This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. Comment of the week is John Schilling on Google X Prize. There’s also a lot of good discussion in the free energy thread, though I can’t pick just one.
2. New ad for brain preservation company Nectome – see eg this article about their head researcher winning the Brain Preservation Prize. If you’re interested in helping, there’s an link for joining their team at the bottom of their site.
3. Nobody is under any obligation to comply with this, but if you want to encourage this blog to continue to exist, I request not to be cited in major national newspapers. I realize it’s meant well, and I appreciate the honor, but I’ve gotten a few more real-life threats than I’m entirely comfortable with, and I would prefer decreased publicity for now.
4. I recently put a couple of responses to an online spat up here because I needed somewhere to host them, unaware that this would email all several thousand people on my mailing list. Sorry about that. I’ve deleted some of them because of the whole “decreased publicity” thing, and I would appreciate help from anyone who knows how to make it so I can put random useful text up in an out-of-the-way place without insta-emailing everybody.
5. Thanks to Lanny for fixing this blog’s comment report function. You should now be able to report inappropriate comments again. If you can’t, please say so and we’ll try to figure out what went wrong.
I look at evolution as this:
Evolution happens when some process is traversing the branches of its substrate in the universe, such that what happens in later branches is more likely to occur if universal conditions around it make it more likely to occur.
Like running through permutations.
The process both impacts the substrate and the substrate affects the way the process plays out. Life is one such process: life is exploring the possible branches of what DNA can do and how it plays out, how life can use resources and the ecosystems that arise and fall, and all other such emergent effects.
Could you replace your post of 11.16.16, “You Are Still Crying Wolf”? It was a very fine piece, and all the more startling for its clarity and honesty among a welter of outrage which would shout it down.
Please do not deny curious readers the power of your reasoning based on a reticence to be seen as a promoter. As Kipling wrote, ” If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools …”
I daresay you can bear it. This was one of the only rigorous blogs which spoke the truth. It needs to perdure, for its historicity and rigor.
It’s on archive.is.
Thank you. I did not know of that archive.
If Stephen Wolfram achieves his lifelong dream and discovers the computer program that underlies The Universe, what would he actually be able to do with it?
See if it can run Doom?
This is slightly late to the game (emerging from deadline hell…)
Re: adversarial collaboration with Chris, here are my comments:
“1) COMPAS (the main algo we were discussing) treats blacks and whites the same.”
Agreed, but _only_ under that definition of same.
“2) The algorithm makes no egregiously incorrect inferences – i.e. a bunch of people the algo says have a 30% chance of recidivism do roughly have a 30% chance, regardless of race. The algorithm is not biased against blacks, in the sense of systematically making wrong decisions with a consistent direction.”
Disagree, or agree depending on the notion of bias used. I am working on a sequel to our paper where four different distinct kinds of bias show up (statistical bias due to model misspecification, confounding bias, bias due to unfair practices in the real world, and decision-making bias by a decision rule). I think a lot of disagreement I had with Chris had to do with what I believe to be confusion on what the word “bias” means. Bias means a lot of unrelated things in statistics, unfortunately.
“3) If we used an alternate algorithm, this algorithm would need to directly discriminate – to punish a white person more harshly for the same behavior. Said algorithm would also lead to more more murders/rapes/other violent crimes by blacks and/or leave more harmless white people in jail.”
You have to define discrimination first, and tell me why that definition is reasonable. Chris would probably use a regression-based definition, and I would claim that definition is wrong (because it fails to do intuitively correct things in examples). I probably agree with above under what I think Chris’ narrow definition of discrimination is, I just think the definition is silly.
Where Chris thinks I disagree:
“a) the article is misleading.”
I am sure it’s misleading to some people. I don’t think it’s intentional though. I said as much.
“b) The misleading nature is deliberate, and probably done for clickbait. I can’t think of an experiment to measure this.”
Chris is correct that I disagree here.
“c) Selection bias somewhere in the data collection is somehow driving the predictions of COMPAS. I only have a rough idea of what Ilya is hinting at here, but I propose to resolve this by looking for direct evidence of this selection bias. (He’ll need to clearly state what the bias is that he thinks exists, of course.)”
Selection and confounding bias is not a function of the observed data. To see this consider a dataset where some values have question marks (there is missing data). I give you two stories for how those question marks were generated in the data:
(a) “?” was generated by a coin flip.
(b) “?” was generated by a coin flip that depends on the observed values of the row (there is selection bias in missingness, essentially).
Claim: no test of observed data can distinguish (a) from (b) in general. This is not a novel observation in statistics, this is known as “missing data and causal inference models make untestable assumptions.” Known since the 1970s (Don Rubin’s work).
Here is one stats.stackexchange question that casually mentions that a common assumption in the Rubin causal model is untestable, for example:
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/182222/unconfoundedness-in-rubins-causal-model-laymans-explanation
Chris’ proposal seems to be unaware of the fact that selection bias cannot in general be tested via observed data.
The sorts of selection bias I am worried about has to do with the fact that given similar looking people, one white and one black, the black one (in America) will likely have a ton more arrests on paper for spurious reasons. Or longer sentences for no good reason.
The fact that selection bias is not a function of the observed data (e.g. literally the data matrix we have) does not mean we cannot obtain information on selection bias in the data. We can interview folks who obtain the data, ask how variables are defined and recorded for different ethnic groups, do investigative journalism in general. The information is there, but it’s “meta-information” about the data matrix. This is how we would obtain evidence of bias of the sort I am worried about.
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I don’t have a commitment on the normative point, but I think it is important to think about trade offs.
For those wondering about context:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/28/ot94-isotopen-thread/#comment-594899
Mind if I restate part of my post from that?
Is David Friedman roughly describing your point of contention?
I think , but cannot guarantee that I’ve 100% understood but I think David Friedman’s post covers the point of contention fairly well.
However stucchio also argues that there are a bunch of metrics you can use to try to assess claims of bias in the source data set to potentially make certain claims of bias like that falsifiable.
Which would seem like an obvious approach to assess for that particular flavor of biased source data.
But your position seemed to be pretty much the embodiment of this graphic,angel emoji included::
https://i2.wp.com/jacobitemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Capture5.png?w=753&ssl=1
where even if the data did hypothetically correctly reflect reality… you’d object to reality [???] as being unfair? since we should make choices based on a hypothetical fair world? Please say I’m misreading you.
I agree that we should look for evidence of bias of the sort I am worried about. I am happy to do that. With the caveat that (per my original post), stuff like selection bias in the data matrix is not a function of the data matrix. You have to look for “side information.”
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You/David stated what I am worried about correctly.
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“where even if the data did hypothetically correctly reflect reality… you’d object to reality [???] as being unfair? since we should make choices based on a hypothetical fair world? ”
Correct. My way of thinking about fairness is there are two worlds — our world, and the “fair world.”
Characterizing the “fair world” is not so easy. There are some features of this world most people will agree on, and some features people will disagree on based on politics and ethical intuitions disagreeing. We could argue about this.
Data comes from our (unfair) world. The stuff I try to do is identify features in our (unfair) world that are unfair, and associate these features with undesirable patterns in the data. Then I aim to find the world closest to our world where those features (via patterns in the data) are removed.
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This is a similar way of thinking that people in causal inference employ, where data where treatment assignment is “uncontrolled” that we actually have is adjusted to move it to a hypothetical world close to observed world where treatment assigned is “controlled.”
@Ilya Shpitser
As a bystander to your argument with Stuccio, it seems to me that your disagreement really boils down to your respective intuitions about what discrimination actually is and/or how significant you believe that certain distorting influences are.
So if I understand you correctly, you are arguing that racial discrimination causes black people to be arrested much more eagerly, sentenced much more eagerly, get much higher sentences, etc; so it is impossible to determine the actual criminality of black people, because there is no measurement without huge distortions. So you can only measure the effect of C (criminality) + D (discrimination) together: CD. Perhaps you are also claiming that D is much bigger than C, so you can only measure cD (mostly discrimination and only a bit of actual criminality).
I have to admit that I consider this a rather extreme claim, because there are measurements that seem relatively hard to distort, like looking at murders, that one can probably use to calibrate the other measurements reasonably well.
Anyway, it seems to me that you have four options:
1. Treat CD as D, which means tuning the algorithm to have equal outcomes. The obvious cost to this is that any actual difference in C between races is ignored, so you give relatively higher sentence to races that have a less criminal culture. This discourages self-improvement by members of a more criminogenic culture. Also, this solution gives the problem that it doesn’t tell you what equal outcome is fair in the first place. Perhaps white people are discriminated in favor of, so if you treat black people as white people, you are under-sentencing both groups. Also, it is quite possible there are other axes of legal discrimination than race. If you claim that it is unknowable whether racial differences in CD are C or D, but that we should treat them as D on faith, then where is the justification to use sentencing algorithms at all? Any person who gets a higher sentence due to the algorithm can claim that there is unknowable, but real discrimination against them based on a trait they have & claim to have their CD measurement be treated as D.
2. Try to estimate the level of discrimination, by comparing relatively hard to distort measurements to outcomes. Then one can apply a correction factor to the sentencing algorithm based on the trait of the individual. An obvious possible problem here is that the discrimination may actually vary a great deal. If the average discrimination is 10% higher sentencing, but Judge KKK gives a 20% higher sentence to black Bob, while Judge SJ gives a 10% lower sentence to black John, then a 10% discount for Bob and John is still individually unjust. If discrimination changes over time, you will also presumably lag with your corrections, so at best you will correct for the level of discrimination of some years ago. The correction mechanism may also become subject to group-advocacy/virtue signalling/politics/etc; where people favor a correction factor that cannot be defended with the best scientific evidence.
3. Treat CD as C. The downside is that you then give relatively high sentences to those who are being discriminated against and that you can keep a feedback loop going.
4. Eliminate measurements from the algorithm. The downside is that you give relatively high sentences to less criminal individuals.
You seem to be favoring a solution that strongly errs to favor the groups that you believe are strongly discriminated against*, at the expense of strongly erring in the disfavor of groups that you believe are discriminated in favor of or that are treated fairly. However, if the level of distortion by discrimination is far lower than you think and/or one of the main causes of discrimination is prejudice against actually criminogenic culture(s) and/or your solution causes more racial resentment, then it may not actually be the best choice.
Note that one can also believe that the sentencing algorithms are not the (best) place to solve the problem & that discrimination has to be addressed differently.
* Although…do you believe that the algorithms should be changing in favor of men as well, as legal discrimination against men appears to be far greater than against black people? My experience is that those who favor equality of algorithmic outcome don’t seek to to merely compensate for legal discrimination, but seek to compensate for societal discrimination in general. Using these means for that goal is very problematic.
“I have to admit that I consider this a rather extreme claim, because there are measurements that seem relatively hard to distort, like looking at murders, that one can probably use to calibrate the other measurements reasonably well.”
I agree that murder is murder. The sorts of stuff I am worried about is arrests and sentencing for drug offenses (there is a long documented history of racial bias there), minor arrests for “contempt of cop,” or things that are left to judge discretion in southern states, where “preconceptions” might play a large role.
But people who murder often don’t start there, they work up to murder. Features predicting murder might have all sorts of issue — heterogeneous definition or recording across ethnic groups, etc.
Another issue is predictive policing reinforcing existing biases, here is a good article on this:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x/full
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One important thing I should clarify — the sort of algorithmic stuff I am working on is NOT NOT NOT meant as a sort of “technie oracle” for what fairness is. The work on coming to a definition of what a fair world looks like is up to people, with their ethical and political disagreements. Different definitions will yield different adjustments in data analysis one will make.
What we did in our work was try to look at features of the fair world most reasonable people would agree is reasonable. I think when it comes to direct influence of race on outcome, I don’t think anyone on slatestar, even folks fairly on the right, really disagreed. But one could imagine giving a different definition where folks on the left will agree, and folks on the right disagree. Or vice versa.
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“really boils down to your respective intuitions about what discrimination actually is”
Probably. But I think I can easily give examples where most people agree with me, and disagree with Chris.
I would be interested in this. I already thought that object-level examples would illuminate the debate between you and Chris.
Have you looked at our paper?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.10378.pdf
We consider the following legal definition:
“The central question in any employment-discrimination
case is whether the employer would have taken the
same action had the employee been of a different race
(age, sex, religion, national origin etc.) and everything
else had been the same.”
Folks find this definition fairly intuitive.
The key point here is biological sex is assigned at conception, which means most personal characteristics relevant to the job are causally influenced by biological sex. The criterion “had everything else been the same” implies that the counterfactual criterion in the above quote is about changing biological sex, but only for the purpose of it’s direct impact on the hiring decision, NOT for the purposes of the other characteristics.
If you agree with that, it immediately falls out that the definition is a particular sort of counterfactual definition and does not reduce to regressions except in very special cases.
I only believe that it is intuitive if the race (or other trait) is (theoretically) flipped when the actual decision is made by the employer. So then the racism or other race-based influences on the person, that happened before this time and made him who he is, are fair game for the employer to consider.
Take these three theoretical people:
– black Bob, a 40 year old person with various life experiences that differed because of his race
– white Bob, who had exactly the same ‘black’ life experiences as black Bob, but suddenly changed race at age 40
– white non-Bob, a 40 year old person who was not born to black parents and doesn’t have black person life experiences, but otherwise is as similar to black Bob as possible
I believe that it is reasonable and intuitive to expect the employer to threat black Bob like white Bob, but not to threat black Bob like white non-Bob.
For example, let’s assume that black Bob had a racist experience that kept him from going to the university and that if he was white non-Bob, he had done so and had learned to be a programmer. By contrast, black Bob is not qualified for this job. If such racist effects exist, then the ability by employees to program is a racially sensitive covariate (as you put it in your paper).
Then to demand that the employer threats black Bob like white non-Bob forces the employer hire a person who cannot do the job or to make black Bob the person he would have been if he was born white. The former undermines meritocracy and the very ability for society to function. The latter seems an impossible ask, since you can’t just magically undo what was done. The employer cannot instantly turn black Bob into an educated programmer who can do the job.
So it seems absurd to me to make the employer responsible for bringing into reality an alternative timeline. The alternative timeline will always be unknowable, so the injury cannot even be determined. The employer also didn’t inflict the injury, so why would they be responsible for fixing it? Finally, the injury may be unfixable.
This seems plainly false to me, Ilya. “Had everything else been the same” does not merely imply, but plainly states that EVERYTHING else be the same. Which means the only variable that can change is sex, and all other variables (to include personality, intelligence, personal history, academic strengths and weaknesses, criminal record in the case of legal questions, etc) must be held constant.
Specifically, to what they would have been under the original sex.
The point is, that quantity is a counterfactual quantity, and is not in general equal to a regression (a regression is a conditional expectation defined on a distribution over _factual_ random variables).
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“So it seems absurd to me to make the employer responsible for bringing into reality an alternative timeline. The alternative timeline will always be unknowable, so the injury cannot even be determined. The employer also didn’t inflict the injury, so why would they be responsible for fixing it? Finally, the injury may be unfixable.”
The fact that you noticed that a lot of legal definitions are counterfactual and this creates complications does not actually change the fact that a lot of legal definitions are counterfactual.
Another common counterfactual one is “but for” causation in tort law.
It sort of sounds like your argument is with the legal community, or perhaps with American law. Not with me.
—
Actually I am trying to avoid an infinite time sink of arguing with people here. My take is, if you don’t agree with the proposal, that is ok. Write yours, and put it on arxiv, and we can talk about it.
The law community also uses the idea of proximate cause when deciding torts. This seems like roughly the legal concept corresponding to what Aapje is talking about.
American law is unsurprisingly unwilling to use just any counterfactual on its own without considering some scope to restrict where legal liability lies.
So I don’t think he has any bones to pick with American law. Nice try though.
Although really, I don’t see why the argument is necessary. Unless I’m mistaken, since you hold everything constant but the one variable, you have restricted the scope. The counterfactual doesn’t propagate changes through like Aapje is considering.
@Ilya Shpitser
IANAL, but I don’t believe that the generally accepted way to read (and administer) the law is how you do it.
I find your argument very weird, as you seem to accept that your reading is unworkable, yet you still hold it as the sensible reading to use. This seems incongruent to me.
Your work seems to only makes sense in a universe where there is no discrimination (or even just culture that is correlated with race) in the first place, but at that point your work is pointless. In any ‘real’ situations, your work becomes unusable.
Hence I see your work as science fiction.
@Ilya
… You appear to be applying a logicians approach to legal language which typically doesn’t yield correct results.
I had a CS professor years back who talked about the problems with this. A college had attempted to automatically parse legal data to treat like propositional logic. it worked up to a point….
Of course in the real legal system there’s lots of things where laywers know that XYZ is treated with a certain dose of common sense due to a pile of case law because if the courts keep producing absurd results sooner or later something is done about it.
If a company is hiring, say, a pilot, they’re allowed include criteria that are involved in actually being able to do the job. If a blind person turns up and makes the claim that had that person not been born blind they might have had flying lessons and been hired “but for” their disability…. that doesn’t mean the company is being unfair (pretty much all definitions) hiring someone who is both a qualified pilot and able to see the runway.
But I’m not so sure that would fall under the definition of fairness you seem to be using….
The “but for” language is from Carson v Bethlehem Steel, which is a generalization of language from an age-discrimination case Gehring v Case Corp. Both are clearly supporting the “only the protected characteristic changes” interpretation.
Did you catch the paper I linked during the last discussion? http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/1/eaao5580.full
It appears that COMPAS has similar results by race to a linear classifier on two features, age and number of past convictions. So at least any proxies through family details etc. have managed to mostly just add a bunch of cancelling noise even if unfair. In a way, that’s better than what I would have expected. A proxy for race appears to have little predictive relevance once you take into account age and number of past convictions.
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see how age could be unfair (Ok, I can imagine convoluted just-so strories, but they’re… pretty bad ideas).
That leaves your worries about number of past convictions. If that’s not detectable in some data set given a plausible generative model for the bias I would be shocked. The homicide rate differences alone show that some differences are not caused by differential enforcement.
EDIT: Or worst case scenario, given a model of how the bias is generated, it should be possible to specify a what data to collect or experiment to do to detect something distinct from the alternate case.
“A proxy for race appears to have little predictive relevance once you take into account age and number of past convictions.”
You are conflating predictive relevance and relevance for fairness considerations.
I am happy to talk about the paper you linked, but we first have to agree on what notion of fairness we are using, and why we are using it. (I disagree with their notation of fairness, for fairly obvious reasons we get into in our paper).
I am conflating nothing. You are reading into what I said a thing I did not say.
I’m mostly just surprised that possible race proxies add nothing to predictive (in the sense of correlation) power in this case, fair or unfair. I would have gained predictive power in terms of guessing things about someone in Alabama circa 1930 (or even better 1830) by knowing their race, but it obviously wouldn’t have been because of anything fair. Completely the opposite.
Second, I understand it has no guaranteed relevance to fairness by your definition.
You have even said yourself you do not expect past convictions to necessarily be fair to use due to differential contact with police etc. I figure the simplest explanation is that if the two feature model is likely unfair for using an unfair causal path involving past convictions a 127-feature model using that feature + other random stuff and delivering similar-ish results is probably going to end up being unfair for a similar causal path. Although I understand it may be unfair in additional ways while delivering essentially identical group results, or may even end up being not unfair at all depending on what causal model you specify.
It seems more productive to me to focus on how unfair a model with similar group level results is. Where that model is transparent (two features). It restricts the number of scenarios we have to consider for how an unfair inference has been made (compared to the 127 feature case). Like now we can focus on unfair causal paths that affect either age or # of past convictions and don’t need to worry about any paths that don’t connect to those. I’d have to double check your paper for the exact criteria on which paths can be excluded, but my goal is just to narrow it down.
A 127 variable model with an unknown algorithm being used is not even vaguely transparent which should have ruled it out from the start. I actually found the paper reading the CJLF blog (IIRC) and if those guys (very tough on crime types) think it’s a procedural travesty, I think I’d have trouble finding many lawyers of any stripe who wouldn’t find it disturbing.
But now we know we’d have most of the problems that ProPublica wrote about if we used a linear predictor and two variables. That’s a considerably simpler case to discuss.
EDIT: For clarity and a little bit less… lengthy
In case anyone is wondering and because it doesn’t appear to have been posted anywhere easily findable on the internet yet:
The irs is not accepting so-called silent returns that don’t answer the health insurance question this year. If you file one by paper you’ll receive a letter asking for additional information and saying that if you don’t respond they’ll calculate the shared responsibility payment for you.
They had earlier announced that they wouldn’t accept e-filed silent returns but hadn’t said what they’d do about paper filed ones.
Copying a comment of mine from the computational mood thread because this thread is mroe read and it may be interesting as I think I had an insight:
“So this is how good world and predictable world, desire and expectation are linked: via action? We expect our actions to make our world better and fulfill our desires or else we would have acted differently, and if it does not happen we feel let down and have low confidence in our predictions about what action to take to make things better for us?
Hm. It is pretty interesting that I went through all the comments and links in both of these posts, and never figured it is action that may be linking expectation and desire, predictable world and good world. And I am actually depressed. Wait, non-depressed people actually expect their actions matter? I just do whatever is expected of me and never expect my actions make me happier, I expect either a miracle will or nothing. I never really planned to win, I planned to fail but in a way that I cannot be blamed because I took all the socially expected actions to avoid it.
This sounds seriously interesting. How do non-depressed people expect their actions will make them happier? Let’s make an inventory. From 3 to 12 years old my happiest moments were getting exciting toys as presents. That depended on other people giving them to me, not on my actions. From about 12 to 36, it depended on trying to find a pretty girlfriend, which depended on them, not me, as I asked a lot out but most rejected. Finally married now it seems how my evening goes depends on whether my wife and daugther are fighting when I am arriving at home or they are being angels to each other. Nothing seems to depend on me.
How do non-depressed people do things that make themselves happier that does not depend on other people?”
Friston strangely reminds me of Mises. Mises takes it as axiom that people do stuff because they want to exchange the current state of things to a more preferred state of things, that this is behind all action. Of course the specific action one takes depends on which action one finds most likely to succeed. But isn’t it going too far to say people act in order to reduce uncertainty? People act in order to satisfy preferences and reducing uncertainty makes their actions more effective, so some of their actions will be dedicated to that: before you attack, you recon, you don’t just blindly rush into battle. But we still cannot reduce all a military does to recon…
I forget nearly everything I read.
About a year ago, I managed to slog through the SEP’s entry on Imagination. I now realize I don’t remember a single thing about it, not even the introduction.
This makes me wonder what the point of reading anything substantial is if I’ll just forget it all anyway.
Take notes. Seriously, take notes. And if you don’t have time to take notes (which raises the question why you would still read the things), at least pull excerpts from it so you know the parts to skim or not skim if you look at it again—copy-pasting is super easy, but writing them by hand helps a lot with memory, so either way is going to be beneficial.
Somewhat dissenting essay from Paul Graham, who thinks it’s enough sometimes that your mental models get updated, even if you can’t pinpoint the source.
Do podcasts or audiobooks have this same effect?
Megan McArdle, one of my favorite columnists, has moved from Bloomberg to the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/megan-mcardle
It seems a bit odd for a paper that far left to hire someone so right-libertarian.
The New York Times has Ross Douthat, right? I don’t think it’s too unusual for major papers to have a dissenting voice or two. But maybe they’re both exceptions in this regard.
Washington Post hosted Volokh Conspiracy for a while, with writings from a collection of conservatives and libertarians, so this move isn’t out of line with that precedent.
The Post has Dave Weigel, formerly of reason.com, and Robert Costa, formerly of National Review, as political reporters. They have Jennifer Rubin, formerly of Commentary, as an opinion writer with her own vertical. Kathleen Parker writes a regular column for the post and Charles Krauthammer had a regular column there too. If you visit the WaPo opinion site today you’ll find articles by Hugh Hewitt and Marc Theissen.
They run articles from liberals and leftists too, but the WaPo opinion page is not “far left”.
The bad news is that it puts her behind a paywall.
Kindle/Amazon gets you 6 months subscription for $1. Still haven’t figured out how to get to the comments section.
You’re dragging the Overton window around pretty hard if you’re describing the Washington Post as far left. The place was a major center for the Neocons for years. If Charles Krauthammer, Jenifer Rubin, and Kathleen Parker are the far left, then where is the center?
@hyperboloid
I think that the way you quote is a bit deceptive and you should not do that. He said “that far left,” not “far left.” Something can be “that far left” compared to Megan McArdle and yet still be centre-left compared to the overall political landscape.
That said, I agree with your criticism that it is silly to argue that the Overton window of the WaPo is that restrictive.
Does nobody in this comments section understand sarcasm/irony.
No
Came across this article: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/ten-reasons-we-cant-and-shouldnt-be-nordic/ from National Review (obviously conservative leaning) and while I could somewhat agree with a few of the authors points, I was motivated enough to do a step by step refutation/rebuttal of his points. Before I continue, I want to point out that I don’t support a viewpoint that the US should attempt to entirely emulate the “Nordic Model”, but I do feel that a lot can be learned from the policies in those countries, and used to influence the policies of our future. Here is my rebuttal, point by point:
1. Innovation is an interesting thing. I agree that a certain degree of competition is needed for capitalism to function, but “Cutthroat Capitalism” , as the author titles it, can create warped incentives also. In a race for “market victories”, the health of a society can suffer, and in many cases, the product or service created via “cutthroat capitalism”, is, as a whole, not all that innovative. Innovation occurs as a side effect of freedom of experimentation and exploration of ideas (at least partially), which in the US, is largely a factor of a combination of diverse population, Excellent upper tier universities, and exchange of ideas. On a per capita basis, several analyses list countries like Sweden , Germany (not Nordic) and even Finland , as being more innovative than the US. I feel that we fail to recognize the outsize impact that a few individuals can have on the level of US innovation. Those individuals (Elon Musk) (Gates) etc.. all had access to privileged educations, and notably did not come form backgrounds of poverty and destitution. ‘Cutthroat Capitalism’ can, as a side effect, create higher levels of destitution , which in turn, can decrease the ability of sectors of the population to be innovative. I should add , also, that the “super entrepreneur” type is often born , and not made, as individuals with a proclivity towards innovation seek avenues of doing so. There is little I see (other than issues of scale and exposure) , preventing Nordic Citizens from doing this.
2. I largely agree with this point, and this is a reason why I feel the US couldn’t copy Nordic ideas directly, but being multicultural, and populated by many descendants of Nordics and Western Europeans, there is not a lack of cultural elements in the US that would be antagonistic to these Nordic Influences
3. I find this to be an odd point. Economies are often comprised of a mix of old and new companies in varying ratios. As far as pure size, many of the US’ largest non tech companies are also rather old, and in regards to tech, while they may not comprise any Facebooks, Apples, Microsofts, etc… there is a small-scale Tech startup scene in Scandinavia, with Spotify and Skype as product examples. He also fails to account that Nordic economies and policies are not static in nature, and Sweden has lowered tax rates at times to foster growth, but they have not dismantled the core of the system…
4. I partially agree, as corruption anywhere is a bugger of a problem. That being said, it wasnt long ago that Americans had more faith in the Government, and one could argue in the growth days of the 50’s and 60’s the US had more parallels with Nordic Countries than it has now.
5. Choice can be over-rated. Also, freedom and choice are not the same thing. Choices are entirely invalid when one cannot access them due to financial or other constraints. One could argue that Nordic Social democracy increases choice and opportunity by removing certain financial constraints upon one’s life.
6. This is a classic “the kids are becoming soft” argument. I personally blame social media and tech access anywhere for this issue, largely. US kids are just the same as Nordic kids in their use of entertainment and a proclivity to laziness. Self-motivation is a huge factor here, and while I agree that giving people too much can breed a certain degree of complacency, the opposite extreme is also counter-effective for the health of a society. I do agree somewhat with the idea of requiring students to have a bit of skin in the game, regarding education, but its the degree of it that matters. Make it affordable.
7. So….societies aren’t perfect? Who knew? (and this statement is also directed at Leftist Utopia types as well)
8. One can also argue that in many places in the US, take home pay is high, but external expenses eat up a lot of it, esp.medical, housing, and education.
9. People explore chemically induced forms of “Happiness” everywhere, as we as SlateSC readers know. “Drive and Motivation” is a rather nebulous concept, and I see the same type of emptiness of people who face harsh day to day living challenges as I do people who have more provided for them. Consult an actual Psychiatrist, Mr. Author……
10. This is where a free market needs to be meshed with Government action. Namely, failures of unrestrained capitalist approaches to society often need to be counter-measured by Government. There is also the point that no system is perfect, and yet doing nothing can let issues fester until they blow up in an even bigger manner. Do I trust the Government? No, not completely, but I also recognize its role and as a citizen, I have a concern that my Government serve me in the best manner that it can. None of this necessitates absolute growth of government, rather I feel it points more towards reform and redirection, which is something I assume many NR readers can also agree with.
I would amend my #1 point by stating that competition can indeed benefit the consumer via cheaper goods and services, but the effects on the environment, worker rights, and even culture, can cancel out benefit of price, or quality. The American “move fast and break things” motivation in capitalism is not the only way to create innovation by any means, nor may it even be the best way
In re the “so much screen time” issue– I haven’t seen much talk about the amount of creativity online. There’s a lot of art, fiction, video, etc.
Precisely. Someone has to make all that content, and it’s far from usually being made by the old guard. What can be said, I suppose, is that the new paradigms of online content aren’t necessarily lucrative, but that more indicates that the screen consumer generation might have different priorities than innovating for money vs. innovating for something else. (After all, the most financially successful can just as much be those who innovate a new form of rent seeking or exploitation.)
The patreon model in which every video ends with an explanation that these things take time and effort so your support is much appreciated suggests that in a UBI world, more people could spend more time creating quality content. Most of the great artworks of old were also created under a patron art system, rather than a commission/product based one. Neither did Mendel have to spend most of his time begging for grants.
This is an excellent point, and one that I feel strongly about, as I have been greatly enraptured by the level of creative content being placed online, that has expanded my knowledge and perception immensely.
Well, I do still see internet/social media usage as simply a tool, and those who are genuinely curious about learning will use it to learn, and those that want to boost egos, etc….will do so. Its just much easier to have perceptions warped by online interactions nowadays, and that can play into a mindset of those that have grown up with smart phones, facebook, etc… I am 28, but didn’t get FB until 2012, and even then, most of my internet usage has been either reading or interacting in discourses over favored topics.
How does this address his point?
He was arguing that higher tax rates and , to an extent, cost of living diminishes levels of take home pay for Nordic citizens in general. My counter was that in the US, many people have to pay large sums of their take home pay towards services and goods that are either fully or partially subsidized in Nordic Nations. (Housing is a partial exception)
Scott, I just read and greatly enjoyed your book review of “Albion’s Seed”. Also enjoyed the comments from you and others here about how much the four English-speaking colonial tribes identified in that work have led to our current national tribalism.
Noticing that the post was written in April 2016 and that its comment thread concluded a month later I’m curious about a followup, for two reasons.
(a) Here we are almost two years later and it sure feels like the Red/Blue national tribalism was come to a new level of focus. How much Trump and the reaction to him has actually sharpened that conflict versus simply revealed it is something that maybe we can’t really see yet from inside the national madness. But surely the right answer is _entirely_ just one or the other…anyway, does “Albion’s Seed” today seem more or less or differently explanatory than it did in April 2016?
(b) There is one significant candidate fifth founding tribe in colonial America that you didn’t mention even in passing, the Dutch-led New Netherlands. (“Dutch-led” rather than simply “Dutch” because it was actually fairly polyglot within a certain range of ethnicities.) Perhaps you’ve seen the book “Island at the Center of the World”? The argument is that the New Netherlands while brief in its specific legal existence was long and deep in its effects upon the formation and development of what became the U.S. (One specific example being free-wheeling and inventive entreprenuerialism at scale, what we now tend to summarize as “Wall Street” or “the financial sector”.) This particular tribal identity also persisted in New York/New Jersey well beyond the end of the official Dutch colony, indeed through and even beyond the Revolutionary War. (Turns out that I have multiple ancestors who were still speaking Dutch at home when their sons went off to fight in the War of 1812.)
Are you familiar with American Nations? It covers some of what you mention– it’s a follow-up on the Albion’s Seed model of American history (except much shorter and, I assume, aimed more toward regular readers), which includes New Netherlands as well as New France and New Spain as colonizing cultures. It’s good but not great.
As far as founding tribes go, don’t overlook the indigenous people either. I think it was 1491 by C. Mann where I read the suggestion that a lot of distinctive features of American culture may have been cross-pollinated from the Iroquois and other tribes.
It’s been a while but Mann’s argument IIRC was that the South partially inherited the slaveholding system from Southern indigenous who were holdovers from the Mississippian cultures, vs. the North which inherited the democratic system from the Iroquoians. I don’t really buy it, considering that the South’s first “partners in crime” in the slave trade were the Iroquoian Westos.
There is discussion above about taboo-ing racism, possibly to replace it with several, more descriptive terms. I thought to brainstorm everything I commonly see falling under the umbrella of “racism” and how these might be described with greater granularity. My initial sense was that most usages of “racism” involve elements of at least two categories freely mixed-and-matched. Thus, 5 possible As and 9 possible Bs means 45, rather than 14 variants of “racism.”*
A.
1. Preferring people who look like you/avoiding people who don’t look like you.
2. Preferring people who talk like you/avoiding people who don’t talk like you.
3. Preferring people who celebrate the same holidays as you/avoiding…
4. Preferring people of similar economic or educational level.
5. Preferring people who share your values/world-view.
B:
1. Not wanting to be neighbors/socialize with people for any of above reasons.
2. Not wanting to hire or promote the above
3. Stating accurate, but negative facts about above as a group
4. Stating inaccurate, negative ideas about above as a group
5. Treating strangers/groups of above differently on the basis of an accurate perception of group differences
6. Treating strangers/groups above differently on the basis of a distorted perception of group differences
7. Treating familiar individuals of above differently due to an accurate or inaccurate knowledge of group differences that does not apply to said individual
8. Not extending full rights of citizenship to the above, including equal protection
9. Actively harassing, abusing, attacking the above
I think what the above suggest to me is: a lot of what is commonly called “racism” isn’t really strictly about race, though, again, I don’t deny the picture is complicated by frequent overlap of language/race/culture, etc.
Second, I think a lot of these things are not obviously problematic, especially from a libertarian standpoint of freedom of association. For example, I don’t see anything obviously wrong with wanting to have neighbors who speak the same language as you and celebrate the same holidays as you, nor even with wanting neighbors who look like you. I don’t personally care much about these points, but I don’t see anything evil about having and acting on such preferences.
Of the above possible combinations that seem like real problems to me and actually primarily about race, it’s basically just A1 in combination with B4, 6, 7, 8, and 9; and B4 and B6 are only immoral if one knowingly states or acts on false or distorted info (not sure the latter is even possible); otherwise, I’d say they’re unfortunate mistake that could be corrected, but not immoral, and probably not even relevant to this discussion since, as Scott described in “Against Murderism,” a consequentialist approach to defining racism produces absurd consequences.
So, possible variants of “racism” worthy of the name:
1.4. Spreading false or distorted information about a racial group. (“racial disinformation”?)
1.6. Treating unfamiliar members of a racial group badly on the basis of a distorted perception. (“racial misperception”?)
1.7. Treating familiar individual members of a racial group badly on the basis of accurate or distorted knowledge of the group that does not apply to the individual. (“racial stereotyping”?)
1.8. Actively harassing, abusing, attacking, etc. people because of their race. (“racial abuse”?)
1.9. Not extending equal protection under law to citizens of different races. (“racial inequality”?)
If someone has additions to the lists or better names for these or other combinations of the above that seem important, it might be helpful; I will admit I’m not actually sure any of these things are common problems in the US today, though I realize some would probably disagree about many or all, and that many would also object to my arguably extreme stance on freedom of association.
*I also don’t deny the possibility of “intersectionality”–that is, that someone could simultaneously be biased against someone because they look different, speak a different language, and are statistically more likely to commit crimes than your group, but I still think it’s worth categorizing because: if you are white, and treat poor, uneducated black people badly, but no worse than equally poor, uneducated white people, then that is better termed something like “classism” than racism. Or if you are a white asshole and treat black people badly, but no worse than you treat white people, then that is a case of “asshole-ism,” not “racism” (arguably even if you abuse the black person with a racial epithet: an asshole, wanting to yell at someone, might grab any epithet close to hand: if he gets angry at a fat person and calls him a “fatass” for example, that doesn’t necessarily reflect deepseated “size-ism,” it may just reflect him grabbing an obvious physical feature to insult).
Arguably you’re missing a variant on 8: Promoting laws that while facially neutral, either deliberately or accidentally disproportionally harm the above. “Disparate impact” gets brought up a lot, and it has some of the more recent examples: “Stop and Frisk”, having inland immigration controls up to X km away from the border, treating hair-braiding as cosmetology and requiring people to be licensed, voter ID requirements, raising/keeping/lowering the minimum wage, all have been categorized as “racist” in at least some circles. The religious counterpart to this, when the Supreme Court declared it to not count as infringement on religion, was broadly banned (to the extent possible) at the federal level and in many states.
I would add “institutional racism” to the list– people in positions of power being actively malevolent and having more effect than private individuals, and neglecting the interests of various groups. I think the Flint water crisis is a strong example of institutional racism– there were a lot of complaints about the water which were ignored.
There is zero evidence that this had anything to do with their race. I think this is a better example of the abuse of the term institutional racism.
Indeed, it was quite the multiracial screw-up. Flint is roughly 50% black, 40% white, and of the two emergency managers who were criminally charged, one is black and the other is white.
Nybbler, thanks for the details.
It could be more reasonably viewed as institutional prejudice against poor people rather than black people.
A lot of conflicts in America could be. This is something that’s frustrated me about contemporary social justice discourse practically since I became aware of it: most injustices are primarily attributable to, or at least significantly exacerbated by, poverty. That’s absolutely not to say it should always be the primary concern, but the discourse seems to me to focus disproportionately on issues of race, sex, etc.
I probably shouldn’t link to ragebait like this, but it’s a CW thread so whatever: Rod Dreher reports of anti–poor white Southern language at Stanford, which was supported by a staff member whom a student complained to. You’ll notice that these students are appealing to the same concepts an SJW would appeal to: racism, classism, slurs, etc. Any leftist could find common ground with this complaint if they tried—but somehow the staff member and student (if it was a student who did it) don’t.
I am a bit disturbed that Flint, of all things, has been *so effectively* painted as racist in its root cases to the extent that Nancy L – generally a logic-minded liberal – isn’t aware of the facts on the ground.
…this makes me doubt that other cases which are presented as (and which I have accepted as) clear cut examples of racism are actually so.
This.
I think it would be far more effective to focus on helping the poor (and the bottom end of the working class, depending on where you draw the lines) rather than trying to sort out who is and is not a victim of various sorts of prejudice. I would also expect it to be less controversial, because the poor are pretty obviously suffering, whereas some members of victim-credentialed groups are not.
“institutional racism” to the list– people in positions of power being actively malevolent and having more effect than private individuals, and neglecting the interests of various groups.
Wait, that’s a new one to me. I thought that institutional racism wasn’t either active nor malevolent, and that it wasn’t due to specific individuals so much as a society wide concept of How Things Are Done.
Did the definition change or am I thinking of something else?
Maybe by now the term is so overused that the meaning is forgotten, possibly deliberately.
keranih, your definition is the one I know.
So it looks like Telford England is going to be the next Rotherham. Their local Muslim pedophile gang is estimated to have raped over a thousand English girls. It’s tragic but not unexpected news: these gangs operate all across the country, with cooperation from the police and media in keeping victims quiet.
The evil of these rapists, the “community” which spawned them, and the establishment which run cover for them is unfathomably sickening. As is the cowardice of the English people who have utterly failed to fight back and instead meekly accepted dhimmitude.
I’m going to take a break from posting for a while. Please for the love of God arm yourself and keep a close eye on your kids.
I was trying to find out what the link was but the articles seem…. bizarre.
it’s as if they just took every crime committed in a 40 year period in telford and then highlighted every crime where the perpetrator was Muslim… including some idiot who got in an accident with a teenager trying to ride on the hood of his car….. and then linking that with estimates for total abuse cases of any kind over 40 years.
I mean there was a group caught abusing girls, but that case was numbers an order of magnitude or so lower.
it’s a city of 150K-ish so 1000 girls would mean something like 3% of the entire female population.
If it’s supposed to be from a few neighborhoods/schools/estates then that would imply something like 25-50% of the entire female population of some neighbourhoods were having sex with [how many?] 9-12 guys?
You should be able to check/falsify this by walking up to about 2 dozen random women between the ages of 50 and 15 in telford council estates and asking if they were personally abused by any kind of organized group of child sex traffickers.
The methodology from the daily mail and similar here seems …. odd.
In honor of tomorrow being March 14 (Pi Day), what are your favorite pie recipes?
Mine is this Key Lime Pie, though I usually use regular limes and a graham cracker base.
I don’t think I’ll make it this year because precisely cooling the filling takes a bit too much time.
Anyone have a good chocolate meringue recipe?
Stella Parks’s The Best Cherry Pie is well-named, both as itself, and as a demonstration of her tapioca starch method for fruit pies.
—
Here’s my own recipe for Kentucky Derby Pie.
Purchase or make two 6-oz shortbread pie crusts, and toast them in a 350 degree oven until they have a nice aroma.
Mix together :
1 cup light corn syrup, heated for a 1:30 in the microwave
6 ounces good eatin’ chocolate (60% cacao or more)
1/2 cup unsalted butter, browned.
Add :
1 cup demerara (or similarly full-flavored) sugar
A good shot of rye whiskey. You could probably use any dark liquor.
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
A dash or two of bitters
Whisk four whole eggs (about a cup’s worth) the mix them into the batter. Just make sure nothing’s hot enough to scramble your eggs.
Pour pecan pieces into each crust, and make it more than enough for the top layer of a regular pecan pie – you want to end up with a layer of nuts on top and some more nuts buried on the pie.
Divide the batter between the crusts, covering the nuts.
Bake at 350 for about forty minutes. The pies will puff up a little and have a decent set when they are done. Eat warm, or eat cool, with whipped cream.
That sounds really good, now I have to weigh up if I’m willing to spend the evening shelling my tub of pecans…
I’m really proud of a couple of zombie pies I did years ago:
-If you’re up to attempting pie crust from scratch, mix it with a tiny bit of blue or green food coloring to get that grayish skin color
-Layer of cherries on the bottom
-Custard filling, use food coloring to get a nasty green color of your choice
-Use a solid top pie crust rather than the strips kind. However, cut some holes/gashes into it, such that some custard seeps out
-I also used spare/extra crust to do “stiches” over “scars” in the crust, or even better, have hands/fingers coming out of one of the holes
-Since I was using canned cherries, I had some of the gel/syrup left, and when I spread some of that over the crust, it bakes into this dried blood color
—-
My other favorite is a savory pie recipe I got from rat-tumb! (Unfindable now, of course, because blue hellsite is unsearchable)
Caramelized onion layer on the bottom. Add layer of shredded cheddar.
Take puree’d squash/tuber of choice, (I once boiled sweet potato with milk) mix with powder spices and cheddar. Original was cinnamon and nutmeg and such, but I’ve experimented with variants using ginger+black pepper, allspice, and especially yellow curry powder, and they all work out pretty great.
Add the squash/tuber filling.
Top with shredded cheddar.
Bake until cheddar on top starts browning a bit.
Speaking of savoury pies: my recipe for tourtiere, which I got from my mother, which she got from a Quebecois classmate in university:
It’s particularly good with a bit of red pepper jelly.
Pie with a creamy milk rice filling
Huh. I’ve had rice pudding, but never thought of filling a pie with it.
Dorie Greenspan’s Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie. I guarantee it will blow your socks off. The texture is simply divine, and it has an incredibly concentrated (delicious) flavor…just a tiny bit of filling lights up your entire mouth.
The Momofuku banana cream pie is pretty great too.
If you like chocolate, try this Warm Chocolate & Banana Tart.
Thank you for the recipe. It sounds delicious.
This is a damn fine cherry pie recipe. I’ve made it a few times; it’s very good with a cup of coffee.
I wanted to try huckleberry pie. They say it’s particularly delicious, but I’ve never seen huckleberries in the grocery stores around here.
Anyway, happy Pi day. Well, not so happy with the departure of Hawking. Coincidentally, today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday.
I feel obligated to point out that π isn’t half the number τ is. I’d be more than happy to make a double pie recipe in a bit over three months, though!
What happened to intersectional white nationalism?
Did you mean nationalists who are white? I don’t see any white nationalists in your link.
Exactly.
This question has been on the back burner for awhile and recently I got into discussion about it and haven’t gotten a good answer, hopefully someone here can help?
to;dr: Is there any evidence that the multiverse theory is more like than deism?
First, my understanding of modern astrophysics is that pre big bang, we have no idea what was happening. The big bang happens in such a way that the cosmological constant is exactly what is needed to allow life to form billions of years later on Earth. The cosmological constant our universe has is really really really unlikely. How do you explain this? Well theists (such as the Catholic Church ) can say “God did it on purpose” problem solved. Atheists don’t have that out so they suppose we got lucky, really really really lucky. The only way this happened is that there are many many many universes and due to survisership bias, our has the right cosmological constant for life.
Is there any evidence for or theories that exist that allow the multiverse theory to have more explantory power or be more likely than deism? So far I haven’t heard any arguments with supporting evidence and I am hoping there is someone that make such an argument or tell me why they don’t exist.
Anthropic principle.
Even if there’s only one universe, pretty much by definition nobody would be there to ask the question if the universe was inimical to life.
It’s not even luck, it’s “you only get to wonder about existence if you actually exist”
it’s like saying,
“I’m the descendant of a chain of a billion organisms isn’t is so incredibly unlikely that every one of them made it to reproductive age!
If each one had just a 10% chance of dying before reproduction age that means that there’s only a (0.9^1000000000)= 2.74 × 10^-45757491 chance of it happening and me ever existing! If even one of them hadn’t survived then I wouldn’t exist!”
“Hence that must mean something special!”
You see the problem with that style of logic? If the 2.74 × 10^-45757491 chance hadn’t come up then that person wouldn’t be there to ask the question. And the effect isn’t a result of factoring in the 7 billion other humans.
Never mind that there may be countless other chemistries/physics perfectly compatible with different types of life under different constants. We don’t really know because we don’t live in a universe where that’s the case, for all we know there could even be a host of other viable ways to do life in our own universe.
In the non-hypothetical world, there are no dodo’s wondering about how remarkable it is that they happen to be on an island that’s never had organisms hostile to their existence imported.
Even in hypotheticals there is no cold dead universe without life or sentient entities where someone is wondering how remarkable it is that the cosmological constant happens to be hostile to life.
I think the view that the anthropic principle counts as an explanation of the constants or that it should make unlikely existence less surprising is deeply confused. To borrow an example from Richard Swinburne, if I am in front of a firing squad of a thousand people, and all of them fire and miss, it is true that I would not be around to wonder about why I am still alive unless they had all missed. But that doesn’t make my being around any less surprising. Nor does it prevent me from using the fact that I survived as a reason for against various hypotheses, including the design-type hypothesis that the firing squad missed intentionally.
Most of the quick responses to the fine tuning argument are quite bad.
It’s not sexy or interesting. It’s just an utterly solid argument. Richard Swinburne appears to be looking for sexy or fun or interesting arguments vs boring ones which merely can’t be refuted.
You can structure anything to sound unlikely but if the alternative is no thinking entities being around to wonder then you need to factor that in. Exactly 100% of thinking entities thinking about how remarkable it is they exist will be doing so in universes that contain thinking entities.
Perhaps the entire universe except earth is dead and life developing at all is even more vastly unlikely than the constant working. Of all the billions of lifeless rocks what remarkable “luck” that we just happen to be on one that has liquid water, the one that just happens to be in the Goldilocks zone, just happens to have a magnetosphere, just happens to have tectonic plates, just happens to lack too much impacting space junk to smother life in the cradle… etc etc etc.
