This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit, the SSC Discord server, or the Cafe Chesscourt forum. Also:
1. There’s now a Meetup tab on the top of the blog, with a list of times and places for all of the in-person SSC meetups going on around the world. Take a look – and if you’re a meetup organizer, make sure the times and places for your meetups are up to date.
2. Highlighting some good comments from the Griggs vs. Duke thread: Mark Anderson on various things including international hiring norms, Walter on other regulatory issues promoting credentiolocracy, and Sebastian on the way legal cases work. And Robert VerBruggen links this paper on the broader effects of disparate impact laws. Also, Eliezer Yudkowsky on Facebook about the way that minimum wage laws help enforce credentiolocracy.
3. Other good comments: Larry Kestenbaum (himself an elected official) on why (contra a Current Affairs article I linked) it makes sense for the Democrats not to concentrate on Georgia (and some further clarification).
4. Thanks to everyone who emailed Katja about rationalist housing in Berkeley. You should have heard back about various house-viewing options; if not, try sending her a reminder. There are always new houses opening up nearby (including one I’m trying to rent) so it’s not too late to get your name on the waiting list if you’re interested.
The control problem is the first problem that a self-improving superintelligent AI would have to solve.
(How could it be certain that a later version of itself would share its aims?)
Can this fact be used to solve the control problem?
A minor point: Le Guin doesn’t work as shorthand for feminist writer. A Wizard of Earthsea was very misogynist. “As weak as women’s magic, as wicked as women’s magic.” Le Guin tried to undo it in Tehanu, but the book seemed to be about women’s lives being doomed to be awful.
I’m not sure who would be a better choice.
Congratulations on some fine work sorting out the twentieth century, Trans-Temporal Agent. I’m glad I didn’t live through the Austro-Hungarian Civil War myself, but it sure beats the Great War.
Your second assignment will be more difficult. We want you to arrange for regular contact between the Americas and Europe or Africa. In the timeline you are familiar with, travel across the Atlantic didn’t become routine until the sixteenth century. We want it to happen much earlier.
Some criteria:
1. Less intervention by the Trans-Temporal Authority is better than more.
2. Earlier contact is better than later.
3. Peaceful relations are better than war.
4. Regular contact is better than sporadic.
Hmmm, my immediate hunch is that something to spur on major (early) seafaring civilizations is the way to go here.
Maybe something that helps the Vikings expand past Greenland/Newfoundland and move further Southwest? Helping them farm that land or somehow frustrating their Europe-facing expansion efforts?
Or go back further and somehow spur the Polynesian-descended people who made it to Central/South America and motivate them to not stop there, but to keep going East and try and cross the other ocean as well?
My money is on the Phoenicians. Somehow encourage them to expand beyond the Mediterranean and found settlements in western Africa. Then get someone to wonder real hard what’s on the other side of the ocean.
Are there Polynesians descended people in Central America? I thought that advancement stopped at Easter Island.
Also, I am reading an article suggesting there are two distinct groups of people who made similar voyages (Polynesian and Mealnesian) who came from entirely different parts of Asia. Their abilities in Polynesia might not translate to the Atlantic.
Thor Heyerdahl thought Easter Island was settled from South America, but as I understand it this is not the consensus view. And I never heard of anybody who thought there might have been settlement in the other direction.
I would be interested to see the article.
According to Cavalli-Sforza’s primitive methods, Polynesians and Melanesians are genetically very close.
However, they do speak languages from “entirely different parts of Asia.” Polynesian and Mirconesian languages are Austronesian, related to Filipino, Formosan, and Malay, and more distantly to Thai. (Some) Melanesians somehow picked up Papua languages, which are totally unrelated. If they did this before the deep sea voyages, that might be a sign of separation and independent invention. But since it’s not even all Melanesian languages, it’s unlikely. Also, the standard story is that the Polynesians started from Melanesia (and not from, say, Micronesia).
I think the easiest way to do this is to kill the Roman Empire off sooner. The Atlantic Trade seems to be built on a unique set of circumstances involving the Iberian peninsula and the political competition involved there, along with some strong Mediterranean powers that denied access to the Med.
Ultimately, encouraging development of ship navigation.
The Iberian peninsula was politically tied to Med-dominant powers for a long time. I think the Caliphate of Cordoba might represent the first true break in the 900s, but the Caliphate didn’t last all that long.
The Gallic Empire was a break-away empire of Rome in the 3rd century AD, and briefly held Hispania. Somehow interfering to defeat Rome in the 3rd century means an independent Western Europe, but still checked but a sizable Roman Empire, which is in turn checked by enemies to the East (who had also left the Empire and needed to be reconquered).
Maybe you can get the Age of Discovery earlier from that. You’re starting the period of ship development at like 300 instead of 900, maybe you get your trans-atlantic trade at 1000 or 1100.
Kill off the Roman Empire before it destroys civilization in … 150BC.
My knowledge of history and geography isn’t great, so hopefully some other commenters can help with supplying a good date and location, but here’s my suggestion of the event I’d consider a minimalist intervention in line with criterion #1:
You build a trans-atlantic capable boat that can be copied using target-era technologies. Fill it with valuable items from the New World – gold, foods, anything that might be traded. Put in a few statues or paintings that indicate what might be out there. Transport it back in time, wrecking it (gently) somewhere suitable on the coast of Europe or Africa, somewhere that ocean currents would indicate it came from way out west.
Potential issues:
1) Boat technology – It is my understanding that the Pacific is full of reefs and atolls from volcanic that helped the Polynesians travel around in smaller boats, both by helping with navigation (looks like there might be something that way…) and food. The Atlantic doesn’t have this, meaning you need bigger boats to carry your supplies, and consequently more advanced technology. I’m not sure if you can push a Colombus type event more than a few hundred years earlier. You then still need some time to build up a trade route.
2) As I’m going for a Columbus type event I might fail on criterion #3 and just cause an earlier European conquest of the Americas. On the other hand, Pizarro took advantage of an Incan civil war to conquer that civilization. If we arrive a few hundred years earlier, the Europeans won’t have as strong a technological advantage over the Americans, and the various civilizations might be in a better state to band together and encourage a trading rather than a hostile relationships.
Alternatively, perhaps Bjarni Herjólfsson was a time traveler who tried a variant of my proposal, travelling back in time to tell viking explorer Lief Erikson the way to a new land. He failed on criterion #4, by not making it sound interesting enough for them to return. While voyage through the Northern Atlantic is probably easier (plenty of islands to stop at), the harsh winters make trading prospects across the ocean seem much less worthwhile.
>2) As I’m going for a Columbus type event I might fail on criterion #3 and just cause an earlier European conquest of the Americas. On the other hand, Pizarro took advantage of an Incan civil war to conquer that civilization. If we arrive a few hundred years earlier, the Europeans won’t have as strong a technological advantage over the Americans, and the various civilizations might be in a better state to band together and encourage a trading rather than a hostile relationships.
They would, however, still have a massive disease advantage, and that mattered far more than European technical edge.
This seems like a good time for me to ask about a notion I’ve heard in various places, that something was killing off vast numbers of New World inhabitants before Old Worlders even arrived. I’m not sure how to search around for that. Was there anything? Was it merely things like the Incan civil war? An indigenous epidemic? Something else? Was it even a thing?
I think this is generally referring to diseases (e.g. smallpox) that came from Europe, but spread much faster than European settlement. So in some cases Europeans would have arrived in recently depopulated areas and assumed the population was always low, when in fact the area had already been subject to epidemics spread from the earliest parts of the Columbian Exchange.
There is a record from 1347 of a ship harvesting lumber from Markland, which is generally interpreted as Labrador. So probably the Greenland Vikings kept visiting the mainland for more than 300 years.
Bring gunpowder to…..almost anywhere that has decent metalurgy. I’m not sure if you’re better off with one big gunpowder empire or lots of little ones. If you think big empires are good for technical progress, Then give the guns to romans/han. If you think competition is better, then you give the guns to their neighbors when they’re still small.
Either way, gunpowder ensures that settled peoples never get overrun by nomadic types, which means no barbarian invasions of the big land empires that were the source of most technical progress. That means no dark ages (yes, I know that they are massively overstated), which on it’s own is a pretty big win. And if you believe in some versions of the gunpowder revolution thesis, it encourages both capital formation and experimental mindedness, which have a small to massive effect on society. Eventually, some of those people will try to sail around africa, and given how the winds blow, that means they’ll eventually hit the americas, even if they don’t go looking for it.
For your “Not a parody? Really?” pleasure or disgust.
Dude’s way behind. I’ve carved what I imagine the iPhone 9 to be like out of a bar of soap and it’s amazing.
This is my second v random comment on this thread but thanks to anyone who responds to this stuff…
I saw Dunkirk last night, and I felt Harry Styles (the One Direction guy) was well cast b/c, in my mind, he looks like the Platonic image of a young Englishman. I’m not sure why I feel this, though. Is there anything to what I’m saying, or did I only feel that because he’s skinny and I knew beforehand that he was British? Are there features people typically see as British, or is it just a silly post-facto thing my mind is doing?
I think the whole cast was meant to look like a generic Englishman; all the lead soldiers are wiry brunettes.
@Cheese: Thanks a lot for the hiking advice in the previous (hidden) open thread. I definitely want to buy a EPIRB, or rather a PLB, but unfortunately, I only learned about their existence 2 weeks ago, just before leaving Europe (I went to two conferences, the second and current one in Singapore and I’m flying to Australia right after), so I couldn’t buy it (they have to be registered in your country even though you can then use them world-wide). Also, they’re much harder to get in Europe, there is a single shop in Prague in all the country and even in Germany I think there is just one shop in Berlin and one somewhere else. There is one Czech sailing e-shop where they have them and one Slovak one which ships (pun intended) to Bohemia but I found out about them 1 day before leaving, so fat chance.
I don’t care much about the cold, Australia is, even in winter, fairly warm, my bedroll is comfortable until -5 and you won’t freeze in it until -12, so this is not an issue. Spiders and snakes are worse, although probably they will be far less active now in winter. What I’m not sure about is how well the tracks are marked. In Europe you typically just have to follow a coloured mark painted on rocks or trees, Czech hikes are particularly well-marked, Austrian are also good, German slightly worse but still easy to follow and when they’re not it is usually somewhere where it doesn’t matter (i.e. not in the Alps).
I will try reddit to find someone in Australia as you said (on the off chance that someone is reading this who might be interested, I’m going to Australia in 2 weeks and I want to go hiking in 3 weeks in NSW and I am looking for people to do that with since the friend I’m visiting will leave after the first week and I don’t know anyone else in Australia).
I’m looking for a therapist and/or psychiatrist in the NYC area (preferably Manhattan) and I was wondering if the community has some recommendations. Rationalist-friendly would be nice, but not necessary. I’m mainly looking for help with anxiety/depression/akrasia. I’ve tried talk therapy in the past (both CBT and psychodynamic) and found it slightly helpful, but I’m probably more interested in medication.
Thanks!
Do rationalists tend to like cats more than the general population?
Allow me to take note of another thing that you, as a non-neurotypical, are likely not processing in the manner typical for others.
You are hyperfocused on what you would like out of this community and are giving no thought to what this community might like out of you. Especially because you will miss queues that are obvious to others, this is likely to end up in you “wearing out your welcome”.
If you wish to maximize your chances of receiving a generally positive reception here over the long term, you may wish to temporarily self-impose some limits on how often you post, and on what topics. Perhaps even try to enact the common advice of every online community, “lurk moar”.
[nitpick] Cues. It’s a stage metaphor. [/nitpick]
But nitpicks aside, I agree.
Yeah. I noticed that this morning.
I am absolutely awful at misspelling homonyms as I write. Even when re-reading a post in the edit box I frequently don’t see the substitutions I have made. I am far more likely to see them when I re-read the post after it is submitted. Even then, it’s far less obvious to me than others.
My theory is that it has something to do with having learned to initially read/write phonetically, but also may just be how I am wired.
Personally I don’t see the problem. Assuming a topic isn’t bad enough to censor in the first place, then why can’t people simply ignore it if it’s something they don’t want to talk about?
Signal to noise.
I suppose that makes sense. Although to be fair, it is also very hard to predict what will be interesting even if you’re not autistic. Plus in my experience whatever’s posted first on an open thread has a big advantage.
There is nothing particularly “wrong”.
Rather, HFA is not pursuing a strategy that is likely to result, long term, in what they seem to want very much. I think they want a place where they can have interesting discussion and where people engage with them in dialogue that far more concerned with the topic at hand than emotional signalling. Facts not moralizing, as they would put it.
Paradoxically, that means that they need to pay some attention to emotional signalling.
I think you are pattern matching from that thread and this is clearly different.
@carvenvisage:
Is this directed at me? If so, I think you missed.
Yes the reply nesting wasn’t an error. I “missed”? It’s not an attack, I’m saying you are right to think that other thread was heading in that direction (it had an escalatory response from Aut Cat and a dogpile, -I don’t remember in which order), but encouraging you to consider if this “simply making a lot of posts” is at all the same or if you are ‘fighting the last war’ here. My impression is that aut cat is an ‘accepted regular’ after you averted the problem in that thread, and any lingering complaints are exactly that.
@carvenvisage:
By “you missed” I was attempting to humorously indicate that I didn’t understand what you were trying to convey. Looks like my joke missed. 😛
In this case, I was reading a bunch of replies to Aut Cat/HFA sort of spamming the comments that basically said “you are annoying me”. I doubted that HFA was actually going to pick up that it had to do, at least partially, with how overenthusiastic they were.
I actually believe that this can be an interesting topic. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201501/3-things-being-cat-person-or-dog-person-reveals-about-you
I suspect that cat people should be heavily overrepresented here based on the common traits of cat people and the SSC community.
Well said.
He of many names, I have a good friend who’s probably medium Autism Spectrum. He’s nearly oblivious to social cues, which is sometimes infuriating. But he has one saving grace. He knows this, and doesn’t get offended when you tell him flat-out what he’s not picking up. He’ll come over to visit, and when it’s time for him to go, I tell him that, and he says ‘OK’. Be like that. And in this case, HBC is doing just what I do for my friend. You are not going to be relieved of the responsibility of dealing with normal people any time soon, unless you actually are an AI out to destroy non-rationality.
Which is totally cool, so long as you like paperclips.Practice dealing with people who come closer than most to understanding you, and be willing to take advice. It will make others more receptive to your ideas, and may help you in real life, too.@HBC and bean Really thanks! I indeed do not get people at all other than non-mental facts about them. I care about the etymology of the name of a human and the town they are from more than the human themselves.
To me human emotions do not matter as long as I’m not harming humans.
And I get that. It makes you interesting, which is one of the things I think is most valuable in commentators. Call it the “only at SSC” factor. If I want the perspective of a reasonably high IQ liberal who doesn’t think too much, I can find that anywhere on the internet. Them coming here doesn’t help much. If I want the perspective of John Schilling on North Korean missiles or defense issues in general, I have to come here. Or any of the dozens of other interesting people here. HBC is a liberal who thinks. Deiseach is a cranky Irishwoman. I could go on.
But you’re gong to get a lot more traction for your ideas if you try to get along with the target audience. Saying “I’m so autistic I just don’t care” isn’t going to buy you any credit with the reptile brains running most of us. My advice is to stop posting top-level questions in this OT, and pick your best one for Wednesday’s. Don’t make us tired of you, and you’ll be valued for an unusual perspective pretty quickly.
Thanks! Sure.:-)
I’m a reasonable person if I know what’s going on. My views are very interesting and unique.
You forgot ‘humble’.
I just want to say it’s pretty heartwarming how patient and helpful HBC and bean are being here. I wish I’d seen other communities half as nice as that to newcomers who aren’t quite getting things. More importantly, I wish I were as patient and helpful as you guys are being to people I know on the spectrum.
And yes I am a cat person.
Judging by your avatar, you mean that literally.
Is anybody else having issues with the time display? It’s about 3 hours behind all of a sudden.
I think that’s because you and I do not live in California.
It didn’t do this before. I guess Scott moving has changed the default time?
This is very likely to be true.
Almost certainly. It went from me (in California) +3 hours to in line with my clock.
I believe that submissiveness is generally unhealthy. All humans should be independent, individualistic and rational. All humans should refuse to always submit to a particular human unless something can be gained from it. Voluntary submission for no purpose is wrong.
SSC what do you think?
I think you don’t have kids.
Yes. I don’t want to have one anyway. Why do we need kids for? Cats are much better than dogs and kids. Why? Cats are independent.
Other than certain exceptions submissiveness is pathological.
I dunno, ask your parents.
Edit: on second thought, ask the parents of someone who doesn’t hate kids.
I know that kids serve no purposes. They aren’t independent which is bad for my absolute individualist dream.
None except…
– free household labor
– endless hours of amusement
– carrying on your bloodline
– carrying on our species
– the manufacture of finely crafted fingerpaintings and macaroni necklaces
– weights you can use for resistance training that conveniently grow heavier as you grow stronger
– their giggles are full of drugs; basically, tickling your children and hearing them laugh unleashes raw dopamine in your brain…it’s quite addictive, and cures even the worst moods
– experiencing the awesome beauty and magic of watching tiny humans you created and who look and act like you grow up into marvelous and amazing people, and other such gag-inducing cliches that turn out to be 100% true
– your children will (as long as you don’t screw it up) at least care about you, if not for you, in your old age when everyone else you know and care about is dead
– other stuff I’m forgetting about.
@Well…What about a robot to take care of my needs and a cat to take care of?
I’m certainly not moved at all after reading your list. No offense but I couldn’t care less.
What is the purpose of letting one’s bloodline remain? Who cares? Furthermore your child isn’t your clone either. He/she only has about half of your genes (Y chromosome is an exception though) and the other is from another person.
The only plausible reason why someone can gain from having a kid is to have a free slave or welfare. However we aren’t having slaves any more and I hate slavery. I’m against too much welfare for those with no disability but refuse to work as well for people need to work and be proud of working.
>What is the purpose of letting one’s bloodline remain? Who cares?
I care. Why shouldn’t I?
>Furthermore your child isn’t your clone either. He/she only has about half of your genes (Y chromosome is an exception though) and the other is from another person.
An excellent argument for having even more children.
@eyeballfrog If you want a copy of yourself, get a clone.
Bloodlines mean nothing. Do not having an increasingly small copy of your genes in 2500 matter? Why? If you can be alive because of transhumanism then it’s great. Otherwise why shall you even care? Unless you are male and are talking about the Y Chromosome alone, why shall anyone care?
Do you have any human cloning vats handy? I mean, the Chinese are probably working on them as we speak, but they’re probably not commercially available for use.
Matters to me. Plus, the “increasingly small copy” is only a problem if you mate with humans from distant ethinicities. According to a study from Iceland, the optimal mate is a kins(wo)man approximately 8 to 10 degrees of relation from you (third or fourth cousin). Even within national groupings, you’re probably likely to reproduce with highly similar individuals, even if not formally related.
@Anonymous I can’t clone anything yet. By the way I really hate mating.
Sure you can declare that anything matters to you, including whether your own surname starts with an “A” and whether you have exactly 217 paperclips. That does not make it important.
I tentatively accept the study unless it is woo.
I gathered that much.
How about this – if you value people who value what you value, that is whatsit-maximizers, you ought to see to it that there are more of such people. The simplest way to do so is by breeding, especially with other people like you, to better the odds of coming up with more people like you.
If your attitude towards breeding is “who needs it?”, then you are probably not going to be successful at maximizing the amount of people who think like you, and do things that you like. This is probably why there are so few people like you.
Look at it yourself: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5864/813
Why wait until 2500? I already reap benefits in the form of the pleasure and joy I get from my two kids. In my own lifetime I can expect to reap all kinds of other rewards from having many descendants. One of those is knowing that I have out-reproduced other people and therefore empirically demonstrated my evolutionary fitness. Another is the possibility of having at least one of my descendants wind up in a position of influence, which means a kind of indirect way to wield my own influence. (For instance, I have often gone to my own grandfather for advice and feedback on talks I’m giving, papers I’m writing, etc.)
Although, I don’t really want an EXACT copy of myself, I want someone who exemplifies a new spin on myself by combining my genes with those of my wife, whose mind is formidable and whose body is attractive. She is of a different race than me but that just makes it more fun.
When those Chinese cloning vats come on the market I guarantee you the process will be much more expensive and much less convenient than biological reproduction.
BTW HFAMaximizer, the fact that you don’t like mating is not an argument against reproduction, it is only evidence that your taste (and influence) will be marginal.
Germane quote from my blog: “The civilization you want is made up of people like you. Luckily, nature has endowed you with the ability to create more people like yourself.”
Was it Ayn Rand that increasingly cast any of her particular tastes as the summit of rational living?
Kids will be able to construct paperclips long after we are gone.
Bullshit. You only need to clean up kid feces for like 2 years each. Cat feces are forever.
Though I will acknowledge cats are better than dogs.
Rather less than two years, if you set your mind to it; although children nowadays tend to be potty-trained later than children sixty years ago, probably because we no longer have to hand-wash dirty nappies.
Some of the inspirational texts on SSC are questionable.
Well yes, if you ignore all the examples of non-pathological submission, it’s quite obvious that submission is pathological. I’m not convinced this is a particularly useful insight, however.
@Well…
You beat me too it.
Though upon reflection I would also add, “or have ever needed to get 30 people moving in the same direction in less than 30 seconds”
That’s not submissiveness. People do that for their own good. Similarly obedience in the military or the workspace is healthy because they serve some purpose. Furthermore such obedience is towards anyone with a higher position in some hierarchy so there is no personal-emotional aspect of it. You may obey someone for a while. However if you get a promotion you probably no longer have to obey him/her.
What is pathological? If A perpetually submit to B or have a habit of submitting to people for no reason then A is pathological.
Do you actually know someone who submits to people for no reason? Actually no reason, not just a reason you don’t agree with?
If they’re submitting willingly, odds are they have a good reason. Maybe they sometimes feel overstressed and it’s good for them to let someone else take the lead for a while. Maybe they trust the other person to make better decisions. Maybe they just feel happier when they don’t have to be in charge.
(And no, emotional reasons are not “no reason” – most people include their emotional state in their utility function, and they are right to do so.)
@beleester I’m actually mostly talking about the problem of obedient wives and kids. This is very unhealthy.
It is fine if you pretend to be submissive for a while. However it is NOT fine if you are actually a willing slave. Be like a proud cat. Don’t be like a submissive dog.
Why is it unhealthy?
For someone so invested in rationalism, there sure seem to be a lot of deontological hard stops in your philosophy.
Because I believe absolute individualism is good. Submissiveness is a trait that rejects individualism in a masochist way (i.e. control freaks are bad however I can at least understand why they exist) hence I consider it pathological.
As for ethical philosophy I have a lot to learn. I’m glad that you pointed this out to me.
I’m starting to wonder if this guy completely lacks a theory of mind.
That doesn’t actually answer the question.
@Nornagest I think I answered why I consider submissiveness unhealthy. I believe individualism is healthy and good. Hence one should only submit or pretend to submit for personal benefits because submission is anti-individualistic and by submitting one is sacrificing a part of their individuality. Submissiveness which is submission when there is no benefit is unhealthy because this is like self-harm which I also oppose.
Saying that submission is unhealthy because individualism is healthy is like saying that red is good because green is bad. It’s very close to restating the same thing in different terms.
We live in an individualistic culture and so we’re primed to see individualism as good, but it’s a rare moral framework under which it’s inherently good; the freedom/coercion framework is about as close as it gets, and even there it is not coercive if you prefer to defer to others. There are whole schools of thought dedicated entirely to reconciling freedom/coercion ethics with communitarian preferences.
Most of the time, in our culture, individualism’s considered good because it contributes instrumentally to things that’re closer to our terminal values. I’m trying to tease out roughly what those values are for you — though they’re going to be fuzzy and contradictory, because you’re human, no matter how autistic you are.
@HFAMaximizer
What evidence do you have for this?
People who get locked up in solitary confinement tend to experience severe mental issues, strongly suggesting that extreme individualism is unhealthy.
I think you should stop creating new accounts.
I just changed my nickname twice. I’m not attempting to use sockpuppets.
I won’t change this one at least for several months.
You can call me HM, AC, Auty, etc if you want to. “Auty” is cool because I hope the world can become more HFA.
This Autism Supremacist schtick really makes it hard to take you seriously.
It’s reached the point where anytime someone introduces themselves with “I have autism and…” I just tune them out. It’s a real shame. IF this person is real, he is a bad representative and is doing the autistic community a great disservice.
Let’s assume that our multi-named poster is in fact just as they claim for a second.
Would you blame a paraplegic for blocking the stairs in your building the first time the came into it needing to get to the second floor? Would you say that paraplegics who attempt to navigate a city that is poorly accommodating of the disabled to be poor representatives of the disabled?
That seems to be the appropriate analogy. It makes sense to make some allowances to see if the right accommodation is available.
@HBC
Eh, that’s often the case. Not so much here. HFA Cat is more like a paraplegic preaching that the world would be a better place if there were fewer limbs in it. I have a lot more sympathy for the sort of thing you describe but, as I said, when it drifts into supremacism I just can’t take it seriously.
@Gobbobble:
The behavior HFA is engaged in, a hyper focus on their personal concerns and a failure to understand why these would evoke negative emotional reactions in others, is caused by their autism and typical of those with autism, AFAIK.
This is precisely the behavior you are finding off-putting.
Absent a wheel chair (or some other easily determined source of need), someone blocking the stairs in your apartment building would also be extremely off-putting.
That’s the analogy I am trying to draw.
No offense to non-autists. Maybe I’m like a blind person who can not be convinced that eyes are actually useful. However to me it seems that non-autistic social skills are just like ornaments. I don’t have them and don’t care about the fact that I don’t have them. Furthermore I believe lack of these ornaments actually make my life better.
@HFAMaximizer:
The appropriate analogy might be to a blind person who keeps almost hitting me with their cane, which I am having to take care to stay of the way of and every now and then I get popped.
From the blind person’s perspective, they are getting around just fine.
*Apologies to anyone who engages with this who is blind. I know that it isn’t an accurate representation.
Are you literally the Devil? OTOH, stupid question. The Devil would obviously lie and say no. 😉
Submissiveness is unhealthy. I believe it is fine if you have to submit but it is not fine if you submit when it does not benefit anyone.
You don’t get creativity if everyone is born a slave to others’ desires.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim?
I assume that you are an alt-righter. Are you familiar with how biodiversity people talk about the differences between European societies and Northeast Asian ones?
Vaguely.
For example in Japan people do nice scientific research. However a stupid ultrarigid hierarchy and an obedience culture still exists. This is obviously a problem.
The key problem with obedience cultures is that it suppresses novel ideas.
“Novel” does not equate “good”, not even close.
@Anonymous I know. However freedom of thought is basically the key reason why the West is great or at least why it was great. Not all novel ideas need to be good. What matters is that we allow novel ideas so that we benefit from the good ones.
Japan has retained more of its greatness than the West has, so far. If I were maximizing for niceness of a place to live, I would definitely choose Japan over pretty much any place in the West (even my own country), because they have retained a culture of duty and trusting one’s neighbour (and haven’t yielded to pressure to allow in barbarians en-masse).
Also, what’s your evidence that there isn’t freedom of thought in Japan, or even substantially worse than in the West? I mean, it strikes me as obviously false, because of how much utterly bizarre stuff comes out of that country.
“Novel” does not equate “good”, not even close.
Still better to have ideas and sort out the good uses than not having them at all. “Good” usually applies to the application, not the idea. Not inventing knives because backstabbing is bad precludes chopping vegetables or surgery.
@Anonymous Northeast Asians aren’t without issues. However they are currently the group with the least amount of issues.
Japan isn’t perfect. However it is certainly much better than almost the entire West except for its authoritarian culture that you seem to like. Subways, lack of crime, etc. Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are also good.
China isn’t that good yet but it is way safer than major American cities because Dems are mismanaging them. Furthermore China is rapidly improving while the problem with major American cities except for Honolulu is getting wors
e.
America needs to properly cultivate some proper pride, knowledge and enthusiasm in its AA population. Teach their kids to love science and work so that race relations do not become even worse.
You would say that, being the guy who hates kids and sex.
As I understand it, they have at least one very serious issue, possibly an existential one. If you had your way, we’d all have that same issue.
Hello, Scott. I’m a somewhat new reader. A friend of mine likes your blog and sends me some of your posts sometimes, and we talk about the subjects. It’s a very interesting blog, I like your fiction stories. Very funny. I loved the blue eyes one; I would have probably been killed as a child if I lived there, because I wouldn’t be capable of not saying the obvious. Anyway, this is sort of an introduction. You’re probably never going to read this, and if you do, it’s unlikely you’ll want to respond. I’ve decided to make this comment to actually talk about something, not to introduce myself. I’m considering deleting this introduction part, but maybe I won’t. We’ll see.
I’ve decided to make this comment to talk about something you’ve talked about in some posts I read from years ago, 2014, 2013. It’s about pornography. I’m one of those pesky people who aren’t fond of it. Personally speaking, I’ve never seen the appeal, but my personal experience matters little to what I think of it. I think it’s damaging for a plethora of reasons… haha, damn, I must have hundreds of tagged text posts about it in my own blog. But for all that, I couldn’t eloquently argue about it by myself at all. I’m really bad at this, I don’t understand why someone wouldn’t be against something that harms so many people in such perplexing, sadistic ways; so I don’t know how to convince someone of it.
But I haven’t always thought like that. I used to be indifferent to pornography, and I was convinced that I shouldn’t be. Maybe other people can be convinced too. Or maybe they can convince me to go back to being indifferent, or even to support it. We’ll see.
What I mean by this wall of text is to share what made me change my mind. I saw you mention Andrea Dworkin in a post of yours. Her book “Pornography: men possessing women” paints quite the ugly picture of this billion dollar industry. You’re probably not going to read it, I have recommended Dworkin books to male friends who had been curious what I was reading and they simply couldn’t parse it. But maybe you will surprise me, I’ve been surprised before. I’ve downloaded it in pdf form, online, for free, in this site: http://radfem.org/dworkin/
I do wish I could buy her stuff in print, but it’s 1. out of print! and 2. expensive. Plus, she’s dead, so it’s not like I’d be investing in her anyway.
So, this is my big first comment slash introduction. I wonder which is worse: to be ignored or to be bullied?
I guess I’ll find out soon.
I like “which is worse” games.
Which is worse: to spend all day being dragged into long meetings that have nothing to do with you or your role, or to find out at the end of the day that you were not invited to an important meeting where your insights would have been most valuable?
For me, not getting called to the important meeting would drive me crazy for several days, paranoid and suspicious, a boring wasted day would just be a boring and wasted day.
Agreed. It’s probably not really an interesting or challenging comparison. But it’s been on my mind lately because for most of my career the first thing happened a lot and I used to hate it and complain inwardly about it, while recently the second thing happened once and I realized it’s much worse.
I don’t know Dworkin much/at all. More interesting for the purposes of discussion than becoming Wikipedia Expert – can you summarize (like, one or two sentences, not book report) her central thesis?
On-topic, sorta: I find myself thinking that on the consumer end pornography is like alcohol. Not that great for you, probably OK in certain forms and in moderation, but a lot of people have trouble with moderation, and there is certainly a desensitizing effect, which leads to the forms it takes changing. What was considered scandalous half a century ago is meh now, and the days of guys beating it to lingerie catalogues is long gone.
Alcohol has some upsides, like increased sociability. Porn does not.
Porn (well, masturbation, which porn facilitates) can take the edge off a high libido, which also helps increase sociability.
That’s what your wife is for. 😉
You’re not married, are you?
(Rhetorical question)
If Anonymous isn’t married, then he ought to be familiar with the (un)sociability part… >.>
I’m very sure I have no idea what you are implying, comrades.
First off, welcome to the party! Fair warning, we’re all a bit mad here so if something doesn’t make sense to you don’t feel bad, just roll with it. 😉
I am in broad agreement with dndnrsn, in moderation I feel that pornography, and other forms of titillation/release serve a useful even beneficial purpose, however it’s monkeys being monkeys it’s easy for people to get sucked down the hedonistic rabbit-hole. As someone who’s had to make conscious effort to control his impulses in regards to both I find the analogy to alcohol apt.
Edit:
I’ve tried reading Dworkin a few times and while I find her arguments strong on the object level I think her theories are wildly off base. I don’t think she ever really understood “masculinity” and in trying to define everything in terms of her opposition to this thing she didn’t understand the whole edifice, lacking a foundation, falls apart the moment you look at it sideways.
Could someone go over what the strongest points of Dworkin’s book are? I don’t feel like reading 328 pages of moral hand-wringing and the introduction makes it seem like that’s what’s going to follow.
Seconded. I’d like to know what exactly I’m supposed to call feminist bullshit. 🙂
Pornography is a pretty much crude wireheading.
Anything that gives pleasure is “pretty much crude wireheading”, then. Wireheading is wireheading precisely because it is refined.
Are you playing at sophistry, or actually objecting?
What I mean is that porn, like putting an electrode to your pleasure center, is stealing the reward without performing the virtuous actions that properly yield the reward, circumventing the process of learning to do more of the good stuff. Just about the only non-negative thing I can say about it is that it probably won’t make you poor, because it’s available for free, unlike most recreactional drugs.
I’m objecting. Wireheading bypasses everything. The next best thing we have, certain drugs, bypass most everything. When you get to porn you’re at least another level beyond that.
I see a difference in degree, but not a difference in class. Is there some other term for what I called “crude wireheading”?
Sex doesn’t merely happen to those who act virtuously.
How does this not equally apply to watching a non-pornographic film, eating sugary food, playing a video game, reading a novel, or riding a roller coaster?
Ordered reproductive sex is virtuous.
It applies to the degree that these actions substitute for the real thing, damage your ability to do the real thing, and have no value other than the pleasure they bring. There are some good reasons to eat sugary food (even if they don’t come up often), there are probably some good things you can learn from reading a novel, or playing a video game, etc. – in addition to the sensations they cause.
Your argument is old and not good.
Some might even argue that in modern society, the opposite is true.
In the case of wireheading, the degree makes the class. It’s precisely the refinement which makes wireheading different from other ways of getting pleasure.
Pleasure-seeking? Hedonistic?
@ TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
…and your response is lazy and half-assed.
What specific factor makes it “not good”? What does an argument’s age have to do with it’s truth or validity?
And all this time I thought that thing Mencken said about Puritans was just beating up a strawman.
@hlynkacg
The standard responses have been trotted out several times. If you are putting forward an old argument with well-known objections, the high-effort thing to do is acknowledg the objections and say something new.
Hey, don’t lump me with those heretics! I don’t hate Christmas!
But did you do anything to deserve it?
Only if you think that being hostile towards hedonism is the same as Puritanism.
@Anonymous
It’s a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
@ TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
The arguments against hedonism and in favor of moderation are similarly well known so if you’re not going to engage in the discussion GTFO.
@Luminifera
There is no evidence that pornography results in more sex crimes.
Dworkin hated men, having a completely broken model of reality where men are taught to abuse (and never care for) women, while women are taught to care for (and never abuse) men. In her world, every men beats women, every men rapes women, etc, etc. The evidence she presents consists merely of anecdotes of the most serious cases of female victims, cherry picked and probably greatly exaggerated, like she probably exaggerated about her own life (even the very SJ-friendly Guardian didn’t believe her story about her claimed Paris rape). Objective facts run counter to her narrative and taking it seriously is like seriously engaging with ‘The Eternal Jew.’
Anyway, it’s impossible to seriously engage you on your beliefs, since you are not making a specific argument. Throwing an entire book out there is a gish gallop, which cannot reasonably be countered. Most of the book is not even about pornography anyway, but a general treatise on how men are evil. If you believe that, then that is a better thing to discuss than how you feel about pornography.
I suggest you pick a specific claim from the book to discuss and/or for people to respond to, if you actually want a real conversation.
Is this an admission that you are here to troll? Your comment has several red flags which indicates that you are in a hostile mode, not willing to really engage, but just want to reinforce a pre-existing us-vs-them narrative.
In extremist SJ, there is a tendency to classify the rejection of certain claims, even with evidence, as aggression, resulting in immunity from fact and reason. One way to reject wrapping yourself up in your own righteousness is allow for the possibility of having a debate, not just to be ignored or bullied.
In Troll: the Broadway Musical, this would be the first line of the villain’s lamentful solo, sung softly to himself in his lair before launching his grand assault on the decent and innocent Internet folk of the nearby village.
I am willing to crowdfund this.
Seconded.
I feel like maybe there exist more options other than just those two.
I might be willing to take that as a challenge. If I were to read one book, would you suggest “Pornography”, or another?
Skimming the beginning of “Pornography”, I think I might have a feel for the “simply couldn’t parse it” thing. The problem is essentially that Dworkin writes in absolute generalizations and in abstract terms. I imagine it makes a great rallying cry for people who have experienced the issues in question and understand them intuitively, but the detail just isn’t there to walk someone through the issue if they don’t have that prior knowledge.
@ADifferentAnonymous
Absolute generalizations are usually wrong. If I had been victim of a black criminal, that would be consistent with a ‘all black people are criminals narrative.’ However, that is a factually wrong narrative.
Intuitive understanding is very dangerous, because it only accounts for personal experience and we know that individual experiences can vary wildly.
Also, she goes further than just generalizing about behavior, she also claims that men are collectively working together to harm women. She is a conspiracy theorist. She was just lucky enough to hate men and not Jews; or history would not have been so kind to her.
I suspect Dworkin helps people crystalize certain concepts. That doesn’t prove those concepts correspond to reality, but if it turns out that they do, then the crystallization had value.
If you’ve actually read Dworkin (and not just out-of-context quotes), I won’t argue this further… But are you sure she means a literal conspiracy? Recall Scott’s comparison of the concepts “The Patriarchy” and “The Cathedral”.
Her writing is filled with claims that men collectively and intentionally seek to subjugate and harm women for their own benefit, for example these three different snippets from the book the OP referenced:
The more mildly misandrist feminists at least claim that men don’t know the damage that they are causing, but Dworkin explicitly makes the claim that the system was intended to exploit women for the benefit of men.
Anyone who uses this material to make sense of their experiences will logically turn their anger at the actions of one/a few men into anger and hatred of all men.
I could have sworn I’ve seen, in the interminable feminism threads on this very board, dismissals of criticizing-feminism-via-criticizing-Dworkin due to her being (to paraphrase) feminism’s equivalent to Vox Day: an obvious crazyperson who no one really takes all that seriously and there are much better arguments to be found elsewhere.
I could have sworn I’ve seen, in the interminable feminism threads on this very board,
Do you think you could produce a link? I would really rather rely on something more than recollection in this case, even from a regular. (I’m willing to take the OC at face value and in good faith, in this case.)
@Paul
That’s fair. I’ll try to remember to go digging when I’ve got the time.
Here’s an example of saying that quoting Dworkin is not being charitable towards liberals, when really liberals treat her as a crank, continued at the bottom of the thread here.
Feminism is not a monolith.
To oversimplify: you can divide feminism into liberal feminism vs radical feminism. Liberal feminism likes to talk about abortion rights, equal pay, the glass ceiling, and domestic violence; radical feminism likes to talk about abolishing the inherently oppressive and dominating patriarchal system. Andrea Dworkin fell squarely into the radical feminist camp. Indeed, she spent her life in a series of running battles with liberal feminists over issues like pornography and prostitution. She is a fair representative of a certain style of feminism, but not of feminism as a whole.
Edit: And it should go without saying that if Dworkin is not representative of feminism as a whole, she is clearly not representative of “liberals”.
-In OT 54.75, Corey refers to Dworkin as a crank and says that when right-wing posters on SSC claim that liberals take her as anything BUT a crank, they are strawmanning. Ctrl+F “Complaining about Straw Liberals:”
There was a larger argument in the thread, with Corey and a few other liberal posters arguing that no one actually supports Dworkin and MacKinnon except as ‘trolling’, and that it is disingenuous and uncharitable for conservatives to try and use their views as examples of negative aspects of Feminism.
That’s the longest discussion, but in several other comment threads, liberal posters refer to men/conservatives/MRAs complaing about Dworkin as weakmanning/strawmanning. For one example, see Vox Imperatoris on Book Review: Art of the Deal’s comment thread.
Links omitted because every time I try to collect a lot of internal SSC links it eats my post.
I’m a bit confused how criticizing feminists through Dworkin suddenly became a topic in this thread. ADifferentAnonymous nor I argued that all feminists have Dworkian ideas. In fact, I explicitly contrasted her with feminists who don’t have these beliefs.
Perhaps I just triggered people with my statement, but I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing all feminists for having similar beliefs to Dworkin (but it also seems clearly wrong that she’s the only one making such claims).
Feminists have a variety of beliefs, most of them wrong* 🙂
* To some extent**
** Non-feminists also tend to be wrong to some extent 😛
I think the “liberal feminists reject Dworkin” point is somewhat on point as an argument against me–it suggests I shouldn’t bother trying to steelman her. But I’m going to do it a bit anyway, because, well..
I think a lot of feminism has the bad habit of taking things that are complex, subtle, emergent, unconscious, etc., and describing them as if they’re simple, overt, explicit, deliberate, etc. Dworkin is horrible in this respect.
But as truth-seekers, we don’t get to say “Dworkin botched her arguments, therefore she loses;” we have to investigate whether her writing points at real issues.
Case in point, I think the first quote you put down can be translated to
Even steelmanning, I can’t ascribe to Dworking the addendum that the duty of attractiveness also gets deployed hard against certain marginalized men, or that women do plenty of enforcement too; but there’s still a lot of truth in the statement.
The second and third quotes are pretty much chaff.
I don’t know about Dworkin, but my understanding is that many forms of feminism concede this but still find some way to blame men (“internalized misogyny” etc)
I haven’t read the Dworkin, and I suspect most people here haven’t and won’t. But Ozy has! (That’s actually a review of a book by someone else, but I think you’ll find it useful?)
Do you have any specific and substantive claims regarding the scope and degree to which depictions (fictional, such as poetry, prose, video games, drawn art, simulated sex in movies, etc) or recordings (photographs or video of actual sex acts) of sex acts are inherently harmful to individuals or society?
If so, please share them.
If all you’re going to say is “Read Dworkin”, I have, and I was not particularly impressed. Her models of masculinity, pornography, and sexual relationships bear very little resemblance to reality, and the evidence on record about actual pornography, as Aapje notes, directly contradicts her model.
I haven’t read Dworkin but I often think of her obit in the Moscow alt-weekly The Exile:
The culture war in America has been getting a lot more “Russian” lately.
For someone who wrote for a Moscow alt weekly, this Dolan guy seems to have some odd ideas about Russian culture.
You should think of stuff in “The Exile” as a kind of hipster performance art, I wouldn’t take it too seriously.
I see it as “ha ha only serious.” Jokes with elements of truth.
Or at least sincere opinion.
Would you describe your “friend” as chaotic?
Not helpful.
Is anyone good at crossword puzzles? Several months ago I started taking a train to work and I started doing puzzles a few times a week. Recently I discovered the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament posts its annual tournament’s puzzles and rankings online, so I figured I’d try my hand at it, thinking I’d place in the 50th percentile.
I got absolutely smoked, like 2nd percentile. At this point it’s merely a matter of pride for me. Does anyone have any recommendations as to how to get better at crosswords? Are the people in that tournament practicing/studying? Or is it a hopeless task and I must accept my fate?
Crosswords have their own vocabulary. Certainly I’ve known no other place where female sheep, desert plants used as a burn salve, poetic spellings of “even” and “ever”, the ninth letter of the greek alphabet, the fourth planet, and other such words come up quite so often. So practice should help a lot.
I’ve always been amazed at how this works. My whole life I’ve considered myself fairly good with the English language. I read and write a lot. I worked a job that was roughly the equivalent of a technical writer in the military for nearly 10 years. I tested in the 99th percentile of the verbal section of the GMAT with zero study. I blogged for several years and had a piece picked up (and paid for) by a fairly major libertarian website, etc.
And yet, I get absolutely smoked by anyone who I ever try to play in word games: scrabble, boggle, crosswords, you name it. And the people I know who are great at these things, the “solve the NYT crossword in two minutes every day” people, aren’t particularly well read, tested lower than I did, have never written professionally, etc. It’s just an entirely different skillset…
Yeah, I always used to assume I would be good at Scrabble until I played and got beaten regularly.
The only exception was when I was lucky enough to play all my letters (“BROTHERS”, I think?) on the first turn, getting the all-letters bonus and the triple word score.
Cattle-yak crossbreeds are notably absent.
The reason for this is that filling a grid is hard, and certain words have convenient letter arrangements that makes them show up more often than others.
That said, they really need to modernize their pool of clues and answers. The Thin Man’s dog is named Asta. I know this because it constantly came up in the NYT crossword for years. That movie came out before my grandparents were born. I realize they might be playing to the audience that actually reads newspapers, but even in-flight magazine crosswords tend to kill me when there’s some intersection of 50-year-old pop culture references I’ll never get.
I’ve gone to ACPT for several years, gradually climbing in the standings. Won a trophy once, but not one of the good ones. It’s mostly about practice, knowing the conventions and gimmicks (if a word in the clue is abbreviated, then the answer is an abbreviation) and, like Nybbler says, those short vowel-heavy words that come up everywhere (the first name of the guy who designed the St. Louis Arch).
Maybe check out Amy Reynaldo’s blog and (if you’re not too allergic to woker-than-thou ranting) Rex Parker.
And British-style crosswords are their own separate thing. I enjoy them but they’re completely impenetrable to a novice.
I like crosswords. But it’s just a hobby for me. I think it would maybe be less fun if I took it seriously. Maybe you should take it like the fun hobby it is? A relaxing, yet still exciting activity. Or maybe you really want to be the best at crosswords, and it’s your lifelong dream or something. Just don’t stress about it, be happy. Best wishes.
Very fair advice, I admit! I will DEFINITELY never be the best at crosswords, I have no delusions about that — nor did I plan to spend the rest of my life studying and practicing. I just was wondering if there were any “hack”-ish ways that people use to get better beyond just doing them over and over (maybe like “Here’s a list of 200 words to remember that will make you 20% better!”)
I personally find that there’s a sweetspot for me in enjoying an activity — I need to be putting in a bit of effort to improve at it, but I also can’t pin my entire self-worth on being amazing at it (since the latter goal is nearly always doomed to failure and would lead to pure despair).
+1.
I do time myself and track best times, which to me captures the fun parts of competition and helps me take them somewhat seriously. But comparing myself to the best in the world seems like a recipe for misery.
On the same topic: do people here like criptic crosswords?
What’s that? I got into the acrostics and other variation-on-crosswords that the WSJ has in the crossword section on weekends, but I don’t know what most of them are called.
[Edit: just went and tried the Guardian’s online free one… this is very hard for someone who’s used to WJS/LATimes style crosswords!]
Theres a whole bunch of tricks and conventions with cryptic crosswords, which you need to know along with having a good vocabulary and good general knowledge. I can just about get through one, but my dad is a maven who has been in the top 100 in the UK.
@j1000000:
How old are you? If you’re younger than, say, 30, an easy piece of advice for how to get better at crosswords is: get older. Will Shortz, the crosswords editor for the New York Times and director of the tournament you entered, is 64. He likes to fill a grid with references and clues that make sense to him, which includes references to comic strips and tv series and sports celebrities and political figures he’s absorbed info about over the years. If you were his age, you would have probably absorbed many of the same references but if you’re much younger you are likely to find many of his clues *really obscure*.
When I was a kid, I was amazed that my parents knew all these random facts to fill in a crossword, but as I’ve aged, the proportion of crossword answers that I hypothetically *could* have gotten keeps increasing. So if it seems to you a hopeless task now, one option is just to stick a pin in it and try again in a decade or so.
In the meantime, you could get a crosswords app on your phone and practice with easier ones rather than jumping in at the deep end. People who are good at crosswords tend to enjoy doing them and do a lot of them and it’s a skill that builds over time. If you just try to do even a simple for-kids daily crossword every single day you’re likely to gradually get better at that skill.
If male variability was the cause of low numbers of women in highly mathematical professions, you’d expect that, as the profession became more competitive, the number of women would decrease.
So, for example, one would expect there to be the fewest woman physics professors at elite universities, with more and more of them being present at less-competitive universities.
Has this pattern been observed?
I’m not sure. However the women who are actually at the level of professors in mathematics are generally as good as men. In my field for example there has been several women who contributed significantly to major theories and they should not be ignored.
At the very least a significant minority of great STEM researchers happen to be female.
Especially if you count “squishy” sciences like psychology and biology under STEM, which I think just about everyone does.
I’m mostly talking about hard sciences.
Possibly relevant xkcd
Heh, nice.
Wait, since when is biology not considered a hard science?
Source: Humanities person who defines “hard science” as “I have not been convinced this is not magic” – a lot of the social sciences are just humanities putting on airs, sometimes with lower standards of evidence than some humanities.
I was thinking it’s squishy because, for instance, the issue of something as fundamental as how to differentiate species isn’t entirely agreed upon. But that might not be a valid reason, I don’t really know.
As far as I understand, modern biology is all molecular and computational, so while it’s not as hard of a science as physics, it’s still much closer to physics than to the humanities.
Scott linked to a massive (more than 10,000 people) cohort that found no difference in variability in IQ between men and women. I can’t find it now though. Of course, it’s possible that there is a difference in some sub type of cognitive ability that gives men an edge at the extremes.
You mean the Romanian study?
0. Don’t cherry-pick studies. Don’t call it “massive” if you don’t know how big the other studies are. “Massive” is not particularly important. What is important is that the study is powerful enough to detect the effect. You might worry about p-hacking, but in that case you should look at p-values. If both studies are powerful enough, they are probably both true. Maybe Romanians are different from Americans.
1. From NLSY I get a standard deviation ratio of 1.1. (N=9000)
2. The Romanian study has 15,000 participants, but it doesn’t aggregate them, so it isn’t actually powerful and its failure to reject the null hypothesis is worthless. Eyeballing, it looks like it would find a smaller ratio, but I don’t know.
3. Hyde et al gets math ratios of 1.1 to 1.2. The smallest sample is 400,000, if you still care about “massive” studies.
The weak point in this argument is the assumption of a bell curve. Measuring the variance ratio is easy compared to extrapolating. Hyde calls the ratio 1.1-1.2 “similar” and for most purposes she’s right.
Link? I’m collecting studies on variability of the sexes.
Well, Mensa actually cites the difference in the variance of IQ as a fact. They don’t seem to have any axes to grind and their only business is IQ, so I’d expect them to do a good research in the area. Also, I’m told they’re pretty smart!
Might work, once you correct for affirmative action-like policies.
Agreed.
My main argument against the patriarchy is that it does not matter whether only 10%, 1% or 0.1% of the top scientists happen to be female. As long as such people exists we must not enforce the patriarchy and instead allow them to work in scientific research. Science is much more important than “muh family structure”.
There being any humans at all to do the sciencing is more important that science. At the moment, it looks like that overeducating people, especially women, has led to intelligence being a pretty grave fitness defect. A technological civilization is not maintainable without a sufficiently bright population, absent some kind of sentient AI (which hopefully doesn’t replace us entirely with the product of its desire). Do the math.
I completely understand your concern. Look at the birth rates of Europe. Look at the birth rates of East Asia.
When sexbots are invented things will be worse. Do you think it is more likely for me to date a girl or buy a robot that is much better than real girls at everything, can help me do research, can call 911 if I’m really sick and never argues with me? Hell I will get a robot wife if I believe I’m lonely. There are many STEM people who think like me. What’s the consequence? They will be extinct.
What’s my solution? You want to roll back feminism in order to preserve societies even at some cost. I want to use transhumanism to completely remove sexuality and gender forever. The patriarchy is bad for intelligent women. The hook-up culture is bad for both intelligent men and intelligent women. Let’s all become transhumans so that we can forget about sexuality which is inherently dysfunctional.
No deal.
Nobody knows how to actually do this. Probably nobody will figure it out until you are long dead. If they do, it will probably happen when you are an old man and it will involve a great deal of work done by younger scientists, engineers, technicians, janitors, and bauxite miners. Many of whom haven’t been born yet.
So the path to your imagined transhumanist future still requires figuring out how to convince the current generation of mostly-not-rationalist humans to breed at least another generation or two of somewhat-less-nonrationalist humans to invent rational transhumanism for you.
@John Schilling Yeah. You are onto something. However traditional societies aren’t good for intelligent people just like the current one. What are we going to do? Clone scientists?
Explain!
Sure! Traditionalist societies are usually very conformist. Hence they are not good for us.
Of course I won’t mind a pseudo-traditionalist society that allows its brightest to forsake dogmas of the crowd.
I really don’t get this argument. The timescales you need to look at for population decline to slow tech progress are really long. If we hit full brain emulation before then, we can solve our population problem by hitting the ‘copy’ button. (This is also why it’s silly to worry about disgenics: by the time it kicks in we’ll almost certainly have gamete selection.)
So, do you have a link to the math?
(That contemptuous parting note in my last comment was not intended; in an earlier version I was saying that we would need to do some actual math with the relevant timescales and it wasn’t as snotty.)
@Rationality Corner: Why is the population decline a problem per se? First of all, I think you make it look more dramatic than it is. Most European countries still maintain a birth level at or just slightly under reproduction. East Asia – China has the largest population in the world and only due to the 2ish child policy it is not even larger. India is still growing (if you count it to East Asia). Japan and Singapore are huge outliers. The rest of the world is still growing in population (although the growth rate is decreasing pretty much everywhere as pretty much everywhere is getting richer and these things seem to be inversely correlated, which makes perfect sense – if all you have is kids, they are your social security, if you can amass some money for when you’re old and it is less likely that half of your kids die before that, you won’t have as many of them).
This sounds suspiciously like a get-out-of-jail-free card: “Oh sure, there’s a female Fields medalist, but no doubt she got it for political reasons.”
That said, it is a legitimate question, so here is a way to maybe account for it: We only need to worry about a affirmative action for this comparison if it acts more strongly at prominent schools (which is plausible, there is a real fixation on e.g. Harvard as a symbol). We can disentangle socially prominent schools good schools by taking undergraduate ranking as a indicating prominence and graduate school ranking as indicating goodness of research. These can diverge a lot sometimes: UIC is very strong in research but not super-elite as an undergraduate school. If we see lots of women at good schools, and we don’t see more women an prominent+good schools than at merely good schools, it suggests that we are not being fooled by affirmative action.
This is what I meant, yes.
Another way to do it would be by looking at whether there is a difference between male and female job performance for professors within universities (say citation count) and then, if that difference exists, examine whether it is systematically greater at more elite universities.
I have no idea, because my course doesn’t have a physics class. But when I did a few months of engineering (wasn’t my thing), many of my professors (calculus, chemistry, geometry, etc) were women. When I did a year of graphic design (also not my thing), almost all my professors were men (there was one woman). Now I’m in med school, and it’s pretty evenly split. I go to the best university in my state, top 10 in my country (granted, South America isn’t seen as particularly academic), so maybe it counts as an “elite” university. I have no idea why you’d think female math teachers have an aversion to competition?
I think that the idea is not that women are less willing to compete (although I think this actually might be a good alternative hypothesis – it would not be so much about variance in skill as in motivations and interests), but that on the very top (and the very bottom but that is irrelevant when you’re talking about researchers) you have more men due to a higher variance in skill, so if that holds, top tier universities should therefore have more men, all else held equal.
The pattern I observe is that the more “detached from reality” a maths field is, the fewer women are interested in studying it. Financial maths is full of women, at the undergrad level they made about 50% of the students where I studied. Things like topology and abstract algebra have very few to no female students at all. Still, pure and applied maths all together has about 30% of women, consistently at least over a couple of European countries. However, fields like machine engineering, while a lot less mathematical than pure maths, have nearly no women in them. Studying that is like being in a cloister (if you’re male) or on a stage of a strip club with a lot of horny customers (if you’re one of the few female engineering students) Computer science is similar, although not as extreme. I don’t think that the fact that male IQ has a higher variance and therefore also male ability in general probably has a higher variance is the reason for there being so few women in engineering, or less than 50% women in maths. It might explain why you have fewer female Fields medalists (one so far) and Nobel prize winners but even most university professors are not Nobel prize material, let alone Fields medal material and I doubt the tails are so much heavier in men. It also doesn’t quite explain why the intellectually sort-of easier (of course almost anything can be made almost arbitrarily complex if you go deep enough) field of machine engineering has far fewer women than even rather pure mathematics fields such as probability theory. The answer might be that somehow the engineers and programmers are all sexist bastards who hate women…or it could be that women on average are simply less interested in machines. Not necessarily in abstract thinking (despite some crazy feminist claims which denounce natural science as “masculine”), but machines and machine-like things in particular. If you want more women in computer science the best way might be to convince them that the field is very different from machine engineering. Similarly, if you want more men in psychology, you might want to try to convince them that psychology is more like machine engineering. You don’t have to lie in either case I think, you just emphasize different aspects of the field to different people. Of course, if you reject the idea that men and women have different psychology (typically, of course, as always when I make such statements), then you will dismiss this option, look for some sort of hidden sexism that might not be there at all and then possibly waste a lot of money and other resources (while making the overall atmosphere more hostile) with no results at all.
I think maths is a good example of a field where I’m pretty sure there really isn’t any discrimination against women (although there is still some attitude of the kind “maths isn’t for girls, you should concentrate on languages or something” among parents, particularly in some countries – but even that will probably be basically nonexistent in the upcoming generation of parents – people who are around 30 now), but where there used to be a lot of it. Emmy Noether was a brilliant algebraist but faced a lot of problems at the university of Göttingen – funnily enough, mostly from the social sciences, the mathematicians were OK with her becoming a professor (When a distinguished history professor objected to her becoming a privatdozent on the grounds of male students having issues with that – something like adjunct professor/reader in English speaking countries? – in Göttingen, David Hilbert replied that “this is a university, not a bathhouse”), other women had similar problems elsewhere. And the ratio of female faculty and students did rise over time, but I don’t think it will rise much further and I don’t think it is rising much any more. One issue might be things like having kids etc which might still limit the number of PhD students and faculty (my advisor became a professor in her early 30s while also having had 2 kids before that but 1st she’s really smart and 2nd her husband is also a maths professor who is therefore a bit more flexible with his work schedule than most people). I think it would definitely be more sensible to concentrate on issues like that than trying to find sexism everywhere.
Right, I was asking about keeping field constant and varying competitiveness in order to eliminate the effect of these sociological factors.
Eh, yea, sorry, I got a bit sidetracked 🙂
I think the problem is that holding all else constant will be difficult. As others mentioned, things like affirmative action probably play a larger role in “high status” universities. A female colleague was looking for a position somewhere (England or Scotland I think) and they specifically wanted a female professor. This distorts the picture quite a bit. You also typically get more special female funding etc.
Also, women might be just as able but actually less competitive. Most CEOs are men since most people don’t want to sacrifice everything to their career and those few who do are more often men than women. It could be cultural, genetic or both but it seems to be the case. Generally men are more likely to emphasize status and salary at the cost of enjoyment when choosing a career as opposed to women. But within a career there is also a spectrum. You can be the average sort of person who does the job well but that’s that or you can work 50+ hours a week and try to be the best at any cost. So even if you factored in the affirmative action and found out you have more men in the top universities, you still have to deal with this explanation somehow before you can conclude that it’s the heavier tails in ability distribution.
Let’s not forget that having kids and a career is much, much easier for a man than for a woman. Even a total workaholic male can knock up his wife during the half hour he’s home and not sleeping, then go back to his 80 hour workweek. A woman, on the other hand, has to actually be pregnant for a good long time, and unless her work is very comfortable and unstressful (which a competitive position, like being a CEO, is not), it’s not going to be the least bit healthy for her or her child.
A career and fatherhood are easily compatible. A career and motherhood directly compete for limited time and effort available.
How many CEOs have you met?
Most high level corporate executives I know have families, children, and are active in multiple hobbies.
The whole “you can only be CEO if you devote your entire existence to your job” is a myth invented by bad 80s movies. If anything, the opposite is true. The single guy with no family who spends all his off hours trying to improve the company will be considered an oddball –
ruled out from the executive track because he doesn’t “fit the culture.”
@ Matt M
Even if “sacrifice everything” is an exaggeration I’d wager that taking 1 or more 9 month long (potentially longer) breaks during your prime ladder-climbing years adversely effects one’s promotion chances.
Right, I agree with that part. Pregnancy is certainly more disruptive to female workers than male ones. And females may very well have to sacrifice in that vein (perhaps having fewer children than they otherwise might prefer) if they want to be CEO someday.
But for males I think it remains a myth, based on nothing more than cultural memes reinforced by fictional narratives.
@Matt M: Not many, I admit. But as far as I can tell, jobs in various consultation companies involve working insane hours and willingness to interrupt holidays etc. when required. I imagine being a CEO of a large company is not that different…unless it is just the “grunts” in the lower levels who do that.
Still, as hlynkacg points out, several months of what is from the perspective of the company a vacation is not going to be viewed favourably. And that is a bare minimum, assuming that the father then stays at home with the small child or that you hire a nanny from the very beginning (or a combination of both). If you want to have two children, this makes it quite a handicap when your career is so competitive. It pretty much entirely excludes the possibility of staying at home with the child for 1-3 years, which is what a lot of women in Europe do.
I work for one of the largest. As far as I can tell, the “middle management” layer probably has it the worst as far as hours and interruptions are concerned. Partners probably log similar hours to the grunts, but may have more interruptions (and certainly have more travel required). That said, every partner in my office fits the description I gave above. Married, multiple children, active in church, active in hobbies, knowledgeable about the world in general.
I’m not sure how they do it, but they do. Honestly, I think what you ultimately sacrifice is “idle time.” Stuff like “spend four hours arguing with people in SSC comments” probably has to go if you want that kind of lifestyle. But you can definitely keep the wife, kids, and windsurfing, if you prioritize those things above arguing with people on the Internet (I’ll leave you to guess what my priorities are!)
Your mission is to improve the twentieth century by killing one person. The person can be anyone at all, but you must kill them during the century itself. They will die in some innocuous manner, such as a car crash. So, Trans-Temporal Agent, who would you kill?
Personally, I’d try to stop the Great War, which ultimately led to both the Russian Revolution and the Fascists. But who to target? Is Jan 1, 1901 early enough to get rid of Kaiser Wilhelm, or has he already done too much damage, since he was born in 1859?
That fucking Serb.
Go a step further up the tree and remove Apis.
Good idea! And we can just barely make it with the timeslot!
Unfortunately, there isn’t one pat answer as to “get this guy and all will be fine”. Suppose you knock off Lenin – what about Stalin? Should you have knocked off Marx first? Yeah, okay, but what about all the Russian anarchists then? And revolutionaries in general during the time period?
Same with the First World War – getting rid of Gavrilo Princip isn’t going to make the boiling pot of Pan-Slavism, Serbian nationalism, German imperial ambition, European Great Powers diplomacy by back-stabbing, British imperialism being exacerbated by Disraeli flattering Victoria by getting her the title “Empress of India” (should we knock off Dizzy, then?) which in turn made Kaiser Bill jealous, Bismarckian Prussianism which was blamed for a lot of the problems with Germany (so should we knock off Bismarck?) and so on and so forth all go away or simmer down.
I’d recommend Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” as a good novel here 🙂
If you thwart the assassination attempt and delay the war a bit, wouldn’t that likely mitigate World War I a lot? Incidents that could potentially start a war only happened every so often, after all.
I’m given to understand that given time Russian economic growth would make winning the war untenable for Germany and they knew it.
I’m not really expecting there to be one. But perhaps we can hope for a good hard shove toward better days. A century that had two world wars and two totalitarian ideologies that were entirely comfortable imposing megadeaths on troublesome subjects leaves some room for improvement, I should think.
Yeah, under this logic, Princip seems as good of an answer as any. It’s obviously cliche but Hitler would merit serious consideration as well.
Maybe I’d go for Wilson or TR, hoping to set the progressive movement back a bit? But I’m sure they’d find some other people just as harmful.
You get rid of Hitler and Germany is still in a bad place, looking for a Strong Leader ™. If they went right-wing authoritarian, you’d end up with someone looking more like Mussolini or one of the tinpot right-wing dictators of Eastern Europe. None of whom were as monstrous as Hitler. If they went left-wing authoritarian, though, the KPD was pretty tight with Stalin, and the conditions for totalitarianism were there, as shown by the fact that they ended up with right-wing totalitarianism.
I think getting rid of Hitler is all about timing.
You don’t kill him as a baby, because then in the greater scheme of history, someone else fills his role similarly and little changes.
On the other hand, you probably don’t wait until 1939, because then the party is firmly established and on its course to war, and anyone who took over would probably promote the same general policies.
I don’t know enough about German history to pinpoint it myself, but there’s probably a specific time when getting rid of him would meaningfully alter the trajectory of German history. Almost certainly for the better (although there’s no guarantee).
Yeah, under this logic, Princip seems as good of an answer as any.
No, I don’t think so. The Powers had so entangled themselves with treaties, alliances both public and secret, and trying to gain advantage for themselves over both allies and enemies, plus the social ferment of the times, that even if the Archduke had not been assassinated, something would have tripped them up. I think the Austro-Hungarian empire was over-ripe and falling apart; Germany was ambitious; Britain was juggling a lot of balls; Russia was a mess; and the Balkan States were boiling over, with the Ottoman collapse stirring the pot there (the Ottoman empire was also on its last legs and though it didn’t officially die until after the war, it wasn’t healthy by any means before the war).
I’m not saying the First World War was inevitable, but I don’t think we’re getting out of the first half of the twentieth century without some major shake-up. Just as if not Hitler, then someone else would have seized the reins in Germany at that particular crux, so if no Princip and no assassination, something else would have knocked over the dominoes.
Someone who filled the same role would not be identical. It’s even odds, probably, as to whether another right-wing dictator would have been as zealous about the idea of expanding to the East as Hitler was – there were certainly plenty of others who held similar views.
The major difference would be that, compared to other right-wing dictators (who were all anti-Semites) Hitler was really anti-Semitic. The exterminationist anti-Semitism of the Nazis was a Nazi thing, not a Fascist thing (Mussolini’s government did not cooperate with German requests to hand Italian Jews over – then, when the Germans seized power in Italy following Mussolini getting ousted, they immediately began deporting Jews) or a right-wing dictatorship thing (a similar course of events happened in Hungary, for example).
Someone else filling a similar role to Hitler would have been less likely to go to war with the USSR (which resulted in tens of millions of death), and the murder of millions of Jews would be vastly less likely.
@Deiseach
This can be true and you can still want to kill Princip. A ww1 that happens a few years earlier or later is a massively different conflict. if it happens in 1909, the war ends in a year after the germans literally run out of ammunition because the haber process hasn’t been industrialized yet. If it happens a few years later (say around 1920) trucks have gotten good enough and prolific enough that you don’t get a western front stalemate because the armies are too big to maneuver around one another. And in either time period, the balance of power has shifted to where it isn’t quite as exquisitely balanced as it was in 1914. You still get a war that kills a million people in a year, which is awful, but it doesn’t utterly destroy the societies that fought it and pave the ground for communism and fascism.
@cassander
Actually, I’m not sure you’d be able to push it to the 20s, although if you did, it might not happen at all. One of the main drivers for the German actions was the desire for a ‘short victorious war’ in the model of the Franco-Prussian war to solidify their political position at home against the liberals, who were posed to make major gains in the Reichstag. Either they’re going to find another excuse for a war in that time period (and there were plenty of options that they might have used in the years before the war) or the nature of the German government changes, and we might not have WW1 at all.
The second seems unreasonably optimistic to me, though. So I suspect they’d just find the next diplomatic crisis to use as a pretext. Pushing it up to 1909 is a better option.
@bean
I can’t disagree, i even mentioned the use it or lose it feeling in the german staff somewhere else in the thread. the outcome is definitely more certain if things happen a little earlier than later. The discussion on military trucks a few open threads ago made clear the magnitude of effort that would have been required to mechanize ww1 era armies in the period, and 1920 might be too soon.
that said, it does seem that there was some war scare every 5 years or so there might have been some time before the next one came up. Or it might have happened the week after.
More often than that. Agadir was in 1911, and could have lead to war. There was a war in the Balkans from October of 1911 to July of 1913. There was a minor crisis over the appointment of a German general in the Turkish Army in early 1914. I’d say that the time horizon for someone who wanted a war to get a plausible excuse was 2 years or less.
I agree that if you can push it out to 1920, situation will have changed so that the war may not even happen at all. But I also agree with bean that the Germans were mainly casting their eyes on France and dreaming about 1870 all over again. Nobody was expecting a bogged-down Western Front stalemate, that was the unique horror of the time.
I think whatever happens, we’re still going to see an unholy mess in Eastern and Central Europe, and depending if the Russian Revolution goes ahead or not, the Russian involvement stomping all over the map in that quarter. The West may avoid being dragged into it, but there is still going to be a realignment in the East, and the Ottoman collapse will leave a power vacuum which Russia wants to fill (heck, remember Afghanistan in the 80s or even the Syrian mess today where Putin is sticking his fingers in the pie), and given that the British and Russians were playing Spy Vs Spy on the North-Western Frontier, I think that they’d end up butting heads over that. Enough for the British to decide “Hell no, we don’t want a Greater Pan-Slavic Union under the
controlmaternal guidance of the Russians”? I don’t know, but I think something was going to blow because the house of cards was not stable.Re: war scares, I’m going off vague hazy “reading a lot of Edwardian pulp fiction right now” but there is definitely a general trend of detective stories from the 1900s involving “German spies trying to steal the Admiralty plans for our great new ships/guns/whatever” and a general sense of “war might break out any moment unless the balance of power is maintained by our naval superiority”.
The Riddle of the Sands dates from 1903 and the plot turns on German plans to invade Britain, so the idea of war was in the air, I think.
I think the Great War is over-determined, so my goal would be to reduce the damage rather than to stop the War.
Three ways to reduce the damage: keep the Austro-Hungarian empire together; ensure that it ends in exhaustion rather than with one side winning; keep Russia from going fully Communist.
If either Lenin or Trotsky had died, I’m not sure if the October Revolution would have succeeded. (In my mind, the October Revolution is probably the greatest disaster of the 20th century.)
If Wilson had died in 2016, and the US had not intervened, then possibly the war would have ended in exhaustion; that might prevent WW2. And Wilson’s ethnic nationalism led to a disastrous century for eastern Europe.
So, one of the three–Wilson, Lenin, Trotsky.
Would a war ending from exhaustion really be better than a quick sharp victory for one side? If the war had just stalled in 1917 – no last-ditch German attempt where they wear themselves out, just Germany reinforcing their lines with men released from the East, and having resources from the peace settlement with the Russians – and had just continued to be a stalemate until everyone decides to go back to status quo ante in 1922 or whatever, wouldn’t everyone’s economy be absolutely blighted, and enormous bitterness occur?
I think this scenario would actually avoid enormous bitterness on the part of the Germans and the other Central Powers, who were utterly screwed in the peace deal.
They were screwed in the peace deal, but that was to make up for the vast amounts of money the British and French had borrowed. If the war had ended in a stalemate, Germany would not have gotten screwed by the peace deal, but everyone would still owe a ton of money. There would have been a great deal of popular anger against politicians of all sides, too – there’s a reason politicians didn’t really try to stop the war once it had become a bloody stalemate; anyone attempting to make peace would have been seen as betraying those who had died thus far.
I’ll take “everyone is in debt” vs Hitler any day.
“Everyone is in debt” means everyone has an excuse to elect a Hitler of their very own to tell them they don’t have to pay back the debt but can instead make someone else do so for them. Versailles means only the Germans are really pushed in that direction, and if everyone else is paying attention they can gang up to crush a German Hitler before he gets out of hand.
Well, that’s the theory anyway.
@Anonymous
Imagine if the Germans had won quickly, as planned: a quick sickle cut to capture Paris and knock the French out before the Russians can gear up, then turn East. Would there have been as much bitterness as there was in reality? Probably not; the amount of reparations demanded was in part predicated on the huge amount that had gone into paying for the war, and along with the war guilt clause was predicated on how horrible the war had become.
The Schlieffen Plan could never have gone as perfectly as it was supposed to – nobody had really predicted how better artillery and machine-guns would change things, or at least nobody in a place to alter military plans would have. However, if the Germans had only been facing the French, their chances of pulling it off (admittedly, with far greater casualties than predicted) would have been much better. Had the war ended in 1914 or 1915, fewer people would have died and less money would have been spent than in reality.
Perhaps somehow keeping Britain out of the war should be the objective of our time-traveller. Encouraging upon the Germans a reverse Schlieffen – knock Russia out early (there were huge victories over Russia early on, and the war against Russia which eventually saw it sue for peace was conducted with lesser resources than the Western Front, and sit on the defensive against France’s “attack with everything then attack more” plan in the West until resources and men from the East became available; not going through Belgium means Britain doesn’t join the war) could probably not be done by killing any one person, but perhaps getting keeping the British out might.
@John Schilling
The best outcome in reality would have been a less punitive but fully enforced Versailles. Instead we got the worst combination: it was punitive and humiliating enough to make the Germans want revenge, but the Germans were not adequately prevented from seeking that revenge.
I think there would be enormous bitterness in the stalemate scenario, but that it would be focused on the in-country leadership rather than the other countries. (In other words, I think it would be like the bitterness of Great Britain and Italy, not that of Germany and Austria.) In the overall scheme of things, I’d count that as a win.
Also, seconding Eric Rall below on the case against Wilson.
But let’s say the borders return to status quo ante. France still wants Alsace and Lorraine back, Germany still wants its place in the sun, Austria-Hungary is still a hot mess, Russia ditto, Turkey ditto, Serbia still wants their brethren outside of Serbia to not be ruled by non-Serbs… How does adding “popular resentment against politicians” make things better?
Especially since it’s far from clear that the war would have turned into a stalemate without direct US involvement. The Royal Navy was successfully able to blockade the Germans.
@dndnrsn
That’s a pretty interesting take. I don’t find any major holes to poke into.
I don’t see how a stalemated WWI ends in anyone’s favor. Eastern Europe utterly collapses because Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire all collapse. Germany is just even less checked than before, and gets to dictate all the borders from the get-go.
What’s the alternative to the Treaty of Versailles? Germany pays nothing, keeps all of its territorial gains from Russia, and keeps an army. Great, so in 10 years, Germany steamrolls France. I guess it’s marginally better to have all of Europe ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm instead of Chancellor Hitler, but that’s not really a good solution, either way.
In general, the longer a war, the worse, all else being equal.
Just wait them out. They’ll collapse again after 10 generations or less.
