy500&feature=youtu.be
And before we rush to her defense, can someone explain why we should bother, when she’d never think to do the same for us? From a game theory standpoint, that just leads to the loss of freedom for everyone-but-her, which is exactly what she wants.
Because we have little ability to affect the outcome of her case, and rushing to her defense signals our superior moral character.
So in turn we should show our deeper commitment to free speech and disdain for cheap signalling through sober analysis that… serves as a cheap signal that we are serious people with superior moral characters.
Signals all the way down.
I can meta on top of your meta but it’s easier for us to just skip the foreplay and admit that my moral character is superior to everyone else’s.
I’m not sure why signalling should be the go-to explanation. If I were to say something like “Freedom of speech should be defended as a matter of principle: first, for its own sake, because a life where you can think as you like and say as you think is incomparably better than one where you cannot; second, because we wish to maintain a marketplace of ideas where, with sufficient time and diligence, good arguments will tend to outcompete bad arguments and thereby improve mankind’s lot in the world; and third, because the ability to speak freely is the best safeguard we have against all kinds of abuse and oppression,” my motives would be totally transparent: I wish to persuade you, and any others who may be looking on, of the value of free speech. I am, if you like, turning my brain into a vector for the spread of the free speech meme. Signalling may be one function of moral assertion, but persuading and converting others is still its central purpose.
Would it be in bad form to link to my personal ad here?
I think you should do it.
I often see arguments here slated as being ‘just so stories’, particularly ones involving evolutionary psychology. I’m not sure I understand the complaint. Isn’t every hypothesis a just so story – a plausible sounding conjecture that might or might not be true? And to try to determine whether it is likely or unlikely to be true, we work out what implications it being true would have and then check the evidence to see if it does or does not appear to fit those implications?
You could criticize a hypothesis as bad if it is inconsistent with evidence, but the phrase ‘just so story’ doesn’t seem to make sense to me, seems more like an empty dismissal than anything else.
Evolutionary psychology isn’t totally bogus, but it’s unusually easy to use it to construct half-assed ad-hoc justifications for just about any random behavior you happen to be interested in. It’s also unusually easy to complain about because many of those justifications involve emotionally charged things like violence and ingroup/outgroup politics and mating strategies.
As a heuristic, if an evopsych hypothesis holds for more than one species of nonhuman primate there might be something to it. Anything relying on analogy to just e.g. chimpanzees or bonobos is speculative at best, and stuff relying on abstract strategic arguments is worse.
“Anything relying on analogy to just e.g. chimpanzees or bonobos is speculative at best”
I very much agree with that. But I’m not sure what you mean by ‘abstract strategic arguments’. For example: is the claim “what we consider attractive is defined by what traits we have evolved to subconsciously view as conveying reproductive fitness” an abstract strategic argument? Is it a bogus just-so story? It seems to me to be obviously true. But I’m sure posting it here without having first questioned the use of the phrase ‘just so story’ would have gotten it decried with exactly that phrase. And maybe still will.
True, but uninformative; it’s not a just-so story, but mainly because there’s not a lot of story there. (At least, it’s largely true; there’s a social component too.)
Evolutionary arguments for why we find specific traits attractive often fall to the level of just-so stories, though, largely through unfalsifiability and unwarranted specificity. Take for example Desmond Morris’ theory that proto-human women evolved fatty breasts when they started standing upright and the prominent buttocks found in many primate species as a sexual display stopped working so well: it’s superficially plausible, very specific, unfalsifiable, and almost completely non-predictive.
“At least, it’s largely true; there’s a social component too.”
Surely a trait being considered attractive by one’s peers is evidence that it conveys reproductive fitness?
“Take for example Desmond Morris’ theory that proto-human women evolved fatty breasts when they started standing upright and the prominent buttocks found in many primate species as a sexual display stopped working so well: it’s superficially plausible, very specific, unfalsifiable, and almost completely non-predictive.”
True, but I think unfalsifiable and non-predictive amount to the same thing. I don’t expect anyone gets particularly upset about this hypothesis because, as you say, it’s pretty much meaningless. It implies nothing. Hypotheses that people do get upset about do imply things – upsetting things, which is why people get upset about them. But then the problem in those cases, surely, is that the things that the hypothesis implies are believed to not fit the evidence. Which is not a problem of the hypothesis being a ‘just so story’ but of it being plausible but unsupported by evidence.
Or to put it another way, it seems that any evolutionary psychology hypothesis that could be described as a just so story is going to be so inoffensive that nobody will care, so any evolutionary psychology hypothesis that people do get upset about probably isn’t a just so story.
All else equal, yeah. But that doesn’t get you to “defined by”. You can have evidence for something that is not in fact true in the case you’re looking at.
As to Morris and breasts, I picked that example because it wasn’t likely to upset anyone and derail the thread. There are far more controversial ones with the same problems, which I’d rather not describe in detail here because they’re likely to upset people and derail the thread.
Is it unfalsifiable and non-predictive, though? Here’s a prediction that it makes: human men fifty years from now will tend, other things being equal, to be more attracted to women with large breasts than women with no breasts to speak of. And here’s an observation that could falsify it: human men, fifty years from now, are universally attracted to women with no breasts to speak of over women with larger breasts.
So I don’t think the problem is one of failing to predict or being unable to falsify. A more incisive statement of the problem might be: the hypothesis fails to make any prediction that we did not antecedently regard as highly likely, or, better yet, the hypothesis fails to make any prediction that is not also made by indefinitely many comparably plausible competing hypotheses. But notice that once we’ve made these refinements, the objection’s target seems to have expanded from evolutionary psychology to just about any causal explanation of human behavior.
@EK — The hypothesis was developed in part to explain why men like breasts. Observing fifty years from now that men still like breasts lends it no additional support.
Changes over time in how much men like breasts might, though. You could in principle compare the model against beauty standards over evolutionary timescales, but that data’s really noisy where it exists at all.
Okay, but what does this have to do with prediction or falsification? Here is what I take to be a fairly canonical definition of falsifiability (suppressing some needed epicycles):
F: A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable iff we can deduce from it a consequence which could be refuted by some future observation.
Morris’s hypothesis meets this condition. Your suggestion, I take it, is that this is not enough, because the hypothesis is designed to explain a type of observation (that men prefer women with large breasts) rather than a set of token observations, so future observations of that same type cannot serve to confirm or falsify it. This yields the following revision:
F’: A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable iff we can deduce from it a consequence which could be refuted by some future observation that does not belong to the same observation-type as the observations the theory or hypothesis was devised to explain.
Setting aside what I suspect is the rather hopeless project of individuating observation-types, F’ is too strict. Suppose that I construct an elaborate and convincing sociological theory explaining Katy Perry’s popularity, which has as a consequence that Katy Perry will continue to be popular 50 years hence. If this prediction is borne out, wouldn’t that serve as a striking confirmation of the theory? Conversely, if the prediction fails, wouldn’t this be a straightforward case of falsification? It seems as thought our answer in both cases must be yes, yet the confirming observation (that Katy Perry is popular 50 years from now) would clearly belong to the same observation-type as the observations which originally served as the theory’s explanandum (that Katy Perry has lately been popular).
In what does the difference between the two cases– Morris’s hypothesis and my Katy Perry theory– consist? I reiterate my claim from earlier, that it consists in the fact that the specified consequence of Morris’s theory we regard as antecedently highly probable, while the predictions of the Katy Perry theory assume a far greater risk of falsification. The problems with evolutionary psychology, if there be such, will not be anything quite as simple as a failure to generate testable or falsifiable predictions. We will have to be a little more perspicuous.
Would you rather I say “trivially falsifiable”? I don’t care much for semantic arguments.
The difference is important, and I don’t think it’s semantic. Failing to satisfy the F-condition given above would probably be a fatal defect for a scientific theory or hypothesis, so it’s good to know that Morris’s hypothesis, and presumably most other claims made by evolutionary psychologists, are not vulnerable to this objection. On the other hand, it’s not so clear that a scientific theory or hypothesis must satisfy our revised condition F”
F”: A theory or hypothesis is non-trivially falsifiable iff we can deduce from it a consequence which could be refuted by some future observation and which we do not presently regard as highly likely independently of the theory or hypothesis.
It is also unclear, as noted above, whether many widely-accepted theories or hypotheses in the social sciences meet this condition.
If someone strongly asserts something as true and the only thing he provides to back it up is a plausible sounding conjecture, that what do you expect the reaction to be? If there’s actual evidence, lead with that.
Separately, I don’t think the method you describe is a very good one for discovering truths. If the hypothesis generation method were really independent maybe, but in practice the two steps of coming up with a story and working out the implications are jumbled together. That presents risks of curve fitting and cherry picking.
Some questions we just may not have a good method for answering right now — better to say so then to dress up motivated guessing as science.
The more rigorous concept that “just so story” hints at is overfitting. As a general rule, total noise can be explained so long as the explanation is as complex as the data and all the data is known in advance. To demonstrate that an explanation is worth something, it must be simpler than the data it explains (hard to measure!) or predict data that did not go into it.
Are sex drives a net positive thing?
What’s your utility function look like?
5x-10 ish
(?)
I personally find the sex drive pretty irritating in that it makes it very difficult to ignore strangers, and also, if ever I have to do anything I find boring, I end up thinking… why am I not having sex now. I’ve been thinking that for about 20 years (on and off).
Maybe that’s just me?
Genetically? Yes.
You could have sexual reproduction without a sex drive though…
Could you?
I mean, just from a logical contradiction standpoint that seems impossible. Sex is how we reproduce, how anything that can’t reproduce asexually reproduces. So something will “drive” a sexually reproducing creature to have sex, and whatever that is, it’s the sex drive.
Hmmmm…well yes, I suppose if you adopt a really broad definition of sex drive that is true – but what I mean is, you could reproduce using some genetic jiggery pokery and get your offspring without any desire for sexual intercourse.
So, you mean is sex drive net positive in the current world for humans at our current state of development?
Or do you mean for only you, personally?
For humans in general at the current state (or at a slightly more advanced state) of development.
@Mark:
It is an interesting question, but I think, given the world’s poverty level, snapping a finger and eliminating the sex drive would lead to a massive population collapse in many countries. They aren’t going to be able to afford the “jiggery pokery”.
Although, perhaps the loss of sex drive, but not loss of mating ability would get you nearer what you mean. The I think you would be a situation, population wise, that is similar to developed countries who have ready access to effective contraception.
On the other hand, would pair-bonding between males and females occur without the sex drive? What effects would that have on population?
Even among couples that chose to still bond and have children, what effects would this have on the emotional health of the pair bond as the stress of child rearing kicked in? What sort of implications would that have for society and long term cohesion?
You can see where I am pointing, but I don’t dismiss what you are saying out of hand.
“On the other hand, would pair-bonding between males and females occur without the sex drive?”
It’s called marriage.
Seriously though, I think it’s possible to have a good partnership with a focus on raising children, a loving family, rather than the sexy stuff. Is the old hormone rush necessary to get it off the ground in the first place… maybe? Arranged marriage might suggest not?
Sexless marriages are less happy, and people in them are more likely to have at least considered divorce.
Sex is one of the strongest means of bonding. Any long-term relationship needs frequent bonding, to overcome stresses and conflicts. So even though sex is evidently not strictly necessary for a successful marriage, I think it should be clearly a net gain in the median case.
@Mark:
Assuming you are male, heterosexual, and relatively far from the middle on the Kinsey scale, how would you feel about an arranged marriage to another heterosexual male? One in which the expectation was that penetrative sex would occur at the proper time in order to produce offspring? Yes, that last bit is sci-fi, but so is eliminating the sex drive worldwide.
I’m not saying such an arrangement is impossible to be made workable, but it seems very unlikely.
The counter argument might be to imagine a group of mates, good friends, who simply pop down to the clinic, give up their DNA sample and get “womb pack” in a few days.
Infatuation and lust are distinct experiences. Asexual couples could still go through a period of romantic obsession that facilitates the transition from independence to commitment.
And yeah, sex without lust is not much fun, but if neither person has a sex drive, their interests are aligned, which is nice 🙂
@Nita:
Would you disagree with the contention that Infatuation and Lust are significantly (90+%) overlapping in bog standard heterosexual relationships?
@ HeelBearCub
I’m not sure what you mean by “overlapping”. Infatuation is a long-term state that tends to last up to a couple of years. Lust is a short-term state that can either arise spontaneously or be entered on purpose by anyone with a functioning sex drive, even if they’re not infatuated with anyone.
Human bonding in general doesn’t seem to require lust. E.g., although most people don’t lust after their closest friends and family, they can still form strong bonds with them.
@Nita:
My impression, based on personal experience and observation, is that men and women don’t tend to become infatuated with each other unless they also, at some point, lust after each other. I would say that the lust/sexual interest almost always comes before the infatuation. Various names besides lust are applied to that interest, like chemistry, but down at the bottom its sexual interest (which then leads to infatuation).
Even if I have a female friend, and I work closely and intimately with them, if I become infatuated with them it won’t be because I merely want them as a friend.
In addition, the kind of infatuation that occurs between heterosexual men and women is different than the kind of infatuation that occurs between heterosexual men and other men or heterosexual women and other women.
All of this is in very broad strokes and may not apply to any given persons situation. That is why I was applying “bog standard” as a descriptor (and I understand that some may object to that descriptor, but I think it describes a very useful concept here).
@ HeelBearCub
Fascinating. I need to appreciate someone on non-sexual grounds before I can truly want them. And I would say that “chemistry” refers to the first sparks of infatuation — although, of course, the addition of lust makes it even more intense.
Uh, I wouldn’t know. Infatuation with men, women and non-gendered people feels about the same to me. It’s often accompanied by lust, but that might be because I’m not asexual, and infatuation is a greedy thing.
Well, I don’t have any data on what’s typical or “standard” — so, obviously, I’m mostly generalizing from one example.
@Nita:
I take you are not heterosexual and/or not towards the end of the kinsey scale? At least that seems like what you are saying or at least implying.
Typical male-male friendship can develop into infatuation, but it’s different than the kind of infatuation of male -> female. Again, at least in my experience and observation. Observationally, this also applies to female-female friendships.
“how would you feel about an arranged marriage to another heterosexual male”
I don’t know… I used to have a lot of fun living with other heterosexual men – and to be honest I think the major thing that gets in the way of that kind of non-sexual relationship is the desire to be having sex. If you sit around for too long watching movies with your male friends and none of you are having sex, everyone ends up feeling stressed.
You could probably say the same thing about living with family – the major reason that people don’t want to do it is because they feel they should be having sex.
Yeah… I’m going to say that more often than not sexual desire actually damages/destroys relationships.
“One in which the expectation was that penetrative sex would occur at the proper time in order to produce offspring”
Hmmmm….
@Mark:
You also seem to ignoring the arranged part.
Absent the sex-drive, how likely are pair bonds to form between male and female? Your answer was arranged marriages.
Do you want your parents deciding the one person who you are going to live with for the next 20 to 30 years (until child-reading is done)?
@HeelBearCub
Yeah, fair enough. Actually, the only possible reason I’d go for an arranged marriage is sex.
I expect that sex supports pair bonding in arranged marriages just as in chosen marriages.
Do you want your parents deciding the one person who you are going to live with for the next 20 to 30 years (until child-reading is done)?
Arranged marriages are not part of my cultural background, but the friends and acquaintances I know who are from a culture that includes arranged marriages tell me that the coercion part of it is (vastly) overstated.
It is far more typical, I am told, for parents/extended family to “window shop” potentials, do background checks, and arrange introductions. The pair are then allowed to socialize under supervision, and develop an attraction (or not.) If not, another option is presented. Whether or not multiple options are on the table at any one time depends on family custom and individual prefs.
While nearly all of the people from this sort of tradition had a horror story of a young female who had rebelled against her parent’s guidance and struck out on her own with her self-selected ‘true love’, the stories were rarely about cruel oppressive parents, and more about flighty teens infatuated with totally unsuitable scalawags. Half of the stories ended with the truly repentant daughter coming back home and being (eventually) married to a more boring person suggested by their parents.
Follow-up question: If we determine that sex drives ARE net positives, should we put aphrodisiacs in the water supply?
Just because some level of sex drive is a net positive that doesn’t mean that an increase in sex drive is also a net positive. As an analogy, consider CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Without any CO2, we would all die in short order, so CO2 in the atmosphere is a net positive. It does not follow that increasing CO2 concentration is necessarily a net benefit.
My mistake, this is the question I meant to ask:
If we determine that sex drives are net positives on the margin, should we put aphrodisiacs in the water supply?
If you are able to determine that higher sex drives are always and for all people a good thing, that these aphrodisiacs have no serious adverse side-effects, and that they are cheap enough, then yes.
But given that these conditions aren’t ever likely to be met, the practical answer is no. A much more reasonable approach would be to tell people and especially doctors and pharmacists about your research showing the benefits of higher sex drive, and then sell aphrodisiacs through the usual channels.
https://twitter.com/modeledbehavior/status/208016529667784704
Hello Scott and SSC Commentariat.
Is there going to be another Michigan Rationalist meeting any time soon? Last one I knew of was the HPMOR wrap party. I found them quite entertaining.
@Scott Alexander
Does this comment (from the thread about reviewing Manufacturing Consent) refer to the Apolyton CIV / SMAC forums? How long ago was that?
“I posted as “Giant Squid”. I’m not too proud of my time there. Don’t judge me, I was like fourteen at the time.”
“cows emit methane which increases global warming.”
To understand the outputs of an agronomic system the whole system must be considered.
In comments below there is discussion of digestive flora both inside and outside of guts and how they can vary depending on diet, environmental conditions, and animal species.
The whole system also includes the setting, whether it is a natural pasture or some sort of confined feeding system. In a grassland the net emissions of the system is the useful measure, and that means that the emissions of the sward with and without grazers is an interesting question.
There are methanotrophs, which consume methane, as well as methanogens which produce it, and their relative populations determine the net emissions of the system. This is relevant because there have been studies that claim that the net emissions of methane in natural grassland with grazers is less than one without grazers due to the rude good health of such systems and the resultant high population of methanotrophs. IOW, such whole systems consume more methane than the animals produce, perhaps by orders of magnitude.
It remains to be convincingly shown that the way to reduce or eliminate methane emissions from animal agriculture is to optimize the genetics of the animals, their digestive symbionts, the pasture species and the soil resident micro and macro flora, but there are an increasing number of researchers and advocates making such claims. Such “carbon cowboys” as they are sometimes called are convinced that such systems are carbon sinks rather than sources, and that the net effect of their existence is to scrub the atmosphere of worrisome GHGs. They are the solution, not the problem.
IMV the issue is even larger since such systems also provide many “environmental services” valued by humans, and provide habitat for many species besides the ones of agronomic value. The net value of such systems is a combination of the human food produced, the services provided, some aesthetic considerations (eat the view), and even ethical values given that the number and quality of lives is so much greater than that of alternative uses such as a bean field.
It’s not just complicated, it’s complex.
Beyond herd grazers being net-positive / net-negative in the GHG column, I think they are an optimal solution to another under-appreciated environmental concern – that we want the countryside to be wild instead endless rows of monoculture.
Maybe the future of food isn’t everyone eating insects for protein, but engineering a tasty moose, and getting most of our calories from grazers adapted to every region’s flora.
an optimal solution to another under-appreciated environmental concern – that we want the countryside to be wild instead endless rows of monoculture
But a grazer-based agriculture isn’t wild, either. It’s human-modified, just in a different manner. (More aesthetically pleasing, less efficient(*) use of space, energy and manpower.)
(*) Under current constraints. Technology may change this.
Cosmopolitanism provides benefits but I think its case is weakest for the poorest countries, who don’t contribute much to global warming, don’t threaten to fire nukes, and don’t trade with us much. In other words, richer countries just have little to gain from treating these nations as equals. But it’s for exactly these countries that the effective altruism folks demand the most sacrifices. (Related)
Effective altruists are altruists.
I think one major purpose of altruism is to help one’s group, however we define one’s group.
Let’s think of two established groups who are deciding whether to merge into a larger group. Each group should be evaluating this decision based on the return for their group. Each should benefit. Then they can create a shared social contract.
Right now there are many groups on Earth. World trade has been increasing for a while (although that trend may have ended recently). Global warming and nuclear weapons are other reasons to pay close attention to other groups. It may be better to merge with these groups-or at least, to move closer to a merger. But when rich countries consider very poor countries, each of these reasons is weak.
A good expansion of altruism as a way of helping your group that I’ve heard of that I think captures the issue here is the idea of circles of concern. Your innermost circle of concern usually is yourself/your immediate family, then friends and/or extended family, then people you identify with more distantly, then maybe your countrymen, and then maybe everyone. Groups within groups, with the innermost group being valued most highly and the outermost groups having less value.
People seem to define these circles differently and have different ratios of priority between them, and this difference is a difference in values; people don’t want to change their values and don’t expect them to be grounded in anything.
It’s plausible people who value the outermost groups more, adapted to do so because of traits that were designed to generate useful reciprocation or similar.
However, the adaptation is part of their value system and they don’t care whether it is suboptimal according to purely selfish values or evolutionary optimal behaviour, because those things aren’t their value system and they don’t actually care about them. Like how people don’t “want” to change their value system to hate contraception instead of finding it useful.
In theory, how you draw your circles of concern is independent from trying to help others within those circles more effectively.
In practice, I think most EA identified people, myself included, identify very weakly with their country and tend to assign similar levels of value between people in other countries and people in their own, which leads to the focus on aid to the poorest nations and a lack of talk about how useful it is for domestic people.
You can also observe this tendency to care a lot about distant circles of concern in the animal welfare part of EA, which puts enough concern in a more-distant-yet circle including animals to want to help them.
Sure. Different people have different circles of concern. Some nations are more selfish than others.
At each circle’s level, however, there is competition. Individuals whose philosophy deters them from having children have genes (likely ones predisposing them to their philosophy) that will be bred out of the population. Parties that advocate boosting the foreign aid budget may be beaten by, e.g., Donald Trump. Nations that waste their treasuries may even be invaded (although with the invention of nuclear weapons this seems to happen much less).
So folks can resist changing their value system, but if their values are greatly suboptimal, eventually reality is going to bite.
Charity is actually beside the point. It’s such a small sliver of what the US is doing around the world that, who cares? They spent more on the Iraq War than the foreign aid budget of all developed countries for 50 years, and most foreign aid is not even about poverty. (Okay, foreign aid is not charity, but I still think this argument works.) We ought to be thinking about government policy.
The challenge I see at the moment to EA-type views is not at the national level, but the personal level. Many EAs are liberal atheists who, statistically, are not having many kids. But the world is going to be more religious (and probably conservative) in 2050 because more religious folks do. Perhaps eventually this may also change international politics…
To me thinking about the self-interest of a country is bizarre. If I care about self-interest, I care about my own self-interest. If I care about doing good, I care about doing good for humans in general.
If values opposed to my own spread easier than my values, I’ll just have to do my best to play from behind. I suspect, though, that Cthulu will continue to swim left.
Here’s a novel thought experiment I’ve been wondering about lately. This crowd seems to be good with this kind of thing…
“Alice lacks youth and marketable skills, so she expects to make relatively little income in the rest of her life. She takes out large loans with the intent to default on them. She manages to grab 1.000.000$ from various corporate lenders. She anonymously and untracably gives the money to GiveWell recommended charities, expecting to thereby save about 300 lives. Alice defaults on the loans and is found (correctly) to have committed fraud. She is sentenced to five years in prison, as she expected from the start. Alice figures that since she’s saving five lives per month of time served, she is doing a good thing. Is she right?”
I haven’t been able to come to a conclusion. From a consequentialist perspective, it seems to me Alice is pretty obviously doing a good thing. Deontologically, she seems to be doing a bad thing, also pretty obviously. From a virtue ethics point of view, it seems good again. But mostly, I think I’m just repulsed by the “economic suicide attack” feel of her story.
What do you think?
I get the impression that if a lot of people started doing this then it would have some additional effects like making people less willing to give loans in general and more reporting requirements for charities.
This kind of thing does occasionally happen in real life and I think even Deontologists view people doing things like this far less harshly than someone spending the money on hookers and blow.
This. Any good that might be done is undone by the loss of social trust and cohesion, which erodes the ability of a society to respond in a coordinated fashion to problems like global hunger or disease. Plus, if people start doing this and it becomes known, giving to charity will become tarred with the “that’s what those lunatics do” brush, which will likely reduce total charity by much more than the originators managed to help.
You sound like you’re more certain than I think you can be.
Bankruptcy fraud has existed for a very long time. The common way to do it is to hide the money, do the prison time and discreetly enjoy the money after release from prison. I’m sure this has done damage to the economy, chiefly by necessitating higher interest rates, but I find it hard to see how giving the money to charity instead would outweigh the good done by saving hundreds of lives.
How is this good from a virtue ethics perspective?
Because in virtue ethics, the intent with which something is done is what counts. Since Alice does what she does in order to save lives, and by doing it anonymously doesn’t gain even reputation for herself, she being virtuous I think.
You can’t be virtuous on behalf of another. The money is not Alice’s, since she went into it determined to default. So this is theft, and what Alice does with the money does not change that fact.
It may be argued that the corporate donors should have given the money to those causes Alice found most worthy, and perhaps they should, but as I said above: you can’t be virtuous on behalf of another (if giving someone else’s money away doesn’t strike you as bad, suppose Alice decided to increase chastity on your behalf, by making it impossible for you to have sexual partners outside of marriage, or decided to increase justice by going around shooting people who had escaped conviction on a technicality).
You’re making a deontological argument, not a virtue ethics one.
I agree that by deontology, Alice is doing bad.
Mmm.
Reminds me of the “Really Extreme Altruism” post on LessWrong.
I had not seen that. Thanks.
If Alice really did manage to defraud all these banks, then surely she’s got some kind of skills that she must be severely underestimating. It’s possible that she would’ve been able to procure even more money by using her skills in more legal ways.
She’d demonstrate great skill only if she got away with it. Crime is easy if you don’t mind getting caught.
When it comes to raising children, how do you think about balancing passing along your own (very atypical) values/ideas vs. wanting them to be able to socialize with peers and get along in the world when those things are in tension? (Possibly relevant examples: the Onion article Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation; Bryan Caplan homeschooling his kids)
Whatever makes them pass along the values you pass onto them to their children.
I would think the main vectors for passing values through generations would be (1) religion and (2) genetics. So if you can find a religion that represents your values, then maybe you should raise your kids in it, but otherwise I wouldn’t expect random ideas or values you have to be picked up socially by your kids, and certainly not their kids.
I’m not thinking about how to transmit views to my grandkids, or even how to transmit views so that my kid holds them long-term. (The exception being religion, and we are raising them within a religion.) Rather, I’m thinking about where on the scale of “very intentionally pushing” vs. “hiding” I should aim for when it comes to my strange views on topics like “evaluating evidence” and “thinking about probability” and “politics.” Since I believe I have worthwhile views on various topics, I would like to teach them to my kid. However, there is a tension between that and alienating her from her peers. I have experienced this, as I think have many people who have parents with odd views.
If your views include things like “to evaluate evidence, build a best case for each side, rather than build the case you want and rely on someone else to build the rest”, and how Bayesian analysis can yield results that are both correct and unintuitive at first, and these views are strange, then your children might be surrounded by soma addicts, and you have a tough choice to make. Maybe. Wanting sociability in itself is rational, after all.
If your children have the mental capacity to simulate more than one mode of thinking, perhaps the key is to present strategies for thinking sociably with people who think your views are odd, and with people who don’t, and being able to flip back and forth depending on the crowd. I’d want to unite the two, eventually, but that might just be a personal bias.
I do have a tough choice to make! But surely I can’t be the first one who has thought about this.
I think at some point they will have that capacity, but it takes a long time to develop. In the meantime, I don’t want to set my kid up to be the one who informs all the other kids that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, conservatives aren’t all evil, and there are these things called probability distributions. Or whatever. And, while my major goal is not for my kid to agree with me, I’d both like for some of it to rub off and I feel uncomfortable with the idea of lying to my kid about what I believe.
(This is not an issue yet. She is one. There is time.)
I’m taking it as assumed that you want your kid to agree with your views contingently, because that is how you came by these views yourself.
In that light, I think it makes sense to describe your views that way. The limiting principle here is that your kid has only so much brain per unit time to absorb this, and contingency itself can be difficult to understand. (For goodness’ sake, I wouldn’t call it “contingency” unless she’s a well-read teenager; I’d just say “I think this because I also think this, this, and…” and then follow up with “what do you think?”.)
Early on, I’d expect to have to explain the value of keeping mum, out of polity. Choosing one’s battles is a useful skill. One factor is how solid my defense is; if my best argument is “my dad said so,” then it’s not very good. So I’d probably test my kid; have her defend a belief to me, at home. Her ability would determine whether I recommend her defending it to other kids, or just giving her side and then asking what the other kids think. That extends to defending modes of argument; if she can’t defend why an argument from authority is weak, then she has to relent on that front, too.
Eventually she’ll look kinda weird for asking “what do you think?” a lot; dunno how that’ll fare, honestly.
Note: I am not married, and have no children, so I lack childraising experience, but I do spend more time thinking about it than is probably average for a childless person.
That is very thoughtful. Thank you.
It is also possible, of course, that she will be totally uninterested in all of these topics. That would also be ok.
Emily,
My wife and I have decided to tell our son that when you give someone a present but you want to pretend that it came from someone else, you say that it’s from Santa Claus. It’s a make-believe game for fun, and when other people are playing make-believe, you can play together with them, or you can go play something else, but you shouldn’t ruin someone else’s game.
On the more general question of how do you pass on values, I think Paul Brinkley has a good approach. By saying “I think this because I also think this, this, and…” you can show a kid examples of critical thinking, and most people learn better from examples when they are first learning something. Then you can ask “What do you think?” to let them get a little practice. When they’re older, you can explain the explicit process of thinking something out, and they will already have a good idea of what that looks like.
My son is as yet only a toddler, and right now the chief value that we’re trying to pass on to him is that of wearing pants. We’re having indifferent success.
Having now thought about this even more than before, I am now very keenly interested in how you, Emily, plan your strategy, and how that goes.
For that matter, same goes for Chris Connor and anyone else reading this as well.
Naturally, I expect very little reporting for a few years, given the ages, but I’ll try to keep an eye out for this topic on SSC open threads in the future.
Well, Paul, I was going to write something high-minded about teaching my son that there are reasons that we do things by giving a reason when I ask him to do something. Even at the age of two, he will respond better to directives if I include a reason, even if there is no possibility of him understanding the reason. For instance, if I tell him that he needs to get buckled into his car seat, he often resists. But if I tell him that he needs to get buckled in because that keeps him safe, he’s more likely to cooperate, although of course he can’t possibly understand how or why a car seat makes him safer.
But now, I find that lofty appeals to the value of teaching reasoned behavior ring hollow for me, and it’s all my fault. My son has a toddler’s fascination with kitchen appliances, and he likes to drag them out of the cupboard and strew them all over the kitchen floor. After dinner tonight, to keep him from doing that yet again, I told him that it was time for the appliances to go to sleep, so he should leave them in the cupboard. Now he is busy saying night-night toaster, night-night mixer, night-night rice cooker, patting each appliance in turn. Close the doors, son, I say; close the doors and let them sleep. I am a weak man and a bad rationalist.
I really want to commend Emily for a terribly thoughtful and interesting thread, here.
Anyway, I think this is a less important question than you imagine. I read once that it’s impossible to teach a child about conservation of volume for water: she won’t understand if you explain it, and she’ll naturally learn it for herself by playing with cups in the bath. To a large extent, you can’t teach a smart-ass kid when to keep her mouth shut, either: she will learn by opening her mouth and discovering that it does not always win a lot of friends. You can warn her beforehand, but you are a parent and therefore have no idea what you are talking about.
You will model good ways of interacting with people, as well as your methods of thought regarding politics etc., through daily interaction. Explain why you act and think that way. She won’t do the same. Until it bites her in the ass, whereupon she will reconsider exactly how stupid you really are. This process takes roughly four decades.
This reminds me of something that happened when I was at summer camp, probably age twelve or thirteen. Some of the other boys wanted to know if I knew about the facts of sex (this was a long time ago), so asked if I knew what “intercourse” meant.
I said that of course I knew. “conversation,” “going between,” something along those lines.
Different worlds intersecting. On the other hand, I was our bunk storyteller, a practice I probably picked up from my father making up and telling us stories on long drives.
If it had been the age of Google, you could have pointed them to the definition of “criminal conversation” and shown that you were literally correct, even in their intended context. I sometimes wonder what word we’d use for interpersonal speech if the word “conversation” had wound up firmly on the other side of the fence the way “intercourse” mostly has.
(Of course in the age of Google, you’d presumably have known or been able to check the other definition.)
I expect I knew the term “sexual intercourse” then. But it didn’t occur to me as the default meaning.
I didn’t know about crim con, however.
My parents have odd views — my mother believes in extreme frugality and totally ignoring all status games no matter what, and my father used to be some sort of pagan and got me reading RAW when I was twelve.
None of that caused me any problems. What was good about their advice (frugality) just comes naturally to me — even if I’m tempted to buy expensive clothes to compete in signaling games, that’s still very far from “never invest, buy frivolous shit on credit cards, buy a new car every three years and a new cell phone every time a new model is out, and aspire to own a McMansion”, which is where most people seem to be — and what was bad about their advice I didn’t have any trouble losing.
What did cause me problems was the media diet. I’d advise keeping that shit on lockdown until the kids are old and wise enough to realize it’s stupid and make sure not to learn any of the wrong lessons from it. (That’s what I did with the Simpsons and South Park — my parents banned them, so I couldn’t watch them until Youtube came along, and I immediately started watching them there and realized that they did in fact glorify stupidity and so on.) I don’t think video games are particularly harmful — the worst they can do is turn into time-wasters — but TV ought to be monitored (I can’t recall any problems with the Saturday morning cartoons I grew up with, but I can only assume it’s gotten worse in a hurry), books can cause issues (you really don’t want smart kids reading books that give them the message that dressing well or getting exercise signals stupidity), and I can’t see any merit in newspaper comics at all.
The goal isn’t to keep permanently impressionable children away from Satan or whatever, of course — it’s to give them the proper grounding so they can recognize horseshit on their own when they see it. I wouldn’t just ban the Simpsons; I’d ban it and tell them I’m banning it because it glorifies stupidity. I wouldn’t just not buy newspaper comics; I’d not buy them and, if they take interest in them, point out that they glorify being cynical and miserable about everything — and then, if they’re old enough, explain affirmation vs. rejection and get them to read someone like Carlyle. (“Positive thinking” was too goddamned sappy for me, even when my age was in the single digits. My father discovered cognitive-behavioral therapy and didn’t stop talking about it for two years.)
As for teaching socially unpalatable beliefs (there is no Santa Claus, conservatives aren’t all evil, etc.), your kids will probably look up to you even if they pretend they don’t — I’d say to just model the proper behaviors for them and explain when you think it’s necessary. As for teaching them those beliefs without fucking them up socially, well, I still think the greater risk there is the media, but my first instinct is to say to figure out how to teach the vital skill of ketman at a young age, but that’s kind of risky, for obvious reasons.
(I don’t have children and won’t for several years at least, but I do remember what my parents were like when I was growing up, and I think they succeeded at passing down the unusual and important values that they held and drew attention to. Except for the one about not picking up a nicotine habit, but I quit every once in a while for a month or two and I’ve never noticed any withdrawal symptoms.)
Newspaper comics are terrible, but fortunately they’re terrible in a way that’s almost totally uninteresting to kids. Most of the format’s problems come from being hyperconservative, not in the political sense but in the sense of resistance to change of any sort, and it’s a rare child that’ll care about the reanimated corpse of a comic that might have been funny to your grandfather forty years ago.
Not that I think I’ll be reading newspapers when I have kids, any more than I do now.
Time for another quote from “The Man Who Was Thursday” 🙂
Nitpick: not even just religion, unless you’re using a very wide definition of religion as any system of beliefs. People often teach their children values without any formal social structure.
I question whether such values are usually retained into adulthood.
For politics, the studies tend to suggest that genes and “unique environment” experiences provide the bulk of the explanation, with “shared environment” seeming to matter relatively little. (Source)
And there’s this
Empirically, people tend to solve this by finding or founding communities which promote their values and socializing their children within them. So a Mormon state, Amish towns, homeschooling groups, churches, extended family, large number of siblings, etc…
Also, the Anti-Democracy Activist shared some thoughts on the effects of media and schooling children and values in his post “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”:
If a lot of other people with kids share your views and/or if you are committed Above All Things to your kids holding your views, I think that’s a good solution. But I don’t think that’s us.
Do you think that homeschooling your kids is more likely to give them your views than putting them in public school is likely to give them the views they are taught at public school?
Maybe a better argument would be that kids in public school get taught a blend of public school views and their parent’s views, while homeschooled kids are taught entirely their parent’s views.
Not only that, but kids in public school socialize mostly with other kids who are taught public school views. Homeschooled kids socialize mostly with family and with kids from groups selected by their parents, such as churches, scouting groups, and homeschooling organizations.
My parents homeschooled me, and while they succeeded in giving me an education that has so far been unrivaled at any level (I’m currently in postgrad work), they definitely failed to inculcate the values they held most dear: the salvation of my (purported) soul.
That said, public school is child abuse, and most private ones are too. The level of education is so bad, it would be less damaging to hand your children over to packs of wolves.
If you care about education, do it yourself. If you care about grandchildren, send the little fucktrophies to the cattle yard with the rest of the barbarian simpletons and wait for the inevitable.
This.
If Kipling wasn’t lying to me, packs of wolves make pretty good parents.
“Empirically, people tend to solve this by finding or founding communities which promote their values and socializing their children within them.”
SLC for example.
When the children of my present marriage were growing up, there was either no television in the house or a TV set in a closet to be brought out when their older half brother came to visit–I think he watched basketball games or something along those lines.
Currently we have a television set connected to a video game machine and bought for that purpose. Part of the reason we didn’t have one was that I had concluded, long before I had children, that the people who made television programs were very good at getting and holding my attention and not watching a TV was the easiest way to avoid wasting time on things I didn’t much value.
Our two children (present marriage–my elder son was brought up by mostly by his mother and stepfather) were both unschooled, first in a very small and unconventional private school on the Sudbury model and later, when that ran into problems, at home. We’re happy with how they turned out and I think they are.
That should, of course, have been SSC.
I thought you meant Salt Lake City.
Anyway, most value-concerned parents are not willing to rely on the internet to cover the majority of their children’s socialization needs, and in any case the rationalist community has a shortage of people below undergraduate age. However, Dr. Miller has been bravely making strides into this new and exciting area by occasionally allowing his ten-year-old son to post on LessWrong. Perhaps if more rationalists were willing to reproduce, there would be enough demand for a children’s version of SSC, or something like that. Unfortunately, few seem willing to reproduce.
Spam.
It’s complicated, because Spam interferes with EMail, and the same technology enables both. But did anyone anticipate early on that a communication channel with close to zero cost for adding recipients would produce the problem it did?
As for spam, more precisely the scam spam, there is an interesting defence that employs exactly the same advantage spam does. If you ever read those scams, you probably wonder how anyone can be stupid enough to actually reply to those emails. And why don’t the conmen come up with a better story? It would not be that hard.
If you are a conman, what you want is to convince people to send you money unconditionally with as little effort as possible. Making the story more believable does not help here, because you end up with replies not just from a few very naive people who are easy to work with but also from a lot of less naive people who will eventually find out that you are a fraud. Since after the first reply it might be hard to guess who’s who, you have to reply to all of them, which costs you time.
This suggests a good countermeasure – have a spam-bot reply to the scam spam. The conman is then flodded with emails, most of them are fake but it is hard to tell which are which, he has to answer all of them and that ends up costing so much time that your returns from being a fraud are not high enough to keep doing it.
One could of course still just post a bank account (in a country which has no international agreements regarding handing over criminals with other countries) and instructions in the very first e-mail.
My parents raised a version this question with me when I was an adult. They asked me whether it would have been better to have reared me within the Jewish religion, which was the religion of their parents. My response was that I preferred to have been reared in the religion they actually believed in, roughly speaking 18th century rationalism, the belief system of Hume, Mill et. al.
All three of my children have been brought up within the belief systems of their parents. The result is one Christian (my wife is Christian, I’m an atheist), one atheist, one somewhat mixed, all libertarian—although my younger son has some doubts about the workability of anarcho-capitalism. We all get along well.
That leaves the question of how well they get along with others, which varies among them, at least in part by personality. I think the answer is not as well as some of their contemporaries but as well as their parents, and we have had lives we are reasonably happy with. There are a lot of different people out there who you can choose to interact with, so having non-standard values and beliefs is unlikely to eliminate all of them.
And, on the whole, I’m inclined to think that people with values/beliefs similar to ours may be a better gamble to associate with.
I had a different experience. My mom had extreme beliefs which led her to some questionable parenting decisions, I held those beliefs for awhile and was frankly a worse and more irritating person for it, and then I stopped having them, which was a long and bloody process for both of us. I don’t want to do any part of that to my kid. And I don’t want to assume my beliefs are inherently so much better that we’ll avoid all of that.
[Edit: If you are reading this, mom, I love you and we all make mistakes.]
“3. Steve Johnson is banned for reasons of total personal caprice. Let it be known that he has not broken any rules and the ban is not his fault. Also, this is the beginning of a Reign of Terror. Govern yourselves accordingly.”
This is the break point. Steve Johnson is not an idiot, he is not insulting, and he is not obscure. If Scott simply disagreed with Steve Johnson he would not have banned him. Rather, he would have dedicated more space to blogs rebutting Johnsonian propositions. In fact he has become more favourable to Johnsonian propositions over the past year or two.
Scott has decided that NRx is essentially the correct way to see the world but is not willing to pay the social cost required to say so publicly.
This decision will affect all his writing. Specifically I expect that this blog will become more oriented toward providing sufficiently left-field reasons for contrarians to turn 360 and embrace the status quo after all. At that point the blog will cease to be interesting to its original audience.
I’m pretty sure I know what post sparked it and it was shit-stiring rather than than well-phrased NRx views.
Someone can be both not and idiot and intentionally pissing people off.
Maybe you have the insider view but I do not see how it can be clearer than:
“Let it be known that he has not broken any rules and the ban is not his fault.”
Johnson was banned for being him. Essentially for stating NRx views in a way that is concise and difficult to rebut, certainly without nailing one’s own colours to the mast.
Johnson’s claims were only difficult to rebut in proportion to the effort involved in making them. Any idiot can rattle off a bumper-sticker-length talking point with zero effort; but it takes actual time and care to convincingly show that one’s bullshit, even if it’s fairly transparently bullshit.
I did that a couple of times. Steve never responded, and kept saying the same stuff. Eventually I stopped bothering.
I read most of the exchanges. There were rarely good rebuttals, even to the points I myself regarded as weak. It was mostly point’n’splutter, how-dare-you-say-such-a-thing type of non-response.
Johnson isn’t the only NRxer who posts here. Nor is he the only annoying (to opponents) ideologue who never lets go – multiheaded anyone? Johnson is the one who got banned.
Oh, sure, there was a lot of point-and-sputter, too. That pissed me off as much as Steve did, to be honest. I’m just saying why I personally didn’t put any effort into high-quality rebuttals after a while, and I doubt I’m alone in my reasoning. Why bother with someone that demonstrably isn’t interested in being reasoned to? To make Steve look like an idiot? I don’t care that much, and the people that do are going to be the ones pointing and sputtering.
This isn’t even about NRx. I don’t always like NRx, and I definitely don’t always agree with it, but I do find it pretty fascinating when the reasoning behind it is laid out well. Nydwracu’s posts are cool, for example. Steve? Not so much.
Multiheaded’s output is mostly shitposting, which is deemed as mostly harmless fun, and they got banned (and subsequently unbanned) a number of times.
Steve Johnson was almost certainly banned for repeatedly shit-stirring. Comment threads he participated in were terrible, and he tended to stir the same kinds of shit no matter what the actual topics where.
That does not mean that Steve is a bad person, that his views are wrong, that what he said was inherently bad and should never be said anywhere. It just means that his participation on this blog made the comments worse in Scott’s opinion (which is the only one that matters, as this is Scott’s blog). That should be enough.
Scott doesn’t want his social group reading the comments and saying, “If you don’t ban this guy, it means you agree with him, in which case you will be purged.”. That is it.
I think that George Bush was too liberal, and I found any thread that Steve Johnson participated in tedious. It’s perfectly possible to post stuff that’s even out there without dragging down the level of conversation.
I can’t tell if this is parody.
Care to bet?
In one of your old articles I came across a link to Cosma Shalizi’s website which is fascinating, particularly that he has all of his work notebooks online. Are there any other rigorous researchers who are not on your sidebar and are worth following?
For a presentation, I want to list some negative unanticipated consequences of technology–preferably of software specifically–and preferably the consequences can be depicted visually in a single image. I’m having trouble coming up with examples that fit those requirements.
The only ones I’ve come up with so far is pictures of people texting while driving and riding motorcycles, or absorbed in their phones while crossing intersections on foot.
Suggestions for other examples? It certainly doesn’t have to be limited to cell phone apps.
You might look at the EU vs. US stance on the right to be forgotten.
Thanks. Did you have a visual in mind?
1?
2? this one could be interpreted, as the author intends, as google being handcuffed, but it could also represent google handcuffing someone else
Thanks. These are helpful in leading me to what I might want, though I was hoping for actual images of real things rather than impressionistic stock photography. If anything else occurs to you please pop back and drop a note! I appreciate the help.
No, no, no, that’s just boring. Everyone knows about texting and traffic accidents already. Total weaksauce.
Try superstimuli instead. Now there’s a cool topic. You can get pictures from the supernormal stimuli comic.
Awesome, thanks.
Not software, but simple to describe and the picture:
Traffic lights were switched to LED to save energy. The new bulbs don’t melt snow, rendering the light useless.
I vote for this. Perfect example.
Old hat, but there is also the “mad hatters” example.
That pun was originally unintentional.
Pure sensationalism. If the headline says “one death, at least twelve accidents”, then if the source is looking at anything bigger than a small town it isn’t doing shit.
Does loss of a US$370 million spacecraft due to an integer overflow that could have been caught by static analysis count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_%28spacecraft%29#Launch_failure
being able to search for number ranges on google? (try 1920..1960)
If you try searching for 16 digit numbers it now throws you to an error page because people were using it to search for credit card numbers visible to search bots.
You’ll also see the same pattern with searches for “inurl:admin.php”
In more general technology terms: How about when it turned out to be possible for a civilian to buy cell phone records for a senior nato general?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110604121830/http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0113-08.htm
Let me phrase the question alternately:
What kind of scenes from life have you witnessed that are examples of negative unanticipated consequences of modern technology, especially software?
The Oatmeal has a comic called “no internet”. It contrasts the placid acceptance of a non-existent connection with the frustration of a slow connection. theoatmeal DOT com/comics/no_internet
Also, cellphone triangulation. This means cell phone companies always know where you are. The government by extension can always look up where you are.
(Scott, I included links in my original comment and it got marked as spam.)
Oil-fired ships and whaling.
Railroads and the outbreak of WWI.
Longbows and the decline of heavy cavalry/landed nobility.
Iron plows and the American Dust Bowl.
Selfies.
Facial recognition and loss of privacy.
Splitting the atom and…well. (To include: Xrays and cancers.)
Small pox vaccine and developing world famines.
Mechanized farm equipment and decline of draft stock.
(Sorry for non-software examples, but it might help to remind people that the third set of effects has always been with us.)
Following on from the recent discussion of Vox.com, I’m pleased to note that they have in fact redeemed themselves somewhat with a well-written (if inadequately argued) piece explicitly and unashamedly arguing in favour of gun ownership: http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9449709/gun-owner-keeping
For once I get to be to the left of Vox. It’s refreshing.
First of all, LOL at the gun guy being named Blanks.
Second of all, I await the day when Vox actually presents honest statistics about gun control. Having one guy who says “But I like having a gun!” just plays into their narrative. Here’s Dylan Matthews or someone giving twenty different out of context correlational statistics “proving” guns are bad, and the counterpoint is some guy saying “My father was a police officer in Fort Wayne Indiana and he owned a gun and that made me feel safe.”
If anyone knows a reasonably concise statistics-based argument against gun control, I would put it on my to-read list
Scott’s livejournal post linked earlier in the thread is a good start, though I imagine Scott would be the first to admit it’s not a full treatment of the issue and more a “THIS ISN’T THAT SIMPLE GUYS” vent post.
Thanks, yeah, that’s about what I was looking for.
Here you go
For quantitative analysis of gun control and related issues, Gary Kleck is the man – nobody else really comes close, on either side of the debate. Unfortunately, while his “Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America” is a solid piece of work, it is anything but concise. Still recommended, but I’ve linked you to a summary he prepared as a talk.
Weakness of the summary version is that it was prepared as a talk, and could use editing for print. In particular, key facts are sometimes asserted in passing when they could stand a bit more explanation in a print essay, though of course everything is referenced to the book so if you are skeptical or otherwise want more information you know where to look.
And it’s a bit dated, but you can search his more recent publications for discussions of e.g. mass shootings in schools.
Thanks. Reading the conclusion, I liked this sentence: And just as gun control serves this purpose for liberals, equally useless “get tough” proposals, like longer prison terms, mandatory sentencing, and more use of the death penalty serve the purpose for conservatives.
By the way, to his credit, I remember Chomsky disputing the standard liberal line on gun control.
I’ve noticed that the pro-control side seems to frequently bring up David Hemenway as a foil to Gary Kleck. Hemenway argues that Kleck’s methods are imprecise and yield higher figures for defensive gun use. He also claims gun violence is a health problem, and therefore it makes sense for the CDC to look into it more.
I argue that Hemenway’s methods still yield too many DGU numbers to justify gun restrictions. I could argue that Hemenway simply doesn’t understand gun use, and that’s probably true, but it’s a blind ad hominem attack, so I never use it. Meanwhile, I haven’t seen many other RKBA people responding to Hemenway, despite looking. I think I found one reference on GunCite, and that was it. I would like to find more.
Control advocates also complain that the NRA blocks CDC research into gun violence. I’m not sure to what extent that’s true. When I ask for references, I get articles that don’t specify, or where the CDC was obviously being tasked to hunt specifically for evidence against gun ownership. OTOH, this argument is attack on the method by which more evidence is gained, so I cannot ignore it. As above, I’d like to see more information on this.
@Paul Brinkley, the restrictions on CDC investigations of gun statistics are complicated. The exact text of the current law is “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control”, searching for “Rivara + 1996 + CDC” should get you further details of the immediate history. On its face, it does look like a blocking of fact-seeking.
The trick is that the CDC was never a group of disinterested observers, or even terribly subtle about their beliefs, even before data came in : The Department of Health Objectives for the Nation had included an explicit goal of reducing handgun ownership as early as 1986, nearly a decade before the funding limitations began, and by the early 90s had quickly grown to funding projects based not just an expectation that the results would match preconceptions, but out of a mandate to find results that matched preconceptions, and CDC leaders and spokesmen were already counselling complete bans and outright confiscation. This may even be part of why public health research on gun violence in that time period is so near-universally terrible, even contrasted to the oft-lackluster Lott.
Even before I became pro-gun, I didn’t find Mr. Hemenway very persuasive, but I think you mostly don’t see many tear-downs of his work because he’s been relatively low profile on the gun control issue since 2006, and gun bloggers just don’t have the sort of institutional memory — only a handful like SaysUncle, SmallestMinority, and Reason when his feud with Kleck was running high. Doing a site-specific search for his last name on each site will get you a bit of a start. Most today look at his constitutional analysis and dismiss him entirely as a hack, and given how bad that part of his research is (even before Heller) I can’t say I blame them.
” honest statistics about gun control.”
Speaking of which: as someone once commented, there is an counter-paper to every paper clearly proving a point, and the counter-argument to the Kates and Mauser paper you cited is here:
http://www.ericgarland.co/2013/09/26/academic-support-american-gun-lobby/
“The bodies aren’t even in the bags when they start calling people “gun grabbers” and claiming that the Constitution was written exclusively for their tactical toys, as if Adams and Jefferson were modern fundamentalist Prepper militiamen instead of thoughtful liberal philosophers in search of a functional society.”
“you don’t get to be part of polite society any longer. You’re done getting a voice in this as if you have something of value to offer this society. All you get is the guns. “
Yeah, we should really be listening to this guy.
No thank you. That’s not a counter-argument: it’s a childish shriek of hatred and entitlement.
My opinion of you is sinking like a stone, sorry to say.
There’s critique of Kate’s and Mausers figures as well as rants. How about addressing the substantial points?
That is all true, and the writer never seems to be willing to accept that there may be tradeoffs between all the things he wants. But it’s Vox. You’re going to get emotive and irrational arguments. I’m just happy to see some coming from a different perspective for once.
And to give Dylan Matthews credit, he has been (in a low key way) acknowledging lately that the main effect of gun control on gun violence is reducing suicides.
And German fricking Lopez of all people is criticising the Daily Show for misrepresenting pro lifers. I mean there’s still the “obviously they’re wrong” disclaimer, but this is a level of respect for opposing views that I never expected to see from that site.
The Vox article summarises as “I don’t understand what politics is for”.
The author a given that firearms are widespread, and argues that, given that fact, then honest citizens have a need for them. Yes, if you can’t stop other people defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma it is rational to defect yourself. But it isnt’ rational to turn all those individual defections into global policy. The job of government is to enforce the co-operative solutions that people can’t come up with by summing their individual actions.
@TheAncientGeek
The job of government is to enforce the co-operative solutions that people can’t come up with by summing their individual actions.
That would be much more plausible if there was a government somewhere where the government was liable for failure to protect you.
Which goes in turn to the oft-brought up point by gun rights advocates: the government cannot possibly be liable for failure to protect you, because it is logistically impractical, unless other even less desirable steps are carried out. Blanks has no doubt internalized that assumption, making his point that honest citizens need guns an easy one to walk to.
To put it in prisoner’s dilemma terms: there’s no actual dilemma. The “cooperate with authorities” action doesn’t get you out of jail; it’s literally worse than defecting. (The authority is himself a player, with an incentive to try to convince you that the cooperation payoff is better than it actually is.)
Sorry to post a drive-by link, but many people probably haven’t heard of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
The infamous case establishes that the police have no duty to protect you, even when you are gang-raped for 14 hours because they don’t bother responding to multiple calls for help.
I don’t have the cite on this machine, but there was another, more recent case that expanded this reasoning to a woman who was murdered by someone under a “restraining order”.
If the police have no duty to enforce those orders, they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.
@Echo – There are multiple cases like the one you cited, and they exist in every country with operational rule of law. The last time we discussed this here, some people were very surprised to learn this.
The police do not have a duty to protect individual citizens.
You are solely and completely responsible for your own safety and security. Anyone who claims differently is either criminally ignorant or actively malicious. Conduct yourself accordingly.
@FC
Your second para doesn’t follow from the first.
The police don;t have a 100% duty to protect in you in the sense that the government doesn;t want them to be liable for unavoidable lapses, but that doesn’t mean you do have a 100% duty to protect yourself.
@TheAncientGreek – “Your second para doesn’t follow from the first.
The police don’t have a 100% duty to protect in you in the sense that the government doesnt want them to be liable for unavoidable lapses…”
The police do not have a 50% duty to protect you, or a 20% duty, or a 1% duty, or in fact any duty at all. The job of the police is not now and never has been to provide security to individual citizens. Their job is to enforce the law and keep the peace. If they can protect you in the course of their actual duties, they may do so. Then again, for a variety of reasons, they may not. If they don’t, you have no recourse.
“but that doesn’t mean you do have a 100% duty to protect yourself.”
Then who does?
If you are in danger, you are solely responsible for getting yourself out of danger. You are the only person who is guaranteed to be present and ready to respond if you are threatened or attacked. Self-defense is a basic human right, and it is by far the most reliable form of defense available.
@ FacelessCraven
Do you think that woman should have kept a loaded gun under her pillow while sleeping next to her 4-year-old child? That doesn’t seem safe either.
“Under the pillow” is an incredibly bad place to store a gun even if there aren’t four-year-old children involved. Not to mention uncomfortable.
Gun manufacturers, sellers, and owners not being complete idiots, they have been thinking up better options for quite some time. When you learn to use a handgun safely and effectively, your instructor should be able to offer more comprehensive guidance than will fit in a blog post.
“That would be much more plausible if there was a government somewhere where the government was liable for failure to protect you.”
No, it’s still pretty plausible. You can’t argue that X isn’t doing Y at all just because you can’t sue X for not doing Y.
@TheAncientGreek – “No, it’s still pretty plausible. You can’t argue that X isn’t doing Y at all just because you can’t sue X for not doing Y.”
I have the right to not be attacked. That right is meaningless if I do not have a defense available against attackers. The police cannot provide that defense. I can, and will. No sane society requires humans to endure assault, rape and murder now in the hopes that their attackers MIGHT recieve some fractional punishment in the future.
Further, you have not actually shown how owning or employing guns qualifies as “defection”. Murder rates are dropping, and have been for decades, while gun ownership and weapon sophistication have exploded. I can clearly point to the benefits. You still have not pointed to the harm.
I didn’t say X doesn’t sometimes do Y – I said X has no obligation to do Y, and says so. X is not a reliable means of ensuring Y gets done.
Since Y is valuable, people need to be able to do it for themselves.
Any players of roguelikes here? Just wondering, prompted by a vague feeling that there could be some positive correlation between those who play roguelikes and rationalists. (In a similar vein, I seem to recall that a slim-but-noticeable contingent of Magic: The Gathering players exists on LW.)
I’ve been playing a bit of nethack for the last few months.
Someone around here once said that you’re likely to find a pretty strong correlation between “LW rationalism” and most given interests that could be generally described as “extremely nerdy”.
EDIT: To properly answer the question. I’ve never played a proper, no graphic interface, roguelikes. But I’ve enjoyed a number of roguelikeish games (Most notably Baroque, Binding of Isaac and Rogue Quest).
I’m quite fond of Desktop Dungeons and I’ve been known to play some Binding of Isaac. Never really got into full-blown nethack/adom/angband/brogue/whatever roguelikes though.
Sure, I have been playing DCSS extensively. It hits a good point in fun-space; it actively discourages grinding, has a concrete, defined end and of course permadeath.
Of course I have overplayed it and nowadays its just a giant skinner box to me, giving the right rewards so I keep playing.
I used to play roguelikes, but I beat Sil several times and other roguelikes are enough worse than Sil that I find it hard to play them. So I play mapgames instead. I still identify with rogueliking enough to get infuriated by what people try to pass off as a roguelike these days (legacy mechanics? go fuck yourselves).
I was really upset by what they did to Crawl in the last few versions. They seem to have overengineered it into blandness. They took out item weight, meat butchery, equipment damage, and item destruction, and the game now feels like pressing auto-explore and auto-attack over and over until you die or win.
Any examples?
I don’t know Sil; I’ll have to have a look at it.
Legacy mechanics are mechanics where the progress one character makes gives a bonus to later characters, a way to get around permadeath and replace it with the old RPG-progression grind. A lot of so-called “roguelikes” coming out of Japan have these sorts of mechanics (e.g. One Way Heroics), as well as a lot of the normie shit people try to sell on Steam trading on the “roguelike” name (e.g. Rogue Legacy).
Oh right; eurgh. Yeah, I’d never heard of that (happily) and it’s gross.
I’m curious what you think of Nethack bones files, which have a semi-similar effect.
(if you haven’t played NH, there is a chance when you die for the state of the level to be saved such that future characters can encounter it, along with your corpse, ghost, whatever killed you, and any items you were carrying (usually cursed). I’m not sure of the exact mechanics but it does make it possible for new characters to acquire the equipment of old ones)
It’s not really the same thing, since it’s not really a repeatable grind, it’s just sort of random and you have to find the bones anyway. Unless you’re scumming bonesfiles, which, don’t scum bonesfiles. It’s not like it’s hard to cheat at roguelikes and defeat the purpose.
Yeah, I’m halfway with you on the changes to DCSS. I admire the desire to simplify the game and remove aspects that don’t really serve to advance the gameplay, but it has definitely made it a lot easier.
BTW, what do you mean by “mapgame”?
I think the official name for the genre is “grand strategy”. Detailed, highly simulationist strategy games, often historical in nature, often with a high degree of focus on sociopolitical management and relatively low focus on military tactics. They are distinguished from 4X games by not only their level of detail and simulationism, but also because they are set in pre-existing political maps instead of a vast expanse of terra nullius. Hence, “mapgames”. Often these maps are meticulously researched historical maps.
It’s a natural progression from roguelikes, as one of the few gaming genres more hopelessly autistic.
So things like the Paradox strategy games (the Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron series)?
Yes, those are the most prominent examples (unless you want to count the Total War games, which are to mapgames like Spelunky is to roguelikes).
I used to play NetHack 3.4, years ago. Over a decade ago, in fact. I dabbled in other roguelikes, but NH and its close relatives drew me for reasons the others did not.
For years, I kicked around the idea of making a new NetHack, set after ascension, where you played a proto-god, and had to accrue power in ways that reflected the quasi-scientific mechanics of NetHack and the lore of existing mythology. It’s still possible that I could do that someday.
Spelunky (rougelike meets Mario Bros) and FTL (rougelike meets spaceship command RTS) are two games I really like
Over 200 hours of FTL and I still love it!
I’ve sunk a lot of time into Tales of Maj’Eyal. It’s not the most hardcore roguelike, but I have fun with it. You can change the mode from “exploration” with infinite lives to true permadeath, with a mode in-between where every few levels you get an extra life. Due to the game’s propensity for randomly administered instant death, I prefer this mode.
It does a little bit of “legacy” stuff, but only in the form of unlocking new options for how you make your character, each of which requires the completion of specific areas or quests.
Used to dabble a bit in Nethack and ToME, but Europa Universalis 4 is pretty much all I play these days.
“banned for reasons of total personal caprice.”
FWIW, I massively support this. I think comment sections commonly fall into two failure modes: either the author is too dictatorial, and bans everyone who disagrees with them, which can be a pleasant environment, but doesn’t get much discussion. Or, the author tries to be “fair”, which is laudable, but it means that as the community grows, if you permit people who abide by the letter of the rules but are constantly aggravating and drag the discussion into pointless arguments, then you get MORE of those, and they start to drive away people who might otherwise feel welcome.
I think it’s useful to try to make sure you have some regular posters representing each major side of each opinion which is commonly discussed, so you don’t cut yourself off from learning things you don’t currently like.
But I think most people need to err more on the side of “is this person constantly annoying and doing more harm than good in the comments, lets not have them”. “True, kind, necessary, pick two” is a good rule, but I imagine it’s usually too much work to enforce it on a comment-level, instead I’d say, people who USUALLY breach it, get rid of them.
Conversely, anyone who says something bad OCCASIONALLY, I’d be very happy to keep them and just ask them to knock it off. Shamus Young said something like this: the vast majority might be able to keep explicit rules, but pretty much fail to keep meta-rules like “don’t be an asshole”, so if you enforce that, you get a lot of people on the “juuuuust polite enough not to get banned” point, so he’d rather give some general guidance, and then anyone who doesn’t seem to fit in, gets banned.
The problem with this solution is that it’s really easy for someone to confuse “annoys me, personally” with “is doing more harm than good”. Nobody sets out to be a dictator over a discussion forum, but when someone is annoying you and you have the power to make them shut up, you will tend to unconsciously come up with reasons why it’s good and proper (or cool, or socially just, or whatever status is locally measured in) to make them shut up.
The trick, as usual, is to hate yourself enough that you don’t unconsciously twist your perceptions to your own benefit.
People who hate themselves tend to engage in self-destructive behavior — for instance, you might foster a discussion space that grates on your own nerves.
So what you’re saying is that Scott should make you supreme dictator of who gets banned around here?
There’s nothing wrong with using power you have due to ownership to manage your property as you see fit.
In the specific case of debate (or any other kind of) forum moderation (which this personal blog is not, despite being more populous than many), it helps to have a stable, self-replicating elite with moderation powers, not just one guy. The elite members should like, or at least respect, each other, and have similar views on how to interpret the local rules, and especially believe that the only admissions to the elite are given to those who are like them, not on the basis of seniority or merit. Seniority and merit are important, yes, but only secondarily so after being very certain that the new person is not some kind of outsider in terms of psychology and views, who will bring strife and remake the community beyond recognition if given power.
Even assuming this for the sake of argument, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to go mad with power. It happens all the time that moderators will shut up people who were annoying them but who were also important contributors to the community, and then their community goes down-hill and they’re left wondering what the hell happened. Oftentimes it’s not the specific people they shut up that are the problem, but the “chilling effects” on others who see that this forum is no longer a free-wheeling place where they can feel safe making good-ass content even if it’s somewhat disagreeable to the squares.
Popehat’s comment policy has no explicit rules and basically states that you may be banned for any reason, or for no reason at all. If I recall correctly, the justification for this is that they consider it basically impossible to be perfectly consistent with any set of rules complex enough to even have a chance at producing civil conversation.
I am inclined to agree with this. People are very good at finding loopholes. The important thing, I think, is to do one’s best to ban people who are actually bringing down the level of discourse rather than people who can politely argue their disagreeable opinions. I think Scott is pretty good at this.
(And, FWIW, I think the comments here are much better than those on almost every other site I visit, including Popehat. Generally I try to avoid even reading comments, but here I actively participate.)
Popehat’s comment policy might make theoretical sense, but looking at their comments it’s not clear that it’s worked well in practice. I think being lawyers they overestimate the importance of perfect adherence to rules. A comments section is not a good place for the Rule of Law, but even the Rule of Man can benefit from some guidelines about which racial slurs are unwelcome or whatever.
Isn’t David Bryon one of the moderators there?
This is true. I think Popehat’s comments are above average for the Internet, but that’s not saying much. They can still be pretty bad.
I’m not thrilled by the banning of Steve Johnson but I can see why you might do it if you want to maintain a friendlier atmosphere. In that case though I’d suggest also keeping a sharp eye on the trollier communists (who seem to have kept quite quiet in this thread at least) as well.
Truly, Scott is acting like a proper czar.
If the machine as designed doesn’t work, it’s his right and responsibility to deal with the misfunction somehow. It doesn’t matter that the behaviour is as designed, according to the rules as written down, if the designer/owner/sovereign thinks there’s something wrong.
Re universal human experiences can I ask you guys to explain clearly what you mean by auditory hallucination? Which of the following things do you personally experience and which not? (I experience some subset).
* Recalling the lyrics or information about the tones of a song without any auditory experiences.
* Experiencing hearing a song (getting stuck in your head) in a way obviously not the same as hearing it for real.
* Experiencing hearing a song that is not in fact playing in a way that’s hard to distinguish from hearing it with your ears.
* Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, in a way obviously different from hearing it if you were speaking.
* Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, which makes it hard to listen to others speaking in the same way that listening to two voices at once would make it hard.
* Experiencing hearing a voice which isn’t clearly your own, and not clearly a memory, and not heard by someone around you.
* Experiencing hearing the sounds that you heard at some point in the past in a way which makes it hard to listen to the sounds you are hearing currently.
* Experiencing hearing a high pitched ringing/whistling sound which others cannot hear. (Tinitus).
* Experience hearing an alarm, ringtone, washing machine or similar simple sounds and being unsure if someone else in the room would also be able to hear it.
* Experiencing more complex sounds (voices, music, car revving) and being unsure if someone else in the room would also be able to hear it.
* Experiencing hearing a voice which isn’t clearly your own, and not clearly a memory, and not heard by someone around you.
Have experienced this from childhood onwards (often came in from the yard convinced my mother had called me when she hadn’t). Latest experience was two mornings ago when I was sure I heard a door open and my brother calling my name; I answered and he said “No, I didn’t call you!”
I frequently get:
* Experiencing hearing a song (getting stuck in your head) in a way obviously not the same as hearing it for real
* Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, in a way obviously different from hearing it if you were speaking.
and occasionally tinitus.
Sometimes when I’m falling asleep I hear very beautiful music, generated spontaneously without any conscious input, and much more vivid than just recalling music or ‘getting a song stuck in my head’, (though still not quite vivid enough that I would mistake it for the real thing). If I pay too much attention to it I wake up enough that it stops. Does anyone else get this?
Tinitus seems different to the others. I think it’s malfunctioning hardware (one of the sympathetically-vibrating hair cells in the cochlea playing up?) rather than a software issue. Not totally sure though.
>Does anyone else get this?
Yes, I often wish I had some way of transcribing it without learning a ton about music. Upon examination it often seems to be some sort of juxtaposition of melodies/rhythms from songs I have heard, though often in different keys, at different tempos, and in different instruments.
I have experienced all of these:
* Recalling the lyrics or information about the tones of a song without any auditory experiences.
* Experiencing hearing a song (getting stuck in your head) in a way obviously not the same as hearing it for real.
* Experiencing hearing a voice which isn’t clearly your own, and not clearly a memory, and not heard by someone around you.
* Experiencing hearing a high pitched ringing/whistling sound which others cannot hear. (Tinitus).
The few times I’ve had someone-speaking auditory hallucinations, they’ve been thinking that my mother has called my name when I’m at home and she’s at home too.
I’ve had some minor visual hallucinations while falling asleep as well, but it’s difficult to disambiguate them from dreaming. Often just a flash of light (as in, my entire field of vision goes white).
Boy, the way you have described these things, I’m not actually sure what you mean.
I think I have experienced all of the following, but I have italicized the things that seem underspecified to me:
– Recalling the lyrics or information about the tones of a song without any auditory experiences.
– Experiencing hearing a song (getting stuck in your head) in a way obviously not the same as hearing it for real.
– Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, in a way obviously different from hearing it if you were speaking.
– Experiencing hearing a high pitched ringing/whistling sound which others cannot hear. (Tinitus).
I can clarify why I find them underspecified if you want.
Yeah, that language is kind of deliberately not very sophisticated because I’m worried about hidden inferences. I can’t say “hearing” because hearing implies that there are vibrations in the air, and I’m talking about sensations that are similar that are not produced by vibrations in the air but by the brain.
“in a way obviously different” should be read as “I could not reasonably be confused about the origin of this sensation. I would never experience this and think that someone else in the room was also experiencing it.”
Does that make sense?
@Adam Casey:
Does recalling information about the tones of a song include simply remembering what key it is in?
Is all of the fluff around “getting a song stuck in your head” just intended to specify what is already understood colloquially as getting a song stuck in your head?
Does experiencing hearing your own voice include when you talk to yourself (for example, telling yourself to remember the appointment you have later)
I will delete this comment if you feel those sentences unfairly bias the reading of your original questions.
>Does recalling information about the tones of a song include simply remembering what key it is in?
Yes, I think so. I’m asking about recalling information about sounds without experiencing the sounds in any sense.
>Is all of the fluff around “getting a song stuck in your head” just intended to specify what is already understood colloquially as getting a song stuck in your head?
It’s to specify what I understand that phrase to mean without presuming what other mean.
>Does experiencing hearing your own voice include when you talk to yourself (for example, telling yourself to remember the appointment you have later)
Yes, so long as you’re not making sounds that others could hear.
I regularly experience:
* Recalling the lyrics or information about the tones of a song without any auditory experiences.
* Experiencing hearing a song (getting stuck in your head) in a way obviously not the same as hearing it for real.
* Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, in a way obviously different from hearing it if you were speaking.
* Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, which makes it hard to listen to others speaking in the same way that listening to two voices at once would make it hard.(Actually, my thinking voice probably sounds rather different from my speaking voice, but I do often focus on it to the detriment of paying attention to what others are saying.)
* Experiencing hearing a high pitched ringing/whistling sound which others cannot hear. (Tinitus).
* Experience hearing an alarm, ringtone, washing machine or similar simple sounds and being unsure if someone else in the room would also be able to hear it.
* Experiencing more complex sounds (voices, music, car revving) and being unsure if someone else in the room would also be able to hear it. (Well, I spend a lot of time around the elderly/hearing impaired, so . . . )
I have never experienced, and cannot imagine experiencing (i.e., it’d really freak me out:
* Experiencing hearing a song that is not in fact playing in a way that’s hard to distinguish from hearing it with your ears.
I experience the following without conscious effort (that is, when I’m not actively trying to remember/imagine sounds):
* Experiencing hearing a song (getting stuck in your head) in a way obviously not the same as hearing it for real.
* Experiencing more complex sounds (voices, music, car revving) and being unsure if someone else in the room would also be able to hear it.
This has only happened with music, and about twice in my life. In one case it turned out I was actually hearing a worker’s radio down the hall, through a closed door. The other case was not thoroughly investigated. There have been a few borderline cases, but I can distinguish them by ignoring the song for a while – if I listen for them again I can catch the feeling of having to find the right place in the song. I don’t know exactly how to categorize those.
* Experiencing hearing a voice (clearly your own) despite not speaking, in a way obviously different from hearing it if you were speaking.
I usually do not experience:
* Recalling the lyrics or information about the tones of a song without any auditory experiences.
Typically to remember that kind of information I have to imagine some limited form of audio.
Additionally, when close to sleep I have heard other voices and sometimes music, both obviously unreal. The voices, in particular, sound like Markov chains; any two or three words together make sense but they don’t form coherent sentences.
The A Tabarok solution is great in principle, but Europe is a funny thing, as regulation of generics is a mix of EU-level and state-level regulation.