Indeed it’s probably more unlikely for any random rock to meet all the criteria than for a thousand people to miss at once when shooting at someone.
But if those boxes weren’t ticked there would be nobody asking.
100% of thinking entities thinking about how remarkable it is they exist will be doing so in conditions that allow them to exist and think.
It’s boring. it’s unsatisfying. but the common sickness in philosophy is rejecting boring but solid vs sexy and interesting.
There are some things that the anthropic principle is the obviously correct, boring answer to, such as “why is the Earth the distance it is from the sun?”.
There are other things where it’s not obvious that the anthropic principle is the correct answer, such as “why does the cosmological constant have the value it has?”.
I imagine Richard Swinburne is the sort of person who entertains himself by shuffling a pack of cards and then looking at all the cards in turn, gobsmacked that they came out in the order they did, and feeling kind of nostalgic that once he shuffles them again, no pack of cards in the universe will ever be in that order ever again.
And that’s exactly why some resort to multiverses: it renders the second question analogous to the first.
If (somehow) we had developed a clear understanding of the solar system without ever twigging to the face that the stars were suns like ours, your two questions would be analogous.
Saying “this circumstance, out of all of them, happened to be the one where everything lined up properly” somehow seems more compelling than “this circumstance, apparently the only one that exists, also happened to have everything line up properly”. It’s a little like Occam’s razor — the former has one unexplained thing, and the latter has two.
All in how you look at it, of course: you also hear the multiverse criticized for “multiplying entities” with a vengeance, a claim it’s hard to argue with.
@Murphy I can’t follow what you’re saying here or how it is a response to the point I made.
Boltzmann brains are another problem with the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Paraphrased as: “fine tuned universes are so rare that if you are a conscious entity, you are far more likely to be a Boltzmann brain than actually living in a fine tuned universe.”
sure, but a Boltzmann brain has no particular experiential link to the universe in which it’s “running”, they’d exist in a solipist universe and have no stability from second to second. So to anyone still existing in a few seconds from now: either you’re probably not a Boltzmann brain or this is a hallucination along with all your memories and you’ll no longer exist in any form in a few seconds.
There are various attempts to explain the size of the cosmological constant. Cosmologists admit that it is one of the hardest unsolved problems in science. So I think it’s wrong to frame “multiple universe theory” as “the atheists'” answer to the problem. The truth is we don’t have an answer, but we’re working on it.
I think you have a second misunderstanding, which is that multiple universes are not proposed “as a theory” in order to explain stuff, but rather are a consequence of some of our other theories. For example, inflation describes a period of the universe’s evolution in which space was expanding exponentially. We have quite a bit of evidence for this, by the way. It’s not an ad hoc way to try and give us multiple universes. However, if you do have a period of inflation, there’s no reason to suppose each region of the universe will stop inflating at the same time. If one region stops inflating it rapidly becomes separated by any other such regions because the intervening regions are still inflating. Thus theories of inflation can give rise to multiple universes. Then all you need is for the cosmological “constant” to actually be a slowly-varying function of position in space and different pockets of the universe will have different values of the cosmological constant. Some of which will be low.
I apologise for going into a bit of detail (and I also apologise for not going into more detail – I will on request), but the point is that “multiverse theory” isn’t really a thing. Rather, something that looks like a multiverse can arise from certain well-established theories. (I believe there are also arguments that string theory leads to a multiverse, but I’m not an expert in string theory so I won’t comment on that.)
Deism, on the other hand, is not a plausible consequence of any physical theory. It also has its own fine-tuning problems. (What were the conditions that caused the constant-setting being to have the properties it has that makes it want to set the constants in any particular way?)
(Note, there is another kind of “multiple universe” that arises from a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is *not* related to the multiple universes I’ve been describing. Both are kind of misnomers, but for different reasons.)
I’ve read this, but from my layman’s position I couldn’t figure out what would give the different universes different values for things like the fine-structure constant or the relative masses of elementary particles. Is there a story for that, or is that still a work in progress?
I think you need to suppose that all those things (the fine structure constant, the mass of the electron, the cosmological constant, etc.) can in general be functions of space-time. The model I described results in the universe* being very much larger** than our region, so it’s possible for the “constants” to be almost exactly constant in our region but still take radically different values in other regions.
This might sound a bit unsatisfactory, this “suppose the ‘constants’ can vary”, but we don’t actually have any theoretical reason to assume them to be constant. The data shows that they’re either constant or very, very near to it, but if the universe is much bigger than what we can see, why are we surprised that the length scales over which they vary are very large?
The tl;dr is that it’s definitely a work in progress and probably will be for many decades yet. However, I also confess to this only being tangentially related to my field, so my understanding may be lacking in important ways. If anybody reading knows more, please weigh in.
*I’m using slightly different terminology to the OP. I prefer to reserve “universe” to refer to the whole thing and use “region” to refer to the part we have access to. This isn’t the same as the “observable universe” which is even smaller. Where I use “region” you might prefer to think “universe” and where I use “universe” you might prefer to use “multiverse”.
**I can’t express how great an understatement this is.
Thanks.
It seems like you’d have to replace an anthropic explanation for “the constants are just right in the single universe” with an anthropic explanation for “the constants vary only over scales in the super-universe that are so large that we can’t see them vary”.
But perhaps that falls out of the different regions maybe having lots of different sizes, and there are regions where the variation does happen at smaller scales. It seems like there might be an interesting connection to the fact that we inflated enough that we have nearly zero curvature and a strikingly uniform density — perhaps it is only in such regions that the constants are nearly constant. (Hand-wave, hand-wave.) But of course regions where the constants varied over small scales would not promote life, any more than a region with truly constant constants that were the wrong values.
I never cared much for Smolin’s “cosmological natural selection” because I never saw why the universe generated inside a black hole should have different parameters from its parent universe. But I gather that the discovery that black holes don’t lose information put the kibosh on that.
@Doctor Mist
Yeah, I think you’re right. Although, as @MB points out below, it’s hard to justify an anthropic principle for such a thing. To paraphrase MB, there’s no obvious reason why intelligent life couldn’t arise in a universe where the region-of-near-constant-constants was much smaller than the size of the observable universe, as long as it’s bigger than a galaxy or so.
We would probably need a physical explanation why the “constants” needed to vary slowly rather than rely on the anthropic principle.
For what it’s worth, I don’t really believe this line of reasoning anyway. I’m still hopeful that we’ll find an explanation for at least some of the physical constants that doesn’t resort to anthropics (and doesn’t require multiple universes, although those may still exist).
I agree with you re: cosmological natural selection. I think it’s a really cool idea and I find it fascinating that such a thing almost works, but there’s just too many stretches involved.
The good thing is that this inflation-based multiverse theory should be testable to some extent, because then remote but still observable regions of the universe should have measurably different values of the fundamental constants.
If this is not so, then it requires a separate explanation, i.e. why does our observable universe exhibit measurably constant values of the fundamental constants, while at the same time these values are non-constant at larger scales. What is so special about the scale of the observable universe?
I don’t see how this follows from e.g. the anthropic principle either: why couldn’t conscious life arise in a universe in which each galaxy had its own values of the fundamental constants?
The string theory version of the multiverse theory or the one based on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics seems more compatible with the anthropic principle, though also at the same time less easily falsifiable (or provable).
Regarding your first point, I don’t think I share your optimism. There doesn’t need to be anything special about the scale of the observable universe. Suppose there’s a particular constant that we can measure to one part in a million, even if it’s in the most distant galaxy observable. Suppose also that the variation in this “constant” over the size of the observable universe is one part in a billion. Perhaps we need to go a thousand times the radius of our observable universe away before it gets to one in a million, and perhaps we need to go a billion times the radius of our universe for it to be different by a factor of order one.
Now, we don’t know that the universe is finite in extent! If it’s infinite, then you can easily go a billion times the radius of our observable universe away. So the “constants” can still explore a huge range of values.
In short, the variation length-scales can be anything longer than the observable universe, they don’t need to be close to it, which I think is what you assumed. As such, the size of the observable universe isn’t a special number at all.
Your second point seems sound to me, as I said above. I think proponents of this view would need to come up with a reason why the variation had to always be slow. They might be able to do this, especially if they invoked inflation, which tends to stretch out inhomogeneities, but I don’t know the details.
As for your third point, I think the string multiverse might be compatible with the anthropic principle (although as I said I don’t understand it) but the Everettean (many-worlds interpretation of QM) one isn’t. The constants of nature are the same in all Everettean universes.
Thank you for the detailed response.
Regarding the first point, the scale of the observable universe is significant because between the smallest and the largest observable scales there are many intermediate scales. Thus, if the fundamental constants are the same at all these scales, this is a significant fact, which deserves an explanation. Probably more observation is needed, though.
The existence of many other scales on top of that, while theoretically possible, seems a sort of a cop-out. Hopefully the inhomogenous nature of the universe should have some (possibly indirectly) testable consequences. If the constants are measurably constant in the observable universe, with no detectable variation, then the object of scientific investigation should be finding out why, not speculating how things look different when we cannot see them.
Possibly, the vast majority of the matter in the universe is situated within some large homogenous bubbles and only a little is within the small bubbles, in areas still undergoing rapid inflation, or at the “boundary” between bubbles. However, again, this does not seem to follow from the anthropic principle. I don’t see why conscious life couldn’t possibly have arisen in a universe in which there are many galaxy-sized (or even smaller) bubbles. I don’t see why a galaxy-sized bubble is necessarily inhospitable to life and why there couldn’t be many more of them than there are large ones.
All these arguments suffer from the same flaw: using probability to argue about the probability of conscious life without knowing what the priors are.
As for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it does not explain the fundamental constants, but what I meant was that it is perfectly compatible with the anthropic principle.
@MB
Yes, you’re right that if you were going to go for this line of argument, you’d need to explain why the variation was sufficiently slow. The point I was making is that it’s not a fine-tuning problem. It doesn’t need to be exactly such-and-such; it just needs to be sufficiently large.
So I completely agree with you, that if we continue to measure ‘constants’ as being constant in the observable universe, we should try to figure out why. My point is that such measurements do not do not disprove the hypothesis that the ‘constants’ vary – they just put a lower bound on what the length-scale of variation is.
Sometimes this is all we can do in physics. Sometimes we only have a single bound that we push further and further until people gradually start giving up on the idea that the true value is anything other than zero or infinite (depending on which way we’re pushing a bound). We really should be motivated by our theories, i.e. do we have a plausible theory that predicts that the length-scale should fall somewhere within the bounds we already have? Does that theory predict that length-scale to be somewhat close to our bounds and is it likely that future experiments will improve our bounds? If the answer to the first question is no, most physicists will lose interest. If the answer to the first question is yes but the answer to the second question is no, then the theory is interesting but not testable. We’d get really excited if both answers were yes.
I think you’re right that the anthropic principle can’t do this alone. It needs some physics first. If there’s a physical reason why the variation is always slow and the regions of constant ‘constants’ are always large, then the anthropic principle can explain why we are in a region with the right constants. If, however, the variation can happen on any scale, then the anthropic principle can’t explain why we live in a region where the constants are constant over many galaxies, as you say.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by your final paragraph. I don’t see any way that the anthropic principle is helpful with regards to Everettean QM.
I assume he means that life would observe itself in some Everettean universe no matter how incredibly unlikely life is, as long as it is technically not impossible.
Don’t tell Scott, but I am not a big worrier re the whole AI singularity thing. At least, I* wasn’t until I ran into SCP-\̅\̅\̅\̅-J (wherein all the existing SCPs were loaded into Botnik, a predictive keyboard app).
Having seen that “All personnel assigned to SCP-2003 have been found completely emptied of contents” and read the note regarding “Facility Director Shirley Gillespie and the smell her body is wrapped in,” I no longer can afford to deny the reality that we are all doomed and also that “Agent Maxwell lost some vital minutes before abandoning flesh itself.”
Furthermore, “crispy sex pirates.”
I think the whole contretemps with that guy Robinson exemplifies why I was so surprised and concerned by Scott’s post on “conflict” versus “mistake” approaches to argumentation over policy. Scott characterized the conflict group as follows (deleting a paragraph break):
“What would the conflict theorist argument against the Jacobite piece look like? Take a second to actually think about this. Is it similar to what I’m writing right now – an explanation of conflict vs. mistake theory, and a defense of how conflict theory actually describes the world better than mistake theory does? No. It’s the Baffler’s article saying that public choice theory is racist, and if you believe it you’re a white supremacist. If this wasn’t your guess, you still don’t understand that conflict theorists aren’t mistake theorists who just have a different theory about what the mistake is. They’re not going to respond to your criticism by politely explaining why you’re incorrect.”
This sounded pretty horrifying. And then at the conclusion of the piece, Scott said in effect (obviously not an actual quotation here), “hey, this blog used to be mistake theory focused but no longer! What I really need to be doing here is engaging from the conflict perspective!” (The same conflict perspective that makes accusations of racism in lieu of merits arguments presumably.)
I know this isn’t exactly what was going on in the partly deleted exchange with Robinson, but some of Scott’s reactions are precisely the same as mine when he announced that it was time to start taking more seriously the approach to argument characterized in Scott’s (actual) quote above.
All that said, I’m 100% on Scott’s side in this and I hope it doesn’t coming across like I’m taking this obviously, understandably painful episode as an occasion to take a jab at Scott. It’s more an admittedly self-centered effortnon my part to reiterate my surprise with the conclusion of that “conflict” piece.
Buddhist tradition has it that when Ashoka converted, he wanted to retrieve the relics of Gautama Buddha that king Ajatashatru of Magadha had collected in a dungeon protected by mechanical guards or traps. The most elaborate version of this tradition can be found in the Pali cosmology text Lokapannatti, which reveals that the machines were robots built with stolen Roman technology.
It seems that, in the 6th century BC, Roma-visaya (kingdom of Rome) was famous for its bhuta vahana yanta (spirit motion machines). The king maintained a monopoly by requiring all engineers to stay within the city limits. An ambitious old man in Pataliputra, India wished for the boon of being reincarnated as a Roman engineer, and so in his next life he became one’s apprentice and son-in-law. When he became a father, he hatched a plan to spread the technology by telling his son to have him cremated in India when he died. Then he sewed a robot engineering text into a cut in his thigh and ran east from Rome, soon getting killed by his own machines.
Needless to say, I’ll have to incorporate the Roman discovery and loss of robotics into the mythic crossover timeline discussed last OT. 🙂
So the king in question, assuming this tale is true, would be Tarquinus Superbus. It’s not as completely insane as it sounds, Ashoka would have extensive contact with the Hindu-Greek kingdoms and points west.
Ajatashatru would have been rather young, as his reign begins 3 years after Tarquinus dies in Southern Italy. But the timeline could work. And the story of the heroic republicans destroying the machine tyranny makes for a good story.
It also makes a nice difference to the usual “exotic Eastern technologically advanced lost mystic knowledge of the ancients” having it be the Romans and not the Egyptians/Indians/Lemurians with the flying saucers 🙂
Yes, interesting how cliches can flip when you use the earliest source. 🙂
Another example of this is how the Prose Edda treats the Germanic people as primitives who can be tricked by advanced Asians (as Snorri describes the Aesir).
Re: Outlandish predictions of the effects of climate change
I was interested in this editorial on the WSJ, which discusses a recent model that gained some traction by predicting that climate change would reduce world GDP by 20%. Of note is that the model also includes predictions like:
I have a tough time imagining there is a single person, on Earth, who legitimately believes that climate change will, within the next 80 years, create world where the average Mongolian is 4x richer than the average American. Not one. And yet, that won’t stop people from casually referring to this 20% figure as if it’s totally uncontroversial science that only an idiot would disagree with.
Hm. Seems like the let’s-not-act-on-climate side often target straw men. I can’t get at this particular article, because paywall. Give us a link to the specific model(s) the article is mocking?
I mean, it would be really big news if this was a model-maker like Richard Muller, who had a model that was so obviously stupid.
(Muller is the author of this NY Times op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html, and not everyone agrees with him, but his change-of-heart on acknowledging that climate was real and scary was a pretty big deal in moving a lot of moderates to accept that the data was, in fact, persuasive.)
Forgive a little skepticism though. The Wall Street Journal’s reporting is really pretty decent, as reporting goes, but IMHO the op-ed page consistently parrots the same viewpoint as Fox and the rest of the Murdoch empire.
That struck me as amusing. My conclusion about the WSJ, long ago and having nothing to do with climate issues, was the precise opposite. The Op-ed page has generally sensible views on economics, the news stories don’t.
That was mostly in to a story on the failure of the free market to work for adoption, the evidence being that there was a shortage (I think at the time–it could have been a surplus) of infants for adoption. It apparently did not occur to the authors that a market where the price was legally fixed at zero was not precisely a free market.
I stand by my point that the WSJ’s reporting is good, “as reporting goes.” Your adoption example seems particularly egregious, and I’m not sure I’ve seen “free market” completely mistaken that badly in some time, but I generally agree that reporting should be relied on for object-level facts (the pavement was wet today between 4pm and 7pm, and it rained today between 4pm and 7pm) not for theory-level stuff (the pavement’s wetness today between 4 and 7pm caused a rainstorm to occur at the same time).
What I had meant to imply with “as reporting goes” was that the WSJ’s reporting is pretty wide-ranging and interesting, although you pretty much have to ignore the theory-level stuff. If you read only one paper to know what’s going on in the world, I think the WSJ is one of the best for pavement-was-wet-today facts that are interesting.
I think the op-ed page has an internally consistent view (I’m not saying their view of economics is wrong, far from it, just that practical economics is an *applied* science and facts-on-the-ground matter) that is deployed in sometimes seeming disregard to facts on the ground, and often in strange opposition to those facts, unless/until you notice that the WSJ works for somebody specific, who probably has a viewpoint that resists some facts.
It apparently did not occur to the authors that a market where the price was legally fixed at zero was not precisely a free market.
Not unless they adopt the modest proposal and go in for a new kind of baby farming, where people would get pregnant to supply the adoption market?
There is, shall we say, a slight difference between farming babies for food and farming babies for adoption.
> I have a tough time imagining
Proof by failure of imagination.
Reading their FAW they have anticipated and address many of the objections people are raising.
Metaculus has private questions now. Only you see them and the site tracks them.
They just added them so I don’t know how good the system is, but sounds p great.
The last open thread had a small subthread about baroque music. I just wanted to recommend All of Bach (http://allofbach.com/en/) for anyone interested in Bach performances. It’s an excellent site. Well produced-videos with good performances of a wide range of Bach’s music. Most pieces have a short interview with the performers as well.
I can’t check it out now, but this seems relevant to my interests! Thanks for the link 🙂
Thank you for the recommendation!
When, where, and why do you predict your public meltdown will occur?
You are assuming this had not already happened 🙂
Yup, I had severe depression in college and snapped one day when a professor cancelled class and did not email us ahead of time. I had to commute an hour and a half and had no other classes for another 3 hours, so basically came in for a 9 AM class for no reason.
Smashed my fist into a wall.
Not my brightest moment…
I don’t think I’ll ever have one as an adult but if I do, I hope it will be at one of those high end “SoDoSoPa” type shopping plazas with an Apple Store and a Nordstrom’s where you have to walk outside to go from one shop to the next.
Regarding “avoiding random email”: depends on how connected with this site you need. If you want it on SSC, but without the alert, that may take some tweaking of settings (or code) for the WordPress plugin doing your alerting. I can take a look, if you’re comfortable sharing credentials; you can reach me at my Greenfield address for more on that.
If you don’t care about the URL, use https://gist.github.com/ or similar.
(warning: CW in article and especially in contents)
Understanding the California Mind, by Victor Davis Hanson
“Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.
The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs.
[…]
In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.
[…]
Cynicism is rampant. Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.”
How fair is this article as a description of life and ills in the non-Bay Area California (which I think it focuses on)? This is an obviously CW question, but I’m asking in good faith as a non-American who’s only been to the Bay Area one.
It’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about California that Southern California which is almost exclusively greater LA and greater San Diego, is 60% of the state. The greater Bay Area is another 22%. Greater Sacramento is another 6%. That leaves only 12% for the entire rest of the state, and there are other, albeit smaller, cities. California, despite its physical size, is even less rural than the United States as a whole (~19% rural population).
12% of California’s population is still more than about half the states in the country, but that’s just an indication of how rotten our boroughs have gotten.
When you ask about life and ills in the non-Bay Area California, you are mostly asking about life in SoCal, not the exurbs of Selma, California.
I’ll also add to this that, while I haven’t lived in both, my perception is that living in the Bay Area and living in LA aren’t really all that different at all… at least when it comes to interaction with local government.
Like, I doubt anyone would look at the complaints in this article and say “Well that might apply to SF but not LA!” (or vice-versa)
CA is a state of great weather and harsh terrain. Makes sense that every urban area is allayed around either a River Port or a Bay. As a lifelong westerner, it wasnt until I lived in North Carolina that I realized that the terrain east of the Mississippi is much more conducive to having cities that are spread out in a more evenly dispersed manner than out west.
California is bizarre. When I was living there, I put an insert from one of my first power bills on my office wall. It was talking about the California Climate Change Credit. Twice a year, in April and October, every utility gives everyone $30 off their bill, and asks politely that it be used to fight climate change. This makes no sense. If you want to lower rates, lower rates. If you want to fight climate change, take the money and fight climate change directly.
That said, I didn’t mind it too much. It was expensive, but I was blessed with a job which meant that it wasn’t a huge deal. And I didn’t really see that many homeless or others causing serious social problems. That said, my encounter with the state over getting my car smogged was not pleasant, and I didn’t own property or do other things to attract government attention.
I am glad I’m out of there, although it wasn’t all bad. Oklahoma’s regulation of ADD meds has caused me more grief than any policy of California’s ever did.
I lived in California for seven years, and don’t remember any troublesome interaction with government. I had to visit the DMV twice to convert and renew my licence, but that went smoothly enough. I also got stopped by a cop once for turning at a place I shouldn’t have, but he let me off after checking my license and registration.
Maybe Canadians are raised to behave in ways that signals NOT A TROUBLEMAKER to American authority figures.
Like bean, my experience with state and local governments has been not great but not atrocious, and about the same to that in other states. (Also like bean, I was mostly in Los Angeles and I never owned land in California.) I moved to Texas last June and have found the offices themselves a bit more pleasant (less waiting time, nicer staff) the paperwork is more confusing. So far I’ve mostly only dealt with car-related offices, in a “nice” part of town, and so I definitely wouldn’t generalize my TX experiences.
I’ve only read the opening of the article (will finish reading and might have more to comment later), but the problems the author is describing sound like problems of rural poverty in general.
The article sounds like it takes place in one of the larger Central Valley communities to me — Stockton, Modesto, Fresno, Bakersfield, something like that. (“Almond orchard” is a bit of a tell.) Those are some of the worst cities in the United States (Stockton and Modesto, especially, show up somewhere near the top of the list every time the question is asked), and the fact that they continue that way is an indictment of leadership at every level, but as Brad says they’re not really indicative of a “California mindset”, if such a thing exists.
Don’t get me wrong, California has big, big problems. But this strikes me as more narrative-driven than substantial.
Not related to Hanson’s small-town California issues, but I’ve heard that San Francisco has a discarded drug syringe problem that makes Portland’s look trivial and that homeless people also defecate on public infrastructure like escalators. Is that true?
I can confirm the defecation issue but not the drug syringe one. Never gone looking for syringes in SF, though, and I’ve never lived in the city proper.
Yep.
In defense of homeless people, they don’t WANT to defecate on the public infrastructure, it’s just that for some reason San Francisco does not have public toilets.
Public toilets or no, I can think of a lot of less disruptive places to defecate than a BART escalator. It’s not like SF is running low on dark alleys.
(BART really should reopen the toilets, though.)
Lots of towns don’t have public toilets. Most towns in the USA, actually.
Yeah, I don’t buy this. No cities in the US have cheap, accessible public toilets. And yet, most of them don’t have homeless people shitting in the streets.
Yes, but a few towns are difficult, (in the bay area) for say social workers, driving through, and the usual public functions, provided by say McDonalds or Starbucks, are not available. Highly correlated with high crime areas or high homeless areas.
I blame excessive regulation. This seems like the sort of problem the free market could pretty quickly render a non-problem were doing so legally allowed, but alas, doing so is even *less* legally allowed in SF than elsewhere.
Not having bathrooms in an area isn’t merely inconvenient to homeless people, it is also inconvenient to customers. And all the businesses in the area do have bathrooms, they are merely reserved for employee rather than customer use. So…why is that?
Imagine you’re a business owner in an old building containing an old restroom which was NOT built “handicapped-accessible” because…the building is old. The room or the hallway to get to the restroom is too narrow to fit a wheelchair. Under the regulatory climate in San Francisco, if you merely allow customers to use that bathroom a disabilities activist is likely to come along and sue you under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act or the even stronger California and local enhancements of that set of regulations. In SF it will be ruinously expensive to fight the lawsuit and the activists will WIN, possibly bankrupting you. That’s what happens if you make the toilet available to the public. But in most cases no law mandates you doing so, so clearly the lowest-risk option is to NOT HAVE A TOILET CUSTOMERS CAN USE.
But wait, suppose you are unusually public-spirited and out of the goodness of your heart you want to spend the money to construct a fully-accessible bathroom? In SF it’s not just the ADA, you ALSO have to satisfy the requirements of a dozen other bureaucracies. The new bathroom has to be more earthquake safe than the building was before. You have to satisfy historical preservationists that you haven’t in any way altered the external appearance of the building while adding that motorized wheelchair ramp to the entrance. You have to satisfy noise ordinances by not making any loud noises at odd times while reconstructing a building. You have to file an environmental impact report. You have to pay off building inspectors and contribute to councilmember campaigns and hire union workers and pay a “living wage” and somehow stay in business despite having to close the doors for a while as work is being done and then wait for a new Certificate of Occupancy.
And even all this might be survivable but for the first-mover problem, that if you’re the FIRST person to add a public restroom your bathroom gets ALL the traffic, which is really unpleasant for customers and expensive to maintain.
There is an obvious market mechanism that would STILL make it possible. And that market mechanism is…CHARGE MONEY FOR USE. In a free market, the first few businesses would install PAY TOILETS and charge a dollar (or a quarter, or whatever) for access, thereby reducing demand and generating some revenue with which to pay for the cost of supplies and maintenance as well as reimbursing the cost of building that expensive infrastructure. The very first PAY toilets might be quite expensive but lucrative. As more firms join in, competition drops the price to more reasonable levels. Some might charge a lot and specialize in being extra-nice, others might charge a little and specialize in being cheap.
Given that world, one could solve the poop problem in the short term by having the local business council or the city or some charity pass out special tokens to let the local homeless use pay toilets for free. Longer term, after a few toilets already exist and are profitable it’ll be much easier and lower-risk for other businesses to add them; eventually prices will come down to nearly-free and the burden of serving homeless will be split up among a hundred firms rather than a couple of first-movers.
However…Pay toilets are illegal today. So that option – common in the 1970s – is off the table.
Thus, all we can do is wait and hope the SF government itself adds enough toilets that *it* owns and maintains. Meanwhile, try not to step on the poop.
While this was a lovely trip down A Priori Lane, a little research would reveal:
1) Like pretty much every where in the U.S., businesses that make most of their money off food are required (by regulations!) to have customer-accessible bathrooms.
2) The city does (try to) maintain a couple dozen public toilets. And although I don’t know if they still do, for a long while after they were installed in the late 90s they were pay toilets.
The general feeling about #1 is that it doesn’t help as much as it could because such businesses often claim their bathrooms are out of order (Regulations: not all powerful!). #2 isn’t all that great because the bathrooms are often out of order, and even when they are working are often used for “other purposes”.
The thing about pay toilets is that they make the most economic sense as profit centers in limited option contexts: rest stops, bus stops, possibly convenience stores and places with a gift shop that don’t care about looking classy. Anywhere else, charging for use of a bathroom makes you look petty to your customers. A good point of comparison is charging for WIFI, which has mostly disappeared in the U.S. except in analogous limited-option contexts.
The main difficulties of operating a customer-accessible or public toilet are that some fraction of people will be angling to use it without paying (or buying) and some fraction of people will do things in or to the bathroom that aren’t remotely worth the trouble compared with what they have paid or bought. And these fractions aren’t necessarily the same.
When a bad thing happens in your pay toilet you can’t charge for it until you fix the problem. Just raising the price until you can pay someone mind the bathroom constantly will likely piss off customers who aren’t likely to do something bad.
Still, many businesses have figured out how to deal with these problems. I’ve only rarely come across a Starbucks with an out-of-order bathroom, and when I’m in S.F. and need one that’s usually where i head to. The out-of-order thing is mostly restricted to fast-food places anyway. The regulations around bathrooms aren’t that different from the more general set of regulations that businesses are subject to, and businesses manage to operate even in San Francisco.
The bathrooms-for-the-homeless problem is more prosaic. For one thing, there’s no direct market solution if the “customers” would prefer pissing and shitting on the street to paying the lowest viable price. This is obvious, which is why discussions of this subject are always accompanied by vague intimations of law enforcement. One problem with that (among … others) is that its hard to imagine an actual law enforcement solution (that isn’t a discreet trip to potters’s field by way of a gas chamber*) that wouldn’t cost much, much more.
* Of course, many smaller U.S. municipalities have famously used the related bus-ticket strategy. But that just moves the problem around, as it were.
I’ve often wondered why homeless people seem to be an exclusively urban phenomenon. I’ve lived and worked in both built-up urban environments and suburbs, and I don’t think I ever saw a homeless person in the suburbs. Meanwhile even Toronto the Good has homeless people sleeping in the streets. Literally. They have tarps and blankets and whatnot and set up on exhaust vents from the subway, which emit hot air. Disgusting.
Do suburban cops make a habit of kicking out homeless people, while city cops just don’t?
I wonder if you could run a business that just offers bathroom facilities. For $5 you get 15 minutes use of a toilet and sink. For $10 you get 30 minutes use of a shower stall, toilet and sink. There’s an attendant that handles payment and keeps the facilities clean, or maybe two for a large store.
Awesome comment!
Car homeless sometimes use gym memberships for exactly that purpose.
Thing is
1) The homeless don’t have money for bathrooms. If there were pay toilets they got some money, they won’t be spending it on pay toilets if they can use the sidewalk.
2) They don’t pay money to businesses and no business wants them using their bathrooms.
3) If you have pay toilets, but somehow let the homeless use pay toilets for free, no one else is going to want to use them.
4) Americans hate pay toilets, so even if you solved the rest of the problems you’d never make a profit on them.
@skef:
I’m actually old enough to remember SF in the ’90s and I distinctly recall disabilities activists at that time successfully made the best the enemy of the good on this issue. Some French firm that had been making attractive self-contained self-cleaning toilets in Paris (of the style pictured here) wanted to sell them to SF. SF being what it is, the fact that the type pictured isn’t wheelchair-accessible means we COULDN’T just install those. Making the same design big enough to handle wheelchairs massively increases the cost (4x? Something like that…) to build and ship and install and dramatically reduces the number of suitable installation sites. So the design/approval process dragged out for years and the same budget that might have installed 10 small bathrooms quickly instead installed 2 big hulking ones slowly. Continuing that rate of progress to the present day we COULD have had “enough” toilets by now (even including a few “accessible” ones!) but instead we have a mismatch between supply and demand.
Are you sure that’s the rule? I’m pretty sure it’s specifically restaurants that applies to. A stall that just sells cookies, for instance, rarely has one. Or a food truck, or a small takeout coffee shop…Anyway, the big issue is areas where the retail isn’t restaurants.
No, the thing about (private) pay toilets is that they are illegal. If nobody wants them anyway, why leave the law in place banning them – there’s no need for it! Apparently the answer to that is because feminism. Laws were passed banning pay toilets on the grounds that (1) a lock on bathroom stalls discriminates against women, because urinals often weren’t similarly restricted, (2) it discriminates against poor people who can’t afford to pay. These forms of discrimination are unfair, so all we have to do is pass a law banning pay toilets and the discrimination will disappear!
…along with many of the toilets. 🙁
Oh, I see. The problem here is that a state government agency couldn’t set aside a federal regulation and just do what it wanted to in this case, and this says something important about the burdens on private businesses. Of course, it got an exception from the state rule about pay toilets and you don’t seem very happy about that.
I’ve been in a number of non-accessible restaurant bathrooms. There is substantial grandfathering built into the ADA rules on private businesses, with additional requirements coming into effect on new construction and upon remodeling. This is true of bathrooms and more generally (e.g., stairs versus a ramp at an entrance).
I’m curious: Since the subject here is bathroom access for the homeless (of whom there are not that many, statistically speaking), are you under the impression that the market addresses the problem of bathroom access for the physically disabled? Have you read about how hard Paris and other European cities were/are for the physically disabled prior to regulation?
Looking into this further, it appears that the rule is some combination of food/beverage sales and seating. So yes, if a business is a “stall” or has no place on the premises for consumption, they are probably not covered.
Meh. Most of the country has been subject to laws passed in the 70s. This was more of a feminist issue than is obviously apparent now because men generally wouldn’t pay to piss — they would just use the side of the road instead. Some areas have rescinded those laws and you still don’t see pay toilets in those places in any significant numbers. Americans don’t want them, and they wouldn’t solve the problem under discussion.
@skef:
Actually it does. SF is kind of a “perfect storm” wrt regulations of this sort – if they are going to cause problems anywhere in the US it’ll be probably be there. Multiple factors that all compound badly, where any one factor alone might be survivable.
The first problem is that SF has a massive NIMBYism streak. The locals have a general no-growth agenda and the power to enforce it. They don’t want bigger buildings. They don’t want crappy old buildings to get replaced by nicer new buildings. Cheap housing is bad because it breeds crime and noise; expensive housing is bad because rich people move in and change the character of the neighborhood; offices are bad because it attracts tech-bros, and…really we just want this neighborhood to stay exactly the way it is forever and ever.
Without that factor, you’d see change in the form of old buildings regularly getting gut-renovated/redeveloped or torn down and replaced with new ones, new buildings getting built on vacant lots…and all the newly-designed buildings would be designed from the start to include accessible bathrooms. So the fact that changing ANYTHING in SF is so damned hard and expensive contributes to there being insufficient accessible bathrooms.
(The fact that there aren’t any accessible bathrooms in any of these old buildings makes the disability activists all the more desperate to demand them in those rare cases where they CAN. They kind of have a point.)
Another problem is that California prides itself on leading the way when it comes to new regulations, so SF doesn’t merely have to satisfy the ADA, they have their own even stricter versions to contend with. California is constantly tweaking things further to maintain activist cred as a forward-looking state. (eg: a recent round of “improvements” involved legally mandating specific signage for gender-neutral bathrooms.)
Yet another problem is the nature of the local activist community. See, laws like the ADA don’t enforce themselves. Rather, the law set the terms under which lawsuits may be filed. Whether lawsuits then actually are filed depends on finding a suitable deep-pocketed plaintiff willing to show up and get offended and then pursue the lawsuit until justice is done.
So one could almost completely ignore these laws if one didn’t have a local population of unreasonably offend-able activists with the right characteristics to file and win the suits. Or the right characteristics to show up at city hall meetings and demagogue over the issue until the council sighs and decides it’s cheaper to let them have what they want than keep fighting about it.
SF does have that large population, and that has made all the difference.
No, no, I’m quite happy about that! Astounded, even. I remember that factor being a sticking point in the ’90s and I’m not sure how whoever managed that even pulled it off. I just wish that kind of exception were also available to private firms.
Glen Raphael: This latest post doesn’t help my impression that you’re using the subject of bathroom access for the homeless to gripe about a bunch of things that, if changed, wouldn’t much change bathroom access for the homeless.
We get it, you’re a libertarian. You’re also off-topic.
@skef
You’re free to believe that, but you’re wrong. 🙂 Improving bathroom access for everyone (by loosening the rules and norms that make this unusually difficult) can’t help but somewhat improve bathroom access for the homeless as well. (Maybe it’s not a complete solution, but few things are.)
(As an added bonus, you also might get fewer homeless people if we legalized building cheaper housing!)
You seem a bit unclear on the whole “open thread” concept. 🙂
Um, I’m not reporting you or something. I’m telling you.
You are acting like a stock character internet libertarian whose urgently communicated list of government gripes bears at best a vague and partial relation to the subject, but is advertised as obviously the whole key to the issue. Any charm this character had wore off years ago. Even those who entirely agree with you could generate the whole thread for themselves from your first sentence.
In Philadelphia, restaurants seem to be required to have bathrooms. Most have accessible bathrooms, but there are some where you need to take stairs– I assume they were grandfathered in.
I’ve heard that a problem with wheelchair accessible public bathrooms is that people were using them for sex.
To correct some earlier discussion: it turns out SF actually didn’t manage to get an exception to the rules prohibiting pay toilets. IIRC the original plan had been to have pay toilets, but what ended up actually being installed was free-of-charge toilets funded by advertising kiosks. The toilets and kiosks are bundled together – a management company under contract is supposed to use the ad revenue to cover the cost of maintaining the toilets.
Since the toilets aren’t pay toilets, the firm contracted to run them has no direct monetary incentive to keep the toilets nice and functional and popular – they get ad revenue whether the toilets work or not. So the toilets are smelly and dangerous and often don’t work. One spot check, found 6 of 10 toilets examined were not working.
The city started installing these in 1995 and there are now 25 toilets, most in poor repair. So the city is planning to replace them with a new design. But since the old design has been in place for 20 years this naturally requires a review by the Planning department’s Historic Preservation Commission.
That’s the same Historic Preservation Commission that needs six months to decide if a random no-name laundromat is too important to allow putting some new apartments near a transit corridor.
SF has arguably the slowest and most restrictive land-use policies in the nation – the gist of my comments above is that this issue slows things like installing better toilets (whether public OR private) in much the same way as it slows the installation of every other thing that requires city approval.
Though a spot of good news is that there’s gradually been a developing YIMBY – Yes In My Backyard! – countermovement, which seems to have influenced all three plausible new mayor candidates and some state legislators and even the local Sierra Club. Things might get better!
[removed some needless argumentation. Deep breath…]
So that’s the story behind those hulking trash-can-looking public restrooms along Market and Mission that never work. Huh. I learned something today.
Portland has straight-up junkie tent camps. I’ve spent more time in SF than I care to admit, but I somehow missed them all there, so that surprised me.
Yes, that scandal may be unique.
As has been noted, Hanson’s anecdotes are quite non-central to “the California mindset.” He’s either pointing to local problems or law enforcement problems that arise from the progressive mindset (“I had to adjust my law-abiding lifestyle to these lawbreakers who didn’t speak English”). So labeling his real problems “the California mindset” makes a false truth claim.
Agree with the other posters that this is an accurate description, but not specifically Californian. Nothing seemed like something you wouldn’t find in Arizona
I live in rural Southern California and agree with this article. My coworkers and I see and experience similar examples daily.
DISCLAIMER: I read but rarely comment, so please let me know if I’m violating any community norms with this post.
I was recently passed over for a position at work. According to the interviewer (after the fact), the reasons were two-fold. First, during the interview, I came across as too passive, and not confident enough. Second, I had a particular performance review that, while not bad, was less than a ringing endorsement and which gave them pause about my ability to fulfill the duties of the position for which I was interviewing. I frequently clashed with the supervisor who wrote that endorsement, largely due to said individual’s tendency to play fast and loose with the rules. Said individual was eventually investigated for alleged illegal doings and, though cleared, reassigned elsewhere in the company. To add to this, I found out today that the position was given to a co-worker. I’m comfortable saying I’m better than he is at our job,* but he has a very confident, aggressive, and assertive personality (to the point of cockiness in my opinion).
With the background thus established, I pose the following questions to the SSC readership:
1) Does anyone have any recommendations for developing a more assertive and confident demeanor without turning into an arrogant or self-aggrandizing blowhard? I’m not saying that’s what my co-worker is; I just have trouble with “middle gears” sometimes.
2) Does anyone have any recommendations on dealing with bitterness and anger?. I find myself slowly growing to hate the supervisor who wrote the review and resenting the company system which seems to be judging me on the results of a single review. (For the record, I’ve worked at this company 8 years.) I generally like my firm and I enjoy my job but if I don’t find a way to deal with this, I expect I’ll wind up jaded, bitter, and burned-out, which is something I’d rather avoid.
3) Does anyone have any recommendations on dealing with envy? I don’t particularly dislike said co-worker and I genuinely want to be happy for his success. On the other hand, this position is something I’ve been working towards for about two years and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t upset that it’s been given to someone I consider less qualified than myself.
I realize I’m doing a lot of whining, but my hope is that someone here at SSC can help me find a way out of this loop of alternatively being angry at myself for not being good enough for this position and being angry at other people for the reasons described above.
*Even considering Dunning-Kruger effect(s)
Time to move on to a new job.
Look for a new job, which isn’t the same as take a new job. Seeing what else is available can help you figure out if your current job is worth it or not while giving you a measure of control back into your life that you feel you have lost.
I would say that the first step is acceptance. Accept that management made a decision, and it very well may have been the correct one, or at least a very well informed one. Accept that “projects a confident demeanor” is a business skill that becomes increasingly vital as one increases in seniority, and is (apparently) a skill at which you need to improve. Accept that being better at the job you current have does not necessarily mean you’re more qualified for a promotion than someone else. Accept that sometimes, luck plays a role, and you may have just been unlucky to have been stuck with the previous manager who wrote you a bad review.
Viewing this outcome as “management screwed me over” does you little good. Work on the confidence thing, at the very least. It will help you in all sorts of situations in life. Perhaps you’re over-indexing on “fear of being perceived as arrogant.” I’d recommend casting that aside and simply trying to be more confident, arrogance-be-damned. Maybe find a close and trusted colleague and ask them to let you know if you’re coming across as arrogant. I’ve done that before myself and found out that I have a much lower bar for “arrogant” than most other people do. 9 times out of 10, if I thought I was sounding arrogant and asked someone, they’d say “No, it didn’t seem that way to me at all.”
I don’t have any good advice for you, just wanted to say that I’m impressed by your constructive attitude.
Here’s my advice. FWIW I have only done this once myself, but I’ve had multiple coworkers who followed a similar procedure and achieved good results.
1). Start looking for a new job immediately. Make it clear to recruiters that you’re looking for the position you would’ve been promoted into, not your current position.
2). Once you have some good leads (or better yet, an actual offer), go talk to your supervisor and/or interviewer. Calmly explain the situation to him. Don’t try to sound threatening, or even particularly confident, but simply explain the plain facts: you believe that you deserve this job, there’s someone willing to hire you for this job, so now the ball is in your current company’s court. If you’d really prefer to keep working at your current company, make sure to mention that — but if not, don’t lie.
3). Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but ultimately, the very best revenge is simply living well. If your current employers don’t value your skills, simply find someone else who will; then bid your current employer farewell. Don’t get aggressive about it, there’s no point. Of course, if you cannot find a better job (and, with the way the economy is going, this is somewhat likely), then you will have to stick it out at your current position. In such cases, there’s really not much you can do. Getting angry doesn’t help, but I’m well aware that telling someone that getting angry doesn’t help usually just makes them angrier. I’m honestly not sure how to deal with such situations.
I think this is potentially good advice for many people, but maybe not OP. Parlaying an outside offer into an internal promotion without winding up on management’s shit list is a delicate task. You need to be able to correctly read the company culture, your higher-ups attitudes, and your market value and suitability for your desired role and play your cards carefully. Even moreso in this situation, when OP is gunning for a job already assigned to someone else, is angry at the system generally and this supervisor specifically, and has trouble with nuance in how they communicate.
Contra your statement on the current economy, the US labor market (I’m assuming that’s where OP is located, correct me if I’m wrong) is currently very tight. For most people in most sectors, it’s not a bad time to move, which is what OP should (most likely) do.
I agree, but I think you may be over-complicating things. My advice solves a much simpler problem: “Get the job that I know I deserve”. If you get that job at your current company, great. If you get it at some other company… also great. Once you have a job offer, there’s almost no way to lose. I agree that adding the restriction “…and I want to stay at my current company” makes the task much harder (and perhaps outright impossible for people with a technical skillset), but that’s not what I was aiming for.
It probably doesn’t matter; they’re not going to make a serious counteroffer. He’s in the position of play-it-safe Picard from ST:TNG “Tapestry”; they’re just not going to take any amount of aggressiveness now positively.
Some thoughts on the second two questions, both of which are real issues.
2) Spend a little time mentally playing with the idea that this supervisor had sound reasons for doing what he did, such that if you had been in his place, you would have done the same thing. You can get a little silly if you like – the supervisor had a vision that your coworker was going to get hit by a bus next week, and wanted to make his last couple weeks on earth happy ones. Or the supervisor was told to not pick you because you’ve been hand selected for special adviser to the CEO, only they can’t tell you yet. Throw in a few reasonable ideas as well. The idea is to build a mental construct that allows you to imagine a world where the supervisor didn’t pick the other person out of malice to you. It’s not to convince you that the choice wasn’t a mistake, but to let you get rid of the crippling anger.
3) Look for ways to help the new guy. I read where helping people makes you more favorable towards them. Also its the right thing for the company esp if you really were the better choice. This will also allow you some time to study your coworker and figure out what they see in him. Also keep on with your current plan for looking for a new job and improving yourself.
There are likely a ton of things that went into picking one person over another and you can’t control them all. Work on the ones you can.
re: 1. If you’re being condescending, you’ll get push-back from people, multiple people. Some may just ask you fewer questions, they may avoid asking you questions when you’re clearly the best person to ask, they may tense up around you, they may offer polite passive-aggressive criticisms (“jeez, really laying it on thick there, huh?”), or they may offer blunt criticisms.
Basically, if you are being cocky and arrogant, there will be plenty of signals. Since you are probably a rather docile person, you will almost definitely pick up on these signals. So crossing the line into “YOU ARE A JERK” territory probably isn’t a big deal.
Re: 2. Well, I don’t have a good answer to this one. There are reasons why managers do the things that they do and they aren’t necessarily wrong. Keeping that in mind and remembering that sometimes things do not break your way is probably the best antidote to resentment, along with counting your blessings and remaining humble.
Expressing your bitterness probably won’t help. Confiding in co-workers will likely result in gossip spreading around the company, and that will reflect poorly on you.
Taking positive actions to move yourself forward will help you feel less like a victim of circumstance, because your focus will be on those positive actions. So, talk to your boss about advancement opportunities, and talk to recruiters about new opportunities.
A lesson on how to spot bad economic or financial thinking. The linked article was a reply to libertarians in general, and Bryan Caplan named specifically, who claim Singapore as one of the most capitalistic countries in the world. In it he makes a messy comparison that is common for those with limited expertise (or honesty) in economics, in short he compares a stock to a flow in support of a conclusion.
Here the author has compared two unlike things in an effort to come up with a big number to support their point. He compares a stock (the value of the sovereign wealth fund) to a flow (the annual GDP), let’s compare a stock to a stock, or a flow to a flow to see how different the numbers can be. Googling gives me an estimate of total US assets at ~225 trillion dollars, and as such a US sovereign wealth fund that owned 12.4 trillion dollars in assets would own ~5.5% of total US assets. Or we could guess at the returns on that stock and compare that to annual GDP in the US. If the fund returned 5% annually it would be generating 620 billion dollars in income a year, nothing to shake a stick at, but if compared to US GDP of ~18.6 trillion dollars it would be worth ~3.3% US annual GDP.
These comparisons, while not perfect, are obviously more legitimate for the thrust of the piece than the comparison made. This goes for either side of the isle. If a conservative or libertarian publishes warnings on a debt crises and uses total debt to GDP ratios on their own they are doing the same basic thing.
This is a handy heuristic for casual economics readers to follow, learning the distinction between stocks and flows will allow you to identify sloppy approaches to problems with (alarmingly) high frequency.
That kind of stock and flow are often compared. It’s a way of getting a handle on the size of the stock in more familiar flow terms. For example, you very often see various nation’s national debt quoted as a percentage of annual GDP.