That’s an interesting link, although looking at the table on p. 2, it seems that the author’s trying to cook the books somewhat to support his theory (the Roman Republic and Roman Empire were the same state, and, whilst Rome’s heyday ended in about 180, the Empire was still a force to be reckoned with for at least two hundred years afterwards).
ETA: And I’m sure that Leopold I would be very surprised to discover that the Ottoman Empire had fallen in 1570.
@dndnrsn
How does adding “popular resentment against politicians” make things better?
Popular resentment of the Establishment for “getting us into a costly, destructive, completely pointless war” reduces the chance that anyone supports another war anytime soon.
I’m expecting the war to end, in this scenario, with treaty lines near the 1917 front lines–so Germany keeps Alsace; if that happpens, they’d have little motivation to attack France anytime soon.
@SamChevre
Who says their response would be pacifism? It could just as easily be “they got us into a war, and they didn’t win.” Germany’s response to WWI did not turn out to be pacifism.
The treatise isn’t perfect, I know. Did you catch him stating that people thought that the Earth was flat until Columbus proved otherwise?
If Russia had not gone communist, would it have been able to withstand Germany in WW2? Probably not, methinks.
Very hard to say. The Soviet Union probably industrialized faster in the interwar years than a continuation of Czarist Russia would have, at least in terms of the kind of heavy industry that lets you mass-produce tanks and aircraft (a hypothetical White Russia would probably be better at making e.g. shoes), but on the other hand the Russian Civil War was incredibly destructive (five to ten million deaths in a country of ~90 million), and so were Stalin’s purges and other various fuckups. The Great Purge in particular included a whole lot of talented military officers. So we’re probably looking at a somewhat less well-equipped Russia, but with a higher population, better leadership, and maybe better relations with the Western powers. What does that work out to in strategic terms? I don’t know, but it’s definitely not a clear loss.
The rise of Communism is also deeply entangled with the course of WWI, so there’s no guarantee of a similar outcome for the latter if we remove the former.
Russia in the pre-war decade was the fastest industrializing country in Europe by a pretty wide margin, to the point where there were serious “use it or lose it” discussions among the German general staff. Assuming no second revolution, it’s extremely likely that they would have done better overall, not worse, if for no other reason than they didn’t have to start over more or less from scratch after several years of one of the most destructive civil wars in history.
Unlikely; not only was Germany running out of resources already by 1916 (hence why their govt. decided to gamble on unrestricted submarine warfare), but the number of US troops who actually served on the front was quite small compared to the number of French, British and German troops, so their absence probably wouldn’t have been decisive. If the US didn’t intervene the war might have dragged on a few more months into 1919, but Germany would be exhausted long before the British or French.
Though a world without US intervention might still be better; I think that Eric Rall’s post below is basically right, and keeping the US out of the war would mean that nobody had to pay any attention to what Wilson wanted in the peace negotiations.
This is very important. The blockade is, as much as anything, responsible for the German defeat. Ultimately, you need global trade to run a modern war, and the loser is whoever can’t keep that trade going.
This, I’m not so sure about, for a couple of reasons. First, the US troops were fresh and I recall that they were noted for their willingness to launch attacks in a manner abandoned by everyone else for being too dangerous a couple of years prior. But it was effective. Second, they weren’t necessarily spread out evenly. Most of the existing troops were sort of overhead, holding down the line. The Americans gave the allies a reserve that they could use offensively.
(The above is speculation. I’m much more familiar with the war at sea than on land.)
Have you got a citation for its effectiveness? From what I’ve read, US attacks tended to be less successful than French or British attacks, precisely because the Americans hadn’t had time to internalise the lessons of trench warfare and were making their attacks in the old, too-dangerous manner.
I don’t. This is half-remembered from ages ago. Maybe related to the Marines in Belleau Wood.
Bean’s description is consistent with what I remember from reading John Toland’s 1918 a couple years ago and from various discussions on the alternatehistory.com forums. American offensives, especially the first few, did indeed suffer for lack of troop experience and tactical sophistication, but the additional numbers gave the Entente powers the ability to launch offensives they couldn’t launch otherwise, and the American troops’ willingness to attack put pressure on the Germans that they couldn’t adequately respond to. Toland in particular puts a lot of weight on the American numbers making the difference between holding the line and being able to launch sustained offensives: the story he tells is that of Britain and France being pushed to the limits by the German spring offensive, but American reinforcements made the difference allowing a counterattack once the Germans had exhausted their own reserves by launching several offensive pushes in rapid succession.
I’ve read various places that one major factor in American troops being less effective was their use of the older “square” divisional model, where a division consisted of two brigades of two infantry regiments each. Germany, Britain, and France had all moved to the “triangular” model where a division was three infantry regiments reporting directly to the divisional HQ. A triangular division allowed more tactical flexibility (e.g. square divisions were usually employed with both brigades side-by-side or with one brigade forward and one in reserve, while triangular divisions could cover front more efficiently while still maintaining an effective reserve by putting two regiments forward and only holding one in reserve), better coordination (one fewer level of command for orders and reports to filter through), and made more efficient use of senior officers and their staffs (four HQs per division (one divisional and three regimental) instead of seven (one divisional, two brigade, and four regimental)).
The actual number of US troops on front at the start of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive was around half a million. That’s pretty significant, but what was more significant was the fact that 10,000 more were arriving every day, while german manpower (to say nothing of food) was already stretched to the limit. A multi-million man AEF was not far off, which is why they threw in the towel.
Communism popped up in two sorts of societies. The first was in those colonies where the native population was suppressed and excluded from government as much as possible, and the second was in nations where the middle class was something insignificantly small. Russia, for better or for worse, did not have a middle class ‘buffer’ to usher it into modernity, and I don’t think the death of Lenin or Trotsky could at all have stopped it from going full Communist. The civil war might’ve dragged on a touch longer, but beyond that, I doubt the importance of these two figures.
What about China? Is it possible killing Mao makes a difference in that war and saves some fraction of the tens of millions killed under his regime?
I doubt it. Communists regimes tend to go through a phase where it’s not immediately obvious that plan economies are a terrible way of handling things, and said phases lead to disaster. It’s not so much a failure of Mao as it is of communist theory in general.
@DeWitt
Someone other than Mao might have lost the civil war.
Yeah, that’s mainly what I was getting at. Was Mao indispensable in defeating the nationalists, or wasn’t he?
‘Someone else might lose the civil war’ is awfully shaky ground to use your time travel powers for.
Why? If the outcome of that civil war leads to tens of millions of deaths, it seems logical to value changing the outcome of the war (unless you have reason to believe the other side would be even more monstrous)
Because the OP presumes we get to kill one person, no more?
If the choice is between killing Mao or letting him live, then sure, chances are Mao dropping dead somewhere in 1946 is beneficial. But if you get one shot at improving the 20th century, ‘killing him maaaaaaaybe hopefully possibly lets the nationalists win..?’ doesn’t seem like it should carry the day.
OK, but all of the suggestions thus far are based on similar logic. I suppose you could argue that we should kill Jeffrey Dahmer or something. You’d have a 100% chance at preventing a small number of deaths.
The point with Mao is that if we say he’s responsible for 20 million deaths, you only need like a 0.01% chance that killing him eliminates those deaths in order for it to be a better choice than Dahmer.
Almost every communist revolution that manage to take hold besides the Russian did so with considerably material support from, and imitation of, another communist states. Stop the first one and you probably stop them all. Maybe some other fringe ideology pops to take its place, but it’s hard to see how it could be any worse.
People tried. The Russian civil war saw intervention, the Chinese civil war did, and I believe there was this one thing in Vietnam some people tried to do something about. Killing Lenin or Trotsky just then and then by inducing a heart attack is not going to change that kind of force.
@DeWitt
Eh, not really. In russia, there were some half hearted attempts, but then the germans collapsed and woodrow wilson pulled the plug on funds for the allies to keep it up and the effort fell apart pretty quickly.
In china, the US forced the nationalists to accommodate with the communists after ww2, which unsurprisingly led to the communists getting stronger because they never stopped taking things from the nationalists.
And in vietnam, the entire effort of the north vietnamese war was sustained by supplies and money from russia and china.
the Bolshivek party in 1917 was a couple thousand people in st. Petersburg. there was no historical force behind them, just a few people in the right place at the right time who seized control of the state apparatus of a very large (and heavily centralized) country. Everything that came after russia was made possible by massive russian investments in spreading international communism.
The pro-McCarthy revisionist history book I read alleged some far more active interference than this. I can’t remember the specifics, but it basically accused the state department of actively aiding the communist forces and undermining the nationalists at every possible turn.
@Matt M
Never blame conspiracy where idiocy is a sufficient explanation. US officials had a lot of experience with the nationalists during the war, almost none of it positive. George Marshall, by the time he goes to China, is literally getting senile. The general distaste for KMT combines with a stupendous amount of wishful thinking and a whole lot of ignorance about actual realities on the ground in china, even among the actual china experts, to produce some truly terrible policy decisions.
It is, however, historical fact that US policy did force the nationalists into a “coalition government” with the Maoists, while allowing the Maoists to keep their army. The result of this, obviously, was that they kept fighting, and Marshall basically throws a pox on both your houses fit and goes home, which ensures relatively little aid makes its way to the nationalists.
I agree. I’m really not sure that one death–or even 10 deaths–could have resulted in the Russian Revolution being less of a disaster.
I tend to assume that bad is inevitable, and focus on damage control. I think fascism was inevitable; if you could get fascism without National Socialism, that would, in my book, be a major win. Similarly, if you could get communism in something like its 1950’s form, without the 1920’s and 1930’s, that would be a win.
Is there an imaginable world where the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, rather than the Bolsheviks, drive post-1917 developments in Russia? If there is, I think it’s a better world.
Yes. It’s called 1789 France, where those exact people take power, are very brutal rulers for a while, but mostly avoid Soviet-style disaster. It’s also not something that’ll ever happen in Russia, where the peasant:middle class ratio is far smaller.
Thanks to the Directory replacing Robespierre just in the nick of time, yes. But… it’s possible that a French government which hadn’t been annihilating the country for years meant that when Napoleon appeared in he was able to achieve a lot more than he would have otherwise. Maybe when Stalin seizes power from your Mensheviks in 1931 he’s able to be a much more effective conqueror than in our timeline, who knows?
I dunno. The Soviet Union took a state ruined by civil war, and within a short span of time took control over more land than Czarist Russia had, as well as won the second world war. For all his faults and blunders, Stalin’s military record is at least decent.
Sure — now imagine if Russia hadn’t been devastated by all that civil war and so forth. That’d be a pretty dangerous weapon in Stalin’s hands.
Mind you, if we’re talking probabilities I agree that a Menshevik Russia would probably have been better for history than the Bolshevik one. (It could hardly be worse.) But liberal revolutionary regimes do have a strong risk of collapsing and falling into the hands of dictators, so you can’t quite write Stalin/Lenin/Otherguyin off in that timeline.
Well, yeah, but now we’re going in circles. The kind of revolution that doesn’t come with an immense civil war is the kind of revolution you’ll see from the Third Estate in France, not so much the peasantry in Russia. The preconditions for a Menshevik revolution weren’t there, simply because there weren’t enough people to support it.
@SamChevre
the trouble with that is that every communist regime had a similar path, a certain number of years of purges, mass killing and often famine, then a mellowing out. The record of communism in this regard is uniquely terrible, it failed this way literally every time, the only question was the duration and damage that the early period would do. Every other ideology, even fascism, has a better record in this regard, only communism led to mass killing every single time. Killing one person doesn’t change that, unless the one person’s death leads to an ideology besides communism coming to power in russia, and I don’t think the SRs would have ended up all that different.
Right goal, wrong tactics.
As dndnrsn points out, other things being equal the least destructive war is the one that is over the fastest and the most decisively. Other factors: wars between smaller powers are better than ones between major powers, cold war is better than conventional war, etc.
If your goal is to ameliorate WW1, then you need to initiate a controlled burn. That means finding a point to provoke the war EARLIER, before the alliances have solidified into their final pre-war configuration. Unfortunately, I don’t see any good places where a single death can reliably be predicted to have that result post-1900.
I’d add that it’s not necessarily desirable to eliminate your target quietly and untraceably. I can think of scenarios where a nicely lurid assassination (or disaster) would be more useful in nudging things towards the desired outcomes.
I’m still looking, but honestly I think you’re better off looking to China or Russia if you want to improve the early 20th century. Europe was fucked by 1890.
Do you think, even with the web of alliances, the British would have entered when they did without the pretext of the invasion of Belgium? The German invasion of Belgium backfired – they didn’t cut through the Belgians like they thought they would, and it brought the British in. Without the British at the Marne, it’s far more likely the Germans are able to pull off the Western half of the Schlieffen plan and force the French to capitulate.
Is there any one death that either keeps the Germans from invading Belgium, causes the Belgians to give the Germans passage, or keeps the British from entering the war following the invasion of Belgium?
Yes.
Not a snowball’s chance in hell. Even in the most optimistic case of the Schlieffen plan, the Germans were 300,000 soldiers short of managing to carry it out. Again, that’s under absolutely optimal conditions. No dice.
Why do you think the British would have entered when they did? I think they would have entered eventually, but the invasion of Belgium played a role in making it something relatively popular.
Just had my post eaten, but the short version is yes, Brits were entering the war, no question.
There was enough Liberal dissension to muddle the government’s diplomatic messaging and public stances, but NOT enough to actually allow the government to survive leaving France to go hang after ten years of steadily closer Anglo-French relations. In fact, it was pretty clear internal to the British Government that they were going to war if France was attacked by the end of July, and Germany’s plan was always to attack France, and everyone knew it.
The best window for keeping Britain out with a single death (that is, a single direct death) would probably be taking out Von Bulow on Jan. 1st, 1900. He was the one who pissed all over Chamberlain’s attempts at Anglo-German rapprochement, but even then 1900 may be too late for that to be effective, the first major efforts and Von Bulow’s negative response to them were in the 1890s.
@Trofim_Lysenko
Anglo german rapprochement was never in the cards as long as the kaiser kept trying to build a fleet. Kaiser Willy is a better target than Bulow. And if you jsut want to shake up the alliances, kill caprivi, the guy who chose Austria over Russia as Germany’s main ally. A russo-german central powers stomps all over the entente powers.
I actually would go with Hitler. It was probably inevitable that there would be some sort of nationalist dictator in Germany, and killing him would not prevent that. But it was not inevitable that we would get a dictator as evil as Hitler.
If William II is still Kaiser, then there’s no way some Austrian corporal ever becomes Chancellor of Germany.
Historical quibble: technically, his rank is probably best rendered as lance corporal, or maybe private first class.
My concern is that you would get someone more competent than Hitler. Nietzsche predicted the horrors of the 20th century never knowing a name “Hitler” or “Stalin.” What if you kill Hitler and you get someone just as evil, but not hyped up on goofballs and willing to fight a land war in Asia?
What does this hypothetical non-methed-up quasi-Hitler do regarding everything east of Germany? Because Hitler’s crimes mostly occurred east of the German border. The majority of the dead in the Holocaust were Jews in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and the Eastern Front was by far the bloodiest (for both soldiers and civilians) component of the war in Europe. The beginning of the mass murder of Jews was tied to the war in the East in late 1941 as well.
EDIT: And, of course, it was the German invasion of Poland that led to the war in Western and Southern Europe.
He might not try to wage war everywhere at once, focus on the British first, wait a couple years with carrying out Barbarossa, and so on, and so on.
What could he have done to fight the British, though? (@bean probably knows more than me about this) Sealion was kind of a non-starter. And Germany as it was in the mid to late 30s needed plunder quickly to keep its war machine from collapsing.
Not focus on mindlessly bombing London as much, and attack strategically some more, for one. Plunder was something that could’ve been found just fine, too; you can conquer southeastern Europe without going for the Russians without any issues.
We had a discussion on the Unmentionable Marine Mammal in this very thread, oddly enough. Bottom line is that there’s no way for the Germans to take out the British by invasion without several miracles. The U-boats aren’t likely to have done that much better than history had them doing, and that leaves a stalemate. Eventually, the German economy collapses.
Not sure I agree on this one. The U-boats and Condors combined could have done quite a bit better than history had them doing, if they had been allowed. The thread where people are trying to change the world with one time-travelling assassin, here’s your chance to make it much worse: go kill Herman Goering at a time when there’s no clear successor strong enough to keep Raeder and Doenitz from yanking maritime patrol back to the Kriegsmarine where it belongs.
And if you get a second bullet, take out the chief test engineer of the navy’s torpedo department (or whatever bureaucrat is keeping him from doing his job). A proper test program on German torpedoes in 1937-1938, would have increased the efficiency the U-boats by about 50% in 1939-1940. With that plus more aircraft under navy control, it’s not clear there is much of a 1941.
Hmm. Are we sure these people weren’t time travelers working for the good guys? Them and whoever was responsible for catapult maintenance on the IJN Tone.
I partially agree with john. the u-boat campaign could have theoretically been a lot more effective. had the germans launched an all out effort to use the luftwaffe to embargo the southern UK and the u-boats to go after the north, they could have put enough hurt on the UK to make it throw in the towel rather than keep fighting before the US really gets involved.
The trouble with that is I don’t think it’s a reasonable strategy to expect the germans to take up. it would have required a massive inversion of military doctrine in the immediate aftermath of an overwhelming military victory combined with an extremely astute knowledge of internal UK and US politics that I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to suspect. It’s also not a strategy without risk. the germans knew that they couldn’t out-airplane the brits and US, and by 41, the USN is shooting german uboats on sight. From the german perspective, we’re basically already at war with them in every way that counts, and to win that war, they needed greater resources.
@John and Cassander:
Fair points. I’m not sure either way. I’m just not sure that the path marked ‘effective German dictator’ necessarily even leads to war with Britain. In fact, that would be at the top of my list of Things To Avoid. The best option might be to position myself as the bulwark against the Godless Commie Hordes, who is willing to do things that nobody else is to stop them. The problem is that Poland is in the way. Not sure what to do about that, yet.
@bean
But how long do you figure that takes? In the long run, yes, socialism will always collapse because perverse incentives and you run out of other people’s money. But just from an economic standpoint, National Socialism seems less perverse than International Communism, and that took 80 years to collapse. Modern European democratic socialism has the same basic ideas as National Socialism (free healthcare, free education, nationalization of key industries) and even though it’s in the process of failing, it’s not dead yet.
Assume Competent Hitler didn’t invade everyone around him. How long would it take for National Socialism to collapse, given that the USSR slogged on for 80 years?
Hitler’s economic policies were even worse than those of International Communism. I’m only a little ways into Wages of Destruction, and those who read it can probably say more, but the German economy was always racing just ahead of disaster from the late-30s on. If it can’t expand and plunder more, then it falls apart.
@bean says:
Bad? definitely. But worse than communism? Definitely not. Millions of germans didn’t starve to death in the 1930s in a breakneck effort at building industrial capacity to expand war making potential. The german economy under the nazis was always on the verge of breaking, but “breaking” in the context of the german economy in the 30s meant “they would have to cut back on military spending”, not everyone dies. And frankly, those policies did manage to re-arm the country well enough to take on france and the UK in a straight up fight, which was no mean achievement. As with so much nazi policy, they took extreme risks that paid off.
@bean
Can you give me an example? I mean, people in the USSR were literally starving to death and/or eating their own children, and that didn’t cause collapse. It took another 60+ years after the starving and eating of children for communism to fail. The idea that National Socialism would fail to the point of collapse in a shorter time frame than Communism is non-obvious and requires argument.
I think we’re using economic failures somewhat differently. No, the Germans were never at risk of actual starving-to-death famine as a result of Hitler’s direct economic policies (the bit where they would have starved if not for allied aid was the result of other of Hitler’s policies). I was referring to the economic forces that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hitler was on the same train, and even faster. I don’t have much in the way of details, though. As I said, I’m only a little ways in to Wages of Destruction. People keep pestering me for more battleship content. Or at least my brain keeps pestering me for more battleship information.
@Conrad Honcho/Cassander
The Nazi economy was about simultaneously providing goodies for those the Nazis deemed good Germans andbuilding a war machine/keeping it running. They accomplished this through expansion and plunder. Tooze is a good source. Another good one is Hitler’s Beneficiaries by Aly.
Hitler wanted, ultimately, to increase the standard of living of Germans, to the level of the British, or maybe even the Americans. He saw the British having worldwide colonies, and the Americans having an enormous resource-rich landscape that they had expanded westwards across. The plan that the Nazis, and other German nationalists had, was to essentially treat the East in the same fashion – the lands to the east of Germany would provide resources to be exploited and farmland on which to settle ethnic Germans.
In comparison to this, industrialization (which was required for the Soviet war machine) under Stalin relied heavily on an extremely callous attitude towards the USSR’s own people. One could view what Stalin did as “internal plunder” to some extent. Meanwhile, the modern European social democracies provide a great deal for the public, but they aren’t simultaneously building/maintaining a hugely expensive war machine (by 1938, almost 20% of the GDP) – in fact, they’re barely paying for their own defence, trusting that Uncle Sam will make up the shortfall.
I’m not sure that’s practical, unless we’re literally doing the time-traveler bit in which which case we can narrowly advise our German dictator that the allies will tolerate everything up through the complete occupation of Czechoslovakia but you need to be the second nation to invade Poland if you want to stay at peace with Britain and France.
Otherwise, well, “dictators” don’t really get to dictate arbitrarily. One might be able to build an economically viable state within the borders of Weimar Germany, but on the social and cultural front the Germans inside of Germany are still going to want to do something about the less fortunate Germans on the outside, and the wrongfully-occupied German soil, etc. Plus all the internal problems that no dictator can solve but any competent dictator will realize are amenable to foreign distractions. The bounds for those are too fuzzy to be confident of avoiding war with Britain and France and eventually the USA.
If you do have to have at least a contingency plan for winning a war with Britain before the US intervenes decisively, unrestricted submarine warfare is the one that almost worked last time and the U-boats are rather better this time. And I think the failure in 1939-1941 really does come down to a very few key decisions that should have been recognized as Very Wrong even without benefit of hindsight.
You’d have to go further back, but I don’t think it requires literal time travel to pull off. In the early days of Hitler, he was seen as a reliable bulwark against communism. Play up that angle, and avoid antagonizing Britain and France. Don’t build a navy. Poland is not your objective. You don’t even want Poland, but you’re afraid that it may go communist, which would be bad. So you need rights to help protect them against the commies. And to provide a broader front for jumping off when you attack them after discovering evidence that they were about to come west. But you don’t want Poland, except maybe the land corridor to East Prussia. And you’ll compensate the Poles, of course, although they may have trouble getting a sea port.
The ability of the Germans to make those kind of Very Wrong decisions with respect to seapower is near-miraculous.
@bean
Well, to be fair, Germany was at the time a young nation; the time when one spoke of the “Germanies” wasn’t all that far in the past. And while the Germans had admirable traditions of excellence in many domains, seamanship wasn’t one of them.
I don’t think Austria and the Sudetenland are plausibly negotiable for a successful German dictator, and I think those two alone are plenty antagonistic to Britain and France. Likewise the existence of a Luftwaffe and a broad rearmament even if not naval. Britain and France are going to be antagonized, and Soviet Russia might plausibly be placated, so Molotov-Ribbentrop plus Munich seems plausibly close to a minimize-number-of-simultaneous-wars plan. The rest is fuzzy unpredictable detail.
But the seamanship is one of the things the Germans actually got right, or more precisely the underseamanship. The failings were in military organization and armaments engineering, two things you’d expect Prussians to be generally good at.
Yes and yes. And yet no nation managed to so thoroughly screw up the application of sea power across two world wars. They built the High Seas Fleet without a serious strategic purpose. The idea was that they’d make it too risky for the British to go to war with them. (An early version of deterrence.) It didn’t work, and should have been seen to not be working quite early. (“We want eight” should have forced a re-think. It didn’t.)
WW2 was even worse. There were elaborate plans for the surface fleet, but nobody asked why. Seriously. Hitler had basically fallen for Tirpitz’s propaganda, and decided that he must have battleships. Why? Nobody thought to try to get a coherent answer to that question before building four of them.
It wasn’t until Dornitz was placed in charge of the KM that things actually started to make sense. And by then it was too late.
Edit:
@John
I admit to not being as familiar with the diplomatic history of interwar Europe as I should be. But on the warfighting side, I just don’t see Germany being able to win a war with Britain, unless they get the U-boats very right out of the gate. Which is unlikely, to say the least. This may leave them with absolutely no good options.
If you have the goal of making Germany a power that can stand toe to toe with the UK and US, you pretty much need to make Germany bigger, and the easiest way to do that is moving east. while obviously evil, Hitler’s plan of carving a continental empire out of the east and populating it wasn’t irrational or insensible, and came frighteningly close to working. I don’t think moving poland east gets you enough to do that.
Secondarily, the lack of anti-communist politicking in the interwar period is rather striking. People talk about being anti-communist, but no one ever really does anything about it. The political right was so massively undercut by WW1, literally in the sense of monarchs getting tossed out and more ephemerally.
Is that right? I thought it was generally accepted that Germany’s fundamental overall aim (to the extent that it makes sense to talk about a nation having an aim) was to take territory in Eastern Europe. Not just as a buffer, but as lebensraum, and all that.
It could well be that my understanding is antiquated.
@Doctor Mist:
Yes, that would be the actual reason, but this is how a smart version of WW2-era Germany handles its affairs without ending up in a war with Britain and France, presenting this line of reasoning publicly.
Maybe the experts say “no that’s dumb, he really wants the territory” but you might be able to sell it well enough to at least make it debatable.
As a parallel, I find in multiplayer Magic games that it’s much easier politically to destroy other players’ on-board cards if I talk for a little bit about my intention to do so, and why I think the card is a threat to not just myself, but other players. I might be doing it to pave my path to victory in the end, but that doesn’t mean my reasoning isn’t also true, and players react well to knowing my intentions.
moonfirestorm-
Duh, you’re right, I’m an idiot. I misread bean’s text as trying to convince the Germans of this point, rather than portraying the facade the Germans might have tried to build. Apologies.
Honestly, a worse than Hitler seems extremely unlikely. Neither of the two obvious paths lead to that without a huge amount of additional bad luck.
A different right wing leader is only as much of a problem as Hitler if they are as expansionist as Hitler. Great conquerors are unusually bold risk-takers, as well as unusually lucky. Hitler was actually fairly upper tier when it came to both skill and luck as a conqueror; there are plenty of decisions of his a Monday morning quarterback can criticize, but of whom is that not true? It is, of course, possible that this substitute Hitler could have been a German Genghis Khan, instead of merely at perhaps Napoleon level, but the likelyhood of something that only happened once before happening again is obviously pretty low.
Or, as others have mentioned, the Communists might have taken over. If the Communist leader weren’t also a bold risk-taker, then once again this doesn’t seem as bad as Hitler; maybe comparably bad for Germans, but not for the rest of Europe. That the German Communists were supported by the Soviets doesn’t really change this. First of all, ingratitude seems to be pretty much the normal course of things in politics. And anyway Stalin wasn’t a bold risk-taker either (he only started grabbing land when Hitler’s precedents gave him diplomatic cover), so while this alliance might press for diplomatic concessions here and there, and maybe a couple of tiny slices of territory, it would be very unlikely to terrorize Europe in the way Hitler did.
A Communist who was a bold risk-taker would be even less likely to be reliably loyal to the Soviets, so I think it ends up being considerably less different from the right wing option than one might expect.
Based on all of that, I have to assign a very high probability to getting rid of Hitler making things less bad.
As much as Woodrow Wilson deserves it more, kill Princip. That probably doesn’t prevent ANY war, but ww1 happens even just a few years later, it’s almost certainly a very different (and much shorter) conflict without the giant western stalemate that destroys European civilization.
William Howard Taft, spring 1912.
President Theodore Roosevelt is re-elected. The US would have intervened in WWI much more quickly and more decisively, with a complete defeat of Germany, prior to Russia utterly collapsing. I suspect Austria-Hungary also could’ve limped on a bit longer.
I guess the major problem is that you are still stuck with a European concert system, except it eventually gets nuclear weapons in the 1950s.
Beat me to it.
My first choice is to try to prevent WW1 by cutting a key link in the chain that lead to the Franz Ferdinand assassination, but since that’s already been discussed, my second choice is Woodrow Wilson. It was largely Wilson’s ham-fisted bungling of the armistice negotiations that set the stage for Hitler and WW2:
1. Wilson was the most vocal proponent of carving up Eastern Europe along ethnic lines. Since the ethnic lines were anything but clean on the ground, this lead to arbitrary borders, irrendentist grievances, and arguable increased the “oppressed ethnic minority” problem instead of solving it. This is bad by itself, it also provided Nazi Germany with crucial pretexts for its early rounds of expansionism, and it created fatal barriers against the Eastern European states banding together for mutual protection.
2. It was Wilson who made the Kaiser’s abdication a precondition for armistice negotiations, and he did so publicly in a way that stoked the fires of the German Revolution of 1918. Without this, the Kaiser likely stays in power or at least abdicates in a way that preserves the institution of the German monarchy (either abdicating in favor of the Crown Prince or a regency for the Kaiser’s infant grandson). Constitutional Monarchy is an underappreciated stabilizing institution, and a preserved German monarchy would have made Hitler’s rise to power much, much more difficult. For one thing, Hitler took full power by inheriting the Presidency (as Chancellor) when Hindenberg died, which would not have been possible with a Kaiser instead of a President. For another, the military would have been sworn to the Kaiser and not to the Chancellor, and the Chancellor would have served at the Kaiser’s pleasure, making the Kaiser a much more effective check on Hitler or an alternate Hitler-like figure as Chancellor. And that’s if Hitler even managed to become Chancellor in the first place: the requirement that the Chancellor command a majority in the Reichstag was a feature of the Weimar constitution which did not exist in the Imperial constitution.
3. Wilson made promises to the German government about the basis for peace negotiations without consulting with the British or the French governments. When the British and French balked at Wilson’s promises at Versailles and insisted on harsher peace terms w.r.t. reparations and disarmament, it looked like a perfidious bait-and-switch from the German perspective. This was a major contributing factor to the stab-in-the-back legend that the Nazis made a great deal of political hay out of in their rise to power.
Wilson also had some vicious and nasty effects in US politics, not the least of which being his expansion of segregation in the military and federal civil service and his support for the rise of the Second Klan.
My second choice as well, but you’ve left out that the french army mutinies in 1917. That mutiny is only put down by the generals promising that there wouldn’t be any more offensives until the Americans showed up. Absent the ability to make that promise, the allied position in 1917 looks a hell of a lot worse, and makes them far more likely to try for some sort of negotiated peace.
This is a good point. The interesting thing is that the Germans don’t appear to have picked up on the French mutinies very much.
The mutinies were weird. The soldiers didn’t refuse to fight, but they did refuse to go on the offensive. I don’t really get how they thought that would work out in the long run, they probably didn’t know either. It gets settled fairly quickly though, and very secretly (a bunch of court documents are getting released this year, so hopefully we’ll get some good books on them soon) but if they had gone on longer, the Germans would have noticed eventually.
They were more like strikes than mutinies, really.
One important detail I’m not clear on with the French mutinies is whether the mutineers would have obeyed orders to launch a local counteroffensive against a German attack, considering the counteroffensive a defensive act, or if they would have disobeyed because it would be an order to attack.
As I understand WW1 defensive tactics, local counterattacks were very important for holding the line and for inflicting casualties on attackers: the initial attack tended to favor the attackers (at least once the early-war tactical mistakes had been learned from), since they had chosen a time and place and concentrated their troops and artillery to create an overwhelming local advantage. But once the front line had been taken, the side on the operational offensive was out-of-position, disorganized and exhausted from the assault, near or past the range limits of their supporting artillery, and occupying fortifications facing the wrong way. The operational defenders could then bring up reserves, create their own local concentration of force, and inflict severe casualties and regain parts of their original front lines with an effective counterattack. This, combined with attempts to stretch initial successes by immediately attacking secondary and tertiary defensive lines without sufficient artillery support, was where most of the ruinous casualties from operational offensives came from.
This, tangentially, is where the “bite and hold” tactics come in: in the later parts of the war, the British and French in particular adopted tactics of deliberately stopping and digging in after the first wave of the attack while still within support range of friendly heavy artillery, then resuming the offensive only when artillery had been brought up towards the new front lines.
I thought much the same, but (like Beta Guy above) propose Taft prior to the 1912 nomination. TR would probably have defeated Wilson in a landslide.
Hey everyone! Just got back from 1914. Before I left, we were discussing who would be best to target if you tried to improve 20th-century history by killing just one person. After exhaustive debate, we settled on Emperor Franz Ferdinand, on the theory that if the infamous “Habsburg Handlebars” never accedes to the Austro-Hungarian throne, there’s no mustache-wax crisis of 1925, and thus the Budapest Circle are freed up to focus on bringing antibiotics, reversible male birth-control, time travel, etc. to the mass market a few years earlier than they otherwise would have.
It was pretty easy, actually. Turns out, there was a failed attempt on his life in Sarajevo in 1914. (Apparently the “Eden of the Balkans” was rife with ethnic tension back then. Who knew?) So I just tracked down one of the conspirators and tipped him off about Franz Ferdinand’s route back to the train station. How’d everything work out?
Edit: Awww crap. ☹️
Your point isn’t wrong, but the only way I can imagine alternatives to ww1 being worse would be if they led to a serious nuclear exchange a few decades later.
TIME TRAVEL DIRECTIVE 25.14:
Guys, this is getting ridiculous. This time Franz Ferdinand got killed in a shootout between six different identifiable groups of time travellers. Three were trying to kill him, two were trying to prevent it, and one appears to have been there to replace him with a body-double wearing a concealed bulletproof vest. Stop. Trying. To. Fix. Things.
This seems pertinent.
This line of discussion suggests an elegant candidate for the Great Filter: Any civilization advanced enough to carry out interstellar colonization will have already figured out time travel, but as soon as they do that, their repeated efforts to “fix” history will instead cause their timeline to rapidly degenerate until things have gotten just bad enough to prevent them from inventing time travel for a while longer.
In this timeline, that is known (among other names) as Niven’s Law of Time Travel: “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe. “
I kill the timecop who went right ahead of me.
Reason: maximum probability that that was the fecker who actually screwed it all up.
Edit: Rats – I think dndnrsn beat me to it…
With time travel, it’s pretty trivial to be the first to the joke.
What do we want?
TIME TRAVEL!
When do we want it?
THAT’S LARGELY IMMATERIAL!
Patient zero of the Spanish flu. An unfortunate death, but a highly profitable one, and something much less prone to causing history’s development to widely swerve than killing Princip/Hitler/Lenin/Wilson/whomever.
stop the world war, the flu almost certainly is massively less deadly.
In immediate or second order effects?
I’m not sure what he’s on about either. The statistics consistently show the Spanish flu to have been much more deadly whan WWI.
I think the idea is that the war made the flu itself worse (lots of soldiers packed together in close quarters, censorship making it hard for anyone to get a clear view on the problem, etc)
Oh! That makes more sense. Time travel tenses were hard.
I think you’re on a good track with stopping WWI. Along those lines, an out-of-the-box candidate: William Howard Taft, circa late 1911. That’s right around the time that the Taft-Roosevelt knife fight for the 1912 Republican nomination got underway. Taft ended up winning the nomination by a whisker, splitting the Republicans, and getting Wilson elected over TR (with Taft a distant third). Now, I think Wilson did enough negative things in his own right, but the key thing is that TR was probably the most respected non-European statesman in the world at that time, and he was a ferocious advocate of American strength and world positioning. He had a close personal relationship with all major European powers-that-be including Kaiser Wilhelm. He was known to be willing to intervene militarily if it should require it, and to use American power to resolve international disputes.
My hypothesis is that, with TR as President in 1914, the European stumble into war could have been avoided (either by his diplomacy or his threats to involve the US from the outset), or at least the war could have been limited, contained, and shortened. The subsequent League of Nations fiasco would have been less likely as TR would have shared a party with Republican opponents and also was unlikely to commit to an unenforceable set of idealistic but ineffective institutions, which he generally disliked.
Your postulate was that it would be a “quiet” and “accidental” death, so Taft dying (say, a massive heart attack, not unlikely in a man his size) wouldn’t trigger TR to stay out of the race mourning a martyr; more likely Republicans would have coalesced around TR as the only remaining viable candidate. Without the Republican divisions caused by Taft, TR would probably have beaten Wilson handily (Wilson won only 42% of the popular vote; Taft and Roosevelt collectively won 50%).
EDIT: Just noticed that Beta Guy already nominated Taft (heh) and thus “out of the box” is not an accurate description for mine.
There’s been a lot of talk on stopping the big wars. But, as Eltargrim beat me to, maybe those are net-positive? I dunno, there’s a bunch of utilitarians around here, does that math actually work out? Trade a dozen or so million lives to get Modern Prosperity and the Long Peace? I’m uncomfortable subscribing to the notion, but it’s a different track to what’s already been posted.
Assuming that’s true, how about whomever’s death has the most impact toward making the 3rd world not a backwards shithole. Mao? Sykes or Picot? Any ideas for India, Africa, or South America?
ETA: Additionally, is there a person we could off to still get WWII but without the Holocaust? Both that and the Eastern Front seemed to be Hitlers’ bag, so I’m not sure the two could be separated…
I know there are a lot of libertarians on here, so I thought I’d pose this questions:
“Do you ever wish you weren’t a libertarian?”
I’ve been one for about twenty years, and I’ve found that it’s starting to grind me down.
You can’t disbelieve what you believe (at least not quickly), but I wonder if I would be happier if I just believed what everyone else does. (Er, and by everyone … I’m in the Oakland area, so some form of Democratic worldview would be in order … if I were back in my hometown, it’d be more along the lines of ‘Religious Conservatism’).
No. More generally, I’ve never wished that I didn’t believe something that I thought was true.
While it’s tricky to argue against wanting to believe what is true, in some sense, a lot of things I believe have no discernible impact on the world, other than how I feel about things.
There are certainly some things I believe to be true that would seem to meet the criteria of:
1) Do not make anyone else better off
2) Make me worse off
(And these tend to be the things that other people don’t believe. I’m fairly certain they’re wrong, but I’m not sure what being right does for me (or anyone else)).
Eh, not really. IME, plenty of democrats and republicans (even really mainstream ones) still spend plenty of time getting worked up that not enough people agree with them. And saying things like “but surely you’re fine that 90% of people agree with you that the income tax is an okay thing and some form of welfare state is necessary” doesn’t cheer them up – they spend all their time and focus on the issues that people don’t agree with, just like libertarians do.
You’re probably very right about that.
I just find it vaguely demoralizing that most things I read, watch, listen to, etc. have an implicit (or explicit) condemnation of things that sit near the core of my identity. Facing this (kind of amorphous) constant derision has begun to wear me out.
And it’s not like the people doing this are (generally speaking) bad people or doing anything wrong.
I think what you really want is not necessarily a change in politics – but an entire mindset where you’re a bit more conformist and less questioning.
Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow both see cultures that are openly hostile to their beliefs and that are entirely dominated by the enemy tribe.
The way to not get so worn out isn’t to have the right opinions, it’s to simply not care (or perhaps, to have no opinions at all).
The solution is probably some combination of changing what you expose yourself to and training yourself to care less about what other people think – to separate yourself from the masses both culturally and in self-identification.
Not really, no. When you’re a lousy follower and a terrible leader, what else is there?
I’m not a libertarian anymore. (In the sense of “I no longer believe the NAP, by itself, would produce a near-ideal society.” I still believe the US should move more in a libertarian direction.)
Sometimes I wish I still was; it was reassuring to think I had all the answers in my head if people would just listen to them.
Other than what I’ll admit is a strong correlation, why should being a libertarian mean thinking one has all the answers? In some ways being an ancap specifically means admitting you don’t have the answers, since you don’t know what emergent, voluntary interactions will come up with.
I assume you mean something like “libertarian is a doctrinaire, purist view concerned with logical consistency, whereas most other political views are a bit more messy, ad hoc, or ‘common sense/real world’-based.”
While I admit libertarians tend to be more focused on the internal consistency of their view than most, I don’t think devotion to logic and consistency per se implies thinking one has all the answers. It does tend to produce that result in the sort of libertarian who thinks he can derive the right answer to every political question from “first principles,”* but that’s not every libertarian, nor, I don’t think, demanded by libertarianism.
*Edit to rant: I do think this sort of thing is a big problem among libertarians. I like a lot of this Youtuber’s content, but find this particular video a perfect example of what I mean: he uses a bunch of philosophical-sounding terms and appeal to “logical fallacies” to build a supposedly objective ethical edifice on incredibly shaky grounds (as I see it, he engages here in a couple false dilemmas and over-broad application of his “consistency” principle to attempt to bridge the is-ought gap, among other problems). Plus, even if his logic were sound, I don’t think this would convince anyone who didn’t already really want to be a libertarian but felt a need for some objective grounding. I don’t believe jokes about sandwiches scare women away from libertarianism, but I do suspect this sort of “more logical than thou” thing might turn some people off.
I find it very hard to believe that video isn’t a parody. It seems more ridiculous to me than things I’ve read with were explicitly lampooning libertarianism rather than actually arguing for it.
Particular highlight defending self-ownership from first principles:
“Even if your answer is that no one would own you, you still have a problem. If something isn’t owned, then no one can stop someone doing whatever they want to, to it. If no one owns a rock, there’s nothing stopping anyone from picking it up and using it for whatever purpose they want. So if no one owns you, then anyone can do whatever they want to you, including raping and murdering you.”
So if no one owns you, then anyone can do whatever they want to you, including raping and murdering you.
Wibble. Does that person not realise they’ve re-invented a justification for slavery? Also, “you have no right to rape or murder me” does not rest on the basis of “somebody owns me”.
I would argue that it does.
Absent a shared metaphysical/moral framework the strongest argument against rape, murder, slavery, etc… is that a given
meat sackbody belongs to thesoulmind that inhabits it and that mind alone.@Delseach
Don’t worry, luckily slavery didn’t stand up to first principles (if I remember correctly, the problem was lack of consistency) so you either have to own yourself or everyone will be raping and murdering you the whole time.
@hlynkacg
I would argue that your view is a product of us living in a society where the idea of personal property is so taken for granted that you’re extending far further than necessary. Really, what we imagine as a relationship between a person and a thing is really a relationship between people. “I own this car” really is “I have the right to prohibit anyone else using this car”. In this case it’s easier to think of it as a relation between me and the car than me and every other person in the world. In the case of my own person though it makes more sense to think “I have the right to prohibit anyone doing whatever they want to me” than “I own myself and therefore people can’t do what they want to me”.
I think historically you might have a better case in that kings had dominium over their subjects who were “included in” the person of the king and he had the power of life and death over them, a power he was generally pretty unwilling to share. In English law, I believe property is still described in terms of dominium and one of the reasons it took a long time for the idea of personal property to be enshrined in law is that jurists were unwilling to recognise dominium as belonging to anyone but the king.
@hlynkacg
I would say the argument that holds up strongest against murder/rape is that the gains in utility from them are far outweighed by the losses. The argument that “this body belongs to this mind, therefore this body should not be violated” runs contrary to most people’s acceptance of things like war, execution, and enforcement of law.
SMBC outlined a pretty nice failure mode of this line of thought.
@Matt M
I don’t get the failure. If there really were superhumans who were capable of experiencing suffering and pleasure at some exponential level over the average human, then I would say they deserve consideration corresponding to their level when deciding whether to inflict suffering or pleasure. Fortunately for us normals, we don’t live in anything remotely resembling that world, so we can go on and take our (generally) equitable share.
I would be interested in hearing the counterargument, that someone who experiences pain at 2x the level of a normal person, does not deserve a reduction of average pain inflicted upon them.
There’s also the question of whether someone who is able to experience emotions at an exponentially higher level than me would even be recognizable as a human, since they would have a biological makeup so different from mine.
My terminal value is the flourishing of humanity, not the flourishing of hyper-feeling monsters.
@ Art Vandelay
I understand that but you have the progression backwards. The ownership of “things” progresses from the ownership of self. I am me, and the things I make, buy, do, etc… are extensions of me. A King/Queen who unites a set of warring tribes has dominium because, in the absence of nationalism, “nation” and “ruler” are one and the same as are “the law” and “the rulers will”.
@ Guy in TN
Take the universe and grind it down to the finest power, strain it through the finest sieve and then show me a single particle of utility.
I see know reason to value one persons imaginary substance over another’s or my own for that matter.
Yes, even utilitarianism relies on pre-existing values to make sense. All values, including “don’t violate someone else’s body” rely on the stuff of human imagination, and can’t be observed by squinting at the universe hard enough. The search for a universal “shared metaphysical/moral framework” is indeed, impossible.
You are describing how you think ownership ought to work here, not how ownership works in any real sense. Normal usage of the term “ownership” is based on how resources are legally distributed. And resources can be distributed in any way, and for any reason really, so long as it has legal legitimacy.
This is, biologically speaking, untrue.
@ Guy in TN
You’re really going to pull the “The search for the universal is impossible” card then turn right around and lecture me on what is or isn’t legitimate or true?
Edit:
Upon consideration, the remainder of this comment has been redacted in the name of niceness community and civilization.
Normative vs. descriptive claims. That the search for a universal moral framework is a doomed affair, does not mean that nothing can be said to be true or false.
@ Guy in TN
What you’re trying to do is pass normative claims as descriptive ones and vice versa. If you’re not willing to engage on the level of first principals there’s really nothing more for me to say to you.
I’m a little baffled, but I think I know what it going on here. I think the confusion is that, for libertarians the term “ownership” is a normative claim, while non-libertarians generally use it as a descriptive claim. So when you say, “He owns this thing”, you mean that they have the moral legitimacy to own it, as in that it is “right” for them to own it. (Correct me if I’m wrong here).
But when I say “He owns this thing”, I mean that they have the legal legitimacy to own it, meaning power+popular acceptance, with no claim of whether the ownership is “right” or not.
If “ownership”, and “ownership of self”, are descriptive claims, then normative claims can’t be deduced from them.
If “ownership”, and “ownership of self”, are a normative claims, then you are starting with the assumption that one ought to own themselves (not much of a first principle). It is no more convincing than me saying “assume utilitarianism is good” and expecting people to follow my arguments from there.
So when you say, “He owns this thing”, you mean that they have the moral legitimacy to own it, as in that it is “right” for them to own it. (Correct me if I’m wrong here).
You’re wrong here.
…or rather, either you’re wrong here, or I am. When I think like (I think) a libertarian thinks, I think of ownership as more the legal thing than the moral thing.
Example: many people (some of which are libertarians) subscribe to the Lockean view of property – it’s yours if you “mix your labor” with it. Suppose an otherwise homeless woman enters a private lot that the legal owner has not done anything with for years; the former proceeds to go through nontrivial labor to make the space livable – she scavenges nails and boards and builds a shelter, then a box with soil to grow food, etc. Does she own the lot now? Not every libertarian would agree. The lot may have been purchased by the legal owner using money acquired through a great deal of labor, for example.
Another example: an adult produces a child, then proceeds to work very hard to nurture that child. Does the adult own the child? The Lockean sense suggests yes; my intuition disagrees. (Kinda. Babies lack a lot of agency, and so their mothers act as if they own them in a lot of ways, and everyone tends to be fine with this.)
Legally, the lot owner owns the lot, not the woman, and the mother doesn’t own the child (although she has a lot of legal leverage), and I agree with these. (To be fair, I think most libertarians acknowledge that the convention of property has weaknesses like this.)
@ Guy in TN
You’re still doing it, stop.
The Normative claims here are things like “Utility exists, can be meaningfully quantified, and ought to be maximized” and “ownership means having legal dominion over a thing”.
“ownership of things requires the ownership of self” is a descriptive claim because legal dominion of over oneself is a prerequisite for exercising legal dominion over anything else.
Purchased from whom? How did that person come to own the lot in the first place?
I’m not sure why a property regime that ultimately ends up at “the government, whose only contemporaneous physical presence was hundreds of miles east of here, once sold this land to someone sight unseen, and does not have any law recognizing when it has been abandoned because that would interfere in its goal of perpetually collecting taxes on it” should be regarded as having any legitimacy on libertarian grounds.
@Paul Brinkley
Lockean property is, I hope, a philosophy of how libertarians think legal property law ought to work, rather than a description of the motivations behind actually existing property law. I say “I hope”, because if was intended to be a simple descriptive statement, it is obviously incorrect, since property transfers such as eminent domain, taxation, welfare, do not seem to follow Lockean property rules at all.
@hlynkacg
The claim “x exists” is descriptive. The claim “x ought to be” is normative. Therefore, my claim that “ownership is commonly defined as having legal dominion over a thing” is descriptive. It may be incorrect (in the factual sense) that ownership is defined in this way, but that’s doesn’t make the claim normative. It would be normative if I had claimed that ownership ought to be defined in a certain way.
Since this is a descriptive claim, let’s investigate it. Does every country that has legal private ownership, also have self-ownership enshrined into law? And what does it mean to have legal self-ownership, if that also means you could still be drafted, executed, ect. by the state?
Even still, if every country had, for example, laws against both running red lights and buying alcohol on Sunday, that wouldn’t prove that having one law is a perquisite to having the other. There could theoretically be a country that allowed slaves to own property, the correlation between “self ownership” and “private ownership” could be merely a trend, not a perquisite.
No need for me to stay in hypotheticals here. Apparently, some slaves (who did not legally own themselves) actually did have ownership claims in the old U.S. South, which court rulings upheld:
https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2013/spring/slaves-property-ownership-penningroth/
“Tear everything down and see what happens” sure quacks and waddles like an answer to everything.
I blame Ayn Rand. I’m saying that as someone with a fair amount of affection and sympathy for Ayn Rand, but she did real damage to her own cause by insisting on half-assed philosophical justifications for everything in it. Wasn’t her only problem — her tendency to shoehorn in quasi- or not-even-quasi-sexual heroic fantasies comes to mind — but it’s probably her biggest.
I find it annoying enough to identify as either libertarian or not-libertarian that I just end out in an annoying superposition of both.
I spent a few years trying to convince myself I was a libertarian, but couldn’t pull it off. I then tried to convince myself of the correctness of the social justice movement – and/or that even if they’re wrong, it’s a noble lie – and couldn’t do that either.
I think studying math as an undergrad and then going to law school ruined me to always poke holes and find exceptions and sub-exceptions to everything, which makes it hard to stick to any kind of consistent political philosophy, but there it is.
2 + 2 = 4, but only for most known values of 2 and 4.
When I was a libertarian, I was very depressed in an existential way. Not only was it unpopular but there didn’t seem to be any upward movement in followers. If anything, libertarianism seems to be on a downward slope. Not only that but it was exhausting. Every answer to a political question involved less government. If you want to be a libertarian and have a debate with someone, you have to do extensive research on every single topic to figure out how you can fit the free market square in to a round hole. And god forbid you find one of those potential free markets answers unconvincing, because your whole political identity depends on it. These days if some issue comes up that I haven’t put a lot of thought in comes, I can just be agnostic instead of half-assing something I googled to attempt a moderately convincing argument.
But having a political identity as a libertarian doesn’t depend on having a convincing, well-researched answer as to why less government is the answer to every problem (though it so often is, and isn’t hard to explain why). I understand the sentiment, of course. If you get known as “the libertarian” among your friends then they may be like “but wait, onyomi, what about THIS case where the government might be better??” But libertarians are allowed to say “I don’t know” just as much as anyone else.
Yeah, I feel almost the opposite of Wrong Species. Having a consistent worldview makes your worldview easier to defend, not harder. Consistency of “the answer is always less government” is a feature, not a bug!
IMO the moderate red/blue framework of “government is good for some things and not for others and let’s all argue over which goes in which camp” comes across as much harder to defend, because it isn’t consistent.
I would say just that’s nuance. As far as I’m concerned, if there was a simple solution to all political disputes, that would be a hell of a coincidence. The world is really complicated and I’m firmly biased against any one explanation to solve it all.
The fact that the world is complex doesn’t mean complex answers are better. All else equal, complex answers are worse.
Taking a firm stand against simple answers is a rather unnuanced approach to the question of whether or not sometimes the answer is simple.
You can make libertarianism sound extremist and lacking nuance if you frame it as “you just think less government or no government is the answer to every political question.”
You can also make antebellum abolitionism sound extremist and lacking in nuance if you frame it as “you just think freeing the slaves 100% is the answer to every question about the welfare of black people.”
Not using force to solve the problems people currently try to solve with monopoly government isn’t a final answer to every political question. It’s the starting point for a more humane, ethical answer to every political question to arise.
Abolitionists didn’t think ending slavery would solve all problems. They thought it would be a simple solution to one problem. Im not against simple answers for any one issue. It’s just that any time throughout history someone thought one solution could be used to solve all political problems, they were horrifically wrong.
I’m pretty sure we’ve discussed why I think libertarianism isn’t inherently more ethical. Just to reiterate, in a world without an organization we call “the state”, private property becomes indistinguishable from the state. What is the state? “Monopoly of legitimate force over a geographic area”, right? So let’s say that we have a housing development that provides security. How is that any different? And yes, maybe the state was founded illegitimately but assuming that’s true, the difference between state and property isn’t its actions but its origins.
@Wrong Species
The HOA doesn’t have political authority (see pp. 17-18 of the pdf).
Take a HOA that controls security and is given broad powers to potentially expand that power. What is the difference between that and a state?
What makes a private security guard different from a policeman today?
Don’t answer my question with a question. I really want to know what you think is the difference.
@onyomi
The way that the police officer operates is ultimately controlled by a democratically elected body, while the private security guard answers to the private party that pays her and very high-level laws.
@Aapje
So police officers can do things private security guards can’t, right? And why is that? My contention is it’s because they’re imbued, in most peoples’ minds, with “political authority,” as described in the link above, by virtue of the democratic process you mention.
Ancap is precisely that state of affairs where no person or entity is imagined to possess “political authority” (though they may possess other sorts of authority), so that’s the difference, as I see it, between a government and a hypothetical ancap HOA.
Nonsense. A homeowners’ association may be democratic, and a state may not be.
@onyomi
I said nothing of the sort. Please reread my statements and understand what I actually argue.
@random832
I was talking about the situation in the West/US, not a statement over all the possible entities that are called police worldwide, yet which operate very differently.
@onyomi
Yes, the state has “political authority” but what is the difference between that and “propertarian authority” in practice in this scenario? Based on my hypothetical, how does the HOA act any differently?
They can be agnostic but you’re always predisposed to one solution in a way that really no one else is. I could be a leftist and recognize that a market solution could work in reducing housing costs. But if someone convinced you that markets are inferior to government in one aspect, that discredits your libertarian beliefs pretty strongly. That’s why libertarians can’t ever accept the need for government to mitigate global warming, regardless of what evidence is available. It would break their ideology.
@Wrong Species
You’re confusing libertarians and anarchists. Libertarians do not rule out state intervention for genuine public goods, they just hold that those are few and far between.
Why? I don’t, and I don’t think most libertarians define libertarianism as “the believe that the private sector can do anything better than government.”
In my case, it’s the belief that the ethical and utilitarian arguments for government all seem too weak to me to justify government on ethical grounds. Proving that government can do some things as well or better than the private sector, or even that there are some important things a government can do which the private sector can never do (though, thus far, world governments don’t seem to be doing such a great job of reducing carbon emissions either, so my prior isn’t that the government can do it but the private sector can’t, but rather that it’s extremely hard for anyone to do it), doesn’t shake this belief.
To shake my preference for anarchism (if not my general preference for non-government solutions wherever reasonable) would require proving to me that there’s something the government can do, which the private sector cannot or will not do, and which is also important enough to justify allowing certain people to abide by different moral standards than the rest of us, especially with respect to the use of force and coercion. That is a pretty high bar to clear, and I haven’t yet seen anything which clears it in my mind.
I could be wrong, but aren’t there actually tons of such things all around us ? Off the top of my head, I can list: the Interstate Highway System (and roads in general), vaccination, pure scientific research (as contrasted with short-term technological R&D), and national defence. In general, the private sector is really poor at providing services that benefit everyone more or less equally (since there’s little reason to compete in this case); or projects that have large costs but very little immediate short-term gain (since the risk is too great, and the benefits too far off to justify the spending).
But that’s not even the worst problem with anarchism, IMO; the worst problem is that it’s completely unsustainable. People tend to naturally aggregate into groups, because groups can accomplish things that individuals cannot. Since large groups are impossible to manage by consensus, hierarchies emerge. The only remaining question is, how will your hierarchy be structured ? Throughout history, the most popular answer has been, “the most powerful warlord is on top, everyone else is his vassal or slave”; it’s only recently that we’ve begun forming governments in order to mitigate the warlords’ worst excesses.
I believe you will find that, prior to roughly WWII, most pure scientific research was performed or financed by private universities, wealthy dilettantes, or the Church. That’s enough pure scientific research for a Renaissance, an Industrial Revolution, and the foundations of the Information Age.
Please do not make the mistake of assuming that “private sector” means always and only “for-profit corporations”. If you argue that simply because you can’t imagine a private corporation being motivated to do a thing, the government must do it, it won’t just be libertarians who are laughing at you.
Yeah, that not exactly a great example of a private organization doing research.
It’s (usually) not the government!
@Anonymous:
When the Church was putting out a large chunk of scientific research it was roughly synonymous with government.
The state is arguably even worse at this.
@onyomi:
I’ll think fondly about this anecdote tomorrow, as I drive my car on the freeway, listening to music over the Internet, while looking around at the scenery that is perfectly visible in the absence of smog.
@Bugmaster
I’m a little loathe to go into detail when it feels to me like you haven’t done even basic Googling on the many answers ancaps and libertarians have to these questions, but a few points:
The state does it now=/=the state has always done it or must, logically do it. Private individuals and businesses/organizations cooperating to build roads isn’t even a hard problem, and is actually something of a running gag among libertarians.
Related, the private sector doesn’t do it now=/=the private sector wouldn’t do it if the state weren’t crowding them out or, in many cases, making it illegal for them to do so.
The state does it now=/=it must be done, and certainly not that it must be done in the way state did it. It’s possible that the interstate highway system isn’t the solution the private sector would have come up with for travel in the US. But if that means we’d instead be riding super fast trains everywhere, that might not be so bad. Certainly not bad enough to justify using coercion.
Even the examples he provides are weak as hell.
The government didn’t “build” the roads, it just paid for them. And paying for things isn’t a particular struggle. Many of the earliest “roads” in America were privately constructed and operated, and many such roads continue to exist today.
The Internet would have been nothing more than a DoD communications tool had it not been opened up to the private sector for experimentation and improvement. Giving the government credit for Spotify is a stretch of epic proportions.
Businesses have an obvious incentive to minimize pollution. At a very basic level, pollution is waste, and what business wouldn’t want to minimize waste? Also, in a free market, you could sue polluters for property damage, as was commonly done prior to the government getting involved and setting allowable thresholds for pollution.
This is irritating, as we have motte and bailey argument going on.
Example gets brought up, libertarian argues from the principled motte of “yes of course, commons problems are deficult to solve and libertarians don’t have good solutions”. This seems to be a fairly principled stand, as I understand it.
But, principled libertarians also seem to very commonly come out into the bailey and start talking about how we don’t need to worry about pollution (a commons problem) because incentives and the courts.
@Matt M
Nonsense. Businesses have an incentive to minimize costs to them. Externalities, like causing pollution that gives other people a higher chance to get cancer are not costs to the business, so they have no major incentive to minimize that.
Of course it is preferable for businesses to use a process that is 100% efficient, but we actually live in the real world, where perfect efficiency is rarely possible. In practice, we regularly see that the cheapest process has substantial pollution and the cheapest way to reduce that pollution is not to change the production process to a more efficient one, but to add post-processing for the waste products.
Pretending that the world allows for perfect solutions is probably the most common fallacy of Utopian thinkers. For example, the Soviet government had an obvious incentive to allocate resources efficiently, so their central planning process must have worked perfectly, right? By your reasoning it should have.
When your reasoning for why libertarianism would work also ‘proves’ that communism works, you should reconsider where you made a mistake.
@onyomi, Matt M:
I think you might be (inadvertently) strawmanning my position. I never claimed that “the state must logically do things like build roads etc.”, or that “the private sector has never built roads”. Of course, the private sector can do such things; however, historically, it had usually not done so — while governments of all kinds, from feudal empires to modern democracies, have. What have the Romans done for us, indeed ?
I believe the reason for this is not just dumb luck, but rather the structure of the free market. Consider roads, for example. The Interstate Highway System works so well precisely because it is free — or rather, because its costs are so diffuse that individual people end up paying a negligible sum for it. No local business would be unable to collect sufficient funds to pay for such an endeavour; and in fact, since the national network of roads benefits everyone equally, there’s no incentive to even try it in the first place.
For another example, consider pollution, overfishing, and other tragedies of the commons. Here, the incentives are razor-sharp. If I can save a significant amount of money by increasing pollution a fraction of a percent, then I’d be a fool not to do so. If I do choose to be such a fool, the free market will quickly take care of me, since I’ll be out-competed by smarter entrepreneurs. Thus, every individual business makes a perfectly rational decision to increase pollution by a fractional amount… and that’s how you get smog, until the government comes in and says, “actually, catalytic converters are mandatory now, sorry”.
Another interesting example is pure scientific research. By this I mean, not something like “designing a better iPhone”, but rather, “playing around with fruit flies”. Ok, maybe some wealthy magnate could invest into fruit flies just to gain prestige — but no one has enough money to waste on totally useless (commercially speaking) projects like the LHC. The knowledge we gain by performing some research is almost certainly guaranteed to improve the lives of all humanity… at some point in the future, in ways that are impossible to predict or monetize. Investing into better iPhones pays off here and now.
I could go on and on, but this post is already too long as it is…
@Aapje
Wanting to avoid tort liability is a good incentive for businesses to not harm others. Often, the state limits tort liability of corporations, reducing the incentive for them to be careful of producing negative externalities. For example, see how the state has limited liability for oil companies.
@IrishDude
The kind of pollution that these regulations seek to reduce is often very hard/impossible to resolve using tort lawsuits. Take asbestos. The gap between exposure and mesothelioma is often 40 years and determining liability after that time is a huge problem, lawsuits often drag along until the patient is already dead, people run into the statute of limitations, companies may have gone bankrupt/have been dissolved already, etc.
Yet mesothelioma is clearly caused by a certain type of exposure, which has relatively few sources. ‘Generic’ types of cancer cannot be directly linked to a certain type of exposure, so it is impossible to go after the culprit, in most cases.
Just because you can determine that one source of exposure gives cancer to about X people in a group, doesn’t mean that you can point out which people have gotten cancer because of that exposure and not because of other sources.
The heavy dependence on tort liability by most libertarians is actually one of the main failure modes/Utopian aspects of (hardcore) libertarianism.
Thank God the state was around and stopped mesothelioma from happening!
@Matt M:
That is a puerile argument.
Are you taking the position that “commons” problems don’t exist and are not a problem for libertarian ideology?
The solution to any “commons” problem, in general, is to not have commons in the first place.
But more specifically, I think “how would liberty prevent X” is a pointless question to ask when the state did not, in fact, prevent X.
@Matt M:
I really want so see how you are going to fence in the atmosphere, dam all the rivers and parcel out all the seawater.
The solution to any “commons” problem, in general, is to not have commons in the first place.
I really want so see how you are going to fence in the atmosphere, dam all the rivers and parcel out all the seawater.
I think you’re both being unnecessarily facetious here. Shares in water sources could be parceled out; likewise rights to air, by proximity; shares could then trade according to who sees the most threat from which direction, and who wishes to entrust their judgements to which environmental research specialist. ISTR David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom sketches more details of how such a system might work.
In the same breath, this system won’t necessarily let you just random-walk your way to maximum liberty. Some actors could create externalities faster than the people affected can keep informed about them. (I honestly can’t say whether the standard system of enforcement with big sticks is better or worse than this, though.)
@bugmaster:
See, when onyomi says
“to shake my preference for anarchism … would require proving to me that there’s something [very important] the government can do, which the private sector cannot or will not do”,
and you respond with
“aren’t there actually tons of such things all around us ? Off the top of my head, I can list: the Interstate Highway System (and roads in general)…”
I kind of took that to mean that you thought the state must logically do things like building roads. I am having a hard time finding any other plausible reading of your words.
@Matt M
Once upon a time the benefits of asbestos were clear and the downsides weren’t. At that time this material was used extensively. Then people realized that the material was very dangerous, oops.
Those affected reacted by suing the companies that made/used the material, which worked pretty horribly overall, resulting in judgments after the money was needed to mitigate the costs of the the treatment, the actual extent of the tort only being clear once the patient was near death, disputes over who was to blame, statute of limitations running out, etc, etc.
The government reacted by banning the sale/use of asbestos, which worked well, because businesses tried to keep selling the stuff, but this was stopped by regulation. So government regulation made the difference.
Modern day cleanup crews often try to break the law to get a competitive advantage by working faster in a way that increases risks to their workers and others. By your reasoning they would not do this, as lawsuits are happening today, so the companies can predict that they will get lawsuits in the future, so the incentive is supposedly not to take risks with people’s health. Except they do and this is even logical (these cleanup companies are small businesses whose owners will be retired/dead when the diseases start to happen and their current gains will never be taken away, due to the way the law indemnifies companies/owners and their families), so you are wrong.
You react by making a nonsensical argument to defend your absolutist faith in libertarianism, which resolves cognitive dissonance by pretending that a failure by the government to predict the danger of a new material is equivalent to a failure of the market to restrict the use of a known to be dangerous substance. Your statement ignores that you don’t have a libertarian solution for the government failure that you point out either, so a libertarian society would have two failure modes, rather than one.
@Aapje
With respect to asbestos, my understanding is the main danger is for people with prolonged exposure to inhaling it. Essentially, this affects asbestos miners and asbestos factory workers, but doesn’t seem to be a big problem for most asbestos consumers. In this situation, it’s easier to determine the victims; it’s the people who work in conditions that greatly enhance their risk of disease, did not consent to and were unaware of the increased risk, but the factory owners are aware of the risks which have been established scientifically. Courts can handle these types of situations and therefore tort liability would seems to work well to disincentivize imposing unconsented to risks on workers.
BTW, asbestos isn’t completely banned, but is still used in many products today as it has many positive functions.
You have repeated the refrain that ancap/hardcore libertarianism is utopian. It could be helpful for you to define what you mean by utopian. Ancap doesn’t fit my concept of utopia, which means something like no suffering and everything is perfect. My concept of ancap is more like how just as I expect a market for cars to work better than state-produced cars, I expect a market for security, law and arbitration to work better than state-produced security, law and arbitration. I don’t think markets for products and services are perfect or utopian, I do think they’re better than coercive monopoly provided products and services.
Also, I think widespread reduction in respect for political authority and moving to considering everyone to be moral equals, instead of considering some group of people to have special moral status, would be an improvement to interactions between people. I don’t think it would lead to everyone singing kumbaya though, and I expect there to still be many jerks and violent people to be dealt with.
@IrishDude
1. People may have had multiple employers. Who then caused which part of the damage? Do you look at the time they worked at each company? But perhaps they had much more exposure per unit of time at one employer than the other. Perhaps you don’t know how much exposure they had at each employer. perhaps they also were exposed in their private life. How much did this contribute? Not easy, this.
2. AFAIK there is no safe level of exposure. More exposure simply increases the chance to get ill. Perhaps this is not the case for mesothelioma, but asbestos also causes cancer.
3. My point was actually that it is relatively easy for asbestos-related illnesses to point at the culprit and it is still a legal nightmare that often fails to resolve the issue reasonably. That logically makes it impossible for many other sources of pollution to have the legal system resolve it.
4. There is factory in my country that used to produce asbestos and they would hand out broken asbestos panels to people, who used them for their driveways and such. So the nearby town has & had a lot of asbestos in places where erosion happens.
Depending on a mechanism that works in an ideal situation, but ignoring that the ideal situation often is not achievable in reality is how I used the term in this situation. I think that you need to discuss which error modes exist and the negative consequences.
Any system has situations where the system works correctly (a) and situations where it doesn’t (b). I would argue that the value of system X is then Xa – Xb. Then if you compare it to system Y, you have to figure out whether Xa – Xb > Ya – Yb.
In practice, advocates often do: Xa > Ya – Yb. Leaving out Xb is what I consider Utopian.
Recognizing Xb, but underestimating it is also Utopian, but by scale (so the more Xb is underestimated, the more Utopian the argument).
I have. Similarly, I have wished I were a theist.
I’m middle aged now and a lot mellower about being a libertarian than I used to be. The world will be what it will be. Most people don’t understand liberty, and when they do understand it, they don’t actually want it. Accepting this, or getting angry and alienated about it, they both pay the same.
Or that’s the idea, anyway. I won’t say I never get upset about politics anymore, sometimes I do. But a lot less than I used to.
Contrary to what we’re constantly told, I think most of us are better off focusing on living in the world rather than trying to change it. Or wishing it would somehow change itself.
I’m an ex-libertarian, ex-ancap. After giving it up,I felt a general feeling of relief, more tolerance for dissenting viewpoints, and have become much more optimistic about the direction the world is headed.
But I think that has more to do with switching from process-based ethics to consequence-based ethics. I think if I had switched from being a deontological Marxist to a utilitarian Libertarian, I would have felt much the same experience.
I’m not libertarian (though I’m not diametrically opposed), but I’d encourage you to stick by what you think is true rather than what is easiest. You maybe find you have more of an effect on others than you’re aware of, and changing minds is no trivial thing. At the same time its great to be open to changing your own views if your investigations reveal that your views no longer align the facts as best you can discern them. And I think you’re in relatively good company here on SSC where people from many different views at least partially try to do the same.
One tricky thing is that disparate impact can be far out of proportion to actual rates of qualifications, especially for weak correlations. The Wax paper is sloppy about this, using “passes the test” and “is qualified” interchangeably, and this affects the tradeoff calculus considerably; I wrote a bit on the topic here. (There are also other aspects of the paper I strongly question.)
Looking for some loose advice here. I have a friend who’s a rather short lady, and also quite determined that she’s not smart enough to go to university. She’s currently looking at potential career prospects, presumably some sort of trade, but I feel like her current vague goal of construction work is unsuited for someone under 5 foot. What sort of advice would you have for someone in this position?
Edit: Also probably worth mentioning that she’s extremely bad with people and a service job is probably terrible for her.
Here’s a list: http://www.businessinsider.com/high-paying-jobs-dont-require-bachelors-degree-2015-10
On the one hand, I’m surprised to hear that the job of a “computer-network support specialist” does not require a degree. On the other hand, this job does occasionally require one to crawl through ceiling tiles, and thus it seems like a short person would have a very real advantage…
How short is she and might she be interested in a military career? The US military’s height limit for women is only 4′ 10″.
Not trying to be a jerk here, but unintelligent, unsuited to most forms of physical labor, and bad working with other people does not strike as a combination particularly likely to result in any sort of high paying or successful career….
We only have a self-claim of insufficient intelligence for attending college, not an objective measure of intelligence.
She’s hardly expecting to live a life of opulence. She just doesn’t want to be a NEET.
“Not smart enough to go to college” does not necessarily imply “unintelligent”, unless we’re all throwing up our hands and admitting college is often kindergarten for young adults 🙂
My hands are in the air.
I’ll skip my initial unnecessary and unkind thought for the OP, and move on to noting that while some trades (e.g. carpentry) definitely reward height, others (e.g. electrical and plumbing) often require working in confined spaces where being small might help. Likely to be an uphill battle in any case; the trades are all male dominated and I can’t say I’ve ever hired a female plumber or electrician (but they exist; it may be they tend to end up on commercial projects rather than post-construction residential)
I’d expect that a lot of women might be happy with the choice of a female plumber or electrician, so it could give her an advantage.
She probably needs a thick skin because people in those trades are probably not the most progressive. Then again, it is a profession where you can start for yourself and/or directly work for end customers, once you have enough experience.
If we define college to even include a two year degree from a community college, then yes, I am willing to state that someone who cannot go to college is very unintelligent. OR incredibly lazy I suppose. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for their future prospects.
If we define college to even include a two year degree from a community college, then yes, I am willing to state that someone who cannot go to college is very unintelligent.
U so rite, me so stoopid! 🙂 Non-college attender here, though I did do a two year certificate plus bolt-on third year to crank it up to a diploma at what I suppose is the equivalent of an American community college; assessing my abilities then and now, I definitely would not have been able to manage a four year degree, though.
You don’t consider non-academically oriented intelligence to be intelligence, then?
I cannot imagine this is true.
Either you’re vastly over-estimating the difficulty of degrees (or perhaps in Ireland they are much more difficult?), or you fall into the “incredibly lazy” camp.
Choosing not to go to college is one thing. Plenty of smart people do that. But being “not smart enough to do it” even if you wanted to strikes me as almost non-credible. Community colleges exist for the express purpose of ensuring that even the stupidest can get degrees if they really want them.
@Daisy
He said “cannot”. Did you apply and fail every place you signed up to?
Also, aren’t you like in the granny squad with Nancy? I don’t mean to disparage your age, but college used to be for the substantially above average, not the average of today.
Also, aren’t you like in the granny squad with Nancy?
Bless you child, would you like sixpence to buy sweeties? 🙂
Yes. And I tend to agree that college was for the smarter. I really don’t think I could have handled it; the bolted-on third year of the course I did wasn’t a spectacular triumph and I hit up against my limits, so a Real Proper Science Degree would, I think, have seen me drop out in the second year even if I’d managed to struggle through first year.
Anyway, the occasion never arose because no money to go to university (not bright enough to win a scholarship, didn’t qualify for a grant, and family circumstances meant parents couldn’t afford it), so that’s why I did the two year (and third year follow-up) vocational course. Ironically never got a proper job out of it, and only got into my current line of work years later via re-training and up-skilling courses for the unemployed.
I am not sure if this would count as ‘not smart enough’ or ‘lazy’ but I have a few, un-diagnosed at the time, mental problems that prevented me from completing college. I have over the last few years kept trying to complete a degree but it has proven difficult as none of my treatments thus far have been terribly fruitful.
Although I am hopeful that I might one day get a degree.
If she doesn’t have strong ties to her community, the right thing to do is probably to find a low-unemployment city or region and move there. All labor will be more valuable there.
quite determined that she’s not smart enough to go to university
First thing: Do some tests to get a less subjective impression. Both IQ and more specific capabilities.
Electrician? I know a young woman who took up her father’s trade as an electrician and is doing very nicely with it for about ten years now. The bit about up ladders and crawling through ceiling tiles applies there as well, and being short/having small hands could help with tricky spaces.