While I generally trust the richer EU countries, I would stay as far away as possible from medications approved in the poorer ones if they have not been approved elsewhere. In Portugal, which is the example I know best, several companies get their drugs approved without the proper studies (. The state shirks its regulatory role both because of corruption (mostly the soft corruption of revolving door cronyism rather than the hard corruption of cash envelopes) and out of a strong desire to keep prices low for itself.
Automatic recognition for medications approved Germany/France/UK/BeNeLux/Sweden/…? Great idea!
Recognition for Portugal/Spain/Italy/Romania/…? Caveat Emptor.
Yeah. I mean in general I feel like “Europe” isn’t a very good cluster in politics-space in the same way that “Southern Europe” and “Shia countries” are. I’d trust the protestant nations of Europe as much as I’d trust the USA. I’d trust the catholic and orthodox nations as much as I’d trust generic South American ones.
I’d trust the catholic and orthodox nations as much as I’d trust generic South American ones.
I’m unsure whether I should be insulted, flattered by the comparison, or shrug and acknowledge that’s an accurate assessment of the state of Ireland 🙂
The only thing that differentiates us from a banana republic is the bananas – at least at times. Under our current, hoping to be our next, government and the economic upturn they keep telling us is happening, doubtless it will be banana plantations in every county hereafter!
One of my “truths that I believe but are not widely held” is that the right cluster is “US+Northern EU” vs “Southern Europe” (roughly protestant vs catholic, although not quite [Austria is catholic])
To equate Southern Europe to Latin America is a huge exaggeration.
Italy has a GDP pro capita roughly equal to Japan’s, and more than double than that of the very richest South American countries such as Argentina.
Southern european countries are much better developed and functional than latin American ones.
Trusting (protestant) Europe leads to a counterfactual history where the US approved thalidomide.
Not a priori obvious that’s a bad deal, given all the other things you’d get as well. Thalidomide was really nasty, but the DALY per head of population impact wasn’t that large, and stopped reasonably quickly.
It’s probably a better counterfactual world, where several medications would have come online faster than they did in our world.
Unfortunately, failing to reject is a costly error for the FDA, but failing to accept only kills patients; so the FDA’s incentives are clear.
It’s a mistake to look at a single high-profile failure from fifty years ago and go so far to prevent another one that we cause as much or more harm from being too careful. Especially since we learned from that incident – the safety trials for thalidomide had major flaws that won’t be repeated now.
Unsafe drugs do slip through sometimes, even with the long and strict approval process in place. A small increase in the number of negative effects is the price we pay for more positive effects, so “bad outcomes will go up” isn’t a good argument against changing or loosening the approval process. The question is whether the increase in direct bad outcomes from approved drugs under a changed system would be offset enough by a decrease in bad outcome from drug approval delays under the current system. And that’s a different question.
Never mind, I found the hide button. I think it could be in a better location, at the top of the post.
Actually, the entire left side of a post, under the gravatar, should act as an expand/collapse target. That would make it really easy to collapse a subtree if you get tired in the middle of reading it, or to quickly skip ahead to the next topic.
It’s actually a problem of UI design; the Hide button already does this, but nobody realizes it.
@suntzuanime:
But you have to scroll back up to the parent post that you wish to collapse. That may be what you meant, but it was unclear.
A better UI would have a series of “collapsers” available, from left to right, that were extended from the top to the bottom of each subthread. Which I think was Outis’ point
I’m not at all convinced that would be a better UI. In particular, people would hit it accidentally, especially on touch screens. And changes to UIs are in general high-cost.
That said, I have been meaning to add a link to parent comments for a while now. You are invited to try the current version by entering ‘makeParentLinks()’ in the dev console. Please give feedback here or to me (bakkot) on IRC. Mind that I am only willing to make small and minimally intrusive changes.
(Scott, if you happen to see this, I’d be happy to ask first about making changes like this, but I imagine you don’t really want to be bothered. And this is only the second change I’ve made in, what, over a year now? But of course I will not if you’d prefer I not. )
@Bakkot or someone who already knows:
“You are invited to try the current version by entering ‘makeParentLinks()’ in the dev console.”
Can anyone point me at how I get to the dev console? I’m sure I am failing at RTFM, so I apologize in advance that I can’t find that either.
HeelBearClub, sorry, it is control-shift-J/K on Chrome/Firefox respectively, or command-opt-J/K on Chrome/Firefox respectively on Mac OS. Harder in Safari, and I don’t know about IE. Not really possible on mobile, as far as I know.
for clarity:
Chrome on Windows: control-shift-J
Firefox on Windows: control-shift-K
Chrome on MacOS: command-opt-J
Firefox on MacOS: command-opt-K
@Bakkot:
It seems that for Chrome (on a windows machine, at least), it is ctrl-shift-I.
I like the idea as implemented, although I think the phrase “See Parent” might be better than the up arrow, especially on smaller screens.
And you are correct that long interface buttons are probably bad on mobile and other touch screen devices. Thinking again, it might also just lead to a cluttered look for no particular gain.
Edit:
And the nice thing about your design is that it kills two birds. I can easily navigate to a level I want to collapse, but I can also easily navigate to the top of a very long max-nested chain to which I wish to reply.
Yeah, I was considering the word “parent” instead of “↑”, but I felt like it might be a bit too heavy, and it’s kinda bad to have three almost-identical links adjacent to each other. Still, will keep in mind.
Seems great to me.
>I’m not sure how to deal with that morally
How about by becoming a vegan? Seems like an easy out.
Scott is on record for attempting it. Apparently, however, he hates vegetables and trying to not eat meat made him miserable.
I think we should bring back self-flaggelation! That way people can eat meat, but still be miserable and obsess guiltily about their bodily urges. Which is basically veganism anyway!
None of the moral vegans I know are miserable or obsessed guiltily with their bodily urges. This is not true, not necessary, and not kind.
About the cows: I am unable to even start discuss the thing of how many chicken a one cow is worth, given that I believe that cow is worth more than a chicken (in a moral sense) but I think it is impossible to quantify the difference; i.e. it is not possible that a cow is worth two, three, or forty chickens (or indifinetely many chickens).
So what you’re saying is, morality is ω-inconsistent?
I encourage utilitarians to explore this.
So an out-of-control trolley is speeding towards a cow. There are 10 chickens sitting obliviously on an alternate track …
Well, sure, you’d obviously pull the switch in that case. But now the trolley is speeding towards 10 oblivious chickens on the track. But there’s a tall overpass that crosses the tracks, and there’s this cow standing on the edge of the overpass …
This joke already exists.
As mobile facetiously points out, you can’t really not decide. There are charities which will save X cows for $100 or Y chickens for $100, and you have to either pick between them or let them both die.
“Alex Tabarrok suggests an elegant partial solution – have pharmaceutical reciprocity with trusted European countries”
I was thinking that. Can we have multiple regulatory entities in competition? Well, we already have multiples in different countries, we’d just need to say “anything OK in Canada is OK here if it’s clearly marked” and we’d legalise what people were doing anyway.
I think multiple regulatory agencies in competition, minus some kind of really clever incentivizing system, just collapses to “whatever the least strict regulatory agency says”
In the case of drugs, I think the interesting aspect isn’t competition, but a division of labor – some drug companies can only afford to get their drug licensed in Europe or the US but not both.
No, there is no problem of drug companies that can afford only to get approval in one place but not the other. None at all. The paperwork is chump change compared to the cost of the studies. It’s the same studies for both places.
But it is true that there are drugs available in one place but not the other.
Some of those are recent drugs that were treated differently by FDA and EMA. Rosiglitazone was pulled from Europe but not America. Other drugs are approved in one place but not the other because the process is arbitrary and random. It is common for a drug to become available 2 years earlier on one place than the other, less common for it to completely fail to be approved.
The situation for older drugs is more complicated. They cannot afford to be approved in the other place because the standards have changed. Maybe they originally failed to get approved in the other place because they could not afford to learn to work the system. But that is why we now have big drug companies that can amortize that knowledge across many drugs. [LPC says that the situation with generics is more complicated, but I don’t think that changes my point.]
Competing regulatory agencies doesn’t require a very complex incentive system. The trick is to increase access to information about which agency approved which drug, and then let patients (with or without doctor advice) choose which regulator they’ll hitch their wagon to. The more people that use StrictCo’s rules, the greater sway StrictCo will have, and the greater incentive drug devs will have to seek and advertise StrictCo compliance.
I suppose it might require a little cleverness to gauge how many adherent StrictCo has. It might come in the form of patients voluntarily paying StrictCo a subscription fee. I’m too pressed for time to think this farther right now. (I suspect David Friedman has done thinking on this; perhaps if I invoke his name, he’ll come.)
“whatever the least strict regulatory agency says”
But that’s basically what we want in this case, as long as we only allowed fairly reputable agencies in the first place. If you have a warning “OK in Canada, not yet FDA approved”, people (and insurance companies) can decide if they want to pay the premium or not.
Does anyone know of any effective charities that take Bitcoin? The main ones Givewell recommends don’t seem to.
Just convert it to cash first. Or get someone you trust to do it for you. You shouldn’t really be letting concerns like “I have to convert this currency first” get in the way of donating to the best place you can.
I’m confused on the economy. The labor force participation has been steadily dropping while the unemployment rate is also dropping so some say that the it’s simply because people are dropping out of the labor force. But the number of jobs being created each month has averaged 200k for a while now(the last two months haven’t been good but those are still subject to revision). So if there a decent amount of jobs being created then why aren’t those out of the labor force looking for jobs? Have they been so crushed by the last recession that they have given up hope, regardless of job prospects? Is is simply baby boomers retiring? Maybe more families have decided to have a stay at home parent? Young adults too lazy to get a job?
And before someone says something about how the job market is really bad, look at Yellens Dashboard. Notice how all of those indicators are showing progress towards full employment except the labor force participation rate.
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-yellens-labor-market-dashboard/
The data suggest that people between ages 16-24, and especially 16-20, are dropping out of labor force participation and this has been exacerbated by the recession but precedes it by a fairly long time: http://faculty.tamucc.edu/sfriday/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/US-Labor-Force-Participation-Rate-by-Age-April-2013.png
Meanwhile, the participation rate of people 55+ has been on the upswing for a while, and actually passed teenagers for the first time since 1948 at least, which is as far back as most of these charts go. I figure a lot of them had their nest egg wiped out and are going back to work because they have to, and because fewer of them have college degrees they’re taking entry-level jobs that teenagers used to do. So teens and college kids are saying “fuck it” and staying in school, which is more socially encouraged/mandated than ever. Not that I blame them; the objective value of a college degree is debatable, but relative to not having one it wins in a rout in terms of expected lifetime earnings, unemployment rate, etc.
As to how that translates to more net jobs being created despite that, from what I’ve heard, the jobs that are being created are mostly low-barrier low-reward jobs in service, retail, etc. In a buyer’s market for employment, employers are freer to demand part-time work, non-salaried work without benefits as a condition for any employment at all, and part-time jobs appear to be beating full-time ones: https://www.google.com/search?q=employment+rate+full+time+part+time&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAmoVChMI6ODymJqtyAIVhKA-Ch1dgg1A&biw=1440&bih=710#imgrc=ddzOJscZvU3ArM%3A
So it’s possible that the jobs being created are low-paying, low-status, low-skill ones that don’t last long and aren’t even full-time, but still go down on the employment chart as jobs. That would explain why lots of people are still down on the economy even though the numbers, divorced of context are pretty good. That plus automation, fewer worker benefits/protections, more freelancing (inherently more unstable), etc, which are smaller effects but which all add up.
The rise of part time jobs doesn’t seem to be true anymore, looking at this graph.
http://www.valuewalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/D-U.S.-Jobs-Picture-Full-time-and-Part-time.jpg
Full time jobs are up and part time jobs are down, which is consistent with the unemployment data which shows U6 declining at a faster rate than U3. For example, last month U3 stayed constant at 5.1% while U6 dropped 0.3 percent.
Also, I’m not buying the “robots are taking our jobs” narrative because that would imply rising economic growth and lowered employment, which is the exact opposite of what’s happening.
> So it’s possible that the jobs being created are low-paying, low-status, low-skill ones that don’t last long and aren’t even full-time, but still go down on the employment chart as jobs.
Actually, the complete opposite of this is true. Almost all jobs growth in the United States since the recession trough in 2009 has been from full-time jobs. You can see in this graph here:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=22F7
Why has automation become such a meme lately in the rationalist community. Yes machines will one day take all our jobs, but that time is a long ways off. Software is inflexible and difficult to change and even things we consider simple like fine motor skills and basic learning and far beyond the reach of our most sophisticated programs and robots.
For more here is Robin Hanson http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/08/automation-vs-innovation.html
the first self driving truck is already on the road and truck driving is the most common job across much of the US.
to marrow is today, yo.
The first self-driving train was put into service more than 50 years ago, yet virtually all trains still have conductors. Even the few subway and elevated trains (where the general public isn’t allowed on the tracks so if anyone gets hit by one of these trains it is 100% their own fault) that have been automated have manual override brake buttons.
Autopilot software has been perfectly capable of taking off, flying, and landing planes by itself for decades. It’s long been a common joke among airline pilots that the flight crew will soon be reduced to a man and a dog: the man to feed the dog, and the dog to bite the man’s hand if he tries to touch the controls. Yet virtually all planes still have pilots, even freight planes that don’t carry civilian passengers. The exceptions are civilian drones that are too small to do much damage if they crash into anything and military drones that are already expected to cause large amounts of “collateral damage.”
And the self-driving truck that you mentioned has a human driver whose job is to monitor the self-driving software at all times and take over if it fails. Much like modern airplane pilots and train conductors.
If trains and planes haven’t gotten rid of their human operators despite having the ability to do so for decades, why should we expect cars and trucks, which operate in a far less predictable environment, to do that anytime soon?
Terminology question: in my (middle American) dialect, a train conductor is someone who takes the tickets and deals with passengers, while the person driving the train is an engineer. Is the usage different elsewhere?
In British English the word “engineer” refers only to practitioners of engineering. Train drivers are just called… train drivers. I’m not sure whether train drivers would be included in the extension of the term “conductor” in British English (somebody more familiar with trains could probably tell you), but “train driver” is definitely used to refer specifically to the driver of the train.
British train commuter here. “Conductor” is the person who takes the tickets, never the person who drives. The person who drives is the “driver”, never an “engineer”.
Being a truck driver isn’t about driving trucks.
Your UPS/Fedex delivery guy is in the statistics as a “truck driver”. How much of their job could be automated by a self-driving truck?
Try Gwern Branwen.
>I’m confused on the economy.
There are two types of people. Those confused by the economy and liars.
The population is constantly increasing, so to stay at level percentages of labor force participation, you need to create somewhere on the order of 180,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the people growing up and starting to look for work (or moving here and looking for work). 200k jobs a month means ~20k jobs more for the people who were unemployed last month. My google fu says the jobs lost in 2008 were about 8.7 million. When adjusted for population growth, we still have ~7 million jobs gone. At 20k per month, thats…..thirty years just to recoup those losses, assuming we have a nonstop growing economy from now until then (lol).
> The population is constantly increasing, so to stay at level percentages of labor force participation, you need to create somewhere on the order of 180,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the people growing up and starting to look for work (or moving here and looking for work).
180,000 is far, far too high. Around 3 times too high in fact.
The working-aged population (15-64) has grown at around 0.5% per year in the post-financial crisis period. This implies monthly payroll employment growth of around 60,000 jobs a month. Anything faster comes either from the pool of unemployed or the pool of those outside the labour force.
You can see detailed discussion here:
http://newmonetarism.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/some-unpleasant-labor-force-arithmetic.html
I’ve seen estimates as low as 90k, but never 60k. That bastion of neoreaction, the NY Times economics section cites “most economists” as thinking it’s between 150k and 200k. 180 is a nice round number in the middle of that estimate.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/how-many-jobs-should-we-be-adding-each-month/?_r=0
Not race or gender, but potentially just as bad (please don’t ban me): gun control. Does it work in other countries? Could it work in the US (constitutional issues notwithstanding)? I’m looking for empirical data, not anecdotes. I’ve seen various analyses that point one way or the other, but nothing I’d consider definitive. What’s the best data we have on this?
Here are some good historical statistics on homicide that should put the claims of various studies in perspective.
http://ourworldindata.org/data/violence-rights/homicides/
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/–decivilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext
The US has had a murder rate several times higher than the UK since at least the late 1700s, and firearms policy seems to have nothing to do with it. Certainly the gun-crazed maniacs carrying concealed handguns in the Czech Republic are not driving up the European rate.
The Americas in general have the highest murder rate in the world 16.3/100k vs 3/100k for Europe, and 12.5/100k for Africa. (We might chalk some of that up to under-reporting murders in downtown Mogadishu, but it’s still remarkable.)
There’s something “special” about our continent, and it doesn’t appear to be the fault of us murder-worshipping NRA goons. Not that it will stop the calls for our extermination, of course.
“The US has had a murder rate several times higher than the UK since at least the late 1700s, and firearms policy seems to have nothing to do with it. ”
How are you determining that firearms policy has nothing to do with it, when the US has never had a period of disarmament or prohibition?
The UK, however, has had a period of unrestricted firearms ownership.
..which included a certain number of firearms deaths, after which we tightened u the laws resulting in fewer firearms deaths, ..oh, and lower homicides overall. Your point was..?
In the 1910s, the homicide rate in the UK was 0.81 per 100,000 per year. The firearms act of 1920 restricts firearms ownerships to people licensed at the discretion of the local police. In the 1920s, the homicide rate of the UK is 0.83 per 100,000 per year.
From 1987-1997, the homicide rate in the UK was 1.12 per 100,000 per year. The 1997 firearms act bans handguns almost entirely, with confiscation of existing licensed firearms.
1997-2007, the homicide rate in the UK is 1.59 per 100,000 per year.
All data per Wikipedia; I was hoping for Crown statistics but they weren’t readily searchable. But I’m not seeing this “lower homicides overall” that you claim.
“In the 1910s, the homicide rate in the UK was 0.81 per 100,000 per year. The firearms act of 1920 restricts firearms ownerships to people licensed at the discretion of the local police. In the 1920s, the homicide rate of the UK is 0.83 per 100,000 per year.”
I mean, WWI is a massive, enormous confounding factor here… Given that the increase was so small this is if anything an argument in favor of the Firearms Act’s effectiveness.
How do you figure? WWI wasn’t taking place in either 1910 or 1920. (While the WWI numbers might be interesting, the paper doesn’t give them.)
Considering that young men are both the most common perpetrators and victims of homicide, and WWI wiped out an entire generation of them… wouldn’t you expect it to cause a large drop in post-war homicides?
What else could you possibly expect?
Were there drops in the homicide rate in the other countries that experienced similar or greater generational losses in WWI?
(I can imagine a variety of hypotheses: fewer young men->fewer homicides is one. Traumatized generation that includes lots of veterans with both fairly-earned anger and untreated PTSD and all trained to shoot becomes more homicidal is another. Effect drowned out by other causes of homicide is a third. But there’s certainly a depressingly large universe of countries to compare effects in if the stats are available.)
What else could you possibly expect?
The British Government rather explicitly expected more violent crime; that’s why they passed the Firearms Act of 1920 in the first place. Young men coming home from the war – because “wiped out a generation” is a gross exaggeration and most of them did come home – trained and accustomed to violence, agitated by communist propaganda, suffering from whatever it is they were calling PTSD that decade (I think “shell shock”), and with lots of cheap military-surplus guns flooding the market, there was obviously going to be blood in the streets, violence on a scale never before seen in the UK.
One possibility is that the Firearms Act of 1920 was very precisely calibrated to exactly compensate for all of these violence-inducing trends, but then you’d expect to see a precipitous decline in violence in the 1930s as the WWI cohort aged out of their peak crime years while the gun ban remained in place.
The more likely possibility is that the UK government, like just about every other, doesn’t have much of a clue about what makes people start or stop committing violent crimes, and society muddles through like always while various government predictions and interventions keep missing the mark.
Is there any evidence of increased violence amongst shell shock victims? More importantly, is there any evidence the English government saw them as potentially violent rather than “weak-willed cowards who needed some spirit beaten into them”?
Certainly the poor, vacant men my father remembers from the 20s were not responsible for any rise in the murder rate.
I’d forgotten this, but Orwell took it for granted that the restrictions were to keep the Irish down, and the fears of communism that you mentioned.
>How do you figure? WWI wasn’t taking place in either 1910 or 1920. (While the WWI numbers might be interesting, the paper doesn’t give them.)
The person said “the 1910’s”, not 1910; WWI most definitely was taking place in the 1910’s.
>Considering that young men are both the most common perpetrators and victims of homicide, and WWI wiped out an entire generation of them… wouldn’t you expect it to cause a large drop in post-war homicides?
> What else could you possibly expect?
‘Young men who could not commit crimes because they were killed in WWI’ are a subset of ‘young men who could not commit crimes because they were deployed abroad during WWI.’ About 90% of British soldiers survived the war, were outside of the UK and not committing crimes in it during much of the the 1910’s, and then returned home afterwards.
@JohnSchilling..
Thanks re UK gun laws, that was useful. I now know the right way to do gun control..the Australian way, where you actually take guns out of circulation.
@TheAncientGreek:
I honestly don’t know that Australian gun control laws have changed much here.
Not very many people owned guns to begin with. They’re not much a part of our culture, with the exception of farmers with rifles for shooting kangaroos/rabbits, and y’know rural and rifles and all so not much in the way of shootings.
Mass shootings aren’t a very big thing here, so not having once since Port Moresby (arguably? I dunno what the stats actually are, and I know there’ve been some guns-involved situations that have ended with two people dead that weren’t drug dealers shooting other drug dealers.) isn’t a huge achievement.
My understanding is that statistical analysis finds very little difference in rates of murder before and afterwards. Don’t know about suicides.
Honestly I barely even know what our gun laws actually /are/. My broad understanding is that handguns are effectively banned, and rifles are effectively banned unless you’re a farmer, but I’m sure there’s a bit more depth than that.
@TheAncientGreek: The British took the guns out of circulation as well; the ones they could find at least. And in 1997, they could find essentially all of the handguns that were not already explicitly criminal.
It didn’t make any difference. It never does. Where there’s a demand for guns, the supply will be promptly refilled by people who are good at that sort of things. And where there’s a supply of guns in the hands of people who aren’t almost obsequiously law-abiding, they go into hiding when the police come looking. But, sure, if it makes you feel good you can disarm law-abiding people who don’t much want guns in the first place.
@John Schilling
Do you have a source on the whole thing about gun control not affecting gun ownership rates amongst criminals who want one?
It certainly does appear that criminals in the UK do not use guns nearly as often; if I read the figures right, only 5% of UK homicides involve a gun compared to ~75% in the US. I would be rather surprised to learn that there was persuasive evidence to believe this was entirely a cultural effect (independent of the law) causing murderers to not use guns, and it’d stay at around 5% if guns could legally be bought online, entirely unregulated, or at any store which chose to stock them, for long enough for this to become normal.
My impression was that the doubt was more over whether restrictions on casual gun and ammunition ownership reduced total homicides, or whether there was a very high substitution rate such that people just commit murders some other way when guns are unavailable, than whether it actually successfully reduced gun ownership/use.
One particular thing that I think is under appreciated is that the cost of a ban on casual ownership is much, much lower in countries which don’t have a cultural thing around gun ownership. In such countries, it’s not particularly more burdensome than controls on ownership of explosives.
Here in the UK, with air pistols/rifles and shooting clubs using some actual guns both legal for shooting things for fun, I’d support maintaining the current controls just because of the evidence of increased risk of suicide even if my very low prior on the idea that mostly low IQ, low conscientiousness, impulsive criminals have extremely high substitution rates for the removal of what is by far the best tool for the job was overcome by some source of clear, well replicated evidence showing that murder rates were unchanged.
But that would be enough to convince me that gun control would probably be a bad idea in the US, because in the US taking guns away from people will distress them much more and the suicide risk reduction wouldn’t be enough there on its own.
@JBeshir – “Do you have a source on the whole thing about gun control not affecting gun ownership rates amongst criminals who want one?”
He may have them; I do not. What I do have is a bit of anecdotal data that is a) moderately relevent and b) highly amusing. Your inquiry is just barely enough of an excuse to post it.
http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/179192-DIY-Shovel-AK-photo-tsunami-warning!
” Widespread abortion. . . have all been claimed as societal ills,”
How can you refute such a claim? The claim is, after all, that killing lots of children before birth IS a societal ill, and lots of children are killed before birth.
It would be like citing crime and statistics to prove that segregation was good, because those things improved when it was in force. It don’t matter. People who think segregation is evil did so because it produced segregation.
… because the difference in murder rates has existed unchanged since before firearms existed in their modern form, through to their mass-confiscation in other countries.
If I suggested deposing the Queen of England to give the UK warmer summers like those in the US, you would be right to point out that US summers have always been warmer, even before the American Revolution removed its king.
It would be a valuable clue that summer temperatures are not, in fact, primarily driven by specific legal changes. Much like homicide rates.
The claim being made by the media is that the US is one massive SWAT search and seizure operation away from a European homicide rate (and only vile reactionaries could oppose those noble home-invasions).
But dramatic changes in firearm policy and technology have never caused a noticeable change in the ratio between US and UK homicide rates.
Why would it suddenly start working now?
Is that really what most proponents of gun control want, though? A middle-ground solution would be stricter background checks and/or some kind of licensing system based on required training, and the elimination of loopholes which allow guns to be purchased without any background check whatsoever. It seems like even most gun owners support some of these measures.
Anyway, thank you for the links you provided; they are very good, although I haven’t had time to get through them completely yet. I don’t see where you got the 16.3/100k rate, though; I couldn’t find that number in either link.
That bit came from wikipedia of all places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
I should have put a disclaimer, sorry. “Data from UN report: may cite LaRouche or the writer’s own C:\ drive”.
Yeah, we keep hearing about “compromise”… right next to the phrase “like Australia and the UK”. I’ve never heard a single one mention the Czech Republic as a goal, which would be an actual compromise.
We strongly suspect it’s one of those deals where compromising means “they’ll just cut your hands off today, and pinkie promise they won’t come back for your head tomorrow”.
@Mitch: We passed most of those laws thirty or forty years ago. A few of them have done some good, a few of them have been repealed, a lot of them are uselessly cluttering up the law books but doing no great harm. This isn’t the first generation of Americans to try passing gun control laws as a solution to “gun violence”; what did you think the previous generations were doing if not trying the more sensible ideas first?
Specifically, when we passed the national mandatory background check law back in the 1980s, we included the sensible “…but if it’s a farmer in rural Montana selling a spare rifle to his neighbor with a coyote problem, we’ll leave it to the government of Montana whether they need do drive all the way to Billings to file paperwork” clause. Some mostly-rural states waive the background check requirement in such purely private, noncommercial sales. None of them has had any big problem with this. Why do we need to make a federal case out of it now, when we decided not to then and it hasn’t been a problem since?
Training has been required in a few places for gun ownership, in many places for concealed-carry and/or hunting licenses. The hunter safety training may have made a difference. The rest, not so much. Actual shooting accidents are extremely rare, and mostly involve deliberate recklessness. Nor are any great number of criminal homicides the result of any genuine uncertainty about when it is legal to shoot other people. Might as well expect to stop young adults from wrapping cars around telephone poles at 100+ mph by making them take a driver’s training class that reminds them the speed limit is 65.
Most proponents of gun control are opinion-poll “proponents”; they don’t much care except to say “Yeah, sounds good” when someone asks. They support your “middle-ground” solutions, in roughly the same way they support “reducing” foreign-aid spending to 13% of the federal budget. And their actual desires are completely irrelevant, because the only thing they are going to do about them is to have a warm fuzzy feeling come election day about the congressman who voted for what someone vaguely described as a middle-ground solution to gun control.
The proponents of gun control who actually write and lobby for proposed new gun control laws, yes, they are pretty much down to wanting to seize essentially all of the guns and offering up false advertising to cover the biggest steps they can take towards that end.
“But dramatic changes in firearm policy and technology have never caused a noticeable change in the ratio between US and UK homicide rates.”
That’s an argument against dramatic measures. Its not an argument against gradual measures.
That’s an argument against dramatic measures. Its not an argument against gradual measures.
If even drastic measures will be ineffective, it’s an argument that all measures are not worth even a trivial cost.
The statement is also false. The US murder rate is approximately equal to the UK murder rate. What’s different is how they are counted; the US tosses in any death without an apparent and obvious cause into the “homicide” category, whereas the UK doesn’t put anything in the “homicide” category without either a conviction or Crown Court approval (I believe there is a process by which certain coroners can designate the cause of death as homicide without such approval, but it is almost never used, and homicide figures for a given year rise over time in the UK as murderers are convicted and the death re-coded). The US also counts negligent and justified homicides, whereas the UK doesn’t.
Is homicide even a verdict in the UK? I thought the terms were lawful and unlawful killing.
And there have been cases where an inquest has found someone to have been unlawfully killed but nobody has been convicted of their murder or manslaughter. Sometimes this is due to differing standards of proof. For instance, Ian Tomlinson was struck with a baton by a policeman and died- the policeman was charged with manslaughter but acquitted. Unlawful killing was also the verdict in various friendly-fire deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the death of Princess Diana!
I’m also unaware of any case where a coroner’s verdict has been changed based on the outcome of a criminal prosecution.
Cause of death and conviction are distinct matters.
The US doesn’t require a coroner’s inquest (the closest thing we have is, I think, a grand jury trial), however; that additional step eliminates many determinations that would otherwise be made.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/crime-stats/crime-statistics/focus-on-violent-crime-and-sexual-offences–2012-13/rpt—chapter-2—homicide.html?format=print
“A number of international organisations, including rostarostat, have attempted to collate international homicide statistics. There are issues surrounding the comparability of international homicide data:
There are different definitions of homicide between countries, although definitions vary less than for some other types of crimes;
There are differing points in criminal justice systems at which homicides are recorded, for instance, when the offence is discovered or following further investigation or court outcome;
The figures are for completed homicides but, in some countries, the police register any death that cannot immediately be attributed to other causes as homicide.
Caution should therefore be taken in comparing homicide rates across countries.”
Another quote, relating directly to verdicts being changed:
“When the police initially record an offence as a homicide it remains classified as such unless the police or courts decide that a lesser offence, or no offence, took place. In all, 559 deaths were initially recorded as homicides by the police in 2012/13. This means that by 8 November 2013, 8 were no longer recorded as homicides, giving the total 551 offences currently recorded as homicides.”
(I have no idea if an additional inquest, jury or otherwise, was required to change the cause of death.)
Okay, good point, but how about the chart labeled “Gun ownership vs. gun deaths, by state”? I guess a problem might be that maybe it’s liberalism or wealth levels in a state that’s driving both gun deaths and gun ownership. So what you’d really want would be a study where they changed laws in the same state/country and we could observe the results. But then, see the section on Australia.
Update: Ok, now that I started reading Scott’s livejournal post, I now conclude there’s more to this. Vox, what have you done? Well, at least they got me interested. And I’m still under the impression that gun control reduces suicide.
There is something very weird about that chart. *WYOMING* is at the top??? *New York* is near the bottom? I don’t have the time to dig through all the sources. Gun-rights advocates can do that. But I’m extremely suspicious that it doesn’t mean what the people using it think it means. Maybe it’s distorted by *hunting* accidental deaths. In Wyoming, a relatively large part of the population goes hunting. And getting shot by mistake in a hunting accident is a significant hazard. Could be high in percentage of population terms. That doesn’t happen much in New York.
Hunting accidents (and accidents in general, such as while cleaning a gun) are a very small proportion of gun deaths.
A much larger proportion are suicides, and that’s probably what we’re seeing here. In states where more people have access to guns, more suicidal people will use guns rather than other methods. Also, there might be a higher suicide rate in rural areas where there are more guns- IIRC farmers tend to have high suicide rates for a whole range of reasons.
The thing I think tends to be a problem with a lot of these statistics is that they quote number of guns owned per capita not rate of gun ownership. Someone who owns 20 guns is not 20 times more dangerous than someone who owns one.
It includes suicides, which are about 2/3rds of gun deaths. Wyoming has by far the highest rate of suicides. Accidents (hunting and self induced/negligent discharge) are blessedly rare.
Easier access to guns=a higher share of suicides use guns. The question is how much does easy availability of guns change the suicide rate vs convert it into suicide by other means.
Usual problem of munging together farmers who own guns to shoot rabbits, homeowners who own guns to shoot criminals, criminals who own guns to shoot homeowners and other criminals, etc.
I tried correlating gun ownership to gun deaths using Wikipedia stats a little while ago and found no relation. I’ll have to look back to try to figure out why Vox’s plot is different.
The source for Vox was Mother Jones, I couldn’t get raw numbers out of MJ’s sources quickly.
I would, however, kind of expect that “gun deaths” would rise with the presence of guns, just as “car deaths” have risen with the number of cars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/
Gun deaths correlate largely because gun suicides correlate. There is a much weaker correlation between gun ownership and total suicide rate even. When you start looking at homicides in particular, there’s nothing there, either in total homicides or firearm homicides.
Rural states tend to have higher rates of depression and weaker gun laws, which is a pretty significant confounding variable.
Actually, the real, fundamental problem is that I don’t want to be beaten to death by a baseball bat, either. I don’t care about “gun deaths”, and no one should. If removing guns just changes the mix of weapons, who cares?
To be fair, it’s really hard to do a “mass baseballbating”. Maybe not impossible, but there’s no such thing as a semi-automatic “assault” bat (loaded with cork?). One has a much better chance of running away from a bat-wielder (I’m not saying that always works, but it’s a higher prospect of success). Drive-by battings are also not easy (again, something could probably be done along these lines, but I don’t think it would be simple to pull off).
People killed each other before guns, of course. But there’s a lot of fallacy from both sides around more difficult vs impossible.
The Rwandan genocide demonstrates that it is pretty easy to commit mass murder using machetes. On a smaller scale, there have been a number of nasty stabbing sprees in China in the last few years. A machete, btw, can be bought for $20-40 at your local Walmart without any legal restrictions whatsoever.
Closer to home, the second worst act of mass murder in the United States in the 20th century (the first worst was the Oklahamo City Bombing, obviously) wasn’t committed with a gun, but with a jug of gasoline and a match. Ironically, the perpetrator had attempted to acquire a gun beforehand and only resorted to arson after he failed to do so, so he might have killed less people if he had been able to carry out a mass shooting.
Also the Oklahoma Bombing used fertilizer, not guns.
And if we’re going to bring up large scale political terrorism…
Boxcutters.
One day in a science-fictional future, with 3D-printing, molecular fabrication, etc, it may be possible for an ordinary person to create briefcase-sized nuclear explosive, something one can put in a backpack and will destroy, say a entire building (bear with me for a moment for the conceit to get the story going).
In that world, in a discussion, someone will say “Gee, before portanukes, it was really hard for an individual to destroy a entire building.”
There will be an IMMEDIATE set of responses:
“Dresden firebombing! You don’t need nukes to annihilate even a whole city’s worth of buildings!”
“Demotion companies demolish buildings all the time, and they don’t use portanukes!”
“9/11! Some of the biggest buildings in the world were taken down by repurposing airplanes, not illegal portanukes. Maybe we should ban airplanes!”
There’s something really odd cognitively going on where “X makes Y much much easier than before” gets transformed into the strawman of “Y was never possible at all before” or “Y cannot be done without X”, and then repeatedly knocked-down like some sort of stress-relief therapy puppet.
@Seth
In that world, in a discussion, someone will say “Gee, before portanukes, it was really hard for an individual to destroy a entire building.”
If after portanukes are invented and become widely available, firebombings and C4 and airplanes continue to be used for the most effective criminal/terrorist building-destroying attacks, I think it’s fair to say that portanukes have not actually made building destroying attacks as much easier as that statement implies.
Do firearms really make mass murder much easier than before? I bring up the Happy Land fire again. Julio González killed 87 people, which is 10 more people than Breivik, more than 2.5 times as many as Seung-Hui Cho, more than 6 times as many as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and in fact seems to be greater than any civilian mass shooting on record. He did this with zero pre-planning using materials that were probably acquired for less than 10 dollars and had no legal restrictions at all. He also caused far more economic damage than any mass shooting ever did. It’s starting to look like fire is a much more effective mass murder tool than a gun.
Granted, González got lucky in that he happened to target a building that was especially poorly designed in terms of fire safety, to the point that the fire exit was locked by the club owner in order to prevent people from illegally entering. But surely in any major city it can’t be hard to find crowded buildings with poor fire safety systems. A quick Google search will turn up plenty of examples of accidental building fires that killed hundreds of people. Furthermore, González wasn’t arrested until the day after, so it’s possible that a sufficiently dedicated serial arsonist could keep skipping town and setting more fires for as long as he could stay ahead of the cops.
The one “disadvantage” that arson seems to have over a mass shooting is that the latter tends to get far more media attention and thus infamy for the perpetrator, as demonstrated by the fact that hardly anyone talks about the Happy Land fire anymore. This is likely at least in part because no one seriously advocates banning gasoline, so they don’t get the Toxoplasma of Rage effect.
@Lupis42 – but “the most effective” elides the distinction between “average” case and “best” case. That is,
Consider: “Widespread use of cars makes it much easier for an average person to travel dozens of miles a day, every day.”
Strawman-pummeling response: “But Olympic athletes have always been able to run dozens of miles, repeatedly! And the best way to travel hundreds of miles a day, every day, is via airplane!”
It’s almost a non-sequitur type of reply. People who would be happy to discuss military history and observe how a trained longbowman was more deadly than a musket-shooter, but the musket-shooters won out because they didn’t need to be very strong or to practice for many years, suddenly can’t even hear a similar argument in a civilian context.
If there was no weapons advantage to a gun over a baseball bat, why would someone object to being forbidden to have a gun for home defense, when they could just have a baseball bat?
@NN – “… a sufficiently dedicated serial arsonist …”. But the point is not a question along the lines of “What’s the most effective way to kill many people with some skill, planning, luck, and counting only the successes?” (e.g. some would-be bombers have instead blown themselves up). Driving a car into a group of people is obvious. But rather, if we’re doing some sort of utilitarian calculus, the effect on the broad median matters, not just the extremes.
Mass shootings aren’t really what’s bad about guns.
It’s hard for me to think of a more reliable way to murder a single specific person than with a gun. Especially if I don’t want to kill or injure a bunch of bystanders, which most murderers don’t.
And if you lower the cost of an activity then more people will do it; applies to murder as much as it does to anything else. I’d need *really strong* statistical evidence to shift me away from the belief that easy availability of guns increases the murder rate.
If there was no weapons advantage to a gun over a baseball bat, why would someone object to being forbidden to have a gun for home defense, when they could just have a baseball bat?
Because this is not some silly game like first-edition Dungeons and Dragons, where weapons can be absolutely ranked by a single parameter.
The advantage of handguns is versatility. There is almost no tactical situation where a handgun is the best weapon. In almost any tactical situation, the handgun is a good-enough weapon, or as close as we can get with something that can be inobtrusively carried in daily life. Eliminate that requirement, and the most-versatile, never-best-but-usually-good-enough weapon is the assault rifle. And who is it that needs the most versatile weapon?
The person who isn’t picking a fight. If I want to commit a crime, whether it is robbing you or murdering an entire school full of helpless children, I can always find a better weapon to use than any sort of gun. A knife and an incendiary device respectively, for the two cases listed. And if I’m limited in my choice of weapons, I can probably chose the circumstances to make best use of the weapons I do have.
If you want to stop me, you don’t get to chose the time or the place or the circumstances of the fight, or what weapon I will bring. If I want to kill you in your home, I might pretend to be a FedEx delivery guy and knife you when you open the door, or I might lob Molotov cocktails at your home from fifty feet away. Against the former, a baseball bat would be a pretty good defense. Against the latter, a hunting rifle. Since you don’t know, and I do, you’re going to want the weapon that’s always good enough. That’s a handgun.
Indeed,most criminals use guns because they are more concerned with defending themselves against other criminals than with overpowering defenseless victims. The bit where occasional amateur mass-murderers incorrectly generalize to, “and if I want to kill lots of defenseless people I should use a gun to shoot them!”, well, we might want to discourage part of that, but it isn’t the “use a gun to shoot them” part.
The whole gun-control debate is precisely about whether guns reduce the practical cost of murder, or of crime more generally. Saying without qualification that they do amounts to assuming your conclusion.
In particular, you’re baking in an assumption that the people you want to victimize are likely (very likely, if you factor in risk aversion) to be unarmed, since what makes violent crime easy is power relative to your victim rather than absolute power. You also need to assume either that you don’t care about getting caught or that you live in a social environment where making a mess and a lot of noise won’t contribute much to it, since guns, while effective weapons, are messy and loud ones.
The fact that the majority of murders in the US are performed with guns is extremely strong evidence that they are the best way to commit murder. (For someone with the mental/financial/temperamental limitations of the median murderer, of course – I have no doubt that most SSC commenters could devise better ways to kill people.)
It’s possible to have a situation where something is the best option for each individual under local conditions and yet systemically suboptimal. Happens all the time, actually.
(I’d cite Facebook as an example, but that might just be compounding an already controversial topic.)
@Nornagest I cannot see a reasonable mechanism by which it would apply in this situation. Could you spell it out? In the Facebook case you have network effects but I don’t see anything analogous.
Already described it. But to spell it out a little more:
– You want to kill or rob someone for $REASONS. You don’t want to be hurt or killed doing it, and you don’t want to get caught. The weightings of these preferences differ depending on who you are, but generally you’ll find all of them in someone that’s contemplating robbery or murder.
– It follows that you want to arm yourself with the most lethal (if you’re more interested in “kill”) or scariest (if you’re more interested in “rob”) weapons available that won’t get you caught.
– But that’s about absolute lethality (or scariness), and your chances of success instead depend on lethality (or scariness) relative to your victim (plus a bunch of other stuff that’s mostly irrelevant to choice of weapons). That becomes a lot harder to estimate when there are lethal, easily concealable weapons in circulation that can easily be trained to effectiveness and don’t depend much on brawn.
– This makes your job harder than it would be if the best weapons out there were, say, knives, even though you’d prefer a gun to a knife under present conditions. Because of risk aversion, this is still true if the average victim is unlikely to be armed — though of course there’s a point of diminishing returns.
“he fact that the majority of murders in the US are performed with guns is extremely strong evidence that they are the best way to commit murder.”
The fact that soldiers are armed with guns is extremely strong evidence that guns enable effective killing.
“The Rwandan genocide demonstrates that it is pretty easy to commit mass murder using machete”
But you don’t really think that machetes are just as lethal/effective/dangerous as guns, because you would object if the soldiers of your nation had their guns taken away and replaced with machetes.
etc, etc.
“Also the Oklahoma Bombing used fertilizer, not guns.”
And so it would make no difference, apart form a considerable monetary saving, to arm the GI with fertilizer. etc, etc, etc, etc..
@Seth
Widespread use of cars makes it much easier for an average person to travel dozens of miles a day, every day.
Widespread use of cars has made the dozen miles from Lexington to Boston substantially more difficult to travel at 8AM. It really just depends on which dozen miles you need to travel, and when.
It might help if you made a clear, non-metaphorical statement of the principle you’re trying to defend. I think some of the problem is that I’m working with a model of what you’re trying to state that’s been reverse engineered from analogies. I may be mapping flaws in the analogies to nuances in the core idea, or we may have a factual disagreement, but I’m not actuall sure.
It’s almost a non-sequitur type of reply. People who would be happy to discuss military history and observe how a trained longbowman was more deadly than a musket-shooter, but the musket-shooters won out because they didn’t need to be very strong or to practice for many years, suddenly can’t even hear a similar argument in a civilian context.
On the contrary – that’s exactly the argument that we’re making. The mass shooter is able to be much more deadly by using a weapon that requires some planning and practice. The gun is less effective, but easier – therefore, to the extent one is optimising for the mass shooter case, it is better that they use guns than that they be discover how achievable the other, more effective options are for them.
This is what I mean about the problem with the analogy.
If there was no weapons advantage to a gun over a baseball bat, why would someone object to being forbidden to have a gun for home defense, when they could just have a baseball bat?
One of the things I’ve discovered is that carrying around a saber, longsword, or crossbow for self defence is not preferred by the various law enforcement agencies, and is often regarded much more harshly than carrying around a handgun. Usually, gun control is accompanied or preceded by weapons control more generally. John Schilling has elaborated at some length on the core of my objection, which is that other weapons are advantageous for *agressors* who get to select the time, place, and manner of an assault, prepare for it appropriately, and arrange the circumstances to overcome their physical limitations, if they have them. Guns are advantageous for *defenders*, who will be lacking those advantages.
@TheAncientGeek
And so it would make no difference, apart form a considerable monetary saving, to arm the GI with fertilizer. etc, etc, etc, etc..
The primary weapons of the modern military are somewhat fancier fertilizer bombs. High explosive warheads, with a variety of fancy delivery systems. WWI was able to persist for way longer than it otherwise would have because Germany, in the process of inventing a way to mass produce fertilizer, had also invented a way to mass produce high explosives that did not require them to import anything from overseas.
@TheAncientGreek
“But you don’t really think that machetes are just as lethal/effective/dangerous as guns, because you would object if the soldiers of your nation had their guns taken away and replaced with machetes.”
The point you are missing is that effectiveness is relative to what your opponent is carrying. If all your opponent has is their fists, and your objective is to rob them, a gun or a machete will do pretty much equally well. If you want to rob them and they have a baseball bat, a gun will work well, a machete not so well. If they have a gun, and they also have the law on their side – well, nothing beats a gun, so this is the only scenario where they have the advantage rather than you.
@Lupis42 – “It really just depends on which dozen miles you need to travel, and when“. This is what I’m talking about with “average case”. That you can find a specific set and a specific time which is made worse, does not refute that overall, cars make travel much easier, in around the dozen-mile range. Which isn’t invalidated by not applying to the 100-feet range or having much better options for the 1000-mile range, or that trade-offs may get unclear in the 1-mile range. Similarly, guns make killing much easier, in a kind of average-case unskilled-individual situation, to around the 10-victims range. This isn’t invalidated by there being many non-gun 1-victim cases, or that a gun wouldn’t be the preferred option for an individual trying for 1000-victims, or that a highly skilled and motivated individual might have a better mass killing strategy.
Now, I am not actually taking a stand here on the public policy results of this lethality-multiplication property. The utilitarian calculus itself is a long discussion, fraught with irreconcilable values differences. But there is something psychologically notable going on when the “average-case” aspect is immediately met with inapplicable “extreme-case” strawmanning.
But there is something psychologically notable going on when the “average-casse” aspect is immediately met with inapplicable “extreme-case” strawmanning.
I wish it were notable, rather than quite common. Between the motte (trivial thus boring) and the outer fringes of the bailey (absurdum) there really is ground for reasonable discussion.
@Nornagest that is an argument that guns may reduce the number of robberies (and perhaps other violent crimes), not that it reduces the number of deaths. The chance of death during robbery and the like goes way up in the presence of a gun – the robber doesn’t want to kill you, after all, and it’s rare to accidentally kill someone in the absence of a gun. (Certainly I would rather be robbed ten times by someone unarmed than once with a gun – either way I’m just handing over the money but there’s way less chance of a misunderstanding turning fatal.)
Eyeballing some statistics on the causes of murder, it looks like maybe a tenth of murders would really be affected by the self-defense aspects of guns? (To be fair the big “unknown” category should give us pause.)
The self-defense logic doesn’t apply very well to most murders.
In crimes of passion, I would expect it to be fairly uncontroversial (?) that the presence of guns increases the chance of somebody dying – a few moments of blind rage plus a gun leads to a death. Take away the gun and you’ve likely just inflicted some bruises.
Also there is murder of a family member or acquaintance. Obviously many of these are crimes of passion, but of the premediated subset, you can attack them when they are not armed or at least shoot them first. And if you’re not John Schilling you’re much more likely to pull it off with a gun than with whatever alternative you can scrape up with your limited human capital (if someone has enough self-control to come up with a good plan and train the relevant skills they have enough self-control to not be a murderer in the first place.)
Maybe one can argue that in the absence of guns, robbery/rape/etc rates would be enormously higher and make up for the lower death rates in the other categories; but I’d find that pretty implausible and very likely ruled out by looking at frequency ratios of different crimes in countries without guns.
(And of course there are suicides)
The fact that the majority of murders in the US are performed with guns is extremely strong evidence that they are the best way to commit murder.
I don’t think you actually have that statistic; what you have is criminal homicides. Most of these are opportunistic and without explicit lethal intent, often criminal-on-criminal, and committed with whatever weapon is at hand for some other purpose (e.g. defense against the other criminals a criminal frequently encounters). You might as well argue that the frequency with which hex nuts and bolts are turned with crescent wrenches proves that the crescent wrench is the best tool for that job.
I am not aware of anyone compiling statistics on weapons used by people convicted specifically of murder – and particularly first-degree murder, which is the only case in which a killer would plausibly select a weapon specifically for killing.
And in any event, the median American would-be murderer A: fails to kill his intended victim and B: gets caught and convicted. This serves as compelling evidence that American murderers are deeply stupid and ought not be considered as a source of expert opinion on how to get away with murder.
As for soldiers using guns to kill people: pretty much the entire United States Army agrees that the least-lethal weapon in their inventory is the pistol and the second-least-lethal the assault rifle. These weapons are generally issued to give soldiers some minimal means of self-defense as they flush out targets for the real guns that do most of the actual killing.
@John Schilling I’m assuming you composed that post before seeing my most recent one?
You are right that I’ve been forgetting the distinction between murder and criminal homicide; my apologies. But I’m not sure why you think it is an important point. Indeed, it seems like you’re making the case that the presence of guns increases the lethality of disputes. Which is a standard argument for gun restrictions?
It would seem to me that the number of deaths prevented by a hypothetical policy would the the most important thing, and whether those deaths come out of the bucket labeled “first degree murder” vs some other bucket is relatively unimportant.
@Lupus42
“The primary weapons of the modern military are somewhat fancier fertilizer bombs. High explosive warheads, with a variety of fancy delivery systems. ”
That’s a nit pick with no relevance to my comment. Why not say that a gun is a somewhat fancier lump of iron ore?
“The point you are missing is that effectiveness is relative to what your opponent is carrying. If all your opponent has is their fists, and your objective is to rob them, a gun or a machete will do pretty much equally well. If you want to rob them and they have a baseball bat, a gun will work well, a machete not so well. If they have a gun, and they also have the law on their side – well, nothing beats a gun, so this is the only scenario where they have the advantage rather than you.”
The point you are missing is that the argument is against a claim,the claim that variations in the availability of firearms would have no effect on the murder rate. You have conceded that point, and switched to another argument, an argument that if it’s a given that firearms are widespread, then honest citizens have a need for them. Yes, if you can’t stop other people defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma it is rational to defect. It is also rational to co-operate if you can. Co-operation means that it is no longer a given that everyone else is heavily armed.
@Seth, @houseboatonstyx
I don’t think it’s inexplicable or strawmanning. I’m attacking a blanket sentiment, because nowhere in the thread is there an explicit statement for me to agree with, disagree with, or even challenge directly. I agree that guns make some things easier, but I don’t think it is as broad or as applicable to the subject of mass shootings as your analogies suggest.
That’s why I asked for an explicit statement: what are you arguing guns make easier?
@TheAncientGeek
That’s a nit pick with no relevance to my comment. Why not say that a gun is a somewhat fancier lump of iron ore?
It’s not a nit pick. You suggested that we would object to the military being obliged to use fertilizer bombs instead of guns, but they do. Most of the Allied deaths in WWI were caused by German explosives made using the Haber-Bosch process. The military’s primary weapons still have much more in common with fertilizer bombs than with guns.
The military would be much more screwed if you replaced explosives with firearms than vice versa.
@Lupus42
The point remains that the effectiveness of killers is dependent on the weapons available to them.
@TheAncientGeek
The effectiveness of killers depends primarily on motivation and regard for consequences, and secondarily on intelligence.
At a tertiary level, it depends on access to weapons which are more effective than those available to the intended victims.
The absolute effectiveness of those weapons is much less important than the relative effectiveness – i.e. an attacker with a spear is more of a threat to an unarmed defender than an attacker with an rifle is to to a defender who has their own rifle.
…it seems like you’re making the case that the presence of guns increases the lethality of disputes.
Per the quantitative analysis by Kleck referenced earlier, it is unclear whether the presence of guns increases the lethality of disputes, but any such effect is a small one.
The case I am making, again supported by Kleck, is that the presence of guns reduces the lethality to innocent victims of disputes. At the expense of increased lethality to the aggressor if he insists on continuing the dispute.
Armed and murderous aggressor vs. unarmed victim generally means dead victim. Less than murderous aggressor, generally means severely injured victim. Regardless of the type of weapon the aggressor has, regardless of whether the aggression is premeditated or opportunistic. The man who, while carrying a knife, suddenly realizes a mortal hatred towards you, isn’t going to say to himself “But, golly, Mr. Chalid is twenty feet away!; I guess I’m going to have to go home disappointed.”
Armed aggressor vs. victim with specialized weapon, also usually results in a dead or severely injured victim. If you’re certain your attacker will use a knife, you can probably trump him with a baseball bat (if the police won’t arrest you for carrying a baseball bat). But he might instead have a bunch of lithic allies, or a hunting rifle on the gun rack of his pickup truck, or just the pickup truck.
Armed attacker vs. victim with general-purpose weapon, can still result in a dead victim. Or a dead attacker. Mostly, though, it results in the attacker deciding that this dispute isn’t worth getting killed over and going home.
It would seem to me that the number of deaths prevented by a hypothetical policy would the most important thing,
If that’s really the important thing, you’ll often find it possible to save the lives of two or three aggressive violent criminals by turning a blind eye to their killing one innocent victim (and severely wounding many others, plus some rapes, etc, etc). And gun control, by the numbers, is mostly about saving the lives of aggressive violent criminals at the expense of their victims.
So, I disagree with your premise. Preventing the deaths of innocent victims of crime is much more important than preventing the deaths of aggressive violent criminals. Consequentially, deontologically, and virtually.
@Lupus
“The absolute effectiveness of those weapons is much less important than the relative effectiveness – i.e. an attacker with a spear is more of a threat to an unarmed defender than an attacker with an rifle is to to a defender who has their own rifle.”
Important for what? The quantity and absolute effectiveness of the weapons generally available to a population is precisely what is relevant to the baseline level of threat.
You are trying to answer the question “how do I defend myself, given that I can’t do anything about overall levels of violence and armament in society?”. But the political question is about the overall level, so it is not a given politically.
I strongly disagree.
I lived in Oakland for five years during one of its most violent periods. Many of my friends got robbed during that time, with weapons and without, so I think I have a pretty good idea of how a robbery goes. (No personal experience, though. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe I don’t look like a soft target.)
Judging from my friends’ experience, the modal armed robbery goes something like this: you’re walking along the street, and you come upon two guys walking in the other direction. One of them has a gun, which he sticks in your face while demanding your money and your phone. You give it to them and they run away.
The modal strongarm robbery goes something like this: you’re walking along the street when four or five guys (or girls, in one case, but I imagine that’s rare; the cops thought it was a gang initiation, and the victim there was also a woman) emerge from hiding to cover your escape routes. They don’t bother demanding anything, though there might be some intimidating preamble. The bravest one takes a swing at you, you swing back if you’re the type, and then the rest of them get into it. Almost no one can win a five-on-one fistfight regardless of fitness or training, so this is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Once you stop moving much they go through your pockets and take anything that looks interesting.
We could speculate all day about why people seem more likely to escalate directly to violence without weapons, but that’s what my anecdata points to (though I have no formal statistics). And getting beat up is actually really dangerous. I’d much rather be held at gunpoint.
What the figures say is:
A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense
Important for what?
Important for figuring out how many people are going to get killed, if that’s what you care about.
If everyone has knives, and every year X% of the population decides to go out and murder someone, approximately X% of the population is going to die every year. If everybody has guns, or death rays, or armed drones, and every year X% of the population decides to go out and murder someone, approximately X% of the population is going to die. No difference. It’s a little bit more complicated if we consider not-explicitly-murderous attacks (and defenses), but empirically it doesn’t much change the end results.
And every year, roughly 50% of the would-be murderers are going do be among the dead, which is going to strongly affect the value of “X”. Just how badly does the average would-be murderer want to murder someone?
But if only some people have effective weapons, and everybody else has ineffective or effective-only-in-limited-circumstances weapons, now there is a class of people that can be safely attacked, and the number of wannabe murderers who decide to become actual murderers is going to increase.
Asymmetry in armaments tends to shift the balance of power in favor of whoever is most highly motivated to acquire the best armaments, and as these are disproportionately violent aggressors that means more dead bodies.
If you want fewer dead bodies, you want symmetry of armaments. If you imagine you can impose symmetry at the level of “nobody has guns (or knives or death rays or whatever)”, that’s not going to work.
“And gun control, by the numbers, is mostly about saving the lives of aggressive violent criminals at the expense of their victims.”
The thing about an altercation is that both parties think the other is the nasty aggressor.
@TheAncientGeek
“The point you are missing is that the argument is against a claim,the claim that variations in the availability of firearms would have no effect on the murder rate. You have conceded that point, and switched to another argument, an argument that if it’s a given that firearms are widespread, then honest citizens have a need for them. Yes, if you can’t stop other people defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma it is rational to defect. It is also rational to co-operate if you can. Co-operation means that it is no longer a given that everyone else is heavily armed.”
My argument doesn’t rely on firearms being widespread. What I am saying is that, as long as there is some weapon that criminals can carry to victimize people that is more powerful than what law-abiding citizens can carry to protect themselves, the criminals have the upper hand. The part I suppose I didn’t make explicit is that, as you go down to weaker weapons, they become more and more widespread. Imagine you wanted to ban knives. How would you go about this? Not only are knives useful for a huge number of things, it’s very easy to make a knife, or knife-like weapon, out of almost anything. I expect you would have to ban all rigid materials, or something.
If you were to allow citizens to carry, say, baseball bats, and banned guns, that would be interesting. What I expect would happen is an enormous expansion in the black market for guns, as criminals are no longer able to use knives to make themselves more powerful than would-be victims.
So in other words, there is no question of co-operation when all that is necessary is relative power, and when it is a guarantee that the other person will be able to get that relative power if they want to. Even if you managed to magic away all weapons, now it comes down to physical strength and numbers. Are you going to be able to ban being strong – outlaw anyone having more physical strength than the weakest little old lady? Ban people gathering in groups of two or more?
The argument for going the other direction – up not down – is that, at least when we’re talking about confrontations between small numbers of individuals, power quickly plateaus. Once citizens have guns, there is nothing criminals can get that will put them at an advantage. At this point it is the honest citizens who have the advantage, because they are within the law and the criminals aren’t. A criminal has to run away after shooting and will have a police investigation after them; an honest citizen doesn’t and won’t.
What the figures say is:
A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense
Do you really want to go there? Because I’m pretty sure I can cite from memory the title and author of the source of that “figure”, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
First off, the version you state is blatantly false, and I suspect the original was carefully written so that the careless would mis-cite it in a false, misleading, and inflammatory manner. The less blatantly false version would end with, “than to be used to kill an attacker in self-defense”.
A critically important distinction, because almost everyone who uses a firearm in self-defense stops shooting (or, more likely, never even has to start shooting) as soon as the attack stops. Better than ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this happens before the attacker has been actually killed.
What the less-blatantly-lying version really means is,
A: If you decide to commit suicide, for-real suicide not pay-attention-to-me fake suicide, and you have a gun in the house, you will probably shoot yourself. If you decide to commit not-fake for-real suicide and you don’t have a gun in the house, you will just as probably kill yourself using one of the other standard methods of for-real suicide that are about as easy and lethal as a gun but leave you in a different statistical bin.
B: If you are not suicidal, you are either one of the small fraction of Americans who are violent criminals or associates of violent criminals, or you are not.
B1: In the former case, you are highly likely to wind up using any guns you have available in a shootout with other criminals – which if fatal will count as a “domestic homicide” because you almost certainly are at least an acquaintance of the criminal you shoot (or are shot by) and that’s the standard used in this study.
B2: In the latter case, there is a small chance that you will use any gun you have access to, to defend yourself against an attack by a violent criminal. This defense will almost certainly result in the criminal running away without anyone getting shot, much less killed.
There are other defects and deceptions in this study, but the bottom line is, if you are not seriously suicidal or a violent criminal, any firearm you own is far more likely to be used in legitimate self-defense than in a criminal or accidental homicide. Every credible study I know of, even the ones performed by and for gun-control advocates, points to this conclusion. Some of them just hide it really well.
TheAncientGeek: A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense[.]
This no doubt is a cite from an old Arthur Kellerman study, which apparently used a non-representative sample, counted only burglar / rapist / innocent person bodies and did not also factor in injuries prevented, medical costs saved, and property protected, and counted 6 incidents where the gun wasn’t actually kept in the home for every 1 where it was.
Kellermann has had a history of studies using methods of similar slack, with a consistent intention of only producing findings in support of gun control; he’s one of the main reasons the NRA opposes letting the CDC conduct further research in that topic.
[Edit: John beat me to it. But this should strengthen the point that this study is well-known and well-debunked.]
@TheAncientGeek:
Important for what? The quantity and absolute effectiveness of the weapons generally available to a population is precisely what is relevant to the baseline level of threat.
No, it isn’t. The baseline level of threat is determined by the cost/benefit tradeoff of attackers, which determines how motivated the marginal person is likely to be to defect. Probability of being hurt/killed while attempting an attack, liklihood of success, and liklihood of punishment afterwards are all significant here. The absolute effectiveness of weapons is not. Muggings do not get easier when we go from crossbows to guns, or guns to suitcase nukes. They get easier if the target is more likely to be unable to retaliate, the judicial system is more likely to retaliate, and the target is more valuable.
You are trying to answer the question “how do I defend myself, given that I can’t do anything about overall levels of violence and armament in society?”.
No, I’m saying that the answer to “can I defend myself, given the overall level of violence in society” has an effect on the overall level of violence in society.
But the political question is about the overall level, so it is not a given politically.
I didn’t say it was. I said that gun control is likely to have little effect on it, but that effect will likely be to increase it, because the ability of people to defend themselves at any rate results in a lower rate than otherwise.
I agree that the political question is whether the overall level can be decreased. I am disputing your model for how that happens.
“The thing about an altercation is that both parties think the other is the nasty aggressor.”
And sometimes it is blatantly obvious that one of them is deluded or lying.
A career criminal arguing that in order for felony murder to bring the death penalty, the victim has to be compliant; killing a resisting victim should not bring it about. How many people read that and think anything but, “Bet you he thinks he would kill only if faced with resistance”?
@ lupis42
I’m attacking a blanket sentiment, because nowhere in the thread is there an explicit statement for me to agree with, disagree with, or even challenge directly.
Speaking just of the sort of shootings that became famous in the Batman movie theatre, the Amish school, Newtown, and Columbine (BANCs), I think these are worth preventing no matter how small a percentage of XYZ the victims add up to. The damage is not just to those particular families. BANCs grieve millions and have resulted in extreme security measures in schools all over the country. BANCs work like terrorism: it’s not the direct damage, it’s the terror.
(Regardless of the shooters’ motives.)
That’s a solid analogy, but I see it as an argument against, not for. When we nationally lose our heads over something, that’s a great time not to pass massive poorly-thought-out social measures with unforeseeable side effects, however tempted we may be to do so.
I’m not a big fan of the measures that’ve been enacted to protect us from the spectre of terrorism, either. Well, most of ’em, anyway. Reinforcing cabin doors on airliners seemed reasonable and effective.
Speaking just of the sort of shootings that became famous in the Batman movie theatre, the Amish school, Newtown, and Columbine (BANCs), I think these are worth preventing no matter how small a percentage of XYZ the victims add up to. The damage is not just to those particular families. BANCs grieve millions and have resulted in extreme security measures in schools all over the country. BANCs work like terrorism: it’s not the direct damage, it’s the terror.
(Regardless of the shooters’ motives.)
I agree with the sentiment, but the most effective policy for doing so is explicitly prohibited by the constitution, and attempting to bypass or revise it would be both politcally unpopular and a open a dangerous slippery slope, legally and culturally.
It doesn’t, however, have anything to do with the Second Amendment.
The best, most powerful tool for preventing these attacks is to keep the perpetrators anonymous, to avoid discussion of the details afterwards, and to focus attention exclusively on the victims and their suffering.
The Werther effect is under-studied, but the evidence for copycat suicides is pretty strong on the face of it, and most of these attacks have strong suicidal quality to them. Even more then normal suicides, however, these attacks are the most effective vehicle in existence for an alienated, depressed, or angry person to ensure that everyone in the country will know, and care about, their deaths. The Newton killer’s name is as widely recognized as any of the last few presidents, and his writings have probably been discussed on more major news shows than Harry Potter. Elon Musk couldn’t get as much airtime with a proposal to build the fastest high-speed rail network ever conceived.
That also plays into the other thing you mentioned, the terror and the widespread impact. Of the ten or twenty people who have had the most effect on what Americans talk about, think about, and worry about in the last decade, most have been adults who have spent most of their lives working towards something, and are in the top .1% in terms of wealth or achievement – even Osama Bin Laden had to spend years working towards goals. The others were angry young men who shot up schools, and one theater.
Are these attacks worth trying to prevent? Absolutely. Are we willing to do what is necessary to prevent them? I doubt it, and I’m not sure I blame us.
Is there a strong First Amendment prohibition? I’m actually not sure.
There’s plenty of precedent for narrow, targeted restrictions on freedom of speech or the press when the speech or press in question endangers personal security. Shouting “fire” in a theatre is the 9th-grade civics example.
“Don’t release the names of mass shooters” is about as narrow and targeted as it gets. The endangerment isn’t as direct as a constitutional lawyer would probably like, but I still think a case could be made.
@Lupis42 – what are you arguing guns make easier? – Roughly, in an average-case unskilled-individual situation, the ability to kill other people in the looking-for-trouble-way (not, e.g., professional terror operation) goes from “1, maybe, with substantial difficulty”, to “several, very easily”. This is different from many other small-scale individual weapons, hence my original remark about lack of “mass baseballbatings”. Guns scale-up in a combination of range and area-effect lethality, in a way most other common personal weapons do not (at least without a huge amount of skill – “mass arrowing”?). This has public-policy implications, no matter what one thinks the proper result should be.
@Nornagest
A case could be made, but I think it would have to go beyond just names – don’t reveal the names, methodologies, or motivations of mass shooters – which I would give 50/50 odds of surviving court review.
@Seth
I’m not sure what the “looking for trouble way” entails – do you mean like a mob hit? Going out and picking fights, because hey, you’ve got a weapon?
In terms of general effectiveness, I think you have the magnitude of the difference far too high. I would say that guns take the unskilled person’s capacity for lethal violence against others from “several, with a lot of practice” to “several, with a little practice”. They move the needle farther for people who have physical handicaps, or aren’t very agressive by nature, but those people are much more prone to be found by trouble than to go looking for it.
In terms of how effective guns are vs other historical weapons, I think there’s a lot of nuance here that isn’t easy to capture – in much the same way that there’s a lot of nuance to the “halberd vs longsword vs crossbow” type of debates that I belive you mentioned above. I’ll try to expand on it in the morning, as I have to run and do some offline things.
I assume that you don’t define “a jug of gasoline” as a personal weapon? Because Happy Land, which was carried out by a very unskilled and unprepared individual, wasn’t some kind of anomaly. In 2003, 192 people died in a South Korean subway fire that started when a 56 year old man attempted to immolate himself, got in a fight with other passengers, and accidentally set a train on fire. In 2013, 46 people died in a bus fire in China that started when a 59 year old man set himself on fire. I could go on for a while. Wikipedia has a pretty long list of people who killed dozens or hundreds of others with fire or explosives, often without even trying. Even less deadly arsons frequently have death tolls similar to the average mass shooting, such as this apartment fire in France a little over a month ago that killed 8 people.
Obviously, if you want to kill specific people and especially if you don’t want to cause a lot of collateral damage, a gun is clearly superior to a jug of gasoline or a fertilizer bomb. But you’re the one who brought up “mass baseballbattings.”
The other thing to consider is that for whatever reason arsons rarely generate the kind of media circus that mass shootings do, (as demonstrated by the fact that probably none of you have heard of any of the events mentioned above before) so they don’t get the BANC effect that houseboatonstyx brought up. That also makes them less attractive to spree killers who are motivated by a desire for infamy. But doesn’t that just underscore that the problem here isn’t with guns?
EDIT: I managed to find an article with statistics on this kind of thing, and it claims that in the US during the 20th century, mass murders with guns killed an average of about 5 people per incident, whereas mass murders with fire killed an average of about 7 people and mass murders with explosives killed an average of about 21 people.
@Seth – “Roughly, in an average-case unskilled-individual situation, the ability to kill other people in the looking-for-trouble-way (not, e.g., professional terror operation) goes from “1, maybe, with substantial difficulty”, to “several, very easily”.”
Guns are more lethal than other weapons, but I think you (and others in this thread) dramaticly overestimate the degree of that increased lethality. Guns are loud, have limited ammo, deal damage in a straight line out the muzzle, and are suprisingly easy to miss with at anything but contact range.
“This is different from many other small-scale individual weapons, hence my original remark about lack of “mass baseballbatings”.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_amok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanping_school_massacre
…and there are a lot more where those came from.
Spree-killing seems likely to be a human universal. Specifics of weapon choice, target choice, tactics and so on are cultural artifact. Firarms may offer a marginal increase in the lethality of these incidents, but only a marginal one. They also offer the absolute best defense against such attacks.
“Guns scale-up in a combination of range and area-effect lethality, in a way most other common personal weapons do not (at least without a huge amount of skill – “mass arrowing”?). This has public-policy implications, no matter what one thinks the proper result should be.”
Guns are not area-effect lethal, and their increased range is of only marginal utility for spree-killing purposes (if you are closer than 21 feet to the killer, your odds in rushing him seem roughly comparable to if he had a knife. If you are further than 21 feet, your odds of being able to escape are not bad at all). Gasoline *is* an area-effect weapon, and you can magnify its effects dramaticly with a bit of chain and a padlock. If you are worried about spree-killing, gun control is not a long-term solution. You need to minimize the spree-killing meme and stop spree killers as quickly as possible. Gun control is irrelevent to the first and actively harmful to the second.
Spree Killing is actually a pretty complicated phenonemon. By far, the biggest effect on its lethality is the meme the killer is operating off vs the memes the victims are operating off, not the weapon they use.
@TheAncientGreek – “The thing about an altercation is that both parties think the other is the nasty aggressor.”
Guns are pretty good about solving this problem. Not perfect, but pretty good. People are a lot less enthusiastic about getting into a gunfight than a fistfight, which is why altercations are frequently de-escalated without firing a shot.
“A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense.”
Oh hey, it’s that study that was so bad it helped get the CDC banned from studying gun violence at all! As with the last time we discussed this topic, I will reply with the detailed rebuttal:
http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html#fn*
…Specifically section 15, but I recommend reading it in its entirety. You are quoting studies from the 60s, 70s and 80s, from the field of firearms epidimiology. Not only have those specific studies been debunked and refuted, the *entire field* was found to be either mistaken or fradulent to the point of uselessness.
There is no evidence for your position. If there were, there would likewise be evidence for banning abortion or gay sex. But there isn’t. Crime is down. Violence is down. Widespread abortion, homosexuality, and firearms ownership have all been claimed as societal ills, and a near half-century of evidence shows conclusively that those claims were false. It’s time to accept that and move on.
“To be fair, it’s really hard to do a “mass baseballbating”.”
Then it would be trivial to plot “gun ownership vs. violent deaths,” because all of the latter would go down.
Nah, mass murders are pretty rare compared to plain old murders. Rare enough that if we magicked away all of the former, it’d barely be detectable in the latter.
Now, I don’t particularly care how the bodies are clumped as long as the overall body count goes down (as it’s been doing), so I don’t see this as a strong argument for gun control anyway. But upthread a bit we got someone who was arguing for controls targeted specifically at mass killings, so it’s not unheard of.
@Mary – “How can you refute such a claim? The claim is, after all, that killing lots of children before birth IS a societal ill, and lots of children are killed before birth.”
You missed the thread, so I’m replying here rather than derailing that one.
The claims were that homosexuality, gay sex, and gun ownership weren’t just bad in and of themselves, but did harm to the social fabric in other, measurable ways. In all three cases, the argument was that crime would go up, violence would go up, and that society generally would slide toward open barbarism. Robert Bork’s “Slouching towards Gamorrah” in 1996 was a typical example of the broader claims for the first two, and any document from Handgun Control Incorporated or the Violence Policy Institute from the same era will demonstrate the latter.
Those claims appear to have been wrong. We do not appear to be declining the way they predicted. It is of course still possible to claim that abortion, gay sex, or firearms ownership are moral evils in and of themselves, but that is not an effective argument for legislative action.
“People who think segregation is evil did so because it produced segregation.”
Segregation is about restricting people’s choices. Gun ownership, gay sex and abortion are about allowing them.
“The US has had a murder rate several times higher than the UK since at least the late 1700s, and firearms policy seems to have nothing to do with it.”
We also have terrible first-world infant mortality rates.
Or do we?