For a more physical example, consider something like dam capacity quoted as a units of annual flow. The purpose there would be to give an idea of how much of a buffer in units of time the dam is providing.
On the other hand, total US assets is a fuzzy, hard to define, hard to measure, hard to grasp quantity that is very rarely used for any thing and so has little explanatory power.
That doesn’t make it correct, the economic journalism bar is low. Any comparison that doesn’t lead or link back to a discussion about debt servicing costs (at the least) isn’t actually giving you useful information, it just sounds useful.
No, its a specifically poor way of getting a handle on the size of the stock. Asset X is worth Y% of gdp doesn’t give you handle on anything on its own and asset X is worth Y% of all total assets is just as easy to handle while presenting a far more accurate picture.
You can compare the stock to a flow of the same thing, the analogy here would be to compare the sovereign wealth fund’s total assets to the sovereign wealth funds earnings. For a damn you would have no reason to compare the damn’s capacity to the total flow of all rivers including rivers that didn’t flow into or out of the damn.
Alan Greenspan:
https://www.bis.org/review/r040121a.pdf
Ben Bernanke
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20110614a.htm
Janet Yellen:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/yellen-20-trillion-national-debt-should-keep-people-awake-at-night.html
Mario Draghi:
All economic illiterates?
Let’s look at Greenspan’s actual quote in context
The very first line of the paragraph is a literal warning against using single measures
then directly after the quote you select he states
The bolded section literally can be read as
“without some notion of the total stock of potential foreign appetite for US bonds we cannot estimate the importance of current total foreign bond holdings”.
You literally quoted someone who couched his stock to flow comparison with an acknowledgement that stock to stock is what is needed.
Singapore is unique. One of the most free-market countries in the world is run by a party that started off as the left splinter of a leftist party. And it’s not that the leadership changed, either. Lee Kuan Yew was in charge from early on. The PAP actually got kicked out of the Comintern. And they’re the ones in charge now.
But ultimately LKY and the PAP have been pragmatic. They knew they needed to attract foreign investment capital, so they made themselves business-friendly. In the 50s and 60s, they had a truly horrific housing problem to solve, and decided government was the best way to do it. They then sold off the units later. (I’d disagree with the article’s characterization of the leases as being a way to keep people in public housing. I’m not entirely sure why it’s done that way, but it’s ownership in practice, and I’d like a cite on declining value. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re renewable by the tenant for a nominal fee.) And in 1949, I’d like to know which state they were talking about. It was a British colony at the time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of land got transferred under the handover. How much was actually appropriated is an open question.
I’m not that familiar with Temasek, but it’s hard to describe as socialist owning the means of production in other countries, and it seems to be largely independent of the government. Admittedly, that’s somewhat hard to measure in Singapore, because the government doesn’t change. PAP could infiltrate it so that it does what the government wants without formal control.
I don’t think this is a solid example of the fallacy normally referred to as comparing stocks and flows, which is essentially an error of dimension (e.g. subtracting a quantity of dollars from a quantity of dollars per year). The article divides a stock by a flow which is fine; the result has units of years, so reporting it as just “62%” would be flatly incorrect, but I think the actual statement in the article is reasonably clear. Then it multiplies by another flow to get another stock (equivalently, it multiplies the original stock by a unitless ratio of flows).
You can argue that this is, in context, a bad way of rescaling figures about Singapore to compare it to the US. Maybe it would indeed be more useful to compare the total wealth of the countries. But you have to make this case on the merits; the calculation in the article isn’t just meaningless.
(I take no object level position on Singapore)
Anyone have any experience with surrogacy? One of my good female friends has offered us her eggs but does not want to get pregnant.
I did a bit of Googling, and surrogacy services seem like they’re geared towards extremely wealthy people. Another female friend mentioned that one of her friends likes being pregnant but can’t afford any more kids, but it seems like a legal nightmare to ask someone I don’t know to get pregnant with another person’s embryo. Whereas I assume a surrogacy agency would have that legal quagmire covered.
Anyone know of any other recommendations?
Are you in the U.S.? Would you mind saying what state? Surrogacy laws vary a great deal jurisdiction right now.
I am in Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania surrogacy is legal and surrogacy contracts are generally enforceable as a matter of state law. There is a procedure in place to get a “pre birth” order which will mean that the birth certificate will have the parents on it from the get-go instead of requiring an adoption. As jurisdictions go it looks like towards the better half, but not among the very best.
I would say you are certainly going to need to hire a lawyer to draw up the surrogacy agreement, the egg donation agreement, and navigating the birth certificate process. You should also think about if and how you could pay for litigation costs if things went sour.
Separately from the legal costs and rules, there may be psychological tests, rules, and/or consent requirements imposed by the fertility clinics that do the egg donation procedure and the IVF/implantation.
Thanks for the info! This helps a lot
What.
There’s upsides, socially and biologically. Definitely downsides, but those vary in intensity.
That’s the only information I got, and yes that’s weird, and another reason I’m extremely hesitant about “using” her.
Some women find that they feel physically their best when pregnant. Hormones do crazy and unpredictable things.
I’ve heard the same from a female friend.
I don’t get migraines or regular headaches when I’m pregnant or breastfeeding. I’ve heard the same from a few other women I know. I wouldn’t say it’s a win on balance, but that is a nice perk. Also, it’s not true for me, but many women also experience less body-image-based stress when pregnant.
I’ve seen one claim that for some women, pregnancy makes depression go away.
I suppose the deduction should be looking into a hormonal treatment for some cases of depression.
Coincidentally, an extreme variant in today’s BBC.
Thanks.
My wife absolutely loved being pregnant. I don’t know how much of that is post-pregnancy reprogramming or hormones, but she claims she’s never been happier. (The fact she has MS and her pregnancy marked the lowest degree of symptoms she’s had in the past 2 decades probably has a lot to do with this too.)
Why is it that some industries are just such total shit-shows? I’m in the market for a new mattress and all of a sudden I feel like I’ve moved from the US, where you can go into a store and buy a tube of toothpaste confident that the price is the price, to Israel where you go the store, elbow your way to the front of the scrum ,and then start bargaining with the clerk over how much that tube of tube of crest really costs.
Online isn’t any better. You have extreme shadiness with review sites being bought and paid for*, and all the online mattress companies sell idiosyncratic products that can’t be compared directly to each other, just like the brick and mortar stores. They are also all the foam style that I happen not to like.
* https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars
What are some good but non-obvious heuristics for trusting on-line reviews? It’s hard to know how much collusion/fraud (charitably, marketing) there is for any particular product, but odds are it’s plenty.
Mattresses seem kind of like cars, in that they are moderately expensive, quality can vary, they are seen as essential for modern life, but not actually required, so it isn’t surprising to see some similarities in purchasing.
I don’t trust slick looking websites that are have links to the products they are reviewing at all. For things like amazon reviews, I read them and see if they sound like shills or not.
The best bet seems to be enthusiast forums. For example, if you wanted an espresso maker the best place to look for reviews would be a forum where a bunch of people would never even dream of buying anything “mainstream”. They all want this one model that was never exported, was discontinued 5 years ago, and cost $2500 new. Look for a thread like “Need to buy my brother in law a gift, he knows nothing about espresso, what should I get”.
The problem is I don’t think there are mattress enthusiasts …
There is a subreddit for mattresses, but it has something like 2000 followers, so it’s probably a ghost town or a collection of industry shills. The “Science of Sleep” tagline makes me think the latter.
Yeah, that’s a good point. For my wife’s birthday I was looking for an “escape room” even to play with her friends for an evening. Yelp/groupon is pretty rough guide, because it’s hard to say how many of those are the owner or some service the owners have hired. In the end I found a site run by a particular enthusiast that has rated most of them in the area and going by his recommendation.
(End result: Found pretty good quality for the price, but should have remembered my wife hates horror and clung terrified to my arm the entire time.)
This was like my escape the room experience. Except my partner doesn’t so much hate horror, as kind of enjoy being scared, and expect the same from others, and then actually scare herself a little and turn to me for reassurance–and I’m kind of immune to darkness and banging noises and plotlines about demons as sources of fear/dread, but am definitely *not* immune to my partner grabbing me by both shoulders and screaming into my face, “why aren’t you freaking out?” Not ideal.
We did a second escape-the-room that wasn’t themed “escaping-hell-demon” and had an excellent time.
As far as a slick website with links to the products they review, I’ve actually found Wirecutter to be pretty good. They seem pretty thorough and not shilling. I’ve found Amazon reviews to be getting harder and harder to trust at all… it’s been a gradual process over the past many years, but it’s gotten to the point where I can’t consider them for most items.
Enthusiast forums are good when you can find one, yes.
I like the Wirecutter as a concept, I’ve just had more than a few times where I’ve bought something based on their recommendation and been really disappointed, and ended up replacing the thing with a cheaper, and seemingly better, alternative.
Echoing Matt M–Wirecutter/Sweethome (same website, just tech vs. home stuff) seems reasonably trustworthy and thorough, but sometimes seem hung up on really specific product characteristics as essential and worth paying a lot for. That said, if you had a solidly upper-middle class income or above and needed to quickly outfit a home you’d do pretty well just blindly following their recommendation for everything.
I would trust reviews for cars more than mattresses. Most people don’t buy cars very often, but many people rent cars frequently or ride in other people’s cars, so there is a good supply of potential reviewers who have experience of a wide range of possibilities for comparison. Also, advertisers have been quite successful in promoting the idea of a car as an expression of the owner’s identity. For this reason and similar reasons, many people have some enthusiasm for discussing cars, and are willing to grant status to others who seem perceptive and knowledgable. Moreover, many features of a car are immediately visible and so open to discussion with other people who happen to be interested.
By contrast, it is rare for anyone else to know what kind of mattress you have. Even if you sleep on hotel mattresses very frequently, you probably do not know what kind of mattresses they are. People do not generally think of a mattress as an expression of their identity, so there is little potential for impressing others by expounding your views on the subject. I would guess that people buy mattresses even less often than they buy cars, on average. All of this means that the supply of well-informed and detailed reviews is quite thin.
Books are probably the optimum product for online reviews. There are many potential reviewers who are passionate about books and have read thousands of them and feel that they can gain status by sharing their insights. It is not easy for shills to create fake reviews that sound convincing. Restaurants and hotels are also good, for similar reasons.
Things like washing machines are the worst for finding meaningful reviews. Most people have only ever owned a very small number of washing machines and are not well placed to make any systematic comparison between them. Also, they are boring, so no one can be bothered to write a review unless they have had a bad experience that they want to rant about. There are magazines that do “professional” reviews, but they only cover a small fraction of the available models. Presumably they would be more comprehensive if that would lead more people to buy the magazine, but apparently it does not work out that way. (Yes, I needed to buy a new washing machine recently.)
Lack of effective regulation.
Do you have any proposed regulation for the mattress industry?
For starters, let’s ban the part where the salesman puts a bag over his head.
Where the hell in Israel were you shopping?
He might have ended up in a riot and gotten confused 😛
AKA “the AnCap equivalent to regulatory capture”
Re: Against Murderism
Love the piece and am sympathetic to it, but here’s an idea for why the murderism analogy doesn’t prove that ‘racism’ the way it is commonly used is not useless or nonsensical.
I think anti-racism activists would say that Alice, Bob, Carol, etc. 1) are making choices that have detrimental effects on minorities, and 2) are blind/ignorant/uncaring about those effects especially in the context of historical/societal context. So Alice is blind to how her discomfort/unfamiliarity with middle-eastern Muslim accents and interests is a result of historical exclusion and how her choice of neighborhood perpetuates that exclusion; Bob is ignoring that low ridership on the bus line in the black neighborhood is due to fewer blacks having jobs to commute to or being integrated into the larger city, and how his choice perpetuates that; etc.
This works with murderism too: murderism is making choices that insufficiently value human life, and being blind/uncaring to how those choices both arise from and perpetuate a society that insufficiently values human life. So soft-on-crime policies are murderist in that we’re just used to and tolerate losing thousands of people annually to murder and we insufficiently value the pain that each of those murders cause; we go to war because we are accustomed/callous to the loss of life; we support euthanasia because, again, we are blind to the sacredness of each life. Murderers are in effect murderist, because they’ve absorbed this societal indifference to human life. Yes, a drug dealer kills to protect his turf, but he’s willing to do so in part because our whole society insufficiently values human life.
“Nectome” obviously comes from the word “connectome”. Why does it drop the first three letters? Caballistically, it must be because they are trying to conceal a con.
Can someone give an opinion on the future state of the job market for combining economics & computer science?
I’m asking for a friend in finances (long-term risk management & day trading) who studies computer science & applied math under the assumption that the combination will be important (already is of course) and relevant for workers (apparently not the case at present, at least in Israel: companies employ CS experts and financing experts and put them in the same room rather than employ dual experts).
If anyone happens to have any relevant opinion (why currently there are limited job opportunities? will this change in the future? is he wasting his time?), and is willing to shape, it will be most appreciated and may really help.
No one knows what the job market will do. People who tell you otherwise are selling snake oil.
My general advice on “combining” skillsets would just be to make sure that you’re doing so in a way that makes you seem more of an expert in a very specific field/discipline, rather than more of a generalist. Nobody really wants smart generalists anymore.
So make sure you come across as “expert in the economics of CS” or whatever (which may or may not be in demand, I don’t really know) rather than “he knows a little about economics and a little about CS” (which is a thing that nobody will want).
This is only partially true.
I work on the R side of R&D in a very well known corporation, and we’re basically on a “how many boatloads of money you want and when can you start” basis with people who understand both the domain and the technical side.
In fact, even with the purely technical projects, capacity for independent work (as many as possible of design, dev, QA…), knowing multiple unrelated but complementary technologies, being able to talk shop with outside partners etc. are far better than being an inch wide and mile deep.
This was really interesting to me because, as a software developer, I was expecting the “choose a technology, spend 5 years living and breathing it, boom, senior dev” career path but didn’t really optimize for it because it’s dreadfully boring. Turns out, I was a square peg that never really looked for a hole that wasn’t round.
I started university in a combined Finance/CS degree in 2008: https://uwaterloo.ca/computing-financial-management/about-computing-and-financial-management, based on much the same reasoning.
Waterloo’s big value proposition is its co-op program, which usually means you graduate with 6-terms (2 years) of work experience relevant to your domain. My first 2 work terms were for standard tech compannies, as they’re more willing to hire junior staff. On my 3rd work term I got a co-op job in BoA-Meryll-Lynch in their development offices (backoffice financial instrument data collection). Even there the job could be (and usually was) done by someone with literally no finance knowledge. The jobs are segregated by skill because mixed-skill people are hard to find, and mixed-skill people end up specializing to one side. I also realized I enjoyed CS work regardless of area of application, so why bother trying to combine the 2 fields?
By the time I switched to regular CS, our program had lost about 2/3rds of its students (half to CS, half to accounting and finance), largely due to the same mechanics.
I don’t really regret going into that program (the finance credits counted as electives and so I graduated on time, I just paid more tuition than I otherwise would have), and I do use the finance knowledge to some extent. But it doesn’t have the payoffs that you might assume.
Now sample size == 1, and Canada != Israel, but I think most of the following is still applicable:
– Any company big enough to have an HR department doing hiring will not make positions that require both skillsets, simply because they wouldn’t be able to fill them.
– Both CS/Finance are very broad fields with tons of possible specializations, so usually being “good” at both comes at the expense of being truly specialized in either. Big, slow-moving companies with the money to hire two separate experts will probably do that instead.
– On the other hand, I’ve seen small startups (“fintech” is the usual category name, Addepar in its early days would be a good example) where being dual-skilled would be an asset as an early employee, because you don’t require as much guidance and have a better understanding of the customer than an average CS grad. The most extreme example of where you’d get an advantage would be in starting your own company, because you’d be a viable development at size 1 (at least in the early stages) and could cut down on a lot of communication overhead. Note that these jobs are still mostly CS-heavy, the Finance knowledge just helps you understand the requirements/fill in the blanks better.
A little biological quiz:
1. A man inherits more genes from his father or from his mother?
2. If humans (Homo Sapiens) inherited some genes from Neanderthals, that means that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals are actually the same species?
3. Some scientists successfully cloned an animal but the clone looks visibly, obviously different than the original. What was that animal?
4. Two (male and female) animals of different species from different continents shared a cage at a zoo and produced a fertile female offspring that later produced her own offsprings. What where those two animals?
5. Some time ago there was a rumor about a remote village on a tropical island where, around puberty, some girls become boys: they grow a penis, testicles appear… A scientist went to that village to investigate the rumor. Was it real?
1. His mother
2. Only if Homo Sapiens and prokaryotes are also the same species.
3. An amputee
4. A lion and a tiger.
5. No, America is not a tropical island.
I imagine for #3 you’re going for rot-13 “puvzren”.
#5 is mostly true; biology is weird. Of course the guevedoces of the Dominican Republic (and similar populations in Papau New Guinea) are not actually changing sex; as a result of an enzyme deficiency their primary sexual characteristics do not develop or become visible until puberty. What’s really surprising is they seem to be normal men after that (or at least the pop-sci articles claim this); I’d expect a 12 year delay to mess other things up as well.
Biology is weird as hell.
1. His mother; it’s evenly split otherwise but the X chromosome is something like 4x the size of the Y.
2. No. They are sometimes classified as a subspecies of H. sapiens, but we inherit genes from lots of species we don’t belong to.
3. Lots of possibilities here, you’ll have to be more specific.
4. Cnemidophorus neomexicanus and anything else.
5. I don’t remember the story, but it wouldn’t be here if the answer wasn’t “yes”.
1-Also mitochondria.
Yeah, good point. IIRC mtDNA is a pretty small genome, though.
And since he specifies genes, and not “genetic material”, I won’t bother estimating how many mitochondria there are per nuclear copy, but in some cells mitochondria is a significant fraction of total volume.
Regarding 1, I wonder if this imbalance is the reason why in mammals females tend to have greater parental investment in the offspring, while in low-sex dimorphic birds, which use the oppose sex differentiation system, parental investment is usually evenly split between males and females.
Doesn’t seem very likely. The difference in humans isn’t that big, and I don’t know if the same size relationship between the X and Y chromosomes holds for all mammalian species (though I do know that a few mammals have lost their Y entirely). mtDNA is going to be female-line exclusive or nearly so in anything with our sex-determination system, but it’s only a few thousand base pairs.
Different levels of parental investment based on this phenomenon would only make evolutionary sense to the extent that resources not spent on children can be used in pursuit of reproductive goals that aren’t subject to the same phenomenon (e.g. the phenomenon might be a consideration in favor of that a man should use resources to help his sister’s children rather than his own children, but not in favor of that he should use resources to put himself in a better position to have more children, rather than helping his current children)
1. Zbgure
2. Abcr.
3. Png,
4. Ryrcunagf & pnzryf qb guvf nyy gur gvzr.
5. Lrf. Yvsr vf jrveq.
I was wondering if somebody had a gun to your head, but I thought I was just being depressed. Golly, this world really is a terrible place that destroys everything of value.
I just binge-read through the Silmarillion, after reading Children of Hurin. I really enjoyed both of them, at least as much as I enjoyed my re-read of Lord of the Rings a few months ago.
Have you read any of History of Middle-Earth? If not, I’d strongly recommend at least the Beren and Luthien book that came out last year; the Lay of Leithian is beautiful.
I just read two more books of HoME myself for the first time. The “Notion-Club Papers” was intriguing, and the “Shibboleth of Feanor” and “Problem of Ros” were amazing in the detail they give. They’re definitely an acquired taste, but if you liked the appendices to Return of the King, I’d recommend giving at least some of them a try.
I listened to Christopher Lee read Children of Hurin and it just made me sad at how there’s this great example of how to do grim/grey-morality fantasy without going brutally nihilist and sophomoric, but we’ve already moved so far past magic helmets and hypnotizing dragons we’ll never go back. Even the Glaurung parts I can imagine disappointing people if they were in a mainstream movie nowadays
For those who have not read the Silmarillion due to its density, I highly recommend the audio book. The voice actor (I forget his name, sorry) who reads it really makes it come alive; if you think of the text as the Bible, think of the voice actor as a fire-and-brimstone preacher. I got chills running down my spine multiple times while listening to that audio book — and no, Fëanor’s speech wasn’t the only case when that happened.
Which audio book, in particular?
I believe it is this one, though I’ve listened to it a long time and several computers ago, so I could be wrong. Sorry 🙁
Seconded. The Martin Shaw Silmarillion is one of hte first audio books I ever got and it remains the best, without a doubt. I’ve often described it as moses reading the old testament.
Yes, that’s exactly it. That’s a perfect way to describe it… Er… or it would be, until you remember that the canonical Moses was a stutterer who had his brother Aaron do all his public speaking 🙂
you mean holywood lied to me?!?! Noooooo!
Indeed.
It makes me sad sometimes that people (on every side of the political spectrum) can be so horrible. Thank you again for hosting this blog, Scott.
John Schilling, what’s your take on the recent supposed North Korean peace offer?
I am generally reluctant to recommend podcasts on the grounds that they are a tedious and inefficient means of conveying information, but my colleague Jeffery Lewis pretty much nailed it on this one. Ankit Panda is also on target, and in print.
TL,DL: Having a sitting US president come to Korea to visit Kim Jong Whatever has been a major North Korean policy goal for at least twenty years and two Kims. It’s a way to boost the legitimacy of the regime, and it is literally the plot of one of their biggest propaganda movies. So Kim III asking Trump to come talk to him isn’t a surrender or even a concession, it’s building on the momentum of the Olympics and the inter-Korean talks to ask the US whether we are willing to make this concession in exchange for a dialogue with North Korea. And, on behalf or the US, Trump said “yes”.
The dialogue might be worth the diplomatic concession. Nixon did go to China, and that worked out OK. But it’s important to be realistic. And, paying close attention to what the North Koreans actually said, they aren’t inviting Trump over to beg for sanctions relief and give up their nukes. Denuclearization is “on the table”. The terms that will be on the table with it are going to be what they have been all along: An end to all sanctions, and returning all the assets that have been frozen or seized. A formal end to the Korean War and a peace treaty guaranteeing the DPRK’s sovereignty for all time. The complete and permanent removal of all US forces from Korean territory, and an end to joint US-ROK military exercises and command structures. Japan too, if they can swing it. North Korea will keep its nukes until after we do all of the above, and no even then we won’t be able to look into their secret military bases to check. Probably we’ll have to accept their having a space program and a civilian nuclear power industry.
A skilled US negotiator could probably nibble away at the edges of that, but not at the core. Might be able to commit to phased denuclearization, where North Korea gives up some fraction of its arsenal at each stage and with at least partial verification. Or, we might get a long-term plan for total denuclearization that never actually gets implemented but turns into a de facto nuclear freeze. Things like this could be enough of an improvement over the status quo to be worth doing, even worth the concession of having Trump go to Korea.
Or Trump could come away looking like a chump and feeling betrayed because Kim didn’t hand over his nukes, and decide he has to Do Something to save face.
Is there a good reason NOT to formally end the Korean War and recognize North Korea at this point?
I mean, as for the rest of it, mostly no way – but saying “NK exists, they are a real country, but they are still our adversary and we certainly aren’t going out of our way to make things easy for them” is just formalizing reality.
I think it would have the upside of not obligating SK to “reunite” if the Kim regime collapses and take on what would probably be the crippling economic burden of rehabbing NK.
My impression has been that South Korea considered unification on terms like those of German unification — i.e., under the South’s political system — to be a good thing, regardless of the financial cost.
If so, that wouldn’t stop us from recognizing the North, but the South might think we were undercutting them.
eh, it’s complicated. They’re not officially against it, but the politicians in the south know how expensive re-unification was for Germany. West Germany had 4 times the population of the east, and the east was, if communist, at least an industrialized country. South Korea only has twice the population of the north, and their economy is, well, north korea. Korean re-unification is going to cost trillions and the ROKs know that they’ll get stuck with the bill, so while they’d like it, they’d prefer it at some distant point in the future, not now.
What makes them think it’ll be any cheaper at “some distant point in the future?”
Note that the US offered formal diplomatic recognition to East Germany in 1974; this does not seem to have interfered with the generally amicable relationship between West Germany and the United States.
And, yes, the ROK genuinely wants reunification but also genuinely doesn’t mind the fact that it will probably not be this generation of South Koreans that has to pay for it.
@Matt M
Part of it isn’t so much “it will be cheaper” as it is “I won’t have to pay for it.”
The less cynical part is the belief/hope/wish that given time the north will normalize, become more developed, and thus reduce the disparity that leads to a lot of the cost, basically some long, gradual process, not the south militarily occupying a famine zone in the middle of a war and having to fix everything at once.
And that’s not even getting into the issues with China. China is not going to sit back and allow a Western-allied country right up against its borders.
All else equal, podcasts are a terrible way to communicate information, but they’re a pretty good way to use up the time in traffic that I’d otherwise be spending either listening to Iron Maiden or quietly fuming. I’ve been using Jeffery Lewis’s podcast for that purpose for a while, among others, and he’s one of the rare people in the policy space that don’t make me want to leap across the table and strangle somebody.
I have a notion that *if* the talk happens, Trump may just end up destroying the value to NK of getting to talk with the POTUS, or at least destroying it for as long as he’s in office.
Probably we’ll have to accept their having a space program and a civilian nuclear power industry.
Would North Korea having a civilian nuclear power industry be a bad or a good thing? I’m hazy on the details, there’s a lot of yes-no-maybe about “can you use a power generation plant to enrich weapons-grade uranium?”, so leaving that element aside: nuclear power generation – good for the environment/climate change as it removes one more nation relying on fossil fuels etc. or bad for the West since that helps North Korea slowly inch its way to having some kind of working economy and becoming less likely to collapse of its own accord?
Can’t answer for John Schilling, but there is no “peace offer”. Instead what we have is a proposal for direct talks between Kim Jong Un and Trump, an offer North Korea has made to every US president since the end of the cold war. The terms on offer are likely to be much the same as they have ever been, with North Korea making vague promises about denuclearization in exchange for US security guarantees; namely a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the Korean war, the end of the US ROK alliance, the complete withdrawal of American troops from the Korean peninsula, and the guarantee that the South will not pursue It’s own nuclear arms.
There is zero evidence that the North can be trusteed to keep their side of the bargain , as they have violated every agreement they’ve made with US in the past, including the 1953 armistice. There is on the other hand every reason to believe that the DPRK will never give up it’s nuclear deterrent, and some reason to think that if they were granted a nuclear monopoly on the Korean peninsula, that they might attempt to force reunification on their own terms.
Edit: ninja’d by the man himself.
Be fair: They cheated only a little bit and to no great consequence with the Agreed Framework; our own little bits of cheating were more visible and more consequential. And that agreement bought us a de facto eight-year nuclear freeze from the DPRK. Looking at where their strategic weapons programs were eight years ago, and where we expect them to be eight years from now, I’m really glad we got those eight years and I’d gladly trade a Trump visit for another eight years.
Your leaving out important context for the 1994 agreement. For one thing It was singed during the hight of the “arduous March” famine of the nineties when millions of north Koreans were saved from starving to death thanks only to western food aid, and for another Pyongyang only singed out of fear that the Clinton administration was going to bomb the Yongbyon facility.
Since North Korea has managed to pull it self away front the brink of starvation, and it’s subsequent progress on building it’s nuclear arsenal has rendered the threat of US military action much less credible, I don’t see the incentive for them to make the same kind of agreement again.
You seem to think that there wasn’t really anything to the “wraith of khan” Uranium enrichment program that ultimately scuttled the Agreed Framework in 2003. Was the Bush administration just full of shit about that?
The Agreed Framework wasn’t scuttled because of the uranium enrichment; we knew about that in 1998 and decided it wasn’t worth scuttling the deal over. In part because the “no uranium enrichment” part of the deal was less than explicit; in part because we were still thinking of breeder reactors as the main proliferation threat. The Agreed Framework was scuttled because the Bush Administration needed a token non-Islamic member for the “Axis of Evil”, and once we nominated the DPRK there was no rational basis for them to believe we’d ever make good on our end of the deal.
I’ll leave it to you as to whether the Bush Administration was “full of shit” about the whole “Axis of Evil” thing.
John’s comment brought to mind this bit of satire from 2002:
China, Syria, Libya form “Axis of Just As Evil”
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=875861
Calling someone an “axis of evil” certainly isn’t nice, but it also doesn’t necessarily preclude cordial diplomatic relations between two nations.
I feel like we do a whole lot of business and diplomacy with countries who have public leaders that regularly refer to us as “the great Satan”
The only nation whose government officially refers to the US as the “Great Satan” is Iran. You may have noticed that the deal where we decided to stop economically sanctioning Iran as much as the rest of the world would let us get away with, in spite of Iran conspicuously not doing things like testing ICBMs and nuclear weapons, was and is deeply controversial in the United States.
So, yeah, language like that might not be an absolute dealbreaker, but it’s really damn close. This is diplomacy, and words matter.
Which is why I said “public leaders” and not “official government position.”
And I guess you can say that the latter is far more important than the former and that’s fine, I’m not willing to die on that hill.
But I’d say there are no shortage of prominent individuals with significant power in various middle eastern countries besides Iran that regularly refer to America in very unflattering terms, and are still beneficiaries of trade, foreign aid, military alliances, etc.
Even if you expand it to public leaders generally, “Great Satan” is almost exclusively an Iranian thing, not a generic Muslims-who-dislike-American-policy thing. About the only major exception is Hezbollah, which is pretty clearly in Iran’s orbit.
And, gosh, the process of negotiating pragmatic live-and-let-live deals with predominantly Muslim nations that don’t like our policies is almost completely uncontroversial in the United States, except with Iran where half the US sees any deal as akin to treason. So maybe it does matter whether you use words like “Great Satan” or “Axis of Evil”.
It seems odd that the American public is so offended by one country (that just so happens to be the main enemy of Israel and regional ally of
the USSRRussia) calling it the Great Satan as to preclude any cooperation, but doesn’t have any such qualms about another country (with the opposite relationships) that supplied 3/4 of the 9/11 hijackers.@RLMS
You think it’s odd that we get along better with the leadership of a country that doesn’t call us the great satan than one that does?
It’s an odd coincidence that being offended by Iran’s comments fits with what the US would want to do anyway. I suspect that Iran’s public hostility is not the only thing that prevents a friendly relationship with the US. I don’t think Assad made any mean comments about America, but that didn’t seem to help him.
There’s no shortage of Americans, including politically conservative ones, who are willing to say that we should pragmatically come to terms with Assad being Syria’s ruler for the foreseeable future and cut the best possible deal. And even the ones who disagree with that view, don’t accuse its proponents of nigh unto treason the way proponents of the Iran nuclear deal so often are.
It could be “Great Satan”, but it could plausibly be the US still holding a grudge over the whole hostage thing.
@rlms says:
Let’s take, as a given, that the population of Saudi Arabia is just as hostile to the US as Iran’s. In that case, the leadership of Saudi Arabia is giving off a costly signal in refusing to publicly insult us. They want to, it would benefit them in domestic politics to do so, but they refuse, and the only reason can be show how how badly they (the leadership at least) desire our friendship.
that Iranian public doesn’t like the US isn’t a strong reason we’re not close to iran. But the Iranian leadership has demonstrated a willingness to give into that public in a way the saudis have not. That’s a pretty good reason to be more sanguine about our relationship with them by people that don’t so refuse.
@John Schilling
I assume there are many (left-wing) Americans who think the US should be a lot friendlier towards Iran, but possibly I’m extrapolating incorrectly from the situation in the UK (where the leader of the Labour party infamously was a presenter for the Iranian state television channel for a bit).
There are several reasons for the lack of accusations of treason against people who support friendship with Assad. I think the main one is that those people aren’t Obama, who (like most presidents nowadays) faced accusations of treasons for most things he did. Other reasons are that opposing Assad by supporting Syrian rebels is hard to be that enthusiastic about: it’s difficult to accuse someone of treason and then propose giving money to guys on approximately the same side as ISIS; and that the Israel-Iran dynamic is different to the Israel-Syria one.
@cassander
Is the Iranian public that hostile to the US? I don’t really know the opinions of either the Iranian or Saudi general publics (although the small number of Iranians I’ve met didn’t give an impression of hostility).
@RLMS
sorry, I misread you as claiming it was. I saw “Iran’s public hostility” as “Iran’s public’s hostility”
In any case, I’m sure there’s polling, and I’m sure it’s not terribly reliable. I tend to assume that regimes, even authoritarian ones, don’t go out of their way to offend their people and are usually good at knowing what will offend them. I suspect anti-americanism is at least as popular in Iran as elsewhere in the middle east.
In any case, public hostility remains not so much a good indicator of lack of desire for a relationship, but it is a good reason for a lack of trust in any relationship. Publicly insulting those you want to do business with is rarely a good idea. Not never, but rarely.
Instead what we have is a proposal for direct talks between Kim Jong Un and Trump, an offer North Korea has made to every US president since the end of the cold war.
I’m really glad we got those eight years and I’d gladly trade a Trump visit for another eight years.
Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Trump can/could go to North Korea?
Insofar as North Korea was one of the designated whipping boys for both left and right in American politics, I think pretty much any US president could have gone to North Korea.
Hmm, Nixon actually did go to China eight years and one US President after China’s first successful nuclear test. If we discount the 2006 fizzle, it’s now been nine years and one President since North Korea’s first nuclear test. Possibly the real issue is that we’d rather have the whipping boy than the peaceful relations, until the whipping boy has nuclear missiles. Then the next POTUS has to go deal with the problem…
You and John Schilling argue that North Korea hasn’t made a peace offer. But Scott’s phrasing is ambiguous. Did the U. S. make a peace offer to North Korea? Did Trump imply any concession other than just a talk?
Ask five people what Trump’s implied in any given tweet and you’ll get nine answers. I don’t even want to speculate on what people can read into actual diplomatic communications.
Another take, from someone who has been there and done that. Bottom line, talks are potentially a good idea but should come with realistic expectations and months of prep work. Maybe ship all your spare modafinil to the State Department’s few remaining Korea Hands, and cross your fingers?
Scott write: “I’ve gotten a few more real-life threats than I’m entirely comfortable with”
Being nosy and curious, I have to ask: threats from the left, right, both, or other?
That’s a stand-in for something slightly more complicated that I don’t really want to explain because I don’t want to encourage it / let people know they got to me – but to answer your question, from the left.
And this is why people on the right are paranoid.
It’s not like there is any shortage of people on the left who can honestly claim to have received threats or quasi-threats from the right.
Can we just agree that it sucks without getting into a pissing contest over who’s more guilty of it? I’m certainly ashamed of how some of my fellow leftists have behaved at times, and apparently they have given me more cause for that. I would like for my side to be better.
@Protagoras
People on the left may get threats. But when someone on the right gets threatened for their beliefs, the people doing the threatening have institutional support(not something like murder but other kinds of threats). I can’t be honest with people in real life about my political opinions because it could have negative ramifications for me down the line. That’s something your typical progressive simply does not have any experience with and doesn’t understand.
@Wong Species, Was it your intention to make me regret my effort to encourage de-escalation, or was that accidental?
I wasn’t trying to paint the left as “more guilty”. I’m just saying it’s not even close to being similar, as one side clearly has more power to carry out its threats than the other. But if you don’t want to go further, then that’s that.
I’m not sure. It’s a bit like news reports of violence by “youths” or “young men” which omit the race of the offenders. Why is the age and sex of the rioters mentioned but not their race? Why does the headline not say “oxygen breathers commit random violent attack”?
Perhaps I’m biased because I’m a conservative, but it seems like again and again in public discourse, these sorts of distinctions and lines and categories are drawn (or not drawn) so as to conceal information which tends to undermine the agenda of the Left.
The fact is that there is a significant problem in America with Leftist violence and intimidation against people who express un-PC views.
This sucks and I’m sorry it’s happening.
(Irrespective of which side the threats are coming from.)
Can someone recommend a good book on healthcare? Particularly incentive structures in the US system as it stands. Really enjoyed Catastrophic Care + An American Sickness.
+ a recommendation for a SSC style blog about healthcare?
I liked _Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis_ by John C. Goodman.
T.R. Reid’s “The Healing of America” is one I read a few years back that offers an easily digestible and personalized view on comparative healthcare systems between, I think, the US, Japan, India, Germany, and France. Rather than go deep into policy, he takes a patients viewpoint, and really points out some of the basic factors that make access to care in other nations more streamlined and efficient.
Is anyone else highly concerned to see term limits for Premier of China going away? I feel like that’s a big red flag (pun semi-intentional)
Highly? No. But it’s a step in the direction of concentration of power in a system where it is already highly concentrated. And that’s usually a bad thing.
Xi Jinping has been concentrating power for a while now, the term limit removal is just symbolic of this. The anti-corruption campaign he ran enabled him to clear out a lot of potential competing centers of power in the country while ensuring the move is popular. After all who likes corrupt officials? And let’s be clear, most of the officials charged probably were guilty. That’s one way dictatorial rulers keep their power. Allow corruption to flourish and use selective prosecution to take out rivals. I think given the context of previous rulers of the PRC, the really important change was the official adoption of Xi Jinping thought. Once you’re cemented in the Constitution at the same level as Mao or Deng, the question is no longer “will I rule for as long as I want,” but “will I rule at the front and center or will I rule from the shadows.” Xi apparently prefers to be more front and center.
I think this is a potentially worrisome trend. Even good leaders with too much concentrated power are a problem in the long run as they increase system fragility. Reducing a country’s potential failure points to a single person is a generally bad idea.
Do we have any idea how corrupt China is today compared to 10 years ago?
Going by the corruption perceptions index for 2008, not great. Tied with Mexico and several other countries for the 72nd place (for reference slightly better than Brazil and slightly worse than Ghana). Today, they’re rated at 77th place, but with a slightly higher score (and now slightly ahead of Ghana).
Good point. See also: Mohamed bin Salman.
Erdogan also.
Yep, MBS seems to be using Xi’s playbook so far when it comes to internal politics (get appointed chairman of everything that matters and use corruption laws to bring down rivals).
Actually, putting it this way, it reminds me of Putin a little bit. His humiliation of the corrupt wealth-flaunting oligarchs must have contributed to his popularity (in a sort of cynical, “look how the mighty have fallen” way).
Two differences — China is not a democracy, unlike Russia (briefly, during the 90s), and Putin openly flaunted the law in the process (but one has to wonder about the Chinese legal system).
Consider that Deng Xiaoping was never president. These procedural minutiae are irrelevant in the Chinese political environment.
I’m not really concerned about that specific detail, because China is ruled by the Communist Party, which was never bound by any written laws anyway. However, Xi Jinping’s consolidation of actual political power has, as I see it, locked in China’s rapid political and economic ascension. This means that Western-style democracies will continue to decline, irrevocably so. The cultural values of the future belong to China, not to the Enlightenment.
That sounds familiar.
Well, right now, Europe is spinning its wheels; they’ve got too many internal problems to deal with, so they can’t really progress economically. India is facing similar issues, and Japan is pretty small. Russia seems hell-bent on returning to the good old days; this may allow them to become a big player once more in the long term, but in the short term, their economy isn’t going to do all that well, so it’s a risky move. Saudi Arabia et al will continue to do well, but their economies are secondary: they can sell lots of oil to someone, but there’s got to be someone there to buy it; and they can’t do anything interesting on their own.
Thus, the economic battle is between the US and China. Whoever wins this battle gets to impose his values on the world.
To win the battle, you have to grow your economy. In the past, you could do this through resource extraction or manufacturing, but in the modern world, technological innovation is key. Also, China and Saudi Arabia have manufacturing and resource extraction pretty much covered. Unfortunately, it seems like the US is doing all it can to reduce their capacity for technological innovation. Between increasingly restrictive intellectual property law, various moral prohibitions, education crisis, and generally becoming an unwelcome place for scientifically inclined immigrants, the US is actively eroding its capacity to innovate.
To be fair, totalitarian countries such as China have their own problems with innovation (you can’t let people get too smart, or they’ll start getting ideas), but they also have one very powerful tool: the ability to plan more than four (or more than two, really) years ahead. China is currently allocating massive amounts of resources to long-term research projects in genetics, AI, and space exploitation. These efforts may or may not bear fruit, but they’re definitely better than doing nothing. This ability to plan ahead can become disrupted due to intra-Party struggles; but now that Xi Jinping emerged as the unquestionably dominant leader, I don’t foresee many stumbling blocks on China’s path to global ascendancy in the near future.
Here’s the problem. China’s going to hit an economic plateau because of its infantile financial markets. If you want Western-style financial markets, you need Western-style rule of law. You don’t need to be Woke, but you do need rich people to have confidence that the ruling premier isn’t going to disappear them and their families.
Technically the nation does have MORE than enough capital to meet its needs. But that doesn’t matter. You need to deploy it an market-oriented matter. Otherwise you are stuck building factories to meet the quotas imposed upon you by the Premier’s 5-year plan.
I am not a China bull in the sense that I think it is ever going to supplant America’s global role. I think it’s more likely that I will be the next Michael Jordan than China being a global hegemon akin to the US in the 90s and early 00s.
I’m more with Beta Guy. The idea of “long term planning” with anything as complex and frankly poorly understood as a national economy is way more likely to weaken a state than strengthen it. The reason is you wind up overly optimizing with too little room to maneuver. Honestly the whole idea of such planning reeks of fragility, looks good until the moment a black swan hits. Not to mention, what happens if your singular leader decides to go down a crazy course of action (a la Mao)? What happens if he dies before a decent replacement is ready (after all having a clear replacement leads to people thinking that maybe you should be replaced)? None of this guarantees collapse in the short term, but the more the fate of a nation puts all it’s eggs in one basket, the easier it is for the unexpected to topple the whole structure.
This isn’t even to mention that shrinking one’s winning coalition changes incentives away from overall growth and public goods to private goods for a smaller number of actors. That’s not the kind of incentive structure that tends towards growth.
People have been saying for years that China is just a few years away from crashing. I’m not buying this idea that they can’t develop the financial markets needed to compete.
As far as China’s advantages, it’s not just that the government does more. It’s that their society is so much more willing to innovate. They’ve been much less squeamish about genetic engineering. They’re quickly surpassing the US in A.I. They can build train stations faster than we can fix potholes. Even with Silicon Valley, we’re stagnating and they’re not. Of course, their growth isn’t going to continue at the same rate forever but they don’t even need to have the same GDP per Capita to be a threat.
People like to bring up the example of Japan and use that as an example of why we shouldn’t worry. But in the 19th century, the UK was worried about Germany and look what happened there.
Predicting crashes is hard. But booms never last forever. Predicting that China will crash next year is foolish (though it might), but saying that its track record guarantees things will still be running smoothly ten years down the road seems equally foolish (though, again, it might be).
I’m definitely no expert on China. But I do have a question. Will China’s demographics interfere with its rise? By that I mean sex ratio (1.15 males : females at birth) and the fact that it might “grow old before it gets rich”?
The latter being a problem that Japan and some Western countries will also face. Having too many retired people or people who can’t work and have to be supported by the young might not be a good economic recipe for success.
And people have been saying for almost a century that [dynamic non-western economy X] is going to Rule The World because they are Growing Fast and United in Purpose and they Make Plans and they don’t waste their resources on politics/frivolities like Westerners the speaker disagrees with.
It was the Russians in the 1930s and it was the Russians again in the 1950s, and then it was the Arabs in the 1970s and then it was the Japanese and now it’s China’s turn. Can you at least come up with a prediction of China’s inevitable economic dominance that doesn’t sound exactly like the ones I was hearing about the Japanese twenty years ago?
OK, the bit about how China having a dictator-for-life is what cements their role as Dynamic Innovators of the 21st century is new. But that speaks from a profound misunderstanding of China, dictators, and innovation.
I don’t agree. The problem is that if the state decides subject X is the important one and puts lots of money and status behind it, the talented people go into X instead of Y and Z that aren’t so officially sexy but might be more important. That was part of my view of theoretical physics at the point I left it.
One of the conclusions of Ronald Coase’s final book, coauthored with Ning Wang on how China went capitalist, was that what did it was mostly marginal revolutions, things Deng didn’t plan but had the good sense not to suppress when they happened. It isn’t clear that Xi has the modesty and sense to do the same.
In terms of ability to compete for global leadership, China having four times the population of the US will make up for a lot of indifferent or even downright bad policy.
@christhenottopher:
I was specifically thinking of planning “Manhattan Projects” such as AI, genetic engineering, etc.; not the entire national economy. In fact, China has been experimenting with limited capitalism on and off over the years; their experiments appear to be ongoing.
@Protagoras:
That’s a stronger statement than the one I was making. I only believe that China will do a lot better than the US (and other Western economies), not that everything will go completely perfectly for them.
@John Schilling:
To be fair, they’ve been saying that about China for a while, and so far, they’ve been right. China started off in a pretty bad position after the Cultural Revolution, but the gap between them and Western nations has been narrowing steadily over the years. In some areas, such as consumer goods manufacturing, they are the undisputed leaders in the world.
@Chalid:
Very good point.
“Can you at least come up with a prediction of China’s inevitable economic dominance that doesn’t sound exactly like the ones I was hearing about the Japanese twenty years ago?”
How about “China reaches the same GDP per person as Japan and due to the much bigger population will have very comfortably the biggest economy in the world.”?
Edit: Ah, the point was already made … anyway, I think that’ll be the story of the next 30 years or so. At the same time I’m pretty pessimistic about Europe, mostly because we solve the lack of kids by importing problems. And I don’t think the US will necessarily decline, except relative to China.
@BlindKungFuMaster:
I agree with what you said, except for this part:
Firstly, I suppose it depends on how you define “decline”; I do agree that the US economy is unlikely to decrease significantly in absolute terms (at least, not over a long period of time). However, I do believe that the economic growth rate of the US may decline significantly.
That said, I think you might be missing a very important point: declining “relative to China” is really all that matters. Once the US loses its status as the top economic and technological power (something that is arguably happening as we speak), the knock-on effects will lead to it losing its place as the top military and cultural power, as well. And it’s very hard to get back onto that pedestal once you’ve been knocked off of it — especially when you end up having to learn Chinese in order to participate in the world economy in an effective manner…
Bugmaster:
Such projects still pull resources from other possible, more diversified, uses. Not to mention given that we still have as a potential result of the Manhattan project the complete destruction of civilization on accident, I think that example actually reinforces the idea “long term planning leads to extreme fragility to negative consequences.” The examples you note are along the same lines.
That does meet the novelty criteria, but I think it still comes up short on the plausibility-of-global-domination front.
If China’s high GDP per person is due to Chinese people producing goods and services for other Chinese people, that leads to China dominating the Middle Kingdom, in which case good for them and no problem for anyone else.
If China’s high GDP per person comes from trade with the outside world, then how did it get there? China’s path to high-ish GDP comes from selling goods to foreigners cheaper than the Japanese do, which would seem to lock them in to a substantially lower GDP per capita than Japan. And a lower absolute GDP, because there are barely enough rich foreigners to buy the stuff it takes to keep Japan’s 127 million people as prosperous as they are.
@bugmaster
The utility of such efforts for general economic progress is, at best, extremely dubious. In the US, we made 8.4 million new cars in 1970 (significantly fewer than in 1969 or 71). They cost an average of $3500, which means that they cost about 30 billion dollars, which is about what the cost of the apollo program was in 1970 dollars. And the car industry did that every single year. Moonshots don’t make for economic growth, the slow grinding effort of capitalism does, and it can’t be centrally planned.
@John
If China develops its own industries for domestic consumption and trades less, as a percent of GDP, relative to now, I don’t see why the US wouldn’t still be concerned. If it had Japan levels of GDP per capita, it would regardless be an economic powerhouse and therefore, much stronger on the international stage than it is now.
Sort of, in the same sense that Russia’s opinion still matters a bit because they have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, a ton of oil, and nearly 200 million people.
But Russia is nothing compared to the Soviet Union, and even the mighty Soviet Union could only briefly compete with the combined West in a handful of fields. By the end of the Cold War the Soviets were greatly exceeded in practically every single category and the gap was widening quickly, enough that the Soviets had to implement major internal reforms that basically destroyed them.