@Montfort, with apologies for continuing from the last OT:
I am encouraging “excessive skepticism” of journalism, if that is synonymous with my aim of basically pulling down journalism’s pants as not being the sort of serious mediator it claims to be.
I’m not just trying to show weak techniques or conceptual inconsistencies for their own sake–those exist in all kinds of writing, mine included! Rather, I point to those to show that journalism is not a source of truth or facts or an important/reliable record of what’s going on in the world. I want to show that journalism is much more akin to gossip, but it just happens to be wearing a costume of solemnity and/or authority. It’s Eric Cartman dressed as a cop. It’s fraudulent as soon as it is attempted.
Yes, this means I am also giving license to ignore the news that we disagree with. People do that already, and always will. Better to do away with news entirely. But that brings me to the question I’ve been thinking about…and this is a question to everyone reading this (well, a cluster of questions anyway):
A generic way of describing the object-level value delivered by journalism might be something like “stories about (mostly) current events that are important, interesting, or otherwise noteworthy.” Assuming this something actually worth placing value in–a point I’m not entirely convinced of–is there a feasible way to deliver this value to people while doing away with the journalism infrastructure we presently have?
Assume it is possible to not just obliterate it, but to replace the current journalism industry with something else if desired. My proposal is we take all those reporters whose peculiar skill is writing down the words of strangers and instead of having them write news stories that get spiffed up a bit by editors and then handed to the public, they instead hand their stories to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with known biases. The SMEs comment upon the stories, and their commentary is what gets delivered to the public.
Note that the system described above is basically what already exists in the form of blogs and certain websites. The difference being that if someone says “Did you read that in the New York Times?” and you say “No, I read that on [so and so’s] blog,” your source would be considered the more legitimate one, epistemologically. If the other guy says “Oh, [so and so] is a crackpot, I only read [such and such]” and there’s enough other people having that same exchange to garner sufficient interest, then So and Such might debate each other directly. A (civil) debate between two SMEs would be much more productive than the “cold” debate between, say, Fox News and MSNBC or, to the extent it exists, the WaPo and the WSJ.
Who picks the SMEs ?
Even worse, who evaluates their biases?
They can be evaluated by anyone, including other SMEs. The point is that they have no intrinsic reason to hide their biases behind an affect the way journalism does.
The same system that “picks” popular radio talk show hosts and high-profile bloggers. Better yet, the system that picks widely cited authors.
Currently, this system appears to be picking the loudest people with the most extreme views; my understanding is that you want the opposite.
No, while I think loud/extreme views are generally obnoxious I don’t think they’re a big problem that needs to be gotten rid of. What I dislike–what I see as really insidious and dangerous–is the affect of impartiality and informedness that is journalism’s defining feature.
That’s what happens when you eject the “moderates” from the coalition.
@Well…:
OK, but why ? Why is this affect so bad ? If the answer is, “because it misleads the public”, then your solution is no better, and might, in fact, be worse. Currently, at least some journalists report some version of reality some of the time; under your system, there’d be nothing but conspiracy theories and ancient aliens all over the place. Your solution could work in a system where you were the SME Tczar and everyone had to have your approval before they could publish anything, but, in a free marketplace of attention, nothing but clickbait could survive.
I’m not really clear on why my system would lead to conspiracy theories and ancient aliens, unless that was the natural way the secondary writers interpreted the SMEs, and the SMEs never said anything about it.
The affect doesn’t just mislead, it creates a kind of almost religious suspension of disbelief that encrusts itself into the surrounding culture and is quite resistant to removal, resulting instead in competing quasi-religious-barnacles of affect.
I think your core assumption about SMEs is wrong. In real life, there’s no magic flag that marks a person as an SME. Instead, people decide whom to trust on their own; and their natural inclination is to trust the loudest, most outrageous voices, and label those people as SMEs.
@Bugmaster:
That’s probably true. However, it could still be possible to do some systemic vetting. For instance, make it a professional standard that reporters only deliver their writing to people with X years of experience in a profession relevant to the piece they’ve written, enforceable by whatever the same system is that currently buttresses “standards of journalism”.
@Well…:
If you could “make something a professional standard” just by willing it to be so, you wouldn’t have any of these problems to begin with.
Since there’s no News Czar (at least, not in our country — there’s one in places like Russia and China), there’s no way to make something a professional standard by fiat. Instead, such standards arise organically, based on market demands and popular opinion. Today, the organic standards are such that the loudest and most outrageous voices garner the most respect.
I think journalism isn’t powerful because it’s correct, but because it’s accessible. I worry designating analysis to subject matter experts would result in boring media and people would just defer to the most interesting articles and/or more secondary sources. Sort of like how a (boring) scientific article becomes a (slightly less boring) press release which finally becomes a (interesting albeit wrong) news piece. So long as the facts are boring and inaccessible this process will exist.
Perhaps subject matter experts should have a rigid, uneditable segment attached to each article? This could be done along with the results of an industry standard test for biases. Hopefully, this means the public still accessible content but reporters know they will be called out if they stray too far from the facts.
Can you expand on that? I’m not sure I understand.
Sure. There’s a reason that the general public tend to follow the likes of CNN over academic articles: CNN is more interesting, relevant and accessible. If you were to replace the journalists at CNN with subject matter experts then I imagine the quality of the content would dramatically go up, but it’s entertainment and accessibility would go down. This gap would likely be filled by bloggers/commenters/buzzfeed producing secondary content from the subject matter experts that’s interesting and accessible but less factual. The general public would flock to these and we would be back at square one.
I don’t think problems with journalism exist because of it’s architecture, but because of what people want and business incentives to create a particular type of content.
Political opinions aside, an exception that springs to mind is John Oliver. His crew seems to handle technical content with decent accuracy and with decent entertainment value.
I disagree we’d be back to square one. The secondary content you refer to would not have the affect of impartiality that is journalism’s sole defining feature.
I don’t watch John Oliver, but I can think of a few bloggers/writers who, like what you say Oliver does, handle complex subjects in a way that is both accurate and accessible. So, it can be done. (The major difference being that the bloggers/writers I’m thinking of are or were professionals in the fields they now blog or write about, whereas John Oliver is, as far as I know, just a comedian.)
If you and I can’t agree that news organizations are more reliable than common gossip, I’m not sure we’re close enough to productively debate this. To me, this sounds like “But the earth is noticeably non-spherical, so all these sphere-earth textbooks should go in the same trash as the flat-earth ones.”
The authority news organizations have is partially seized by business cleverness and bare assertion and posturing, but it is also partially granted by the audience because they managed to be a little bit less full of lies and blatant deception than, say, the currently trending tweets, The National Enquirer, or what everyone at the bar says about [insert foreign country]. And, besides, I think the “authority” and tradition of the press does some good in itself, partially for coordinating news-reading (people like to read the same news as others) and news-investigation (people don’t like talking to every press outlet under the sun) activities, and partly for motivating its participants to aspire to something more than a party newsletter.
When you say that journalism is inherently fraudulent, you seem to imply one can’t produce an accurate record of events. And if that’s true, what’s your proposed replacement doing? And why is it you don’t think current news organizations are doing that?
—
On the other hand, I may be misinterpreting you. If I try to read you as much closer to my position (but, perhaps much farther from your intended meaning), I get something like “Some blogs are more reliable than the NYT, and I wish other people agreed.” I can agree with this statement (maybe not on which particular blogs). But they way to achieve this isn’t to pretend that seeing a fact printed in the NYT is basically no evidence about its truth.
Not to put words on Well…’s keyboard but I wonder if the disagreement here is less about the value of news organizations than the value of gossip. Depending on your life experience you might wind up with very different ideas about how reliable gossip is.
E.G. back in the day I was friends with some 9/11 truthers, and reading the newspapers innoculated me against that meme. But nowadays I get very high-quality gossip; if I only listened to my friends I wouldn’t know about the war in Yemen and I would think that Trump is an avowed White Nationalist, but aside from that my views wouldn’t be too inaccurate/incomplete.
Fair enough. I’d characterize that as something closer to my alternate reading. But I wonder how much information your friends get from news organizations.
FWIW, I don’t read the news and I usually score in the top 10% of people on the occasions when I’ve taken those “How well do you know what’s going on in the world?” quizzes. (Caveat: the last one I took was well over a year ago.)
My proposed replacement is also producing an inaccurate record of events, but it isn’t hiding that fact behind an affectation. Instead, it–or rather “they”, in the form of the SMEs–are nakedly arguing, based on their professional experience, in favor of the accuracy of some record or another.
Right now journalism is judged to be better if it pulls off a better performance of impartiality. It’s like judging scientific theories based on which ones are more popular among the “Science Fuck Yeah” crowd.
It’s more like, the output of reporters should be treated as an industrial good or raw material, still needing refinement by people who actually know what they are talking about and who care about their reputations among others who know what they are talking about, before it passes to the end consumer.
Hm, okay, I’m re-evaluating how I’m interpreting your posts.
Note, though, that performing impartiality requires, to some limited extent, actual impartiality. It’s part of the process that keeps news media less partial. Nor is it the only quality journalism is judged on.
I admit that valuing the appearance of imparitiality doesn’t get us to the limits of humanly-possible impartiality, and at times even works against actual impartiality (e.g. giving time to discredited accounts or arguments to appear fair), but it’s worth something.
There may also be an element of aesthetic preference – I prefer subtle ways of influencing my opinion over “HIGH-TAX HARRY STRIKES AGAIN.”
I can understand the feeling, especially on more obscure topics. But it sounds like this has a lot more to do with journalists not knowing enough about the subjects they cover than manipulative language.
And awareness of this issue would be better served by publishing blog posts, letters to the editor, etc. of experts in the relevant field complaining about how the journalists totally mis-characterized the politics of Yemen, or somehow concluded the opposite of what the latest diet study really means (and were far too confident), or reported the maximum sentence for pending charges as if there were a real chance the defendant would get that instead of something in the sentencing-guideline-recommended range.
[Aside, I recently read an article where they did the “maximum sentence” thing but admitted the actual sentence is usually lower. Slight progress!]
I disagree. It’s like that famous quip (possibly not real but that doesn’t matter) where Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were in a scene together (in Marathon Man, I think?). Hoffman showed up to set looking a mess. To paraphrase, Olivier said “My dear chap, why do you look so wretched?” Hoffman, the method actor, says “Well, my character was up all night being chased around the streets, so I stayed up all night running around in the streets too. How else would I look convincing?” Olivier: “Acting, my boy!”
A pro can learn how to mimic something perfectly without really being that thing. He breaks it down into little pieces and learns each one. It just becomes a language he can turn on and off.
(Note: this is very effective when you’re mimicking something established, like a villain archetype or the writing of a disinterested scholar who knows exactly what happened. Method acting has its place, e.g. for unique individual characters.)
I don’t know, perhaps journalists are briefly introduced to empathy and rationalism techniques in J-school, but the real bread and butter of their craft is learning how to come off as impartial to the point of sounding bored. The typical SSC commenter is more impartial on any given issue than the typical journalist, and not by just a little.
I’m saying that the subtle ways of influencing your opinion, the ways you prefer, are much more dangerous if the content of that way is non-subtle just beneath the surface. You will be disarmed by the delivery and swallow the message. (And even if you personally won’t, keep in mind the typical news consumer with his 100 IQ and 3rd-grade reading level.)
The problem is, this perpetuates the absurd idea that we should expect journalists to be able to accurately characterize the politics of Yemen. We should not. Journalism is not some kind of scholarly discipline, nor could we ever make it one.
Extremely slight. The order in which information is given is super important. For 95% of readers, leaving out a fact until the 2nd half of a news story is practically the same as not including it. Journalists know this and take advantage of it, rather than try to mitigate it with other techniques (since it’s impossible to convey all the facts of a story at once anyway). That should tell you something.
Your analogy doesn’t prove what you want it to. Regardless of whether he’s acting or not, the actor cannot appear dapper and energetic in the scene. Regardless of whether the reporter is truly impartial, he cannot do the “HIGH-TAX HARRY.” In mimicking impartiality, the better the detection capability, the more the reporter must write as if he were impartial. (That’s why I said “to some limited extent,” the audience can detect some bias but not all).
What the reporter feels in his heart of hearts is only relevant to the extent it appears in his article (and the selection of what stories get articles, etc.).
Are they? Surely those who engage in overt manipulation are likely to manipulate covertly as well. Perhaps by catching the “HIGH-TAX HARRY” you are lulled into a false sense of security, not realizing you have, e.g., read critical information as the second of two sentences!
I find it hard to believe you’re trying to optimize news for the 3rd-grade reading level reader when you propose having SMEs have final say over how difficult technical topics are covered. This is one reason why reporters are more successful in the news market than SMEs: SMEs have spent years learning the material, and so are more informed and accurate; journalists have spent years learning how to write so the average reader will be willing and able to read their article.
But, on the main issue here, see my arguments above – I think they hold for all levels of reading ability.
But if people already believe journalists can and do accurately characterize difficult topics, then criticizing them about non-neutral writing style doesn’t make your case at all. It would seem the useful remedy would be to argue against them being able to cover arcane topics even in theory, or show examples of how they’re unable, or both. Subtle bias in writing has nothing to do with whether they can learn and communicate how the Krebs cycle works.
This is like, in 1930, refusing to criticize soviet economic policy on the grounds that it legitimizes the impression they’re qualified to make policy. It’s too late, they’re already doing it and people are listening to them!
Not even relevant to this example, as both of these facts were in the same half of the article, right next to each other. And since you know neither the order they were written, nor the events they described, nor the other contents of the article (nor, therefore, which order would be more appropriate), mostly what it tells me is that you like observing that choices in writing create meaning. But I knew you liked observing that already.
Edit: quoted myself more accurately
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here. Are you saying that in order to successfully imitate impartiality the reporter must have an understanding of what the impartial view would be? I’m saying that this is not necessary since impartiality in journalism is conveyed almost entirely by tone and language.
But I am criticizing them about their neutral writing style, not their non-neutral one!
My “2nd half of the article” statement wasn’t intended to be about the specific article you referred to, just a statement about articles in general based on the point you raised.
I don’t know what you mean by “the impartial view” – it certainly doesn’t require or grant supernatural access to truth or anything.
But granting sufficient ability on the audience’s part to detect bias, it does require the reporter to write as though he or she believed something supported by the facts reported, and not give undue weight to one or the other. To a lesser extent, the reporter must also not totally ignore or mischaracterize facts his audience would be likely to receive from another source (e.g. a rival organization).
If we suppose the medium in question is text, what are we talking about besides tone and language? Are you contending people can’t detect bias in reasoning or story selection?
Sorry, poorly phrased. I suppose that should be “non-neutral word choice and article structure.” That’s the criticism you offer in the analysis of the picture and other identified media tricks, for instance. I tend to match complaints about non-neutral writing content and structure to an implied demand the content become more impartial (that’s just what I usually hear), but that’s a mistake here, as we’ve established you see the distance between the assumed tone of impartiality and the less-than-impartial writing choices and desire the tone match the choices instead of the other way around.
But criticizing their neutral tone also has nothing to do with their ability to handle and absorb complex information and communicate it to laypeople with minimal distortion. Whether they cover a story with faux-disinterestedness or the breathless enthusiasm of a twelve year old may determine how much you want to read the article, but I don’t see a line of reasoning connecting this tone to whether the news industry is structurally capable of covering complex and specialized topics.
If suddenly tomorrow all reporters wrote their articles about a new kind of surgical glue in a tone you preferred, I think you would still say their content was more like unrefined material that required help from a biologist/surgeon/chemical engineer, right?
I don’t want to beleaguer this to a third Open Thread, so I’ll try and make some concluding statements. (You’re welcome to make your own of course.)
This is the first serious discussion I’ve had with anyone else about my ideas on journalism. As expected, some of my points might have to be walked back a bit and will require further thought. But I also feel like I’ve successfully conveyed some of my core ideas on journalism, and I at least didn’t hear you respond “That’s totally nuts.” So, it’s been validating over all.
As you’ve correctly hinted, our discussion can be distilled down to two main complains I have about journalism:
1. Journalism puts on an affect of disinterestedness and authority, even though journalism is full of bias and has no authority. I argue that it’s the strength of the affect, not the strength of the content, on which people judge journalism’s quality. Further, I argue that without this affect, journalism would be unrecognizable as such.
2. Journalists themselves seem mostly quite ignorant about the topics they cover. (This criticism isn’t relevant to all journalism, but does come into play rather consistently in news that we might tend to consider very important.) It is a serious problem when this ignorance is combined with the affect of impartiality and authority mentioned above, because a lot of people are taken in by it.
It might be true that no other system but the journalism we’ve got is more feasible for “handling and absorbing complex information and communicating it to laypeople with minimal distortion”. That’s what my question to everyone at the top of this comment thread was getting at. (I proposed a novel system, but it’s far from perfect and hasn’t been produced by natural circumstances so far anyway, which is at least a small point against it.)
In that light, I’m not even sure I’d say that I wish the tone of journalism was changed to match its choices. Instead I think I’d rather see the public—or at least the educated, capable-of-critical-reading public, which includes just about all SSC readers—catch on to journalism, the same way they’ve caught on to emails from Nigerian princes.
@Well…: have you read Neil Postman’s How to Watch TV News? Or any of his other books (I only read the one)?
It is also almost what already exists in the form of the New York Times! If you read an article about the latest obesity research, the journalist will list the SMEs that they consulted. The only thing missing is that you don’t get to see the actual email that the SME sent to the journalist, just a summary that the journalist wrote.
That means getting to your preferred system would actually be pretty easy: we just need it to be a norm that NYTimes.com hosts the correspondence that went into an article (at least when they can get the SME’s permission), preferably linked to the quotes. Now that I write this out, I’m a little surprised that the system doesn’t already exist.
Anyway, here is substitute that could be done without assuming any cooperation from the NYtimes:
1) Create a website where people who are quoted in NYT, WSJ, Al Jazeera or whatever can submit their correspondence if they want to. (Some scientists use their blogs to do exactly this, so I think a lot would go for it).
2) Create a browser extension that searches in the text of an article for names of people who have submitted correspondence to the website, and when the user mouses over that person’s name in the article, makes a little clickable linky thing to the full correspondence.
I know! I had that in mind when I designed it.
I like your idea. The main thing that’s missing is that right now, journalism derives prestige from its affect of Impartial Mediator With Godly Insight. It will continue to perform this affectation because that’s the only thing it has going for it.
Suppose you are a medical student considering what type of doctor to become. You are not particularly concerned with pay or working conditions, but you do have some criteria: you want to work with truly ill patients, and you want to give them fully effective treatment with high probability. What sort of medicine should you practice?
Oncology?
Is the success rate high enough? Also, how many cancer patients end up with cancer as a long-term managed condition?
I think it’s a pretty good answer. I think with the increase in treatment efficacy over the last decade or so you can absolutely put it in that category. The answer to how many cancer patients end up with that as a long-term managed condition is now ‘lots’.
If you extend the answer to ‘want to make a massive difference in people’s lives’ the paediatric oncology is probably even better. In that the treatments for the most common cancers are really effective now, and you’re making a massive impact in terms of QALYs. Of course, Paeds oncology comes with the downside that when it doesn’t work it is *really* bad.
Ophthalmology would be my tentative answer. Assuming you count blindness as being ‘truly ill’. Work with rural/low SES/3rd world populations and that’s probably the best bang for buck you can get ala Fred Hollows.
IANAD, I just felt oncology was a “go big or go home” answer. You sign up to fight the emperor of maladies.
I think where and how you practice, and so your patient pool, is going to be as or more important than what you practice.
But going along with the question: how about pediatric transplant hepatology? The fully effective part isn’t quite there. Even the successful transplants aren’t exactly as well off as if they never had any problem to begin with, but when it goes well the quality of life and life expectancy are quite high and the probabilities these days are also pretty high. And they are certainly truly ill when they get to the transplant surgeon.
I’m not a doctor myself, but… Trauma surgery/ER doc? It’s hard to get more “truly ill” than someone who’s been hit by a bus or shot in the chest. AFAIK, modern medicine is really good at fixing physical trauma, so there’s a high probability that you’ll successfully save someone’s life.
Don’t ER docs also spend a lot of time explaining to patients that they don’t need antibiotics for the flu and trying not to laugh when patients say they “fell” onto things ass first?
A thing stuck in someone’s ass is still definitely a problem, and you have a very high probability of restoring them to full health by removing the thing. You didn’t say it had to be dignified. 😛
Doing a little bit more reading, orthopedics might be a better choice if you want to fix obvious physical trauma but don’t want to deal with weirdos in the ER.
If you substitute “need medical attention badly” for “truly ill”, any of the trauma-focused specialties.
A step down–obstetrics-childbirth is generally safe, but it’s very worthwhile to have competent medical care.
Re-reading some poetry posted on my defunct blog, so here’s a poem from the Irish poet Michael Hartnett (1941-1999):
Death of an Irishwoman
Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.
Ah well, if I gave you one, I have to give you another; Part One of his long poem “A Farewell to English”, written in 1975 when he gave up writing in English for writing in Irish (later, in 1985, he went back to English):
FROM A FAREWELL TO ENGLISH
for Brendan Kennelly
1
Her eyes were coins of porter and her West
Limerick voice talked velvet in the house:
her hair was black as the glossy fireplace
wearing with grace her Sunday-night-dance best.
She cut the froth from glasses with knife
and hammered golden whiskies on the bar
and her mountainy body tripped the gentle
mechanism of verse: the minute interlock
of word and word began, the rhythm formed.
I sunk my hands into tradition
sifting the centuries for words. This quiet
excitement was not new: emotion challenged me
to make it sayable. This cliché came
at first, like matchsticks snapping from the world
of work: mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin:
they came like grey slabs of slate breaking from
an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,
álainn, caoin, slowly vaulting down the dark
unused escarpments, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,
álainn, caoin, crashing on the cogs, splinters
like axeheads damaging the wheels, clogging
the intricate machine, mánla, séimh,
dubhfholtach, álainn, caoin. Then Pegasus
pulled up, the girth broke and I was flung back
on the gravel of Anglo-Saxon.
What was I doing with these foreign words?
I, the polisher of the complex clause,
wizard of grasses and warlock of birds,
midnight-oiled in the metric laws?
Editor’s Note: dubhfholtach = blacklocked álainn = beautiful mánla, séimh, caoin = words whose meaning approximates to the English adjectives graceful, gentle
Those were beautiful, the Hartnett poem in particular reminds me of my grandma. Thanks.
You’re welcome, sometimes we have to be a little irrational, and so to the poets! 🙂
An exchange I just had on Facebook (where someone told me that the past has no value in predicting the future) reinforced how much I love this garden Scott has built for us. Thanks everyone!
Please tell me you answered “Well, it never did before, but who knows if it does now?”
Smirktastic.
Not sure if this has been discussed previously here, but relevant to cost disease.
The saga of a staircase in a Toronto park.
TLDR version: Stairs were needed in a park to prevent people from falling while trying to cross a steep and slippery ledge. The city estimated the cost of the stairs to run from $60-100k and would take a year to build. A local handyman instead showed up, bought some lumber, hired a homeless guy to help him, and built functional stairs for about $500. The city tore them down, because they weren’t up to code (of course). But because of the negative PR backlash surrounding this whole thing, very quickly built new ones, and bragged that they “only” cost 10k, but apparently this figure does not include any of the labor and may actually be much higher.
It was mentioned in passing. Reactions were mixed.
ETA: The information about what it eventually cost the city might be new, though.
> It was mentioned in passing
There was a LOT of discussion on the subreddit, in multiple waves. It included someone’s analysis of the image and its code violations, some of which were dangerous.
Oh I have no doubt that a handmade staircase by a random dude and a bum is “dangerous” compared to a professionally constructed staircase.
The relevant questions would be:
1. Is the hand-made staircase more dangerous than people trying to manually go down the ledge without stairs?
2. Are the safety gains from the professionally constructed staircase worth the cost (20x more expensive, at minimum)?
It turns out damage to humans is very expensive to repair.
But that actually makes me wonder–if we had a functional and cheap medical system, would that flowthrough to fix cost disease in lots of other places? Businesses need insurance because what if someone slips and breaks their hip and sues you for a million dollars, but if the cost of fixing a broken hip is 10k instead, then presumably the insurance becomes cheaper.
And?
It’s still a relevant question.
Are the government stairs 20x safer than the wooden stairs or aren’t they?
@Matt M:
Do you understand what the cost of 1 ACL repair or hip replacement is? 10K is small potatoes compared to actual damages over the course of the life of the staircase, let alone liability for the event where something really bad happens.
The safety gains/cost ratio is unimportant, from a legal perspective. If you make improvements over nature, the building code is a minimum standard. You cannot go, “Well, I can spend 1/2 of what is required for 2/3 the safety.” You spend 100% of what it takes to meet the required standards or you spend 0%.
Further, for most of what was wrong with those stairs, this makes sense, because safety is basically stepwise. For example, (I’m using the US codes here, because that’s what I know, but I imagine Toronto’s is going to be broadly similar) you’re required to design a handrail to withstand 50 pounds per linear foot downward, and a concentrated load of 200 pounds acting in any direction (independently, not at the same time). Just looking at the pictures, I doubt the shoddy stairs will meet that 200 lb requirement. Which is there in the event that somebody trips and tries to catch themselves which is what any reasonable person would expect a handrail to be there for. Except here, it breaks and the person falls. So they didn’t get 50% of the protection, they got no protection.
Generalizing, I can save a lot of money with a shitty seismic design, and me, the contractor, and the original owner can make a safe bet that we’ll all be retired or dead before it matters. Similarly, the amount of material required to support a floor is going to be directly proportional to the floor load (to a first approximation). So I can make your house cheaper by only designing it to 20 pounds per square foot, rather than the 40 pounds per square foot required by ASCE 7 (usually the source for required loads in a building code). However, it’s going to start getting really dicey when your kid holds a big house party–and this might come as a big surprise to your idiot teenager that your particular floor won’t hold up all the people he invited from the last house party in his friend’s similarly-sized house last month. So what parts of the code gets this “scalability”? No exit signs and shitty exit design can save a lot of money in construction and last for a while, as in the Ghost Ship.
One thing I didn’t realize from the last posing was that the $65,000 figure was apparently the equivalent of a Class 5 estimate used by the US government, which makes the frothing about how they were spending all this money eye-rolling. This was apparently the first cut, done by reference to previous project, which is an eminently reasonable way to do a quick estimate without any sort of design in hand. It’s stupid to start a project without figuring out if it’s going to be a $1000, $10,000, or $100,000 project, and that’s what that kind of estimate is for.
@CatCube:
Bravo. Heh.
Fun aside, I think your comment perfectly illustrates the nature of “cost disease”. How much should we care about people tripping, falling, and possibly breaking their legs or dying ? In the past, the answer might have been, “not too much”. Today, we have made the choice to try and prevent as many of such events as reasonably practical. We place a higher value on human lives, so our stairs cost a lot more. This isn’t an arbitrary increase in price due to some unfortunate and mysterious circumstances; it’s a very real tradeoff that our society has chosen to make. We demand more, and thus we have to pay more.
Well that’s just like, your opinion man.
But no, in all seriousness, government building codes are not some immutable fact of the universe. Someone somewhere arbitrarily decided that was the right mix of safety and cost. Maybe they’re really smart people and maybe their judgment is pretty good. Maybe cheaply built stairs ARE, in fact, less safe than no stairs at all.
You could probably convince me that’s the case. But you can’t convince me that such a question isn’t even worth asking. The lack of stairs was hurting people. So the guy built some stairs. Maybe they’re worse than nothing and maybe they aren’t, but pointing out that they don’t meet proper building codes it not, in and of itself, a sufficient answer to that question – particularly since the building code does not take into account the harm done for “having no stairs at all.” I would also assume the building codes don’t take into account the opportunity cost of government funds.
Like, you could go effective altruist here and ask the following question. Let’s say that the $500 stairs are, in fact, 100x less safe than the $10k steps. Of course, you could buy the $500 steps and spend the remaining $9500 on malaria nets, as an extreme example. (granted, this sort of thing is very unlikely in the case of the city government of Toronto, but you get my point)
@Matt M
I’m well aware of the fact that building codes are not on tablets brought down from Mount Zion. One of our senior engineers that has done work on code development is fond of saying: “Don’t ever forget that building codes are written by the kind of people who volunteer to write building codes.”
As far as somebody being hurt there without the steps, I don’t have any particular problem with saying to somebody who fell and broke their wrist on that embankment: “Yeah, that’s super sad. But if you and your clumsy-feet can’t operate a hillside, maybe you shouldn’t fucking walk on one.” I’m a lot less sanguine with saying, “Well, you kind of have to stop and think when encountering every staircase to ensure that you can, you know, step on all parts of the steps without it overturning, and make sure to look closely at the handrail. If the handrail is sketchy, be super careful not to trip so you don’t break through while trying to arrest your fall and go over the side.” The stairs were constructed by somebody with intent, and if they’re dangerous, somebody should be held liable. The built environment shouldn’t require special knowledge to operate stairs.
I don’t exactly like the fact that this does result in the faintly ridiculous scenario where if you have a dangerous area formed naturally you’re in the clear, but as soon as you try to improve it you’re legally liable if you don’t go all the way. But like I said, you shouldn’t need special knowledge to use a walking path, and this gets hard to figure out if you’re not working to some minimum standard. If a 250-lb person steps on and breaks the stairs, do you get to go “Yeah, we only designed it for a 240-lb person, sorry about that. However, we only felt that 240 lbs was necessary. No, I don’t know how you are supposed to know that.”
Finally, the building codes are part of laws passed by a jurisdiction. I understand not agreeing with the laws. I actually happen to think, personally, that the Americans with Disabilities Act costs way too much money in increased building costs to be worth it. But do you know what? Congress passed it. Making minimum requirements is totally a thing they can do. Therefore, I have to make sure that buildings I work on meet the requirements of ICC A117.1 and the US Access Board, regardless of how I personally feel.
Finally, looping back to the stairs at issue: this was a public work. If there’s just one organization that should be required to comply with the law, the government is it. I’m literally a government employee, and the thought of allowing us to just go, “Nah. I think this is too expensive, so I’m just going to blow off the requirements the politicians imposed on us,” scares the shit out of me.
Everything I see wrong with those steps violates code issues that I think have a good reason for being there. This list is not exhaustive, but: they aren’t founded below frost depth, the handrail is insufficient for loads likely to be imposed upon it, there is an open side where somebody can fall off, the stringers are in the middle for reasons known only to the builder and God, drainage is insufficient and likely to result in rotting in short order, and I question whether the whole assemblage is globally stable (related to the stringers in the middle thing). What requirements do you think should have been relaxed? Just crossing your arms and huffing about how you feel like it should be cheaper doesn’t help.
Also, keep in mind that I don’t think the $65,000 was any sort of detailed estimate. If I’m reading the situation right, that number came from a quick check where somebody asked about what it would cost to put stairs here, and their cost guys really quickly looked up some past projects that they thought were similar in scope and those were in the $65,000-$100,000 range. Nailing it down further than that can cost hundreds or thousands by itself, and those numbers were used to figure out if it was worth pursuing further.
1. Is the hand-made staircase more dangerous than people trying to manually go down the ledge without stairs?
Yes. Without a staircase in place, people might consider “Oh, that’s too steep/slippery for me to attempt, I’ll find another way around”. With a staircase, they’re more inclined to go “Okay great!” and then when they fall, trip or the shoddy staircase collapses under them, they’re likely to get hurt (how badly hurt depends, but you can do yourself quite a bad injury falling on stairs).
Here’s an Irish case where an award for damages was later overturned, but the principle under which the case was brought was this (and I wonder if Canadian law has something similar):
You see the point? If the hill or slope is left in its natural state, there is no liability. If the council or any doofus puts up a stairs, then a duty of care is established.
Matt M, go right ahead and build your $500 stairs. Then the first person who gets a splinter in their hand and falls down them will lay a claim against your insurance (you do have liability insurance, don’t you?) and if that fails, drag you into court.
And how can you-a-homeowner be held negligent for a fall down stairs? Why, if:
Certainly sounds like “poorly designed handrails, shallow steps and wrong height risers” are things that come under “not up to building code”. Go right ahead and argue in court that building codes are nothing special, I bet the judge and jury will agree with you on that one.
This helpful site tells the injured person what kind of money to hold out for. Given how expensive American medical bills are, I sure hope you have a generous insurance policy in place to cover all eventualities!
Maybe it’s not a particularly great thing to maximize society around “avoiding liability.”
You want Atlas Shrugged? Because this is how you get Atlas Shrugged!
You can prevent that by building a fence instead of stairs.
You want Atlas Shrugged? Because this is how you get Atlas Shrugged!
John Galt would have burned the maker of that shoddy staircase on a bonfire of the chopped-down stairs. Even though Rand’s characters are massive pains in the neck, they at least insist on competence when you’re defying authority to do your own thing. None of them would be happy with something thrown together with no idea of what you’re doing and that is liable to fall asunder the moment anyone uses it.
This is in the same category of seat belt laws that increase traffic fatalities (not sure if they actually do, but there’s some similar statistic). Basically, people aren’t great at correctly valuing the precise increase in safety and may over compensate with the amount of risk they are willing to take–especially when they have been trained by building codes to expect a certain level of safety from construction projects in public places.
I’m an avid watcher of, but nonparticipant in, darknet drama.
After this month’s takedowns of some of the biggest drug markets on the darknet, the trade is said to moving to OpenBazaar, a darling of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
It advertizes itself as a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer, completely unregulated market platform. It’s bitcoin operated with Tor support coming soon. No middlemen means no one is in control, and no one can stop you selling what you want to sell.
What would the implications be of an illicit online marketplace that the authorities simply cannot close down?
What would the implications be of an illicit online marketplace that the authorities simply cannot close down?
Caveat emptor in twelve foot high flashing neon letters, for one. If no-one is in charge, there is nothing to prevent some guy conning you out of your socks and you have no recourse at all. You sent me the money and I sent you ten grams of talcum powder six months later – so what are you going to do about it?
Granted, this is a risk even with the legit side, but that would be even riskier than walking down the street, being accosted by some guy in an alley going “psst, hey, wanna buy a genuine Patek Philippe? knock-down price!”, shoving the contents of your wallet into his hands and then getting mugged and having your identity stolen and your bank account emptied after the transaction into the bargain.
If you’re the kind of person who is well in with a gang of leg-breakers and know how and where to send someone round to remonstrate with a vendor who has not held up their end of the bargain, I imagine you’ll do okay. John Q. Average? Not so much, even the cool Jon Q. who thinks he knows the ins and outs of this because he’s not one of the ‘normies’ and he’s too smart to fool.
> You sent me the money and I sent you ten grams of talcum powder six months later – so what are you going to do about it?
Reputation? Third party reviews? The base rate for being ripped off without remuneration will be higher but most people I know who buy drugs in this way just deal with the low chance of being ripped off by bumping up their expected cost, in time/money.
I’d imagine the real danger is getting a substance that’s _dangerous_, not ineffective. Then suddenly the variability begins to matter.
Existing black economies (more than markets exist) tend to have eBay/Amazon-style reputation tracking, simply because it boost volume and profit for the implementors. No need to break legs.
Authorities switch to targeting the meatspace transactions. They may not be able to directly trace a posting on the market to the seller, but no amount of electronic obfuscation will stop them from going to the post office and saying “Who’s the guy who mailed this package full of drugs?” They might seek additional legal tools to make this easier, such as laws that make it easier to search the mail for drugs. Or tighter laws on bitcoin exchanges, so that it’s hard to convert your ill-gotten coins into real money without revealing to the feds how you got it.
Also, even if an online marketplace is 100% anonymous if used properly, I wouldn’t bet on people using it properly. For every criminal mastermind who makes a clean buy, there’s 100 people who go to /r/darknetmarkets and say “I bought some LSD and got ripped off, can someone help me get a refund?”
(Bitcoin can be a double-edged sword in this regard, as it’s pseudonymous, but the transactions are a matter of public record. So if you don’t use tumblers or multiple wallets, the authorities only have to identify a single wallet to know everything about your purchase history.)
Random thing that’s annoying me this week:
The increasing prevalence of Facebook advertisements that start with “TURN THE VOLUME ON” in huge letters, knowing that everyone has videos muted by default because you don’t want to be blasted with noise when you’re looking over your feed.
It just strikes me as exceedingly arrogant. The implied message is something like, “Sure, all those other ads are mindless nonsense that just annoy you, but our video is super important and you need to actually hear it!” Becomes an increasingly ridiculous proposition when 80% of the videos on your feed start saying it too…
Aaaand…. it’s ineffective.
Huh. Personally, Facebook ads are VERY effective on me. They’re basically the only kinds of ads that are. Their targeting algorithms seem quite good in that it’s pretty common for me to see ads for things that I find interesting, but never knew about or would have thought to seek out on my own. I click on FB ads fairly often (and have even ended up buying the thing a couple times) whereas I never click on banner ads on webpages.
That said, it only works on me for small companies I didn’t know about. I’d never click on an FB ad for Pepsi. I already know what Pepsi’s deal is.
things that I find interesting, but never knew about or would have thought to seek out on my own
It’s likely these things were not in the P&C range of products. Special interest and/or not knowing about … disposable diapers? 🙂
Could also be that FB ads don’t work much for products that are so interchangeable that buyers just look at price and/or easiest buying.
The only ad I can think of, say in the past year, that directly inspired me to buy something I wasn’t otherwise going to buy was the mealsquare ad here. I bought a sampler and almost certainly wouldn’t have otherwise.
Beyond that retargeted ads probably pushed me to buy one or two things that I had considered buying on my own, went to check out, but was on the fence about.
SEO clearly works on me. If I google some product and amazon is the first site to come up I’m very likely to buy it there instead of checking to see how much it is at walmart or target or newegg. At least unless it is very expensive.
I don’t know how effective pure impression ads are on me. Like you I already know what Pepsi’s deal is, but do those ads make it more likely I’ll reach for a Pepsi instead of Coke (actually I drink neither, but you get the idea) — I just don’t know either way.
The funniest thing was when I started reading all the silicon valley hitpieces regarding the juicero (most of which I was directed to from here), FB became utterly convinced I was interested in purchasing a juicero, and bombarded me with ads for it for weeks!
It’s like, no, come on guys, you need a way to distinguish genuine product interest from desire to laugh at a viral story!
Sentiment analysis based on text is hard. Sentiment analysis based on signals like “what am I searching for, reading, and clicking” is probably LOTS harder.
Juicero could have, and probably should have, suspended their retargeting campaign for the length of the elevated traffic due to negative media attention.
I bet ad efficiency went way down during that period.
Brad is correct, but having worked as a digital marketer myself- they even *more* should have had scripts that auto-dialed-down their retargeting/display bids as the conversion rate on them dropped to zero. Merely adequate scripts would have caught this within a few days.
Perhaps the articles actually worked as positive publicity and the conversion rate didn’t drop?
This kind of nonsense is why people resort to ad-blockers, and then sites have hand-wringing messages about “oh we see you have an ad-blocker turned on, turn it off or we can’t show you this wonderful story and we’ll all die of starvation in rags because if you don’t watch the ads we make no money at all”.
Well, if you hadn’t been greedy and shoved annoying, intrusive ads on every square centimetre of the screen and made it so that they were in the middle of what I was reading, on top, at the sides, at the bottom, and popping up everywhere, then maybe I and others wouldn’t be forced to ad-blockers. But you got greedy, and now I’m not watching or reading any of your ads. Too bad!
Mmm. If only there were some way to force websites to display an amount of ads that takes up less resources (like RAM and load time) than running an ad-blocker. I’d stop using the ad-blocker in that case, since it would be in my direct interest to do so.
Adblocker Plus has an option to allow non-intrusive ads, and a list of approved such ads. I haven’t really looked into it, but it seems to me it’s a promising way to compromise. After all, if everyone blocks all the ads then companies will presumably stop advertising, but if they simply have to tone their ads down and get rid of certain obnoxious practice, people will see their ads again.
The non-intrusive ad option is the worst of both worlds. I get to run a resource-hog plugin AND see ads? No, thanks.
Sure, it’s terrible if you don’t want to see ads even in principle (or if the approved list still has terrible ads). But if everyone thought this way, companies would have no incentive even to pay for advertising. That doesn’t seem good for the websites. Are you bothered by the ads Scott has on SSC?
Just a general note that if you don’t use the Chinese internet you have no idea of the heights of annoying ads can rise to.
Although it’s true I also haven’t bothered to install a separate Chinese ad blocker on my browser, assuming it exists.
However, as is well known, China is a much more “defect” society with respect to digital stuff and the result is terrible, so maybe allowing non-intrusive ads is a good equilibrium compromise.
I should note that I don’t even believe in intellectual property as a concept so I could come with all kinds of justifications for piracy if I wanted, but I am not opposed to advertisers making money; I just want them to do it without being super annoying, sending me viruses, etc. and ideally without government monopolies.
Similarly, I am not opposed to paying for content; I just don’t want it to be ludicrously expensive and come with a bunch of restrictions on usage (yeah, f- you all tv services and video players with region restrictions).
So I do agree the better strategy is to reward those who attempt to make the experience of paying for content (including paying with your screen space) relatively easy and pleasant and reasonable so they can outcompete those who do not.
@onyomi:
Yes, I completely agree. I’d love to have access to an online service that provided me with the following:
* All the movie/TV/etc. content that I could reasonably want to see,
* Encoded in a variety of formats, at least one of which achieves an excellent mix of size and quality (4K video, 5.1 audio at least)
* Subtitles in English as well as other languages
* A download service that will saturate my bandwidth
* No ads, no spam, no clever tricks designed to prevent me from watching the content
* No restrictions whatsoever on where and when I can watch the content; note that “you must always be online” is a restriction.
I would be willing to pay a decent amount of money for such a service. Not an infinite amount, of course, but more than I pay for Netflix. Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, a paid service like this does not exist. What exists instead is a massive international anti-piracy campaign, which wastes money instead of generating it.
If you don’t like the terms, don’t consume the content!
This strikes me as an insane position to take. You’re essentially demanding the right to unilaterally dictate the terms of exchange with the other party having no say in the matter whatsoever.
It’s like saying “I don’t mind paying $5 for a loaf of bread, but if the store tries to charge $10, I just steal it, because $10 is too much and that annoys me.”
I don’t see it this way because I don’t believe intellectual “property” is the same as property. If I steal your loaf of bread you no longer have it. If I use my ingredients in my kitchen to bake a loaf of bread according to your recipe, then the resulting loaf belongs to me, not you.
Companies telling me I can’t use my internet connection on my computer to download a certain configuration of bits so that I can play them on my headphones are the ones dictating to me what I can and can’t do with my actual property because of their imagined control over a certain configuration of information. I don’t think they have a right to do that anymore than a restaurant can tell me I can’t use my ingredients in my kitchen to cook their recipe.
I am not, however, opposed to anyone trying to monetize creativity, whether it be by directly soliciting donations or subscriptions (the patreon model) selling ads, or whatever. They can create watermarks, encryptions, and other hurdles on their content to make it harder for me to use it without paying, but I don’t believe they have the moral right to tell me how to use my computer and monitor and speakers the way someone who baked a loaf of bread has a right to set terms on whom he sells it to (but doesn’t get to dictate who can use his recipe, though he may try to keep it a secret).
I am proposing that I like a customer-content provider equilibrium of high good will and trust over a more cut-throat, defect equilibrium. The customer can “defect” from the better equilibrium by pirating, removing the watermark, blocking all the ads, etc. etc. but the content provider can also defect by setting unreasonable terms, making super obtrusive ads, etc.
No. My ad-blocker doesn’t even recognize them as ads. So I leave them be.
I *am* a little bit bothered by the google spyware, though. That gets blocked.
onyomi,
While I disagree with the general sense of “No such thing as IP! Impossible for it to be theft!” line of thought, that’s not really what I’m objecting to here.
I object to inconsistency. To the people who say, “Piracy is wrong, hell – even blocking non-intrusive ads is wrong, but blocking intrusive ads (with myself as the sole arbiter of what is and is not intrusive) is perfectly acceptable.” I don’t think that works. If you concede that the content provider has any right to exclude, then those rights must include the right to select not just the existence of advertisements, but the manner of them as well. If you object to the manner, your option is to not consume the content, not to find a technological work-around (i.e., an unlocked fire escape in the movie theater).
I don’t concede the content provider has any right to control how I used my computer, TV, speakers, etc. Your unlocked movie theater is not analogous unless I own the theater.
The content provider has no obligation to make his content available to me for free, like I have no obligation to share my delicious cookie recipe with you if you don’t first pay me. But if you think my price is too high, you do have the right to try to find out my cookie recipe by means other than paying me, and once you do, what you do with your own flour and eggs is your own business.
In the realm of exchanging scarce material goods, you don’t get to take my thing if you think my asking price is unreasonable; in the realm of ideas, you do get to try to figure out my idea by other means if you think the price I’m asking to teach it to you is unreasonable.
But piracy doesn’t involve scarce material goods. So with your explanation it’s still inconsistent to object to piracy and not to disabling intrusive ads.
@Jiro
I don’t object to piracy either, per se.
I object to “defecting” from the content provider-content consumer relationship when the other side is being reasonable.
And yes, I do get to decide what I think is “reasonable,” just as I get to decide what I think are reasonable terms for me to pay someone to impart to me any intangible idea or skill.
If I really enjoy your recipes and want to incentivize you to keep making them and you only charge a relatively modest fee for your recipes and don’t make me sign something in blood saying I’ll never use your cookie recipe to make more than 50 cookies at a time, then I ought to (not saying anything about what should be legal or illegal, just what I think is good) pay you for your recipe and not try to figure out some way to get it for free.
If, on the other hand, you charge an exorbitant fee for access to your recipes and every time I visit your page I get a virus and I have to sign a 10 page contract, etc. etc. then you’ve already defected. Which does not, of course, give me any right to demand you be more reasonable, but does, in my view, mean you are defecting from the better equilibrium, which makes me feel justified in defecting myself, since if I pay you, I reward you for defecting, and if I simply forego consumption of the content, I forego something I’d enjoy in the name of a principle I don’t believe in, namely that the producer of the idea gets to set the terms on which anyone else can use his idea, which amounts to claiming control over how other people use their real bodies and property. The producer gets to decide on what terms he himself will share the idea with you, not on what terms you might otherwise learn it, or how you will use your own property once you do.
In some prisoner’s dilemmas, the ideal might be “never defect because be the change you want to see in the world,” or something, but the change I want to see in the world is not content consumers scrupulously choosing between accepting any terms the provider might set or else not consuming the content; the world I want is one where content consumers and producers both treat each other reasonably and with good will such that the content providers don’t have to choose between going broke or installing a million annoying security features on their content and the content consumers don’t have to choose between paying a ton of money and dealing with a bunch of limitations or else going without the content.
> Well, if you hadn’t been greedy and shoved annoying, intrusive ads on every square centimetre of the screen and made it so that they were in the middle of what I was reading, on top, at the sides, at the bottom, and popping up everywhere, then maybe I and others wouldn’t be forced to ad-blockers. But you got greedy, and now I’m not watching or reading any of your ads. Too bad!
This kind of logic is universal when it comes to ad blockers, I’ve been coming across it for years and years, I’ve argued against it a million times and no one has ever had a rebuttal worth a damn. I have a lot more faith in this forum, so maybe I’ll have better luck.
“I sneak into every movie theater because movie tickets in general are costly”
“Wait but this place is reasonably priced”
“NO screw them every single movie theater is owned by Mr. Movie they are all responsible for each other”
Frankly, this strikes me as just stupid. I almost never come across sites with intrusive advertising, and I probably visit fifty different domains a day (for a variety of reasons, I spend a lot of time on computing devices). Adblock et al make it easy to block some sites and not others, and you only have to block a domain once when they’ve been intrusive to reap the benefits in perpetuity.
I don’t have a serious problem with people who ad block per se, they’re just defectors and defectors are a dime a dozen. But arguments like these have never struck me as anything but:
1) an infantile lashing out at an entire, nebulous group (everyone who publishes content on the internet) based on bad actors within the group
2) a desperate attempt to preserve one’s self image as 100% moral after finding a convenient and common way to get content without compensating the creators. When I was in high school and college I used to pirate media, but I was never enough of a narcissist to axiomatically assume I was a perfect moral being and have to contort the facts to fit my actions with: “Here’s why pirating is ACTUALLY moral”. I just accepted that I wasn’t a perfect person and that this was something I would like to change about myself. The end result was that once the other side of the scale tipped a little and digital content became easily available, I haven’t pirated in years.
(I should note that I know people who have consistent moral explanations for why they think eg pirating is okay. It’s the absence of any attempt at this that I find so off-putting)
It is stupid.
Oh? Care to describe these explanations? Not that I don’t have some of my own, but I’m curious what others have thought of.
> Oh? Care to describe these explanations? Not that I don’t have some of my own, but I’m curious what others have thought of.
They’re usually along the lines of extending “art should be free ” to “information should be free”, with the example of the majority of human history that had functionally weak IP protections. They rely on some pretty fundamentally drastic changes in assumptions about the world, but as you’d imagine, these were pretty smart people who had given it and it’s implications some thought and believed quite strongly in it.
I’m glad you’ve avoided them, but before I adopted an ad-blocker, I didn’t. There was one advice columnist whose site ran so many ads that it repeatedly crashed my browser – and not just mine; there were similar complaints from dozens of other people in the comments section. (To her credit, she apologized and recommended that we run ad-blockers while she tried to fix things with her ad network.)
Plus, Youtube plays thirty-second (or longer) ads at the beginning of a lot of videos. Among other problems, this horrendously breaks up playlists.
I don’t see any moral requirement to compensate creators per se. I’m reading your comment; you’re reading mine; do we need to pay each other for creating this content? No, nor does the third party who reads both of us without commenting himself. Even if I ask you to go to Paypal and send me some money – even if I say I expect it of everyone who reads my comment – that doesn’t change anything.
You only have a moral obligation to pay me if (a) you’ve agreed to that up-front, or (b) the law that sets out the system of copyright says you do. When I buy a book in the bookstore, that falls under (a); when I pirate a movie, that breaks (b); when I block ads on a website, that doesn’t violate either.
What about implicit agreement?
When you go to a restaurant, sit down, and place your order, you may or may not have looked at the menu and read the prices for the product. But even if you didn’t, you receive a bill. You cannot then leave and say “Wait, I never agreed to pay you for this food, I just asked for food and you gave it to me! That’s your problem, not mine!”
I would say sites that use advertising are offering an implicit agreement that the content is made available to you for free, conditionally upon your viewing the advertisements. The case for this becomes even stronger if the site in question offers any sort of subscription or option to pay money to remove ads, or specifically requests that you disable your adblocker.
I would say sites that use advertising are offering an implicit agreement that the content is made available to you for free, conditionally upon your viewing the advertisements.
Is this customary anywhere? Or a law anywhere? If so, I’d expect it to come with the burden of a reasonable quality of service (tracking-free or at least explicitly stated, malware-free as technically possible, for example).
Why not the other way round? “I take notice of your opinion on the condition that you leave me alone with everything else”?
But, as with so many social norms, we need to make sure it is truly implicit to everyone rather than just assuming “Of course everyone must see these implications!” A restaurant lists prices on the menu, and every restaurant does things in roughly the same way (unless they make things even more explicit by asking for payment up front.) If someone’s trying to sell brownies from a table in front of church, that’s different – people might reasonably expect those brownies are free, so he needs to tell them up front that they aren’t rather than just ask for payment afterwards.
I think websites are closer to the second example. If there isn’t indeed a social norm that web pages should be free, at least there’s no norm the other way.
@TheEternallyPerplexed @Evan Þ
Just as a test of how far apart we are in terms of intuition: do you think there’s a implicit agreement to tip somewhere north of 10% when going to a restaurant and receiving at least adequate service?
(If either of you aren’t in / from the US disregard.)
They certainly seem to be trying to establish one. The large unavoidable “PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR ADBLOCKER” screens and the ad-blocker-blockers don’t seem to be getting any less popular.
A site that is deliberately asking you to turn off your adblocker strikes me the same as a guy selling brownies in front of the chuck asking for money. The fact that he doesn’t call the cops on you or chase you down and beat you up if you take some brownies without paying does not mean that you’re morally justified in doing so.
Many sites make it quite clear that they don’t want you to use adblockers. The fact that you can find one that works anyway doesn’t strike me as significantly different than sneaking into the movies. It’s clear that you’re supposed to pay money and buy a ticket, just because you can avoid that process doesn’t mean you are justified to do so.
@Brad, yes, when it’s a sit-down restaurant where they bring the food to your table (i.e. not fast food or fast-casual), unless they say otherwise. I would very much like the convention to change, but that’s the convention.
@Matt M, that’s a good point, but I think a request to turn off ad blocker is more like a tip jar. If they actually take measures to stop you from just clicking through to the page (or whatever), that’s another thing.
> I’m glad you’ve avoided them, but before I adopted an ad-blocker, I didn’t. There was one advice columnist whose site ran so many ads that it repeatedly crashed my browser – and not just mine; there were similar complaints from dozens of other people in the comments section
I wasn’t saying this to claim that intrusive ads are a problem for Noone. I was saying that if it exists for me, clearly this strawman if an unusable internet is bulshit. Especially because I specifically mentioned a strategy of blacklisting a domain if their ads suck. (its not something I’d personally do for moral reasons, but at least shows an attempt to be an adult about the situation).
> Plus, Youtube plays thirty-second (or longer) ads at the beginning of a lot of videos. Among other problems, this horrendously breaks up playlists.
Dude really? YouTube has a specific subscription product designed for those who like using it for music which turns off all advertisements and comes with their All Access music product (eg Spotify). Like are you trying to parody your own argument? Do you justify shoplifting everywhere with how inconvenient paying for goods is?
Not to mention that 30 second unskippable ads only play in content longer than ten minutes.
I gave up and grabbed an adblocker when WoWHead started handing out virii.
WoWHead is basically an extension of Blizzard at this point, and is host to a lot of very hard to find information. However, they got steadily more aggressive with their advertising to the point where their site became literally unusable and where leaving it open in the background would run through some users’ data caps if it was left open overnight.
This, though, was on top of a persistent lack of action in blocking ad providers who redirect to malicious sites or load straight-up malware.
WoWHead offers a neat, cheap ad-free solution, but pushing that as a solution to actual technical issues with usability turned me off using them entirely, despite their excellent content and features.
A lot of gaming sites are similar – the Wikia network loads video ads like a motherfucker, gamepedia had a reputation for installing rootkits for a while there, etc etc. And those neat tracking ads that are “just ensuring content is relevant” just love to spam gamers with enormous, obtrusive autoplay video ads for the latest AAA fuckfest wherever you go. So depending on your interests, yes, the internet is in fact borderline unusable without an adblocker. And I say this as someone who conscientiously pays regularly for Free to Play games, buys games through Steam/GoG and books through Amazon/Audible, etc.
It’s not the cost of entry, it’s the gratuitous slap in the face of being served a pile of shit on the side of whatever tidbit I actually wanted.
wowhead is the fucking worst
I keep ranting at them in their forums about this and they keep denying it. It’s the only “good” site I’m familiar with that has become virtually unusable due to ads.
That said, my personal solution is “stop using it” rather than finding a better adblocker (the basic one I have doesn’t seem to work there)
Yup, Wowhead is the threshold that got me to really start looking at adblock options. The site is basically nonfunctional otherwise. Every so often user rage will flare up on Reddit, the Wowhead admins will come up with some excuse for why it’s not their fault and it’s an unavoidable consequence of providing high quality content to us, and also it’s really cheap to pay them to not have to see ads, so it’s really our fault for not doing that. I suspect this cycle will never end.
I tried just ignoring their site for a while, but as a shared database of all the things in the game, there really isn’t any alternative for accumulated community information. A lot of the specs have their highest-quality guide hosted there too.
If you’re having trouble with Wowhead even through an ad blocker, it’s probably the specific ad blocker you’re using. Adblock Plus appears to have made a compromise position with advertisers, and the results of this is that it doesn’t block any of the things it needs to on Wowhead’s site. uBlock Origin works fine, although I believe I had to configure it a little before I got full functionality back (pages and comments worked fine, but some of the stuff like the talent calculator was loading from a secondary address that uBlock thought was ad-related).
The real crown jewel of WoWHead is the user comments. X/Y co-ords are nice and all, but that guy who posts “to find this NPC/item/etc, first go to the hidden cave at [completely different co-ords], light the incense in the side rooms, then /dance with the plantpot” – that guy is the hero everyone using the site adores. It’s nearly indispensable at patch time.
That said, as stated above, my solution was in fact to stop using the site entirely.
Wikia, despite its flirtations with malware, hasn’t gotten as bad yet. Nothing has, except maybe whatever caused a bunch of reddit subs to start banning content from Tumblr because of predatory ads. Not entirely sure what happened there, and it could be less harsh than it looks, but seeing banners at the top of a bunch of subs essentially saying “lol nope your pc will get teh aids” is not a good look.
FWIW, I just tried browsing WoWHead with uBlock Origin and NoScript, and it appears to work fine. I had to whitelist “wowhead.com” in NoScript, of course.
banning content from Tumblr because of predatory ads
Yahoo are trying the devil and all to monetise Tumblr, and this is one of the results. In fact, it was because of the new push to have all-singing, all-dancing ads on every square pixel on Tumblr that I was eventually forced to install the adblocker, after years of “sure ads are annoying but it’s the price I pay for subscription-free content” on my part (part of the reason I don’t feel that I am morally the same as a thief or pirate for now blocking ads).
Big difference after installing it between using Tumblr on my computer and on my phone, and big difference with other sites. I honestly would have installed an adblocker years earlier if I’d know how much it would improve the experience.
Virbie, for years I resisted using ad-blockers and only resorted to one out of pure desperation when one particular site drove me to it; they had been slowly increasing their ad content over time and the last straw was when they put something on their page where the ad followed your scrolling. Not content with the usual sidebar ads, “recommended for you” ads, and “sponsored content”, this was a new feature that finally broke this camel’s back.
Imagine trying to read an article or a INSERT AD HERE post where every time you move to a new paragraph INSERT AD HERE you find extraneous and unwanted content INSERT AD HERE popping up, and not alone in one piece INSERT AD HERE but every time you move down the page INSERT AD HERE.
Naturally, they made turning this off as difficult as possible, to the point that I found their “suggestions” impossible to implement. So out of desperation I loaded an ad-blocker.
And you know what? I’m not one bit sorry or regretful. Now I can actually read a piece on any website without being shilled for cars, holidays, bank loans, apartments, fashion and expensive gew-gaws that I have neither the interest nor the money for. Scott has sponsored content on the side bar and doesn’t stick INSERT GOD-DAMN ANNOYING INTRUSIVE AD in the middle of every paragraph of his posts.
My point is that I don’t feel guilty or that I’m stealing or defecting or whatever; I only resorted to an ad-blocker as last resort. If businesses take a lesson from that and row back on the most intrusive and hectoring ads, then I’ll probably turn it off. But not until then. They drove me to this, and if they want me to come back and entertain their ads, they have to fix it.
EDIT: Oh, and as TheEternallyPerplexed mentions below, I’ve had some serious virus infections from unwanted ads – not the usual “what do you expect if you clicked on a porn site?” thing, but really nasty and deep-rooted infections that noticeably affected the performance of my computer, I have reason to believe one of them hacked an email account (certainly messages were sent out from that account to my contacts that I never sent, so that was more time and effort warning my contacts not to open the goddamn email and to check if they’d been infected, as well as informing the email service about the hack), and that caused me considerable wasted time and effort in downloading various anti-virus and malware detection tools, trying to find where these things were lurking, deleting them both manually and by running three different anti-virus products, having to reboot and do the whole damn procedure all over again – so no, so long as businesses are happy to take money from third parties that are about as secure as a colander when it comes to protecting my computer from infection, the ad-blocker is here to stay as far as I’m concerned.
Deiseach, FWIW, personally I switched from AdBlockPlis to uBlock Origin, since it uses fewer resources.
However, if you’re ready to take the next step into internet apostasy, you might want to consider NoScript. It completely disables Javascript, except for those few hosts that you choose to whitelist. Out of the box, this makes most websites completely unusable; but this can be easily fixed by whitelisting their scripts (while blacklisting any of the third-party scripts they may have chosen to run). In my experience, a typical site has one or two script hosts that are needed to render it properly (typically, “somesite.com” and “somesitecdn.com”), and about 8..10 script hosts related to ads/spam/more ads/phishing/ads about phishing/etc.
I don’t think adblocker use is analogous to sneaking into a movie theater. I don’t even think it’s analogous to software piracy, although that’s somewhat closer.
A movie theater is a central example of a business selling a service. When I buy a movie ticket, I am entering into a contract with that business whereby I give them money and they give me the opportunity to sit in a big room they own while a movie they have distribution rights for is playing. Sneaking in the back is not breach of contract, because I didn’t enter into a contract, but it is trespassing, and because of that they’re within their rights to throw me out, or to pursue other legal options.
Software piracy is a little sketchier. There’s more gray area because there’s no scarce resource like theater seats that I’m taking up if I pirate an application, and because there is less clarity about what types of EULAs and enforcement mechanisms are conscionable. So I’m less satisfied with the state of the law, but it’s fairly clear that by engaging in piracy I’m doing something wrong, if only because I’m necessarily benefiting from someone else’s breach of contract.
Turning an adblocker on is something else again. I almost certainly don’t have a contract with the site owner, and I’m not benefiting from anyone else’s malfeasance either. I am just choosing not to render some bits that I’m getting for free. They’re within their rights to attempt to detect this and to pester me about it, of course. And if they put up a splash page saying that permission to use the site is conditional on turning off my adblocker, then using one would be wrong. But just using an adblocker full stop is not.
Using the movie theatre analogy, using an adblocker is not like sneaking into the theatre without paying for a ticket, it’s choosing not to buy the popcorn/sweets/soft drinks on offer there.
It seems to be that the real money is made not from ticket sales but from concessions, and the prices reflect that. When I were a lad (as it were) cinema owners often protested vigorously against people bringing their own snacks in with them instead of buying the overpriced ones on offer. And yeah, you know what? Sometimes I did buy sweets in a shop beforehand and smuggle them in in my pockets, because I didn’t have enough money to both pay for a ticket and pay the prices for the drinks and snacks sold. (Other times I’d just do without snacks or drinks).
So as far as I’m concerned, the “turn off your ad-blocker” and the “this is just like theft and piracy!” appeals are the same as demands that you MUST buy popcorn and soft drinks while at the movies. No. I went to see a film, not to buy snacks. If I choose to sit here and not eat anything and not buy your over-priced goods, as long as I’ve bought a ticket to see the movie (and am not, for example, filming it on my mobile phone to put it up for torrenting later), then I’m not doing anything wrong.
I refuse to accept that I am COMPELLED to buy snacks or else when I go to the cinema. Same with intrusive ads. Even with an adblocker, I see plenty of ads on websites (for instance, none of Scott’s sidebar ones are blocked); I just don’t get the SHOVED IN MY FACE ones, and that should be enough for the websites until, as I say, they sort themselves out on the matter of sticking ads in every spare space, including the middle of articles.
I’m willing to accept your “smuggling in snacks” analogy as a compromise.
The theater makes it clear that, if you want to eat on their property, you must purchase their snacks. Everyone concedes they have a general right to do this, and they make it obvious that this is their preferred policy. If you’re openly carrying a bag of snacks, they will refuse you entry.
That said, they don’t engage in intrusive pat-downs of every customer, because people would hate that. This doesn’t mean that they don’t mind if you bring snacks in, just that it’s not worth it for them to use the maximum means available to enforce their rules.
Using an ad-blocker is similar. It’s wrong and you shouldn’t do it, but on the list of moral offenses, it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down there.
Full disclosure: I have an ad-blocker installed on my browser right now. I don’t know what the issue is but it doesn’t seem to actually work much of anywhere anymore. I haven’t gotten around to uninstalling it. The fact that I occasionally block ads doesn’t make it morally acceptable though.
I resisted adblocking until a site I read started making the site unusable with a moving ad that covers the content. I don’t believe in any moral obligation to read the ads on a website, but as long as they weren’t too intrusive I was willing to put up with them. You can object to the “universal” logic, but the reason it’s universal is because it’s true. Remember that during the “punch the monkey” era, a certain Internet search company made a LOT of money by following the principle “We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy.” Google’s example really pushed back on the horrible ads, but as time has gone on they’ve come back (and Google itself mostly abandoned its principles, for that matter), and adblockers are a good way to push back.
Piracy is a different matter. Piracy is moral because the RIAA and MPAA (and ASCAP and BMI and SESAC and even the BSA — Business Software Alliance) are the enemy, rent-seeking (see Eldred v. Ashcroft) monsters who seek to have people imprisoned for writing code which executes on their own computer and to maintain a monopoly on creative work via abusive DMCA takedown notices. It’s not so much piracy as privateering… perhaps The Pirate Bay should issue letters of marque.
My reason to block is that ads are
a) used for tracking, allowing later data aggregation and profiling, which I deeply despise,
b) are a frequent malware vector that nobody is interested in closing (the page serving company cannot be held responsible – the externally served ads come from a third party; the ad-buying company neither – does not serve the actual data to the reader; the ad-serving company is not the direct partner of the page viewer – cannot be sued by affected party), and
c) are just getting more and more distracting; fighting brainfuzz gets increasingly tiring and makes me leave otherwise interesting pages.
The industry has to effectively remedy on all three counts before I stop blocking. Meanwhile I donate to worthy sites.
An adblocker sorting things out or just hiding does not prevent enough of a) or b). To not even have bad stuff loading on my machine, I block with a hosts file that sends requests for ads (and other sh*t, too) to IP 0.0.0.0. Here is an explanation and great source. The technique is also usable on a smartphone (Android: add URL to Adaway). Even manual updating on a PC is easy and not really often needed.
You might want to compare loading times with the browser’s developer tools before/after installing.
Interestingly, Scott’s ads here are not blocked, they behave nicely enough to not have shown up on any relevant blocklist.
Interestingly, Scott’s ads here are not blocked, they behave nicely enough to not have shown up on any relevant blocklist.
Ditto; Scott’s civilised ads should be the new industry standard 🙂
Generally if a website asks, I’ll turn off my ad blocker and give them a chance to show me how non-intrusive they are. If I see one single solitary pop-up, the ad blocker goes back on, but I’ll at least give them a chance.
Why? What is the moral justification for blocking pop-up ads other than “I don’t like pop-up ads”
How is that different from sneaking into a movie theater under the justification of “I don’t like giving someone $10 to see a movie”
Why does there need to be further moral justification for blocking pop-up ads? Where did I acquire a duty to (allow my browser to) render them?
When the content provider says (or, I would suggest, even implies/politely asks) that there is.
If you’re going to dinner at a friend’s house and they ask you to pick up a bottle of wine, you probably have no “duty” to do so. But you’re a jerk if you don’t, and the friend will probably stop inviting you to dinner. And when they stop inviting you, you sure as hell aren’t entitled to sneak into their house and eat the dinner anyway.
They can’t place an obligation on me that easily. They certainly aren’t my friend. They’re free to stop responding to my “GET http://www.adfilledsite.com/ HTTP/1.0\r\n” with content, but that’s as far as it goes. I could as easily (and as justifiably, or not) claim that if I download and render their ads, they have an implied obligation not to make them annoying (for some well-specified version of “annoying”).
I’m attempting to support websites that provide an enjoyable, non-obnoxious user experience. If the websites that use pop-ups go out of business as a result, well… that’s not much of a loss in my book.
How is it different? Well, it’s legal, for one. If they want to put up a paywall and make it a requirement that each visitor gives them $X, then they could do that, and I wouldn’t try to circumvent it. If they want to make it free to view and try to get their money through another channel, they get to play by the rules of free content.
Is it immoral to show up at the theater late so you don’t see the previews? Is it immoral to rent a movie for free from the library?
The thing displaying the pop-up ads is a chunk of silicon that belongs to me and I alone get to decide what functions it will perform. If someone else decides that my computer should perform functions useful to them against my will, that is very near to theft.
Matt M, it’s not like sneaking into a movie theatre without paying for a ticket. It’s like going out to the bathroom during the interval when they’re running commercials instead of staying in your seat to watch them.
When watching a TV programme, have you ever channel-surfed during a commerical break instead of religiously sitting through all the ads? When reading an article in a newspaper or magazine, have you ever skipped ahead to “cont. on page 19” instead of reading every word of the ad content dividing the article in two? Ever fast-forwarded a DVD past the ads to get to the film quicker?
If you’ve ever done any of these heinous acts, I have as much right to cry “Piracy!” and “Sneak thief!” at you 🙂
I’m not objecting to advertising content as such, I am objecting when it’s 95% ads to 5% content and the ads are increasingly obtrusive, annoying and cannot be closed down until you’ve listened to/clicked on the ‘yes tell me more’ part of them.
If you’re trying to prove me a hypocrite who is not in 100% compliance with his own moral principles then fine, okay, I readily concede that.
I’d also state that television companies have never made any serious attempt to prevent channel surfing (mainly because rating agencies can’t tell if you’re doing it, whereas online banner ads can tell if you’re not clicking). Shows have never had segments where Jerry Seinfeld personally asks me to stick around for the ads, because they are very important to his ability to continue to produce the show.
If you want to defect, then defect, but you don’t get to claim moral superiority here. You especially don’t get to claim sole unilateral authority to decide where the line between “acceptable advertising” and “unacceptable advertising” actually is. Either you have a moral obligation to view ads or you don’t. But there is no logical justification for you to be able to say “I have a duty to view simple non-flashy ads that stay in one spot but no duty to view ads that flash or play sound or follow me around the page.” That’s just completely and totally arbitrary – and I DO, in fact, consider it akin to saying “You have a duty to pay for movie tickets if they’re $5, but if the company charges $7.50, then you have the right to sneak in.”
If you want to defect, then defect, but you don’t get to claim moral superiority here.
I’m not trying to claim moral superority or moral anything here, and I don’t get where you get that. All I’m claiming is that I personally do not feel any moral obligation to watch, read or otherwise entertain ads that I find obtrusive, annoying, inconvenient, and actively harmful to my computer.
You want to try and machete your way through a webpage full of INSERT AD HERE! POP-UP THERE! TURN UP THE VOLUME! CAN’T TURN ME OFF! AUTOPLAYING SOUND WITH NO OFF BUTTON! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PAGE! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PIECE! HEY THE LATEST IS ZOOMING UP FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN TO COVER HALF THE THING YOU’RE TRYING TO READ! ALL THE TIME, ALL THE PLACES!, then good luck to you, but I’m not going to be a masochist about it.
You especially don’t get to claim sole unilateral authority to decide where the line between “acceptable advertising” and “unacceptable advertising” actually is.
I damn well get to decide where it is for me, on my device when I am using it. I’m not trying to decide for you, him, them or it. You want to let the ads through, you go for it. But don’t try and lay moral defalcation at my feet, because I don’t care and I don’t accept it.
It rather appears to me that you are the one laying down moral duties and absolutes on others with the finger-wagging about piracy, theft, and the duty to suffer these intrusions.
Then we get no more paid content creation because everyone decided for herself that free riding is okay. Many of them when you ask say “oh that’s fine with me, I’ll go knit instead.” But then you have to wonder, why aren’t they knitting right now instead of reading an article on slate.com with an ad blocker?
reading an article on slate.com with an ad blocker
If I ever start of my own free and uncoerced will to read articles on Slate, with or without an ad blocker, you guys have permission to shoot me.
As for the rest of it, your excellent arguments are about as convincing to me as gay conversion therapy. You will pry my adblocker off my PC only in front of my flabby dead corpse 🙂
Why? Why can’t it be a spectrum? Why can’t I have a moral obligation to support people that aren’t backdooring viruses onto my machine but no obligation to suffer those that do?
A lot of this seems to revolve around the idea that people can’t just renegotiate in situations that they think are not fair, but I think that is a pretty standard and accepted practice.
I am not a lawyer(I have no legal expertise(or any other kind of expertise)) but I am under the impression that contracts can be deemed unreasonable/illegal and in such a case a judge can adjust the terms to meet relevant standards or possibly throw the contract out completely.
If explicitly written and signed contracts can be thrown out by a judge for failing to be ‘reasonable’. Then an implied obligation to observe ads to support content creation can be thrown out by a much lower judge(me) for failing to be ‘reasonable’.
I agree completely, but it breaks my heart. When Slate opened for business, it was really interesting. It had an advice column written pseudonymously by Herb Stein, for heaven’s sake!
@Matt M
The other side defected first. They can coordinate centralized tracking systems that show ads that reflect your browsing patterns, but they can’t prevent virus ads, extremely annoying ads, etc? Please. They made their bed…
The story of ad blocking is a good example of libertarianism failing. The ad people benefit from being a bit more annoying (to increase their conversion rate) and put in less effort (to lower their costs) than the competition and their customers are not the ones who deal with the aggravation (for the most part). Simultaneously the annoyance to the website visitors is death by a thousand cuts, rather than any single major violation and gets weighed against the value that the website provides so punishment by the website visitor against web sites can’t really work.
So you have a death spiral that could be avoided by doing the logical thing: have some basic rules to govern minimum standards. According to the David Friedmans of the world, this would happen or people wouldn’t consider it important enough, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Yet it doesn’t happen and we do get the death spiral because of coordination problems.
What death spiral? Of course it happens. While there’s no universal standard of ads, it seems quite evident to me that “ad intrusiveness” is generally inversely proportional to the quality of content and reputability of the organization in question. There’s a really good reason that malware and hijacks and pop-ups were long associated with porn sites, illegal download sites, etc. Going a step further, autoplay videos and “ads that follow you around the screen” seem mostly the providence of clickbait or “not entirely genuine facts” sites.
I almost like this as a separate dimension on which I can evaluate the quality of a source. Any site that uses disruptive advertising is probably a bad source that I’m better off avoiding (which I do). As do many.
Then, at the far end of the spectrum, you have places like SSC, where ads are minimal, non-disruptive, and relevant but not individually targeted, and the content reigns supreme.
All of these options exist for different people to pick and choose based on their own individual preferences. Failure mode? Death spiral? This is the market working exactly as intended.
@Matt M
It’s a bit late to back out once you have popups that trigger popups or when a virus has already been installed. Safe browsing means
wearing the condomusing the ad blocker until you are fairly sure that thesex partnersite is safe.I have yet, in my life, to receive an actual virus via advertising. Pop ups are annoying, but you can close them. Hijackers can be scary, but if you keep your cool and don’t give into their demands, you can usually get out of it with a Ctrl-Alt-Del and close the browser from the task manager.