For infant mortality, we are fairly unique in counting stillborn infants. Some countries, like France, don’t count infant deaths in the first few months. (What are they even counting?)
For homicide, we are fairly unique in counting homicides, pretty much period.
The 2014 homicide rate in the UK will rise over the next two years, as convictions come in for homicides – because the UK usually doesn’t code the cause of death as homicide until a conviction is arrived at. There are some cases when they do, but it takes a near-equivalent of a Grand Jury trial to declare a death to be a homicide. If somebody is convicted, the death is recoded to homicide after the fact. (I presume this is to increase their apparent conviction rate of homicide, but it could just be a different way of counting things.)
The US, by comparison, codes basically -any- suspicious death as homicide. We also count justified homicide as homicide, whereas in the UK, justified homicide isn’t counted as homicide, instead counting as involuntary manslaughter. Negligent homicide in the US is frequently coded as voluntary manslaughter in the UK.
The WHO’s attempt at using normalized definitions suggests that the UK has a higher per-capita murder rate than the US; my own attempt, involving several hours of digging through data, suggested a very similar rate, with the UK slightly lower than the US. Given the issues I’ve encountered with the WHO’s methodologies in the past (ever count the number of times the US is penalized on our healthcare score for not having a national health database?), I’m inclined to trust my own calculations, and say that the UK is probably pretty similar to the US.
TLDR? The UK probably doesn’t have a lower murder rate than the US. The same is true of many other countries.
Do you have a link to this normalized WHO number?
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/profiles/United-States/Crime/All-stats
and
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/profiles/United-Kingdom/Crime/All-stats
Notice the fairly large difference between the murder rates calculated other ways, and the WHO values given (see Murders > WHO ). The definition given in the WHO Rankings (click on the WHO link in the All-stats page) looks incorrect to my eye, given that it’s the same for multiple other murder categories.
Thanks, but I think it is in error. It claims to be from the WHO, but the numbers in all the reports I find on who.int are the usual numbers, where Britain is much like France not America. If these numbers really came from a WHO report, the original source would give much better documentation of the methodology.
Also, I think it’s easy to make mistakes by comparing just two countries, like America and Britain. I would find it a lot more plausible if you claimed that all of Europe had the same weird definition than if you claimed that Britain was the only country hiding its homicides and the only country in Europe to have a murder rate comparable to America. In fact, you did claim that, but your source does not match your claim. It puts France and Germany at the usual low rates and only puts UK anywhere near USA.
I didn’t claim the UK is the only country “hiding its homicides” – it is the only one I know for certain counts homicides in this way, and that after seven or so hours of tracking through often-contradictory UK government webpages describing the law.
It might be deliberately bolstering its homicide conviction rates with these methodologies – this is far more likely than trying to appear better in international rankings.
I did specifically say I don’t trust the methodologies used by the WHO. My own methodology was going through UK death statistics for two or three hours for Wales and England (each country in the UK tracks this information separately, and I couldn’t find a unified UK dataset that included in-depth COD coding) and adding up figures.
I can’t do equivalent research for other European countries on account of not being able to read their government webpages. I expect they do similar things, however, and that the UK isn’t unique.
The usual US rate used is “murder and non-negligent manslaughter”. This is as determined by police investigation, but it doesn’t include justifiable homicide (which is a relatively small number however)
https://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/violent_crime/murder_homicide.html
There isn’t a “usual US rate used” – the figure used varies by who is arguing what. If it’s ~14,000, and around ~4-5 per 100,000, it’s the intentional homicide rate. If it’s higher, it’s including other values.
“The classification of this offense is based solely on police investigation as opposed to the determination of a court, medical examiner, coroner, jury, or other judicial body.” This is… true, but only once you set aside that medical examiners and coroners are who tell the police investigators what to classify the death as. What’s notable in this definition, however, is that it makes clear that the classification is different from that used by other countries, which DO use courts, juries, or judicial bodies to make that classification, often only after conviction.
http://economics.mit.edu/files/9922
Yep. Control for latitude (Vitamin D? Latitude has strong correlation with health generally) and population density (healthcare proximity) and the difference disappears almost entirely.
False. (And I’m really curious where you’re getting this idea, because it’s really easy to find the opposite from any of the relevant reports.)
Crime statistics for England and Wales record homicides based on the initial police assessment that triggers a homicide investigation, which obviously must precede even the issuing of a charge. In fact the number of recorded homicides for any given year goes down, not up, over time.
Furthermore, homicide statistics include manslaughter (and corporate manslaughter, and infanticide).
(When past deaths are found after the fact to be homicides, as most notably happened in the Shipman case, they are recorded for the year in which they were discovered, not the original year of death,)
That nationmaster link you give is suspiciously out of line with the numbers currently reported by the WHO and by every other source, and doesn’t give a reference. The source here for WHO 2004 figures gives a completely different number.
>False. (And I’m really curious where you’re getting this idea, because it’s really easy to find the opposite from any of the relevant reports.)
More reading than the two or three links I’ve thus far provided. Far more. As mentioned elsewhere, the reports provide extremely contradictory information. It took hours to sort it out. Long story short: There’s more than one set of statistics.
>Crime statistics for England and Wales record homicides based on the initial police assessment that triggers a homicide investigation, which obviously must precede even the issuing of a charge.
Completely true for a specific report while also completely missing the point. Homicides are frequently coded as “Pending” (This, and a couple other variants, are explicitly permitted to be recoded to homicide – other codings are not, under any condition, allowed to be changed to homicide for justice system statistics collection purposes) until the trial ends, at which point the coding is determined by the outcome of the criminal trial. Other codings, such as “Narrative”, permit criminal trials without requiring being recoded.
>Furthermore, homicide statistics include manslaughter (and corporate manslaughter, and infanticide)
Depends on what report you’re looking at.
>(When past deaths are found after the fact to be homicides, as most notably happened in the Shipman case, they are recorded for the year in which they were discovered, not the original year of death,)
You’ll find that this once again depends on what report you’re looking at, but as a matter of department of justice statistics, is a result of the aforementioned rule that certain causes of death are not permitted to be recoded to homicide. (As far as I can tell, this is the reason for the increasing use of the “Narrative” cause of death.)
>That nationmaster link you give is suspiciously out of line with the numbers currently reported by the WHO and by every other source
Yep. I’ll readily admit this. I’ll also repeat what I wrote elsewhere, that I don’t have much faith in that figure. Whether it’s Nationmaster’s fault or the WHO’s fault doesn’t particularly concern me.
There are at least four official and different set of homicide statistics for England, and probably Wales as well. The ONS statistics, the Home Office statistics, the Ministry of Justice statistics (whose rules are the ones you seem most familiar with), and a crime victimization survey whose name fails me for the moment. The Home Office and ONS partially rely upon Ministry of Justice and crime victimization survey results, but then apply their own rules on top of those (while complaining bitterly about the quality of the coding provided, if you read the reports), producing slightly different statistics; so the homicide from 1980 that was just now coded gets assigned to this year by the Ministry of Justice, but effectively gets assigned to no year at all by the Home Office, and assigned to the original year by the ONS, if I recall correctly. (It might be the ONS that erases it and the Home Office that assigns it to the year it happened, it’s been a while since I tried to sort all that out.)
TLDR? The statistics are rubbish.
I once found the percentage of “Narrative” and “Unknown” and “Other” (the non-homicide “Other”, as homicide has its own “Other” column that is included) death codings that resulted in a homicide conviction – it doubled their homicide rate, if I recall correctly. I got within 80% of the US homicide rate after multiplying the totals out by their homicide conviction rate, assuming their other codings had identical conviction rates. (That is, if their homicide conviction rate is 25%, and there were 4 “Narrative”-coded deaths resulting in a homicide conviction, I assumed 16 actual homicides coded as “Narrative”.)
None of the above actually makes the point that you tried to claim regarding US vs. UK comparisons.
The “headline” figure — that the UK has a murder rate on the close order of 1.3 per 100k while the US rate is on the close order of 4.7 per 100k — is, in both cases, based on “police recorded crime” figures (FBI crime report for the US, ONS (formerly Home Office) police recorded crime statistics for the UK).
Both figures record the police classification of the case and not as you claimed for the UK, the outcome of legal process (either inquest or criminal). There are no cases excluded from these numbers as “pending”.
Both figures record number of dead bodies, not number of perpetrators or incidents.
Both figures include manslaughter (voluntary and involuntary). They may differ on some edge cases but these don’t skew the values much.
For the UK, there are two very similar figures: the initial police recorded crime statistic, and the Homicide Index figure, which is slightly lower because the Homicide Index tracks every individual case, and cases initially recorded by the police as homicides but later determined (by police investigation or the courts) not to be are removed from the Homicide Index figure. These two figures are very close together, because they start out from the same number (the police disposition of the case) and the number of cases removed is small (well under 10%). International comparisons — in particular anything using Eurostat or UNOCD reports — tend to use the higher number, not the lower one.
Your statement that the UK 2014 homicide rate would “rise over the next two years” is a simple falsehood because none of the relevant comparison statistics are calculated that way.
Now, this isn’t to say that the police recorded crime figure for homicides is perfectly comparable between UK and US. I’m sure there are methodological differences some of which may be relevant. But you haven’t identified any: your claims are all false as applied to the published police recorded crime data (the formerly Home Office, now Office of National Statistics recorded crime reports), and in looking for alternative sources of UK data you have not shown any attempt to identify comparable US statistics.
For confirmation, the WHO 2012 figures put the UK at 1.5 and the US at 5.3, which is about the same ratio.
Not exactly what you wanted, but in case you hadn’t seen it, from the old blog: If gun control arguments make me want to shoot myself, does that just prove their point?
I’ve read some of the stuff on Scott’s old blog, but this one was new to me. I didn’t realize he had written on the subject. Great post, too!
Alternative hypothesis – gun control is about control, not guns, and the focus on the tool allows us to avoid grappling with systemic change.
A proposal – The harm from firearms is not that they exist (unlike dangerous dogs, smallpox reserves, nuclear waste HIV virus, etc) which can act independent of human violation, but that humans can use them to harm other humans.
Most humans with or without firearms do not harm other humans. Humans harm other humans with or without firearms. Are we more rational when we address firearms or when we address humans who harm other humans?
“Alternative hypothesis – gun control is about control, not guns,”
Are bans/licensing/restirictions on poisons, explosives, motor vehicles, etc, etc, etc fundamentally about control, or do they have a pragmatic, consequentialist justification?
“A proposal – The harm from firearms is not that they exist (unlike dangerous dogs, smallpox reserves, nuclear waste HIV virus, etc) which can act independent of human violation, but that humans can use them to harm other humans.”
Cars kill far more people than guns, for some value of “kill” ..yet a cars hardly one human without the action or omission of another. The harm for cars isn;t that they exist, yet everyone seems to believe that restricting access to cars, restricting the places times and ways they can be used, and requiring training to operate them, and so on, arr good ideas. Are they wrong? Are all potential dangers to human life best addressed by finding someone to blame, and doing nothing else? Should allow anyone in any condition to drive, and just blame they’ve killed someone.
“Most humans with or without firearms do not harm other humans. Humans harm other humans with or without firearms.”
Fallacy of grey . Armed people can do more damage to themselves and others. That’s why we arm our soldiers instead of leaving them to rely on McGyver-like improvisation?
” Are we more rational when we address firearms or when we address humans who harm other humans?”
Difference that doesn’t make a difference. Let’s say a nation tightens up firearm regulations so that it is harder for certain classes of people to own firearms. Is that addressing humans or addressing firearms.?
The car analogy isn’t very good because cars are difficult to operate and it takes quite a bit of training to be able to do so safely enough that you are not going to accidentally kill anyone or yourself with it.
Guns are easy to operate and it does not take very much training to learn how to do so safely. If the argument from gun control proponents were “look at all these people who use a gun without knowing how to properly, and end up shooting themselves in the process!” then a comparison with cars would make sense. But the argument isn’t that, it’s “look at all these people who know perfectly well how to use a gun, and competently do so in order to intentionally kill other people!”. Correct or not, that isn’t something that ‘more training!’ is going to solve.
The car analogy was about a bunch of things besides training. The central point is that no one thinks a good solution to road safety is a combination of free-for-all before the fact and blame afterwards. It may be the case that the person who pulls the trigger is the most morally relevant factor, but you save lives by focussing on practically relevant factors.
I certainly think that’s a reasonable solution to road safety, maybe not optimal but with some potential areas for improvement on our current model – not least of which being the end of the fee/fine farming approach to traffic law widely practiced in the US.
There are however, some useful lessons available from practical road safety legislation, most notably
1) Focus on imminently dangerous behavior.
2) The difference between a 1980s Civic and a high-capacity assault SUV is irrelevant.
3) Paper violations reduce trust in the system, and that can ultimately reduce overall safety.
So is the bullet bitten or not? Do you think allowing people to drive drunk, and only punishing then if they kill someone will lower death tolls? Do you think drunks can make good rational calculations about the consequences of their actions? Do you think free-for-all+blame is better in spite of body counts?
If after-the-fact blame is categorically inferior to preventive action, I’ve got to wonder why it’s being urged upon potential crime victims. (“No, you can’t have a gun to protect yourself from your crazy ex-boyfriend. But once he’s stabbed you to death, we’ll be sure to lock him up for it.”)
TheAncientGeek
October 11, 2015 at 7:21 am
So is the bullet bitten or not?
You haven’t given me a bullet to bite. Our vehicle regulation scheme seems to me to be the core cause of a huge number of social problems, not least of which is the shift in role of local police to fee/fine revenue generators, and the resultant social rifts in places like Ferguson. Getting rid of that would be a Good Thing(tm). There is probably an ideal system that could achieve better results than a free-for-all+blame scheme, but I don’t think either the legislative process or the practical realities of enforcement will allow it to work.
Do you think allowing people to drive drunk, and only punishing then if they kill someone will lower death tolls? Do you think drunks can make good rational calculations about the consequences of their actions?
Why would free-for-all+blame means only punishing people when they kill someone? I see no reason not to arrest and punish people who are driving recklessly/drunk, or for that matter people who walk down a city street drunk, pointing a gun at passerby.
I think arresting people who are behaving in a clearly reckless and
dangerous manner is a reasonable step.
Do you think free-for-all+blame is better in spite of body counts?
I think you’re question begging here. I think free-for-all+blame would yield lower overall harm than most of the regulatory systems we actually have.
Vehicle regulation seems not to be the core cause here. Broken municipal funding arrangements create the pressure to raise revenue by other means. A system which allows locally controlled law enforcement and judiciary to collect fines to go into general revenue provides those means. That the fines are mostly (but certainly not exclusively) vehicle related seems circumstantial; maybe the potential revenue from only non-vehicle fines might not have been high enough to be worthwhile, but that only raises the pressure threshold rather than preventing the problem.
Okay, let’s regulate cars like we do guns: You can now usually buy a car without a license or registration, but if you want to drive it in public, transport it in a functional condition, or really do anything but boondock in it, you do need a license in most states.
Buying a car from a dealer now requires an “instant” background check (that might take up to 3 days). You can usually sell or buy a car to/from someone in your own state without the background check, but if you try to sell it to someone outside your state without first shipping it through a dealer, that’s a felony and you go to jail.
Your drivers’ license may not be recognized in some states, and if you attempt to drive in them you will go to jail. Some states don’t offer licenses at all. Cars that are legal in one state are illegal in the next state over and if you drive it there, it’s a felony and you go to jail.
You cannot modify your own car with certain aftermarket parts without an expensive license. Some aftermarket parts, or combinations of parts, are totally illegal and using them will send you to jail. You cannot sell a car you build up yourself without expensive licensing.
Many states restrict the horsepower of your car, what fuel you’re allowed to use, or how many cars or gallons of gas you may own. Sports cars manufactured after 1986 are illegal for civilian ownership, and pre-1986 ones are wildly expensive. Owning or attempting to buy one, or even the necessary parts to convert a regular car into a sports car, is a federal felony and you will go to jail.
All those sound like reasonable, common sense, easy for a law abiding citizen to navigate laws on car ownership?
Don’t forget the importance of closing that “three day loophole”, where you can buy a car without explicit permission after a three day wait just because the government never bothered calling the car dealership back with an answer.
Putting such a burden on that poor, hostile bureaucracy… what were we thinking?
You seem to be saying that
a) the US can only possibly model enhanced gun control on the US’s own system of automobile control
and
b) the US’s own system of automobile control is broken.
Well, I’ll take your word about b), since I know no better, and I’ll offer my sympathy about having so many broken things going on at once in the US..but I will also state that I was making a much more general point:
c) appropriate controls before the fact save more lives than blame after the fact.
d) if you;re not trying to save lives…WHY NOT?
a) You stated “The harm for cars isn’t that they exist, yet everyone seems to believe that restricting access to cars, restricting the places times and ways they can be used, and requiring training to operate them, and so on, arr good ideas. Are they wrong?”
You seem to be implying (as many others I’ve had this debate have as well) that guns are unregulated, and we should accept that regulation on par with car regulation is proper and necessary.
My point is that guns already are regulated, and in ways that if applied to cars would seem very strict or needlessly complicated and not clearly beneficial. Many gun-control advocates seem to be unaware of the degree to which guns are already resticted (and I didn’t even get into all the ways you can lose your right to own one, forever, that don’t apply to cars). So the “You accept car regulation, why not gun regulation?” is easily answered by “We do!”
b) I’m actually not particularly against the way we regulate cars in the US. They are generally easy to purchase and keep legal in any state, everyone accepts everyone else’s licenses, etc. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a safety class, license, and liability insurance requirement for gun ownership – if it was strictly “shall issue” (no needing to “prove” you “need” a gun), and it stopped there.
The problem is no one trusts the gun control advocates to stop there because most of them want to ban guns outright, or large swathes of popular gun types, and it would be a lot easier to confiscate all the guns (which they’d love to do, see their fawning over Australia) if they know where they are with a registry. So no one wants to let the camel’s nose in, and the the camel ain’t exactly going out of the way to hide its desire to get all in.
It’s nice to say, “People are getting hurt! We need regulation!” It’s much harder to come up with regulation that actually keeps people from getting hurt without needlessly harrassing the millions of people who currently own guns and use them responsibly. I know it’s a cliche, but if you make gun ownership a crime, only criminals will own guns. Tens of millions of guns exist in the US. Even if you ban all of them tomorrow, how do you propose substantially eliminating them from the people doing the most killing? Guns are durable and transportable – we can’t even keep them out of airports with aadvanced technology and vastly permissive search and seizure rules. What makes you think we can disarm Chicago gangs?
“My point is that guns already are regulated, and in ways that if applied to cars would seem very strict or needlessly complicated and not clearly beneficial.”
My point was that the “people are to blame, not guns” argument seems to suggest that regulation is just the wrong approach in principle, not that there is too much of the wrong kind. But the “people are to blame, not guns” argument seems to prove too much, to generalise into arguments that car’s aren’t to blame., poisons aren’t to blame and so on.
If your argument is that death tolls would, counterfactually, be lower with less or simpler regulation, then I am not seeing the evidence, but I am I am seeing the evidence for the opposite counterfactual. For instance if required background checks had been carried out correctly on Dylan Roof, he would not have been able to purchase his gun.
http://news.yahoo.com/jail-clerical-error-acknowledged-church-shooting-gun-buy-190536334.html
If your argument is that higher death tolls are acceptable so long as gun owners get less “hassle”, all I can see is that it is a difficult one to make baldly. It is effectively saying “it is OK for you to die for my freedom”. The “you” in question may well have an objection.
(Perhaps the famous but mystifiying “blame” argument is a way of making the unacceptable claim seem more acceptable).
Many gun-control advocates seem to be “unaware of the degree to which guns are already resticted (and I didn’t even get into all the ways you can lose your right to own one, forever, that don’t apply to cars).”
So? The point was that the arguments for regulating cars, in principle, apply to guns. It wasn’t that gun regulation should be set at the same level as car regulation or vice versa. As to how much is too much, that depends on what death rates you find acceptable.
“So the “You accept car regulation, why not gun regulation?” is easily answered by “We do!””
Even the people who are making the blame argument? Then what *is* the point of the blame argument?
“The problem is no one trusts the gun control advocates to stop there because most of them want to ban guns outright, or large swathes of popular gun types, and it would be a lot easier to confiscate all the guns (which they’d love to do, see their fawning over Australia) if they know where they are with a registry.”
I suppose you mean “no one who agrees with you”. Again, this argument proves far too much. Many times, someone who puts forward a piece of compromise legislation would like something more extreme..that applies to all sides of all debates, and isn’t a good argument for rejecting compromises.
“It’s nice to say, “People are getting hurt! We need regulation!” It’s much harder to come up with regulation that actually keeps people from getting hurt without needlessly harrassing the millions of people who currently own guns and use them responsibly.”
It is easy to say that regulation “needlessly hassles” people, since no regulation can exactly target only the people who are going to cause the problems, as known from some God’s eye point of view, as opposed to classes of people and objects that are statistically more likely to cause problems. Again, the argument proves too much.
“I know it’s a cliche, but if you make gun ownership a crime, only criminals will own guns.”
Everyone recongnises that problem. Some people think it’s worth trying to solve, some people want to give up.
“Tens of millions of guns exist in the US. Even if you ban all of them tomorrow, how do you propose substantially eliminating them from the people doing the most killing?”
A complete overnight ban is the straw man here.
“Guns are durable and transportable – we can’t even keep them out of airports with aadvanced technology and vastly permissive search and seizure rules.”
Fallacy of grey. You have kept a certain number of them out.
Are bans/licensing/restirictions on poisons, explosives, motor vehicles, etc, etc, etc fundamentally about control, or do they have a pragmatic, consequentialist justification?
You might want to look into the history of the rules concerning these items. (Also consider: rules concerning use of the internet, and licensing of printing presses.) Specifically, cars were registered (and issued a VIN) in order to combat car thieves – not to keep people from killing each other in car accidents.
The harm for cars isn;t that they exist, yet everyone seems to believe that restricting access to cars, restricting the places times and ways they can be used, and requiring training to operate them, and so on, arr good ideas.
I think you’ll find less agreement on this than you expect. I also point out that the issue with cars is the accidental death rate. Accidental deaths from firearms are (much) less than a thousand/year in the USA, while deliberate deaths from vehicles are…well, I can’t find any.
Armed people can do more damage to themselves and others.
…smart people can do more damage to themselves and others. Healthy people can do more damage to themselves and others. Well-educated people can do more harm to themselves and others.
Relevance?
Let’s say a nation tightens up firearm regulations so that it is harder for certain classes of people to own firearms. Is that addressing humans or addressing firearms.
When municipalities and states passed laws limiting the access of Negroes to firearms, it wasn’t about controlling the weapons. When we have current laws concerning weapon ownership by felons, it’s not about the firearms, but about that person.
” I also point out that the issue with cars is the accidental death rate”
And explosives and poisons?
“…smart people can do more damage to themselves and others. Healthy people can do more damage to themselves and others. Well-educated people can do more harm to themselves and others.
Relevance?”
Relevance, indeed. Being healthy and educated makes you more dangerous as part of making you more effective at a wide range of things. That isn’t at all analogous to guns.
The relevance of pointing out that armed people are more dangerous is to counter the argument that in the absence of firearms, people would continue to kill each at an identical rate with knives or clubs. (And/or to counter the argument that any nonzero death rate is equivalent to any other).
“When municipalities and states passed laws limiting the access of Negroes to firearms, it wasn’t about controlling the weapons.”
And that single datum generalises to every case? There’s basically no such thing as safety legislation in your view, it’s all about putting down speciifc groups?
” When we have current laws concerning weapon ownership by felons, it’s not about the firearms, but about that person.”
WEAPON OWNERSHIP by FELONS is about the weapon AND the person, because no one wants laws against banana ownership by felons.
Looking into the mass shooting statistics in the wake of the recent tragedy, I was again struck by something I’ve noticed many times: the way people tend to, on some level, view sovereign nation states as comparable, regardless of their populations:
In other words, according to some statistics, Norway and Sweden have more mass shootings *per capita* than the US, and more deaths by mass shooting (perhaps because the unarmed populace is more defenseless in the rare case when a crazed gunman does go on a rampage). Now, of course, when you have a small population, a single horrific tragedy may create the false impression of a trend. Yet, if it does turn out to be the case that the average Swede is as likely or more likely to die in a mass shooting than the average American, despite a strict regimen of gun control in that nation, then it would, of course, call into question whether gun control here is a good solution.
But the bigger point I’m trying to get at (and regardless of whether I’m right about the object level issue of Scandinavian vs. US mass shootings), is the issue of what gets reported as Scott recently commented on, combined with the fact that people erroneously view themselves as part of a community when they share a nation state, whether that state has 3 million or 300 million. Like, if for example, a horrible shooting tragedy happens once a year in the US and once every 10 years in Sweden, but the population of Sweden is less than 1/10th that of the US, then Sweden actually has a bigger problem than us, even as we, as a nation of national news-viewers, get the impression that we are living through an epidemic, while the Swedes enjoy relative peace.
Wait, really? Norway/Sweden have more mass shootings per capita? Is this just that the Breivik thing was a huge outlier that’s skewed the average, or is that true in general?
http://www.ijreview.com/2015/06/348197-obama-said-mass-shootings-dont-happen-in-advanced-countries-like-in-us-one-chart-proves-him-wrong/
https://www.reddit.com/r/politicalfactchecking/comments/3asjwo/america_is_number_6_in_the_top_ten_developed/
This is what I was looking at. As with most things, it does seem to depend on how you count things, and it’s clear that Breivik is putting Norway at the top in a way which it probably wouldn’t be otherwise, but it seems like there are still at least four other developed nations with more mass shooting incidents and/or deaths per capita than the US, all of them with more restrictive gun control (and, in particular, it looks like maybe the average mass shooting results in a higher body count in nations with restrictive gun control, so even if the US had more total incidents, it could be that one’s chances of dying, if not being involved in, a mass shooting, are greater in Scandinavia than the US, lending credence to the pro-gun view that having more armed civilians makes us safer).
This seems vulnerable to tweaking the definition of a “rampage, spree or mass” shooting. They don’t say exactly what they’re using. Even if they’re honest enough to use the same standard everywhere, this is a degree of freedom for researching allegiance to come through.
This cuts both ways. Counts that went the opposite way might have done that too.
Right. The last time we talked about this I went with just looking at the most lethal spree killings, because those are pretty unambiguous. At the level of the marginal spree killing, just gathering the statistics is a Very Hard Problem and I do not believe that there is any transnational consensus on how to classify e.g. a criminal shooting two rival criminals who have fled onto the playground of a local school.
But by any standard that we can measure, spree killings (with or without guns) are not a uniquely American thing, and if there’s any pattern to where they happen, I can’t see it.
Reminds me of the statistics that bystanders with guns don’t stop mass shootings.
Well, DUH. The whole point of stopping them is that they DON’T BECOME mass shootings.
There’s a fairly standard definition of “rampage, spree, or mass” killing, which is used in most places; any instance of 4 or more people being killed by the same person in one instance of violence, where ‘one instance of violence’ can stretch across hours but not across days (barring someone on uppers continuously killing without significant break across several days, which almost never happens outside of warzones).
EDIT: Tracked down the RSI definition: “The Rampage Shooting Index applies a more definitive set of five criteria to identify rampage shootings, namely: (1) a criminal event, (2) involving a lone perpetrator, (3) that begins and ends within a 24-hour period, (4) in which the perpetrator uses firearms, (5) and in which four or more people are killed or injured directly or indirectly from the attack. Additionally, we do not consider attacks at military installations, police stations or prisons – or attacks specifically targeting military or police personnel – to be rampage shootings, even if all other criteria are met. We also exclude assassination attempts against state officials.”
Which matches the one I’d seen on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Not inventing the definition for the purpose doesn’t mean it’s not a silly argument.
Here or here is the chart Onyomi is referring to. Choosing a four year window 2009-2013 is pretty damning. Rampages are rare, generally 0-2 per country, making the statistics and the rankings very sensitive to choice of window, definition, noise, etc.
Norway turns out to be really tiny. From wikipedia numbers I get that the deaths from mass shootings per capita in the US and Norway is just about exactly the same since 1960. All of those deaths in Norway is accounted for by the one incident.
Regarding murder rates, my dad had a flippant but somewhat thought provoking comment;
“The US was peopled by all those who couldn’t get along with people in Europe, how do you expect them to get along with each other?”
Here’s the Australian violent crime rate, here’s an article about the Australian suicide rate, and here’s a paper from 2006 claiming that there was a drop in firearm-related deaths mostly due to the decreased suicide rate and that a drop in homicide rate was statistically insignificant.
My impression is that the gun ban dropped the suicide rate, raised the robbery rate a bit, and dropped the murder rate a teeny-tiny bit but drastically reduced the number of mass-murders. However, it’s 1AM here, and I should really be in bed instead of on google scholar, so I preemptively apologise if that impression is false.
Edit: the biggest change to our laws was in 1996, for clarification
Look at that chart of suicides. There is too much noise to conclude anything. It fell rapidly after 1995, but it rose rapidly before 1995. If you don’t understand why suicide rates rose 1975-1995, you don’t understand why they fell 1995-2005. It might be gun control in 1995, but it might be the removal of the previous effect.
Both male and female suicide are about the same in 2005 as in 1975. A little lower than before, with the sex ratio unchanged. Women got there by slow but steady decline, while men went up and went back down. Women don’t use guns, so it’s no surprise that gun control didn’t affect them. But neither did the whatever caused the male upswing.
However, the 20 years up 1975-1995 was reversed in only 10 years, 1995-2005, which is (weak) evidence that it was something new, like gun control.
Saying the Australian gun ban “Drastically reduced the rate of mass murders” is like saying the TSA has drastically reduced the rate of terrorism because we haven’t had another 9/11 attack.
It’s a low frequency event either way.
You saw “TheAncientGeek’s” responses in this tread, so that’s at least one example of “yes, we DO want confiscation, even when we say we don’t”.
“In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them.”
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9455025/us-gun-violence
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-gun-free-society/2015/10/04/6da29040-69c4-11e5-9ef3-fde182507eac_story.html
Until we eliminate that threat, we won’t be making compromises that hurt our bargaining position.
A good-faith proponent of laws to reduce firearms homicide would start by helping us put unacceptable outcomes off the table, so that we could cooperate. We would like nothing better.
I wonder how many gun control advocates are also saying “We’ll totally cooperate, just after our dirty stinking opponents stop defecting”?
@James Picone – Define “defecting”.
Assault weapon bans do not make people safer.
Handgun bans do not make people safer.
One gun a month limits do not make people safer.
Restrictions on the number of legal guns owned do not make people safer.
Waiting periods do not make people safer.
Ammo Capacity restrictions do not make people safer.
Folding stock restrictions do not make people safer.
Bayonet lug restrictions do not make people safer.
Pistol grip bans do not make people safer.
Flash hider bans do not make people safer.
RG launcher bans do not make people safer.
Semi-auto bans do not make people safer.
Suppressor bans do not make people safer.
Restrictions on “military” chamberings do not make people safer.
bans on bullet types do not make people safer.
Ammo rationing does not make people safer.
“arsenal licenses” do not make people safer.
Saturday night special bans do not make people safer.
Bullet buttons do not make people safer.
Banning carry does not make people safer.
Barrel length restrictions do not make people safer.
Mandatory thumbhole stocks do not make people safer.
Maximum caliber restrictions do not make people safer.
Prohibition does not make people safer.
The only utility the above restrictions (all of which have been touted as vitally nescessary by the anti-gun movement on four continents over five decades) have in common is their efficacy in restricting gun ownership by the law-abiding. We have tried all these schemes, and they all failed. We have done the reverse of these schemes, and no disaster befell us.
There is not a single attribute of any firearm that has not been touted as uniquely antisocial and evil by the anti-gun movement. There is not a single make or model that has consistently been considered “acceptable” to the anti-gun movement. Complete prohibition has been the stated goal for fifty years. Entire feilds of fradulent science have been generated, staffed, funded and published to try and make the case for prohibion, and even after entire other scientific fields have exposed their fraud, the perpetrators are still routinely quoted as authorities on the subject. The anti-gun position is profoundly irrational, and we gun owners are more than done with pretending otherwise. We are the ones with the data on our side. They are the ones arguing that three ounces of plastic connecting the stock to the pistol grip transforms a rifle from a sporting arm to a murder machine.
I think national licensing of guns would probably improve safety. The gain would be marginal, and CCW licensing already covers most of what it would accomplish with the added benefit of giving precisely zero ground to the consistently irrational demands of the anti-gun crowd, and the extra-added benefit of driving them absolutely mad with frustration. In addition, we now know as a group that registration is utterly impossible without our explicit and enthusiastic consent, which we will start to consider providing sometime a half-century after the anti-gun movement is as dead as the Women’s Christian Temperence Union.
It is two decades at least past the point when this stopped being a debate. The majority of american states have concealed carry, and it works just fine. The ones that don’t have open carry. The assualt weapon bans are dead, and will not return. The supreme court has ruled in our favor, and will do so again. The home manufacturing community has never been stronger, and now we have 3d-printing of complete firearms.
We won. Fuck them.
[Edit] Tell you what, let’s compromise. I’ll back national licensing for firearms ownership, if they’ll back reopening the machine gun registry and dropping the NFA tax stamp to a uniform five bucks. Sound fair?
I’m not actually advocating any particular legislation here. I don’t even know what current American gun control legislation looks like – for example, I have no idea what the ‘NFA tax stamp’ is, and while I can guess what ‘reopening the machine gun registry’ entails I don’t know for sure.
My interpretation of Echo there was “I’ll start cooperating with gun-control advocates when gun-control advocates stop defecting against me”, where ‘defecting’ is broadly ‘advocating ridiculous positions’.
The point I’m making is that I’m sure a lot of gun control advocates have the reversed opinion, that they’ll be happy to advocate more moderate gun-control opinions if only anti-gun-control people (is there a more neutral term?) didn’t advocate positions they consider ridiculous.
I was making a meta point, not an object-level point.
James, that doesn’t exactly make sense. The anti-gun control people are already pretty close to the limit on their side; you don’t see mass movements for reducing the limits on guns but rather preventing new limits. There just really isn’t a ridiculous position on the anti-gun control side unless you view the status quo as ridiculous.
This doesn’t give any reason to go extreme on gun control if you’re only a moderate gun control advocate because there isn’t a slippery slope to slide down on the anti-gun control side; they can’t exactly win much harder after all. The opposite doesn’t hold true, in that there is plenty of slope on the gun control side for extremists to keep fighting after any concession is made.
Now, there is a “no more gun control period” or the pure status quo position, but the presence of the extremist gun control advocates means that this is much more of a tactical position; the Anti GC know that the Pro GC side will never stop fighting even after a compromise, so what’s the point in compromising? You might gain a slight benefit because you like some of the restrictions, but you’ve also given the ball over to the PGC to keep pushing. PGC thus has to make a credible commitment to excising the extremist PGC if it wants to bring over the moderates from AGC to come up with a compromise.
In effect, there’s no tactical advantage to defecting on PGC and a huge tactical advantage to not compromising for AGC. Thus we have to assume that the extremist PGCs truly believe in it and therefore the moderate PGCs have to show that they can shut out the extremists from the discussion
@James Picone,
They’re doubtless out there, but I haven’t run into many of them.
Among pro-gun people, at least in America, there’s a strong current of betrayed trust that goes into the “we’ll compromise after, not before.” We already deal with a bunch of laws that are awkward, cumbersome, and ineffective. Those laws were put in place under the premise that they would prevent X sort of tragedy, and since X sort of tragedy keeps happening, gun control advocates say we need other laws.
The evidence is that the first three rounds of federal gun laws clearly failed to prevent tragedies, and yet all the pro-gun control proponents view the idea of removing or weakening the existing laws as laughable. As long as restrictions only ratchet up, the slippery slope arguments are very persuasive.
I believe the moderate gun-control advocates exist, but they don’t seem to be meaningful group in the US, and I have encountered relatively few of them.
If they’re out there, and they want to be heard, I would suggest that they become as informed as possible about the current state of gun law in the US, and the statistical arguments (as our host has done in the past).
More than 95% of people I’ve read/talked to/heard of who’ve taken that step are no longer moderate gun control proponents – most have become pessimistic on the effectiveness of gun control at all, a few have become pro gun.
@James Picone – “I’m not actually advocating any particular legislation here. I don’t even know what current American gun control legislation looks like – for example, I have no idea what the ‘NFA tax stamp’ is, and while I can guess what ‘reopening the machine gun registry’ entails I don’t know for sure.”
The National Firearms Act of 1934 required certian classes of weapon to be registered with the government and a tax paid before they could be owned by private citizens. Full-auto weapons, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, suppressors, rifles of greater than .50 caliber, and so on. in 1986, the machine gun portion of the registry was closed, meaning that automatic weapons not in private hands before that date are illegal for civilian ownership. The 1986 law is a stupid one for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that technically speaking, owning a semi-auto rifle and a shoe-lace is technically a felony. It’s okay though. Life finds a way.
The actual registry is not a terrible idea. It was badly used for many years, but most of its problems have now been successfully routed around and I doubt most gun owners are all that interested in seeing it closed down. In my opinion, it is an example of “reasonable gun control”, and like most reasonable gun control, it has been in place for decades.
“The point I’m making is that I’m sure a lot of gun control advocates have the reversed opinion, that they’ll be happy to advocate more moderate gun-control opinions if only anti-gun-control people (is there a more neutral term?) didn’t advocate positions they consider ridiculous.”
So, the Christians will stop pushing for Sodomy laws if the Gays will just stop pushing for Gay Marriage?
No thanks.
Your assessment runs directly counter to the statements of the Gun Control movement for decades. Confiscation and prohibition are not tactical goals, they are terminal ones. And I’m sorry, but the evidence is that moderate, effective, evidence based gun control involves LESS control than we have now, not more. For every effective law we can’t pass, two dozen pernicious ones are already in effect. When the pernicious laws are gone, we can start talking about implementing the effective ones. Meanwhile, the status quo is entirely in our favor, and we’re happy to keep it.
[EDIT] – fixed links.
Can you offer a scenario of defection on the pro-rights side? I’m struggling to come up with one, which means I’m not thinking broadly enough.
One example I can think of is “registration and training” requirements, which are a commonly expressed goal of gun-control groups. There’s a lot of support for them on the pro-rights side as well, but somehow the control side never comes to the table to talk about them.
Permit reciprocity standards is an issue that could help both sides achieve their (expressed) goals, but there’s still no conversation happening. The cynical among us suspect this is because it’s a kind of registration and permitting that does not discourage or punish gun ownership.
So-called constitutional carry as well as a number of other state level laws.
This whole who-is-negotiating-in-good-faith discussion is nonsensical. Where gun people have a critical mass they pass laws they like, where anti-gun-people have a critical mass they pass laws they like. Inasmuch as there are ever compromises it is where the government is dived, and these compromises are obviously contingent on the political status quo. Anyone who claims to believe otherwise is either lying for rhetorical reasons or doesn’t understand how democracy works.
I’m looking for compromise that leads to a stable outcome that neither side can get their base angry enough about to challenge, instead of this constant back-and-forth and all the harms that come with it.
@ Echo
I’m looking for compromise that leads to a stable outcome that neither side can get their base angry enough about to challenge
Hm, that might be worth looking into. What energizes many PGC people, is periodic events such as BANCs (ie what happened in the Batman theatre, the Amish school, Newtown, and Columbine). If such events happen less often, the PGC will be energized less often. Between such events, we tend to focus on unrelated things.
Perhaps AGC people keep a steadier level of energization and focus, not needing particular events that actually happen, or even details about some current proposal, but constant warning by media hosts etc about the same bottom of the same slippery slope.
One “problem” is there’s now a professional core of AGC activists which built up to deal with the constant low-level attacks. Cities and states trying to pass laws that allow no-knock “inspections” on gun-owners, attempts to get ranges and gun stores eliminated, etc.
When a big threat comes along and the base gets energized, these people focus the anger in a constructive way. They’re also the ones responsible for the impressive legal work that went into decisions like Heller.
There’s also more lower-level organization that emerges naturally from sharing a hobby and sport. We have a saying that “we make more friends because there’s no such thing as an anti-gun range”.
The constant activists are our standing army in the culture war. We need them to win the war, and they need a war to win.
The anti-gun side needs to eliminate them to even the activism gap (hence the constant calls to “Declare the NRA a terrorist hate group!”). Much of their activist energy goes into ineffective hatemongering that mostly gets wasted on broadly anti-right propaganda rather than specific goals.
Hence spending so much money on cartoons mocking truck-driving racist white fat men with tiny penises.
“You saw “TheAncientGeek’s” responses in this tread, so that’s at least one example of “yes, we DO want confiscation, even when we say we don’t”.”
I don’t see why I should be held up as an example of the existence of a hidden agenda, when I haven’t hidden my agenda: I continue to believe that the only way to address gun-related problems is to target guns, and I continue to believe that because I haven’t seen an alternative.
“A good-faith proponent of laws to reduce firearms homicide would start by helping us put unacceptable outcomes off the table, so that we could cooperate. We would like nothing better.”
Complacency is unacceptable to a lot of people as well. Maybe you could turn the “people are to blame” argument into some kind of practical proposal for actually addressing the problem, because at the moment it sounds like a way of shrugging it off.
This isn’t a debate between tow sides who both want to reduce gun crime, but have different ideas about how to do it, it’s a debate between people who want to do something and people who don’t.
@TheAncientGeek
Maybe you could turn the “people are to blame” argument into some kind of practical proposal for actually addressing the problem, because at the moment it sounds like a way of shrugging it off.
See, elsewhere in the thread, my proposal re: not publishing the names/philosophies/details of mass shooters.
See various proposals from people of a red-tribe inclination about “getting tough and crime”, or from the grey tribe about ending the drug war.
I continue to believe that the only way to address gun-related problems is to target guns, and I continue to believe that because I haven’t seen an alternative.
Targeting guns has failed to move the needle in four major federal initiatives and dozens of state initiatives. It hasn’t worked. We have some alternatives, but I don’t know if you’ll see them as alternatives, because I don’t think the two sides really agree on the problem.
I suspect the focus on gun deaths vs overall violence is symptomatic of this, but I have only very modest confidence in my ability to pass an Idealogical Turing Test on this one.
Edit: forgot last two paragraphs.
At a considerable tangent …
I’m currently in Brazil, and had a long conversation with someone here who runs a shooting range and so is well informed on firearm regulation. By his account, getting permission to own a handgun costs about a thousand dollars plus time, with an additional substantial annual fee. The handguns in question are limited to calibers less powerful than the 9mm that’s currently pretty much the police and military standard. Semi-automatic rifles are illegal.
So the only legal handguns in private hands are owned either by rich people or by security guards. That isn’t quite the end point that the more serious gun control folk want, but pretty close. Hunting rifles limited to bolt action.
The murder rate is 25/100,000, or a little over five times the rate in the U.S. Obviously there are a lot of other differences between the societies, but that’s at least some evidence that keeping legal handguns and semi-automatic rifles pretty much out of private hands does not produce the benefits desired.
I was also told that the crime rate went up a lot when the firearms restrictions went in, but I don’t know how to check that and it’s the sort of factoid that I don’t trust in oral information.
You’ve written here about implicit association tests and some standard and potential uses thereof, so I thought I’d bring up a question here that’s had me curious for a while now. If I were programming some kind of associative mapping with weights or probabilities, I would be very careful to distinguish the direction of the weight/probability. That is, arcs like “NFL football player” -> “male” would have a very strong association, while the reverse direction would be very weak.
My understanding of the implicit association test is that it presupposes associations without directionality (that is, it assumes an undirected graph, or symmetrical weights, or whatever). Is this true, or is there some aspect of the test that addresses this? Or is there reason to believe that this test measures a subject’s associations which are actually not predicated on direction?
The ones I’ve done have had you fill it both ways – e.g. you’d have Arab names pop up you needed yo attach to positive or negative qualities, then qualities you needed to attach to Arab or non-Arab names.
I don’t see now the order in which they are presented would give the direction of the association. In my trivial example, I would expect that attaching “NFL football player” to “male” instead of “female” would be fastest, and attaching “male” to “NFL football player” instead of “botanist” likewise, but both response measurements could be due to the high probability of NFL football players being male.
The subject is given just two options, and with that constraint it seems to me that a uni-directional association could produce a measured “implicit association” in either direction, unless the experimenters have found and identified some pattern or artifact that crops up when an association is uni-directional, and so can identify bi-directional connections when they occur.
If your only two alternatives for “male” (or indeed “female”) are “NFL football player” versus “botanist”, then naturally you’ll pick “football player” even though Linnaeus, because you know that the rules of American football mandate (at present) all-male teams (not mixed gender ones, and I don’t even know if, unlike soccer, there are ladies’ teams associated with NFL league clubs).
That doesn’t mean you’re biased pro-male or have gendered assumptions regarding professions, simply that you know how things are set up in the world. If it was something like “doctor” versus “botanist”, that might be better but then again I’d like a third option (either “equally likely” or “unknown” or something because I don’t know the actual percentages of male medical doctors versus male botanists or whatever).
Hard to find data on this; one online source quoted 58% of B Sc degrees in biology went to women, another said 46% women in biology overall (is this women dropping out at higher levels or going into other fields, e.g. being science teachers in school after getting the bachelors degree?). Possibly a strong presumption that botany is more likely to be a female-predominant field, but I can’t find solid figures – anyone else able to do better?
I don’t think they actually do. Lauren Silberman was invited to try out for the New York Jets as a kicker in 2013. She did terribly (possibly due to injury) but I can’t imagine that they would have invited her if the rules banned her from playing for them.
For an introduction to the world of women’s American football, looking into the Lingerie Football League might be instructive. Iirc, they’ve scraped the garter belt and switched from lingerie to more sporting underwear and better coverage with the padding under pressure from the players. Who knew preventable injuries made people upset?
“NFL football player implies male” is a very reliable rule (100% of the former are the latter, as far as I know), so it simply reflects world knowledge, but “male implies NFL football player” is very unreliable: less than 1 in a million chance.
The same issue comes up when the statistics are less clear or matters of personal experience, where P(A|B) is a reasonably good bet, but P(B|A) is very unlikely. I’m wondering if the implicit association tests can tell the difference when the testee has such an asymmetrical association, or if it accidently detects P(A|B) when looking for P(B|A), and reports bias.
Very much worse would be if the test accidentally detects a strong P(A|B,C,D,E) and reports it as the detection of a moderate P(E|A), where P(A|B,C,D,E) is reasonable, but P(E|A) represents prejudice/bigotry.
Do the implicit association experiments have some kind of statistical tests to avoid these cases?
Writes Paul Lutus in his “Science” slideshow (for young people):
“A drug is introduced that can keep women from getting sick while they are pregnant. Laboratory animals show no harmful effects. The drug is already available in Europe.
“The Food and Drug Administration must approve new drugs. Dr. Frances Kelsey is the responsible scientist, and she feels the drug has not been studied well enough.
“The drug companies are outraged. The drug obviously works, relieving the suffering of pregnant women. Newspapers call Dr. Kelsey a ‘bureaucratic nitpicker.’
“Dr. Kelsey fights alone to stop the drug’s release in the US. Just about the time the drug would have to be released, many European women who have been taking the drug give birth to deformed children, children without arms or legs.
“The scientific error: Laboratory animals were given the drug, but, since the drug was intended for pregnant women, the tests should have used pregnant animals. New tests using pregnant animals show the same terrible effects. Dr. Kelsey is awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by President Kennedy.
“The drug: Thalidomide.”
Yeah yeah, and how many people are you willing to condemn to death in memory of thalidomide? We need a number, not just an anecdote where it turns out the child was Albert Einstein like and reblog.
>yeah yeah
You have a short temper today, dear general. I love your post but there’s no need to risk drawing the ire of our new overlord by framing it this way.
Making fun of (((our new overlord))) like you seem to be doing is way more likely to “draw his ire” than being rude to a known anti-utilitarian dissident.
I was being sincere in my post since suntzu made several sarcastic remarks in an hour and I like his contributions, but ironically my phrasing also ended up with unfortunate connotations. Sorry, Scott.
I agree.
The reaction to Thalidomide has retarded progress in pharmaceutical development to an utterly unbelievable extent. It has, without question, killed millions. And the situation is only getting worse. Our cringing and fearful FDA, with “Thalidomide, never forget!” as its motto and catchphrase, continues to make drug development and approval ever more difficult. It now costs approximately $2 Billion, and takes roughly ten years, to get a new drug candidate approved — and the regulatory costs associated with drug development keep rising.
…You can imagine what a chilling effect this has on pharmaceutical progress. It makes finding cures for obscure diseases, and the discovery of much-needed new antibiotics, unprofitable. It condemns millions to die as the drugs that might save them are held-up in unnecessary regulatory processes. It all but ensures that new drugs are exorbitantly priced, regardless of how much they actually cost to produce. (It’s estimated that production costs account for less than 2% of a new pharmaceutical’s price-tag.) It also ensures that only very rich and large companies can carry drug candidates through the entire regulatory process, so there’s little real competition for the likes of Pfizer, Merck, GSK.
Personally, I’d trade some side-effects for (much) faster overall progress, a healthier industry, and a broader selection of drugs to choose from. The balance the FDA has struck is a very poor one; it leans far too heavily on the side of caution.
Another thing that bears mentioning: Drug screening in animals has advanced since the 1950’s, our knowledge with respect to mechanisms of action has also progressed, and I’d reckon we wouldn’t experience “another thalidomide” even if the FDA were abolished tomorrow. (Assuming, of course, that strict enough penalties were in place to prevent bad actors from irresponsibly releasing drugs.)
Assuming, of course, that strict enough penalties were in place to prevent bad actors from irresponsibly releasing drugs.
So what penalties are in place for the likes of Sprout Pharmaceuticals and their push for getting Addyi approved?
We can (and have) fought over “legitimate treatment for genuine medical disorder held up by over-caution” versus “profiteering on the holy grail of ‘finally a female Viagra!’ (which it’s not)”, but it’s undeniable:
(a) Sprout Pharmaceuticals were not the originators, they acted in a similar vein to Turing Pharmaceuticals in seeing an opening, if not quite as brazen-necked in their profiteering, and bought the rights from the original makers
(b) they have some previous on this, allegedly, in their former incarnation as Slate Pharmaceuticals. They were peddling testosterone implants and got a warning letter from the FDA:
(c) they did not rely on The Science when pressuring the FDA to rethink their decision but whipped up a PR campaign called Even The Score, including roping in some media feminists who are popular (I’ve never heard of them but then again I’m not American and run a mile from reading trendy political feminists/other activists anyway) into pushing the demand that the FDA licence it on the basis of “The Mean Old Patriarchy is at it again, trying to repress and control women’s bodies and their ownership of their sexuality, denying them access to equal fulfilment and enjoyment as men have with their medications for sexual dysfunction”
(d) the FDA caved and rushed to reassure everyone they did too care about women’s health (because who wants to be a Mean Old Patriarch? Or some kind of crazy zealot religious bigot like Kim Davis?)
(e) Sprout Pharmaceuticals were sold within 36 hours to a larger pharma company which was licking its lips at the prospect of “female Viagra” and
massive profitscaring about women’s health(f) instead of over-regulation we should leave such decisions up to the wisdom and experience of doctors?:
Addyi is not supposed to be used by women who drink alcohol, which could significantly curb sales
It’s a drug for women with low sex drives. You really think women with low sex drives, who are finally prescribed something that will let them be as sexually active as they feel they should be, and who want to go out to clubs and other places to meet men for sex, are going to stick to drinking mineral water? As part of the whole “Whoo! Friday night, it’s the weekend, let’s party, going clubbing with my mates for a good time!”
Really?
Let me be clear: I don’t think the FDA or the current regime is perfect, flawless and divinely mandated. But if you chop down the FDA and don’t put something in its place, you will not get the brave new world of cancer cures, you will get profit-chasers looking for easy sells in sexual enhancement drugs for men and women who are getting older, or who think they’re not being as adequately sexual as everyone is telling them they should be. Or cosmetic enhancements (previous to acquiring Sprout, Valeant had tried and failed to buy the makers of Botox). Or the problems associated with aging, like medicines for stomach ailments etc.
Self-regulation is no regulation – doctors who haven’t even got a new copy of a desk reference telling them the side-effects and contra-indications of a drug that is not even in production yet writing out prescriptions, presumably under pressure from patients asking for it, under who knows what pressures themselves (my boyfriend is going to leave me if I don’t give him more sex, for example?)
I appreciate the reply. I can’t help but disagree, though, for a number of reasons:
(A) You’re comparing apples to oranges.
I don’t support the current FDA bureaucracy in any way at all. You’re showing me an example of a company that has profiteered as a result of its manipulation of the FDA & its current, openly capricious, drug approval regimen. You’re making my point for me. (To wit, not only is the FDA’s drug approval process long and expensive, it’s mostly pointless as it doesn’t work well and it is open to abuse.)
(B) Of course that company got bought out. The current drug approval system concentrates power in the hands of a few pharmaceutical companies, and they don’t suffer competition gladly.
Aside: We can’t expect start-ups or small innovative ventures to positively impact the pharmaceutical industry. If any small venture has a single interesting drug candidate, they’ll be bought out before Phase I trials even begin. (They’d be insane to try and take their chances with the regulatory process, when a single failure can mean bankruptcy and professional disgrace.) Even bad start-ups get bought out. You might find the Sirtris story interesting — though “story” is perhaps the wrong choice of words, as it was an utter failure, a total debacle.
(C) What is the harm in more “sexual enhancers”, more questionable cures for baldness, and so forth? If, at the same time, there are also more research efforts into antibiotics, more legitimate pharmaceuticals, shorter drug development pipelines, a healthier competitive environment, etc., then the end result is very firmly a net positive. Even today, fools and their money are soon parted; I don’t shed any tears over idiots who waste money on questionable patent-medicines, nor should we put the brakes on an extremely important industry for the benefit of fools.
(D) “Self regulation is no regulation” — so we should allow faceless, cowardly professional bureaucrats to make our decisions for us, because we’re afraid of “another Thalidomide”? Is there no other way? If not, I believe that no regulation is much better than the regulation we seem to be stuck with, as it has led to the stagnation of progress, a laughably distorted market, drugs stuck in development limbo for decades… And more. All of which does a great deal of very real harm.
If, at the same time, there are also more research efforts into antibiotics, more legitimate pharmaceuticals, shorter drug development pipelines, a healthier competitive environment, etc.
As you say – IF. I very much doubt it, though, as the recent trend seems to be – or maybe that’s just because of the publicity around the recent cases – one of small-scale, investment-oriented private companies looking for a way to make profits out of out-of-patent or undervalued drugs.
What’s the best market? Sex and aging!
Will we make a lot of money developing a new anti-malarial? Probably not, because at present the market for those is largely in poorer countries whose governments may not put as much – or any – money into nationalised health care (it will be interesting to see what happens if, for instance, malaria is re-introduced into places like the Maremma) but on the other hand if we can acquire the rights to something from the original creators and market it as making you feel younger, sexier and happier, there is a huge market of aging Western population all too eager to pay for the Fountain of Youth!
I’d love to be proved wrong on this. I can see a lot of research into easier(?) drugs for stomach troubles, joint pain, etc. as people get older, but new antibiotics take a whole lot longer and cost more. Easier to repackage an old product or buy an out-of-patent drug, fancy it up with a website claiming (as per the testosterone implants) that it will cure shingles, dropsy and the head staggers, and peddle it online or “ask your doctor to prescribe for you”.
I think the Addyi case shows the potential for the worst – the FDA refused permission twice on scientific grounds (whether you think they were justified in such caution or not) and finally caved in to social pressure and a clever manipulation of public opinion campaign.
I think Ms Whitehead is being pretty damn disingenuous when she gushes about how all she is interested in is serving women’s health (yes and the fact that you and your family and friends made a tidy profit from that $1 billion sale price of the company solely on the grounds of getting the go-ahead for that one drug has nothing to do with it, I’m quite sure) but what can you do?
Who, in these days of arguments over defunding Planned Parenthood, wants to look like they’re the bad old Republicans, not the good old Democrats who are all for marriage equality and women’s reproductive rights? A clever and cynical PR campaign that roped in (to their shame) prominent women media figures and spokespersons for feminism put the wind up some of the bureaucratic higher-ups who have to liaise with the government administration, and they gave in for fear of being tarred with the brush of ‘puritanical anti-woman, anti-sex, anti-equal opportunity, repressive tools of the patriarchy’.
I see no reason at all that, now companies see PR campaigns can get them what they want, they will hold back in a deregulated world from the same tactics, and I do fear that even without the weak opposition of an independent and nationally-based entity to regulate and enforce, this will only get worse. We will be back (if we’re not already there) to the days of snakeoil peddlers – or do you really think laetrile does cure cancer and Mexico was leading the way in progressive medicine against the stultifying opposition of the FDA who keep refusing to permit such treatment in the USA?
As I understand it, your argument is that the presence of a regulatory agency keeps the industry honest. Fair enough. It’s probably true to some extent. Here’s my issue with it: The FDA is downright terrible at its job. Its original mission has been forgotten & “thalidomide, never forget!” has become its new motto; its entire regulatory process has expanded in a downright malignant way; the mercurial little emperors of its bureaucracy ultimately do far more harm than good. You don’t need a 10-year, $2B drug approval process to prevent people from selling laetrile and snake-oil as cancer cures. (Which, by the way, are a natural “supplement” and a food, respectively, and by definition are not pharmaceuticals.) Give me a couple of days & I’m sure that I — or any other fair-minded person with experience in the industry — could come up with a logical scheme for drug approval that would take less than a couple years and cost a minuscule fraction of the $2B currently required.
In general, I find that your view is a very pessimistic one. There are lots of researchers with noble aims, who, if given more freedom, would research antibiotics and diseases that need cures. (Currently, researchers are not the ones who make the money in the pharmaceutical industry, nor do they typically have a choice as to what they work on. If incentives change, this too might change.) They would do this out of altruistic motives, for the prestige, out of a personal interest in screening bacterial products, or for any number of other reasons.
…In any event, certainly the NIH, and most University research groups, wouldn’t stoop to working on laetrile.
You mention sex and aging as being large markets which might incentivize a disproportionate amount of pharmaceutical research in an unregulated market. What’s the issue? I’d absolutely love to see more research into aging, and more treatments that focus on preventing it. Without the FDA, there’d be a brighter future for us radical transhumanists. 🙂
There is a new anti-malarial, by the way. (Link opens PDF.) It is extremely effective — it cures malaria in a single dose. We haven’t heard much about it because it has been stuck in development limbo since 2006 — and although it might save lives, it has not seen use where it is needed most. There are several reasons for this, but I think that excessive regulatory costs are probably the primary one.
…You must admit that this is a shame, and far more important than whether or not one can buy sexual enhancement or anti-aging capsules of dubious efficacy.
Lastly: Without an FDA-granted monopoly on “female sexual enhancement”, Addyi would be worth very little — its overall value would depend on the size of the market & whatever people might pay for it OTC. If I were a betting man, I’d say that the market is not very large, and that people would not be inclined to pay very much for it, especially as it doesn’t seem to be particularly effective.
Thalidomide is to justifying the FDA what smoking is to justifying epidemiology what 9/11 is to justifying the ever-enlarging War on Terror.
I wish to propose a seemingly dubious concept of “brain entaglement” arising from .
Consider the similarities amoungst humans and the considerations that cause one to cooperate with oneself in the prisoner’s dilemma. It appears that actions that you take can “cause” others to take a similar action, due to “brain entaglement”. The actions you take make other humans more likely to take those actions. How big is this effect? Might this deal with issues of deceit/non-niceness in utilitarianism? Consider arguments like:
1. My vote might not matter enough for voting to be worth it but me voting will result in 5.6 other people voting due to “brain correlation”?
2. Me donating 100 dollars to charity will “cause” others to donate 50 dollars in addition.
3. Me secretly revealing the results of therapy of a criminal will save many lives (nobody has any physical way to know at all that I did this). However due to “brain entanglement” criminals will be less likely to go to therapy and the world ends off worse.
4. Me purging one person I disagree with vehemently seems to improve the discussion here but results in 10 people being falsely purged elsewhere.
Looks to me like you are reinventing Timeless Decision Theory.
I think I’ve asked this before, and I admit I haven’t read it very carefully, but how is TDT meaningfully distinct from plain old super-rationality (which is basically just plain ol’ Kant)?
It is a formalization of the concept really. Superrationality seems to consider that all agents will behave the same “superrational” way. TDT relaxes that and requires that they are just correlated.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bxi/hofstadters_superrationality/
Also, the plain old “superrationality” just assumes that the other players are enlightened enough to do the “superrational” thing. Which in real life is often not true. Yes, those non-“superrational” players will harm themselves when they meet their copies, but more importantly, they will harm you a lot, now.
TDT — I may be wrong here — reads the opponent’s source code, and thus doesn’t feed the predators.
I am aware of Timeless decision theory. I am just pointing out what I believe are some interesting results of it. I guess I wanted to emphasize how hard the computations that TDT requires are and ask if anyone has any estimates of them.
That’s cool, next let’s purge all the people I don’t like
starting with me
huh. i guess self-hating tyrants kind of take care of themselves?
I just read the June 2014 post about depression. This comment is late, but it might help somebody.
I wasted decades being treated for depression, when I actually had Bipolar II, a disease that causes depression alternating with periods of normality, with no manic episodes. Skipping a night’s sleep invariably made me feel better, for one day. Exercise helped.
Four psychiatrists tried every family of anti-depressants, but only one had any effect: an MAO Inhibitor caused a wonderful week long hypomanic episode, but it was never repeated.
I turned down ECT.
Finally, psychiatrist #4 discovered that drugs for Bipolar were miracle cures for me. I am now on Lamictal, which eliminates the depression, but leaves the occasional hypomanic episodes. I’m ok with that.
There are complicating factors in my case. I was found to have sleep apnea, fixed by a CPAP machine. I had a meningioma, now removed, and that might have contributed.
A few months ago, I spoke with a friend from decades ago, and we were shocked that we had almost the same story! If it happened to us, there are probably others suffering in the same way. Even psychiatrists complain that there is no good way to diagnose Bipolar II.
And if anybody knows a way I can give back to all the people who helped me, let me know.
I endorse this. One of my patients has your same story. Lamictal is a hell of a drug.
Is there a good way to know if Lamictal is an appropriate treatment?
I suspect I may have sleep apnea – what’s the way to deal with this? Just bring it up with my doctor or therapist? Go online for a SPAP machine and see if it works? How did they find it in your case?
A useful way to find out if you have sleep apnea is to ask your roommate if you snore, and if so, would zie please get a recording of it. A suitable medical professional hearing that will give some specific positives (along with false negatives).
Official next step is to get a sleep study (polysomnograph). Your doctor can write you a prescription for one / tell you where to find one.
Unofficially, some people just get the CPAP and see if it helps, but your insurance won’t help with that.
Anecdotally, I’ve never heard of anyone doing a sleep study who doesn’t wind up with a CPAP machine. This impression (of a diagnostic that never answers “no”) has made me somewhat cynical about the process. But I also know I shouldn’t trust anecdote.
In practice, what fraction of the people who get a sleep study wind up being diagnosed as not having sleep apnea?
My girlfriend has issues with insomnia (some related to her bipolar depression, and we also suspect she may have some degree of non-24). Every time she goes to see a doctor about this, she either A) ends up with a prescription for a sleeping pill like Ambien, which tends to work well for a bit but then not or B) gets recommended for a sleep study.
The big problem is that sleep study centers are really awful places for an insomniac to sleep! It’s stressful, it’s foreign, you’re hooked up to stuff. As a result she’s never managed to achieve her natural level of sleep in a sleep study and the results are ambiguous or useless. Any advice?
Just in case you haven’t hit the low-hanging fruit: melatonin?
Tried and mostly failed. Her insomnia seems to be more anxiety related (want to sleep, can’t because anxious, anxious because not sleeping, rinse and repeat) than not feeling tired (when stuff has worked it’s generally been stuff that treats anxiety).
Anyway I was more curious about recommendations for obtaining good sleep diagnoses, since sleep studies seem to be a prerequisite to get anywhere, but they are really lousy for anyone who can’t sleep.
A few years ago I was able to get an ‘at home’ sleep study done. I went into the clinic to have the sensors and recorder box taped to me, and was given instructions on how to fit the breathing tube under my nose before I went to bed. Detecting my breathing started the recording.
In my case, they were looking to confirm the sleep apnea diagnosis, I don’t know if the equipment can be used for other sleep disorders. You’re still covered in wires, but at least you’re in your own bed, which sounds like it might help.
There are phone apps that use the accelerometer to do a crude sleep study. Much cheaper than a real one.
Are there any you can currently download? the only one I found googling says they’re waiting for FDA approval to release.
The Atlantic had an interesting article about how the United States needs to give up the ghost on the importance and reverence towards BA degrees. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/reverence-bachelors-degree/408346/
The author provides a tale of two nephews. One graduated from college after 6 years and has been floating around in underemployment since then. The other knew that college was not for him and went to culinary school and did well as a cook but is finding it hard to break out of the tough wages of chefs and cooks because he lacks a BA and the prospect of going back and doing it all from scratch daunts him.
There was also an article in the Federalist about how it is time for America to return to making things which contained an unfortunate snide remark about how liberals (like me) would rather have a transgendered child over a child that works as a deep-sea welder. Some thoughts and questions.
1. Deep Sea Welding does seem to pay good money but it is also an incredibly risky and dangerous career which can lead to shortening of life spans and/or serious injury and death from work-place accidents. Is it morally and ethically wrong for parents to stress college education in order for their children to avoid jobs that are physically back-breaking? Isn’t deep sea welding the kind of job that should be performed by robots? Let’s concede that emphasing a college education to get out of backbreaking work leads to underemployment for college grads and less than safe finances and employment prospects for people without college educations for the sake of the question.
2. How close are we to admitting that some people are just going to lead working class lives and/or economically precarious lives and there is nothing we can do about it? No politician can ever get away with saying this kind of stuff in a Western Democracy because it would mean a quick end to their career. I suppose someone can fashion themselves as a “brave truth-teller” because “brave truth-teller” always seems to mean “I will say why the lives of others need to suck.”
3. Does anyone have any ideas about how to make employers reconsider not making a BA a minimum requirement?
RE:
2. As long as immigration is a large and ongoing thing, blue coller ppl in the developed world will always lead difficult life cause their labor can be easily replaced. OTOH, i think being a blue collar worker in the dark days between US immigration waves was a much more pleasant experience. I dont think you can have both high wages for less skilled work and lots of immigration. Free trade might also make it difficult as well. (and yes i think unions declined in power b/c immigration and free trade, not politics).
3. Dont guarantee student loans. BA’s would simultaneously increase in value and become less universally necessary for employment.
To me the most interesting (in a good way!) thing about your comment is how it illustrates that your pov is not mine…go SSC!
Deep Sea Welding does seem to pay good money but it is also an incredibly risky and dangerous career which can lead to shortening of life spans and/or serious injury and death from work-place accidents.
Here is a reddit on underwater welding. Other sites give more info. It appears that a) the people in the field feel that OSHA’s definitions of “commercial diver” are inaccurate and b) assuming a working lifetime of 45 years for the field is highly inaccurate. It also looks like a very socially useful way for young men to take risks and use physical strength.
Is it morally and ethically wrong for parents to stress college education in order for their children to avoid jobs that are physically back-breaking?
I think it’s completely acceptable for parents to stress that their children should live ethical lives and to avoid harming other people. I think it’s also a good thing for parents to want their children to have as many options as possible. I don’t think it’s a good thing for people to stress avoiding physical work on the basis that it is physical work.
Isn’t deep sea welding the kind of job that should be performed by robots?
Weeelll, no one is actually forcing anyone to do welding of any sort. It’s a job that pays fairly well. It employs people. If we had robots to do this – and it appears that underwater welding is actually a highly skilled job – then people would be out of work. Given the various challenges – salt water, visibility, depth, etc – I think this is a job that is going to be automation-resistant.
How close are we to admitting that some people are just going to lead working class lives and/or economically precarious lives and there is nothing we can do about it?
…You say this like “working class” (I would say “blue collar”) lives are a bad thing. Is that what you mean? Also – many artists deliberately choose economically precarious lives over working jobs they don’t fancy but would pay quite well. What is your choice here?
Does anyone have any ideas about how to make employers reconsider not making a BA a minimum requirement?
Have alternate certificate markers for level of education, social skills, and/or social class that are a) meaningful and b) legal to use. Making it much more difficult for socially disruptive individuals without basic literacy skills (and math) to get a HS diploma would go a long way to making that a reliable marker (again) for employers to use as a weeding tool. Reversing the SCOUS decision on intelligence tests for employment would allow industry to develop their own (more useful) metrics instead of forcing them to rely on colleges.
Re: #3,
Improve regular school to the point where a bachelor’s isn’t the absolute baseline “can breathe without verbal prompting” sorting mechanism. Institute tracking and apprenticeship programs for the vast majority of kids who aren’t headed for academia. Teach job skills young (and I don’t mean welding, I mean “show up, on time, and fucking well work for the time you are paid”).
> How close are we to admitting that some people are just going to lead working class lives and/or economically precarious lives and there is nothing we can do about it?
Most people born in working class backgrounds do accept this, unless they get their make it big in X (football, singing, acting, etc).
There’s also a significant blindspot here for the way most wealth is created. See this bio for Boston’s most recent billionaire:
– Herb Chambers
On 3, I think pushing for IQ testing would help.
Having a degree correlates with intelligence, partly through demanding at least a little of it, but also from being correlated with the person’s background and parentage. It has an obvious correlation with conscientiousness. A candidate having one is probably pretty good evidence towards them doing better on these traits. Right now, I think favouring candidates which have one is perfectly individually sensible- the discount you can get by offering to pay candidates without one less is not enough to offset the fact that you might be wasting a large amount of time and money by hiring someone who is just not very good.
One way to improve this would be to encourage more, better evidence to be available, which will reduce the value of a degree as evidence. Direct intelligence testing would be a form of this.
Another option I favour is Scott’s idea of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of having a degree except where said degree can be shown to be directly relevant. Yes, it’s individually useful to, but if we’d rather they didn’t for societal benefit it’s reasonable to require that employers not.
A third option that I think is less likely to have significant benefit might be to try to generate these signals in a way which is less ridiculously expensive.
I am unsure about totally halting schemes to allow the poor access to university, because I think the tulip subsidy model is, like most models, partial; true, but not capturing everything significant which is going on. I think there’s value in allowing intelligent-but-starting-poor people to viably enter the social circles of the university educated and gain that background, for maximising the value generated by them, and I think most people are bad enough at being self-taught that universities probably do provide useful access to knowledge for most even in the 21st century (so far), and that having affordable access to training for some careers which demand specific degrees rather than “any degree” is probably useful. I think I also have a direct aesthetic preference for societies with grand places of learning, accessible to anyone who can make good use of them, even as disappointing as universities are in reality.
But setting limits on the amount tuition is allowed to be, providing immediate incentives (ones way off in the future fail to motivate) to students to favour cheaper universities since at present they’re very price insensitive (perhaps letting them have a share of the amount their tuition is below the limit in immediately available money, or introducing a kind of “copay”), attempting to coordinate the creation of long distance teaching for those who can do that, are all ideas I like.
I’m a regular, but anonymous for the purposes of this subthread as I am looking for personal advice. How can one best help someone else overcome akrasia?
My wife has a major case of akrasia when it comes to anything relating to jobhunting. She is at a job where she is overworked and underappreciated, and has been periodically resolving to leave and find something better for a good three years now. But she ends up in a cycle of resolving to find a new job, then procrastinating on doing anything about it, and then gradually forgetting about it, until a month passes and something else happens at work that makes her resolve to leave again.
She did have a period of prolonged unemployment a several years ago at the height of the Great Recession so I speculate that she’s been conditioned to find job-hunting to be an unpleasant and unrewarding task. That said, her background is strong enough that I would expect it to be relatively easy for her to find something new.
Any ideas on how I can help her out with this?
Assuming you don’t have the same problem and there is no objection to your accessing her personal data, the obvious solution is for you to do the hunting instead, up until the interview stage.
You probably shouldn’t use your real email address when commenting anonymously, or people will be able to identify you by your Gravatar.
“Find a satisfying new job” is way too big and important and abstract to actually do. You need to break it into smaller, more concrete pieces.
“Find a job title in your area that you didn’t know existed before” might be a good step. “Experiment with searches on [one specific site] until you find three phrases that turn up interesting-sounding job descriptions – then write down those phrases” is about the right level too. “Look up an organization you kind of like on LinkedIn and see if anyone who went to [your alma mater] works there.”
A friend interviews occasionally for jobs they aren’t interested in just to stay sharp, perhaps applying for a job without the goal of actually getting it is a good way to reduce the importance of it and thus the stress involved.
That’d be wasting the hiring manager’s time, which some might think unethical. If the applicant is just 99.5% sure they won’t accept, though, it might become a “chance for them to change [the applicant’s] mind”. Seems a bit like a cop out, though.
Someone I met at App Academy had his grandfather move to California because he took an interview for a job he didn’t want.* They said they wanted him, he refused, and they upped the offer in a few steps until it was double his then-current salary and two spots higher in the engineer hierarchy. So he changed his mind and accepted. I think if you’d be willing to accept if this happened to you, it’s reasonable to go for the interview.