Also, China’s comparative population advantage will shrink. China currently has 1.38 billion people to America’s .323 billion people. That’s 4:1. By 2050, China will be at appx. the same level, but the US will expand to .4 billion. And China will actually be older than the US at that time, and the numbers only look worse from there.
Here’s some food for thought: Japan and South Korea already top some innovation metrics, up there with the US. They have global companies like Toyota and Samsung. They also have much, much, much higher gross investment than the US (which is actually a laggard in investment). Nonetheless, this doesn’t show up in any of the GDP per hour stats….and yes, SK and Japan have impressive GDP per capita numbers, but that’s accomplished in part by working insane hours. If you look at PER HOUR productivity, South Korea is something like 40-50% of the US level, and Japan is something in the 60-70% range. The big Western European states like Germany and France and the UK are in the 90% range.
I also am not sure why we should automatically assume China will converge to SK and Japanese levels of prosperity, and not, say Malaysia. A relevant comparison might be between Southern Italy and Northern Italy, the former being a corrupt basket case, and the latter being a pretty productive section of the world economy, probably should be considered at least on par with, say, the Great Lakes region.
Doesn’t Japan have a big problem with people being incentivized to stay long hours at the office for appearances regardless of whether they’re doing anything?
Both the communist nations we were supposed to convert to democracies with our awesome markets are now ruled by strongmen with effective life-time terms.
Woooo, “End of History.”
I’m not highly concerned. I’m not Chinese. If anything I am raising P(US remains #1 superpower in my lifetime).
Nope. The reaction has been 99% virtue signalling
Signaling what virtue, to whom?
“Patriotism” and “whoever’s listening to the signaller at the time”
China is, and has been, a rather undemocratic system, and while I don’t like this, I see it as more of a step for things not improving than for things getting worse. My main worries about this are that I think the increased centralization of power increases the risk of a Chinese civil war; monarchistic and dictatorial systems are very vulnerable to civil conflict, and even if modern ones tend to prefer coups instead, it may only take one botched coup by a major faction for it to degenerate into outright warfare.
We have not, thus far, had any wars to the death fought by nuclear-armed powers, but it’s entirely possible (maybe 15% in the next twenty years?) we might get a serious war; it might even be something as brutal as the Russian Revolution or as the last Chinese civil war, and the prospect of one of those wars being fought by people some of whom possess nukes worries me very much.
Can anyone recommend me the best books which either (1) make consequentialist arguments for feminist policy prescriptions, in general or in particular areas, or (2) make arguments about the extent to which woman have been/are oppressed in a manner which is not overly leaden with non-consequentialist moral assertions?
Oh, and for what it’s worth Scott, I also have also “moved in progressive circles” for a long time and I constantly find people who either literally believe ‘racists are monsters’ or who see them as enemies that must be fought rather than human beings worth saving. So there’s some more evidence you can add to your data pile.
I’m looking to donate to efforts to cure aging.
What are the relevant organizations that would benefit from more money? I’m only really aware of SENS, and I can’t just outsource my choice to Givewell because IIRC they don’t look into moonshot projects.
(if any such organizations have a need for an IT engineer/programmer, that’d be nice to know too. I’d like to use my skills for something more worthwhile.)
The Brain Preservation Foundation (http://www.brainpreservation.org/how-you-can-help/) sounds like it fits your bill.
They don’t need money right now: they just need people to understand the arguments, and to talk to their friends about brain preservation.
Disclosure: I intern at the BPF
You didn’t specify in which species, so I thought I’d mention the Dog Aging Project (University of Washington).
I’m seeing two buttons now, and they both generate the “Cheatin’ uh?” message. Doesn’t seem to have worked.
I get that for one button, but the other one works..
same here
You probably need to log out and log back in.
Still seeing two buttons. At least one (ETA: both) of them worked when I tested it, but the report button worked after logging out and back in even before the change.
Update: wanted to report somebody this morning, and neither button worked (or at least provided feedback) until I logged out and back in. No “cheatin'” message, though.
I have some questions about changes in U.S. dating norms over the past sixty years or so.
The old rules, as I understood them, mostly as observer not participant, permitted a man or woman to play the field, date multiple partners. Eventually that was supposed to lead to going steady, which was exclusive, and from there to engagement and marriage. At the dating stage necking and petting were acceptable, intercourse might happen but would lower the status of the woman. It would not lower the status of the man–the traditional double standard. In theory, and sometimes in fact, intercourse was postponed until marriage, but became more likely and more acceptable as the relationship went from dating to going steady to being engaged. It was assumed that the limits on sexual behavior were set by the woman.
The new rules, as I understand them, are both more and less restrictive. Dating is now supposed to be exclusive. A woman who goes out with A then B then A is violating the norms unless it is very clear that the interaction with B couldn’t be seen as a date by either party. Intercourse on the first date is a norm violation that lowers the status of the woman. Intercourse by the third date is common but not required, intercourse within a few months almost certain, waiting until marriage seen as very odd behavior.
The first question is whether this account is accurate. The second is whether the double standard still exists in the new context, whether a man who has intercourse on the first date does or doesn’t lose status as a result and the related question of whether it is still assumed that it is the woman who sets the limits on how far sexual activities go.
And the final and most interesting question is the reasons for the change. In particular, is the increasing acceptability of intercourse at a relatively early stage in the relation responsible for the decreasing acceptability of playing the field, with dating taking on some of the traditional characteristics of marriage–just marriage with very easy divorce.
I don’t think this is true. I think some equivalent of “going steady” is still the norm, even if that exact term is anachronistic. The onus is on one or both individuals to specifically ask for/demand exclusivity. If that conversation hasn’t taken place, both parties are free to date others without being seen as defectors.
I think it varies more than most people realize. 😛
Often in fact varying between two people who are dating one another, with amusing effects (if you’re not one of the two people and you enjoy watching the misery of others).
Maybe in high school, college, small towns, and tight knitted subcultures. But among most adults in a contemporary urban environments this is now largely outdated. There are so many ways to meet strangers to date and/or hook up with, that a person’s friends, co-workers, etc. need only know as much about his sex life as he chooses to share. And those other people he chooses to tell mostly don’t care. If there’s an issue it’s almost invariably internal—people either do or don’t themselves end up feeling guilty/bad/slutty/whatever. Reputation (“status”) isn’t a big factor.
@And the final and most interesting question is the reason for the change.
George MacDonald Fraser (Quartered Safe Out Here or Lights Out at the Signpost, can’t recall which) thought people in the forties just didn’t think about sex as much as we do. They’d have said we are wildly oversexed by porn and advertising as well as just having men and women on the job together as a rule. If you work where it’s all guys, you just don’t see women as much. If she’s always at home doing all the work housework used to be, she won’t see so many men.
This is the kind of content I’d like to see more of on SSC.
To answer your first question, you’re off on several of your claims. The old division between dating and going steady still exists, just with new names and much more ambiguity. Sex generally happens before the third date, typically on the first date or even without a date at all (“Netflix and chill”).
Once you correct that, the second question becomes a lot clearer. The trend is towards atomization full stop. The connections we make are shallower and shorter lived as there’s rarely anything binding us together beyond “chemistry.” If you try to make stronger bonds the full social and legal apparatus of society is arrayed against you.
> there’s rarely anything binding us together beyond “chemistry.” If you try to make stronger bonds the full social and legal apparatus of society is arrayed against you.
I won’t say atomization isn’t increasing, but I think you’re overstating things? There are still steps above ‘chemistry’. The current relationship ladder, as I perceive it, goes dating -> cohabitating -> marriage -> children.
Maybe it would be better to think of it not as one rule set, but a couple different rule sets, and people signal which set they want to follow. Prudes find each other. Poly people find each other. Monogamous people find each other. “Monogamous” people find each other.
People seem to decreasingly find each other, though.
My experience is that a person is free to go on as many ‘dates’ (dinner and a movie, whatever) as they want with as many people as they want, but will eventually be accused of stringing the other person along. More often, after determining they’re an acceptable prospect, both parties will start to spend more and more casual time together. This is specifically alone since doing it with your friends is an imposition on them and doing it in public invites comment. This is when sex really becomes a first possibility. It is absolutely not acceptable to do this with multiple people at once (ie, two men in the same room) but you can do it with multiple people at once. (With a natural pressure on the fact you only have so much time and favoring anyone will lead to accusations of leading on the others.)
At some point, the two will start formally dating, and that is exclusive. The signs of this are showing them off to friends, appearing in public gatherings together, arriving and leaving together, saying they love each other, calling each other boyfriend-girlfriend, etc. This mostly happens either due to a jealousy threshold (demanding exclusivity) or a desire to make the relationship more formal and permanent, since otherwise, neither party has an obligation not to just drop the other. And the longer you are at this stage the more people will pressure you to leave it. The general sentiment is either that they’re incapable of locking the other person down (and so being used) or just stringing the other person along (and so using them), often determined by who is more attractive.
My experience is that people who disapprove of premarital sex disapprove of it in both genders. People who explicitly approve of premarital sex approve of it in both genders, with some exceptions. The two are at war with each other. The vast majority are in between. They divide sex into short flings (which largely require the person be unknown or distantly known) and long-term relationships. Flings with people close to you can happen only once before the group starts pressing for you to turn it into a long-term relationship. But otherwise mixing flings and relationships is generally considered faux pas. If it’s going from fling to relationship it’s known as catching feelings and is considered somewhat embarrassing. But this isn’t as bad as the other: using relationship signposts to get a lot of sex marks you as a user (ie, someone who uses people or leads them on) and people tend to really look down on that.
Flings, especially in excess, establish the person as libertine and sex-driven but is not a moral defect per se. I suppose I’d compare it most to drinking. Almost everyone can do it in moderation without much issue. Someone who likes it too much but stays under control gets teased and marked by certain people. Those who let it take over their life are looked down upon.
I can’t really comment on the change. I never experienced the old system and I was recently kicked out of the Secret Cabal of Young People to Make Specifically YOU Feel Old, so I can’t check their records.
>It is absolutely not acceptable to do this with multiple people at once but you can do it with multiple people at once.
what
Cutting out the explanative parenthesis does make it sound confusing, doesn’t it? I hope that with that explanation there it makes more sense: You cannot literally have two people in your room at the same time but you can have two people, separately, coming to your room at separate times in the same day, month, whatever.
It is absolutely not acceptable to do this with multiple people at once but you can do it with multiple people at once.
I think it means “No, you can’t ‘come back to my place for a coffee’ with both Bob and Bill at the same time in the same room all together, but you can if you have Bob over on Monday, Bill over on Tuesday, and Sam over on Wednesday, though eventually if your friend-group find out that the reason you can’t go out with the gang on Tuesday is not that you have to wash your hair, they will put pressure on you to decide between Bob, Bill and Sam and make the relationship more ‘Invite Bob along to go to the pub on Thursday’ and move it into the public ‘we’re going out together’ sphere”.
Correct. Apparently, I need to get a style guide.
There is huge confounding variable here that you are overlooking, which is age. US dating norms half a century ago were by and large the province of teenagers. Adults would “court” occasionally, but it was a much different affair, likely more similar to what you are describing as the modern model. The dating population now extends through every age demographic, so on the whole dating preferences of older adults trump the practices of the youth, which to a large extent were born out of the school environment with its large population of available partners.
It depends on whether you’re dating friends or strangers. If you’re dating friends, in my experience asking someone out is a signal that you’d like to have a committed relationship with them, which is generally monogamous. Sometimes you hook up with your friends several times (without going on a date) and then consider asking them out; hooking up can mean anything from makeouts to intercourse. If you’re dating strangers (usually, but not always, through online dating), then my understanding is that you are allowed to casually date multiple people at once, but I’ve never really dated strangers so I don’t know.
So, I don’t suppose the deleted post is going to show up at some less-than-fully-public URL or anything (making it a page rather than a post, like Douglas Knight mentions)? Because it was a really good response… 😛
Create a
pagerather than apost. You’ve done this before, like your mistakes and predictions pages. This will not show up linked from any human-readable page on the site, eg, not in the archive (but it is in the human-unreadable sitemap).Clocks that use the frequency of alternating current as a timer have been running slow in Europe, because Kosovo has stopped subsidizing electricity for the Serbian minority in Kosovo. The minority refuses to pay for their own electricity to a Kosovo utility, because they don’t want to recognize Kosovo’s independence. There was a 2015 agreement to create a Serbian utility company that the Serbian minority in Kosovo could pay to, but this company has not yet been created. Serbia and Kosovo are blaming each other for obstruction.
So now there is an electricity shortage in Kosovo. Because the power systems are linked in much of Western Europe, this impacts Poland, Portugal, The Netherlands, etc. Instead of 50 hertz, the current alternates at only 49.996 hertz. So some of my clocks are running slow now.
Is it worth it for the way the connection makes the world seem alive?
I mean, the way bitcoin seems to link interest rates to energy price rates is kinda terrifying, but also makes the world seem like a single organism where blood pressure affects metabolic rate affects mood affects… I mean, it just makes everything feel connected, you know? (I’m not a unitarian, I promise. I just don’t know how to point at what I’m pointing at, and suddenly am pointing at it, and hoping someone will understand what I am pointing at and give me a word for it.)
No. The world is not a single organism, it is a complex system with dependencies.
This event just underscores that maximizing dependency is not desirable.
That’s how I think about it also, actually–the world is not an organism, and I know that. And maximizing dependency should make us all think “cascading failures” somewhere not too far to the back of our heads.
Looking at my comment now, in a more jaded mindset, I was trying to point at a feeling that’s sometimes available when noticing how things are interconnected. The feeling is available to mostly everyone I think, but people get it different ways. Carl Sagan got it from noticing how petty the world’s arguments can look from outer space (a la “the pale blue dot”) and Henry Nilssen’s song “Think about your troubles” sometimes works pretty well on me.
So I think I was asking if the specific fact of your clock having fallen behind was, as a matter of inconvenience, outweighed by the neatness of finding yourself in possession of a story along the lines of shortages in Kosovo causing clock delays in Amsterdam, which is the sort of story that might carry this kind of feel. That seems like a stupid question, now, and one mainly aimed at finding emotional reassurance in precisely the kinds of events that ought to make us stop and think carefully. I’m still figuring out how to participate online without being an idiot, apparently.
This is the most persuasive argument for off-the-grid living I’ve yet encountered. Not for practical/rational reasons, just on an emotional level.
The basic conflict is that Marxism is an amoral philosophy while the social culture of progressivism is intensely moralizing. And today’s left puts adherence to the dominant social culture above anything else, so you get a lot of self-described socialists who have only a moral vocabulary.
Marxist iconography but liberal beliefs is the order of the day. See Jacobin and their recent Irving Howe turn.
I think you’re right. One thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of people who describe themselves as radicals or leftists but don’t really want much other than the cards of the liberalish, capitalist social order reshuffled: they want more CEOs who aren’t cishet white guys, or are swooning over the fact that capitalist Hollywood has realized that you can make more money by increasing representation, or they’re demanding stuff from the university that amounts to faculty and admin jobs for themselves. Stuff that really is liberal reformist incrementalist stuff, but that’s just not cool. You gotta at least sound like you want to burn the motherfucker down.
I mean what’s the signature “socialist” issue today? Single payer health insurance – which isn’t socialist. It’s just welfare state liberalism. A socialist alternative to our medical system is to nationalize the entire industry. Single payer just means that the government is pumping the most money into a legacy market system. Socialist systems destroy markets, not enter them.
I really don’t understand why people with social democratic views in the United states can’t just describe themselves as “social democratic” rather than “socialist.” Nobody seems to have this problem anywhere else.
Americans seem to insist on maximizing linguistic confusion. Also see: liberal.
France? What would you call le Parti socialiste if not social democratic?
Liberal/progressive/socdem are corny, toxic labels now, and if you say you’re one of those, they’re just gonna say you’re a socialist Marxist communist anyway. You can either deny it, like Obama, which makes you look like a liar, or you can just accept it, like Sanders, which makes people say “oh yea he’s a loon… but one of the only honest ones left”
The last several decades have proven Nixon’s madman theory to be true, at least for American domestic affairs. If you want any sort of change, you don’t gain anything by letting everyone know you’re not starting from an extreme position
I actually think they have this problem pretty much everywhere.
Toby Bartels gave the example of France. I would add UK and Spain.
(Ok, the UK Labour Party isn’t called “The Socialist Party”, but everybody calls Corbyn a socialist even though he’s basically a social-democrat.)
I dunno about those countries, but in The Netherlands, socialist is not considered a synonym for communist. The stereotypical example of a socialist IS a social-democrat.
They call themselves socialist to appropriate the label because the GOP and the libertarians already label welfare liberalism as socialism, duh. How is that not obvious???
American progressives don’t even need to point to Scandinavia to say “look, that’s what social democracy is” – which raises the counterargument “but Scandinavian countries are all high-trust because they consist of three people who know each other well, having to share body heat and all”. Just point at Canada and the NDP. They’re a more-or-less social democratic party in a geographically large, multiethnic society. They don’t always get what they want, in fact they usually don’t, but in some provinces they’re very strong provincially, and they serve to keep the Liberals from tacking too far to the right (since the left wing of the Liberal party would just go NDP). We’ve got some of the social programs that American progressives want and American conservatives think would break the bank. It all works OK.
A couple of questions about Canada:
1) Are you sure that Canada would have been able to afford its social programs without its highly restrictive immigration system?
2) If Canada is a better run country than the US why is emigration from Canada to the US much higher than vice versa?
1. Is our immigration system highly restrictive? We’ve got over double the relative legal immigration of the US. We’ve got a points system, sure. It’s relatively restrictive. But we take in more legal immigrants than the US, and have less immigration-related strife.
The major unfair, unearned advantage we have is geographic. The US can’t just steal our system. They’d have to figure out a way to deal with the fact that there’s a big border with a much poorer country, and significant demand within the US for cheap, exploitable labour – and deal with that fact in a humane way. Also deal with the fact that there’s a lot of people from south of the border in the US who are there due to nudge-nudge-wink-wink-look-the-other-way from both parties.
2. That’s usually attributed to “brain drain” – if you work in some fields, the job prospects are just better in the US. You might be more likely to get a job, you might be able to get a better job, or both.
There is a Chinese saying – “It’s easy to be a saint while sitting on a Tian Shan mountain. Much harder is to be a saint while sitting in the marketplace”. When the majority of your immigrants are highly educated people who pay more in taxes than the average native is not it a lot easier to be generous with the uneducated minority?
If the job prospects in the US are better for three times as many Canadians as for Americans in Canada (with similar ratios for the EU countries) could this indicate some advantage to the US economic system?
Certainly. The average legal immigrant to Canada, and we have far fewer illegal immigrants (geography again), is smarter, better educated, probably less prone to crime, etc, than the average Canadian. We’re one of the few net-immigration-destination countries where that’s the case.
Combined with the way that all 3 major parties have a decent ability to attract votes from immigrants/their kids, and a decent ability to attract votes from visible minorities (the Conservatives aren’t reliant on white votes to the degree the Republicans are), there’s less incentive for immigration to be treated as a political football, and less anti-immigrant sentiment. What anti-immigrant sentiment there is, is usually focused on refugees and asylum claimants (with the difference between the two often obfuscated, either through ignorance or intentionally) – because they don’t have to go through the points system.
Were I to be put in charge of the US immigration system, I’d move to a points system without changing the number of immigrants per year – points systems are often used by immigration restrictionists to try and smuggle in reductions in immigration. But illegal immigration would still be the biggest issue.
I presume part of it is economy of scale and the US’ central role: there’s 10x as many people in the US, and it’s the world’s dominant economic, cultural, etc power, so the top jobs in whatever field are mostly going to be there. Additionally, a lot more of the US than Canada isn’t frozen year-round so people can actually live there. But I don’t know the degree to which you can say this is because of the US’ system. Just as you can’t look at Canada’s favourable position with regard to immigration without noticing the geographic position, you can’t look at the US’ favourable position without noticing the effects of geography, history, etc. There’s probably nothing Canada could do to cause Wall Street or Hollywood to set up shop in Canada instead of New York or LA.
Seems a very good idea to me, but it does not seem to be politically feasible in the US.
Suppose we try to test your explanation empirically. If the size of economy and political dominance are the main factors behind the migration asymmetry, I would expect that the magnitude of the asymmetry will be inversely proportional to the size of the country.
I have taken the migration data for the 13 richest European countries from the Pew website (here is the link in case you are interested http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/02/28/global-migrant-stocks/?country=SG&date=2017) and compared it to the country size. The regression analysis shows that the migration asymmetry (the number of emigrants to the US divided by the number of immigrants from the US) actually increases with the population size (R~0.45). The largest asymmetry is found in Italy (6.2) and Germany (4.6). The smallest is in Switzerland (1).
So it seems to me that economic and political dominance does not explain the migration asymmetry. Neither, I believe, the difference in climate (while the US weather is an improvement over Canada’s, the climate in Europe is generally much more human-friendly).
I can’t really argue with your numbers, but there’s all sorts of factors that seem difficult to quantify. If considering, say, Switzerland – how does one consider that the disproportionate size of the Swiss banking industry is due to factors other than the number of Swiss people? How do we take language into account – which is important if we’re discussing “skilled” migrants?
Additionally, I was thinking cultural, rather than political, dominance. There’s a bit more than 4x as many Americans as Germans, but due to English being the default second language in much of the world, the US has a far greater impact on international culture – and so any industry involved in producing that culture is going to be an outsized draw to people looking to work in films or music or whatever. American universities are another big draw – most countries are lucky to have one or two universities in the top 30 or 50 or whatever; the US has many more than that.
In any case, in Canada, the issue is cast as brain drain. I have no idea whether that’s reality, or just the narrative decided on in the 90s.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you suggesting that most of 650.000 Germans came to the US to work in culture related industries?
The number of foreign researchers from Western Europe in the US is pretty small (most foreigners are Asians or Eastern Europeans). In any case the entire faculty of the top 50 US universities is under 100.000 people.
Isn’t it more plausible that most of the educated immigrants come to the US for greater opportunities provided by its “wild capitalism” which they don’t find in their own social-democratic countries?
No, but that there’s some fields the US really dominates. Let’s say you’re a German computer engineer – the best jobs available are liable to be in Silicon Valley. There’s a lot more cases of “you’re a German, and the best jobs in this are in the US” than vice versa.
I meant it merely as an example of one of the fields where there’s more jobs in the US. Does that faculty size include, say, graduate students?
That’s plausible. It might be one reason more jobs are available. On the other hand, the World Bank has Denmark ahead of the US on how easy it is to do business there, and the Scandinavian social democracies do better than Germany – at least stereotypically, they’re supposed to have stronger cradle-to-grave social welfare systems.
Regarding Canada, the US ranks well ahead in the rankings, but the actual difference on the 100-point scale the World Bank has used is a few points.
No, but I don’t think there are many grad students from Western Europe in the US. While the professors in top US universities get much higher wages than their European colleagues the same is not true of grad students.
Sure, but I don’t think the fact that Silicon Valley emerged in the US rather than in Germany or UK is purely an accident (just like it’s not an accident that Germany is ahead of the US in manufacturing sector). I suspect that with low taxes, the ease of firing employees (since most start-up fail) and the general fact that capitalism is not considered a bad word in the US have been major factors in creation of the US software companies.
Suppose an American conservative asks you the following question – “You say it all works OK in Canada. But Canada is not the US. If we implement social programs that American progressives want we’ll have to spend a lot more than you on helping the unskilled immigrants and their children (since we don’t have a country that can act as a buffer). Unlike Canada, high commodity prices would not help us fund the social programs so we’ll have to raise taxes. But if we raise taxes we’ll start losing immigrants like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin or even native born entrepreneurs to places like Switzerland and Singapore, thus further depleting our tax base. What makes you so sure it won’t break our bank?”
I don’t know what the numbers are, but grad students will follow the profs they want to learn from as much as they follow the best pay as a TA or whatever (it usually isn’t great). Anecdotally, the best universities in Canada (all public) don’t treat PhD students as well (monetarily, at least) as the best universities in the US (mostly private).
That all sounds plausible. I think you’re leaving out the role of the US military establishment in the founding of the tech sector, though – which can’t be laid at the door of capitalism in the same way. Similarly, the language factor is an issue: a computer programmer in India, where English is quite useful even within India alone (it’s often used for communication when two Indian languages aren’t mutually intelligible), is going to have better options in the US than Germany, the US industry is going to grow more due to more workers available, etc.
It would, indeed, be much harder to implement in the US than in Canada. However, Canada’s example shows that the outright horror stories won’t come to pass.
Google shows that there are currently about 10000 German students in the US or roughly 1.5 per cent of the total number of Germans in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/233880/international-students-in-the-us-by-country-of-origin/)
High military spending may have helped some tech enterprises, but, on the balance, should it not be an economic liability?
True. However, I don’t think it’s a decisive factor. UK and Canada have the same advantage (and plenty of Indian immigrants) but no comparable tech sectors.
Suppose someone suggests to you that Canada should drastically lower its taxes and drop most of its progressive policies because Singapore’s example shows that the outright horror stories won’t come to pass after that (in fact, Singapore has higher average income, lower poverty rate, higher literacy etc.). Would you be convinced by such an argument?
@WarOnReasons
It’s not military spending now that’s relevant, it’s things like ARPANET.
Canada has around 10% the population of the US, so it would be pretty remarkable if it had a comparable tech sector. To the extent that the comparison it makes sense, I think it probably does have 10% the tech sector, and probably more.
Canada and the US are a lot more similar than Canada and Singapore, but nevertheless some policies working in Singapore *does* show that they don’t inevitably lead to disaster.
On balance for the economy as a whole? Honestly, such questions are out of my wheelhouse, and those whose wheelhouse they are give different answers. But I’d be willing to bet that the beat-the-Reds US military money in computers and so on gave a real shot in the arm to the tech industry.
But smaller populations, less Cold War era government spending on tech, and without the historical happenstance that can contribute. I doubt there’s any one decisive factor. If I described Switzerland to you, would you think “now that sounds like a candidate for a disproportionate share of the foreign banking market” absent knowledge of the various historical reasons for Switzerland being a place foreigners like to put their money?
“Shows the outright horror stories won’t come to pass” is different from “think this is a good policy for the context.” Trying to just take Canada’s health care system would probably not work for the US. But a similar system, adapted, might work. My objections to saying “Canada should just adopt Singapore’s model” would be along the lines of pointing out that Canada is much geographically larger and less densely populated while Singapore is a city-state, that the base of Canada’s economy is different, etc, rather than “if Canada did that the rich would hunt people for sport” or whatever. Popular defences of the US health care system versus proposals for a single-payer or similar system tend to be emotive and exaggerated, rather than a simple “we’re a different country and we face different challenges”.
By way of analogy, “Canada should have the same relative military spending as the US” is a terrible proposal. We don’t need that military; we’re at most a regional player and in any full-on war we’d either be a) alongside the US, b) not involved, or c) screwed. But it’s not a terrible proposal because upping military spending would lead to a junta or mean we would have to abandon all other spending or whatever.
But just think. If you did have the same relative military spending as the US, you might be able to afford…
Amphibious Forces.
Perhaps, but I think 1960s era DOD funding is much less of a “shot in the arm” to, e.g. 21st century white tech industry professionals /wannabes relative to blacks, or to native-born Americans vs German grad students vs anyone else, or to the Bay Area tech industry vs that in any other city, or to anything else that anybody has been discussing in this or any other vaguely related thread.
@bean
“This defence policy paper is just shouting JUNO BEACH repeatedly…”
“Yes, and?”
EDIT: @John Schilling
OP to this subthread is Freddie asking what’s with the mix of liberal beliefs plus Marxist flavour, not the discussion of race, etc, which is going on at the same time. My point is that the American tech industry’s dominance may have something to do with that 60s era funding, which contributes to a Canadian techie being more likely to go to the US for a job than vice versa.
@ dndnrsn
I may be overestimating myself, but I suppose that if you told me that some country a) is a western-style democracy; b) has one of the lowest state income tax rates in the Western world; c) has bank secrecy protected by a special article of its constitution – then yes, I might have thought that it “sounds like a candidate for a disproportionate share of the foreign banking market”.
But were not the objections I raised essentially the same? I did not argue that tuition-free colleges would result in Khmer Rouge style of massacres, but rather that there are major differences between the US and Canada, just like there are major differences between Canada and Singapore. In the previous comments I listed several specific differences between the US and Canada that seem to make it financially impossible for the US to adopt Canadian progressive policies. If you can show me realistic solutions to these problems then I hope I would be open-minded enough to see that I was wrong. If you do not clearly see them yourself then consider the possibility that adopting Canada’s progressive policies may actually be harmful to the US.
Good point. But, naturally, less spending by Canada and Europe means that the US has to spend a few more percent of the GDP on its military rather than social programs.
Don’t be silly, bean, I’m pretty sure it was established in the last open thread that Canada has no coasts – that’s why they have to keep their Navy in US ports now.
And I’m skeptical of that point, given how thoroughly the US tech industry has moved from e.g. MIT to Silicon Valley, and how much of it has been offshored altogether. Do Canadian aerospace engineers mostly move to Germany or England or France to practice their trade, on account of the early and largely government-funded lead those countries once had in aircraft and rocket design?
@WarOnReasons
But without particular historical factors, they might not have come to have that bank secrecy, is my point.
I’m not saying your objections are wrong – but they’re more wonkish than some of the objections that have been popularized in the past. I don’t think the US as a whole could adopt a system like Canada’s on a national scale, in part for the reasons you listed. On a state-by-state level, I can see it working, but some states probably wouldn’t be able to make it work. But the reasons they wouldn’t be able to make it work are not “the US is a lower-trust, more-diverse society than the guys out on the fjords have.”
You’re right that there’s a tendency of various European countries plus Canada to fund their military to less than the NATO target due to the presence of the US. Personally, I think that Canada should start looking at ways to increase military spending – by many accounts, spending is too low and it causes problems for the military’s smooth functioning.
@John Schilling
Well, Germany’s rocket industry mostly moved to the US, didn’t it?
More seriously, wasn’t the Silicon Valley area also home to a whole bunch of American defence outfits?
I’m not saying this is a slam dunk, I’m merely speculating there are reasons other than the US being a bit more business-friendly than Canada for why it’s more of a destination for Canadian workers than vice versa.
@ dndnrsn
It would have been great for the US if each state could make such a decision for itself, but it seems politically impossible. Central authorities almost never willingly reduce their powers.
Not really. Lockheed-Martin has a fairly substantial facility in Sunnyvale, which is geographically nestled in between Google and Yahoo but doesn’t have much in the way of cultural or economic ties and mostly isn’t doing the software-and-electronics stuff that “Tech” mostly now means. There’s LLNL and LBNL, I suppose. And the proto-Tech industry stalwarts like Xerox and HP and IBM would sell their wares to the DoD but would not really be classified as “defense outfits”.
Possibly you are thinking of Southern California, where most of the big aerospace companies had their hubs once upon a time (and some still do).
Mostly, the DOD and DARPA funded a bunch of universities and traditional defense contractors to develop the underlying technology of “Tech”, with the biggest concentration of that effort being in the Boston area. Then a bunch of people saw the commercial potential and decided to work on that, and they coalesced someplace completely different. That happens to have been the San Francisco Bay Area, but I’m not seeing any defense-related reason for that.
Northrop Grumman’s got one too. Mostly naval stuff, I think. But again it’s not closely tied to Tech.
After WWII, Termin returned from the Rad Lab to Stanford. Knowing how important and lucrative radar had been during the war, he built up the EE department and brought in defense grants, then he developed a network of small defense contractors focused on radar.
That’s not really an obstacle. They can just keep the ships in US ports alongside their existing three frigates.
@WarOnReasons
Canadian provinces and American states have different levels of authority in different things relative to the federal government; I think on the whole Canadian provinces have a bit more autonomy. I’m not a lawyer – but I also think we don’t have anything quite like the whole weird “everything is interstate commerce if you squint” situation in the US.
@John Schilling
Ah, I stand corrected – I was misplacing some things. Thanks. I also suppose the hellmouth in Sunnyvale scares people away.
Maybe it’s just random chance, and then critical mass once you get to a certain point? Hollywood being in LA makes more sense – I’ve read that the local climate and geography is conducive in various ways to filmmaking, or was back in the day at least.
@bean
Excuse you, we have twelve frigates. And HMCS Oriole.
I’m not sure that Canadian provinces are more autonomous than US states, it’s just that the lines of federalism are drawn a bit differently. One clear difference to me is that Canada has a nationwide criminal code, only the federal government can amend it, and any provincial law of a criminal nature is necessarily unconstitutional. Contrast the US where both state and federal government have independent criminal-justice apparatuses. A federal crime is a federal crime nationwide, but most crimes fall under state jurisdiction, and even where there’s overlap the local police are enforcing state law, not federal law. So Colorado can make marijuana state-legal and it has a real impact even though it’s still banned under federal law; meanwhile, British Columbia can’t do anything about making marijuana legal, and if federal legalization passes Alberta can’t ban it again.
The hellmouth is nice this time of year. It’s warm; the malefic crimson glow contrasts nicely with cloudy skies; the rain makes a soft sizzling sound as it boils away on the brimstone, which does a pretty good job of drowning out the screams of the damned. It’s almost poetic.
@dndnrsn
That hellmouth got closed 15 years ago. I think the only one in the US today is in Cleveland.
Yes, but I was giving the strength in US units, not in metric.
That’s not terribly impressive compared to either our oldest ship or our sail training ship.
@BBA
That’s one of the places US states have more authority. I’d have to doublecheck, but I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of powers provinces have that states would like to have – I think, for example, Canadian provinces have significantly greater control over natural resources?
@bean
Come on, nothing is more luxurious than a yacht.
We have many amenities, thank you!
That’s… complicated. States have legal authority over resource extraction within their borders, but the western US, especially, has the odd feature of including a hell of a lot of federal land. Since the feds have title to that land, new resource extraction projects in the western states generally happen only when they feel like granting rights to it.
Single payer is a socialist change, it’s just that it’s nationalizing health insurance rather than the whole health industry. Having the government run all the groceries stores would be a socialist change, even if they were still getting the groceries from private producers.
Exhibit A, the “socialists” in the US just appropriate what ignorant laymen like Prof. Friedman call them.
@Multiheaded:
You are treating “socialist” as a binary category. I am not.
@multiheaded: Much as I may disagree with him, I wouldn’t call Prof. Friedman an “ignorant layman,” especially not on economic issues.
What you’re failing to understand is that 1.) ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ are both loaded terms that have several different meanings, many of which are nonetheless considered correct by the academic establishment, and 2.) capitalism (in the sense of private property rights and free-marketism) and socialism (in the sense of state and/or collective ownership over land, natural resources, the means of production, or some combination of the above) are not a boolean dichotomy, but rather exist on a spectrum.
Every modern nation-state is socialist to some degree. For that matter, every modern nation-state is also capitalist to some degree; even the Soviet Union had some semblance of a market. In one sense, you could use the term ‘socialist’ to refer exclusively to proponents of the most extreme form of total socialism. However, the term could also be used to refer to anyone who supports moving in a more socialist direction. I’ve seen some right-libertarians who’ve called Donald J. Trump a socialist for his protectionist trade policies and his staunch support for closed borders, and while that seems like a stretch to me, I do understand the sentiment.
Of course, I’ve also seen plenty of self-proclaimed socialists claim that Trump’s policies or Bernie’s policies or Hitler’s policies or Stalin’s policies go against the “spirit” of socialism, which is ostensibly based on equality for all men. But it makes a lot more sense to define ideologies in reference to actual tangible policy proposals, rather than by some vague immaterial philosophical ideal.
Of course, there is a real danger of conservatives or libertarians or liberal centrists referring to anyone they don’t like as a “socialist” if we’re using an overly broad definition of the term. But if we use too narrow of a definition, then ideologues can simply claim that only their specific (often untried and untested) brand of socialism can be considered “real” socialism.
Multiheaded is probably being sarcastic (note the juxtaposition of the the phrase “ignorant layman” with the title of Professor, that implies the opposite), I assume they favour a broader definition of socialist than is being proposed further upthread.
The most radical “Socialist” idea under serious discussion is a guaranteed minimum income, it’s not outright “workers seize the means of production”, but depending on it’s exact terms it could well amount to the same thing in practice.
If this is your definition of Socialism, then you are excluding the ideas of the men actually founded the European Socialist movement.
The early labor and co-operative movements were determined to place control of the means of production in the hands of the workers, and institute a system of industrial democracy. Their view was that the profits earned by capitalists were a form of exploitation that forced workers to turn over a portion of the fruits of their labor to a rent seeking class, thus depriving them of fair market compensation for their work. The predominant notion was that capitalism was a distortion of the free market caused by the unjust concentration of wealth in a small number of hands.
At any rate, the principle of Socialism, as understood by almost all Socialists before Lenin was that workers would directly control the means of production through some democratic process. This in no way precludes a market mechanism for brining supply and demand into equilibrium.
In fact It’s surprisingly hard to find any Socialist before the Bolshevik seizure of power who described their vision of society as one of centralized state economic planing. Certainly not Marx; who didn’t really describe it in any detail at all.
The state already regulates virtually every aspect of the “means of production.” Private entities “own” it in name only.
@Matt M
Do we have sit here and have a conversation where we both pretend that you really believe that?
Okay, if you insist.
In the United States today a business owner can (excluding some narrow exceptions dealing with discrimination against women, and some minorities, and some, truly pitiful protections for organized labor) hire and fire any employee he sees fit, for whatever reason he sees fit. He can conduct his business without consulting his employees, or any of their representatives about decisions that will radically impact their lives. He is under no legal obligation to provide them with health insurance, or pay them a living wage. If he has good enough accountants he can often pay little or no corporate tax.
Of course he can’t hire child labor, or dump toxic waste into public rivers, or pay his workers in credit at the company store. But I’m sure Paul Ryan will get around to writing these great moral injustices one of these days.
I don’t disagree with any of that specifically, but I think it proves me right, not you.
1. He can hire and fire “whoever he wants” except for the various categories of people the government says he must hire, and is not allowed to fire. And who controls the list of who these protected groups are? Not him, the state. They claim the right to dictate these terms, and to change them at any moment.
2. He can “conduct his business” without consulting his employees be he essentially has to consult the state, who controls what types of businesses he is and is not allowed to operate, when, where, etc. Once again, they claim the right to dictate all such terms and to change them at any moment. And he does have to deal with “their representatives.” Congress. (and the various armies of bureaucrats under their employ)
3. He is under no legal obligation to provide them with certain benefits. But he is under legal obligation to provide certain other benefits. Yet again, the state sets these terms unilaterally without his input. Subject to change at their whim. He is forced to provide unemployment insurance. He is forced to provide a minimum wage. Etc.
4. I’m aware of very few companies (aside from those who have been unprofitable for several years) who pay zero income tax. But even if true, those terms are, once again, set by Congress. They could eliminate all loopholes and institute a 99% corporate tax rate tomorrow, if they wanted to, and there’s nothing the “owner” of the business could do to stop them.
Business owners have about as much freedom as schoolchildren do during recess. “You can do whatever you want, at the time and place we select and so long as it doesn’t violate any of these 100 rules we set and that you have no say over.”
MAtt M–That’s somewhat persuasive, but I think it proves too much. If the only law was “Do not kill your employees” you would be able to say “Sure, I can do anything with my employees–except for those things that I can’t do, like kill them. And who decides what things I can’t do? The state. See, the state basically owns my company when they feel like it.”
Randy,
That’s a fair point and pushback. That said, I think “do not murder” falls under basic NAP stuff, and therefore is irrelevant to property rights discussion.
The state prohibits all sorts of voluntary actions corporations might want to engage in. That’s different entirely. Banning a below-minimum-wage employment contract is NOT the same thing as banning murder.
@hyperboloid wherever firing people is not easy, people are very reluctant to hire them. Don’t want to be stuck with a bad hire. In an industrial democracy that means 4 rounds of interviews with all kinds of elected commitees. But not necessarily easier hiring or more jobs.
I think what socialists don’t understand that transactions cannot be treated like crimes because people always have the option of not engaging in transactions. So if there is a minimum price of labor, minimum wage, you can decide to not hire, not grow the business. If there is an obstacle to fire, you, again, not hire, not grow.
This is entirely different from a crime like killing where there is no transaction.
But in transactional relationship, there is something the other party wants and it can always be denied. The worker wants to get hired. Maybe he does not want to get fired too easily, but if the price of that is not getting hired easily he may reconsider. He wants to work. Maybe he does not want to work for peanuts. But if minimum wages result in not getting a job at all, he may reconsider.
This tends to be the problem with this type of thinking.
To be honest, direct nationalization, instead of regulatory tinkering, avoids these transaction breaking traps. It introduces others, sure, but those are more complicated. But this kind of regulatory tinkering really ignores even the most basic questions “what if the other guy then does not want the transaction?”
It’s just center left politics for young people. Since you can’t sell them on the NYT consensus yet, because it’s boring and, even worse, a little conservative, you have to make it seem as these policies and opinions are actually radical and dangerous.
This kind of stuff really activates my almonds, because even though I am not a fan of the obvious dishonesty of the whole charade, I’d rather they don’t actually go ahead and start supporting actually radical and dangerous stuff.
It seems to me to be a sort of path-dependence thing, where people whose prime motivations were along democratic or social inclusion lines fit in best (or in some cases only) with the workers’ parties and socialist organisations. You therefore find people who identify with those organisations even in cases where they don’t care much about the economic underpinnings of the groups. History has brought people who care about minority rights and people who care about Marxism together, but I think it’s a mistake to think of them as one category.
edit – I also now recall that I once thought that controversial social issues such as gay marriage, abortion rights, race relations etc. might have risen more into prominence in recent times in some sense Because there has been movement on them in recent memory – while attempts at less inequality etc. have not gone far in the same time period. People see signs of success in those areas, success leads to effort leads to success. I’m not sure to what extent I still believe that, but it was a thought I had a couple of years ago worth mentioning.
When have Marxist movements ever not been moralizing?
Marx teaches us that the clash between social classes has nothing to do with the good or ill intent of either and emerges simply because of the underlying structural realities of capitalism.
And Calvinism teaches that you can’t be saved by good works. That doesn’t stop the moralizing. If anything, it seems to encourage it.
This is a strange and good point. Look at the far right. They literally believe various minorities are genetically bad and cannot choose not being bad and yet they are frothing.
Maybe our moral instincts don’t actually line up with the moral philosophy that only conscious decisions are morally culpable. I strongly suspect everybody, not only conservatives, shares Haidt’s disgust reaction. Consider calling a murderer “sick”. People mean it as a condemnation. But why would being sick be a moral judgement? It isn’t. But it can be pretty disgusting. QED.
The Calvinist can see the unsaved, the Marxist can see the rich as one sees a leper. Sure on a philosophical level it is not a moral fault to be the victim of an illness but GAAAH just get away from me die die die die omfg aggresive panic.
On the other hand when people emphasize choice and moral responsibility for our choices, they seem to be far less hostile to those who chose badly and do bad things. Mayor caught in a corruption scandal? Step down. And then OK. Maybe they don’t even insist on prison. Just step down and it is over.
Knowing it was a choice, knowing he COULD HAVE refused the bribe, i.e. he is not (disgustingly) entirely rotten but just made one immoral choice, makes him look human, almost sympathetic. People think well who knows if I could have resisted the temptation?
So our moral instincts seem to work exactly the other way around than our choice oriented philosophies. If I see you as someone who can still choose between good and evil then I see you as human, as someonelike like me, and that view generates empathy. If I see you as someone so “sick” that you cannot choose anything but evil, I will see you an abomination, not a human and have a strong disgust / kill it with fire reaction.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Putting aside questions about whether this characterization is accurate, if I think you’re genetically bad I’ll probably react about the same to you as if I think you’re simply choosing to be bad. Either way, I don’t want living near me/marrying my daughter.
Haidt has somewhat repudiated his stance on left wing purity.
This is plausible. The trouble is I can tell an equally plausible story, that the person who chooses to be evil must be violently purged/re-educated because he could do good and isn’t, and must at the very least made an example of. Someone who has no choice, by contrast, is someone to be pitied, not hated, because his fate is outside his control. Both moral instincts/stories are real, I think, but different ones activate in different times and circumstances. There’s probably an interesting book about what makes us we choose one narrative and when we choose the other.
I mean, there’s still very clearly a normative component? If you meant something stronger by “moralizing”, you might want to be clearer about it.
What’s never been clear to me is how to reconcile believing that individual Marxists have the power to effect change, with refraining from moralizing and instead ascribing everything to underlying structural realities.
Like, why would any Marxist make personal sacrifices for the cause, unless it’s in some sense the right thing to do?
I’m a welfare state liberal myself. Is there any value of ‘should’ available to you to say I “should” be a socialist?
This is a tension in Marx’s writing; early on, he starts out writing about “universal human emancipation” as a desirable thing, and how it might be achieved. From there he comes up with the idea of the proletariat as the “universal negative” – the people who can’t be freed without freeing everyone. The next step is the “science of history” claim – the idea that the future evolution of class relations is predetermined, according to the logic that Marx has understood.
You could, I suppose, describe the fundamental theory as amoral – there is a sense that people’s political engagement is going to be driven by their material circumstances. But that doesn’t describe the practice; the dry descriptive theory doesn’t offer any reason to help the proletariat gain power, or really take action at all.
I’d say the most useful way to handle Marx is to throw out the “science of history” as the garbage it is and use the rest of the analysis (which, imo, contains useful insights) in your preferred moral framework. But YMMV.
Musical trilogies!
Meaning, take an artist or band, and describe their sound as the mean (artistic center of mass) of three other artists/groups. These could be predecessors, stated influences, or neither ; they could be contemporaries, or could come from some other era. Bonus points for disparate and unexpected trilogies.
DVNE : Intronaut, Elder, Isis
Anna Burch : La Luz, Ladytron, The Cranberries
Metallica : Diamond Head, Motorhead, Thin Lizzy
Goldfrapp : Madonna, Justice, Zero 7
Deftones : The Cure, Meshuggah, Helmet
The Tragically Hip: The Rheostatics, Pearl Jam and The Rolling Stones
If you haven’t heard of the Hip before, I beseech you to check out their album Fully Completely, or Day For Night.
There should be a way to do this through machine learning, seeing as someone already did it for language:
https://www.robinsloan.com/voyages-in-sentence-space/
Metric: David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, the Sex Pistols
Sounds intriguing! Never heard of Metric, but looking them up now. 🙂
Soundgarden: Black Sabbath, the Beatles (esp. Harrison and Lennon-penned songs), Jimi Hendrix. (OK, not surprising.)
Alice in Chains: King’s X, Simon and Garfunkel, Heart.
Days of the New: Alice in Chains (esp. “Unplugged”), Metallica, Led Zeppelin
The Tea Party: Nine Inch Nails, The Doors, Led Zeppelin
Melvins: Black Sabbath, Tom Waits, northwest coast Native American drumming
Nails: Slayer, Napalm Death, Integrity
My Disco: Shellac, Wire, Battles
Frank Zappa: Bela Bartok, Ween, (modern jazz ensemble)
Convulsing: Ulcerate, Portal, A Million Dead Birds Laughing
Baroness: Mastodon, Isis, Torche
I don’t really have the musical general knowledge (or perhaps imagination is my failing) to contribute any of these, but I just want to say that I think this is a really fun idea and I’ve enjoyed reading the responses.
Jesus and Mary Chain: Beach Boys, Velvet Underground, and Ramones
Continuing the irregular series of puzzles, here’s one that’s slightly more numerical than logical.
The Cucumber Puzzle, or 28 Days Later
Having decided to record your cucumber-eating habits, you find that for the past 28 days you ate at least one cucumber every day. Altogether you consumed 42 cucumbers in those 28 days. Prove that there must be a *contiguous* interval of days during which you ate exactly 13 cucumbers (total in that interval, not every day).
Days are discrete and start/end at midnight. Every cucumber eaten belongs to exactly one day; no midnight snacks or any other tricks. In other words, it doesn’t matter *when* in the day any cucumber was eaten, just on what day. rot13.com your answer, remember to spell out numbers if necessary.