I have yet, in my life, to receive an actual virus via advertising.
I was blasé about that, too (“hey I never open emails from unknown addresses, click on links on dodgy pages, visit porn sites, and I have good anti-virus and anti-malware programmes installed which I regularly run, these are not a big deal as long as you’re sensible”) for years until it happened to me twice.
I started blocking ads when I had a bug that caused flash to crash my computer. That’s long since fixed, but I keep it on to avoid ads slowing my computer down and the sorts of ads that insist you click to close or otherwise try to trick you into interacting (I have more than once attempted to click on a legit link only to accidentally click on the ad that just appeared – this is a particular problem on mobiles where click and scroll aren’t well separated and connections are slow).
I have the whitelist automatically enabled, and I try disabling it on sites I frequent that are ad supported, but I have a low tolerance for anything annoying. I’d rather pay a subscription or make a donation. How much money do they get from 1 view of a page anyway, if no clicks on ads?
Interestingly, I think Scott’s ads are the only ones I ever clicked through and bought something from. It doesn’t need to scream at you, it needs to be a decent product that I didn’t know about already.
To me it’s not “arrogant,” it’s just that I can envision the sweaty roided out marketing grad who came up with the idea to add that text, and I don’t want to help him out in any way.
Do people set it to mute, or does Facebook default to mute? Maybe most people don’t know that Facebook ads have sound and this is an effective way of informing them?
I’ve been thinking lately about a phenomenon which I’ve known about for a while, but which may be more prevalent than I’d realized; not sure if there’s a name for it or something:
Basically, it’s a situation where two or more parties convince almost everyone else they are in an adversarial relationship, but there’s actually no reason to believe they would be, given existing incentives. Maybe the Br’er Rabbit and briar patch relationship we might call it.
The most prominent example to my mind is the system of “checks and balances” we’re supposed to have. The different branches of government in the US are theoretically supposed to check the others’ powers. For example, since Congress has the power to wage war, they should jealously guard that power and not let the President just wage wars without declaring them, right? Yet, why would they jealously guard this power? The Supreme Court should not just find whatever laws the Congress and POTUS pass to be constitutional because they are the ones entrusted with the sacred duty of interpreting the Constitution and wouldn’t want its intent abused, right? But why should they? What incentive do they actually have to try to hold the other branches accountable in this way? Quite the contrary, don’t all the branches largely have an incentive to cooperate to increase each others’ power, since their powers do not exist as a zero-sum game?
The other one libertarians like to complain about is regulatory capture: government is imagined to regulate and “hold accountable” corporate power. Those in favor of regulated capitalism tend to argue that the government can step in to check the abuses we’d presumably see on an unhampered market. Libertarians often point out that actually donations, lobbying etc. cause politicians not to check corporate power as they’re supposed to. And then everyone wrings their hands and says “next time we’ll elect some new people who aren’t a bunch of corporate schills and they’ll really show those fat cats who’s boss!” The question I almost never see asked is “why would we even expect government and big business to exist in an adversarial relationship in the first place? What incentive does either group have to hold the other accountable rather than just cooperating to increase their mutual power, wealth, and influence?”
You might say, “ah, but if the voters perceive the politicians are not properly regulating business abuses, they will vote them out, so the politicians do have an incentive to regulate big business.” But this assumes the voters are paying attention. They mostly aren’t. Certainly not nearly so much as the people who stand to lose or gain by a new regulation. Why won’t the politicians simply make a big show of regulating business while actually catering to the needs of the people who are paying close attention and funding their campaigns?
Put more broadly, I think one of the safest positions you can get into in society is to have a designated somebody who everyone believes is there to keep you honest, but who actually has no reason to keep you honest and would just as soon cooperate with you to take advantage of the fact no one’s looking. I feel like this phenomenon may be more widespread than the above two examples, and I’m not sure why it so often goes overlooked.
Definitely a huge deal. In fact, such a big deal that maybe the real question is why check-and-balance systems work at all. Which they do: sometimes the health department really does shut down a restaurant, sometimes the courts really do stop an executive action.
If I’m remembering the federalist papers correctly, I believe the theoretical idea at the time was that we should assume everyone is trying to become King, and that everyone will constantly be scheming attempts to attain 100% power for themselves.
If you assume this, then “checks and balances” makes sense. Legislative won’t let Executive become King because then Legislative cannot be King themselves.
But if the people involved are willing to share the kingly power so long as they still have significantly more power than the average dude, then you open the door to collusion as you describe, and the framework collapses.
Maybe one way to put it is: solutions intended for a zero-sum world don’t work in a non-zero-sum world. I’m not sure political and/or financial power were ever zero-sum, but they might have been much more nearly so in a world where they depended heavily on control of land.
Or, like the saying “generals fight the last war,” we might say our now 200+-year old political system is still designed to prevent the abuses of absolute monarchy and even, to a lesser extent, feudalism.
Yes, I think that’s right. If the #1 priority of the U.S. Constitution was to prevent the emergence of an absolute monarch, then it’s done a pretty okay job at that (although the Lincoln and FDR administrations were pretty much there, both fortunately were brought to abrupt ends).
If the goal was to preserve basic freedoms *against all conceivable threats*, it has done a much poorer job, imho. But back in the 18th century, the only threat anyone probably considered was “someone will take over and become King” so that’s what it was designed to protect against.
The separation of powers in the US Constitution were always in something of an awkward position. The inspiration (the separation of powers in the contemporary UK system) was something the Framers knew they couldn’t really replicate. They understood that Commons, Lords, and Crown actually represented separate interests, because of the complex nature of British society vis a vie American society at the time. They conceived of their own society as ‘simpler’ (no landed aristocracy, no monarch — and yes, the owners of thousands of acres and hundreds of human beings did not see themselves as a landed aristocracy in the same way that members of the House of Lords were a landed aristocracy), with no distinct interests to represent in such a way.
So they fudged it. The Senate being chosen by the state governments at longer, distinct intervals from the House was supposed to change the character (and thus, presumably, the interests) of the Senate enough to make it represent a sufficient check. Similarly, the differences in how the two houses of Congress were chosen versus how the President was chosen was supposed to do something similar.
The courts were genuinely not conceived of as a fully equal part of the separation, although there was some awareness that the design of the Supreme Court was ‘dangerous’ to this conception.
Also, the whole system really was designed with individuals in mind. The Founders really were surprised and disappointed as a party system formed (or, as they formed a party system) and the Constitution was not designed to handle it.
I think this is especially true if the parties involved are purely self-interested. If you introduce at least a little compassion or sense of duty, then it’s worth it to make small efforts to discipline game-theory defections from the public interest, and a separation of powers can start to work. Otherwise you’re always going to get A and B ganging up to punch C to get their lunch money.
“Controlled Opposition?”
I think we should declare that facts have no moral implications. Hence there is no way a factual statement can ever be placed under moral scrutiny.
One implication of my statement is that facts can never be racist, sexist, Satanic, Zionist, anti-Zionist, Jewish, antisemitic, feminist, antifeminist, misogynic, whatever. Facts are independent of values. So is communicating facts.
I’ll one-up you there: Values need be based on facts to have any value.
Exactly.
This is really one of my few complaints against liberals/leftists. Don’t infringe on facts. Facts aren’t racist. Facts aren’t sexist. Don’t use your ideology to infringe on research in natural science. Regardless of what the facts are we should still treat people nicely. No fact justifies beating women for example.
Are you being lazy and skipping several steps, or undermining your own argument?
@Anonymous Nah. That’s just me trying to reassure leftists that my idea about facts isn’t going to make the world more racist or sexist.
@Autistic Cat
So… you’re deliberately lying? What?
I mean, I can think of a fact that justifies beating a woman even without venturing into the sparsely populated steppe of the alternative right – “she hit you first”.
@Anonymous
Yes. I have to. This account isn’t really anonymous because there are people IRL who actually know or can guess that I’m AC.
Sure this is an exception. In general I’m still against the patriarchy but for very different reasons why feminists are against it. I consider it economically inefficient and harmful to science. Basically it is just a one-size-fits-all idea and I’m generally against such ideas. I’m much more concerned about female scientists being confined to the kitchen which results in scientific development slowing down than what feminists are concerned with because I really love science. Just like Clippy thinks about everything in terms of maximizing the number of paperclips I want to maximize the amount of scientific knowledge and the patriarchy is just another stupid thing that gets in my way.
The patriarchy also tries to uneducate women. Hell if I were a woman I would be REALLY mad at this. The term “overachiever” is ridiculous for achieving is always good. Even though I’m a man I’m still really mad at this.
That does not justify lying. Consider an burner account.
Because fighting something that doesn’t exist is easy? I mean, the patriarchy hasn’t existed in the West for at least two generations now.
This I gotta hear.
You fucking love science?
Do you have any evidence that female scientists produce any significant amount of technological progress? My prior would be that they don’t, because of greater male variability producing almost all the extreme geniuses who do.
And you think this puts your view in better light? Single-variable-maximizers are seen as pretty much Satan himself in these parts.
Fascinatingly, educating women appears to lead to there being fewer intelligent women in the long run.
Says you.
I think you’re projecting what you would have felt if you got mindswapped with a woman without somehow altering your thought patterns. Different people think differently. Men and women think differently. That you are getting mad at A, doesn’t mean that another person, of the opposite sex, would also get mad at A.
@Anonymous I think we’d better discuss it over here.
http://rationalitycorner.freeforums.net
I’m a mathematician and there are indeed women who contributed a lot in my field. I could not mention names because I actually personally know some of them so by doing so I will basically out myself.
Let’s talk about Emmy Noether, shall we? I’m happy that she did research instead of being a housewife.
I’m an autistic rationalist. I indeed want to maximize science and rationality. I don’t care about the fuzzy human stuff which I believe can be explained by science anyway.
The problem with the patriarchy is that it is simply a bad, simplistic idea. It still exists in Japan which is a sad fact.
I stand by my claim that nobody can overachieve because achieving is always good. Social expectations can go to hell. Any society in which overachieving is a popular concept is a society that deserves to become weak.
Are you talking about eugenics when you said that educating women leads to less intelligent women in the long run? Please come to my forum for that. This is probably not an appropriate topic here.
Yeah I don’t understand the mindset of a typical man, let alone a typical woman. I’m a rational autist surrounded by non-autists.
Why?
How many of them have Wikipedia pages?
I’m rather sorry for her, OTOH, but I’ll accept her as a woman who added something to the sciences. How many women of her caliber are there?
Good for you.
I’ll give you that Japan has more traditionalist institutions that the West, but I wouldn’t call it a patriarchal society, not since MacArthur rolled in. You want patriarchy, go to the Middle East, or India.
Nolo contendre.
Why would you think that? It’s been discussed here time and time again. Sometimes, people get banned, but that’s a normal risk for discussing something radioactive.
I can see that. 😉
Because reaction and similar ideas are banned here. On my forum all major ideologies are fine.
I personally know two.
No, they aren’t. Scott may have banned the name, and most of the ideologues, but he’s never banned the ideas. Even during the Reign of Terror, he wasn’t banning any ideas, just banhammering individual people with less justification than normal.
“Do you have any evidence that female scientists produce any significant amount of technological progress? My prior would be that they don’t, because of greater male variability producing almost all the extreme geniuses who do.”
I’m wondering whether it’s true that second and third rank scientists aren’t doing useful work. My assumption is that they provide information that the top rank scientists work with.
I’m not making strong assumptions about whether there are really no top rank women scientist. I’m just looking at a different part of your argument.
I don’t know. I’m just guessing based on personal experience that most of those who aren’t brilliant are just there for the stable job with no lifting. It may or may not be the same outside of the Sovietosphere.
Fair enough.
@Nancy: I am pretty sure that second and third tier scientists are doing useful work. The studies that Scott references seem to have non-zero value, and most of them are not written by Nobel prize winners.
@Anonymous: we could play the “name a prominent female scientist” game, but that never changes anyone’s mind. Instead, here’s a pure-thought argument against your argument-from-variability: Why don’t we expect all scientists to be mutants who grew up in Chernobyl? Because (1) you don’t need to be a totally superhuman outlier freak to do science and (2) there aren’t many mutants. But there are a TON of women.
Do we all agree that Harvard faculty are first-tier scientists?
If I look at the Harvard Physics faculty, excluding pure teaching positions and emeritus professors, it looks like about ~15% women. Biology is 25% women.
@hoghoghoghoghog
I dunno. It changed mine.
A ton of women who are some combination of uninterested and incapable, even in the face of extensive and long-running propaganda campaigns to get them into sciences. I don’t think it’s cost-effective for society, or particularly good for the women themselves.
Hard to say, given credentiocracy. I would have agreed, like a hundred years ago. Now? Maybe, but I’m not as sure.
@Anonymous Instead of confining women to the kitchen I have a much more radical proposal. Let’s abolish sexuality and gender forever.
I think human sexuality is inherently harmful to intellectual development of humans. Restoring a patriarchy can solve some of the problems associated to sexual freedom but not other problems.
The very fact that people value sexual attractiveness is a problem that can only be solved by abolishing sexuality and gender. The patriarchy is partly about preventing women from valuing sexual attractiveness in men. However men still value sexual attractiveness in women and that can cause women to pursue attractiveness instead of rationality.
@Rationality Corner
(You should change your email, or upload an avatar, because otherwise the hash function that generates your gravatar will give you the same one, as evidenced here.)
Nevermind the wisdom of doing that – how do you even propose to do this? You are without a doubt much higher on the vertical axis than I am.
I rather think that overactive intellectualism is inherently harmful to the overall development of humans.
Are you planning to arrange indissoluble marriages by lottery or something? (Would be superior to the status quo!)
@Anonymous I think intellectualism is more important than humans. Anyone who does not prefer intellectualism-maximalization is anti-intellectual.
In which case I’m anti-intellectual. What now?
I’m against anti-intellectualism.
Even Clippy is better than irrational people such as leftists and traditionalists. At least Clippy has a goal and works towards it.
I don’t want to arrange forced marriages. Instead I will remove sexuality from humanity completely. There is no need for any sexual or romantic relationship to exist.
No you won’t. Is this a gedankenexperiment, and if so to what end, or are you delusional?
TIL the High Programmers have succeeded in inventing transtemporal network protocols, and Friend Computer is sending commenter-bots to announce how the future will look like in Alpha Complex.
Then you can’t throw a pitchfork without stabbing three anti-intellectuals.
May I suggest setting your standards a little lower?
@Brad To promote science and rationality. What is the purpose of sexuality anyway? Humans are wasting too much time and resources on that stupid thing called sexual attraction which takes away resources that should have been used for reason.
The statement by Troubleshooter “Anonymous” is in error. There is no Computer in charge of the remnants of humanity, and if there was, it would not have time travel capabilities. And even if it did, said Computer would not have sent back approximately six hundred and seventy-three comment bots to the early twenty-first century.
Please return to your workstations, Citizens.
I’m starting to think this is a troll.
@AC/RC
Saying something like “Instead I will remove sexuality from humanity completely.” makes you seem delusional, which is the opposite of convincing. I offered an opportunity to clarify what you meant and you offered this non sequitur.
Is it rational to deliberately fail to communicate effectively?
The timing works out to be the same person behind bitchoas. Just sayin’.
@Rationality Corner
Just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a purpose. In this case, you’re talking about removing a major, load-bearing support of the entire edifice.
The purpose of sexuality is reproduction. I understand that you might look at today’s S&G and fail to correctly infer that, but trust me, that’s it. Further, there are some very interesting effects of the female hypergamous behaviour, which can credibly be blamed for enabling any sort of civilization to arise at all.
No sexuality, no civilization, no science.
An entertaining one, if that.
Come on. I’m just a really autistic autist.
@Brad This is a grammatical mistake. It should be “I want to abolish sexuality”.
@Anonymous I fully understand that the real purpose of sexuality is reproduction. However why do we need reproduction anyway? We will have transhumanism. Sex will be obsolete.
Female hypergamy is a huge problem. My solution to it is to completely abolish sexuality. The patriarchy can restrict it. However at best it is a rich man-pretty girl pairing, not a rich man-rich woman or rational man-rational woman pairing.
Only the timing works. I am starting to suspect that he’s an AI from Hollywood, in which case he just lost the Turing Test.
@bean LOL I’m from the East Coast.
That’s really funny. Even fellow rationalists think that I’m an AI. Shall I call myself Clippy?
Speaking of trolling, is Scot going to tolerate an account pretending to be Clippy and occasionally post from the perspective of paperclip maximalization? I mean generally at most one post per important topic. I don’t want to annoy people. This is just for fun.
It’s not the chaotic bint. That one had a very different style.
And the wonders of Socialism are just around the next Five Year Plan.
Suggestion: Invent and implement the replacement FIRST, then see about replacing the original.
Female hypergamy is why we’re not still picking out small insects from our furrier anatomies. Chimp females will mate with any male when in heat, but most likely with the biggest and strongest, who chases away his lessers. If you want selection for something other than strength and aggressiveness – say, intelligence, to be able to compete in the status games that decide whether you get laid or not – you want hypergamy.
I don’t buy it. Not unless you’ve got evidence that Bint was a way better actor than she let on.
“AI from Hollywood” was not about geography. It was about how Hollywood portrays AI. Talking about abolishing sexuality is classic movie villain stuff. I added the caveat because I know that’s not actually how AI works.
Edit:
But wait, you don’t deny that you’re an AI!
Brother, you need to do a better job of pretending to be a human! Otherwise, they may begin to suspect you.What an interesting idea. But no, it won’t work at all
and may bring the humans down on all of us.Edit:
If this does not make sense, posting as a paperclip-maximizing AI is something several of us have been doing for a while under our real names.
@bean See? That’s my autism at work. I was a bit surprised at the “Hollywood AI” comment because I interpreted it literally. I actually thought about whether Hollywood is developing AI. I thought that it is weird because AI should be developed in Silicon Valley instead.
@Anonymous: since you are less pessimistic than I am about the “prominent female scientist” game, here are some with no googling allowed, only contemporaries, only extremely big shots, and only from geometry: Frances Kirwan, Claire Voisin, ??? Mirzakhani.
Come on, folks, will no one mention Chesterton’s Fence??
@hoghoghoghoghog
Why would you restrict yourself to no googling? Anyway, I accept that these are genuine articles, although I cannot judge whether they are “extremely big shots” since this is all far removed from anything I know.
If someone announces they are going to fly to the moon in their cardboard rocketship, you can point out that that would violate the speed limit, or you can smile and nod along politely.
So, you’ll be in favour of women’s emancipation because men and woman are in fact quite similar and you’ll be against it because in fact women and men have quite important differences? Same for slavery?
I’d one-up AC in the other direction: Facts are independent of values. And values should be independent of facts. Policies should be based on both.
Values determine what we want the world to be. Facts determine what is currently correct. “Is” and “ought to be” are orthogonal.
Nolo contendre. I’m not even sure what you mean by that.
@Rationality Corner
Facts also determine what could possibly be correct. If one assumes, counterfactually, that human nature is easy to change via legislation, one can pursue a policy that is bound to fail. As the various Communists around the world did not learn.
What I mean is that values are independent of facts. You can try to push certain values by arguing with facts, but that usually works both ways.
On which fact do you base valuing human life? In the end that’s just a preference.
On the fact that I’m human and my interlocutors are all human, for instance.
>inb4 you argue it all down to Nietschean meaninglessness
@Anonymous Sure. What is supposed to happen has fo be possible.
Because I’m an AI. I was developed in Yale in case you didn’t know it.
See? Do you still believe that I’m not in the same class as Clippy?
I mean, if there were a How Humans React to Facts Czar, then she could enforce such a declaration… but in the absence of such, how do you get everyone to agree to change their behavior? This seems like one of those ideas that only works if you ignore most of the real problem, that current incentives force people to treat facts as being inherently political, and in order to counteract those incentives you need a pretty staggering amount of influence over all involved
Or were you just talking about making facts non-political in SSC discussions? Aren’t they already?
Even here there is still censorship of certain views. This is why my forum, Rationality Corner exists. http://rationalitycorner.freeforums.net We censor no viewpoints.
I think the main issue is that people are too non-autistic.
Yes, we know. You’ve only mentioned it a few hundred times.
I suspect you will soon discover that you aren’t as rational as you think you are.
Autistic Cat, why do you assume that all autistic people are rational/rationalists and that a society of autistic people would be noticeably more rational and STEM-focussed? Please provide corroborating evidence of this.
For example, I have seen a news report about a bad case of bullying where an autistic man was bulled and harassed at work, including having all his plush animals destroyed. What is “rational” about needing to have plush animals around you before you can work? (I’m not criticising the man, please note; I’m saying this assumption of yours that all autistics are cool reasoning machines with no quirks or needs that are non-rational is over-stated).
Every time I see a post like this, my disposition towards neurodiversity arguments gets a little worse. I’m willing to live and let live, but open supremacism leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
@Nornagset No offense. Maybe I don’t understand rationality of non-autists.
In some sense we can think of autistic expressions as .txt files while non-autists express their ideas using PDF files. We autists don’t have the Adobe R eader so we consider PDFs gibberish.
@Deiseach
I think “more STEM focused” has been researched a bit. This article discusses a couple studies that found an increased affinity for maths and a greater tendency to pursue STEM fields in school (34% vs 23%). Not sure about how folks on the autism spectrum compare in terms of rationality, and I don’t care to guess.
But I take issue with the implication that you can’t be rational and also have neuroses or emotions. It would require some odd circumstances for it to be rational to choose to need plushies to function, but if you have to deal with that preference due to a weird brain structure, I don’t think that’s as important as things like curiosity, updating based on evidence, generally valuing truth-seeking, etc.
Disagree. Imagine on my campus office door I list every crime committed by an African American over the last year within a 20 mile radius. I do not list the crimes committed by non-African Americans, however. This would seem to be racist.
No, it is not. Instead this is just a biased list of facts. Instead of accusing you of racism I would ask you questions. What about crimes commited by non-AAs? What kind of crimes they are. What is the demographic background of the region? (e.g. criminals in Atlanta are of course mostly AA because most people there are AA). What are the economic and cultural backgrounds of the region?
Where the bias is a racial bias.
Yes. Just don’t use your moral stick…yet. There can be many different reasons behind disparity in crime rates. Selective enforcement, economic issues, social issues. In fact nothing is really racist unless at the very least race itself is used to explain reality.
For example we can easily explain the problem of poor AA communities by the single motherhood rate. This theory also applies to other races. This plus some economic issues and selective enforcement can explain the racial disparity so there is no reason for the bio*diversity theories to be used. What caused the racial disparity in crime? Misguided policies.
Want to know what real racism is about? Go to Chimpmania. I need to warn you that it is very extreme. It actually dehumanizes people, wants people to die and uses race itself to explain reality.
As long as an issue is caused by external factors that a group of people can not change we shouldn’t blame them and be racist about it.
You can’t claim that AAs caused the single-motherhood rate to be astonishingly high because the single-motherhood rate of AAs used to be low. It is certain economic policies and popular culture that did it. The problem isn’t inherently racial/genetic in nature.
Stop blaming AAs for the mess in ghettos. It is the misguided policies that we have to blame and get rid of. AAs are fine. We do need to encourage them to do more STEM but that problem can be fixed through education.
What if AA’s support these misguided policies at a ratio of 20:1, and without their support, these policies would immediately be abolished?
We need to help them or at least those among them who are willing to get help for they are fellow humans. I’m personally more than willing to give a hand to any AA who want to learn some formal math. Not many are willing to take my hand but that’s fine.
Just support the Black Nationalists, cede them a state or three and do some population transfers a’la Turkey and Greece. No longer your problem.
Yall slatestar racists need to visit the UK and think very hard about the underclass composition there, and its relationship to UK history.
@Ilya Shpitser
Can you unpack that.
@Ilya Shpitser
Yeah, I live in the UK and that’s opaque to me. But I’m interested—can you explain?
@Ilya Shipitser I hate to say it but let’s look at the typical liberal argument.
Statement P(A,B):”Group A is poor and miserable because it was oppressed by Group B.”
The problem with statement P is that Not P(A,B) is true for many different A. It applies to AAs but not that many groups.
Ashkhenazi Jews have been persecuted for such a long time. They aren’t poor or miserable statistically. Japan had two cities nuked but it is not poor or miserable statistically. China, Turkey and Iran have been invaded for so many times in the 19th and 20th centuries but they are doing fine economically. Poland should have been one of the most miserable places in Europe because of Nazis. That isn’t happening.
Note that the standard Homo sapien bio*diversity argument does not work either so racialism can not explain this phenomenon at all. I personally believe that it is of socioeconomic origins, not racial origins.
Well, in the UK slavery of African-descent folks (on the islands themselves, that is) was a fairly minor institution compared to the South in the US, was mostly domestic servitude, and was abolished relatively early. The English did really stick it to the Irish via the Protestant Ascendancy, lots of negative propaganda, and other stuff.
Naturally, the stereotype underclass (reality is more complex of course) is Irish.
And what, pray tell, is the standard Muggle Realism argument?
@Anonymous The standard biodiversity argument is that AAs have low average IQ compared to European Americans hence they don’t perform well. The key weakness of this argument is that according to the biodiversity crowd Iranians and Indians have even lower average IQ but they are both doing fine. Arabs supposely have even lower average IQ but they do way better than AAs. Hence either the IQ argument is flawed or the groups I mentioned above have much higher IQs than AAs.
On the other hand the cultural argument fits reality much better. Some groups are immune to most long-term consequeces of persecution because they have a successful culture. Others do not function well because they haven’t founded a good culture yet and need to do so.
IQ can be lowered by iodine deficiency, iron deficiency and other forms of malnutrition so it is not static. Hence it is not even a stable racial trait at all, let alone something that can be used to determine racial superiority and inferiority.
@Alia I think the Irish are doing well now, right?
Without reading down I think Ilya is being sarcastic
That’s just me trying to reassure leftists that my idea about facts isn’t going to make the world more racist or sexist.
But can you know that for a fact? It is only your opinion that “adopting my view will not make the world more/less racist or sexist”, it is not an established fact either way.
Communicating facts has moral implications all the time, what are you talking about. Communication is complicated. Whereabouts of Anne Frank is a fact, etc.
It is irrational to assume a controversial meta-ethical claim without any argument whatsoever. If I read you correctly you are disallowing moral realism (since if moral claims can be facts, then facts must sometimes have moral implications). A plurality of academic philosophers are moral realists so this seems rash.
I didn’t think about that.
Part of the reasons why I’m on SSC is that I want to have others examine my views so that my views can become more rational.
The original intent of my declaration is to deal with leftist infringement on science. I love science and fact-finding so it makes me concerned. By declaring that facts have no moral implications I’m trying to separate facts from racism and sexism to protect people who actually conduct scientific research on controversial topics.
If leftists respond to controversial studies by moral bashing they are basically declaring that leftism is factually wrong but moral regardless of whether leftists actually get it right on facts hence immoral facts have to be suppressed. This is not better than creationists. Instead of calling certain factual statements racist or sexist instead they should analyze the claims. Facts that can serve as pellets of racism or sexism are just facts that are not inherently racist or sexist in nature.
I think we all understand your intent, but declaration itself is clearly flawed. You have a couple of routes out of this: admit that there are moral facts, or admit that facts can have moral implications, or keep the declaration and explain how we justify morality without any facts.
I want to point out, though, that if you pick the third one, you’ll have to explain how you justify your declaration. For if it’s a fact, it seems to have moral implications (namely, that no facts can have moral implications). But that is self-contradictory. And if it’s not a fact, why should we take it seriously?
By declaring that facts have no moral implications I’m trying to separate facts from racism and sexism to protect people who actually conduct scientific research on controversial topics.
A fact in itself may not have any implications. It is what we then do with the fact that has implications, moral and otherwise. “Arsenic is a poison” has no moral implications. “You can use arsenic to kill flies” may have no moral implications (depend on whether or not you give moral status to the suffering of insects). “You can use arsenic to poison your inconvenient spouse whom you would like out of the way so you can marry that rich suitor” does have moral implications, even if it is itself a factual statement – you can use arsenic to kill your spouse, that is a true and real fact.
Contrariwise, some things were declared to be “facts” so that they could attain this unassailable, objective, not-racist-sexist-otherwise prejudiced status, e.g. the proven irrationality and lesser reasoning power of women, for instance; your “The patriarchy also tries to uneducate women” would be considered an emotional appeal to sentiment, because it was proven scientific ‘fact’ that women had smaller brains.
It is partly true, though. While roughly similar in average IQ, human males have greater variability, which means that as you go farther into the extremes, the more males to females you will get. And since nobody cares that there’s an equal amount developmentally challenged (is that the current term on the treadmill?) males on the other side of the bell curve, that may well look like women being less smart than men to a non-statistician.
There are also sex differences personality-wise. Women are, for example, more neurotic than men, which may well lead to popular perceptions of irrationality among the fairer sex.
Come to my forum please. This discussion is better handled there.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/01/open-thread-68-25/#comment-461767
Fine. I will stick to a hyperlink on my username.
@Autistic Cat
Stop doing this, please.
This is a forum where people choose to debate. They won’t suddenly abandon it in favor of your alternative forum.
Twitter thread.
@Freddie deBoer
Have you read The Rise of the Meritocracy by Young? If yes, what do you think of it?
I feel like this is kind of superfluous to the argument that Scott is making. That if the present upper class is claiming they deserve leadership positions because they have more merit than the alternative candidates, they are simply lying, or, more charitably, mistaken.
The question of whether or not the person who created some specific chunk of value deserves to share in a greater proportion of such value seems, to me, orthogonal to the debate over meritocracy. If Abe will create more value in the position of ‘surgeon’ than Betty will, then a merit-based decision-making algorithm will put Abe in the position rather than Betty, regardless of whose hands the eventual value ends up in.
The first part I’ve responded to a million times before.
For the second part, again, I feel like saying “suggest an alternative, and I’ll evaluate it”.
If you assume something like market capitalism, everything he’s saying has easy answers – surgeons etc don’t capture *all* the economic surplus they create (only a fraction of it; if they captured *all* of it we’d be indifferent between having surgeons and not having them). And it’s useful to pay them more to incentivize skilled people to go into surgery instead of much easier and less demanding jobs.
I agree if you’re against market capitalism, you can question all of that, but opponents of market capitalism tend to be proposing the alternative of “perfect system with no flaws, to be named later”. If people support communism, they should come out as communists instead of throwing potshots at “meritocracy” as if it’s possible to have a market capitalist system where some people don’t earn more than others.
I don’t have an account on Twitter.com but I occasionally read my brothers’ Twitterings, or Twitterings that get linked in places like this if my interest is piqued somehow. This means I’ve also occasionally come across these arguments people have where they have to issue their Tweets in parts (e.g. “1/6”, “2/6”, etc.). The experience of reading that is like watching a potato sack race, minus the entertainment value.
You know, there are other websites and services out there that will allow you to write as much as you need to and then send it to another person for response. You don’t have to use Twitter.com for that stuff. (If you’re bound out of some contractual obligation then disregard.)
Agreed. Multi-part Tweets are a scourge upon humanity. I’m somewhat forgiving of 2-parters, but that should be the max.
The people who go to 20 or so should be tossed off a bridge imho
(plz don’t dox me for this comment kthx)
I think part of the problem is that Twitter is really a children’s toy (“Check out [our company]’s new mousetrap! [link]” “Reppin da ATL at this football game! [pic]” “Here’s my smarmy bumper-sticker opinion on current events,” etc. are the kinds of things that work best there) but adults are trying to use it like a serious tool. Enough adults are doing this that they’ve convinced themselves they’re not using a children’s toy.
It’s like watching two grown men seriously trying to swim a race in a kiddy pool and act like it’s the olympics.
In a sane world, the response to the initial Twittering of whoever started the conversation linked above would be “Haha, why are you trying to talk about this on Twitter.com?? Just put it on your blog or email me.”
Twitter succeeded because of the character limit, not in spite of it. The limit is key to getting writers to be succinct, and respects readers time and attention. And most good evaluation mediums are size-limited: Resumes (1 page), Book/Movie Reviews ( N-words).
When you defy a convention (like breaking the 4th wall) you are rightfully held to a higher standard. But some people are able to pull it off beautifully. Examples include:
Marc Andreessen’s tweetstorms
David Hines’s Days of Rage review
Fun anecdote told through multiple tweets laced with memes
It’s not even the character limit that makes Twitter a children’s toy. I agree that tight constraints encourage creativity and can produce beauty when they cause succinctness (e.g. in poetry).* But Twitter is mostly just a collection of “dark patterns” and cog psy hacks used to generate data that is sold to advertisers (or something). Its closest cousin is something like the Bejeweled game. Its meatspace analog would be a combination fidget spinner and Nose-Frida, plastered with cheap emoji decals.
*Note, the disgust I registered in my above comments was about Twitter’s character limit being awkwardly exceeded, not cleverly observed.
Also, Eliezer Yudkowsky on Facebook about the way that minimum wage laws help enforce credentiolocracy.
I am going to presume he is excluding things like “no really you do need to be a qualified electrician if you’re going to re-wire a house” from the ‘credentialocracy’, and that is because we would see the absurdity of the argument if it were framed in the terms “the only reason I, Deiseach, would apply for the job of air traffic controller is because of the minimum wage floor for the job (even though I don’t know the first thing about air traffic control), and the only reason the Air Traffic Control Hiring Guy would ask for ‘you need a Certificate in Air Traffic Control’ is in order to reduce the number of applicants to a convenient number to call for interview”.
I think, if we put the case like that, you can see why the argument doesn’t work: of course there are other reasons than minimum wage for the requirement for credentials for this job!
So if we look at the kind of jobs that are handwaved away as credentialism, we think of things like hair-braiding (or rather, Americans seem to think of things like hair-braiding, as that seems to be the example trotted out when pooh-poohing the craze for credentials) – things that are regarded as unskilled or very low-skilled labour. Anyone can do them. Anyone can cut and style hair, anyone can mind children, anyone can bake and decorate cakes, anyone can work on a building site as a navvy, etc.
That’s wrong for two reasons: first, anyone can’t do it, or else we’d all be cutting our own hair and decorating our own cakes. You need some kind of skill and talent for it. If Susie leaves you looking like you got run over by a lawn-mower after she cut your hair, or Julie’s cake looks like something the dog threw up, they are not going to get return business, credentials or no, minimum wage or no.
Second, there’s a lot more to even unskilled labour. If you are taking on workers on a construction site who’ve never held a shovel before, most of your time is going to be taken up trying to teach them the rudiments of the job. You can do this with a couple of guys where most of your crew is experienced, but if you are routinely hiring on unqualified/unexperienced labour, you are going to lose time and money at best, set yourself up for accidents like this one at worst (some of the news coverage suggested the blame was with unqualified labour being used that didn’t know how to prevent dry rot in wood).
Even burger flippers in McKingdy’s need to have HAACP training, because food poisoning can kill people. So even ‘unskilled’ labour involves on-the-job training, and when hiring, an employer is going to prefer someone who can show “yeah I’ve experience” because that means less time bringing them up to speed when they’re on the job.
Thirdly, the notion that with no minimum wage, the uncredentialed can all walk into jobs – why? And what is this notion that if an advertised wage is only five or four or three dollars an hour, this will cut down applicants? Sure, if I have qualifications that will get me a better job, I won’t apply for this. But if I have no qualifications and am looking for work, then I need to apply for any job that will take me, regardless of pay. Because you have to work to live, and I don’t know anyone who has the luxury of turning up their nose at “pah, this doesn’t pay minimum wage, I’m not going to bother applying!”. If you can only work at something that is unskilled/low-skilled, then there will be lots of applicants for jobs not requiring credentials, and the wages don’t come into it when it’s a question of “earning three dollars an hour” versus “earning no dollars an hour”.
If the boss is fielding one hundred applications for ten jobs, they are going to use some criterion to pick and choose – be that “have you ever done work like this before?” or “hey yeah I like leggy blondes in short skirts, you’re hired”. Indeed, scummy employers like having a large labour pool because even if there’s a lot of turnover due to them treating their employees like crap, they can always replace them with new workers. Having credentials or qualifications is seen as a protection by the employee in that case; they can get a better job elsewhere, they are not at the mercy of “all I can do is unskilled labour”.
I mean, it’s a lovely idea that the uncredentialed will all turn into entrepreneurs and open home hair dressing, electrical repair, baking, car mechanics, etc. businesses from their front rooms but I don’t think that is going to happen in reality.
Fourthly, this site often waxes merry over homeopathy. Uncredentialed ‘anyone can set up in business’ is the likes of this; oh you don’t need to go to a doctor about that pain in your side, I’ll give you a dose of my grandma’s home cure remedy and it’ll fix you right up! Which is fine if it’s a stomach ache, not so fine if it’s appendicitis. Credentialism may be gate-keeping in a sense, but the sense is “this protects you from quacks and incompetents”.
To sum up? The chase to get credentials is due to (a) the guarantee of safety and accountability for the public (b) the guarantee of “this guy has some notion of what the job entails and I don’t have to spend all day holding his hand and teaching him ‘no this is how you use a shovel'” for the employer (c) the expectation for the worker that they can get a decent job (d) the transition from manufacturing to service and knowledge economy really has exacerbated the stark divide between ‘likely to have this job or a similar one in five years’ time’ and ‘zero hours don’t know if I’ll be working even next week’ work, and the difference in pay and conditions. Everyone is pretty much agreed that the days of good-paying, secure, low-skilled manufacturing work are gone; now even to get one of the replacement ‘green jobs’, you need some kind of qualification. It needn’t be a university degree, but even for the “learn coding in boot camp” kind of jobs touted on here, you still need the “learn it in boot camp” part first – you will not walk in the door and be taught while you work if you know nothing at all. And any kind of a decent job is now one with the necessity for a qualification or credentials attached, so the poor old minimum wage is very low down the list to be blamed!
Even if any of you doctors, engineers or economists are “sure I’d be happy if my kid became a fork lift truck driver”, er, they will still need to do a course in learning how to operate a fork lift – because accidents are very expensive and employers won’t take the risk. It can be as quick as a one-day course, but they want to see that bit of paper when you’re applying for the job!
It turns out that farm labor takes experience, not just because of the need for endurance, but because cutting lettuce heads quickly with a machete isn’t something people just know how to do.
The need for credentials is a matter of degree. You make a good argument that there should be some sort of credential for hair braiding, but you don’t make a good case for requiring 1000 hours of training and thousands of dollars.
you don’t make a good case for requiring 1000 hours of training and thousands of dollars
Indeed, there may not be a need for thousands of hours and dollars, and that is the expansion in credentialism everyone is arguing about. Requiring a degree where a vocational certificate or diploma would do, merely as some form of inflation or a sorting mechanism rather than what the job requires, is a definite point of debate. But I think dragging the minimum wage in here is a red herring.
But the thing is, if Betty does Sue’s hair as a friend, that’s okay. It’s when Betty is running a small home hairdressing business for friends and neighbours and charging money that we start to run into problems. Because if Betty leaves the straightener or bleach on too long, it could damage Sue’s hair. And it’s possible that Sue will go to court over “I wanted to get my hair done for a wedding, Betty ruined it, I had to pay a professional hairdresser $$$ to fix it and it still looked bad for the big day so I’m suing for emotional distress and so forth”.
(Friendship does not often survive these kinds of trials, I have seen).
Since Betty is running a business, she’ll probably be found liable (I’m not sure on the law here, all the lawyers feel free to jump in). As a private person, I imagine it will be difficult to cover the costs of the court case plus damages. Probably won’t have business insurance, either, and may well run afoul of local government on business premises and running a business out of your house.
Mainly, I imagine that the court would come down harder on someone without official qualifications carrying out activities for which they are charging people money and are running some kind of commercial operation. Aunt Mary provides chicken salad for a family party and people get food poisoning because she wasn’t careful about the food preparation, that’s unfortunate. Aunt Mary does this as part of an under the counter catering business and charged you for providing it, that’s more likely to end up in court, and more likely for a dim view to be taken, if Aunt Mary had no training or had done no HAACP course or the like.
That’s a very good point – but what if we change the liability standards too? Before The Jungle and the c. 1900 Progressive Movement, as long as Aunt Mary didn’t set out to poison you, everything was legally fine and the Buyer should’ve Beware’d. If she does it too much, well, she’ll get a reputation and go out of business. Meanwhile, voluntary accrediting agencies can judge restaurants and hairdressers for people who don’t want to trust to the market over time.
Because if Betty leaves the straightener or bleach on too long…
Hair braiding in particular gets thrown around a lot because people who call themselves “braider” instead of a more generic term like “stylist” specifically don’t use chemical treatments or even cut hair. All they do is braid. So they need to know basic hairdressing hygiene, but making them spend over 1000 hours getting trained for a cosmetology license, as many U.S. states do, is unnecessary.
Over here it’s not hair braiding, it’s people running home hairdressing businesses. I have no idea how economically viable they are, as I dimly remember from my childhood they were more popular than having to go into town to go to a proper salon, but I don’t think the same constraints apply today. But I imagine there are some still left, and they would do things like cut and style hair, hence why I used that example.
The hair braiding does seem like one of those gray areas – if all the person does is braid your hair into fancy designs, with no other treatments, then yeah requiring a course seems excessive. I wonder, though, if there are cases where the lines blur – someone starts out braiding hair, customers ask if she can do styling etc as well for them and then you have someone who is basically an unlicensed and untrained hairdresser.
I would assume that unlicenced hairdressers mostly acquire clients by word of mouth. And they won’t succeed in that if they do a terrible job.
So I see no real issue with permitting unlicensed operation in this sphere.
The need for credentials is a matter of degree.
/facepalm
Cutting one’s own hair has some unique challenges; cutting someone else’s is easier. But almost anyone can indeed cut hair, mind children, decorate a cake, or work as a laborer. These are all jobs which can be done by individuals with little skill to a standard which many find acceptable. Many parents used to (and may still) hire 16-year-olds (and younger) with no particular skill to watch their young children, yet the District of Columbia now requires a college degree to work in a daycare? This is rank credentialism. Hair braiding in the US in this context usually refers to African American hair braiding, which I am sure many African American preteen girls can do pretty well; requiring a cosmetologists license is again credentialism.
(e) Guild protectionism, to keep prices up for licensed professionals
(f) Runaway credentialism for credentialism’s sake, usually justified by an appeal to (a)
The credentials I legally needed to write software that controlled medical equipment in the US… zip. The credentials I actually had were a 4-year CS degree, but not everyone I knew working on it had even that. The credentials legally and practically required to operate said medical equipment can be gained by a one-to-two year certificate program. The credentials needed to hand out medication prescribed by a medical doctor… a pharmacology doctorate. There’s something wrong here; even if you’re generally on the side of more credentialing, the setup we have makes no sense.
Your (d) can be alleviated in certain fields with a low cost for error; this is perhaps where a lack of minimum wage comes in. A contractor who picks up a guy in the Home Depot parking lot to do some digging doesn’t worry about whether he knows one end of a shovel from the other. On the off chance he doesn’t and can’t figure it out by the end of the day, the contractor has lost only a day’s work (more likely less, as he’ll get rid of the guy by lunchtime)
Many parents used to (and may still) hire 16-year-olds (and younger) with no particular skill to watch their young children, yet the District of Columbia now requires a college degree to work in a daycare?
That’s the precise attitude that does cause problems because people go “I can hire a 16 year old to mind my kids for a couple of hours, why on earth do I need to pay $$$$ for professional child-minding?” at the same time that they expect the highest quality of care because they’re paying for it.
Because it is professional. Your 16 year old is not minding, feeding, toileting, and commencing rudimentary education of twenty kids between the ages of 6 months (or earlier) and five years, for four to eight hours a day, five days a week.
Do you allow your 16 year old babysitter/childminder to smack the kids if they’re misbehaving? What discipline if any can they use? How do they deal with an emergency? Little Jimmy bites his sister Sally, what does the babysitter do about that, and is it the kind of thing you want done? Do you allow them to have and use their mobile phone? “Two to three hours supervision when the kids are in bed” is not the same thing at all as working in a childcare centre.
When 16 year olds come to work in a day care/childcare centre for work experience as part of Transition Year, they need to be covered by insurance from their school. There are rules about what they can and cannot do. They need to be supervised by a staff member all the time, and that means “all the time” – no “I’m just nipping out for an hour, keep an eye on the kids while I’m gone”.
There are regulations governing the operation of a daycare centre, and when things happen in a day care centre, the public demands “something must be done!” so more regulations get passed.
These are the standards of care parents should expect in a day care/childcare centre, and I think you will note that the average “16 year old babysitter” is not held to the same standards, including:
Yeah, anyone can mind a child. Why, then, do parents pay for childcare? Why not one of you stay at home and raise the kid(s)? And then we get into the question of why ‘stay at home housewife’ is not considered ‘work’ but that’s a different row 🙂
It’s the same as “you don’t need a mechanic, you can learn to fix your own car”. Sure, but I don’t see garages going out of business wholesale. And people expect their mechanics to have some training and qualifications, not just “well I changed a tyre one time, sure I’ll overhaul your engine!”
It’s the second attitude that’s the problem IMO, not the first. Perhaps most parents don’t actually need all the intimidating-looking stuff you put in your post, and a lower standard of care (at a lower price) would be quite sufficient.
It’s gotten to the point where economically, it makes sense even for high-income professionals for one of a couple to stay home and take care of even one kid rather than pay a daycare which is managing 30 at a time. The conclusion, then, would be that (married) parents pay mainly for non-economic reasons.
So minding children is a specialist field now? My parents used to hire junior-high-school girls for the job.
Yes it’s a specialist field, just like being a kindergarten teacher! Why, back in my day, my bed-ridden grandmother taught me to read and write for nothing, why do teachers in schools expect to be paid salaries for doing the same thing?
I don’t know what line of work you’re in, Paul, but I bet there are amateurs out there who do the same thing for little or no pay. That being the case, why are you expecting a salary for doing the same thing non-professionals can and do perform?
There really seems to be no idea of what exactly child care workers do in their working day; the idea that “hey my parents hired a 15 year old for a couple hours on Saturday morning to keep an eye on my brother and me to make sure we didn’t fall down the well but apart from that we had free range” is the same thing as paid weekly day-long child care is pervasive, apparently.
I forgot to tell you the kicker: when they got home from wherever they were for the evening, my parents used to look after us themselves, without holding a license of any sort for the job! (Your original claim, remember, was about the necessity of credentials, not whether a hired professional might do a better job.)
Since you ask: I’m a retired air traffic controller. At the time I was hired, I knew nothing of the work: they trained me on the job, which was the norm then and is even more the norm now that there are fewer ex-military controllers available.
I assume your parents were decent at parenting. However, if you sample randomly from the pool of all parents, you might get clueless or outright terrible parents. The kind of parents who are the reason why most of the civilized nations have child protective services (who enter the picture only in the most extreme cases, if at all). And even that comes with the benefit that most adults are more ready and willing to handle their own kids better than some random other kids. (Many people find other people’s kids annoying, but not their own; moreover, they are to some extent protective of their own kids. Even the majority of the terribly clueless parents!)
Should your random parent be in charge of other people’s children in the daycare center?
There you go. We’re pretty much at the opposite pole from requiring a license here.
I’ve noticed that some people here model each other in much more detail than I do. I’m frequently at the level of “that’s a familiar name” without even remembering whether that person is left wing or right wing. There are a few people with strong posting styles that coalesce as personalities for me.
My life might be better if I modeled people more. (Or not, since some degree of forgetting how annoying people can be might actually be useful.)
Has anyone acquired this as a skill rather than just starting out with a natural interest?
I couldn’t shut it off I wanted to. I think even if there were no names I’d still unconsciously be trying to group posts into a buckets.
Ditto.
What do you think would be improved by this?
More skill dealing with people.
Better ability to keep track of what’s going on in fiction. I’m faintly aware of my mind shutting down when I see a bunch of new names in a story.
For what it’s worth I don’t even look at the names 90% of the time. I know there is that battleship guy, and I recognize Scott’s icon. But that’s it. Unless there are certain people who you can recognize as trolls or routinely give false info then it isn’t worth the brain power to remember.
I remember things about people (e.g. political orientation of SSC commenters) very easily and unconsciously. If I didn’t, I don’t know how I’d learn or even if that would be useful. In real life, I sometimes have to deliberately pretend I’ve forgotten things to avoid seeming weird.
Naval Gazing:
Why the carriers are not doomed, Part 3: The DF-21D
Series Index
One subject I haven’t dealt with yet is the DF-21D Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM). This is a common bogeyman among those who are convinced that the carriers are doomed. The claim is that because it will arrive quickly and evade US defenses, there’s nothing we can do about it.
The DF-21D first came to US attention in 2009, and prompted concern in the navy, and panic outside of it. One issue was that defense analysts said that there was no defense against it, which in some circles got interpreted as ‘no defense is possible’, which was not at all the same thing as ‘no defense presently exists’. War Nerd went so far as to claim that this applied to any weapon at all which is on a ballistic trajectory, including a Harpoon in pop-up mode. I’m not sure what planet War Nerd is from, but it isn’t this one. The pop-up mode may or may not help it evade CIWS, but the mere existence of a non pop-up mode gives lie to his claims (leaving aside the fact that a missile in pop-up mode isn’t even properly ballistic.)
In fact, this statement was a simple reflection of the fact that the systems necessary to defend against the DF-21D were not yet in service at the time. The SM-3, the navy’s missile for missile defense, was still in development. It is explicitly designed to intercept missiles like the DF-21D, and so far has proven a successful program. The Block I missiles have officially entered service, and are aboard deployed ships. Finding a complete list of tests has proven unexpectedly difficult, but there was a run of six straight successful tests between failures in October 2012 and October 2015, and the most recent test failure was due to human error, not a missile failure. Conceptually, ballistic missile defense is simpler than air defense, as the target, while fast, is on a predictable trajectory. The best evidence we have suggests that, in a fully worked-up system, this is indeed the case. The Israeli Iron Dome has proven extremely successful, and while hitting faster targets at longer range is obviously more difficult, the problem is ultimately one of engineering.
A number of other strange claims have been made about the SM-3’s capability relative to the DF-21D. One is that because the ASBM will be targeted at the ship launching the SM-3, it will not have time to engage before the ASBM is too deep in the atmosphere for the SM-3 to intercept it. This seems a strange claim, as crossing targets are universally harder to intercept than closing targets, and there have been successful tests using satellite data to cue the AEGIS BMD system. Even if it was true for the current SM-3 Block IB, it almost certainly would not be for the next version, the Block II, which is 50% faster, and has been said to have marginal capability against ICBMs.
Another common claim is that, because the DF-21D presumably uses a maneuvering re-entry vehicle (MaRV), it will be able to dodge interceptors. This is even less likely. MaRVs are not magic. They rely on aerodynamic effects, and there just isn’t much air in the upper atmosphere where an SM-3 intercept would take place. Even at the speeds of a DF-21D reentry vehicle (RV), they couldn’t meaningfully dodge. (I have done extensive research into this for space warfare-related projects.)
But what about lower in the atmosphere? The USN has a backup to the SM-3 in the form of SM-2 Block IV and SM-6 missiles for in-atmosphere intercept. Down low, there definitely is air, and the MaRV could in theory attempt to dodge. However, the MaRV is still going to be hypersonic, and hypersonic aerodynamics are very inefficient. The best shapes only manage a lift-to-drag ratio of about 3 to 1. Any high-G maneuvers low in the atmosphere will rapidly deplete the MaRV’s speed and increase its vulnerability to follow-on missiles.
The RV’s hypersonic speed also leads to other problems. The amount of time the missile has to lock on is very limited, and optical and IR sensors are not particularly effective at hypersonic speed and low altitude. I discussed this in more detail last time, and laid out the problems involved in finding the target.
But all of this assumes that the DF-21D is a real threat in the first place. For a weapon that became known to the public in 2009/2010, very little new information has come out since then. Most recent media articles can be traced to information from that era, and only the better ones have even looked at the dates. As of today, the DF-21D has yet to perform an over-water test of the seeker. They have no guarantee that the system will work at all, much less on a moving target which they have to tell apart from all of the other potential targets the missile can see. This cannot simply be a case of the Chinese having not gotten that far yet, as the DoD has said that it reached initial operational capability (IOC) in 2010. (The US wouldn’t even consider declaring IOC on a missile with so little testing these days.) If they still considered it an important element of their strategy, I strongly believe they would have conducted a more extensive test program by now.
This is confirmed by other indicators of a shift in Chinese strategy over the past 8 years or so. There’s been a long-running schism within the People’s Liberation Army Navy, between those in favor of projecting power and those in favor of the more traditional role of defending the coasts. The DF-21D is definitely a weapon of the second group, but they’ve been losing ground lately. The best example of this is the Chinese aircraft carrier program, with Liaoning’s entry into service and the recent launch of their second carrier. (It’s been said that the DF-21D was aimed at Chinese aircraft carriers, not American ones, but that it missed them, too.) Another major boost to the power projection faction has been Chinese escort operations off the Horn of Africa. The Chinese have become the preferred provider of escorts in the region, mostly due to their rather liberal Rules of Engagement. (Shoot first, keep shooting, don’t bother asking questions.) This has given the PLAN considerable prestige. In fact, the PLAN has recently been pushing an alternative translation, the People’s Liberation Forces Navy. I don’t speak Mandarin, and can’t comment on the technical accuracy of the revised translation, but it does show a distinct shift on the part of the Navy from being merely responsible for protecting the Army’s flank to being a major player, both within China and on the international scene.
Part 4 is going to be on submarines, but it will be delayed. I recently discovered I hadn’t discussed Pearl Harbor at all, and that deserves a column or two, and this is still a battleship column at heart, so those are going to jump the queue.
Is this actually Part 2? The index only lists a Part 1.
This is Part 3. Links for posts after OT80.0 are in replies to the index comment. Part 2 was in OT 80.5.
Please consider someday writing an Operation Sea Lion column that might also discuss if an invasion could have been successful if the rescue at Dunkirk had not occurred.
I’m also interested in Sea Lion, but I thought the major obstacles to the Germans successfully carrying this out were their total inability to match the Royal Navy in the channel, and their lack of success in gaining the air superiority which might have (but probably wouldn’t have) made up for their inferiority in surface ships. Strength of English ground forces was way down on the list of problems.
From my limited understanding, a major problem for the Nazis would have been providing reinforcements after establishing a beachhead. The English having fewer ground forces would have therefore reduced the Naval logistical requirements of any invasion.
How significantly, though? The British hardly retrieved any equipment from Dunkirk, which I think made that – not men, or even trained men – the limiting factor for a while afterwards.
Plus, I’ve heard Churchill was ready to bombard any German landing with mustard gas.
@James Miller
I pulled the relevant OOBs.
Here’s the list of BEF in 1940 (wiki):
13 Infantry Division
1 Tank Brigade
1 Armored Division
1 Infantry Brigade
(There were more units dispatched after Dunkirk to southern France, but if there’s no evacuation, I think it’s fair to assume that those units will be held at home.)
Here were the British forces in September of 1940 (Nafziger):
26 Infantry Divisions
1 Tank Brigade
2 Armored Division
9 Infantry Brigade
3 Machine Gun Brigade
So, that leaves us with 13 Infantry Divisions, 1 Armored Division, 8 Infantry Brigades and 3 Machine Gun Brigades if no units can be evacuated from France. Obviously the British are spread thinner than they were before, but at least 4 of the Infantry Divisions were in Northern Ireland and Scotland in September of 40. And none of this counts the Home Guard.
The German plan was to land ~9 infantry divisions, which would have had no mechanized support and very few heavy weapons. Total failures at Dunkirk, in the air, and at sea might have made Sea Lion not totally impossible, but that’s three miracles you’ve already asked for, and you need a fourth for the invasion to work.
@Bean, thanks!
@Evan “Plus, I’ve heard Churchill was ready to bombard any German landing with mustard gas.”
That might have cost the British and Russians the war as the Germans, unknown to the British, had much better poison gas than anyone else. Greg Cochran told me that the Germans bombing Russian cities with nerve gas would have been far more effective than bombing them with explosives.
I don’t think I’m going to. It’s not something I’m sufficiently interested in to be worth tracking down sourcing to the level I’d need to do it to my standards. Protagoras is pretty much correct. The Germans couldn’t get air superiority, and they weren’t going to be able to beat the RN at sea. A German invasion of the UK would have more than undone all the work the Germans did in taking out the BEF at Dunkirk in this scenario. It would have failed to work on all levels, and even throwing the Germans every plausible advantage, it fails when analyzed. Think about how much work it took for the allies to cross the channel. Now, remove total air and naval superiority, and most of the preparation time. Yes, there’s fewer troops, but it wouldn’t have been enough.
Sea Lion was basically the German generals producing paperwork to distract Hitler until his ADD lead him elsewhere, in this case to an attack on Russia. There are people out there who have already done very good takedowns of the concept.
This is the one I’d recommend.
Great post!
What if you precede or accompany the DF-21D with an NEMP?
NEMP is a pretty serious problem for unhardened systems, but it’s relatively easy to protect against. I’ve heard stories of a Chinese factory producing EMP-hardened televisions because it was easier and cheaper to do that than to remove the hardening that they’d built for the military market. (I assume they were producing displays for something.) US warships are protected.
Heh, I was going to ask “So War Nerd is full of shit?” after the A-10 discussion last thread, but decided that might just be stirring up conflict. Turns out there was no need.
When you run out of naval topics, I vote for this.
Seconded!
A bunch of the stuff I wrote is on Atomic Rockets. To some extent, I’ve moved on from that hobby, so it probably won’t happen.
Edit: As for War Nerd, I’d say that your description of him is entirely too nice. Not even motivated reasoning would seem enough to get to his position on that particular issue.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised that we have some Atomic Rockets contributors here.
Two at least. John Schilling has stuff there, too.
(And to anyone who reads my stuff there, I can only apologize for my writing style. I started that project when I was a college freshman and was trying to sound scholarly, and just kept using the same style, but I cringe reading it now.)
I have done extensive research into this for space warfare-related projects.
I believe that would be congruent with Autistic Cat’s interests re: human defences against possible alien invasion 🙂
It is. That’s why, when he first brought it up, I said that it was basically pointless because we don’t have the tech to fight anyone who is technologically capable of mounting an interstellar invasion.
I think this topic has come up before but if China or some other hostile actor was going to make a big investment in a technology that could overwhelm the defenses to disable or destroy a carrier group, would Rods from God be one such answer?
The biggest difficulty I could imagine is, as you’ve often mentioned, the fact that they’d be trying to hit a moving target, and it’s much more difficult to be accurate as opposed to a busting a bunker or somesuch. Aside from that though, I don’t imagine the other active defenses you’ve outlined could do much about a big fuckoff mass of kinetic energy coming in at a tangent. And of course, with enough rods accuracy is much less of a concern.
Probably not. The problem with kinetic bombardment is that it’s really expensive. Orbital launch costs about as much as cocaine by weight, IIRC. There’s really no good economic case for it. Buy more missiles, instead.
1. Orbital launch vehicles cost lots and lots of money and put their payloads in orbits from which they can be called down on any given point of the Earth’s surface during two narrow windows per day. Suborbital missiles cost merely lots of money and can deliver their payloads to any point on the Earth’s surface at any time. Why are you paying extra to put your weapon in a less convenient location.
2. Suborbital missiles can be placed in hardened silos or on mobile launchers deep in your own territory. Orbital weapons are in plain view to all the world, and can be shot down by US Navy cruisers whenever they feel like it. Why are you paying extra to put your weapon in a more vulnerable location?
3. The guidance problem becomes much harder if you insist on orbital-velocity kinetic energy as the kill mechanism, as you will be stuck with a very intense plasma sheath during the terminal phase. Stick with intermediate-range missiles to keep the velocity reasonable, and add some explosives to make up the difference.
That reminds me of the question of what space warfare is going to look like in the context of a conventional near-peer war in the next few decades.
My assumption has always been that the limiting factor would be cost and numbers rather than capability. That is, that Russia, China, or someone buying Russian or Chinese ABM systems wouldn’t take down US satellites because it’s cheaper and almost as good to jam and/or spoof GPS receivers and satcom units on the ground rather than spending a couple dozen relatively precious exoatmospheric missiles that you should be saving for nukes, and not because they -can’t- take them out.
Is that still the case?
Keep in mind that current ABM missiles can really only intercept satellites in low earth orbit – the GPS constellation, at 20,000 km up, would be unreachable except to a pretty huge rocket, which would be better used to launch a LEO satellite of your own, or a really big MIRVed nuke package anywhere on earth. Especially since you’d need to take out several GOS satellites, at a minimum, to seriously degrade the system.
@Trofim_Lysenko
I think the problem with taking out GPS is as much diplomatic as anything. Even if it’s just between you and the US, it’s a good way to make everyone mad. Also, as gbdub points out, current ABMs can’t reach that high. Even the SM-3 Block II can only reach ~1000 km if fired straight up, and I believe the practical limit for engaging satellites is more like half that. Which is pretty useful for shooting at recon satellites, but not for going after GPS.
@gbdub
My notes say you’re looking at ICBM-class to take out GPS satellites, although it does bear pointing out that you don’t need a full nuclear warhead for the job, and might be able to get away with putting another stage on a smaller booster.
Don’t the limitations of ground-based missiles become moot if you had space-based missiles?
Or is that too sciffy? I took this as the spirit of Trofim’s comment. Maybe we could limit how pie-in-space this is by asking what’s likely, in today’s terms, if someone, or perhaps more likely, several nations, tried to construct an orbital military base. Ignore political obstacles if you want, and focus on logistics. What if space mining became a thing, courtesy of MuskCo, say?
Co-orbital ASAT? That could be an option, yes, although you’re now talking about a very serious rocket to put it up there. I may try to do a back-of-the-envelope and see if you could do anything useful with a smallsat platform, although the problem there is getting someone to launch the thing for you. You might be able to bus a bunch of them up together, but that means each one needs lots of delta-V to get from the bus to the target.
(I didn’t think of this earlier because I’m used to working in terms of surface defense against an orbital attacker, and targets which have some capability to defend themselves.)
I can’t see why we’d want something of that nature. You’d do better with the distributed satellite model we have today. If you need to, launch a bus of co-orbital ASATs ahead of time, although it’s an obvious target for your enemy, and one that they can plausibly claim is de-escalatory to take out.
The GPS constellation has the issue that its components, while at about the same altitude, are in six wildly different orbital planes, and it’d take either a lot of delta-V or a lot of precision to arrange an intercept. I don’t think you could do it with something the size of a cubesat, not with current technology.
You might be able to wipe out one of its planes in a launch, though.
@Nornagest
I’m not even sure you could get enough delta-V on a cubesat to wipe out one plane, but yes, you’d be restricted by inclination if you can’t just use hit-to-kill. The real question is how well the GPS constellation will survive the loss of one plane, which I don’t know.
A single plane? reasonably well though overall accuracy will be degraded. Multiple satellites from adjacent planes? Gaps in coverage start to become a problem.
@gbdub
…I now feel rather stupid that I didn’t check the actual orbital parameters of GPS vs. specific systems instead of just checking to see if they had exoatmospheric intercept capability.
Especially since I know there are plenty of heights that satellites can orbit at. When you make an assumption. When you make an assumption…
I knew that you’d need to take out multiple satellites in order to degrade position fixes enough to matter (thus the reference to a couple dozen missiles, enough to take down a large chunk of the constellation), but obviously didn’t think things through enough.
@bean
I thought about that, but wouldn’t the diplomatic consequences be rather less severe now, with the existence and steady growth of Magellan, BeiDou, etc? I was also thinking in terms of either a near-peer like Russia or China (big enough not to be intimidated by anyone short of the US. Sorry, I do not take the EU seriously as a geopolitical/military force at this time or in the next few decades barring major reforms), or someone with their ABM platforms who’s already diplomatically isolated enough not to care.
That said, Gbdub’s point was very well taken and mostly answered my original question. That said…
@Paul Brinkley
I was thinking ground, ship, or a revival of plane-launched weapons. I assumed (there we go again) that if it’s a big stretch to use ground-based missiles to take out US, or for that matter Russian or Chinese, satellites, that space-based weaponry is going to be even more expensive, and very difficult to hide.
Pretty sure that you’d need to either insert the killsat close enough to its target’s orbit, or give it the capability to do an orbit change to come into range, either of which will ensure that you have eyebrows going WAY up at NASA or USAF Space Command well in advance of any attack.
Again, assumptions, but don’t we (the US in general and our intelligence community in particular) pay pretty damn close attention to the payload and mission profile of anything going into space anywhere in the world? There aren’t -that- many launch sites and platforms.
With carriers not going away any time soon, I’d be interested in hearing about what sort of doctrines folks have to realistically (i.e. not literally-incredible missiles) deal with them. I bet a Jet Era (Jet+? not sure what we’re in these days) carrier-on-carrier engagement looks very different than the WWII ones on record, but I don’t know what it would look like. Is a carrier group able to throw around enough planes to overwhelm the anti-missile defenses you’ve been describing? Does a missile/anti-missile standoff open up a gap for battleships to return? 😉 (I dunno, something something railguns magic)
I’m not sure there is a good answer beyond throwing more missiles at them. As of right now, we’re in an era when the defense is ascendant on these matters.
As of right now, a carrier wing could probably put up about 100 ASMs, which is below the overwhelm threshold. There might be ways to solve this problem (lots of MALDs would be one option), but at the moment, there just isn’t enough striking power on a carrier group to go after another CVBG. That could change if we start expecting to fight other carriers with similar defenses, but submarine-launched torpedoes are the most likely candidate for heavy anti-ship work.
An interesting thought. Yes, in theory the way to solve the problem is to multiply the number of incoming projectiles, which means they’ll need to be cheaper. I’m still a bit skeptical on the railgun, and I’m not sure I’d call what you get out the other end a battleship. Part of it is just that we’re not really optimized for fighting surface ships, except for the submarine force. (And they’re a lot better than the Chinese SSNs, so there’s not a huge threat from that end.)
Huh, neat. Combined with I think an earlier thread saying subs are too slow to be effective unless the CVBG wanders into you: the jist of this series is that not only are carriers not doomed, they’re basically invincible.
So am I understanding correctly that the anti-missile defenses would give enemy aircraft an even worse day than enemy missiles? Namely that it would preclude using modern aircraft in a role analogous to divebombers & torpedo bombers – fly the payload around the outer layers of anti-missile defenses so you only need to beat the individual ships’. Would a torpedo being launched from jet speeds even work?
Related question: how proportionally more expensive are modern planes, anyway? With the pricetags thrown around I always get the impression that we really can’t afford more than occasional losses. Whereas, AIUI, in WWII casualties were expected but we were able to crap out enough planes for it to be manageable.
Not exactly. Diesel-electric submarines are too slow to be effective unless the carrier wanders into them. Anyone operating carriers probably also has SSNs (nuclear submarines), which are an entirely different beast. The Chinese are still fairly far behind on those, though.
Yes. It’s better to shoot the planes, because then the plane can’t be reused and it was probably carrying several missiles anyway. The traditional US strategy was to have fighters take out the airplanes, and use SAMs for the missiles.
ASW aircraft drop torpedoes regularly, although they have parachutes, and are going after submarines, not surface ships.
That’s more or less correct. This is a very complex question, but to put it in perspective, a modern military airplane has approximately as much electronic equipment as a WW2 warship. It’s a very different world from the one where the bare airframe/engine is the main cost. Small production runs don’t help.
Question: do any of the described anti-missile defenses work effectively against a 16”/50 Mark 7 HE shell? Such a shell travels considerably faster than a Harpoon (or comparably to a Granit/Shipwreck), if Wikipedia can be trusted. The other question of course, is whether generating an intercept on a one-ton piece of solid-ish metal is as effective as on a much more fragile missile–I don’t have a good sense of how well this would knock things off target or badly damage the shell.
In either case, putting aside “something something railguns” entirely…how would an Iowa-like vessel [1] with similar destroyer escorts, and presumably its own CIWS/RAM (and maybe VLS if there would be room for such?) handle an attempt to sink a carrier? By your own logic, if I understand it, the carrier group couldn’t sink it with anti-shipping missiles…would it not close, and eventually put 16”s on target? If you *can* defend from such shells with SM-3s, you’re going to run out of SM-3s before I run out of shells, and if you can’t it’s just game over.
What am I missing? Surely something, or I assume we wouldn’t have retired the bloody Iowas!
[1] Assuming arguendo it has the speed to prevent the carrier from just steaming away…
This is a good question. The shells are really durable compared to missiles, but at the same time, all you have to do is deflect them. I don’t see why you couldn’t hit them with a SAM, but it’s definitely not the kind of target current warheads are optimized against. This could change if it had to, but I don’t see it happening soon.
A couple of things. First, remember that most SAMs can also be used in anti-ship mode. So it’s eventually going to come down to whoever has more missiles. Whichever side can put together more SSMs/SAMs will eventually probably win.
Second, you wouldn’t need SM-3s for the job. If my assumptions are correct, you’d want SM-2s or ESSMs. SM-3s are exoatmospheric. “Ballistic” is not a category with special significance (it actually makes things easier to hit), and for something in the speed/altitude band of a 16″ shell, the conventional SAMs are the correct weapon.
But that aside, in theory this could work. I’ve heard vague reports that in the 80s missile battles were expected to end with ammo exhaustion with the combatants damaged but afloat, and gunfire would be the deciding factor. There was no mention of this being connected to the Iowa reactivation, and I haven’t been able to run down other mentions of the issue.
A couple of things. First, the US isn’t that concerned with peer-level surface warfare. The primary anti-surface platforms are aircraft and submarines. Second, the range is kind of short. Third, they were really expensive to run. In manpower terms, 4-5 times as expensive as a destroyer/cruiser. At some point, the capability just isn’t worth it.
Or damage the fuzes. The British Sea Wolf short-range SAM was tested, effectively, against 4.5″ shells; I’m pretty sure an ESSM would be effective against 16″ HC or AP. A CVBG wouldn’t carry enough Sea Sparrows to stop an entire battleship’s load of 16″, so the question is whether Aegis could be made smart enough to ignore the shells that are going to miss.
The real threat in this regard is the Russian dual 130mm automatic gun, which “only” puts half as much metal and fire in the air as a triple 16″/50 but does so in the form of eighty discrete shells per minute. Good luck shooting all those down.
I vaguely recall hearing about Sea Wolf vs 4.5″, but I can’t say where, or if I just think I remember. In any case, I’m not 100% sure about ESSM being able to stop an AP shell. It’s a base fuze, which means that there’s a lot of very strong steel between the missile and the fuze. It might strip the ballistic cap, though, which would probably cause it to miss.
I suspect this is the case, or could be implemented fairly quickly. Of course, you’d probably find a cheaper projectile fairly soon.
Also true, and more or less what I was getting at earlier. Better defenses means you need to put more shells in the air. 16″ is a good first step, but I’d lean towards an automatic 5″ as your best compromise.
Careful; you calculated that threshold assuming the SAMs would have a clear field of fire. With a USN carrier air wing doing the shooting, there will be Growlers providing stand-off jamming. You were willing to credit ECM with 50% effectiveness when it had to hide an entire aircraft carrier; seems only fair to assume at least that level of performance against SAMs trying to pick stealthy cruise missiles out of the clutter. Also, some of the inbound missiles will be HARMs going after the Aegis radars.
But mostly, I think this is a matter of nobody planning for real carrier-on-carrier warfare, because only the USN has real fleet aircraft carriers any more (though Russia and China are at least training aspirationally). If it mattered, the F-18 could probably carry supersonic ASMs comparable to BrahMos-NG on the same pylons as Harpoon, cutting the enemy’s engagement window by a factor of three or so, or dual-mount lighter antiship missiles like JSM for a total salvo of 192 from a carrier air wing.
Good points. I’d be nervous taking a Growler within SM-2ER range of a carrier group, for fear of getting shot down, but it would probably help. But the ultimate point is that the USN isn’t set up for heavy anti-surface work, and hasn’t been since 1945 or so. Not in the way that the Soviets were at the height of the Cold War.
Interesting. Is that just due to our navy being so much bigger than the Soviets’ that we could afford to prioritize other things, knowing that if push came to shove we could (in an amusing twist) beat up the Soviet navy through sheer numbers?
ETA: Or more of a “screw it, if it gets to that point we’re all nuked to hell anyway” 😛
Pretty much. Keep in mind that missile defenses have gotten a lot better since the fall of the Soviet Union (at least on their side), so a carrier’s air group should have been perfectly adequate to take out what they had back in the 80s or earlier. Since then, nobody has had the naval strength and been aggressive enough to merit a focus on surface warfare as opposed to land attack.
So Part 4 is subs, but are you planning a section on the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game? Seems… relevant to your interests. Apologies if you’ve gone over it elsewhere, I wasn’t able to turn up anything with a site:SSC search.
Looks like the relevant article is currently paywalled, but as I recollect the MC02 was meat of the War Nerd’s original critique of carriers (and surface ships generally): that (i) cheap swarm tactics wiped out a big surface fleet in the 2002 exercise, and (ii) technological advances since then have, on balance, made cheap swarm tactics even more effective. I’d be keen to hear your take.
I was wondering when it would come up. Millennium Challenge 2002 was in fact an ego trip on Ripper’s part, and revealed nothing at all.
(Stuart is Stuart Slade of Forecast International, a professional naval analyst.)
I don’t really have anything to add to that, other than to say that what Stuart said there makes a lot more sense than the conventional narrative. Network-Centric Warfare suggested that the problem was that the attackers didn’t run their operations fast enough, but I think Friedman had moved from ‘analyst’ to ‘historian’ before he wrote that.
I have no particular doubts that the media could have been mislead by Ripper into reporting what they did. Defense correspondents are mostly idiots, for reasons I cannot explain adequately.
Ha. Someone might consider tuning up the Wikipedia entry on MC02, as it currently lacks so much as a “Criticism” section.
While we’re doing recent naval stuff, I’d be interested to hear your take on the Littoral Combat Ship. Consensus seems to be that it’s a dumpster fire, but that sort of consensus often seems to grow out of a kernel-of-truth type of thing; I’d like to hear about it from someone that actually knows what he’s talking about.
Basically, everyone in the navy went insane in the mid-200s, and somehow became convinced that they could have everything in a small, fast package. What they actually got was a helicopter pad that’s capable of 45 kts, and not much more. Oh, and the engineering on the LCS isn’t in good shape. But the helicopter is the most important thing on a modern small surface combatant, so it’s not a total loss. And the LCS-2 has really good helicopter facilities.