*Specifically: They contacted him, and said they’d fly him out. He didn’t want the job, but did want free plane ride from Texas out to California, so he took the interview and spent the weekend visiting his son at college. He did the interview, said he wasn’t interested, and went home. They called back multiple times over the next couple weeks.
It seems pretty exploitable actually – there are a fair number of companies which fly out people after only a minimal phone screen, assuming of course that there’s something in your background that they’re interested in. If you came up with a list of these companies you could do a lot of flying for free. Aside the cost of your time, obviously.
Last time I was job-hunting, I was flown cross-country for an interview after one phone call which, basically, consisted of a recruiter reading me a job description and asking me if it sounded like something I might be interested in. So yay free California vacation.
http://Www.beeminder.com. I set up a goal of 5 minutes job hunting a day and that was enough.
Forgive me this, but there’s something I don’t get about the Steve Johnson ban; why couldn’t people just ignore him? If he doesn’t spam up the place just let him have his comment tree and knock him for breaking the rules.
I mean, maybe I’m just typical minding here, but it’s not that hard to just scroll past someone who is acting up for attention. His views were batshit and quite frankly it didn’t seem like he was hitting two of the three requirements for posting, but many of the comments in that tumblr thread just left me scratching my head. If you don’t want to see his NRx ramblings on the latest matter, just pass them by?
One person can do so easily. A group of 10 moderately disciplined people could. 100 commenters could if such a norm were explicitly promulgated and enforced somehow at least once.
I imagine we have >100 unique commenters, and provocative comments will draw out the lurkers, too, and the new readers.
Think of it like the law of large numbers. Someone’s going to roll a critical fail on their composure test, it’s just a matter of who and when, and then we get large unpleasant threads about race and gender.
Is this your first internet community? The phenomenon of “trolling” is extensively documented.
Good heavens; I hope not! Can you imagine the high expectations set thereby? Talk about a tough act to follow.
I suppose it’s too much to hope for poeple to show restraint. It’s not even like he tricked people by using alts — every one of his posts was prefaced with Steve Johnson. You knew exactly what to expact. If he did have alts, their writing style were sufficiently different that they did not troll anyone.
I responded to him frequently because I thought that someone ought to argue against the narrative that every piece of leftist policy is a conscious step in the program to destroy Western civilization. Because, frankly, it seemed like it would be unjustified to just bitch about the comments section getting more right-wing and more stupidly so without making at least some token attempt to challenge it.
Exactly.
And if Scott is worried about the impression his comment section makes on outsiders, 10 people yelling at Steve Johnson is strictly superior to everyone ignoring him.
Even better than 10 yelling people? Eight people patiently engaging the bad arguement and acknowledging areas of merit, where they exist.
Reasonable lurker says ‘huh, so if I say something offending local custom I don’t get burned at the stake. Way cool.’
Troll lurker sez ‘these people are more boring than drying paint. Off to find more explosive forums!’
The folks who think “women are always on the lookout for those delicious rapist genes” is something that offends local custom are not the kind of lurker Scott is worried about. (And I’m not sure Scott wants to attract more of them, either. To truly show off our open-mindedness and diversity of opinion, we should lure in some of these ladies instead.)
1) I read that thread, that’s not what SJ said.
2) “Local custom” covers a variety of discussion centered sins, but mostly the sort of things you don’t realize are horrible until after you’ve done it. Tolerating alternate povs is not the same as agreeing with or supporting them.
3) …I am hoping you are joking with that link.
1) Well, I had to paraphrase for brevity, and adjust for the fact that the rape hypothesis seemed unnecessary in context, so it would have to be rather central in Steve’s worldview to have such salience — and remember that we’re considering potentially uncharitable readers here.
2) “mostly the sort of things you don’t realize are horrible until after you’ve done it” — do you think Steve made a mistake of that sort?
3) Hey, what’s the problem? Like Steve, they are sincere, have very unusual and thus ~interesting~ ideas, and don’t resort to crude insults 🙂 Yes, I am joking. Although I do think that a space aimed at maximizing diversity of opinion would welcome both neoreactionaries and these peculiar radfems with equal enthusiasm.
All that said, if I were Scott, I wouldn’t have banned Steve yet — but obviously Scott should manage his own blog any way he likes.
I’m trying to decide if the reaction would have been better or worse if Steve had decided to discuss, in agonizing detail, the difference between evolution producing a top-level desire that interfaces with consciousness universally, and a set of responses that produce that outcome without triggering a craving.
Species do weird things around sex all the time. If you honestly believed that species acted in accordance with their individual desires and that those desires lined up entirely with their well-being around mating, how would ant reproduction look, or salmon spawning, or praying mantis sex?
Given that there appear to be really common linkages between sex and violence and sex and dominance, and that there are multiple other species who use multiple fitness strategies, I think there’s conceptual room to examine the hypothesis. On the other hand, if Steve wasn’t going to take the effort to clarify his position to something more nuanced than “Women do X in response to selective pressure from this oddly-specific scenario.”, I really don’t see the point in trying to extract any such hypothesis from the wreckage of yonder thread.
Depending on how many such bad arguments are here, that could be a lot of work. Bad arguments are sometimes very easy to write.
I hate discussing this bloody thing again but since I was in the comment thread cruisin’ for a bannin’ by jumping up and down and yelling at Steve Johnson, I should clarify:
(a) the comment he left was not relevant in total to the comment that invited it as a reply
(b) the part that could have been relevant was poorly phrased
(c) there was no further engagement or clarification; he made the comment and then left it there
(d) he dragged rape in out of nowhere and then compounded that by dragging in evolution as the be-all and end-all and it was not even an explanation, just a statement made and left lying there
So to the rule of “true/necessary/kind” regarding Steve Johnson’s comment, I am not worrying about the “kind” part (an unpalatable fact may not be kind or susceptible to stating kindly but true and necessary for all that), but for the “necessary” I don’t think it was, and as regards “true” obviously I don’t think it was true.
@ddreytes – “I responded to him frequently because I thought that someone ought to argue against the narrative that every piece of leftist policy is a conscious step in the program to destroy Western civilization.”
I frequently wondered if I shouldn’t do that as well. I seem to allign more with the reds/greys here than the blues, and it frequently seemed to me that I would prefer to see more of them arguing vocally against him. I didn’t myself though, and the question of why troubles me a bit. I’m pretty sure I spent a lot more time arguing against Nita’s various positions than I did against his, sometimes even in threads started by him. I’m also pretty sure I agree with Nita on a lot more than I did with him. Something about his posting style just triggered a “do not reply” response. *
@Nita – “Although I do think that a space aimed at maximizing diversity of opinion would welcome both neoreactionaries and these peculiar radfems with equal enthusiasm.”
I agree, actually. I wish more SJ types in general posted here. The recent influx of outspoken communists has been largely salutary.
“All that said, if I were Scott, I wouldn’t have banned Steve yet — but obviously Scott should manage his own blog any way he likes.”
I agree with that as well. By the way, your writeup on life and politics in Russia in a recent thread was informative. Thank you for it.
In fact, I’m going to Russia for a couple of weeks — we’ll see whether my model is supported by fresh evidence.
And I enjoyed our debate about the costs and benefits of Western anti-communist stratagems, so thanks to you, too.
If your behavior was never challenged or punished, would that make you do it more or less? There’s the kind of bad behavior* where you’re just fishing for reactions, which I think can be stanched by ignoring it, and the kind where you’re motivated by a higher calling, so to speak, like spreading your political beliefs as far and wide as possible. That kind is less likely to be stopped just by ignoring it, and I think it has to be confronted directly if it’s to be addressed as all. I always sensed (from my mostly-lurking position) that Steve’s motivation was that he genuinely wanted to convert people, not just for the lulz (do people even say that anymore? I honestly don’t know.)
Also, it’s Scott’s blog, he can do what he wants with it, etc. I agree that anyone willing to argue honestly and rationally should be welcome here, but the thing about that is there are people who aren’t willing to do that, and if you don’t do something about it, what’s the point of holding those values in the first place?
*-Trolling, I mean, but I use trolling to mean ‘deliberately making people angry for fun’. It seems like in the last couple years it’s expanded to mean ‘anything remotely antagonistic to the prevailing local values and mores’, just like ‘hipster’ means ‘anyone whose life choices and values annoy me’. I think if you’re sincere you are by definition not trolling.
Yeah, I find this a really weird bit of linguistic drift. I recently saw people who were legitimately enforcing copyright online described as “copyright trolls”. Weird.
It’s a shame, because I love the original definition. (Maybe it was just too nuanced to survive past the Usenet era into 2015, when the internet is no longer majority-nerd?)
That specific example is probably an extension of ‘patent troll’, which IIRC has different etymology – it’s supposed to bring to mind a monster hiding under a bridge, waiting for people to cross it before jumping out and grabbing them. True patent-trollery relies on patenting something, waiting for someone to use the patented thing, and then jumping out and suing them when you think you can make money off of it.
Ah, yes, interesting. I think you’re right, though the usage I saw probably was also influenced by troll-as-in-internet-troll.
Of course, I think the fact that that sense’s etymology (troll, verb, a form of fishing) is homonymic with troll (noun, ugly thing that lives under a bridge) probably also helped it gain its current popularity and influenced its present shift in meaning.
Of course, I think the fact that that sense’s etymology (troll, verb, a form of fishing) is homonymic with troll (noun, ugly thing that lives under a bridge) probably also helped it gain its current popularity and influenced its present shift in meaning.
Old Usenet hand, here. I saw a (humanoid) troll lurking under a bridge sending out his fishing line to see how many people would bite. When a regular caught on, zie would reply “Plonk” (which was the sound of a post, or a poster, dropping into the trash or a killfile). It took me a while to remember why one regular would say, “Plonkkity, plonkkity, plonkkity-plonk.”
The shift in the meaning of troll is interesting.
Classic trolling was about upsetting people, making them expend emotional energy and effort, etc, preferably out of proportion to the troll’s effort. Often implicit was the idea that the troll was saying whatever would most upset the targets, regardless of what the troll actually believed.
Now we do indeed see, as you describe, anyone who disagrees with the local mores might get described as a troll.
But there’s a bit of column A, bit of column B situations: if someone shows up in a comments section and starts arguing a diametrically opposed view which they actually believe, they’re probably going to upset people, waste their time, etc. They might be arguing in earnest (but still upsetting people and unintentionally trolling), or they might be setting out to upset people (and not really arguing in earnest, because they know they’re not going to do more than upset people), or they might be doing both – maybe they hope to make some converts while simultaneously upsetting those who cannot be converted.
I don’t think the meaning has “shifted” or “drifted”, so much as “split”. Also, part of the split is apparently due to people not grasping the concept of trolling.
Which results in plenty of opportunities for misunderstandings, and manipulation.
Also, some communities will be quicker to call “troll” than others, it seems – that is, to assume that someone arguing a contrary position is not acting entirely in earnest.
The impression I have gotten is that left-wing communities or communities usually seen as left-wing will be more likely to accuse someone of trolling (which to some degree at least implicitly carries the weight of accusing them of not arguing wholly in earnest).
In comparison their counterparts on or seen as being on the right will be more likely to accuse them of being idiots, wrong, etc, but assume they’re speaking in earnest.
Again, just my impression, no hard numbers, and no idea how you could collect them anyway.
I responded to him on that because I did blow up about it. I’m female. I take it personally (which is a bad thing, doubtless), when things are floated about evolutionarily correct responses about sexual violence, because there’s too much crap still in the collective social assumption of how men and women and sex and all the rest of it works.
I’m not left-wing either politically or socially (though I regard myself as more centrist-right in the European model, so God knows what that works out as in American terms) so my disagreement with him was not on neo-reactionary grounds per se (I don’t know if those are his politics and if they are, I’m certainly not as right-wing as him, but I’m not socialist/communist either).
But “evolution encourages rape for stronger genes” is a very hot potato indeed and you can’t just lob it into the middle of a discussion about martial arts and sword types, then walk away and leave it there, and expect nothing to happen!
Having somebody like that rolling around really does change the tenor of a comment section overall. When Megan McArdle blogged at The Atlantic, there was a conservative commentor (who’s name I can’t recall right now) who would drag down the comment section every single time he opened his mouth. Even when he said something I agreed with (about 1/3 of the time) he would phrase it in such an assholish manner that it would instantly ignite a flame war. As soon as I saw that guy’s name, I just started scrolling because nothing worth reading would follow downthread. These threads started to get more and more frequent and longer. There was another commenter, tstev, who I think had English as a second language that would also post diatribes (“You’re badgering! You’re a badger! Why do you keep badgering?”) that for some reason never caused hateful flame wars. He was a lot easier to tolerate.
I think that losing Steve Johnson will be a net positive for SSC.
EDIT: Movertyperguy was the guy I was thinking of.
Seems like the sort of thing people around here might know… are there medications that make people more sociable, but don’t do so just by reducing anxiety/depression, i.e. is there evidence of an effective treatment for a naturally reclusive, unsociable temperament? Modafinil is to intellectual capacity as ??? is to social capacity.
Cocaine? Ecstasy?
I’m only half joking, but I sort of understand the desire. Those two drugs are far from long term solutions.
+1 to Ecstasy. (Never tried cocaine.)
At lower doses, MDMA (the chemical name of ecstasy) does not cause the sensory excitation associated with an Ecstasy trip, and can’t really be said to cause “intoxication” in any useful sense, but it does foster trust and openness and lower inhibitions, which is probably what you want.
I have no idea where you get lower-dosed Ecstasy though.
I actually think a few good MDMA experiences can have a long-term positive affect.
That said, doing it alone in your room or at a party where you don’t know anyone probably wouldn’t work, so if your baseline is low enough it’s not the solution.
I suspect this is not the answer you’re looking for, but: alcohol. Seriously. If you’re looking for something without the side effect of intoxication, then I don’t know of anything.
Seconding this – it’s not the way people usually think about it, but a couple of drinks pretty much have the exact effect of socializing you (two works for me. YMMV). Of course, it you take it too often you develop tolerance and harm your liver, but that seems fairly standard as medication side effects go.
I don’t drink much but when I do it produces an ability to pattern match things in conversations. I find it much easier to relate to others. A story or topic they bring up will much more easily trigger a story/point of my own that seems related.
I think I’m an outlier on this, but alcohol actually makes me more quiet and withdrawn. Granted, I’ve never drank heavily.
Alcohol is a mild sedative, it’s benefits to socialization are a placebo effect, just like sugar making kids hyperactive. It’ll only work if Lampchairdesk believes it should.
Mild sedatives can reduce anxiety, including social anxiety.
Lyrica. All the “turning the gain down on social inhibition” and none of the hangover.
Mdma
Alcohol
Not sure about “legit” treatment medication. But you could always experiment with getting drunk and applying those lessons to sober life.
Amphetamine would be the go-to drug for this, but if you use it to hide your flaws and don’t change your actual behavior it will cause you to crash and burn.
Smoking.
Not sure if it’s a good idea (even compared to alcohol) – side effects aside, there are a lot of people who would avoid socializing with someone if they smelled like cigarettes.
Huh. Who/where are they? A lot of the people I know outside the SSC-sphere smoke.
Me, for example. Unless there is a compelling reason not to, I’ll avoid the hell out of you if you smell like cigarettes.
Probably a difference between cultures. In Australia smoking is likely to make you a social pariah while in Germany the opposite appears to be true.
Smoking has become more of a win and lose thing. It’s becoming harder to get to know non-smokers but it’s becoming easier to get to know smokers.
Yeah, tobacco smokes reeks. I will happily throw you out of any space I have any control over for having smoked within the last half-hour and take whatever short-term hit to my social capital is required to do so.
I think of this as a coastal California thing. Smoking seems a lot more prevalent/acceptable even in hip Blue Tribe circles elsewhere, at least within the US.
Anyway, there’s always dip. And snus.
I wanted to get an e-cigarette just for show, because I like the gestural and aesthetic possibilities afforded by smoking. (That and the opportunity to fidget and put things in my mouth in a socially appropriate manner.)
Apparently they don’t work with pure water, though, and all the no-nicotine liquids have these disgusting flavors. I gave up.
You might be interested in one of these: http://www.newrulefx.com/collections/actor-cigarette
Same ‘mint-flavored’ propylene glycol cartridges.
It won’t work with pure water, but it will work with pure glycerine. Unflavoured glycerine still has a slightly sweet taste, but it’s cheap and you can get it at the drugstore.
Funny you should mention modafinil – I think there’s an important analogy here. Modafinil doesn’t let you know things you didn’t already know – modafinil might help you on a calculus test, but it won’t help much if you never read the textbook. Almost all of its effect is to increase energy, then some changes to motivation, and then possibly small changes to intelligence that don’t fit under “energy” or “motivation.”
A substance that improves your social outcomes isn’t necessarily going to be a substitute for things like practicing remembering peoples’ names and traits, or practicing asking people out on dates, or practicing calming people who are irate. Instead it’s going to do something general like “decrease nervousness” or “increase energy” or “change motivation.”
The time to reach for such chemical aids might be if you already attend the metaphorical calculus class, and already have tried doing some metaphorical homeworks and exams, but are having trouble learning from the homeworks and/or performing on the exams. Cocaine is not going to help your party life if you don’t go to any parties.
Okay, this is interesting. The modafinil analogy might have been a bad one, except to the extent that it alters motivation. I think I am imagining a drug that would assist someone who frequently felt no desire to socialise, but wanted to want to socialise, ie. has a second-order desire. I am imagining someone who has no huge difficulties with social niceties and small talk (no more than average), except that they seem to them to be a bit hollow and pointless.
I think I read somewhere that socially anxious people weren’t unique in suffering socially-induced anxiety, which everyone has from time to time, but in having a deficit in their reward circuity, ie. no countervailing reward response, no squirt of dopemine. Something that made social activity more intrinsically rewarding might do the trick.
You know how occasionally people go off their antidepressants because it worked too well and they feel like their personality has been altered? Well, that would be a feature not a bug in this case. Complete personality overhaul.
Small doses of beer (or cocktials)
Don’t forget to factor in the chance that the prevailing narrative is wrong and greenhouse emissions are a net good. If for no other reason than that longer growing seasons and increased rainfall mean we can grow more non-animal crops to feed people.
There’s also the issue that many if not most carbon offsets are in fact ineffective and either bordering on or plainly are scams.
Okay, but counterbalance that with the possibility that the prevailing narrative is wrong and making living things suffer is good because it pleases our dark lord and master, Azathoth.
You know, if there’s one person I wouldn’t have expected to act like the prevailing rhetoric about a topic is obviously good and a contradiction is obviously evil it was you.
Then again, it is pretty hard to resist being flippant.
I was also somewhat disappointed in Scott’s lack of charity here.
There comes a time when PRATTs just aren’t worth addressing anymore.
INDEED, TORMENT AND THE SPILLING OF INNOCENT BLOOD PLEASES ME, HOWEVER, THE CONSUMPTION OF PURPOSE-BRED CREATURES FOR SUSTENANCE IS A RELATIVELY INEFFICIENT WAY OF SPREADING INJUSTICE AND PAIN. MAKE SMALL, INCORRECT EDITS TO WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES WHERE THEY ARE UNLIKELY TO BE NOTICED YET ARE SUFFICIENTLY SIGNIFICANT TO CAUSE CHAOS IF TAKEN AS FACT. TAKE ANY OPPORTUNITY TO DESTROY TRUST AND ENCOURAGE DEFECTION.
Blind Idiot, YOU made us invent general intelligence and got us into countless iterated prisoners’ dilemmas for millions of years, what did you think would happen
Are you the guy who organized the boycott of our Effective Sadism conference because toddlers were taken off the luncheon menu?
There’s a difference between an is and an ought, Mr. Alexander. The prevailing narrative about how awful it is for animals to suffer can’t be wrong in the same way that the prevailing narrative about how dangerous greenhouse emissions can be. It can be bizarre, incoherent, inhuman, or evil, but not *wrong* per se.
More likely, imo, that our metric for “does this system make living things suffer more than the alternates” is subject to factual bias depending on how we define living things, suffer, and the alternates.
I mean, yeah, it could also be wrong because it pleases Azothoth’s daughter Eris, (and so indirectly pleases Azothoth) but I think a measurement/definition error is more likely than a system narrative one in this case.
With all things there are diminishing returns. It’s quite credible that some moderate amount of global warming will be a net benefit, mostly because far more people die from cold than heat each year. But this isn’t certain and more importantly that small amount of global warming is what we’re going to end up with if we make a much more strenuous effort than we’re currently making to fight global warming.
Deaths from heat or cold aren’t the main problems caused by global warming. As far as I know, the main worries are flooding and difficulties in farming.
It isn’t clear how much warming we will end up with if we do nothing to mitigate it. So far, the IPCC has pretty consistently projected high. There are possible explanations for why.
My preferred one is that they special cased the mid-century thirty year pause as due to aerosols when it was actually the result of a recurring pattern, thus substantially overestimated the rate of warming due to AGW. There’s an article from a few years ago in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ that argues that position and concludes that warming due to AGW has been pretty steady since 1910 at .8-.9°C/century.
If that’s right, then we may well be better off from warming as of 2100. I’m skeptical of attempts to predict much of anything that far ahead, let along further–for reasons see my _Future Imperfect_.
I don’t believe that flooding is a major worry, given that even on the IPCC’s high emissions scenario the upper edge of SLR as of 2100 is about a meter. The lowest city in the Netherlands is currently more than six meters below sea level, and the rest of the century is a long time. The high emissions scenario assumes continued economic growth, which means much larger resources available to deal with problems by the end of the century.
I did a back of the envelope calculation based on an article that tried to work out the consequences of burning all fossil fuel. My conclusion was that the result, as of a thousand years from now, would be loss of usable land mainly from heat, not from flooding.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/09/if-we-burned-all-our-fossil-fuel.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-overestimate-global-warming.htm
(tl;dr: early IPCC reports tended to overestimate how much CO2 we’d release in the next N years, and had a slightly-too-large value for CO2 forcing, but feedback values appear correct).
Reference?
Note that we can actually observe the top-of-atmosphere energy-imbalance caused by increased CO2, and that alone is sufficient to explain the increase in temperature since the 1970s. And all the natural factors that we know of are pointing in a a cooler-than-average direction right now (exception: this is an el-Nino year). The oceans are also getting warmer, which means it can’t just be an ocean/atmosphere heat shift thing. Hypothesising magic heat from nowhere is unnecessary.
Storm surge on top of that, and increased rainfall as well.
The Netherlands has spent on the order 400 years and god-only-knows how much money diking their coastline. When do you expect that to happen for Bangladeshi river deltas?
That conclusion – warm parts of the world ending up with too high a wet bulb temperature for human survival causing more loss of land than flooding – is correct. The conclusion that it’s not a big deal is utterly insane. You describe coastal areas moving inland at 300 metres/century as “well short of the catastrophe implied by “coastal cities deep underwater.””. It’s about 400 years short for the major cities I checked, and noticeable at 100 years. For example, part of the road I drive to work would be underwater at 3m of sea level rise, according to this. I can’t even see the ocean from it. I poked around a couple of large coastal cities, and every one I checked had significant sections going underwater. It’s not deep underwater, but this is not as much of an exaggeration as you portray (and of course, if we commit that much, by the end of things we genuinely are looking at ~50m of sea level rise, which will very much put major coastal cities deep underwater).
You take the ~10c warming (in a couple of centuries) estimate and split it into 5c for hot places, 15c for warm places because of arctic amplification/similar processes. This is likely too large a split – the difference between the tropics and the poles on Earth is only about a factor 2, and there isn’t as much land at the poles as there is around the equator (EARTH IS NOT A CYLINDER) so the average will have more ‘warm’ land in it than ‘cold’ land.
Fortunately, the authors of the paper note that “The ratios between the global mean temperature and the near-surface air temperature and ocean temperature at about 400-m depth in the region south of 66°S are almost constant on long time scales, as shown in a 6000-year simulation with the coupled climate model ECHAM5/MPIOM (21). They approach values of 1.8 and 0.7, respectively. “. If I’m reading that right, they’re saying that under +10c warming, Antarctica hits about +18c. With a polar amplification factor of 2.0, India hits +9c.
Actually calculating where becomes uninhabitable because of heat is difficult; you have to take humidity into account (wet bulb temperature is what is important). Fortunately, 9c is enough for us to very readily say that India is gone.
India’s current population is ~1.2 billion. Assuming it takes ~200 years to hit that much temperature increase (as shown in the paper) and no population increase, that’s only about 6 million people a year that need to leave the country! Over 200 years! I guess we could do it in less time, but then you need to move even more people! Maybe the world’s largest exodus of humans, going on for decades, is a really bad thing?
I don’t know enough about mass extinctions to speculate about how many species go extinct if the Earth gets 10c warmer. Wikipedia says that the PETM is believed to be a Earth-got-warmer mass extinction, with an increase of ~5c. Only significant data on wikipedia RE: extinctions there are a specific class. It’s also when mammals took over the world, so that’s nice I guess. We’re likely getting warmer faster than the PETM did, though. Any geologists around? I imagine the drastic acidification of the ocean would be of real concern to anything living in it, though. At that much warming clathrates certainly blow, so there’s a chance we get local anoxic events. What fun!
The model they used has an ECS of ~3.1 c, so around the IPCC’s best-estimate. Sure hope we don’t get unlucky and end up in the large chunk of the probability mass above that…
“skepticalscience.com”, now there’s a URL that a sane and reasonable website whose positions track the truth and not particular ideological commitments would have.
They cite their references and show their working. Check it yourself, if you’d prefer to do something more than take cheap potshots.
As you should damn well know the name came about because Cook was annoyed at climate change denialists using the term ‘skeptic’ when it’s abundantly obvious that they don’t actually respond to evidence.
Christ. When I say that McIntyre is the personification of isolated demands for rigour or that Watts has zero understanding of climate science I at least try to back that up with evidence (see, for example, McIntyre’s acceptance of Loehle’s excuse for a reconstruction vs the fun and games he’s had with MBH98, a 17-year-old paper. See that famous post of Watt’s where he had no idea how anomalies work). You think that particular SkS article cheats? Fucking /show me how/. When Friedman quotes his attempt to do the same comparison, I have the intellectual honesty to check it and figure out how he screwed it up (he doesn’t actually compute trends or error bars, he doesn’t check the scenario against actual CO2 emissions to determine where the differences lie).
I would prefer nothing in the world more than to take cheap potshots.
I read your link. I’m not impressed.
When reviewing the First Assessment Report, the author does not discuss CO2 at all. Instead he switches to “greenhouse gas (GHG) radiative forcing (global heat imbalance)”, which sure sounds like the output of a model, rather than something that can be measured. He then adjusts the IPCC model “because climate scientists at the time believed a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would cause a larger global heat imbalance than is currently believed”. After both of these ‘corrections’, he claims that the predicted 0.25C/decade would have been 0.2, which is within the range of 0.15 +/-0.08 observed.
For the Second Assessment Report, he makes the same ‘corrections’, and gets a similar result. Not what the IPCC actually predicted, but what they should have predicted if they knew what he knows.
When he reviews the Third Assessment Report, he gets sneakier. He now does actually talk about CO2. However, he compares the predictions over the timespan of 1990-2012, when the TAR was published in 2001. Looking at his graph, the TAR did a very good job of ‘predicting’ the 1990-2001 period (I hope so, it was history at the time!) and not a good job at all of predicting the actual future.
He does the same thing for the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) – at this point fully three quarters of the ‘predictions’ are really retrodictions, and he still has to conclude “the observed warming has likely been lower than the AR4 projection”
So, all four of the IPCC reports have predicted more warming than was actually observed. If you adjust their models, you can bump them down to the point where the error bars overlap with those of the observations, although the mean is still high. On top, the predictions are judged mostly with data that was already history at the time the IPCC made their predictions.
This ignores entirely all the skeptical critiques of the data gathering mechanics and ‘adjustment factors’ and so on – on the IPCC’s own terms, using their own data, their predictions are consistently high.
@David W:
Radiative forcing is the first-order effect of additional greenhouse gases. It would be difficult to measure directly because it’s not really possible to tease out directly whether a given change in observed total radiative balance (this can be measured directly) is due to what. The water vapour feedback, for example, would throw things off.
Fortunately, it’s the area of climate science most constrained by physics. Values can be calculated for concentration changes of a given gas. Something called ‘MODTRAN’ gets used. It’s a ‘model’, but not in the sense you mean it – it’s not an output of a climate model, but a line-by-line radiative transfer model. I don’t know what brand of ‘skeptic’ you are, but this is basically the greenhouse effect. Here‘s Roy Spencer noting that:
(my bold).
‘GHG radiative forcing’ instead of ‘CO2 radiative forcing’ means that they’re including non-CO2 GHGs as well – methane and CFCs would be the principle ones (water is not included, because it’s a feedback in IPCC modelling).
tl;dr: using radiative forcing to select which scenario to compare against is the Correct Way to do it.
I alluded to this when I linked to the page:
(bold not in original).
Let me explain the problem: that 3.7 W/m**2 figure for doubled CO2 forcing? In the original IPCC reports, that was 4 W/m**2. In the TAR it got updated down to 3.7 W/m**2.
What this comes down to is this: what are we actually trying to compare?
If the IPCC report said “With 2N extra CO2, we expect this”, and we actually saw N extra CO2, I would consider it correct to recalculate the IPCC’s prediction with N CO2 before comparing it against the present day, if what you were trying to determine is whether the IPCC’s understanding of how CO2 increase leads to temperature increase is correct (obviously if you’re trying to determine whether the IPCC can accurately predict GHG emissions, that would be cheating. But I don’t think anybody expects them to do that). On an incidental note, the page I linked to makes that correction as well; not sure if you noticed.
The argument for accounting for the forcing is similar. The forcing value is uncontroversial amongst non-crazy people. What people like Roy Spencer and Lindzen claim is that the feedbacks the IPCC estimate are too high. Correcting for the early radiative forcing problem allows comparing the feedback value to what actually happened.
Put another way: We know the early forcing value is ~10% too high. If we fix that and then the predictions are bang-on, then that suggests the rest of it isn’t too incorrect. We’re doing error analysis.
It’s worth noting that if you didn’t correct for the forcing change, the IPCC’s model would still outperform the naive, no-change model.
2001->2012 is 11 years. There’s not enough data to make any call. FWIW, the trend from 2001->2012 in GISTEMP is 0.062 +- 0.203 C/decade, which contains the TAR prediction, so it certainly doesn’t reject it, and the claim that it doesn’t do a good job at predicting the future is wrong.
The AR4 graph starts in 2000, so it’s not like he’s showing a full-blown set of prior data. Just providing some context for the data coming up. Starting the graph right at when the report was released for 11 and 4 (!) year spans is a great way to distort the figure.
Again, that AR4 comparison is against /four years of data/. It’s meaningless.
I disagree that the TAR and AR4 have predicted more warming than was observed. I’d argue the the comparison is statistically meaningless for AR4 and close to meaningless for TAR, and also that they match within error.
I argue that accounting for a known error in the FAR and SAR results in their predictions matching well, which suggests that the rest of it is right enough.
‘the mean is still high’ when you’re within error bars is a meaningless complaint.
The ‘skeptical’ critiques of the data gathering and data adjustment are entirely bullshit. Raw GISTEMP shows more warming than adjusted GISTEMP. BEST happened and showed very much the same data as the other surface temperature datasets.
“I don’t know what brand of ‘skeptic’ you are,”
I waffle between the lukewarmist position and a belief that nobody knows anything about climate. I acknowledge the physics of CO2 on a black body, but I find it very hard to believe in positive net feedback in a natural system.
“tl;dr: using radiative forcing to select which scenario to compare against is the Correct Way to do it.”
The theory is nice. I looked more into the details he links: I do find a NOAA model that looks plausible – ln() dependence on concentration for CO2 fits well with my understanding of absorption. I really don’t like the linear dependence used for CFC’s, but maybe it’s a valid approximation in the ppb range. Complicated relations used for CH4 and NO2 seem unlikely, but at least they contain ln() terms. I still find things to make me suspicious, though: I find a term for clouds, and a term for surface albedo – there is no way this is a naive model that only accounts for the gas composition.
Even conceding the point for the sake of argument, I’m afraid this is a bit of a seesaw. If it rescues the FAR, it surely sinks the TAR and AR4 that he’s no longer willing to use the ‘Correct Way’ to defend them, yes? It’s almost like he’s cherry-picking from noisy data the particular trends that support his argument, rather than giving a neutral account.
” On an incidental note, the page I linked to makes that [actual CO2] correction as well; not sure if you noticed”. I did, but didn’t mention it because it’s what I would have expected from a competent analysis; it didn’t ring any alarm bells.
“‘the mean is still high’ when you’re within error bars is a meaningless complaint…FWIW, the trend from 2001->2012 in GISTEMP is 0.062 +- 0.203 C/decade, which contains the TAR prediction [0.16 C/decade], so it certainly doesn’t reject it, and the claim that it doesn’t do a good job at predicting the future is wrong.”
On the contrary, error bars assume a Gaussian distribution. We may not be able to reject the IPCC hypothesis at a 95% confidence level (where I assume they set their error bars), but with a divergence that large, we can reject it at an 68% level. Insufficient certainty to publish, but enough uncertainty to support a ‘don’t spend money’ position.
Ultimately, though, the details of the analysis are not terribly important to me. What matters is that a motivated defender of the IPCC has to constantly shift his arguments in order to come up with the conclusion that climate is probably still within their wide error bars, albeit on the low side. Further, every IPCC report predicts less warming than the one before it. I am more confident than before I read your link that the truth is somewhere between ‘CO2 matters, but less than the IPCC thinks, and way less than the fearmongers claim’…and ‘nobody knows nothing’.
Keep in mind that what climate scientists mean when they say ‘positive net feedback’ is different to what a control systems engineer means when they say ‘positive net feedback’.
Define lambda as the ratio of the second-order effect of a change to the first-order change.
Climate scientists say ‘net positive feedback’ when lambda is positive. Lambda of 0.5, for example, means that every forcing gets doubled when everything runs through, and that’s ‘net positive’ in climate-land.
AFAIK control-systems people consider lambda > 1 to be ‘net positive’, and I’m unaware of any climate scientist that thinks climate sensitivity is infinite, so climate scientists don’t think there’s a net positive feedback under that definition.
(Although at ~30c over current temperatures you do start to reach a point like that, when the oceans start boiling off. Obviously that’s not even a remotely plausible outcome though).
There are net-positive feedback systems in nature. Consider planetary formation, for example.
The radiative transfer models NOAA refers to are much less complicated than actual climate models. Containing an (unchanging!) surface albedo and cloudiness isn’t that big a deal.
I think the CFC thing is because their IR band isn’t saturated the same way CO2’s is.
Don’t know about methane and N2O; might be an attempt to compensate for their relatively short atmospheric lifetime (although I thought CFCs had reasonably short atmospheric lifetimes as well…)
Are you sure the scenario selected wasn’t the scenario with the best radiative forcing match? I’d be very surprised if that wasn’t the case for the SAR/TAR/AR4 (The SAR scenario selected was chosen because “so far its scenarios IS92a and b have been closest to actual emissions.”, which I think is what you’re contrasting to the FAR’s explicitly calling out that they were using radiative forcing? Are you confusing this with the 3.7 vs 4 W/m**2 CO2 radiative forcing issue, which applies to the FAR and the SAR?). CO2 is, after all, the principle component of total radiative forcing change.
Part of this is that the FAR was published before the Montreal protocol; its projections may well have had very wrong CFC values.
Who is picking and choosing values from a noisy distribution to suit their argument now?
The trend from today to tomorrow is probably going to have a trend of roughly zero and large error bars; it’s still not very meaningful. Ten year trends and four year trends are just slightly more sophisticated looking versions of the same mistake.
Notice, for example, that the trend from 2000 to 2012 is 0.122 +- .188. Adding an extra year at one end doubled the central estimate!
Oh, and the SAR estimate is below the mean.
The claim that that SKS link ‘constantly shifts its argument’ is just a tad bizarre to me. As in, I don’t see how you get that from reading it. The only ‘shifts’ I can see is the possibility that the best-match scenario for TAR and AR4 by radiative forcing might be different to what was compared against (and frankly I think that’s unlikely), and the different-radiative-forcing-for-CO2 thing, which was a mistake in only the FAR and SAR, not the TAR and AR4.
Not just that, but TAR and AR4 compare against so little data that the comparison is essentially meaningless.
As for the claim that each report has predicted less warming than the last, uh, here’s the series after adjustment for scenario and FAR/SAR’s wrong radiative forcing:
0.2 c/decade, 0.14 c/decade, 0.16 c/decade, 0.18c/decade.
Radiative forcing change is worth about 18% (that is, n is what FAR and SAR predicted originally, after radiative forcing fix n*.82 is what you get). Revert that and you get:
0.24, 0.17, 0.16, 0.18
So FAR is an outlier and the other three are all very close. This doesn’t seem to match your impression of the situation.
The warming effects are almost entirely on temperature lows (nighttime temperatures), with relatively negligible impact on temperature highs (daytime temperatures). (This is anticipated owing to the nature of the forcing.)
the far more likely possibility is that the cost of climate mitigation will exceed the benefits, particularly since the costs need to be borne now and the benefits come much later.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3nkz2y/d_monday_general_rationality_thread/cvpi4iw
At the above link, I ask How can I improve the availability of my recall? in the /r/rational subreddit. I’d like this community’s input as well, but I don’t want to split the conversation across two places, so I’d prefer if you commented there. If you don’t have a reddit account you can comment here instead and indicate if I have your permission to cross-post it there on your behalf.
General memory improvement has already been discussed here.
For your particular case, no good object-level memory hacks occur to me (maybe write things down? Have your phone always recording audio so you can go back and reference it? Method of loci) I will comment, however, that the more I’ve learned about human memory, the more forgiving I am about the errors it makes, both in other and myself.
You have my permission to cross-post on my behalf.
I have a practical question since we seem to have 1-2 govt employees here and I don’t know where to ask it.
My city has a rule that if you move in, you should tell them your address within a week. I didn’t know about that rule and now its been roughly a month. Should I give them a fake date, or tell it as it is?
I doubt it’s a big deal either way, since many people don’t seem to report their address changes at all. On the other hand, I’d rather not lie and make a minor thing bigger and I doubt I’m gonna get fined for being late. But yeah, I have no experience in this area so my common sense may not be grounded in reality, which is why I’m asking if anyone has any experience. Wouldn’t want to be all “hey, didn’t know about the rule, moved in a month ago” and for them to go “we don’t really care but now we’re forced to fine you thanks to procedures and we secretly wish you had just given us a fake date instead”
(Of course I know that this all varies on a case by case basis, I’m not gonna blame anyone but myself if I end up choosing wrong)
Wander into the relevant office and ask someone at a desk. Gauge their reaction and act accordingly.
Depending on the smallness of the town, this might bite you in the ass when said employee recognizes the name on your paperwork. If this situation applies and you’re REALLY worried, attempt to locate the correct official’s email and ask with what you feel is the appropriate degree of obfuscation: burner email, fake name, question posed as hypothetical, etc. However, people who process forms generally do not care. (This is the part where my experience might differ from yours: see my note at the end.)
As someone who has moved a few times and submitted changes of address almost universally late, no one cared. (In fact, I don’t think I ever got any non-automated confirmation that I’d changed my address, and sometimes not even that.) However, I was always careful to leave a forwarding address at the last place I lived, which satisfies the point of the government having an up-to-date address: so they can communicate important things to you. I think this is one of those cases where no harm means no foul, but if you’ve missed jury duty/paying taxes/getting arrested because the letter/bill/cops got sent to your old address, you might be in trouble.
My general experience is that the people who process forms like these are not filled with a sense of duty to carry out the exact letter of the law. They will provide you with curt help to ensure you do nothing which will make their lives harder, but will not go out of their way to gleefully inflict torment and fines on you. Re: their knowledge of you lying on forms, nothing bad can happen until the form is in the computer, and I’ve never encountered anyone who said anything to the tune of ‘oh I know this now so I have to get you in trouble’.
I’m assuming you’re a Yank; admittedly I’ve never lived in America but I can’t imagine that it’s that much different from Canada/the UK. Then again, your minor officials seem to have a penchant for getting drunk on power as opposed to carrying out the spirit of their jobs, like issuing marriage licenses, so YMMV.
Agreed entirely, with one addendum: I was a Yank living in the UK, and the Home Office was quite adamant about my obligation to notify local police whenever I moved. There were some rather lurid threats, as I recall (and this was before 9/11). Also I was supposed to carry my identity booklet everywhere I went, which given my alcohol consumption at the time would have been a surefire way to lose it instantly.
I only lived in the UK as a native citizen, but that the Home Office got shirty with you is entirely believable.
Haven’t seen that precise rule before.
In nearly every state in the USA, there is a legal requirement for you to keep your drivers license address (and your vehicle registration) current. Exact times vary, but “within 30 days” seems to be a general rule.
From personal experience, no one at the DMV asks when you moved, they just update your record. Also from personal experience, this can matter a great deal if you’re trying to register to vote, or to get some services sent to your house, but generally there are work arounds. Also from personal experience, not having your records updated only REALLY matters if you get pulled over, particularly for not having current registration. (If you get pulled over for DUI, heh, you’re in so much trouble your lack of proper registration/DL isn’t going to make much of a difference.) In all cases, go ahead and correct the record *now*, and the problem is solved. Wait until next week, who knows what might happen.
I didn’t change my license until after 30 days and didn’t have any problems.
(Didn’t have anything they would accept as proof of address before then. Indeed, used something they didn’t list after.)
I literally don’t recall ever changing my address within 30 days. (Or 90, frankly.) And compared to many contemparies, I’m a bit of a stickler for that.
(Well, I am *now* – having to go stand in front of the judge and admit to being an idiot because “failure to update address on vehicle registration” turned what would have been a speeding citation (+ other things) with a (sizeable) mail-in fine into a MANDATORY court appearance will do that to a gal.)
I’ve gotten pulled over with an expired registration, and all it got me was a $25 fine — piddling in comparison to the already-minor traffic infraction I got pulled over for. Perhaps things differ state to state, or perhaps the wrong address is a bigger deal than the wrong date?
Oh, the registration was expired, too. (That was one of the ‘other things’. I had been v. v. bad.) It was the wrong address that flipped the “MANDATORY” switch – the cop basically wrote off most of the rest.
(And I am *positive* it varies from state to state, and the law in that state might have changed in the *mumble-mumble* years since.)
Depends if you think you’ll ever need services as provided by your local government.
Irish minor public service minion here, presently working in social housing, previously worked in education.
We go bananas over people not providing up-to-date addresses, mainly because when we do want to interview them/offer them houses, and we send the letter out to “last known address” and it comes back returned by the post (or worse yet, never comes back so we assume they got it), it bites them in the ass because come on, we’re going to offer you a house! and it bites us in the ass because people automatically AND WRONGLY assume that the Social Welfare office will give us their new address, then they get pissed off that we have failed to contact them, then they complain to local councillors/the local papers/the local radio station and we get hassle about “Why didn’t you contact poor Susie with her three fatherless children living in a leaky shed about offering her a house, you heartless pen-pushing bureaucrats?”
Don’t talk to me about changing mobile phone numbers 🙂
I don’t know why your city has that rule, but phone or write in and give them your new address. If you’ve only moved there, you can probably get away with “I am a poor hapless stranger, nobody told me until now I needed to give you my address”. Re: what PsychoRecycled said about small towns and recognition, yes there’s every chance someone in the office will recognise your name and go “You lying liar, I’ve seen you out and about with six months!” but again, likely no hassle about it; my place of employment is in a small town and yes, things tend to happen such as my colleagues doing their shopping and running into applicants (claiming to be split up and no longer cohabiting) happily and romantically sharing ice-cream cones while holding hands and the like in the shopping centre, but eh – as long as we can’t prove you’re a lying liar, we don’t do anything about it unless we absolutely have to.
Protip: please do not post photos of your big flashy engagement ring on Facebook at the same time as you’re telling us you and your boyfriend are splitsville, over, no longer in the picture 🙂
Unless they are making a fortune from fining people for late notification (highly doubtful but then again, this is America we’re talking about, you lot are nuts) they won’t care, it’s probably happened before plenty of times, they’ll grouse about it in the office but as long as they finally get the right address that should be okay.
Keep us detail-obsessed paper-pushers happy! 🙂
Thanks to everyone for replying. Issue resolved a couple days ago, but I forgot to thank you then.
In “Stop Voting for Nincompoops”, Eliezer Yudkowsky praises the power of the internet to route around the mainstream media’s power to declare a presidential candidate “serious” and in so doing narrow down presidential choices to the tiny number of alternatives which fit in the Overton window. The piece was written in January of 2008, and the examples he cites are Ron Paul and Obama (as opposed to Hillary and Giuliani, whom he considers establishment candidates). Not only is Obama hilarious in hindsight, but now that Trump is benefiting from the mainstream media’s descent into irrelevancy I find myself wondering if he regrets his wish (Eliezer has compared Trump to the Catholic Church, arguing that both are in the business of pushing hate; also, Trump is literally Voldemort).
As a Catholic, I am personally insulted by that comparison; at least our corrupt and venal power-mad popes provided good architecture and great art! 🙂
… you’re saying Trump Tower isn’t good architecture and great art ???
I’ve never been to any of the various Trump Towers, but I’ve been to the Trump Hotel in Vegas, and it’s tacky even by Vegas standards, which are very tacky indeed.
On Vegas standards…
In the early years of the movie industry, the director of a biblical epic was shown around the very impressive set by the set designers. His comment:
“It shows what God could have done if He had the money.”
That’s my description of Vegas. Everyone should visit it once.
I’d say Ferdinand Marcos rather than God, personally.
Eliezer should have exercised the Virtue of Scholarship there and looked into the problem a bit more. This post on Less Wrong from a bit later shows where he went wrong.
I think any argument that involves you saying “And X is exactly the same as The Catholic Church, the Most Evilest Evil Thing That Ever Eviled in the Universe!” is going to be on shaky legs. (Dawkins is very prone to this, and Philip Pullman did a bit, too).
Maybe we are the Most Evilest etc. That does not mean X (be it animal, vegetable or mineral) is in any way, shape or form like the Church. If all you are looking for is a handy way to signal “Most Evilest etc.” and you can’t use Nazis because of Godwin’s Law, please rethink what you are saying and try condemning X on its faults if it/he/they have faults.
That post is about Eliezer’s other argument, the one that isn’t about Catholics being hateful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55NxKENplG4
Here is Scott Adam’s explaining his take on Trump’s linguistic skills in a way which makes him sound slightly less crazy (though I still think 99% chance of Trump victory is lunacy).
Though he probably overestimates the extent to which it is intentional, and to which it will ultimately lead him to success, I do think he makes some good points: especially about Trump’s ability to craft put-downs which stick in the mind.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/29/the-free-market-its-like-uber-but-for-everything/
(Wrote a longer post to accompany this, but it got lost somehow and I was too lazy to retype: the gist was that, while I am pro-uber and pro-free market, I think this would also apply even if one were anti-uber and/or anti-free market: in other words, if you want to critique libertarianism, I think uber is a good model for what we are actually advocating, both for good and for ill, as opposed to say, 19th c. robber barons or imperialism).
But then what will we compare to Somalia?
We don’t necessarily think you are advocating for robber-baron-land, we just worry that libertopia might turn into that despite your best intentions.
Are all your taxis really mandated to offer the same standard price at all times? That seems odd.
I think one of the main libertarian critiques of ‘robber-baron-land’ is that it’s not actually an accurate depiction of what happened in the 19th century, and survived more by being an evocative story than anything else.
That is true; which is another reason I wish people would stop critiquing it. I think the late 19th c. is actually probably the best time in all of human history, relative to what came before it (consider: at the time of the US civil war, most Americans were using whale oil, riding horses, and pooping in outhouses; fifty years later, they had lightbulbs, cars, and indoor plumbing).
BUT, I think talking about how something which came into existence a few years ago works>relitigating the history of a period no one you’re talking to was alive to remember.
Yes, our taxis are mandated to have the same prices all the time: how else would we prevent evil price gougers from taking advantage of poor people?
And, of course, most (maybe not all) critics of libertarianism realize we are not intentionally advocating robber baron-dom; the point is, if Uber, which is a free market in taxis, does not result in robber baron-dom in the world of transportation, why would the free market result in robber baron-dom in other areas?
Ah, I see. Poor people don’t use taxis here. We have (municipality-run, price-controlled, subsidized) buses for them — as well as for daily commuters who hate driving in traffic jams, students etc.
Obviously you can’t use this solution, though — that would be too close to communism 🙂
There are government-run bus services in most American cities — my hometown even had some, and it was a fairly small town in a fairly conservative area. They’re slow and unpleasant, and some areas are poorly served, but they’re the most common form of in-city transportation for people too poor to afford cars; taxis (and Uber) are an order of magnitude more expensive, especially if you’re going more than a couple miles.
Long-haul travel for people too poor to afford plane tickets is also done mostly by bus, but the long-haul bus services are mostly private. (Though not exclusively; Amtrak, the US’s crappy government-run passenger rail service, has some bus lines under its management, and there are a few long-haul lines run by local governments too.)
We have price-controlled taxis around here, and the price is too high for poor people to use them. As anyone with a little background in economics would guess, yes, there are also high, government-enforced, artificial barriers to entry in the taxi business. Uber is in the process of being outlawed, after loud demonstrations by taxi drivers.
We also have price-controlled, subsidized buses running on government-mandated lines. They are ok. I remember some fifteen years ago a short-lived wave of unlicensed van drivers competing with said buses – I remember it being considerably easier and faster to get around town during the few months it took regulators to catch up to them.
I spent some time hanging around Manila a while back, and found myself rather happier with its system of sporadically regulated private vans (“jeepneys”) than with the American bus systems I’d been used to. They’re uncomfortable, cramped especially for a tall American, emit noxious diesel fumes, and tend to make alarming grinding and rattling noises, but they’re easy to find at all hours, they go anywhere you want once you get the hang of transfers, and they’re dirt cheap.
Related to the equity argument people make against price “gouging” (i.e. prices rising dynamically in response to supply and demand): I have realized for some time that the alternative to paying extra money for a scarce commodity (like say, healthcare) is paying extra time: when prices are not allowed to rise, waiting lists or long lines (like for gas) inevitably develop.
I think many leftists are explicitly or subconsciously okay with this because it seems more “fair”: some people have more money than others, but everyone has the same amount of time. I just realized, however, that this is actually wrong. Everyone doesn’t have the same amount of time: people who work more have less time to wait in line for things (in China, people actually hire people to wait in line for them at govmt offices); therefore, as with so much else, government mandated “fairness” is actually anti-productive, as opposed to simply not biased against the unemployed.
I think another part of it is that there are a lot of people who are time-rich but money-poor (children, the unemployed, those who can only get a single part-time job, etc…).
A thing I’ve thought about the utility of recently: zeroth order models.
Consider the old problem of giving one textbook to some pre-scientific civilisation or something like that. What information is important? I’d suggest the most important things are really basic low level models that give you an intellectual framework to hang discoveries off despite being wrong almost everywhere. Likewise I’d suggest finding such models is an important step in learning a new subject. They make the assimilation of new knowledge much easier.
Do others think these kinds of models are helpful? Who knows of good resources for finding them if so.
Examples:
* Maths: “If you take abstract concepts and manipulate them formally like in arithmetic then your conclusions are true.”
* Physics: “The world is made of point masses that apply forces to each other and then accelerate according to f=ma.”
* Biology: “Living things grow according to rules set by genes. Genes that get passed on in reproduction become common in populations.”
* Chemistry: “Substances are made of a small number of elements. Elements are rearranged in reactions according to integer ratios of mass.”
* Civilisation: “Tit for tat grows in an evolving populations playing iterated prisoners’ dilemma despite losing to its neighbours.”
* British government: “Every five years we elect a dictator to run the country. Everyone’s enough of a gentleman that this works out.”
* American government: “Two different legislatures and a president have to agree before laws can be passed, so we mostly legislate by other means.”
* Economics: “People paying for things is how society finds out what people want. Paying for things motivates others to give you what you want.”
* Human biology: “Everything is 70% genetic factors, 30% something else. Nothing is specific genes, most things are lead poisoning or gut microflora.”
This is probably too complex for the average pre-scientific civilization.
The Greeks (eg, Euclid, Archimedes) wrote science textbooks and the Romans didn’t understand much. The really big problem is conveying the idea of modeling.
I think the most important goal is to avoid having it siloed away as some kind of guild secret. My initial thought is that detailed information on how to create firearms from scratch would do that most effectively.
Oh, the Priests of Styphon will definitely be keeping that one a guild secret.
Ha, I know you’re being flip, but I really can’t see that working. First, you have a huge problem with control brought on by the fact that the one of the things that makes firearms most useful is the fact that you can hand them out to a bunch of peasants with relatively minimal training. Means they are sure to be captured by the enemy and stolen by deserters. There’s a huge incentive to trade or otherwise distribute them in order to influence polities that are too distant to influence directly (see, e.g., 18th century interactions between Native Americans and European powers). And, if all that fails, whatever power managed to maintain their firearm monopoly is sure to expand beyond the borders it can logistically maintain and fracture, Alexander-style.
Piper, being neither ignorant nor foolish, put the monopoly one step back. Any peasant can use a gun, and a good blacksmith can figure out how to make one. Only the Priests of Styphon know how to make gunpowder without blowing themselves up.
Given the frequency of powder-mill explosions even in a world where the relevant knowledge isn’t a guild secret, that’s not entirely out of the question. If all you know of gunpowder, as a time traveler, a spy, or a clever alchemist is saltpeter/sulfur/charcoal, 75/10/15, congratulations, you get to blow yourself up. If the Priests of Styphon are peddling disinformation along with their gunpowder, looking at who’s buying up sulfur and saltpeter, inquiring into mysterious explosions and arranging a few mysterious deaths if anyone looks like they are getting close, they might be able to hold onto the secret for a good while.
“people point out that cows emit methane which increases global warming”
Cows don’t emit methane, rotting vegetation emits methane. It does so no matter whether it rots inside a cow or out in a field, however passing it through a cow first also gives you cow.
Surely cows eating grass causes more grass to rot than otherwise would? I’d assume after being eaten grass grows faster. But that might be utterly wrong.
It’s microbial decomposition. We also call this digestion and speak of digestive flora. Various gasses are produced – methane, nitrous oxide etc. – depending on the material being decomposed. Many of the species involved live free in the soil as well as in the guts of animals. One way or another, inside an animal or not, unless the material is buried in some way, frozen, desiccated or otherwise made life-hostile, it will rot.
Grass grows fastest when young and vegetative. As it matures it switches into sex mode and puts more energy into stem, flower and seed production than into leaf growth. If grazed or clipped it stays immature and vegetative, and so long as there are mineral nutrients, water, CO2, and sunlight it will regrow and regrow again. There are limits, but you are right that to some extent predation encourages growth by extending youth.
A point source of rot, such as an animal orifice, is easier to measure and monitor than a non-point source such as an open field. Drunks look for their lost keys under the street light where seeing is good. Point source, but probably not where the keys will be found.
I don’t know a lot about cows – my mental explanation for this was always “cow stomachs synthesize methane from other, less harmful gasses”. Is this something that can actually happen?
Cows are foregut fermenters (as opposed to hind gut fermenters like horses and rabbits). They eat grasses, ect, which are acted on by a mix of bacteria and protozoa in the rumen vat. This vat is a huge holding tub forward of the rest of the digestive system – stomach, small intestine, large intestine, etc – which is much like that of ominivores/carnivores like humans, pigs, bears, dogs, etc. The action of the microbes releases volatile fatty acids and simple carbs (and alcohols, and proteins, and so forth) which can be digested by the true stomach/intestines/etc of the cow. (The cow itself can’t digest grass and whole corn plants any more than we can – it just has a lot of microbes to break down those things for them.)
The action of the microbes also releases gas. Gases would be also released if the microbes were acting outside the cow’s gut. The exact mix of gas would not be the same – but the relative mix of gases is very dependent on the type of environment. Swampy places, for instance, release a great deal more methane than cows. Dry grasslands, probably a bit less. So if we were serious about reducing GHG, we might consider draining swamps and grazing cows on the resulting pasture.
The outcome also depends on the species doing the decomposing, and the environmental conditions. In particular, methane is usually the result of anaerobic decomposition, and there is plenty of oxygen in the average meadow.
@ pku
More precisely, archaea (simple organisms like bacteria, but more closely related to us than to them) inside one kind of cow stomach synthesize methane (mostly) from CO2.
Here is one article arguing that methane is a less concerning GHG than CO2.
Cows are saving the planet?
This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why the clathrate-gun hypothesis is wrong* – methane’s short atmospheric lifetime means that even if you dump ludicrous amounts of it into the atmosphere in one big pulse it breaks down in decades, unlike CO2.
*In the sense that it won’t kill us all, not in the sense that methane won’t be released from clathrates.
“there is plenty of oxygen in the average meadow”
There is, but it is soon exhausted. That’s why gardeners turn their compost piles or have mechanical aeration systems. And every time it rains aerobic bacteria suffocate. Then, as the sward dries, anaerobic bacteria are burned by oxygen. The relative populations vary depending on conditions.
Note that aerobic bacteria produce CO2. One way or another the CO2 that plants breathed in will be returned to the atmosphere.
2 minutes of research lead me to believe that cattle spend most of their life on feedlots eating specialized cattle feed composed of corn and other stuff. If people didn’t eat cows, probably the demand would lessen for the plants that make up cattle feed, and so farmers would grow less of those plants. I would expect wild plants, like trees, to give off less methane per unit time than harvested crops do.
A bit more research is in order.
Firstly, beef cattle are finished in feedlot for 180 to 60 days and are fed a mix of dried grass, whole corn plants, and various grain during that time. Prior to that time, the cattle are on pasture with generally minimal supplementation with grains, whole corn plants and dried grass. Most supplementation is in the winter when the grass is dead, under snow or both.
Secondly, cattle digestion processes vary depending on the contents of their diet. (Because the exact microbe mix in their rumens changes in response to available nutrients.) Cattle on high percentage grain diets (ie in finishing feedlot) produce less methane and other ghg than cattle on pasture and low percentage grain diets.
I was under the impression that cow digestion produces more methane per unit vegetation than vegetation rotting in fields, as a result of the different methods of decomposition.
Also land use changes, most notably land clearing to get farmland for growing cow food and/or keeping cows, though some of that applies to chickens as well.
Of the two, land use changes are probably the more significant. As everything is a tradeoff, it would take some complex modeling to find optimal solutions – cows use pasture ranges much more efficiently than chickens (chickens are very poor at getting enough insects and grains to make much meat/eggs on their own, and yes, I’m including the heritage breeds) but chickens are far better at feed conversion for the fed period. It is also more efficient in terms of ground utilization to pen-house the animals and bring the feed to them (less is wasted) than to have the animals wander over the landscape and stomp on the grasses. It also takes less ground to grow an intensive crop of grains (and a less intensive crop like hay) and feed that to a penned cow than to pasture the cow.
(The real gains in feeding livestock, though, are from recycling secondary products, like cottenseeds, orange peelings, soybean hulls, grain husks, sugar beet pulp, etc, etc. All of these are indigestible to humans (and other non-ruminants) so they are mixed with hay and whole corn plants and some grain and the cow turns them all into cheese and steak. Awesome critters, cows.)
“It also takes less ground to grow an intensive crop of grains (and a less intensive crop like hay) and feed that to a penned cow than to pasture the cow.”
This is true if one assumes that the pasture is neglected. If it is pampered and coddled like a grain crop it is very productive. It’s a combination of added fertility and improved grass and forb cultivars.
There’s a large upside potential still unrealized since comparatively little research and development has gone into pasture species. The focus has been on field and row crops, or on turf grasses for lawns, playgrounds and golf courses.
This is changing, albeit slowly, as the virtues of grasslands are better appreciated, and the happy combination of grasslands and grazers for the environment (in several complicated ways, not least GHG emissions) becomes better known.
Agreed that there is a lot of room for research on pasture feeding livestock (I suspect it has been subject to the same limits as methane research – much easier to track gains and illnesses in penned animals than ranging animals.) I look forward to the many things we
canwill find out.I do not, however, expect that the findings will be entirely positive. Pastures are in constant conflict with grazers, with a wide web of counter-grazer limits (including weeds (toxic and otherwise), parasites, weather, and predators.) (And people do not consider pastured meat as tasty as grain-finished meat.) All of these factors will need to be accounted for.
Aesthetically, I would be quite pleased if in the future people could meet their protein & B12 needs with tasty steaks (or roasts, or eggs, or bacon, or whatever they choose) from animals who were raised on green rolling hills (with wind and snow breaks) (and not many harmful parasites) (and sufficient offsets from waterways) living their lives under moderate suns and gentle rains.
(What we would have to do to Colorado in order to have this vision be reality more than two weeks out of the year is beyond the scope of this pleasant daydream.)
@kerani:
“What we would have to do to Colorado in order to have this vision be reality more than two weeks out of the year is beyond the scope of this pleasant daydream.”
Maybe just have El Niño every year? We’ve had plenty of gentle rain this year, and the hills were green for almost 5-1/2 months. Give it a few decades of warming and the snow won’t be too bad on the plains, either. Probably nothing to be done for the wind, though.
I claim zero expertise on this topic, but I have an initial reaction that this is probably wrong, due to reading about the fact that kangaroos emit vastly less methane than sheep or cattle, to the point where scientists are trying to figure out how to transfer roo gut microbes into cattle.
Also, sadface at NatGeo recent purchase by someone that doesn’t seem to particularly like nature all that much 🙁
It is true that the emissions of animals from digestion depends on the composition of their digestive flora, and that some are better by some measures than others. This is as true for people as any other animal and why there is is mini-industry in fecal transplants to alter the hindgut flora to optimize some value such as reducing obesity.
But there are many values to consider from an agronomic perspective. Reducing methane is only of value if it also achieves the general agronomic goals. Is the animal healthy? Does it thrive and grow to maturity well? Is it an economically viable hack?
As it happens there are economic and agronomic values to altering digestive flora it since can be more energy efficient. IOW, the animal can derive more food value from forage if it has top notch digestive flora, and so grow faster or consume less forage.
The combined host/digestive flora system must be considered. From one perspective the genetics of that whole system are the proper target of consideration as if, in a sense, they comprise a single animal though there are several species. This means that by using modern genomic tools the genetics of the animal and its digestive flora can be better matched, and that to realize the potential of either, both must be considered.
Kangaroos are healthy and a viable industry, though they are too low intensity (which is fine/optimal for Australian scrublands) to become staple for the world.
I wonder if there is any types of gut bacteria that eat methane? Perhaps they could be used somehow?
Every time you talk about ethical offsets, it completely turns me off from utilitarianism and I’m sure I’m not the only one. So I make the utilitarian case that you should stop promoting ethical offsets because it is seriously creepy.
As a general rule not talking about things that some people find creepy is a bad way to run an interesting blog about ethics.
What specifically about offsetting seems creepy to you?
It provides a rationalization to do incredibly terrible things. And even if we assume that ethical offsets are ok, it’s not practical because people will just do the bad things without any offsets. Think of all the people who declare factory farming to be terrible, and that we should eat meat that has been raised ethically yet they still eat factory farmed meat.
Now, I wasn’t completely serious with my comment. Scott should talk about whatever he wants to talk about but ethical offsets is one of those things that would have terrible consequences if the majority of people believed it.
I find that the possibility of ethical offsets points out a flaw in utilitarianism. In order to avoid the conclusion that you must give away as much you can give away without going insane or being unable to make more money (and that you are obliged to self-modify to not want anything, so you can give it away without going insane), you need to have some kind of principle that limits how much you must give away.
But once you say that you’re only obliged to give away X amount, if you do something bad that decreases the utility of others by Y, but you also increase your giving to X+Y to make up for it, the total good you have done is still X. In other words, allowing carbon offsets–or murder offsets–is an inevitable consequence of patching up utilitarianism so you don’t have to give away everything.
Yes but this problem also applies in other moral philosophies too. You can always be more virtuous and less viceful. Likewise in real life you’re never following reason’s rules or gods rules perfectly. I don’t think unachievability is a flaw in moral philosophies, its a flaw in our abilities.
Or to come at it from another way, consequentialism need not provide a rule by which you live your life, it merely says “this action is more moral than this other one”. Morality isn’t the only human concern, and it would be a shame to abandon our determined pursuit of it because we thought that it was.
Those other philosophies only have half the problem. The problem of how to limit the requirement is still a problem, but it doesn’t lead to the additional problem of justifying offsets.
Seems like errantry, redemption or repentence would be fairly good examples of offsets in other non-utilitarian traditions?
It’s very unclear that it provides that much wiggle room to do bad things.
Even assuming I make a mistake about my offset and in effect I offset eating meat by setting $100 on fire. I’m not going to start eating an enormous amount of meat and then set many thousands of dollars on fire. The offset costs something and so naturally limits how much bad I’m able to justify.
But surely that missing $100 (worth of resources, actually burning a bill would be a semi-legitimate offset) should count against the offset scenario? You’re doing all these terrible things, and you’re not even enjoying them because they cost so much.
>But surely that missing $100 (worth of resources, actually burning a bill would be a semi-legitimate offset) should count against the offset scenario? You’re doing all these terrible things, and you’re not even enjoying them because they cost so much.
Oh sure that situation is bad, that wasn’t my point. The point was that compared to other forms of moral wiggle-room (all of which are bad by definition) this one has the advantage of being self-limiting.
If my moral wiggle room is “human weakness” or “doing it to defend a sacred value” then I can excuse arbitrary amounts of bad things. If it’s offsetting then I’m naturally limited.
This isn’t an argument that offsetting is good, it assumes we’ve made a mistake and that it’s in fact bad. I only claim that the amount of bad is contained.
@Adam
You’re assuming people are going to be consistent with their offsetting. That’s not a good assumption to make.
So I think this gets at something interesting. Government agencies have to make decisions that trade sacred values like human lives against financial values, so they assign a monetary value to human lives. http://www.theglobalist.com/the-cost-of-a-human-life-statistically-speaking/ . They do this because otherwise they couldn’t fulfill their mandate. However, I don’t think anyone believes that these offsets are actually anything other than a fairly arbitrary number, so there are limits to what kind of trade-offs government is allowed to make with them. For instance, if the EPA found a way to kill people and harvest their organs for $9.1 million dollars a pop (their value for a life in 2011), and started doing it, it would end in scandal and prosecution. Why? Because there are deontological constraints in addition to utilitarian considerations, such as, the government shouldn’t start killing people without due process. Consequentialist reasoning is a necessary part of a government’s moral apparatus, but it’s not a sufficient part of it.
Ethical offsets are what you get when you start taking that $9.1 million dollars too seriously, which is why people find them “creepy”. It’s creepy because it is threatening to have an agent that doesn’t respect deontological restrictions; you don’t know if you’re safe from them or if they will happily consume you to satisfy their utility function. When the agent in question is the writer of an ethics blog, the creepiness is fun, like in a horror movie — when the agent has an actual position of power in society, it’s much less entertaining.
Consequentialism has a perfectly good justification for the government not killing people and harvesting their organs – it would have obviously terrible consequences. Taking advantage of a system of moral offsets would probably result in you behaving less ethically; a society-wide approval of moral offsets would almost certainly have terrible consequences.
Joking aside (all glory to the anti-Johnsonian revolution!), every internet community I’ve seen with a strong focus on politics and social issues has a situtation where either a) comments are strictly policed, either by the mods or by the other commenters, vast swaths of opinion are deemed unacceptable, epistemtic closure descends like a cloud, and everyone’s slightly worried about being randomly Unpersoned (aka the Gawker model), or b) anyone can say anything, the most aggressive and unyielding hate-mongers in the world take full advantage, chaos reigns, and everyone who wants a bit of human decency or sanity flees in horror (aka the 4Chan model). I don’t know if that’s just a natural feature of the system or if there’s a way to incentivize against it. (No points for noticing you could apply the same problem to societies in general.)
Edit: If it sounds like I’m slamming this place, I apologize; this site is clearly in the 98th percentile for civilized interaction between people of wildly differing political views, to its credit.
It’s inevitable. There’s probably a pretty good mathematical model for this–I’ve seen it lots of times.
Yeah. It all makes me wonder if anything worthwhile can come out of that focus on politics and social issues. Along the lines of: The community thinks it can solve (social or political problem X)? It can’t even figure out how to have a reasonable comments section! A simple set of comments, for heaven’s sake – not a real social conflict where the stakes are higher than an Internet argument.
It’s sometimes a reminder of the virtue of humility.
I think temporary bans (with increasing time, publicly announced) are a good solution. If you don’t mind being banned for a day or a week, you don’t have to be too paranoid.
> the most aggressive and unyielding hate-mongers in the world take full advantage, chaos reigns, and everyone who wants a bit of human decency or sanity flees in horror
So, do you actually read 4chan?
It doesn’t sound like he does. Neither does it sound like he reads fullchan, either.
fullchan? Is that some alternative name for cripplechan?
Sometime around the original Gamergate debacle and/or moot selling out, some of the channers fled to the less-restrictive 8chan; they sometimes call 4chan ‘halfchan’ in protest, making them ‘fullchan’. (No word on 2chan.)
So cripplechan, yes.
I’ve noticed a recent trend of articles expressing worries about people with 4chan accounts. Of course, this kind of thing has been happening every now and again since the hacker known as Anonymous got his membership.
Actually, that’s a pretty fair description of /pol/.
Do you? I quit because it’s toxic as fuck. 4chan is incontrovertible proof of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. It’s even worse than Tumblr, and that’s saying something.
Since people seem to be very sensitive about 4chan, you can use marginal revolution as your go to example of the perils of non-moderation. Given the subject matter and top posts, you’d expect the comment section to be fine, if perhaps a little boring. Instead it is an open cesspool.
Really? I don’t think they’re that bad. Quarrelsome and tribal, but sometimes amusing, and I occasionally learn something.
It is my hope that this is unlikely to happen, because the quality of justice (moderation), when personally dispensed, depends upon the quality of the rulers. Gawker is terrible because those who rule it are (I presume) terrible; SSC shall remain as it is because Scott is just and wise.
I have a general question regarding inner speech. Before I speak, write, or do anything having to do with language, I already have a full phrase or sentence “recited” and “held” in my mind. I almost never can go directly from abstract thought or feeling to speaking. I used to think that this was the common case, but I have recently found through talking with several others about this that it is probably not. Others have claimed that there is no noticeable gap between “feeling” what they want to say and saying it. That their inner speech has little to no role in their outer speech.
I’ve been lurking on this blog for a few years now, and I thought I’d pitch it to this group to get more info. How does inner speech play/not play a role in your outer speech?
I’m both. Most of the things I say seem to me to be generated spontaneously. I’m not consciously aware what I’m going to say until moments before it leaves my mouth.
For anything complicated however I have to think about it in advance. And some things that I care about my brain spends hours giving itself bombastic Churchillian speeches which I hear very clearly as someone (obviously me, nobody else talks like that) haranguing me.
1) My inner speech says what I’m thinking.
2) My outer speech says a terrible bastardized version that is all wrong and conveys none of what I meant.
3) Having spoken the outer-speech version aloud, I can’t remember any of the original inner-speech version anymore.
I have exactly this problem and loathe it. I attempt to deal with it like the OP, by mentally reciting before speaking. Success is moderate.
Edited to add: The major downside of this approach is that, frequently, the appropriate point to speak is long gone by the time I’m ready to do so.
+2
Try pot.
I’ve tended to go through a process of holding an idea or visualization and then talking about it as two separate and distinct experiences. This is basically why I’ve done almost zero eye contact for the first two and a half decades of my life (combined with a parentally installed desire to be clever).
Recently, I’ve been doing deliberate practice in YOLOing out words instead, usually combined with looking at people. It works much better.
I’d also recommend reading The Inner Game of Tennis.
I hate language because it is linear and my thoughts are trees/graphs/maps. Communicating concepts that exist as non-linear data structures in my brain to language sucks. My thoughts have layers and I feel that to comminicate anything successfully I have to explain concepts that only really exist in my brain that I find obvious.
Use your thoughts as a heap – just pop whatever’s on top at the time.
When I pop the heap, the topology of my monologue turns into a big ball of spaghetti. It’s like trying to walk though {wikipedia, TV tropes, LessWrong, reddit} without getting lost in time: “Oh yeah, I forgot to explain that. Before we continue, allow me to recursively digress into a labyrinth of hyperlinks and never find my way back to the original topic.”
Eventually I become aware that I’ve lost them, pause to collect my thoughts (which I should have done from the start), and start over from the point of least inferential distance (rather than from first principles).
This makes me wish we had balanced delimiters in speech marking opening and closing of clauses, so we could push and pop more clearly. There are some in writing (quote marks, parentheses), though possibly not enough (the comma is overloaded and plays too many roles, and it isn’t balanced (that is, paired like parentheses) anyway).
We should take a cue from programming languages and start using verbal analogues of ( ) { } [ ], etc.
Speaking of programming, I wonder if someone could use an app format to write a novel in a branching-thoughts manner rather than linearly, where you can select and zoom in on different trails of text as they branch off and re-merge, maybe partially rotating a 3D model of the text layers or something.
How is this different from “choose your own adventure” novels?