There is almost certainly a mathematically-elegant way to solve this, but :
Fgneg jvgu gur svefg guvegrra qnlf. Rnpu zhfg unir ng yrnfg bar phphzore, fb, vs abar bs gurz unf zber guna bar phphzore, gura gur svefg guvegrra qnlf jvyy or na vagreiny jvgu guvegrra phphzoref. Vs V nqq n phphzore gb gur svefg qnl, gura gur svefg gjryir qnlf jvyy unir guvegrra phphzoref vafgrnq. V pna xrrc nqqvat phphzoref, ohg gur vagreiny pna xrrc fuevaxvat.
Vs V nqq guvegrra phphzoref gb gur svefg qnl, gura gur guvegrra-phphzoref vagreiny jvyy ab ybatre pbagnva gur svefg qnl, ohg gura qnlf gjb guebhtu sbhegrra jvyy pbagnva guvegrra phphzoref.
Vs vafgrnq V nqq guvegrra phphzoref gb gur guvegrragu qnl, gura V pna srapr bss gur svefg guvegrra qnlf (rvgure gur svefg gjryir qnlf unir gjryir phphzoref, be gur svefg guvegrra qnlf unir sbhegrra). Nal yrff guna guvegrra jvyy crezvg n guvegrra-phphzore vagreiny jvguva gur svefg guvegrra qnlf.
Ohg vs V nqq guvegrra phphzoref gb gur guvegrragu qnl, gura qnlf sbhegrra guebhtu gjragl-rvtug pna pbagnva n guvegrra-phphzore vagreiny. Vs V pbhyq nqq guvegrra phphzoref gb bar bs qnlf fvkgrra guebhtu gjragl-rvtug, gura V pbhyq cerirag nal guvegrra-phphzore vagreiny. Ohg V qba’g unir rabhtu phphzoref. Rnpu qnl unf ng yrnfg bar phphzore fb gung vf gjragl-rvtug hfrq, naq gura V hfrq guvegrra ba qnl guvegrra, juvpu fhzf gb sbegl-bar. V bayl unir bar phphzore naq V arrq guvegrra.
Nygubhtu vg vf gehr gung vs lbh qb guvf nanylfvf bhg naq rknzvar rirel pnfr lbh’yy svaq gung gurer vf abg rabhtu phphzoref gb pnhfr ceboyrzf, V qba’g svaq guvf nanylfvf nal zber pbzcryyvat gura fnlvat “V purpxrq nyy gur pnfrf naq vg qbrfa’g jbex.”
V gubhtug bs n jnl gb rkcerff guvf zber trarenyyl :
q = gbgny qnlf (va guvf pnfr gjragl-rvtug)
p = phphzore vagreiny fhz (va guvf pnfr guvegrra)
r = gbgny phphzoref rngra (va guvf pnfr sbegl-gjb)
Vs r vf terngre guna (gjb gvzrf q zvahf p cyhf bar), gura gurer rkvfgf fbzr vagreiny pbagnvavat p phphzoref.
Va guvf pnfr, sbegl-gjb vf yrff guna (gjb gvzrf gjragl-rvtug zvahf guvegrra cyhf bar), fb gurer vf fbzr vagreiny pbagnvavat guvegrra phphzoref.
Yrg gur ahzore bs phphzoref pbafhzrq ba qnl v or qrabgrq ol p_v. Qrabgr gur ahzore bs phphzoref phzhyngvir pbafhzrq hc hagvy qnl v ol P_v. Gur ahzore bs phphzoref pbafhzrq ba qnlf {z, z+1, z+2, … a} vf abj tvira ol P_a-P_{z-1}. Fvapr jr pbafhzr sbegl-gjb phphzoref, rnpu P_v vf yrff guna be rdhny gb sbegl-gjb. Fvapr jr pbafhzr ng yrnfg bar phphzore cre qnl, rnpu P_v vf qvfgvapg.
Abj yrgf cvpx fbzr frgf hfvat Enmmzngnm zntvp (n grez jr hfrq va pbyyrtr gb ersre gb pyrireyl cvpxvat fbzrguvat bhg bs gur oyhr gb znxr n ceboyrz pbzr bhg evtug, anzrq nsgre n cebsrffbe jub jnf cnegvphyneyl tbbq ng vg). Bhe frgf jvyy or:
{bar, sbhegrra}, {gjb, svsgrra}, …, {guvegrra, gjragl-frira},
{gjragl-rvtug, sbegl-bar}, {gjragl-avar, sbegl-gjb},
{guvegl}, {guvegl-bar}, …, {guvegl-avar}, {sbegl}
Gurer ner guvegrra frgf va gur svefg ebj, gjb va gur frpbaq, naq ryrira va gur guveq sbe n gbgny bs gjragl-fvk frgf. Gur havba bs nyy gjragl-fvk frgf pbiref nyy cbffvoyr inyhrf bs P_v, fb rnpu P_v vf n qvfgvapg ahzore gung snyyf va bar bs gurfr frgf. Vs P_n naq P_o unccra gb snyy vafvqr gur fnzr frg, gura gur qvssrerapr bs gubfr jvyy or guvegrra, naq fb ba qnlf {n+1, n+2, …, o} rknpgyl guvegrra phphzoref jvyy or pbafhzrq. Gurer ner gjragl-rvtug qnlf, naq fb gjragl-rvtug inyhrf bs P_v. Gurersber ng yrnfg gjb jvyy snyy vagb gur fnzr frg, ol gur cvtrba-ubyr cevapvcyr.
Sbegl-gjb phphzore-rngvat riragf ner neenatrq nebhaq sbegl-bar vagreinyf bs gvzr. Fbzr pbagnva n zvqavtug, ohg arire gjb. Ab gjb zvqavtugf ner guvegrra vagreinyf ncneg. Neenatr gur vagreinyf va ebjf bs guvegrra, lvryqvat pbyhzaf bs guerr be sbhe. Ab gjb zvqavtugf ner nqwnprag jvguva n pbyhza. Rnpu pbyhza unf hc gb gjb zvqavtugf, sbe n gbgny znkvzhz bs gjragl-fvk zvqavtugf.
What counts as an “interval” ? Does one day count as an interval ? In any case, this answer is too simplistic and therefore is likely wrong, but still:
This strikes me as the start of an intuitively compelling analysis, but there is still some discussion missing regarding
Vf gurer na boivbhf fgengrtl sbe nyybpngvat gurz guhf? Boivbhfyl nal guvegrra-qnl vagreiny zhfg trg bar nqqrq gb vg (be gung vagreiny shysvyyf gur pbaqvgvbaf). Ohg whfg nqqvat bar qbrfa’g oernx nalguvat orpnhfr lbh pna whfg znxr gur vagreiny bar qnl fubegre gb znxr vg shysvyyvat.
V guvax lbh zhfg unir n inyhnoyr vaghvgvba, tvira ol gur bofreingvba gung gur nyybpngnoyr pneebgf ahzore sbhegrra, juvpu vf unys bs gjragl-rvtug naq bar zber guna guvegrra. Guvf zhfg or jul sbegl-gjb vf gur tenaq gbgny, naq yrnqf zr gb pbawrpgher gung sbegl-guerr jbhyq *abg* jbex. Ohg gur ynfg cneg bs gur nethzrag vf fgvyy unml sbe zr.
ETA: Duh. I now realize I’m not sure what I mean by
Qb V zrna gung jvgu sbegl-guerr (naq guhf svsgrra fhecyhf) lbh *pbhyq* cbvfba nyy cbffvoyr shysvyyvat vagreinyf? V pna’g fnl V frr bssunaq ubj.
Vf lbhe dhrfgvba nobhg “vagreiny”f ersreevat gb zl nafjre?
Na vagreiny vf n frg bs pbafrphgvir erny ahzoref. Phggvat na vasvavgr yvar gung ercerfragf gvzr jurerrire n phphzore jnf rngra yrnirf sbegl-bar svavgr cvrprf. Nyy vagreinyf zl nafjre gnyxf nobhg yvr va gung frg.
Yrg n(a) or gur phphzoreyngvir pbafhzcgvba shapgvba, v.r. gur gbgny ahzore bs phphzoref rngra ba qnlf 1, …, a vapyhfvir. (Ol pbairagvba n(0) = 0.) Pbafvqre gur sbyybjvat cnegvgvba bs gur frg { 0, …, 42 } ol gur erznvaqre zbq 13:
{ mreb, guvegrra, gjragl-fvk, guvegl-avar }
{ bar, sbhegrra, gjragl-frira, sbegl }
{ gjb, svsgrra, gjragl-rvtug, sbegl-bar }
{ guerr, fvkgrra, gjragl-avar, sbegl-gjb }
{ sbhe, friragrra, guvegl }
…
{ gjryir, gjragl-svir, guvegl-rvtug }
Gurer ner 13 fhpu frgf, naq 29 inyhrf bs n(a) gb qvfgevohgr nzbat gurz, fb ol cvtrbaubyr gurer vf fbzr frg va gur cnegvgvba pbagnvavat 3 inyhrf bs n(a). Ohg nal guerr fhpu inyhrf bs n(a), jurgure gurl pbzr sebz n guerr-ryrzrag frg be n 4-ryrzrag bar, jvyy pbagnva gjb gung qvssre ol 13.
That’s very elegant, and illuminates some other points.
Sbegl-gjb vfa’g fbzr zntvp fjrrg fcbg, fb zl rneyvre fcrphyngvba jnf jebat; lbhe cebbs jbexf jbexf rira vs svsgl-bar pneebgf jrer rngra, ol tvivat rnpu bs gur guvegrra frgf sbhe ryrzragf.
Va snpg, fvapr gur cvtrbaubyr cevapvcyr npghnyyl fubjf gung gurer zhfg or rvgure guerr frgf jvgu guerr bs gur inyhrf be ryfr ng yrnfg bar frg jvgu sbhe, vg npghnyyl rkgraqf nyy gur jnl hc gb svsgl-guerr pneebgf — lbhe zbqhyb frgf gura fgneg jvgu gjb svir-ryrzrag frgf:
{mreb, guvegrra, gjragl-fvk, guvegl-avar, svsgl-gjb}
{bar, sbhegrra, gjragl-frira, sbegl, svsgl-guerr}
Vs nal bs gurfr frgf unf sbhe bs gur pbhagf, gjb jvyy qvssre ol guvegrra, ohg vs guerr bs gurz unir guerr bs gur pbhagf, bar bs gurz zhfg or n sbhe-ryrzrag frg, va juvpu pnfr gjb jvyy qvssre ol guvegrra.
Gung’f n gvtug obhaq, naq fubjf hf ubj gb trg n pbhagrerknzcyr vs gurer ner svsgl-sbhe pneebgf: cvpx gur inyhrf va pbyhzaf bar, guerr, naq svir bs lbhe gnoyr, juvpu unf lbh rngvat bar n qnl sbe gjryir qnlf, gura sbhegrra va bar qnl, gura bar n qnl sbe gjryir qnlf, gura sbhegrra va bar qnl, gura bar n qnl sbe gjb qnlf.
Glad I could provide some clarity.
V jnf guvaxvat bs tbvat gur bccbfvgr qverpgvba: jvgu bayl guvegl-rvtug phphzoref, gurer ner guvegrra fhpu frgf, nyy bs fvmr guerr. Trggvat gjb va gur fnzr frg vf onq, hayrff lbh qba’g cvpx gur zvqqyr ryrzrag, fb gjragl-fvk qnlf jbhyq oernx vg (ng yrnfg bar frg lbh pbagnva nyy guerr bs), naq gjragl-svir vf qbnoyr va gur bar jnl gung’f cbffvoyr (cvpx gur gjb bhgfvqr ryrzragf bs rnpu frg, pbeerfcbaqvat gb rngvat bar phphzore sbe gjryir qnlf, gura sbhegrra, gura bar phphzore sbe gjryir qnlf ntnva).
Inspired by a recent Marginal Revolution post, I’ve been thinking about what traits can set a formerly dominant city into long term decline. So I’m curious, within the next 100 years, what currently cosmopolitan cities do you think will decline and lose their status? For me the defining feature of a cosmopolitan city is one where large numbers of people from outside the city’s home country want to move to a city or work there (just being a tourist destination for old buildings or nice museums doesn’t count). So here are a few of my guesses:
60%: San Francisco – the current tech boom seems to me less built around technology in general, but instead built around a current specific type of mindset and computers specifically. At some point, I would guess that some new type of economic growth engine will get started and I would further guess that a city that is specialized in the last boom would not be the place that rides the wave on the next boom (see Detroit).
70%: Dubai – The oil economy isn’t going to last forever and no matter how “liberal” a monarchy you’ve got set up I doubt people will really want to move to a desert with intolerant Wahhabis right next door. When the oil profits start tanking, my guess is Dubai will too.
65%: Hong Kong – Hong Kong is built on two things, relative social/economic freedom compared to China proper, and widespread knowledge of English. That first trait is already being eroded and within a few decades the 1997 handover agreement will no longer be a protection. At that point Hong Kong’s distinctiveness will drop significantly. But there is still some hope for the city for it’s widespread English knowledge.
More speculative picks:
Boston 30%: Someone finds an alternative to traditional formal education that catches on with employers. 400 years of banking on being formally educated down the drain.
London 10%: Brexit turns out way worse than anyone currently expects and Jeremy Corbyn (or someone like him) manages to destroy the finance industry.
Tokyo 1%: Godzilla turns out to be real.
I think you are too pessimistic about Hong Kong. Their natural harbour isn’t going away any time soon, and more importantly they have a very strong education system: look at the stats on page 8 here.
I would push back on that at two levels. First, education levels seem to be more of an indicator of past success than future growth. Most education is signaling so having an educated workforce is not the growth guarantee it’s often made out to be. Second, Hong Kong Harbor is already declining in importance compared to other nearby ports such as Shenzhen or Guangzhou. Indeed, total traffic in Hong Kong is down about 14% from it’s peak in 2008 even as other Chinese ports continue to rapidly grow. Hong Kong was not an important location before the British arrived there and set up shop. It became important not because it’s the objectively best place to have a port in the Pearl River delta, but because the British economic system put in place there was way more efficient for promoting economic growth than what the Qing, Republic of China, or Mao were offering. As China’s economic policies have become more growth friendly and Hong Kong is put under increasing pressure to stop being so distinct (and therefore a potential rallying point for organizing opposition to the regime), it loses the advantages it had.
It’s only saving graces I see are momentum and strong English skills, neither or which are guarantees of continued relevance.
I agree that the natural harbour isn’t the reason for Hong Kong’s success relative to Guangzhou, but it still provides a baseline: Guangzhou is arguably cosmopolitan itself already (since China is so big, intranational migration there is more like international in e.g. Europe) and would be more so if it had Hong Kong’s physical infrastructure. Even if the people of Hong Kong were suddenly replaced by those of Guangzhou, it wouldn’t just collapse.
You can say that education is just signalling, but people listen to signals and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
I think you’re dismissing “momentum” (in terms of having a strong financial services industry) too quickly. What else does e.g. London have going for it (except for strong English skills I guess)? In theory, there’s nothing to stop the City upping sticks and moving to somewhere else in the UK, but that would require a degree of coordination that won’t be available in practice (unless Brexit goes really badly). For Hong Kong, the PRC could potentially provide that coordination. But that would require a lot of effort on their part and if they end up in a position to do so they will probably have enough control over Hong Kong that they won’t want to.
Gunagzhou (traditionally Canton) is as good a port as Hong Kong, and serving a larger industrial market with better access to the Chinese interior. And the PRC has been developing the Shenzen port complex as an alternative to Hong Kong as well.
Hong Kong was a minor fishing port before the British Empire took over; its economic prosperity was due entirely to its privileged legal position as the best place to trade in Chinese goods or silver without losing all your stuff to nationalization or corruption. It will continue to prosper for maybe a generation or two after that relative privilege vanishes. Less if the PRC government wants to make a point that the privilege is gone.
ETA: Ninja’d by chris
Los Angeles isn’t a particularly good natural port either, and its original reason for becoming a good artificial one (the SoCal oil fields) no longer produces meaningfully. Development counts for a lot.
Right, that’s why it matters that Guangzhou is a larger industrial city with better transportation access than Hong Kong. The development is done. Hong Kong lost. All it’s got left, for another twenty-nine years, is the privileged legal system.
50%: Las Vegas – the only reason why it exists is that for half a century, Nevada was the only state where gambling was legal. Now that gambling is increasingly legal in the rest of the country (and the world) Vegas’s growth engine is sputtering, and it hasn’t diversified into any other industries of note.
I think that’s a good call. If anything I’d raise that percentage since similarly overly specialized entertainment towns (I’m looking at you Atlantic City) have met with similar fates.
I had it higher, but then realized that many of the new eastern casinos are owned by LV-based companies, so at least in the near term the city will remain a center of the industry even if the Strip resorts are a smaller piece of the pie. (Also, I’m not sure how “cosmopolitan” Vegas is to begin with. Atlantic City certainly never was.)
Atlantic City has been declining severely for many years. Vegas has held strong, so far. If anything I’d say that’s a good omen for its long-term chances.
Atlantic City has had longer to decline though, and is arguably better positioned for any sort of Renaissance, being both located in a prettier area, but closer to larger urban areas.
Nevada still has prostitution tho
Yes, but the state law prohibits prostitution in counties with over 700,000 people. Clark County (which contains Vegas) would have to lose 2/3 of its population before it would be able to legalize prostitution under current state law. That would be a pretty significant decline.
Legal prostitution in Nevada accounts for maybe 1% of the market due to the heavy restrictions placed on it. Unless they adopt a far more liberal legal regime it’s never going to amount to much more than a rounding error in the state’s prostitution industry, never mind the whole statewide economy.
Eh, it has basically diversified into general interest tourism/partying.
Gambling as a destination, in and of itself, is definitely dying, if not already dead. But I know tons of people who have gone to Vegas as a destination even though they have little to no interest in gambling.
Presumably anywhere else could take that mantle away and replicate it with enough effort, but nobody has yet.
Las Vegas is also heavily dependent on water that other locales would surely like for themselves.
“Every city that relies on Colorado water but isn’t Los Angeles” is a good candidate for medium-term decline
Nah. Given Californian urban water prices, desalination is basically inevitable for all the coastal cities – which will free up water.
Which leads to the obvious crazy idea: Desalination based water utility for the Urban Californian. Selling points: “No more rationing or guilt tripping! We are not cheaper, but we will not tell you to stop filling your pools or watering your garden. You pay, we supply.”
Given the political climate of California, this strikes me as entirely unwanted/not necessary. A bug, not a feature.
.. A: If that were so, there would be no pools or lawns there in the first place.
B: it is easily marketed as a green alternative, too, assuming you have enough sense to source your electricity demand carbon neutrally. (Which is doable. Cali also has cray-cray electricity costs, so running your own supply wont murder your margins.)
I readily agree. But as a poster mentioned, the Coastal CA cities can enact de salinization once the tech is widely applicable
I think Vegas has another thing going for it though: middle-class people leaving California, for various well-known reasons. People who maybe want a more established metro area, winters not too cold etc. I think this may keep Vegas viable for a while, although obviously , non-gaming employers have to move there as well.
I’d throw in both SF and Paris as ridiculously large, expensive, cramped, dirty, crime-ridden cities that seem to be increasingly run by people who wish to optimize everything for the interests of homeless drug-addicts/muslim refugees.
San Francisco isn’t going to die because the tech boom ends. It’ll die if people decide that it’s not worth paying thousands of dollars every month to share a room with three other people. At which point, some other city(or multiple cities) will be where the techies go.
Perhaps already underway…
Seems like the West Coast version of this
That’s not just SF. When I looked at using U-haul to move out of LA, it was basically the same price as hiring movers, and I would have had to pay for the gas. I went with the movers.
“nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded…”
I think that’s looking at it the wrong way. The Bay Area has become a world-class metro area in spite of dysfunctional housing policy. People are *still* moving there in spite of the costs. What that suggests is that the region’s natural advantages are very strong. It also means that there are relatively simple policy changes that can be made to boost growth further, which you can’t say about most of the other cities on the list.
They aren’t “natural” advantages. Not only are they man-made advantages, they’re relatively recent advantages largely dependent on network-effects.
“Natural” here wasn’t meant to mean literally coming from nature, it was in the sense of “innate.” Though the Bay Area does have pretty significant advantages from nature in its excellent weather, beautiful surroundings, and its harbor.
San Francisco’s success isn’t a recent phenomenon. The San Francisco Bay Area has either been the most important region on the West Coast, or #2 to LA, since shortly after the Gold Rush. And in spite of the tech boom, it’s still got a decently diversified economy with strengths in financial services, biotech, and tourism, with multiple world-class universities driving further innovation (Stanford, UCSF, UCB).
Wrong Species, that’s a big chicken and egg: the thousands of dollars rent for a shoebox is only feasible if the big tech jobs are there – if they go, then people can’t afford to live in SF at those rents, and the techies move away, which accelerates the big tech jobs moving away and rinse and repeat.
You are acting as though the rental prices are born out of a necessity. If the big tech jobs leave, then the rent prices will just shift downwards until they reach a new equilibrium. (The downward shift will be somewhat attenuated by a contraction of supply, as a number of previously rentable “apartments” will go back to being sheds and storage closets.)
American Alpha Cities:
NYC
San Francisco
Washington
Chicago
Los Angeles
American Beta Cities:
Boston
Atlanta
Dallas
Houston
Philly
Minneapolis
Seattle
Denver
San Diego
St. Louis
Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh are adjacent cities not far away from this list.
Within the Alpha-class ranks, I’d suggest SF and Chicago are the most vulnerable. SF has a substantially smaller total GDP than several other American clusters: they seem to be hitting above their weight-class thanks to the tech sector. But them hitting above their weight class means that they have a lot of opportunity for reversion to the mean. I guess their saving grace is that they have the opportunity to hoover up a lot of other West coast companies still, like from Seattle and Portland. Portland and Seattle are both national cities, but they aren’t GLOBAL cities, and their regions produce a lot less output than the area around SF.
Chicago has the problem of crappy Illinois finances, but it also has the problem of being in a competitive area. The whole Great Lakes region functions as a sort of Mega-City, which puts Chicago in competition with other cities, particularly Toronto. But Chicago is still a global city, so you can still have a lot of companies sourcing INTO Chicago from the surrounding area. Like maybe Express Scripts and AB can move in from St. Louis. That’s not at all impossible to imagine.
Denver and Houston seem like possible at-risk candidates, and then you have the continuing slide of places like Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit.
I’d like to say LA, because screw California, but I don’t see its global prominence diminishing any time soon, unless California suddenly decides to do something weird and ban all manufacturing or something.
SF has a really dysfunctional culture around housing and transit. It could well choke on blocked growth or mishandled growth. We are already seeing spillover in the tech area to nearby centers, particularly Seattle, which is no slouch, with both Amazon and Microsoft.
Yeah, that’s my concern. Like, it’s already smaller than some other US areas, it cannot grow very well, so it needs efficiency out of the people already there, which seems like a chancey game.
It’s especially at-risk compared to NYC, LA, and DC, IMO, which are going to stay around for a hell of a long time.
Don’t be fooled by the hype. Seattle is nothing like the Bay Area.
The first big thing is that non-compete agreements are binding in Washington state, whereas they aren’t in California. So if you want to go from a big company to a startup in Washington, you probably can’t because your noncompete (unless the startup is in California, which does not honor non-compete agreements.)
Traffic in Seattle sucks. People I have talked to say that it is worse than the Bay Area. The problem is that Seattle has an isthmus-like geography and a concentration of jobs in the city proper.
Maybe you can get around this by living downtown and walking. But then you have to deal with the fact that it rains all the time.
One area where Washington is slightly better is in taxes. California has a state-wide income tax, whereas Washington does not.
I’d be more concerned of Seattle jobs going to SF than the other way around. SF is a global city, and Seattle is not.
SF’s problem is that it cannot get as big as NYC or LA or Houston or Chicago, so it needs to punch above weight to stay in that class. SF isn’t even top 10 in terms of population.
Why couldn’t SF, or at least greater SF, grow as big as any of those cities? NIMBYs aren’t some immutable fact of the universe they are a pernicious political obstacle that it is possible, though by no means easy, to overcome.
Neither earthquakes nor the geometry of the Bay are insurmountable problems. That said, I don’t know what the elevation and flooding situation is like. That could be a serious and near impossible to fix problem going forward. But Houston and NYC have similar long term issues.
Part of this is just games with subdivision though, isn’t it?
Don’t focus on cities and focus on “metro areas” and SF has room to expand just the same as Houston does. Houston is a big city mainly because its geographic borders reach pretty wide and encompass a lot of suburbs in a way that isn’t true of SF (or Boston, for example).
The populated parts of the Bay are almost all coastal plain except for San Francisco itself, and often infill, but it doesn’t flood very badly because of its geography. The only major river it connects to is the Sacramento, which is kind of a footnote: its floodplains are all further upstream. There is potential for minor flooding along creeks or culverted watercourses but nothing like Houston or the cities along the Mississippi.
That got stress-tested last year, in fact, when after a long drought the state got hit by a hundred-year storm. The Oroville Dam almost failed but the Bay was left largely intact.
Good point, the broader SF CMSA is #5 on the population list, at least going off the Wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
I’d agree that San Francisco is vulnerable, because Silicon Valley is not so much a place as a state of mind (man). That is, it’s not tied to that location because they need a sea port or the coal from the nearby mines or what have you like traditional manufacturing. The main reason to be there is because “that’s where everyone else is, and the venture capital money for my start-up to create wedding dresses for cats that can be downloaded off our website and 3-D printed”, but if MegaHugeBigCorp decides to move to a
secret volcano basenew location where the local government is willing to grant them every concession they want (not just tax breaks) in exchange for having a big employer, then where one goes, others may follow.If you made Dogpatch really attractive and the big fish started moving there (or even the hot new lean young pretenders who are going to be the next big fish), then it would be easier than it is assumed to be to slowly drain all the cutting-edge away from San Francisco, which might then be just as stuck due to its dependence on Big Tech as Detroit was by being Motor City.
Largely true. But there’s an argument that that mindset is enabled by California’s legal environment, which while horrible in a lot of ways does get some things right for a place like Silicon Valley, e.g. by having relatively weak non-compete protections.
I don’t know how unique this is, though, or really how important.
Disagree with your assessment of SF, Deiseach. I work at a building where all of the actual manufacturing plants for the company are in other states/countries (because the associated plant in the area closed down years ago). Logistically, it’s very inefficient for this building to remain open instead of getting moved to where the plants are.
The reason this building stays open is that a significant number of senior management live in the area, have lived in the area for decades, and don’t want to move. They certainly have the money to ride out SF housing issues (hell, they’re probably counting on it for a nice big retirement payday.)
The execs will continue to live where they think the quality of life is desirable, and sucks for the peasant employees who can’t afford the area. (See also that Disney World employee who was homeless and died recently.) And so that venture capitalist money will stay right where it is.
Basically, SF’s weather and unique capability to take daytrips to both super urban and super hiking contrasts with cities like NYC/Houston/LA/Vegas, where you have to spend continuous money on A/C a significant portion of the year, and navigating between urban/suburb/rural attractions takes precious hours.
The availability of pop culture means a lot to residents! There are certain cities in rural states that are host to increasing numbers of manufacturing plants, due to the every concession/tax break they get from the local government you mentioned, but employees at those places will choose a 4-hours-1-way commute in order to live at the nearest big city, because there’s Nothing To Do in the city where they work. (And education for the kiddies is also crap, which plays a large role in where the middle class chooses to move.)
Detroit’s already declined. In fact, it used to be the undisputed titleholder in the category “most well-known post-apocalyptic urban hellhole in the US” until _The Wire_ and Freddy Grey put Baltimore back in the running (My home state has Camden, unofficial motto “Worse than Detroit”, but it’s too small to count). Pittsburgh, like New York, is a city that already decline and climbed back out of the hole (Detroit, to be fair, is trying, but it’s got a lot more room to go up than down, as there are still packs of feral dogs roaming the streets).
Was Cleveland ever dominant? I thought it was only known for river fires.
Of the Alpha class cities you listed, DC isn’t going anywhere as long as the US government is there (that’s all that got it through the ’80s). New York is ascendant. Los Angeles and Chicago seem pretty resilient. San Francisco seems the most likely to fall; it’s a tiny little city punching well above its weight.
We have many amenities, thank you!
Realistically, St. Louis doesn’t belong on this list, although it does have an interesting decline story. It rose to be the fourth largest US city as the dominant city of the Mississippi and Missouri river trade network, and for several decades functioned as “the city” for a huge slice of the American West. But even before it peaked the railroad connections to Chicago and beyond it the eastern seaboard were taking away the fundamental source of its strength, and it started sliding by the early 20th century.
There’s an interesting question of whether it can have the sort of renaissance other similar cities have had. A lot of the ingredients seem to be there, but nothing’s caught fire yet for reasons that are hard to pinpoint; the unusually fragmented municipal map and city-county divide are candidates, but not clear why they should have quite such a powerful impact.
London is in bad shape. It’s hard to see how the finance industry can survive the next 10 years in London without shrinking substantially. As The Economist writes:
With regard to the political situation, I would put the chance that Jeremy Corbyn or someone like him comes into power in the next 10 years at more than 90% at this point. JC is not going to be friendly to any of the things that London is good at (except maybe foreign oligarchs parking their money there), so the future looks bleak.
I’d go with: Frankfurt, Cape Town, Delhi, Calcutta, Rome, Istanbul.
None of these is currently a first-rank city (some used to), but they’ll sink even lower for reasons of economic, political, and demographic change — and possibly due to war.
Also, London and Singapore, currently world-class cities, will lose some of their preeminence, for similar reasons.
Confidence: 80% for each, individually.
For everyone discussing San Francisco: are you talking about the City of San Francisco by itself or the Bay Area in general? Because if the latter I’m not sure its “punching above its weight” based on population size — the Nine-County region (which seems to match the modal usage of Bay Area) is 7.6 million, bigger than Great Houstons 6.5 million. The most restrictive group I would accept for “Silicon Valley” would include San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda Counties, which is 5.1 million people.
I mean the City of San Francisco itself. Silicon Valley is traditionally only South Bay, whether you accept that or not.
Common causes of cities becoming less cosmopolitan: war, climate change (usually desertification), loss of imperial dominance, shifting trade routes (due to changes in trade destinations, regulatory environment, or transport technology – I’ve visited towns that were major centers in the steamboat age but declined when the railroads came), or a dominant industry losing competitiveness (the Rust Belt and manufacturing towns in northern England are both good examples).
Frankly, my read is that on a hundred-year timescale it’s harder to find cities with upside than downside; that’s far enough that we could see China supplant the US and then get supplanted, and long enough for any sea level rise to start to kick in. (Note: For these purposes it doesn’t matter whether climate change is anthropogenic, only that it happens.)
Particular downside:
Phoenix, Tuscon, Vegas, Reno: Inland Western US cities that are very vulnerable to water supply issues.
Washington DC: On a hundred-year timeframe I’d be very surprised to see the US remain the leading world power. That’s not a death knell for DC – London survived the fall of the British Empire
New Orleans, Venice, Miami: Obvious risk candidates if any sea level rise occurs at all. For New Orleans/Miami add “major hurricane strike causes too much damage to bother rebuilding and the city is abandoned” risk. (Arguably in New Orleans’s case this has already happened.)
Johannesburg: Genocide warning.
Taipei: “The US managing to protect us for a hundred years is unlikely, and when that ends we’re getting invaded by China” warning.
Silicon Valley in its entirety: Obvious candidate for the next Rust Belt. (Amusingly, San Fran might be in better shape than most of the Valley – they at least have a deepwater harbor to fall back on, though IIRC they foisted most of that off on Oakland. Cities like San Jose are at more risk.)
Dubai, Riyadh: Yeah, chalk up another pick for “the oil’s going to run out, and when they do these cities are screwed”. (To quote a phrase I’ve heard attributed to Saudi Arabia: “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies an airplane. His son will ride a camel.”)
(Won’t argue with Hong Kong being likely to eat losses to due a shift in trade routes/regulatory enviroment, either. Also, Tokyo should be at higher risk, mostly due to the possibility of Chinese economic or military offensives. China still hasn’t forgotten Nanking, after all.)
I agree with the second point. I think climate change is in large part anthropogenic, but whether it is is less important than what its implications are.
But the high end of the IPCC high emission scenario for the end of the century is only about a meter of sea level rise. With a century to do it in, raising dikes by a meter shouldn’t be a big problem. It’s possible that it won’t happen, due to the sort of incompetence that let the New Orleans dikes fail, but that doesn’t seem like the way to bet.
New Orleans also has to worry about the Mississippi River changing course, which it probably would have done back in the 80’s if not for the Old River Control Structure.
It doesn’t seem imminent or anything, but it’s a concern.
@New Orleans also has to worry about the Mississippi River changing course-
We could gouge the central channel fifty feet deeper two hundred feet wide if we had to. And sticking telephone poles into a break in the levee and packing sandbags around them is a well-established technology. We’ll have problems with areas that used to be flooded sinking as they slowly dry, but we could fix that with scattered ponds.
The problem, if I correctly understand the explanation my geologist wife gave me back when we lived in New Orleans, isn’t ultimately the depth of the river channel. It’s that as the delta builds out the slope gets lower and lower, which normally results in the mouth of the delta shifting to find a steeper outlet. That’s what the Corps of Engineers has been fighting for decades.
One result is that the delta is now so long that the sediment from the Mississippi is being dumped off the edge of the continental shelf so doesn’t wash back to balance the gradual subsidence due to the overburden of past sediment, with the result that the coastline is moving gradually north. On the other hand, if the Corps ever loses it’s fight, and it has come close before, the end of the river switches to the Atchafalaya, Morgan City is under water, and New Orleans is no longer a river port.
Any geologists reading this, including my wife if she does, are welcome to correct any errors in my account. I once had ideas for a computer game to be called “The Corps vs Mother Nature.”
@Any geologists reading this are free to correct errors-
Goes double for me, but ‘the delta is so long that the sediment from the Mississippi is being dumped off the edge of the continental shelf’ rhymes with ‘we could gouge the central channel deep enough to get a steep slope’. Too bad we lose sediment.
Aha. So the key is to gouge out a channel and truck it back up to Minneapolis!
@So the key is to gouge out a channel and truck it back up to Minneapolis!
I like how you think. Had we but world enough and time, I’d like us to gouge a deep channel through the delta, build an underwater dam (or series of dams) at the end of the delta, top of the dam a hundred feet underwater, and tube a slurry of sediment to bolster the Louisiana coast. I leave financing the dam thing as an exercise for the financially competent reader.
The budgetary cost of the real world equivalent is negative. Just stop engaging in expensive engineering projects to keep the Mississippi from shifting its mouth, as it has been trying to do for a very long time. The sediment gets dumped into shallow water and the coastline stops moving north.
Of course, Morgen City is now under water and New Orleans is no longer a river port, but you can’t make an omelette without …
@Just stop building expensive engineering projects-
This coyness, David Friedman, were no crime, except that letting the Mississippi go where it wants is wildly expensive too- it would go back to multiple swamped-out switchbacks and no navigable channel if we let it. Dredging is an old, well-understood technology. Not that I understand it. I didn’t realize the delta reached the edge of the continental shelf until you said.
Which is why I wrote:
(asterisks added for emphasis)
@Which is why I wrote: the ‘budgetary’ cost is negative-
My vegetable brain is running slow.
It’s a long poem–are you planning to use all of it in this thread, or spread it over several?
What are the best resources for someone with no university affiliation but who wants to read medical studies? Specifically on complex regional pain syndrome.
Also, if I were to try a mirror box like the kind that are used to treat phantom limb syndrome I’m guessing it wouldn’t work. But is there a downside to trying? (The pain is in a left hand that has been disabled from childhood.) I can’t imagine that kind of therapy poses any risk even if it’s almost certain to be useless, but I thought I’d check here before trying it.
Depending on what your first question means, either google scholar or scihub
Start by reading what the best doctors in the field have to say. Normally you’ll be able to find an overview book targetted at a general audience. For example, for RSI, Dr. Pascarelli’s “Guide to Repetitve Strain Injury” helped me recover from RSI.
A word of caution. There is so much misinformation about medical conditions out there, especially on the internet. At this point, in fact, I basically default to assuming anything I read about medicine or nutrition on the internet is complete bullshit (unless it’s on this blog, of course 🙂 ) This is a case where you want to look for those medical credentials, and exercise some common sense.
Once you know the fundamentals, you can consider reading the research literature. Although, it can be very difficult to correctly interpret.
Some public libraries provide journal access, and some universities sell library access to non-students (my local state university does this and has discounts for certain employers).
Thanks all. There’s a college library near me so I’ll see if they sell access to journals. And yeah, I’m worried about either getting misinformation or my misinterpreting a paper I’ve read. I’ll do my best to run everything by doctors (including the mirror box) before trying anything.
GitHub?
i was going to suggest github gists, yeah. they’re fairly out of the way while still being a service which will definitely be there tomorrow, and there’s a convenient enough interface for just typing in some bare text.
I use gists for this too. I’d be kind of surprised if Scott had a github account, though.
If you have something you think of as “articles” for public perusal, blogspot.com works fine. If you have something more like “documents”, some of which should be available to the public, though not presented directly, Google Drive or dropbox.com should work. Both of them should make it possible to make documents globally visible.
Evernote also works for hosting documents. I use it for certain things, but I have pretty mixed feelings about it, to be honest.
I recommend Stephan Jay Gould together with Richard Dawkins’ books (they even have a discussion/discourse along several books countering each other’s arguments)
Gould has a bit of a dismal reputation in these circles, for extremely intellectually dishonest behavior. See the LessWrong post ‘Beware Stephen Jay Gould’.
Something of a tl;dr, quoting from The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (page 11):
Don’t know the details behind 3). But the fact that it needs to be said is not a good sign for the future of civilization…
Crossposting from the subreddit.
What’s your crazy idea?
Consider this a judgement-free zone to post half-formed, long shot ideas you’ve been reluctant to share with anyone.
Get permission from whoever holds the copyright to SR3 to clean the system up.
Shadowrun 3rd Edition, or a different SR3?
Yes.
You are an anon of impeccable taste, sir.
@Zorgon
Thanks. Haven’t actually played the game for years, due to that gaming group sort of fracturing. 🙁
Godspeed to you, chummer !
Create a really awesome utility for Battletech that incorporates all the rulebooks, obsoletes all the various unit creation tools and campaign support applications, and otherwise makes playing and theorycrafting the game easy and fun. And then monetize it. (The creators are apparently looking for some things in this category, which is why monetizing someone else’s game is at all conceivable, but if all goes well I’ll be making it much bigger and better than they’re expecting).
Note that this is primarily crazy because I’m not a particularly good coder, and I already have a full-time job. So, if you know any good guides for getting into serious semi-professional coding(specifically, using C#/Visual Studio/SQLite as my primary languages/tools), that’d be awesome.
For what you want to do, C is the wrong tool. Java for maximum portability, and reasonably accessible difficulty is probably the way to go.
He said “C#”, not “C”; but I agree, C# might be the wrong tool for this (though not as wrong as C). Java would indeed be better; Python would be better still; in fact, I’d recommend using Python/Javascript/AWS as your platform for a Web app, not Java as a thick client.
Java is one that’s been used for a lot of these utilities, but it requires installing a whole Java environment to make it work, and it’s not easily moved onto some OSes(iOS in particular), as I understand it. It’s not terribly well-regarded by the community. Similarly, I want to avoid web apps, because they’re both far too prone to dying, and I find them deeply irritating to sue(if only because I spend a lot of my phone-using time on the subway)
I wanted to stick to something that was easier to make into a standalone program, and C# is a language I have some recent experience with, as well as being well-supported. It might not be optimal, but it should at least be a decent starting point I think.
Java on iOS
Is the deployment story for .net on iOS really better than for the jvm?
Does the .NET deployment story for iOS even exist, outside of Mono and .NET Core ?
Build a “hard scifi” 4X space strategy game at absolutely absurd, flat-out ludicrous levels of simulation fidelity. Aurora x 10,000. I’m talking full Einsteinian mechanics running at a granularity measured in fractions of a second. And make it multiplayer.
Team up with Walmsley. 😉
He’s said a million times he’s making it for him and no-one else. I’d rather team up with bean 🙂
The Codex Astartes supports this action.
Bean is definitely interested in this plan. I’m not a programmer, but I have a lot of background information you’d need to make it work, and I’m a good researcher.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t doing so require a computer the size of the Universe, because essentially you’re trying to emulate the entire Universe ? 🙂
Yeah, I know the prompt was “crazy ideas”, but it really seems like if you have the capability to do this, it would have many practical applications that would make you rich.
Well, giving it some more thought than the “pie in the sky” 2 second original…
A project like this would have a number of specific goals which I can see settling out like this:
– Game Level. Produce the ULTIMATE NERD TOY.
– Maths Level. Figure out how to leverage the gloriously wide range of simulation maths out there.
– Systems Design Level. See just how completely batshit insane you can make the scale and granularity and still keep the thing processing at a reasonable rate.
There’s potential for applying more recent paradigms like Data-Oriented Design and also offload a ton of calculation work to GPUs. I’d be particularly amused by the idea of needing a latest-gen machine just to play a game which is like 99.9% spreadsheets (and that one 3D starfield we all make in our first 3D graphics classes).
@Zorgon — That sounds an awful lot like Dwarf Fortress.
Fractions of a second is doable at planetary distances. Light speed helps a lot to localize changes, which is probably why it was implemented in our
simuuniverse.It all depends on what people would be able to build. Chunks of matter flying around has already been done. Building a ion engine from scratch and expecting it to create thrust… not so much.
As long as we’re asking for miracles 😋 space 4x strategy game where the ship customization/building/retrofitting is fun and rewarding instead of suicidal tedium
I’m not sure that’s compatible with realism. Well, at least if you’re not me. I enjoy shipbuilding in Aurora, but I’m deeply weird.
I’ve never heard of Aurora. I just googled it and saw the descriptor “Like Dwarf Fortress as a 4X.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever play it, but that’s a great way to get my attention. How would your review read?
I’ve only played a bit of Dwarf Fortress, but I’m a long-time Aurora fan. It’s like DF in that it’s massive and complex and detailed. It’s unlike DF in that it’s less perverse. You’ll write off your first game or two due to bad choices (and you aren’t a real player until you’ve accidentally bombarded a planet), but it’s not a constant struggle to keep everything working, at least to the same degree. (That may just be me being inexperienced in DF, though.)
I, also, am intrigued by this “Aurora.”
Master of orion 2 had that!
You of course meant to say “Master of Orion 1” :p
Sure it didn’t have retrofitting, but the customization is just deep enough that you’re not certain you’ve built a good ship until you see it fight, and the six class limit imposes some surprisingly realistic tradeoffs around specialization and obsolescence cycle length. These things together mean you can get a real attachment to a class that turns out well.
I suppose MOO 2’s lack of stacking is a plus for the Navy fans, but to me it undermines class too much. Also, I like small vs. large ships to be a doctrinal choice, but without stacking you basically have to just get bigger as time goes on.
I’d really like to see a system in some games that encourages you to keep around slightly obsolete designs. Spaceward Ho! had a mechanic for this, the first ship of a class would cost dramatically more than all subsequent versions, which discouraged minor improvements. I’d love to see ship build times and cost drop as you make more of a given class.
I also like the idea of ships losing some efficiency/getting more expensive to refit over time, but I think in practice that would create more of a pain in the ass than benefit.
@cassander
Better classing mechanics is one of my top suggestions for Aurora. As it stands, some people tool their shipyard for the most expensive possible designs (survey sensors are good for this) and then can build anything. I’ve tried and mostly failed to come up with a good implementation. I’ve also suggested learning curves a couple times, though that’s not one of the ideas Steve has taken.
Ascendancy would have a surprisingly good case here if not for the combination of a couple of other design decisions (invasion and ship limit mechanics, hull unlock techs, and travel time) and the game’s legendarily poor AI ensuring most of it never came into play.
(Ascendancy’s planetary management, on the other hand, was another matter entirely, at least once you got to what was supposed be the midgame but in practice was the lategame. That game needed a build queue in the worst way.)
(Speaking of crazy 4X ideas: Ascendancy done right.)
+1 Upvote
A charity to clean up a poor neighborhood. Not just trash and graffiti, but fixing power lines properly, repairing damaged structures, and such.
A business to let young children learn how to handle breakables. They could come in, and pick stuff up, and turn it this way and that. Throwing things gets you banned (unless done in a zone set aside for the purpose). Entrance fee, not charge-per-accident, so the parents won’t discourage their kids from actually handling the breakables. Demonstrations for how high up of a drop breaks glass in various shapes at various angles. Group discounts for class field trips. Lots of staff to handle accidental breaks (I suspect there’d be far less than people expect).
I’ve heard that pre-natal and perinatal care is really good for mothers and babies. It seems like this could be organized as local charities, but I haven’t heard of it happening.
My version of this would be a charity to develop water and wastewater infrastructure on native reserves in Canada.
And that business idea is brilliant, btw!
Good luck with your liability insurance.
Especially if you go with both ideas.
OK, you want the really crazy ones?
1. A social experiment designed as a gun class for anti-gun activists. They would learn about different types of weapons, their histories and design and capabilities, how to handle and fire them, and how to clean and maintain them. The goal would be to measure the extent to which the class alternately enhanced the activists’ anti-gun arguments or else moderated (or even reversed) their anti-gun stance. The class would be somewhat rigid in structure and content so that nearly identical versions of it could be offered all over the country over a long period of time. Data would be collected with various methods, including analysis of graduates’ gun-related social media statements before and after taking the class.
2. Figure out the right proportion of coconut to carrot to create the perfect carrot/coconut smoothie. Last time I got a neon orange substance with the consistency of soft butter. (But it tasted as good as I imagined it would.) Got this idea by eating coconut meat and carrots at the same time and experiencing the flavors coming together in my mouth.
3. I’ve got a few rather absurd ideas for strange short films and subversive music albums I’d enjoy making someday.
4. Compose a symphony with rhythms modeled on a field of crickets, with a movement that includes machine gun as a soloing percussion instrument.
5. A company you can hire to perform elaborate April Fool’s Day pranks and events at your place of work or education. There would be a number of restrictions on what kinds of things can be done of course; nobody should get hurt, for instance. The general idea would be to invoke a comical sense of wonder or absurdity.
6. A novel set in America but with an Australian first-person protagonist. The entire novel would be written in phonetic Australian. (Lawk theess.)
6. Reminds me of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Injun, which I found totally unreadable. It’s fine for a novel to have its own slang (prime example, Anothy Burgess) but I don’t think I could get through a book written the way you describe. It’s a fun gimmick now and then – an entire book, it would be an ordeal to finish it!
What about Huckleberry Finn?
That it’s possible to write a great book using an annoying device doesn’t make the device not annoying, and definitely doesn’t mean anybody else should be trying to emulate the deed. Just as the world would be better off with fewer authors trying to imitate Joyce, it would be better off with fewer authors trying to imitate Twain.
Loved Feersum Enjin, also Riddley Walker.
Hey I said it was a crazy idea.
There’s a novel called The Bright Side of My Condition written in something of an Australian pidgin language.
Tell me more about idea 2. My interest is piqued. Any other ingredients that go in? Do you use coconut milk, coconut juice, and/or blend a fresh coconut?
The one time I tried it, I used coconut meat, coconut milk (from the same coconut as the meat) and carrots. That’s it.
I think next I might try simply mixing coconut milk (from a can or a carton, as long as it’s the white and opaque kind and not the translucent stuff that’s more popular now) with carrot juice.
Oh yeah, the translucent stuff is coconut juice (sometimes called coconut water). Very different. Refreshing, but not at all creamy.
For #5, are you aware of Improv Everywhere? They do stuff pretty similar to your idea, although I don’t know if they hire out to others or just pull their own pranks. Either way, their youtube channel is worth checking out!