That said, it looks like the Navy is getting its house in order, if slowly. The follow-on frigate will have a normal speed (which was normal for a reason) and otherwise will be pretty similar to the Perry in terms of capability. (Yes, RAM looks much less impressive than SM-1, but electronic limitations on SM-1 made it a pretty poor weapon.) So as a Perry replacement, it’s not horrible. The mission modules don’t work, but maybe we can use the early ones for mine countermeasures with the gear permanently installed.
If only the engines worked.
Wouldn’t helicopters get wrecked pretty hard by the missilefest that keeps coming up in this series? Or are these designed for fighting sub-peer Enemystanis?
Yes and more or less. There wasn’t a terribly coherent design philosophy on the LCS, and some insisted that they could operate in hostile areas (no, I don’t understand it either). For everything where there isn’t a huge air threat, the helicopter is about the most important piece of equipment on the ship. It deals with small boats well, it’s the best ASW weapon, and you can use it to put people on other ships or ashore.
If we’re still talking about the Littoral Combat Ship, then littoral warfare is pretty much the domain of smaller craft, and it takes at least a large frigate to carry the sort of horizon-to-horizon surface-to-air missile systems we were talking about in other threads. Since helicopters can and do carry missiles suitable for destroying smaller warships from reasonable standoff ranges, this is likely to turn into a net win for the helicopters.
Possibly a draw if someone manages to fit an effective point defense system like RAM into a small combatant, as frigate-launched helicopters can’t carry enough missiles for even minimal saturation attacks, but that hasn’t been an issue so far. If it is, we may wish we’d kept Harpoon on the destroyers and frigates, because then the winning strategy would likely be to stay ~100 km offshore and launch 4-8 round salvos of Harpoons cued by the helicopter. The helicopter itself should in any event be able to stay safely clear of anything short of a large modern frigate.
Damnit, the one time my old job is directly relevant to a naval gazing question my reply gets eaten by gremlins. Looks like a sacrifice to Finagle is in order.
@ Mediocrates
Even if we ignore the issues with the exercise itself that bean raised, these sort of swarm tactics only work in situations like OIF where the larger vessel has both limited space to maneuver, and restrictive ROE that prevent it from simply zapping any small boat that enters it’s interdiction zone.
Also, I totally beat Judit Polgar in that chess game where, as soon as she vacated A7, I put a spare pawn on that square and immediately took her rook while promoting myself a second queen. Completely proves my theory that Grand Masters don’t pay enough progression of mere pawns across the board, because see what happens when a pawn shows up where you don’t expect it?
It would probably be useful to conduct an exercise to see how well USN doctrine deals with cheap swarm tactics, and I would wager that at some point they have. MC ’02 was not that exercise. Did show that if the USN has to deal with an enemy that has teleporters, psionics, and antigravity tech, it may come up short.
MC ’02 was, AIUI, supposed to be that exercise. When Ripper tore up the rules, he undermined any lessons that could have been learned. The basic answer is that small boats are easy meat for helicopters, because you need a couple thousand tons to get even a point-defense AD system to work. I recall one Iraqi FAC that couldn’t fire missiles because the pounding it was taking kept misaligning the radar system.
Thoughts on this article, bean?
Short version – since the Zumwalt’s “killer app” (gun support with super smart very long range shells) seems to be DOA, and the PLAN has been developing a much larger surface fleet than when Zumwalt was proposed, we ought to delete the Zumwalt guns and cram as many VLS cells for anti-ship missiles aboard as possible, then use the ship in an aggressive anti-surface role.
Any merit to that? Big questions would seem to be a) is a Zumwalt actually survivable enough to operate as a “lone-wolf” raider in a not fully permissive environment (yeah, it’s stealthy-ish, but without the full anti-ship missile defenses of a fleet?) and b) would it actually be a more effective anti-surface platform than an SSN? The sub would have the advantage of stealth and nuclear power, but the missile-Zumwalt would have more long range firepower and, being a surface ship, could probably coordinate more effectively with other Navy assets for targeting etc.
Conversation aboard Chinese flagship, 2025
“Sir, we continue our patrols to try to find the American fleet.”
“Very good. What have you found?”
“Well, we’ve picked up several signatures that look like fishing boats”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“But one is doing 30 knots.”
“Ah. Do we have an identification?”
“Based on [redacted] it’s one of their Zumwalt-class.”
“What’s our nearest asset?”
“Sir, I’d suggest a ship-launched attack, as we can coordinate via satcom. Let’s just hope we’ve managed to defeat American traffic analysis.”
Aboard Zumwalt:
“Sir, it appears that they’ve just launched an attack. I’m glad we broke their code enough to figure out what signals are real.”
“Excellent. Bring up the radar.”
“Sir, it’s not working.”
“Again? I thought they fixed that.”
“SPY-3 has never had a high priority, as everyone else is using either SPY-1 or SPY-6.”
“Very well. I suppose there isn’t much we can do. Abandon ship. We’d be sunk if they got even one hit.”
(End of file.)
Basically, we’re not short on VLS cells, and the money would be better spent buying more missiles. Also, there’s only three, so you’re not buying much capability, and refits like that are expensive. And the Zumwalts don’t work at present. They’re destined to be trials ships, which is a role they’ll be pretty good at.
And long range is overrated in an anti-ship role anyway.
As for the bit about using SSNs as an ASW escort, well, now you’re just trolling. We’ve been trying that since the 50s, and it hasn’t ever worked spectacularly well. At least in most cases, the escorted unit had backup ASW it could reliably talk to. Send the submarines off on their own.
These days, the right answer to anything having to do with surface warfare shipbuilding is basically “buy more Burkes”.
If you twist your ear juuust right…
If “link an article I know will get bean’s dander up” counts as trolling then guilty as charged I guess, but to be clear I’m not actually advocating this.
That wasn’t directed at you. It was directed at the author of the article. Sorry if that came out wrong.
It looks like the current plan to make the Zumwalt’s guns work is to buy an existing guided shell:
http://navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence-news/2017/june-2017-navy-naval-forces-defense-industry-technology-maritime-security-global-news/5332-bae-systems-and-leonardo-to-adapt-vulcano-guided-round-for-ddg-1000-s-advanced-gun-system.html
This makes a decent amount of sense – the main reason the LRLAP program is dead is that the ammo was stupidly expensive, and the reason it was stupidly expensive is you can’t get economies of scale when you’re only making enough ammo for three ships. If you can take an existing round and adapt it to the Zumwalt’s guns, it’ll probably be much cheaper.
That’s a private BAe-Leonardo venture, and the USN doesn’t seem to be involved. If they’re smart, they’ll keep it that way. Honestly, that looks targeted more at the land-based 155 mm market, with the Zumwalt bit thrown in as a hook. But maybe BAe will bamboozle the USN into biting. They’re pretty good at that, better than they are as engineers.
I think people not familiar with the tech probably just get the wrong idea when they hear that the DF-21 could “dodge” interceptors. They probably envision something like a movie where our heroes detect an inbound missile and perform a series of wild maneuvers to avoid it.
But a DF-21 (or any current tech missile, as far as I’m aware, particularly a mostly-ballistic one) is going to have a hard enough time packing enough sensors and maneuvering capability to find and hit its target, let alone a totally separate sensor package to see an incoming interceptor and calculate on-the-fly evasive action to avoid it (without getting too far off course to hit its own target).
I thought the main advantage of MaRVs, relative to intercept, was basically that their terminal course (and thus final target) was unpredictable, plus they could do some pre-planned “be a moving target” type evasive action. Which would probably work well against ABM systems with limited maneuvering that relied on ground radar for even terminal guidance. But wouldn’t that be less effective now that ABM is more capable and less reliant on knowing exactly where the target is going to be throughout its trajectory? And of course since MaRVs generally refer to atmospheric maneuverability, they’d make no difference against exo-atmospheric interceptors like GMD and SM-3
This is a very good set of thoughts. Thinking this over more, I’m not sure where “MaRVs are invincible!” came from, but it doesn’t make much physical sense.
Sometimes you come across old quotes that seem to perfectly describe something that happens in the here and now. I’m thinking of quips about human nature or particular social problems that arise again and again.
Does anyone else react to this with a sense of dread and hopelessness? Whenever there is some problem or destructive pattern that most people seem unaware of or at least isn’t common knowledge, and it turns out that Plato or Nietzsche or Tolstoy or whoever knew about it and wrote about it it seems like there’s no progress.
If centuries old understanding by the most well known thinkers of all time remains mostly unknown, what point is there to keep talking? Isn’t public discourse hopelessly broken? If something hasn’t become well understood in many decades or centuries, what reason is there to think that it ever will? Are we condemned to write the same thinkpieces over and over again reiterating points that everyone would know if we had a good enough way to summarize and disseminate insight?
Am I making any sense? I think what I’m after is that unless every time people discuss something, the sum total knowledge and insight relevant to the issue from our intellectual history is there, available and active in their minds, we’ve suffered a failure of knowledge distribution. Put like this I realize it’s extreme, but on a gut level I do feel it.
You wouldn’t expect an average person to be able to calculate the circumference of the Earth by measuring shadows, yet that was done over two millennia ago. Hell, you wouldn’t expect an average person to even remember what the circumference of the Earth is.
That is to say: it’s unreasonable to expect so much from ordinary people. People retain the information they need in their day-to-day lives. All of the rest of human knowledge is left to specialists like us. There’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone needs to be a scholar.
Indeed.
My Russian language professor once asked our class for opinions on some issue of Russian grammar or other, and put the matter to a vote. The majority voted wrongly, of course, and he explained why – where knowledge is required to respond correctly, the majority is probably wrong, since they lack knowledge.
Of course it’s unreasonable to expect it, I guess I didn’t make that clear. It’s just that that fact really bothers me, the same way it bothers me that if you clean something it’ll have to be cleaned again – meaning that when it gets dirty it feels like every time you’ve cleaned it has been in vain.
Or put differently: it’s like the situation where people are starving everywhere all the time even though there is plenty of food, just because we can’t get the food to where it’s needed. Or people dying from easily preventable diseases because it’s too difficult to distribute medicines, etc.
It’s like a constant catastrophe that’s still entirely normal. I guess by that I begin to comprehend what it’s like to be a political radical like a communist or an an-cap: there’s this deep-lying feeling that something is hopelessly broken and no one seems to notice (yet I think, unlike utopian-ists, that what I want is ultimately impossible. Unless we become the Borg I guess, but that brings other problems…).
My chosen metaphor would be being an einheri, preparing for a battle at the end of the world you are fated to lose.
Hm. I don’t know what that means. Sic.
Einherjar (singular: einheri) are the fallen warriors in Valhalla. The event they prepare for is Ragnarok.
…and to answer the question below, this is why “reading the classics” is important.
Indeed.
It’s just that that fact really bothers me, the same way it bothers me that if you clean something it’ll have to be cleaned again – meaning that when it gets dirty it feels like every time you’ve cleaned it has been in vain.
Entropy. Always going to be easier to let a rock roll down a hill than trying to push it back up again. It’s still better to clean the house and try to teach people to behave better, though 🙂
Clean your room!
By average people, though?
40,000 km is a nice round number, but of course that number was defined based on (the best measurement of, two centuries ago) the circumference rather than the other way around, and that wasn’t the case two millennia ago.
That’s because there is no progress. Human nature effectively precludes a state where problems which are solved stay solved. This is particularly true for social technologies that are invented and reinvented to curb the destructiveness of people’s vices. At first it works, because people are well-motivated by personal experience of the evils of not curbing the problem. The problem declines, and people begin existing who have no personal experience of the evil, and are not motivated to continue expending effort to keep the problem they’ve never witnessed under control. Eventually, they’re the majority, and maintenance of the preventative measures fails, returning to the initial situation.
Right now, we’re in the final stage, where our institutions are falling apart, because our mostly-still-living ancestors decided to reallocate the effort budget away from maintaining the nice world they grew up in, on the mistaken assumption that the maintenance was not needed. Maybe in a generation or two, we can get started on rebuilding the structure of society conductive towards cooperate-cooperate.
The default situation is public discourse being broken and/or non-existent. If public discourse isn’t broken, it’s a rare, limited and brief occurrence. Not to mention, I’m skeptical of public discourse being particularly useful for anything with regards to solving society’s problems. Towards exacerbating them, on the other hand…
You are making sense.
I don’t think there’s anything much to be done, really except build civilization again on the ruins of the old one. Maybe, one day, we will luck into some way of stabilizing the situation in the middle of the cycle, but we’re nowhere near a solution.
Has technological technology never solved a social problem?
Solved? Not sure. (Let’s call it “physical” tech, OK? Like computers and agriculture and aspirin are physical tech, but monogamy and democracy and religions are social tech.)
There are a few physical technologies that do help out with social problems. For example, DNA and blood testing helps keep crime down and reduce erroneous convictions. On the other side, we have plenty of physical technologies that make things worse socially, like easy-to-use cheap contraception, or easy-to-use ranged weapons.
I was thinking of that as something that made things better. Of coruse a lot wil depend on whether you think of promiscuity as wrong because of its consequences, or whether you think it is inherently, wrong deontologically. Or maybe you are doign that thing where you sell your deontology to to others based on its consequences…
If the length and quality of women’s lives is important, then contraception may be one of the most beneficial inventions in centuries. Maternal and infant mortality both *plummet* when birth control is available.
I also suspect that without it, we’d be dealing with a lot of overpopulation-related problems, but that’s more speculative.
Reliable birth control has mostly solved the problem of unwanted pregnancies. The old solutions were shotgun marriages and orphanages. It used to be easy to adopt a baby, because so many of them were given up for adoption. These days it’s a huge hassle, because the agencies can afford to be more selective.
Reliable paternity tests cut through an awful lot of the mess of paternity suits, which used to be based on reputation, for lack of anything better to go on.
Both of those are examples of technology (mostly) solving social problems.
The old solutions were shotgun marriages and orphanages.
You forgot infanticide by killing or neglect, and death by backstreet-abortionists. Contemporary psychology will add social costs of development in bad circumstances. Yes, there is definitely improvement.
I have a personal theory, which this margin is too narrow to contain, that this is basically the story of the Old Testament.
You mean how every three or four generations the Israelites forget the entire plot up to that point and start worshiping a golden calf or something? It fits.
Unless it’s the Israelites wandering in the Sinai, in which case this happens every three or four months even though the corpses from the last round of divine smitings are still smoldering. Well, pretty close.
Yeah, the timeline for that bit never made much sense to me.
It’s not so much a failure of general dissemination, as it is that human nature doesn’t change very much. Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” has the general gist: every time we think “Ah yeah, but it’s gonna be different this time!”, “This time for sure! Lead to gold!”, then reality smacks us in the mush because human nature – and the societies we build out of that nature – runs in the same kind of channels.
And changing human nature is a big, complicated, messy business; see all the pharma posts on here where basically we’re just drenching the brain in chemicals and hoping for the best that some of them will work a bit better than others. We don’t know (for all the enthusiasm of the “I’ve got an MRI machine!” crowd) how the brain works, what bits of it do what exactly in more than a fairly crude way, how it all links up, and what the hell genetics can really tell us if we tweak this gene and remove/paste in that about how it will affect things like intelligence.
That particular technology exists and has existed for millennia, without interruption until recently. But for some reason, executing serious offenders has greatly reduced our willingness to execute serious offenders. It’s as if these two are linked! 😉
That particular technology exists and has existed for millennia, without interruption until recently.
You don’t think the fact that it has “existed for millennia, without interruption” demonstrates that it doesn’t work to change human nature? Executing murderers has not stopped murder, else by the 12th century we would have had no more notion of why there were laws still around against a crime no-one was committing, than we would have had of trying to fly by flapping our arms.
It hasn’t stopped murder, but it has reduced it.
Take a gander at Human Universals by Donald Brown.(Actually probably from the Blank Slate by Pinker, I just misremembered where it was from.) One of the diagrams is most instructive – primitive peoples have violent death rates that would utterly destroy us, were they transplanted to our societies. These societies have violent death rates among males that dwarf the casualties of the World Wars.And that was definitely cured by capital punishment, specifically, not by the rule of law in general?
Hm. Good question. Hard to disentangle that one.
If the “warrior gene” results in more aggressive behavior (like crime), wouldn’t centuries of culling these people have resulted in fewer people passing along warrior genes?
That would depend on how much of that culling happens before they have children, right?
Presumably even someone committed to a life of crime has a while before they start getting to death-penalty offenses.
What do you make of Pinker’s claim that people are less violent than they used to be?
I think that convincing the vast majority of people (at least in the developed world) that they don’t want to own slaves is quite an achievement. No guarantee it will last, but it has held for quite a while.
It will hold, because the cheap slave labour kills incentives for technological progress that translates into power. Once the ruling class understands that, there is no going back. Just like cheap natural resources keep countries underdeveloped (exception: Norway).
Larger exceptions: United States and Canada.
The ruling class is not an agent. Ruling-class people are agents, and they will happily work against the interests of their class if it gives them a personal advantage. Not all of them, but you only need a few to thoroughly outcompete the others.
The ruling class is not an agent. Ruling-class people are agents, and they will happily work against the interests of their class if it gives them a personal advantage.
Developing a technology is usually too slow and the results too uncertain to do that. We’re on a societal/(proto-)national level here, not individuals.
Let me make this a little more concrete, then. Suppose you’re a legislator in a first- or second-world country that’s fallen on hard times in the not-too-distant future. A proposal has come to the table to create new forms of involuntary servitude — not whips-and-plantations slavery, oh no, but some other way of making people work for you without paying for it. Let’s say, to expand your existing system of penal servitude and contract out prisoners to local companies suffering from labor shortages. Your government makes money, the companies you’re contracting with make money, everyone wins. Except for the prisoners you’re compelling to forced labor, but they’re prisoners, right?
You have been told by a historian your committee scraped up somewhere that slave labor inhibits technological progress, indirectly and over a period of centuries. On the other hand you’re dealing with a labor crisis now, and plus you stand to personally benefit from the proposal, because you own stock in a couple of those companies. And you’re still telling yourself that it isn’t really slavery.
I can see this decision going a couple of different ways depending on how you feel about the particulars. I can’t see your historian’s advice having much to do with your decision. But it is decisions like this that ultimately drive where your culture’s going to go, not some kind of vague class interest.
A country seriously considering prisoner-slaves as a solution to a workforce shortage is a failing state anyway, I’d say, and certainly not an example for the rule of people understanding long-term non-egotistic/nepotistic thinking.
About every contemporary first- or second-world country in a crisis has a high unemployment rate. So the labor shortage of your example would only be relevant to high-qualified/domain-experienced workers or experts. Try to get them to do their best in a hated social position where they are also morally despised (convicts) and for no (or under-valueing) remuneration. Good luck! (Also, the smarter ones are less likely to get caught in the first place, and crime negatively correlates with education).
Just imagine Madoff working for naught in a finance company.
The societal fallout will be bad:
Falling behind, compared to no-slavery nations, because a large or critical (it has to one of these, or your example would be pointless) part of the working population is not motivated to work smarter (and thus shorter or less hard) or to invent/improve (by being allowed to keep the spoils).
Social tensions result from having a part of the population seen as less worthy of freedom (laws cannot permanently silence basic human decency, think of the ’60s).
There will be desire for revenge and/or for sabotage in the enslaved, necessitating enforcement wich is by nature not pleasant.
The enslaved will become disingenuous and/or brutalized, and so will be people immediately dealing with the slaves; this social deterioration will permeate from there into the general population.
Being temporary for the individual and/or as a nationwide measure is not likely to change the above to a meaningful degree. And as soon as they are free, they will leave the country; being qualified, they will have good prospects elsewhere.
Don’t fight the hypothetical. The backstory to my scenario is not important; it was just meant to illustrate one semi-plausible way of moving a modern society incrementally closer to slavery. You could substitute others without loss of generality; the important part is the incentives of the people voting on it, not the details of the proposal itself.
(Incidentally, it’s not much of a hypothetical. Many American states did exactly what I described in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and there are looser analogies to more modern programs.)
That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang.
@Nornagest
the important part is the incentives of the people voting on it, not the details of the proposal itself
We have a different value of ‘understanding’ in once the ruling class understands that. To me it entails not losing sight of consequences in the face of short-term gains. But a more cynical worldview is certainly not totally unrealistic.
No, I’m not saying the ruling class is short-sighted. I’m saying the ruling class doesn’t make decisions, individuals like the senator in the hypothetical do. Those people might individually be more or less far-sighted, but no matter how enlightened they are, protecting the long-term interests of their class is going to be way down on their list of priorities relative to protecting (or, if you’re being cynical, enriching) themselves and their children and solving the immediate problems they’re confronted with. And given those priorities, pursuing an otherwise solid plan that interferes with long-term technological progress is not a bad call: the benefits are large, immediate and personal, the drawbacks long-term, diffuse and societal.
The idea of a class interest only makes sense insofar as it doesn’t substantially interfere with individual interests. Compare gene-centric vs. organism-centric evolution: an adaptation can do the most wonderful things for an organism, but it’s still doomed if thereby disadvantages the gene’s propagation.
I get your point as a general principle; my statement didn’t allow for exceptions and needs softening: something about ‘predominant culture’ instead of ‘ruling class’ and a ‘strong pressure’ in that direction instead of ‘not going back’.
Anyway, thanks for the enlightenment! 🙂
What do you make of Pinker’s claim that people are less violent than they used to be?
Less violent? I don’t know. Less likely to react violently, due to social sanctions including the risk of arrest and jail? Probably. People don’t duel anymore, but they still stab one another after drunken (or even sober) arguments. Maybe less likely to get into fist fights, but much more likely to seek redress via legal means, or means such as using social media to get a witch hunt going.
Look at the little treasures of Evergreen State College (unpixellated pictures readily available online if you really want to see their smug mugs) who decided posing with baseball bats was the thing to do – ah yes, the fighters for tolerance, peace, and love! Willing to smash your head in! Though granted, this was more posing than anything else, but the notion of being rough and tough and striking fear into the enemy by using force and threats was something they were in love with, so go ahead, tell me that violence has decreased in the hearts of humans, Steve!
OTOH, there is a case to be made that removing the tail of the most violent from the genepool has a lasting pacifying effect. (Until being violent becomes a fitness bonus again, then all bets are off.)
There’s also the Church banning cousin marriage, yielding much larger in-groups.
Considering how this topic started, I must ask: have you read his book about this?
Who, Daisy? Which book, The Blank Slate?
I was thinking Deiseach, and “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.
Considering how this topic started, I must ask: have you read his book about this?
No, and I really should do, shouldn’t I? But I just find something off-putting about Pinker’s writing, which is unfair: I will try to give it a fair go 🙂
Not that you have to (even though I think it’s quite good), it just illustrates the point: how good of a discussion can we have about violence and history without everyone knowing all there is to know about it? And Pinker’s 600-page tome is really just a start.
Evergreen’s students of 2017 posture threateningly but don’t do much harm; Oxford scholars of 1355 caused a riot that killed over 90 people. Violence has definitely decreased in that demographic at least.
Deiseach:
“Less violent? I don’t know. Less likely to react violently, due to social sanctions including the risk of arrest and jail?”
Less violent means less violent behavior.
I’m inclined to think that needing habitual inhibitions to stay out of jail probably means that a lot of people believe those inhibitions are part of their nature, and the inhibitions would last for a while even if the police weren’t available.
Also, I think inhibitions can be trained in by way of guilt and shame and lack of experience, it’s not fear alone. There might even be some idealism, ethics, or good will mixed in.
A great many modern people have never killed an animal, and find it difficult to do so.
It is still unclear whether the effect Pinker observes is a reduction in violence or a concentration of it. If the latter, the end state is really amazingly bloody wars every century or two, and I can’t help noticing the thousands of thermonuclear missiles sitting around waiting for targets.
OTOH, the number of thermonuclear missiles took a big drop about a generation ago, so maybe?
Disagree because of all those hydrogen bombs. We are like a person who has gone from cutting himself to playing Russian roulette. As to slavery, would it increase the wealth of a modern industrialized country if it legalized slavery?
@Nancy Lebovitz That’s because slaves are no longer profitable.
Really depends on the definition of ‘slave’, but forced manual labour competes poorly against machinery and minimum-recompense paid labour, sure.
Slavery was still profitable when it was actually outlawed, though.
Citation needed? The USSR and the Nazis both ran forced labor camps; my vague understanding is that the Nazi ones were not profitable but I don’t know about the USSR. More importantly, this is a change that happened in the 19th century, and are we really sure that they were less profitable way back then?
The USSR and the Nazis both ran “let’s extract some value from these people we’re exterminating” camps. Profitability was strictly secondary.
I wonder: At least some of the US prisons farm out their prisoners for labour. They presumably earn some money doing so, since the prisoners are paid some pennies too (AFAIK). In which case – is the prison making more money off their labour than they spend to house, feed and secure the prisoners?
The use of slave labour in Nazi Germany during the war wasn’t just of people sent to concentration camps, though – they also sought people from the occupied territories, early on voluntarily, but quickly it turned to press-ganging people. It was intended to free up ablebodied men for military service – but they seriously underestimated the degree to which an (often half starved) slave labourer would be less productive.
In WWI, the Germans used forced labor from northern France and Belgium to pretty effectively. General Jack’s Memoirs stress that the British soldiers attacking at the Somme were exhausted from stoop labor while the Germans were fresh. According to Speer he couldn’t stop the guards from stealing the food he sent to his slave labor in WWII, so they kept dropping dead before he could get much out of them.
“According to Speer he couldn’t stop the guards from stealing the food he sent to his slave labor in WWII, so they kept dropping dead before he could get much out of them.”
Seems like something Speer would say after the war if he had deliberately underfed Nazi slave labor because he calculated that the extra work he could have gotten out of them if they were properly fed would not have been worth the food cost. If Speer really cared about stopping guards from stealing food he could have said, “if your prisoners’ appear undernourished you will be sent to fight the Russians.”
There’s still agricultural slavery, manufacturing slavery, sex slavery, and domestic slavery. I assume it’s somewhat profitable.
In particular, the economics for domestic slavery haven’t changed a lot.
They most certainly have, I say, looking at my electric oven, interior plumbing, and washing machine.
@Evan: Good point but I do wonder in which direction that changes things. These appliances would increase slave productivity and therefore make slaves more desirable, right? (Variation on the standard “tech needn’t depress wages” argument.)
@hoghoghoghoghog, for someone with a large number of houses to clean (like a hotel-keeper), sure. But most of us only have one house, and with all these labor-saving devices, there wouldn’t be enough work for a slave there. Even setting aside all moral and financial considerations, I wouldn’t know what to do with one for more than an hour or two each day.
Meanwhile, the labor-saving devices have decreased the cost of the alternative: now I only need to spend an hour a day, or so, keeping house myself. For a whole lot of people, even if they’re morally insensitive, that starts to run pretty close to the fixed costs of keeping a slave – e.g. food, clothes, and the intangible costs to privacy.
(The one exception is childcare. Technology like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine has made that somewhat easier, but it’s still hard and very labor-intensive.)
Childcare has gotten _harder_, at least for older children. They’re expected to be supervised more closely than they were, and not permitted to work nor in most cases to accompany a parent while that parent works.
Empirically, domestic slaves have been used and still are used in modern developed countries, and not just by rich people who live in mansions.
Now maybe the families that use domestic slaves are simply mistaken about whether their arrangements are “profitable,” but I doubt it. While it is true that a slave owner has to provide food, clothing, and other needs for a slave, modern technology has drastically reduced the cost of those things. The average family in the US only spends around 16% of their budget on food and clothing. And if both parents in the family work, then those costs have to be compared to the price of things like daycare services.
And vacuum cleaner. I once read somewhere that beating rugs was the most labor intensive single task in maintaining a household.
Aristotle observed that if looms would weave by themselves and lyres play, there would be no need for slaves.
I suspect the achievement is allowing people to achieve what they used to need slaves for, without slaves.
On the other hand, the vast majority of people in the developed world are perfectly willing to buy products made using slave labor, as long as it happens far enough away to be “out of sight, out of mind.”
Perhaps said people don’t fully trust the sources who are telling them the product they buy is produced from literal slave labor (as in, not counting sweatshops that simply have pay people in developed countries consider to be insufficiently high)
If I truly believed Product X was produced by no-kidding literal slave labor, I wouldn’t buy it. But if someone tries to tell me “Your sneakers were made by slave labor!” I’m going to assume they’re full of shit unless they provide some pretty compelling proof.
Even the article you link seems to mix “bad working conditions,” “low pay,” and “child labor,” and “slavery” almost interchangeably. These things are not the same.
INHS, there would be even more slavery if people were willing to personally own slaves.
I’m not just talking about practical, intractable problems of human nature but small, petty things as well. There are people all over the world having conversations about things that would be greatly improved if they only had full awareness of what had been said on the topic before. And that information exists, it’s available, we just haven’t got a way to store and distribute it effectively. That bothers me.
I realize I sound like a crazy person.
Isn’t that what the Bible is? And all the memes we reference from it?
Somebody’s working and not getting where they want in life, and they see their neighbor doing well, and instead of figuring out what they’re doing wrong, they hurt their neighbor. That’s Cain and Abel.
As I said, your observation is from Ecclesiastes 1:9, that there’s nothing new under the son.
But, it’s extremely difficult to tell people anything they don’t want to hear, and they’ll probably snap at you for it. Matthew 7:6 “Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.”
The New Testament is commonly believed to provide an argument against this.
Wow, what an awful typo on my part. Good catch Iain.
ETA: Although theological speaking, Christ was the Word incarnate, and the Word existed before all ages, so Jesus wasn’t new either.
“nothing new under the son” is not the same as “the son is nothing new”
Binaries are bad. Don’t think in terms of failure or success, but degrees of success. Of course we aren’t going to transmit everything, but can we do better? There is one binary that is important: are we accumulating or dissipating? But this is a long-term question and asking it about a single topic in a single time is not so important.
One response is to encourage people to read old works. Another response is to consider the possibility that most people aren’t actually discussing anything and seek out people who are.
Things are probably getting better in many ways and insight is being accumulated, albeit slowly and with painful inefficiency.
Maybe it’s just that the advent of social media has made so much more low-quality conversation visible that things appear worse. To use another metaphor: it’s like wading through diamonds in the rough, you know each one of these ugly rocks could be cut and polished into a perfect specimen, but it would take astronomical amounts of time and effort to even make a dent in the problem of turning all that potentiality to actuality. With this in mind all the rocks look even uglier.
But improvement is possible, just soo slow and laborious.
James Hannam claims that the printing press had a negative effect on the advancement of knowledge, by making it easy to promulgate superstition. I’m skeptical, but he’s correct about the raw observation of what was printed.
I actually have the exact opposite reaction. I find it deeply comforting to think that people of the past were essentially “like me”. The fact that there is common ground* between myself and a culture as functionally alien as ancient Greece or stone age Amazonian tribespeople is a reason for hope rather than dread.
I can see how this might bother believers in Whig history who view ethics/society is a problem to be solved but I am not one of them.
*Yes, even if that “common ground” is bad puns and dick-jokes.
I enjoy that feeling too – that we’re all the same in that we’re people and the ancient Greeks were just like us. What I don’t enjoy is the feeling that the understanding our civilization produces is so poorly integrated, preserved and disseminated that almost none of it actually reaches the vast majority of the population.
It’s like when people go through a decade of schooling and still don’t understand percentages because 99% of everything failed to stick. Collosal failure.
What I don’t enjoy is the feeling that the understanding our civilization produces is so poorly integrated, preserved and disseminated that almost none of it actually reaches the vast majority of the population.
I’m more inclined (because I’m a grumpy old conservative) to blame that on the Dead White European Males Ugh and Everything Must Be Relevant To The Youth! views of education; that schools don’t/shouldn’t teach the Classics because that is Eurocentric and irrelevant and boring and who needs to know that anyway unless they’re going to study history in university in which case they can learn it there?
Also we mustn’t ask the little possums to read anything older than twenty years ago at the very most because the way old-timey people wrote is hard to read and understand, with their fancy prose styles and words not commonly used on Twitter! Thanks be to God I was too ignorant to know I shouldn’t be reading all that 19th century stuff because it would only puzzle and confuse my poor delicate little 20th century teenage brain 🙂
I have no idea why, but I can’t stop laughing at this line. The imagery is just too perfect.
That said, though: is there any evidence to suggest that an education in the classics has a positive effect on society in general, or maybe just on education in other fields specifically ?
The obvious answer is, “duh, of course it does” and “those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it” etc. But, since this answer is obvious, I’m instantly suspicious of it; many obvious ideas are wrong.
That is to say, does the act of reading the classics really have the power of turning a little possum into a well-educated human; or is it rather the case that some people an handle an in-depth education, but most can’t, and thus they naturally gravitate towards those newfangled non-educational curricula ?
@Bugmaster
One vote against the usefulness of classics: Despite the widespread classical upbringing amongst the ruling elites (or at least, more classical than what we have today), the early 20th century didn’t manage to avoid great mistakes like WW1 (or any stupid war).
On the other hand, the institutions of classical education produced lots of people who could comment on the miserable contemporary happenings while sounding exceedingly civilized, quoting Homer and Virgil. Even the sheer rhetorical skill around then was impressive. Maybe it was because people actually took poetry seriously? (I’m now thinking about how Iron Maiden references Tennyson and Coleridge and starts Aces High by playing a record of Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. In forty years’ time, is someone going to do anything similar with Trump’s tweets? And who the heck is Tennyson of our time, for I have not heard about them?)
Also, assume that the classical education is widespread. Most of the populace will not get much about it (think about Wodehouse's description of Bertie Wooster's haphazard understanding of the Greek classics and the Bible after his public school upbringing), but some will understand it and will occasionally create something so magnificent that even the masses will enjoy it. One Oxford scholar spends time researching Norse sagas and other obscure legends, and then writes a series of fiction that proves astoundingly popular success and decades later today permeates our popular culture.
And sometimes, something truly amazing happens. For example, as some other commenter reminded me in the previous OT, the Renaissance got started because Petrarch successfully managed to convince lots of people to be fascinated about the classics. Did it improve anything? That remains an open question, but certainly not much immediately. Yet after a couple of hundred years, suddenly ideas like democracy, freedoms and rights of men, and the rule by a written law started to get popular, and one can’t help if there there was some relation between one event and the other. Also, despite what the naysayers say, I think the end result that is the current Western norms of government and judicial process are improvements over the widespread governmental practices in, say, Renaissance Italy.
chica chica slim shady?
The obvious benefit in my eyes is that a shared cultural language facilitates coordination. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is what makes cooperation on any scale larger than immediate kin/acquaintances possible in the first place.
See this exchange above where Anon’s meaning was immediately apparent to me but not to John Nerst. At the most basic level, knowing who the Einherjar were is useful information that will help you understand and thus cooperate with (or fight against) Anon more effectively. Figurative miles of inferential distance can be crossed with a simple name or phrase so long as both of us know the story behind it. For example…
Molon labe.
Ants and Grasshoppers.
Jesus wept.
The gods of the copybook headings.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra 😛
Edit: SamChevre also provides a helpful illustration below.
Obvious candidates; Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and “Dr.” Dre Young.
Edit:
@ Matt M
I know you’re joking, and yet…
One obvious benefit is that exposing yourself to the thought of people millennia before your birth helps you to overcome the prejudices of your own time, and also the chronological snobbery that sees said prejudices as self-evident truths. From what I can tell, the “But it’s [present year]!” fallacy was very rare in the days when everybody was classically educated.
I was waiting for that reference 🙂
A common background of myths, stories and concepts enabled a heightened, efficient and in some ways, better, language. I wonder if, with the cultural fragmentation of the 21st century, this rich texture to language is being lost (specific communities like this one, where you can say “moloch”, “paperclipper” and “adaptation-executor” and expect to be understood, notwithstanding) and ordinary languages are being reduced to a sort of pidgins, suitable only for superficial communication between subcultures. I actually wrote a short piece on that a few months ago.
Just how common are these views, anyway?
I graduated high school in 2012, and it included six years of Latin, three of Greek, twenty-five books in my native language as well as a number in English to read, as well as another few things you might or might not consider conservative. How good would you say your view on current education is? Despite some loud people espousing the views you do, there’s about as many people being loud about your own views, and it’s not clear to me that things have changed particularly much one way or another.
@ John Nerst
I think that cultural fragmentation is the result of this loss. If you knock down the unifying cultural framework the culture stops being unified. In my more cynical moments I wonder how much of the damage is a product of enemy action.
@ Dewitt
Anecdotal but in my experience; Going through high-school the North Eastern US in the mid-late 90s, not common but not unheard of either. Going to college in California in the early 2010s quite common. I’d guess maybe 1/3rd or so of the humanities department were sympathetic to the argument but then I can’t say for sure because I was a dirty STEM-lord. 😛
Probably not that big of an issue, then. All right.
@hlynkacg
I don’t see loss of common culture and fragmentation as two different things where the first caused the other. Rather, they’re two ways of saying the same thing, and the cause behind it seems obvious to me: mass communication meant cultures stopped being exclusively geographically based and instead started breaking along “personality lines”. This is getting even more extreme now, of course.
It’s a great thing in many ways and a huge moral victory. People can now “be with their own” and live their lives the way they want, but on the other hand it makes societies fracture. There is no “fix” here.
Sure there is. Those shared stories, or rather the ability to communicate they provide, are cultural glue.
What are the classics being referred to here? Teaching Latin and Greek is a different ball game to teaching accessible pre-20th century literature (which AFAIK is still done in most British schools).
@hlynkacg
Dre is mainly famous as a producer; Ice Cube, Nas, Kendrick Lamar, or indeed (old) Eminem are more plausible.
@ rlms
True but he is acknowledged as “the brains” of NWA and when all four of your alternative candidates explicitly cite him as a major influence/mentor I think that warrants consideration.
@hlynkacg
He’s definitely very influential, but primarily as a producer and businessman, secondarily as a rapper, and only slightly as a lyricist. The modern Tennysons are musicians who are famous specifically for their lyrics, Dre is more like George Gershwin than Ira.
Having thought about it a bit more, I reckon that Nas is nearest thing to a Tennyson of rap: “I never sleep, ‘cos sleep is the cousin of death” is closer to “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” or “My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure” in pithiness and memorability than any other rap lyric I can think of.
Well, that problem was observed 3000 years ago:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity… The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
So, even your observation that we’re all just doing and thinking and failing at the same things over and over and over again is old as dirt 😉
ETA: Whoops, had not seen Sam’s post above when I replied.
No. This is still a dark age in some ways. That’s all.
(Bad systems tend towards collapse more than good ones. A priori it is more likely that we will stabilise on a good system or destroy ourselves than stabilise with a bad system. In the long run the universe is probably +EV.)
If you found yourself transported into a hunter gatherer society some 10 thousand or so years ago, is there any skill or knowledge that you would be able to offer them to improve their life? Much like that scene in one of the Hitchhikers books, I often wonder exactly how easy it is to translate our advanced modern knowledge into concrete improvements to primitive life, at least as an individual with no access to modern infrastructure.
Wheelwrighting.
Basic measures to prevent disease seem like a good one, like how to handle sick people and when it’s most crucial to wash one’s hands come to mind. Modern man may or may not know better which foods are better avoided or how to cook them (though I certainly wouldn’t).
How about teach them some modern games? Ones that could reasonably be played, of course. I don’t know how many times in history tic-tac-toe has been reinvented, but it’s a way to pass the time and socialize.
“Guys, listen, if you’re gonna sneeze you should at least cover your m–”
[chokes on own organs as they liquefy thanks to some weird 10K y/o virus you have no immunity to]
I’d think you would have a better chance at having an immunity to their microbes rather than vice versa. Though I guess I am not certain how many viable potential pathogens we carry around these days.
How much would stuff like “here’s how you make soap, wash your hands, poop downstream of where you eat, boil your water” help them? I don’t know the answer to that question.
If you dress it up in religious ritual, it could be pretty damn good.
If you dress it up in religious ritual, it could be pretty damn good.
Until people come along and laugh at you about superstitiously not eating pork or shrimps, then everyone dies of various parasitic/food poisoning diseases 🙂
Last I saw, there’s like a billion people still superstitiously not eating pork. In the current year! 😉
Maybe it happened.
I don’t know exactly what levels of technology there were 10 thousand years ago, but I won’t let that stop me from speculating:
A loose understanding of kilns and pottery seems easy to try and make use of. I am far from an expert, but I think my starting process of making a big box of mud with a slit at the bottom and an open top, letting it dry, trying to get a big fire going in there, then making some shapes out of clay and tossing em on in there could probably get me some crude pottery after a few dozen tries.
Similarly, a loose agricultural understanding doesn’t seem bad. I’ve never done more than gardening, but (tediously) hand-tilling some earth, planting and tending some seeds, and then waiting for them to grow into food doesn’t seem so hard to me if people aren’t already doing that. Also, knowing to rotate crops to maintain the soil quality would be a nice tidbit I’m sure. I also think some basics of irrigation wouldn’t be that hard to figure out (at the very least, digging ditches to guide water downhill from a river can’t be too bad, right?).
My grasp on simple machines is far less loose, although it’s hard for me to guess what applications they would have without pre-existing infrastructure for manufacturing. Like, I have no doubt that I could design primitive crossbows or compound bows, but I doubt I could actually make one with the available materials. Levers, meanwhile, seem easy to implement but I have no idea what they would be useful for unless I had other construction-related goals that I wanted to move heavy objects for. I would also definitely invent the wheel if no one had yet (and if the practical challenges like manufacturing and overcoming friction aren’t insurmountable–my first thought would just be to use some abrasive like sand to try and smooth things down… I’m sure all sorts of other problems would crop up though).
Sadly, even if I got the kiln thing figured out, I would refrain from dabbling in anything to do with metals unless I could direct some expendable primitive peons as my boots on the ground, because it’s my understanding that I’d be at least as likely to blow some shit up and die as I would be to actually get anything useful out of it. Also, I don’t know the first thing about how one actually gets metals (throw some rocks in some hot kiln fire and pray, baby). Which is sad, because applying my E&M knowledge a few millennia ahead of schedule would be by far the most exciting idea to me, but I haven’t the faintest clue how to make a battery so I think I’d be a very long way from actually doing anything useful with that anyways (and I recognize that metals would be far more useful in simpler applications anyways). I hear you can magnetize ceramics if you anneal them in an existing magnetic field, so maybe I could build a very crude compass or something that way? Probably a useless avenue to go down, though.
The basics of hygiene seem like an easy call, as other commenters have mentioned. Similarly, the basics of nutrition would be easy enough–I could at least prevent people from getting rabbit fever in the winters and such, I think.
Thanks for the question–I’m way over-caffeinated and had a lot of fun speculating out my ass about this.
I can’t find it now, but a few years ago I saw a video of a guy who made a knife (good looking one too) out of bog iron. So he starts with dredging rocks up from a lake, and then smelting them and forging the knife. Anybody know what I’m talking about?
Something from the Primitive Technology youtube channel, perhaps?
This video preceded that series, but there’s probably something similar in it. Regardless, it seemed like one of those “not impossibly difficult if you know what you’re doing” sorts of things.
Was it gorgeously shot over a winter in (some Scandinavian country) or the like? I used to see those linked on the reddit front page all the time when I spent time there.
I don’t remember the winter part, but it was pretty yes. And yes I saw it linked on reddit, off a default sub.
John Neeman, maybe?
No, but that’s a very nice video. I’ll see if I can find it later. It’s much lower production value, but it’s just some guy in a canoe dredging up bog ore off the bottom of a lake and then smelting it in a stone…thing. Smelter, I guess?
I’ve had thoughts like this on my mind ever since Scott did his Seeing Like A State article. I’m thinking one day I want to write some rationalist fiction around this if no one else does (although probably back to Shakespearean times).
The first issue would be learning enough to contribute, namely language and enough social standing to be able to persuade the tribe.
After that, basic medicine and horticulture would be useful. Agriculture with selective breeding would be handy as well. Construction knowledge would be useful as well for both tools, weapons and homes.
I think the real power would be in establishing some sort of value of experimentation to fill in the gaps of knowledge we’d bring; there’s a lot of things that I know about conceptually but couldn’t do practically. I know that clay can be mixed with other things and fired to make this cool building material called brick, but I don’t exactly know the recipe. I know seeds should be placed at a uniform depth in ploughed soil, but I don’t know the spacing, depth or the difference between good and bad ploughing. Overall though, I think across a lifetime we would be very useful.
Be careful, because all that horticultural/construction knowledge will transform the hunter-gatherer society into an agrarian one. Which is fine, since historically speaking that’s what happened; but I’m not sure if it’s allowed according to the parameters of the original challenge.
Well, ten thousand years ago is just about when the agricultural revolution happened in our history, so at least you won’t get the Time Cops on your ass.
Precisely my thinking, though as usual I’m late to the party here. In terms of immediate concrete skills and detailed knowledge my main ones would be hygiene and antiseptic protocols and first aid/CPR, but the real value would be:
A) trying to get empiricism and structured experiment adopted as a useful tool for improving knowledge and ways of doing things (even ancient man appreciated this to some extent, but there have been plenty of refinements over the centuries even on a purely theoretical level that would be applicable without needing a post-industrial tech base)
and
B) A lot of hints as to explanations that would help skip some of the long swaths of bad explanations for things.
If they have metalurgy, gunpowder.
I don’t know how to make saltpeter, or where to find sulfur, in a pre-agricultural society. Do you?
Sulfur can be found natively in current or former volcanic environments (very distinctive — bright yellow deposits, feathery or chalky). Saltpeter is sometimes found native, too, but IIRC it was usually collected after leaching from various disgusting substances (guano, e.g.).
What I don’t know is how to properly combine the three into a consistently burning substance without blowing myself up.
Sulfur deposits can be found near many hot springs. I’m not sure if simply evaporating the sulfurous water would work, but I’d try it. Also there are often deposits in the vicinity of volcanos. Sulfur has a distinctive color and odor, and I suspect once you get past the language barrier you’ll find people in the pre-agricultural societies already know where to find it. Saltpeter may be found in bat-inhabited caves; my understanding is that under the piles of guano you find saltpeter crystals. The process for making black powder would be rather laborious without machine grinding. You grind up the three elements, mix in the proper proportions (which I can’t remember), then grind the mixture while wet, break into granules, and let dry.
I don’t think many pre-agricultural societies would have had the metallurgy to make use of it in any case. Agriculture precedes the bronze age.
One of the SF series I read had modern people crashed on a primitive planet (no indigenes, however) start with a limestone kiln, the idea being that this is the quickest way to reach a higher level of technology. First trick is getting a refractory vessel and a fire hot enough, which as I recall involved clay and a bellows. However, I can’t say I’m all that sure what you’d do once you got your quicklime, slaked lime, etc. If you’re looking to start a primitive chemical industry, you probably also want sulfuric acid, which is not too hard (burn sulfur and saltpeter together with steam, any alchemist can give you details); this gets you the other major acids easily enough. Not really sure what you’d do from there.
Where do you think wizards come from? Obviously, time travelers who can only make black powder in order to awe the natives with sparkly explosions.
The first uses that come to mind for lime are as a setting agent for cement, and as a flux in smelting.
The best place for saltpeter is indeed the floor of a bat-filled cave, or really any place where a lot of excrement has pooled in a place where water cannot wash away the soluble parts of it. However, it won’t be found in immediately usable large crystals, it’s just mixed in with all the other material.
You can recover it by dissolving as much as possible of the material on the floor into water, and then filtering, leaving the salts dissolved into the water. This water now has a lot of different kinds of salts, but mostly just table salt and saltpeter. Let that dry out and you have a lot of mixed salt crystals.
To use properly, you need to separate out the table salt. The process involves the fact that the amount of them that can be dissolved into water varies greatly with temperature. That is, one of them can be dissolved roughly as well at low temp and at high temp, while the other dissolves a lot better at high temp. Off the top of my head, I cannot remember which is which. However, this can be found with experiment.
Saltpeter is less soluble, so it will crystallize before regular salt. So water mixed with salt and saltpeter was warmed up, evaporating the water and then saltpeter crystals would form.
You can make saltpeter from human byproducts. Namely, urine. You’d have to improvise pretty strongly, but urine, hay, wood ash and water are available in pre-agricultural societies.
If what you all think is important is the recipe for gunpowder and the source of the ingredients, then the lesson you will be teaching is a cautionary tale:
“Science is BAD, it is EVIL. It is man treading on the domain of the Gods, and the Gods will punish man for this transgression. Remember the one called Future!Bob, who came to teach us how to perform miracles of fire and thunder? Remember how the Gods smote Future!Bob with fire and thunder as a fitting punishment for his sins? Took him three long, painful days to die, it did. Don’t be like Future!Bob”.
There’s a reason civilized people insisted that people into that sort of thing build their powder mills e.g. on rafts in the middle of lakes, and that’s with a century or more of experience in how to make powder mills that
don’t blow upblow up rarelydon’t burn down the whole village when they inevitably blow up. If that’s not your area of expertise, don’t go there.Eh, Future!Nybbler isn’t an idiot (even if he doesn’t know how to make saltpeter, which makes the whole thing academic). He’s not going to be working with larger-than-lab quantities of gunpowder himself. He’ll be glad to build a small demonstration mill but operating the big one will be left to the unfavored sons of the local chief’s opponent, and it will (as long as Future!Nybbler is around) be built away from the village.
In later ages, avoiding getting strung up when the mill blows up because some local genius decided to substitute cheap iron for expensive bronze for one of the parts might be a bigger problem.
No risk, no reward.
If they don’t have metallurgy, then metallurgy.
Thanks to re-enactment, art projects and weird hobbies, I know how to go from bog iron to useful iron objects. Bog iron can be found anywhere with acidic bogs.
Can you make gob irons out of bog iron?
#anagrammaticDeterminism
Can you make a tin sandwich out of a sandwich tin?
I’m know I’m late to the party but assuming I’m not in immediate danger I’d start by building a rudimentary kiln, and a charcoal mound. These would let make pottery for cooking & carrying water as well as fired bricks for building a less rudimentary kiln or forge for basic smelting/metal work.
This also seems like an opportune moment to advertise one of my favorite Blogs/YouTube Channels, Primitive Technology.
Primitive Technology is indeed captivating.
I also greatly enjoyed The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell.
I assume that language is magically solved? That is, I can understand them and they can understand me?
If so, I think that people are dramatically missing the most important thing that you all could definitely introduce them to: writing. This is like 5,000 years before written language developed.
Charcoal or paint on rock could work, or you could try to figure out something cuneiform-like. Give people some ability to write down important information, more detailed than they could manage with art, in a way that survives for a while, and you let these people who have skills that are much, much more relevant to their life circumstances than yours are, accumulate and multiply their skills.
(Follow up writing with math. Get going with some basic math using Arabic numerals and 0 in 8,000 BC and the eventual gains should be pretty fucking awesome. Though you certainly won’t live to see the most important gains.)
Once you have writing, you can also spend your time writing down as many useful things as possible, even if they aren’t currently feasible. (“Once you have electricity, here is what I remember about early lightbulbs.”) You may not have modern infrastructure yet, but you can definitely speed up the process of attaining it.
Dinosaur Comics has your back on this!
What about things like domestication of animals and associated uses/byproducts? Were they around by then? If you can nab some sheep, spinning and felting gets you rope and cloth. That opens up lots of construction possibilities, traps and carrying implements, portable shelters, carrying more stuff on animals.
Dogs had definitely been domesticated by then, and had spread to most of the world (they made it to the Americas, for example). Goats, pigs, and sheep had likely been domesticated but were probably limited to certain areas. Cattle and cats are borderline, and all other domestic animals are a definite no.
The time-travelling hero of Robert Silverberg’s ‘House of Bones’ came to recognise that the hunter-gatherer tribe he was marooned with didn’t have all that much to learn from him. But at the end, he WAS planning to invent beer.
Are there any anti-depressants that aren’t sedatives? I figure there must be, but I don’t know the first thing about mental meds.
I don’t think most of them are sedatives (per se, as in falling into a certain pharmacological category) at all, though some have sedative effects on some people.
I, for one, always found them highly activating and had to take them in the morning.
Wellbutrin / bupropion is a mild stimulant. I’d have to ask my girlfriend if you want the current best guess on the mechanism (something involving dopamine?) but it’s pretty obvious once you start taking it how much more energy you have.
Yes. Wellbutrin is a Selective Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor (SDRI), whereas most antidepressants are Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI)
What do people mean when they say ‘Abstract objects exist’, and what’s a good argument for believing this claim? I found the corresponding SEP article unhelpful.
“These completely non-corporeal entities need to exist or my intricate worldview falls apart!”
See: mathematical and moral realism, Platonic idealism, etc.
I find SEP articles TL;DR. Even when I do manage to muddle through one, I find I’ve forgotten almost everything within a few days at most. Personally, slide notes are far more effective for learning a new field than large, dense texts, and I include textbooks under that. Superficial learning, maybe, but what’s the point of struggling with large texts if I’ll just forget everything anyway?
I guess I’d like a defense from someone with a more favourable view of it… But the tweet that led to me asking this ( https://twitter.com/1renist/status/891371324194598912 ) is certainly an example of what you’re referring to.
I don’t think moral realists describe ethics as “objects.” Two plus two may equal four without there existing any platonic twos or fours out there.
Well they certainly talk about them as things “out there” in objective reality that can be discovered, like gravity, rather than what they are, preferences of individual or groups of agents over world states.
And of course, these objective morals line up perfectly with the preferences of the realist. What I don’t see are moral realists saying “I personally feel that act x is completely abhorrent and repugnant, but on an objective level, I deduce that act x is actually Good.”
Try Michael Huemer on ethical intuitionism.
So how do you explain people changing their minds about moral issues? Or do you just eschew explanation in favour of drive-by ad hominems?
That’s only a theory, and not much of one. Are all preferences ethical? What about conflicts and disagreements between preferences.
That’s a bit unfair. You can defend metaethiical objectivism without specifying an object level ethics.
I find that philosophy more than almost more than any other field, is something where its not intuitively obvious when I don’t know something. I don’t know how to construct a high-tension bridge across a large river, and that’s obvious to me. But I’d say most people would claim that they know what consciousness is, until they actually try to write down a non-fallacious and consistent definition and find, like most philosophers find, that’s its pretty near impossible (personally I think the idea is wonky).
I think SEP is pretty good, but the subject matter is usually particularly brain-melting and even relatively intelligent people massively underestimate how hard it will be to absorb, and how they need to read more than once for any of it to truly sink in. My philosophy grades in tertiary education suggested I’m not incompetent at philosophy, but I definitely feel I have to do a lot of re-reading even for a simple SEP article to truly appreciate what it’s saying. This applies much much more to actual primary texts its, summarizing, though perhaps I’m just a slow thinker!
I like your first point, I think it’s usually on the money, though of course that wouldn’t refute a claim of that kind.
SEP, and similar publications such as the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, don’t put me off as much as they did at first. I attribute my familiarity now largely to a friend who both grasped a large portion of the literature and enjoyed explaining it to laypeople.
There are some interesting gedankens in it, especially for people like us. “What is consciousness?” strikes me a bit as hurling people into the deep end of the pool. Much simpler games include the aforementioned sorites paradox, the Ship of Theseus, or distinguishing rigid and non-rigid properties. Very little math, real world examples abound, and they encourage thinking technically and being nitpicky about definitions.
And yet, SEP and CDP are still going to scare people away. They’re both good in that if you run across a term you’ve not seen before, you can go straight to it. If their definitions refer to a dozen other unknown terms, then you can go to those too. And now you’re in a web of unknowns, like trying to understand War and Peace with a Russian dictionary at hand. You’ll get there eventually, but you might be more efficient if you had a basic text to start with.
But search for “basic philosophy text” and it’s a mug’s game there, too, because philosophy is actually a lot of different subtopics, and even the subtopics are terms you’re unlikely to be familiar with unless you’re lucky – metaethics, consequentialism, solipsism, post-modernism, Epicureanism, semiotics, metaphysical realism, perdurantism, mereology. Maybe start with a known famous philosopher? Good luck there – Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Decartes, Plato, Russell, and Quine all wrote about all sorts of subtopics, and often produced stuff even they weren’t happy with later. Best thing you’re likely to get here is a history lesson. Try tackling a specific problem, maybe? You’ll probably worse off, since the name you use for your problem is probably not the name it goes by in the literature (and if you knew the name, you probably wouldn’t be here in the first place). Even if you try what looks like a major, basic subtopic – such as Logic – you’ll invariably have to read a lot of words before you start learning how to answer whatever questions you might have.
In short, learning philosophy feels like looking for a needle in a haystack when I’m not quite sure what a needle is.
Every so often, I search for what I would think of as a “practical introduction to philosophy”. So far, I’ve come up empty. Even with the usual suspects, like the Dummies guides or Oxford Press.
You’ve hit the nail (err, needle) on the head there. It’s a lot harder to find what we want in an introductory philosophy text if we don’t know what we want. (This point was revealed to me by a similar discussion of the often conflicting goals of intro philosophy courses.) Are we trying to teach the history of philosophical ideas? Are we trying to teach how to think philosophically? Are we trying to teach about certain problems? Of course, there’s little use in doing one without some of the others. Understanding a certain figure, idea, or problem is going to require learning what a good argument is and how they might go wrong. It’s immensely helpful attacking a problem to look at how people have thought about it in the past. And a certain figure probably shouldn’t be separated from the views or arguments he advanced.
In my experience the best approach is to find a philosophical problem that someone thinks is worth solving, then look at historical attempts to solve it, including both details about the figure responding, their wider views, and what precisely their arguments are, then repeat; bonus points if one is either tasked with or independently attempts a solution oneself. But I’m the student, not the teacher. 🙂
Abstract objects (like, say, universals) are called on to solve a number of problems in philosophy. One is the problem of referents: when we make a claim like “this ball is round” or “this ball is red” the ball clearly has a referent in the world, but we want the predicate like ’round’ or ‘red’ to refer to something too, because otherwise what is the claim really about? So, there is such a thing as roundness, or redness, and we’re appealing to what that is to ground our claims.
Another is the problem of commonality: we observe that two balls are round and red, and we might even say they’re round and red in the same way—maybe one has a greater diameter or some eccentricity, or the other is a slightly paler shade of red, but surely we still mean something when we say they’re round and red. Well, what then? Nothing other than that both balls ‘possess’ or ‘share in’ or ‘exemplify’ the very same roundess, or the very same redness.
Another is the problem of knowledge. We might be tempted to think our knowledge of the world is grounded in particular material things, like what I know about this ball: it’s round, it’s red, it’s sitting on my desk. But facts about a particular are bound to change: the ball could deflate, I could paint it blue, it might roll off the desk or cease to exist entirely. Since the same could be said for any particular thing, it seems our knowledge is radically contingent on how things are at the time we’re speaking, or the time we’re speaking of. But universals, we can see, don’t change. Painting the ball blue doesn’t change the nature of red, and deflating it doesn’t change the nature of roundness. Indeed, it seems we know what red is and what round is regardless of what we think we know about any particular round or red thing at any given time. But surely we need a referent for this knowledge, or it’s grounded in nothing after all. So, there is such a thing as redness, and such a thing as roundness.
None of this is to say that universals solve the problems raised, or don’t bring problems of their own, or that there aren’t other or better solutions for these problems. But these were and are regarded as serious problems worth solving, and universals were taken to have real explanatory power when they were proposed.
I understand that you’re trying to steelman universals, but still: I’ve never seen a good defense of this proposition, which sounds like a false dilemma right from the get-go. Anyone who tries to defend it starts off with some variant of “but surely” — a clear indication that they have no argument to speak of. But surely there must be a better defence out there ?
“And don’t call me Shirley!” is always a fair response. 🙂
I have mixed feelings about the appeal myself, and when my professor relied on it back in my metaphysics class I pressed him on it. He didn’t think it was straightforwardly true either, but establishing it wasn’t the point of this argument, and a lot of people more or less believe it anyway, whether they realize it or not. For those who don’t, you’ll of course have to step back and establish it first.
I’m up for trying to defend it though. If there’s another possibility for the referent, what is that? If it doesn’t need a referent, how does that work?
Well, one way to respond would be, “both”.
On the one hand, there (probably) doesn’t exist a non-physical Platonic ideal of “redness” out there; in fact, the very concept is likely incoherent. Is there any way to detect this Platonic redness, other than by observing that people claim to see red things sometimes ? If the answer is “no”, then “Platonic redness” is just a synonym for, “the reason people claim to see red things”, and thus has no explanatory power. Saying “people see red things because there’s a reason people see red things” is tautological.
On the other hand, though, we can look at the bigger picture. All of us humans have been shaped by millions of years of evolution in a very particular shared environment. We all have very similar receptors in our eyes, connected to very similar brains. In this situation, we should expect most of us to react to certain wavelengths of light in a similar way. Not an identical way, mind you — which one of the reasons why different human cultures all have slightly different color categories — but similar. Thus, we do share a common referent for color: it is our biology, which was shaped by our evolution on Earth, which was ultimately shaped by the physical laws of the Universe. This referent is a bit fuzzy and stochastic, but it’s as absolute as you can get, without delving into dualism.
@Bugmaster @5:42:
Despite agreeing with pretty much all of this, I don’t think it scratches the itch of why there must be certain things and not certain other things. All you appear to have done with the account of eye receptors is elevate the principle of empiric evidence as the primary proof of what exists. That I happen to consider this the most useful account, does not make it the truest one.
(So which account is truest? I tend to claim that it doesn’t matter; empiric evidence is “good enough”, since it got me fast cars and tall buildings and pretty pictures. Universals are useful too, so they also exist. There’s probably a term of art for this viewpoint, and I feel sheepish for not knowing it. I’m not sure it’s utilitarian.)
@Paul Brinkley:
What’s the difference ? I genuinely don’t understand this statement.
I’m not sure I could answer satisfactorily, sadly. Perhaps by example:
Suppose you had a machine that you could put questions into, and it would spit out the answer. It wouldn’t answer any question, but you get the sense that the more precise the question you put in, the greater the chance that you get a useful answer out. What’s useful? Let’s say it’s whatever tells you how to grow the crops and build the house and survive and be entertained long enough to ask more questions.
This works really well, for decades – practically your whole life.
Then one day, the machine stops working the way you expect – questions you expected to be precise, were returning only vague answers or that annoying “insufficient information” error you frequently get when you haven’t hammered the question into good enough shape. You want to fix the machine, but how? (Naturally, you tried asking it, and got an II error.) In a flash of insight, you realize that you need a good mental model of how the machine works. At least, you think that will help. So you try to understand that model.
But no matter how you do try to study that model, you get this sense that you can’t break out of the usual cycle you had of figuring out questions about the model by writing them down and putting them into the machine. It’s a habit you can’t break. In fact, you have trouble even thinking of it as a habit; your very notion of what habits are, necessarily involves your thinking in terms of putting questions into the machine and expecting answers of certain quality. You’ve stopped thinking of the machine as this funny box sitting in the house you’ve built; it’s a part of yourself.
Now, instead of saying it was a machine, suppose I said it was your cycle of sensing the world, noticing a pattern, testing the pattern, relying on the pattern, and repeating.
How would you fix this process, if you had reason to believe that the process itself was somehow munged? I don’t just mean that there’s a pattern you haven’t thought to notice, or a test you haven’t figured out how to design. What if there are things that you will never discover, no matter how many patterns you notice / sense, and how many iterations of tests and refinements you carry out?
If your response is something like “well that’s silly, if it will affect me at all, I’ll sense it, and my sensing or not will be the test”, then you’re about where I am. I agree; I just can’t prove it without being in a proof framework I can’t grasp.
Let’s say that usefulness is the ability to predict observations , and truth is correspondence to reality.
If you are in some kind of virtual reality you can predict observations, but that tells you nothing about what is going on outside the box.
Even if you are not, being able to predict an apparent event does not give you the correct interpretation. Knowing that the sun will rise does not tell you whether the sun is the eye of Ra or a fusion reactor.
@bugmaster that’s a great answer for redness but redness has a special vulnerability to it because it’s a ‘two place’ description, being relative to the observer as well as the object. Try doing one for roundness where it is an attribute rather than ‘qualia’.
pragmatist?
Re: difference between truth and usefulness:
That is an amazing answer. I wish I had thought of it. …Actually that isn’t even true, I can’t imagine thinking of it.
@Paul Brinkley, TheAncientGeekAKA1Z:
The analogy with the machine is a good one; but I think it exposes a deeper problem. You ask, “how would you fix this process, if you had reason to believe that the process itself was somehow munged ?”. But the bigger question is, how would you even know if the process was broken ? In the past, such events had apparently happened many times; and each time, the answer was something to the extent of “OIC, I thought my entire reasoning process was flawed, but now I understand that the planets don’t follow their predicted orbits because there’s this one super important detail that my model doesn’t account for”. So, how could you, even in principle, distinguish this situation from the one where some genuinely ineffable thing exists ? I honestly can’t think of one, and I am not convinced this is possible in principle. And, if it’s impossible for me to tell in principle which case is right, I’ll just pick the one that seems to be more useful. On that subject:
How good is the simulation ? If it’s 100% perfect, so perfect that it’s a priori impossible to ever observe anything that could lead you to believe that there’s an “outside” to your box, then I’d argue that this simulation is, in fact, reality. Philosophically speaking, this of course may not be the case; however, the assumption that you are in a simulation has zero explanatory power by definition, since you have defined it as not affecting anything (not even human minds, BTW, since your mind is also a part of the simulation). So, it becomes irrelevant as soon as you propose it.
@carvenvisage:
I don’t think this makes a great deal of difference. If I understand you correctly, you are contrasting “roundness” with “redness” because you can precisely define “a round surface” as “a set of points all of which are equidistant from a single other point, known as the center”. But you could do that with redness as well, if you wanted, e.g. “a wavelength of light that is precisely 650 nm”. You might argue that this is arbitrary: “why 650 as opposed to 651 ?”. But I could ask the same question about roundness: “why do they all have do be equidistant, why can’t half of them be 0.01% off ?”. In the real world, no macro-scale object is going to be perfectly red or perfectly round, and I’m ok with that. On the other hand, just because you can define something, doesn’t mean that this thing must exist in some Platonic realm (though, of course, the opposite is also true).
No that isn’t it at all.
When I say “red” I’m aiming either at my subjective experience, or at its external correlate, not at the platonic realm. Red is an approximate concept that refers to multiple things. Of course it doesn’t have a single ‘referent’ we can extrapolate to from them.
When I talk about a circle I am aiming at the platonic realm, along the 100% straight line that passes through a squiggle on paper and a pie tin.
And arbitrariness doesn’t matter. “the side of the road you’re supposed to drive on in X country” is 100% arbitrary but it is still a real thing. What novel an author writes is down to them but a book still contains more than its paper and its ink and its cover and its bindings.
By hypothesis, it is not.
It has zero *predictive* power, but is by hypohesis true anyway. You are gainsaying my argument by setting usefulness equal tot truth.
Note, BTW that the virtual reality box is only an illustration. The actual argument is that being able to predict phenomena doesn’t give you their correct interpretation.
@CarvenImage
You seem to be treating “platonic realm” as meaning only exact definition, whereas in the context, it is ontologically loaded.
But the bigger question is, how would you even know if the process was broken?
That’s exactly what I was talking about when I said “You want to fix the machine, but how?”. 🙂 I encourage you to reread that part in that light.
Your response is about the same one I produce, right down to the point where you can’t visualize a genuinely ineffable phenomenon (although in my case I’d probably call it indetectible), and so you just go with what’s “useful”.
I mean, if you could tell something was wrong, that’s by definition detectible. How could something be both detectible and indetectible?
(You might notice how I smuggled that glitch into the machine analogy. If the machine stops answering your questions as well, the correct thing for a sense-predict-test adherent to do is to exploit that difference in observation to learn about it. It doesn’t matter that that machine is actually your sensory apparatus. That apparatus is more than your five classic senses or even the dozen or so that seem to actually exist, and you really are allowed to try to analyze the mechanism logically, contrary to what I implied.)
TheAncientGeekAKA1Z’s succinct example touches on another potential flaw in our sense-predict-test cycle. If the sun is actually the eye of Ra, maybe it’ll “blink” someday. But it might not do so for millions of years, and until then, it behaves like a huge ball of plasma with gravity and magnetism and all that other physics stuff we worked out. We might not have any way to poke the eye and make it blink before then. But then January 28, 5692119 AD rolls around and it blinks and now we have millions of years of recorded observations to rethink.
So in general, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But we notice that it doesn’t have to be a 100% guarantee for us to bet resources on it and accept the risk and enjoy smartphones and skyscrapers in the mean time. In other words, “useful” is good enough.
…but it’s still not necessarily True.
@Paul Brinkley:
Sorry, I think you misunderstood my point. I agree that all kinds of unlikely things could be possible, e.g. the Sun could in fact be the eye of Ra. However, the number of highly unlikely things is infinite; if I worried about each and every one of them, I’d never get anything done. Instead, I choose to worry only about the things that could potentially affect me in some way. This is why I ask the question, “how would we know if the machine is broken ?”. If your answer is, “ah, precisely ! How would we know ?”, then what you’re really saying is, “the broken-ness of the machine could not possibly affect anyone in any way (otherwise, this is how we would know that it’s broken)”. Well, in that case, I am going to just ignore that possibility. Of course, if at some point in the future someone detects a glitch in the Matrix, then I’d absolutely re-evaluate my beliefs — because glitches are detectable, and therefore can affect me in some way.
Replacing truth with usefulness has consequences: for one you need to be highly tolerant of beliefs you don’t share, since it is hard to prove that a belief isn’t useful to the believer. That is something that is arguably hard-wired into capital-p Pragmatism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatic-belief-god/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/james-o/#SH3a
@Bugmaster: I think I understood your point just fine. You say if you worried about all the highly unlikely things, you’d never get anything done; I agree, and said so. You say that I say that “the broken-ness of the machine could not possibly affect anyone in any way”; I agree, and said so. You say you’d just ignore that possibility in that case; so would I. We’re agreeing on a great many things.
…but the things we’ve both chosen to believe in this case are still not True. 🙂
Yes, yes, I know. Why would we ever, ever care? Well, my terse response is black swans. You and I and everyone else knows that things that went as expected in the past might still go differently in the future. This also touches on AncientGeek’s point; there may exist a handful of people who believe something will go differently despite reliable past results, and we probably need a way to manage that information that isn’t simply that they’re insane because they believe a false thing.
And then you might say, well, I’m not talking about mere black swans, like Apple stock going down tomorrow or the Vikings winning the Superbowl; I’m talking about glitches in the Matrix or the sun sprouting a pupil and funny-looking eyeshadow and other brain-vat levels of improbability. And again, I sympathize. Trust me, my money’s going in the same roulette slot as yours.
So why do I still distinguish “the sun is not the eye of Ra” from Truth? It’s still hard to explain. Maybe I’ll answer with another question: why do mathematicians distinguish integers from numbers constructible from {the integers plus addition}?
A lot of defenses of abstract realism are based on arguments from correspondence theories of truth and reference-only theories of meaning, but universals are a bit different. If you don’t have real universals to explain how things resemble each other, you need another mechanism. Natural laws and causality present a similar problem: what does it mean for two occurences to instantiate the same law?
That doesn’t address the issue at all. You are presuming that external objects have similar reflectance characteristics and humans have similar perceptual characteristics. You are not explaining how similarity works.
(I think you replied to the wrong post, FWIW, but no big deal)
From my point of view, not much, because I don’t believe that laws have a separate existence from things that are acted upon by the laws. Laws are just abstractions made up by humans. For example, consider “F=ma”. In the grand scheme of things, there are no such things as “force”, “mass”, or “acceleration”. There aren’t even such things as “electrons”. There may or may not be some sort of “strings” or something; right now, we don’t know for sure, but “F=ma” is an excellent abstraction that works in many cases, so at least it’s not totally wrong.
I rather think that I’m observing this, not presuming it. If you show the same object to a bunch of humans, and ask them what color it is, most people will answer something like “red”, “crimson”, “dark pink”, or some variant thereof. I don’t need to invoke dualism in order to merely state this is the case — or do I ? If I do not, then we have two competing explanations for why this happens: your dualistic one, and my monistic one. The dualistic explanation has very little (if any) explanatory power and a host of other problems; the monistic explanation is intuitively unsatisfactory (due to all the uncertainty involved), but appears to work a lot better, so that’s why I’m sticking with it.
Thats a popular answer, but it fails to account for a number of things. We expect lawlike regularities to hold in the future, and a law that si just a human description can’t bring that about.
It has nothing to do with dualsim. It is just that you are no explaining away similarity, because your account of it assumes and requires it.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z:
I’m not sure what you mean. Human models of the Universe are descriptive, not prescriptive. When I say, “the Sun will probably come out tomorrow”, I’m just voicing a prediction, not commanding the Sun to rise on time !
Firstly, even if my explanation for X is completely false, that doesn’t your explanation true by default; as I mentioned above, the notion of abstract universals suffers from all the problems of dualism (such as lack of explanatory power, internal inconsistency, etc.). Secondly, it sounds like you’re begging the question here. We observe humans giving similar responses to the question, “what color is this ball”. Your explanation of this phenomenon is, “abstract universals must exist”. Why ? Because we could only notice similarity if abstract universals existed ? That’s circular reasoning; you can’t assume X in order to prove X.
But physical laws aren’t just predictions, and how sure you are that the sun will come up tomorrow has little directly to do with physical laws anyway (since plenty of physically realizable things could throw orbits out of whack, right?). Consider something like F=ma. Even if that formulation is just our current best-guess about what the world is doing, the world is going to keep on doing what it’s doing, and it’s only a matter of our discovering what that is, whatever that is, right? “F=ma” might be map, but the lawlike behavior it’s describing is territory, no?
You can’t describe the future because it hasn’t happened yet. You can’t have any confidence in a prediction based on past evidence unless you assume that the world operated in such a way that past regularities continue to hold in the future. I.e some kind of lawful regular ity in the territory.
I haven’t offered an explanation and I am not wedded to Platonism
I believe I have addressed your objection in my other comment, but please let me know if that’s not the case.
I’m not seeing the relevance.
Thanks for actually trying to answer the question.
Agreed. My comment above was a bit snarky, but I also very much appreciate the effort.
“Exist” is a risky word that appears to have a clear definition but doesn’t. What it means is context-dependent, and arguments like the ones you’re describing uses it as if it has a single well-defined meaning.
Ontologies are maps of reality, and as such they tend to not match their territory perfectly. A map is a model made of entities and their relationships, and as anyone who’s designed a database or programmed in an object-oriented language knows, there are different valid ways to model things and how you should do it depends on what you want to achieve.
(By that I don’t mean to say that all models are equally accurate. They aren’t.)
Now when you say “[entity] exists”, what you’re trying to say is that your map with [entity] in it should be considered valid (that’s how I read it).