CYOA gives you multiple plots to choose, but only one ever happens.
I think Sylocat is talking about a story with multiple plotlines all executing simultaneously, where this is made visually more evident, rather than the usual format that pushes the reader through one plotline for a while, then teleports them to another, possibly moving in time as well, pushing them through that, and so on.
I think this wouldn’t be a very popular genre to write in, since readers can only go through one plotline at a time anyway, and writers often care about the order in which their plotlines are experienced. OTOH, this form might be very useful when modeling real wars or other large crises, when lots of stuff is going on all at once, in order to get a sense of “who knew what, when”. And a period of playing with that might inform later artworks using that framework, that rely on it to share insight.
Maybe a tool like this could help?
Sometimes I tell others that my vocabulary is larger than I can handle. What I mean is that sometimes I have trouble finding le mot juste. I’ll often pause and try to grasp it, in the mean time stalling the conversation with “what’s the word…”. Part of this is because I consider linguistic precision important. It’s not just finding the most impressive sounding word in the thesaurus, because sometimes I think of an impressive word first and think “no, the simpler version is more accurate. But what is the simpler version again?”
When I’m speaking casually, there’s always a monologue in my head that runs a fraction of a second ahead of my actual speech. But in more complex topics, I need to visualize the model first. Then exert energy in trying to convert the model into a monologue. This process may consume several seconds. (p.s. yep, eye contact is difficult during visualization.) (p.s. yes, I dislike language’s linearity also.)
When I read I have to subvocalize. Speed readers say this is bad, and I plan to get rid of it some day.
I have the same issue (since I grew up bilingual it can be unusually frustrating too – I can usually throw a few English words in and expect Hebrew-speakers to understand, but not the other way around).
I have a slight speech disability and occasionally realise that I have embarked on a sentence leading to a word I have no idea how to pronounce. Occasionally I manage to adjust on the fly. So my inner speech-outer-speech relationship is somewhere between those two extremes, but most of the time I don’t notice.
I usually lack the inner voice – to the degree that I usually can only work out what I think about something as I say it. This is to a degree true for written stuff too, although (for instance) not so much of this reply because I had to think it and then decide whether to post. But it’s unusual for me to consciously work out what I think about something when I’m on my own, it’s almost always in dialogue. I don’t really think in ‘words in my head’ most of the time either, unless I’m doing something unusually deliberate (e.g. trying to work my way through a complex logical argument)
“He who thinks in words, thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it shows that he does not think of objects or think objectively, but only of his relations with objects – that, in point of fact, he only thinks of himself and his audience).”
Is there any piece of diet advice just about everyone can agree on? The best candidate I can think of is an admonition against refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup (which eliminates non-diet sodas, most pastries and desserts, and most candies). A prohibition on processed foods is a distant second, mostly because defining “processed” is hard (fresh cheese is probably okay, cheetos probably aren’t). Conversely, fruits and leafy vegetables are almost certainly harmless additions to your diet.
Keto-type people object to fruits, I think. And vegetables usually won’t hurt, but won’t help much either (most of them are mostly water, and the ‘healthier’ ones more so).
> vegetables usually won’t hurt, but won’t help much either (most of them are mostly water, and the ‘healthier’ ones more so).
IIUC, mostly water plus a lot of fiber. You can’t just discount the latter, particularly given its effect on satiety and the fact that most Americans don’t get enough fiber.
Some common ones, not even that. Lettuce and other leafy greens are the worst offenders.
Most foods are mostly water the moment they are eaten. Water is a nutrient we need.
If that’s a problem, well, the same foods can often be had in concentrated, dried form. But then you’ll be left thirsty and will have to drink at some point during the day, and it makes little difference for your stomach.
Vegetables are very useful in putting together a nutritious diet, because unlike other foods it’s possible to eat them in immense amounts. This means that the micronutrients add up. I can eat huge amounts of vegetables a day. With tomatoes, the easiest to eat in bulk when properly cooked, I can eat 9-10 pounds in one day. Traditional Irish diet consisted mainly of 7 pounds of potatoes daily, which add up to less than 2400 calories. It is doable thanks to the low caloric and protein density of these foods. In contrast I can’t even eat one pound of meat in one day. Too much protein which triggers early satiation.
You say that lettuce is not nutritious, but if you cook lettuce in a way that makes it easy to eat 1 pound of it, and then look at the mineral and vitamin content of that pound you just ate, it’s remarkable.
Whereas there’s no way to cook meat that makes it easy to eat 1 pound of it.
Maybe for you there isn’t.
I have many many times eaten a meal composed of nothing but a pound of meat with token spices and maybe an onion or bell pepper.
The point is not whether you can eat one pound of meat, the point is that vegetables can be eaten in larger amounts than many other foods, and this must be taken into account when evaluating their usefulness.
How do you cook lettuce? I’m fascinated to know because it seems to me that steam it – mush, boil it – mush, fry it – fried mush, roast it – roast mush.
Cabbage and tougher greens you need to cook, but lettuce is so much water that I can’t see it holding up to cooking. Even spinach is a bit hardier!
@ Deiseach:
You cook lettuce like
this.
And vegetables usually won’t hurt, but won’t help much either (most of them are mostly water, and the ‘healthier’ ones more so).
Well, yeah, 100 grams of red pepper contains 92 grams of water. But it takes about 0.1 grams of Vitamin C to satisfy your daily requirements twice over. 100 grams of kale contains 91 grams of water. But it takes about a milligram of Vitamin K to meet your daily requirements seven times over.
Most vegetables have extremely low levels of vitamins and micronutrients, as well as macronutrients. Leafy greens, specifically, are water with texture.
This is absurd.
It ignores that leafy greens, and in fact all vegetables, are very easy to eat in large amounts.
You can’t compare foods by weight. This is a common fallacy in evaluating the usefulness of foods. You must compare the amounts that are possible to eat.
I explained it in a comment a little above. I can only eat small amounts of meat, but large amounts of vegetables. A lot of it is about the cooking.
Leafy greens are difficult to eat in large amounts because they taste highly unpleasant to many people. A pound of steak is a reasonable meal, but a pound of kale in any form I’ve encountered it in will force me to either give up or puke.
Oh, right, I forgot about keto; apples will knock you out of ketosis and all that. Okay, leafy vegetables only I guess.
The only thing I’ve found which seems to be prohibited by every diet plan I’ve ever seen are french fries.
Some people (most notably the late Seth Roberts) claim sugar before bedtime is healthy because it improves sleep. Apparently it works for some people, but not for me :/
It works for me.
Drinks. Pretty much every dietician says that you should drink less ANYTHING except for water (and maybe unsweetened/black tea/coffee). Milk? Lots of fat. Soda? Lots of sugar.
No, some diets specifically recommend high milk consumption (whole milk, specifically).
No. Assume that all food is at least one of: animal, vegetable, or synthetic. (My argument will obviously fall apart if anyone produces a counterexample to this).
If a food is animal, then, according to Ornish, if it contains protein, it will give you cancer. Otherwise, we’re looking at pure fat (animals: not so much a great source of carbohydrates), and, while I can’t cite anyone off the top of my head, I’ll assume that everyone here believes that there exists some faction that believes that eating lard is bad.
If a food is vegetable, it is either a fruit or not. If it’s a fruit, sugar, will make you fat, according to keto types. If it’s not a fruit, it has evolved to contain chemicals that discourage eating it (this is the weakest result; ironically, I draw it from Food and Western Disease, the book that convinced me to spend about a year eating about 3 pounds of veggies a day. Double the irony: same book, which advocates a paleo diet, convinced me to go all in on DIY soylent; checking my email records, I ordered my ingredients the day this post was published, within hours of learning soylent was a thing. Haven’t looked back since.)
Which leaves us with synthetics, which are automatically opposed by paleo types.
This implies that no food you *should* eat is agreed upon by everyone. But there are definitely foods that dietitians will always tell you *not* to eat.
I can think of two: sodium chloride and dihydrogen monoxide. The former is advocated against by mainstream cardiologists, and the latter by a very broad and vocal coalition.
Mushrooms and other fungi are neither animal nor vegetable, and some are decent protein sources.
Is there any piece of diet advice just about everyone can agree on?
Eat less, exercise more, and don’t expect that being clever about what kinds of food you eat or do not eat is going to make much difference beyond that.
If you can tie a bowline knot with your carrot you’ve left it in the fridge too long.
Oily fish is recommended in a lot of diets.
I’m pretty sure everyone informed and not profiting from them agrees that partially hydrogenated fats are bad.
Ditto alcohol intake beyond maybe 2-3 drinks a day, tops.
Most vegetables are good for you, and there are minimum amounts of vitamins and minerals you need (though there’s disagreement on what those minimums are).
Why is email a required field to comment, here and elsewhere? I can enter a garbage email address so it’s obviously not validation, and I don’t get reply notifications or anything when I use a real address.
It gives you your avatar if you have one registered under your email address with gravatar, or ensures you have unique made up geometrical one if you don’t.
It is usually a way to identify spam.
i.e. if you posted a bunch of comment with 1 mail and they weren’t spam it is less likely that a questionable post that you made is spam.
I certainly hope it isn’t being used for that, since you can just fill in any random email you want.
Example: This comment was posted under evan@thisemaildoesnotexist.example
Scott (or anybody), do have any advice for dealing with Intrusive thoughts? I’ve had them off and on for at least a decade and I think maybe I should do something about them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought
If they stick around and you can’t get rid of them and they’re really troublesome, then they cross the line into obsessive compulsive disorder and can be treated accordingly.
thanks
that is very nonspecific. as wikipedia says “Many people experience the type of bad or unwanted thoughts that people with more troubling intrusive thoughts have, but most people can dismiss these thoughts”
I have good experience with meditation to help deal with unwanted, troubling or unsettling thoughts and it seems to help with mental health in general (or something, i dont remember the scientific specifics)
Since we know from history that reigns of terror always unfailingly target the most deserving wrongdoers, and that erstwhile supporters of the policy never find themselves on the wrong side when factions realign, I welcome this new development and cheer the enlightened new order.
I’ve had a quip saved up for a while, and no opportunity to use it. “When the revolution comes, I expect to be guillotined for being insufficiently enthusiastic.”
Except I’m quite liking this one so far. I can spin the results to be a win for me either way. Either a lot of annoying heads end up in baskets, thus making SSC a better space, or my head ends up in a basket, and a distraction from work and various fun stuff has been removed.
I never liked Marat (not only was he the worst sort of bloodthirsty rabble-rouser, I’m a chemist, and he got Lavoisier killed), but oh, the temptation to play digital Marat here…
David Severa’s “An Imagined Dialog on Immigration” is excellent, with lots of charity and reasonableness for both sides of the debate. I’m still not buying the study which claims that immigration mildly benefits even unskilled natives economically, though. Gonna have to keep believing my lying eyes on that one.
Wow, that really is excellent. Thanks for posting it!
> Steve Johnson is banned for reasons of total personal caprice. Let it be known that he has not broken any rules and the ban is not his fault. Also, this is the beginning of a Reign of Terror. Govern yourselves accordingly.
This will be my last post here this year. If the Reign of Terror ends by 2016, I will consider returning then.
I don’t know if this is sarcasm or not, but I guess I won’t be posting after this either. If you are going to have rules then you need to stick to them not make a joke about blatantly ignoring them. It’s funny because there was a discussion about the rules setup here over on Reddit the other day and I thought Scott had made an attempt to be fair minded, which is all too rare. I was wrong.
I see you two are more of the formalist types and less evolian.
It’s not like it was written anywhere, that nobody can’t/won’t be banned for any other reason… Take it as Scott’s admission that he wasn’t able to make the rules as perfect as he wanted.
I think it’s better to ban person who’s repeatedly fruitlessly engaging in kind of discussion Scott doesn’t want here than to change the rules which would stop all the discussion on such topics, which may be potentially fruitful.
I think that announcing the ban is fair enough (unlike e.g. answering to comment and subsequently banning without telling which happened to me elsewhere).
I admit, if he was banned for the “mail-order brides” comment, I’m extremely disappointed. I won’t be leaving, though, unless this actually turns into a regular thing and spoils the site.
He didn’t say anything about mail-order brides (that was Jaime, who’s still with us, as you can see below).
As it stands right now, I’m strongly in favor of a guaranteed basic income. The one thing that gives me pause about a GBI is the widespread sentiment (which I believe is supported by studies?) that people are much happier if they’re earning their money through gainful employment than if they’re on the dole.
My hope is that this effect, insofar as it really exists, is due to present-day cultural prejudice against those who don’t support themselves. If so, the prejudice could be done away with and people could be just as happy living off a GBI as they are living off a low-paying job. Hopefully happier, since they’ll have so much more time for personal pursuits.
But suppose that the effect isn’t the result of prejudice, or else that the prejudice proves too hard to eradicate. Then it’s possible that a GBI won’t do much to improve people’s well-being or increase net utility.
If that turns out to be the case, what poverty-relief policies might work better? Is there some possible mass-job-creation scheme that would not be too much of a drag on the economy? Or would we just have to do what we can with Keynesian stimulus, plus a safety net to prevent starvation and the like?
My instinct would be to have a broad-based artistic thing, or something. A qualifier on the GBI that says “What have you made, this year?”. Probably with a very low bar, but making it explicitly be about creating something; no need for it to have been valued by anyone (not even you), and it could be a mural, a performance, a programming repository, a community scheduling system for a small house, anything, but there must have been something they made.
The value of the GBI is that it doesn’t have exceptions and can’t be politically gamed. The BI is G, full stop. The only stable number of exceptions to the guarantee is zero; one will rapidly become many and then you’ll be right back where we are now with a dead forests’ worth of statutes, regulations, and case law about who gets how much and who gets nothing and who pays.
I am theoretically in favor of the GBI if it can be implemented with zero exceptions: Any citizen gets the same sum of money as any other citizen with zero exceptions, and with rigorous safeguards against even one tiny exception. I think the odds of this ever being implemented are extremely small, of course, but it’s fun to talk about and not completely hopeless.
The thing I can’t figure out is what happens when little Timmy’s alcoholic dad blows the check at the strip club on the first weekend of the month? Timmy’s completely innocent, and he and his dad are both going to need to eat for the rest of the month.
Even if Timmy’s dad is guilty as hell, he is still a human who will need to eat. That doesn’t change if he’s a good person or a bad one.
If the question is “what is the moral requirement for the rest of the community in this situation?” One response might be that people who blow their money on strippers instead of feeding their children should not have the responsibility of taking care of those children. Another response might be that the community has a vested interest in making sure that this behavior is not repeated. A third response might be the community has little need for people with that significant a lack of impulse control, and that there are many good and useful competing uses for the funds (and emotional energy) it would take to feed Timmy and Timmy’s Dad.
How rational do you want the community to be about this?
The same thing that happens when he does that now.
This isn’t a problem specific to a society with a GBI, and I don’t see how having one would change how we deal with it (or don’t, depending on the social services available in your area). GBI would replace welfare, employment insurance, permanent disability payments, etc, but presumably not other things, like child and family services.
I think you’re linking two separate issues. A parent blowing his monthly garbage-hauling paycheck happens already. A GBI guarantees a monthly check whether the parent is working or not; it doesn’t have to make sure everyone in the family gets fed.
It could have such an effect, though. Without the nasty job, Mr. Parent would not need to drink so much and Mrs. Parent would not need a nasty job of her own, so they’d both have less stress and more time to do more home cooking and find cheaper ways to amuse themselves.
My answer: distribute some necessities directly. Create a basic food guarantee, basic housing guarantee, basic healthcare guarantee, basic education guarantee, and a basic spending-money guarantee on top of that.
That also solves the other big problem with basic income: businesses raising prices for necessities because their poorest customers suddenly got more money. (Look at how college loans have bid up the price of education, and tell me that basic income won’t have the same effect!)
IMO direct distribution is the obvious upgrade to the basic income idea and I’m not sure why more people aren’t pushing that.
Interesting how quickly you’ve moved from UBI, which can at least claim to be not-communism, into actual full-blown communism.
Your name makes me think that you might actually remember this, but anyway: what you’ve described is very close to the implementation of state Communism as it existed in the ’70s and ’80s. You had a job (you were required to have a job unless there was a waiver, usually for medical reasons), your job entitled you to ration books for housing, food, etc., and anything left over you could spend freely. It worked… well, hopefully we know how well it worked.
What do current welfare systems do about this? Paying daily seems like a reasonable solution, though I understand that banking amongst the poor is complicated.
Mai La Dreapta, though communism in Russia ended when I was a child, I remember it well. It had good and bad sides. The mass terror is bad. But free higher education for everyone (which I got because post-Soviet Russia never bothered dismantling it) is pretty good.
What I’m proposing is not communism. The state doesn’t own the means of production and doesn’t require everyone to work. Rather, it’s an expansion of the social safety net which many Western countries already have. (I’m living in Switzerland nowadays, you should visit sometime and try to find homeless people in the streets. It’s an interesting contrast with San Francisco.) Some folks even say that libertarians should welcome a stronger safety net because it lowers the risk of entrepreneurship.
@Vladimir – the problem is that in order to distribute that much stuff, the state has to own, or at least control, so much of the OUTPUT of production that the ownership of the means is basically moot.
I think a GBI is inevitable and a good idea, but only in a truly post-scarcity society where the means of production are essentially free.
I’m envisioning a state-managed army of fusion powered not-quite-intelligent self assembling robots handling all the day-to-day, with a capitalist crust on top dabbling in scholarship and hand-made goods for enrichment and nostalgia. Basically like the noble leisure class’ relation to serfs, but in this case the serfs are robots we don’t need to feel bad about exploiting.
Prosecution for child neglect? I think it’s probably an under-prosecuted crime today because we don’t want to punish people for being poor. But when being poor is always a result of voluntary decisions, that’s far less a concern.
Gbdub, not sure I see your point. If we can afford basic income that would cover food and housing for everyone, that means we can afford free food and housing for everyone. If one of those things can be done without government control of the economy, then the other can too.
Vladimir, my point is that if ” state guaranteed free food and housing for everyone” requires say 80% of a country’s total economic output to produce, that means the state has to de facto control 80% of the economy and you’ve got communism in all but name (doesn’t make it bad, but it’s basically communism).
In a truly “post scarcity” world where basic food and housing require say <10% of economic output to produce, then sure, you could still call that a private capitalist economy with a bit off the top for the GBI.
Rough estimate: The US GDP is $18 trillion. Providing everyone with $20000 per year comes to around $6 trillion. It ought to be possible to do that using taxes that don’t distort the economy too badly, particularly given that a large part of the basic income will be spent on the taxes used to provide it.
If little Timmy is living with an alcoholic dad who blows the food money on strippers, that is neglect and physical abuse and Timmy should be taken into care and fostered.
Ideal world, of course, because the social workers systems in Britain, Ireland and the USA all seem to be fucked up and fucked up spectacularly.
Zakharov: no, you need either to assume a huge new source of productivity (robots?) or to bite the bullet of massive deadweight losses to institute taxation on that scale. Estimates of the deadweight loss for a tax range from 10% to 50%, usually on the high side of that. A $20,000 GBI costs one-third of the entire US economy, and another 10-15% of the entire economy is probably lost in the process of taxing that much. And that assumes away any administrative costs. And that ignores anything else governments might do, such as national defense, police, courts, roads, regulation, education, parks, or going beyond GBI (say providing additional care for people with disabilities).
There would not be a national debt if it were possible to raise $6,000,000,000,000 losslessly. Given the current economy, you would need to assume effective tax rates above 50% to institute a meaningful GBI while still having government do much else. And that still feels optimistic.
I am theoretically in favor of the GBI if it can be implemented with zero exceptions: Any citizen gets the same sum of money as any other citizen with zero exceptions, and with rigorous safeguards against even one tiny exception. I think the odds of this ever being implemented are extremely small, of course, but it’s fun to talk about and not completely hopeless.
Non-citizen residents?
Newborn babies?
Grandma on life-support that costs less than her BI?
Non-citizen’s wouldn’t be covered under “Any citizen” and the other 2 don’t seem to be problems.
OP indicated ideally being no exceptions. Why are non-citizen residents excluded?
The other two are mostly abuse and regency concerns. Who gets to spend (or not spend) their money, which they obviously cannot use themselves?
Non-citizen residents are excluded because we would ideally like to try this on a scale less than “all of humanity”, in case it doesn’t work as well as we’d like. We therefore need to define members of the group that gets (also pays for) GBI, and “citizen” is the appropriate term for formally recognized member of a governed society.
If, before implementing GBI, you’d like to set the standards of citizenship to include all local residents, that’s negotiable. I can see some practical problems, though.
“No exceptions” generally means “no exceptions except for a few I’ll specifically state right now and a few I’m forgetting to mention but will indignantly claim should have been obvious if you point them out and I’ll wiggle all the definitions legalistically to try to achieve my preferred result”.
That said, it can still be a useful stance to take. “No exceptions” isn’t immune to hypocrisy creating exceptions, but it still makes exceptions more expensive, which can be what you want.
Don’t fight the hypothetical. This is assuming that people unavoidably “are much happier if they’re earning their money through gainful employment than if they’re on the dole”. It’s a broad enough category to restrict very little while still providing a purpose.
That’s no good for me, because I am completely inartistic and have no talent at all (I did a one-year arts and crafts course to explore that and yep, not one fragment of an atom of ability at all).
I might rise to the dizzy heights of whitewashing a fence, but “What have you made this year?” would be “This horrible mess”.
And have you seen the examples of public art inflicted on the ordinary citizen in civic spaces? Compulsory “work for your benefit” systems of artistic production would be even worse, in that eyesores would be inescapable everywhere (more murals! the GBI this year has a quota to fill!) and the public weal would suffer. I would certainly be much more miserable if I knew that the moment I walked out my door, the public ‘art’ produced by every hog, dog and divil getting the GBI would be assailing my visual (and doubtless auditory – oh God, the prospect of sound art! Or public music performances!) cortex.
You have no ability to program, machine things, anything? I’m envisioning a broad enough definition that hobbyist mathematics ought to qualify, so I’d think it’s pretty unlikely that you don’t have any skills that could make something worthwhile.
>public art inflicted on the ordinary citizen in civic spaces
It’s usually pretty decent.
I honestly genuinely can’t. I’m mathematically useless so programming etc. is out of the question. I can’t sew, bake, sculpt, paint, draw, make things involving welding or metalwork or woodwork. I don’t even know how to put on eyeshadow and I’m *mumblemumble* years old!
I have no hand-eye co-ordination and I have balance problems so sports etc. are right out.
Basic clerical skills is about it. You want someone who can type long boring documents into Word for you? Can do. I also, for some reason, seem to get stuck with filing no matter what job I go into (even though it bores me rigid, I must be good at it?)
You want somebody who can draw even stick figure cartoons to amuse a child? Out of luck there, pal.
You have, I think, demonstrated the ability to write an entertaining and informative pamphlet on How To Deal With The Irish Bureaucracy While Going Only Slightly Insane, And Occasionally Getting Something Useful Out Of The Process. There’s got to be a market for that, albeit maybe not enough to make an independent living out of. I’d certainly pay a few bucks for the American version.
The only down side, in the present hypothetical, is that if we somehow get Ireland to implement GBI, a fair chunk of the insanity-inducing bureaucracy goes away.
Deiseach:
You routinely demonstrate here writing ability well above the average. How you could best convert that into income I don’t know–possibly your own blog with a Patreon account?
I’m sure that ‘writing interesting stuff on the internet’ ought to count…
But more generally, I think I agree with you – making the BIG conditional on producing stuff, with no requirement that anyone else value it, sounds like a recipe for a lot of people wasting a lot of time doing things that bring no benefit to anyone.
I’m sure you, like 80% of women in history, can make a baby if you try.
I’m sure you, like 80% of women in history, can make a baby if you try.
(a) There’s this thing called the end of fertility, or, the menopause. Gone through it.
(b) Secondly, given my paternal family mental health issues and my own raft of social problems, reproducing with my genes is irresponsible and would cause any offspring more misery than is worth it
(c) How kind of you to offer, John; do you care to try fathering my putative children? I’ve always wondered how much effort it takes to rip out someone’s throat with only your teeth, and as the novel of “Silence of the Lambs” tells us, close enough to fuck is close enough to fight
If this is what flirting on SSC looks like all the time, I’m ditching my girlfriend in favor of some other lady up in this place.
“Or public music performances!”
Considering the terrible public music performances engendered around here by unsubsidized voluntary contributions, I can only shudder.
I’ve been to cities where the baseline for street buskers, at least in places where tourists congregate, is good to excellent. I have no idea why Chicago’s theme music is “saxophone playing Take Five, the Simpsons’ theme, or the Flintstones’ theme, all out of tune”, “loud drumming”, and my favorite, “high volume bad hip-hop karaoke before captive subway station audience”.
(When I run into actual talent, I drop in a fiver pour encourager les autres. This costs me less than five dollars a year on average.)
I’ve had this idea that we can create little communities of people who have less technology and lower standards of living than we do, but it’s still decent. So lets say we buy a farm, get a bunch of homeless people living there and have them work the farm using minimal modern technology. So maybe they have essentials(food, water, shelter and clothing) while working the land and doing something that may not be important to the economy, but is something tangible they can work on and be proud of while also having a community they can rely on. Basically what I’m saying is that they could be secular Amish people. If it works, then it could be a cheap way for the government to give the homeless a decent life while not giving regular people incentives to take advantage of the system. Of course, that wouldn’t solve problems like single working class moms trying to raise their kids but it could be a safety net for the lowest in society.
A related idea was a form of quasi-socialism proposed by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in which the government would in some way ensure that every individual or family had access to sufficient means of production to maintain a basic standard of living, if they make use of it, without having to sell their labor, lose their independence, or forego the virtues of skilled labor. The means of production could be farm equipment, like you mention, or craftsman’s tools, or maybe a timeshare at a machine shop, etc. But it would all stay very much private property, despite the wider distribution. The catchphrase was that “too much capitalism means too few capitalists”. The proposal, “distributism”, is mostly talked about by Catholics and anarchists, but I don’t see any reason why the meat of it couldn’t be adopted more broadly.
And… the disabled? the elderly? children? I mean, you can say “their families and friends and community can help take care of them”, but then all you’ve done is reinvented classic socialism on a smaller scale.
Arguably, the problem with classic socialism is precisely one of scale, so I’m not sure why this is a counterargument. After all, my reactionary household is communistic on a small scale, with each person contributing according to their ability (working a job, keeping house, doing chores), and the results of this labor being distributed as needed to each person.
Yes, on a smaller scale (http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html) and without the class-warfare rhetoric.
But calling it quasi-socialism or merely classic socialism isn’t really an accurate picture of Distributism. Chesterton once quipped that the problem with Capitalism wasn’t that there were too many capitalists, but that there were too few.
As an actual modern day Distributist, I would point out that while it’s true that Chesterton had a disproportionate fondness for the idea of each family being its own sole-trader business, the more important idea is for larger businesses to function as worker-owned co-operatives. That is, a business would be something you join and leave, not something you buy and sell. Workers would be paid with profits rather than wages, and capitalists would earn interest rather than profits.
You appear to have reinvented the workhouse.
Human zoos? Because if they’re not producing anything beneficial to the economy, then basically what you are suggesting is the equivalent of those TV programmes about “the Victorian kitchen”, only with less didactic content and there for people to gawp at (“Look, Susie, see the people in badly-made homespun? Those are the Interactive Living Museum Project people!” “Oh, you mean the bums and tramps?” “Yes, aren’t they funny, using a horse-drawn plough on this quarter of an acre!”)
I suppose, if really desperate enough, people might be willing to put on the ‘look at the poor people’ version of chimpanzees’ tea parties. It might be more palatable if these were out-and-out “model historical recreational communities”, which at least – by pretending to an educational and tourism purpose – would enable the participants to maintain some human dignity, rather than “everyone else gets the latest smartphone but since you’re a loser, you can have a three room shack where you draw water from a pump instead” reservations for the homeless.
Sorry if that sounds aggressively mean about your idea, but I was born into one of those “three room cottage and you walk to the pump three fields away with your bucket for water” deals and I get twitchy about the idea that “of course, this is only for the homeless, not regular people” attitudes.
Choice is of course the main defining element here, and if people are being steered to “work on the farm with manual labour” by whatever kind of compulsion (social, political, economic, the “dole spongers and benefits cheats” mentality fostered if people born and reared in an urban context don’t want to live on a farm out in the arse-end of nowhere having to hand-milk cows and tackle up horses to carts when they’ve never even seen any animal bigger than a dog in their lives), then I have to disagree with it.
Okay, to try and show I’m not completely a heartless grumbling nay-sayer, there was a 70s British sit-com called The Good Life about down-sizing, cutting back consumption, being self-sufficient, and running a farm in a suburb.
You’re objection seems to boil down to “It’s undignified!”. We’re comparing my proposal to the lives that homeless people live now. I think they would prefer being a farmer than scavenging dumpsters and begging for handouts. This is a compromise between helping the lowest in society without screwing up incentives or costing too much money.
“I think they would prefer being a farmer than scavenging dumpsters and begging for handouts.”
And on what do you base this? What is your experience with the homeless?
If the majority of homeless people would prefer their current living standards to that of a simple farmer, then I will drop my proposal and suggest letting them continue sleeping on cardboard and drinking all day.
If the majority of homeless people would prefer their current living standards to that of a simple farmer, then I will drop my proposal and suggest letting them continue sleeping on cardboard and drinking all day.
The majority of homeless people in the USA have health issues – mostly mental and addiction – which prevent them from performing the daily life actions of a simple farmer. They will(*) not get up on time, choose the appropriate task for the day, perform basic hygiene for themselves, their living quarters and their animals, and cooperate with other members of the household in order to accomplish the tasks for the day.
With adequate (**) supervision and treatment, many of them could function as part of a closely knit society which made use of their labor. Not all of them.
The idea that the homeless would choose something is the wrong answer, because they can not choose otherwise.(***)
(*) A statement of prediction, based on past behavior, not a judgement of capability or will power.
(**) At a minimum, supervised taking of medications, restrictions on use of personal time, screening of contact with outsiders, embargos on substances of addiction, and frequent searches of personal property for items of addition. Most of us would not stand for this.
(***) I am not sure how to fix this, partly because I am not sure of the trade-offs.
You have to be careful when you use the term homeless. Colloquially it conjures up the image of a guy living on the street and begging for a living, but in when used in government statistics it includes people living in “overcrowded conditions” (as part of the adequate portion of “fixed, regular, and adequate”).
No, not that it’s undignified but if you want to keep “regular folks” from deciding they’d like to give up the apartment in the city and move to the country to make artisanal soap from goats’ milk and their own honey bees, then it’s already slapping a stigma on it: FOR THE USELESS AND THE LOSERS ONLY.
Poor people also have pride, it’s often the only thing they have. If their work is of no economic benefit overall, and is only make-work and something that day trippers from the towns (the regular folks) can come and gawp at on public holidays, then it is humiliating and painful. And maybe someone who comes, as I said, from a town background knows nothing about cows and oats, and doesn’t want to know anything about them.
@Deisach
The stigma is a feature, not a bug. The whole point is to find a way to help the lowest people in society in a way that won’t create bad incentives. But you seem to suggest that not only is this low status, it’s downright humiliating. Do you really think it is that humiliating to do some honest to god work, even if it’s not necessarily the most efficient way to go about it? It’s not like they are making mud pies. They are growing something that they can enjoy for their own consumption(or maybe someone would even be willing to buy it) And if pointing and laughing at these guys becomes that big of a problem then there is a very simple solution. Ban unwanted visitors. Boom. Problem solved.
Also, I again want to point out that people who go around begging on the streets probably don’t have much pride. Between my proposal and living on the streets, which do you think is more humiliating?
Can any historians weigh in on whether modern American attitudes towards work are different from those throughout most of human history? As with most things, I’m not an expert, but I imagine more tribal or communalist societies would be confused at the dictum that being independently solvent is so intrinsic to one’s worth as a person. It’s certainly a weird co-dependent sort of relationship. I know plenty of people who fiercely and openly hate their jobs but whose personal honor would never let them go on welfare (and they’d definitely see GBI as welfare). You could call it honor or you could call it self-abasement demanded by the strictures of a soon-to-be-obsolete societal model, I guess.
The political obstacles to GBI are usually phrased as people seeing taking ‘handouts’ as a sign of weakness and moral degeneracy, but I think it goes deeper than that; that hatred of handouts, I think, stems from the belief that anything is possible/if you can dream it, you can do it. And most people would not take “Actually, that’s not true anymore, your skillset is totally obsolete and your dreams of being a surgeon have been crushed by technology that’s ten times better at it than you ever could be. But, um, here’s 15 grand, and you can still, like, paint and stuff.”
I don’t think rich people used to be troubled by living off interest.
My impression (admittedly as much literary as historical) is that they often saw themselves as having the job of local patron/administrator/organizer/etc., aided by a social hierarchy that treated their property as a source of authority. And that the ones who didn’t do so (which wasn’t uncommon) had a tendency to many of the same sorts of pathologies associated with high-unemployment communities (substance abuse, problem gambling, child neglect, in some milieus violent interpersonal conflict via dueling), just with a different veneer. How much of that is stereotype rather than social observation, I’m not sure.
Modern attitudes toward work are definitely very different from most of human history. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were conceptually and temperamentally incapable of sitting in an office for 40 hours a week to pay the mortgage. Market pricing is an entirely modern phenomenon that would have been as mysterious to them as a computer. (Hell, it’s mysterious to most modern people, but we grew up with it.)
As for honor, well, they had that in spades — much more so than moderns, especially in its more violent manifestations — as well as the cheater-detecting intuitions that underlie moderns’ objections to welfare and GBI.
The flip side of your point is that if people do not feel that being self-supporting is important to their feelings of status, a welfare system results in a lot of people who could be productive choosing leisure instead, at the expense of those who still work. Arguably that’s the problem the European welfare states are now encountering. Their system worked tolerably well as long as the old attitudes were strong enough so that almost nobody went on welfare if he had any other reasonably tolerable alternative. But those attitudes gradually eroded.
The trick would be to tie the basic income to a make work program that doesn’t feel or seem like a make work program (like a massively multiplayer online game or something similar).
The U.S. military and associated industries is the obvious model for that.
The trick would be to tie the basic income to a make work program that doesn’t feel or seem like a make work program
Community Employment Schemes – do you have something similar in the States?
Many people get part-time jobs on these schemes, like them, would like to continue working there, but since the scheme is time-limited and the organisations can’t employ them in a real job (not having the funding, relying on volunteers and labour schemes like these) then there isn’t a chance for them to remain employed there.
GBI that did not have the stigma of “welfare” and wasn’t time-limited would help there; if people want to volunteer for free for someplace that caters to their interests, then traditional volunteering for charity work could go on; but if you’re required to work for your GBI, then part-time work paid for by the GBI in charities and community groups would benefit both parties.
The main thing would be (a) take away stigma, so a GBI job is just as much a real job as getting a job anywhere else (b) no compulsion (c) the problem then is would this do away with volunteerism if adopted on a large scale?
As it is, all the jobs looking for unpaid interns and promising Access! Foot in the door! Get an introduction to the industry! would also fit for GBI, since you have to live on something while you’re getting “valuable work experience” and at the moment that seems to limit it to people who have parents able to support them into their 20s even when working in an unpaid job.
I ended up wondering about just making everyone go to school forever in response to that. I still don’t know if that’s a good idea.
From the comments of “On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor”:
“or else that the prejudice proves too hard to eradicate”
Or else that there was a very good reason for the prejudice in the first place, and it was simply pre-judged for us in the same way as “lava is hot: do not jump in it”.
One of the main reasons the costs of current welfare programmes are bearable is precisely because employment is a sign of status and people living on the dole are stigmatised. Remove these social sanctions and more and more low income people will stop working, making the tax-base smaller and smaller.
There are multiple objections against GBI, and each should be evaluated separately.
Things like “unemployed people have low status” would probably fix themselves when enough people get unemployed. I mean, a person really cares only about opinions of their neighbors, not some abstract national average, and when those neighbors become unemployed too, it stops being a thing. There is a risk of creating bubbles, e.g. in one town everyone is unemployed and there is no social penalty for it, while in other town most people work, and the unemployed ones have low status. Maybe people would separate themselves into working communities and non-working communities, so that everyone feels comfortable with their neighbors. Is that a problem? Possibly, because even the people from the non-working cities would need some services which no one from their city would be willing to provide. So they would be completely supervised by strangers. Not sure what would happen then.
Maybe there is a risk that with GBI too many people would drop their jobs too soon. I mean, some people have a problem to find a job today, but some people are in high demand. But after seeing all their friends having fun and games 24/7, even the people in high demand might decide they want to join the fun, and they don’t mind having less money. This would probably need an experiment.
How many people would work if the work would be completely voluntary, and would no provide significant benefits above not working? Again, an experiment is needed here, and probably a longitudinal one. Just because people who grew up and gained their working habits in the “old system” would mostly continue to work, does not guarantee their children will inherit the attitudes if they know from the childhood that work is completely optional.
School system: If e.g. half of the population will choose not not work, does it make sense to educate them? It seems like wasted money. I mean, if someone wants to learn, that’s great. But what about those 15 years olds who will insist that they don’t want to learn anything, and that they have already decided to stay unemployed for their whole lives? If they are allowed to stay unemployed, what exactly is the reason to make them study something they don’t want to (because they would rather spend the time playing videogames)?
Maybe people need some structure in their lives to maintain sanity. Some people can find their own structure, but some probably can’t. Imagine a person who wakes up at noon, and then keeps browsing Reddit till the early hours, every day, week after week, year after year. I can’t speak with certainty even for myself that, given the option, I would not become that person. Once I was voluntarily unemployed for three months — at first I imagined how many plans could I accomplish during that time, but the three months passed quickly and I realized I did nothing; I have completely wasted the time. On average I have higher productivity in the afternoons after my regular job. This was really sad to admit.
If playing video games and surfing the internet is a terrible waste of time, then surely making these things is equally (more?) of a waste of time ?
I always feel like the time I spend looking at the sky is time well spent, the time I spend talking bullshit, time wasted.
Arguments against GBI need to start by recognising that in many countries we *already* have one, with the condition that you *have* to not work in order to get it. A basic income would realistically be just that – basic. Most people can find lots of non-basic things they would like to spend money on, and most are quite willing to work to be able to afford them, even if they know their basic living requirements would be met anyhow.
Expanding it to cover everyone rather than just the unemployed has a couple of effects. One is that it reduces the incentive to be unemployed. Another is that it costs more, which implies higher taxes, which implies a reduced incentive to work (unless you go the Scott route and pay for it by eliminating education subsidies or something). How these effects net out is unclear, but I for one would love to find out.
I mean, isn’t the biggest problem that, at the current level of technology, we still need a fairly high percentage of people working to provide the basic necessities? Much fewer than in the past, certainly, but even in the most advanced countries we need a lot of people just to keep the food growing, the lights on, and the sewers flowing. GBI is a long way from stable if many more people than are currently unemployed take advantage of it.
SF, NY, BOS people: when you want to do some computer work or read you go to the library, right? I mean there’s all these resources there, free internet, free movies, research materials, etc. Why isn’t the library the center of civic life like an intellectual version of the Roman gymnasium?
It’s harsh to point it out but it should be acknowledged: the “guaranteed right” of anyone to use the library makes it kind of suck. And kind of sticky. I think mixing GBI with the competition/scarcity inherent to desirable cities will fail. But there is a version of ‘red-state living’ that could work with GBI.
A basic income of $15000 a year for every American would cost somewhere around 4.8 trillion dollars (plus program overhead), which is about one and a half times the total federal tax revenue of the United States in 2014.
You’re not going to get there by reducing spending on entitlement programs. You’re not going to get there by gutting the DoD or replacing Social Security, either. Now, GBI would have complicated and not necessarily one-sided feedback effects on the economy, so these numbers aren’t necessarily the end of the story — but we really are talking a pretty enormous gamble here, at best.
That cost doesn’t take into account the amount that comes back in taxes. I don’t see any reason you wouldn’t tax the basic income.* Also I don’t see any reason to give it to unemancipated minors given that they can’t legally keep it away from their parents, nor the institutionalized population whose government provided care costs more than that to begin with.
The last time I did a back of the envelope calculation, I ended up with a cost net of taxes of around $2T for a BI of $11,700 (FPL) for each adult, non-institutionalized, citizen. Though admittedly the income tax part is remarkably difficult to figure out given that you’d expect employment and income patterns to change fairly dramatically.
* It would make sense to set the standard deduction / exemption / etc. such that someone only receiving the basic income wouldn’t generally owe taxes, but that’s different from exempting it from taxes altogether.
No, it doesn’t, but that only gets you out of twenty or thirty percent of the total under the most optimistic assumptions. Unemancipated minors are maybe another twenty percent, but I think you’ll have a tough political time not giving it to them or their parents. The institutionalized population is somewhere around one percent of the total if you exclude nursing homes.
But that’s not important. The point is more that we’re talking such a giant pile of money that no reasonable, and not many unreasonable, adjustments to federal spending are adequate to fund it. A few dozen percent here or there isn’t going to change that.
Another requirement for GBI is that we accept that basic income will be well below poverty level, probably more like $5000/year. Since we are replacing essentially all the other entitlement programs with GBI, we can at least imagine affording that. Since we aren’t means-testing GBI, you aren’t condemned to live on just $5K/year.
GBI plus twenty hours a week at $10/hr, gets you back to $15K a year. Or GBI plus the interest on the ~$2000/year you put into your retirement savings back when you had a job. If you insist on your GBI-given right to lay about playing video games all day, and you never held a job from which to save money and if you haven’t made or kept any friends or family willing to lend a hand, then you get to live on $5K/year.
If you aren’t willing to have anyone suffer that fate, then GBI won’t work, because whatever we set the absolute floor at, we’ll soon enough redefine “abject poverty” at twice that level and get right back on the escalator.
@Nornagest
$4.8T seems completely implausible to me (at current GDP), while $2T seems plausible, if tough. So the first order details do seem to make a difference.
If everyone in society is fed, sheltered, etc. etc. then surely the basic income is affordable, because in real terms, it is already being paid. I would say this is the case in many European countries.
There are people who don’t work, get old, kill people, etc. and they receive it. Anyone who wants to receive it, receives it.
The only way the introduction of an explicit guarantee could make any difference *at all* is if people hadn’t actually realized that the implicit guarantee existed.
@brad: wait, we’re going to tax the basic income? AND only give it to adults? So a single mother with two kids (my own family unit growing up) would get roughly $11,700 to pay for all necessities of life at market rates?
That’s barely half the federal poverty line. And much as we can sneer at the voluntarily unemployed, the single mom in this scenario would have to earn enough at her day job (which is of course taxed starting at Dollar One, she already used up the personal exemption) to cover the costs of child care. On the very plausible assumption that many single parents have below-average productivity (because somebody has to), it may not make economic sense for them to outsource child care.
Once we start bandying about more plausibly affordable numbers like $5,000, it starts getting very harsh indeed. Three meals a day for three people for one year is 3,285, so good luck feeding yourself and two kids on $1.52 per meal, and no, kids do not have kid-size appetites. The hypothesis underlining GBI is that it is supposedly valuable for people to not feel like they need to work to survive, but the math tends to assume that anyone who doesn’t participate in the labor market is a shiftless layabout who can suffer for all we care. We can talk about the escalator of living standards, but simply keeping three people alive in a place with cold winters is not that easy on $5,000/year. Subsistence farmers at least have a modicum of capital in the form of arable land and a shelter already; if they don’t, even subsistence farmers starve or die of exposure.
@Mark: you’re absolutely correct that there is effectively an implicit guarantee of basic living standards already, so in principle it is possible to make the guarantee explicit without creating genuinely abject poverty. But GBI involves reapportioning implicit government guarantees from the poor and to other segments of society. The poor are (thankfully) a relatively tiny fraction of the population already, so you need a way bigger pie for them to get a smaller slice and not be seriously harmed.
@FJ
People who can’t afford to have children ought not to have children. If they do anyway and then proceed to neglect them, that’s the crime of child abuse and should be treated as such.
A welfare system designed so that a parent’s standard of living goes up with the marginal child is a disaster. We’ve known that since at least since the Moynihan Report in 1965.
Two parents each receiving the FPL for a single person will have have 97% of the FPL for a family of four. If your self actualization requirements include having kids it is possible under GBI, but you’ll need at least one partner.
1. What you can and cannot afford may change rather rapidly — e.g., if your partner dies, you lose your job, or your child is diagnosed with an expensive illness.
2. Children get quite attached to their parents — how will Bobby feel about your welfare reform after you’ve put his mom in jail for being poor?
@brad: No, conceiving a child is not a crime in most Western democracies, even if the parent is extremely poor. Crimes such as child abuse (or more pertinently, neglect or endangering the welfare of a child) require an actus reus, and neither “having sex” nor “being poor” qualifies. You could potentially combine a GBI with a new criminal statute prohibiting certain forms of sexual activity, but I suspect that that would be even more controversial than the GBI alone. And, in the U.S., pretty clearly illegal under Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas.
Conceiving a child and then proceeding to neglect them is a crime. As is neglecting a child that one has become the guardian of through other means, though for the truly indigent most of those other means are going to be difficult to arrange whereas natural conception works for rich and poor alike.
@FJ
I never suggested that any form of sexual activity ought to be banned. Nor that conceiving a child be a crime. Nor being poor simpliciter.
Not providing any food to a child of which you have physical custody on the other hand is child neglect. A failure to act where there is a duty to do so is sufficient for actus reus purposes.
Regardless of the current state of law, would you consider it immoral to reproduce endlessly without any realistic plan for preventing your offspring from starving to death?
@Nita
Re: #1
Life insurance is the way to insure against death of a partner. Perhaps it ought to be mandatory for parents — I’d have to think about it more. As mentioned above with a basic income and partner, loss of a job doesn’t put a family of four much below the poverty line. As for expensive illnesses, I support UHC as well (which based on evidence from around the would would save money).
Re: #2
Presumably Bobby would prefer to be in foster care than to starve to death. Unfortunately he’s a victim of his parents either way, but we can’t prevent all crimes.
Heck, there’s loads of people who would be considerably less of a burden on the taxpayers than they are now if they were given these handouts.
@brad: An actus reus is not merely failure to act on a duty: it’s *voluntary* failure to act on a duty. A parent who does not feed her kids because she has no money is no more guilty of a crime than a parent who does not feed her kids because she is in a coma. This is not a scenario that actually comes up much because we have a variety of means by which parents without money can nevertheless acquire food for their children. But, when it does happen (e.g., natural disasters or shipwrecks), no crime is committed.
Separate from the law, I am not really sure what moral obligations one has to children as-yet-unconceived. I know for a certainty that any child I conceive will suffer and, eventually, die. In some circumstances, that death may be awfully swift. But I’m not certain that even an stillbirth had negative utility over the course of her gestation, much less that I owe some moral obligation to prevent that entity from coming into existence. As a practical matter, I’m not sure this is a great slogan for GBI: “With GBI, it will be immoral for poor people to conceive!”
We are explicitly talking about a GBI scenario here, so there’s no such thing as a parent who doesn’t feed their kids because they have no money. And for that matter, the point of comparison is a society with a kludge of patchwork welfare-ish programs that generally does offer money and/or actual food to anyone who needs it to feed their kids.
The neglectful parents here, real or hypothetical, are the ones who choose to take the money that could buy food for their kids and instead buy booze for themselves. Or, perhaps, refuse to accept the money because it comes with the humiliation and degradation of being on the dole. That is and ought to be a crime.
We ought to do something to reduce the humiliation, the degradation, and whatever is causing the desire for alcohol, but regardless of how diligent or successful we are on that front, if there’s money you could use to buy food for your kids and your kids instead starve, you’re going to jail.
@John Schilling: I agree that a parent who squanders an adequate GBI and lets her kids starve is a criminal. But now we’re back to where we started: how big is the GBI? You claimed previously that a practical number is something like $5000/year. That is simply not enough to purchase food for three people, even before you start squandering money on frivolities like clean water, shelter, and heat. brad seemed to suggest that that was an acceptable conclusion: the GBI will be large enough to keep a single adult alive, and if she has the temerity to reproduce while living on GBI, she should be prosecuted for child neglect for “reproduc[ing] endlessly without any realistic plan for preventing [her] offspring from starving to death”. You seem to think that $5000/year is plenty to provide enough sustenance for three people, so long as Mom doesn’t squander it. Where the heck do you shop? The USDA claims that a mother with two kids under the age of 3 can theoretically feed them for $4,581.36, assuming the toddlers eat everything put in front of them, there’s no food waste, and they live naked on the Serengeti. I respectfully submit that a $5000/year GBI is literally not enough to live on for a small family, at least in the middle latitudes.
Even $1500/year is enough to feed three people if you’re willing to cook (we’re talking completely unemployed here, so time is not a problem) and disciplined about cooking cheap but nutritious food with very occasional treats. But that would I admit be an unrealistic presumption for many of the wholly-unemployable people who would wind up on GBI but make otherwise tolerable parents.
But no matter; the GBI is for everyone, every citizen of the implementing state, no exceptions. That’s the point. So the mother and two children get collectively $15,000 per year for food, clothing, shelter, etc, not $5,000. That I think offers a comfortable margin over not-starvation.
It does offer perverse incentives to parents who don’t much care for children but think they can raise them to state-accepted standards for $2000/year, but that’s a different problem – and one we already have to deal with in other contexts.
@FJ
FWIW, I didn’t take a position on the feasibility of supporting three people on $11,700/year. My inclination is to think it is possible given that $11700/3*365 = $10.68/day/person which is well above the international moderate poverty line. My position was that if you can’t manage to feed your child, that’s child abuse.
I’m also curious as to what the current typical welfare amounts to for a non-working parent with two children (ex healthcare given that I think that should continue or be expended under GBI). TANF is limited to sixty months, WIC is only until the youngest child is five, and section 8 is unavailable in many areas. If the median transfer would go up under a $11.7k GBI, then what are we even arguing about?
Finally, I’m not sure why you keep mentioning conception being the critical thing. You still have nine months to abort after that. Though they are under shameless political attack as we speak, I hope and expect Planned Parenthood to be around for a long time to come.
@John Schilling
It is a farce to claim that the basic income is “going” to an unemancipated minor when he has no real legal personality and thus no ability to control how it is spent. At that point we have two programs, one is a basic income for all full citizens, and a program that pays people for being parents.
“A basic income would realistically be just that – basic.”
As I think I have pointed out here before, if you try to create an objective standard of basic, something like the lowest amount which someone can live on without having his life expectancy sharply reduced by poverty, you end up with a level that no supporter of a basic income would accept. It may be relevant that per capita income in the developed world at present averages twenty to thirty times what it was through most of history.
Few of us appreciate just how rich we are.
So why not have a subjective standard of basic, and provide the GBI recipients with some things that medieval serfs would have thought of as luxuries but which we now think of as essentials?
@walpolo
Presumably because kids starving to death is easy to understand as a really bad thing. Everyone would agree that starving to death is bad no matter what. Beyond that, your argument becomes more like “this is bad because it’s unequal, and inequality is inherently bad” which I expect fewer people will find convincing.
Inequality does seem to make people unhappy. But I was thinking of the argument (which came up in a recent thread) that the increased utility of making more money falls off so sharply once you reach about $70 or $80K. As a result, transferring money from people who make that much or more to those who make much less will have the effect of increasing net utility, potentially by a large amount.
@walpolo
Does it not depend on who people compare themselves to? Does inequality make people unhappy if it’s the vague knowledge that there are people in the world better off than them? Are you made unhappy by the thought that the 0.01% has more wealth than you can possibly imagine? Are there really no ways of organizing ourselves such that it is possible to not care about some people who are better off than us?
I’m also not sure how to square this with the observation that people so often seem to want to move to nicer neighborhoods, higher social circles, wealthier countries, rather than the other way round.
“But I was thinking of the argument (which came up in a recent thread) that the increased utility of making more money falls off so sharply once you reach about $70 or $80K.”
I think I remember that thread. I concur with those who were highly suspicious of the idea that today’s middle-class income is exactly the right amount of wealth. It seems you’re suspicious of this idea too, since you suggested just acquiescing to the subjective standard of ‘basic’. One reason not to do this is that fewer people probably care about inequality than do about absolute poverty, so you will have a harder time getting this subjective standard popular.
I can understand being suspicious, but the evidence we have does seem to support the hypothesis that 70 to 80K is the most happiness-promoting number, in our present culture and level of technology at least.
The more important point, perhaps, is that the returns (in utility) of wealth diminish as you get wealthier, so that to a certain extent, robbing the rich and giving to the poor increases net utility.
Walpolo asks about a subjective standard of basic. Two answers:
Most rhetoric on the subject is either mistaken or dishonest, since it almost always is put as “what people need” not “what I would like everyone to have.” The usual implication is that less than that means starvation, death from exposure, or the like.
It’s tempting to believe that if only we get substantially richer, we can give everyone a basic income without creating serious incentive problems. With a fixed standard of basic, that’s doable. But by a fixed standard, we’ve already done it in the developed world—by the standards of a few hundred years ago in the U.K., or much of the world less than fifty years ago—a dollar a day used to be the standard cutoff for world poverty—there are essentially no poor people in the developed world. Providing a basic income at that level would not be a burden–existing welfare systems cost much more than that.
But once you redefine basic to mean “the level of income at which I would feel poor but not be lacking anything important,” now it rises as incomes rise, so providing it to everyone remains costly however rich the society becomes.
Why doesn’t Walpolo’s argument imply that we ought to be transferring from everyone in the U.S. (and other developed countries), rich and poor alike, to people in really poor countries? The number of people below the old line of a dollar a day is much smaller than it was forty years ago, but still in the hundreds of millions.
Is it relevant that the enormous reduction in world poverty over the past century or two has owed almost nothing to redistribution, almost everything to economic growth?
Insert the standard argument about different costs of living here.
Because non-utilitarians care more about people inside their circles of concern than people outside of them (actually, utilitarians do too, they just think that they shouldn’t).
Not applicable here, since the dollar a day (or $1.25 per day according to the more recent definition) is already adjusted for inflation and purchasing power.
“Insert the standard argument about different costs of living here.”
That’s why statements about income changes over time or over space are put in terms of real income. It isn’t that the same things are consistently more expensive here, it’s that we take it for granted that we “need” more expensive things.
A small apartment, for instance, is quite a lot more expensive than a bed in a room shared by four people.
“Why doesn’t Walpolo’s argument imply that we ought to be transferring from everyone in the U.S. (and other developed countries), rich and poor alike, to people in really poor countries? ”
It does!
Basic income doesn’t take away rewards for working. The basic income is just enough that if you subsist on it and have no other money coming in, you’ll have your essential needs met – you never have to worry about not having enough money for food, shelter, clean water, and that kind of thing. BI isn’t enough to pay for luxuries. BI alone means you’re poor, but not desperately poor. So if having a house instead of a small apartment, having lots of clothes, going to concerts with your friends, traveling, etc. are important to you, you have to work to earn the money. If you’re content with a tiny living space and just enough money to be dressed and fed and clean, then you’ll be OK without a paycheck job.
Cadie writes:
“The basic income is just enough that if you subsist on it and have no other money coming in, you’ll have your essential needs met – … So if having a house instead of a small apartment …”
This struck me as a nice example of my point about not appreciating how rich we are. Minimal housing doesn’t mean having a small apartment all to yourself, or even shared with wife and children. Take a look at Orwell’s description of how tramps were housed in London in _Down and Out in Paris and London_. Or the description in _The Russians_ of how people lived in Moscow in the mid-20th century.
Minimal housing means as many beds per room as the room will hold with room to get out of them.
It’s worth noting that this assumes that zoning/planning permission laws were revoked at the same time the BI was enacted, since at present such minimal housing is probably not legal to build anywhere usefully close to places people without a car could buy food and other basics.
If a basic income was to be created to replace welfare, but no other changes to laws were made, it would need to provide enough income to cover housing/shelter as currently legal. I think this would probably be the part with the least give in it, in terms of reducing costs relative to how people currently live.
You’d also have large numbers of people made homeless in the short term, because even if such minimal housing became legal it’d take time, possibly a lot of time, for supply to catch up, and large amounts of relocation for people to get to where it existed. This could be smoothed over by more money spent around the transition, or similar.
How it handles housing is I think one of the strongest arguments against having a single welfare payment rather than a separate payment for housing set based on the local housing market and a smaller payment for other needs. You strongly motivate people to move to where housing is cheap, which is good, except for the part where the places housing is cheap are the places with no jobs available, which means people can get stuck on welfare. Even if you don’t make job hunting compulsory, that’s probably a bad thing.
“You strongly motivate people to move to where housing is cheap, which is good, except for the part where the places housing is cheap are the places with no jobs available, which means people can get stuck on welfare. ”
One quibble: Where there are many people, and all of them have incomes, is an excellent place to start a business. And GBI doesn’t go away if you get a job–it’s guaranteed–so it seems likely that you’d see a very large number of small-scale entrepreneurs.
Excuse my resorting to ev psych style explanations, but historically people who have productive roles in a group are far less likely to be killed or exiled or otherwise harmed, and so it seems to make sense that psychologically we might strongly favour productive activity that gives a sense of helping or being desired by others in comparison to hedonistic activity. I don’t discount your points though – that sort of stigma can be very powerful.
Yes, it’s possible that the cultural prejudice is just a front for a deep fact about human psychology. I hope that’s not true, but I don’t have any evidence against it.
No? This strikes me as only true as a sampling bias (killed or exiled or otherwise harmed people cannot be productive) and I can provide the equal and opposite just-so story: historically, people who have productive roles in a group expend lots of energy and get killed by woolly mammoths (mammi?).
I hope humans “might strongly favour productive activity that gives a sense of helping or being desired by others”, though. No shortage of that to go around.
A possible test case for GBI is Native American communities with casinos – many tribes set up a profit sharing system whereby every member of the tribe is entitled to an equal share of the casino profits. These can be quite substantial, certainly to the size you could call a GBI.
Anybody aware of research (or first hand knowledge) of how that works out? Anecdotally, there is the occasional family gaming the system by having a bunch of kids, and certainly many communities struggle with drug and alcohol issues (though the latter was true before the casinos too).
This Economist article claims that tribes that distribute casino profits as “per-capita payments” do worse than tribes that instead invest the profits in local businesses. I haven’t looked into the data close enough to see if the Economist’s take on this is accurate.
A couple issues from the article jump out immediately:
1) It’s not clear that using the same definition of “poverty” for workers and non-workers makes sense. As the opening story alludes, working introduces a lot of expenses (transportation, clothing, etc) that non-working does not. Plus its a huge time suck. So working might bump you above the poverty line, but not substantially improve your quality of life.
2) The tribe used for the opening example only gives out $1200 a year – hardly a GBI. It mentions some tribes have payments of $100k or more (I’ve heard that it’s around $40k for one of the tribes here in AZ). THAT’S real money, and it would be interesting to see a study isolated to those cases.
3) The article does show that, well, people can be dumb. And big lump sums can be a bad idea (e.g. 18 yr olds blowing their trust fund on a new car). So the question of “what to do when Timmy’s dad blows all the cash” is still a good one.
Then again, investing is businesses probably gives a better return, but it only helps the tribe insofar as it produces more jobs or more profits to share. Either way, you’re still generating paychecks, and people can still waste them.
How paternalistic are you willing to be to prevent bad decisions? And how merciless are you willing to be to protect from the consequences of bad decisions?
What if Timmey’s dad, through the miracle of electronic banking, actually gets $1.50 every hour. If 24 transactions/day are too expensive, have him get $36 every day.
Then it takes about five minutes for some enterprising lender to show up and offer him an up front lump of cash secured against his future income (at a very reasonable interest rate, of course).
I have a decent amount of experience with a tribe whose per cap is right about at GBI level (a little over $10,000, I’d rather not be specific). There’s not really a lot of unusual results or surprises. There are a lot of issues stemming from the fact that minors’ payments are shunted to a trust fund which is disbursed when they graduate from high school, but that wouldn’t really be in play with a GBI. Some people live off of it, but there’s definitely stigma against that both within and without the community. Unemployment doesn’t really seem any higher than you would expect it to be in a community with their social history (although that might be confounded by how easy it is for members to get a job working with the tribe, which is a very large employer).
I’ve noticed in these discussions of a GBI, nobody seems to bring up Paul Graham’s “Why Nerds are Unpopular” essay, and the school/prison/ladies-who-lunch dynamic. In fact, to quote:
This particularly also applies to Cypher’s “school forever” idea above. (“if you want a vision of the future, picture a jock stuffing a nerd into a locker… forever.”)
The major benefit of GBI (or Universal Basic Income, UBI) is that you get it whether or not you work, unlike many welfare programs. In studies like MINCOME, primary earners kept their jobs, the only people who quit their jobs were people working part-time and would-be students who now didn’t need to drop out of school. So it replaces many current social programs without creating a “poverty trap”. A negative income tax would do this too, and maybe be cheaper but seems like it would be harder to implement.
The other thing to remember is that people often find joy and meaning in things that don’t pay well. Being a stay-at-home parent for example. Or an artist. Or social worker. Or working at any non-profit. Or being able to survive a period of unemployment without being evicted and starving, thus allowing somebody to quit the job they hate and find a better one. What it comes down to is if one believes that the free market perfectly allocates money, then obviously a UBI is a bad idea. If one believes that a person shouldn’t starve to death even if they don’t have the money to buy food, it starts to make more sense.
What if GBI gets passed and the bottom 90% of earners realize that all they have to do to make themselves richer is vote to increase the GBI? At what point do we expect the GBI to stop increasing?
Briefly … de Toqueville had it wrong. If the poor were going to vote the treasury empty, they could have done it a long time ago. What might have taken some time, is for the rich to earn enough interest and power for the snowballing we’re seeing now.
The treasury has been empty for some time.
Abo Elementary School was an underground school built during the Cold War designed to double as a fallout shelter. I find the idea strangely appealing; so long as you are building a public school, might as well make it useful.
Related: “This place is not a place of honor.” How do we ensure that our nuclear waste remains undisturbed for 10,000 years? I would have thought security through obscurity, but this is just so much cooler. “We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”
I just got back from a conference where the keynote speaker referenced this exact nuclear waste project. Basically his point was that protecting far-future generations from nuclear waste hazards was a “wicked problem”–i.e. one with no good solution. Any message or construct we come up with now could be misinterpreted by people later.
It’s an interesting topic because I’m concerned with how the technology we’re designing now (not just AI, but trivial stuff that we don’t expect to have dramatic ramifications but could) will impact us and our society in the future. It’s a very tough puzzle.
I always took the view that we should assume that future generations aren’t morons.
Surround the site with normal garbage dumps(they’ll understand the idea of a garbage dump if they’re still remotely human and have 3-digit IQ’s), the further in and deeper you go the more obviously toxic/hazardous the waste with nasty industrial waste and toxic chemicals and gunk.
Place lots of Rosetta stones explaining clearly in 100+ languages the purpose of the site. Include primers on the Rosetta stones.
If you’ve just dug through hundreds of meters of increasingly toxic sludge you’re probably going to be a bit paranoid about the next layer, or dead, especially when it turns out to be boring looking barrels with low-level radioactive waste in them in barrels carved with most of the symbols from the earlier layers and then some.
People don’t need to be stupid for our warning efforts to fail.
For example, you suggest we surround the site with garbage, but societies 10,000 years in the future might value our fossilized garbage as an energy source.
Literacy could go away (even in advanced societies, due to, say, cyborg technology that allows people to transmit thoughts directly from brain to brain, or the adoption of a single universal language that causes the study of other languages to be a lost art), making Rosetta stones potentially useless.
heaps of Rosetta stones and miles of landfill seems like too much of an investment. how many lives per dollar can we reasonably expect to save heee?
I mean, worst case scenario a bunch of post-post-apocalypse people with no clue what the stuff is break in and play hacky sack with it and maybe a couple dozen of them get sick before they realize that this tomb really is cursed and leave off?
how many (tens of) millions is it worth sinking into preventing that?
Is that a worst case scenario? Wouldn’t it be worse if these clueless post-post-apocalypsians also had a bunch of powerful tools that allowed them to, say, grind up the mysterious warm metal they found into shavings and distribute it into the drinking water of their whole civilization?
if all the people who actually touch the stuff getting sick and dying doesn’t clue them in that that’s a bad idea I don’t think some spooky tablets will either.
If it’s noticeably warm and macroscopic in quantity, you’re going to be dying of radiation sickness within hours of drinking that first cup of magic-warm coffee. I don’t see a plausible path to sharing that clever plan with the rest of civilization, or really anything more than one modest social gathering.
The post-post-apocalypsians aren’t digging up the nuclear waste in a vacuum. They’re going in with their own beliefs about cause and effect in the universe. Maybe they feel that digging up things is a bad idea unless you say the big complicated magic words that only those of truest blood can utter properly. The first few who utter the words and open the lid to the nuclear waste get sick and die. The rest are convinced that those first few must not have been of truest blood, and so they send in the next batch of people to do the job right this time…
They could go through a lot of good people, perhaps even make it a competitive thing on a national scale, before deciding that maybe the nuclear waste is the source of the problem.
@NZ
If they’re that foolish then they’re going to get themselves killed chasing cheese ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyQBSMeIhM ) anyway so the radiation just slightly speeds things up.
Maybe their society will mandate suicide by radiation at age 70 thus leading to billions of deaths related to the nuclear waste but again, there’s only so much moral culpability you can take for the choices made by other intelligent humans who should have their eyes open.
Grave robbers were stealing from the pharaohs as fast as they were buried because never mind the ritual and physically real threat of doom and endangerment, there was money to be made there.
If people for whatever reason are going to dig up nuclear waste dumps, it will be because they think they can use whatever is there for profit. And money trumps everything.
One of the reasons ISIS is blowing up ancient monuments such as Palmyra is because they can then loot and sell antiquities. Western markets (whether museums or private collectors) may tut-tut about the disgraceful behaviour, but they’ll snap up “prime exhibit fell off the back of a lorry guv” as fast, and for as much money under the table, as any buyer of goods from a grave robber back in Pharaonic times. Look, people ground up and used actual mummies for everything from medicine to pigments even as late as the 19th century and in as allegedly modern a civilisation as Great Britain (“A London colourman informs me that one Egyptian mummy furnishes sufficient material to satisfy the demands of his customers for twenty years”), and if they didn’t even respect the corpses of the dead and weren’t put off from using them, what do you expect from our descendants two to five hundred years from now?
If people are willing to dig up industrial waste to use for something at great risk to themselves then I’m happy with simply making a significant effort to let them know what they’re dealing with. I’m sure at some point in future generations some number of people will die somehow digging into normal garbage dumps, if I don’t feel a great need to weep for those people I don’t feel any more need to weep for someone who does the same with nuclear waste.
I think this gets at a deeper point, which is that we often think about how far our loyalty should extend horizontally over human groups, species, etc. But there’s also the matter of how far it should extend forwards and backwards into time.
I feel a strong desire for my great grandkids (who will probably be born about 60 years in the future) to enjoy a nice life, and I even think of them theoretically sometimes as I’m making decisions or forming opinions right now. It’d be nice if my descendants 600 years in the future were doing well, but I can’t say I lose sleep thinking about it. 6,000 years in the future? It’s fun to think about but pointless to worry about. And so on.
I’m not totally discounting the value of future lives but beyond a certain point I have to trust other humans to not pass their time by rubbing their genitals on/in bear traps.
I don’t want to leave landmines for future children to step on but if future-miners and future chemists want to dig up the dangerous materials of the past the best I can do is make a good faith effort to let them know what they might be in for.
[Some Troll’s Legitimate Discussion Alt] above made a good point.
“how many lives per dollar can we reasonably expect to save”
If we spend 1 billion on extra safety steps it would have to save about a million lives because we could make that many lives longer and happier right now with the same money.
Yes, morally speaking I think that’s right: you make a good faith effort. A government the size of ours spending $2,000 on such an effort is not what I’d call “good faith” though that is probably more than enough for an individual of average income. It happens that our government spent millions on the effort, and I think that’s probably fine.
To me it seems like the obvious solution is to leave the burial site completely unmarked, then bury the waste so deep that only a civilization advanced enough to know about radioactivity will be able to retrieve it, or even detect that anything is there in the first place. If this future civilization is investigating deep underground bunkers of “those who came before us” without checking for all kinds of danger signs, then they’re bound to stumble onto some kind of dangerous stuff no matter what we do.
Any warning signs would only draw attention. Natural nuclear reactors seem like a pretty good proof of concept of leaving a nuclear waste burial site unmarked.
I can envision a plausible scenario where an advanced future society creates easy ways to access the deep nuclear waste sites (but are smart enough not to actually access them) but then something happens and society regresses dramatically, so that now they can still easily access the sites but aren’t smart enough to know not to.
I’m not seeing it. Future advanced civilization digs shafts to the waste sites, and doesn’t put up warning signs in their own language? Or immediate post-apocalyptic societies can’t read warning signs put up by the most recent advanced civilization?
Neither of those seem plausible. As I have noted, post-apocalyptic or otherwise “dramatically regressed” societies have a powerful motive for retaining the ability to read the records of prior advanced civilizations.
Imagine that somehow, most humans die except for the population of Brazil. Then, something causes people in the settled parts of Brazil to die too, leaving only the tribal people out in the sticks of the Amazon. Over time they venture out and find the ruins of a civilization they cannot comprehend. To them, bright colors and sharp black shapes could mean extravagance and poise, and so they end up specifically gravitating toward and collecting objects that carry these kinds of symbols. Of course, bright colors and sharp black shapes are exactly the characteristics of warning signs–including those for nuclear waste–in the most recent modern societies.
Even our most basic symbols carry huge assumptions.
@NZ You’re sort of treating the humans in this example like magpies. Yes there will be lots of silly people but whenever you have a large group of people together you have at least some who are level-headed and logical who are going to look at the world with more than the the thought “OOOOH! Pretty colors!”
These people will find the garbage dumps, the shops stocked with guns and ammo, the school chemistry labs and the people who do best are likely to be the ones who make an effort to understand things, who try to learn or the minority who already learned to read from some missionaries.
I mean if we’re going to worry about intermediate societies being that irresponsible we might as well just worry about them leaving their own easily accessible nuclear waste sites.
Does anyone in these conversations consider that in order to produce those nuclear wastes we had to mine uranium and that if we had left the uranium where it was the same contorted imaginary future scenarios being discussed could have our descendants digging up uranium ore and putting it in their water supply?
Or in other words, I think worrying about nuclear wastes ten thousand years from now, in a society whose nature we cannot know anything much about–not even whether our species will still be around–is nutty. If you want to help people that far into the future, I suggest designing an information store that would help very premodern people develop to our level of scientific knowledge, making lots of copies, and putting them in geologically safe places. It probably won’t do any good, but the odds are better than spending the same effort making sure that our nuclear wastes won’t be a possible hazard ten thousand years from now.
To be fair: fission fragments are a lot more dangerous than the uranium ore the fuel came from.
Personally though I’d bet on the worlds current landmines having a larger body count hundreds or thousands of years from now than the nuclear waste sites.
See, that part about “This is not a place of honor. No great deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.” doesn’t dissuade me, because anyone who has played D&D knows that is the kind of inscription you put on the tomb of an evil sorceror-king, and he’s probably a lich by now, so you HAVE to go in there and kill him before he starts liching everything up.
I think the choice of wording and word order is weird (why would they consider “something made by humans is here” to be more important than “something dangerous is here”?) but I honestly think the more interesting problem is how to build the information centers such that nobody will ever cannibalize them for resources. That’s the real tricky one.
I think they’re making much ado about nothing. If future civilizations are more advanced than us, they will be able to decipher simple warning signs and messages and understand the dangers of radioactivity. If they are more primitive than us, they won’t be able to dig that deep, making the point moot.
How seriously do we take warnings on burial chambers of ancient civilisations noting that the curses of the gods will totally strike you down if you disturb this resting place?
Hopefully future civilisations would have more respect for our understanding of reality, and would recognise that if we say “This thing is dangerous” we might actually be correct, but the fear is that a more advanced civilisation – or a similarly-advanced civilisation built on our post-apocalyptic graves – might interpret that warning as curses-of-the-gods and not as ‘no, trust us, we know what we’re doing, this stuff is quite poisonous’.
If a similarly advanced civilization knows about radiation, they’ll be like “oh, it’s radioactive”. If they don’t, well, here’s an opportunity to learn.
I think I agree with the part of the report that says “the best warning sign would be a few folks dying of radiation sickness”. Rather than spend the money on trying to keep a few folks from getting poisoned after the apocalypse, let’s spend it trying to keep civilization running so it’s not necessary. Still fun as a thought-experiment though.
If people dying horribly of a lingering illness was an effective method of dissuasion, then nobody would get venereal diseases – when syphilis began ravaging Western Europe, people could see sufferers with their noses literally rotted off their faces, they knew it was transmitted by sexual contact with the infected, and yet they still gambled “Sex tonight and the risk of a horrible death, or do without and be sure of living extra years? I’ll risk that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get the pox!”
So there will be those who, out of gambling on their luck, poverty, desperation, criminals forced by the state to dig into these cursed tombs etc. will still risk death even though they have the evidence of their eyes of people dying horribly.
Because hey, maybe they’ll be lucky! And maybe there’s something really valuable here, actually there must be incredible riches, why else would the ancients have used such extreme methods to keep people away?