I’ve heard of them, and I think I’ve seen a few of the videos. Yes, I think this would be something similar, only of course you could hire them and the pranks would be both tuned to April Fool’s and restricted by a set of ethical codes. I also envision pranks that aren’t necessarily performance-based, but could involve props or effects of some kind.
A few years ago I had the idea to purchase a bag of customized fortune cookies, with a mix of fortunes that all warned, in various ways, about a chicken. Then I’d find someone with a chicken costume and have him run circles around the building, pecking at windows, etc. It never panned out but I decided there ought to be an affordable way to make it happen.
@Well…
Now I’m convinced that you are Werner Herzog…
Unfortunately, unlike Scots, colloquial Australian isn’t really its own dialect, has decayed into a variant of British English in the Cities (where the vast, vast majority of Australians live.) and unless your character is rural NSW/QLD, the Phonetics won’t be what you are expecting.
Also, America isn’t really different enough, It would be somewhat like a novel set in California, with a protagonist from New York speaking phonetic Brooklyn.
I think that’s different enough.
A pyrotechnic envelope for destroying hard drives and other electronics. Put in the drive, light the fuse, and stand back.
An internet hosting provider designed to make it very difficult to push out customers who are doing unpopular but not illegal things, and also designed to make it difficult for outside forces to push the hosting provider itself off the internet more generally.
A software company built on the apprenticeship model. Starting apprentices spend some portion of their days in classes learning software development, and the rest of the day actually testing/fixing/building things. Managers and tech leads are full-time professionals, the rest of development is done by the apprentices. Apprentices are trusted with increasingly demanding tasks as they accrue experience. The course of study is designed for four years, after which they graduate and seek other positions. The most promising graduates are offered direct positions as tech leads. Apprentices receive modest pay, just enough for room and board.
A distillation of the GURPS RPG into something simpler and more tractable. Toss out all the magic, fantasy powers, past and future tech levels, and special maneuvers. What’s left is a playable game for modern-day cops, spies, PIs, security operatives, and paramilitary types that fits in 100 pages.
Isn’t Nearly Free Speech what you’re looking for? They’re well known for being willing to host controversial content, and I’ve never known them to give in to bullying.
@Toss out all the past and future tech levels-
Tech levels are the best part of GURPS!
I’d buy this. The last time I had to destroy a bunch of drives I used a literal hammer and anvil, which was fun but time-consuming and probably wouldn’t stand up to serious data recovery techniques.
I had a summer job once where I had to wipe dozens of old hard drives to fulfill the inscrutable mandates of the new corporate security policy.
Hard drives that would still successfully turn on were overwritten with DBAN. If a drive didn’t boot, I opened it up and scratched up the platters with a screwdriver. A few of them were sealed beyond my ability to open; those went into the side room to be zapped by a big electromagnet.
Notably, this whole exercise in security theater was assigned to an undergraduate intern who also had full remote access to every computer on site.
Wouldn’t it have been quicker just to electromagnet-zap the whole lot at once? Given the scratching, it doesn’t seem like reusing them was a goal.
I think the idea was that DBAN would do a more thorough job than the magnet. Realistically, there wasn’t anything remotely sensitive on any of these hard drives anyway.
There’s a strange satisfaction in taking an absurd job and doing it well. At least one of the drives was so old that none of our functioning machines had the right connector. We pulled an old beast that must have been older than I am out of a back room, but we couldn’t get it to boot, so we eventually resigned ourselves to using the magnet.
@A distillation of the GURPS RPG into . . . a playable game for cops, spies . . .
GURPS Cops, other GURPS modules not allowed in the game.
Reading “The Case Against Education” right now, and thinking that the apprenticeship model should really make a comeback, in most industries.
I can’t speak for all industries, but in software engineering, apprenticeship won’t be enough. The apprentice would still need to have a solid grasp on computer science theory, in order to be an effective programmer — as opposed to just learning specific practical skills.
This is preposterous. CS theory and practical software engineering are worlds apart. Why do you think so many CS grads can’t even write fizzbuzz?
I’m not sure what you mean by “CS theory”, but I’m talking about things like basic data structures (hash tables, arrays, linked lists, trees); big-O notation (not the notation itself, obviously, but its underlying meaning); inheritance (interfaces, design patterns); threading (threads, locks, semaphores, race conditions, deadlocks); basic algorithms (sorting, search, graph traversal); memory allocation (yes, even for garbage-collecting languages); etc. etc.
You may or may not agree that such ideas are “worlds apart” from practical skills, such as “this is how you make a checkbox” or “this is how you draw a rectangle”; but without these basic concepts, your apprentice would be useless at best, actively harmful at worst. Despite popular belief, programming is a creative endeavour. It’s not about repeating the same tasks over and over (otherwise, the programmer would get replaced by a script pretty quickly); instead, it’s about coming up with effective solutions to novel problems. And without a thorough understanding of theory, it can be nearly impossible to even understand what the problems are, let alone solve them !
I don’t think anyone is arguing that software developers should be trained purely by having them follow an experienced software developer around and seeing what they do. There’s definitely a room for some direct instruction (in classrooms) in the underlying fundamentals of the technology, such as what you mentioned. But that’s true even for more blue-collar trades, such as electricians and plumbers.
The question is how much of this classroom instruction is necessary and useful. The thinking is that a little goes a long way, and actual experience might be more useful. Also, a conventional education in CS in a university involves studying a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. A four-year degree can easily include a year of breadth requirements. I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that the breadth requirements are useful enough to warrant making them mandatory.
I disagree pretty strongly. I sat through many bits of threading in my college days, and have used exactly none of it in my 10+ years of professional software development since then.
I think, to continue the metaphor, that there are really distinct levels of skill required. Most software that’s written these days really is apprentice-work, requiring no more than a few year’s instruction by a professional and a clever, motivated student. Building, e.g., a web page with a few minimal bits of non-out-of-the-box functionality in PHP with some custom HTML is exactly the kind of thing which maps to “OK, you’ve learned the basics of blacksmithing and hammerwork, now go make nails for our customers. It’s hard to mess up nails.”
Journeyman-level software is the stuff which requires deeper understanding, and master-level software requires both understanding the underlying mathematical abstractions, and their bare-metal implementations and when they don’t add up.
The problem is that while the difference between a nail and a suit of proofed full-plate kicks the average person in the teeth, the difference between a basic gussied-up CRUD application or web page and a really complicated bit of bare-metal bit-hackery doesn’t. As such, people who don’t know software tend to assume that anyone who can build something as fancy-looking as the first can definitely do the second, with predictable consequences.
@Robert Liguori:
Regarding threading, this may be my own bias talking, but personally I use it every day, extensively. What’s more, I’m the only person at my current company who understands how threading works well enough not only to use it, but to avoid using it when possible. I dearly wish this was not the case.
…Is a job that is done by CMS systems nowadays. Few people still do it by hand. Naturally, those “few minimal bits” end up being the kind of work that point-and-click systems are poor at automatically generating… i.e., work that requires understanding of what you’re doing, i.e., see my previous comment.
Agreed, but as I said above, it is virtually impossible to advance to the next level (“master” vs. “apprentice” or “journeyman” in your example) without a deep understanding of the fundamentals. And very few people can derive all that theory from personal experience. It takes real education to gain that type of understanding.
@johan_larson:
Well, that depends on the quality of instruction, of course. I feel like I’ve been very lucky, precisely because my own education had a pretty wide breadth; still, if anything, it wasn’t broad enough. I’ve studied (*) the basics of computing all the way from transistors to LISP; and, as it turns out, when you are trying to learn something new in the real world, it’s helpful to see the new idea not as an isolated point in some arbitrary idea-space, but as a new permutation of some pre-existing system.
To use a trivial example, you can always memorize a rule such as “in Java, if you override equals(), you must also override hashCode()”; but if you understand how hashtables actually work, you won’t have to memorize it, because it’s blindingly obvious. You will also be able to debug your own code (or, Turing forbid, someone else’s) much more effectively, since you won’t need to memorize a dozen possible bugs that could occur due to violating this rule.
In keeping with the same theme, you could also memorize a rule of thumb like, “don’t try to put X million elements into a List”; but if you understand how memory allocation works, you won’t need to memorize the rule, because it will be obvious. And you’ll be able to apply the implicit rule to other data structures that utilize an internal array, such as hashtables… even if your master neglects to mention them, somehow.
I could keep going like this forever, but my point is, it’s useful to understand what is happening at multiple levels of abstraction, as opposed to just memorizing some set of quick — though admittedly effective — techniques.
(*) Note that I said “studied”, not “mastered”, there’s a huge difference there… wish there weren’t.
The devil is in the details. Take big O notation. It’s absolutely imperative that a programmer understands in his bones what it means when he looks up a data structure and the documentation says “inserts are amortized O(1), deletes are O(log n), and get kth highest is O(n)”. It’s far less important that he be proficient at using the master theorem to derive the asymptotic run time of a recursive program.
@Brad:
Although I agree, I am not sure whether it’s possible (for most people, at least) to internalize the former without performing the latter (or some variant thereof) at least once.
@Anon
As I’ve argued elsewhere, a CS graduate who can’t write fizzbuzz isn’t someone who overemphasized theory at the expensive of practice. It’s someone who skated through without learning or at least remembering anything at all.
Has anyone ever had a recruiter or hirer complain about people who can’t write fizzbuzz, sent them something saying “I can write fizzbuzz, but I don’t have (ridiculous requirement from your ad)” and get hired?
I’ve personally interviewed a person would could not write a simple counting loop, in any language (we’re just talking about a loop here, not even fizzbuzz). When I tried giving him a hint, he became indignant, proclaiming that such low-level coding minutiae are beneath him.
He was not hired.
I’m not asking if there’s someone who can’t do it and wasn’t hired, I’m asking if there was someone who could do it and was hired.
More specifically, I’m trying to distinguish between “we can’t hire anyone because our applicants are so incompetent that they can’t do fizzbuzz” and “we can’t hire anyone because our requirements are ridiculous, but since it’s also true that some applicants can’t do fizzbuzz, it’s easier to blame it on that”.
If half your applicants can’t do fizzbuzz, but you also require 3 years experience in each of six technologies (one of which has only been out for 2 years) it really isn’t fair to blame it on the fizzbuzz.
I have to agree with Jiro here, I’m all in favor of increased immigration including programmers, but the fact of the matter is that when it to complaints about not being able to hire I’m very unsympathetic given the cockamamie ways employers hire them (or more relevantly don’t hire them).
I would never hire anyone who couldn’t do fizzbuzz. By analogy, I would never hire a carpenter who couldn’t hammer in a nail, or a fiction writer who couldn’t spell the word “dog”.
I do alright on code challenge sites and can certainly do Fizzbuzz, but I’ve applied to hundreds of programming jobs and gotten maybe two dozen phone screens, two interviews, and no offers. I don’t know what the hell these recruiters are talking about.
The part that scares me is that I’m not a programmer, entirely self-taught in a few languages to the “banging rocks together” point with what I’m sure is a coding style that would make a professional’s face melt like looking into the Ark of the Covenant, and I can write FizzBuzz. How the hell can you take on programming as a career and not be able to accomplish that?
@azhdahak:
What kind of questions do you get asked on phone screens, out of curiosity ? Are those screens administered by the recruiters, or by the prospective employers ?
The economy is pretty poor right now, and is likely to remain so for a while, so honestly “two interviews and no offers” sounds pretty typical. Still, if your phone screens consist solely of questions like “define term X” or “where do you see yourself in five years”, that’s a bad sign — it means that your recruiters are wasting both your time, and the time of your prospective employer, so you might want to think about getting better recruiters.
My experience is that tech phone screens are pretty different from non-tech phone screens.
Non-tech phone screens are generally “tell me about your job and why you’re interested in this job, get a more detailed explanation of the job, ask whatever questions you might have, and we’ll somehow make a decision based on that.” I don’t know what the hell is up with that.
Tech phone screens are where I get the “do you memorize JS trivia in your spare time” nonsense. But I gave up on looking for tech jobs. My impression is that, unless you’re willing to move to Kentucky (which I would be if I had a car), you have to know people to get one of those. (On a higher level, my impression is that it’s less “the economy is poor” and more “the people in charge of hiring are very risk-averse, and the economy isn’t strong enough that they can’t get away with that.” The reason I gave up on tech jobs is that I started hearing from tech recruiters that I was unemployable because my degree wasn’t in CS. Then again, I did App Academy, but didn’t land a job from it [I think because I didn’t have enough general work experience at the time — most of the people there were in their early 30s and I’d applied straight out of college when I realized I didn’t want to become an academic] and it’s been long enough that I figure I can’t tell them that.)
What’s up with that is, we’ve already decided we probably want to bring you in for an interview, but that’s expensive so we’re just double-checking to make sure there hasn’t been some mismatch of expectations or other obvious miscommunication that we can clear up with a phone call.
I don’t want to deny the validity of your experiences, but for another perspective I just finished up a programming job search. I have no CS degree. I do have several years of professional experience but all with tiny companies no one knows.
The very top tech companies showed zero interest. I’ve read in various place that google at least reaches out to anyone internally referred but I’m here to tell you that isn’t true.
The lumbering enterprises (think banks) were very interested. I was asked more than one time to do automated assessments of my knowledge of java. The questions got fairly obscure but the grading seemed pretty easy. The phone screens for these guys were entirely behavioral (“Tell me about a time …”). The onsites were a mix of behavioral and being asked about experience with very specific technologies. For me this was the stumbling block for this set of companies, I hadn’t used the enterprise-y frameworks and libraries and apparently they don’t believe they are something that any decent programmer can pick up quickly.
Finally, there were the second tier tech companies, late stage startups, and tech forward but not pure tech companies. This turned out to be my sweet spot. A couple wanted short take home assignments (which I was fine with but understand why many wouldn’t be). The phone screens tended to be a mix of behavioral and high level tech questions (seemingly designed to smoke out someone that’s resume was completely made up). One had a screen sharing phone screen. The onsites all had technical component—whiteboarding, pair programming, API design—it varied.
One company to consider working with is triplebyte. They are an advertiser here and if you click that link maybe Scott gets a few bucks. Anyway, they are resume blind until very late in the process. There’s a multiple choice test which is very easy. Then they schedule a fairly long phone and screen sharing interview. There are four sections—all of which they explain in advance. I got dinged mostly because my debugging was haphazard and slow where it should have been systemic and fast. But I don’t regret doing it, the process itself and the feedback were helpful. If you pass that, I understand they put you in with a mix of funded startups and established tech companies and you are supposed to be able to skip right to the onsite.
As a final note, if you are having trouble I’d highly recommend working with a consulting company (e.g. teksys). Or even an Indian body shop (e.g. tata), they are required to, and anecdotally do, employ qualified US nationals that apply. The pay, and especially benefits, for either of these options in this route will be less but a recruiter will work hard for you and you’ll be building a resume.
Never heard of fizzbuzz before this thread. Looked it up on Wikipedia. Given a proper description of the original game at the hiring test, I could totally write it, though I’d have a million questions:
-what language? (might be obvious based on hiring language, but if hiring for multiple languages…)
-do you want it to be a game, or just an output?
-if just an output, do you want it in command line or a gui?
Self-Taught, never got very far in any of the languages. I did take a course in Java back in college, but that was over a decade ago.
Studying C# at the moment. I’m tempted to do the output, and then make it into a game, just for the practice…
Might be a case of just preferring the poison you don’t know. Becoming an apprentice in the trades requires either knowing somebody (usually through relatives in the trades) or sometimes getting into an apprenticeship program through the state with a years-long waiting list. And it makes it just as difficult if not more so to change careers as formal degree requirements; nobody wants a 40-year-old plumber’s apprentice.
And then there’s the worst of both worlds, as we see in various medical and “professional” engineering programs: you have to get a specific degree, and then work as an apprentice (not generally called that; therapy programs call it “supervision”, engineering “progressive engineering experience under a PE”, doctors “internship”, “residency”, and “fellowship”)
Crazy idea?
Implement a US version of Sweden’s Vision Zero without just handing everything over to the machines forever and while maintaining the possibility of personal mobility ownership
Make real autonomous vehicle safety standards more akin to FAA certification standards than the laughable garbage we have today.
@ Bluesilverwave:
What, did an autonomous vehicle run over your dog?
Why would you want to strangle a perfectly good new industry in its crib like that? If the FAA had existed at the time of the Wright Brothers the airline industry would never have gotten off the ground, so to speak.
(My apologies and condolences if an autonomous vehicle did run over your dog… 🙁 )
The FAA’s mandate was until fairly recently to regulate and promote the aircraft and air travel industry, which they have done very effectively. And I am not aware of the regulatory activities of the FAA or its predecessors, back to 1926, significantly impeding the development of air commerce (other government agencies took care of that). Nor would any plausible retro-extrapolation of the FAA have interfered with the activities of the Wright Brothers in 1902-1905.
And for that matter, the contemporary FAA has regulatory authority over commercial space launches, yet Elon Musk seems unimpeded in his ability to send self-driving cars out past Mars.
The FAA’s approach of “Go do what you want with your own lives, but tell us how many innocent bystanders you expect to kill on average and show your math“, is a bit prior-restraintish for my libertarian tastes, but it’s not an intolerable burden. And we live in a society run by mostly non-libertarian voters, who have historically reacted very badly to finding out after the fact “you killed how many innocent bystanders?” So I’m sympathetic to the idea that the self-driving car industry might in the long run benefit from a bit of the FAA’s style of regulation.
John, the FAA has been attempting with all its might to strangle drones. I’m already theoretically facing several $10,000 fines every time I lift one of my model helicopters off the ground (one for flying an unregistered UAS, plus one for every one of the 15 or so “airports” — some helipads, some fields where a helicopter might make a landing, and one small airport — within 5 miles that I didn’t notify. If you want to fly a drone commercially, you need a raft of paperwork (including certificate of airworthiness) and a private pilot’s license (same as for flying a real airplane), and you must do it under a rather serious set of restrictions. They’re trying to make it worse by requiring transponders that weigh more and cost more than the airframes and electronics. And they shut down all model aircraft operation up to 30 miles from Washington DC for a few months just to show the AMA they were serious.
If they’d treated full-size aircraft the same way, I can certainly imagine they’d give Wilbur and Orville trouble. Neither of them had a pilot’s license or a mechanic certificate. They certainly didn’t have type certification for any of those things, and they didn’t submit a plan for the testing of each of their experimental aircraft and have it approved.
@The FAA has been attempting with all it’s might to strangle drones-
Wonder why. There was a flying penguin moving low enough to annoy traffic last year about a mile from where I live, and cops looked for its owner. Are these regs that never get enforced unless you walk in the cop shop and tell Officer Friendly you are here to help him make his quota? I mean unless an airliner reports a drone you bought sucked into its engine.
Well of course they didn’t. They were first, taking off into empty skies. The regulatory infrastructure came later when the industry expanded and having planes run into each other was a reasonable possibility.
I would guess much of the resistance to small drones come from two sources. The first is sheer institutional inertia and turf war. The FAA wants to make sure they stay in charge of air traffic in the US. Institutions that don’t protect their turf tend to wither, it’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. And that means new types of use of the skies must be made to submit to FAA regulation. The second is the quite reasonable fear that existing air traffic, including commercial air traffic, will run into these drones, with bad results.
Yes, that’s the point. If you had today’s regulations, you’d have never gotten an airline industry. I’m sure our ur-FAA could have borrowed from some other (probably inappropriate) set of regulations, maybe something from naval shipping or civil engineering. That’s what regulating autonomous cars would be like today. The impulse to regulate means you can’t get any new industry off the ground (literally or otherwise) unless you can move faster than the regulators, and autonomous cars have probably fallen behind the curve and will die on the vine as a result.
@engleberg
The regs don’t get enforced because the FAA doesn’t have many enforcement agents. They control pilots by pulling or threatening to pull their licenses or medical and aircraft certifications. People who violate the drone regulations (following of which means flying at a designated flying field where there are people who can co-ordinate with the local airports, or being 5 miles from anywhere) typically don’t have pilot’s licenses (in fact there are some who gave up flying model aircraft in order to safeguard their real licenses). They occasionally threaten people who post drone footage on YouTube for violation of the commercial use rule, and they got some real estate listing services to refuse to allow drone footage; fortunately for the FAA I’m sure real estate agents would not lie about the source of their pictures.
Along similar lines, I remember my father reporting a conversation he had with someone who was involved with the introduction of some now important medical substance quite a long time ago. The man commented that if current rules had been in effect then they could never have done it.
Unfortunately, I no longer remember what the substance was.
I’ve heard that claim made about aspirin many times.
An RPG wargame where you are a general and your success is not only about your ability to fight the war.
Let’s say it’s WWII. If you’re a Soviet, your job is to balance doing what makes military sense with (early on) the boss’s demand to do things that are often pointlessly suicidal and (later on) not get too popular. If you’re the Germans, you probably can’t win. A lot is out of your hands and the German chance after they started Barbarossa was at best 50-50. So your job becomes to juggle commanding well, keeping the boss happy, and trying to set things up so you get captured by the Western Allies and aren’t on the hook for serious war crimes (serious being the kind where you get in trouble more than a few years in prison then out for good behaviour), and then write a book claiming you knew nozzink that sells a bunch to Wehraboos. If you’re a British general early on, it’s about avoiding any huge defeats that just absolutely wreck home front morale. If you’re an American or British general later on, it’s all about balancing the alliance/fighting for position within it – if you’re the top guy, who do you give the bulk of resources to following the Normandy landings? If you’re below that, how do you jockey for those resources? Japanese general would be lightning strikes early on vs holding actions after that. Italian general would be a new game+ hardcore gamer mode, because, c’mon.
Sounds sorta like War in the East.
https://lparchive.org/War-in-the-East/
Ehhh, I don’t know how WitE works; Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa is probably closest to what I want. But not close enough. I want to be able to play Eisenhower, and face the problem of juggling Monty and Patton. Or, let’s step the difficulty up; make it a Vietnam War game: You’re Westmoreland. Can you make it so people don’t use your name as a pejorative?
Burden of Command is an upcoming release that’s supposed to be about managing the soldiers under your command and earning their respect, in addition to the usual wargame strategy. It’s a smaller-scale form of command than you’re envisioning (you play as a Captain), but I’d keep an eye on it.
Not ones I have been reluctant to share, but I think they otherwise qualify …
A MMORG designed to make learning a language fun. When you are at level one the NPC’s occasionally use a word or phrase in French, always in a context that makes the meaning obvious. As you go up in level, the amount of French gradually increases, using words you have already gotten used to at the lower level. Possibly but not necessarily, at some point it sometimes becomes necessary for you to talk (in text) to them in French.
Software to put the R back into MMORG speech interaction. When you talk to someone during the game, such as other members of your raid group, the software modifies your voice tone to fit the gender and race of your character.
Idea 1 seems interesting and plausible.
I know a few limited phrases in Orcish thanks to WoW!
Nobody’s done it for voice, but there are a few games that do it for text. WoW has a language barrier between Horde and Alliance players, for instance.
Urban Dead has zombies, which start off only being able to say a couple of phrases – “Graah,” “Grrh,” “Mrh?”, etc. They later can get a skill called “Death Rattle” which lets them chat normally, but their text gets run through a filter that makes it garbled and zombie-ish.
This led to players ended up developing a “zombie lexicon” so that zombies could communicate more effectively. For instance, “Mrh?” is generally understood to mean “Revive me, please,” which is important, because survivors generally won’t use a revive on a player unless that player actually wants to live. They also came up with phrases that fit into the (very narrow) list of letters that Death Rattle uses, so you could say “Ram, gang, ram!” to urge zombies to break barricades, or “Harm bag man!” to tell them to target players with first aid skills.
(Urban Dead isn’t as active as it used to be, but it had absolutely fascinating emergent gameplay.)
Slime Forest accomplishes at least some of these goals, though it’s a single-player RPG.
Anti-Semites are human.
I’m thinking about posting on the subject to Facebook, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble.
So are anti-everything
*narrows eyes* You’re turning into one of those crazy fundy “Love your enemies, pray for them, want them to be well” more-Quaker-than-the-Quakers types, aren’t you.
No. If I write about anti-Semites being human, I’ll put in caveats about just the facts (they aren’t all the same, some of them will change for the better, punishing them isn’t a reliable method of controlling them), rather than advocating specific changes in how people treat them.
Hmmm. Would you do the same for the people whose actions you admire and find worth emulating?(Point out that they’re human, and could change, etc)
I don’t think there’s a need to do that sort of work about people I admire– there’s no big push to portray them as not human.
I want to introduce university courses designed such that you spend one day a week at them (say, Friday) but designed to last your entire working life. I dunno how to implement something like that, maybe you could start it off by partnering with some companies in one sector (IT seems like an easier place to start). Eventually replace most bachelor degrees with this ongoing in-tandem-with-employment style of learning.
I could see that working for some stuff, but how does that work for fields where new material builds on previous material? Does it just repeat after a while? If so, isn’t it better partitioned into many classes like existing programs anyway?
Wouldn’t this be really ill suited for career changes, job flexibility, etc…?
Milton Guasti should be hired full time to develop official Metroid games.
Teach a class (online, most likely) about practical debugging. It seems that most people I end up working with have no idea how to debug any kind of code properly. The syllabus would be something like the following:
1). Use a programming language that allows debugging (if at all possible)
2). Write down the full stack trace, including all the wrapped exceptions
3). If the error was in your own code, go there and see what caused it
4). If not, or if you can’t figure it out, google “$exceptionType $exceptionMessage”
…
And so on. Advanced classes would include topics such as “ok, so it’s Assembly, now what ?” and “C++: not even once”.
Of course, I personally lack the skills to teach this (or, in fact, anything) to anyone effectively; still, raising the debugging waterline seems like a worthy goal.
This is probably a good idea. But my question is, how does anyone work as a programmer, or indeed pass a CS course, without being able to debug? Cuz it’s sure not by writing your assignments bug-free on the first pass.
My suspicion is that this is related to the absurd amount of time other students spent getting help from TAs. (By which I mean, more than a single email to clear up an ambiguous homework problem)
Isn’t your handle kind of dishonest then?
My handle is “Bugmaster”, not “Teachmaster” 🙂
Master is from the Latin magister meaning teacher, so your name literally means Bugteacher.
In that case, I am still compelled to point out that my name is, at best, “Bugteacher”, not “Debugteacher” 🙂
What is the point of a classics major if I can’t win arguments using etymologies?! 🙁
A business where you go to smash things. For catharsis. You come in after an aggravating day at work, receive a sledgehammer and a set of safety goggles, get set loose in a warehouse full of breakables, and go to town.
I’m not sure how to make it cost effective. Presumably most customers would spend most of the time breaking things that are already broken. Hopefully that is worthwhile enough.
This has been knocking around in my head ever since a friend took me out in the desert with guns, and we shot up some old computers for fun. It was fantastic.
These already exist.
Oh, wow. Time to see if there’s one near me.
Got a modern phone? Google Daydream has this in VR.
Its called the GYM. With weights a plenty. Much better for the psyche and body
A desktop feed reader designed to limit the internet firehose. Possibly titled “Newspaper”.
I have a terrible thing I do where I’m working on something, the procrastination monkey strikes, and I start poking my RSS feeds like a mouse in a skinner box, waiting for something to come up. Then something does, and I spend the rest of the afternoon reading it and headdesking at the comments and chasing links, and then my day is gone. And I was trying to think of ways to stop that, because it screws up my life and makes me feel awful.
You give it a list of feeds. It collates them, but it only checks once a day, or once a week, or whatever schedule you set it to. No “check now” button, no notifications. All feeds are full (if the source only provides a summary, it attempts to download the real thing), most html and chrome is stripped (a bit like firefox’s reader view), links are stripped (to prevent tabsplosions), and comments are not included (because humans).
The idea is that you still get some sense of what’s going on in the world, but aren’t constantly exposed to the infinite firehose of the internet. You check the newspaper in the morning, once, and then go about your day. The program is deliberately crippled to not do more than that.
Would it work? No idea. But it’s within my capabilities. It would just be a lot of work, and my 170 tabs are calling out to me…
I have 80% of an RSS feed reader and some unrelated code that library-calls something to download full articles lying around. I’m also poor as shit, so If I do this, what price point should I aim for and how does one go about selling software?
whale heart and whale aorta as playground slide for children
A (tabletop) gaming megastore. Enough open table space for a decent tournament / small convention. Rentable back rooms for RPG games fitted out like a good office conference room, with a projector, built in sound system, video conferencing, each room furnished to a theme (for example, one room with faux stone walls, a couple of suits of replica armor and swords/shields on the wall, another room with a replica sci-fi spaceship theme with the rooms lighting fixed to a replica control panel). A decent stock of wargames terrain pieces for fantasy / historic / sci-fi in most of the common scales. The ability to sell decent coffee / pizza / snacks and a place to eat while playing something light without making too much of a mess.
I want to write a musical that is to Rent as Wicked is to the Wizard of Oz. It’s a tragedy about a brave, optimistic real estate developer Benny who wants to revitalize a dying slum, who is stopped by a bunch of pretentious trust fund hippies who are variously engaging in poverty tourism, mob justice, unsafe sex, and murder-for-hire. (Seriously, Angel murders someone else’s dog for money. And Rent codes that character as a hero. What the fuck.)
I describe Rent as the above tragedy to people who don’t know it, which gets a rather nice double take from my musical theater friends.
YES PLEASE! Well, I’ve only seen the movie version, but Benny was by far the most likable character in it. Although I think Angel is the second most, somehow I found her dog-murder-for-profit much less objectionable that everyone else’s antics (maybe because it’s offscreen and described in a peppy song?)
If you haven’t seen it, you might really like Lindsay Ellis’ video essay on Rent — it says pretty much what you do above, plus discussion of how Rent doesn’t really work as an adaption of Puccini’s La boheme
Oh, thank God, someone else loathes Rent as much as I do.
You need to make this happen.
This is genius.
Ruby on Excel.
But why…?
Same way you climb a mountain. Because it is there.
I’ve heard a few adventure stories from college-age people with less-than-optimal cars. The really fun ones ended with “and we fixed it by spending less than $20 at the local Wal-Mart!”
So, I might offer some college students an adventure along these lines.
A. You will be handed the keys to a car that is in mostly-working order, but it something like ten years old
B. The car will contain a paper map of the area you are in. It will also contain some reference data for various stores that might sell things you might need on the trip.
C. You will also find a handful of tools (pliers, screwdrivers, a ratchet-and-socket-set, a set of jumper cables) in a box the cargo area. You won’t find a charger for your smart-phone in the car…but we may forget to warn you of that detail.
D. The vehicle is in good mechanical shape, but may develop trouble of the not-too-challenging-to-fix kind.
(Maybe one of the belts under the hood might wear out in the next hundred miles. Maybe a spark-plug-wire has cracks in the insulation, and will need replacing in the next hundred miles. Maybe the clamp on a coolant-hose is loose, and might need tightening if you wish the engine coolant to last the entire trip.)
E. You will be given a destination that will take at least six hours to drive to, and a route that will bypass many of the heavier-traveled highways through the area.
E. There is a “I can’t take it any more” button in the car, if you’d like to give up.
F. You’ll be given a packet of cash.
G. If you ask beforehand, we will be able to supply a checklist for diagnosing the problems mentioned in C. above.
Good luck and bon voyage…
This sounds like a job for Top Gear. TL, DR: three British gearheads dropped off in Miami with $1000 each to buy the car they will drive to New Orleans.
The secondary challenge of “paint slogans on your competitors’ cars that will get them killed by an angry mob in Alabama”, should perhaps have been given a bit more thought.
Cute concept, but I’m really wondering about the ratings box up there. PG for “mild themes”?
I’m not sure if they were either well-advised or slightly too ignorant to insult the Confederacy. That might have actually gotten them killed.
But yes, I second John’s endorsement. Top Gear/The Grand Tour does this stuff all the time, although they’re probably better at the mechanical side than S_J’s hypothetical college students. Well, two of them are…
Now that I think about it, I think I need to strike “potential coolant leak from poorly-secured hose-clamp” from section C.
That’s the kind of thing that some contestants may not see happening until the engine turns into a useless hunk of overheated metal…
Cracked hoses and pinpoint leaks are actually pretty common, and reasonably easy to patch (albeit temporarily), so I’d leave it in.
Massive apartment complexes for poor countries that combine sanitation with power production, fermenting the waste and burning the gasses released for electricity. Hopefully bringing a stable, if low level, of power to areas that see frequent outages and work as a base for economic development.
why won’t these turn into the hellholes that other public housing tends to?
Who said anything about public housing?
The idea would be private ownership and construction of the buildings. If the electric power generated could be done at neutral cost then during outages they could sell the electricity at higher rates to businesses with high value uses (who frequently have to take large risks or spend significant sums of capital for generators and fuel). Part of the profit potential would be in stabilizing areas around where you build, eventually pushing the land values/rents of your buildings.
fair enough then, apologies for reading things you didn’t intend.
You cant power the buildings like this. Biogas is a very neat technology, but the primary benefit is that the end product is a fertilizer which is less smelly and not a biohazard in the same way raw human waste is.
From reading and conversations with people who designed systems for this purpose large and small (Specifically: The specs for Biogas facilities for danish agricultural farms of hundreds of pigs, and a conversation with one engineer who designed a field-expedient version 3d world farmers could build into their own latrines as her master project.) :
The waste from four families will generate enough gas to do the cooking for one family. It was apparently still quite a popular innovation, but as I understood what she was relating, that was entirely down to not having to spread raw shit on your crops. The one day in four that you did not have to collect firewood being a bonus, not the point. To power a building – with lights and so on, you need a much better power source.
The goal/concept is not to power the buildings, but to set up a baseline of local power generation in areas that have issues with inconsistent infrastructure. If I recall my developmental economics correctly a good number of attempts to pull regions out of poverty traps are doomed by poor infrastructure. Local power outages plus inconsistent fuel deliveries for generators often means that minor crises turn into major ones.
Yes, but in order to any do good you need to provide sufficient power for the mainstays of domestic productivity: Lights, refrigeration, cooking and washing. Biogas just wont produce enough kilowatts for any of that.
The only solves that work are “build an actual grid” and a full solar + storage system, and the latter needs to be user-maintainable. Which is a really tall ask. I mean, I can vaguely recall success stories about powering third world villages, but those were in places with rivers, and basically amounted to a team of idealistic engineering students talking the village into building a water-mill + generator setup. – Since the village built it, they knew how to keep it running. (and people dont willingly give up electricity once they have it)
This is supposed to be judegment free, but whatever I’ll engage/enjoy myself
This is not true as far as I can tell. The US, or almost any developed nation, didn’t go from no electricity to total coverage quickly, nor did it go from no electricity to lights, refrigeration, heat and a/c, cooking and washing all running on electricity (or even existing for some) quickly. However having some electricity allowed for the grid to be built on itself, and for advancements to follow.
A hypothetical example: There are many small things that can have a large impact but require refrigeration, vaccines for instance. If you have access to consistent power you can store many vaccines for long periods of time without losing efficacy, and you can set up programs to vaccinate large sections of the population over any time period you like. If you don’t then you need to bring large batches of the vaccines in all at once, and they pull all available medical staff to administer them and do a massive publicity campaign to get everyone through the door during a short window and then you have to do this every couple of years to keep up with population growth. The issue with generators (the most common solution) is that the same events that cause large and lasting power outages also have a tendency to interrupt fuel deliveries (as well as being fairly capitally intensive with little to no immediate return).
Ehh.. People invented uses for electricity in sequence. Noone *ever* built a grid which only provided enough use for lights once the electric stove had been invented.
That would be idiocy, and it is still idiocy to propose it for the third world.
Seriously, the only advantage the third world has is that it gets to leap-frog development steps. Suggesting that they make do with trickles of power is not trying to actually help, and economically, the fully electrified household is insanely important, in terms of freed up labor. – Women literally cannot work outside the home without at least the basics.
I think we are talking across each other. I am not suggesting that it should be the only form of electricity, only that it would provide a base with a local and (presumably) cheap fuel source so that people could act as if there weren’t going to be major interruptions even if there still would be.
This is a theory, but it doesn’t seem to be definitively true, and maybe not true at all for many things (and true for some things). IIRC there is a reasonably strong case that marginal improvements lead to long term marginal gains but that attempts at large leaps often rarely lead to more than that.
People often forget that we have definitive proof that countries can advance by following all of those steps, but relatively little that they can do so by skipping large chunks of them or that we can consistently tell which steps can be skipped.
I think that skipping technological steps can often be possible. Going straight from no phone to mobile phones, for example, skipping wired phones.
However, I think that there is probably a strong link between institutions and culture, so you can’t just institute Western laws and Western institutions in a place with little/no experience with them & expect people to back those laws and institutions.
People in poor countries really really want to be rich. To attract them, you will need apartments that look classy, like rich people live there. At least some impressive white pillars on a nice front doorway, even if the rest is a cheap box, and you plant trees to hide the cheap box. That’s the Federalist style, 200 years of success and still going strong. I’d skip biogas- burning poop is not intuitively a classy social step up to living like rich folks. I’d put any big complex on the face of a dam, so they can look down on the rest of us like rich folks do. It would help a lot if you got actual rich people to live in similar apartments or mansions on a dam face.
OT, we should do this in America. Consider: dams are important and require maintenance. The government runs dam maintenance. The government is run by liberals. Liberals are piss-scared of rich people. Lots of rich people like a place with a view. If rich people lived in palatial apartments on the faces of our dams, the government would prioritize dam maintenance. America! Dam right!
Tailor made for the Indian market. Having expereinced power outages there on a brief trip, and tech allowing building units to be self sustainable would be of advantage, given the poor infrastructure in many parts of the country.
Figure out how much labels affect perception.
Run some kind of experiment with identical cups of water and ask people to select which one they preferred. Then add labels such as 1/2, A/B, Left/Right, cool/room temp, room temp/warm, bottled/tap fiddle with it for a while and try and find out which label has the largest effect.
I demand better labels:
– drugs/pure
– male hormones/female hormones
– urine extract/fecal extract
– poison/cure
Replace the US House of Representatives membership with a non-geographic proxy voting system. Every eligible voter may grant their proxy to any other eligible voter, who then may grant proxy for all their votes to another, etc. Anyone with at least 1M votes gets to propose and vote on legislation, with a voice weighted by total votes controlled. Voters can update their proxy monthly, and can view the upward path from them to their representative. Downward path is anonymous to prevent coercion.
We will not colonize the galaxy even when we will have the technology for it. Unless we can warp to Earth type planets that ar truly good to live on, we are not going to live unhospitable environments as there is no point, it is cheaper to send robots to mine them.
I even doubt we would live on very hospitable planets with warp drive technology. I mean, sure, there is something that looks like a grassy meadow but it is full of unknown things you don’t if will poison you, if you left the can opener at home it is 134 light years away, and if you overcome all obstacles congrats you can be a basic farmer without internet access, TV or phoning home. Just who wants that?
I think is the kind of un-fun thing rarely mentioned in sci-fi: even if you found a planet that looks like Earth and seems a nice place to live and doesn’t immediately poison you, chances are you may find you have developed some previously unknown disorder due to the lack of some micronutrient in the food you grow there.
Sci-Fi doesn’t use it but real SF uses something close often: CJ Cherryh in her Cyteen trilogy, Brian Stableford in that series about the small ship with a gene synthesizer and an expendable crew going from one abandoned colony world after another.
You can see why Han Solo never gets sentient explosive space-dysentery from that taco stand on Whatsit IX during the love bits with Leia.
On the other hand, people live in all sorts of strange places on Earth. And you’re making a lot of assumptions about the robots not needing human overseeers.
The same could be said of the first people who came from Europe to the Americas. Some people want adventure. Some people want to be away from society. Some people want wealth.
As for the biochem problems, any potentially-habitable planet will be analyzed to within an inch of its life by interested scientists.
Amish? That’s actually a pretty common SF trope, that planets get colonized by various religious sects who don’t want to take part in the modern world.
The “we” for whom you speak is only a subset of humanity. And for at least the first few generations, the subset of humans who will colonize the galaxy will do so in part because they know that the other subset won’t.
Doing HEMA, I’ve always thought it somewhat sad that we’ll never really see how differently people fight when the stakes are much higher. Historical accounts show that fights to the death were often very different from normal duels or tournament fighting.
Considering that just getting a bunch of swordfighters to fight to the death is probably a bad idea, I thought we could try and make a tournament that has more lasting effects. I thought this could be achieved by having the tournament be a series of fights to just first hit, no time or scoring systems, and if you lose you can never enter the tournament again. Alternately you can yield, where you lose but can enter the next one.
I’m thinking of starting a blog. A lot of my posts around reddit and blog comment sections generate a lot of interest. A number of Internet friends have suggested I start one.
For anyone else who’s gone down this route, do you have any advice about getting a successful blog off the ground? (Even if that advice is “don’t bother, it’s not worth it”, I appreciate honest feedback.) My biggest failure condition would be putting a lot of effort into the thing and having basically zero readers.
A couple of more specific questions. How do you get traffic to your site in the first place? (More focused on quality readers like the type at SSC, then just eyeball quantity). Is it better to focus on fewer long-form SSC-type posts, or very frequent small Marginal Revolution type posts? What’s a good comment policy to have? I want a generalist type blog, but have specific subject-matter knowledge in certain niche fields. Would it be better to avoid overly niche posts, or can more content only help? Do you think it’s better to coalesce a bunch of content before hand, then release it in regular frequent intervals at a preset blog launch? Or would it be better to start ASAP, and just ship content as its produced? Finally what’s a good platform for a neophyte to minimize headaches (not worried about spending a few bucks to make the process smooth)?
I can’t claim to have ever launched a blog which is popular by any measure, but here is my two cents. A lot depends on what you meant by “basically zero readers” above. It’s quite easy, in my experience, to get a small handful of readers, and it’ll probably be easier for you given that you already write popular things online and have people urging you to start a blog. (I’ve never revealed my blog to Facebook or anyone I know IRL, by the way.) And I find that having just a small handful of readers already yields a good number of interesting comments for me to engage with, and occasional praise and/or general interest is enough to motivate me to keep writing blog posts.
But writing quality blog posts is (for me) quite laborious, and my expectations of success have somewhat gone down since I started my first real attempts. Your aspirations seem very high compared to mine, so my input might not apply to you that well.
Thanks for the input. It’s actually more helpful than you’re giving yourself credit for. My aspirations aren’t as high as they’re coming off. Not really hoping to get any personal benefit, besides self-actualization. Having a couple dozen regular readers and handful of quality commenters would be more than enough. (I’m pretty happy if I make a reddit comment with 20 upvotes.)
Also agree, the laboriousness of it is my main hesitation. Outputting a blog seems more demanding than making good posts on forums and comment section. The latter means, you can go through periods of low and high output and write when the mood strikes. If you have a blog your readers expect semi-regular updates, and will drop out if you don’t deliver.
I think maybe you overestimate the importance of posting on a regular schedule. Even most of the readers who are seriously engaged with your typical blog output and are excited each time they see a new post have their own complicated lives and probably aren’t internally keeping very careful track of exactly how often you post or how long it’s been since your last post. At least that’s the way I feel about blogs that I follow (now I get much more impatient about anything I consider light entertainment for unwinding rather than serious intellectual stimulation, but that’s another matter).
Consistency is one of those things that for some people matters a lot and for others doesn’t matter at all.
It’s highly unlikely you will have zero readers. Any new blog will get curious people clicking on it. The trick is getting the readers to come back over and over. Sounds like you already have the writing to do that, so then it’s just a matter of that one bit…
Consistency is key. Post once a week, or once a month. The more often you post, the more often you can skip without losing readers. It takes at least 10 posts before your readers will be forgiving of you missing a standard post-date altogether, but slightly late is forgivable quite quickly. I’d recommend having a buffer of 5 posts ready before you start the blog (including the standard “this is my blog, here’s what I plan to do with it” opening post).
Now, even with a horribly inconsistent schedule, I still get 5-8 people reading my blog, and I’ve done zero linking to it, and didn’t tell anyone about it (it’s an anonymous, “please don’t recognize me but I have to put this out there” kind of blog).
My blog gets about one hit a day on average, and that might be a bot. WordPress email notifications about a comment someone left are rare and exciting events for me, enough that I’ll rush out and buy a bottle of champagne and take my wife out for steak. (OK not really.) This state of affairs would really bother me if my goal was to have a lot of readers, but instead my goal is simply to write as frequently or infrequently as inspiration strikes, about stuff I’m interested in, to both refine my ideas and improve my writing, and be able to be proud of what I wrote if I go back and read it weeks or months or years later. (I’m not sure I’ve entirely gotten there yet.) If I pick up a few readers and subscribers along the way, great — but I don’t have any hopes pinned on that. And I’m very happy with this arrangement.
So, my advice is to think hard about what you want out of your blog first, and then make sure your expectations about what you’re willing to put into it are aligned with that.
Just took a look at your blog and it seems that you write about things that interest me in an approachable way. So you may be averaging more than one hit a day and get a few more comments in the near future. 🙂
Guess I’ve gotta rush out and buy some champagne tonight!
Have guts. Tell the truth. That’s all.
If you’re the Doug who writes long comments at Marginal Revolution once in a while, I’d read your blog. I’d probably suggest a Twitter for your blog where you put up links to your posts or something though.
Hell, if your blog was just your collected Internet comments in a location where I didn’t have to wade through Ray Lopez spam I’d even read that.
Blogs, like most forms of entertainment, function under a power law in terms of readership. Almost all blogs get no readership, and only a very lucky few get large readerships. But blogging is a pretty low cost endeavor so if you find the act of blogging fun then just do it. Long or short doesn’t really matter as long as you are writing quality content people want to engage with. A relatively consistent stream of posts is probably the most important, at least until you do develop some audience.
But if you’re just doing this because you like the idea of running a famous blog, rather than having some specific concept you’re already into, then my guess is you’re in for a rough time. Take bean for instance. He really loves and knows a lot about warships and just started talking about them in these open threads. People engaged with it so he kept going. Eventually he made his own blog for this and while it may not be Marginal Revolution or SSC level in popularity, it way above the vast majority of blogs that get 0 hits. So if you want to try out your idea for a blog on an even cheaper scale than actually opening up a wordpress, just start commenting here what would otherwise be your blog posts. If it’s generating interest, then spin it off into a blog. If not, well nothing lost but a bit of time.
Fully endorsed. I don’t know the hits (and for complicated reasons, I don’t really want to), but I seem to average a comment or two a day by people who aren’t me (plus, usually, my response). I didn’t start out to have a blog. I started out writing about battleships, because I like them and people seemed interested. Finally, I got tired of the formatting limitations of doing them here, and decided to strike out on my own, but I had a ready-made audience when I did so.
I don’t think there’s a hard-and-fast rule as to how to write. Personally, I’m very much of the ‘consistency is key’ school, but that may not be universally shared. As for post length, depends on what you want to do. I usually aim for 1000-1500 words, because it’s big enough to get an idea in, but small enough to be easy to write and (presumably) easy to read. But most days it seems like a natural outgrowth of the level of detail I’m going for.
I agree with all of these comments. Consistency is important if you want to build an audience but blogging can also be useful just as an exercise in refining your ideas and building your writing skills.
For platforms, I’ve been very satisfied with ghost.org. You can write in markdown (similar syntax to editting a Wikipedia article) which I find a bit more natural than html.
For me, blogging is incredibly rewarding. I write two types of posts:
1. Something opinionated that I’ve been thinking about.
2. Explainers on a hard topic that I don’t currently understand but want to understand more. For these types of posts, I spend about a week or more doing research.
Both types of posts feel satisfying to write. Even if a post doesn’t get many readers, I still feel good that I learned something or got something off my chest. I don’t want to overstate this case too much as appealing to an audience is certainly important, but honestly I’d recommend putting most of the weight on what you personally think is interesting. You’ll feel more satisfied and you may be surprised by how many people share the same niche interests anyway.
In terms of promotion, I’ll link to each post once on Twitter, Hacker News, and an appropriate subreddit. I stupidly use my real name on reddit, and so the mods normally take my posts down due to a weird anti blog promotion rule they have. I would therefore recommend using a pseudonym on reddit.