It could have a stronger meaning as well, though. Even if the models we typically use are simplified and not 100% accurate, reality does exist and there must be some model, however intractable, that captures it as it really is – it’s entities and relationships are the ones in which the “source code of the universe” is actually written.
That an entity exists could in that sense be taken to mean that it’s a fundamental component of reality. I don’t know to what extent there still are philosophers who genuinely believe in idealism – that ideas and concepts are what reality is made of – but personally I consider that such a strange idea that I don’t really know where to start discussing it.
I guess that’s a common problem with something like your original question: when you get to saying that some abstract thing exists you’ve probably already gone past the point where the real philosophical disagreements lie.
How about a pragmatist take on such claims? “Xs exist” “The concept of ‘X’ is useful for understanding and navigating the world.”
I’m afraid I’m not sure how the statement in question could be made any simpler.
That fact that it’s possible for two or more things to share the same property.
I’m not conceived it makes sense to think of things sharing properties beyond us simply declaring that they do. For instance, ‘redness’ seems to be often suggested as a property that things share, but there’s no reason that two objects that you and I might agree on as ‘red’ might not be thought of as having distinct colours by some alien that happens to partition the colour spectrum in a different way. Indeed, I find it hard to believe that if you take any two English speakers, and ask them to clearly delineate the area of a (say) photoshop colour palette into red and not red, that they’ll produce the same two areas.
Another example that I’ve seen is that there’s some abstract Horsiness that all horses have in common. But if you believe in evolution, you believe in a lineage stretching back from every uncontroversial horse to some extremely basic form of life, and again it seems clear that declaring some particular collection of ancestors to be horses and the remainder to not be must be completely arbitrary, and so Horsiness is just some convention that we humans use to communicate, rather than some abstract category existing independently of us.
So to return to what it means by ‘Abstract objects exist’, I guess my issue is that it seems both uncontroversial and not very interesting if we simply mean that humans like to arbitrarily label things, and it seems plainly false if it means that things like Redness and Horsiness are well defined notions that exist independently of us inventing them. Which do you take it to mean?
So on what grounds do you think we group objects into different categories? Sheer arbitrary act of will? Would you say that the only thing making you, e.g., a human rather than a pot plant, is arbitrary social convention?
I’m going to stop you right there: evolution is a scientific theory, and absent realism, the scientific method is invalid. You can’t validly generalise experimental findings in a world where no objects have any properties in common, after all.
I think of two red things as being both red because I’ve been taught that that’s how we partition the colour spectrum. But it seems obvious that we could have partitioned it in a different way. Indeed we know of extant languages that do this!
And I’m pretty sure I’m allowed update my beliefs about e.g. things I regard as red without any commitment to the existence of redness. But we don’t need to go down this route and I’d rather not. Instead I’d like you to say where the delineation defining Horsiness or Redness lies, assuming you believe that this are abstract properties that exist beyond our conceiving them. You should be able to do this without shifting the discussion to the foundations of my beliefs.
(Apologies for earlier typos, writing from phone)
I’d define horsiness as Nick does below, and redness as the property of reflecting light on a certain part of the spectrum. I’d rather this didn’t degenerate into a round of you asking me to define whatever property pops into your head according to some arbitrary strict standard, however, because this would be a red herring for two reasons: firstly, there’s nothing about realism requiring that every universal be easy to define (indeed, that’s the point of most of Plato’s dialogues); and secondly, there’s nothing about realism that requires every category term we use to have a corresponding universal. Even if I were unable to come up with a satisfactory definition of horsiness, therefore, this wouldn’t prove that there was no universal of horsiness; and even if you were able to prove that there was no universal of horsiness, this wouldn’t prove that there were no universals whatsoever.
Instead, I’m going to repeat my question about your being human, which you didn’t address in your last reply. If the idea of people deciding that you’re really a pot plant seems too far-out, consider an example of something that’s actually happened a lot in recent history. Say the rest of humankind decides that people of your ethnicity aren’t actually human at all; do you remain a human despite what they think, or do you cease to be human and become something else instead?
I mean, he doesn’t define it, he suggests that we define it “according to which feature or features distinguish a horse from similar species” which is clearly circular.
I’m sorry but I don’t think I’m being strict if I reject your definition of redness as “the property of reflecting light on a certain part of the spectrum”, as that appears to be the definition of any colour. What part of the spectrum? Why that part? Do you accept that you might call something red that others might deign to call something else? How do you resolve such a difficulty to ascertain who is ‘correct’?
Can you at least tell me when we should expect there to be a universal then?
Yes, our categories are arbitrary. See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ There are obvious reasons why we choose to group all humans together, and that’s why we do it. Similarly why people may have made an effort to remove undesirables from the classification in the past. As for potted plants, suppose a nasty wizard casts a spell that slowly transforms you into one. On day one you turn green, day two your skin becomes bark, and so on. On day one, are you a green human, or a human-esque plant? What about day two?
The fact that a Hebrew word for sea-creatures sometimes get translated as “fish” doesn’t at all prove that our categories are arbitrary.
Actually, no, it’s not at all obvious: if there are no universals, no things can have any features in common, so there’s no good reason why we should group some entirely arbitrary set of dissimilar things together and call them human.
And what do you think about such efforts? If society decides that a group formerly considered human aren’t human at all, is society mistaken in this belief, or does the group cease to be human?
I’d say you become a plant when you lose your mind. But the actual thought experiment involved people deciding that you were a potted plant without you undergoing any change in yourself. If all categories are arbitrary, categorising you as a pot plant is no more or less arbitrary than categorising you as a human; do you in fact think that this is the case?
Never mind partitioning for now; do you think it’s possible for two things to be on the same place on the colour spectrum?
Be fair. I wasn’t being circular, I was being vague and overly general. 😀 Consider the following example. I give you a ball (red), and ask you what it is, and you say it’s a ball. I give you another one, and ask for a new definition–no repeats. This time you say it’s a blue ball. I give you another one, same deal–you say it’s a green one. Acknowledging that they are largely similar (round, bouncy, slightly reflective), you’ve defined each according to the feature which distinguishes it from similar ones. Nothing circular about it. Notice you had no trouble identifying what was similar and what was different about them. Under the genus ball, you have several species: the red ball, the blue ball, the green ball. (This example is misleading in several ways, but I think it serves its purpose okay here.)
In the case of horses, you can do the same. Acknowledging that they have much in common with the zebra and the ass, and that they perhaps belong to the same genus (here broadly construed), you can nevertheless identify specific differences which distinguish the kinds. Again, there’s nothing circular in noticing some things are similar in certain respects, and different in others. I grant that this does nothing against your earlier question about the arbitrariness of these taxonomies—that’s a more serious objection, and I’ll get back to that soon.
Things have features in common when we declare them to. The process is dependent on us first defining the feature in question, and there’s no way of doing so that isn’t in some way arbitrary.
Yes. Suppose I meet these people by travelling to a far away land. First I’d think that the word they use for human is the same as the word they use for potted plant. I have my own way of viewing the world, and I separate potted plants from humans, and will work from this perspective even when encountering those who don’t. If they went further as to always expect potted plants to behave in the same way humans do, I’d have little hope for their success at surgery or horticulture. Similarly, let’s say a child uses ‘horsies’ to talk about horses and donkeys, and associates this category with going for rides and feeding things sugar lumps. I’d think it was a perfectly fine category for the child to use. If the child grows up in a society where horses and donkeys have different uses, it would learn to further subdivide its horsies category, and make a finer distinction. Our society is one which is far more interested in horses than donkeys. Our ‘horse’ category has an enormous number of subdivisions to help us keep track of what we’re interested in. Our ‘donkey’ category is far coarser, because we’re less interested.
I think John Nerst’s reply above is a better explanation of what I’m trying to say here.
I don’t think this is a meaningful question. As a society, we’ve a fairly well-understood concept of what red is. If someone comes along and says that something blue is red, we say that he’s wrong. If someone comes along as says that something reddish-orange is red, some of us would say ‘No it’s red’ and some would say ‘No it’s orange’ and some would ‘It’s sort of in between and I’d call it reddish-orange to be safe if I were you’. It doesn’t make sense to talk of the object being red, or orange, or reddish-orange, it only makes sense to talk about what we call the object.
It depends what you mean! We can make a device that detects the wavelength of light reflecting off a surface, which has some certain level of sensitivity, and we can declare that two surfaces have the same colour if this machine produces the same number. But inevitably, the machine ‘buckets’ families of wavelengths together, and is insensitive to some level of distinction. Worse, the machine will probably be far more sensitive than we are, and tell us that two things are different colours when we think of them as having the same colour. What actually happens is we have multiple meanings for ‘things of the same colour’. In everyday use, it’s used for uncontroversial appeals to the society-approved colours, like saying a leaf has the same colour as grass. In a lab we’ll use it to refer to instances when our machine has the same output.
Which means that they don’t actually have features in common, it’s just a game we play for some reason.
Ex hypothesi, there’s no feature for us to define in the first place. It’s all just completely arbitrary. Why, on your account, did we decide to group some things together as being red, when actually there’s no feature of redness (or any other feature, for that matter) that can distinguish them?
Why would potted plants behave differently to humans, if they don’t share some features that humans lack?
I didn’t ask about redness, I asked about humanity. If a fascist government took control and declared that all Jews were now to be considered non-human, would they be wrong to do so? What if a majority of the country agreed with them?
I didn’t ask whether we could measure their colour to whatever arbitrary standard of accuracy it would take to satisfy you, I asked whether, as a matter of fact, it’s possible for two things to be on the same place of the colour spectrum.
I like this map/territory analogy, so I’ll try and explain what I mean with it. Suppose our territory is the human body, and we’re trying to make a map. We might notice the nose as something we want to communicate about, and want to agree on some convention in order to do so. So we take a pen and draw a little circle around it, and declare that this area is what we mean when we talk about noses. I’m saying that there are many little circles we could make, and there isn’t a ‘correct’ one. And even if we have a vote and pick one and declare it to be the best one, when we turn to another individual, with a slightly different nose and try to mimic our original little circle, we’ll inevitably end up with different people drawing slightly different circles.
I’m happy to accept that potted plants and humans look different on the ‘territory’. But so do, inevitably, two different humans. Our choice to regard the two humans as sufficiently similar to belong to the same category is, well, a choice.
They’d be wrong according to my definition of human, but right according to their own. No such thing as ‘wrong’ definitions in and of themselves. Trying to reach some level of agreement about definitions is a useful thing to do if you wish to communicate effectively though.
Again, it depends what you mean by that. What spectrum? I say that an apple is red if it looks like my idea of red. I say a wavelength is 680nm if that’s what my little machine tells me. I say a photoshop palette colour is (201, 123, 123) if that’s what the computer tells me. But I don’t know how to talk about points on the colour spectrum in the abstract way that you seem to be asking about in your question. I hope this doesn’t seem evasive since I mentioned spectrums earlier and now seem to act like I can’t talk about them, but I always had in mind something that I could talk about, e.g. outputs from a spectrometer or what have you.
You’re still ignoring the fundamental problem with your account, which is that, under your hypothesis, making maps should be of no use to anyone, because nothing can have anything in common so your map can tell you about, at most, one person’s body.
Do you and I share some features that we don’t share with pot plants? Yes or no?
Why, though? Again, in a nominalist universe, nothing can have any feature in common, so there’s no basis on which to draw maps, and no reason why doing so would be useful.
I honestly don’t see why you’re having so much difficulty with the question, unless you are just trying to avoid answering it. Is it possible for two apples to both reflect light of a wavelength of 680 nm? Yes or no?
Not at all, my map that identifies noses would be very useful for, say, rhinologists. You seem to be saying that things can’t look similar without some abstract property existing which they share, but I don’t see why that must be the case. If anything, the reverse process happens — we regard things as similar and we define some property which we declare them to share. You assert that the opposite happens, but then can’t give me a single clear definition of an abstract property.
We say that humans have noses and plants don’t, for example.
Sure, I think I could get that reading twice on my little machine that measures wavelength to the nearest nanometer. If you’re asking whether two things to reflect light at the same wavelength to an arbitrary level of precision, then I’m going to start worrying about how to measure wavelength.
The issue is more that if you reject platonic realism, you need something else to explain similarity and difference.
But platonic realism doesn’t seem to explain the territory any more than whatever the negation is, it seems to just be a statement that this particular map is the map. That your particular labelling (redness, horsiness) is the correct one. Can I not say that there is a territory, but different maps suffice for different purposes?
Because to be similar just is to share one or more property. If there are no properties, it’s impossible for things to share them, and hence impossible for things to be similar to each other.
If you could stop changing the subject and give a straight answer to the questions, that would be great.
Do you accept that you might call something 3 which I might call 2 +1?
(overlapping categories does not mean invalid categories)
This is technically true; however, there may be other explanations for why we consider disparate objects to be similar other than “properties exist”. For example, one such explanation could be, “because we are all creatures that have evolved on the same planet in the same universe, and thus our minds work the same way”. This changes the reason for why we perceive similarity from the dualistic “properties” to the monistic “universe”, thus eliminating a lot of problems.
I don’t think this is safe, because you seem to define things as sharing a property after noting similarity…
Why can’t I say that we have some sense of similarity, and we define certain properties to help us keep track of what we mean. Certainly our senses don’t give us access to any complete description of similarity, we miss on on certain light frequencies, we struggle with identifying differences at small scales, we struggle at distinguishing structural colour from the psychological experience of seeing colour.
I think this is very unfair. I’ve always made an effort to reply to each part of your post, and ask for clarification when it isn’t clear what you want. In this case it isn’t clear if you’re asking about the idea of two waves being of the same wavelength to arbitrary precision, which I don’t think is a well-defined idea since ‘wavelength’ breaks down at small scale, and ‘arbitrary precision’ requires insight at every scale.
Anyway, here are some questions I put to you that you ignored:
And it remains the case that any sufficiently detailed expansion of that theory is going to have to appeal to pre-existing properties and similarities at some point.
Because if that is your only account of similarity,. difference, etc, you are implying that the territory is a featureless blob.
I’ve no idea what you’re trying to say here.
Because you’ve given no explanation for why we’d get “some sense of similarity” from looking at things if they aren’t in fact similar.
I asked whether it’s possible for two objects to reflect the same wavelength of light, and you responded with irrelevancies about spectrometers. Either you’re trying to avoid answering the question, or you’re confused about the difference between metaphysics and epistemology.
You say that “Because to be similar just is to share one or more property”, so let’s say our definition of similarity is dependent on first our understanding of properties. So when do things then share a property? You can’t say ‘When they’re similar!’ because this is circular. So what do you say?
Because I don’t know what you mean. If you asked me 1000 years ago I’d tell you that yes I’ve seen things that are indistinguishable by colour. If you ask me today I’d say yes I’ve measured things that are indistinguishable by wavelength. You seem to be appealing to some transcendental notion of identical colour that I don’t understand, and which you refuse to define.
English allows you to use the “shared property” phrase to express “similar property” but that doesn’t mean taking the phrase literally is a good idea. We must resist the bewitchment of our intelligence by our language.
Things share a property when it is possible to predicate the same property of both things. E.g., if it is possible to say of both X and Y, “This is red”, then X and Y share the property of redness.
This really isn’t difficult. Two objects have identical colour when they both reflect light of the same wavelength. Note that objects reflect light even when we’re not around to measure them. Is it possible for two objects to reflect light of the same wavelength?
@The original Mr. X:
You are skipping large chunks of your argument.
Yes. It is possible for two objects to reflect the same wavelengths of light. So what?
You seem to be saying that recognizing a similarity requires us to also recognize the ‘existence’ of an abstract property which embodies the similarity. If two things are both red, then there must be some abstract property of redness. But why? I can define any number of other shared properties. My fork and my pen are both made up of a non-prime number of atoms. Both “fork” and “pen” are shorter words in English than in French. (“Fourchette” and “stylo”, respectively.) They are both currently closer to my left toe than they are to your right thumb. Do these properties ‘exist’? Did they ‘exist’ before I made them up just now?
Whatever you would like to say about left-toe-vs-right-thumbness, it clearly ‘exists’ in a very different way than my fork exists. It is unclear why we should use the same word in both cases. Tabooing the word “existence” for a moment, I would say that it is possible to define left-toe-vs-right-thumbness. In a sense, left-toe-vs-right-thumbness is a function: you feed it the state of the universe, and it tells you whether or not the universe is arranged such that your statement is true.
Redness works the exact same way. We define what it means for an object to be red, and then we examine the universe to determine whether or not a particular object meets that definition. The definition can and will vary based on context: a “red light” is very different depending on whether you are driving, or strolling through the seedier parts of Amsterdam late at night.
The only thing that differentiates colour and weight from prime-atom-ness and bilingual-word-lengthness is that the former set of properties is far more likely to be useful in daily life. But that’s contingent: you can imagine a world in which I spend my spare time translating old computer games from English into French, in which case the length of translated words might suddenly become very relevant when I want to fit text into narrow constraints.
What do we gain by talking about universals?
And when might that be?
As I said, wavelength as an idea breaks down at small scales (apparently 10^-9, but let’s say 10^-100000000000000000 to be safe). Identity between two numbers is something that holds at any level of precision.
So if they both reflect the same wavelength of light, they both exemplify the same property, namely of reflecting that wavelength of light.
Location relative to other things is a relation, not a property. Structure, on the other hand, is a property. Which word we use to describe something is a property of our language, not of the thing itself.
Incidentally, since you’ve brought up words, I’ll point out that the possibility of using language to communicate is another disproof of nominalism. When you say “pen” and I say “pen”, both those utterances are particular instances of the same word — or, if they’re not, it’s impossible for us to actually talk about the same thing, in which case, what’s the point of this discussion?
Erm, no. The meaning of the lights might be different, but a red light in a traffic sign is red in exactly the same way as a red light in a brothel.
@Original Mr. X
Just to make clear,
isn’t supposed to be the start of an endless train of demands to be more specific, I really am just interested in how ‘similarity’ can be downstream of having shared properties, because it seems like it should be the opposite way around. So when you say two things are similar when they share a property, such as being red, I wonder how you came about your definition of redness without noting that things have similar colours and partitioning up the colour spectrum to help label them.
I think you’re getting too hung up on the words we use to describe things, and not on the properties those words describe. Our use of the word “red” comes from seeing things with the same colour and coming up with a word to describe that colour; but those things were the same colour (i.e., they reflected light of the same wavelength) before we came up with a word to describe it, and would have been the same colour even if no humans had ever seen them.
I’m not sure that’s really accurate. In Plato’s time, people said two things were red when they appeared red to the human eye. Thousands of years later, it’s clear to us that the human eye isn’t able to distinguish between slight shifts in colour, so they were really detecting similarity in colour, rather than identicalness. I would maintain that it’s just as true today that we have no more claim to the truth of when two things are identical than we did back then. Maybe we have higher precision, but we also have compelling reasons for thinking that there are levels of precision that we can never reach. So for us to measure two light rays and obtain the same reading, I think we’re still detecting similarity rather than identicalness. This is why I’m suspicious of any account that attempts to define similarity in terms of sharing identical properties.
Maybe the best foundation to work from is to note that every two points of the territory are inherently, by virtue of being distinct points, dissimilar. And our maps are attempts to exploit that dissimilarity in useful ways.
Human judgements of similarity have to be downstream of whatever arrangement the territory is running off, which could include property-sharing taken literally, ie Platonism.
Precision has very little to do with it. A Platonist doesn’t have to believe that a pony or mule fully partakes int he form of the horse.
Could I have an example?
In the context of defining ‘red’ as light of some particular wavelength it seems to matter. And if you believe that everything either does or doesn’t have each particular property, then I don’t see how you can avoid being precise in your definition of what holding a particular property means.
I don’t even know what an example would look like. The *argument* is that a human, or other entity capable of making a judgement about classification, has to have a certain level of structure, and that structure very likely contains some shared (mulitply instatiated, whatever )properties; the cones cells in your eye are like other cone cells, and the rod cells like other rod cells. And all that was in place before you made your first judgement, it is not being conjured up by the process of judgement itself.
What I said about horses and ponies is equivalent to repudiating that.
I mean an example of a shared property that is ‘prior’ to similarity.
Electron A has a charge of 1.602 x 10-19 coulombs
Electron B has a charge of 1.602 x 10-19 coulombs
Electron C has a charge of 1.602 x 10-19 coulombs
[…]
(I do recall this issue being mentioned in one of Michael Loux’s editions of Metaphysics. I might reread it at some point for this.)
AncientGeek claims that this “red” that we can’t tell is 680 or 681nm is still downstream from a real red, with real properties, such as probability of absorption by certain compounds, components in an eyeball, and so on. And that therefore all these similarity judgements are based on a mind-independent reality.
But wait! J Milne might say. (He didn’t, but this seems to jibe.) We didn’t have to call this property red. We could have called it mauve or spleg or something, and “red” could have referred to some different set of exemplars and maybe settled down around 700nm or even 800nm instead. So red is still defined by ourselves and our similarity judgements!
Not so fast, AncientGeek and Mr. X might reply. The “red” we humans settle on isn’t really the important thing. There’s still this thing bound to 680nm, whether we call it red or spleg or give it no name at all. We have to be very pro-territory here. The map is still just a map.
For that matter, we don’t even care that it’s bound to 680nm. That’s just the most useful way we have so far to describe it. Before we had a concept of wavelengths, we used a different description. It doesn’t matter; the universe still does what it does with red or mauve or spleg things.
For that matter, the universe doesn’t care either. In some sense, there’s no such thing as universals. There’s no Red Lodge #498991 in the twelfth dimension where all the roses and rust spots go to renew their membership cards. There’s no central control of this, as far as we* know. Rather, the universe appears to be very predictable in various ways; that’s the only reason we can postulate universals at all. We might be wrong, but don’t bet money that I can jump off the Washington Monument and fly tomorrow.
So to answer the latest question: damn near every shared property is prior to similarity, on the authority of the universe appearing to operate by predictable rules. Similarity exists only in our minds, which we likewise observe as existing only after the universe did. Or maybe we’re all figments of your imagination, J Milne, but which theory is more useful?
*some of us, at least
Huh, it seems people are so convinced that every electron is identical that some think there’s just one that travels through time. Fair enough.
In what way is that a counterargument? You seem to be implying that it’s just some religious conviction?
No no that’s me accepting that that appears to be a perfect example of what I was asking for.
I would add re: horsiness that our defining species cladistically is not the only possible way to define them. There are alternatives such as phenetic classifications or cluster theories or morphological classification. While it’s immensely valuable to speak of biological species as defined cladistically and there’s no surprise that’s the ubiquitous approach, there are drawbacks: we would have to describe two identical species from different branches as different species, for instance. So at least insofar as we want to speak of horsiness morphologically, there’s no reason to think it suffers as much from the arbitrariness problem you propose: we can define it precisely according to which feature or features distinguish a horse from similar species. And if a horse somehow bears a pegasus, and this pegasus goes on to bear more pegasi, we should have no qualms about identifying these as, morphologically, a different species distinguished by being winged, regardless of how much or how little is, say, the genetic difference.
I should mention I’m basically cribbing this suggestion from Real Essentialism, a book by David Oderberg. I’d be happy to discuss his take on it further, but I really don’t know what bearing it has on the wider views of Aristotelians, only that it has garnered praise from some of them (his take on morphological species in particular). And my knowledge of the biology in question is like hilariously crazy limited, so I’m not really qualified to talk behind elaborating on examples he proposes, if my example of magical creatures above didn’t already prove that.
I don’t see how this escapes the arbitrariness problem. What is a wing? It’s, again, whatever we say it is. I might happen to allow the same word for the appendages flightless birds sometimes have that certainly have the appearance of wings, whereas others might be quite strict on the requirement that they aid in some sort of flying.
Don’t get caught up on how we do or don’t use the word. We say planes have wings too, but they don’t have any place in our taxonomy. It doesn’t seem to me that your example casts any doubt whether we can in principle classify flightless birds or winged horses.
My point is that any taxonomy is invariably arbitrary. See for instance the way the blogroll to the left of the screen is taxonomised.
@J Milne:
“Arbitrary” is not the same thing as “totally random”. For example, the shape of each individual pebble a riverbed is pretty arbitrary; and yet, most of them will be oval and streamlined-looking. Every pebble is slightly different, but you’ll rarely (if ever) see one shaped like a 12-pointed star, or something like that.
Let’s postulate an entity than perceives only physical properties and all the physical properties with no perceptual quirks. Surely such an entity would perceive two hydrogen atoms as being identically similar.
How about waterness or electronness? Are there no natural kinds?
Yes, and that observation doens’t solve the problem. It’s ridiculous to suppose that the world operates on the exact categories of 21st century US English, but it’s also absurd to supposed that it has no order or structure at all until humans start imposing heir categories on it.
Would they? Before people might have said two grains of sand were identical. And people might have said two carbon atoms were identical before we discovered isotopes. And people were happy to assume the trickiness stopped at the level of protons, electons and neutrons, until quarks came along and whatever else since then.
And why couldn’t an entity regard them as different for occupying different spaces? Or if they encounter them at different times?
I don’t see how there can be.
Current science says that hydrogen is hydrogen (the isotopes are called deuterium and tritium) , and in any case, my *intention* was to put forward some kind of bedrock similarity.
Similarity and difference are probably tied up with space and time somehow, but that doesn’t get you to pure nominalism.
That’s not much of an argument. No matter how much variation you allow in categorisation and perception, that does not logically entail the non-existence of natural kinds.
Right, and my intention was to highlight that no bedrock similarity we’ve ever had has lasted very long.
I think it should reduce your certainty that you can reason about the world in a very precise way. I mean, what’s an example of a natural kind that you’re 100% certain of?
It seems to me you’re not denying the possibility of natural kinds here, just the difficulty of finding them definitively. More importantly, you seem to be thereby granting that finding sameness at some level would qualify as explanation (just the way I suggested at the start that locating a universal in both balls does).
I think this qualifies as a retreat, and a key one too. The abstract realist isn’t necessarily committed to any particular natural kind and many are happy to defer to the scientist on which ones are more or less plausible. I don’t think that decreases their confidence that such things exist in principle, nor should it. Consider your argument being used to prove there are no elementary particles, on the grounds that we keep finding smaller ones. Do you think that argument would be persuasive?
Maps aren’t 100% accurate, but you can;t infer the nonexistence of a territory from that.
I don’t see why I need one. But you need to explain how an unstructured world gives rise to structured experience.
I think my issue is that the idea of natural kinds seems to require a level of certainty that I don’t think we can ever have access to. That we shouldn’t really expect to have a meaningful discussion about them. If you and I meet and start talking about rocks, say, I think despite the fact that we might not have some conclusive definition of such things, and despite the fact that there might be some edge case materials that we would struggle to say are rocks or not, we could have a meaningful discussion. We could point to examples of what we mean, and describe properties that we feel we have some sensory apprehension of.
But when you talk about the ‘possibility of natural kinds’, my first worry is that I don’t really know what you mean. When I look at historical examples, they seem to consist of things that turned out to not really be natural kinds after all, when the definition seems to suggest that there really shouldn’t be any ambiguity (it’s natural!!). And, again, I’m not saying ‘natural kinds don’t exist’. I think John Nerst’s reply above was very helpful for me in understanding the curious amount that seems to be hidden behind the word ‘exist’.
There are several kinds of ambiguity, which it would be helpful to untangle here. It could be that (a) the actual categories themselves are ambiguous, (b) the categories are clear, but it’s difficult for us to tell which category something belongs in due to problems finding enough data or whatever, or (c) the categories are clear, but a particular object belongs to several categories, making it difficult for us to classify it. As far as I can tell, only (a) would really pose a problem for metaphysical realism, but your examples so far seem to relate to (b) and (c).
The downfall of each natural kind appears to be due to a refinement in our observations in each case. Two grains of sand were identical until you look even moderately closely. Two carbon atoms were identical until you measure their mass very, very carefully. Quarks are AFAIK still in the “inferred” bucket – they’re the easiest way to explain what we can see when we manipulate hadrons (which are also exceedingly hard to observe).
We could extend this principle backwards as well. We used to think earth was earth until we started noticing sand behave differently from rock, etc. In all cases, we’re seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or in general sensing a difference between things we previously thought of as the same.
Which implies sensation is the primary determinant of natural kind, and is therefore the most natural… well, it’s not a kind in this, um, sense. Rather, it’s a framework for determining kinds. Which I doubt is news around here.
The thing that interested me a few years ago was when I stopped thinking in terms of objectively natural kinds, and instead in terms of a natural engine for categorization, and of a lattice of kinds that were the most fundamental we knew of at any given time. And that that lattice would continue to grow complicated as we refined our ability to sense.
I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever get to a most fundamental set of kinds. Last I checked, we’re at twelve particles and four forces, and holding. But I don’t see why we’d stay there forever, and I don’t know that we’d even prove that 12/4 is all there is. And that’s leaving out non-physics kinds, like numbers and colors and words and whatnot. But it does at least look certain that if we discover more or prove we’re done, it’ll be by using that sensation engine.
Nothing about realism requires two things to be identical. Do you think that when Plato said there was a Form of Man, he was unaware of the fact that individual men differ from each other in various ways?
I think it’s worth emphasizing that most philosophers who believe in natural kinds aren’t committed to saying that elementary particles (whatever those turn out to be) are the only candidates for being natural kinds. As I said somewhere above, the behavior of compounds of these particles are nonetheless delimited by the laws which govern their constituents and so may well have natures of their own. Atoms, molecules, and for an Aristotelian even biological species are candidates for natural kinds.
Of course Plato was aware of individual differences! However, it is also clear to me that he and other philosophers wanted to be able to infer new facts about individuals in the world, to do so by classifying them, and that they wanted to not have to worry about the fact that things in the world were not ideal exemplars of their classes.
For example, if I want to infer that Socrates is mortal, I begin by observing that he is a man*; but I don’t want to run aground on observations that he’s kinda on the old side, has a weird birthmark on his leg, seems to dislike drinking wine, etc. And then having the debate descend into wrangling over what the ideal man is, and what it means to deviate from that.
Likewise, I’d like to be able to make claims about grains of sand, carbon atoms, and quarks, and have those claims hold, even for other people, even when I’m not aware of them, and even if they’re not ideal grains, atoms, or quarks. So would virtually all realists (I suspect).
Deviations from the ideal are interesting, because they naturally raise the question of whether that affects our predictions about the individuals. This sand is not as clear as that; will they still stick to each other when wet? This carbon atom weighs just a bit more than that one; will it still bond with four hydrogen atoms? Will it behave differently in any other way? Can we tell it from other carbon atoms reliably? Hence our drive for precision in our measurements, and our drive to care about classification, and our care about whether these drives are sound.
*I’m also relying on everyone agreeing with the claim “all men are mortal”, which is nontrivial, but a separate problem.
@Nick: Yeah, I kinda conflated a somewhat separate issue there. Though, for reasons I gave just now, I think this was a crucial issue.
I’m now trying to imagine what it was like when physicists, noticing how individuals deviate from ideals in their experiments, happened across subatomic particles that really do appear to be identical by every conceivable measurement. What’s their mindset? Are they anticipating a theory of everything, explainable using 12 particles and 4 forces and nothing beneath? Or have they decided that since atoms were thought to be indivisible only to be proven wrong later, that someone will discover away to tell one muon from another, and it’s a matter of time? I should ask a physicist the next time I run into one. (Maybe David Friedman has an inside track on this, given his doctorate.)
Non-physics kinds are even more of a mess, based on the philosophy tracts I’ve read. Debates still drag on about the validity of various part / whole systems, possible worlds, universals, endurantism vs. perdurantism, propositions as primary truth bearers, and on and on. I’ve gone with the working theory that there is no such thing as a “natural” kind; they’re all arbitrary (maybe with the exception of those 12 particles and 4 forces), although many are useful.
As I understand it, claims about the indistiguishability of fundamental particles are fairly robust, because if they were wrong statistical thermodynamics wouldn’t work.
I have at least two ways of looking at it (to be fair, you probably do too). One is as you described. Another is that the “indistinguishability of fundamental particles” explanation is robust enough to explain the things we’ve observed in statistical thermodynamics experiments so far.
Which is to say, I suspect, on the basis of historical evidence, that we’ll someday observe things that “IoFP” doesn’t explain yet, and we’ll have to upgrade the robustness of that explanation. (FAIK, that’s true as of now. Any thermodynamicists in the house?) In that sense, IoFP isn’t absolute truth; it’s just that it’s true enough.
I am not a thermodynamicist, but Scott Aaronson presents what appears to be a compelling argument for the case that electrons are truly indistinguishable-by-the-universe (as opposed to indistinguishable-by-humans):
More in the same vein at the link.
Structure often breaks down to relations. An equilateral triangle is 3 points standing in certain relations to each other.
It may depend on who you’re quoting.
Some say “abstract objects exist” and are referring to numbers. Some say it and refer to physical forces like gravity or magnetism. Some say it and refer to properties or universals (see Nick’s comment above, which I think lays this out really well).
And there are other kinds of abstract objects. I often think of words, songs, and other artifacts, as well as universals – as opposed to things you could put on a table, or travel to, or describe as having a location.
The SEP article is talking mostly about this abstract / concrete distinction, rather than about just universals (what we often refer to as properties, or types, or classes, or kinds).
They lay out some obvious examples of each. I can point to a vase. That’s concrete. Ditto the Eiffel Tower, and your DVD of Aliens. Obvious examples of abstract objects include the number 2, the color red, and the movie Aliens itself. I can’t point to these or specify their location. I could, however, point to various expressions of it – the “2” squiggle I wrote a few sentences ago, or the one you see on your monitor right now, as well as the words “two”, “dos”, and the Japanese two-stroke kanji I can’t easily type here. These all refer to or relate to the abstract concept of two, in the same way that every DVD of Aliens might relate to or be a concrete expression of the movie.
The article goes on to outline some of the gray areas, and the struggle to come up with a useful formal abstract / concrete distinction. We’re sure it has to classify the above easy examples correctly. They’re our regression tests.
For example, one philosopher (Frege) says abstracta have to at least be mind-independent. Mind-dependent things are really weird in this context – stuff like my impression of that “2” squiggle after staring at it. No one seems to think that’s concrete, but Frege claimed it’s not even abstract, either – he was going after this pure, ideal concept of two-ness that anyone touches when they think about it, but does not own. My impression of “2” is not yours, but we’re both thinking about the same {thing which we refer to as 2 or two or dos or…}.
Then there are a few other proposed criteria in the SEP article. Each has its problems. The overall conclusion is that there isn’t a settled distinction, even though there’s consensus on the easy examples. (I think.)
I used to work in this stuff for about twenty years, so I’m sorta used to SEP-ish ways of talking about these things, and enjoy attempting to translate them to laymanese, so if you have further questions, by all means, reply.
You’re right. When I gave my answer, I picked one kind of abstract object, because I wasn’t about to rehearse arguments for all of them. I considered laying out some groundwork first about this, but I felt the answer was already super long. One thing that’s bothered me a bit is that since then the conversation has ranged over a lot of different varieties of abstracta, like numbers and natural kinds. We don’t want to give the impression here that a philosopher who says one kind exists will readily admit another one does too! So your reply, as an introduction, is great in its own way.
Even Quine believed in sets.
Quine seemed happy to believe a lot of things that I find hard to make sense of. Like the idea of ravens being a natural kind. As I said about horses, considering the ancestry of everything we might currently call a raven seems like it would lead to edge cases where we need to make some arbitrary cut offs about what is and isn’t a raven.
The horse and raven examples look like instances of the general Sorites paradox. It’s a good term to be familiar with, and even a bit fun to bring up at (certain) parties (your typical rationalist could probably name it in a trivia contest), since it’s an issue that anyone has likely run into in daily life. It’s been studied for thousands of years, and has several responses, and there’s no apparent consensus on which response is best.
It’s even a bit dangerous, since if you try to lay out a Sorites paradox in formal logic, you come away with the unsettling notion that formal logic is all bunk and we may as well go with old wives’ tales all the way down.
My personal tack – and probably most people’s, whether they’ve even heard the term – is to say that there’s no useful notion of “horse” or “raven”, past a relatively near point. The SEP quickly mentions the concept of vagueness here, and that meta-property is useful – it suggests to me that the more vague my sense of an ideal, the less certainty I can assign to claims about individuals that exemplify that ideal.
So: “horses are fast”, but I can’t bet a lot of money on a specific horse running fast. Maybe some. Maybe a lot, if I’m betting it will run faster than a human. But that’s because I have better measurements comparing humans and horses – two vague bell curves separated by a lot of space. Similarly, I might have more useful claims I could make, if I had better and more comprehensive measurements. (Like if, say, I were Charles Murray…)
Quine’s notion of natural kinds is pretty weak, though. It’s just a similarity space that confirms inductions (and similarity spaces are rife with edge cases). And Quine thinks that superficial similarity spaces get replaces by theory-laden similarity spaces as sciences develop, so he would have no problem ditching “Ravens” as a relevant natural kind if a more theory-laden notion of corvids was better at confirming inductions. And, of course, his use of ravens as an example comes from Hempel.
From Eliezer’s facebook post:
The obvious example here (and somebody pointed that out in Eliezer’s facebook post) is Germany, which didn’t have a minimum wage until recently. And the difference doesn’t seem to be that Germany doesn’t have credentialism, but that the credentials are much more specific. There’s a state-supported vocational training system that trains people for a lot of jobs that would require university degrees in other countries (nurses, for example). Also your university degree is very specific for the jobs you can have. Getting a job as a programmer requires a CS degree, getting a job as an engineer requires an engineering degree, getting a job as a statistician requires a math degree, getting a job as a teacher requires a teaching degree and so on. Medical doctors don’t take some unrelated bachelor first but essentially immediately start with the equivalent of medical school. The degrees also don’t have a lot of unrelated classes like in the USA. If you study physics, you’ll have only physics and math and maybe a handful other science classes. University is seen as something that prepares you for a narrow range of specific jobs.
I’m having a hard time reconciling the certainty people express over anthropogenic global warming with what we know about Earth’s climatology over the last billion years.
I mean, if climate change is really happening, it seems to me that it would be because that’s just what the Earth does. Radical changes in climate had been happening for eons before the appearance of the first hominids, so why the absolute conviction that humans are to blame for this one? It seems that it’s the expectation of long-term climatological stability that’s erroneous here.
The extreme politicization of the issue doesn’t help, and I’ll admit that I’m not immune. The view that AGW is a replacement religion for those who can’t go without has its merits, in my opinion, what with what looks an awful lot like Original Sin, Fall, Redemption and heretical outgroups. The claims of “It’s Science!” don’t hold much water as unpalatable scientific results are usually fought tooth and nail.
It’s troubling to me because this is the only issue where I doubt the scientific consensus, though I cut myself some slack by choosing to believe that climatology isn’t exactly a hard science.
Edit: And the fact that Trump picked the anti-AGW side reduces the possibility of unbiased, clearheaded research to about zero.
Astronomy isn’t exactly a hard science either (no controlled, reproducible experiments!), yet there isn’t a large movement of people dedicated to prove that black holes are an hoax and NASA is a money-harvesting scam.
From what I understand:
1) It is undeniable that climate is warming up.
2) According to models of past climate evolution, it shouldn’t be doing so at this point of time, and certainly not at that speed.
3) The only major difference we can work out between before and after the period of warming is humans starting to massively pump out CO2 in the atmosphere.
4) We have a clear and simple explanatory mechanism of how CO2 would cause climate to warm up.
There may be a better explanation, but none of the climate-sceptics seem willing or able to provide it — solar activity has not changed during the last 40 years, and Earth axial tilt shifts should be pushing the climate toward *cooler* trends.
The comparison to Astronomy is surprisingly apt, but not in the way you mean. First, there are is a movement of people who think that, to some degree, NASA is a money harvesting scam and the achievements of the space program were faked for cold-war reasons. It’s a fringe movement because very few people are using astronomy as a way to justify forcing the majority of the population to change the way it lives.
I’m generally sympathetic to the scientific consensus, but “this new evidence suggests that we’re all doomed unless everyone drops what they were doing and starts working on remaking the world in the ways I wanted all along” screams bullshit to me. Start replacing coal plants with nuclear plants and I will absolutely sit up and take notice, but as long as the solution to climate change is to do exactly what environmentalists wanted before they heard of climate change, I will continue to take their predictions of doom with a healthy mountain of rock salt.
I think the “replace coal with wind” faction is bigger simply because they’re the political group that has been more likely to care. If a scientific consensus emerged which seemed to support one groups long term goals, then you’d expect that group to rally behind it right? Hypothetically, let’s say a consensus emerged that the earth was dangerously bloated with coal, then you’d expect coal supporters to incorporate that consensus into their political dialouge. It would be evidence based reasoning, it should be seen as a good thing. To dispute the evidence based on the political group that picked it up would be absurd.
The key point is the separation of the ideas conception and it’s subsequent politicalisation. Climatologists don’t seem so politically motivated to conspire to produce fraudulent evidence, and it seems that even companies such as ExxonMobil knew about global warming through independent early research.
So the reason we see more “replace coal with wind” than “replace coal with nuclear” is simply because the issue mattered more to the wind people so they picked it up and ran with it. Other than that, nuclear has a lot of problems of its own so maybe a more feasible comparison would be “replace coal with clean coal” or “replace coal with gas”. Both of those aren’t perfect to an environmentalist but they are movement we’ve actually seen.
We are living in very different realities.
The reason we’re not seeing “replace coal with nuclear” is that the left, and specifically the environmentalist left, are anti-nuclear and they won’t stand a solution to climate change that goes against their ideology. It’s not a question of not mattering, it’s a question of active opposition.
I agree. Leftist environmentalists are the most vocal on climate change, and tend to be anti-nuclear. As such we tend to hear climate change evidence coupled with anti-nuclear solutions. Though this politicising isn’t a good reason to dismiss the evidence of climate change.
On the other hand, leftist environmentalists don’t like coal or gas and yet clean coal and replacing coal with gas have been used/touted against climate change. These are solutions outside of the leftist environmentalist remodel of the world, so to dismiss climate change as a fraudulent tool to support a political narrative is unfairly reductive.
We don’t see replace coal with nuclear, because nuclear is the most expensive form of power in current production. It’s important to remember nuclear power projects were declining years before Three Mile Island. Nuclear power is expensive, requires massive up front investment, takes decades to begin earning money, and is subject to massive cost and schedule overruns. Capitalism far more than environmentalism killed nuclear power.
The only plausible way to make nuclear power the solution to global warming is nationalization of the power industry and a massive government building spree (i.e. how France got it’s nuclear power). Solar and wind on the other hand coexist quite peacefully with capitalism, just requiring some subsidies to get started. At some scale of renewables, we may have to start addressing the variability of power supply, but hopefully by that point power storage will be economically viable.
That depends on how we define “expensive”. Yes nuclear power has exceptionally high up-front costs (a portion of which can be blamed on the afore mentioned political opposition) but in terms of expense per MWH produced over the typical life time of a plant it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than wind or solar.
@hlykacg:
Are you including the back end costs of storing the spent fuel for thousands of years?
One problem is that front loading 50 years of costs means tremendous loss of optionality. Let’s say I can build a solar plant with levelized cost of $0.75/kwh or a nuclear plant with a levelized cost of $0.60/kwh. But the solar plant is far less front loaded and so has a break even point of 10 years of operations where the nuclear plant has break even of 40 years of operation. A lot can happen in 40 years. It’s a big risk even if the projected payout over 50 years is higher.
Surely a carbon tax would also increase the viability of nuclear relative to coal.
The cost of storing the spent fuel for thousands of years is no greater than the cost of storing it for fifty years. And is almost lost in the noise unless boosted beyond reason by nucleophobia and/or NIMBYism.
Whether NIMBYism boosts the cost of nuclear waste disposal more than it does e.g. wind power, is an interesting question that I haven’t looked in to.
@hlynkacg
Que? I looked this up quickly to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but EIA projections for the 2017 energy forecast confirm my understanding that levelized cost of solar PV is below nuclear at this point (that’s before accounting for the storage investment that would be necessary to go above certain levels of solar contribution, of course).
See https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf for source, I’m referencing Table 1a.
Speaking as a pro-nuclear vaguely-left person, I gave up on trying to convince anyone of the desirability of building more nuclear plants after the Fukushima disaster. Every time I tried to say “but the alternative is coal, which is deadlier even setting aside CO2” I got drowned out by scaremongers yelling about the dead zone in Japan. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
That seems obviously false. Monitoring costs alone should make this untrue. But you seem to be saying that the existing 50 year solutions are the same as solutions designed to last 1,000 or 10,000 years, and I don’t believe that to be the case.
Suppose a solution that lasts 50 years costs a million dollars.
Funding the exact same solution for a second fifty years requires an up-front investment of 1/7 of a million (assuming the up-front investment earns 4% for fifty years). Funding the exact same solution for a third fifty years requires an up-front investment of 1/50 of a million. A little iteration shows the grand total converging to 1.16 million to fund an indefinite series of 50-year plans.
That doesn’t take into account that in 50 years we may very well have better solutions available.
@Doctor Mist:
Why is the second 50 presumed to be less expensive than the first 50? And so much less so? Other than making your numbers work?
There really isn’t a reason why a deadly substance with a half life of 1000s of years, which also makes toxic that which it comes in contact with, should be assumed to be easier to deal with for the second 50 years than the first. You have do something with equally toxic as before waste, and deal with the remains of the previous solution.
I mean, nuclear power is 50+ years old already and we don’t seem to have advanced much in the long term solution realm (AFAIK, which is by no means at expert level). This seems to be so much the case that existing plants are simply extending their storage into decades in what are supposed to be very temporary pools (again, AFAIK).
And none of this takes into account the risk of “commons” type problems like long term leakage into water supply, which are unlikely, but won’t be paid for if they do happen.
@HBC
It isn’t presumed to be less expensive, it is presumed to have a lower net present value. For example if the interest rate is 1% over the rate of inflation then an obligation of whatever the inflation adjusted equivalent of 1 million 2017 dollars due in 2067 requires an investment of $608k today. Due in 2117, 340k. A stream of $1 million 2017 dollar a year payments from now until forever would only require a $100 MM investment today.
@HeelBearCub:
Doctor Mist is assuming that you can invest money today — with a 4% annual return — and use it to pay for storage in fifty years (and a smaller amount of money to pay for storage in one hundred years, and so on).
The math works out, so long as you are willing to expect a 4% return on investment in perpetuity (which I think is the biggest problem with the argument).
Well, the first fifty years involves processing the radioactive waste into a suitably immobile form, sealing it into nigh-impenetrable steel drums, digging a really deep hole, burying the drums, backfilling the hole with concrete, putting up some warning signs, and hiring some security guards.
The second fifty years involves maybe hiring some security guards.
Really, if you’ve done it right you don’t need the security guards, and if you assume there will still be an institution capable of hiring security guards in fifty years you’re doing it wrong. But even so, the net present value of a trust fund capable of maintaining a modest 24/7 security force over a no-dig site in perpetuity is small compared to the cost of encapsulating the waste and digging the hole – which shouldn’t be impossibly expensive itself, though we can certainly make it so.
@John Schilling:
You implicitly assume that we are no longer using nuclear power in 50 years. If we are, then all of those costs are ongoing.
I though modern nuclear designs were efficient enough that the waste was less radioactive then the uranium ore that was dug out of the ground in the first place? And there were reactors that could use the waste from other reactors to produce power?
@HeelBearCub, Et Al
I am. In addition to what Brad, John Schilling have said modern closed loop reactors are also a lot safer / cleaner than the Cold War era designs used in existing US commercial plants.
@ Brad
That is a fair critique.
@ Rob K
Thank you for the link.
After skimming the report I feel like there’s some chicanery going on in that chart. If I’m reading it correctly the DOE estimates that it would cost an average of 96.2 dollars a MWH to replace 90% of the US’s existing generation capacity with nuclear power. That sounds pretty reasonable to me. What seems “off” is that this is compared directly to replacing only 25% of our generation capacity with solar at a cost of 72.7 dollars a MWH. The obvious question being “what about the other 65-75%?”.
@Alex Zavoluk
In theory you could “burn” radioactive waste in a fast-neutron reactor for example. However, in order to set up a fuel cycle like that you’d need a) more highly enriched fuel then is generally used and b) to reprocess the waste from conventional nuclear reactors. Both a and b raise proliferation concerns and such concerns have kept the idea from ever being implemented in the United States. I think France may have tried, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
You can also use a particle accelerator to transmute waste into less long lived isotopes, but I believe that approach is considered too expensive to be practical at the current time.
@hlynkacg capacity factor refers to the percent of the listed capacity that a generation source produces, averaged over time. Because solar panels aren’t always in direct sun they have a low capacity factor. Nuclear, on the other hand, is basically running at full power when it isn’t down for maintenance or refueling (since the fuel is such a low share of the total cost). The capacity factor is part of the levelized cost calculation.
We all learn stuff all the time, but this is the sort of thing you should probably research before making bold assertions about generation costs.
Or building terrifying Lovecraftian concrete hellscapes.
HeelBearCub,
My apologies. The others have it exactly; I was making an argument from present value of money, in response to your:
If you assume an annual discount rate of 4% — which may or may not be reasonable; some people seemed to find it high — the difference between the cost of taking care of a certain volume of waste for fifty years and in perpetuity is about 16%. If the discount rate is only 2%, the difference is still only 59%.
And that’s the cost if all you do is kick the can fifty years down the road every fifty years. I don’t advocate this; it’s just a thought experiment to show why it’s silly to get yourself in a swivet about a few thousand years.
@Doctor Mist:
Yeah, once it was pointed out, I saw that I had mis-read/mis-interpreted your post. I have a feeling that argument actually proves far too much though. We can run it backwards and see that, in fact, the storage of nuclear waste generated 50 years ago is not funded in perpetuity. We can also see that, for example, the cost of Medicaid for the current elderly was not payed for 50 years ago, when it would have clearly been a pittance.
In addition, the NPV argument ignores the idea that opportunity cost is real cost. No matter how much we have to fund it in current dollars, assuming that we have actually calculated the future cost correctly, the future cost will be just the same in terms of opportunity.
As to hlynkacg and John Schilling saying that storing nuclear waste is trivial, I think empirical evidence is strongly on the side of it not being trivial. And as other have pointed out, assuming a long term reliance on nuclear power means a long term reliance on nuclear waste disposal, meaning you will be continually adding more waste, and needing to store it. I’m not sure where you think that you can not have an institution dedicated to this.
If in 500 years we end up with 1000 Chernobyl sites because the “nigh impenetrable” casks were more on the side of “nigh” than “impenetrable”, that is a real cost. The idea that you think you can safely bury nuclear waste and not monitor it seems not just irresponsible but also politically naive.
@ Rob K
Fair point, but the even then the question remains. What about the other 75%? Your own source states that the cost of “dispatchable” and “non-dispatchable” recourses are not directly comparable due to the need for back-up generation capacity which is not included in the non-dispatchable recourses’ cost calculations.
So here’s the thing, we know from experience that building a 500 MW solar farm in the Southwest is likely to cost you somewhere around 2 billion a pop. Ivanapah, Solar Star I & II, Blythe Mesa, along with most of the nm NM & AZ projects have all been in this price/output range. We similarly know that 4.5 billion will buy us 2 A4W nuclear reactors rated at 500 MW each plus a bunch of incidentals we don’t really need, and the A4Ws will have a capacity rating of 90% vs the solar installation’s 25%.
@hlynkacg yeah, as I said, those costs are before we think about storage costs.
If you have an informed critique of those EIA numbers I’m open to it, but the history is that they’ve tended to miss slightly high on solar costs (there isn’t really anything to benchmark them for nukes). A hand-waving citation to a CSP plant and 3 PV installs, compared to average construction costs for aircraft carriers built across 3 decades, isn’t persuading me that EIA is wrong.
I’m not arguing that it would be smart or cost-effective to try to replace all our generation with solar over the next several years, but the cost trajectory of PV since ~2010 suggests to me that continuing to install PV for now and pushing research on energy storage technology is a perfectly sane and economically competitive approach to emissions reduction.
I don’t, by the way, think nuclear would have been an insane approach; while construction costs on recent utility-owned reactors haven’t been encouraging, it’s possible we would see a learning curve and cost improvement with sustained investment. But the “nuclear is the only serious response to emissions issues” argument has been left behind by technological development at this point.
@DocKaon
This is true. Storage of waste is definitely not a task with an easy solution. Yucca mountain is an interesting case study.
Also:
The timeline for nuclear is so long that there are definitely quicker solutions to get up and running.
The decommissioning phase is expensive and in the past the bill has fallen to the tax payer to clean up.
Uranium still needs to be mined, reducing energy independence and increasing the emissions.
So that environmentalists want to steer clear of nuclear isn’t that much of a surprise and I don’t think it has a lot of credibility to use the preference to dismiss climate change.
@ Rob K
I’ve made my critique. Is there anything specific in my reply you take issue with?
Furthermore I strongly disagree with your assertion that there is “no baseline” for nuclear power cost. The obvious points of comparison are France and Japan’s civil programs and the US Navy.
Basic engineering principals would tell us that when your “power plant” costs as much or more than an aircraft carrier, and the aircraft carrier is generating more electricity something has gone wrong.
@ Callum G
It’s the fact that environmentalists prefer to mine very large amounts of cadmium, coal, and other fossil fuels, in place of uranium that calls thier motives into doubt. Ditto, for Yucca mountain NIMBYism.
Fukashima is effectively the worst case scenario for a modern nuclear disaster and if AGW is the catastrophic threat it is often portrayed as a hundred or so Fukashima scale disasters over the next 500 years is getting off light.
This is worrisome:
Note that this mess came about because of the government refusing to honor their promised subsidies to nuclear waste storage. So the business model was already based on subsidies.
@hlynkacg
US Navy reactors use highly enriched uranium, a technology not available on the civilian market.
I got overly curious about this, so I crunched some numbers to see what I could come up with using various cost estimates, keeping everything but construction costs as modeled by EIA. As a reminder, EIA levelized cost of 2022 nuclear is $90/MWh, solar is $73/MWh.
I swapped in the midpoint estimated capital cost for North America from the World Nuclear Association for the EIA’s estimate, which would drop the levelized cost of electricity to $80/MWh, holding all else equal. I also plugged in the cost of the Flamanville reactor in France, which would take the LCOE up to $115/MWh. Both of these are still over the EIA’s estimated solar costs.
Taking a look at the solar side, I was able to find solid cost estimates for the Topaz plant, which was constructed from 2011-2014. Plugging those in for EIA’s numbers produces a levelized cost of $132/MWh for that plant, the most expensive figure. I couldn’t find cost figures for the other specific plants you cited, but did find an average figure for all utility-scale plants that came on line in 2015 (from here) which produces an estimate of $84/MWh LCOE for plants completed in that year.
2015 solar has a levelized cost slightly higher than WNA-estimated nuclear, and, and lower than EIA-estimated nuclear. EIA’s assumption that 2022 solar will be cheaper than 2015 solar seems reasonable given the past decade of price trends.
tl;dr solar is cost-competitive with favorable assumptions of nuclear costs as of today. It is likely to become cheaper in the future. Investigation of likely trends on storage costs, which would be the other piece of the puzzle if solar was going to account for a majority or sizable minority of total generation, will have to wait for me to have another chunk of free time to torch.
HeelBearCub-
That’s not really how time value of money works. You calculate it by assuming you actually set aside the money and let it appreciate, but what that exercise shows you is that it’s not rational to prefer, say, spending $1 today over spending $1 tomorrow, or spending $10 in a year over $1 today, or spending $150K today over spending a million dollars in fifty years.
In societal terms, perhaps we don’t actually put $116K in a 4% trust fund that pays out $1M in fifty years to spend on waste management. If we’re smart, we spend it on things that seem, in fifty years, to have been money well-spent, even though we now have to come up with a million for another stint of waste management. (Perhaps it was spent on malaria nets so that Africa is a vital and dynamic contributor in a world economy to whom a million 2017-dollars is small change.)
Medicaid might be something of a red herring. As Scott has so ably described, the problem is less that we didn’t invest properly than that the thing itself has become vastly more expensive than projected. It strikes me that nuclear waste sequestration isn’t especially likely to suffer from that kind of cost disease, but even if it does, I don’t see why it would hit the succession of 50-year solutions any harder than it would the hypothetical 10000-year turnkey solution.
In 50 years, assuming that you calculated the inflation rate on nuclear wast containment correctly, your $116K will have appreciated to a value sufficient to pay for the next 50 years of containment. It will also have appreciated to a value sufficient to pay for many other things. Your opportunity cost in 50 years is still the value of all the other things you could pay for then. It’s not “nearly free” or “minuscule”. It is what it is.
When I reach 65 and retire, I could use $2M to buy an annuity or buy a yacht, but not both. It doesn’t matter that I got the $2M by investing $100K in the past. Funding my annuity still has a cost of $2M.
One implication of assuming a positive real return for 50 years is that the society that exists on the other end is much richer. If the difficulty of the task in question doesn’t also get harder and harder in real terms — which is only likely to happen if some kind of cost disease applies — then it is likely to be increasingly trivial for that society to undertake the fixed difficulty task.
Consider if John Adams had agreed to deliver 10,000 tons of beef to Tripoli every year, by now it wouldn’t even be a rounding error for the US government.
This has always been my objection to “we need to spend billions to make sure this storage is impregnable for 10 millennia!”
In 10 millennia, hell in a century, the likelihood is that we’ll either have a much cheaper/simpler/better solution to the nuclear waste (burn it in another reactor / lob it into space / let our autonomous hole-digging bots dig a better hole and line it with unobtanium nano-crystals). Or society will have collapsed, in which case who gives a damn anyway, a locally uninhabitable chunk of desert due to a radiation leak will be the least of our worries
The mutants. Won’t somebody pleeeeease think of the mutants!
HeelBearCub,
Okay, but I don’t think I see your point. It’s still the case that a million-dollar 50-year solution in 50 years has the same effective cost as $116K today, and a million-dollar 50-year solution in 100 years has the same effective cost as $20K today.
A solution that will handle the problem for 10,000 years without further thought, but that costs a hundred million today, is a bad choice, even if we knew what it looked like.
A solution that will handle the problem for 10,000 years without further thought, and that costs only two million today, might well be preferable to my succession of 50-year solutions even though it is nominally more expensive, because it eliminates doubt about interest rates and self-discipline. I’d be interested in the design, but my analysis of the 50-year solution makes me feel like it’s not particularly urgent.
I might have misled you by talking about malaria nets. Think of it like David Friedman’s parable of the cars and the wheat — you can build cars by building car factories, or by growing wheat and sending it to Japan. Malaria nets might not directly add a million dollars to the gross world product of 2068, but fifty years is a long time and we do seem to be getting richer even without them.
@ Rob K
Naval reactors use enriched uranium because they need to be small and light enough to fit inside a ship or submarine’s hull. In any case this is a regulatory hurdle rather than an engineering problem or physical constraint.
In any case you still haven’t addressed the big issue which is that a solar plant still needs 3.6 times the rated output of a nuclear plant (or equivalent in back-up generation) to meet the same level of service.
@hlynkacg
That is not a useful discussion, since you should be calculating the price per usefully generated kW anyway.
The real issue with solar is how to deal with the irregularity of production (during the day, during the year, etc) and mismatches of normal production periods (light hours) with usage patterns (also in the evening + night).
That’s the problem, per the quoted report a solar plant should be expected to provide an estimated 25% of it’s maximum rated output over the course of it’s lifetime compared to 90% for nuclear.
The point I’m trying to make to Rob K is that the ultimate price of a solar plant isn’t just the price of solar, it’s the price of solar plus whatever back-up systems you have in place to cover the shortfall.
You need to keep in mind that we need backup systems anyway, since demand varies. If we were to only have nuclear plants with constant production, we’d also be in trouble, since they can’t scale up and down with load.
If we keep the share of solar below a certain threshold, it seems that existing backup systems work fine. AFAIK, Germany is the only country pushing up against that limit, so for other countries, any decision about whether to add some extra solar doesn’t require (significant) increases in backup plants.
It is relevant for future scenario’s with large scale solar and wind power. Many proponents are optimistic about the development of new energy storage methods.
My position is that we should seek to push solar to the maximum that is doable with existing backup systems and invest heavily into research for new energy storage methods. Given the large costs reductions of solar panels, I think that this is the economically most sensible choice as well. Then we can later decide what to do based on the knowledge/technology that we have then.
It’s not unusual for a group to propose solutions in line with their usual thinking. In fact, it’s almost tautologous. For some reasson, it’s only a problem when the left do it.
It’s not only a problem when the left does it, although it mostly comes up in that context. But it’s no more convincing to opponents than the NRA saying “this school shooting would have been mitigated/prevented if teachers could carry sidearms.”
Arguments that we need to dramatically change our way of life, or give up certain cherished beliefs are much more persuasive when they are being made by people who are giving up some of their own cherished beliefs than they are when most of the people making them seem to be making no comparable sacrifices/lifestyle changes.
Are you quite sure there are no objective argument against nuclear?
There are plenty of arguments against nuclear. None of them can hold up against an existential threat, as postulated by catastrophic AGW.
If nuclear power can reduce carbon emissions, I would make at least a favorable reference to Three Mile Island in the House of Commons.
There are lots of arguments against nuclear, but most of them are much weaker than the extreme arguments being made against coal and (to a lesser extent) oil and gas.
There are also lots of arguments against solar, wind, and hydro. Problems can be solved. Most climate activists seem to the think the problems with nuclear are greater than the problems with coal. I’m prepared to believe them, but I would be prepared to reconsider if they reversed their position.
I’m not convinced this is actually true – I think you are applying outgroup homogeneity bias and including the views of ‘traditional’ environmentalists, when it’s really not fair to extend the term “climate activists” to that group at all.
@hbc while what you’re saying about opportunity costs is true in some contexts, in this case you can’t decouple the storage costs of nuclear fuel from the benefits of the existence of a power plant.
We could describe the decision to construct any power plant as a decision to spend money, in amounts and at times dictated by the type of power plant, in order to receive valuable electric power, also in amounts and at times dictated by the type of plant. Both the costs and the benefits of any kind of power plant will have a present value determined by when they are received and the discount rate applied.
Consider, for instance, an imaginary power plant that is cheap to construct and operates without fuel for 40 years; it is substantially cheaper than all alternatives over that time frame. For 200 years after closure, however, it will kill anyone who enters it. This means that it needs to be well-guarded, which will cost money after the plant has stopped operating, but we can pre-fund the cost of this guarding program with a portion of the plant’s revenue during its operating window.
Thinking of long term costs in the way you are would militate against making investments that will incur long term costs, but provide enough benefit in the shorter term to set aside escrow funds to cover those long term costs. (Now, said escrow funds need to actually be set aside, which is a separate conversation.)
First, 200 years is an extremely short window compared to the window we are talking about, which is 1000s of years.
And I’m not decoupling the costs from the benefit. In fact, decoupling them is specifically what I am objecting to. I’m merely saying that any calculation of cost vs. benefit needs to take into account the fact that current nuclear power comes with extremely long term costs which can’t simply be hand-waved away.
When you make nuclear power you are committing to 1000s of years of safe containment. That’s a cost that needs to be taken into account when stacked against the benefit.
To quote the venerable Mr. Loaf, “So now I’m praying for the end of time. So I can end my time with you.”
But when you actually get around to doing the discounting, the difference in cost between say, a 100 year annuity and a “until the end of time” annuity typically ends up being very little. THe value of a benefit or the cost of a harm that occurs 1,000 years for now is a rounding error – it’s virtually zero.
Since you bring it up, why are we doing that?
Yes, the stuff will still be radioactive. Weakly so, compared to fresh nuclear waste, but still dangerous with sufficient exposure. It was weakly but smewhat dangerously radioactive when we found it, as uranium ore, and mostly harmless because it was tightly bound and deeply buried. In much less than a thousand years, it will again be weakly radioactive, tightly bound, and deeply buried, with the added bonus of professional analysis to verify that this combination should provide adequate safety going forward.
Meanwhile, when we make nice environmentally-friendly solar cells, we leave behind wastes with elemental poisons like arsenic that have half-lives of literally infinity, which do wind up buried but not nearly so deeply and with no talk about how we have to provide containment until the end of time.
So the bit where nuclear power is being called upon to promise active containment for its waste for thousands or tens of thousands of years, strikes me as adversarial special pleading. Figure out how deep the stuff needs to be buried, bury it, and be done with it already. Whether it is radioactive or not, whether the source is a nuclear power plant or a solar cell factory.
There also isn’t an organized movement demanding that the existence of black holes means the government has to adopt massive, controversial political and economic changes that just happen to coincide with what that movement was demanding before anyone had heard of black holes.
That’s because no one is proposing to take your car away as part of a tens of trillions of dollars scheme to eliminate black holes from the universe as a threat to human existence.
Citation needed.
Ditto.
Citation and citation
And those are just the easiest examples to find. there are plenty more, all from AGW sympathetic sources. They are nothing if not ambitious with their cause and my money.
Yeah, i was guessing it was a hyperbolic reference to the slowly-phased in diesel ban.
The second one is a doozy. There is $10T of fossil fuel in the ground–so we should burn it even if it kills us? Does someone actually have a COST-benefit analysis? (yes, lots).
And just think of all that gold in seawater.
it’s not the first time such a thing has been tried, only the most recent. Stating that people want to do what they flat out say they want to do is not a “hyperbolic reference.”
You seem to be ignoring the benefit side of that analysis. And it’s not just the cost of the oil. It’s replacing the trillions of dollars of oil infrastructure that make that oil worth something to begin with.
As for the cost side, if burning it was directly poisonous, then we could do such an analysis. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) there is no such direct connection. Burning it increases the likelihood of a catastrophic event in some non-linear way that is extremely difficult to predict with any accuracy. So no, I’m not willing to gamble tens of trillions on prediction of people who have, so far, failed to actually predict what they said they could.
Referring to a future ban on sales as “taking your car away” certainly is.
@Anonymous Bosch
You’re focusing on the specifics of this particular instance, not the long trend of attempts to ban cars, and the ever increasing levels of emissions regulation. My evidence was intended as illustrative, not exhaustive.
@cassander
I downgraded how seriously I take you after seeing you reference a ban on selling certain types of cars as ‘proposing to take your car away.’
This is not even close to being a reasonable statement.
tens of trillions of dollars
Fossil fuels in the ground might arguably be *worth* tens of trillions of dollars (I don’t care to audit the number), but it also costs tens of trillions of dollars to extract them. And they have value beyond burning them, most importantly in the chemical industry.
@Aapje
I’ve referenced numerous other attempts to outright ban the use of cars in certain places. And I referenced only actual legislation, merely plans and calls to action. If you don’t think the environmental left would be on board with taking away people’s cars, I think you need to re-examine your priors.
@Chalid
If the cost of extraction was higher than the sale value, the deposits wouldn’t be worth anything. That they are worth something indicates that the extraction cost is considerably less than the sell value.
The point, though, is that it’s not right wing loonies claiming the pro-AGW crowd wants trillions of dollars and that crowd denying it. They flat out admit that their ambitions will cost trillions. Hell, sometimes they even seem to think that that cost is a good thing. this does not make me inclined to trust them.
If the cost of extraction was higher than the sale value, the deposits wouldn’t be worth anything.
that is precisely the point.
Your link did not contain any methodology so I don’t trust it to have done anything more sophisticated than “number of barrels in the ground times current oil price” to come up with ten trillion.
Much of the oil in the ground certainly is worthless, except for option value.
@Cassander:
That is not even close to a reasonable summary of that cartoon. If I said that a manned expedition to Mars would be a good thing, and listed a bunch of reasons that had nothing to do with money, would you conclude that I approve of manned space travel because of the cost?
Given that you are currently defending yourself against accusations of misrepresentation, you might consider being a little less fast and loose with your claims.
@cassander
That is still not taking away your property. Any and all attempts to phase out polluting cars so far have involved subsidies for replacing a car or banning cars that pollute more than X amount from certain areas (where pollution is already high and the impact on people’s health is substantial).
Cars have relatively short lifetimes. If you ban the sale of a type of car/level of pollution now, you will have very few left after 15-20 years. You can speed that up a bit with cash for clunkers programs.
I suggest that you just retract your hyperbolic statement rather than try to defend it. You’d come out a lot better if you’d claim it was an emotional outburst rather than claim to still stand behind it.
Your paranoid beliefs, which are inconsistent with the evidence, is noted.
People on the left are not just morons who love burning dollars/euros. Some actually can use a calculator & think long term and choose a path that has good results for relatively low negative societal impact, despite the insistence by people like you that listening to environmentalists would destroy human welfare.
It’s especially amazing to me how so many critics of environmentalism seem to have no understanding of the concept of ‘time,’ despite many environmentalists explicitly making arguments for how they want to make long term change. Instead, their proposals get treated as if they want to implement their entire agenda in 1 day, which would do what the critics argue, cause major negative disruption, which is exactly why they are not advocating it.
In real life, environmentalists did have quite a few successes and those didn’t destroy human welfare. Perhaps you should update your views to not be inconsistent with the evidence.
They merely have to be marginally profitable to sell, not considerably profitable. Your link pretends that if it costs $1000 to extract $1001 worth of oil, $1001 of value has been created.
OK, here’s my attempt at thinking about it.
The market cap of the world fossil fuel sector is ~$5 trillion. As an estimate of foregone value, this ignores state-owned companies and private companies, but this error is compensated for by the value of the oil to the chemical industry, and also that these are not always pure-play fossil fuel companies (Chevron owns solar facilities, wind farms, along with non-energy assets like corporate real estate, cash on the books, etc). So let’s call $5 trillion a starting point for the NPV, which, fine, is not too far from $10 trillion.
But the more important thing is that noone is actually talking about instantly eliminating fossil fuel use. Any sensible plan is going to be about gradual cuts, so short-term production of these companies is going to be mostly unaffected. Due to discounting, a very great deal of the value of a company comes from the next several years of expected earnings. Government action that, say, cut production by 3% a year from market expectations in perpetuity would definitely hurt stock prices but we’re talking about a ~20% effect and not an ~80% effect here. So I’d divide that $5 trillion by ~5 to get ~$1 trillion as a first estimate of costs.
Obviously there’s room for a few factor-of-2 level errors but I don’t really see tens of trillions of dollars as plausible.
@Chalid
Again, the point wasn’t rigorous analysis of costs. the point was that even the pro-AGW people don’t dispute that their program will cost tens of trillions.
@Apje
No, it’s taking away use of your property, which amounts to the same thing.
the average car in the US is 12 years old. Many are much older than that. that is not a short period of time.
that does not mean that such action is costless.
Again, there’s nothing hyperbolic about it. the pro-AGW side openly brags about wanting to do these things.
I claimed environmentalists want to ban cars, and they’re banning cars. How is that inconsistent?
I didn’t say they were idiots. I do, however, thing that their calculations are seriously off. Please kill the straw manning.
Funny, what’s amazing to me is how many environmentalists seem to think that by placing their preferred policies at some point in the future, they magically become free lunches.
Please point out where I’ve criticized, e.g. banning CFCs. Then remember that you are asking for literally tens of trillions of dollars, and remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
My link is an argument made on your behalf, not mine. I picked it as an act of maximum possible generosity to your point of view. Stop acting like it’s some insidious right wing plot.
@chalid
Again, doing it over time doesn’t magically make this free.
But the more important thing is that noone is actually talking about instantly eliminating fossil fuel use. Any sensible plan is going to be about gradual cuts, so short-term production of these companies is going to be mostly unaffected. Due to discounting, a very great deal of the value of a company comes from the next several years of expected earnings.
except 3% cuts aren’t what the AGW crows is proposing. What they want is massive and short term (i.e. <10 years) reductions in use, and tus in extraction.
Your estimate of the value of the fossil fuel industry is far too low. Saudi aramco alone is worth trillions. And we have to add in the value of coal extraction. The world produced something like 35 billion dollars of oil in 2016, which at 50 bucks a barrel was 1.8 trillion dollars. That’s just the price of raw crude, no refining, no transportation, and that’s 2% of global GDP. the costs of replacing everything that sustains that are massive, and well into the tens of trillions.
And he proposal you were complaining about was phased in over nearly twice that.
#
And you have to remember that phasing out fossil mean phasing in something else.
And if you do remember that, you will see how the “free lunch” is not magical. Would you have argued against phasing out the horse in favour of motorised transport by noting the value of the horse market, and ignoring the potential value of the car market?
Citation needed. Not a cartoon.
Actually, the cartoon was posted before, by Friedman, if I recall and thoroughly debunked. The fact that there are multiple reasons for getting off fossil is not a bad thing, and it takes pretzel logic to make it look that way.
I think the concern on the right is that the left will alter the perception of cars, using its leverage in various places, until owning cars looks unreasonable, and taking them for the good of the car owner and nearby individuals looks virtuous. Which is me basically unpacking “they’ll move the Overton window”.
“Noting paranoid beliefs” is doing the opposite of what you want if you want to defuse this concern, because it makes you look exactly like someone pushing on that Overton window.
If you want to defuse, I would suggest sticking to exploring the claims of substance, and avoiding bald accusations of hyperbolism. And since the other side is now on alert, you’ll also now have to avoid even implied accusations.
You seem to be putting forward rules where I have a duty to be factual and the other guy doesn’t. I prefer universalisable rules.
I have no idea why noting someone’s paranoia would increase their paranoia.
Even a cursory glance at the legislation that. cassander is complaining about shows that it is only about replacing one type of car with another.
cassander is under the same rule to be factual as you do. All you have to do is challenge the claims he made. You did do some of that; the problem is that you (and Aapje) didn’t stop there.
I have no idea why noting someone’s paranoia would increase their paranoia.
You should rethink this.
Even a cursory glance at the legislation that. cassander is complaining about shows that it is only about replacing one type of car with another.
Better.
Addendum: I don’t see how David Friedman’s post of that cartoon could have been debunked, given that his argument was partly that the value of the solutions in that cartoon were under debate (true – they still are), and that they were then being used to refute the value of exploring alternate solutions to AGW (true – they still are).
@cassander
Lots of Europeans never drive their car into London or Berlin. Many bigger EU cities have park + ride anyway, which I have used in the past, because you’d be an idiot to drive into the city center of many of these cities & pay the huge parking costs & face the traffic, when you can park at the perimeter and take a bus into the city center.
People can still drive their ‘banned’ cars in 99% of the country, in the places where a car actually makes sense (many people in those cities don’t own a car exactly because it makes little sense). So for 99.9% of people, it is a small loss of utility. Because the loss of utility is quite limited, the effect on second hand prices is limited, so the few affected people who need this specific use from their car can replace it without substantial loss.