There seems to be an implicit idea that we only get to leave a single sentence.
Don’t leave “This thing is dangerous”. Leave a thousand laser etched rosetta stones in every known language with language primers scattered around along with the wikipedia(ok not really wikipedia) pages on radiation, nuclear waste, radiation sickness and fission then bury it all in garbage to make it clear that it’s waste.
It takes a lot of expertise and training for archeologists today to dig up an ancient site and determine what’s garbage and what isn’t. How confident are you that there will be such expertise and training 10K years from now?
If they’re still what I’d consider human then I’m willing to trust in their ability to think.
If you have to dig deep for something then you’re talking about adults who can dig a mine. At some point you have to trust in other adults.
It would be very surprising for there to be no understanding of what waste is.
Humans have been able to dig deep holes for a long time. But even today, we have trouble figuring out what various archeological findings are. Our garbage looks very different from the garbage of people 1,000 years ago, let alone 10,000 years ago. What would a man from Biblical times think of a discarded plastic ziplock bag?
oh I’m sure he’d be deeply surprised by the first one he found but by the time he and his community have dug through a few hundred meters of it they’ll have come up with some quite reasonable guesses. Old cabbage can last for decades, possibly hundreds of years in oxygen the-free environments under landfills.
We don’t take warnings about divine curses seriously because we don’t believe any such curses exist (or at least not from the gods of previous civilizations). A civilization advanced enough to dig thousands of metres into the earth will believe in radiation.
Then again, as far as we know, a future civilization capable of digging thousands of meters deep may have an understanding of radiation that renders it a non-serious threat to them in turn.
How do we ensure that our nuclear waste remains undisturbed for 10,000 years?
Put up signs, or if you’re a traditionalist carve into the surrounding stone, “Nuclear Waste – Do Not Open Before 12,000 A.D. Unless You Know Exactly What You Are Doing, Or You Will Die”. In English.
There, done. This isn’t ancient Crete, where every scrap of text ever written would fit in one decent library and one volcanic eruption will leave ‘Linear A’ as a mystery for the ages. Scholars will be able to translate English in 10,000 years. If for no other reason than that most of the books that explain how to build machine guns are written in English and that will be extremely valuable knowledge for the rulers of any post-apocalyptic or otherwise degraded civilization.
If you really want to screw with our descendants, or share a joke with their scholars, do a Rosetta-stone type deal with English, Classical Latin, Archaic Sumerian, and Klingon.
And if you really really want to make sure nobody digs the stuff up, have submarines drop it into the abyssal depths in sealed barrels and destroy all records of where. Because if you label it or mark it on maps, people will dig it up. Techno-archaeologists, to see what they can deduce about our nuclear programs from the isotope distribution of our wastes. Thieves, because some of those isotopes will be valuable. And some of those books that tell how to build machine guns will also include chapters on atom bombs, which require a stuff called ‘plutonium’ that doesn’t exist in nature but could be isolated from spent reactor fuel…
Why are you so confident there will be scholars in 10K years? Scholars are probably low-priority in a post-apocalyptic society where being able to build machine guns is the driver of learning English.
Dumping spent reactor fuel in sealed barrels at the bottom of deep ocean trenches does obviate the “warn future societies” problem, but seems like it creates huge environmental risks.
The guy who builds machine guns by finding the instructions in old books in otherwise-dead languages is a scholar, no matter what you call him and what motivates his patron.
This film is quite an enjoyable but interesting exploration of the topic, leaning a little against the industry but in a sympathetic way, and exploring some ideas that are kind of cool regardless of your position.
Man.
If I’m a post-apocalyptic archaeologist 9000 years from now and I see a warning saying “This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
There is absolutely no chance I’m not digging.
That’s not the literal text they proposed. That’s a statement of goals. They wanted to write something that would make anyone who read it think “This is dangerous, we shouldn’t dig here.”
They note that you don’t even have to put that message in writing. For instance, the mere presence of bigass earth mounds indicates “Sending this message was important to us.”
What the message should amount to is telling people to use Chesterton’s fence. It’s dangerous, and if they don’t understand why it’s dangerous, they should keep away. If they understand why it’s dangerous, they may consider trying to go there.
It’s not just about the cost of offsetting the cost of global warming, but it’s also about the suffering of animals that lose their habitats due to climate change, which makes that calculation much more difficult.
If you offset your carbon, doesn’t that reduce the effects of the extra global warming on animal habitats to zero?
If you offset your carbon, doesn’t that reduce the effects of the extra global warming on animal habitats to zero?
I’m strongly inclined to say “no” because I think carbon offsets, or rather the purchasing of carbon credits, are a massive con job, at least as presently implemented:
Which sounds lovely but in practice means Country A is poor but still has native forests. Country B has massive pollutant-belching smokestacks. Country B can buy carbon offsets by paying Country A to plant more trees and/or not log its native forests for money instead.
Country B can continue to run its big smokestacks for its industrial economy and keep prices of goods cheaper than its competitors because abra-cadabra, it magically is offsetting the carbon it produces by the trees it is not growing, and Country A can make some money by planting new saplings which – when they come to maturity – will make things all better somehow. You can merrily continue to carbon produce today and get the benefits of carbon reduction tomorrow (if tomorrow ever comes).
I am too stupid to understand economics and extremely cynical about human nature so probably this is why I was suspicious about how enthusiastic industrial nations were about adopting carbon offsets, i.e. “if it really made a difference to their carbon footprints it would hurt, so they wouldn’t be happy – see the part about ‘negative impact on performance’ – but they’re happy, so it mustn’t really be making a difference”.
I know it’s a carrot-and-stick approach, but I think there’s too much carrot, not enough stick, and no real means of making countries accountable if they decide “Up yours, we’re not signing up to this crap”.
Or suppose Country A is getting in money by other countries purchasing carbon credits by paying for reforestation? So it’s in Country A’s economic interests to plant as many carbon credit acres of saplings as possible. If this means the habitat of the endangered Lesser Spotted Boll Weevil gets turned into forestry plantations and the Weevil gets wiped out, too bad for the Weevil because what money for the economy is it producing? Screw you, Boll Weevil, we need to feed our people and that means jobs planting new trees which will probably die because the marshy habitat isn’t suitable for them but who cares, the certificates have been issued, the projects have been signed off on, and the money has been transferred to our exchequer!
Oh, it’s even worse than that.
Yeah, I’d read about the Russians but I didn’t mention it because maybe Putin reads this blog and do I really want him nuking Scott because Russia’s good name has been impugned and as a manly man national leader Putin must act in a decisive fashion to protect Mother Russia’s honour? 🙂
“We didn’t expect the problem to be this bad”.
Seriously, global monitoring and policy advisory committees: give me a job. I will read proposals then roll my eyes, emit snorts of disbelief, and utter a range of phrases such as “You must think I came down in the last shower.”
Simply pay me enough to clear (after paying my legitimate taxes and PRSI etc. deductions) €300 a week and I will save you all a fortune on the dodgy schemes you are not now going to go ahead with.
I won’t claim this will save the planet, but it’s not going to fuck it up any worse than it already is, which is already a huge improvement over what you’ve done so far!
YOU NEED MORE CYNICS, BAH-HUMBUG, AND BELIEVERS IN ORIGINAL SIN IN GOVERANCE!
The difficulty is not in finding sufficient cynics in government. Those cynics are there (at least in the subset of government I’ve worked in). The problem is creating a system that incentivizes senior leaders to create subordinates who should listen to the cynics.
Couldn’t you get even better outcomes by not eating either AND purchasing carbon offsets (assuming they’re actually an effective means of carbon reduction).
In other words, even assuming that I will only purchase offsets in exchange for eating meat, I still don’t know whether I should be eating cows or chickens. It just changes my choices to carbon neutral and 1 suffering cow and carbon reduction with 40 suffering chickens. I still don’t know how to calculate the suffering of the species affected by that difference in carbon reduction.
A lot of the carbon from raising beef is actually from deforestation to make more farm land. Since trees are both a carbon sink, and pull co2 out of the air, that’s what creates a ton of the net emission change. On top of the climate change it causes, that you’d be offsetting, there’s still the raw loss of forest habitat to deal with if you value animal happiness / suffering.
What about if we hit ourselves with whips? Will that be enough to offset?
To offset something you have to do good, or prevent bad. Doing something bad to yourself would actually make things worse.
If some animals lose their habitats while others take their place, is that a bad thing? I suppose the transition might be painful. But then I don’t see why – seems to me it would be more like one species is more successful for a while, one species is less successful for a while, until equilibrium is reached with more of the first species, fewer of the second, and both maintaining their new population size. Unless you expect the effect of global warming to be to make all land less habitable for animals rather than just change how much land is good for which species?
I think the strongest argument to be made is on the effect not on individual animals, but on number of different species. If you consider species diversity a good thing, then global warming reducing it, which it seems it probably will, is a bad thing. But I don’t think valuing species diversity can be justified on utilitarian grounds, at least not on the behalf of the animals, considering that a species is not a being.
I think you could justify species diversity on utilitarian grounds on the part of humans – argue that having lots of different kinds of animals exist provides a benefit to people, that it makes them happy to know that there are penguins and tigers, even if they never see them.
Well the habitat loss often results in extinction, which itself causes suffering of the animals who are going extinct. That they might be replaced in a few million years doesn’t seem like enough to counteract the pain of extinction.
Does an animal that is dying and also its species is going extinct experience more suffering than an animal that is dying but its species isn’t going extinct?
I suppose I assumed that the replacement would be immediate – grey squirrels outcompeting red squirrels, for example – but of course it might well not be.
the replacement would be immediate
In the sense that nature abhors a vacuum, yes, something(s) will fill the niche left by the extinct species. The space is likely to be imperfectly filled, however, and there are ripple effects. (See: dodo birds and tambalacoque trees). Nutrients are in short supply in this sad old world of ours, and life will find a way. Many have also suggested that chaos/edges/disruption is the mechanism for new adaptive lifeforms and behaviors.
It is intuitive, however, that the disruption of extinction of one or more species would be more harmful to the overall life on the planet than the resulting new adaptations are beneficial. I do not know of anything in the literature which supports this.
Does an animal that is dying and also its species is going extinct experience more suffering than an animal that is dying but its species isn’t going extinct?
Animals don’t just “die” – they -like humans – contract illness, fail to find enough to eat, and are attacked by things which want to eat them. Things die ill, starving, and chewed up by other things. A declining species has more things dying than are healthy, growing, and reproducing. In the very last stages, many individuals would suffer from loss of reproduction opportunities and lack of same-species companionship. So the *net* misery of a declining species is more than that of a stable or expanding species.
How that balances out for multiple species (some expanding, some declining) over the long term, and if it matters to the dodo or Dusky Seaside Sparrow in question, I don’t know.
In response to the reproducibility crisis, the Anti-Democracy Activist suggests replacing social science with social engineering. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. He’s basically arguing that social change should be approached very slowly and conservatively, with extensive safety and stress testing, rather than pushing whatever the latest fad in academia is.
In practice we do this already. Obamacare is probably the biggest change of the decade, but if you plot health care policies in some abstract possibility-space, or even in a space bounded by the health care policies of all the different countries of the world, Obamacare was a tiny tiny barely visible step through that space. A better suggestion might be to implement things on smaller levels (eg single states or cities) and run controlled experiments before universalizing them. But sometimes that’s really hard.
@Scott Alexander:
“A better suggestion might be to implement things on smaller levels (eg single states or cities) and run controlled experiments before universalizing them.”
Note that this is exactly why Obamacare is constructed as it is. Massachuesetts implemented what was essentially the same plan. It worked. Obama proposed replicating it it nationwide.
Obamacare involved a lot of moving pieces besides what we had in the Massachusetts law.
@Andrew Clough:
I think you need some sort of citation to back that up.
I have seen many credible sources (here is one of them) describe them as essentially the same.
Now, can you just take the Romneycare bill and substitute “US” everywhere “Massachusetts” is used? No. But I don’t think that is the level the bar is at.
The effect of Obamacare is to roll Romneycare out to all 50 states, individually. Each state might do it slightly differently, and there is freedom in the law to allow that kind of tailoring or experimentation, but the system enacted, and its effects are essentially the same.
And they are certainly similar enough to believe the claims that Obamacare was modeled on the successfully implemented Romneycare, which is the system that Scott was proposing.
In fact, I wonder if Scott was trying to be subtle here and I ruined it for him.
They’re certainly related, but even the source you cited listed a number of differences. Basically all the cost control stuff in Obamacare, for instance, wasn’t there in Massachusetts. But of course as a Massachusetts resident part of the reason I voted for Obama rather than Hillary is that I liked Obama’s healthcare plan better than Hillary’s. It’s a shame it ended up being her plan that he embraced.
Romneycare vs. Obamacare –
So there are some differences. One or more of these differences has to be a thing which turned a supposedly good law (Romneycare) into a supposedly bad law (Obamacare). Sure there’s always going to a bunch of technical minutiae going on in any such law, but if it were any other context folks would all (rightly) ignore such details and worry about the actually impactful stuff.
Unfortunately, your typical rank-and-file Obamacare hater is not careful about separating the effects of the differences versus effects that were already present in Romneycare.
However, do not despair, thankfully there is someone on hand to provide clarity, someone who is firmly aware of the differences between Romneycare and Obamacare. HIs name is Mitt Romney.
Way back in 2009-2010 or so he provided the answer (by the 2012 campaign however the emerging political necessities had forced him to switch to a combination of vagueness and just plain abandoning his own law).
Romney’s original (and perfectly accurate) answer: Medicare cuts.
(there might have also been stuff about other cost-cutting measures, I can’t remember).
So, the original “Romneycare good, Obamacare bad” position basically reduces to “the problem with Obamacare is that it just plain doesn’t burn enough taxpayer dollars”.
(OK perhaps there are some technically legitimate differences between those two positions, but in the absurdly unlikely event that such differences actually played a role in your decision making process, you of course recognize how lonely your position is and find all the anti-Obamacare discourse every bit as disgusting as I do).
The Republican party rode a wave of outrage at Obama being excessively fiscally conservative all the way to a congressional majority in the 2010 election, and they are still today riding the momentum from that even though they have since shifted though approximately a dozen other mutually-contradictive consensuses about the reason why Obamacare is bad.
Whoops, misplaced.
Romneycare was 70 pages
Obamacare was 2,074 pages
Claiming they are the same does not pass the laugh test.
Furthermore you need more details when claiming it “worked.”
@Mary:
I will try to engage, but based on the way this comment is written, and past history, I don’t have high hopes.
“Romneycare was 70 pages
Obamacare was 2,074 pages”
Someone help me. This is a logical fallacy, and I assume it fits into some well known fallacy. It’s seems like an implied appeal to the stone. Just because something needs more pages to implement legislatively doesn’t mean that the two programs are not substantially the same.
I can describe hammering in a nail using one sentence or several paragraphs. That does not mean the two descriptions don’t describe the same action.
“Furthermore you need more details when claiming it “worked.””
Are you saying that Romneycare did not work? Or are you confused and believe that my post claimed that Obamacare worked?
Ockham’s Razor says that if one thing is THIRTY TIMES as long as another, the burden of proof is entirely on those who claim they are really the same. Yes, if you write thirty sentences about hammering in a nail, I think it would be substantially different than one (assuming the same length.)
“Are you saying that Romneycare did not work? ”
You asserted that it did. Burden of proof is on you.
@Mary:
“You asserted that it did. Burden of proof is on you.”
I don’t dispute this, but I did want to be sure I understood the actual objection.
I won’t offer a general assessment at this time, but merely point out that whether RomneyCare worked or not is not a typical point of contention. Romney certainly though that it worked.
Regardless, whether RomneyCare is/was actually working is not even the correct objection. Scott suggested a model of try something and see if it works, then increase the usage. Because RomneyCare was perceived to be working, it pattern matches.
Unless you are claiming that Democrats wanted to try a model that they perceived to have been tried and not to be working.
As to the bill length contention, and the nail example, consider:
“Hammer in the nail”
and
“Hammer in the nail, by holding it between the thumb and forefinger of your left hand and striking it with the head of the hammer held in your right hand. If your dominant hand is your left hand, substitute left for right in the previous sentence. Apply an initial blow to set the nail. Use enough force to set the nail, but not so much force as to risk missing the nail head or disturbing the angle of the nail. Attempt to strike so the surface of the head of the hammer is parallel to the surface of the head of the nail. After the initial blow, assess whether the setting process has driven the nail deeply enough to remove the applied thumb and forefinger. If not, repeat the motion until the nail has been driven at least half way to the point where the surface of the nail head will be flush with the wood. Once the setting process is complete, remove the thumb and forefinger and apply the hammer head to the nail head until the nail head is flush with the wood surface. An experienced carpenter should be able to complete this process with two blows. Those with less experience will require more blows.
If at any point in the hammering process the nail becomes unaligned with the intended direction of the connection, usually, but not always at a 90 degree angle to the wood surface, assess whether this can be rectified by tapping on the side of the nail using either the side or head of the hammer. Rectify the nail angle or remove the nail. (See Nail Removal)”
Do those describe different activities?
Romney has a conflict of interest. Also, a lot of people said it was NOT working. And there’s an obvious reason to roll it out even if it’s not working, since it put more power in the hands of the Leviathan.
Also, yes, those are different things. One is actual directions, the other is directions for idiots. Are you saying that the federal government consists of absolute idiots? It’s not like there could not be a lot of other things swept into the bill. Especially when we were TOLD it had to be passed to find out what was in it.
@Mary:
I did not ask if the instructions were different.
I asked if they described two different things, or whether they describe the same thing.
Those extra sentences may matter dearly. If you accidentally include a sentence about holding my thumb on top of the nail in certain states and forget to tell me to pull that thumb out, why, I might have quite a sore thumb unless the Supreme Court edits your instructions for you.
@A Beta Guy:
That would just mean the instructions were in error. A mistake in instructions is quite different than attempting to describe a reality that is different. I believe the phrase “the map is not the territory” is a standard invocation at this point.
And note that this is not a problem with the specific example I gave.
HBC:
One obvious difference is that this tells me to put both the head of the hammer and the nail into my left hand:
“Hammer in the nail, by holding it between the thumb and forefinger of your left hand and striking it with the head of the hammer held in your right hand. If your dominant hand is your left hand, substitute left for right in the previous sentence.”
That’s very different from what I would have done if you hadn’t spelled it out.
@lupis42:
Either I don’t understand what you are saying, or you are misreading what I wrote.
Nail in left hand
Hammer in right hand
(unless left-handed, in which case switch)
And again, any mistake in the instructions does not mean a difference in activity.
Slight differences in execution due to more explicit instruction (for instance, making sure the nail stays straight as you nail it) are frequently the reason for more explicit instructions, so that actual intention will be carried out, rather than assumed to be done correctly.
Obviously the nail and hammer example is simplified and pedantic. The purpose is to establish the principle that more explicit instructions or descriptions do not equal different activities.
@Mary:
You NEED TO STOP abusing Okham’s Razor for concrete arguments where it just makes you sound clever but where applying it doesn’t make any sense at all.
@HeelBearCub – I’m not disputing that you intend to describe the same activity, but it doesn’t create the same impression in my mind.
In particular, what I noticed is: you specified hold the nail in the left hand, then specified hold the hammer in the right hand unless left handed, in which case use the left instead. That means that, if left handed, I need to hold the hammer in my left hand, and I still need to hold the nail in my left hand.
You also stated the instructions in a way that implied that the head of the hammer should be held in the hand.
It also precludes my use of a two-handed sledgehammer, robotic hammer, and nailgun, requires that I hold the nail in my left hand, rather than with pliers or some other holding device, and generally suggests that you’re much more concerned with the details of the process than you are with the result.
The point I’m trying to get at here is that the extra instructions have an effect – and that effect can dramatically change with the degree of specificity even if the nominal goal is held fixed.
@lupis42:
On left vs. right, the implied “and vice-versa” isn’t clearly specified. So, a literal reading can misinterpret what I was saying.
Which sort of goes to my point, doesn’t it?
If you think those who are reading the instructions to hammer in the nail might attempt to do so with a sledgehammer, you would be well advised to more clearly specify what type of hammer you actually intend.
Nonetheless, the mere fact that one description is longer than another, even much longer, is in no way a proof that the two things described are different things.
Remember, Mary’s original point was that the mere page count of the legislation indicated that the system’s implemented were different.
@HeelBearCub
Which sort of goes to my point, doesn’t it?
It depends on whether you mean that activities you intend are the same, or the activities I will perform are the same.
If you think those who are reading the instructions to hammer in the nail might attempt to do so with a sledgehammer, you would be well advised to more clearly specify what type of hammer you actually intend.
That depends on whether you trust their judgement – if my carpenter was nailing something up in my house and decided to use a sledgehammer. More on this in a moment.
Nonetheless, the mere fact that one description is longer than another, even much longer, is in no way a proof that the two things described are different things.
I agree that the same intent can lead to two very different descriptions. I submit that the two descriptions will yield substantially different effects, because the more convoluted description is much more likely to be interpreted literally (why spell it out otherwise) and much more likely to hide impactful details.
Remember, Mary’s original point was that the mere page count of the legislation indicated that the system’s implemented were different.
I’d put a fairly high probability (>85%) that the implementations will turn out differently as a consequence of all that extra text, even if we assume that the intent was the same.
I also think that assuming the intent was the same is a stretch. From the perspective of people who don’t trust the drafters, the existence of all that extra specificity makes it much more plausible that important things are buried in there as if they were irrelevant details.
From the perspective of the drafters, a lot of that extra specificity is there because they don’t trust the intent or judgement of the implementing red states.
@lupis42:
Suppose I instruct someone to “hammer in the nail” and they take a sledgehammer, swing full force and crack the lumber in half as well as drive in the nail.
Your contention appears to be that they have followed my instructions.
The other way to read your contention is that it is impossible to specify what I mean by “hammer in the nail”. Instructions are like quantum particles, wherein only certain properties can be known at once.
Regardless of your wanting to refuse to concede that hammering in a nail can be specified in more detail without changing the activity in significant ways, I will continue to contend that it is possible.
Finally, the difference in expected/likely behavior when presented with the two instruction sets is essentially trivial. The contention that length of legislation is somehow proof that Obamacare is not the implementation of a RomneyCare system nationwide is without merit.
“You NEED TO STOP abusing Okham’s Razor for concrete arguments where it just makes you sound clever but where applying it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
What a stunning non-sequitor. Are you seriously trying to claim that when “this is much larger than that”, the explanation that does not multiply entities beyond necessity is NOT “this contains stuff that doesn’t”?
“Remember, Mary’s original point was that the mere page count of the legislation indicated that the system’s implemented were different.”
Mary’s original point was that the vast difference in page count makes it stunningly implausible that they were the same.
I confess, I did assume that you would realize you would need to back it up with substantive evidence in order to claim it’s still true.
“Regardless of your wanting to refuse to concede that hammering in a nail can be specified in more detail without changing the activity in significant ways, I will continue to contend that it is possible.”
But the original assertion was that two other description with equal difference in length WERE the same. Not were possibly the same.
If you asserted that it was possible that Obamacare and Romneycare were the same, that would be a different matter.
Are the same? That requires stronger evidence that an example that was obviously contrived for the situation.
@HeelBearCub:
Suppose I instruct someone to “hammer in the nail” and they take a sledgehammer, swing full force and crack the lumber in half as well as drive in the nail.
Your contention appears to be that they have followed my instructions.
Yes – they didn’t do what you wanted, but they did what you said. Someone who used a nailgun would have done what you wanted, but not what you said.
What you wanted is never exactly what you said. What you said didn’t perfectly describe what was done. The map is not the territory.
The other way to read your contention is that it is impossible to specify what I mean by “hammer in the nail”. Instructions are like quantum particles, wherein only certain properties can be known at once.
Regardless of your wanting to refuse to concede that hammering in a nail can be specified in more detail without changing the activity in significant ways, I will continue to contend that it is possible.
It is impossible to specify what you mean in language. No matter how detailed you try to make the map, it will not become the territory. Someone reading your instructions will fill in the gaps with assumptions that may not match yours, and interpret your words in ways that don’t perfectly reflect your intentions.
The contention that length of legislation is somehow proof that Obamacare is not the implementation of a RomneyCare system nationwide is without merit.
The length of the legislation reduces the liklihood that the two systems are equivalent substantially. Or do you think that a tax code with 2074 pages is substantially identical to one with 70 pages, because they both implement “a progressive tax system with a top MTR of 35%”?
There are additional details specified in one that are not specified in the other. They have an effect, that may or may not be what the people who drafted them intended.
If you’re claiming that the drafters intended to create “RomneyCare, but nationwide”, that’s certainly possible. But (as someone who lived in MA through the whole thing), they didn’t do that. There are differences, and whether or not they are consequential requires evidence. Claiming that they don’t exist is not evidence.
@Mary:
I did offer evidence that they are the same (look up thread, under my OP). You have never offered any evidence that the page count means that they are not substantively the same. You make no assertions for how they are different. You simply assert “page count different, therefore the systems are different”.
@lupis42:
“It is impossible to specify what you mean in language.”
I suspected as much. Your contention is that even if a second state were to implement the EXACT SAME language, that one could not even then say that they were implementing the same system.
This is very different than the “map is not the territory” claim you want to make.
I believe the logical conclusion on my part should be that ANY conversation with you is pointless.
Nah, you produced people who said it was. People with a conflict of interest. For instance,
“Unless you are claiming that Democrats wanted to try a model that they perceived to have been tried and not to be working.”
Why not? It would put more power in their hands regardless of how it worked. Conflict of interest.
@Mary:
If your view of the almost 100 year long quest that liberals have been on for universal healthcare in America is that they do this only to put more power in the hand of that state and do not care whether the plan works, I will simply say that you are extremely uncharitable to your ideological opponents. Your position is akin to me taking the position that you are opposed to universal healthcare because you like it when poor people die.
And I offered a link to Politifact. I’m not sue whether you did not see this, or are accusing them of being a liberal mouthpiece.
Ok I will consider your original statement:
“Ockham’s Razor says that if one thing is THIRTY TIMES as long as another, the burden of proof is entirely on those who claim they are really the same.”
1. If you put it like this, if something is longer than something else, then it is not the the exact same thing, I agree. This does not require Ockham’s Razor at all.
2. Obviously, it wasn’t implied that the text in both legislations was exactly the same, but that they largely agree in content. So let us look at this claim.
3. Now when the one is much much longer than the other one, you might consider this some evidence against them containing the same content.
4. Using Ockhams Razor, the easiest explanation why one is longer than the other is “it uses more words”. Wow, that helped a lot for determining its content.
5. Instead, your actual reasoning for deciding they are likely different is based on your experiences and evaluations of different things you read or heard.
6. So we are in a situation where the quality of the argument or a reliable source is important. If you don’t believe something someone writes on a comment without giving a reference, that is ok, but again it depends on your very complex subconscious assessment of that persons credibility.
7. Since you didn’t identify all relevant observables and specified the underlying theories you are assessing, Ockham’s razor is not applicable, also this is never the case in any argument that is not about science or metaphysics or something of this sort.
And off the coast of Texas here we see “Beta Island” where new laws and policies are beta tested.
our system doesn’t experiment, it ratchets. “experiment” implies some ability to stop doing things that don’t work and start doing others that do, we don’t do that. there’s a lot of gum in the gears, but they only turn one way.
Even positing that Romneycare “worked”, it still seems a big step to me.
If I build one bridge and it seems to work, do I instantly decree that all bridges must be built in exactly the same way?
If Romneycare was such a win, might not one or two other states have adopted it of their own free will? If it seemed to work well in ten different states, then think about going nationwide — or better still, figure that the other forty will come to see the truth in their own good time.
The problem with taking the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” model is that it’s not that simple. Some cultures work better for different people. How should we measure the goodness of one civilization versus another? This isn’t just a problem with bad outcomes, there’s also a problem with different values. Good engineering isn’t going to fix that.
Social (and technological) change is coming from a globally integrated system and our standard of living would be (much?) lower if it wasn’t integrated, so maybe it’s kind of hard to separate out components individually to stress test them?
http://studiahumana.com/pliki/wydania/In%20Praise%20of%20Passivity.pdf
Linking this is normally St. Rev’s job, but I don’t know the last time he was here.
I’m not advocating this, but as technology is a really powerful driver of social change, arguably more powerful than many political groups, wouldn’t this require a relatively luddite position to technology, economics and so forth? It always seems like this caution is applied very selectively, especially when capitalism as much as liberalism races ahead with basically uncontrolled cultural experimentation.
I personally lean towards agreeing with Scott – try/encourage change on smaller scales, study the **** out of the results of the experiments, and then be decisive but also extremely discerning, strategic and surgical about what you import to the mainstream.
All else equal, technology is about offering people new stuff that we think they might want (though sometimes stuff that can be used to kill people and break things) and policy is about restricting their options (though sometimes in the service of reallocating resources where we think they’ll do more good). Makes sense to me that we might want to be more conservative about the latter than the former.
I don’t strongly agree or disagree, but I still think social conservativism and pro-technology are totally at odds. My own sense is a judge-each-case-by-merit might be superior, rather than being for or against either technology or social change as some kind of blanket rule.
There is a human society that treats technology that way—the Amish. Each Amish congregation has a set of rules, their Ordnung. Those rules control, among other things, what technologies the members of that congregation are permitted to use. As best I can tell, the purpose is to avoid those technologies that would subvert their social system.
For example … . It’s a society based on close social interaction in a relatively small group living close together. Routine use of telephones or automobiles would subvert that system by encouraging a wider network of relationships. Old Order Amish congregations generally forbid their members to own and drive automobiles, although they are permitted to ride in automobiles driven by non-Amish. They generally forbid a telephone in the house, although they may permit a phone in a place of business or one shared by several households and not located in any of their homes.
The Amish are a pretty successful society–they seem to lose only ten to twenty percent of each generation by exit.
Good example, thanks. Sounds like a rational pursuit of exclusively socially conservative goals, even if I’d probably not choose a life like that myself.
And rescinding what doesn’t work?
And here I thought the title was a Unix pun. I was thinking “popen is for starting processes, not threads, sheesh”.
Yeah, race conditions are a real concern with a thread popen().
To test that, you could write a threading test called T_test, something like this:
import threading
import subprocess
import sys
class T_test(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self):
self.stdout = None
self.stderr = None
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
def run(self):
p = subprocess.Popen(‘echo Doge’.split(),
shell=False,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
self.stdout, self.stderr = p.communicate()
while True:
threads = []
for i in xrange(10):
t = T_test()
threads.append(t)
t.start()
for i in xrange(10):
threads[i].join()
if threads[i].stdout == ‘Doge\n’:
print “OK”
else:
print “Failed!”
sys.exit(1)
It may take a while to produce an error, so while cuddling with a person of the appropriate gender, one tails T_test and waits for vindication.
Ridiculous. Great, but ridiculous.
Same.
heh, yeah me too.
Why are there so many utilitarians in the “rationalist community”? The way I see it, utilitarianism goes against pretty much everything rationalists believe in. I doubt this is a case of mass hypocrisy, so it’s probably an issue of unexamined assumptions and not taking the practical problems seriously enough. I have six main avenues of attack, three of them on the meta-ethical level and three against practical implementation issues, which will show that a) you need to give up significant rationalist values to be a utilitarian and b) even if you do, it’s still so messy as to be useless.
1. Moral Realism: Even if the pre-conditions for practical utilitarianism are fulfilled, you still can’t get to normative propositions without moral realism.[1] Moral realism isn’t a free lunch: unless you have a really, really, really good explanation for why moral facts are impenetrable to the scientific method (why haven’t physicists detected any moral facts yet? Where is the moral fact-sensing organ?), you are forced to fall back to dualism!
2. Origin: Let’s say moral facts exist, where did they come from? Did they pop out along with everything else at the big bang? Were they generated by some sort of natural process? If so, what was the mechanism, and is that process still going on? Could we co-opt it to create our own? How did you acquire knowledge about this? Neither explanation seems even remotely plausible… The only alternative is that some supernatural intelligent entity created them.
3. Parthood: Let’s say moral facts exist, are they composed of parts? They seem far too complex to be simples; e.g. they need to contain references to the world to be useful. If yes, what sort of mereological system do you believe in? I don’t see how a mereological theory can support both moral facts made up of parts, and reductionism.[2]
So regardless of the practical considerations, to get to utilitarianism you have sacrificed physicalism, reductionism, naturalism, empiricism, monism! I believe these are core values of the “rationalist community”. What gives?
On to the practical issues:
4. Measurement: Let’s say that you accept moral realism, there’s still the problem of measurement. No, your “educated guesses” (or even worse, intuitions) are obviously not good enough, as you can easily observe in practice: intelligent utilitarians not only disagree with each other, but some factions tell us that we must do the exact opposite of what other factions say. I don’t see any good way of choosing between them. Many of the common assumptions behind such educated guesses (especially those neo-Christian in nature, e.g. equal capacities/”everybody to count for one”/equal weighting of preferences) strike me as obviously wrong unless you assume some sort of god-given soul. This problem is even more pronounced with preference utilitarianism, where the weighing of (degrees of) preferences and grasping to generate meaningful interpersonal comparisons reaches complete absurdity.[3]
The fact that you can’t measure it also creates problems with utilitarianism’s consequentialist basis. You never actually have access to the consequences, you just have a new set of guesses. The standard reply is that it’s irrelevant and you should do what you believe is going to maximize utility, but what reason do you have to believe that you are a good judge of that? You never compared your forecast to actual values of utility, you can’t know. How would you go about convincing a Nazi utilitarian that he’s wrong?[4] Both of you have nothing but your intuitions to rely on…
5. The Future: Let’s say you manage to measure it, how are you going to account for future utility? Is a util a year from now worth as much as a util right now? Why? If not, what is the discount rate, and how did you calculate it? What about uncertainty in your forecasts? Is the utility of utility linear, i.e. should we prefer a 50% chance of +100 utility, or 100% chance of +49 utility? You need good answers to these questions and I have no idea where you’re going to get them…
6. Aggregation: Finally, there is no way to meaningfully aggregate utility.
First, there’s the apples and oranges issue: there are no discrete “pleasure” and “pain” counters in the human mind; the utilitarian folds in an extremely wide range of states into each side. Mill went on about combining the “quality” and “quantity” of a “pleasure” to arrive at utility, but how could you possibly do this in practice? How many orgasms is solving a puzzle worth? And surely this calculus is different for different people, and you don’t have access to it.
Even if we were talking purely about pleasure and pain, these are personal, subjective experiences; to speak of a “sum” or “mean” or “median” is literally meaningless. If there are two people in a room looking at a ball, it is obvious that there is no way to sum their experiences: there is no sense in which the abstract grouping of these people is watching a ball in aggregate. This is because subjective experiences are simply not additive, not fungible. Utility behaves in exactly the same way. Personal experience is just that, and aggregates experience nothing. Just because you quantify it doesn’t mean you can treat it as any other number. There is no sum of utility to maximize. You might object that mental states are nothing but their neural correlates and we can add those up, but that is not a real way out: different types of pleasure have different neural correlates, not to mention the enormous difference between pleasure and pain.[5] The only reason we can talk of these things as a coherent group in the first place is because we abstracted away from the neural correlates! The only way I can see to avoid the aggregation issue is qualia realism with a lot of arbitrary assumptions about the comparability and fungibility of said qualia, which is a very shaky position and again requires you to forgo monism, physicalism, etc.
George Bernard Shaw delivered this coup de grâce in 1937 and to my knowledge there hasn’t even been an attempt at a serious reply. In his own words, from “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism”:
“What you yourself can suffer is the utmost that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death you experience all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten thousand other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten thousand times as hungry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand times. Therefore do not be oppressed by the ‘frightful sum of human sufferings’: there is no sum […] Poverty and pain are not cumulative: you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is.”
And for the cherry on top, a bit of Nietzsche. BGE 225: “Whether it be hedonism or pessimism or utilitarianism or eudaemonism: all these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to pleasure and pain, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are foreground modes of thought and naïveties which anyone conscious of creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down on with derision, though not without pity. […] You want if possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ – to abolish suffering; and we? – it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been! Wellbeing as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end! A state which soon renders man ludicrous and contemptible – which makes it desirable that he should perish! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man, creature and creator are united: in man there is matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but in man there is also creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine spectator and the seventh day – do you understand this antithesis? And that your pity is for the ‘creature in man’, for that which has to be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, refined – that which has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity – do you not grasp whom our opposite pity is for when it defends itself against your pity as the worst of all pampering and weakening? – Pity against pity, then! – But, to repeat, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and pity; and every philosophy that treats only of them is a piece of naïvety.”
And on the interplay between evolution and utilitarianism, GS 4: “Nowadays there is a profoundly erroneous moral doctrine that is celebrated especially in England: this holds that judgments of “good” and “evil” sum up experiences of what is “expedient” and “inexpedient.” One holds that what is called good preserves the species, while what is called evil harms the species. In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different.”[6]
——-
[1]: Technically you can, e.g. with error theory, but not in a manner useful to the utilitarian.
[2]: That is: the moral realist needs either moral facts to be indivisible, or moral facts to be more than the sum of their parts. The former isn’t workable, while the latter requires you to sacrifice reductionism (i.e. magic woo woo happens at some scale). You can’t argue that moral facts are an emergent phenomenon, because then what exists is their parts and not the moral facts themselves.
[3]: Another enormous problem for the preference utilitarian (in addition to stuff like misinformed preferences, etc.) is the treatment of unfulfilled preferences. Does utility decrease when a preference goes is frustrated? If yes, everyone’s always stuck at infinite negative utility. If no, even a single fulfilled preference in an entire life has a positive effect on total utility, making vegetarianism (not to mention abortion) super immoral.
[4]: I actually didn’t think I’d be able to find any Nazi utilitarians, but here you go: http://www.nazism.net/about/nazi_ideology/ “Strength, passion, lack of hypocrisy, utilitarianism, traditional family values, and devotion to community were valued by the Nazis”
[5]: The NCC approach does allow for solid intraspecies interpersonal comparisons though, which is a fairly big deal.
[6]: See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/ -> http://www.xenosystems.net/war-in-heaven-ii/
Regarding point one, we don’t know that the world around us is real or a simulation but the scientific method is still useful regardless. With morality, we can say that we have no idea whether morality is objectively true or not but if we all start from premises that we agree with than we can still come up with something useful.
What premises did you have in mind, exactly?
First off, I’m not a moral realist, I was just playing devils advocate. With that in mind, what about something like “pain is bad” and “happiness is good”. Now obviously not everyone agrees that we should do everything in our power to promote wireheading and/or committing genocide to eliminate pain but people usually agree with the general idea.
If you follow that line of thinking, you end up at some flavor of contractualism, rather than utilitarianism…. If the fundamental impulse is “let’s find some norms we can agree on”, it’s easier to get agreement around narrow injunctions, whereas utilitarianism is a totalizing system that doesn’t leave much room for compromise if you take it seriously.
How do you decide which norms to agree on, except by examining the consequences they lead to?
The first three problems you raise are based on a conflation of ethics and metaethics. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory, moral realism and nonrealism are metaethical theories. Many rationalists think the problems with moral realism can be solved in some way, but also many (perhaps more) are metaethically nonrealists, and still utilitarians at the object level. That is, they say something like “I think everyone should act for the greatest good or the greatest number [or whatever formulation of utilitarianism they prefer]; this doesn’t reflect a fact about hte universe, it is just what I feel, but I do feel this way and am willing to act on this and urge others to do as well”.
>many (perhaps more) are metaethically nonrealists, and still utilitarians at the object level
Sure, but a) prominent utilitarians (e.g. Singer) are realists and b) that’s really silly. If you’re going to consciously pick some arbitrary system to follow, knowing that it’s nonsense, why in the name of the lord would anyone pick utilitarianism? It’s not just broken when it comes to practical application, it’s also boring. If I were to pick a moral system for shits & giggles I’d probably go for Catholicism, they literally get to drink the blood of God every Sunday!
If the ice cream I like best is chocolate, then I cannot voluntarily choose to prefer another flavor, even if I think it would be more amusing (or healthier or whatever). “The utility function is not up for grabs”. In the same way, if what I would prefer the most is for everyone’s happiness to be the greatest possible, then I cannot voluntarily choose to prefer everyone to be unhappy and Catholic.
I believe you can taste the difference between chocolate and vanilla, and that you have an instinctive pre-rational preference for one over the other (though I’m guessing your flavor preference is more malleable than you might think, this is definitely a real phenomenon: https://xkcd.com/185/)
I’m more skeptical that you can taste the difference between a world where one person you’ve never met is happy vs a world where that person is sad. Unless you have the ability to sense and empathize with millions of people simultaneously?
they literally get to drink the blood of God every Sunday!
Only if you attend a church where receiving under both species is the norm. Otherwise you will only get the Host, so sorry, you’ll have to stick to the ritual cannibalism instead of vampirism 🙂
re: b.) Speaking for myself, I think we’re really talking about something that is basically a political position, and personally I prefer (for a vast variety of reasons that largely boil down to “because that’s how my mama raised me”) to caucus with the utilitarians rather that the deontologists.
You can always break the chains and side with neither! Join the non-cognitivists, we have cookies.
Oh, I’m definitely a non-cognitivist. It’s a source of constant surprise to me that anyone isn’t. I’m just one that, for the most part, supports the utilitarian party.
Ethics and metaethics are inseparable in the sense that if no moral statements are true, normative ethics is grounded on a falsehood. Attempts to combine non-realist metaethics with normative ethics like the one you suggest fail to be interpersonally binding. If “everyone should act for the greatest good of the greatest number” is “just what I feel”, then that doesn’t give others sufficient reason to act for the greatest good for the greatest number if they feel differently, and it’s also internally inconsistent, because if you admit that it’s just what you feel, then you don’t actually believe that it’s what people should do, only that it’s what you want them to do, and then it’s no different from statements like “I want everyone to give me ice cream”.
Sure. But I like being happy; that’s a terminal value and I don’t see how that could not be real, because I can tell it is real. It looks to me like the best method for ensuring that I’m happy is to endorse utilitarianism.
If you look at what utilitarianism requires you to do (donate as much to charity as you can, abstain from using animal products, save strangers rather than loved ones when there are more strangers, etc), then this is highly dubious. You’d be better off embracing egoism.
Wanting to be happy leads to wireheading. Also to the blissful ignorance problem.
Ethics is a social construct, but so is a tank formation.
I agree with you that ethics is a social construct, but if you take that position, I don’t think you end up worrying whether it’s better to eat cows or chickens, because you know there’s not a “right” answer… it’s more of a question of what everyone else around you can mutually agree to and find palatable (no pun intended). So I think utilitarianism as a fuzzy “let’s value other people we haven’t met, and try to make the world a better place!” is a reasonable thing to caucus around (I’m stealing that turn of phrase from your upstream comment, it’s great), but as soon as the math starts getting complicated and the conclusions start getting unintuitive, I think most of its value starts draining away.
That was exceptionally long for a comment. I’ll take it in parts unless, by the time I post, I like others’ comments better. 🙂
1. Moral Realism
Utilitarianism: a theory in normative ethics that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility (whatever that is).
Moral realism: the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world.
So a utilitarian moral realist would (probably) define utility as referring to objective features of the world, and also hold that these features exist.
A utilitarian moral non-realist might (A) define utility the same way, and hold that the objective features don’t exist, or (B) define utility in some other way than with propositions referring to objective features of the world, such as identifying utility with positive emotional reactions, or defining utility based on relationships or abstractions that aren’t objectively features of the world, or relativizing utility to whatever social process of inculcating values in the young happens to get used in a society, or positing that utility exists in some dualist way, or any of the bajillions of other subtle distinctions that philosophers love.
In short, utilitarianism and moral realism are orthogonal concepts philosophically, so you can combine them any which way, even if some combinations are more common statistically.
>So a utilitarian moral realist would (probably) define utility as referring to objective features of the world, and also hold that these features exist.
It doesn’t end there. The utilitarian moral realist says that the command to maximize utility is an objective feature of the world (that is the moral fact — not the utility). The simple existence of utility isn’t enough, you still need to get “you should maximize the sum” from somewhere.
> The utilitarian moral realist says that the command to maximize utility is an objective feature of the world
Some utilitarian moral realists might say that (although I’ve never encountered such a claim), but nothing requires them all to say that. More common is the position that “more utility is better”.
That’s not enough to get you all the way to utilitarianism, because if it’s only this, then more utility can potentially be overridden by other considerations, which utilitarianism wouldn’t allow. But even “more utility is better” can be subjected to the same critique – is more utility being better an objective feature of the world?
blacktrance,
> That’s not enough to get you all the way to utilitarianism
Correct. It was only a common position among utilitarians, not a definition of utilitarianism.
> utility can potentially be overridden by other considerations
One could adopt a hybrid theory with both utility and other considerations. It might be fun to think about.
> subjected to the same critique – is more utility being better an objective feature of the world?
It earns the same reply: both the Yes and No positions are compatible with utilitarianism.
>It earns the same reply: both the Yes and No positions are compatible with utilitarianism.
How is “no” compatible with utilitarianism? If “no”, then the sentence “more utility is better” is not a proposition. At worst it’s meaningless, at best it’s an expression of a subjective sentiment — that is something completely different from the realist (i.e. the standard utilitarian) position.
But how to calculate the utility? IMO you cannot without perfect knowledge of the world and the future. The consequences of your actions go indefinetely into the future, meaning that you have to make subjective decisions which consequences to take into the account.
You can’t calculate utility with zero error without perfect knowledge of the world and the future, but then, we can’t calculate anything else with zero error either.
Making measurements of utility that are within the boundaries of “meaningful,” as opposed to the stricter boundaries of “highly reliable,” is still quite difficult, but perhaps not too difficult to be worth doing, particularly in this context
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/
Rationalists like utilitarianism because it promises that you can solve ethical problems with math. Math is what science uses, and science is great, so it must be good for everything else, too. (I’m speaking in jest, but truthfully.)
They’re moral realists because to a first approximation, everybody believes morals are real. Yes, it is inconsistent for atheists to hold onto moral realism, but humans know morals are real at about the same level they know that 1+1 must eternally equal 2. It is very hard for people to truly accept anything else.
Can confirm. I find utilitarianism appealing because of the maths. Any moral system without math comes across to me as “do it because I said so”, which feels either a) patronizing or b) sketchy. Although lately I’ve begun to think of Virtue Ethics in terms of economics, and therefore find it increasingly appealing.
If you’re interested in escaping from people who want to tell you what to do because they said so, consider nihilism / existentialism. It’s hard to object to “you are totally free! Do whatever you want!” Although perhaps a little stressful, since you can’t defer responsibility for your actions via intellectual justifications.
I’ve been down the road of Nietzsche/Sartre before. I was into it for a while. But in terms of insights, it seemed like a dead end. And also a little frightening.
When I think of Existentialism, I think of Jim Carrey in Yes Man. “Do you want me to throw the brick through that window?” “YES.”
It’s trivial that the laws of physics permit people to do what they want. But even if philosophers eventually decide that objective morality isn’t a thing after all, there’s still the question of “why do people (excluding psychopaths) feel like morality is a thing?” Similar to how even if one goes atheist, there’s still the question of “why do people feel like theism is a thing?”
(My paragraphs are logically unrelated. They compose sort of an impressionist attitude towards Existentialism.)
Yeah, I get that. Existentialism as a life philosophy by itself isn’t very useful, and does tend to lead to crazy Jim Carrey.
I do think it makes a great starting point, though. When you start from the position that none of this moral stuff is actually real and there are no right answers, you get to discard a lot of really pointless questions (see cow vs chicken above), and get out of interminable debates, and skip to the productive questions:
-What do I actually care about re: the people around me’s behavior? How do they need to behave for me to trust them / respect them?
-How do I need to behave so that I can trust / respect myself?
-What value system would I want my government to have?
…etc. None of which have one right answer the way math does, but all of which have better and worse answers the way engineering does.
I think we hold similar (if not identical) opinions. Preachin’ to the choir, basically. The difference amounts to little more than a matter of framing. Cf “Newtonian physics is a great starting point!” vs “Newtonian Physics… didn’t we move past that decades ago?”
Then you are just fooling yourself because any morality is in fact based on “because I say so”. Morality is not and cannot be objective. That’s why I once said that utilitarianism is just for people like to delude themselves.
“fooling”? “delude”? Sounds like someone has an axe to grind. In any case, this comment represents just the type of intellectual dead-end that I complained of in my comment towards Existentialism. “Morality isn’t objective!” Okay… and then what? Do you feel like you’ve learned something about the world? “Of course, we’ve learned that morality isn’t objective.”
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: We did it Reddit! We’ve solved morality! It isn’t objective after all!
szopeno, do you know what else is based on “because I say so”? Fiat money. Oops, looks like we just proved economics is subjective.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Supply & Demand has been Debunked. Comparative Advantage is a Sham. Banks are a Ponzi Scheme and the wages you earn mean nothing.
Wait, why is it inconsistent for atheists to hold onto moral realism?
Sure, they can’t hold onto any version of moral realism that posits that morality derives from a god somehow (either divine command style, or ‘the god just is the embodyment of morality).
But if you broaden your scope to include the claim ‘there are things to be known about what behaviours and policies will tend to increase the wellbeing of sentient entities, and / or reduce their suffering’ … then that’s perfectly compatible with atheism. Sure, it’s presupposing consequentialism, but I don’t understand how any system of ethics worth its salt could fail to have a consequentialist bedrock, even if it requires a deontologist or virtue-ethicist structure built on top of it.
That’s not even presupposing consequentialism, it’s presupposing utilitarianism. It’s perfectly possible for a consequentialist to think the moral course of action is one that decreases wellbeing.
Moral realism is incompatible with atheism because the moral realist needs to explain where moral facts come from, and any answer other than “God” is very silly. Go ahead, try to fill in the sentence: “Invisible, undetectable moral facts (that somehow interact with the brain anyway) exist because ___________ and they came into being by _____________”.
any answer other than God is very silly, but any answer that is God is also very silly, so I’m not sure that’s a mark against atheism
I think you are using ‘moral facts’ in a way different to how utilitarians would.
If I have a given utility function, then “Action X best satisfies that utility function” is a fact. If you have a utility function, then “Action Y best satisfies my utility function” is a fact. It may well be possible to determine that the action that maximises some combination of the two functions is action Z, in which case that would be a fact.
Utilitarianism is the claim that 1) if you want to maximise your utility function, the best course of action is to act to maximise some combination of everybody’s utility function, because mumble mumble iterated prisoner’s dilemmas mumble universability and 2) this can be determined by listing the consequences of every action you could take and taking the one that maximises some combination of those functions.
None of that seems to rely on, as you put it, ‘invisible, undetectable moral facts’. The facts it relies on are testable claims.
“Oh but that doesn’t have moral force” maybe that’s not what utilitarians are claiming? Maybe when they say “You should X” they are implicitly assuming that you want to maximise your utility function?
“I doubt this is a case of mass hypocrisy, so it’s probably an issue of unexamined assumptions and not taking the practical problems seriously enough.”
Much more likely is that you are mistaken, really. Which does seem to be the case here.
On meta-points: Others have pointed out that utilitarianism does not require moral realism. I want to take a different tack: everything you say applies equally well to the claim “1+1 = 2 under Peano arithmetic”. It seems false to claim that accepting 1+1=2 requires giving up rationalist precepts. So, the first three points prove far, far too much.
On object-points: These apply equally to empiricism in general: you can’t know things for certain, so what’s the point of trying? Well, the usual response goes, you can’t be perfect, but at least you can do better. Indeed, rationalists have pointed out in a hundred places that performing utility calculations is impossible in principle, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless in practice.
>Others have pointed out that utilitarianism does not require moral realism
I’m not sure you and the others completely understand what you’re giving up along with realism. Without it, any sentence with “x is wrong” or “x is right” etc. is either devoid of semantic value or degrades to some version of “boo x”. Neither angle strikes me as particularly rationalistic.
>On object-points: These apply equally to empiricism in general: you can’t know things for certain, so what’s the point of trying?
It’s not the same thing. Empiricism, even if it doesn’t lead to “certainty”, leads to predictions that can be compared against future observations. But you have no observations of utility.
On the meta-issues, I take the point to be that, even if they’re a problem, they’re not a problem for utilitarians *in particular*. What you say is equally true for deontologists, contract theorists, natural law theorists, and even ethical egoists. You seem to think it’s a criticism of utilitarianism specifically, rather than of normative ethics in general. That just isn’t the case.
Of course. The reason I’m going after utilitarianism specifically is that utilitarianism is exceedingly popular around here and the EA stuff has been getting more visibility lately. You could probably count the deontologists in this comment section on one hand.
As a moral non-realist, I tend to read and use “X is wrong” the same way I’d read and use “X is beautiful”. That is, as an assertion that “X is wrong according to consensus morality, my morality, and your morality.”, similar to “X is beautiful according to societal standards of beauty, mine, and yours.”.
Statements that are made relative to a specific set of standards are complicated when the set of standards isn’t explicitly named, but seem to essentially be part of how human communication tends to rely on making reference to an assumed common base of attitudes, values, and knowledge.
I’d agree that it’s generally a good idea to avoid simply stating things like “X is wrong” much of the time, if only because they assert too many things too subtly and are difficult to break down, but I don’t think such statements entirely simplify to “boo X”.
I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, so my belief is that the “stuff” of morality is really just qualia. With that in mind, nearly every critique on this list can be applied to belief in the existence of qualia.
Feel free to do this with the other items in your post. Many of them will follow the same pattern.
Yes, well as we all know, qualia doesn’t really exist. Carry on, my p-zombie friends!
…honestly, I do generally fail to see why we need to accept the existence of qualia beyond a physicalist view; if you accept it as solely an outcome of the physical brain wiring then it’s quite hard to attach morality to it.
My take on this is that the breeze from the open window causes my feeling of coldness, and my feeling of coldness causes me to get up and close the window. And it turns out that the breeze from the window causes certain neurons to fire, and the firing of certain neurons causes me to get up and close the window. So it seems to me that the feeling of coldness and the firing of certain neurons just have to be the same thing. I recognize that there are theories on which the feeling of coldness is causally inefficacious, but I find epiphenomenalism at least as bizarre as you seem to find physicalism. And if qualia are causally efficacious, and it is the neurons that do causal work, qualia must be something about the neurons.
I am quite confused. You had it right earlier, when you said that on physicalism the feeling of coldness is the firing of neurons in the brain. And so, as the firing of neurons in the brain makes me get up and close the window, it is equally correct (under physicalism) to say that the feeling of coldness makes me get up and close the window. Just as the fact that Cicero denounced Cataline makes it correct to say that Tully denounced Cataline, since Tully is Cicero. It is only if you say that the feeling of coldness is not the firing of neurons that there is a problem with saying the feeling of coldness made me get up and close the window. Since it is certainly the firing of neurons that made me get up and close the window, if the feeling of coldness is something else other than the firing of the neurons, it seems not to have been involved in the getting up and closing of the window (hence the epiphenomenalist view among some of those who insist that there is some distinction there).
“Firing of neurons” is an observation.
But the experience I have when your neurons fire is very different to the experience when my own fire.
So how can it make sense to regard these two things as equivalent.
Calling qualia “the firing of neurons” doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think that quite works. If hedonistic utilitarianism is correct, then what we have most reason to do (morally) is whatever will maximize the number of hedons. But reasons for action themselves are not qualia. They’re reasons!
I think you’re right that both qualia and reasons (moral, epistemic) cast grave doubt on physicalism.
You’re assuming that moral facts are non-natural and “metaphysically queer”, but moral naturalism and constructivism are forms of realism too, and they don’t posit that moral facts are difficult for physicalists and reductionists to accept. For example, Railton (a naturalist) formulates it as “x is morally right if and only if x would be approved of by an ideally instrumentally rational and fully informed agent considering the question ‘How best to maximize the amount of non-moral goodness?’ from a social point of view in which the interests of all potentially affected individuals were counted equally”[1], constructivism simply that they’re “determined by an idealized process of rational deliberation, choice, or agreement”[2], etc. This provides a relatively clear picture of where moral facts could come from that doesn’t necessarily conflict with metaphysical naturalism. The investigation of moral facts is a combination of rational deliberation and empirical investigation of natural facts. There’s no need for a “moral-sensing organ” because the moral is reducible to the non-moral, nor are moral facts a matter for physics any more than game-theoretic facts are.
As for measuring and aggregating utility, your argument proves too much – if it were true, we’d have no knowledge of which gifts to give to which friends. Should I give a strawberry cake to strawberry-loving Xerxes or to strawberry-ambivalent Ygnacio, assuming I care about both of them relatively equally? Should I give food to a beggar or to Bill Gates? If it’s impossible to have expected utility, then there goes gambling – or any kind of decision-making under uncertainty (i.e. all of it). If it were really impossible to measure or aggregate utility, then these kinds of comparisons would be impossible too, and it’s obvious to me that they aren’t. Preferences or pleasures counting equally regardless of their source is part of utilitarianism, so if someone claims that they don’t count equally, they’re not a utilitarian. Of course, there are disagreements between utilitarians about the specifics of utility maximization, but equal weighing of utility is a core premise. As for how to sum different people’s pleasures and pains, see Scott’s contractualist take here. I’m not a utilitarian myself, but it seems obvious to me that world utility can be maximized, the question is whether it should be.
[1] http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=15253
[2] Constructivism in Metaethics
The fact that we give presents to friends and that we gamble proves a point about the mind, not about the world. Specifically, it proves that humans predict and imagine future outcomes and have emotional responses to said imaginations. It does not prove that our predictions are accurate, that our imagination is complete, or that our emotional reactions are consistent either wih ourselves over time or between other people. Utilitarianism is taking the mental process of judging things good or bad and reifying it into facts about the world, when really it says more about the values, biases and worldviews of the judger.
Humans predict future outcomes and assign values to them – and other people’s well-being is relevant to some of those outcomes. All of the flaws you mention are present, but they’re still no reason to throw away expected utility. Otherwise, all actions would be equally good (or bad), which is an absurd result. Maybe I can’t tell with 100% accuracy whether a particular person likes a specific thing, but in the relevant situations I can tell much better than chance. I need not always be right, I just need to be right often enough, and that’s a standard that most people can meet.
I’m saying that expected utility is a heuristic for making decisions, it’s not a fact about the world, and there’s no reason to think that different people would or should converge on agreements on what the expected utility of a decision is. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth having in your cognitive tool belt, or that you shouldn’t make your best judgments and go with them.
I don’t think “all actions are equally good” is an absurd result at all. From the vantage point that there is no right and wrong (the moral null hypothesis), that’s the logical conclusion, not an absurdity. You may like or dislike some actions more than others, and relative to that preference you might say that some are better or worse, but again, that seems to be a fact about you, not about the world.
If the expected utility is the utility of the world (whether preference-satisfaction or pleasure), that can be maximized regardless of what opinions people have, though people should ultimately in principle converge on how to maximize that, like they should on any factual matter.
And your reasoning doesn’t merely dismiss actions being equally good in just a moral sense, but in any sense. While all actions being equally good is the null hypothesis, it holds up as poorly as the null hypothesis of gravity not existing – at least some actions are better for me, and that gives me reasons for action, can ground normative facts, and so on – and I’m part of the world.
“though people should ultimately in principle converge on how to maximize that, like they should on any factual matter.”
Well, that’s exactly what I’m arguing: that utility isn’t factual! Our sense that some world-state is better than another is a transient emotional reaction to a destructively-compressed model of reality, and says more about us than it does about reality. I’m saying it is intellectually confused to have that emotional reaction and mistake it for some fact about reality.
I’m not saying it is wrong take action on the basis of that emotion — as you point out, the business of living requires you to temporarily believe that one course of action is better than another. However, I think you’re trying to make a stronger claim, which is that one course of action really is better than another, which leads down the intellectual rabbit hole of trying to figure out what the best possible course of action is, which leads to being very concerned about whether it is better for the world to eat cows or chickens (if you’re a conscientious person) or demonizing other people who don’t agree with you about what’s best for the world (if you’re an unreflective and aggressive person), both of which I think are unhelpful mental patterns.
People are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, and have preferences. That means that utility is factual – you can say that it’s in their heads, but their heads are part of the world. Certain actions cause better outcomes in net than other actions, so there’s something we can do to increase good outcomes and decrease negative ones. That still leaves open the question of what specifically should be maximized, and in what context, but if you take as a premise (as utilitarianism does) that all people’s utility counts equally, the rest follows without too much trouble.
This objection is bizarre. First, mereology, the aprioristic metaphysics of parts, wholes, and the composition relation, is about a thousand times more mysterious and disreputable than the weak, naturalistic form of moral realism needed to get utilitarianism off the ground. You are attacking the spooky by means of the spookier. Second, there is no reason in general to think that facts are susceptible to mereological analysis in the way that objects are, e.g., the fact that I currently want to eat a burrito does not seem to be a good candidate for decomposition into parts. The natural route for the utilitarian to take is to say that moral facts supervene on various biological, physical, physiological, and psychological states, in much the same way that facts about my burrito-desires supervene on neurological and physiological states in my body and brain. We may find ourselves dissatisfied with this answer, but this is not because it commits us to an untenable mereology.
Utilitarianism is not objective, but it’s rational. It’s rationally applied subjectivity. We each know about pleasure and suffering from our own experience. From a subjective standpoint, pleasure is necessarily good and suffering is necessarily bad. Other people are enough like us in behavior that it’s reasonable to assume they’re also a lot like us in their subjective experience. An egoist ignores this last part; a utilitarian does not.
I’m an egoist, and I don’t ignore that part, nor do I know any egoists who do. Other people’s subjective experiences are likely to be relatively similar to mine, but that doesn’t by itself give me a reason to improve them – my subjective experiences are fundamentally different not by any mind-independent metric but by the relational virtue of being my subjective experiences. That’s not to say that I don’t care about others, but only as a component of caring about myself.
“That’s not to say that I don’t care about others, but only as a component of caring about myself.”
If “others” are our own experiences imagined to exist elsewhere, surely this is the case for everyone?
The only question is how far you choose to imagine them.
@Daniel Kendrick
It’s nice to see that other people here share my frustrations on this topic. I’m not sure if I am an egoist, but it certainly seems to me that ‘utility as measure of what is important’ and ‘aggregate utility as what everyone ought to care about’ are needlessly intertwined. I had not thought of it as a motte and bailey, but you’re right that it is: arguments for utilitarianism that are aimed to convince non-utilitarians generally seem to consist of justifications for utility as correct metric, with the part about caring about everyone’s utility just as much as your own going unsaid.
I’m not sure why you don’t seem to see deontologists argue that one ought to act in a way that minimizes the aggregate number of rights infringements – much less argue that the obligation to do so falls obviously out of an understanding that natural rights are what matters.
Utility is utility. If other people’s utility is no less real than yours, then it makes sense to increase everyone’s.
I agree that maximizing other people’s utility is not necessarily the best way to maximize one’s own. Actually to a degree I believe the reverse. You need to help yourself before you help others, otherwise you’ll be bad at helping others. If you’re destitute and give 10% of your income, not only is that a small amount but you won’t be able to sustain it for long.
Edited to add: The comparison with the categorical imperative is incorrect. The reason to increase total utility is not to solve a logical contradiction, but because it is an end in itself.
I should also add: the reason utilitarians focus on universal utility is efficiency. There’s only so much you can do for yourself, and there will be diminishing returns. A lot of utilitarians would say that an entity with infinite and linear (or exponential) capacity for happiness would do well to be selfish.
“I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say here.
I am also an egoist. I don’t deny that other people exist, or that they have experiences which are just as vivid as my own.”
We obviously don’t have access to other people’s experience. The best we can do is project our own experience onto other people. For most people projecting is enjoyable.
(Or perhaps they can’t help themselves)
I actually think that the golden rule can be a tautology – treat others as you would wish to be treated – “others” means “other people with an experience similar to my own”, but these entities can only ever exist when we choose to project our own experiences onto them. The extent to which they feel things (from my perspective (the only perspective)) is the extent to which I feel it.
I think this is perhaps the real difference between deontologists and utilitarians. Deontologists actually project onto other individuals, whereas utilitarians abstract out from the kernel of their own experience.
As to why they should do this… I think it appeals to them. While they aren’t imagining each individual’s “happy”, I would guess that they sort of have a glow of generalized “happy” in mind when they are imagining their maximizing activities?
Anyway, I think I agree with you in that I believe we’re all just on different sub-branches of egoism.
(The right thing must on some level appeal to us)
@Daniel
Egoism as you describe it sounds like solipsism. If an external reality exists, it’s relevant to everyone. If other people have experiences, which you acknowledge, they are relevant even though you can’t experience them directly. Happiness and suffering still exist when you sleep. Happiness and suffering will still exist when you die.
“This is a confusion of the issue. If you are helping yourself as a means of helping others, that is altruism/utilitarianism. If you are helping others as a means of helping yourself, that is egoism. Yudkowsky made this point several times.”
That’s pretty obvious. I’m not sure how I gave the impression I thought otherwise. I was just giving a counterexample (me) against the idea that utilitarians are all just confused egoists who help others just because it makes them feel good.
@Mark
“We obviously don’t have access to other people’s experience. The best we can do is project our own experience onto other people. For most people projecting is enjoyable.”
It’s more than a projection. It’s an educated guess based on people’s common characteristics, and what you’ve learned about specific individuals. I’m pretty sure one doesn’t even need mirror neurons to do this, just the ability to reason.
Fair enough. My point was mostly about how I (and I assume other utilitarians) derive utilitarianism.
“I doubt this is a case of mass hypocrisy, so it’s probably an issue of unexamined assumptions and not taking the practical problems seriously enough.”
Hmm…consider entertaining other hypotheses?
There’s a major problem here where you seem to start with “assuming morality is a thing, what does it look like?” While utilitarianism comes more naturally from assuming nothing (or at most, that some situations are preferable to some other situations), and figuring out a decision method from that (since it ends up looking pretty much like what we call morality, we can call it that, although this is degrading into semantics).
How do you get ethical sentences to be propositions “assuming nothing”?
Consider: why have utilitarians from Bentham to Singer been moral realists (which is one heck of an assumption)?
Well, you want things. And you know with imperfect but high confidence that so does everyone else. If everyone agreed to work to satisfy everyone’s desires, this would, you can say with high confidence, eventually lead to a stable state of you and everyone else being very satisfied. You can label this state of universal high satisfaction ‘a good outcome’ and attempt to work out how best to reach it, and which parts are more important to reach first. One philosophy that presents itself as a thorough attempt at answering this last question is utilitarianism.
Or Eliezer’s position; ‘morality is a fact about human minds, but it’s still a fact’.
>eventually lead to a stable state of you and everyone else being very satisfied.
Given that virtually every utilitarian out there is saying I should donate everything I make to make others better off, I highly doubt this.
Instead of labeling it “a good outcome”, I’ll label it “human paperclip maximization” and try to avoid it. Now what?
Facts about human minds don’t lead to ethical propositions.
First of all, that doesn’t necessarily follow. But even if it does: You’re just using blindness bias to make it look bad, by counting the loss for you as real loss, but the gain to other people as “just money”. You could just as well describe it as “non-utilitarian morality systems mean that it’s okay to leave a kid to die of malaria to save some wealthy first-worlder twenty bucks”. which suddenly seems less easily refuted.
Utilitarianism is reductive. It is true for some utility function. It describes what seems most obvious to be the reductive moral solution. It gets rid of all of the hacks and heuristics we have in related areas of disease prevention, epistemology, negotiation, cooperation that are smuggled into the default human morality and forces us to understand why they are needed.
I think the “core” rationalist position can be defined equally as well as:
“Moral realism is true; the objective features that moral propositions reflect is the evolved neural structure of the human animal. Every time someone says right or wrong, it means it is in accordance with an unchosen code of ethics imprinted on the human animal by the billions of years of normal actions of physical laws from the Big Bang to today.”
or
“Ethical subjectivism is true, but the real opinions involved are not mere changeable fashions, but the deep opinions we are evolved to have. Non-human minds do not have to have the same opinions, but this is irrelevant because when we say ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, we mean and can only mean according to our evolved opinions as humans, which bind us because we are humans. If we try to ‘transcend’ our humanness by holding our evolved moral code as no better or worse than any other, we will transgress against the human moral code, and transgressing against our human moral code is, automatically, the same thing as ‘wrong’.”
This is based on the known-to-be-unproven assumption that evolutionary-encoded human values can be coherently extrapolated, even though we have not successfully done so yet. It is then generally believed that under a known fully coherently extrapolated moral code, consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics each can be reformulated as restatements of each other.
The problem we have is we do not know what this code is now (and even if we did, since we would never have omniscient understanding of the world, we would lack the ability to perfectly apply it anyway). Under this lack of knowledge, rationalist utilitarianism is not “The Answer” — it’s a heuristic for moral judgment under inevitable uncertainty.
Existing deontological rules are (generally) acknowledged to have similar value as heuristics. It’s just that deontological rules are most useful in “familiar” situations, the sort of situations that crop up frequently in human society and so led to their development, while under known-novel situations they tend to break. So while deontological rules are quite useful in daily life (where de novo reasoning is more likely to lead to error than tested-and-proven rules), they’re of limited use as heuristics for novel circumstances (where one is basically obligated to do de novo reasoning).
(Note that none of the above is universally accepted by all the members of the community, even the ones that identify as rationalists, and I may well have accidentally conflated my own personal interpretations with what I think is the “core” views.)
The first option is trivial to attack because utilitarianism is not an ESS. Additionally, there is extreme disagreement between different people about moral facts, and these disagreements have changed significantly in a very short timespan. Therefore there is no one evolved code of behavior imprinted on everyone.
The second doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, but are utilitarians content with subjectivism?
I’m reasonably certain your whole first paragraph is false, but you’d need to provide a specific example for me to explain why the extreme disagreement is not an issue. The Moral Foundations assessment is strong evidence in favor of this position; the set of moral foundations are common, with shifting emphasis but common principles. Also, utilitarianism being an evolutionarily unstable strategy is a total non sequitur; the evolutionary instincts are not utilitarianism, but those instincts make up are the terms of the utility function.
And the two options are object-level indistinguishable. Which one you claim is pure semantics; they both say that there is a shared unchanging but internal basis for morality.
The moral foundations stuff is like horoscopes. It casts the net so wide that it captures everything, rendering it meaningless. Just because two ethical views concern the same issue doesn’t make them equivalent.
The idea that the ethics of sex from the Victorian era to the summer of love, or the ethics of race and murder from Nazi Germany to 2015 Germany are simply a matter of “shifting emphasis” is absurd. Is there anything that an emphasis shift can’t accommodate? How do we empirically differentiate between different morality and different emphasis?
And it doesn’t even touch metaethics: does your “shifting emphasis” account for both deontologists and consequentialists? Please…
>the evolutionary instincts are not utilitarianism, but those instincts make up are the terms of the utility function.
Clarify, please.
I find a defense of utilitarianism from an evolutionary standpoint a little weird. With the standard disclaimer that evo-psych justifications are just-so stories and probably completely wrong, I’d say:
-Most likely evolutionary explanation for moral feelings is game theory / being able to win iterated prisoner’s dilemmas with your fellow tribespeople… pure rationality is game-theoretically sub-optimal, so we evolved irrational emotional reactions.
-Therefore moral emotions are primarily about costly signaling about your intent…
-And have nothing to do with the actual consequences, and everything to do with whether your fellow tribespeople think you are sincere.
-Which is also why people are happy to kill others they don’t see in their tribe.
Not sure if that’s exactly right, but a consequentialist morality that values every living being equally is emphatically not what I would predict evolution to lead to.
And in fact, when people go out and do studies to find out if people’s innate morality is consequentialist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem), the answer is no: people’s gut reaction is that inaction and action are morally different, and you have to argue really hard and use a lot of rhetorical tricks like Peter Singer does to get them to feel otherwise.
Responding to Steven above: According to my own understanding of it, your second quoted paragraph is a very nice summary of Eliezer’s position in the original Metaethics sequence. Thank goodness someone else understood it. The LW community’s original response to it was the single greatest reading comprehension failure I’ve ever seen.
I would also add that consequentialist reasoning in general is troublesome in that it becomes easy to justify “lesser” evils in the present if we can convince ourselves that they serve a promised “greater” good to come. Humans as a whole are generally pretty bad about judging such trade-offs beyond a very small scale, and we are very good at justifying evils that suit our egos. Trying to live by a set of moral injunctions, especially if they seem to be pretty universal (e.g. the “golden rule”) strikes me as less prone to such egoism.
Also, ethical offsets (as opposed to ethical *trade-offs*) concerns me. If I beat up a guy because he is terrorizing and stealing from a bunch of little old ladies living on fixed income, it may not be the ideal outcome, but we would generally consider it to be a necessary and justified trade-off. If instead I convince this guy to be nice to these little old ladies, and then beat him up for the fun of it (and what the heck, I have utilons to spare, because I just stopped this guy from terrorizing and stealing) then that is probably grounds for pressing assault charges. My ethical instincts tell me these situations are quite different, but I don’t see how utilitarianism can account for the differences.
1) As a practical matter, beating the guy up will make him less likely to follow through on his promise to be nice.
2) By extracting said promise, you improve the state of the world–things are better at t+1 than at t. But now you have to judge the utility of your actions relative to t+1, not t. Following up with a beatdown, even if the promise still holds, makes the world worse at t+2 than at t+1, with no future improvement to set it off.