I use Github Pages / Jekyll because I wanted to make my own JavaScript animations. But if you want to get something up quick, WordPress is totally fine.
First: just started reading your blog and I like it, especially the layout. I’m adding it to my reading list.
Second: How do you deal with anonymity with blogging? It looks like you’re OK using your real name, but does that mean you don’t post things that are controversial? Do you ever share things you post on your blog on your personal social media? If your blog got a massive influx of readers (+100,000) and commenters (+1,000) would you be happy with your level of anonymity or would you want more or less? Do you ever worry about IRL repercussions of things you’ve written?
Thanks — yes, because I use my real name I don’t say anything too controversial, but that’s fine with me. It forces me to keep my arguments buttoned up. I’m also lucky to work in a profession that isn’t too strict about what you can say publicly.
I blog at briefliteraryabandon.wordpress.com. Leave me a comment with some thoughts on something, and a link to your blog if you start one, and I’ll visit and follow along for a few posts, promise.
Good luck!
Don’t launch the blog until you have 5 or more pieces prepared and ready to go straight away. Make them on a range of topics written with a strong individual voice.
People don’t want to get in on the ground floor when it comes to reading blogs. They want to see that there is some action (even if all occurred around the same time) and a range of posts to choose from. If they visit your blog and there is only one thing up and it sucks, you just lost that reader (and everyone in their network) forever.
see eg this article about their head researcher winning the Brain Preservation Prize
What, nobody noticed the obvious pun? 🙂
I shuffle mental frames every few words, so by the time I got to the word “Brain” I assumed we were talking about octopus brains, which are mostly not in the octopus’s head at all. Result: whoosh!
Oh, wait. You mean they’re the head of the team, and that’s what was meant by “head researcher”? By the time I processed the first part of the sentence, I knew we were talking about brains, so instead of thinking of that explanation, my thoughts went “Does that say ‘head researcher’? Oddly specific, given the category. Maybe it’s a multidisciplinary team?”
Naval Gazing returns to amphibious warfare, looking at the postwar world.
OT because 1944 Walcheren, but weren’t those Goliath drones cool! Thanks for doing this stuff.
More trivia categories.
Name five:
1. Dynasties of China.
2. Presidents of France.
3. Egyptian Pharaohs.
4. Land-locked countries outside Europe.
5. Glaciers.
6. Lakes in Africa.
7. Wine grape varietals.
8. Novels by Alistair MacLean.
9. Movies directed by James Cameron.
10. Songs by ABBA.
I got 6.5 points: pharaohs, countries, grapes, novels, movies, songs, and half marks for dynasties, which were close but not quite right.
Amusingly, I have a MacLean 5-in-1 book right beside me, and I could still only get 3. (It’s been a long time since I read any of the novels within.)
4; 7; 9. A solid three.
I got 1, 3, and 4. I expected to get 2 but stalled out at 4 of them. I could probably get 9 and 10 eventually if I rattled off likely movies and songs, but mixing wrong answers in with the right ones seems like cheating.
1. Dva, Una, Fbat, Gnat, Zvat (even managed to avoid the foreign dynasties)
2. QrTnhyyr, Zvggrenaq, Puvenp, Fnexbml, Znpeba (Fifth Republic or bust)
3. Xhsh, Wbfre, Enzrfrf VV, Ungfurcfhg, Nxurangra (admittedly had to get spelling help for the last two)
4. Obyvivn, Punq, Arcny, Znynjv, Hmorxvfgna
5. I have an idea of regions with glaciers, but not the glacier names.
6. Ivpgbevn, Punq, Znynjv
7. Cvagb Tevtvb, Evrfyvat, Puneqbaanl (used to work in a wine restaurant, my former manager would be ashamed)
8. Pass
9. Ningne, Gvgnavp, Nyvraf
10. Gnxr n Punapr
So, starting out strong, but faded in the stretch. But I’ll deal with 4/10.
China, Pharaohs, land-locked countries outside of Europe, and grapes were gimmes for me (got most of them 10+). After that, I couldn’t get more than 2 in any category. I don’t know who MacLean or Cameron are.
1. Dvat, Zvat, Lhna, Gnat, Funat
2. Puvenp, Qr Tnhy, huu qvqa’g Ancbyrba VVV oevrsyl ubyq gur gvgyr bs “Cerfvqrag”? (Yeah I don’t pay enough attention to foreign politics)
3. Fborxarsreh, Fpbecvba, Nun, Cgbyrzl VV Cuvynqrybcubf, Zraxnher
4. Yrfbgub, Arcny, Zbatbyvn, Ohehaqv, Nstunavfgna
5. Rlwnswnyynwöxhyy, qhaab, qhaab, qhaab, qhaab
6. Ivpgbevn, qhaab, qhaab, qhaab, qhaab
7. uhu?
8. jub?
9. Cvenaun 2, Gur Grezvangbe, Nyvraf, Gur Nolff, Grezvangbe 2: Whqtzrag Qnl
10. qhaab.
4/10
Can only do five of these.
1. Fbat, Gnat, Una, Zvat, Dvat, naq n obahf cbvag sbe Znb.
2. Cnff.
3. Enzfrf V naq VV (V’yy bayl pbhag sbe bar), Qwbfre, Farsreh, Naxurangra, naq bs pbhefr Ghgnaxunzra. Obahf cbvag sbe Cgbyrzl V naq n unys-qbmra bgure Cgbyrzvrf vs gurl pbhag nf cunenbuf.
4. Vs lbh pbhag obeqrevat gur Pnfcvna Frn nf orvat ynaqybpxrq, V pna anzr svir whfg va gur ‘fgnaf: Nstunavfgna, Gnwvxvfgna, Ghexzravfgna, Xnmnxufgna, Hmorxvfgna. Bgurejvfr, Nstunavfgna, Hmorxvfgna, Zbatbyvn, Obgfjnan, naq Mnzovn.
5. Cnff.
6. Cnff.
7. Mvasnaqry, Zreybg, Cvabg Abve, Cvabg Oynap, Puneqbaanl.
8. Cnff.
9. Gur Nolff, Grezvangbe V naq VV, Gvgnavp, Ningne.
10. Cnff.
1. Kvn, Funat, Una, Fhv, Gnat
2. Puneyrf qr Tnhyyr, Trbetrf Cbzcvqbh, Inyrel Tvfpneq q’Rfgnvat, Senapbvf Zvggrenaq, Wnpdhrf Puvenp
3. Enzrffrf VV, Enzrffrf V (nygubhtu V xabj abguvat nobhg uvz, vg pna or vasreerq gung ur rkvfgrq 🙂 ), Ghgnaxunzha, Nxurangra, Cfnzzrgvpuhf
4. Xletlmfgna, Gnwvxvfgna, Zbatbyvn, Arcny, Ouhgna
5. BX, V qba’g xabj nal tynpvref.
6. Ynxr Ivpgbevn, qba’g xabj nal bguref.
7. Ab vqrn.
8. Ab vqrn, arire urneq bs gur thl.
9. Gvgnavp, Ningne, qba’g xabj nal bguref.
10. Jngreybb, Qnapvat Dhrra, Znzzn Zvn, Gur Jvaare Gnxrf Vg Nyy, Sreanaqb
5 complete: dynasties, presidents, pharaohs, landlocked countries, ABBA songs
I’m surprised how many people can’t get James Cameron movies. He has at least four movies that are bona fide classics and another that is very well known.
Even if you’ve seen all his movies, you won’t necessarily know who directed them.
I don’t think I’m doing this set, because I would do terribly, but I think for this question I’d cheat and say Gvgnavp cyhf sbhe Ningne zbivrf, orpnhfr ur’f jbexvat ba gur arkg sbhe be fb evtug abj.
You shouldn’t have to cheat to know the answer. Fahundo says that people can’t connect his famous movies to him, which must be the answer because surely you have heard of these movies:
Grezvangbe
Grezvangbe gjb
Nyvraf
Gvgnavp
Ningne
I had no idea Cameron did the first three of those movies…
How do people become the kind of people who know these things? I know 1,4,9 and the first two are only because of my nerdy hobbies.
I suspect either job or nerdy hobbies (1-4 all fall under at least one of my nerdy interests: history, political geography, international politics).
You read about all sort of stuff, because there are many fascinating things in this world, and knowing more about them is fun. Then you get together with other people who do so too, perhaps in the comments sections of disreputable web sites, and talk about what you have learned for intellectual cross-pollination.
Random Wiki-walks and accumulated garbage. There have been 4 French Presidents since the Iraq War, so you only need to know one more on top of that, and De Gaulle is a gimme.
I know some Chinese dynasties because my AP World History teacher had me memorize some to the tune of Do Re Mi.
My Mom likes Abba and I have a bunch of wino friends.
Wikipedia addiction.
I make conscious efforts to memorize these sorts of lists when I feel that they constitute what ought to be general knowledge. Have done so from an early age; it’s just my idea of fun.
4, 5, 10.
My score is ~5.5. Dynasties, presidents, pharaohs, countries, wine grapes, and half a point for movies.
1. Una, Zvat, Dvat, Dva, Gnat.
2. Znpeba, Ubyynaqr, Fnexbml, Puvenp, Zvggrenaq.
3. Enzrffrf*, Ghgnaxunzra, Arsregvgv, Naxunangra, Nzraubgrc.
4. Cnenthnl, Punq, Ynbf, Ouhgna, Arcny.
5. ???
6. Ivpgbevn, Punq, Nfjna*
7. Puneqbaanl, zreybg, fnhivtaba oynap, pnorearg fnhivtaba, evrfyvat.
8. ???
9. Ningne, Gvgnavp, Grezvangbe*, Nyvraf.
10. Znzzn Zvn, Sreanaqb, naq gung’f vg.
*Cebonoyl abg snve gb pbhag nyy bs gur Enzrffrfrf, vf vg?
*V jnf tbvat sbe Ynxr Anffre. Mreb cbvagf va nal rirag.
*Grezvangbe vf gb Wnzrf Pnzreba nf Enzrffrf vf gb Rtlcg, fb V tvir zlfrys n unys cbvag sbe trggvat sbhe havdhr Wnzrf Pnzreba zbivrf.
1, 3, 4, and 8(!). I got close on 9.
I’m not surprised 8 seems hard to get. What I am surprised is how often references to one of MacLean’s works show up in pop culture. I felt awesome in college that a Pinky and the Brain episode, of all things, had a whole-episode reference to Where Eagles Dare and I was the only one that even had heard of what they were referencing.
That was possibly a “Clint Eastwood movie” thing, rather than an AML novel thing.
Might have something to do with the fact that your strongest pop-culture references are usually fixed at a time when all the pop culture you’re consuming is made by people twenty years older than you are.
1. Gur ovt svir: Dva & Una, Gnat, Fbat, Zvat, Dvat. Vs jr’er fpnggretbevmvat guvf, zber bofpher: (Kvn/Funat/Mubh), Wva, Yvnb, Lhna, Fhv. V zvffrq fbzr bs gur zvabe barf qhevat gur yngre Gnat naq Fbat lrnef, V guvax.
2. Qnat. qr Tnhyyr, Ubyynaqr, Puvenp, Znpeba…hz, fgno va gur qnex, Crgnva be Obancnegr?
3. Enzfrf, Guhgzbfrf, Ungfurcgfuhg, Ghgnaxunzra, Xhsh.
4. Nyy gur fgnaf: Nstunavfgna, Xletvfgna, Ghexzravfgna, Hmorxvfgna. Qbrf gur Pnfcvna Frn pbhag? Vs abg, Xnmnxufgna naq fbzr bs gur pbhagevrf V anzrq hc gurer qrsvavgryl obeqre vg. Gvorg, Arcny, Ouhgna, Zbatbyvn, Ynbf. Fjnmvynaq naq Yrfbgub. Ejnaqn naq Znynjv. Avtre. Punq. Fhqna? Mvzonojr, Obgfjnan. Obyvivn & Cnenthnl.
5. Tynpvref unir anzrf?
6. Punq, Ivpgbevn, Znynjv, Gnatnalvxn…V’z bhg. :/ Ahgf.
7. abg n jvar thl.
8. Gung vf pregnvayl n anzr gung fbhaqf snzvyvne!
9. Gvgnavp naq Ningne, pregnvayl. Yrg’f frr, ur qvq Grezvangbe 1 & 2 naq Nyvraf, naq yrg’f guebj va gung Gvgnavp qbphzragnel ur qvq, Tubfgf bs gur Nolff?
10. Znzzn Zvn, Qnapvat Dhrra, Gnxr n Punapr ba Zr, Tvzzr! Tvzzr! Tvzzr!, Fhcre Gebhcre – lrf, V’z whfg ehaavat guebhtu gur fbhaqgenpx bs Znzzn Zvn! va zl urnq.
Fb 1, 3, 4, 9, & 10. Znlor znantrq 2, naq whfg zvffrq 6. 5, 7, & 8 ner Evtug Bhg.
Hey, Gnat just reverses itself in rot13!
1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10.
Does land-locked exclude river borders? I assume so.
Once upon a time I could probably do 3 and 6. African rift lakes interested me for a while when I got lost on a Wiki-Walk from the Rwandan genocide, but that info is all long gone.
I have no idea who Alistair MacLean and did not know glaciers had names….
> Does land-locked exclude river borders? I assume so.
Yes, and usually large lakes and inland sees also. So the -stans are considered landlocked even though some border the Caspian Sea (except pakistan, which of course borders the Indian Ocean). Same with Htnaqn naq Ynxr Ivpgbevn.
MacLean may be a touch oldfashioned at this point. He was a thriller writer who was a big deal back in the sixties and seventies. My dad had a shelf of paperbacks from that era, many by MacLean.
MacLean was a big enough deal that several of his books were made into fairly well-regarded movies, most notably The Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra. Before my time, but I could come up with half a dozen or so names anyway.
I felt good last time, but this one I don’t have much. I can do pharaohs, land-locked countries, and James Cameron. The others I can barely get one or two items.
I wrote this up before I started replying to people. I got 1,3,4,6 and was close on 7:
1. Una, Gnat, Lhna, Zvat, Dvat (Fbat? Jrfgrea Kvn–Abcr? Dva?) 5/5
2. Fubbg V qba’g xabj gur Serapu flfgrz jryy rabhtu… Znpeba vf cerfvqrag evtug? Znpeba, Ubyynaqr, Qr Tnhyyr?, Qrynhqvre? (ABCR, CZ, zvfcryyrq), Eranhq? (ABCR, nyfb CZ, nyfb zvffcryyrq) 3/5
3. Qwbfre (gunaxf FFP!), Nzraubgrc (bxnl gurer jrer frireny bs gurfr… ohg V’z fnlvat vg pbhagf sbe bar), Nxurangra, Ghgnaxunzra, Enzfrf gur Terng 5/5
4. V’yy yvzvg zlfrys gb prageny Nsevpn: Ejnaqn, Znynjv, Ohehaqv, Prageny Nsevpna Erchoyvp, Mnzovn 5/5
5. …Xvyvznawneb? (abcr) 0/5
6. Ynxrf va trareny, be bayl gur Terng Ynxrf? Ivpgbevn, Gnatnalvxn, Znynjv, Xvih, Nyoreg?, (aba-terng: Punq) [V npghnyyl fcryyrq nyy bs gurfr pbeerpgyl!] 5/5
7. Cvabg abve, mvasnaqry, punzcntar (abcr), zreybg, cvabg tertvb (zvfcryyrq) 4/5
8. V’ir arire urneq bs Nyvfgnve ZpYrna. 0/5
9. Ningne, Gvgnavp, … V qba’g xabj zbivrf 2/5
10. Jngreybb, Qnapvat Dhrra, Znzn Zvn, … 3/5
#2 and #4 were easy. The rest, impossible, especially #7-#10.
I approve of these. Please keep doing them.
1. Qlanfgvrf bs Puvan. – Zvat, Puva, Djra, Punat, gur bar jvgu “Jryy, jr’er yngr.”
2. Cerfvqragf bs Senapr. – Qr Thnyyr.
3. Rtlcgvna Cunenbuf. – Enzrfrf V, Enzfrf VV, Uncgfhrg, Ghg,
4. Ynaq-ybpxrq pbhagevrf bhgfvqr Rhebcr. Obyvivn, Htnaqn, Ejnaqn, Obgfjnan, Fjnmvynaq
5. Tynpvref.
6. Ynxrf va Nsevpn. Ynxr Ivpgbevn,…nnnaq anqn. (V jbhyq qb orggre sbe eviref, V fjrne.
7. Jvar tencr inevrgnyf. Pno, Zreybg, Zhfpnqvar, Cvavbg Abve, gur purnc Vgnyvna fcnexyvat jvar, Mva
8. Abiryf ol Nyvfgnve ZnpYrna. Uru. Znqr zr fb unccl gb frr guvf. Jura Rvtug Oryyf Gbyy, Gur Jnl gb Qhfgl Qrngu, Vpr Fgngvba Mroen, Tbyqra Tngr (abg irel tbbq), Cnegvfnaf (ernyyl abg irel tbbq)
9. Zbivrf qverpgrq ol Wnzrf Pnzreba. – Nolff, Grezvangbe, Grezvangbe VV, Ningne, Gvgnavp.
10. Fbatf ol NOON. – Lbh unir tbg gb or xvqqvat.
Only 4 and 10 🙁 I should have been able to do 1 and 9, but only got four.
I could manage to remember 5 only for presidents, pharaohs and ABBA songs – so only 3/10:
2. Qr Tnhyyr, Zvggreenaq, Fnexbml, Ubyynaqr, Znpeba
3. Enzfrf VV, Nzrabcuvf Nxurangba, Ghgnaxunzha, Purbcf, Ungfurcfhg,
10 F.B.F., Sreanaqb, Puvdhvgvgn, Gunax lbh sbe gur zhfvp, Tvzzvr Tvzzvr Tvzzvr
I suppose the “pharaohs” of Macedonian origin were excluded – otherwise it would be very simple:
P I, P II, P III, P IV, P V 🙂
Before I go any further I want to say I hope Nathan Robinson and Scott work together in the future, because I would happily pay to read their back-and-forth. (I already pay separately for Nathan Robinson’s site and this one, and would pay extra for regular exchanges between them.) I also want to mention that I deeply admire Scott for risking such a hard discussion held in such a public way.
Nathan suggests that Scott may not have engaged with the best conceptual analysis of racism, and Scott opened the door to reading suggestions, so I want to offer one article that changed the way I think about racism in the US, and which may advance the back and forth: Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993). I read it as a first-year law student, while I was taking property, criminal law, and constitutional law, and it made each come alive for me in a special way. (I thought about it again when I read “Against Murderism,” and once more recently when I read Briahna Joy Gray’s “The Politics of Shame,” which ran in Current Affairs but makes the Scott-like point that shaming identified bigots is cathartic but of extremely limited effectiveness.)
A lot of constitutional thinking about racism imagines it as crime-like or tort-like: to prove that a Racism happened, you must show the guilty mind, the guilty act, and the harm of it all. But that often totally misses the point and makes a lot of racist injustice invisible to the law in horrifying ways. (On this, check out McClesky v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), where the Supreme Court rejects the argument that the death penalty is unconstitutional because of its disparate racial impact. Especially check out Justice Brennan’s dissent, which is a soaring defense of using reason and evidence to demonstrate racist patterns of injustice.)
As Harris discusses, in the US context at least, it’s less like we have little racism-crimes all over the place and more like we have a property-esque institution called “whiteness,” which hands its owner a bundle of valuable claims that the owner can pull out and use to their advantage. People can own whiteness, rent whiteness, use it as capital, consume it, and sometimes you can even sue for a kind of trespass on your whiteness. (Many 20th century US courts said that a false assertion that a white person is black was defamatory, for instance.)
This property model is akin to Scott’s racism-by-consequences but different because it is more flexible: racism happens where we have a basis for expectations about consequences that follows from race alone.
The Whiteness-as-Property model also seems to avoid many of the problems of definition-by-consequences that Scott raises in About Murderism. (Whiteness can cause things, whiteness is almost always bad, whiteness is detectable before all the consequences of an act are known.) It’s also practical because it lets us describe things like redlining or segregation or police abuses as “racist.” It complicates talking about a racist /act/ or /belief/, but doesn’t nix it. Maybe a Klan rally is a way of saying “do not dare to tread on my whiteness,” for instance. When someone uses race as a heuristic to detect danger or merit, we can understand it as making a claim against their whiteness policy. If this all seems like a strange kind of property right, imagine elite airline status or VIP membership schemes or the difference between students and non-students at a university. (I admit Whiteness as Property doesn’t let us talk about a racist /person/, but since nobody’s model can make sense of that kind of talk, maybe it was in error anyway.)
In light of this, I hope Scott or one of the readers here will consider Whiteness as Property as a substitute for his definition-by-consequences, and maybe address it someday.
Interesting model! I think it probably works better in addition to Scott’s definition-by-motive (which covers shouting racial slurs, explicitly not hiring black people etc.) rather than as a replacement.
Did you mean to write this? Is it not OK to be White?
(But otherwise, I agree with much of what you say, and find the rest intriguing and not obviously wrong. Except that, as rims already noted, use definition-by-motive to define racist people, who are now rare but do still exist.)
For the avoidance of doubt, this Whiteness-as-Property model does not call for or implicate white genocide. A reading that does have that implication is a misreading. Instead, it says that invoking the property-esque construct of whiteness almost always brings bad and unjust consequences, in the same way we intuitively expect “racism” to be nearly always a bad and unjust thing. I almost wrote “racism is almost always bad,” but changed it to “whiteness” to be clear that I was invoking the Cheryl Harris idea and not something else. I did not mean “white people are almost always bad.”
I think The Pachyderminator and many others picked up on what I meant to convey, but I think your question was in good faith and I am happy to have an opportunity to expand.
With dndnrsn's explanation below (now far below!) of the difference between ‘whiteness’ and ‘being white’, I now see that you were never saying that there's anything wrong with being white. And don't worry, even without that understanding, I never had any of those more extreme interpretations! Rather, I found that particular sentence of place, and I knew that either I had misunderstood or you had misspoken. (It was the former, but I suspected the latter.)
Yeah, it took me a while to find dndnrsn’s comment but I think that’s the best explanation of the distinction.
I knew that D&D analogies would be good for something someday!
racism happens where we have a basis for expectations about consequences that follows from race alone.
Hmmm. What about instances where it’s hard to distinguish “Bill is an asshole which is why he treated Ben badly” from “Bill is white which is why he treated Ben, who is black, badly”?
“Racism is expectations based on race” sounds like the kind of tidy explanation that would indeed better explain things like “it is racist to say ‘Asians are good at maths’ or ‘Ben is very articulate'” than the usual back-and-forth about this, but I wonder if perhaps it’s not a little too tidy to work very well? I find the concept of “whiteness” is something that is very vague in parts, and I don’t find it any more helpful when the discussion goes along the lines of “white people invented the notion of whiteness and used it to mark off others as non-white (so they could be racist in colonialism and exploitation and feeling superior)” where “if there was no whiteness, nobody would be black” – where does that leave all the work on “blackness”, then? Or are we really claiming that without the concept of whiteness, nobody anywhere would ever notice or remark upon or create a definition of “them over there do not look like us over here”? No Chinese saying Nigerians look different (and vice versa) and making assumptions and generalisations on that basis?
I think it’s a concept that works in a Western context where you’ve a lot of particular limitations hedging it round, but I still think that racism outside of whiteness has not been explored (if anyone knows otherwise, tell me) and so there are no neat answers. EDIT: That is, I think it would work well as a model if (hypothetically) Chinese firms investing in African nations prefer to import their own, fellow-Chinese, workers rather than employ locals because “they’re stupid and lazy”. That would be an example of “racism happens where we have a basis for expectations about consequences that follows from race alone”, but I don’t think too many Western theorists would go within a mile of touching that for various reasons (are there any Chinese theorists doing work on Chinese racism?)
And basically I also think too many people still like to flip from the meta, conceptual, societal level definition to the “you hate black people and want to lynch them, you KKKer!” definition when arguing online or in the media in order to show how horrible awful terribad their opponents are – not that Bill is profiting from renting whiteness, but that Bill is a dreadful violent hateful and hating person who wants to hurt, harm and exterminate non-whites (and then flip back when someone says and can back it up that “But Bill doesn’t want to do any of that!” to “No, you misunderstood me, I meant Bill is a racist on the “possession of whiteness” level”). So until we get that tendency sorted out, I think new models won’t make much headway anyway.
One thing that I sometimes do is to distinguish racism in the sense of modern notions of race —where all people are divided into four or so broad classes by ancestry, paying particular attention to skin colour to start with— from the more general notion of ethnic division —which can be based on any number of factors and which we've had forever. Chinese people don't have to go to Africa to find people who look different; they can find them right there in China. But racism puts the difference between Chinese and Nigerian people on a fundamentally different level than the difference between Han and Miao or between Chinese and Japanese —a difference in kind rather than just degree—, but it's not clear to me that anybody would see it that way without the influence of modern theories of race that came out of Europe and privilege Whiteness.
But racism puts the difference between Chinese and Nigerian people on a fundamentally different level than the difference between Han and Miao or between Chinese and Japanese —a difference in kind rather than just degree—, but it’s not clear to me that anybody would see it that way without the influence of modern theories of race that came out of Europe and privilege Whiteness.
I was thinking more along the lines that nobody would really say the English were “racist” about the Germans despite fighting two wars, because that’s one white nation fighting another white nation. Similarly, Han Chinese discriminating against another Chinese ethnic group isn’t quite the same thing; it’s discrimination, prejudice, persecution, all the rest of it, but to call it racism is putting it too strongly.
But when you get Chinese versus Nigerians (and this is just pulled out of the air, I have no idea what the Chinese opinion of Nigerians is) then yes, there is enough of a large difference, a difference “on a fundamentally different level” – and okay, I accept that modern race theory does come out of thinking about interactions between Europeans and others. But 13th Chinese could have been ‘racist’ in the accepted definition of that about 13th century Africans without any white contact or influence to lead them to divide up people into the social construct of race.
I think what I was groping towards was to counter “racism is an inherent property of whiteness (and whiteness alone)” as it often seems to be presented with “no, racism is an inherent property of humanness, and you can replace ‘whiteness’ with ‘blackness’ or ‘brownness’ and it will still come out the same in the wash”.
Xenophobia is an innate human property. Racism requires scientific categorization and other qualities of an advanced society that mean its not really innate to humans. Grunting ape-men on the savanna weren’t racist
Some context from Singapore which might be relevant to your discussion on Chinese/Nigerian differences.
As everyone knows SG is majority comprised of people of Chinese ancestry with a small but significant amount of people with Indian and Malay descent.
There does seem to be some sort of attempt by some to import the idea of ‘white privilege’ as ‘Chinese privilege’. I’m not fully sure how these two should be different though.
True, the Chinese doubtless would have come up with a lot of ideas that Europeans in fact did come up with, if the Ming dynasty hadn't been so inward-facing; racism may well be among them. If they had sent out explorers to Africa and the Americas, seeing the greater variety of humankind than they would ever have met with near home back in China, then they probably would have wanted to classify people; and if they hadn't done so by skin colour, then they would probably have just done it some other way. On the other hand, if you just suppose that a Nigerian wandered into China in the 13th century without any European help (not that the Europeans would have had much help to offer back then anyway), then I don't think that the Chinese would have come up with racism just from that.
So ethnic prejudice is an inherent property of humanness, racism as we have it is about whiteness, but an alternate history featuring Chinese instead of European hegemony during the relevant centuries would probably have a version of racism that's not about whiteness.
[Citation Needed]
The monkeys came down out of the trees, and the monkeys from the one tree hated the monkeys from the other tree and vice versa and they murdered each other for resources and monkey girls. That’s pretty much the story of humanity from 2 million BC until now.
So everyone was getting along and then scientists convinced people to have racial and ethnic hatred and conflict? You sure the hatred and conflict didn’t always exist, and the scientists didn’t just describe it? I think you’re getting carts and horses mixed up here. Newton didn’t invent gravity, he just described it. The forces were at work long before Sir Isaac came up with the Law of Universal Gravitation.
@Conrad Honcho
Read the first part of that comment: “xenophobia is an innate human property”. I’m pretty sure ilikekittycat agrees (as do I) that hatred of groups that are different to you is pretty innate, but that’s more general than racism. Modern racism involves prejudice based on groups that are pretty arbitrary: it just so happens that at this point in time people (i.e. mainstream Americans) use the categories white/black/Asian/Muslim rather than distinguishing between English and French (or Ingaevones, Herminones and Istaevones) or grouping white and Muslim into caucasoid.
@rlms
Black or white skin color is a rather obvious physical difference and one that is passed on genetically, so I disagree that ‘modern racism’ is arbitrary.
I would argue that the main thing holding back racism in the past was that people were far less mobile, so people generally didn’t actually see other skin colors very much. I also think that people had smaller identities, closer to tribe-level, so outgrouping entire races was on a different scale to the kind of discrimination that they found useful.
@Aapje
That’s exactly what I mean by “arbitrary”. The racial categories people use and therefore discriminate based on are defined by society (one could say that they are “socially constructed”).
Conrad:
“The monkeys came down out of the trees, and the monkeys from the one tree hated the monkeys from the other tree and vice versa and they murdered each other for resources and monkey girls. That’s pretty much the story of humanity from 2 million BC until now.”
You just implied that females aren’t real members of their own species.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Only if you’re looking for a “gotcha”. Gotcha opportunities are hard to avoid when writing colloquially (I’ve had much practice, not here).
@rlms
I wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘arbitrary’ when the circumstances determine what how people discriminate, as it can be fully deterministic based on the circumstances, but you probably have a different definition of ‘arbitrary.’
The slave trade from Africa into the Islamic world existed quite early, with the result that Muslims in the ninth century were familiar with the black/white distinction. A number of prominent figures were identified as black and there was a major black slave revolt at one point, as well as a black military unit that played a role in Egyptian political disputes.
Blacks would have been less familiar in Christian Europe, but the “Chanson de Roland” does include a description of black African troops.
@Aapje
The thing I’m saying is arbitrary is the specific groups people use at a given time (for instance, white/black), not the general concept of such groups. The point is that people often act as though white/black/Asian/Muslim are universal/objective/natural categories like male/female/other, when they are actually the result of societal happenstance.
No, I’m stating it’s been almost entirely the males doing the murdering and raping throughout human (and monkey) history. Am I incorrect, and all these wars I thought were fought by men were actually fought by women?
@rlms
I would say that the lines are arbitrary in the same way that borders are arbitrary. They still tend to very often end up at natural barriers, because that is usually way more convenient.
Similarly, it is just very convenient to discriminate by skin color & less convenient to discriminate by ethnic group & even less convenient to have no clear distinction. The Nazi’s looked at ancestry, required people to carry identification and made Jews put a mark on their clothes. Quite a bit of work.
One of the particularly awkward cases is “Bill is an asshole who would like to treat everyone badly, but knows he can only get away with treating blacks that way.”
Oh god, that’s one designed to piss off absolutely everyone. (Bill is doing his job properly, clearly…)
Equal opportunity assholishness, he has no expectations about race save that being an asshole to people of one race gets him into less trouble than being an asshole to people of another race. Lessen/increase the punishment for being an asshole to the same for all races, and Bill will be/won’t be an asshole to anyone!
Bill’s mental state and culpability shouldn’t matter. If he’s leaning on a race distinction, racism is implicated.
One possible solution is to institute a social standard of “don’t treat people badly, for any reason”, while deprecating the rule “don’t be racist”. Note how I said that the solution was “possible”, not “easy” or “even remotely probable”…
You might be a communist if you think whiteness as property is an answer.
Since the communists “solution” is to confiscate property. Defining whiteness as property gives you something to take.
Except that whiteness isn’t property. To take whiteness away it to take the skin off of the whites. Oh, that sounds drastic and shockingly violent. That’s because it’s the outcome your “whiteness as property” will deliver.
Communism has many flaws but if you reduce it to “confiscation of other people’s property”, then yes, I guess that fits your strange wacky world view.
Can you have Communism without confiscating property?
Are people of Italian or Jewish ancestry white?
Today, yes. A century ago, no. This is one of the more obvious cases of race-as-social-construct.
What do you mean by “white”? They certainly were considered white at the time.
If Jews weren’t white a hundred years ago, how on Earth did Judah Benjamin convince the Confederate government to let him be Secretary of State?
@ albatross11:
Judah P. Benjamin was Sephardic. I associate the view that Jews were foreigners, like Irish and Italians, with the later, poorer and much larger Ashkenazi migration. I don’t think “not white” quite captures that attitude, but it was at least something in that direction.
I’m not /pol/ so, sure, why not.
The problem with this “trump card” is that it’s a double edged sword. Since my ancestors weren’t considered white when they came here, and they didn’t have anything to do with slavery or segregation, then why the fuck does this all come out of my pocket?
By your logic I should be the creditor and not the debtor in this situation.
No, they were not considered white then. My Italian and Czech and even my German ancestors weren’t part of the dominant “race” of their time.
Nonetheless, I became a shareholder in the company. Personally, my liability is limited. Nonetheless, the corporation in which I hold ownership is liable.
How?
I can’t speak for your family but I can speak for mine. My father came here after the end of legal segregation and lived in a poor predminantly black neighborhood. He had to deal with gangs, poor education, and non-existent medical care just as much as anyone else there did. But he kept his nose clean, he worked like an animal and saved every penny he could, and he lived as healthy as lifestyle as you can while pulling sixty to seventy hour work weeks. The same is true for those members of my family who came here earlier: they didn’t have anything when they arrived and nobody gave them anything they didn’t earn through blood sweat and tears.
I’m middle class because of that sacrifice, not because Whiteness Incorporated handed me a check on my eighteenth birthday. I’m willing to bet that you never saw a check either.
So again, if we’re shareholders in Whiteness then it hasn’t paid out a penny in dividends in either our or our parents’ lifetimes. Given that the shares are evidently non-transferable, they seem pretty worthless and hardly a source of envy.
But you're ignoring your White privilege here.
Now maybe you want to deny that you have such a thing, but I mean that you're not even engaging the arguments of those who claim that you do. Your family went through a lot to give you the opportunities that you have, and you don't owe anything to anybody else; but a Black family would have had to go through even more to get you to the same position. That's what you get for being White.
Or so the argument goes. Maybe you disagree; and you did say that your father ‘had to deal with gangs, poor education, and non-existent medical care just as much as anyone else there did’ (emphasis added). But do you claim that all down the line, as your ancestors sacrificed for you, Black ancestors would not have had to sacrifice any more than your White ancestors did to achieve the same result?
This isn’t the fundamental claim of white privilege though, as this would clearly separate minorities into groups where blacks in the US have privilege over blacks whose ancestors lived in impoverished African countries not in the US for years, or for other minority groups who moved from terrible conditions to the US.
White privilege works under the assumption that the structure in the Western world exists and generates wealth independently of its participants actions and that any group that doesn’t get its ‘fair’ share must have done so because of repression.
@Toby Bartels,
Being white doesn’t actually count for very much. Especially not when you’re poor and foreign. So no, I don’t think that my family had it any easier on account of their race.
We can play Oppression Olympics and see how Russian pogroms or the Irish Potato Famine stack up against black slavery but at that point we might as well argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In living memory nobody in my family has benefited from their supposed “white privilege,” and before that they were in another hemisphere entirely. Why do I or people like me have to pay for things we didn’t do and never benefited from? It’s just scapegoating the successful to salve the egos and line the pockets of the incompetent.
@Nabil ad Dajjal:
Do you have any trace of foreign accent? If so, what is that accent? If not, is there anything that marks you obviously as the child of recent immigrants?
What about your child, if you have one?
Once you or your heirs are indistinguishable from the current majority “white” ethnicity, then you or they are “white”. No one will make any particular assumptions about you merely based on your skin, hair and morphology.
Compare that to someone who grew up in that same black neighborhood, but happened to be black.
This could be greatly improved by substituting “blankness” for “whiteness”, a better description of what it means (the motte version).
Few people would have a problem with “destroy blankness” because they would have to pause and wonder what it meant and find out that it’s not bad.
It isn’t (unlike “whiteness”) wearing another concept’s hat, and therefore it’s jargon that fails gracefully – when the message isn’t coming through properly it fails completely and cleanly instead of arriving in a garbled and vulgarized form.
Of course: no misunderstanding = no weapon = no toxoplasma = little adoption.
@John Nerst:
That is not a bad substitution, but I think it has a few issues.
1) There are plenty of people who are arguing FOR “blankness.” They (sometimes in good faith, sometimes not) object to the idea that heritage or background has any place being recognized as important.
2) It also doesn’t address the concerns of those who object to discrimination against those who are “Black”, “Hispanic”, etc. Destroying “blankness” would fail to address this in any meaningful way.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
The argument about white privileges isn’t that they have to count very big, or for very much, just that they give more options. The fact that (most) poor American blacks have to eat from the stores around them in urban areas, whereas the poor whites in Appalachia get a lot less suspicion/harassment about having guns where they live and can go and shoot deer or whatever to supplement their calories is a white privilege. It doesn’t mean that life is good and easy in Appalachia for whites
No. It’s an Appalachian privilege, applying to both poor blacks and poor whites in Appalachia.
I’m white and not poor, live in an urban area, and I not only can’t shoot deer near me, I can even use my air rifle to shoot the squirrels that steal my apricots from the tree before they get ripe.
“Can’t”, surely?
@HBC
I’m not sure what you mean by 1). To me “destroying blankness” (as in, not having any particular ethnicity being the norm or the unmarked) is pretty much the same thing as extending it to everyone, which is desirable. If “destroy whiteness” is supposed to mean anything other than that (breaking the link between white and blank) then I might have granted the proponents of the term more charity than I should.
On 2), neither would “destroying whiteness” AFAICT if that still keeps those other ethnic identities in place, so I don’t quite get the objection.
@John Nerst:
1) The proponents of “destroying whiteness” (generally) want white to mean nothing, and everything else to mean about as much as “Italian”, “Irish”, “German” do today (with some context, which we will get to in 2.)
There are others who say (sometimes genuinely, sometimes disingenuously) that they don’t see color. The claim there is (roughly) that racism was already completely defeated and its effects erased by the time the post CRA generation made it to adulthood.
Thus “destroying blankness” still looks like an attack on them, and will be treated as such. It doesn’t do the work you want.
2) “Destroying blankness” also seems to say that there aren’t currently any negative connotations associated with minority ethnicities. That the real problem is that we aren’t treating “whites” as individual ethnicities. Thus the framing of blankness also doesn’t really do the work you wan’t to defray objections to the framing on the left.
The fact that (most) poor American blacks have to eat from the stores around them in urban areas, whereas the poor whites in Appalachia get a lot less suspicion/harassment about having guns where they live and can go and shoot deer or whatever to supplement their calories is a white privilege.
Wait a minute – you are going to argue that white privilege consists of people in urban settings not being able/permitted by law to go up to the Phoenix Park and shoot a deer for their dinner? If somebody wants a pork chop or a pound of mince or a joint of bacon for their meal they have to – oh the horror! – go to the shops and buy meat ready prepared by the butcher and pre-packaged!
I think I’ll just sit here and admire that remark from all angles. Further comment on my part would, I think, be gilding the lily.
Correct. My typo.
Strictly speaking, I can, but it would be illegal, both because it’s illegal to kill squirrels and because it is illegal to use the air rifle. Also, perhaps more important, my wife disapproves of the idea.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
The way I like to conceptualize White privilege is to make an analogy with attractiveness. I think everyone agrees that being physically attractive means that you make a better first impression, you’re more likely to get the benefit of the doubt, people might be more likely to ascribe other positive qualities to you, etc. That doesn’t mean that attractive people don’t also work hard or suffer hardship, and being attractive doesn’t automatically get you a check on your 18th birthday. But we still consider attractiveness to be a significant enough force that we all try to look our best when we go on dates, job interviews, important meetings, etc. When people talk about White privilege, I imagine it as having a similar set of benefits to those of being a good-looking, well-dressed person vs someone else who is only average looking.
I think this makes a little more sense than the “shareholder” analogy and is easier to conceptualize than the invisible knapsack, because attractiveness is something we all acknowledge on a daily basis. And it’s easily distinguishable from class, unlike point about the food deserts.
For the people who are willing to consider White privilege as a plausible concept, does this improve your understanding? Where does this analogy fail and what are its weaknesses?
Edit: I didn’t see Nabil’s comment further down where he expands his position a little more.
White privilege is not hard to understand. Ben Franklin could wake up from his 250-year nap, roll the rock away from the mouth of his cave, and get hit in the head with a hard-copy collection of Think Progress articles that somebody threw away, and he’d come away with an accurate if not exactly comprehensive understanding of the concept just from the table of contents. All this business of coming up with new and ever-more-strained analogies for it buys us nothing. There is no magic analogy that’ll make the scales fall from the eyes of everyone who isn’t already into grievance politics. The underlying facts are… not uncontroversial, unfortunately, but the controversy around them is well-mapped and well-trodden and is not illuminated further by analogy.
And what the hell is with this habit of capitalizing “white”, anyway? The only other people that do that are from Stormfront.
Sorry about the capitalization. I mostly just do it to keep a stylistic consistency with the capitalization of other races / ethnicities (eg Asian, Native American, Iranian, Romani, Punjabi, White, Black). If doing this is going to get me associated with SF, then I’ll stop.
You say it’s easy to understand, and yet there’s always a persistent category of response that’s “If white privilege exists, then how come I / my ancestors still have to struggle and work hard? Explain THAT”. This was the kind of response that I felt Nabil gave with his comments here (although he expands more in his comments downstream). I agree that there are other, stronger criticisms of the concept of privilege, but on the principle of steelmanning, I think we need to establish the most coherent and useful version of privilege before we go attacking it.
In general, I agree with dndnrsn’s position that social justice jargon is deliberately unclear, vague, and misunderstandable so that they can smuggle more emotional punch into their arguments, but that there are still some useful concepts and insights once you learn to translate.
@mdet
I think that the detractors generally don’t oppose the idea that white people have certain advantages, but rather object to how big these advantages are made out to be, how the impact of other circumstances is often ignored, how eagerly problems by black people are blamed on oppression, how the morality of white people is attacked, how Moloch is ignored, that it’s ignored that historic disadvantages to black people and advantages to white people are very unevenly distributed, that in specific circumstances there can be a (even substantial) advantage to being non-white, etc, etc.
I very commonly see people judging overall ‘privilege’ of a person merely by their race (and/or gender) and/or not acknowledge the advantages and disadvantages that individuals within racial groups have, which often dwarfs whatever bonus of penalty their race confers.
I think that ‘white privilege’ is often used by people to rationalize helping the the relatively advantaged who belong to their ingroup, ignoring the disadvantaged who belong to their outgroup.
Imagine:
A white guy who was forced by the government to serve in Vietnam, got PTSD and became homeless. The services to help him are poor, often putting him in violent and dangerous situations, when he tries to get base necessities, like food and a place to sleep. Then you have people who argue that this person should not be helped, because he has ‘white male privilege.’
He might have some of that, but probably in a very insignificant way. The ways in which he has been harmed and the suffering priority that we should put on helping him have very little to do with race. The very act of equating ‘who are we going to help’ with race, rather than looking at a far broader set of causes of suffering, is in itself extremely offensive to me.
No, it’s far worse than that. It smuggles in extremist claims about how some groups as a whole are oppressing other groups as a whole, that only some groups have issues that can and should be addressed by greater society, etc.
If it was merely emotional manipulation, it would be far less offensive.
Here’s my understanding of white privilege in its simplest form:
If you could choose, from behind the veil of ignorance, whether you were going to live your life in the US as a black person or a white person, all else being equal, you would almost certainly want to choose to be a white person. You would expect your life to be a little easier that way, as is reflected in just about every kind of outcome we can measure in US society–income, life expectancy, disability, jail time, marriage, etc.
Further, if you were going to be given such a choice where you’d be about equally willing to live the black life as the white one, you’d want some offsetting advantages–being a black guy with a wealthy family, or a high IQ, or outstanding talent in music, or great physical attractiveness might be more appealing than being a random white guy. But you’d want that offsetting advantage.
IMO, that’s the core insight. Life is likely to be easier for you if you’re white than if you’re black. That’s a statistical advantage–just as men are taller than women on average, yet there are 6’2″ women and 5’6″ men, there are blacks who have a privileged life that’s easy all the way, and whites who have a terrible path in their lives. Malia Obama probably has an easier path ahead of her than 99% of whites, but that doesn’t contradict the fact that the average black kid has a harder path ahead of him than the average white kid.
This doesn’t tell us anything about causes (which could be anything from overt discrimination to genetic differences to subtle structural stuff about how society is organized), and there’s a whole argument you can make about whether you as a white person owe some kind of debt as a result of this privilege you have. (IMO, the exact same argument applies when you consider the advantages you get in life by being very smart or very attractive. You didn’t earn your 150 IQ anymore than you earned your white skin.)
@HBC
Re 1) I see no reason “white” should mean nothing and “black” mean something? “Blankness” is what separates them and without it there is no legitimate difference. You can replace them with “European” and “African” in the style of “Asian” and “Hispanic” and it’s all symmetric.
I think “I don’t see color” should be interpreted as an ideal, something to strive for, and not as something people actually believe. The idea isn’t that race-related biases don’t exist in society, but that as long as you do your best to treat everyone equally (“not see race”), on a personal and an institutional level, you’re not culpable.
Destroying something is always going to be an attack on someone (and I’m unsure about when it is and when it isn’t reasonable to demand that a norm be abolished), but it this case it reduces the disagreement to being about an indentifiable claim, which is a win. (Note that blankness is not an exclusively racial term, it exists everywhere there is a norm/an expectation that means some things are considered to be a property and another the absence of one).
“The work I want”, in this case, is the ability to meaningfully talk about the negative consequences of one ethnicity being the norm, without smuggling in the ability to attack that ethnicity for existing and being the norm.
About 3) I take you as saying there are negative connotations about specific minority ethnicities that don’t specifically follow from them being simply not-blank (and therefore would not improve if “white” ceased to be blank). Well, yes there are, but that’s is a separate issue that doesn’t really have anything to do with “whiteness” either, unless I’m misinterpreting you. Negative connotations about specific groups of “others” are pretty much a human universal, no?
Part of the point is to see this as a set of separate issues, which it is, and not as one giant fluffy ball of terrible mess.
Is that still true if you control for all the factors other than race: e.g., from behind the veil of ignorance you get to choose whether to be a white guy or a black guy with:
120 IQ
Two parents of collective income 90k year
Living in a school district of quality x
Living in a neighborhood with crime rate y, etc. etc.
The answer seems a lot less clear to me, especially when you consider that the black kid in this example can probably get into Harvard, while the white kid probably can’t.
@Aapje
I agree with everything that you just said. And at the same time, I thought Nabil’s “I’m middle class because of [my family’s] sacrifice, not because Whiteness Incorporated handed me a check on my eighteenth birthday…[Whiteness] hasn’t paid out a penny in dividends in either our or our parents’ lifetimes.” was a very weak and naive statement that I didn’t think anyone in the thread had successfully rebutted yet. (I was reading top to bottom, so I hadn’t yet noticed dndnrsn’s comments, all of which I agree with). On the Vietnam vet analogy and the claim that social justice types believe that “only some groups have issues that can and should be addressed by greater society”, while I DO know some people who act like you describe, I also know many other social justice-types who would vocally criticize those people for being blind, callous assholes. So while I don’t think you’re strawmanning, I don’t personally consider those people my central example of social justice.
@onyomi
As someone who is an upper middle class, hopefully-pretty-intelligent black guy, I’d like to point out that what I think the concept of “white privilege” captures that your analogy doesn’t is that I often get treated like I’m some kind of “exception”, some kind of “outlier”. Or maybe I’m not treated that way, and I’m just treated like “any other” black person. Or sometimes going somewhere and being acutely aware that I’m the only black person in the room, feeling a little out of place, having experiences that I can’t share or ideas I can’t communicate because of cultural barriers.