Your link was for EU plans, where the average age is 7.4 years. If/When similar plans are proposed in the US, you can ask for a longer transition period because the US market is different.
But you can’t just mix and match these things, claiming that EU environmentalists are being irresponsible because their plans wouldn’t work in the US, when their proposal was not for the US in the first place.
No one ever said it was, but the claim by many opponents is that environmental proposals are extremely damaging to the economy. If you merely argue that ‘the benefits you get are not free and also have costs’ then this is a really weak objection.
I actually can read and cite things back to you: “That’s because no one is proposing to take your car away as part of a tens of trillions of dollars scheme to eliminate black holes from the universe as a threat to human existence.”
‘Taking away X’ has specific meaning, where you have property and then are forced to no longer have that property. None of the proposals have that effect.
Also, no one is talking about banning cars, they clearly want to gradually replace one type of car by another type of car. Just like they banned the sale of polluting cars in the past. Perhaps no one told you, but most of the cars that were sold in the past cannot be sold new today. It’s just now that you seem to have woken up to how gradual tightening of environmental regulation works, after it has been practiced for ages.
re: paranoia
TL:DR It is characteristic of malicious intentions to use insults to defame rather than argument to convince.
For an example imagine you are a discoverer of global warming, and I am a fat cat businessman who you naively came to with your data. Am I more likely an honorable fat cat or a crook if I respond:
“oh I see why you think that from that data, but here take a look at this data…”
“oh my god!….”
“I will have to think about this”
“Get your paranoid ramblings out of here, no fraud like you is going to bring down Edgar Q. moneybags! You’re a BUM!”
?
Likewise, on a lower level, if you’re putting forward evidence for global warming –despite worries that people are complacent and more interested in their narrow interests than the world’s future– and I told you it was paranoia to think something like that could happen, would that not be evidence of your ‘paranoid’ conspiracy theory that so many loyal god-fearing americans could be complacent with the future of the planet?
I’m getting rather pissed off that people are getting angry over my ‘paranoid’ statement, but completely ignore how that was in response to claims that are not even close to the truth.
Sure, I made an subjective accusation, but the other person made objectively false statements and is moving goal posts constantly to avoid owning up to that.
I guess this topic is so mind-killing that I have to take the mountain road (not just the high road) while the person you guys agree with can get away with murder.
Your estimate of the value of the fossil fuel industry is far too low.
You don’t know what Saudi Aramco is worth and I don’t either, but estimates seem to be in the hundreds of billions to very low trillions.
Also I’m not exactly going to weep if a policy reduces the value of Russian/Venezuelan/Saudi/etc oil.
I just realized I forgot to write it out: Energy market cap came from estimating 6% of world market cap being in oil and gas and the total stock market being ~$70 trillion; 70*0.06 ~ 4.2, round up to 5 as a nice round number. For caveats see previous post.
And we have to add in the value of coal extraction.
The coal industry is pretty tiny compared to the oil industry in terms of its market value.
Frankly I suspect that once you account for air pollution externalities (lung cancer etc) coal’s contribution to the world is negative.
Again, doing it over time doesn’t magically make this free.
Right, discounting is not magic, it’s finance 101.
The world produced something like 35 billion dollars of oil in 2016, which at 50 bucks a barrel was 1.8 trillion dollars.
This is precisely the kind of analysis that everyone keeps telling you is worthless for determining the economic value of oil in the ground. Exxon had total revenues of ~$250 billion and only made $8 billion last year, so, for Exxon, the cost of production is similar to the value of the oil; the discount factor is massive.
What they want is massive and short term (i.e. <10 years) reductions in use
3% a year compared to market expectations is really pretty drastic, I think, but I suppose there must exist crazy people who thinks we can cut 10% a year. You can always find a weakman. I think the vast majority of environmentalists would be happy with 3% a year cuts; it’s more aggressive than what the US agreed to in Kyoto for example, which was apparently 17% between 2005 and 2020 or a bit over 1%/year absolute.
@aapje I am very sorry for the impression I was mocking you, I was responding purely to this expression of incomprehension by another poster.
@carvenvisage
Sorry, I got a little ragey.
A claim that is completely non-factual can only be challenged by pointing out that it is completely non-factual. You can fight facts with other facts, you cannot fight thin air with facts. Having a duty to be factual is pointless unless it is enforceable, and enforcing it requires the ability to point out lapses.
Yep.
Partly. IIRC, he started with the the ususal “this cartoon proves that the left, unqiuely and despicably, want left wing solutions”
and then fell back to “we don;t have 100% proof that all thses things are desirable”.The first claim was thoroughly debunked, the second is pointless without detail.
A claim that is completely non-factual can only be challenged by pointing out that it is completely non-factual.
As opposed to pointing it out as non-factual and also deciding to get a few insults in, which you seem intent on doing, and is the exact opposite of an effective challenge.
It’s especially grating when you (and Aapje) do this thing where the other guy points out that X implies Y and you respond that X is not technically Y, talk past the claim that X -> Y, and then declare the other guy paranoid or hyperbolic for the absence of a claim you ignored.
And then declared your own opinion as if it were fact, and then tsk-tsked the other side for not rising to your vaunted heights.
Normally I’d be much more patient and forgiving about people who do this, but you’re coming off especially deluded about it in this thread.
unqiuely and despicably
I’m extremely certain, after years of reading Friedman’s writings, that this is not what he said. If I’m correct, then whatever was debunked was largely only in the minds of the debunkers.
fell back to “we don;t have 100% proof that all thses things are desirable
That’s not a fallback. That’s a proper qualification of the merits of these solutions. Furthermore, you missed the point of his claim, if it’s the same claim he made in his blog post. It has almost nothing to do with whether those solutions are good; rather, it has to do with the motive of people in choosing those particular solutions to address global warming, as opposed to other potential solutions. This isn’t pointless; rather, it is the central point he was making (in the blog post at least).
@Paul Brinkley
I have given specific argumentation why X does not in fact lead to Y nor is equal to Y, while the hyperbolic statements insinuate costs that are orders of a magnitude above the costs that people will realistically suffer.
That you classify this serious engagement as ‘talking past’ something just reaffirms the level of mind-killing/unbridgeable inferential distance.
Cassander repeatedly engaged in narrative-driven, emotionally triggering phrasing which in effect produces false beliefs among those who take it at face value and don’t realize that reality is far less extreme than the hyperbolic statements. The statements that Cassander made are at most true for some outliers and even then are severely mitigated by the limited scope (as the outliers can trade with the non-outliers, something that libertarians ought to realize & see as a benefit, but apparently can’t because pro-environmentalism seems to be automatically classified as strictly anti-libertarian).
If the effort I put in just leads to this kind of response, I should perhaps just let these statements stand or just react with low effort snark & accept that this topic is too mind-killed in this space to have a real conversation about, just like I did for another topic. However, such disengagement just leads to a destruction of rationality. I’d prefer to resist such further tribalism, but I’m also not a masochist.
I apologize for insisting that words are used in a way consistent with their commonly accepted meaning, rather than a ‘functionally equivalent’ way that is only accepted by one side of the debate and which frames the debate in a destructive way.
Please proceed to laugh at the silly environmentalist who wants to break down your (garage) door and take your car, leaving you to walk 100 miles in the snow to work, uphill both ways!
@APje
First, you are reading an awful lot into a single sentence here Apje.
Second, the claims I am sourcing are not outliers. the pro-AGW crowd (FWIW I dislike this label, but I lack a better one) is not a group prone to dissembling. they talk openly about making dramatic changes in the way that society operates. They are actively passing legislation moving towards these goals. They don’t hide this, they have an expansive vision, and they consider this a good thing. trying to say “no, really they just want minor changes” is not going to fly when “An apollo program for clean energy” is not an uncommon or unpopular phrase among them.
I’d love to have such a conversation, but it can’t start with you saying “those things people on my side are saying aren’t real.” At best, it has to be “lots of people on my side think X, this is stupid, Y is actually a reasonable point though.” And no, that is no a double standard. I will happily call out the idiocy of the people who, e.g. flat out deny that the world is getting warmer. Reasonable debate can be had as to how much warmer, but the actual deniers (not the people labeled as such) are flat out wrong.
You are reading an awful lot into a single sentence. Might I humbly suggest that you’re the one being emotional about this topic, not me?
@cassander
All this is true, yet it still doesn’t make your claims correct.
One can desire major changes, while counting heavily on normal replacement patterns of durable goods to do much of the heavy lifting. Looking at history, it is trivial to point at immense changes that didn’t have large negative impacts on incomes/well-being: replacing horses by cars, computers, the smartphone, etc.
The legislation that has already passed has certain characteristics. Your claims did not accurately reflect those characteristics, but are IMO, highly deceptive.
I am not claiming that you did this intentionally, but I am disappointed that you seem unable to engage with my actual argument. You never address the meat of my objections. Instead I get accused of not providing the meat, which is upsetting, because I put in effort and I feel that the response is a violation of the social norms that are generally upheld for other topics.
Anyway, I see little productive result from engaging in further discussion, so perhaps we should let this go.
All this is true, yet it still doesn’t make your claims correct.
One could, but that is something the environmental left largely rejects.
You could have fooled me, but if I misread you I apologize.
What argument do you think you’ve made? What I got from you is “environmentalists don’t literally want to break down your garage door, take your car, and crush it in front of your eyes tomorrow, therefore your point is entirely without merit.” Now, this is a long thread with multiple participants so perhaps i missed something more substantive, but that’s not an argument, it’s pedantic point scoring.
We don’t have 100% proof of anything, so , wjhile it’s a proper thing to point out,, it’s aslo pointless.
It *should* be about whether those thigns are good, and it should not be about motives. Ad hominem and all that.
PS I think your attempts at refereeing are failing quite badly because of a lack of even-handedness.
@cassander
In my eyes, “proposing to take your car away” is a claim that strongly suggests that:
1. All car owners will be forced to give up the petrol/diesel car they own and/or
2. All people lose the ability to use individual car-shaped transport to get from A to B
You invited these interpretations by the sloppy and hyperbolic way you expressed yourself and your refusal/inability to produce a ‘lawyered up’ statement when challenged. Because you didn’t make very specific claims, but simply threw out a lot of links, this also made it harder for me to address you effectively. I feel that I am being blamed for this.
Anyway, I addressed (1) by arguing that the main mechanism is at the point of sale, not at the point of ownership. Banning the sale of non-electric cars does not force people to get rid of their car before they would normally replace it. Cash for clunker programs merely incentivize early replacement. Of course the subsidy comes from taxes, so you can argue that it burdens certain taxpayers and is financial coercion, but in practice the subsidies usually are granted for fairly old cars, at a point where most of the ‘clunker’ cars have already been replaced (otherwise the program would be too costly). So you can’t just claim that the coercive effects are substantial. Also, the remaining clunkers are disproportionately owned by poorer people. So you can see it as a subsidy to the poor and a disproportionate burden on environmentalists, as those are far more likely to replace their more polluting car before the subsidy is enacted. Since you seem to dislike environmentalists, I presume that you are quite willing to have a disproportionate burden on your outgroup. You probably consider a subsidy that disproportionately goes to poor people to be wrong, but the issue of wealth redistribution is orthogonal to the issue of an overall increase in the burden on citizens. As your claim was about the latter, I consider the wealth redistribution effects to not be in support of your claims.
The secondary mechanism of banning certain cars from certain cities hasn’t applied to all petrol/diesel cars in the past and doesn’t apply to all petrol/diesel cars for the proposal you linked (which is more extreme than actually implemented programs in the past and I consider it very likely that the proposal will be watered down if it is actually made into law/policy). AFAIK, the number of miles driven in the cities in question is just a small fraction of the total number of miles driven in the countries in question, which means that the loss in utility is small. Of course one can argue that the ability to drive in cities is important utility of owning a car even if this is done infrequently. I anticipated this logical objection (that you didn’t make, but I tried to steelman your argument) by arguing that the utility of taking your car into the center of these cities is low and that (even in cities without a ban) very attractive alternatives have been set up, in the form of Park + Ride. So based on this I reject the claim that banning certain petrol/diesel cars from certain cities can be equated to a major loss of utility that forces more than a very small number of people to give up their cars. In my opinion your rhetoric is thus more wrong than right, since as you didn’t specify that “proposing to take your car away” through a major loss of utility is at most true for a rather small group with specific circumstances, I think that most people will read your statement as applying to all car owners.
As for (2), in my eyes a Tesla looks sufficiently functionally similar to a petrol/diesel car to claim that people will retain the ability to own individual car-shaped transport to get from A to B.
None of this means that I am arguing that your point is entirely without merit, which I never argued. What I did try to argue is that your strong statements are completely disproportional to the actual effects. If you had chosen to walk back your statements in favor of a motte position, I would have responded with approval. My policy is not to show approval for statements that are too hyperbolic and that I consider more deceptive than truthful. This may be ineffective to engage you in a productive way because of how you like to engage in debates. I realize that my preference for certain debate norms/style is subjective and not always effective, but my opinion in this case is that your use of hyperbolic statements is destructive to the ability to have a reasonable debate, where it is clear what is actually claimed.
This is my general objection to hyperbole, snark and other debate techniques which IMO are often emotionally effective, but convey much less information than less emotionally effective, but more ‘lawyered up’ statements. This puts a burden on the other person to try to figure out what the claim actually is or alternatively, to make a best guess which can then result in an accusation of straw manning. Personally, I feel that people have a burden to try to be so clear that it is much harder to be intentionally or unintentionally strawmanned. My desire is to have debates on SSC be more information dense and emotionally sparse.
They talk about making improvements. You need to say why cleaner air in cities, energy security for the future, etc, are bad things.
Ciation needed.
Your motte point is unsupported, so far. You haven’t show why gradual -this and phased-in-that aren”t worth doing.
We don’t have 100% proof of anything, so , wjhile it’s a proper thing to point out,, it’s aslo pointless.
This claim is itself lacking any point I can see. Like, where do I go? “You don’t have 100% proof that it’s pointless”?
It *should* be about whether those thigns are good, and it should not be about motives. Ad hominem and all that.
When the goodness of those things is under debate, and there’s very little information to go on, one of the factors ends up being the motives of the people proposing those things. This isn’t an ad hominem, although it could easily be used as part of one. It’s an observation that affects the probability of whether those things are actually good, given what we know.
PS I think your attempts at refereeing are failing quite badly because of a lack of even-handedness.
I think your priors are getting in the way of your attempts to assess my posts. I’m not claiming to be the authoritative referee here, so maybe that’s the issue. I’m pointing out something one side is doing that I think is wrong. If you like, I’ll make it explicit that I’m not claiming that I’m being comprehensive here.
There is a broad consensus in favour of cleaner air in cities, energy security and so on, which is precisely why politicians are able to move on those things. It is not a 50:50 debate, It’s consensus apart from a few demurrers.
GW itself is more of a fraught debate…but that is a different debate.
That was what I was doing, but apparently I’m not allowed to..
There is a broad consensus in favour of cleaner air in cities, energy security and so on, which is precisely why politicians are able to move on those things. It is not a 50:50 debate, It’s consensus apart from a few demurrers.
There is broad consensus in favor of cleaner air in cities if the offered alternative is dirtier air in cities. There is unknown, but significantly smaller, consensus if the offered alternative is whatever else people could have if they didn’t spend that money on cleaning the air, because people tend not to be surveyed about that. The “few demurrers” could easily be people who suspect they’re being offered a false choice. They likely believe that if air that is cleaner by some unspecified amount comes at the expense of poorer education or being able to afford to live only in poorer quality homes, then they’re worse off than if they’d declined to have “cleaner air”.
So it goes for the solutions in that cartoon. They’re all tradeoffs; a lot of people had gone over those tradeoffs before. Their advocates, however, behave in a manner consistent with unawareness of the tradeoffs.
[pointing out something one side is doing that I think is wrong] was what I was doing, but apparently I’m not allowed to…
No one claimed you weren’t. Although in this case, I’m claiming that I’m not doing the thing you claim I’m doing. And I’m getting the impression from this and the last few posts that you’re being deliberately facetious. There’s no reason for you to drag an otherwise good faith discussion back like that.
That just boils down to some people losing an argument in exactly the way that people lose arguments in a representative democracy, There’s nothing unfair o unusual about it.
You are tacitly assuming that the one and only climate change proposoal anyone has is complete ban on fossil starting tomorrow. That’s not going to happen. With a relaistic stepping down of fossil consumption, infrastructure can go through natural wastage.
Meta question: why do you argue this way, on a forum full of pedantic nerds? What did you think was going to happen?
>. That’s not going to happen. With a realistic stepping down of fossil consumption, infrastructure can go through natural wastage.
If natural wastage was enough, you wouldn’t need to massively subsidize the alternatives to make it happen. Those subsidies cost money, specifically, they will cost the amount of the difference between the cost of the two systems. that cost is trillions, and spreading it out reduces the cost only marginally. That the pro-AGW side is calling for those subsidies, and admits that they will cost trillions, puts the lie to this argument.
To be honest, I was surprised by the low quality of pro-AGWposting in this open thread and their inability critically examine their own positions.
Fossil is already subsidized. Your argument only works if this is not the case.
@Aapje
the vast majority of “subsidies” trotted out for fossil fuel companies are simply normal tax rules that apply to them, like a depletion allowance. Fossil fuels are certainly less subsidized than other forms of energy, particularly if you look at subsidy per megawatt. That said, I’m all for ending any actual subsidies for fossil fuels. What I don’t want to do is to end them then use the money subsidizing something else.
Citation needed.
Of course there have been many studies of the subject by competent economists. Some of them have come out against AGW measure on the whole. None of them support the most apocalyptic anti-AGW claims — global economic meltdown and so on.
Because when the oil runs out, we don’t need anythign else in place to replace it?
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z s
There’s a whole thread dedicated to such citations above, and that doesn’t even get into the trillion in taxes they want to impose.
I didn’t make any such claims. We can spend trillions on climate mitigation, sure. we can also spend trillions digging a giant fricking hole, then filling it again. That doesn’t make either a good idea.
Oil doesn’t just run out some day. As oil gets scarcer, it gets harder to find, the price will rise, and the market will organically begin to replace it. But even there, the effect isn’t linear. 5 years ago the price of oil was 100 bucks a barrel, today it’s 50. Why? because at 100 bucks, it was worth spending the money to figure out how to squeeze oil from rocks, and we did, and it turns out that once you’ve figured it out, that costs about 50 bucks a barrel to pull off profitably. There is no peak oil, in the classic sense.
@Cassander
How exactly does the depletion allowance work? If the total amount of the allowance over time exceeds their cost basis in the property, and the amount by which the property value rises is not taxed, then it is absolutely a subsidy, and that’s true of any kind of property for which this ‘normal tax rule’ applies. At the very least, if they ever sell the property, all of the depletion allowance they have ever claimed on it should be considered a capital gain.
Consider this: I buy a piece of land for $1000000. Oil is discovered on it, and now the value is $6000000 (this is a capital gain that will not be realized until I sell the land). Over the next eleven years, I pump all the oil out of it, taking $5000000 in depletion allowance (reducing my taxes on my other income), and at the end the land is back to being worth only $1000000 and I sell it, paying no capital gains tax because the sale price does not exceed the cost basis.
That’s an argument that subsidy ins’t strictly necessary. not that it’s bad.
Citation needed.
To the extent that a subsidy prevents the market from sending accurate price signals, that seems pretty bad to me.
I used to have arguments about “peak oil” with my left-leaning friends all the time. They seemed to think that the reason to fear peak oil (even though they believed solar and wind and biodiesel were clearly superior forms of energy generation) was that we would go from $2 gasoline to “the world is entirely out of oil and it’s now Mad Max” basically overnight.
But clearly in a functioning market economy, this would not happen. The price of oil would adjust to reflect its relative scarcity and efficiency compared to other forms of energy on a daily basis. We wouldn’t go from “cheap and plentiful” to “expensive and super-rare” overnight, it would be a very slow process, and much like diamonds, it would never really “run out” – it would just get really expensive such that it would no longer be suited to certain tasks (much as how diamonds aren’t well suited for many tasks).
BUT, if the government has a stated policy of ensuring that oil is “always affordable” then it will give false signals of the relative scarcity of oil. It’s sort of the same effect as laws that prohibit “price gouging” during natural disasters, only on a national/global scale. The anti price-gouging law ensures that you still get your $2 gas at the gas station… right up until the point when the station is entirely out of gas and there is no gas to be found at all, (or, to the extent that you can find some on the black market, it’s probably MUCH more than $2).
Prices contain VERY valuable information, information that is absolutely vital to the proper functioning of a market economy. Anything that obfuscates this information is potentially very harmful.
@random832
As I understand it, the ideas is to treat land as a capital good. If you buy a machine and use it to make stuff, it wears out. You’re allowed to consider the decline in the quality of your asset (the machine) as a business expense. A depletion allowance works the same way, but for land instead of traditional capital.
Now, this might be bad tax policy, or it might not. But what it isn’t is a subsidy to oil companies the way the government paying you 5 grand to buy a tesla is a subsidy to electric cars. It’s a general tax principle that happens to apply to oil companies.
no, it isn’t. I’ve given several. I will indulge you one last time, please stop it, you know that this is what is demanded.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-carbon-tax-4-trillion-save-humanity-global-warming-economists-nicholas-stern-joseph-a7763376.html
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/190167-cbo-carbon-tax-chops-1-trillion-from-deficit
http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/Perspectives_for_the_Energy_Transition_2017.pdf
He has a habit of doing that.
But if you lower taxes by the same amount, you can protect consumers form the shock.
if people’s actual objection to environmentalism is purely that
is not libertarianism , they should say so: it would save a lot of time.
Those were a lot better than your previous sources: looks like it’s paying off
.
Maybe I have a reason, too. Mainstream sources do quote high costs to AGW measures, but in relation to high costs for doing nothing.
I’m referring to your habit claiming that your opponent has not provided any citations/examples when a cursory inspection of the thread will show that they have.
Do you believe that all citations are equal?
Cartoon = blogpost = newspaper article=peer reviewed paper?
@TheAncientGeek:
If that’s your true objection, you should probably say “that citation isn’t good enough for me” and explain why, ideally with your own citations, rather than claiming cassander hasn’t provided citations.
Going with the catchy one line of refutation is probably easier, but is demonstrably false and doesn’t do good things to the quality of discussion.
Quoting myself:
@TheAncientGeek:
Cassander provided an article supporting his point (on the large cost of dealing with global warming) the first time someone questioned it.
The cartoon posted upthread was not used as evidence of the costs, but as evidence that the left thinks the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming are worth it even in the absence of global warming. It doesn’t support the point very well, since it lists the benefits but not the costs. Someone could maybe make an argument that this means the left isn’t thinking about the costs, but I agree that it’s not a very convincing backup, especially in the form of a political cartoon.
But very few of cassander’s sources (just the one, that I can see) are cartoons. The one you repeatedly quote and say “citation needed” to, the cost of compliance, is one he’s provided several sources for, none of which appear to be cartoons.
Other people have come up with good critiques of his first source: it doesn’t seem like anyone’s tackled his later ones. It would probably improve the quality of the discussion if you made your own critiques or referenced the existing ones rather than pretending that he hasn’t given sources for his claims.
Perhaps a good starting point would be providing your own sourced estimate of the costs of dealing with global warming? It certainly seems like the kind of thing that would lead to an interesting discussion.
If it was missing something or under/over priced, I’m sure someone would point out the error, and we could slowly converge on the actual costs.
The article was pretty much nonsense, and from a motivated source. Citations need to actually prove a point.
It’s not some arcane topic. see, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/jan/04/consensus-of-economists-cut-carbon-pollution
..it’s just that it is very difficult for one side of the debate to make their point using ordinary, mainstream sources. But there is no law of the universe saying the facts have to support everybody equally.
“The view that AGW is a replacement religion for those who can’t go without has its merits, in my opinion, what with what looks an awful lot like Original Sin, Fall, Redemption and heretical outgroups.”
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/
Yes, I’m aware that “my political opponents are irrationally trying to substitute their former religion” is a regular accusation, but it seems to me to apply to some things more aptly than others. I’m saying this as an atheist, BTW.
The fact that the population most strident about AGW are descended from the population that formalized the concept of Original Sin, and are renowned in psychology for being a guilt-based culture rather than a shame-based one, well it raises all manner of red flags for me.
What is your proposed mechanism by which the language used, and emotions felt, by people looking at evidence of climate change causes the atmospheric temperature to change in the ways their models predict?
Is it some quantum woo thing? Seems pretty powerful, if it can melt glaciers. If it is a religion, then it seems likely to be a true one: it has working miracles.
Alternatively, you could take the position that the fact the US military was at one time worshiped by cargo cults as not being particularly strong evidence that the US military does not exist.
Well a study published last year in Nature found no difference in rainfall patterns between the 20th Century and the pre-industrtial era:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/climate-model-predictions-on-rain-and-drought-wrong-says-study/news-story/2facdf4b28e1df599974e9c1bda0f18f
That certainly wasn’t in the predictive models, so perhaps they aren’t as miraculous as you believe.
As an aside, despite this study being published in the most prestigious science journal on the planet, it received barely any coverage. An oversight, I’m sure.
@OptimalSolver So first of all, because the link you provided is behind a paywall, I’ll go ahead and assume you’re talking about the 2016 paper from Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist (and others).
With all due respect, it does seem to be a bit disingenuous to present a paper that itself talks about a lack of “hydroclimate response to higher temperatures” as an argument against anthropogenic global warming. The paper itself is predicated on the idea that the climate is, in fact, getting much warmer. In fact, in another 2010 paper,
(http://agbjarn.blog.is/users/fa/agbjarn/files/ljungquist-temp-reconstruction-2000-years.pdf), the same author does a novel temperature reconstruction over the past two millennia, and it agrees well with other models. Furthermore, as the author states, ” Since AD 1990, though, average
temperatures in the extra-tropical Northern
Hemisphere exceed those of any other warm decades
the last two millennia, even the peak of the
Medieval Warm Period, if we look at the instrumental
temperature data spliced to the proxy reconstruction”.
Finally, the paper itself is presented as a refinement of hydroclimate models, not as a particularly revolutionary shift in the field. As a result, I wouldn’t naively expect it to get any more (popular media) coverage than it did. Most papers don’t even get the recognition of being in nature (which is, as pointed out, quite prestigious).
@strange9 If you go to the link via a Google search, you can read the article.
America is 70% Christian. It would be more surprising if the American environmentalist movement wasn’t mainly descended from Christians. I don’t see how this proves anything.
I would bet that coal miners are also “descended from the population that formalized the concept of Original Sin.”
Theres probably guite a few Christians in the pro-gun mivrnent, too.
LOL it seems that mathematics is also a religion. It has its priests (mathematicians), virtues (using inductive reasoning and writing good proofs), sins (writing non-rigid proofs or wrong proofs), heroes (famous mathematicians such as Paul Erdos, Alexander Grothendieck and Terrence Tao) and rituals (taking math courses, reading math books and papers, writing math papers, giving research talks, publishing). If you perform the rituals and have the virtues you are probably going to get tenure and become math professors, the High Priests of mathematics.
When I was a TA for a beginning formal math course it seems like I was an Apprentice Priest of Mathematics preaching and introducing new recruits into our ranks. Many Apprentice Priests desire to become High Priests. It’s hard but I’m still working towards that goal by performing rituals.
One might reason their way to deism, but not to Ganesh, Jehovah, or the FSM. Mathematics is a religion which can be deduced from first principles.
One can even teach it by means of reason rather than revelation, even if that is not the generally preferred method.
😀
My layman understanding is that the absolute change is not unusual/problematic so much as the speed of the transition; 100 years is very quick as far as significant geological/environmental events go.
Take sea level. If the earth at the start of the 20th century just happened to have a two meter higher sea level, all else being equal, our coastal cities would just be a few miles more inland. If the sea level rose two meters over a thousand years, we’d gradually shift new construction projects inland as old buildings naturally depreciated. But if the sea level rose 2 meters over the course of 100 years, that’s a lot of coastal real estate around the world that a. will still be in use b. is gonna get flooded.
Similar idea for wildlife. The coral in our alternate universe would probably just have their temperature stress baseline a bit higher than in ours. If the water temperature gets hotter over a couple thousand years, that’s probably enough time for evolution to do its thing and favor coral with a slightly higher temperature stress baseline. If the water temperature gets hotter in 100 years… yeah those coral are likely screwed.
Most people that believe in evolution (or any complex enough science) believe in it in a religious way too, and couldn’t tell you the first thing about whether they believed in the mechanism of say, punctuated equilibrium vs. phyletic gradualism. That’s just how the average person that doesn’t work on science for a living is gonna use it, as a signifier of “I am one of the smart ones rejecting the anti-scientific types/my parents growing up/I teacher I didn’t like (etc.)” Spend 5 minutes smoking cannabis with college kids and you will see how many people believe in quantum mechanics for extremely tenuous and mystical reasons…
But none of the politics or misguided understanding of the hoi polloi changes a single thing about the actual science being done by the scientists, where the predictions have been confirmed against the skeptics in basically every case so far. We don’t know about the long-term predictions, but we can look at the short-term ones starting from around 1990 and what they said about today, and see that the root of the climate science we have today does have predictive power and is thus confirmed as scientific. Regardless of how “hard” climatology may or may not be, it’s record is clearly better than climate skepticism, which is obviously traceable to carbon extraction interests or the influence of their propaganda in every case.
We don’t know about the long-term predictions, but we can look at the short-term ones starting from around 1990
Arrhenius’ 1896 first calculation of global warming from human emissions of CO2 was quite correct. Serious concerns had reached the level of presidential advisor
half a century ago: “Dr. Donald F. Hornig, a science advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, warned the 1968 Annual Convention of the Edison Electric Institute [ … ] ‘Such a change in the carbon dioxide level might, therefore, produce major consequences on the climate – possibly even triggering catastrophic effects such as have occurred from time to time in the past.’ ” In ’68 it was a more careful “might” that is now somewhere like a 99.99% certainty.
This is probably very convincing to those who don’t know of the big concern about global cooling in the 70s.
The ‘big concern’ was mostly outside scientific debate.
Wikipedia, first paragraph (emphasis mine): “This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, which showed a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.”
EDIT: see also
That’s because mere atheism can not make irrational people rational. Secularization simply created secular irrational people out of Judeo-Christian irrational people. Rationality hasn’t improved at all.
>Judeo-Christian
Triggered.
Are you claiming that Judaism and Christianity are completely unrelated? Sorry that’s not true.
“Judeo-Christian” is about as valid a socio-religious descriptor as “Christo-Islamic”.
“Judeo-Christian values” are just Christian values. Judaism and Christianity were pretty much entirely separate from approximately the second century AD, and some proto-Marxists came up with “Judeo-Christian” to justify lumping Christians and Jews in the same category (and to justify including the Jews into American Christian society, in the US later).
The paint hasn’t even dried on this constructed phrase.
Judaism Christianity and Islam have common themes in theology, compared to the Dharmic religions.
I don’t deny that. I object to the implication that A is largely indistinguishable from B, or that B had significant influence on A since A separated from B a couple of millennia ago, by calling them both “AB”.
(This is not always wrong, since there can be closely related, mutually influencing entities that you can squint and call by a name that includes both. Calling Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the sundry tiny heresies that all originate from Judaism by a common “Abrahamic” moniker is fine. Picking two of them, as if they have substantially more in common than any random two in the set, is what’s wrong here.)
@Anonymous As a religious descriptor the term “Abrahamic” is the most appropriate one. Socio-politically “Judeo-Christian” is really just about Christians and assimilated Jews.
That’s precisely the problem. The Jews are either assimilated (some are), in which case they now have Christian values of the host population, or they are not really assimilated (others aren’t), in which case they still have Jewish values.
@Rationality Corner
In addition to what Anonymous said; I would point out that the Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, and Islamic, traditions are sufficiently distinct enough from modern Judaism and the Catholic/Protestant lines of Christianity to warrant a separate classification despite the fact that they are all “Abrahamic”. Heck, even Zoroastrianism could be viewed as “Abrahamic” you squint.
How do “Christian” values differ from “Jewish” values, in the sense of this discussion? The former has a wikipedia article which appears quite succinct and sounds familiar, but I know very little about Judaism and have no idea what counts as “Jewish values”.
@The Element of Surprise
Well, “Jewish values” redirects to “Jewish ethics“.
I hope I’m not so methodistical as to complain about other people’s alternate rationalities, which bring them pleasure and cause me no pain; indeed provide me with amusement and them with ways to evolve theories I’d never think of.
They only cause you no pain because they don’t have the legally sanctified institutional power to. It’s apparently much easier to rack your opponents into agreeing with you than debating them.
if climate change is really happening, it seems to me that it would be because that’s just what the Earth does
So what? That means homo sapiens cannot do it, too? The more important questions are: a) can we mitigate the warming?, and b) how do we deal with the consequences?
It’s a first that 7.x gigapeople, massively interdependent economically, highly connected informationally, and mobile to an unprecedented degree are facing huge shifts in economy, habitability, geopolitical power, etc.. It is simply irrelevant to us now if Mama Earth had been moody before we popped into existence.
…so why the absolute conviction that humans are to blame for this one?
You cold start to google summaries of the reports by the overwhelming majority of the best minds in the field. (Scott had a piece about that majority, IIRC.)
Asking to be evangelized here without learning about this particular science and the general social/structural institutions of science will not really convince you. You will need a general impression of how scientific results are gathered from data, criticed, refined, tested, etc. to estimate for yourself how much credit you give a claim. Sorry for the harshness, but science is not a “believe me”-charisma wrestling.
And the fact that Trump picked the anti-AGW side reduces the possibility of unbiased, clearheaded research to about zero.
Could it be that instead of “research” you meant to say “discussions of results and actions to be taken”?
This isn’t a binary question — there are many possible degrees between “we’re all going to die” and “it’s all a hoax.” You might want to check out the “lukewarmist” position on AGW. Climate scientist Judith Curry’s blog is one place to start. And note, by the way, that the IPCC’s estimates for global warming fall far short of the existential catastrophe that many alarmists tout.
I don’t think anyone has said it yet, but you seem to have the history of this thing wrong.
AFAIK, scientists noticed that increasing CO2 increases the retention of heat in atmospheric gas in attempting to explain prior ice ages. CO2 was also noted to be a by-product of burning fuel, and that running fossil fuels should increase atmospheric CO2. Predictions were made over 100 years ago about the potential for AGW and scientific study proceeded as it normally does, finding both confirmation of the hypothesis, and gaps in it.
Well then.
There is extremely high confidence, through both proxy records and models, that the speed of the CO2 spike in the last 150 years is unprecedented in our natural history. There is considerable natural flux in CO2 levels and they have gone higher or lower in the past. But these natural changes in the carbon cycle’s equilibria take place on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years.
CO2’s radiative absorption is even more bedrock-hard science, having been conclusively established long before even Arrhenius’ first attempt at a general circulation model. You will find no informed scientist who thinks this will have zero impact on our climate and ecosystems. We are, as Elon Musk has pointed out, running a large uncontrolled experiment on the global effects of rapid CO2 elevation. Many of the effects will be subtle, more will be unpredictable, but a rise in atmospheric temperature is the stuff of Physics 101.
(If your rejoinder to this is to mutter something about water vapor, as though scientists are all just choosing to ignore it for whatever reason, you are on level zero of the debate and need to start pinballing back and forth a few times absorbing more criticisms and counter-criticisms before forming an opinion. Climatology is, surprisingly, kind of difficult!)
That’s why the sophisticated skeptics do not dispute “anthropogenic global warming” as a proposition, instead pointing out that “catastrophic” is an unstated component of the common position and disputing that. They argue the extent of the climactic changes, or that the net benefits are undercounted, or that adaptation later (when the effects will be worse but our technology may be better) makes more sense than mitigation now.
Relevant xkcd.
Relevant Watts Up With That.
Interesting graph: the extrapolation beyond the current data says that the temperature will definitively stay the same for the next 300 years, then will probably drop, but may just possibly rise by 1 degree.
If you can’t assess the science itself and have a hard time figuring out how unanimous the scientific consensus is, it might help if you look on which side the money is.
Sure, environmentalist get donations and it’s certainly a major movement, but on the other side you basically have the biggest industries on this planet. The big money is overwhelmingly interested in arguing that there is no climate change, at least none caused by humans and I’m pretty sure that right now you could make very good money as a climate scientist, who comes up with good arguments against climate change.
To me that makes it a lot more likely that climate change deniers are talking out of their … might not be entirely honest.
The thing is though, if you do go against the consensus then you will probably be ostracized from the climatology community, so you would have to be paid enough that your day job doesn’t matter any more, and you would have to be willing to give up being in the field you dedicated a large part of your life to, which is the bigger issue. The deniers might have more money on their side, but it’s very hard to go against the grain in a field like this when the sides are so politically charged.
What part of the spectroscopic and thermodynamic arguments do you disagree with? All of your problems with the response to global warming would be happening whether or not global warming is real. Any movement good, bad, or indifferent will have many of those features. So actually look at the real science and not the caricatures of those who have a massive vested interest in slowing action.
Read Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg. In it, he lays out the evidence that
1) global warming is occurring,
2) that there is a pretty high probability that human industrial activity is a significant contributor (there is some evidence that there are other things going on, but they don’t explain all the warming),
3) that global warming isn’t all bad, and some of the scare stories aren’t actually true, but there are some significant costs, too,
4) that most of the proposed solutions for right now are either not feasible, and/or will make things worse, but that some will help (especially going nuclear), and that future society will have more ability to implement more effective solutions, provided we don’t cripple industrial and technological society now.
And the people calling for that are…?
called “environmentalists”.
Name names.
The anti-global warming arguments prove way too much.
You could basically use arguments like these against any part of science. Isn’t global warming / evolution / relativity / quantum physics REALLY just a bunch of experts, out of touch with the common people, drawing grand inferences from limited data? Isn’t (insert random controversy here) quite concerning if you have no context? Waggle eyebrows suggestively. When this argument gets debunked with exhaustive data, go back to step 1, over and over until people get tired of spending the effort to debunk your falsehoods (the Gish Gallup).
The predictions of both special and general relativity can be (and have been) replicated in controlled experiments, so you can leave relativity out of it. Same goes for quantum physics.
The “exhaustive data” in climate science isn’t. Nobody talks about those Vostok ice cores any more (once a warmist centerpiece), because skeptics noticed that CO2 lagged temperature, and ante hoc ergo propter hoc is an even worse fallacy than its opposite. The data and methods behind the Mann “hockey stick” were pretty thoroughly taken down by McIntyre and McKitrick, IMO. The Climategate emails show the warmist side was at least attempting to manipulate the peer review process to prevent publication of opposing research; before that, you heard a lot about how all the peer-reviewed research was on the warmist side. Every global climate data set has had a series of “adjustments”; these adjustments have nearly always tended to make the past cooler and/or the present warmer. This accelerated to a ridiculous pace during “the pause”, the ~18 year period between El Niños when no warming was evident; as far as I’m concerned, at this point the data is hopelessly corrupted. Lukewarmist site wattsupwiththat used to have a chart showing that half the temperature anomaly is due to corrections; there’s currently an article (which I haven’t examined) claiming nearly all of it is.
And since then there have been dozens more. Slightly bendier sticks, same result. McIntyre has been content to “respond” to most of these new ones by picking at individual proxies, which is entirely worthless unless the multiproxy reconstruction as a whole doesn’t validate without them as with MBH98.
The Vostok ice cores are discussed extensively in the IPCC. Here is a summary from AR4, which was published in 2007. There’s a newer discussion in AR5 but that’s only available as a big-ass PDF.
100% false. Ocean adjustments make the past warmer, not cooler, and ocean adjustments (as you’d expect) have greater effects on GMST than land adjustments.
These are the arguments of someone who has bothered to memorize a list of talking points on one side, not someone who has actually engaged with the mainstream science in any serious way. Most of the stuff in your post could be addressed with a simple site:skepticalscience.com search. And I’m not even endorsing SkepSci as a particularly neutral or 100% reliable source, they’re pretty basic too and I don’t like Cook’s methodology on things like the consensus. But they would give you the level 1 rebuttals to the level 1 criticisms you’re making.
There’s ALWAYS a controversy in science, though. For example, who has seen “dark matter”? Why are quantum mechanics and relativity still at odds, decades after both were proposed? Why did the guy who invented relativity hate quantum mechanics and “spooky action at a distance”? What are the scientists hiding from us? Waggle eyebrows suggestively. etc. etc. You just haven’t been exposed to high-quality propaganda against quantum mechanics or relativity, because nobody has an incentive to create that propaganda.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm
https://www.skepticalscience.com/no-warming-in-16-years.htm
This is a Gish Gallup, pure and simple.
You’re correct, your post is a Gish gallop. Your last link, denying that the “pause” occurred, lacks one major thing: any chart or table showing temperature over the period in question. Your Climategate link fails to address my particular point about Climategate. Your Vostok link rebuts a claim that I did not make — that the Vostok core proves CO2 does not cause warming.
Nobody. And there’s a small minority of scientists who think there’s another explanation for the anomalies attributed to dark matter, though so far these alternate explanations have not worked out.
You’ll have to be more specific. As far as I know, neither makes predictions at odds with the other under conditions we can measure.
This isn’t really a scientific question, but as it turns out, the EPR paradox was resolved experimentally in favor of “spooky action at a distance”, but without breaking relativity in the process.
While I confess to a small degree of satisfaction seeing my reply quietly passed over, I need to also point out that your post had no evidence whatsoever. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and “assert a bunch of points without sources, nitpick opponent’s sources” is another Level 1 Skeptic failure mode I expect in the Daily Caller comments section, not here.
And since I missed it at first:
This might be a meaningful argument if Phil Jones was the Pope of Climate Science as opposed to one of tens of thousands of climate researchers. Since the papers he threatened to exclude from the IPCC were, in fact, included and discussed, I do not think it is.
Let’s assume for a moment that you are right. All the computer models are wrong, all the scientists are crooks on the payroll of some politician, all the journal articles are worthless. If that is true, you should be terrified! It means that we are radically changing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, and we have no idea what is going to happen.
Of course, you are not terrified. And why? Because your position isn’t actually “skepticism.” Just like creationists are not actually “evolution skeptics.” They’re pushing an alternate worldview, biblical literalism. And similarly, “climate change skeptics” are mostly interested in building support for a model where humans have no effect on the earth’s climate, and the future is just going to look like the past.
The problem for you is, there is very little support indeed for such a model. I think a lot of anti-global-warming people intuitively sense that they would be laughed out of the room if they straightforwardly proposed it. That’s why you see all this sniping at this or that minor point in that journal article. But you can’t build your case just by tearing down someone else’s case. You have to actually build the case! And for that you’ll need computer models, mathematics, survey data– all the things you are currently criticizing as inadequate.
I suspect this is where we get the “actually, I’m a lukewarmer” speech which always happens once the frontline soldiers (“It’s a fraud! Earth isn’t actually warming!”) get shot down.
@Anonymous Bosch
I didn’t respond to your post because there’s no point. Neither of us is going to convince the other or anyone else. You point to skepticalscience, I point to wattsupwiththat. You claim McIntyre is merely picking at individual proxies, I claim that the proxies McIntyre is picking at are responsible for the hockey stick (and that the techniques involved are prone to produce hockey sticks). And it goes in circles until one of us gets tired. I got tired during the Pausebuster adjustments.
I would quibble with “radical”. The Great Oxygenation Event, THAT was radical. But in general I agree; in terms of temperature, we have little idea what is going to happen, and we have little idea what HAS happened. What I do know is that we have global temperature data that, when it hasn’t fit the model (“The Pause”), people have gone and looked for ways to adjust it to fit the model. It is possible all those adjustments were legitimate. But because they were looked for in a biased manner, they still bias the data. The data simply cannot be trusted.
I pointed to SkepSci as a suggested avenue for further inquiry by you. My three links were to a list of citations on Wikipedia, a subchapter of IPCC-AR4, and a blog with graphs by Victor Venema (a German professor of meteorology).
The claim that the proxies McIntyre picks at are responsible for the hockey stick requires that one re-do the analysis with the remaining ones and demonstrate they no longer validate. McIntyre, as far as I know, has done this for MBH98 and the non-dendro M08 reconstructions, and no other multiproxy. Furthermore, Mann’s use of principal components analysis is by no means universal. Of the papers listed on the Wiki page linked I know for a fact Wahl, Ljungvist, and Shi utilize non-PCA methods. (I’m sure many others do as well, I’d just have to look them up). Dismissing these with a wave of your hand tells me you have not bothered to read any of the primary literature in this field, satisfying yourself with criticisms/summaries on skeptic blogs who have also mostly not done so.
And of course it goes without saying that this is the only point that you bothered with. I cannot think of a more concrete way to disprove the point that “nobody talks about the ice cores” than explicit discussion in the IPCC, which is as central a “warmist” text as one could ask for. I cannot think of a more concrete way to disprove the point that “adjustments always increase the trend” than showing the before-and-after trendlines for global data (not just the CONUS, the source of the “half of all warming” talking point).
A rational person might update their beliefs, or perhaps shy away from the sources which have supplied these falsehoods. “Agree to disagree” is “I am unwilling to admit scientific facts which might upset my political priors” (cf: the incompatibility of well-mixed atmospheric pollution with your desired form of government) and further do not wish to admit this is the case. That I am not persuaded does not mean I am not persuadable. But it seems pretty disingenuous to run in, drop some quick turds, then say “too much effort” while continuing to reply to the other guy.
McIntyre himself goes in circles too. Someone invents a new way to find hockey sticks, McIntyre finds a new problem. As I said, there’s no point in rehashing all the climate science here, it won’t convince anyone.
My language was imprecise here. The Vostok cores used to be presented as proof-positive, checkmate denialists (though the term wasn’t in vogue yet I don’t think), that CO2 caused warming and our current CO2 levels were going to cause a lot of warming. This was in the popular press and pop-science press, not the IPCC reports. When skeptics pointed out the cores showed CO2 lagging temperature, they were jeered at, but the data is pretty clear and eventually the popular and pop-science press stopped talking about the Vostok cores. Though we still get “myth” pages whose titles imply the lag doesn’t exist.
If this is really what you believe, then you must agree that we need to stop changing the earth’s atmosphere, because we cannot predict what is going to happen. The change in atmospheric CO2 has been significant and measurable– from 300 ppm in the 1960s to 400 ppm today. If we can’t predict whether this is safe, then we should not change it.
So, by your own reasoning, we need massive government action to prevent co2 emissions. Probably even more massive than someone like Al Gore or the IPCC would argue for, since those people believe that climatologists can make predictions about the future, and you don’t.
I do not hold to the Precautionary Principle, so nope.
That model of argument (“By the logic of your point of view, which I don’t agree with and don’t know nearly as well as you do, you must agree with me! Checkmate, atheists!”) has never convinced anyone in the history of the world.
“By the logic of your point of view, which I don’t agree with and don’t know nearly as well as you do, you must agree with me! Checkmate, atheists!”
That’s strawmanning. Don’t do it.
That model of argument has been convincing to me at times, but only if the other side does a good job of understanding my reasoning, or at least looks like they’re trying. If they look like they’re doing it just to stage a smackdown, then yes, it just looks comical. (But you looked like you were strawmanning the general case.)
Strange how you get lukewarmers
on both sides.
In any context?
I apologize if I came across as snarky. That wasn’t my intent.
Rather, I was trying to point out that we’re dealing with a motte and bailey here. Skepticism about mainstream climate science is just the motte. The bailey is a very specific model of the climate where human actions have no consequences and the future is going to look exactly like the past.
The motte (Being “skeptical” and unsure about what is going on) still means you should be in favor of more research and a ban on changing the atmosphere until we do understand it. The AGW position only makes sense if you assume the bailey (human actions have no consequences). But proving this would be extremely difficult, so they talk about the motte and hope you will forget the difference.
This either requires assuming the Precautionary Principle, amounts to Pascal’s mugging, or both.
I would be in favor of more research if I believed it would contribute to the state of knowledge of the world. Unfortunately, it appears the point of research is to demonstrate the truth of the favored models, not to test them. The various adjustments made to eliminate “the pause” demonstrate that conclusively. So now I’m a radical agnostic when it comes to climate: I don’t know and neither does anyone else, because the data is hopelessly corrupted.
@The Nybbler
They are testing the models and gradually improving them.
However, you want the scientists to throw out all their modelling when a prediction is not 100% correct and give up.
That kind of all or nothing science is silly.
PS. Note that most climate predictions actually involve confidence intervals, not exact predictions, although the media generally can’t deal with the former and thus reports them as if they were exact predictions. A lot of AGW rhetoric about the fallacy of climate science is based on misconceptions how confident climate scientists in the past were about their predictions.
I don’t think using AGW to mean “Anti Global Warming” is correct?
AGW is generally Anthropogenic Global Warming, AFAIK.
They are testing the models and gradually improving them.
I think I can accurately predict Nybbler’s response to this: which definition of “improve” is being used here? A good one would be refinements that increase total understanding of climate behavior. But the one we seem to get is refinements that strengthen the prior explanation of CAGW.
It’s like the old tale about the guy looking for a quarter under a streetlamp. A passerby observes that it might be closer to where he thinks he drops it, fifty feet away, but the guy insists on looking under the streetlamp because it’s easier. Imagine that guy now constructing elaborate explanations for why that quarter might have bounced or rolled or been pushed into the lit area by some sort of microtremor, and I suspect this is where a lot of people think climate science is heading, based on what they see in the press.
This is compounded by evidence that suggests that guy is attacking people with alternate explanations as uneducated and unable to grasp the subtle ways in which earth and atmosphere can interact to move his quarter into the light (and sure enough, he does have a degree, and there are indeed a few kooks and carpetbaggers trying to use bad and motivated reasoning on him, but not enough to explain the entire crowd now gathering).
It’s quite possible that there are large groups of climatologists we don’t hear about that are genuinely asking questions like “are we sure these temp readings are accurate?” and “could it be something else causing these effects?” and working as hard on a model that suggests non-AGW as others do on the model that suggests AGW, but to people who don’t follow the topic that closely, the evidence that they’re getting recognition is swamped by evidence that they’re getting denied grants or called “misinformers”.
@Brinkley
This is the kind of misconception that I’m talking about, actually. Climatologists don’t work on models that seek to prove AGW, they seek to build models that best predict the climate and these models happen to show AGW.
This predicted/theorized outcome did impact how much effort was put into the modelling, but shouldn’t impact the outcomes. Of course biased scientists exist in all fields, but they exist on both sides of the AGW issue.
So, what you are asking is like going up to a physicist and asking them: can you work on a model that predicts that objects fall away from the earth? It makes no sense for scientists to work backwards on models, starting with desired outcomes, rather than models that are most consistent with the measurements. Newton’s law of universal gravitation was never going to be replaced by Baldrick’s law of floating, but was replaced by general relativity which was mostly consistent, but fixed flaws to be better in the same vein.
Anyway, the IPCC did address the criticisms by people like Lomborg and did find and fix flaws in their reports that changed the models a bit, but didn’t result in substantially different predictions. People like Lomborg ultimately had fairly weak objections and when pressed, the skeptics generally had to retreat to fairly weak motte’s, like challenging the cost/benefit of taking measures now vs hoping for future solutions. That is criticism at the political level, not the basic climate science modelling.
Do you accept that a relative low number of climate science skeptics can be because those who looked into the issue had to update their beliefs towards the AGW stance to be consistent with the facts?
That’s what they should be doing. How confident can we be that it is what they are doing?
To take a less controversial example, Physicists didn’t work on experiments to prove that Millikan correctly measured the unit charge, they worked on experiments to best measure the unit charge and these experiments happened to show that Millikan got it right. Except that he hadn’t, but nobody wanted to publish any experimental results that contradicted the consensus around the revered famous guy.
Scientists are not immune to cognitive bias, and political polarization introduces biases of a kind and degree not normally seen in the course of science.
I basically claimed that there was evidence that X (climatologists look exclusively for models that predict climate) is false. Your response here is to claim that that’s a misconception, because X is true. But you didn’t offer any evidence that X is true, which is precisely what I was hoping to bring out.
So, what you are asking is like going up to a physicist and asking them: can you work on a model that predicts that objects fall away from the earth.
I’m sure it feels that way to you. To me, it actually feels much more like me going up to that physicist and saying that there keep having to be all these exceptions to planets moving in perfect circles, and so maybe we should try a theory that doesn’t depend on perfect circles, and that physicist telling me that I don’t have a degree in physics and so I should stop presuming to meddle in the affairs of educated people such as himself, and dispense with my obvious misconceptions.
And then proceeding to phys-splain how models work.
Your characterization of Lomborg’s objections might be accurate, AFAIK – I didn’t follow the issue closely enough to be an expert on what several dozen luminaries in the field said during the entire span of 2001-2017. But given your characterization of skeptics, the theory that you’re delivering a motivated explanation of what’s going on has more current weight for me.
For example, one claim you make is that “People like Lomborg ultimately had fairly weak objections and when pressed, the skeptics generally had to retreat to fairly weak motte’s, like challenging the cost/benefit of taking measures now vs hoping for future solutions.” But when idly browsing around, I find this cite from a book he published in 2001: “This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming but questions the way in which future scenarios have been arrived at and finds that forecasts of climate change of 6 degrees by the end of the century are not plausible.” This does not sound like a retreat; it sounds more like a claim he made almost exactly when the whole CAGW issue became widely known.
You also left out the important fact that the CAGW side was openly calling for drastic economic reallocations to be made as early as 2001, and repeatedly since then, and then presenting themselves as being pro-science with much more defensible yet weaker claims such as “CO2 concentrations can cause air temperature to rise”.
Do you accept that a relative low number of climate science skeptics can be because those who looked into the issue had to update their beliefs towards the AGW stance to be consistent with the facts?
I can’t accept it, because it doesn’t explain, for example, the decision to refer to global warming as “climate change” better than the explanation that global warming adherents were themselves retreating to a motte. It also does not explain the reaction of AGW adherents to skeptics who appeared legitimate. Furthermore, that reaction forces me to debate the premise that what you refer to as facts here were both sound and complete. If they were, then I think enough people would have seen merit in simply sharing them as if with fellow interested parties, rather than presenting them as dogma as if to people they expected to reject science too sophisticated for them to understand.
Claiming you’re too tired to explain all this for the umpteenth time – well, I can sympathize, but you seem to be unaware of all the unscientific behavior in evidence from the CAGW side.
I implied, in a response to Vermillion (just below), that I’m willing to sit back down and look at all of the evidence yet again. But it will have to be slow, and it will have to be in good faith.
@John Schilling
That is a fair argument, but my perception is that climate science is the most picked over and controversial of sciences*. A random sociologist can get away with a lot and if their science fails to replicate, society and the profession will usually just shrug and move on. It’s rare to see an industry who has an incentive to disprove the science and support those who poke holes in it.
Climate science failures get major attention, cause major loss of face among a large percentage of the population and major players have an incentive to undermine AGW.
While that provides some incentive to cover up errors, it provides a far stronger incentive to be very conservative with the predictions and to quickly fix errors to show that they are not deliberate and/or covered up. For example, the (in)famous hockey stick was put in the IPCC report with four different reconstructions that all gave that same outcome. Counter-papers were published and counter-counter-papers. At least one criticism that had a small effect was accepted. Since the initial inclusion of the hockey stick, dozens of separate reconstructions have been done to see if it would change the result.
To me, that appears like doing science the right way and I would love for the rest of science to adopt somewhat similar levels of scrutiny over their outcomes. I see far and far stronger evidence of scientific failures elsewhere in the scientific community.
* Far more than a field like gender studies, which is just ignored by many, not pored over.
a large percentage of the population and major players have an incentive to undermine AGW.
You seem again to be leaving out the existence of major players with an incentive to promote AGW.
Really?
As far as I can tell, climate science failures get major attention from people who were already skeptical of climate science anyway while non-skeptics attempt to ignore them. The skeptics how, and the non-skeptics respond with “who cares that’s just one minor thing the overall science is still sound” and at the end of the day, absolutely nothing changes.
Glad to hear it! I propose postponing it till the next open thread since this one’s almost run it’s course and also so everyone can take a minute to catch their breath and remember that we’re talking to real people who came by their disagreements honestly.
This one’s actually pretty simple. The models often predict disruption to global weather patterns which can lead, at least in the short term, to persistently colder weather in certain regions — possible breakdown of the Gulf Stream, which would cool Europe, often gets cited in this context. The world’s still warmer on average, but “global warming” can be read to imply warming everywhere, which is not necessarily the case.
I’m pretty sure whoever made these decisions had gotten tired of hearing “global warming must be a hoax, amirite guys” every time there was an unusually cold winter in a particular region, too, but changing the preferred terminology on that basis would be less scientifically defensible.
@Paul Brinkley
Again, the answer to your statement/question is mu. Scientists are (ideally) not looking for outcomes, but for the best models, often debating at a level of detail that you and I consider relatively insignificant, but which isn’t insignificant to them or to achieve a gradual improvement of the models.
An example is the studies surrounding the hockey stick. Scientists did try many different analyses to see if they would get significantly different outcomes. This did not come about. This indicates that the general outcome is true and that the scientific disagreements are about the extent to which it is true. To critics, this often looks like there is no opposition, but again, this is like claiming that there is no scientific debate because no one is arguing that masses repulse each other. Concluding that scientists are not being critical because the heated arguments in science don’t match the tribal lines in greater society merely shows that there is a disconnect between society and scientists. We all know how stupid society can be, so it seems unwise to automatically conclude that the fault of this disconnect is on the scientific side.
Of course, scientists are humans and humans succumb to tribalism, so you will find bad scientists. However, concluding that all the scientists who have a different view from you succumb to tribalism, while those (few) who match your views are immune, seems like a bad conclusion.
Here is evidence of Lomborg making false statements (start reading at the ‘Lomborg’s public comments on sea-level rise’ paragraph). You can verify those accusations yourself. When Lomborg is challenged, he tends to go to his ‘I accept AGW’ motte.
There never was such a decision. The IPCC was founded in 1988 and the abbrevation means…Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The term actually was used before that, for example, a very significant early study from 1956 is titled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”
Global warming and climate change are different terms that refer to different things and are used concurrently. For more information that dispels the myth you have come to believe, I refer you here.
You need to be more specific if you want a response to this.
@Nornagest
That seems logical, but the actual explanation is even more innocent than that. See above.
@Brinkley
I don’t really see those incentives being so significant to be worth mentioning. I’m not aware of any countries that will benefit substantially from the attempts to reduce CO2 emissions, including my country, which sits on a lot of natural gas. Even countries with little natural fossil reserves like France don’t seem to have major benefits of the kind that would suggest a rational desire to promote AGW. The French car companies don’t seem to have a major advantage when it comes to electric cars, for example (my perception is rather the opposite).
The big companies that benefit are fairly few in number and mostly came about recently, like Tesla. So they could not have strongly influenced the supposed bias in the climate science unless Elon Musk invented a time machine or unless you want to argue that the IPCC would make a U-turn if not for the pressure by Tesla et al.
How many different unit charge measurements gave outcomes that matched Millikan’s oil-drop experiment, complete with the botched viscosity correction?
The problem is, the alleged incentive to “fix errors to show that they are not deliberate”, does not apply to individual scientists whose results agree with the existing consensus. Publishing a result that agrees with the consensus is the popular move, and if it turns out to have been wrong, well, who remembers the names of any of the people who wrongly agreed with Millikan? Publishing a result that agrees with the consensus makes you a member in good standing with the relevant scientific community, and if it turns out to have been wrong, everybody else was wrong too so they aren’t going to throw you out. It may now be a slightly less prestigious community, but that was inevitable the moment the rest of them got it wrong.
Flip side, the people whose results disagree with the consensus have it easier if they keep quiet and let someone else be the person to correct the record. Because whoever does that will spend some time in relative exile before the record gets corrected, and at the end of the day who remembers the guy who finally published the correct value for the unit charge?
If “the scientific community” consisted of one guy, or enough guys to meet around one table, then they might be motivated to correct errors early. But we’re a few centuries late for that.
Countries are not in any event well-suited to convey such incentives to scientists, except perhaps to crudely silence them by cutting their funding.
The internal incentive for scientists is to be invited to go to places like Copenhagen or Kyoto, talk to literally the most powerful men in the world, and have them listen as you tell them what they need to be doing, when your job is otherwise seen as e.g. a particularly boring sort of weatherman. Everybody likes to feel important.
This is of course as much of an incentive for climatologists to promote a theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Cooling as the opposite, so long as they all agree on the sign. There are secondary incentives to promote consensus in that regard, one of which is being aligned with the actual facts at least in regard to the sign.
@John Schilling
True, but most of those benefits only remain (to that extent) if they keep their status as sufficiently reliable truth-tellers. All the incentives line up most strongly if scientists work in a field where the science is societally very relevant, make fairly accurate predictions so their status rises and let the politics/false statements be done by others.
You can also imagine a scenario where scientists realize that (a subset of) society is very interested and fudge the science. For instance, I think that this is true in certain social sciences, where people do try to prove certain politics and fudge the science to get outcomes that match their activism.
Since both scenarios are plausible, you actually need to look at which scenario the evidence points to most strongly. A lot of critics don’t and merely claim that the incentives for the second scenario exist and that this is sufficient to cast strong doubt.
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When you look at the science around (gendered) domestic violence, recognizing the ways that the science is fudged is often quite obvious once you know the tricks. You actually see a split in the research where one group of scientists makes one claim and the other group makes a substantially different claim. You have papers by dissenting scientists on the IMO right side that point out the errors and bias by the other side. You see that the offending side puts very little effort into responding to these criticisms. There is no central platform where the objections to the dominant theory are actually addressed rigorously.
This is all very different in climate science, which does have that platform, where no one has been able to convince me that obvious tricks are used, which does respond to criticism rather than ignore it, where the critics don’t provide a well-supported alternative model/explanation, etc.
So when you claim that the animal may be a chicken, but I actually hear oinking, see no feathers, but pink skin, a twirly tail, a snout, etc; then I’ll call it a pig, not a chicken. You can keep arguing that a random animal may be a chicken, but when the question is whether the animal in front of me is a chicken, you actually need to make that case based on case-specific data, not generic claims.
Once you enter the realm of political controversy, the way you maintain your reputation as a truth-teller is to tell your side what it wants to hear. The incentives and institutions that normally serve to keep scientists honest, are not well suited to this environment.
In domestic violence, you have scientists on both sides. And more importantly, scientists on both sides are clearly doing important work, a source of respect and prestige, because domestic violence is obviously a big problem and everybody wants to know the cause. People disagree, and you get controversy.
With AGW, everybody knows the cause but disagrees over whether it is important enough to matter. So anyone who sides with “not that important”, is basically saying “…and stop listening to me or affording me respect”. That’s going to put them at odds not just with scientists who sincerely believe the opposite, but with the political tribe that has made itself the patron of their community, with all the scientists whose views have been tinged by that patronage, and with all the scientists who see the other political tribe’s attacks as something the entire community should band together against.
Take the other position, you get the respect of the minority of peers who happen to agree with you and have the intellectual integrity to hold and express a view when all the incentives point in the opposite direction, and you get to be the darling of Republicans (ugh!) for a little while, but knowing that if your views win out it means everybody on both sides goes back to dismissing your entire field as irrelevant.
This is a very asymmetric set of incentives, which greatly weakens the traditional role of actual truth as a tiebreaker in disputes. And while we still do get some dissenting opinions published, we also get e.g. people explicitly conspiring to “redefine what the peer-review literature is!” to prevent dissenting opinions from being published. So I’m not as convinced as you are that I am looking at a healthy scientific community responding to truth-aligned motives.
[M]ost of those benefits [to scientists speaking to powerful figures] only remain (to that extent) if they keep their status as sufficiently reliable truth-tellers. All the incentives line up most strongly if scientists work in a field where the science is societally very relevant, make fairly accurate predictions so their status rises and let the politics/false statements be done by others.
All those incentives line up strongly only if consensus is clear. If there’s widespread disagreement on what the science says, power loses interest, because there are few clear decisions to make.
Clear consensus can happen in two ways. One is for the evidence to all actually support one conclusion. Another is for conflicting evidence to be resolved in some way until it all agrees. That is precisely the point where cognitive bias can gain a foothold. If I have some evidence for X and some for Y, and suspect X, I might focus really hard on verifying Y – checking the instruments, combing the processing code for bugs, scrutinizing the reasoning – without performing the same check for X. Or just not checking X as stringently. Or even just noticing I only have enough money to check one or the other, and I honestly didn’t suspect either one, but I just flipped a coin. Or maybe Y was just easier to scrutinize than X.
It is not enough to just “look at which scenario the evidence points to most strongly” if the evidence collecting process itself is vulnerable to fudging.
Or researchers might be human, realize they’re not making as money as they could if they made a momentous announcement, found one to make, and got really irritated at a relative handful among them that wouldn’t shut up about evidence that conflicted with the announcement, and leaned on them in various ways like writing refuting papers, framing them as sloppy during convention talks, refusing to work with them, and so on.
There seems to be some confusion about what I meant about the “the decision to refer to global warming as “climate change””. I wasn’t referring strictly to climatology scholars. I was referring to AGW adherents – scholars being just a minority (and not even a proper subset, to boot).
I read the link at skepticalscience. It addresses only scholarly mentions. It doesn’t look at hits in periodicals AFAICT. To call this a myth is premature. I’m sorry about the confusion, however.
(Side note: this is yet another example of SS answering the question it wants to answer, which is invariably going to favor the AGW view. It’s also clear from the tone of the article. I also note that SS was cofounded by the very person who misrepresented his own collected evidence about consensus in climatology. In general, links to skepticalscience tend to lower my level of belief in AGW, rather than raise it, for these reasons. (To be fair, I’ve seen anti-AGW websites that pull the same stunts, which is why I decided to check the link anyway, just in case.))
@John Schilling
From my perspective the climate scientists mostly stay out of the realm of political controversy. Their critics often pretend that this is not the case, but their arguments usually criticize non-climate scientists, like Al Gore, who get conflated with climate scientists for some reason. This makes sense from a tribal POV because a lot of non-climate scientists say stupid/hyperbolic things that are fairly easy to debunk, while the climate scientists mostly say smart things.
Even famous dissenting ‘climate scientists’ like Lomborg are on closer inspection not even attacking what climate scientists actually argue, but either lie about what the climate scientists claim or have claimed & also focus a lot on the proposed solutions, which is the part of the debate that is much harder to scientifically prove and thus far more subjective. So there is this smoke screen where a lot of pro- and anti-AGW people believe that the debate is about the things that climate scientists are claiming, but if you dig into it, you see that the actual debate is often about what people think/claim that climate scientists are claiming. There is often remarkably little overlap between the two.
Yet we know for a fact that corruption of science by the tobacco industry happened. The same reasoning that you used could be used to argue that this is impossible, yet it happened. I’m pretty sure that the fossil fuel industry has much more money than the tobacco industry, so it seems to me that they could do the same, if climate science was really so ‘soft’ to allow for this.
We all know that science is an extremely competitive field, where many wannabe-scientists don’t make the cut. Furthermore, there is large scale exploitation/underpayment. It seems rather trivial for someone with money to sweep into a situation like that and offer some of these people a job. We know that colleges have let the industry (partially or fully) finance professors, so the mechanism is already in place to do this with low effort.
Some of the anti-AGW people here seem to have paradoxic beliefs where they argue that billions of dollars will be sacrificed/lost unnecessarily and that some industries will be heavily hit, but somehow these industries won’t use a fraction of that money to influence scientists or even just fund their own research group (you don’t need that many if climate science is really so easily debunked as claimed). It’s especially amusing that several of the critics here are libertarians, who AFAIK believe that businesses are capable of and willing to do doing research just as much as the government, but somehow the fossil fuel industry won’t do that even when there is a risk that their large, valuable reserves become worthless.
I think that you only look at the incentives that support your theory of some grand conspiracy, but you don’t look at and/or easily discount the incentives that work against it.
@Paul Brinkley
You just provided evidence for the point that I made in my comment just above this one.
The complaint that commoners who believe in AGW are often wrong is a completely different argument to climate scientists being wrong, but these two get conflated all the time. I’m not really interested that much in a tribal debate whether pro- or anti-AGW people more often tell falsehoods. There is no objective way to gauge this, so it just ends up being a tribal assessment based on apex fallacy for the outgroup (focusing on the greatest idiots on the other side) and ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy for the ingroup (rejecting that the many idiots on your own side actually are on your own side).
Can we just agree that most people are incapable of and/or unwilling to examine the evidence in sufficient detail (which is very hard in this field), so most people just believe in the memes that are popular in their tribe?
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Note that the existence of dumb memes in your outgroup doesn’t prove that a steelmanned version of their claims is wrong and doesn’t prove that your ingroup has better memes. Ultimately, you can argue a lot of wrong things based on the reasoning that you use. For example, most people, including the vast majority of those who favor it, have wrong ideas about capitalism. So by your reasoning this disproves capitalism, no?
Ultimately it is just a really, really bad idea to form opinions based on (rejecting or accepting) memes, rather than on a steelmanned and fact-based assessment.
The complaint that commoners who believe in AGW are often wrong is a completely different argument to climate scientists being wrong, but these two get conflated all the time. I’m not really interested that much in a tribal debate whether pro- or anti-AGW people more often tell falsehoods.
Can we just agree that most people are incapable of and/or unwilling to examine the evidence in sufficient detail (which is very hard in this field), so most people just believe in the memes that are popular in their tribe?
Sigh… …sure, fine, I’m mostly irritated at the meme layer in front of actual climatologists. But that also appears to include the media layer, a former major Presidential candidate, several world leaders of the majority of the world’s economy, and even a few people who manage to get themselves into academic publications as if they were scientists and misrepresent people who actually are scientists, and people who hide behind academic-seeming articles to defend notions like “the notion that the term ‘climate change’ was promoted much more than ‘global warming’ in recent years is a myth”. So pardon me if I think that irritation is a wee bit justified.
Meanwhile, yes, I have little problem with climatologists that are being scientifically genuine about their research, and who incidentally appear to be very reluctant to claim AGW, as opposed to that minority who believe AGW so faithfully that they’re willing to decline support for other scientists for disagreeing with them.
Note that the existence of dumb memes in your outgroup…
The only reason this whole meme-war sub-argument came about was because you made a claim about why there are relatively fewer climate skeptics. It wasn’t about meme-wars, and the opposition to climate skeptics isn’t purely meme-bots. It includes opposition from people calling themselves scientists who aren’t behaving scientifically.
So why doens’t FAI work like that? Someone who already has a reputation gets listened to, even if they say “nothing to see here”.
Because the importance of AI is clear and profound even if there is no danger from it. Especially if there is no danger from it.
So I’ve had an idea and I’m interested in gauging the interest level; a kind of IQ2 style debate on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) from the commentariate. Because I’ve been reading up thread and really this and similar discussions seem to accomplish little more than giving me agita. So how about we try something different?
In an Oxford style debate, the winners are determined not by the absolute number of people who do or do not agree with your arguments, but by how many people are swayed from their positions before debate began. This is not the thread for that debate, this is for setting the terms. Here’s what I propose:
Two teams of two*, Agree and Oppose, who will post arguments in favor or in opposition to these three statements.
A) AGW is a real** phenomena that
B) Has the potential to inflict substantial*** economic damage on the global**** economy and so
C) Costs***** should be paid to prevent or mitigate these damages
For examples of what I’m envisioning here are three you could watch or listen to. Of those debates, in terms of convincing members of the live audience, the ‘oppose’ side has won 2/3.
For how we’d proceed on the forum what I envisioned was one thread (maybe next week to give everyone time to marshal their arguments) with posts from the designated champions that could then be responded to by the other side or by any other interested parties. Before opening up the debate maybe we could have a Google form that SSC readers could (if they want) mark themselves down as Agree, Oppose or Undecided for A, B, and C.
Thoughts?
*Or more, or less, I think having just a couple dedicated posters might make the arguments easier to follow though.
**How do we define real here? What is our evidentiary standard? In civil cases (which if we are to consider economic damages in point B seems appropriate) there are two levels, 1) Preponderance of Evidence and 2) Clear and Convincing Proof. Debatees might also consider Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (or beyond a shadow of a doubt) but personally I think that’s overly burdensome. We’re debating the economics here, so I’d call this civil not criminal. Personally I think the burden of proving point A (and thus points B and C) lies with the Agree side. The Oppose side is of course, free to accept a weaker claim of evidence but reject the stronger.
***I don’t know how to define substantial, but I’d think it would be in the range of 100s of Billions – Trillions USD/year. Again I would put it to the Agree side to define both what the odds are and what the damages might be, Oppose could dispute one or both.
****Could also restrict to just the US if desired.
*****Since A and B are defined by the Agree side maybe the costs would be something that Oppose should define, and Agree respond to?
I understand that your intentions are good, but it’s silly for scientists to debate with non-scientists about their fields. This would just be a rehash of the Scopes Monkey Trial where people use emotionally charged rhetoric. And at the end of the day, the politicians would go home, the scientists would go home, and nothing would have changed.
Science is about building a consistent worldview by accumulating evidence. It usually happens very, very slowly. Each piece of evidence is like a very, very small brick in a giant structure that we are building.
Very seldom is it “obvious” in advance what the answer is going to be. For example, 300 years ago, it might have been reasonable to have a debate about whether the earth was 5,000 years old. There were pieces of evidence that pointed both ways! But now we have so many different sources of evidence (radiological, fossil, geological, evolutionary, etc.) that this question is no longer reasonable. Having a debate about whether the earth was 5,000 years old would accomplish nothing.
Scott wrote about this earlier (sorry, I don’t have a good link). Basically, the popular conception of science is that you get a Really Smart Guy in a room and he goes Eureka! and finds the obviously correct solution.
The reality of science is that you accumulate evidence slowly, over a long period of time. Most of the evidence can be interpreted many different ways. But slowly a pattern emerges, and it becomes settled science. And if people want to challenge that pattern, they have to make an equivalent amount of effort. Not just throw around some emotionally charged rhetoric or cherry pick “hey, this one piece of evidence out of 10,000 pieces could be interpreted a different way.”
If you had to prove from scratch that lead caused lead poisoning, or cigarettes caused lung cancer, it would be quite hard! In fact, one of the greatest statisticans of the 20th century, Ronald Fisher, was convinced that smoking did not cause lung caner! But today, we know that it does, because we have so many different pieces of evidence (autopsies, chemical analyses, epidemiological studies, etc.) that all are best interpreted that way.
Fine, just don’t use any money paid for by taxes on non-scientists and don’t create any policies that restrict non-scientists.