(1) Fair point. I don’t think he would continue to be mean to the little old ladies (LOLs), but he might just move out of town (after all, some crazy guy just beat him up for apparently no reason) and not deal with the LOLs at all. It really depends upon the specific personality of the individual at hand, but I think it is plausible that this guy might still stick around and start being nice to the LOLs.
(2) My understanding of utilitarianism is that only aggregate utility matters. So long as utility is improved between time t+0 and t+2, it doesn’t matter the utility at t+1. Otherwise, I don’t think ethical offsets would work.
Consider that I want to offset my meat consumption via ethical offsets. I know I am about to go out with family to a big steak dinner, so I decide to donate some extra money before going out (to offset my family’s consumption as well as my own). If I understand your argument correctly, it doesn’t matter how much I donate – simply because I donated before going out, rather than afterwards.
> So long as utility is improved between time t+0 and t+2, it doesn’t matter the utility at t+1.
Aim higher than ‘not absolutely worse than we started’. You had an opportunity to do even better than you were doing at t+1, not worse.
This leads to some very entertaining results.
If you’re a pure even utilitarian, then yes, it does rule out ethical offsets because you only want to do the ethical thing.
People are not pure utilitarians, and they really want to do things for themselves, and they assign everyone else some degree of consideration (coefficient negative if malicious).
If you’re indulging in some vice, then you can fall back on settling for not making things worse, sure. But you don’t get to call that utilitarian.
> it becomes easy to justify “lesser” evils in the present if we can convince ourselves that they serve a promised “greater” good to come.
Can you give any examples? Note, the suggestion of giving all charity money to AI work would be a misrepresentation.
I see it more as aiming us at solving problems rather than judging.
> Can you give any examples?
Hm… the best example I can think of is from the following piece of fiction:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/09/a-lost-chapter-descendants-and-emulations/. It’s kind of long, but the relevant philosophical point comes out towards the end of section 4.
Eco-terrorism might be another one.
> I see it more as aiming us at solving problems rather than judging.
I like that perspective. I think that is an essential aspect of developing moral character.
But I think there is also a need to recognize that we run the risk of letting our egos run away with us and presuming to solve problems we do not truly understand. Eliezer Yudkowsky addresses that here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/).
It seems therefore, that we need to strike some kind of balance, to achieve some kind of mean, between the extremes: between being judgmental and being presumptuous; trying to focus on solving problems while maintaining our humility.
Okay, so, a fictional example. Not too scary just on that basis. ETA: and… okay, this story is a bit of a mess, but it seems like this guy is trying to prevent humanity from being wiped out, and is using this insanely silly strategy of basically not participating 99.9% of the time, and for SOME reason, they blame his stupid strategy on a straw man of consequentialism (it’s not ‘OK to commit evil if some good may come of it’ – acts are to be judged by the expected ensemble of their consequences. Doing things normally considered ‘evil’ remains a very bad thing, but you need to look at everything else)
I can see ecological direct action agendas being utilitarian positive, but terrorism seems like poisoning your well. If you focus on problem solving rather than blaming, it doesn’t rank well.
And yes, if you’re being utilitarian, you need a generous dose of humility before you begin violating those deontological rules because it is so easy to mess up. Heck, the more general ‘Beware of Other-Optimizing’ is enough, no need to even pull out the ‘I am running on corrupted hardware’ card. But!
I don’t see declining to other-optimize or seize power, and thereby predictably avoiding things that will tend to decrease overall utility, as failing to be utilitarian. It’s just being wise about how you go about it.
And yes, the disadvantage of utilitarianism is that it has a higher wisdom requirement than JUST FOLLOW THESE RULES.
…isn’t this how most very famous moral failings involving various forms of violence and pain have been justified to those who have qualms about instigating or continuing with it?
(Not counting the peculiar sort of crazy that already considered violence as an innately right and good thing.)
I mean, sometimes temporary hardship leads to a payoff. But doesn’t the whole of the political history of 19th and 20th centuries reek of payoffs that never did come, like the ones promised by the various forms of totalitarianism across the globe?
Or even in the Western world, where especially the form where the hardships were to be survived by others for “their own good” was quite popular. See, for example, even us the “right side of moral history” Nordic countries: Sweden and their now infamous eugenics program, or how we all used to treat our local language or other minorities.
Was it? <- serious question.
As far as I know, that might apply to the Soviet Union, maybe – but to a greater extent they justified it as 'those people are against the revolution. therefore, they don't matter.' And of course that's even more true of the Nazis.
Telling the people who are working for you, "Hey, go do this thing that we allow is bad, because it will accomplish something even better later"… just doesn't seem like it's nearly as effective as giving a moral justification for doing the bad thing itself. It seems to invite questions later about where that good thing ended up in a way that hurting the bad thinkers doesn't.
I'm sure that some appeal to consequences was made somewhere in the process, as it's a very universalizable argument – much more so than 'kill the bourgeoisie!' – but I'm not at all sure how central it was.
…it should be puzzles solved per orgasm not orgasms per puzzles solved, surely?
Yes, this is an unresolved issue for Eliezer Yudkowsky’s brand of utilitarianism (I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy, but he’s basically the founder of “Less Wrong rationalism”, so many rationalists’ opinions are derived from his). Eliezer’s view seems to be that we’re simply not smart enough to resolve our disagreements in a satisfactory way, but a solution probably exists, and that’s why we should build a Friendly AI to figure it out.
Do you really consider that an effective argument?
It seems to say:
(i) you can only experience your own suffering, so the suffering of others shouldn’t bother you;
(ii) you shouldn’t think of suffering as cumulative because it might “crush your spirit”.
Neither claim is justified by anything in the text.
Of course, the most common ways of aggregating utility (whatever we mean by it) all have their issues, but so does Shaw’s idea that X + X = X.
A bit further along, Shaw says:
I think all of your criticisms of aggregate utilitarianism would also apply to Shaw’s opinion that it is our moral duty to implement socialism to increase “the health, happiness, and honor possible for each”.
That’s poetry, not a rational argument. Perhaps you could rephrase what you consider to be the central idea in more down-to-earth terms?
Eh, that’s not the kind of “utilitarianism” we’re talking about here. It’s probably about their quasi-Spartan aesthetic, not the greatest happiness/fun/whatever of the greatest number.
I think you have the GBS argument a bit wrong. He’s not saying the suffering of others shouldn’t bother you. He’s saying the sum of suffering shouldn’t bother you, because it doesn’t exist. He’s not saying X + X = X, he’s saying X + X = undefined. If anything, his argument is for some sort of “cooperative egoism”.
What Nietzsche is saying is that focusing simply on pleasure and pain is a bit myopic, and that both of these things have ulterior uses to humanity. That suffering has spurred great artists, philosophers, etc. That the goal of utilitarianism is basically to create a universe filled with Last Men: content, but lacking in creative impulse, dreams, individuality, etc.. “that is no goal, that seems to us an end!”
OK, we have to make decisions somehow, right? And if I’m indifferent between the options “make 1 person suffer” and “make 1000 people suffer” (following Shaw’s advice), I might make some morally repugnant decisions. Do you agree?
Possibly. But:
– not all utilitarians focus on pleasure and pain
– although e.g., pain is a useful signal, chronic pain or pain before death usually brings no benefit to anyone
– why would it be moral to subject someone to suffering for the sake of art (or whatever else Nietzsche happens to like)?
Shaw’s argument is still inane. “If your brick weighs five pounds, that is the utmost a five-pound brick can weigh. If ten thousand bricks also weigh five pounds alongside your brick, their weight is not increased by a single grain; their equality in weight does not make your brick ten thousand times as weighty. Therefore do not be oppressed by the ‘frightful sum of masonry’; there is no sum … weight is not cumulative; you must not let your body be crushed by the fancy that it is.”
Although everything before “therefore” is true, nothing that comes after follows from it.
Shaw appears to be arguing that we have no reason to prefer one person starving to ten thousand people starving. For this nonsense, he is condemned in the afterlife to eternally push a trolley up a hill, only to have a fat man push it back down and crush him.
Everything you just said is irrelevant.
It’s slightly less relevant than someone complaining that physicists haven’t detected any particles of maleness yet in a debate about trans people.
Did you just copy paste your whole argument from a 1st year phil course book?
If you hang around on less wrong you’ll notice that when the subject comes up there’s very little in the way of claims that the other side is Objectively Wrong etc, merely attempts to convert people to their personal utility function.
Your personal utility function is personal, if you can convince some other people to adopt it as well have fun with that but you won’t find many rationalists claiming that their utility function is the one true utility function.
There’s no need for Moral Realism, the Origin doesn’t need to be any kind of divinity, Parthood is irrelevant.
Measurement,The Future and Aggregation are all 100% issues to be dealt with by each individuals utility function, some have clear and easy answers for each of those even if some lead to unintuitive answers.
How do you get ethical sentences to be propositions without realism?
How do you function if all your sentences don’t meet the rigid formal-logic definition of a “proposition”? oh wait, really easily
I function because in everyday speech pretty much every sentence is a proposition. The vast majority of everyday sentences that don’t appear to be propositions actually boil down to propositions. e.g. non-ethical normative sentences are typically just statements of fact regarding the speaker’s beliefs or the state of the world.
A: I want to get swole.
B: You should go to the gym.
B’s statement boils down to something like “I think the best way for you to get swole is to go to the gym”, which is a proposition.
Sometimes things get fuzzy, but we understand each other by simplifying, filling in the blanks, or guessing the speaker’s intentions and creating a proposition that way.
Are you the same “Anon.” because it seems to me that if you want to focus on “propositions” that’s a pretty good way to try to make it work without needing to invoke moral realism
So where’s your problem?
A: I want to prevent as many children under 5 as possible from dying from preventable diseases.
B: You should invest in charities which hand out xyz tablets or malaria nets.
@Murphy: I have no problem with that, but that’s not utilitarianism. There is no moral imperative involved there.
How can your A “want to get swole” without realism? He must have some goals, some king of function in his head that says that being swole is better than not being so.
A Utilitiarian has no more trouble with translating their utility function (which may say that the world would be better if there was more happy people or which may attempt to maximize for preference fulfillment or which may call to optimize for minimal suffering or may just optimize for paperclip production) into “I want to prevent as many children under 5 as possible from dying from preventable diseases.”
The utilitarian doesn’t have to first prove experimentally that there can be no other reasonably utility function. They are free to personally view someone who tries to create a world which goes hard against their personal utility function negatively.
There’s no requirement that they do something stupid like claim that the fabric of reality shows their utility function to be the one true utility function.
>He must have some goals, some king of function in his head that says that being swole is better than not being so.
Not in the moral sense. It’s perfectly possible to have goals that are not ethically motivated.
Utilitarians don’t say “well, maximize utility by whatever function you have in your brain”, they say “there is a moral imperative to maximize total utility” (and this is the bit that requires realism). Disagreements between utilitarians don’t arise because of different utility functions, they arise because of difficulties in measuring the one sum of utility they are all trying to maximize (see: cows and chickens).
You remember that thing you mentioned where people fill in the blanks themselves? Well it sounds like you’ve been filling in all the blanks with your own faulty preconceptions.
If you don’t believe in realism, if you believe that all the other ethical systems which claims a “moral imperative” are based on nothing more than the feelings of the people designing them (perhaps with some silly unfalsifiable claims to authority tacked on) then “moral imperative” means no more than that.
You genuinely believe Disagreements between utilitarians don’t arise because of different utility functions? Really? Have you been paying attention? Hedonic Utilitarians can consider a universe tiled with heroin-blissed out brains optimal while lots of other utilitarians with different utility functions disagree with them.
A utilitarian could even have quite a quite absurd utility function which to anyone who doesn’t share it is clearly bad, like the afore-mentioned utilitarian who considers maximizing paperclips to be good.
Many utilitarians simply don’t consider animals to have any value in their utility function. Others give them a weighted value.
>ethical systems which claims a “moral imperative” are based on nothing more than the feelings of the people designing them then “moral imperative” means no more than that.
Sure, now if only the utilitarians would admit this and we can all go home. But they don’t, because that’s not how they think of moral imperatives. I’ll bring up Singer again because he’s the most prominent utilitarian: he actually believes moral facts exist. Why?
As for the disagreements between different types of utilitarians, I still only see it as a measurement issue. The hedonist says utility is pleasure, the preference utilitarian says utility is fulfilled preferences. If we could measure utility we could trivially tell who got it right, and the other one would immediately change their opinion. The intermediate schemes of deciding what goes into utility, how much to weigh different types of pleasures, etc. are only an artifact of our inability to measure.
Which ones? Everyday rationalists who happen to lean towards utilitarianism or navel gazing philosophers? I have no problem with the idea that there’s no magical source of “rightness” in the universe.
I don’t think you’re getting the idea.
Lets imagine 3 utilitarians 2 with very odd utility functions to make it easier to think about.
The first, A, has a utility function which awards 1 point for each statue of the virgin Mary in the universe.
The second, B, has a utility function which awards 1 point per copy of the Koran in the universe.
The third, C, has a utility function which awards 1 point per 24 hour period for each human child who goes to bed healthy, fairly happy and fed and subtracts 1 point for each child who goes to bed hungry, sick or terribly unhappy.
The 3 utilitarians aren’t trying to discover some magical [unit of real utility].
All three are trying to maximise some personal idea of what they consider “good” or utility. Their goals are not aligned, there is no shared magical unit of utility that they’re going to discover. There is no “got it right” though most humans would probably prefer C over A and B since they’d prefer their kids going to bed happy than to see their kids biomass converted into statues.
If there is no “got it right” (which I agree with), then what is the value of expressing your preferences as a consequentialist function, as opposed to other formulations? Scott seems worried that he might “get it wrong” re: his personal utility function if he eats the wrong animal. But this worry only exists because he’s conceptualized this function that, at least in theory, has an actual scoring system. Wouldn’t it make life simpler to express your preferences in a way that point you in a general direction, but aren’t actually computable mathematically?
@discursive2
I assumed that scot’s utility function had some if’s in it.
ie “if X is conscious” “if X has a subjective experience” which we might, in theory be able to falsify at some point in the future if we work out how to upload minds or understand the brain better.
“How do you get ethical sentences to be propositions without realism?”
Propositions, or true propositions? Direct realism (one-to-one-to-one correspondence with a moral fact) or indirect realism (correspondence with a complex set of preferences, tendencies and agreements)?
Evaporative cooling.
You make some fairly strong points about utilitarianism, some of which I agree with. The subjective nature of its terminal goals is a particular weakness in my opinion. Your point about the future discount rates is also very powerful. A couple of points that I strongly disagree with, however:
“You never actually have access to the consequences, you just have a new set of guesses. The standard reply is that it’s irrelevant and you should do what you believe is going to maximize utility, but what reason do you have to believe that you are a good judge of that?”
Why don’t we have access to consequences? I don’t think anyone is suggesting perfect access, just access. Also, I may be a bad judge, but there is no-one else to judge it, given that deferring moral judgement to others is also a moral judgement for which I must be responsible.
“Finally, there is no way to meaningfully aggregate utility.”
It seems reasonable that one might use judgement to imperfectly aggregate different forms on utility. After all, if we are to choose between two virtues, or a choice of actions that must run afoul of one of two conflicting moral rules, the same challenge applies. Mathematical precision is likely impossible, but I don’t see why some basic quantification couldn’t help improve our judgements proportionality, especially in areas where we know our intuitions fail us (eg. scope insensitivity).
I find the Shaw passage you quote extremely unconvincing and nothing like a coup de grace, though perhaps I have it out of context. Why would kicking a thousand people in the stomach be morally the same as kicking one?
I find the Nietzsche quote, though I admit a lack of familiarity with his work, and though I personally agree there are higher concerns than pain and pleasure, less convincing still. It seems to justify suffering on aesthetic grounds, valuing the toils and trials of other humans because it makes those humans seem majestic to us. Sure, I get that feeling, but to place it in the core of our moral philosophy seems like an autistic morality (as opposed to the morality of an autistic person, which I have no problem with) that sees other people as objects whose moral worth is in what they provide us.
“however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different.”
I strongly disagree. Murder and genocide are not tendencies that improve the ultimate survival of our species. Self-defence is admittedly expedient, but not evil. Perhaps human predation of other species might be arguably evil, but its not clear why vegetarianism, while perhaps unpleasant for many, would harm our species survival (probably the opposite). Though I’m sure there would be exceptions, I don’t see any evil instincts that strongly tend towards assisting the human species.
I think the species-consequentialism argument that is dismissed a little flippantly at the end here, if a thoughtfully developed version of it (disclaimer – my blog, lengthy reading) is considered openly and fairly, is the solution to most the problems of subjective consequences in utilitarianism. It’s also passes the intuition test if that’s what’s important to you, because common human decencies flow from its logic imo. Suffering is still undesirable because its a good proxy for badness, but you don’t end up with arguments like destroying all life or putting everyone in permanent stasis to eliminate suffering.
I also think it solves the moral realism issue. If an objectively demonstrable biological process of cooperation occurring, and human moral behaviours (neural activity) are correlated with that, moral propositions are true or false based on their similarity to the broader biological process.
In my experience arguing around this its not a bullet that many want to bite, but I do think it’s the correct and moral answer.
Thanks for posting btw. Actually it sounds like you could use a blog. 🙂
Perhaps a way to unpack the Nietzsche thing is to draw a distinction between spirituality and ethics. When you’re looking from a first-person perspective at your own progress through life, Nietzsche’s point I think makes a lot of sense. There’s a strong case to be made for seeking meaning instead of seeking pleasure. However, when you’re looking from a third-person perspective at designing systems for other people, then yes, what Nietzsche is saying does come across as “autistic”: I shall make you suffer for your own good! — yuck.
So, what to make of this discrepancy between the third person and first person perspective? My takeaway is that ethics shouldn’t be totalizing; the principles around living a good life for yourself are different and incommensurable with the principles for designing a just social system. This is why I think the Nietzsche quote is in fact a good rejoinder to utilitarianism, because utilitarianism is a totalizing system: it’s an attempt to answer with a single formula both the spiritual questions (what should I seek out in life?) and the ethical questions (how should I treat my fellow human beings).
In other words, utilitarianism over-reaches; there’s a whole, very important domain of human experience (the artistic / spiritual) that utilitarianism tries to annex into the realm of ethics, when in fact it doesn’t belong there.
Interesting thoughts. The meaning over pleasure is definitely powerful to my ears. A couple of potential difficulties occur to me:
-The subthread OP was writing in a context of monism/physicalism which may rule out a dualistic 1st/3rd dichotomy of the type you point to.
-The distinction you make seems to suggest possible conflict could occur in cases where the two need to unite. For example, I may design a good life for myself in one way, but find that it harms others horribly. By integrating the two from the start perhaps we avoid a rift forming that we can no longer cross?
So I think that resolving that kind of conflict is what civil society is all about. Not sure where you’re from, but the American Declaration of Independence enshrined the “right to pursue happiness”, which is basically saying, seek your own fulfillment however you want as long as you do it in a way that doesn’t get in the way of others pursuing theirs.
As the American frontier disappeared and topics like global warming, global poverty, structural inequalities, etc came to the fore, there’s been increasing criticism of this social contract, on the grounds that everyone pursuing their happiness in their own way does not lead to a world where everyone is free to do so. So maybe the line between the personal and the social is intrinsically unstable. That said I think having a line to some degree is worthwhile… Autonomy of the self seems like, for all its faults, one of the better innovations of human civilization.
I’m an aussie, so we basically have the same deal culturally except its less formalised constitutionally. Our politics seems to be a little less polarised than you guys too, but we’re doing our best to catch up 🙁
Without wanting to move too much away from philosophy into politics, I see very significant value in the sort of autonomy you’re talking about though I’m not a hard individualist and tend to see policy discussion through several other lenses than the traditional individual/collectivist conflict. I definitely agree harmonising social and individual needs does seem to be the artform required for a good civilization.
I was mostly arguing for ethics and altruism rather than individualism or collectivism in the above post I think.
>Why don’t we have access to consequences?
Because you can’t measure it. I admit this is probably one of the weaker angles, but still: group A says that to maximize utility you should stop breeding and stop eating animals. Group B says to maximize utility you should save as many African kids as possible. Only one of these can be true, and the proponents of each view have some sort of indirect access to the consequences. But neither of them is about to change their mind, are they? If they truly knew exactly what the consequences of each route were, the groups would converge.
>that sees other people as objects whose moral worth is in what they provide us
I think N saw it the exact opposite way: their worth stems from what they provided to themselves. Keep in mind he was highly individualistic. I think what he’s going for there isn’t “suffering led to great art, which is good because it edifies us”; instead: “suffering is a necessary ingredient in creating great men”… bad for the creature in us, but useful to the creator. This overcoming is valueable in itself. Obviously Nietzsche did not think this was possible for anyone of course, only a select few can embrace suffering and use it. In GS 338 he argues that to know true happiness you must also accept suffering, that the comfortable man has no capacity for great joy.
Also, GS 19:
Evil. — Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask
yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense
with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some
kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence
do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth
even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish
strengthens the strong—nor do they call it poison.
BGE 262: “A species comes to be, a type becomes fixed and strong, through the long
fight with essentially constant unfavorable conditions”
>Murder and genocide are not tendencies that improve the ultimate survival of our species.
Consider two herds of mountain goats. The evil herd does things the traditional way: males fight each other for dominance. The loser often dies; if he lives, he leaves the herd. The strongest, ablest goat gets to mate with all the females. The good herd has dispensed with fighting and instead practices monogamy: everyone is happy! In the long term, which herd will prevail? Do you see why Nietzsche considers the “good herd morality” to be fundamentally opposed to life itself? The point isn’t simply about procreation though — take a more abstract form of this line of thinking and apply it to us.
You could perhaps make an argument that due to civilization and technology we are beyond this. What is certain however is that you and I are here because our ancestors were not utilitarians.
>Why would kicking a thousand people in the stomach be morally the same as kicking one?
That’s not what he’s saying exactly. He’s saying that while there might be a thousand instances, each person receiving a kick can only ever experience their own experiences. All you have is a thousand separate instances — not a sum.
Because you can’t measure it.
Hmm, well made point. But I wonder if we have that sort of infallable direct access to virtue or moral rules either? It seems that almost everyone imagines themselves to be virtuous, to have good intentions, to be rationally moral, or to be following their religion’s rules correctly. Yet the result is a myriad of very different behaviours – perhaps more so than within consequentialism. Though I’m also worried this is an unfair criticism for any approach – a lack of measurability could potenutally be just a symptom of us being to morally or epistemologically deficient to measure it.
I think N saw it the exact opposite way: their worth stems from what they provided to themselves.
I don’t necessarily disagree with that. However, I feel the phrasing was particularly aesthetic sounding – rather than thinking what greatness *is* we select an image of a person that seems to us inspirational, like a majestic landscape, and decide we’d like to live in a landscape of great people. It’s too aesthetic and seems a little morally superficial at first glance (uninformed glance). My phrasing of this objection is far from majestic lol, but I hope you get the idea.
In the long term, which herd will prevail?
I think here we imagine the evil herd mounting an all out ambush attack in which the good herd are wiped out. But for species, long-term ongoing contact/conflict would result in the good herd coordinating its much greater resources to continually improve their defence, and ultimately prevail, while the evil herd continue to betray even within their in-group.
I’m very hesitant to closely align fitness with strength with aggression with evil (in the case of fitness, take rabbits or the sloth. Or plankton. Defenseless, passive, and alive while the saber-tooth tiger is not). And we must consider what we mean by evil. We rarely class a lion or a spider or a shark, or an angry goat, as evil. It is the human who kills with no need for self-defence or food that we consider evil. Murder and genocide, more typical to our conception of evil, do not make humanity stronger against other species. Strength against attack is very different from needless killing – which is both evil and generally a harmful malfunction in nature. Being good doesn’t equate to weakness.
There may be individual instances where evil and species-survival have some overlap, but they are rare and contrary to the general trend – goodness and the survival of a species seem to be aligned.
All you have is a thousand separate instances — not a sum.
Yet I can’t help but wonder, are these instances really so incredibly different that imagining their sum isn’t useful or valid? By refusing to do that sum are we in some way refusing to acknowledge many of these instances, beyond our intuition of scale, happened at all? Isn’t that a much greater inaccuracy?
“Consider two herds of mountain goats. The evil herd does things the traditional way: males fight each other for dominance. The loser often dies; if he lives, he leaves the herd. The strongest, ablest goat gets to mate with all the females. The good herd has dispensed with fighting and instead practices monogamy: everyone is happy! In the long term, which herd will prevail?”
The good one, of course. It is more robust because it contains more genetic diversity. Also, it has a lot more adult males than the other and could easily overwhelm it.
Was so busy thinking about the strength of cooperation that I overlooked that. Nice!
So, to paraphrase Nietzsche, valuing things according to the amount of pleasure or pain they entail leads to sub-optimal outcomes, because pain is necessary for the elevation of mankind. If you abolish pain, you abolish inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune. Elevation, bravery, and inventiveness are more important than avoidance of pain, so we should seek to increase suffering rather than avoid it. That’s what people would choose if they were not so naïve.
Friedrich Nietzsche, preference utilitarian.
So, I was once like you, non-cognitivist (or whatever I then thought it was called).
So I went to an academy with two moral realist professors to call them out. Granted, I’m not a philosophy student, so I was a bit frustrated with their approach (telling stories). Also granted: since my self-education on the topic may have been lacking I may not have been a decent foil to two professors and a PhD student who were all moral realists (but different flavours so some properly credentialled people did debate).
There was one thing that I couldn’t really deal with. The thing is, I like my whole believing-in-reality. They pointed out that I was inconsistently privileging my reality-perceiving organ (my brain) over my moral-perceiving organ (again, my brain). On top of that, I also thought that they were privileging their moral-perceiving organs over their aesthetics-perceiving organs (again, their brains).
Now, I pouted a little and defended epistemological skepticism for a bit. Which is just a bit boring really. As I said, I like believing in reality. So I made that assumption. And I actually like having goals in life, so I made that assumption as well.
How do you decide what you will do each day?
I have to admit, though, while I now no longer feel that bad about believing in my moral perceptions about as much as in my reality perceptions (i.e. not all that much and I try to check them for inconsistencies), I am a lot more worried about the pessimistic induction for morals than for facts. So what, if I believed the wrong facts all my life.
But will future generations see my meat-eating as partaking in the big Animal Holocaust of pre-2100? And will they be right?
Will they hate me because I decided to increase knowledge about the world when it has now been decided that we had enough knowledge to make money and improve the world?
Personally, I have the feeling that I know so few is-es, that getting to the ought-s is presumptuous. Will they call me a coward?
Btw I tend to think that we’re getting to a point where even if you’re a psychopath or whatever the equivalent of colourblindness for morality is (i.e. you grok some aspects, but not all) and perceive something completely different, it’s now often easier to play along than to cheat the system in a major way (i.e. murder is difficult).
>They pointed out that I was inconsistently privileging my reality-perceiving organ (my brain) over my moral-perceiving organ (again, my brain).
I don’t think this is a reasonable objection.
First of all, to the realist morals are part of reality so what privileging are we talking about?
Second, we understand the organs that perceive the world quite well: vision works by photons hitting photosensitive cells, and similarly for taste, touch, hearing and so on. If we can perceive morals, where is the organ? The burden of proof is on the realist to show where it is located and how it functions.
Third, there is widespread agreement on our perception of light, sound, etc. Agreement that is corroborated by devices that perceive the world far better than our crude biological systems can. To the extent that our perceptions of reality are faulty, we can augment them with superior observations through this equipment. Not so for moral facts. There is extremely widespread disagreement about moral facts. How is this explained if we are all perceiving the same thing?
>How do you decide what you will do each day?
Without any need of ethics, it’s fairly simple really.
>But will future generations see my meat-eating as partaking in the big Animal Holocaust of pre-2100? And will they be right?
Who cares? There are billions of people alive today who think you’re living immorally, you don’t even need to look to the future for condemnation.
Reasonable objection or not: It is entirely possible, that I’m less adept at raising the objection than those two professors could in the course of a whole week of intense discussion. My argument is partially that I had the same position to begin with and the same arsenal of arguments, but was still convinced. May not be particularly convincing.
1. I used reality casually here. My fact/is-perceiving organ vs my morals/ought-perceiving organ should be clearer. I do think that in this conception is and ought are and can be separate domains of reality.
2. We understand eyes well, but your eyes are not how you perceive facts, your brain does that (with non-negligible input from your eyes). We don’t actually understand brains all that well, but we know it’s possible to feed brains artificial information (e.g. bionic eye) and they make sense of it. There’s no way around brain in a vat except making an assumption. Moral intuition in the brain can be researched (and that sort of research happens), but I don’t think it’s pertinent to the argument we’re having. The leading analogy isn’t sight, apparently, but math (but other commenters have pointed this out, so I won’t repeat it).
3. That is also my main hangup. Seeing you make this point makes it easier to point out the possible error of reasoning than when I think about it on my own, so thanks. I think what you’re drawing up here is a false equivalency between basic facts and complex moral inferences.
People don’t agree widely on anthropogenic global warming, the existence of a God, the age of the earth, whether politician x or y is more competent, who caused a traffic accident.
They tend to agree on whether a bus is red or green (but some blind and colourblind people will have to abstain, but we posit that the bus is still the colour it is even though they cannot agree with us) and usually agree that a house is bigger than a mouse (but hey some people are crazy).
Similarly, people tend to agree that killing your mother for fun is bad, that having sex with your brother is bad, that eating faeces is bad. Probably fairness and loyalty are also pretty agreed-upon. I’m guessing your background isn’t psychology, but there is some okay research on moral universals, i.e. cross-culturally widely accepted moral truths. Similar research also demonstrate quite universal agreement on some aesthetic things (pretty ladies, sounds, sights, tastes). And again, if there’s some morally blind or colourblind people, that does not mean everybody else is wrong. Google e.g. moral foundations by Haidt (not that I particularly endorse that).
So, different reasoning capabilities (if killing humans feels bad, why is that? Because they feel pain? Hey, slugs feel pain. Don’t kill slugs vs. Because they will be missed. Hey, slugs don’t care about each other. You can kill slugs.), different knowledge about the facts of the world (i.e. you thought your brother was a stranger) can lead to disagreement about non-basic moral truths. And yes, which truths are “basic” may be a question of empirical research.
> billions of people alive today who think you’re living immorally
I have access to way more information and slightly more reasoning capability than billions of people and worry about their opinion as much as I worry about being wrong about facts (i.e. more when they are smart and know stuff).
I’m talking about people in the future who have access to way more information and more reasoning capability than me. I am for example fairly sure that people who treated slaves badly but non-slaves well made an error of reasoning somewhere, but people as smart as Aristotle believed in natural slavery.
> Without any need of ethics, it’s fairly simple really.
That’s not really an answer to my question, I think. How do you decide what to do?
Regarding (1), there’s an entire thing called “moral naturalism”, which says that moral properties are scientifically examinable natural properties. And as to the rest, well, I’m not a utilitarian.
1. This completely fails to understand what moral facts are. Moral facts are abstract concepts. I believe someone else pointed out that they are analogous to 1+1+2 in Peano Arithmetic. Saying physicists can’t detect moral facts is as absurd as saying they can’t detect pluses, equals, and minuses. Our moral fact sensing organ is the abstract reasoning portions of our brain.
2. Again, same place other abstract concepts come from. The abstract reasoning portions of our brain. Abstract concepts have the interesting property of being objective, but also only existing in the minds that conceive of them.
3. I suppose they are, in the sense that 1+1=2 is composed of 1, +, =, and 2. Similarly, the moral concept of “fairness” is composed of components like “Proportionality,” “equal,” “between,” and “people.”
4. People seem to do okay with our fuzzy, imprecise approximations of VNM utility functions.
5. Same way you do it with a normal VNM utility function. Utility*probability.
6. Interpersonal utility comparisons are ridiculously easy. You just use a special human ability called “empathy.” Our empathy seems to contain a built in normalizing assumption for different utility functions so they can be compared.
I’ve never understood why anyone finds interpersonal utility comparison problems to be a valid argument against utilitarianism. To fix that bug you just need to replace “maximize aggregate utility” with “make a normalizing assumption consistent with the normalizing assumptions normal human empathy makes, then maximize aggregate utility.”
Also, I should mention I am a motivational externalist. A lot of your arguments seem to presuppose motivation internalism. Please avoid doing that if you reply to this.
>Moral facts are abstract concepts.
Obviously not to the moral realist, that’s the whole point of realism. The realist business collapses if moral facts are not mind-independent. The idea is you say moral facts *actually* exist, and in return you are allowed to say “x is good” and have that be a proposition.
Your conception of morality as simply abstract ideas in our heads is anti-realist and non-cognitivist (or perhaps realist subjectivism but let’s not go there) and definitely doesn’t support utilitarianism: if we’re purely talking about ideas in our heads, then “x is good” means something like “I like x”, standard expressivism.
A simple proof by contradiction: Right now I am simultaneously holding the abstract ideas “killing babies is good” and “killing babies is evil” in my mind. Given your conception of moral facts as simply abstract ideas in minds, they must both be real and true.
>Saying physicists can’t detect moral facts is as absurd as saying they can’t detect pluses, equals, and minuses.
Yup. That’s why I’m a mathematical anti-realist.
>People seem to do okay
How would you know?
It’s definitely cognitivist. It’s possible to be right or wrong about moral facts the same way it’s possible to be wrong about what 1+1 equals, or about what the probability of something is.
It actually fits quite well with conventional notions of morality that moral facts are not physical objects. If they were at that would imply that you could make torture okay by finding the moral facts, breaking them apart, and reassembling them into a new configuration. And that’s obviously absurd. We’ve known that that’s absurd since Plato.
I’m not sure this is anti-realist either. The idea that moral facts are not physical objects has been around since the Ancient Greeks, and they weren’t anti-realists.
Moral facts are mind independent. 1+1=2 is true no matter what mind is thinking about Peano arithmetic. It’s true regardless of whether I do it, Matt Damon does it, Genghis Khan, or Glarzag the Rigellian does it.
No it doesn’t. You’re confusing the fact that abstract concepts only exist in the minds that compute them with the idea that preferences are subjective. It’s possible for something to be objective, and also only exist in the minds that compute it.
To help illustrate this look at the following statement: “The psychopath knew that killing people was wrong, but he didn’t care. He liked doing the wrong thing, not the right thing.”
There’s nothing inherently contradictory with that statement, it describes reality. In real life some psychopaths have made statements like “I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I didn’t care.” But it doesn’t make sense under a subjectivist, expressivist account of morality. To an expressivist, that would be like saying “The psychopath liked what he was doing, but didn’t like what he was doing.”
My cognitivist account of objective morality makes accurate predictions about reality that expressivism and other non-cognitivist accounts do not. Under my theory, it is perfectly possible for people to know something is wrong, but not care (which, again, is something that has been repeatedly documented as happening in real life). Under expressivism, it isn’t. Expressivism has been falsified by the evidence. In order to believe in it I would have to reject empiricism.
No it just means that you simultaneously have a true idea and a false idea in your head. I simultaneously am holding the ideas “1+1=2” and “1+1=9,545” in my head. Both ideas aren’t true. One of them is true, the other is false.
Because people make decisions all the time, and are satisfied with the results more often than not. I am more frequently satisfied with the results of my decisions since I tried to be more VNM-like in my thinking. Other people have been as well.
>No it just means that you simultaneously have a true idea and a false idea in your head. I simultaneously am holding the ideas “1+1=2” and “1+1=9,545” in my head. Both ideas aren’t true. One of them is true, the other is false.
And how do you determine which one is true and which is false?
1+1=2 is true by definition, are you saying the same is true of morality? That utilitarianism is somehow true by definition?
In that case, isn’t “maximizing utility is good” just a tautology? What would you say to someone who thinks “following the teachings of Jesus is good”? You can hardly tell them their definition of good is mistaken…
>If they were at that would imply that you could make torture okay by finding the moral facts, breaking them apart, and reassembling them into a new configuration. And that’s obviously absurd.
I completely agree, hence my parthood attack angle.
>Because people make decisions all the time, and are satisfied with the results more often than not.
That’s just repeating the same thing, it still makes no sense. The utilitarian doesn’t aim for personal satisfaction, she aims for maximum utility. Utilitarian A tries to maximize utility by saving cows, utilitarian B tries to maximize utility by saving African kids. But at least one of them must be wrong, at least one of them did NOT do the utility-maximizing thing and perhaps should actually feel super bad (we are in a consequentialist mode of thought, yes? your intentions don’t matter one bit). The only thing that saves their conscience is the inability to measure.
It’s not that it’s true by definition. Morality isn’t just about how we define words. It’s that morality is a concept, or set of concepts, about which actions and states of affairs are good. I’m talking about concepts like fairness, welfare of others, etc. The word itself doesn’t matter, if you used the word “gazornenplatz” to refer to the concept instead of “good” it would still be the same concept.
It easier to make sense of it if you use a specific moral concept like “fairness,” rather than the more nebulous “good.” Fairness is a moral concept involving equity, proportionality, etc. So if someone says that it is fair that they should get all the food while everyone else starves, they are simply wrong. Them getting all the food isn’t equitable or proportionate. Either they’re mistaken about what the concept of “fairness” entails, or they are using the word to refer to a totally different concept.
Utilitarianism is the belief system derived from understanding and following basic moral concepts like “fairness” correctly, the same way you can derive complex mathematical systems from fairly simple axiomatic concepts.
Also, morality is not the same as “your preferences, values, and/or desires.” This is evidenced again, by the fact that there are people who know what they are doing is wrong, but don’t care. These people understand what the abstract concepts like “good” represent, but are not motivated to increase goodness. When we refer to our “moral values” we mean that we value morality. It is possible for someone to not value morality, but still understand the concept.
I’d tell them they made a mistake similar to a multiplication error, or a more complex mistake that involves incorrectly extrapolating from the basic concepts of morality the same way one can incorrectly extrapolate mathematical concepts.
They don’t actually have a different definition of good than I do. They just made some mistakes when they were extrapolating what was good. We’re both reaching for the same concept. If this wasn’t the case it wouldn’t be possible to persuade people through moral reasoning.
Although, let’s be honest, it isn’t that big a mistake. A lot of the teachings of Jesus, like “love thy neighbor as thyself,” are derived from the same foundations of equity and welfare as utilitarianism.
This is another piece of empirical evidence in favor of my theory. People make the same predictable mistakes when engaging in moral reasoning, and draw similar conclusions. They can often be argued out of those mistakes in predictable ways. This suggests that they are all reaching for the same concept, or family of concepts. If my theory was false people would make random moral judgements with no relation to each other.
I don’t mean “satisfaction” as in “the feeling one gets when one’s emotional needs are being met.” I mean satisfaction as in “the belief that one’s goals are being met more effectively than they were before.”
I can see you making an argument against moral realism and cognitivism. But arguing that, regardless of whether that is true or not, we shouldn’t represent our values as Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions seems bizarre to me. There are lots of arguments for VNM utility-maximization. The Money Pump/Dutch Book Argument is probably the most famous, you should look it up.
Yes, one of them is wrong. But I don’t think one of them should feel bad. If you make an honest mistake about what the utility maximizing thing is, and instead do something that increases utility slightly less, that doesn’t seem worth feeling guilty over. It might be worthwhile to feel guilty if you make such a huge mistake that you decrease utility instead of increasing it. But it doesn’t see warranted to feel guilty for increasing utility slightly less than was possible, especially if it’s an honest mistake.
Remember that from a utilitarian perspective, guilt is only good to feel if it motivates you to do better in the future. If you did the best you could except for one honest, understandable mistake, feeling guilty is just inflicting pointless suffering on yourself for no reason, because you’ll probably do just as well in the future as you would without it.
I’d rather have my conscience be saved by admitting I did my best, and I will continue trying to do my best in the future, than by measurement errors.
Alright, so:
* Morality is not true by definition.
* Moral facts exist, and they do so independently of minds.
* Moral facts are not physical.
* The “abstract reasoning portion of our brain” senses moral facts.
Is this some sort of dualism then? Are you trying to say that moral facts exist on a different “plane”, and the brain has access to this? Like Plato’s forms? Can a machine with abstract reasoning abilities sense moral facts?
>I am not a utilitarian at all. But all they are alleging is that utilitarianism is real in the exact same way any abstract idea is real.
Clearly this is not the case, he’s also saying that some ideas are “true” while others are “false” and that utilitarianism is “true”. The abstract idea of Hamlet is not truth-apt at all.
Abstract ideas are mind-bound. Ghatanathoah said “Moral facts are mind independent.”
Statements about a performance of Hamlet can be judged to be true or false based on examination of physical reality. If someone says “this is a scene from Hamlet”, you check your copy of the play and find the scene in there and conclude that is true. What is the equivalent of that for “the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility”? How can I check whether that is a true or false statement?
They know that they’re doing “wrong” as described by many people’s moral intuitions or ethical theories, but they don’t believe that it’s actually wrong, because believing that entails believing that one ought not to perform the particular act, which would lead them to not do it. Saying something like “X is wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway” only makes sense if “wrong” is used as an anthropological judgment (e.g. “other people would describe this as ‘wrong'”, “according to commonly accepted principles this is ‘wrong'”), not as a moral judgment.
@Blacktrance
“…but they don’t believe that it’s actually wrong, because believing that entails believing that one ought not to perform the particular act, which would lead them to not do it.”
What about failures of will power? I might think it is morally wrong to cheat on my wife yet still do it and feel bad about it.
That’s a fair counterexample. It’d be more accurate to say that believing an act is wrong entails believing that one ought not to perform that act, so one won’t will to perform it. “I know it’s wrong, but I’ll do it anyway” is willing to perform it, so it’s incompatible with a belief in the wrongness of the act.
I wish to note a typo: you wrote an objection to moral realism, and then accidentally used the word ‘utilitarianism’ (well, for points 1-4, at least. 5 and 6 are reasonably relevant to utilitarianism, too)
Realism is a necessary prerequisite for utilitarianism, so any attack on realism is an attack on utilitarianism. Obviously it’s an attack on other things as well but this place is crawling with utilitarians so that’s what I’m focusing on.
Was Hume a moral realist?
Nope.
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, […] Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No.”
“All this is metaphysics, you cry. That is enough; there needs nothing more to give a strong presumption of falsehood. Yes, reply I, here are metaphysics surely; but they are all on your side, who advance an abstruse hypothesis, which can never be made intelligible, nor quadrate with any particular instance or illustration. The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.”
Straight-forward anti-realist non-cognitivism.
Follow-up question: was the author of these words a utilitarian?
It appears to be matter of fact, that the circumstance of UTILITY, in all subjects, is a source of praise and approbation: That it is constantly appealed to in all moral decisions concerning the merit and demerit of actions: That it is the SOLE source of that high regard paid to justice, fidelity, honour, allegiance, and chastity: That it is inseparable from all the other social virtues, humanity, generosity, charity, affability, lenity, mercy, and moderation: And, in a word, that it is a foundation of the chief part of morals, which has a reference to mankind and our fellow-creatures.
No. While Hume does use the word “utility”, it is not meant in the sense of “numerical value of pleasure – numerical value of pain”, but in the sense of “usefulness” or expediency. i.e. morality not as a goal in itself, but a means to achieve societal goals. Also, Hume is not justifying morality by virtue of its usefulness, simply explaining how it arises.
Hume’s very close to Nietzsche here.
Your definition is too restrictive– it leaves out utilitarians who take preference-satisfaction or human flourishing as the summum bonum, including, at least at some points in their careers, both Mill and Singer. The second point has more merit. We can draw a distinction between (N)ormative-Utilitarianism, the thesis (roughly) that we ought to act so as to maximize utility, and (D)escriptive-Utilitarianism, the thesis that moral judgments are chiefly motivated by or reduce to judgments of utility. Hume will come out a D-Utilitarian but not an N-Utilitarian on this classification.
>Hume will come out a D-Utilitarian
Perhaps, in a limited sense…he doesn’t give a crap about non-human utility, for example. One passage that could support such a view is:
“Utility is only a tendency to a certain end; and were the end totally indifferent to us, we should feel the same indifference towards the means. It is requisite a sentiment should here display itself, in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious tendencies. This sentiment can be no other than a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and a resentment of their misery; since these are the different ends which virtue and vice have a tendency to promote.”
But again this is purely descriptive/explanatory…he’s just saying that happiness is something that virtue promotes, and virtue is:
“The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.”
In plain words: it feels good to improve happiness in others, because this is societally useful, and therefore we have constructed moral systems that promote this. When we follow this system, we gain the pleasure of approval from others, a sort of incentive mechanism. If he were born later he would formulate this in terms of evolutionary psychology (and it would not be right, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_spite for one counter-example).
BUT! Crucially: we’re already there. He’s not saying we need to fundamentally change how we live and donate everything we earn, he’s providing a description of things as they already are. This is radically different from anything that is recognizable as “utilitarianism” in the contemporary sense.
As for being an anti-realist and still taking utility maximization as the summum bonum, see the discussion above with Alejandro.
@Anon, OK, so we’re agreed that Hume is an anti-realist. I see that Earthly Knight has already asked the obvious follow up question, and I have to say I’m not impressed by your responses. Hume was certainly a utilitarian. Your evidence to the contrary seems to consist of a dubious interpretation of Hume’s use of the word “utility,” plus the fact that Hume failed to advocate what you seem to take to be core utilitarian principles (“donate everything you earn,” etc.), never mind that neither Bentham nor Mill advocated those alleged core principles either (or are they perhaps also not utilitarians?)
There’s nothing dubious about my reading, it’s plain English. The Enquiry Concerning Principles of Morals even has a section called “Why Utility Pleases”. Utility in the utilitarian sense IS pleasure, it doesn’t CAUSE pleasure — obviously he’s talking about something completely different. It’s crystal clear that the argument he is presenting is this: being societally useful (utility!) leads to pleasure by way of approbation.
“It seems so natural a thought to ascribe to their utility the praise, which we bestow on the social virtues”
i.e.: social virtues should be praised because they are useful. Nothing to do with pleasure – pain.
I don’t know about Mill, but Bentham was extremely similar to today’s utilitarians. He made practical plans for charity on a mass scale, at least within his own country, see Tracts On Poor Laws And Pauper Management. Similarly on animals: “The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.” The tiny differences that remain are simply a matter of opinion and his 18th century culture.
—-
And a bit more on the Hume-Nietzsche relationship:
“Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Men of cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it. The infinite confusions and disorder, which it has caused in the world, diminish much of its merit in their eyes. When they would oppose the popular notions on this head, they always paint out the evils, which this supposed virtue has produced in human society; the subversion of empires, the devastation of provinces, the sack of cities. As long as these are present to us, we are more inclined to hate than admire the ambition of heroes. But when we fix our view on the person himself, who is the author of all this mischief, there is something so dazzling in his character, the mere contemplation of it so elevates the mind, that we cannot refuse it our admiration. The pain, which we receive from its tendency to the prejudice of society, is over-powered by a stronger and more immediate sympathy.”
“The characters of Caesar and Cato, as drawn by Sallust, are both of them virtuous, in the strictest sense of the word; but in a different way: Nor are the sentiments entirely the same, which arise from them. The one produces love; the other esteem: The one is amiable; the other awful: We could wish to meet with the one character in a friend; the other character we would be ambitious of in ourselves.”
What kind of Benthamite is this, filled with admiration for the heroic and praising the “awful” Cato? Ha! Hume is but an ahistorical Nietzsche.
@Anon, You cite the section on “Why Utility Pleases” as if it in some way supported your point. If you believe that it does, then you have misread it so completely that I cannot possibly imagine how to express its points in a way you would understand. I mean, it’s all about the relationship between different kinds of pleasure, and particularly why for various reasons (both self-interested and those involving the faculty of sympathy) people are concerned about pleasure of others as well as their own, but Hume is quite clear about all that and yet you seem to somehow read it as making something other than pleasure (I have no idea what) fundamental.
Utilitarianism (or consequentialism in general) is a useful moral heuristic for certain situations, just like duty-based ethics, right-based ethics, and virtue ethics. What’s odd to me is when people take any one of these as the only possible moral heuristic without arguing for it at both the ethical and meta-ethical level. Hedonic utilitarianism (and it’s bizarro form in anti-natalism) are both cases of the utilitarian heuristic applied inappropriately. What is the appropriate application of a moral heuristic? It’s when we can come to some sort of compromise between our moral intuitions (which obviously vary across individuals and cultures) and our factual commitments. Everyone in their everyday lives uses lots of various moral considerations that come from each moral tradition. This seems to me as it should be. Maybe ethical contextualism is a thing, and if so, I’ll vote in favor of it.
> I’m not sure how to deal with that morally except to say that I am much more confident that charitable offsets are an important moral good than I am that eating cows instead of chickens is.
It means that if you’re eating cows and buying carbon offsets, you’re doing it wrong.
You should eat carbon offsets and buy cows instead? 😉
I find your views intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Also because you might find this amusing – my first gut reaction to “buying carbon offsets” was “my God, we have a solution to the need for fossil fuels! Luther has to be spinning in his grave so fast we could power the whole *planet*!”
Alas, my response to offsets hasn’t evolved much since.
I had the same thought. So what’s the difference between offsets and indulgences?
When you pay for an indulgence, you give money to a priest to do something mysterious that helps you in the afterlife. When you buy an offset, you give money specifically to mitigate a certain harm, Right now in the world.
Before asking what the difference is, mind explaining what the similarity is?
With an ethical offset, you donate money which you believe will rectify a specific harm you caused. With an indulgence you perform some work considered meritorious by the Catholic Church in order to reduce the temporal punishment for a sin you have committed and have since confessed and been forgiven for. This is particularly relevant since according to Catholic teaching, people who die in a state of grace but haven’t undergone sufficient temporal punishment for their sins will spend time in purgatory before going on to heaven.
As far as I can tell, the only resemblence between the two is that first you do something considered bad, then you do something considered good.
what’s the difference between offsets and indulgences?
Well, there is the short and snarky answer (ie, “None”) which is IMO True, but is also Not Factual.
As the local custom of SSC is to hold rational and factual answers in better esteem than snark, I’ll give it a shot. (Please to forgive for tediousness.)
I think it helps to understand what the intent and original purpose of both indulgences and offsets is/are, and also what the eventual practical use and abuse of the instruments became. Because sure, if you compare the ideal of one to the actual effect of another, you get wide differences. NSM if you compare them at relative stages.
Briefly then: indulgences are sacrifices made in atonement for spiritual faults and damage. Tell lies about your sister because you were mad that she got asked out and you didn’t? Fine, you can atone for it by patiently babysitting your little brother even when it is not your turn. (You hate kids, and your brother likes to yell and stomp and throw things and take your books and color in them.) Or maybe you don’t have a little brother to babysit, so you babysit the neighbor kid instead. Or maybe you can’t babysit the neighbor kid, because you have other commitments, so you use your icecream money to pay for another sitter. (You see how the practice can creep?)
This has a long tradition in both religious (across many faiths) and in civil society (think werguild). It acknowledges that a harm/offense was done which can not be undone – forgiveness does not mean it didn’t happen – but that balance, justice, and growing past the…errr…past is helped by specific positive actions.
Wergild, penance, and indulgences were/are formalized in order to a) identify bad actions b) identify positive actions and c) meet social expectations that B could only balance an A of equal weight. In addition, there was an expectation (generally overt, but not always) that bad action A was *regretted* and not intended to be repeated, and so positive action B would be an extra-ordinary action, and not everyday activity. (It should be noted that part of the reconciliation/forgiveness ritual of Christianity includes a statement on the part of the offender that they regret their error (against God, or against God and fellow human) and will strive to not screw up again.)
So a not-unusual method of handling errors and offenses, that became very problematic, when people (priests and community alike) lost commitment to a) reforming and not repeating bad actions and b) matching beneficial action weight to that of the bad action. Plus, money/property became the preferred medium of recompense, rather than direct action. This allowed inflationary creep to wipe out the impact of severe sacrifices over the course of a century or three, and gave the impression (often correct) that rich people were just buying their way out of trouble with God. The Church, on the other hand, got used to being a clearing house for money, instead of a mortal arbitrator of moral behavior.
It’s important, IMO, to remember that this is what split Western Christianity. The schism came close to destroying the formal social order (and wrecking property ownership, and trade, and all that) and eventually gave rise to the Western tradition of a separation of Church and State. So when people compare something to buying indulgences, it’s not a complement.
Carbon offsets: Like indulgences, I get the impression that they have an admirable foundation. Everything has a downside, and many things that cause pollution (which I am using as a short hand for various environmental sins) have long term benefits or would cause a great deal of disruption to avoid. (If you live thirty miles from your job, and the bus would take you two hours one way, driving a car to work is the choice most people would make.) Plus, it is assumed that carbon emissions – like evil in the world – act as group forces, so that reducing *overall* emissions from a person’s actions would be like, oh, lying to the abusive spouse who came to your door looking for their spouse, who is currently hiding in your spare room. Yes, driving a car is bad, but if you use it to earn lots more money, and spend the money on carbon offsets, then you are helping the world. A small evil is done in order to prevent a larger evil.
(In medicine, the phrase is “cut to cure” – ie, you have to take a knife to people and make them bleed in order to make them better. See also: radiation chemo, exercise that makes you sweat, etc.)
IMO, the problem with carbon offset purchases is that they are used – like the bad old indulgences – to “make up” for things which were wrong/bad/harmful and should not have been done in the first place – but the person acting justifies their actions by pretending the offsets/indulgences will “wipe away” the bad action. If it was true that all the effects of ones sin/carbon emissions were countered by the payment, then this ‘tit-for-tat’ could make sense. But this has never been the case in indulgences, and imo is not the case in carbon offsets.
Part of the problem with offsets is (as we pointed out in other places in this thread) because of inaccurate information on emissions, and faulty equations for trading offsets. Another is use of offsets to justify things like recreational international air travel – a better use of the money, imo, would to not fly. I myself find the second type – the use of offsets to justify wasteful/harmful actions – morally offensive and most repugnant, but in actuality, the failure to do proper accounting and balancing of offsets is probably the larger offender.
Of course, we’re not going to be able to fix *that* without a lot more data on just what we’re trying to prevent by buying offsets, but raise that question in some quarters and you’re a climate denier.
My apologies for the huge long comment and I hope it is helpful to someone.
@kerani: I feel like there’s a very important difference in that unlike the harm done by sins that can never be undone regardless of indulgences, carbon emissions are fully fungible. If you offset your carbon you really can wipe away all the damage done by your emissions, assuming of course that your offsets are legit and the numbers add up. You could make a case that in practice that standard isn’t consistently met but I don’t see the problem with the idea in general.
@ Paul Goodman
unlike the harm done by sins that can never be undone regardless of indulgences, carbon emissions are fully fungible
Eh. Firstly, we have the temporal issue, in which CE damage exists for [set time] until the offset actually occurs. Could be minor, but given the shaky nature of climate change maths, I’m not willing to write that off entirely.
Secondly, and more importantly – carbon-equivalent molecules aren’t the only pollutant out there. Always there is something else also produced, and I have no faith in the ability of carbon offsets to recapture all that.
One of the most disturbing things about carbon offsets to me is the way they resemble wergild fines, with the implication that paying enough money for a murder makes the family whole again. (Wergild stops wars, which is greatness. But it does not undo death.
Oh, and thirdly – the math sucks. Or the regulators can’t do math. One of those. Either way, the idealism of offset theory is not translatable to offset practice.
I’ve heard it said that American football is simulated warfare, but I didn’t realize how blatant it was until I actually looked at the formations. They might as well call the line a phalanx, the receivers cavalry, and the quarterbacks generals. They even wear armor and fight on a plain and everything! I think I’m gonna be a lot more interested in football from now on.
Also, golf is simulated hunting. Then again, so is World of Warcraft. Turns out men like hunting and fighting; who knew?
Football is also turn-based combat.
Indeed.
I am very disappointed that this wasn’t a link to Blood Bowl.
That was the most amazing summary of the rules of Football that I have ever read, and I’m now extremely interested in watching a game.
It must be an accurate summary because my eyes glazed over about three lines in.
I apologise, dear Americans, but I simply do not have the spare processing capacity to comprehend anything more complicated than “kick the ball into the goal/hit the sliothár over the bar” when it comes to games and rules 🙂
http://jere.in/penny-arcade-sportz.jpg
I wish it were permissible to rebroadcast 10-year-old football games with the commercials and other milling about removed so it could be cut down to 20 minutes or so, since there are only 11 minutes of gameplay in the average game.
Its not as fun to watch that way as you would think. My father was the head coach of our HS and that is what the scout film was like. I watched it with him often. Also the local TV station replays some of the college games in that format.
Doing without comercials is great, but without the rest, the rhythm is unatural. Also you miss the replays which can help you see how plays work.
It might be better if you get everything from when they break the huddle to when the play is blown dead. Like baseball a good bit of the strategy of football is in the alignment and what happens before the snap/pitch.
@eccdogg:
I think ESPN3 rebroadcasts, after some amount of time, eliminate most of the commercial breaks.
I was being flip when I compared football to an RTS, but I wasn’t being untruthful. If you think of “gameplay” as only when the ball has been snapped to when it is dead, you miss the most important parts of the game–the play on the field really is resolving decisions made between downs like in an RTS.
For example, the previous Super Bowl’s final play was somebody making an interception, but if you stripped the game to only snap-to-dead, that final play would seem like a limp couple of seconds, instead of the baffling decision to pass on 2nd and goal and great work by Butler in reading the play to make the interception that it was. You also miss the clock management that forms an important part of the final minutes in close games.
If you don’t like the game, that’s cool–soccer bores me, a sentiment that is very much in the minority, worldwide. But football won’t be more exciting by stripping it down to only when the ball is in motion; you’ll be even more bored, then.
It’s a bit saddening that the stereotype of nerds who hate football unless you explain it in nerdy terms is an inhabited one. It was always a good game, though like most games it’s more fun to play than watch, and more fun to watch if you play it.
This may be weak naturalistic evidence for priming: Football’s normal explanation is couched in terms that remind nerds that, as a demographic, they are bad at the activity, which primes them to be biased against the game.
Hey, some of us nerds actually have played it. 😛 Violence is fun and it’s one of the few ways to get away with beating the fuck out of someone.
(on the other hand, practice is physically grueling and mostly no fun at all.)
Both of those go double for wrestling!
Come on, World of Warcraft isn’t all simulated hunting. Some of it is simulated gathering.
Waiting in DPS queues can be both figuratively and literally fishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_(gridiron_football)
I can’t find a good reference, but it was consciously copied from World War 2 tank warfare.
Regarding pharmaceutical reciprocity: I understood that while different countries have different safety standards for drugs, it was set up so that if you’ve passed the FDA tests you can present those same experiments as proof to anyone with similar (or weaker) requirements on drug safety proof, and that the reason this was problematic in america was simply that the american FDA is unusually strict, so we already pretty have one-way reciprocity (which I guess is not, technically speaking, reciprocity).
Yes, the same studies can be used for most countries. The main exception is Japan, which requires a certain number of Japanese people in the studies, which is why they didn’t have the pill until 1999. Moreover, the standards in rich countries are all pretty similar. The written standards are so vague that they are meaningless. FDA and EMA have pretty much identical standards in practice today. There have been times where one was stricter, but no consistent pattern in which one: they have repeatedly leapfrogged each other.
As for the Turing case, I think that generics are available in Europe not because the standards are different between places, but because they have changed over time. The drugs were approved 50 years ago, when they could easily have been approved in America, but they weren’t. That 50 years of experience ought to count for something.
There’s two (well more probably) issues–
1) Should molecule x be authorized for sale in the US?
2) Should company y be allowed to sell it’s formulation of molecule x in the US?
You can do reciprocity on #2 without necessarily having to do reciprocity on #1.
Scott, have you ever thought about reposing some of your old articles here, like your FAQs, your LessWrong posts, or your LiveJournal posts? You have accumulated quite the collection of thoughtful and eloquent commenters here, and it would be fascinating to see what they have to say about those pieces.
Related: The Library of Scott Alexandria. Don’t miss out on the ebook version!
I suspect that the overton window has moved far enough that much of his old content is now unacceptably toxic and problematic.
Republishing it would probably give “people who want to attack this blog as a crimethink space and get it shouted out of the pale of acceptable discussion too much ammunition.”
the funny thing is i think the overton window has moved right within sane circles the last few years. That stuff was more impressively out there back then than now.
But he’s more visible and more connected to mean people on Tumblr these days, so the product of vulnerability and radicality is still higher.
I don’t think the Overton Window has shifted to the left in the past couple of years. The current Republican frontrunner became a serious contender by saying that Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug smugglers and later doubling down when challenged on those remarks. I think the Overton Window has expanded both leftward and rightward.
I’ve had similar thoughts, but tended toward different categorizations. I had two main “sequences” in my head:
Finding Truth is Hard:
* The Cowpox of Doubt
* Two Dark Side Statistics Papers
* The Control Group Is Out Of Control
* Utopian Science
* Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
* Beware The Man Of One Study
* Debunked And Well-Refuted
* Trouble Walking Down The Hallway
* Why I Am Not Rene Descartes [part V]
* Contra Hallquist On Scientific Rationality [part III]
* I Myself Am A Scientismist
* On first looking into Chapman’s “Pop Bayesianism”
* Streetlight Psychology
* Holocaust Good For You, Research Finds, But Frequent Taunting Causes Cancer In Rats
* That Chocolate Study
* Contrarians, Crackpots, and Consensus
* If You Can’t Make Predictions, You’re Still In A Crisis
Almost No One is Evil; Almost Everything is Broken:
* We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalities
* Meditations On Moloch
* Misperceptions On Moloch
* The Toxoplasma Of Rage
* The Influenza Of Evil
* The Anti-Libertarian FAQ
* The Invisible Nation – Reconciling Utilitarianism And Contractualism
[Jai’s Foes Without Faces and Ozy’s Privilege vs. Forces can go here too, if we sort of handwave them as Scott-inspired]
No “In favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization”?
I don’t think it really fits in either sequence. It seems more interested in condemning than debugging meanness and uncivilizedness.
Or did you mean there’s a sequence on that theme? Possibly. I’m not sure very much would go in it: that essay, Live By The Sword, maybe Goddess of Everything Else.
You can sort-of do that yourself by posting them to /r/slatestarcodex
(arrgh, I’ve done it again, I’ve posted here when I said I was only going to do so on reddit. Replies will not be read, because there are no reply notifications here; if you want my attention flag up /u/m50d in the /r/slatestarcodex thread)
I think that would be a fantastic idea. LiveJournal and LessWrong posts have an aura of unseriousness. I often want to send people to Scott’s pre-SSC writings, but find myself annoyed by their low-prestige vibe. Scott doesn’t even need to post them here. Someone should make Astral Codex Ten (a name for Slate Star Codex that Scott was considering) and elegantly present his pre-SSC writings there.
I second this notion, although I far prefer the commenting systems on Lesswrong and LJ
The thing I’ve been wondering about after the Muggeridge/Conquest discussion is whether there are huge things (possibly atrocities, possibly who knows what) which haven’t made it onto our radar. I don’t *think* it would be possible to murder millions of people without the world noticing it these days, but I might be missing something.
Look into how many people have died of malaria as a result of DDT being banned. You will be shocked.
In countries subject to malaria, DDT is only banned for agricultural use. Agricultural use of DDT hastens the development of resistance in mosquitoes, so banning agricultural use of DDT makes it more effective against malaria.
In practice though, you can’t guarantee that the DDT is being used according to regulations, especially as most malaria endemic countries are not known for having effective governments or regulation regimes. I used to live in Ghana and DDT is sometimes used to fish there.
https://www.modernghana.com/news/475765/1/killer-ddt-dynamite-still-used-in-fishing.html
On a totally unrelated note, how do you insert hyperlinks into comments?
On a totally unrelated note, how do you insert hyperlinks into comments?
You would type [a href=”slatestarcodex.com”]example text[/a], except you would replace the square brackets (these: [) with pointy brackets (these: <). For example, the above code produces this as output:
example text
Scott used to have a few HTML pointers on top of the reply form, but I don’t know what happened to them.
Look into how easy and cheap it still is to buy DDT … you will be shocked … and you will be shocked too at the persistence and environmental ubiquity of organochloride pesticides like DDT.
nothing wrong with this but lmao holy shit does by brain pattern match it to a spam comment
Lol … yes, all your ideological problems are solved by this one crazy trick!
There is something wrong with it: the utterly unnecessary bolding of links. It would be a strictly better comment without that.
Also without the gratuitous ellipses.
The bolding plus the phrase “you will be shocked”. People who are not holding live electrodes just shouldn’t use that phrase.
OK, you rational folks win. No ellipses. No boldface. No “you will be shocked”.
Just one simple ultra-rational market-efficient message
Hurry, because DDT supplies *are* limited (to 500,000 tons per month FOB Mumbai, yikes).
People who were claiming that left-wing-aligned lying doesn’t get spread about, here is an excellent example of a lie that is widely believed in right and libertarian circles.
(As Protagoras points out, DDT hasn’t been banned for antimalarial use).
This also feels like “the digression prevents discussion” type of posts.
The question was are we missing something that is “the murder of millions of people”. Favorite anti-regulation talking point is inserted as the first Sub-comment. Sub thread becomes arguing over claim.
But, perhaps the commenter really believs banning DDT is due to wanting people to die, or at the very least callous disregard for people’s lives. But it doesn’t seem like it was posted as an example that really responded to OP.
Edit: and it’s not as if malaria itself is an unknown and uncombatted killer. There are massive anti-malarial effort ongoing, pretty much anywhere that the country is stable enough.
And yes, I realize I am semi-guilty of the same thing in this comment.
Good point. This seems like exactly the kind of thing a Reign of Terror should discourage–a random NRx shitpost shutting down a topic.
I reported it and your post (not because I think there’s something wrong with yours, just in hopes that Scott might notice the two of them). I don’t know if that was the appropriate thing to do, but I’m new here.
Fair enough. I wouldn’t have reported either as I think Scott’s shot-across-the-bow is more a call for self-policing than anything else, but I can’t fault the thought process.
I feel like there now needs to be a “LiterallyTheWorst” competing username.
OTOH, this is an “open thread” and probably ought to be the place most permissive of digressions.
@Gdub,
I got the impression that HBC wasn’t referring to the digression itself, but the way these digressions are used strategically to shut a topic down whenever someone’s not talking about the latest NRx/libertarian pet peeve but left an opening by which the dark arts can force them to.
One of the tell-tales for this tends to be that the content of the original shitpost is not actually true. Steve Johnson was guilty of this pretty regularly.
TheWorst – I was mostly engaging in a bit of snark. At worst, I was implying that HBC didn’t need to be reported. But otherwise your point is well taken and I agree.
Digressing a bit is one thing, but intentionally derailing conversations to your pet topic is of course rude.
Gee, I sure am glad that the standard of discourse here is so high that nobody would even think to take a specific label and bleach its semantics until it means “anything and everything I don’t like”!
If an anti-vaxxer starts shutting down every discussion that isn’t about how vaccines cause autism (whenever anti-vaxxer thought it was an opportunity to talk about anti-vaxx, which is all the time) that would be the same problem, and mentioning this activity would in no way be “bleaching semantics.”
Or are you saying Steve Johnson wasn’t NRx? I’d certainly accept correction on that front, though I’d appreciate more detail.
@TheWorst:
I think nydwracu was objecting to you categorizing the Van Horn post as NRx. There is nothing particularly NRx about the content of that post, so describing it as NRx is either an earnest mistake or what he describes, the turning of the category NRx into merely anything you don’t like.
@HBC: Thanks, and while it’s a fair criticism–I can’t always tell the difference between “Irrelevant Libertarian Shitpost” and “Irrelevant NRx Shitpost”–I didn’t mean to be referring to the object-level.
The habit of irrelevant shitposting, to my mind, matters more than which particular agenda the shitposter thinks he’s serving.
Maybe in North Korea? Do the effects of the collapse of the USSR (largely related to the collapse of law and order and public health), especially in Russia, count?
Congo War? The entire nation of Eritrea?
Kevin’s example is only one of many where people claim that billions have been killed without people noticing. I think that the total is 100 billion over the course of the 20th century.
Not possible; 100 thousand killed per year*100=10 million killed during 20th century. Fewer than either WW II or 1959-61 famine.
I think 100 billion is the total number of people who have ever died. Maybe somebody was making a claim that there is no such thing as noticing?
As an aside, 7 billion is the number of people who have not died (yet! growth mindset?). The evidence base for “man is mortal” is looking somewhat weak.
Furthermore, only half the members of the Beatles have died, which means that the basis for “Beatles are mortal” is even weaker.
Oh, you’re one of the deniers.
75%!
60% if you count the guy who replaced him.
57% if you count the guy who replaced him and also Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe
(Ignoring Paul-is-dead, it’s still 50% with the not-really-beatles)
Ridiculous. Everyone knows that Paul has been systematically harvesting the life-force of the other Beatles to maintain his own youth.
Jeez, you guys. Douglas’s claim is of the form: “Kevin says that his church has a piece of the true cross, and I believe it– after all, there are enough fragment of the true cross floating around Europe to build a man-o’-war.”
This is one of the more plausible formulations of the argument I’ve heard– you only have the DDT backlash killing people 62 years before Silent Spring, and a mere 39 years before the chemical was first used as an insecticide.
“Kevin says that his church has a piece of the true cross, and I believe it– after all, there are enough fragment of the true cross floating around Europe to build a man-o’-war.”
I’m going to address that, because it’s something often seen floating around, even if the person using it has no idea it’s a fragment of the rhetoric of the Reformation.
First, not every relic claiming to be a relic of the True Cross is acknowledged by the Church to be such. Yes, you will be shocked to learn relic-faking was a thriving trade back in the Middle Ages and probably even earlier! 🙂
Secondly, this “enough to build a man o’war” probably comes ultimately from Calvin’s ” In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load.” However, Calvin was writing polemic, not scientific or historical research. Exaggeration in the aid of mockery of pernicious superstition was not something he rejected.
Thirdly, we have the work of a guy finicky and obsessive enough to go “Well, all right then, Calvin and Erasmus, let’s count up how many and what size!”
Charles Rohault de Fleury and his “Les instruments de la passion” of 1870:
Does it really matter that we notice if we still do nothing?
The mortality associated to schizophrenia is “huge” by any reasonable definition:
Note that the risk “7.2/1,000 persons” translates to fifty million afflicted people globally.
Are the dire mortality rates associated to schizophrenia (and other severe mental disorders) as low as reasonably practicable? This question excites spirited debate.
Conclusion The early deaths of the world’s severely mentally ill people are among the easiest deaths to ignore … somehow we feel (to our shame and disgrace) “they had it coming.”
I mean, I’ve lost a friend to schizophrenia (and fuck you for saying I feel he had it coming), but it’s not clear to me that deaths due to schizophrenia are morally culpable by anyone the way a genocide might be. It’s not clear that we’re not earnestly trying to treat schizophrenia, and even if we weren’t, it seems unlikely that we’re deliberately causing it. John Oliver is not a reliable source of earnest truthseeking.
Emerging neuroscience points to molecular mechanisms by which personal contact and social support, when given to people like your schizophrenic friend, can indeed exert therapeutic effects … so please accept my sincere respect and appreciation of the friendship that you provided, under circumstances that in general are very far from easy.
I don’t think it follows at all that we feel that the severely mentally ill “had it coming” in some way. We (well, the general populace, not necessarily the people in this community) are far more prone to ignore the tremendous prevalence of deaths related to old age. I don’t think we’d say that people who die of aging-related causes “had it coming,” it’s just that we see their deaths as part of the natural order and outside of our power to correct. I think that most people would consider curing all severe mental illness to be a social good, but absent such cures, I think it’s fair to acknowledge that it’s more difficult to keep people who’re severely mentally ill within our social safety nets than people who’re not.
Yes, obviously.
Yet isn’t the really challenging question, are we trying hard enough?
Here rationalism provides no very assured guidance, and even the better angels of our nature fold their wings.
The really challenging question is, does linking to images improve the rhetorical force of an otherwise empty argument?
Perhaps linked images could be used to stand in for content in order to make an emotional appeal.
The above-pictured better angel with folded wings is of mass-murderer James Eagan Holmes, who was judged in trial to be “mentally ill but legally sane“ by reason of schizotypal personality disorder.
Tragically, Holmes’ exceptionally strong rational capacities were accompanied by exceptionally weak empathic capacities.
Sobering question Can any measure short of an outright weapons ban prevent mass-murder by persons whose reasoning capacities are intact, but whose empathic capacities are diminished?
Conclusion A handful of communities cultivate empathy even for persons who are incapable of reciprocal empathy — the Friends are one such community — but asymmetric empathic practice is rare by-and-large.
To these challenges there are no easy or simple answers (as it seems to me and many).
The angel I posted is Himenokouji Akiko. She comes from the anime Onii-chan dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankeinai Yo Na and is furiously, passionately in love with her older brother.
Conclusion Anime owns.
Yes, because the desire to understand “Which evangelion character are you most like?“ is irresistible, and the empathic urge to share this knowledge with others is universal … this universal and fundamentally compassionate outreach is a great strength of the anime arts.
whether there are huge things (possibly atrocities, possibly who knows what) which haven’t made it onto our radar
The cynical part of my nature says do it quietly enough internally, spread it out over decades, and make sure you’re on the right side of American governments of whatever party (“our gallant ally in Latin America/Middle East/Central, Western, Eastern, Southern or other parts of Africa/Far East in the fight against totalitarian Communism”) and you’ll be fine.