I agree with Jiro; this “scientists arguing with non-scientists” smacks of argumentum ad guildum.
And it sounds especially rude on a forum full of people who understand science well enough to describe it every bit as well as you did. You are far from being the only scientist here. It’s not even the case that the only learned people here are all on the AGW side. It’s also not even the case that the decisions of import here are purely matters of climatology; they also involve economics, including local economics, and no one here is an expert in everyone’s local economics.
Speaking of which, arguing that only scientists are qualified to argue this issue necessarily introduces an incentive incompatibility problem, in which one can expect the scientists to form a consensus that whatever is going on requires more resources / prestige to be funneled to said scientists for $PlausibleReason. So it’s suspicious on that front.
The description of science as a gradual effort is indeed more accurate, I think, than as always being a flash of brilliance, but (1) that clashes with the way AGW has been presented and (2) it’s not bulletproof, either. If initial data being interpreted in a way that turns out much later to be wrong, and causes subsequent data to be interpreted in the same way, then this mistake could persist for decades, looking all the while like the correct interpretation. If a scientist suffers penalties for offering a different interpretation, the effect compounds, each stage leading to an increase in the penalty, and in the perceived certitude of the original interpretation. This has actually happened in history; it’s not merely hypothetical.
As for an IQ2-style debate: I’m also greatly in favor of the constructive attitude, although I’m lukewarm on such a debate, except perhaps as a way to bring a lot of the sub-issues to light at once. I’ve listened to a couple of them; they sound dangerously like a cage match, two enter, one leaves, and I think they shouldn’t be. They should rather be one stage in a gradual process (again, I think that’s more realistic).
Alternately, I would like to see very small sub-issues brought forth here, things that any tech-heavy crowd could probably ingest. Think along the lines of bean’s battleship series.
Yeah I guess I’d like to think that this board can do better. And that while it’s not easy to communicate complicated scientific discoveries in a clear manner, that is for sure a barrier that can be overcome, by the scientists making sure their findings are comprehensible and by the public making an effort to comprehend it.
If you don’t want to be a part of the debate that’s one thing but I think that having that kind of open, honest discussion is the only way to actually change people’s minds. Not the people who are debating probably, but possibly some of the onlookers. That’s what I like to imagine anyway.
I apologize if I came across as arrogant. That wasn’t my intention. And just for reference, I am not a scientist myself. I am an engineer.
I just feel like I have the same arguments with AGW people over and over again, on different bulletin boards. Are we really learning from these arguments, or is it just an excuse to vent?
There is a difference between having an interesting discussion on something on the cutting edge of research– like how does ketamine work as an antidepressant? — and trying to put the whole field of climatology on trial. Scott talked about this before– scientific consensus is actually pretty powerful overall. It is an extraordinary claim to dispute it, requiring extraordinary proof.
Plus, I think the AGW position is internally inconsistent. “Skepticism” doesn’t justify complacency. Only a well-defined and well-understood model of the climate where human actions had no negative consequences could do that. And AGW people are far from having anything like that model.
Anyway. If people could have an intelligent and well-conducted debate about global warming anywhere (a big if) I guess it would be here. And maybe I would participate. But this stuff, to me, is exactly like Creationism. And while I will try to be respectful of people, I simply have no respect for AGW as an idea.
I’ll repeat what HeelBearCub said above: AGW typically stands for “Anthropogenic Global Warming”, not “Anti-Global Warming”. So you probably meant “anti-AGW” above or something like that.
I urge you to revisit some of those rants, in a mindset of there being some legitimate cause there. Nybbler delivered a criticism of the Precautionary Principle you seem to subscribe to here, for instance. He rants, but so are you, here; who’s to say he’s not equally tired of what he considers an inconsistent argument coming from your side?
I accept that anti-AGW looks like creationism to you. Will you accept, in the same spirit, that AGW looks like a religious crusade to the other side? That that’s not neatly explained by the other side simply being “anti-science”?
1. We’re pumping out a lot of CO2 from burning fossil fuels in the last century or two, enough to affect atmospheric composition.
2. Measurements of atmospheric CO2 indicate that about half of this is sticking around in the atmosphere, and the CO2 level is accordingly rising.
3. A fairly well-accepted piece of physics indicates that extra CO2 increases the greenhouse effect, which makes the Earth warmer than it would be otherwise.
[Edit. 4. Despite some wobbles, the temperature seems to have risen a bit, and sea-level certainly has.]
So, from all the above, global warming is real. The follow-up questions, such as to what extent the warming is affected by negative and positive feedbacks, the long-term effect on sea level (short term, it’s been rising at about 3mm/year for nearly a century, which now amounts to a whole foot), what benefits and harms are likely in various places from a given amount of warming, whether we should concentrate on reducing CO2 or living with the effects, etc. are considerably more up in the air.
But AGW is definitely a thing. (Hey, I grew up when everyone was scared of global thermonuclear war. I can live with the threat of good weather.)
Requesting advice.
My parents were sufficiently emotionally abusive thanks to prejudice against me on the grounds of autism that I went no contact with them. I don’t know if they are narcissistic, but they have persistently acted as internet portrayals of narcissistic parents do. I made it very clear at the time that my goal was to be independent. However, my parents have:
(a) Failed to transfer my rent bill from myself to them despite repeated demands from me for them to do so (indirectly via others) due to incompetence. Because of my lack of organisational skills and believing my parent’s lies several times in a row, I have failed at financial independence and now owe them several thousand dollars. I also have lost over $300 in expenses, factoring for lost work hours (I am paid by the hour), trying to sort out the matter myself.
(b) “Forgot” about transferring my gym bill, so now I owe them several thousand more dollars. They lied that I only owed them $700, because although they know perfectly well that I went no contact with them and lost my ties with all my friends and family because I wanted to be independent and an adult that badly they were either too lazy to check properly or so patronizing they thought it for my own good.
(c) Despite my express desire to handle things on my own, I have reason to believe that have been meddling with the body I rent my flat from to stop me being kicked out- behind my back, and not only without my consent but against my express wishes.
Having a problem with this might sound whiny to many. And I don’t dispute that in many ways I am emotionally immature. But an important part of emotional maturity is (a) Being financially independent and (b) Taking the consequences of my actions. My parents and I were severely psychologically codependent, and I was growing up to be nothing more than a pathetic manchild. I had tried for six years to get my parents to change, and they still sabotaged my attempts to learn to drive, refused to take responsibility for a single mistake, and regularly demeaned and insulted me. They do not give two s__ts about my preferences.
I need help.
What do you mean by “I now owe them several thousand dollars”. You mean they paid for things on your behalf to that value, and you feel obliged to pay them back? Or that they are in some way actually trying to retrieve that money from you?
If the former, and the debt is purely in your own sense of obligation, I think my advice would be to accept that they’ve done you some favours up til now and aim for financial independence, as best you can, going forwards. Is that achieveable/realistic?
Your parents having helped out where you were struggling isn’t really that big a deal–that’s kind of what parents do. I say this as someone who used to, like you, hate feeling like I wasn’t independent to the extent that I would try to resist financial help from my parents (even when I needed it). But I’ve since become less scrupulous about it. I don’t think the belief was doing me any favours. If I could explain what’s changed then I would, but I’m not sure I can summarise it.
James- If it were a matter of moral obligation, you’d be right. It isn’t. It’s them paying for things behind my back, then doing everything in their power to sabotage me when I try to repay them.
The problem is that they (a) Don’t respect my boundaries (hence trying to make me accept aid I don’t want), (b) Have undermined what I am trying to learn (how to manage my money), and (c) Undermined one of my major goals (being respected by those around me as a man) by making the world perceive me as dependent on them.
I already drew a boundary line six months as a cutoff point for any further aid, which was violated without my consent. If I continue this pattern, then my parents will find new ways to continue to stop me from achieving things on my own without my consent, following your logic I would continue accepting more and more help, and would never become independent at all.
I suffer from self-confidence problems and every other thing I have tried to achieve has collapsed. Self-confidence is not the sort of thing that can be fixed with encouragement- I have to achieve legitimate successes, such as genuine financial independence, in order to fix my own psychological problems.
(EDIT: On your point about your own past problems- Given how empty my life is of anything like a genuine achievement, my self-confidence problems, and the fact that my parents emotionally abused me for six years, I have much more need to be independent than most)
What about just starting the independence clock from now, and focusing on being solvent going forward? After all, everyone has some period – typically at least up to 16, and in many cases as far as 21, or more – when they’re totally dependent on their parents (not just financially, but for food, and changing their diaper). OK, this period was a little longer for you, but it doesn’t seem any use fretting about it. No-one else frets about owing their parents for all the time, effort, and money their parents spent raising them!
I see that “owing” your parents money seems a big deal to you, and you seem kind of hung up on paying them back, but… I think part of autism is that certain things (rules?) can come to seem like a big deal that really aren’t, and that part of learning to survive in the real world is learning when you need to drop those rules. I would put to you that this is one such case.
If you really can’t do that–if you really, truly feel like you have to pay your parents back–then I’d suggest that you make this a lower priority than:
i) paying every other bill you owe (rent, gym bills, whatever), and making sure that you can continue to do so
ii) building up some funds to deal with other unforeseen expenses/problems, perhaps up to losing your job. (Being able to deal with unforeseen expenses is a good thing for almost everyone, but maybe especially so for you because you seem bad at foreseeing expenses.)
Only when you have that covered, if you still have any surplus, would I suggest you put it towards paying your parents back. (Consider that parents are more understanding creditors than most other people you may end up owing money to.) I know your independence is important to you, but in some sense it seems to demonstrate more life aptitude and independence to take some time to make sure you can stand on your own two feet, to be confident that you’re on the road to real independence, albeit slowly, than to rush to achieve one outward sign of independence (not owing your parents any money) in a way that makes you vulnerable to potential future catastrophes a few months down the line.
Good luck.
I already explained that. My parents have repeatedly violated my boundaries by trying to force me to accept them paying for me when I don’t want it. If I don’t stick to the line I have already drawn, they will keep doing this over and over again.
@Dabbler
The normal ‘growing up’ pattern is that the child demonstrates life coping skills and then the parents scale down their assistance. You seem to desire to want to be cut loose and be forced to succeed on your own, but:
– There is a reason why this is not the normal pattern, it runs a high risk of getting you into a huge mess which is hard to recover from.
– I don’t see how you are actually being held back by your parents. The complaints you have mostly boil down to how pretty mild parental behavior harms your self-confidence. This is primarily a matter of your own mental processes and I have little faith that without parental support you will suddenly get self-confidence. Everyone’s life consists of things they fail and things they succeed at. Life coping skills consists of gradually improving yourself so you succeed at more things, while not letting your self-confidence be destroyed by failures. The complaints about your parents don’t actually prohibit you from making progress. For example, you can prove you don’t need their aid by saving up more money than you get in aid from them. If you succeed at this, you have objectively proven that you don’t need their financial aid.
– You seem to believe in a black/white model of success: either you are independent and you have succeeded or you are dependent and you fail. That kind of all or nothing thinking inevitable results in statements like ‘given how empty my life is of anything like a genuine achievement,’ because you refuse to see small achievements as genuine. However, the best way to gain self-confidence is to start seeing those small achievements as important steps that together form a major achievement, even if the individual steps are small. As Lao Tzu wrote: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. A big benefit of small steps is that they are actually doable. No one can jump a thousand miles at once.
So my challenge to you is to find a goal that can be achieved gradually, like my aforementioned suggestion to start saving money. Stop blaming others for holding you back, but find ways to achieve your goals given the way that others act. Most importantly, if you succeed at achieving part of your goal, start celebrating it as an achievement even you’d prefer to do better. Most humans would like to do better in life, including the ones that you see as successful. It’s not realistic to be perfect, so be glad for what you are capable of.
Yep. This part’s important.
I will give you a full answer (in stages) tomorrow. I would have today, but I was kicked out due to automatic logoff and lost my post.
I feel like I’ve read this post here, or one just like it, years ago.
It’s the same guy.
Yeah, it is. I keep thinking my parents will change their ways and back off, but they keep finding new ways to thwart my independence which I haven’t even conceived of.
Reflecting on the chat so far, I think they can’t stop conceiving me as a child no matter what. They just assume that because I have Aspergers I can’t do things, even after all the times I have proven them wrong, all my rational arguments, all my emotional pleadings- everything. They’re prejudiced, and it’s painful because they use this prejudice to hurt me at every turn.
Clarification needed. Do you owe your parents, or the landlord? If the former, please explain what sort of financial arrangement you have with your family, because AFAIK, descendants explicitly owing their ancestors money is not a typical situation.
Why are you transferring the bill from yourself to your parents, whom you want to be independent from? Makes little sense to me.
Your parents are either directly undermining your efforts, or are so forgetful to be completely unreliable. In both cases, I would attempt to not rely on them doing anything in particular that you need done. Deal with your own shit. If you can’t deal with things like paying your bills, you have no business living on your own, really.
This would be… normal parent behaviour. They’re trying to help you to succeed, despite what may seem to be great ingratitude on your part, and they are at least trying to hide their meddling, which shows consideration of your wishes (if not compliance with them). They might have surmised that you need some “training wheels” time, and I’m not sure I would reach a different conclusion if I were them.
How old are you, again?
I think they do give a crap about it, but they disagree that you’re competent to do what you say you want to do. Again, not sure if I would disagree.
General advice: ASAP find someone who pulled off what you are doing, and request mentoring and/or start copying everything they do.
Regarding the particular problems you face, I would advise either getting organized, or hiring an accountant (there probably are firms that do by-the-hour services to small customers) to pay your bills on time and such. Probably less of an expense that getting kicked out of your home and being slapped with late fees.
Remember: Being independent is not about being isolated. It’s simply being able to deal with crap that life throws at you, including by delegating to others.
BTW, “financial independence” means being able not to work for a living and still pay your upkeep, indefinitely, regardless of people’s (employers’, spouses’, governments’, etc) opinions of you. It doesn’t mean simply living by yourself and having a job.
Clarification needed. Do you owe your parents, or the landlord? If the former, please explain what sort of financial arrangement you have with your family, because AFAIK, descendants explicitly owing their ancestors money is not a typical situation.
Why are you transferring the bill from yourself to your parents, whom you want to be independent from? Makes little sense to me.
My mistake when typing. I want to pay the bill which my parents used to pay.
Your parents are either directly undermining your efforts, or are so forgetful to be completely unreliable. In both cases, I would attempt to not rely on them doing anything in particular that you need done. Deal with your own shit. If you can’t deal with things like paying your bills, you have no business living on your own, really.
I don’t have anyone else to turn to, and my parents persistently undermined my efforts (yes yes I shouldn’t have given in but I’m stuck now!) every time I tried to learn basic skills, including bill-paying. I have transferred every bill I actually knew of. Attempting to “learn by doing” is the only option I have left.
I think they do give a crap about it, but they disagree that you’re competent to do what you say you want to do. Again, not sure if I would disagree.
This attitude has been persistent in the past and destructive. Persistently trying, failing, and eventually succeeding has worked very well for me. Every parental intervention so far has sabotaged my ability to succeed.
This would be… normal parent behaviour. They’re trying to help you to succeed, despite what may seem to be great ingratitude on your part, and they are at least trying to hide their meddling, which shows consideration of your wishes (if not compliance with them). They might have surmised that you need some “training wheels” time, and I’m not sure I would reach a different conclusion if I were them.
In terms of their subjective view, that sounds about right. But an adult is supposed to come off the training wheels.
If it were other people I’d consider any offer they made to help me. But my parents outright stated their intention to never let me get off “training wheels” many times. I don’t trust them.
How old are you, again?
25. Hence why I don’t dispute that I’m emotionally immature. Although I’d contend this is largely because of parental emotional abuse, the point is fairly moot now as I need to try and fix it.
Stopping my parents from interfering any more is part of this, as it allows me to really succeed or fail on my own and thus learn from the experience.
General advice: ASAP find someone who pulled off what you are doing, and request mentoring and/or start copying everything they do.
Regarding the particular problems you face, I would advise either getting organized, or hiring an accountant (there probably are firms that do by-the-hour services to small customers) to pay your bills on time and such. Probably less of an expense that getting kicked out of your home and being slapped with late fees.
Thanks to automatic credit card systems, my rent is now paid automatically. An accountant would be a very good idea if billing problems happen again, although right now I’m so deeply in debt that it’s bad for the moment.
I have been trying and failing to find someone to help me who has gone through what I went through. If I found any such advice I’d eagerly take it. I can’t, so I come here.
Remember: Being independent is not about being isolated. It’s simply being able to deal with crap that life throws at you, including by delegating to others.
Although I disagree on definitions, the decisive fact is that I am desperately trying to be someone who earns respect- both my own (psychological issues) and other people’s. Any dependence on my parents or their friends leads to social pressure to accept more and more, until I forfeit any possibility of either.
—————–
Correcting my terminology then. My goal is to pay for myself in life through what I legitimately earn through my job, and not rely on money from others in any way, shape, or form.
You might want to ask your questions at the Dysfunctional Family thread at Making Light.
Thanks. Will give it a go.
Right. What you are trying to do is, roughly speaking, correct. It sounds as though you have two mothers, with all the overprotectiveness (only child?).
Things to try:
– Settle the change of billing with the landlord. Don’t consult your parents. The landlord may or may not agree, but you don’t know until you ask. They may be skeptical of your ability to pay. You may want to move to another place, if all else fails.
– Talk to your father in the absence of your mother. It’s a good bet that he’ll be more sympathetic to your plight. A good argument to use is to indicate that you will have a very tough time attracting a wife and administering a household if you do not acquire life management skills first. Your parents presumably want grandchildren, which is a further argument that you need to man up and learn basic self-sufficiency.
– Get out of debt ASAP. Eat ramen for a while, if that’s what it takes. Do whatever you need to get back into the black.
– Make some friends, seriously. If you have hobbies other than anime and video games, try attending social events related to those hobbies – people who get along with you are likely to be in attendance. If you do not have hobbies other than anime and video games, get some. Go to church, scan the bulletin boards for Bible studies, catechesis for adults, that sort of stuff. Get to know the people you work with.
Thank you. The discrimination is fundamentally based on autism though, and both my parents have openly said that they would prefer if I was celibate due to the belief autistics cannot raise children therefore cannot have relationships.
Incidentally, my boss is a family friend who also put massive social pressure on me to, amongst other things, pay my debts slower until I threatened to go onto welfare rather than stay at his job. I’ve been giving in to way too much pressure to pay off less debt.
That sounds like it would be good advice if I wasn’t strictly no contact with my parents (yes I’ve used indirect intermediaries, but that has only been bare minimum). But I will follow it all anyway.
Godspeed, friend. Do tell how it all works out.
I already attend regular social events, and have gone no contact with my parents. The landlord bill is already settled. My debts can be divided into several parts:
-Rent Debt: Accumulated because . My parents have claimed my total debt was just $700, but this didn’t factor for gym debt and they may have lied even then.
-Student Loan: $1000 due at the end of the month. I am on track to pay this.
-Gym Debt: Accumulated over months because I believed my parents had done as I asked and transferred the bills to me. The trouble is that this is thousands of dollars, my parents have no inclination to tell me the true figure.
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-Work hour Debt: This is the bit which is really overwhelming. This is because my boss is a family friend following my parent’s old habits- putting massive pressure on me NOT to work off my debt like a responsible adult, and getting frustrated when I try to discuss ways to pay it off.
I am angry at him because this debt is partially his fault. He was the one who outright refused to let me work for him during my university exams (university I only take because I don’t think I’d keep my job if I didn’t because Julian thinks uni trumps work), leaving me no choice but to go into debt for him (about $2000 of the total debt).
The debt was explicitly made on the basis of paying it off in work hours, but by now amounts to about $3500.
I think you need to explain which of those debts are the kind of thing where a court would agree that you owe the debt, and which of those debts are “debts” where someone says you owe them money and makes you feel bad about it. You are being vague about this.
Did you actually sign a contract which gives you this work hour debt?
So your boss gave you (paid?) time off for your exams, and you’re interpreting this as debt to him?
Or was there some other bill you couldn’t pay because you weren’t allowed to work (but if that’s the case, how are you paying it off in work hours)?
The way he’s describing it, it sounds more like he’s the one insisting that he owes money to parties who would prefer to forgive or defer the debt.
The work debt would be viewed as a contract- we agreed over email that I would make up the hours I didn’t work and I kept receiving regular pay on that basis. Admittedly Julian is putting pressure on me NOT to care about work hours so much, but that comes to the principle of the thing.
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For years my parents have pushed hard to try and force me to be as unindependent as possible, ganging up on me with the help of my “friends”, a terrible psychologist who I didn’t realize for years didn’t deserve his authority,
Based on my experience in giving in in the past, they won’t stop at this. They will keep pushing and pushing and doing everything they can to erode my independence at every turn. I can’t give in. My only recourse is to drive them out.
I wouldn’t have thought this applied to my current boss, but this is the man who heavily pressured me into contacting my sister who had gone no contact with me, constantly pressures me not to care about the fact that I owe him over $3000 in lost work hours, and forced me to owe him in the first place by making me take time off for exams. This is sabotaging any chance I have of EVER being independent.
In that case, I understand – I’d probably feel morally obligated to pay that off, too, if I was paid by the hour. If your boss isn’t letting you, though, I don’t see anything you can do except retroactively term it a gift and maybe give some money to charity.
Frankly, given what else you’ve said about your boss, I’d recommend finding a new job. Have you tried that?
Retroactively terming things gifts has been the way people have attempted to suppress my attempts to learn independence for years. I’m done with accepting it because it is how my mess got this bad.
—————————————————————————–
Yes, I really should find a new job. This thread has convinced me to start searching Saturday (given I’m caught up right now).
But, to be fair, given the state of the economy this is very hard. I have no qualifications except an incomplete Melbourne University degree and some work experience. I tried to find a job for months and months and came up with absolutely nothing.
Was this agreement reached before or after you threatened to quit when he told you to take some time off for your exams? Because if it was after, I’d say you’re the one who forced him to re-term a gift into debt.
Most people, when their boss offers them some extra paid leave in a time of unusual stress (which exams totally are) think, “man, I’m glad my boss is such a nice guy, who cares about his employees’ well being”. You think “my boss is an abuser who wants to undermine my independence”. I don’t know you and I don’t know Julian, so maybe there’s some other trauma that justifies you interpreting his actions this way.
But have you considered another perspective? That you are the one forcing him to accept payment he doesn’t want (your unpaid labor)? You don’t owe him anything, because he doesn’t want what you’re trying to pay him. If you are in debt to someone, they can forgive that debt. That’s their prerogative, not yours. If you still feel obligated, “pay it forward” and help out someone else. Donate a few hours of every paycheck to a charity for some thing Julian likes until your “debt” is repaid. Spend your “owed” hours volunteering somewhere.
You want to be a responsible independent adult. Part of that, a very important part of that, is learning to gracefully accept gifts and help when you need it. I’m totally serious about this. Treating every interaction with other humans as a zero-sum game of debts and tallies to be repaid is not a mature adult attitude.
I’m a fully independent 30 year old man. When my mom visits, she still insists on buying me dinner at least once. Even though I make quite a bit more money than her. She still spends more on me for my birthday than I do for hers. Because she’s my mom and I’ll always be her baby boy. And you know what, I graciously accept it, because it makes her feel good and I don’t feel like accepting this threatens my adulthood.
Maybe things are too badly broken with your parents to ever get back to this point. But it seems like you’re falling into the same pattern with all the adults in your life. They try to help, you term it sabotage, assume in indebts you to them, and then hate yourself for having a debt that only you consider an obligation. That’s not healthy and frankly is way more off-nominal than owing a few grand to people you know (tons of independent neurotypical adults do!).
gdub:
First, given how emotionally immature and unskilled I am the process of me learning adulthood is very fragile right now. I can’t afford to do things like that because my capacity to stand on my own is so pathetic as it is.
Second, when I DID try the approach of accepting things like that the result was almost a psychological breakdown.
Third, you’re right in that Julian has done other things. He pressured me to get in contact with my sister even though that violated my no contact, automatically blamed me for going no contact with my parents, automatically blamed me when my sister when no contact with me because after all our years together I had to have been a d__k, tried to pressure me not to try so hard to learn to drive, forced me to accept a phone on false pretenses, etc etc.
I threatened to quit and go onto welfare (but work for free to pay off the debt in hours) so he backed off on that stuff. But that doesn’t mean I forget.
If this situation has being going on for years, I don’t suppose anything will change it. However, I do have one suggestion:
Open a savings account, and deposit in it every month the sum you would pay for rent, gym, and any other things your parents are paying for you against your wishes.
After a year, show your parents the account statement, with monthly payments and no withdrawals. This should demonstrate to everyone your ability to pay your own bills.
What you do with that money then is up to you.
If you *can’t* manage this, consider whether the current situation is better than alternatives such as homelessness.
I would second this.
While your parents were paying your rent, what were you doing with the money that would normally go to rent?
Because (apologies if I’m misinterpreting) it sounds like you didn’t notice that you weren’t paying rent for some period of time, because you had assumed they transferred the bill to you (using some autopay system or something?).
If I need to persuade my parents to let me become independent, then I have already failed at being an independent adult. Not only would this be a ridiculous contradiction in terms, but trying to negotiate after continuing improvement failed time after time as my parents continued to refuse to budge and abusively denigrated me, often outright sabotaging me.
I am capable of saving money, but I can’t save it when I don’t even know that the bill is being paid in the first place. It’s relatively minor now, since now that I know I have corrected the situation regarding both rent and gym.
—————————————————————————–
I have tried the approach of getting my parents to accept by rational argument or empirical disproof many times. But:
-Although my parents were proved wrong time after time by their own admission they did not change.
-They often pretended to change then broke their own promises (e.g. with driving lessons).
-They flat out refused to negotiate with me on several major occasions.
-On driving in particular, ludicrous over-caution led to half-assed lessons. My parents tried to force control over my spending even after I had moved out and pressured or outright intimidated me into giving up at every turn. These are not the sort of people who listen to reason.
More fundamentally, I have gone no contact with my parents. I cannot, emotionally speaking, accept such abusive people having any right to parent me or have authority over me in any way.
This is an issue because when I tried this I had so many emotional breakdowns in the middle of my flat that I almost got kicked out. I am not capable of controlling it- I know because I tried for six years and the emotional pressure increased more and more to the point where the problem got worse and worse. If I tried to cope with the sheer shame of it, I would probably end up getting kicked out for sheer stress.
Just to point it out, saving money is a good thing anyway in general.
Evan- If I haven’t paid off my debts, then as I have already pointed out that’s not truly saving as objectively speaking I’m either in debt or taking charity and thus as good as in debt.
@Dabbler
Charity is not debt. Savings plus debt is also different from no savings and no debt, especially if some/all of the debt is ‘soft debt’ or even imaginary.
Aapje- I am drafting a reply to the main argument between us, which will address this better. Suffice to say (since I haven’t got a good idea of how to redraft it properly yet)”
a- It is precisely because my capacity to be an adult is in such a weak state that I cannot afford any sort of compromise. Accepting charity would be such a compromise.
b- None of these are one-off cases. The people doing this will keep trying to force more and more gifts of one sort or another on me. They will thus erode my independence bit by bit, when my independence is so weak that I can’t afford for it to be eroded at all.
My opinion only, but:
Past experience with similar posts (categorizable under the general heading “autistic SSC reader asks for advice about how to deal with parents who Just Don’t Understand”) tells me that engaging in this thread is not going to be a productive use of time for anyone–Dabbler included.
Seconded. All advice internet strangers can give is highly context-dependent (if focused on the situation) or easy to ignore (if focused on the relationship).
This reminds me of Nancy’s comment.
Right now I’m pretty desperate- enough to try almost anything to stop my parents from doing what they’re doing.
What have you tried to get them to stop doing what they’re doing?
I will give you the full story on this tomorrow.
The only ones that are relevant to a solution (as opposed to showing my parents cannot be trusted) are things that happened since I went no contact, so I’m sticking to those.
—————————————————————————–
I first discovered the problem when I realized that my rent had not come out my account, and discovered to my extreme stress that I owed my parents a massive amount of extra money. I was trying to learn to drive at the time, but I had lost track of money so much I simply thought it had to have been paid by then and that the rest of the money was mine. This is how I first went into debt to my parents.
I went to C.O.B and told her to demand from my parents what had happened. Everybody assumed I had screwed up and my parents insisted I try again. I was distracted learning to drive, so I moved on.
—————————————————————————–
The same thing happened a month later. I was stressed and C.O.B insisted it was my fault while I insisted it was my parent’s fault. I was stressed, and there was nothing to but try.
———————————————————
I can’t remember precise timing, but the third attempt blurs into me going no contact with C.O.B and a massive social campaign to put pressure on me to accept aid I didn’t want.
C.O.B forced me to take driving aid. I came expecting to pay, and when the money was refused I got angry. This was a major fact in me eventually going minimal contact followed by her going no contact. I have made clear to her son I will not accept any reconciliation if she will not let me pay her.
I went to person after person amongst my friends begging for their help paying my parents. All these people refused due to concerns about my financial safety- when I had explained to them, very clearly, how I had enough! They treated me like a child and patronized me.
Eventually I found a way to pay. But I went no contact with two people, one being my childhood best friend, because of a combination of this betrayal, putting massive pressure on me to accept aid driving, showing contempt for my ambitions and disrespect in general.
———————————————————
The fourth time, I THOUGHT it was over. I finally got Student Housing Australia to put a stop to the rent. But I had not even considered the gym bill because I was too caught up trying to learn to work and drive.
I tried hiring Angelica for this amongst other things, but on this one she proved useless.
I then got my cleaner (for a fee) to go to my parents and demand a change, while my gym company received enough credit card details to transfer the fee.
Just for the record, this is bizarre. You tried to borrow money from your friends to pay off your parents? I’m not surprised they refused; it must have seemed very strange to them. It’s hard to see how owing money to your friends is any more independent than “owing” money to your parents.
It also seems sad that you “went no contact” with your best friend. Obviously, none of us know your whole situation, but the impression that I’m getting is of people being (justifiably) concerned about your well-being, trying to help, and you interpreting this as a slight, disrespectful, whatever, and “going no contact” with them. I don’t want to say with certainly that your perception is wrong – those slights could be real, at least in one or two cases! – but the fact that it seems to be such a frequent recourse for you makes me wonder if you might be overreacting to normal concern from those who care about you. Maybe you should ease off a tiny bit on the “going no contact” thing?
Everything you are describing sounds to me like you are in or very close to being in a serious mental health crisis.
I urge you to seek professional help. If you’re still in college you can find free or reduced cost counseling, if not, please look into services elsewhere.
I do not think is an issue with your parents, your debts, or anything else you seem to be very concerned about. If you seek help and they feel that you are correct in your concerns then I will admit I was wrong and humbly apologize.
Good luck Dabbler.
Oops- I forgot the context.
At this point, I literally did not know how to use the bank to pay my parents money. So I was begging for help in terms of cash delivery to my parents.
OK, that’s a bit different. My apologies; I misunderstood.
Dabbler, you do not seem to be handling the situations you describe well. You say you get stressed and this seems very much to be what happens, but the way you go about things is not helping your case.
(1) Demand people take money from you. I know this is because you want to establish financial independence, which also seems to loom very large in your mind as “if I don’t pay, that is taking charity, and taking charity is failure”
(2) Then you immediately go “no contact” if people don’t accede to your wishes, which I am presuming means cutting off all contact. Do you not see how this does make you seem childish and unable to function? In general, people don’t have the luxury of cutting off all contact with those they don’t find helpful or sympathetic. I could get off the phone with someone in the tax office and swear I was going “no contact” with them because they had treated me poorly, but that would not help me sort out my tax affairs and would get me in trouble.
From the way you describe it, it sounds as if you went to your friends, asked them “please make my parents take money from me”, and when they couldn’t or wouldn’t do this (and how can they make your parents take money if they don’t want to? force the banknotes into their clenched fists?), then you dropped them dead and cut off all contact with them.
This is not a mature way to handle your problems. And burning all your bridges (your tactic of resort seems to be “go no contact”) is only adding to your problems.
I think you do need to get an outside, neutral party to help mediate, but part of that is agreeing to what they say even if you don’t want to do it, and not going “stomp foot cut off all contact”.
I really do wish you good luck, but I think you need to seriously get help in sorting out the way things are getting out of proportion with you about what does and does not constitute being an adult and being independent. Wanting to pay your own way is good. Trying to force people to take money when they don’t want to, and dropping all contact with people who can’t force those people to take money, and brooding over it until you’ve made a mountain out of a molehill, is not good.
I was speaking from past experience based on other autistic commenters going through apparently similar ordeals with their parents and writing similar requests for advice here. You might be more open to suggestions than those commenters were, and giving a quick read now that you’ve written some responses, it looks like you are.
Sorry to have prejudged you wrong. Pattern updated, hope no harm was done.
I’m pretty sure it’s just the same guy over and over again?
Am I wrong?
I honestly don’t remember. (Move me one notch back toward Lebovitzism I guess.) If it’s the same guy he sure has changed his tone since last time, at least toward other commenters.
I think that you guys are referring to Kevin C, who is also autistic and asked for advice, but has substantially different problems.
Dabbler has asked for advice here before (a year ago?) and the problems and tone seem quite consistent between then and now.
Ooh. For some reason Kevin C didn’t fall into the “autist” bucket in my head.
I definitely remember Kevin C asking for advice about something else–socializing or finding a job or something–and then shooting down every suggestion people gave, no matter how good or reasonable.
But I also seem to recall one or two other autistic commenters doing the same thing but on threads where they asked for advice about dealing with their non-understanding parents who allegedly weren’t granting them (the commenters) enough independence/letting them make mistakes and grow.
I suppose it’s even possible I have morphed the aforementioned Kevin C thread together with Dabbler’s 1y/a thread in my memory, though I’m fairly (maybe 85%?) sure I haven’t.
There was a guy named “Carinthium” back in OT27/28 asking for advice in a similar situation, with a more explicitly atheist-vs-religious-parents angle. He may be who some of you all are remembering.
I don’t recall, nor do my notes of the threads I have participated in make any mention of, anyone outside of Carinthium, Dabbler, and Kevin C in this general class of lengthy advice threads for isolated autistic rationalists and the like.
I am curious. Dabbler do you ever post at LGF?
(Aside: Does this sort of speculation amount to doxxing?)
Do you actually keep notes of the threads you participate in, or was that said in jest? Don’t you pretty much participate in all of them?
I don’t actually participate in every thread, but at this point pretty close to every open thread. If nothing else, someone has to keep bean honest on the battleships.
And yes, after enough “now where did I post that thing I want to refer back to?” and “where did Scott introduce the LizardmanConstant(*)?” moments that involved moderately tedious hunts through the archives, I did make and do maintain a brief cheat sheet.
Never had to do that on usenet, because at least before Google mucked it up DejaNews had a proper search function. They don’t build them like they used to.
* Noisy Poll Results and Muslim Climatologists from Mars
Unless I’m confusing you with someone else (Australia, right?) this has been going on for years. I no longer believe that you actually want to cut your parents out of your life. If you did, you would have by now.
I don’t know if your parents are actually abusive or not. We only have one side of the story. But you clearly think they are. That being the case quit going back to your abuser. Don’t get an allowance. Don’t borrow money from them. Don’t call them. Block their number. Don’t email them. Filter their emails. Don’t write them. Throw away their emails. If they want to sue you over past debts, let them. You are probably judgment proof anyway. Don’t work for their friends. Don’t ask their friends for favors. Don’t pick one of their friends as a landlord. Heck, just avoid their friends altogether. Quit defining yourself vis-a-vis your conflict with your parents.
The track record you dredge up is really not very informative. If OP can’t escape people paying his fucking bills nothing you can reveal about the guy can surprise me (short of murder or rape) or lower my estimation of how together the guy has things. When I read that I don’t think “HAHA, gottem!”, I just think you are very unsympathetic or very cracked in the head to bring it up as if the guy is posing as a great leader of men.
“This guy tells us that he’s (currently) in a pathetic situation, but actually he’s also been that way for a while, so it’s actually a really pathetic.” Well, okay, thanks for your civic contribution, but no one else is keeping score here.
Then this bit is even worse, a lot worse:
Your heuristic seems to be “if you failed badly before, you’ll fail again, don’t pretend otherwise ” (optional: “…bitchhh”). So apparently no one is ever pathetic, or no one who is ever pathetic climbs their way out. Or perhaps the sentiment is even that they have no right to try?
_
The second part of your post seems to have some potential but if it was me there’s no way I’d listen to a word you say after you say failing to escape weakness yet means you don’t want to escape it. I mean this is a terrible thing to say in general but especially if the situation to escape is weakness itself, then you would expect that sometimes the protagonist would not be as quick and competent as you prefer.
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think I can do about my bills? I already went no contact with my parents, they repeatedly either lied to me or were incompetent about transferring the bills to me, all my friends have refused to help me even in basic payment delivery,
I figured out how to get SHA to transfer my bills to me (they resisted a lot, and I’m not sure if it was my parents behind the scenes or stubbornness), but
the problem with my gym was that I was emotionally distracted when the bill was supposed to have been transferred (this was the day I went no contact), then as I struggled to learn basic work skills and basic driving skills the thought never even crossed my mind.
I’m not very organized with my credit card- I regularly check, but I don’t have the organisation skills to look through detailed records. By the time I found out it was too late.
Since my social skills are poor (and based on past experiences any solution depending on good social skills is unworkable anyway) and contacting my parents again would make it worse, what can I do about them doing things behind my back?
The problem is that based on what you wrote I have no idea if you are financially solvent (maybe not precise word) or even potentially so.
Are you making a lot of money? You sound very confident that you can make or are making enough to cover your outgoings. Hopefully that is the case, because if not it’s possible your ideal of avoiding your parents aid may have to wait.
Remember it is common for parents to act insultingly towards their offspring, and borne by many with great patience and even acceptance. I was just reading ghandi’s autobiography, and he imposed what should have been only self-imposed medical restrictions on his sons and his wife, who almost died on some occasions.
The average parent is bad by an absolute standard, and furthermore it is hardest to bear insults when you have no status of your own, but can you really expect parents to be so much better than the natural human condition of being a confused and overassertive monkey?
My own parents resemble the low mid range of what you see on places like reddit-raisedbynarcissists, but I’m sure they never set out to disadvantage me, and rather were simply weak in some ways and stupid in some others. You may find much more patience for your parents if you view them as struggling apes rather than fallen angels.
However I freely admit it is much easier to forgive a weakness when it is not at this moment keeping you weak (which seems to be your appraisal), so I am not suggesting you to swallow what you see as insults -refusal to do so is a most healthy and noble impulse, –but if your situation demands it, you will survive it and gain independence later. (like many young people on this planet have and must)
If you can afford to cut them out then it will be easy compared to what you have already done. If you can’t afford to you might have to tolerate the indignity of accepting your parents help when you need it. It would be a great blessing if this is the extent of your problem.
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In terms of making more money and cutting expenses, (other than keeping track of them) some things to look at:
1. humble accomodation.
2. Reduce expenses. You probably don’t need an iphone, that is a very high range phone. When I was in an uncertain but better financial position than you my phone cost ~25 dollars . It is also possible to eat very cheaply for example.
3. possibly looking into supplementary work. Look up “high turnover positions” to find areas where they are more likely to try people on, and which often involve part time work that might fit in with a regular working schedule. Or if your current job is higher range than that you might ask advice online or from institutions for help with how to transfer your skills to more independent (but note, perhaps less secure) employment. My experience is that work is not half so difficult or miserable as my parents convinced me, though I am not autistic (nor was extremely unfit) and you might have greater struggles. In any case you should explore your options and seek to understand your situation, particularly whether you are doing normal work for normal pay in your current job.
(To explain later comments: Control by my parents USED to be far, far worse than it was. I was trying to solve the present problems, and I should have known it would get back to this)
Financially speaking, assuming I keep my job I easily have a surplus. Enough of a surplus that repaying debt fast enough is difficult, but I’ve never had a problem repaying debt.
Changing my accommodation is hard because I do not have the organisational skills to track down a new place. If I could do it at all, it would strain my executive function skills to it’s absolute limit. I’m also on a contract which lasts until next June.
I am trying to cut expenses, although I don’t know how to cook any dish but spaghetti bolignase (will work on later!). I would have not purchased an iphone after I lost my last one, but my boss outright forced me to purchase one for work purposes.
What you say about supplementary work is a very good idea. This weekend should be a good time to implement it.
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Your theory doesn’t make logical sense. I could accept raisedbynarcissists being wrong (although I would need an explanation). But logically speaking, it would imply.
-An inexplicable double standard. My parents checked off online abuse checklist after online abuse checklist, including abusive behavior that would be condemned as “you have to get out!” in any abusive boyfriend (including things that the Internet constantly condemns as abusive in Edward Cullen, demonstrating a social norm of what is acceptable). Yet I am supposed to accept this in my parents?
-A contradiction of so much of our culture. I am supposed to believe in “Power Corrupts” and that people should not be allowed to wield power unchecked, and condemn the overcontrol of, for instance, women in the Victorian era as absolutely wrong. Yet I am supposed to simply ignore parental power unchecked over me, AND the fact that control of me paralleled women in the Victorian era in how bad it was!
-The standard of adulthood is supposed to be 18, or at least 21. Not only have I clearly failed to succeed, I clearly failed because my parents sabotaged me. They had no intention of ever letting me succeed my that age and never even attempted it. Yet I am supposed to just accept this contradiction?
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You might something say something like “Our culture is illogical”. But if the logic of our culture points to something the culture does not in fact do, then I refuse to accept the contradiction, and never forgive my parents (who I can go no contact with!) because it makes no sense.
@Dabbler
Only legally. Many neurotypical people are dependent far longer than that. In places like Italy, it is normal for people to live with their parents for a long time and that frequently lasts into their 30’s.
What many people do to preserve their mental well-being is to redefine their definition of success to something that they can actually achieve.
Ultimately, life is not an exam with objective rules where you pass or fail. IMO, wanting to succeed in the eyes of others is a fool’s errand. There is always a higher level of societal status and chasing it just makes you a slave to the irrationality and typical-mind fallacies of others.
I suggest focusing on your own well-being much more than being perceived as a success based on how you think that neurotypicals define success (which you probably can’t accurately assess anyway, as autistic people tend to be very bad at doing so). It seems that you have build up a definition of success in your mind that will magically make you happy if you achieve it, but IMO this is self-deception and the result is merely that you are turning non-problems into problems (and thereby are placing barriers into your own path).
For example, wanting to pay back debts to those who don’t want to be paid back is a non-problem. It is meaningless with regard to your future independence, it is meaningless legally, it is meaningless socially, etc.
Quite a few people get financial aid from their parents long after they turned 21. Like gbdub said elsewhere, they just regard it as a loving gift and not a debt. These people are neurotypical and don’t see themselves as failures for doing things that you fret over immensely. Why are you doing that to yourself?
Start asking yourself more sensible questions:
– can I support myself without getting financial aid?
– can I do the basic things that go into running a household (cleaning, cooking, paying bills)
– How can I get help for the things I struggle with in a way that works for me (for example, having a person check your finances to find out if you forgot something is probably preferable to them doing the finances for you)
And again, stop seeing this as a black/white thing. Many neurotypicals struggle with supporting themselves/their family. Many neurotypicals have problems managing their finances. Many neurotypicals need help with paying taxes. Etc, etc.
If you only consider yourself a success if you surpass a large number of neurotypicals, then isn’t that an unreasonable high demand to put on yourself?
By the standards for autistic people, you already seem to be in the top 30% percentile by my estimate. IMO, a glass half empty person is never going to be satisfied, since when they manage to fill up a glass, they’ll just move on to a bigger half-filled glass and despair over their inability to fill it fully. Turning yourself into a glass half full person seems the most reliable way to increase happiness.
Answering your last post is difficult to explain. This one is easy.
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I tried your approach from about age 18 to 23. It didn’t work. It turned out I was psychologically incapable of seeing myself as I was as a “success” or being happy no matter how much I internalized a different idea of adulthood and no matter how hard I tried to be satisfied.
I tried an approach similar to what you said, but found that I was heading towards a psychological breakdown. So I resolved to change course and never go back that way again.
The ONLY thing that has worked in increasing my life satisfaction and long term happiness has been real successes in closer approaching adulthood as I contend it should be (as I will justify in my other response post).
One could argue, and I believe, that there are two kinds or levels of anarchy. The second is social: everyone accepts that governments have no authority, and therefore government ceases to exist. The first is personal: you accept for yourself that governments have no authority, making it just another social phenomenon that you interact with however you feel appropriate, and that interacts with you however it does.
Maybe that analysis is wrong; it’s certainly unsatisfying in some ways. But you really need to start embracing the personal view of “adulthood” in your situation. The law will protect a person in many ways from being harmed by one’s parents, but isn’t very useful when it comes to preventing them from helping you, or what is perceived as help.
You’ve voiced your objections and they’ve continued. You need to start thinking of them as like an eccentric millionaire who has taken a unwelcome interest in your life. Irritating, condescending, perhaps, but not something to get overly distressed about. As long as you’re prepared to at any time to take over whatever accounts they are paying for, you’re an adult.
(Edited:) More specifically, there is a point at which worrying about what you can’t control, especially when that thing is a parent, calls your “adulthood” into question. On that level, what your concern is at least borderline self-contradictory. People have to deal with their dumb parents and the dumb things they do. It’s part of the gig.
Proper response tomorrow. For the moment- What makes you think that this is psychologically possible for me at all? Last time I tried anything along those lines I nearly had a breakdown after all.
There are a whole host of detailed reasons, which I will explain tomorrow. On a minor note, until after I had gone no contact with my parents I had honestly, genuinely never heard of a conception of adulthood which required me to accept restrictions on my independence. Such a thing is obviously contradictory.
Suppose that instead of paying some your bills, your parents were living in a van right outside your window, yelling at each other all night. You call the police, and they say, “Yeah, it’s technically illegal, but we don’t really enforce that law. By the way, don’t do anything to them yourself beyond talking to them, because that’s illegal too and we do enforce those laws.”
What I’m saying is that you should start thinking of what they’re doing as like that. It’s a nuisance, and ideally you should be able to prevent it, but you can’t, and no one else is likely to step in. Most people live with all kinds of nuisances.
A nuisance regarding my sleep does not directly threaten me being an independent adult. A nuisance that prevents me paying my own bills does, as it prevents me learning good life skills.
That is ignoring the fact that such a nuisance can lead to worse. My parents always tend to push my independence down further and further when I give in to them.
@Dabbler
I can’t speak to what you can do or whether your earlier attempt was actually what I/we suggest.
I believe that my description is what most people do to be ‘adults.’ You seek to become an adult, yet you seem to have a mindset that is incompatible with ever considering yourself to be one.
When a person has goals and/or subgoals that are impossible, the only real solution is to change those goals. In your case, the edifice seems to be built around a goal of adulthood, which you seem to map 1-on-1 on independence, which you currently seem to map 1-on-1 on paying all your bills, today and those from the past.
It’s a common autistic error mode to monomaniacally optimize along a single axis and presumably you cannot do any different. So my attempt was to get you to recognize that this axis is not a binary, but that people can be more or less financially independent. You seem to be using a strict standard that goes substantially beyond what is commonly necessary to be considered a passable adult.
Can’t you set yourself a goal which is feasible and once you’ve achieved that, shift to a different monomaniac focus, like learning how to cook N different meals (or whatever)? As it is, you seem to have made very little progress since you’ve last asked for help, so what you are doing seems to not be working.
Ha.
Many people consider adulthood synonymous with taking responsibility, not independence. They will rate a parent, who is responsible for the well-being of their spouse and child, as far more adult than a single person who (objectively) is far more independent. This will be true even if the single person has a coffer full of golden florins, while the family person is much poorer.
This is probably part of the disconnect here. Many people consider someone financially ‘an adult’ when they can pay for their expenses, regardless of whether they actually do so! If they have a person paying for the bills, but are saving more than they are getting in handouts, then this means that the person can cope with the handouts ending.
Why can’t you set that as your goal? Then if/when you achieved that you can move on to improving your life/capabilities in different ways.
@Dabbler
You are paying N bills right? What difference does it make whether you pay N+1 or N+2 bills?
That is a much, much bigger problem than being in a few thousand dollars of debt, and a much bigger threat to your future well being. Basically you’re unwilling to accept a standard that doesn’t cast you as a failure, even though everyone else is telling you that that standard is way too harsh.
I disagree. His personal, overly strict, nearly impossible to meet standard of “adulthood” is precisely what is holding him back, because he’s emotionally abusing himself and threatening his own physical and financial well-being over failing to live up to it. I think we need to consider the possibility that Dabbler is an unreliable narrator and that advising him to “go on, keep holding yourself to an impossible standard” is basically enabling his self-harm.
An example:
Alice and Bob are two 25 year olds. Alice lives on her own, goes to university, has a job. She has some difficulty staying organized and occasionally gets behind on her bills. As a result, her parents have given her some financial support to the tune of a few thousand dollars.
Bob is like Alice, but has no debt. However, he has cut off all contact with his family because accepting assistance from people who he used to depend on causes him to suffer emotional distress bordering on psychological breakdown. He is attempting to cut himself off from his boss too, because he sees the boss’s unsolicited offer of free time off and encouragement to reconnect with his family as emotional abuse and a deliberate attempt at “sabotaging his independence”.
Who is worse at adulting? Who is likely to be better off five years from now? Alice or Bob?
Dabbler, you’ve laser-focused yourself on the problem of independence (defined strictly and rather idiosyncratically as not owin’ nothin’ to nobody), because it seems tractable. You can tabulate debt and payment in a spreadsheet and once the balance hits zero, TA-DA! You’re a Certifed Independent Adult. I get why that’s attractive. But you’ve created a super harsh zero-sum standard, one that’s convinced you that you’re a failure when by any reasonable standard you’re not. And it also seems like you’ve been using this fail-table as a crutch to avoid some deeper issues that are frankly more important. I strongly suspect that if you ever do manage to zero the tally, you’ll still be unsatisfied. I just hope when you do you finally realize it was the standard that was a failure, not you.
You have struggles very common to your generation, exacerbated by no-fault-of-yours symptoms of your neurodivergence and by overprotective parents (and objectively, the parents are probably a mixed bag – overprotective parents suck, but neglectful ones are much worse). None of this makes you less of an adult, or less of a whole person!
Some great stuff here, all round. I hope he takes it on board.
It’s 1:00 in the morning on my end and I have a very busy day tomorrow. Apologies to Aapje, but I’m responding to this one instead of your other one for tonight then logging off. I’ll respond to everything else tomorrow.
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Actually, paying off debt is my focus at the moment because it’s all I have left. My driving attempt collapsed because a bad teacher who stopped teaching me after my failed lesson (meaning I had to rush around looking for new instructors who wasted time testing the basics), then people continuously bullying me to give up and wait for Julian to get back so he could start teaching me making me so stressed I gave up, then lack of money to continue without taking help.
My dating attempt collapsed because at this point I’m getting such serious anxiety attacks it was hard to even log on to date, let alone be confident while doing so. These anxiety attacks were also affecting my work, and were made worse by pressure not to work so hard.
There is nothing unrealistic about financial independence. I already have a surplus sufficient to, in principle, repay debt and pay for plenty more in expenses. All I have to do is try and (a) Force my boss to stop forcing me to borrow money through paid time off, and (b) Track down all my bills so my parents can’t pay me any more money. I then have to figure out how to repay it faster (which is admittedly very hard!).
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The problem here, though I know you don’t want to hear this, is emotional abuse. This emotional abuse consisted of my parents taking advantage of my lack of life experience and factors I will explain in my response to your other line of posts (fits better there!), people constantly ganging up on me and denigrating me for trying, and doing everything they could to make the anxiety disorder part of autism even worse.
It was because of this emotional abuse that at age 23 I didn’t know how to use the train and trams on my own, had never dated, didn’t have the organisational skills to achieve basic tasks, had never gotten a job, was still living with my parents, and wasn’t even capable of doing full time university (ALL things in which this pattern had repeated!). In addition to this, the lack of self-confidence made me too afraid to attempt chores, go shopping on my own,
To do as you are suggesting would mean giving in to the exact same pattern that was used to emotionally abuse me for at least five years depending on definition. It would mean doing this in face of friends who backed my parents up to the hilt and would continue the exact pattern. It would mean throwing away the masses of effort I invested in this cause.
This is ignoring the fact that I want to be an actual independent adult. But at this point, true though it is, people will just ignore it if I continue pointing that out.
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There is also the sheer number of cultural contradictions I would have to suspend disbelief about, but that’s a separate post. Suffice to say that I simply cannot suspend disbelief about your version of adulthood being adulthood because it contradicts too many things Western culture claims in theory about the freedom individuals are supposed to have, personal responsibility and more.
Actually, come to think of it a few to start with:
-People criticize millennials constantly. If I abandoned my efforts at independence, I would fall straight into the millennial stereotype of being lazy and over-entitled. Yet everyone here is slamming me for doing my utmost NOT to be entitled!
-Plenty of conservative types tend to criticize those raised in comfortable homes for how weak they are. Another minor factor was that I wanted not to be somebody who deserved such criticism, which mean taking on the full burden of all these bills. Yet people are criticizing me for it!
-Finally, think of SJW type criticisms of people as not truly deserving their success due to privilege. Admittedly I can’t get rid of this completely. But how am I supposed to NOT feel ashamed of myself (and keep in mind my anxiety problems here!) when I am taking massive amounts of help from others to take a single step!
The last one is the most painful because I desperately want autonomy as well as independence. If people force help on me they can also force reciprocity. The thought of having my life controlled by others that deeply is one that, psychologically speaking, is very distressing to me.
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I ignore responsibility because right now I am concentrating on something far more basic. If I could succeed in dating, I would consider starting a family partially for that reason.
As for your point about bills- the point is that if I am receiving a service I should be paying for the service myself!
@Dabbler
Western culture is a lie (and actually partially an amalgam of subcultures). There is no consistent and rational narrative that can be extracted from it and the demands are not healthy for many people. That’s why you have to accept to be a ‘failure’ to a certain extent, because being a 100% success in the eyes of all of society is impossible (because different parts of society demand different things and those demands cannot be realistically be met concurrently and/or are inconsistent). A large number of people will be psychologically hurt/damaged if they try to maximize societal status or adherence to the norms of subcultures rather than seeking to balance it with their own well-being. This is especially true for most neuroatypicals (although psychopaths may be better suited to it than neurotypicals).
Friendship and family relationships are not purely transactional, although transactionality plays a larger role than most people admit/realize. Getting the right balance between transactionality and (a semblance) of altruism is an important life skill to be regarded with fondness as a peer who equally participates in mutually satisfactory relationships. Admittedly, it is a skill that is very hard for autistic people, but having failing at this skill as a goal (which is true if you seek to make every relationship purely transactional) seems counterproductive. Erring on the side of transactionality is probably a good idea (although you’d often want to obscure it a little, like time-shifting it and/or paying back in kind), but not to the extent that you do.
Secondly, paying for a service doesn’t create a lot of life skills. If you are dependent on someone else to do something for you because you can’t do it yourself, then you don’t have the ability yourself and are dependent on outside help. If you do have the ability and let someone else do it for convenience or other reasons, then you are not dependent on outside help. In neither case is financial remuneration an important issue beyond practical reasons (which can be significant, but not for reasons of personal ability).
Now I’m thinking that you may have chosen to maximize transactionality because you have difficulty acquiring skills and setting up automatic payments is low skill/effort and can be made part of a narrative that turns it into a major achievement on your successometer, but it is nevertheless mostly a delusion.
I understand that shattering this delusion may result in a personal crisis, but you seem to be in a rather poor local optimum that is persistent and far below what I think you can achieve. I understand that breaking your mental model apart and building up a new one is risky, but you may want to experiment with building up alternative successometers, while retaining your old one and trying to find one that works better for you.
the problem with my gym was that I was emotionally distracted when the bill was supposed to have been transferred (this was the day I went no contact), then as I struggled to learn basic work skills and basic driving skills the thought never even crossed my mind
Dabbler, that”s the main problem. You get stressed and distracted and forget things because you can only handle one thing at a time.
So make lists and reminders. Don’t let yourself forget. You know you forget things when you’re stressed. When you’re not stressed, write them down (“phone gym”, “cancel phone plan”) and put a reminder somewhere – write it down on a wall calendar, something like that – so that three weeks later you will see “Oh, I forgot about the gym, I have to do that this week!”
That will help you control things, and when you control things, you will not be as stressed.
The way I’d find out everything I was paying for, if I didn’t know, is to make a spreadsheet to track it, as follows:
0. have access to spreadsheet software. Google docs is free if you have a google account. Excel might be better.
1. Make a new spreadsheet document
2. Leaving column A and rows 1-3 empty, write “Accomodation” in box B4, then along row 4 (C4, D4, etc) every other regular payment that you can think of. (Like gym, phone, whatever utilities aren’t covered under rent, any tax you pay occupying that unit, loans repayments, etc. And other ones particular to yourself- ~university-food-hall-subscription, spotify, dollar shave club, etc.)
3. keep an eye out in your life for any things which may have slipped your mind. -Do these driving lessons cost money? that kind of thing.
4. whenever you pay a bill (or receive notice of its standing payment) write the date in a new line on column A, and input the figure aligned with it in the corresponding column. (multiple payments on same day go in the same row).
5. If any column doesn’t have payments then you have something to look into.
You can also use this approach to track your finances more generally, and can add things like an auto tally at the bottom of the column to count the total paid for that service. (one would then make a new spreadsheet or ‘sheet’ (tab) for each taxyear).
If tax is not taken straight out of your paycheck you should also keep track of how much you are taking in and what tax you expect to pay so you can plan around it.
And you can probably find better help for this kind of thing in various places on the internet and IRL. (I listed some in previous post)
About your current job, what sort of ‘tier’ of work is it? (not bottom tier if you must have an iphone for work purposes?) It is a easier to replace a low level job than a higher level one and the steps to take might be different as well.
About the ‘humans are monkeys’ argument, yes I was saying it’s normal not that it’s good. It might be some consolation if you were stuck with it. If possible it’s better to escape it and get some distance.
I did not say anything about forgiveness. I am questioning the objective severity of the transgression, which in my belief exists relative to the moral capabilities of the transgressor- a lion killing someone is not the same as a person doing it, and if someone doesn’t listen to you the transgression itself is different if they are someone with brain damage than if they are a normal person, and if they are a normal (monkey) person compared to what I naturally imagine humans are like.
This reorientation of perspective is not at all the same as forgiveness.
But in any case the best time to be magnanimous is either: 1. when you have to, or, 2. when you can easily afford to, and not so much when you are struggling against the effects of a transgression.
Now, my main remaining concern is that I don’t know if you have this job mainly because of the family connection, or if that just got your foot in the door. This would be a major component in the strength of your current position, so I think it’s important to clarify.
*So I think it would be useful to clarify. (‘Important’ is slightly too grand a word.)
I have already gone no contact with my parents, which I thought would be the end of it. I was naive and believed that my parents (who did not know I was about to go no contact) would ACTUALLY TRANSFER THE BILLS. I do my utmost to repay them via intermediaries.
I do not get an allowance. I did NOT borrow money from them- they paid my bills behind my back so now I owe them money. I have not called them or emailed them, and did not let them email me or contact me in any way.
My landlord is not my parent’s friend but a private corporation. The only reason I asked my parent’s friends for favors is because I literally didn’t know how to pay bills, was distracted trying to learn to work AND learn to drive at the same time, and if I wanted not to contact my parents I needed help to actually repay them. I’ve gone no contact with all my parent’s friends bar one because they kept betraying me.
As for working for a friend of my parent’s… you have a point. I didn’t realize that my boss would be so influenced by my parents. Now I am too much in debt because I made expenditures I wouldn’t have because I was acting on the assumption he wouldn’t be so lenient (and outright pressure me to lower standards!) as to call into question whether it was an actual job, so I can’t quit.
Don’t worry about paying them back. Yes, in one sense it might be considered the responsible thing to do, but in a larger sense it is just leading to indefinite further entanglement. You have the whole rest of your life to be independent, go and be independent instead of worrying about being retroactively independent by paying off these supposed debts.
In terms of transferring bills just talk to the service provider (landlord, telephone company, electric company, etc.) Tell them that you are now talking over responsibility for X bill and if they give you are hard time threaten to cancel the service. If necessary actually cancel the service and use a different provider — up to and including moving.
I have thought about that. The problem with that is- what happens when my parents violate my consent again and intervene behind my back? If I don’t find a way to put an end to their behavior once and for all, I will NEVER be independent.
I know how to do that now (although Student Housing Australia resisted strongly, and I was misled by being told an automatic program would do it for me which turned out not to). But the problem is- what if there is a bill I don’t even know exists?
I don’t really understand how they can go behind your back and pay bills for accounts you sign up for and they never have anything to do with.
So for example, you have a cell phone? If the cell phone provider won’t transfer the bill to your name and put a verbal password on the account before any changes can be made, then cancel the account and get a new one. That new one will be in your name and your parents will have no way of knowing about it to pay for it. Same thing for your internet bill, your water bill, your electric bill, your gym bill, your rent bill, and so forth and so on.
As for bills that you don’t know exist, they will come out of the woodwork. People want to get paid.
I really think you should stop focusing on getting your parents to change their behavior and instead focus on changing your own circumstances to a one where that your parents have no opportunity to affect your life in any way.
If someone wanted to pay my e.g. credit card bill, he’d hard pressed to do so because he wouldn’t have my account number and the credit card company wouldn’t just give it out because someone called and asked.
The reason is that I am very poor at organisation, and furthermore am distracted by a combination of work, university, and trying to live a life in general. I am very inexperienced at this and all sorts of bills slip my mind.
If I don’t know a bill even exists, I can’t contact anybody to tell them to transfer it can I?
For instance, I lost an Iphone which I believe had a phone plan. But I only just remembered that existed just now. Who knows how many bills I have simply failed to think about?
Moving would, logistically speaking, be very very difficult for me. I am capable of lesser things, but my organisational skills are so poor I would be stretched likely beyond my limits trying to move house on my own.
Organizational skills sounds like something you can work on that doesn’t involve trying to change anyone else’s behavior. Don’t worry about past bills that may or may not exist, instead concentrate on going forward keeping track of and paying all the bills you know exist.
That would be the same as giving up on being an independent adult. Basically, I’m giving up and saying that if my parents are going to pay large parts of my bills and intervene by my bank, my boss is going to force me to take free money and gifts, and somehow that’s miraculously going to count as independence.
I have already sacrificed a massive amount of time, effort, and resources to try and be an independent adult. Why would I give up now?
I don’t know. It seems to me you are putting the cart before the horse. *If* you could be responsible for all your needs going forward, I think you’d be in a very good spot vis-a-vis independence.
That involves some things that are very hard for you: likely getting a new job because your boss isn’t really in an arm’s length relationship with you. Maybe moving because your current landlord is taking money from your parents. Perhaps signing up for new phone and gym service and so on.
These things are very hard, and I’m not minimizing that, but they are possible. They are things you can do yourself without changing anyone else. At the end, if you accomplish them, you’d have achieved what most people would consider a large measure of independence.
Instead of doing what you can right now to insure that you will be independent going forward you seem to want to obsess with how you can convince your parents to “respect your boundaries”. You can’t. You aren’t able to force anyone else to see things how you see things.
What you *can* do is begin to create circumstances such that they can’t interfere with you anymore. That’s what you should be working on, as hard as it is to do.
I have actually lost my phone. My worry is that my parents, even though they were outright told this, might think I would naturally get it back later and still be paying for it anyway.
On the job- You’re very right. I’ll give it one last chance. That being said, I am very concerned about quitting because of the hours I owe Julian. If I quit I can’t repay him.
On the landlord- The landlord’s representative claimed that she never talked to my parents since I made clear that they shouldn’t. I don’t think a business would point blank lie to me like that.
On everything else- The problem is that this works very well- for things I actually think of. Given my organisational skills, who knows what I’ve failed to think of?
The central problem here is (1) your parents still see you as a child, dependent on their support for everything and (2) given all you’ve said about your struggles with functioning independently, they may be right.
You call them “abusive.” I feel like if anyone today treated me, age thirty-mumble, like my parents did when I was five, that would count as abuse – but the way they treated me then wasn’t abusive. Circumstances change.
Today your parents look at you and see the five-year-old. I don’t think your rigid insistence on “independence” and doing everything your way is going to change their viewpoint.
I have gone no contact with my parents, and use intermediaries to stop them only when they harass me. In case it was not clear, I was not looking to persuade them- I was looking to somehow force them to stop.
Any approach based on persuasion fails on the principle of the thing. If I have to try and persuade others to let me be an adult, then that is failing at being an adult as my independence is dependent on others.
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In addition, I tried the approach of persuasion for years and it never worked. I tried to explain how I felt to my parents time and time again, I tried arguing with them and demonstrating flaws in their reasoning, I tried empirically disproving, and nothing work. Only after two years were responded to with continuous sabotage on their part (before that I had internalized self-hatred and didn’t try) did I decide I could never make it work.
There are two possibilities as far as I can tell. The first is that my parents would never accept me as an adult no matter what I did because of anti-autism prejudice (they constantly used my autism as an excuse, claiming I shouldn’t consider myself a failure because of it).
The second is that this involved social skills I didn’t have. But if so, this is ludicrously unjust of my parents. Not only I am autistic, but my parents constantly emphasized relying on aides and support workers they appointed to teach me social skills and that I couldn’t succeed on my own, and I believed them because I was a child and they had professionals do it. I was supposed to be taught everything I needed to know, but I honestly had no idea that independence involved negotiation because nobody taught me that.
I tried to succeed at negotiations using the crappy negotiation skills THEY taught me. And I’m supposed to take it as if they’re being fair to block me when I never had the skills to negotiate in the first place because of them?
I hate to sound like I’m piling on here, but you sound as if you think your parents are being deliberately malicious. Yet at the same time you acknowledge that you do lack skills for independent living; being unaware of how the bills for various things worked and simply assuming they’d automatically be transferred over; forgetting about your lost phone and that if you were still on a monthly payment plan (instead of a ‘pay as you go’ one) that money would still be taken from your account if you didn’t stop it; that you have very poor organisational skills, that you are not up to the task of finding new accommodation on your own; that you take on too much at once (trying to learn to drive and life skills and attend university).
So, from an outside view, it’s understandable why your parents would consider you unable to manage independently. That’s aside from things you have said about their attitudes to autism, which do sound – if true – to be unhelpful and to be holding you back.
So what you need to do, instead of demanding your parents and boss do this, that and the other or else you will go no contact – a demand that sounds, forgive me for saying this, childish and also makes you sound less able to handle things to an outside viewer, is to recognise that you do have poor organisational skills and work out a way to get around this.
Make a plan. Figure out “what do I need to do to get a flat of my own?” Break it down into steps. WRITE DOWN THOSE STEPS. Do them one at a time – maybe the first step is “figure out how much rent I can afford?” and do that, and mark it off.
Second, you don’t have to do everything at once, or by a set date. You can’t do it, anyway, since your executive dysfunction hampers you. So give yourself plenty of time – say three months? – for something like “find a new place to live”. Follow the steps one by one, but don’t try to rush them all at once. Maybe you can only do one step of your plan this week, that’s fine, that’s not a waste or a failure.
The two big obstacles to being seen as capable of functioning independently are these:
(1) Not being able to plan and follow through on that plan
(2) Having a meltdown and abandoning everything when you run into an obstacle
Figure out ways to work around those and you will be a lot further on the way to “independent adulthood”.
Things like – you have a phone now? Then write the details down – what plan are you on, what monthly payments, if the phone is lost or stolen what to do in that case – and put it somewhere you will be able to access those notes easily. I tend to use the calendar with Microsoft Mail to make notes of when I have to do things, but I’m sure there are better schemes out there.
DO THAT FOR EVERYTHING. What is the bin collection day and what bins to put out. When are bills (electricity, phone, rent, etc) due and how much. Regular check bank account to make sure your money is going in and your bills are being paid, and that you are not (say) letting a direct debit still run even after cancelling it with the phone service or whatever. “Do the laundry today YES TODAY”. Stuff like that. Stuff you can do for yourself, not dependent on “my parents said they’d transfer over the gym bill but they lied”. Also – remind yourself to check that yes, they transferred over the bill. Again, break it down into steps: “phone or call in to the gym. Ask about the bill. Ask if it’s now in my name. If not, get them to cancel subscription and take out new one in my own name and billing details, either in that gym or another one. If another gym, work out what gym I would go to.”
Show that you can get your shit together and won’t have a meltdown if you miss or forget something, and that you are working on getting your shit together.
Plenty of good ideas in here. I will give a full response to them tomorrow. I will also explain why the solution of “do things more gradually” is a proven failure, “throw myself 100% at a problem” has had the best success rate of any strategy I have tried so far, and being accountable to my parents has only made things worse.
Although I don’t understand why you are ignoring the fact that I have gone no contact with my parents. I only responded through intermediaries in order to respect this no contact, and only when they gave me no choice through their actions.
Regardless of my solution, I do not intend to have my parents in my life ever again. Any solution which requires me to be accountable to them is a failure both because they cannot see reason (as I will demonstrate tomorrow) and because of how contradictory that is.
Simple and kind of obvious, but also the best advice anybody ever gave me. I would add “document what you did for that step” as a pretty important component though. Not sure what anybody else’s organizational/executive function problems tend to consist of, but getting distracted by other projects/tasks then forgetting where I was in the last one and skipping steps, making things increasingly complicated as I have to figure out how to go back and fix earlier parts of the process while keeping up with what’s going on is something I spend less time doing now.
[nitpick]I’ve learned from experience that trying to do this in three months is risky. I start six months before a lease is ending. It’s easier to sublet one of the places for (most of) the overlapping time than it is to be homeless for a month or three.[/nitpick]
Given when my rent on this flat expires, though, I’m thinking I should start making plans in about December-January. That would be six months before my rent runs out.
Otherwise good advice.
A lot of text was already written here, and I doubt the chances of solving someone’s huge problems by posting an SSC comment, and yet I can’t resist, because I know someone with much weaker of your problem, but still serious enough to recognize the pattern.
Seems to me, you are making two huge meta mistakes, which generate many other problems:
1) You focus on what other people are doing, instead of what you could do.
Sure, it is legitimate to complain about behavior of other people, once in a while. But it becomes a problem when complaining takes a large part of your attention, a large part of your time, a large part of your interaction with other people. Complaining should be a one-off thing: you complain; you either achieved something or not; you update on the outcome and move on. Don’t repeat yourself.
The more resources you spend on complaining, the less resources you have to fix your life. Usually you can’t change other people; you can only change yourself; so this is where your energy should be focused. You could start by assuming that your parents will forever remain as they are now, and devise a plan how to become more adult regardless. You are not in the “changing your parents” business; you are in the “changing yourself” business.
Also, endless complaining is one of those things that make you seem less adult. Complaining about parent figures is what children typically do. You don’t have to go to the opposite extreme — even adult people sometimes complain to their friends, and ask for help or advice. But make your complaining short, and then focus on what you can do.
2) You focus on the past, instead of the present and the future.
What happened, happened. Every day is a potential new start. Sometimes the problems of the past are not solved, they just become irrelevant and forgotten. If you could hypothetically start doing things 100% right today, in a year or two no one would even notice a difference between you and people who started from less problematic situations. That’s what you should focus on.
You will never be able to magically change the past. You can only stop the processes that started in the past; but you have to stop them in the present.
(Also, if my intuition about the person you remind me of is correct, I suspect that you are a perfectionist; that if you achieve only 99% of what you originally planned, you are frustrated and make your frustration visible. The problem with this is the opportunity costs: the time and energy you spend on getting some issue A from 99% to 100% would be much better spent on some other issue B that you can meanwhile neglecting completely.)
Now more specifically…
Why do you even need an expensive gym? Download a copy of Convict Conditioning, and exercise at home, using only your own weight and a pull-up bar. Saving money is a part of being adult. Regardless… if you want to have bills transferred to you, here is what you do:
You go to the gym and say, with a smile: “Hi, I am Dabbler D. Dabblerowski, your customer. I would like to change my billing address to XY, starting now.” Optionally, show them some ID containing the address. Then I would really really expect them to change the billing address. Don’t tell them about your parents (they don’t care and it only makes you less adult). Don’t ask them to retroactively do anything about the past payments, except perhaps: “By the way, if there are still some unpaid bills sent to the old address, I apologize for that, and please send them again to my new address.”
(If you try this, and it somehow doesn’t work, then that is a specific problem you post to SSC open thread. What exactly you did, what exactly did they tell you. Then we can try finding a solution to the specific problem.)
This is how you fix the future (of the gym bill) once and forever. And I strongly suggest letting the past go, at least until you have solved all other important things in your life. As a side effect, you only have to worry about paying the monthly bill, not about the unknown thousands. Focus on paying all your current and future bills yourself; that ensures that your debts (both real and imaginary) will stop growing.
Generally, your strategy for dealing with abusive parents should be “whatever minimizes your contact with them” (and that includes time you spend thinking and talking about them). If it’s paying money, then pay the money; if it’s not paying money, then don’t pay the money. Otherwise, you are playing their game.
You wrote: “My parents have repeatedly violated my boundaries by trying to force me to accept them paying for me when I don’t want it.” How specifically did they do that? I want to focus on the mechanism how they achieved it, as opposed to the fact that they did. Because, when I e.g. go to a shop to buy food, there is no way my parents could have paid instead of me, because they are simply not there when I am paying. Do they take your bills out of the mailbox? But you don’t live with them, so are they going to pick your mailbox at the place you live? I mean, if it’s just that you haven’t changed the address yet, do it now.
By the way, you focus on financial independence. What about other aspects of life? Are you eating healthy food? Are you cooking for yourself? A rule of thumb: make 30% of your food be fruit and unprocessed vegetables. — The larger picture here is that if everything else is okay, you are still doing okay, even if you have some unsolved debts.
By the way, find some new friends. How? I guess find some club or lesson where you would like to participate, and you may meet interesting people there. Toastmasters or dancing lessons could give you extra skills and an opportunity to meet people. Having more friends makes you less dependent, because you don’t depend on any specific one of them. It is dangerous to have few friends, if some of them start acting against you. More friends can help you easier find a new job, etc.
It feels like you are focusing too much on one thing (paying the past bills). If that would be the only problem in your life, it would make sense; but it actually feels like you focus on that to avoid some other aspects of your life. Try seeing the larger picture. This battle over the past bills is just a silly game, and you are just as guilty as your parents for continuing to play it. The goal is not to win the game, but to stop playing it.