The media won’t be interested and sure, some hippy-dippy organisations like Amnesty might run a few campaigns, but as long as the populace of the West gets the newest shiny toys each year and we aren’t harrowed with ‘drowned toddlers washed up on beaches’ imagery, things can tick along nicely (until the Yanks decide your rival would play ball more nicely with them and let you fall or take you out themselves).
I only learned about the anti communist purges in the 60s in Indonesia recently. About a million people were murdered in living memory in a country that neighbours mine and I had no idea.
Ethnic germans
I remember seeing a quite interesting but lonely documentary on the systematic murder of very large numbers of ethnic germans after WW2.
I don’t know how large the real death toll was, the documentary was quite upfront that records from the time are poor because it was quite popular with the victors of the war, didn’t get much news or academic attention and happened while the truth of what had happened in the concentration camps was going public meaning that there was a widespread belief that the ethnic germans deserved whatever happened to them.
The show included a lot of interviews with elderly ethnic germans people who were children at the time recounting stories of their families being rounded up and shot etc.
Eugenics
2nd possibility, warning, I am not an expert on this subject and this is based on a few evenings searching google scholar for figures and some conjecture, nothing more:
I remember a few years ago trying to hunt down figures on the gender balance of people subjected to forcible sterilization as part of eugenics programs over the centuries. I wasn’t too surprised to get the impression that as fashions changed it appeared to swap from targeting more women to more men and back again but the amount of data available through google scholar varied massively by gender.
In decades where the focus was on sterilizing criminals men seemed to be targeted more but I’d find 1 maybe 2 sets of figures for perhaps a 20 or 30 year stretch then the focus would shift to sterilizing disabled people and it would target women more. Imagine a sine wave shifting back and forth between male and females with data points along the wave whenever I could find numbers for a year.
In a 20(or more) year stretch where mostly women were targeted I might find 5 to 10 data-points, papers mentioning how many men and women were sterilized with the line looping up then back towards the 50%:50% line.
In a 20(or more) year stretch between times when women were targeted I might find 1 or 2 datapoints, papers mentioning how many men and women were sterilized or sometimes no papers at all.
I suspect that academic funding may influence how much is researched and published about the treatment of different groups in this case.
Right, no one has heard of the the single largest ethnic cleansing in the history of the world, on par with the partition of India. However, it was the least deadly ethnic cleansing in the history of the world, so I reject the charge of “systematic murder.”
“Nonetheless, the official positions of the German government and the German Red Cross are that the death toll resulting from expulsions ranged from 2 to 2.5 million civilians.[7][8] The German Federal Agency for Civic Education puts the figure at 2 million.[9]”
Fair enough, when I heard about it however it genuinely wasn’t on my radar which surprised me given how much I’d heard over the years, that something on a similar scale to the Rwandan genocide was just not mentioned in the many documentaries about the war that I’d seen.
Correction: “between times when **men** were targeted I might find 1 or 2 datapoints”
It’s a little hard to parse but it does actually make sense as written. There are the 20 year stretches during which women are targeted, and then the 20 year stretches between those times.
How many people know about the deliberate famine during the Biafran war? I don’t think anyone has an accurate body count, but my impression is that it was on the order of a million people, killed by an internationally recognized and to a considerable degree supported government.
If you count excess mortality due to drug regulation, one can argue that when the FDC finally approved a beta blocker it also confessed to killing about a hundred thousand people by the delay in doing so.
Re: competitive dictatorship: you are very right about that, but your wording in MoF was misunderstandable and was misunderstood. I wrote a long post explaining it, it looks like arguing with you (because I misunderstood you too) but now I think it is fairer to say I am arguing with how you are misunderstood. Whatever. TL;DR “Power does not diminish by dividing it, it diminishes by dividing the domain of power, and actually even in that case it does not diminish over the total sum of the domain, merely makes humans exempt from the domain – and yet that is the key to human freedom, perhaps the only one.”
https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/the-gravest-error-misunderstanding-the-division-of-power/
The Muslim conquest of India. The shortest way to describe it would be “ISIS conquers Genroku-age Japan multiple times“.
The destruction of indigenous culture was so phenomenally thorough that very little remains today. (What is now called ‘Hinduism’, for instance, actually consists of what were, back in their day, multiple mutually incompatible and separate religions with their own conversion ceremonies. For comparison, imagine a catastrophe covering the modern world so dire that five hundred years in the future, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam get lumped together under a single name.)
Nothing in Indian history makes sense unless this massive discontinuity is acknowledged and accounted for. Sadly, for political reasons, the official stance of the government is denying that anything like this ever happened. This denial is also repeated and reinforced in school and university curricula. Worse, anyone trying to study this topic in any detail is treated like an outcaste, and has their books literally banned.
After that horrible story, I really shouldn’t have laughed at “outcaste”.
You’re right. Substitute the word ‘racist’ for ‘outcaste’ to get the right connotations (for modern liberal American society). (And I mean the old-fashioned and violent kinds of racists, not those merely tarred with the word as a smear.)
The way the denial works isn’t by denying any of the facts of what happened; it’s done by glossing over them, and then creatively re-interpreting the period of Islamic rule.
An analogy: imagine ISIS becomes a stable Middle Eastern state in a hundred years (after losing and gaining territory ten or fifteen times in the process). Two hundres years later, ISIS v2 conquers the same area again. As does ISIS v3, another hundred years later.
700 years later, history books treat ISIS as merely another state, glossing over completely how barbaric it was, specially during its conquest phase. Also glossing over the barbarism of the v2 and v3 variants, as well. The same history books showcase the ‘achievements’ of ISIS rule. And to top it off,
And then you realise that the history book is being used in a democratic country with a 20% Salafi population that’s politically powerful (and with a vocal minority within it that isn’t unwilling to get its hands dirty being violent if they think they’re under attack/being insulted), with state control of education, and everything suddenly makes horrible sense.
Addendum (remembered when I read the ISIS re-introduced slavery): the words ‘Hindu Kush’ mean ‘Killer of Hindus’ in Persian. They’re also the name of a mountain range in Afghanistan. It came to have this name because it was on the route which Muslim slave traders, carrying slaves from India to the slave markets of the Islamic Middle East, had to traverse – and where Indian slaves died in huge numbers due to ‘violent cold and quantity of snow’.
Imagine a situation where so many slaves dies in the Atlantic crossing that the Atlantic came to be known as the Black-killer Ocean. (An ocean is not a mountain range, but the parallel is striking nonetheless.)
Indian history books mention none of this; not the slaving, and certainly not the origin of the name. Currently, the majority population lives in complete ignorance of what the Islamic conquest was like, and what it did to their ancestors, and how it contributes to their current condition. And any ‘waking up’ to history is going to be immensely painful for all involved.
A parallel: Imagine there existed a Jewish country the size of India. Now imagine that Nazis captured and ruled it for ~500 years, and found it more profitable to not murder everyone, but live instead as a dominant and ruthless ruling minority (while, naturally, completely destroying/dismantling/defunding every Jewish institution, and tearing down every big synagogue they could lay their hands on, and forcing the Jews to live as second or third-class citizens). Now imagine that the country becomes independent, but the majority of Jews today is completely unaware of this history, and the government is scared shitless of their grand (but ultimately false) narrative of historic peaceful co-existence being overturned, purely for reasons of political expediency and maintaining the peace today. That’s India’s current situation in a nutshell.
Nothing in Indian history makes sense unless this massive discontinuity is acknowledged and accounted for.
Not sure I agree with this. Seems there are several historically plausible paths that could have lead to roughly the present state of India, e.g. the Brahmins conquering the nation from within, subjugating other religions and cultures and forcing them to accept low-caste status within their religion, enslaving excess low-caste individuals and selling them abroad, making friends with high-status Muslims from neighboring states, etc. This may not be true, but a thing doesn’t have to be true to make sense. And a sensible untruth, long established, makes for a perfectly functional and stable history.
The United States still celebrates Columbus Day, even though every educated American knows that Leif Eriksson beat him by half a millennium.
And any ‘waking up’ to history is going to be immensely painful for all involved.
Therefore, nobody is going to want to wake up, and as it turns out nobody has to wake up. Certainly not in an abrupt and traumatic manner.
It might be worth mentioning that what we normally think of as caste is a very coarse-grained classification (much like the similar classification of society in the Icelandic Eddas, if you’re familiar with those); it does come out of the Vedas, but at the time of the Mughal conquests the practical understanding of caste in India was far more complicated. We’re talking hundreds of communities — called jāti — that have no close analogs in English, but can be thought of as some linear combination of tribe and religion and hereditary trade guild, and which didn’t map particularly cleanly into the Vedic four-color system. Although they would, of course, have been aware of it.
There’s some debate over how the modern understanding evolved, but social realignments during the post-Mughal collapse and subsequent British administration seem to have been important.
Any such plausible path has to account for known historical facts – which the current narrative doesn’t. In fact, given the literary and archaeological evidence available today, the disconnect between ‘popular’ history and what what the evidence points to is as vast as the popular egalitarian/left-wing perception of IQ (it isn’t real, isn’t of a single type, and doesn’t matter anyway) versus the what is common knowledge among psychometricians. (Readers: please don’t take the thread down the direction of debating the example; I’m merely using it to point out that huge disconnect exists, and that this disconnect is qualitatively similar to the one in the example. It’s a split within the academy as well.)
I suspected something like this, due to the overuse of the word “Vedic”. That is similar to “loosely Old Testament based, at one point”. Really a brooooad circle of things.
BTW what really weirds me out about India is that it seems they never say a clear no to anything. Rather coopt everything. I mean the West has a spirit of confronting whatever you don’t like head-on, while India seems to have a spirit of “oh, my opponent is totally saying the same thing as me just with different words”. For example, they don’t want to become Christians, so instead of telling the West in the honest blunt way we are used to to fuck off with all this Jesus thing, so instead of saying a clear NO, they just turned Jesus into a Hindu empowered avatar (of some god of healing) and then there is this endless obfuscation about how Christianity, Hinduism, and basically everything and the kitchen sink are being totally the same thing just in different words.
This is really weirding me out, I intend to study more about Indian culture but this total utter lack of confronting or even openly disagreeing with anything just makes it hard to decide what can I actually take seriously vs. what is just an nicey-nice obfuscation / placation attempt to avoid tensions.
And I guess the problem of teaching history is of the same kind – it is the same never antagonize anyone approach.
The reaction is extreme, I would expect professional historians to be able to talk about this even if it’s downplayed in the schools. Your description of the Mughals as ‘basically ISIS’ isn’t. (Is there attempts to co-opt this stuff by somebody perhaps? The closest thing I’ve seen is the reaction to details to European on European slavery which gets co-opted by elements who try to use it to justify rather extreme racism, ‘see the Irish are ok despite the slavery so its black people’s fault’ and as a result legitimate scholarship that isn’t trying to pretend the affairs are the same gets ugly knee jerk reactions).
For a comparison, the Roman conquest of Gaul killed or enslaved somewhere between a fifth and half of the population in the first 5 years (Caesar claimed a million total and real historians tell me this actually probably wasn’t exaggerated but the population figures of the time are very fuzzy). And the guy running that was considered to be exceptionally merciful by the Romans! Even the repeat gain/loss territory is only really notable because it’s the same entity, instead of the same spot getting conquered 2-6 times by different people each time.
I believe that professional historians do not, of course, deny any of the facts of the case. It’s how the dominant academic narrative (Marxist (yes, classic old-school Marxist; India was socialist until around ~1991, at which point a reforms process started that is far from over, but the country’s ‘intelligentsia’, for whatever it’s worth, has for a long time been solidly Marxist, and changes much more slowly than the economy)) interprets these facts that causes trouble. For an idea of what I’m talking about, I suggest Arun Shourie’s “Eminent Historians”. It has its own bias, so correct for that, but the point he makes isn’t really disputable.
Thanks to the extremely violent recent history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the country, there’s a massive reluctance among academics to acknowledge anything that would cause disturbances of the peace, or to interpret many acts of historic destruction as religiously motivated (even if they clearly were). In addition, there are political and religious extremist movements within the country that the liberal, Westenised, and fundamentally colonial-descended administration fears both ideologically and politically. To these people, evidence of Muslim barbarism in the past is politically useful. There is a great fear of a repeat of Nazi history if the majority starts to subscribe to anti-Muslim ideologies.
The problem is that the dominant narrative is simply wrong, and the ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘bigoted’ narrative closer to the truth. Not because the fundamentalists have any great insight into history – far from it (their own distortions are as bad, if allowed free rein) – but by sheer historical accident.
And so history became a political game (and a very dangerous one), with the dominant group – Marxists – pushing their narrative through the state. If history had not been politicised, and the naked truth left out there, there would have been nothing for the fundamentalists to build a narrative around. Persecution and ‘othering’ thrives when the ‘other’ actually tries to pull such crap. A honest appraisal of the damage would have been painful, true, but it would have prevented the very thing – the dominance of fundamentalist or nationalist interpretations – that may now come to pass.
I do not believe that I err when I describe the Mughals as ‘basically ISIS’. An examination of their policies shall reveal that in their treatment of conquered territories and their laws, they were nearly identical, specially during the ‘conquest’ phase (which is the phase at which ISIS is now). ISIS appears barbaric to us in the modern world because of it’s aberrant nature in our view of history as a linear progression. ISIS would, however, be considered completely normal (if commendably more zealous than expected) among the Islamic empires of the time of the Mughals, and certainly so among the Islamic empires that preceded them.
Further, the characterisation applies not merely to the Mughals – who were merely the last Islamic wave – but also all those that preceded them. They merely followed what was standard practice at the time. ISIS is aberrant because the standard Islamic practice of that time is not the standard Islamic practice of this time – or, at least, isn’t supposed to be.
The reason I, personally, am so impassioned by this topic is because I grew up libertarian in India, within a closed and stifling intellectual culture, of which this is merely one manifestation. As classical Indian civilisation simply died during the Muslim conquest (every institution was destroyed; what remains today are the remnants that could stick around in the absence of support and through multiple rounds of destruction and persecution), it is not one that I can claim as a personal loss – you cannot lose or miss what you never had.
And any attempt to talk sanely about this is met with the same kinds of desperate emotional shrieking and panicking, followed by personal insults and attacks, that greets serious and sober talk about race or gender in the US. The truth is nobody’s friend. Everything you say is a political statement. So my stance on this has gotten me tarred and personally attacked as a ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘Hindu nationalist’ repeatedly, though I think the state should stay the hell out of religion (and almost everything, really). I don’t like to contribute to (much less bring up) this topic in ‘polite’ society, for fear that merely knowing what happened is sufficient grounds for getting lumped in with crazy people from both sides. This is not a dilemma I expect anything other than an epistemic safe space to solve. SSC is the closest I’ve seen to something like this, which is why I posted this here. As such, I haven’t gone near this topic in years, for these reasons.
This is part of a larger problem – the politicisation of almost everything in Indian intellectual life (controlled as it is by state institutions), and complete dominance of Marxist thought in particular and left-wing ideology in general. Imagine the institutional capture of the humanities/social sciences by the left current that has happened in the USA and Europe without the network of right-wing think-tanks and other institutions that co-exist with then; India is such a place. Growing up there with libertarian views was like being a stranger in a strange and hostile land.
You say that, in the interests of preserving interfaith harmony and promoting Marxist ideology, Indian history texts gloss over the horrors visited by the Mughal conquerors on India, and I see no reason to doubt you. But what do they say about the many atrocities inflicted by Hindus on their fellow Indians in the centuries before and after the Muslim conquest? Do they speak frankly about the venerable custom of immolating widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, the vast swaths of society who were treated as subhuman garbage for the grievous sin of having been born into the wrong family, or the fact that the central Vaishnava religious text is one long glorification of violence and bloodshed?
A lot (so far as I can tell), hell yes (numerically disproportionate amounts of textual space are devoted to widow-immolation; I suggest you take a look at the numbers here; it appears that the practice is either an emergent or indigenous one, which every elite – Brahminical/Hindu, Muslim, British, and finally the modern Indian state – have been trying to eliminate whenever they could: see here), hell yes again, and to the last – textbooks most wisely stay out of the business of critiquing religious doctrines. One major reason I get so upset it precisely because of this unbalanced treatment. It’d be fine if they took a hard line on human rights and blasted everything that was barbaric proportionate to its barbarism. But that is not happening.
How does that cause you to update your beliefs?
It’s all too human to see the outgroup as a monolithic mob who bear collective guilt for any crime any outgroup-member commits, while viewing members of the ingroup as distinct individuals who are of course only responsible for their own actions. A prime example of this is xenophobes who fixate on sensationalist tales of crimes committed by immigrants, without even thinking to ask whether the rate is higher or lower than among native-born citizens.
I mostly wanted to make sure you weren’t doing that.
Ah, I see.
My critique of Islam is fundamentally a libertarian/liberal one, not a sectarian or partisan one. I’m well aware – perhaps more than most, having actually looked into it – into how fragmented the larger Islamic world is into sects and cults. Most are aware of the major divisions, such as Shia and Sunni, but India has a bunch of local traditions that, though often classifiable into the larger groups, often fall outside it as well, such as the Ahmediyas, or Bohras, or the indigenous variants of the Sufi cults. In addition, the Muslim population of India is not, if taken as a group, as mindkilled as that in the Middle East (though now I suspect it may be bifurcating into revanchist and modernised forms, as some part of the group succumbs to the siren-song of modernity, and the other falls prey to the organised international movements that have been attempting – with a large measure of success – to make Islamic practice uniform across the world (which I guess is another feature of modernity)).
I use the word ‘mindkilled’ advisedly, as Islam as conceived of by Mohammed was not just a religious revelation, but an ideology, a polity, and an in-group all in one. Insofar as it makes truth-claims about the world, it is subject to factual investigation; to the extent that it makes political or normative claims, it is open to the same kind of critique as any ideology. (I use a singular ‘it’ for rhetorical convenience; I am well aware that doctrinal differences exist within what is at this point an umbrella term.)
This, by the way, is exactly the problem I’ve faced before: that of people suspecting my motives. The idea that I may be outraged with Islamic ideology, and the behaviour of its believers in the past, for liberal/libertarian reasons is not taken seriously, even though it is the case.
Some of my earliest experiences with this double standard were that of consistent libertarian outrage at the excesses of history, no matter where they came from. So, for instance, I find widow-immolation (to the extent it was forced or due to misguided beliefs) horrifying. (And even if completely sanely and voluntarily chosen, I still find the suffering involved horrifying.) And that’s treated as completely normal. But being equally outraged by Islamic atrocities in the historical record has been met with hysterical accusations of partisan bias, personal attacks, and a questioning of my motives, even though the sack of a single small city by, say, the Mughals (the Ghurids, Ghaznavids, and assorted others were worse than the Mughals, I believe), would involve much more killing and suffering than a century’s worth of widow-immolation (in sheer numbers).
FWIW, I have no animus against those still living for the crimes of their far-distant ancestors, who are now all dead. (In case it’s not clear yet, my stance is a libertarian one.) Constantly being treated as if I secretly wanted to ‘Kill all the Muslims!’, in spite of my repeated assertions to the contrary, and in spite of my consistent libertarianism, was jarring, tiring, and enormously invalidating, and again one reason why I gave up talking about this before. It’s nice to have a place where, having established that I am not in fact a cartoon villain, I can finally talk sanely and sensibly; or at least, so I hope.
Do you understand where I am coming from now?
Rather than answer your question I’m going to answer a different one instead. What triggers manipulative-nationalist-propaganda alarms for me is hearing a [star-bellied sneetch] recite a litany of horrors committed by the [sneetches without stars on their bellies] and complain how none are accurately recorded in the history books, without even alluding to the many nasty things which I know her fellow [star-bellied sneetches] have done. Clearly it is the comparative claim– that textbooks do justice to the latter but not the former– which matters. So the best way to persuade me, and perhaps others like me, would be to acknowledge up front several ways that [star-bellied sneetches] have been bad actors before launching into how the history of the [sneetches without stars on their bellies] is whitewashed.
Keep in mind that I have no way of verifying what Indian history textbooks actually look like or what topics are tabooed among Indian intellectuals, so if I’m going to trust what you have to say you’re going to have to work a little to establish your even-handedness and commitment to liberal values. This has nothing to do with your particular cause, and I’m not trying to invalidate your experiences or whatever. It’s just that a Hindu nationalist masquerading as a liberal to foment anti-muslim sentiment and a sincere liberal trying to set straight a biased historiography look uncannily similar in silhouette.
Regarding Tabarrok’s excellent point, I have made that argument for decades, suggesting any drug licensed in Europe be allowed here with no more than 1 year delay, referring to it as the “Europe As Guinea Pig” proposal.
Historical data shows you would need at least 3 years to safely use Europe as a Guinea Pig , see Contergan : used from October 1957 to November 1961 ( first dicovery of problems December 1960 )
And for safety reasons i suggest the opposite , anything forbidden in one country is automatically forbidden in the other too .
I’m kind of curious, would you institute a three-year delay in the case of bans as well? It seems like there are enough political issues involved in substance bans to warrant a little caution.
Are you sure that 50 years ago the testing times were not significantly shorter?
Speaking as somebody who is opposed to the FDA entirely, and would rather anything be legal for anyone:
No.
That creates perverse incentives for Europe to continue to allow dangerous drugs to be sold there for a set period of time, for no other reason than to allow their companies to then be able to market and sell those drugs in the US going forward.
> I am experimenting with a Reign of Terror. So – Steve Johnson is banned for reasons of total personal caprice.
This sounds less like a Reign of Terror and more like a light sprinkle.
Also… really??
As somebody who knows nothing about this issue, could somebody please give me some context? Is this really as capricious as it sounds or is there something I don’t know about Steve Johnson?
I think he had a history of warping comment topics towards NRx-adjacent directions while remaining within the letter of the law; this is a correction for tone. Assuming I have the right guy, it is more-likely-than-baseline than Steve Johnson would agree with the governing philosophy that led to his ouster, even though he’s probably not too happy with the ban on the object level.
“Democracy is a failure! Rule by a strong autocratic leader is the only way for society to thrive! Sure, peoples’ feelings will get hurt but that’s just the way it has to be.”
“…What do you mean you’re banning me just because you feel like it?!”
Logicians: Does this qualify as a self-refuting argument?
An opposing and perhaps equally valid interpretation is that in banning Steve, Scott demonstrated that Steve’s ideas are applicable and even helpful within the domain of blog curation. But either way, the situation is probably very ironic.
Ages ago, Scott posted
And, as near as I could tell at the time, they didn’t.
That entire community won a bit of respect from me for that.
Ah, I don’t think it particularly has anything to do with reaction or neo-reaction or liberalism or libertarianism or anything of that nature. My own personal notion is that a person’s blog is their own domain and they make the rules.
If they want to allow everyone on to say anything at all, even things banned elsewhere, that’s their right. If they want to say certain topics will not be entertained (as Scott says “no race or gender in the open threads”) that’s their right. If they say “I have the right of life and death over comments and I’ll ban who I like why I like, e.g. it’s a month ending in “er”, once again, that’s their right.
I forget where I saw it but someone made the analogy that a personal blog is like someone’s living room. So for me, you’re being invited into the house and you’re a guest. You behave accordingly, and the host is perfectly entitled to toss you out the door if you kick the dog, put your feet up on the table, slap their spouse/partner on the behind and demand “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer, okay?” And it’s no excuse to say “That’s how I behave at home!” or “You asked them to get you a beer!” This is not your house, so have manners.
(I’m the grumpy cranky slightly crazy spinster aunt that turns up at family events because, okay?)
If someone is setting up a public forum for discussion of particular matters (whether backed by an organisation or not, e.g. media or politically-affiliated social media outlets) it’s a different matter, but a private effort – it’s their blog, their rules.
Why is it that whenever we want to build a functional community, we always find ourselves using the neo’s system instead of the one we claim to believe in?
Maybe we are using a compromise between autocratic rule and absolute egalitarianism.
@ Jaskologist
It’s almost like being prevented from posting comments on a blog and being prevented from living are substantially different things.
Jaskologist: Dictatorship works great when combined with painless exit. It’s when exit starts getting costly or hard that it becomes a serious problem. Exit not only limits harm but also gives dictators incentives to act better. Sort of like the free market, really.
I don’t find this argument very good. Generally, if an opponent of some idea characterizes the idea as supporting X, and proponents don’t actually claim that it supports X, it probably doesn’t. Of course, ideally, anyone should be able to understand even their opponents, but this is an area where as humans it’s easy to fall into biases where we interpret out opponent’s ideas in a way convenient for ourselves.
Just consider that this could be done for any opinion whatsoever. If you didn’t like socialists on your blog you could say “well, socialists believe in government control, and I’m the government here, so socialists have no reason to complain about my banning them”. If you wanted to ban conservatives you could say “conservatives believe in private property and this is my private property, so conservatives have no reason to complain about my banning them”. If you want to ban people who oppose immigration you could claim that by their standards they are immigrants to your blog and it’s okay to keep them out; if you wanted to ban people who support immigration you could say that they don’t mind being displaced by immigrants and so they should have no complaint being displaced by friendlier posters.
An argument that proves anything proves nothing.
This is not to say that Scott can’t ban what he wants, but the argument “see, by your own standards you should be okay with being banned” sounds like a rationalization, not a fair analysis of the opinions he is banning.
@ Jiro
Uh, I think that last part was a joke.
@Nita
Are you sure the neoreactionaries know that?
@Deiseach:
Everything you said is true, yet…
I have this one relative in real life who is really invested into keeping her living room pristine. Every chair and cushion cover must be placed just so; every flat surface must be polished; you may touch only these specific things and not others. If you violate any of these rules… Well, just don’t violate the rules.
I stopped visiting that person a long time ago.
@Bugmaster
Maybe that’s their passive-aggressive way of saying they don’t want visitors?
“Why is it that whenever we want to build a functional community, we always find ourselves using the neo’s system instead of the one we claim to believe in?”
Answer: because in an environment where everyone’s free to leave, defending your borders is cheap and easy, and there are no harmful externalities spilling out onto your neighbors, neo-feudalism works great. The blogosphere is such an environment. The physical world, not so much.
“All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa.”
— Larry Wall
Andrew: My version of your point is to say that the ideal form of government is competitive dictatorship–the way we govern restaurants and hotels. I have no vote on what’s on the menu, an absolute vote on whether I patronize that restaurant.
Deiseach: I think you may be missing the point, which isn’t about what people have a right to do but about what ways of organizing human interactions work. If Scott runs his blog in a way that makes it work badly, for instance by banning all comments that disagree with his views, he isn’t violating anyone’s rights—but after a while there will be a lot fewer people reading it and it will do a lot less good for the world.
The implicit argument some people are making is that if you believe dictatorship works well for a blog, that is at least some reason to think it would work well on a larger scale, which seems to support the neoreactionary view. A possible response is that their view is correct, but only in a world where there are lots of nations and the costs of moving from one to another are very low—like the case of restaurants at present.
D. Friedman:
“My version of your point is to say that the ideal form of government is competitive dictatorship–the way we govern restaurants and hotels. I have no vote on what’s on the menu, an absolute vote on whether I patronize that restaurant.”
Have you read the ex-Geogist Spencer Heath’s book? This sounds exactly like his concept of proprietary communities.
@Jaskologist
I think that autocratic rule is the simplest and therefore more common form of government. Democratic governments were usually established by people wielding guns.
If SSC was hacked every week by people who didn’t like how it was moderated, and if Scott has a sufficient incentive not to shut it down, then it might become a democracy.
There are exceptions, both in real life and on the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia), but the general rule seems to hold.
@David Friedman
The restaurants aren’t completely free to serve you what they want, they have to comply with lots of regulation on which you have an (indirect) vote through your government.
Also, there are a limited number of restaurants, grocery shops and hotels in any given area, hence your freedom not to patronize them is also limited, unless you want to starve and sleep outdoors.
I have no vote on what’s on the menu, an absolute vote on whether I patronize that restaurant.
And that’s fine; you want a meal of lamb chops, you don’t go to the vegan restaurant.
But if you do go to the vegan restaurant, order a plate of chops and get told they don’t serve that, you have no right to demand “But this is a restaurant, you’re supposed to sell food to the public, I want my chops and I demand you cook them for me, and if you don’t do that, I’m going to get my friends to burn your premises down!”
I have no vote on what’s on the menu, an absolute vote on whether I patronize that restaurant.
Seems like there’s a lot of tension between this idea and the performance of local governments, at least in the US. Local governments have easy exit and relatively little democratic accountability, and yet they’re really really badly run compared to the federal government.
I’m no sure how well that generalizes internationally.
@Chalid Easy exit from local government? Maybe in a world in which everyone rents; the worst local governments seem to be in mid-value suburbs where everyone has most of their net worth tied up in property.
HOAs, anyone?
Houses can be sold for something resembling fair value – this is not an insurmountable obstacle. And, more relevantly, it is an obstacle that would be faced in the hypothetical world of competing dictatorships with free exit, so the analogy holds.
Indeed the fact that people take actions that make it more difficult to move, such as buying instead of renting, shows that they attach little value to the right to exit.
You can move from your local government, but you can’t take your house and land with you. You can sell them, but if the local government makes this a bad place to live, the price you can sell them at will reflect that. The Thibout model only prevents local government from exploitive taxation that is more than the total rental value of all immobile resources in their territory.
Well if your house has no value due to bad government policy, how would it tie you down? You can walk away from something with no value.
Actually no: it is consistent and logical to say that corporate capitalism under strong autocratic CEOs is the best economic system on the whole and yet still be unhappy with one particular CEO.
Furthermore, and this is the most important part, there is no logical connection between “this makes me feel bad” and “therefore it is actually wrong and someone should do something about it”. Not understanding this difference is one of the plights of our age.
So if Steve Jones proposes to a hot woman and gets rejected by her, he can simulatenously think “ouch, this rejection feels bad” and “she was perfectly right to do this if she is not attracted to me”.
Actually, if you assume that if something makes someone feel bad then he also thinks it is actually wrong, you need to read right-wing bloggers more: this is one of the first things the Reactor tends to reject (“realz before feelz”, as the more puerile PUAs tend to put it).
Although, of course, there is the slight issue that it is not clearly exactly what kind of productivity of the territory Scott is optimizing for? As it is generally good governance to tell subjects the exact utility function so that they can decide to adapt to it or exit. Sort of blindly guessing what is the owner optimizing for does not sound very efficient. Imagine going to an auction but instead of the highest bid wins it is more like “the most likeable of the top 3 bidders win”. Okay…
@Jiro, I thinkt here’s a huge difference in that A) the positions you’re describing range from ‘misrepresentation’ to ‘outright lies’ about the ideologies. Whereas I think Scott is correct about NRx (NRx’s feel free to correct me) and B) that Scott has no intention to ban all neoreactionaries, just to ban the shitty ones, which actually strengthens their ability to argue here, this is not really an intolerable position for any ideology (and ass backwards from the usual internet dictatorship of exiling the strongest opponents).
It’s not just that he moved discussions in NRX-adjacent directions. I think both his specific interpretation of those views, and also his general method of discussion, lessened the quality of discussions, to the point where it’s hard to believe he was arguing in completely good faith.
I didn’t agree with his politics, but there are people I disagree with as much as I agreed with Steve Johnson who I very much respect. But I think he had a pretty poisonous effect on discussion, and I am glad that he is banned.
Ok, can someone tell me what “NRX” is?
Careless, it’s neoreaction, otherwise known as the dark enlightenment, and available under the blogroll as “those who belong to the emperor”. Scott’s posted on it quite a few times, and has so far been quite willing to tolerate those who espouse its ideas.
After all, no matter how you feel about it, it’s completely fascinating to see a full-throated defense of monarchy in the 21st century.
Careless: see Scott’s answer.
It’s the new fascists. “New,” not “neo.”
Ilya:
I don’t think Neoreactionary is fascist. Do they propose a corporatist model of the economy, where firms are privately owned but the whole economy is coordinated by the central government?
They disagree, but some propose corporatist models (I don’t pay an enormous amount of attention anymore).
But I more meant “fascism” as a concept placeholder (not sure what a good name is) for the nasty type of memeplex independent from contingencies of the 1930s (like the kinds of economies and tech levels countries had), but still nasty somehow. As in, if these people get anywhere near actual power that will be enormously bad news for everyone. Also a memeplex stripped from the kinds of things we have antibodies to (or perhaps “reborn”). Illinois nazis from the Blues Brothers are a joke because of our antibodies to that manifestation of the nastiness.
Pretty sure he means “it’s the new meaningless slur everyone uses against anyone to the right of them.”
I’m sure we’ll see neo-crypto-reactionary thrown around soon.
In other words, “anyone I don’t like, but with the implication that everyone I don’t like is to the right of me”.
@Ilya: the word ‘fascist’ is the prototypical snarl word. A snarl word may or may not have a denotationally specific meaning, but is often or usually used to induce the ‘ugh’ response – “still nasty somehow” is a pretty good description, actually.
Interestingly, I don’t discuss my politics at all online. Being “to the left of the nRx” narrows down the space very little.
The kind of attractors in operation here lead our good friend Nyan Sandwich to literally use a bundle of spears as a logo for a group aimed to “cultivate masculine virtue.” It’s uncanny. “New fascism” isn’t something that came to my mind for no reason.
@David Friedman
If I understand correctly Neoreaction is a loose far-right movement supporting some combination of fascism, feudalism and absolute monarchy.
I’m not sure that we can describe feudalism and absolute monarchy as corporatist, but they certainly entail private businesses while allowing the government unlimited power to meddle with the economy, so if they are not the same thing in terms of economics they are at least adjacent.
@Ilya Shpitser
It’s a group of men who like “masculine virtue” and “spears” the same way Greek hoplites did. The logo looks like three spear heads somehow inserted into each other. “Uncanny” isn’t the right word do describe it… 🙂
Almost everybody is wrong here about what NRx is. Feudalism or monarchism or even fascism, or lon the left socialism or communism are a political goals goals. Currenty NRx is less interested in goals. Currently NRx is more interested in studying and understanding the ills of modern society than simply declaring “this X will solve all problems”. There are people toying with goals, like neocameralism, but it is secondary. So it is a critical movement more than one with a political goal. The first and foremost aim is to learn and understand.
Human biology. Evolutionary psychology. Human mating. Un-falsifiying history. Religious psychology. Group dynamics, the most important aspect perhaps – how identity groups, thedes shapes politics.
I am actually really weirded out by the idea that being interested in politics means you have to have a goal like socialism or feudalism and work for that.
I think the part when you study, learn, think, analyze, is far more important.
Not just NRx, but basically the whole of the alt-right is mostly a study group. GRECE etc.
As a parallel, you could compare feudalism or fascism to Revolutionary Marxism, while NRX is mostly similar to Critical Marxism.
It is far too obvious to me that Critical Anything is far better than Revolutionary Anything. Critics try to study why are things wrong, Revolutionaries think they already know and want to change them.
I can also promise you will not do anything naughty – we cannot, we haven’t the power. There is no putsch or counter-revolution in the works and that is a big difference from fascists. It is just study and analysis and waiting for the Collapse. It is after the Collapse where we can actually do something, and that something will be obviously constructive, rebuilding, not aggressive. Of course, yes, it could be a feudalistic or authoritarian type rebuilding, but compared to the violent chaos of the Collapse you will consider that, in comparison, civilized and liveable. I mean even if you want liberalism once again (like the man who got divorced and then married again: didn’t learn the lesson the first time), you probably don’t expect you can go from the “zombie” apocalypse to right there, you are expcting some authoritarian first create a working order, right? I mean I hope liberals understand at least that much – basically liberalism is hoping a true Collapse never happens, but if it does and it is back to tribes fighting each other, you do understand the next stage in civilization is Charlemagne, not the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, right?
“Currently NRx is more interested in studying and understanding the ills of modern society”
This is a misrepresentation of NRx. NRx aren’t into empiricism at all, so they aren’t “studying” anything. Is Moldbug an empirist? He just writes super long diatribes, he doesn’t run studies, or even suggest a research program. At best, he’s a well-read, prolific blogger.
NRx have a particular (fairly toxic) ideology. They are not scientists, they already made up their mind about classical liberalism.
@Ilya
OK I wrote a post for you:
https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/no-such-thing-as-fascism/
Thanks. You misspelled my name.
“Fascism” is an idea attractor for certain kinds of people. I don’t think you are The Other (if I did, I wouldn’t be talking to you, I would be getting my pitchfork), I think you are real people playing with toxic ideas.
If you say “fascism” does not exist you basically lost everyone, including a ton of historians who study it.
Everyone says they want to save/rebuild civilization, what else would everyone say?
In a shellnut: Steve Johnson just kept posting horrible, bigoted things while not technically breaking any rules; instead of defending any of his points, he would, at most, posture about how he was too smart for people to dare to understand.
It is one thing to think that certain races have lower IQ; I don’t think it is a correct or good thing but it’s a factual proposition that can be debated. It’s another to just drive-by with “Certain races have lower IQ! Women want to be raped by powerful men! That sure does upset you liberals who are too scared to accept how smart I am, doesn’t it?” all the time. He wasn’t debating unpopular ideas in a space safe for all forms of intellectual inquiry, he was smugly threadshitting.
Is there evidence on the other side of the Race/IQ question? I am genuinely unaware of any other than one small study about people of African descent in the Netherlands or something like that.
There is – it’s extensive, convoluted, and mediocre.
I’m assuming you mean “Is there evidence for the proposition that different races have substantively different IQs?”, but my statement is pretty true in either direction.
There are a stack of studies that attempt to control for culture, history, and economic status and still turn up racial differences. There are another stack of studies which don’t, and finally a *third* stack of studies demonstrating how *both* of the first two groups were biased and flawed in study-ruining ways.
The evidence seems to suggest a small-but-significant gap which can’t be explained away with any of the usual hand-waves like nutrition or wealth. However, there doesn’t seem to be any proof that this is actually down to race, as opposed to systematic flaws in the studies or uncontrolled confounders.
Wikipedia has lots on this, but obviously it’s a pretty ideological article. As usual with IQ, the data is confusing and you can make it say whatever you want if you try hard enough.
Juanson, you are conflating the question of whether racial differences in IQ exist and the follow-up question of whether and to what extent these differences are caused by biological differences. As far as I can tell, the answer to the first question is a clear yes (modulo some quibbling over definitions), while the second question is unresolved and extremely controversial.
The general Liberal/Leftist/”Seriously guys, we need to properly define whatever this means” response is that it’s a dumb issue altogether because race is a social construct: more specifically, “race” as it is commonly defined, is an arbitrary distinction and intra-racial variance is higher than inter-racial or something like that (the more technical it gets, the less I can accurately describe the position).
I have honestly no idea what evidence there is for or against this.
Re: women ‘enjoying’ being assaulted, I remember he got accused of mixing up the fitness-maximizer/adaptation-executer divide. If you go back and very carefully read his post, you are only assuming that he makes this mistake. His belief is simply that women won’t resist rape, not that they will “enjoy” the rape. This is accomplished just as well by having the women kind of go into shock during the act, and after a while suffering from stockholm syndrome. He never implied that this strategizing on the part of the female was *conscious*, just that evolution nonetheless found a way to make it happen.
Was he shitposting? Yes. But I am less than happy that nobody thought he was saying the above, when I thought his message was obvious.
I thought it was obvious too, but who wants to stick up for unpopular people when you can smell the Reign of Terror coming?
Are we going to rehash the entire debate now? OK then.
No one claimed that Steve said that women “enjoy” rape. He did say that women benefit (in terms of fitness) from rape, because the genes of successful rapists are obviously (to Steve, I guess) superior. Therefore, to be raped and not judged for it is “the best of both worlds”, according to Steve.
Here’s a quote:
Questions (rhetorical, but answers welcome):
– what is this “dual mating strategy”, and how does it work on an adaptation-executer level?
– what is the “social technology” the demise of which Steve laments?
You must not read Deiseach’s posts. I mean, I don’t blame you.
>>– what is the “social technology” the demise of which Steve laments?
Probably restrictions on female autonomy in general and shaming of bastardy.
The ban didn’t have much to do with that particular thread and I was considering it even beforehand.
To be fair, mediocre evidence seems like an enviable position compared to most other social science of late.
Nita, you did enter that one with:
While Deiseach went with this as a Reason Why People are Creationists:
Also:
I don’t think I’d have bothered with the discussion otherwise.
@ Cauê
I have to admit, “love” was a flippant way to put it, but I promise that I did not mean “experience pleasure during the entire process”.
Within Steve’s paradigm, rape is one of the best things that can happen to a woman — she doesn’t have to go looking for those alpha genes (which is something she wants to do — remember that dual strategy), they come to her instead. In this paradigm, rape is a good thing from a woman’s perspective. Good men like Steve and Jim hate rape (because it free-rides on their hard work), but bad men and all women love it. That’s what I meant.
E.g., when Jim writes that “all girls yearn for the gentle but firm touch of ownership”, he means that they want it and, in a way, love it, but not necessarily that they enjoy it.
Ockham’s Razor, of course, says it’s more likely that certain men tell lies about women than all women lie about themselves — because the first group is smaller, and therefore you are hypothesizing fewer entities.
Nita, I’m quite confident that you’re still failing your theory of mind/empathy checks here, but going further would be poking our benevolent dictator with a shorter stick than I’d be comfortable with.
@Nita
That still seems to place far more content to Steve Johnson’s comments than was actually in the text. He doesn’t seem to imply at all that women “love” being raped or enjoy it or desire it or have ANY positive thoughts, emotions, or feelings, conscious or unconscious, whatsoever, wrt being raped.
What he seems to have said is that being raped is beneficial for the propagation of that woman’s genes, and therefore women have evolutionary adaptations that cause them to behave in such a way as to increase likelihood of being raped (versus being killed). Again, I don’t see how this implies any sort of desire or preference for it in the part of the woman, conscious or unconscious.
I find his arguments entirely unconvincing and highly inappropriate given the original conversation thread, and I find his tone to be unnecessarily abrasive, but summarizing his arguments as being anywhere in the vicinity of women-love-being-raped isn’t just uncharitable – it’s putting words in his mouth.
@ lvlln
I did interpret Steve’s comment in context of his previously expressed views, so that might be why it seemed to me that he had finally decided to take up Jim’s mantle, so to speak.
How do you think women’s “dual mating strategy” works on an individual level? Does it also manage to bypass all thoughts, emotions and feelings? Do any of those even matter, if in the absence of certain “social technology” all women will constantly sneak away to mate with alphas and then pretend that they were raped?
@ Nita
It very well may be true that you are accurately describing Steve Johnson’s opinions (my belief based on his other posts is that you are accurate). It’s still not sensible or accurate to tack on extra baggage to a given argument he makes. That’s not interpreting the argument within a context, that’s putting words in his mouth.
I don’t feel comfortable discussing Steve Johnson’s beliefs about sex strategies at the object-level for a couple reasons. #1 being that I interpret Scott Alexander’s rules on open threads as prohibiting it, and #2 being that I don’t feel like I have a full enough grasp of his beliefs, as I only looked at it closely enough to judge it as just another just-so evo-psych story with no meaningful evidence.
I will, however, reiterate that describing Steve Johnson’s posts about women’s sex strategies as implying anything about women’s conscious or unconscious thoughts seems entirely inaccurate. It is my opinion that he does believe that (some? many? most?) individual women hold conscious or unconscious thoughts relating to what he said about the “dual mating strategy” and whatnot, but his statements are also just as consistent with the belief that such strategies entirely “bypass” any sort of conscious or unconscious thoughts individual actors hold.
The assertion that rapists’ genes are “superior” strikes me as extremely implausible. Everything we know about rape points to it being a mating strategy of last resort, perhaps an adaptation to the spread of polygynous cultures after large-scale agriculture and urbanization ~7k YA. (If 10% of the men are claiming 50% of the women, there will be a lot of desperate men.) This fits with the observation that rape, while not completely unknown, is very uncommon among our primate cousins. So a woman would only “want” (in an evolutionary sense) to have a rapist’s babies if there were a high likelihood that her male offspring would need to rape in order to reproduce, which probably wouldn’t be the case if she were married to one of the top-10% status men. Modern rapists are disproportionately skewed toward the lower socioeconomic classes and are much less likely to be married than non-rapists; there is no reason to think the situation would have been any different in the ancient world.
But even that is overthinking it. Women nearly universally feel a strong aversion to being raped. Evolutionary psychology is in the business of trying to explain our emotions, not to explain them away. If women did, in fact, gain some kind of reproductive advantage from being raped, that would be strong evidence against the basic premises of evo psych itself.
@ lvlln
I still think your position is too vulnerable to some hostile strategies.
Explaining that women and men, on average, have different upper body strength etc. seems like a sad waste of time, and yet ignoring these comments strewn around the place like Chick tracts also seems untidy.
Of course, my chosen solution didn’t quite work as intended, either — I guess I’ll try something else next time.
WHTO’s “intra-racial subgroup differences are bigger” are a very good point. This is where a sane discussion of HBD begins: races are too broad categories for study. Those old fashioned racial prejudices were part superstition and when not they were like bare eye astronomy, pre-Galilei: they could vaguely see some things are stars and some are planets. HBD is like proper modern astronomy. Trying to be far more detailed.
The social side of the problem is that racial tensions are never about whole races. American blacks aren’t simply blacks, they are Sub-Saharan West Africans AND not a random sample from there either because why would slavers take random samples? Slavery itself can be understood as a sub-racial subgroup maker, the same way how nationalism and suchlike, or island isolation (Brits) are subgroup makers. American whites are disproportionately NW Europeans, not just random whites. Not many Circassians or Georgians there, right? E.g. for Romania, the question is not what all South Asians are like, but their current Roma (gypsy) population, which is a very small set and moved out from India many hundreds of years ago and had all kinds of different selective pressures on them. Everybody understands the gypsy underclass in Bucuresti and the Indian programmers in the Silicon Valley are not even remotely similar subgroups.
They just look alike. But focusing how people look is unscientific. That is why HBD, which is scientific, not racist, as racism is looks oriented.
Anyhow, one good way to interpret HBD’s social side is that it is not about being racist but about being anti-anti-racist. For example, let’s just suppose there would be a 10% subgroup of American blacks who are problematic and you could prove that it is so because the slavers took them from the Yoruba people and those folks were genetically problematic. It would be idiotic to get racist against the rest of the 90% of blacks just because of these hypothetical ex-Yoruba, right? But it would make you anti-anti-racist in the sense that you would say the reason that ex-Yoruba subgroup is underrepresented in professors and overrepresented in prisons is not oppression and prejudice, right? And on the aggregate statistics, what would that ex-Yoruba group do with the stats of blacks?
If the case was that he was posting stuff then posturing about how people were afraid to accept his positions instead of defending those positions, as DrBeat says…
Wouldn’t “content-free arguing” and the like (“you sheeple are too sheep-like and sheeply to accept my harsh truths” or conversely “you are an bad x-ist and no good person would believe your x-ist opinions, because they are not the opinions a good person would have” trip the true/necessary/kind filter?
It’s not kind, and defending a position via “you’re just scared/dumb/bad” doesn’t seem especially true or necessary. No personal caprice required.
“threadshitting”
I hope I see more of this delicious neologism spreading throughout the internet in the near future.
Context.
hmm that “context” makes me much more squirmy about the banning than i did before. I mean, heck everyone knows Steve Johnson is an asshole, even nrx-sympathizers like me. If Scott’s annoyed with that, more power too him. But he is an interesting one and the fact that this thread suggests he got banned for the interesting part of his character rather than the assholeness…well. I hope scott’s reign of terror doesnt go ideological. Remember 9 thermidor i guess?
(esp considering how “dr. beat” describes the situation as one where “Steve Johnson just kept posting horrible, bigoted things”…. hm)
(i prolly should edit this and say that Scott should feel free to ban anyone for any purpose, lets just hope he’s optimizing in the right direction. as gnon wills…)
My politics are pretty much the opposite of SJ’s*, so I’m trying to self-diagnose whether I support his ban just because of that or whether it really was his behavior that was a bannable offense. In my defense; there are a number of far-right NRx-type people who I don’t have a similar problem with, and the idea that someone’s bad behavior, independent of their politics, can get them kicked out the Garden of Niceness isn’t a new idea; in fact, without it, the concept of a Garden of Niceness doesn’t amount to much.
I don’t think anyone particularly likes the situation where a handful of aggressive people start hijacking comment threads, and I don’t think that’s “the price we have to pay” for intellectual open-mindedness. Maybe he didn’t technically break the rules, but couldn’t that just mean that the rules were poorly formulated? Perhaps there should be a rule where you’re penalized (within reasonable limits) for not responding to criticism of your post if there’s enough of that criticism and it doesn’t break the rules itself, in order to prevent the sort of hit-and-run posting people complained about?
*-Just noticed this. What…ironic initials.
The beauty of the three-rule system is that it’s simple. Being simple means it doesn’t necessarily cover all cases, and thus sometimes requires Scott’s intervention. Scott intervening when the rules haven’t been broken erodes trust in the assumption that we can have candid discourse.
The answer isn’t to make the rules complex enough to cover all cases; even the justice system hasn’t figured that one out. In my opinion as a channer it is up to everyone else to learn their lesson and just ignore his posts if they don’t like his way of discourse; not to ban him. But arbitrarily banning one guy to preserve the comfort of one commenter subgroup isn’t an unforgivable sin (or maybe I’m just making excuses since I really like SSC).
FWIW, as a regular reader but only occasional commenter, I had mostly stopped reading comment sections. In part because I got tired of the general “how does this post relate to NRx pet topics #7 and #12” thrust of commentary, when the answer was usually “tangentially at best but let’s go on about them anyway.”
Not saying I quit reading comments in protest or anything like that. Just that it stopped being worth the time, and the above was one of the reasons. I would support a reign of terror and a relevance-police gestapo far harsher than anything I actually believe Scott temperamentally capable of implementing.
I guess I probably have to explain my decision beyond just “reign of terror”.
There is a tendency for everything here to end up talking about neoreaction, social justice, or (for some reason) rape. This is bad for a lot of reasons. First, it crowds out topics where there’s better chance of productive discussion. Second, it gives people who want to attack this blog as a crimethink space and get it shouted out of the pale of acceptable discussion too much ammunition. Third, it drives away commenters who are grossed out by that kind of thing; whether or not you agree with this preference, there are a lot of people who have it, and a lot of them are the sort of people who would be good additions to this community.
While all of these topics are potentially interesting, I feel like there are some basic rules for when you can and can’t bring them up and how you should do so that a lot of people are violating. I can’t verbalize these rules explicitly very well, and probably there are a lot of disagreements at the margin, but I think there is probably some consensus at the extremes. If you’ve got to have those discussions, have them on IRC where there’s no permanent record.
I hope that I can give an extensional definition of the kind of behavior I don’t want to see by banning Steve. If that doesn’t work, I will ban more people until they get the message. Everyone who participated in this subthread is…second against the wall when the Revolution comes? Is that even a thing?
Did you read the rest of my post, dancing judge?
I don’t think “He’s a bigot! Git ‘im!” is a good thing to do to people even if they express ideas that I find wrong, or dangerous, or repulsive.
But he wasn’t even expressing ideas any more, he was threadshitting. The only reason he got away with it for as long as he did was because he was expressing extremely unpopular political opinions, and so had the protection of “if I ban this guy, that’s censorship, because it has to be due to his politics”.
I think relating all things to politics, social justice, and neoreaction is lazy and unnecessary and certainly do not defend it.
I think being rude like Steve Johnson is, well, rude.
I think that SSC is uniquely wonderful in that people can talk about nearly anything, behave civilly while doing so, and the worst someone will say is “well i disagree with you for x,y,z.” You have cultivated the best comment section of any forum outside of good lesswrong threads ive ever come across.
i think you are shortchanging SSC’s taboo on taboo topics. I suspect its the part of the mix that makes things so interesting. Hopefully its unnecessary to have a purge based on being willing to discuss taboo topics unemotionally.
Nevertheless, you are a killer writer with an extremely quality blog that i read all the time and should totally pay you something in exchange for.
@ drbeat – i agree he was rude and intentionally provocative in his bad-think-swagger, but i think that those things would be deserving of banning if done by a communist. I just dislike the implication that its those things+his nrx ideas that made it bannable. Ofc his shitposting attributes made him obnoxious and why i didnt, at first, think anything of him getting the axe.
I think this is a good reason to look for a better comments nesting system. Have collapsible trees so that if someone does want to give the NRx view on a subject matter you can just hit the little + so it becomes a – and not deal with it.
I just scroll past the commies and the NRx people, ignore the topics trying to use evopsych for whatever crazy theory they want to justify today. It’s really not difficult, but I can fully understand your urge to cleanse. The whole crimethink issue is a real one, but I don’t know, the bit of rebel in me just wants to tell them to fuck off.
That said, from a pure consequential point of view the banning of Steve Johnson is probably a good thing. By his own views he should be totally okay with it so there shouldn’t be much of a reason to worry about you going ham. But might it be simpler in the future to just say “No NRx or Rape discussion please?” Since that seems to make up 90% of the shit, the rest tending to be racism.
Held In Escrow: They do collapse, but no one ever realizes it. Try clicking “hide” at the bottom of a post.
Huh, I thought that was just a single post, not everything following it. Shows what I know. This seems like a much more adult solution if you dislike certain posters or topics. Perhaps add on a way to tag your comment chain with a topic so that if someone wants to ignore the NRx postings they can easily do so, or they can not have to read Social Justice stuff or drug questions or what have you.
That said however, I do think that Steve massively crossed the line anyways when it came to kind/true/necessary many a time so phrasing this as a reign of terror doesn’t quite seem right.
@ The_Dancing_Judge
I think relating all things to politics, social justice, and neoreaction is lazy and unnecessary and certainly do not defend it.
For the sake of symmetry, notice that the SJW posts ceased long ago.
>They do collapse, but no one ever realizes it. Try clicking “hide” at the bottom of a post.
holy fuck
If you’re having an easier time pointing at it than defining it, then it might also be fruitful to explore a bit in short fiction, as you sometimes do. That might make the unspeakable rules more vivid, even for people that are unfamiliar with the victims of your reign of terror.
Dancing judge: But it wasn’t rudeness and NRx that got him banned. It was the rudeness, which he used NRx to express. Had someone else acted like he had, only about some other subject, they would have been banned even faster because there would be less worry about “Am I only banning this guy for an unpopular political opinion”?
When I first came across the distinction between Civil Law and Common Law, I thought Civil Law was obviously the superior implementation. I reasoned that the spirit of the law ought to be kept separate from the messy legalese of implementation.
But then I read the rationale behind Civil Law (I didn’t understand Chesterton’s Fence back then). The rationale was that law-by-precedent bestowed economic stability since legal entities were able to more accurately predict how their future actions would be judged in court.
I think the key here is “predictability”. So long as the bans retain some semblance of predictability, the community stays terror free. Otherwise, the average SSC commenter can’t be sure if their innocuous comment might be banned “capriciously”.
My suggestion is warnings. E.g. “Steve, please stop hijacking every thread into NRx. If this continues, I’ll bring down the ban hammer.” Then if Steve continues, no one is surprised when he’s actually banned.
@FullMeta_Rationalist
True, although on the other hand warnings make it easier for trolly types to play brinksman.
I can see the other reasons, but this justification really, really bothers me. You’re paying the danegeld.
Paying the danegeld isn’t the only possible historical analogy. What about “paying a token tribute to the Emperor of China back in the days where if you paid a token tribute they would leave you alone and give you all the benefits of Chinese civilization, but if you didn’t then two million Chinese people would show up on your border and murder you”?
>I can see the other reasons, but this justification really, really bothers me. You’re paying the danegeld.
Well, uncomfortable as it may be, the fact is that a lot of criticism that this blog takes is explicitly “Look at what SJ wrote, why is he allowed to post here?”. And for better or worse, Scott likes a whole bunch of SJ people and takes their criticism to heart.
For whatever it’s worth, he has also, repeatedly, claimed to want to ban Steve Johnson for the longest time (I’ve found claims several months old, at the very least), so it really might just be a case of just not liking him.
What if the “Emperor” is just some fish-faced pretender who will extort you for increasing amounts of money, while being utterly incompetent at doing you lasting harm unless you let him?
When did that ever happen? Anyway, the whole thing is pointless, because there really isn’t anyone you can appease to make yourself safe from an internet mob. You did not make yourself any safer from sjws by banning Steve Johnson.
Warnings don’t work. When you warn people that they’ll be banned if they e.g. stop making every thread about strawberries, you get a larger volume of discussion that’s recognizably about strawberries but has a veneer of plausible deniability. If you go after that, another thin layer of obfuscation gets added, and the volume goes up again because they have to be more talky to get their point across.
Since you as a mod generally don’t care about strawberries as such, but rather about the tone of discussion they tend to come with, this is counterproductive. And people on the Internet are pretty good at talking around things, so it can generally continue until you get frustrated enough to give up or try the tyrant approach instead.
(Well, occasionally you get someone that goes “fuck you, you’re not the boss of me” and whom you can ban without criticism or remorse, but that’s not as common. And people like that are a different kind of mod headache because they’re usually pretty good at ban evasion.)
The problem with allowing frank discussion of taboo topics is that the vast majority of people who want frank discussion of taboo topics are assholes. For every thoughtful, view-from-nowhere-taking rationalist who is genuinely interested in probing the off-limits parts of human nature, there are ten people who just want an opportunity to use racial slurs or phrases like “cruising for a dicking”.
SSC’s origins have, I think, betrayed it in this respect.
I think that banning Steve Johnson actually does fall under the three rules, though probably no single post of his actually fails hard enough to warrant a ban on its own. Even granting the possible truth of his statements, he (deliberately?) makes them in ways which are bound to be misinterpreted, and they’re often off-topic. So not-kind, and not-necessary, and with their truth-value more obscure than needed.
Yes, I suppose it does depend on whether you believe the SJ crowd has a set goal which they will be content with once achieved, or whether they will keep escalating their demands for more more more. I know which way I’m betting.
I agree with Steve’s banning for the sake of improving discussion quality, but I doubt banning folks like Steve will do anything to appease the SJ crowd. Was there ever a time they forgave anyone? Once you’re evil you’re evil.
@Nornagest
Perhaps you misunderstand. The warnings aren’t meant to incentivize Steve Johnson types to cease and desist. The warnings are meant to assuage the average commenter that Scott will never ban them unexpectedly. It’s not about B.F. Skinner-ing the stubborn shitposters. It’s about Scott promising the pure and earnest that he’ll rattle before he bites.
This is how it works in my model. Steve stirs shit. Scott publicly warns Steve. Steve continues shit-stirring, but under the cover of plausible deniability. Scott bans him anyway. (This diverges from your model, where Scott wants to ban him but cannot since Scott feels he must first isolate and explicate exactly where Steve broke the rules.)
The commentariat knows that Steve continued shit-stirring. Scott knows that Steve continued shit-stirring. Steve knows that Steve continued shit-stirring. Given Steve’s repeated behavior, the ban will happen — plausible deniability or not. The issue I want to mitigate is rather the chilling effects in the aftermath of the ban.
If Scott just bans people out of the blue, the earnest commentators will get nervous. “What if I’m next? Better play it safe.” And then the “safe-space for weird ideas” becomes a “space without weird ideas”. And that’s why Scott needs to set some type of precedent regarding the mitigation of surprise.
———-
N.B. I don’t know the extent to which Steve Johnson shitposted. I’m one of those rare few who uses the ‘hide’ button. I’ll just assume for the sake of the argument that he deserved the ban.
“Was there ever a time [the sj crowd] forgave anyone?” It seems to me the answer to this is overwhelmingly yes. It seems in bad taste to drag up things from people’s past, but here are a few people whom I think would be okay with it:
Ferret Stienmitz (theferret) was attacked for his role in the Open Source Boob project and is now a prominent left-wing pro-polyamory blogger.
The Nielsen Haydens were on the non-SJ side of Racefail but were accepted as leaders of the anti-Puppy forces.
Hugo Schwyzer was forgiven numerous times before finally failing catastrophically.
I don’t want to list details for Barry Deutsch (Ampersand) because I think he would be hurt by people bringing them up again, but there was definitely a period where the main topic on the feminist internet was whether or not to associate with him.
What bothers me is that all of the examples I’m thinking about are from 2005-2010, and it is not because it took five years for these people to be forgiven back then. I spent a lot more time on the political internet back then, so it could just be my ignorance, but I am worried that people are getting genuinely meaner.
@Toggle:
Heck, writing short fiction analogizing the nature of Steve Johnson’s infractions is easy: Just picture a kid who, after being admonished to stop poking his sibling on a car ride, holds his fingers an inch from his sibling’s face and waves them around, while saying, “I’m not touching you, see?”
@DES3264: Thanks for those examples. Something I’ve noticed is that the only men who stick around on feminist blogs are the ones who are the meanest and most virulent feminists, more mean & virulent than feminist women even (similar to the PC Principal from South Park if you saw that episode). My hypothesis is that being an ultra mean feminist is the only way to effectively atone for the crime of being a man. I noticed something similar going on with your examples of “forgiveness”… it seems like the only way someone can be “forgiven” is by leading SJ moral crusades themselves. There’s never a reflective “hey guys maybe we made a mistake here moment” on the left, akin to say Germany after World War II.
I think in functioning moral systems, things work more like this: you get punished for infractions. The punishment fits the crime: the bigger your infraction the bigger the punishment. Once you’ve been punished for your crime, you’re considered to have “paid your debt to society” and there aren’t further punishments unless there are further crimes.
This stuff isn’t that hard… it’s how kindergarten teachers run their classrooms. My general impression of the left is that they are much more concerned with outcompeting each other through virtue signaling than they are with creating incentives that work well… which means ultimately leftism doesn’t work well and it’s better described as a wave wreaking havoc on a functional system than a system in and of itself. (Every so often the wave peaks and subsides: Stalin, Robespierre, 90s political correctness, etc. I suspect it’s nearing a peak right now; someone in my opinion accurately described the modern left as having perfected the “circular firing squad”.)
I take back the Germans analogy, I acknowledge it was hyperbolic.
@Frank: I think you are right. So much “social justice” “discourse” is, at the core, yet more patriarchal male bullshit and male-on-male violence.
If I may be so problematic – I don’t know, maybe I’m transphobic against myself, idk – I think that trans women SJWs also tend have those fucking aggressive violent habits because of male socialization; you don’t see other oppressed groups being quite so nasty. (Trans men SJWs tend to be way way less awful.)
His spirit haunts us even now, I see.
Going off on a tangent, the sexbot fantasy isn’t solely gleeful handrubbing about how feminists will be sad. For a lot of people, primarily but not wholly men, it’s a distant hope for contact and warmth from someone who feels utterly unlovable.
When I was in school, the really unpopular kids used to go read in the library, which was staffed and quiet and thus safe from most kinds of bullying. The social contact that they got from this probably wasn’t as good as that experienced by the somewhat unpopular kids, who played board games, or the popular kids, who played sports, but it was better than nothing. This is one way to see sexbots: a low-status replacement of what high-status people achieve with ease and take for granted. As another example, mocking sexbots seems similar to mocking the culinary taste of a struggling family that goes to McDonalds for a treat.
People who are desperately lonely and needy are being laughed at and denied what could be their greatest hope for living a happier life. Granted, lonely people are often not always nice, sexbots fall right in the uncanny valley, some number of sexbots are going to be treated in a way that we wouldn’t treat ethically meaningful beings, and the redpill/MRA circles tend to regurgitate material about sexbots, but those are excuses rather than justifications.
I think that perhaps a lot of the unpopular kids reading in the library were unpopular because they spent free time reading in the library, rather than spending free time reading in the library because they were unpopular. Being deeply introverted generally does not offer strong routes to popularity. I actually was quite popular for a period during my time in school, but because I was so introverted, I didn’t enjoy it, and tried to avoid spending too much of my time socializing with other people.
Although it’s not evident in the linked thread, as far as I know, Veronica is not against sex bots as such — only against the gleeful handrubbing.
lol. “ok, you can have your sex robots, but you have to promise to still be miserable”
@ suntzuanime
“Gleeful handrubbing” here means not “yay, sexbots!”, but “when cunts realize than they have become worthless, they will come crawling and begging, and we’ll finally get to treat them the way they really deserve”.
@Desertopia
This is a small sample size, but a number seemed to be mentally ill. Three were very clearly autistic, and many of the others seemed a little “off”, although “off” probably won’t be making it into the DSM any time soon.
Going back to sexbots, I’m not sure that the two situations are fully parallel when it comes to outcomes. If someone is deprived of a library, they might conceivably become more popular through immersion, but they probably wouldn’t be able to take friendship by force. The same is not true for sex, and there are multiple examples of the availability of various sexual products reducing rape rates, so the consequences of denying access to sexbots might be a bit more dire than the consequences of denying access to school libraries.
Re: cuddling, Primatology hobbyist here. I spend days watching the Gombe livestream, zoos, etc.
All other primates spend an *inordinate* amount of time with large areas of skin in physical contact with another, whether play-wrestling or cuddling or copulating.
In captivity, where Chimps have basically nothing to do all day but socialization, this tendency becomes even greater.
I can’t help but imagine that, back in the pre-agriculture days, humans were the same.
For those of you who have yet to read the essential ‘Chimpanzee Politics’: physical contact is a self-reassurance mechanism. In a typical incidence wherein an Alpha’s position is threatened by an up-and-comer, the Alpha first approaches his strongest supporter and reaches out to him in a begging gesture, asking for a show of solidarity. The supporter demonstrates his loyalty by mounting the Alpha from behind, as if they were about to copulate, with full chest-back contact. The up-and-comer sees the two faces, one right behind the other, both arrayed against him. Only once the leader has received this reassurance will he start displaying at the interloper. Sometimes he still feels insecure, though, and must rally and be reassured by additional allies before he is confident enough to display.
To us, this seems like submissive behavior. The alpha, allowing himself to be mounted in what is obviously derivative of the copulation position, and refusing to fight until more of his own allies have done so than his opponents?
Look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc__L9Vo4g0#t=21m45s
Dunno if timestamp worked, but a conflict between Nikkie, the alpha, and Dandy, the up-and-comer, starts around 21:40. Rather than attacking Dandy, Nikkie immediately goes to Mama, the leader of the female coalition, and is mounted by her. Dandy tries to give Mama a slap, punishing her for her allying with Nikkie, but while he’s doing that, Nikkie goes and embraces the Beta male, Jerome. When Dandy sees that Nikkie has been embraced by two strong allies, he flees. There is no actual physical confrontation; it is all down to what alliances each party can demonstrate.
This is, of course, not so different from how we manage our affairs. When we get into a fight on the internet, we message our friends and tell them to join us.
But we are certainly lacking the physical contact aspect of these alliances. We are reassured by our allies, but we don’t get the same warmth from them.
I think this is the worst thing that could have happened.
To be honest, I did not understand so-called ‘cuddle cultute’ in the bay area, until I started watching primates obsessively, and then it became obvious and I felt bad for being cynical before. When you watch fully grown rival male chimps nonetheless get what is obviously an immense amount of reassurance and satisfaction from physical contact…
It almost makes me glad I’m a heroin addict and that there will always be girls attracted to bad boys, because my lack of social grace will never be able to keep me from finding that reassurance. It sucks that human culture has sexualized physical contact to the point that any enjoyment of it must be sexual in nature, but that’s where we’re at.
I applaud the efforts of people in the Bay area in restarting cuddle culture. I fear that once you sexualize skin-on-skin contact your species can’t go back to regular cuddling, and that this effort won’t work.
:[
This runs in to the same problems as welfare though. Yes, you are probably helping the lowest of nerds who would probably be alone for their whole life anyways. But what kind of incentives are you creating for the rest of society? Obviously the high status guys will find sex dolls beneath them so that leaves a huge portion of guys in the middle. If these guys decide to use a sex doll because trying to find a real relationship is difficult then that would be a problem.
Addict: so the chimp won’t start posturing until another chimp literally has their back. That’s fascinating! Thank you.
@Wrong Species,
You say it will be a problem, but how exactly?
I typed and then deleted a long comment on the sexbot thing, but now I’ve reconsidered.
The whole damn topic of sex and gender is toxic, pretty much, so can we please talk about something, anything else? Even something silly?
Well, sexbots give us an excellent opportunity to test that proposition. Surely we should welcome the chance to prove these horrible misogynists wrong?
What’s the point of a sexbot? Couldn’t you get the same gratification from porn?
Forget porn. Something like this would surely cost at least tens of thousands of dollars. Inanimate Real Dolls already cost more than $6000, and you also have to factor in power and maintenance costs. Anyone with enough money to afford one would already have enough money to pay for escorts, or a sugar baby, or a mail order bride, or whatever. So I don’t see sexbots becoming anything more than a novelty any time in the forseeable future.
And if it’s cuddling that you’re after, then there are already a number of “professional cuddlers” who offer the chance to cuddle a real human being for $60 per hour with no legal risk at all. It’s going to be a long, long time before cuddlebots can compete with that.
@ suntzuanime
I don’t even know what you’re trying to say anymore. We should donate to sexbot R&D because the post-sexbot world might make some misogynists change their opinions? To be honest, I think there are more efficient ways to use one’s money.
@ Addict
Thanks, that was fascinating!
@ Deiseach
Apparently we can’t 😀
@Alexp
The point of my post was that the warmth from physical content is likely to be important to happiness in primates. Porn doesn’t supply that. A woman (or man, in a less sexualized society [bay area cuddle culture?!]) can. A sexbot just might be able to.
So for us gammas who fear the day when feminism/polyamory/whathaveyou has given alphas a monopoly on women (or, for me, when heroin addiction stops seeming ‘cool’ and starts seeming ‘massively unattractive’, around age 22ish), it sure would be nice to smoothly migrate to sexbots. Not because women are ‘unnecessary’ but because they’re ‘unavailable’.
Edit: rereading, I realize my last post kind of seemed like a non sequitur. My point was: physical contact appears to be just as important, to chimps, as food (as determined by their observed preference ordering). I think the debate about sex bots should be reframed with this in mind.
When a man can’t get sex, any complaints on his part are treated with scorn. But I think most of the ‘hurt’ suffered by isolated men is not the lack of sex (as you say, porn serves pretty well here), but rather the lack of warm, physical contact. In chimp society, males who would never be allowed to mate still spend just as much time cuddling/wrestling with other chimps. Not so, in human society.
How does your opinion change if we call them “pillowtalk bots” instead? For that would surely be their *real* purpose.
If you want warmth, physical contact, and pillowtalk, then you can already get all of those things for about $20-40 per “session” at a strip club, even if there aren’t any of the aforementioned professional cuddlers in your city. If you want just pillowtalk, you can get that for even cheaper over the phone. So I still don’t see the point of sexbots.
Obviously if someone wants “real” love and affection none of the commercial options that I’ve mentioned will suffice, but a sexbot won’t help with that either.
One lurker’s unsolicited opinion:
a) every internet forum above a certain size has posters who bring up some topic repeatedly because they never tire of it: “This article about kittens/NASCAR/trilobytes is just more evidence for what I’ve been saying all along about feminism/race and IQ/9-11…”;
b) Such posters aren’t bad a priori, if you like a boisterous community full of fierce debate and sometimes-wacky topics – where would you hear the “rape is great for women evolutionarily” idea if not from a troll? But they are bad in excess, and banning them periodically is necessary and healthy, like pruning a rosebush;
c) from what I’ve seen, Scott’s calibration for “excess” is, if anything, too lenient: “I’m going to assume the last seven times you kicked me in the balls were on accident, but I will have to ask you to leave if you do it three or four more times.”
/me visualizes : “This article about feminism/race and IQ/9-11 is just more evidence for what I’ve been saying all along about kittens/NASCAR/trilobytes…”
The nesting comment structure might make derailing worse? I personally can’t understand how generally sequentially-presented forum interfaces have become seemingly less popular than the comment-section format.
Also, trilobye fux/kitten bux.
It’s partly because of click efficiency (i.e. the school of web design that says you should never be more than three clicks from anything) and partly because forums tend to run away and become their own, often horrible, culture separate from the parent site (but which you as site owner are still paying for). Tying comments tightly to top-level content doesn’t prevent shitposting, but it at least cuts down on completely content-free threads about e.g. whether Ewoks or Klingons would win in a fight, or about roleplaying as your forum avatar or talking in bad harem anime cliches.
That doesn’t excuse terrible threading, though.
…okay, yeah, in retrospect, the TV Tropes Forum was pretty bad.
It’s what came to mind, but I’ve seen stuff just as bad elsewhere.
I rather like Reigns of Terror. They (a) appeal to my Inner Saruman (“I am going to make you be good whether you like it or not!”) and (b) chime in with my cynicism about human nature and the nature of progress (“yeah, it starts out all ‘Let’s wear light floaty rational clothing instead of heavy, deforming corsetry and ends up with the guillotine and the noyades’).
If you run a successful blog with a popular comments section how could you not at least occasionally ban someone you kinda just don’t like? That would be like slaughtering a cow for meat but *not* sending the corpse to a rendering plant so the fat could be turned into base chemicals and eventually crayons. Not very ethically altruistic if you ask me.