I don’t know that there’s a solution to this. And it’s entirely fair if you weight “being able to get into Harvard more easily” as being a much larger benefit. But I want to have some way to communicate “Even IF we are comparing me to a white American who looks exactly the same on paper, that person would probably still have an easier time navigating social interactions and fitting in and just being a *normal* person”. It’s the idea that black Americans have been here for hundreds of years, and even the most well-off of us still feel like we’re recent immigrants, making our way in a society that isn’t really “ours”. “Privilege” probably isn’t the best term to describe this, but it’s the term I have. And I’m sure that there are white people out there who’ve had similar experiences! I agree that this term ignores that white people aren’t a homogenous group, and that many people will have experiences that parallel mine in some way.
I recognize that anecdotes aren’t accepted as well as data here, but the whole point is that this is something that the data can’t capture.
Let’s approach this from a different angle, and attack the concept from the left, so to speak: talking about “white privilege” ignores that different groups that don’t have it actually experience significantly different disadvantages. Thus focusing on the advantages white people (actually or ostensibly) experience reinforces white-as-norm.
Example: an Asian man is going to have a different list of complaints than a black man. Both are stereotyped, but the former’s stereotype is allegedly positive (hardworking, smart, studious, etc) which means people are less likely to try and dismantle the stereotype; the former’s stereotype is extremely negative. Asian men are desexualized while black men are hypersexualized: not since the early 20th century have any white men feared that Asians were going to take their women and that was mostly concerning East Asians, was concentrated along the west coast, and also tied into the early 20th century drug panic (the usual line went something like “the wily Oriental is using opium to enslave white women!”). Asian men often seem to have the opposite complaint: that white men go after their women (who are, if not hypersexualized, then at least sexualized in a certain way).
Materially, their situations are very different. Asians tend to do significantly better than black people, and than white people, academically; incomes vary significantly among Asians (and it’s hard to make good comparisons due to the combination of low-earning recent immigrants and high-earning Indian-American tech worker visa types) but it’s generally higher than black people, and the pattern is of going from impoverished hardworking immigrant to successful. Black people have had a very different experience, as mdet describes: the overall impression I (not an American historian or anything like that) get is just a long string of dickings-over, with the occasional boost, but also with the occasional “well-intentioned-white-people-try-to-help-but-bungle-it” situation.
Black people are incarcerated significantly more than the average and succeed academically significantly less than the average; we can argue about the reasons for this but regardless of the reasons, it frames their experience. It’s the opposite for Asians, but they are sometimes punished for their success: a lot of universities quite clearly discriminate against Asian applicants, because if you let people in only on academic merit, they’d make up a huge % of the campus population.
Black people have the complaint that people pay too much attention to them – eg, the cops, or the store security, or whatever – Asians the opposite, especially East Asians: Asians are sort of ignored much of the time witness environments (Silicon Valley, some university campuses) with significant Asian populations described as “too white” or “overwhelmingly white”. The former is especially apparent in the fact that opposition to AA usually gets framed as “oh dear Becky didn’t get into UT how sad” when in fact it’s Ivies using the same tricks that kept the Jewish population of the schools down in the past to keep the Asian population down now that’s a major issue: when it can be quantified, Asians (especially East Asians) get hurt by AA policies more than white people do.
So talking about “white privilege” erases these wildly different experiences and, again ironically, shoves everyone who isn’t white into one big “Other” category. It also has the result of erasing bigotries that fit a different model, like anti-Semitism: Jews have more than once had the experience of thinking that everything is cool and they’re fitting in and life is good and then oh shit. Breaking things down more by group seems far more intellectually productive, but is rhetorically less potent.
@mdet
The problem is that the privilege or disprivilege of the individual is fundamentally not really knowable or comparable. Isn’t this why critical race theorists tend to flee into anecdotes and demand that their subjective view of their own experience is accepted as true? Perhaps in an alternative history, black Nabil would have had an experience that severely damaged him. Perhaps not. It probably depends on whether the butterfly flapped his wings. So his statement is not right or wrong, it is nonsensical.
—
BTW, your comment make me realize that disprivilege can* even drive people to (a kind of) success. For example, I would characterize the male gender role in large part as coercing men into behavior that is desired by others, through denial and the lack of choice.
A brilliant book about the male gender role is Character, by the Dutch writer Bordewijk. The book is about a violent, ruthless father who never allows his son any love or comfort. The son is forced to either use all his capabilities to survive or he will fail horribly. The middle ground is not an option. At the end of the book, the son has become much like his father, successful and esteemed, but without a true capability to love or be close to others.
Of course, the son could also have given up or not have had the ability to meet the challenge and be destroyed.
—
Not that I’m arguing that there is always a silver lining to being disadvantaged, but it’s also not true that disadvantage always merely causes harm.
@Mdet
Well, as a white person living in Asia, I think I can say I have! Of course, it’s not exactly the same since, as you say, black people have been in America in significant numbers for hundreds of years.
Nevertheless, I don’t think “privilege” is quite the word for it; what you’re talking about sounds to me like an unavoidable part of being a minority. Based on my experience being a minority in Asia, I can say there are upsides and downsides. The upside is you never just blend in; you’re always a little “special” or remarkable. The downside is… you never just blend in; you’re never just “normal.”
But I also don’t think I would describe the Asians in Asia as “privileged.” Sure, some things are easier and more convenient for them than they are for me. And, on rare occasions, someone will just outright treat me badly. But I think it would be a little unfair for me to come to a place full of Asians and then say “hey, it’s so unfair how you’ve created this society that really caters to the needs of Asians!”
On the flipside, I’ve also lived most of my life in majority-black US cities and have lived in mostly-black neighborhoods myself. And in those places I’ve felt out of place, or even looked upon dismissively on occasion as well, though not often. But I think it would also be weird for me to say, in a mostly black neighborhood “you know, it seems to me you guys need to do more to make sure white people feel at home here.”
Overall, it seems like there are some downsides and, sometimes, a few upsides to being a minority anywhere.
Which is not to say it makes no difference what specific race you are; obviously there are different stereotypes, deserved and undeserved, about different races and in different parts of the world.
Insofar as I think “white privilege” is a thing, I think it would simply mean something like “being treated by strangers on the basis of positive stereotypes people have about white people” (of course, there are also some negative stereotypes people have about white people). On this score I can understand why someone would say it’s a disadvantage to be born a race about which there is a somewhat higher expectation of criminality (somehow this rarely gets cited as a disadvantage of being born a man, though my prior on not getting mugged by a woman of any race is way higher than my prior on not getting mugged by a white person).
Thing is, you can’t stop people seeing patterns and people have to have some heuristics they use to deal with the great mass of humanity they don’t have time to get to know. Otherwise you spend time interrogating elderly Asian ladies at the same rate as young Muslim men when your goal is aviation safety, and that isn’t the kind of sacrifice I’d personally think is worth it to avoid making young Muslim men feel bad (and again, I’m sure that sucks! I’m not saying it doesn’t; I just don’t see a better solution).
I think where a lot of white people have gotten really tired of it of late is because it’s been drilled into our head from a young age to not stereotype, not treat people badly just because of their group membership, etc. etc. and the vast, vast majority of us actually make an effort to do so insofar is as reasonable, yet it not only doesn’t seem to help, it seems like resentment has only grown and grown in recent years… which leads to the suspicion that what is really desired, at least on some broader level, is not for white people to try harder to be nice, but just naked power.
White privilege seems to me to basically be the relatively small level of kin preference that European peoples have, aggregated across their larger share of the population in countries settled by European peoples.
Then you should call it something neutral like “the effect of being white” rather than “white privilege”. Calling it “privilege” implies that it can’t ever be harmful. Notice how we don’t say “attractiveness privilege”?
I don’t want to sound more authoritative than I am but if you’re a kind person who doesn’t stereotype, etc, then I don’t think the average black person will have a problem with you, personally. The hardcore social justice types will complain about microaggressions, but I think there’s actually much less tension between the average black person and the average white person than the political discourse would lead us to believe (as you seem to attest to when you briefly bring up having lived in a black neighborhood). Obviously black people are frustrated with our socioeconomic position, as anyone would be, and while this is a hard problem, it does seem to be steadily improving. There’s much less crime, many more college degrees and middle-class jobs than there were a generation ago.
The other thing I was trying to get across is that it is just challenging to be in a demographic minority, even without any bigotry or socioeconomic differences. Like, being successful as a black person usually requires learning how to integrate into White America in a way that a successful white person doesn’t really have to move into a black neighborhood, or climb the ranks at a majority black business. And any product marketed to a mainstream, general audience inevitably means “marketed to white people”. We’re a niche market, so it can be hard to see ourselves as part of “mainstream” “normal” America. I’m not even really upset here, I think America is on the right track overall in this regard, but change is slow, and people’s perceptions of change are even slower.
@Mdet
I don’t really share your perception things are getting better between black and white Americans. Most of the economic stats I can find don’t look very good (black education and income may be up a little in the past 40 years, but considering hidden inflation of money and the value of college degrees, it may not mean much, especially when the gap between blacks and other groups, especially in household wealth, seems not to be closing at all; there do seem to be fewer blacks living in extreme poverty, which is an undeniably good thing, but may constitute a kind of “low-hanging fruit” already picked at this point if it refers to e.g. very rural blacks living without electricity), but if you can show me some reason for more optimism, I’d be interested.
And in my hometown, where previously uncontroversial Civil War monuments recently became a big, angry debacle, there is certainly a widespread perception of more tension between blacks and whites. The day after Trump’s election there was widespread vandalism–not something that would have happened in the past just because a Republican won.
Sure, most of my interactions with black Americans are fine, but that’s true of all groups; if I go from 99 out of 100 interactions are comfortable to 9 out of 10 interactions are comfortable, that’s still a very bad trend. Question is, would I feel more or less comfortable living in a black neighborhood today than ten years ago? I think I’d probably feel slightly less comfortable. Don’t know how a black person would feel about living in a white neighborhood today versus ten or twenty years ago; maybe you can tell me.
Replying before I’ve read everything.
To my mind, privilege exists, and is a fair point to make about disparate outcomes– not that privilege is necessarily a complete explanation, but it’s frequently in play.
For example, Federal housing policy really did give a substantial advantage to white people and disadvantage to black people from 1934 to 1968, and this had effects on wealth accumulation.
However, what went wrong in my strongly held opinion is that privilege morphed into an obligation for privileged people to feel bad all the time, and constantly acknowledge that everything good in their lives was gotten unfairly.
Oh, you’re not supposed to *feel* bad, and certainly not to mention it. You’re just supposed to serve without complaining.
This is presumably a reference to redlining. My direct ancestors (and most of my relatives, in fact) lived in red or yellow areas during that entire period. This is probably quite common for descendants of “ethnic” whites and/or immigrants between the late 19th and early 20th century. The redlined areas were not close to a clean black/white split.
Yellow areas?
I’m not sure what you mean. Is it that a lot not-exactly white people were able to buy houses in areas where they weren’t supposed to?
@Nancy Lebovitz
Redlining wasn’t what Ta-Nehisi Coates implies it was. While it was a racist policy, it wasn’t about who got loans nor about who could live where. It was about which neighborhoods would qualify for FHA-insured loans. There were four categories A-D, where A was coded as green on maps and labeled “Best”, B was blue and “Still Desirable”, C was yellow and “declining” and D was red and “hazardous”. Being a black neighborhood was usually sufficient to get a “D” rating, but there were plenty of non-black “D”s and “C”s. The area my paternal grandparents lived in at least part of the time was a D; according to the writeup it was 0% black but 80% “foreign”.
…and the reasons why FHA loans weren’t extended to specific regions was because the resale value of homes in that area tended to be very low – lower than the loan value. The resale values were low because people with enough money to buy houses preferred to not buy houses in those areas.
Which is still largely true – houses on streets with “lower class” people living next door linger on the market long after houses just around the corner sell for twenty-five percent more. Sink that house into a majority African American neighborhood and the difference is even more striking.
A variety of reasons could play into this, depending on the individual home-buyer: wanting to live where the neighbors share the same values and tastes in churches, food, holidays, music, pets and lawn decoration; wanting to live where people put money into house upkeep; wanting to live in a neighborhood where most of the families have married parents who keep the boy-kids more-or-less inline, so that there is little drug use and less housebreaking and joyriding; wanting to live in an area where the neighbors don’t have offensive dark skin even if all other aspects of their lives are the same as the home buyers.
One narrative is that the last one trumps everything else. To me, that’s not accurate, and one can’t understand the “redlining” phenomenon while clinging to the idea that it was just that black people couldn’t buy houses in parts of town.
How on earth does that follow?
It’s obvious that the whole point of this discussion is to conceptualize an abstract social reality, so I don’t know (if your confusion is genuine) where you got the idea that “whiteness” = “the actual pigmented epidermis on people’s bodies”.
This seems like the Mother of All Baileys. You’ve got activists in the street screaming “kill whitey,” “smash white supremacy,” demanding people check their “white privilege” and condemning them as racist for any affront to “people of color,” and then it’s pointed out it seems as though maybe you don’t like white people and it’s “how did you possibly get the idea we’re talking about skin color!?!”
I dunno. I’m skeptical.
Undoing whiteness as property doesn’t require killing all the white people any more than getting rid of American Airlines Executive Platinum Status requires killing all the people with American Airlines Executive Platinum Status. Getting rid of a club good doesn’t require—or even suggest!—killing all the people in the club.
In fact, one of the things I liked the most about Whiteness as Property is that it’s got no time for blame or guilt. If you take the Harris view as I understand it, all the culture-war morality plays are totally beside the point. The problem becomes practical, consequentialist, evidence-responsive. It appears in a solvable form.
Why do you want to get rid of Executive Platinum? Do you work for AAL?
Triggered.
If he does, I have many bones to pick with him; my SEA -> DFW -> JAX trip yesterday was pretty fucking terrible. (SEA -> DFW had the worst seat pitch I’ve even had to fly, for one thing.)
@Andrew
You got one of the 737MAXs, didn’t you? That’s something AAL did because they seem to be managed by schizophrenics. For the pitch specifically, you could have flown Southwest…
If being an AAEPS member was a biological outcome getting rid of the group of AAEPS members would require either killing them all or preventing the genetic transfer of those traits to a future generation.
That’s because “whiteness” isn’t property; as others have pointed out, it has almost none of the characteristics we associate with either personal property or real property. Whiteness is “a” property of a person, one which is inextricably bound up with their skin color. It’s the thing that impels “anti-racists” to say such things as “By being a white male you are in a privileged class that is actively harmful to others, whether you like it or not”. And the only way you’re getting rid of it is getting rid of white people.
Yeah, nobody seems to be answering the simple question of: “What, specifically, might I do to divest myself of my ‘whiteness’ such that I am no longer deemed to posses it?”
Property that you cannot get rid of is no property at all. It’s an innate characteristic.
Your skin color is an innate property.
What that skin color has meant, legally and culturally, is certainly not an innate property. You seem to refuse to engage with the actual argument here.
People aren’t asking for you, personally, to get rid of your membership card. Your membership card is innate, and you can’t get rid of it.
They want the club itself to be expanded so that everyone gets in. And they want the club renamed to “human”.
I doubt there’s anyone at all that accepts racism as a valid concept but doesn’t want everyone to enjoy full membership in society. Where we start coming apart is how well that goal is served by the white privilege model (and that’s what we’re talking about; OP is basically recapitulating the “invisible knapsack” concept).
And frankly it doesn’t look good. Framing something as a “privilege” does not suggest inclusion. It’s an inherently adversarial word, with deep class connotations: it doesn’t say “something we should extend to everyone”, it says “an unearned boon that the authorities can and maybe should take away” (viz. “a privilege, not a right”). And the way it’s used in rhetoric follows that: it’s never used to mark a state that some are unjustly denied, always as a way to shout down dissenting viewpoints, or at best to urge speakers to second-guess themselves. This even though it largely unpacks, once you get down to the object level, to things like “not being hassled by the cops for no good reason” that we definitely should extend to everyone.
Repackaging it in terms of property, or as Executive Platinum Status or whatever, still seems to leave most of the same issues.
Are they planning to get rid of their membership cards to the black club, the Jewish club, the Latino club, etc?
I don’t think they have any interest in doing that when those cards are still useful for privileged treatment.
@Nornagest:
“I doubt there’s anyone at all that accepts racism as a valid concept but doesn’t want everyone to enjoy full membership in society.”
Let’s assume this is correct for a second. The the argument is entirely about whether this has already occurred. If you think that ethnic minorities are still subject to lesser membership society, but don’t like the terms “structural racism” or “white privilege”, do you really think “minority disadvantage” or some other term won’t cause the same frictions?
Secondly, what about the people in this thread who are arguing that discrimination against blacks really is warranted because they really are lesser? Are you saying those people don’t accept that racism is a valid concept?
@Conrad Honcho:
There are very few people, certainly not the mainstream of the left, who want the “Irish Club” torn down. Thus what we are arguing about is mostly about whether those who are in the “Black” club are currently disadvantaged.
I’m (at least) Italian, Czech, German, and French-Canadian. My cousin’s children are (at least) Black, Irish, Czech, Italian.
How many people are willing to grant them access to the Irish, Czech and Italian clubs?
I think we would be better served by identifying specific areas where ethnic minorities are subject to lesser membership in society and talking about those. “Racial profiling”, for example, is pretty inoffensive, but it’s hard to imagine an umbrella term for society being unfriendly to minorities which completely avoids the sort of adversarial framing I’ve been talking about. That said, I prefer “structural racism” to “white privilege”: its framing is still adversarial, but at least it’s negative.
I could have been clearer about this, but no, I don’t think the aitch-bee-dee folks etc. think racism applies to their analysis. They don’t think of themselves as being motivated by race, they think of themselves as having identified concrete grounds for discrimination which just happen to correlate with race. (This is obvious rationalization in some cases, but I think others really are trying. They could still be wrong, of course.)
But availing yourself of the privileges of Executive Platinum Status requires a deliberate act of some sort, doesn’t it? Even if you don’t have to whip out a card or give them a frequent-flyer number, at the very least you have to sign up for it. This seems to land us right back in the blameworthy territory of bailey-racism.
If your membership card was actually an RFID tag, you could walk freely everywhere in the airport without making a conscious assertion of your membership.
Fair enough; but now we’re back to the familiar idea of white privilege, in which the supposedly clarifying concept of property (“a bundle of valuable claims that the owner can pull out and use to their advantage”) is, as far as I can tell, doing no work at all.
@Paul Zrimsek:
If you walk up to a door in the airport, it opens automatically for you, you sit down in a comfy chair, have access to fast WiFi and have someone bring you a complimentary beverage … is this not valuable?
If there are others for whom that door does not open, does this have no meaning?
If there are others for whom that door does not open, does this have no meaning?
Yes, but it’s as much or even more a class-based meaning as a race-based one. Like the example of poor urban blacks versus poor Appalachian whites and sourcing food above – there are also poor white people in cities around the world, yea even in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave its very self, that have to rely on stores and can’t go out and fish/hunt/shoot extra meat (and let’s leave out the vegans having fits of the vapours at the very notion of killing for food right this minute).
If we’re seriously going to argue that, then poor white Joe in New York is less privileged than a Bushman in the Kalahari, but it’s not to do with race in that instance – it’s to do with money, education, access to good jobs, the argument about ‘food deserts’ and the rest of it.
(I end with a “won’t somebody think of the children” plea – if you’re going to discuss a topic like racism, can you please remember that other countries than the US exist? Or if confining your examples to the US, that you are discussing a particular and not a general case? Please?)
@Deiseach:
We are talking about the US primarily, because it has unique issues on this front, for several reasons, the legal status of black persons throughout most of its history being primary.
A conversation around racism that involved the treatment of, say, the Roma, in Europe is possible (and sometimes people attempt it).
As to whether this is mostly a class based thing, the treatment of an motorist who is both black and well to do vs. a motorist who is Appalachian and poor will differ (on average) and not in the way you would have us predict. Yes, Appalachia has issues related to class. Indeed if you look at liberals/progressives, you will see that they broadly recognize and are concerned with addressing those issues.
I posted this as a top level comment, but it’s relevant here.
That defines completely valid expectations to be racist. For example, if you select a completely random white person out of all people in the US, and a random black person, it is correct to expect the black person to the more criminal, or more likely to have committed a serious crime, or more likely to commit such in the future. If you want to use this definition for racism, then you need to admit that all correctly-thinking people should be racist, and “non-racism” is only for naive idiots who can’t face reality. Since I don’t really believe this is what you intend, you need a (much) stricter definition of “racism” if you want it to be something that could be called “bad” or “incorrect”.
The crime rate among US blacks is higher than among US whites, but a large majority of both whites and blacks are non-criminals, so the correct expectation of both a randomly selected white and a randomly selected black is “this person is probably not a criminal.”
Conflating “somewhat more likely relatively” with “absolutely likely” makes you the one failing to engage with reality.
No, this is intentionally obfuscating the reality. It is not the same expectation for both. You should expect more criminality from a random black person in the US just based on race.
It seems you’re trying to downplay the correct expectations you should have based on race as somehow “insignificant”. But that does not really work. A lot of expectations that are relevant in practice are smaller in effect than that. If you want to argue for a definition of “bad/not-factually-true” racism based on that, you absolutely need a qualifier like “racism is when the expectations you have based on race alone are many times as big as what is justified in reality” or something like that.
Without any qualification, if you only consider something like 50% likelihood threshold for “probably not a criminal”, you reject significant expectations that are absolutely considered valid in other contexts. For an exaggerated example, consider “has committed murder before”. I’d expect that across all such people, less than 50% are going to be committing more murders. But sane people will still reject the notion that there should be “no expectations” about the risk of further murders, even if it’s less than 50%.
You think the proportion of black people who are criminals is similar to the proportion of murderers who are repeated?
really making me think there, rlms.
@rlmns :
You mean the proportion of murderers who repeat, not the proportion of murderers that are repeaters. And no, the proportion of Black people that are convicted criminals is higher!; murder recidivism rates are very low. But we should really consider the proportion of murderers that are repeat offenders, not repeat murderers, and now that is higher.
Source: looking up statistics on the Internet and comparing them, which is not very reliable. But I'm not worried about that, because my real point is: what if the proportion of future criminals among Black people was higher than among former murderers? What if I'd said so and backed it up with impeccable citations to airtight statistical analysis? Would it change your views on affirmative action and the value of workplace racial diversity? It wouldn't change mine; and if wouldn’t change yours either, then I think that you're arguing about the wrong thing now.
@Adam Berman
The parent comment appeared to be making quantitative claims (that’s the only interpretation I can see for ‘Without any qualification, if you only consider something like 50% likelihood threshold for “probably not a criminal”…’. So if the example isn’t somewhat similar to the actual issue, it’s pointless.
@Toby Bartels
They are the same, no? (people who murder >1 person)/(people who murder >=1 person)
I assumed the original comment was talking about repeated murderers in general, not just those who were convicted, released, and murdered again. I assume the proportion there is a lot higher (and the parent comment presumably did too, since it compares it to 50%).
@rims
That was in response to Matthew S., who wanted to deny the relevance of expecting higher criminality based on race, and wanted to sweep the expectations under “this person is probably not a criminal.” (which would apparently apply to anything up to 50%). My point was that this is a flawed way to view the issue, and rates below 50% do matter.
But why 50%? Why not 0.005%, or 95%?
You should expect more criminality from a random black person in the US just based on race.
No. You should expect increased likelihood/better odds that random black person might be a criminal as compared to the odds for white/Hispanic or whatever term we’re using today/Asian etc. but you can’t point to a black person at random and say “definitely a criminal!”
This is the same kind of thing James Damore was accused of saying – “women less likely!” when he did not mean “any and every random woman will never want to be in STEM/will be as good as a guy in STEM”, he meant taking the general population and averaging it out.
@rims
Those would not be reasonable interpretations of “probably not a criminal”. If you want to claim that everything which can be put under that phrase is “the same”, then 50% is the only really natural interpretation – if you claim such grouping and try to make up some other exact percentage which makes your claim look better (without even specifying it up front), that’s not really a credible argument.
@Deiseach
I think “should expect more criminality” is a reasonable phrasing, and does not imply that every individual separately would have to be a criminal. Think of it as “expected value is higher” (of either number of crimes committed, or of 0/1 classification of non-criminal/criminal).
@ rlms :
Heh, yeah, I guess so. I thought that you were trying to say (murders committed by people who murder > 1 person ever)/(murders), which is not the same, but it's not what you or I ever said either. Fortunately, math makes it clear.
@uau
Such as? What concrete action would you take, at the individual level, if you knew that the person you met has a 0.01% chance to be a murderer, instead of a 0.002% chance?
You accuse Matthew of lumping anything under 50% as the same thing, but that implies that the actual probabilities are anywhere near 50%.
Why restrict it to the individual level? Policy isn’t made there.
Be fair; a random African-American adult male has a ~1.0% chance of already being a murderer(*), not 0.01%, and a similar chance of committing murder in the future. That’s at the level where you might start taking concrete action.
Except that nobody ever actually meets random African-American adult males, and if you can’t accurately adjust that ~1% estimate by an order of magnitude or so in the first five minutes, you’re not trying. You can start by asking questions like “was this particular African-American adult male actually in prison when I met him?”, which is a huge discriminator.
* Using the FBI’s definition for criminal homicide generally
> You should expect more criminality from a random black person in the US just based on race.
As I’d expect more (violent) criminality from a random man than a random women chosen at large. To deny this would be to deny robustly-reported deny statistical facts, and no one is a racist for believing things like this. Does anyone really dispute this?
The moral problem (let us not say racism, it would apply as much to discrimination against men based on criminality) is any implication that these facts can or, even worse, should have any great utility in real life.
I’m never dealing with a random black or random man, and very much not so when I am considering offering a job, renting a place to someone, or on a jury. If I think “random black” is the ever right reference class to use in such cases (or indeed, most social interactions), I’m guilty of up to three things. First, an intellectual failure: I don’t know what statistics tell us or how, mathematically, to use them. Second, in many cases, stupidity because I may be acting against my interests. Third, some degree of immorality because, if it’s important, it is a virtuous thing to strive to learn more about a person as an individual so as to undercut the applicability of very broad and adverse group statistics. Treat individuals as individuals. (And if it’s not important, why not be as charitable as possible?) Yes, it’s not always possible or wise to ignore the coarse numbers entirely (I might not be able to learn enough to fully undercut a ‘murderers often reoffend’ concern) but when possible we should strive, mightily, to avoid treating people adversely based on statistics from some group (especially, a big group) they belong to.
@alef
It is true that you usually dealing with an individual, but it is also true that you usually have imperfect information. It is pretty normal and gives utility, to then make assumptions.
These assumptions are on a spectrum of correctness and/or how much benefit they give. Then people choose a cutoff where they stop assuming. However, I don’t think that people will ever give up assumptions altogether nor that they should.
Some of these assumptions are correct 99+% of the time. Some of the increased accuracy caused by making these assumptions provide great benefits. There would be a huge cost to never assuming anything. It would be like giving everyone enormous social anxiety.
So IMO, the only reasonable thing is to argue where the cutoff should be and/or that we should have a higher threshold for making assumptions based on certain information (like skin color), but not to never make assumptions based on such facts.
@Aapje
> It is true that you usually dealing with an individual, but it is also true that you usually have imperfect information. It is pretty normal and gives utility, to then make assumptions.
True! But what assumptions? I’m going to over-formalize this, to try to keep things more concise. We have some very broad population statistic P(Criminal|Black), but were are in a nontrivial social interaction with an individual and have learned a fairly rich set of information about him, “I”. We want something like P(Criminal|Black and I).
So here’s an assumption: assume the information I statistically undercuts evidence from blackness: P(Criminal|Black and I) = P(Criminal|I). Well, before you yell, it is an assumption – which is what you (rightly) asked for – and does let us make progress.
So now you can try to tear apart the reasonableness of this assumption, and you’ll find it easy. Except: I think that – in situations of the type above – you’ll often (not universally!) find that any other assumptions (that are simple enough to help you make progress) are yet more easily attacked, less workable, and less effective as tools of approximate rationality.
@alef
You have lost me at this point. What are you referring to when you say “any other assumptions”? ‘I’ or blackness or something else?
> What are you referring to when you say “any other assumptions”?
I think I’ve misread you, or you me, on what ‘assumptions’ mean in this context. I’m not sure how to clarify that expect by resorting to an over-formalism that even I find misleading.
We have statistical facts, e.g. P(C|B). They come nowhere near close to determining P(C|B&I) – so we must either give up or make assumptions, including assumptions about statistical relationships, to find an answer. And by ‘an answer’ I don’t mean a ‘right’ answer, but just something approximate, utility-justified, helpful, good enough, practical, that lets us get on with things.
So back to the over-formalizaiton. P(C|B&I) = P(C|I) is clearly a simplifying assumption – not about the ground facts, but about statistical relationships. But here’s another: P(C|B&I) equals (or should be dragged towards) P(C|B), because for the latter we have reliable statistics (not strongly evidential, but by golly the numbers are right) whereas P(C|I) is just so terrribly compicated so let’s assume it’s largely ignorahble. So that’s an assumption: we can discount/ignore things we don’t know with confidence in favor of less relevant things we do know more precisely. Or consider another different but also very simplifiying assumption: evidential independence. Whatever you think “I” tells you about criminality (yes, that’s hard, uncertain, “messy”), assume “B” tends to add (in a log-likelihood sense, literally does add ) on top of that since it’s convenient to assume it’s independent evidentially.
These are the sort of ‘assumptions’ that let us go from ‘I am in a state of uncertain knowledge, here’s what I know – (including, at least: the the particulars (B &/or I), the limited reliable statistics I have on hand such as p(C|B)., and my human wisdom) to a practical answer.
That’s what I mean by assumptions, if it helps.
Suppose (a different world?) where blacks were far, far, more likely to be criminals than others. You are a well-known expert and proponent of Bayesian reasoning, but somehow you are picked as a juror on a trial with a black defendent. Do you not see that it would probably be wrong (not just a moral wrong, not just an affront against fairness and law) to count her blackness againt her? Restricting the question just to rational decison makiing, no, make that approximate and heuristic decision making, would you not agree that this bias is rationally unsound.
@alef
Whether it is culturally wrong depends on the agreement that society makes about how justice should be administered. The current standard for judging guilt incorporates a Schelling fence*, where we accept reduced (possible) quality of decision making, to get other advantages:
– legitimacy in the eyes of certain groups
– reduced ability to use the system as a weapon against the disfavored
– reduced impact of incorrect prejudice
– etc
The willingness to accept a high cost to get these advantages resulted in the famous one-liner: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
However, it is doubtful whether most people are actually willing to go that far in practice. Also, in the case of war, we see that state-sanctioned enforcers are allowed to kill with relatively low standards of evidence, often causing many innocents to suffer, because the circumstances are deemed to make it impossible to use higher standards.
So I would argue that the cultural agreement would not be sustainable if 99.99% of black people would be criminal, but that the support for the principle of color-blindness in law is in fact conditional on the level of black criminality being below a certain level.
* There are many other Schelling fences in policing & justice as well, like those that defend privacy
—
Furthermore, we see that the principle of blindness to born traits, even if those improve decision making on average, is not consistently observed by society, with two famous examples being higher premiums for male drivers and affirmative action.
When a principle is held as sacred and critics attacked as racist/sexist/etc when some groups bear the burden, but that same principle is dismissed when other groups are negatively impacted, then that principle is not actually sacred.
So given that people seem to rarely actually believe in the principle, but instead believe that it is justified in some circumstances, the logical debate to have is to argue the circumstances, not the principle.
Thanks @AApje. Useful. I was trying to make the case for a Schelling fence (thanks, new term to me) for trials and lesser such matters, purely in terms of rationality (i.e. that in the real world it will tend to increase the ‘quality of decision making’ you think it might reduce) – entirely independent of the social considerations you list. Trials are/should be an easy case for my argument: I honestly don’t believe anyone could, in any way, use a black criminality statistic (as it is, not 99.9% because the logic changes very much then) in a trial at all sensibly (and granted the usage has to be approximate and heuristic and assumption-laden), even if all other Schelling-like restrictions were off the table.
But even if my case has some strength to it, I’ve clearly made it very poorly, so enough. But thanks.
Anti-racism is the preposition that the (ultimately pretty limited, for the reason Matt points out) utility people derive from your observation is outweighed by the injustice done to individuals who neither asked to be born a particular race nor contributed to the statistics driving that prejudice.
I’d add that, by your logic, misandry is like racism, only far more rational and true. If you would agree that misandry is less of an animating force in our society and history than racism, the reasons for that distinction might be informative/illuminating.
(if you would not agree, then we’re starting from vastly different views of the world and no further discussion is likely to be useful)
You can hold an “anti-racist” view of that definition while still being “racist” by the “expectations based on race” definition. For example, you can (correctly) expect that black applicants for a position will do a worse in the job on average, but still give them as many interview opportunities as while applicants. So you don’t really seem to address the content of my post.
Expectations based on race can be factually correct. If you call that racism, then either you need to agree that racism is a good thing, or you oppose reality itself. Policies based on directly on race can depend on more factors, and you can have better reasons for opposing those. But that’s shifting the goalposts from the initial attempt at defining racism.
I wouldn’t be ready to directly forbid policies based on race either – or at least not policies that end up corresponding to race. For example, if a community is more criminal, harsher policing has a better payoff/cost ratio. So IMO it can for example be justifiable if blacks end up under more invasive police scrutiny. When making decisions at a higher level (such as which areas/cities to target in general), you can almost certainly do better based on other statistics than race directly (but the result will end up significantly correlating with race); when doing decisions on the street, race can be a valid factor for police officers that do not have much other information.
Well, neither are the “anti-racists.” They don’t exactly want to see an end to affirmative action or diversity quotas.
“The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exists, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (chapter 16)
@herbert herbertson
This is an extremely good point, in both parts. The first part especially – isn’t gender of far greater predictive force that, say, someone on the street late at night might be trouble, than race? Age and intoxication status are also pretty big.
Well, I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. I doubt many conservative-minded people cross the street when they see a 50-year old black woman walking towards them.
Matt M:
Indeed, I’m pretty sure that even the most virulently racist people don’t feel any great urge to do so.
@Matt M
However, this place doesn’t have a lot of talk about how it’s right to be suspicious of young men, etc etc, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people here take affront to the concept of Schroedinger’s Rapist.
@dndnrsn
Is anyone disputing that young men are far more violent? The statistics seem clear on that.
The metaphor betrays a complete misunderstanding of what Schroedinger’s cat is about, so it is a deceptive use of words that smart people will interpret differently than intended. So it is a linguistic affront.
If we do take it as intended, then we see that NISVS data strongly suggests that adult men are not significant more rape-prone than women.
@Aapje
The Venn diagram of “people who think crime differences justify police discrimination against black people” and “people who think crime differences justify police discrimination against men” are not a circle, though.
With regard to Schroedinger’s Rapist, it uses the colloquial understanding of Schroedinger’s Cat. Which is, I’m pretty sure, a misunderstanding. But it’s a catchy way of saying that a woman can’t be sure whether any given man is safe.
With regard to the NISVS, it doesn’t include people who have been in prison recently, right? So male-on-male sexual assaults are probably undercounted. I buy the reading in which “made to penetrate” is counted as rape, which puts men at about 1/4 of rape victims in the US, but even if most male rape victims had female perpetrators, you’d need a lot of female-on-female attacks to have the male and female attackers even, wouldn’t you?
@dndnrsn
Catchy and wrong is a good way to deceive people, so I’m not a fan of that combination.
As for NISVS, the survey data shows that the 12 month victimization statistics are roughly similar, with men having male perpetrators more often, but still close enough that the perpetrator ratio is not that different (in my eyes).
The lifetime survey data is more disparate, which can be because women are far more often victimized before adulthood or it can be an artifact of socialization making men forget events far more often or both.
Whatever may be the reason, if we assume that Schroedinger’s Rapist is invoked by an adult, then I think that the 12 month statistics are most relevant for their actual risk at that point in their life. The NISVS data suggests that for an adult American, risk of rape is roughly similar for each gender, with both men and women being most at risk of getting raped by a person of the opposite gender.
dndnrsn:
If you’re trying to avoid trouble on a dark street, I’d absolutely recommend assigning young men the highest threat level and little old ladies the lowest, regardless of race. That should inform things like whether you decide to duck into that one restaurant for a couple minutes to avoid a possible confrontation. And if you want to understand crime statistics in the US, similarly, it’s helpful to understand that violent crime is overwhelmingly a young man’s game.
Knowing more is almost always better than knowing less, for making decisions.
Aapje, I think it’s not so much that people forget sexual assault (including rape), it’s that they’re apt to discount it.
What I keep seeing is people (both male and female) saying that they were generally frightened and depressed after a sexual event, but they would tell themselves that it wasn’t really the other person’s fault so it can’t have been that bad.
Lately, there’s been a social shift to say that sexual events which lead to trauma are that serious.
When it comes to assessing a stranger, “is male” should absolutely raise the probability of their being violent/criminal. It’s not debated because I don’t think anyone objects to it, and I’ve seen it pointed out several times in prior threads on other topics.
However, what that has in common with the talk about race as a factor for analysis is that if you’re well-calibrated, not even “male” should raise your confidence of criminality/malicious intent to 50%. Nor does “Black”. Or even “Young + Black + Male”.
I think it’s reasonable to critique anyone who said “Well, if I see a young black man on the street at night, I cross the street, because you just can’t know if they’re a law abiding citizen or would-be mugger looking for a victim”. In this case ‘you just don’t know’ is a colloquial way of saying “there’s at least a 50-50 chance that young black man is a mugger”.
The problem most people have with the “Schrodinger’s Rapist” argument (which I’d never heard called by that name before but I like), is that it sounds to them like the people using it are making that exact same claim with regards to men as my example above about the young black man at night: “You just don’t know”, or in other words “As a base starting point, you should have about a 50% confidence interval that any given man is a sexual predator.”
The relevant question is how high the probability has to be to make it worth crossing the street, and the answer is surely well below 50%. If I say that I don’t know if it is going to rain tomorrow, that doesn’t imply that I think odds are 50-50.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Answering affirmatively to the survey doesn’t require ascribing ill intent to the perpetrator, but merely that one didn’t want the sex. A person can blame themselves for causing the situation and still answer that one didn’t want the sex & this would be counted as a rape/forced to penetrate.
But you are correct that I was sloppy.
A more accurate way of putting is that men may be especially prone, especially for long ago events, to alter their memory to edit out the non-consent. After all, victim-hood is inconsistent with the male gender role, men are supposed to be good at seducing women, are supposed to always like sex, etc. So there are a lot of incentives to think: it still counts (although for some reason I feel sad when thinking about it).
@Trofim_Lysenko
Is “you can’t be sure” necessarily something that defaults to 50-50? Something that a prudent woman will do (and, honestly, anyone prudent should do) is before going on a date or being alone with someone for the first time or whatever is make sure that someone knows where they are, is expecting a call by x time, whatever.
If they only did that with someone they were 50-50 on whether they are safe or not… That’s a situation anyone would be wise to avoid – if you think someone is 50% likely to attack you, you should avoid them. It’s more “the chance might be 1% or 5% but the bad things that could happen are really bad”.
I’m going to bite the bullet and agree that, strictly speaking, “all correctly-thinking people” should take race into account when making their decisions, but only when doing so would actually lead to more correct decisions.
For example, when a doctor is prescribing certain kinds of medicine, he should definitely take the race of the patient into account (until genotyping each individual patient becomes practical, at least). On a more trivial level, band-aid and sunscreen manufacturers should take skin color into account when marketing their products. If people fail to do this, then patients will die, companies will lose money, and everyone will be generally worse off.
The problem with saying “all black people are criminals” is not that the statement is immoral, but that it is incorrect. If you make decisions based on such a grossly incorrect belief, then, once again, everyone will be generally worse off — including yourself.
Fair enough, but the statement ‘More Black people are criminals than White people are, proportionally.’ is correct, so how do you propose to handle that information?
It depends on which question you are trying to answer by using this information. For example, if the question is, “I see a black person, should I call the police ?”, the answer is “No”, because, while P(criminal|black) > P(criminal|white), P(criminal) << 1.
That might be statistically true, but irrelevant in most facets of life. If you’re dealing with an individual black person (or even a small group), you can just judge them on, well, them. There are far more accurate ways of determining if they’re criminals than simple race. Put in the effort. I don’t hold truck with most left-wing screeching on this issue, but they’re right that some people lazily round off “black people are more likely to be criminals” to “just rake all black resumes into the trash to be safe”, which given the actual odds for an individual is mostly pretty stupid.
The only place the “differing rates of crime” factoid is relevant is if you’re discussing social policy in aggregate; there, when discussing aggregate rates of success or failure, the fact that in aggregate there is more crime in one group or the other may have explanatory power.
I agree with these replies, of course (at least, it feels as if it should be of course). But this still leaves room for racist behaviour at the margin. That is, while most decisions can be made on the basis of better information than race, sometimes there will be close calls in which race is the deciding factor.
So if racial diversity is a goal, then I think that you have to take ‘affirmative action’ (to coin a phrase) to ensure this result. Even if it just amounts to ignoring certain statistics, you have to make the decision to ignore them (at least once you've learnt about them), lest they make a difference some time.
Toby Bartels:
I think there are places where this makes sense, but we need to do it explicitly. The public discussion needs to accept the available facts and then say “yes, we could get better outcomes in some ways by making this judgment on race, but we’ve decided not to because that would lead to worse outcomes in other ways.” You could make a pretty decent argument against racial profiling along those lines, for example. Yes, the police can probably do better at catching criminals with racial profiling, but that has a lot of unpleasant downstream effects, so we’ve decided we’d rather accept slightly lower police effectiveness in exchange for not having blacks getting disproportionately hassled by the police.
But this is an explicit tradeoff, and I think it’s really important to surface it. The common way this sort of thing is discussed in prestige media outlets in the US hides half the relevant facts and turns the discussion into a good guys/bad guys story.
I think that that information should be excluded from virtually all decision-making, for several reasons.
Firstly, and by far the most importantly fairness: I think that it’s deeply unfair to treat people who have behaved identically in all ways relevant to the treatment differently. That’s exacerbated when it’s always the same group of people getting the thin end of the stick, rather than everyone getting unfair advantages sometimes and unfair disadvantages other times. At the point where someone says “you are treating me badly solely because I am black; if I my behaviour had been identical but I had had white skin then you would have treated me better”, and you can’t give a loud clear “no I’m not” as your answer, you have some very, very serious explaining to do, and “I can improve the accuracy of my test by a few percent by doing so” is not nearly a good enough excuse.
Secondly, people are far more likely to support imposing onerous burdens on others in order to increase security if they don’t have to face them themselves; if you allow the majority to vote for a minority to be targeted with stop-and-search or increased security at airports or longer jail sentences or what have you without having to face those costs themselves, you can’t expect the majority to trade off their security against someone else’s liberty fairly.
A slightly more questionable reason is utilitarian. One of the reasons black Americans have worse life outcomes, and commit more crimes per capita, than white Americans, is that if you believe that “the system” is on your side you’re more likely to opt into it by trying to get an education and job, obeying its laws, and respecting those who enforce them, than if you believe that it is unfairly rigged against you, and in many senses actively hostile to you. Most black Americans, sadly reasonably, believe the latter, and a pretty essential first step to reducing the prevalence of that belief will be to render it false. So even if racial profiling helps fight crime in the short term, it may well provoke more crime in the long term.
I don’t have any kind of quantitative argument here, but even in the least-convenient-world where racial profiling would prevent more crime than it provokes, I think the other arguments are more than sufficient.
In some narrow cases something vaguely similar may be justifiable – if you’re searching for a specific suspect, it’s legitimate to only stop people who match their description – but in general, with e.g. police stopping and searching people because they suspect them, the police should be required to apply the same standard of suspicious *behaviour* to justify stopping black and white passers by, even if they could increase the rate of criminals stopped per innocent citizen stopped by using racial profiling.
The way you put it shouldn’t limit it to race. We treat twelve year olds differently with respect to all sorts of things–drinking, driving, voting–even if the particular twelve year old has behaved identically in all ways relevant to those particular issues to an adult. Do you disapprove?
What does “relevant to” mean here? If I have reason to believe that, on average, twelve year olds are less likely to drive safely than adults, is age relevant? If it is, then the same applies if, on average, blacks are more likely to commit crimes.
Young adult men pay higher rates for car insurance than young adult women or older men and women. That is true even for someone who has shown no evidence of being a dangerous driver. Is that also “deeply unfair”?
Your second reason is a better argument.
I would definitely say yes, although something can be both deeply unfair and a sensible decision for efficiency reasons.
rlms:
It seems to me that a lot of the really hard problems w.r.t. organizing a society come down to tradeoffs between fairness and efficiency, or between two different, equally-valuable notions of fairness or of efficiency.
In response to David Friedman, several posts above, or possibly below (am I the only person who struggles with the limits on the threading here?):
No, of course not – provided everyone has to wait til the same age to do these things, fairness isn’t an issue here because everyone is being treated the same, and you can cut straight to the discussion of utility.
With “relevant to” I was talking specifically about behaviour. The thought process was inspired by the discussion about a few weeks back about what things it is and isn’t legitimate to feed into an algorithm used to determine parole; my view is that in that context the only information the algorithm should be given is stuff related to culpability – even if e.g. single people are more likely to reoffend than married people, that shouldn’t be factored in, because it’s unjust to punish differently people whose behaviour has been identical in all ways relevant to culpability and rehabilitiation.
“Relevant to” is an intentionally weaselly shorthand, because while I think the idea I’m trying to convey could be defined more rigorously, I think doing so would be both tedious and unenlightening, and I hope “relevant to” is enough to enable the reader to reconstruct the gist of it.
As I’ve said above, I don’t think that treating everyone the same at each stage of their life is at all analogous in terms of fairness to treating people differently throughout their lives.
Once you’ve gotten past the fairness argument then yes, using statistical information from age is equivalent to using statistical information from race (although the former is a much stronger predictor), but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
Yes, I think that that’s an excellent example of the kind of thing I’m characterising as unfair, and I’d prefer it if it didn’t happen, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as discrimination on grounds of race, because as I said I think that if everyone sometimes benefits and sometimes loses from unfairness that’s less worrying than if it always goes the same way.
It’s just as bad a violation of principle, but should not be nearly as high up a list of “priorities for things to change to make modern society better”.
@rlms:
I find it useful to think in terms of two views of morality, the God’s eye view and the man’s eye view. From the former it makes sense to say that people ought to get what they deserve, so it is unfair if someone works hard and fails or succeeds due entirely to luck. That make’s sense from God’s viewpoint both because He has perfect knowledge on which to base his view of deserts and because he has unlimited resources with which to reward the deserving.
From the man’s eye view, it makes more sense to think in terms of what Nozick called “entitlement” (in contrast to “desert”). If I obtained something without violating other people’s rights or injuring other people, I am entitled to it, and “you injured me by not giving the something to me” doesn’t count as injuring.
For the very simplest case, consider a bet. We agree to bet ten dollars on the flip of a coin. You win. It makes no sense to say you deserved to win, since you didn’t deserve to have the coin come up heads any more than I deserved to have it come up tails. But it makes complete intuitive sense to say you are entitled to win, and to get my ten dollars, that being what both of us agreed to in advance. If I was a good person who badly needed the money and you a rogue with lots of money it might make sense to say that it was unfair for you to win—God should have made the coin come up tails.
Does that help? The fact that young men are dangerous drivers and the insurance companies can’t recognize the ones who are not is unfair to young men who are good drivers, just as the fact that women live longer than men is unfair to men. But neither is unjust—I’m not entitled to get insurance at a price that is fair given the actual risk in a world where an insurance company cannot measure that risk. The fact that one bad driver is in a terrible accident and another equally bad driver isn’t is unfair in the same sense. Also the fact that some people get cancer for no good reason and some don’t.
We live in a world of imperfect information, so there is always going to be unfairness to individuals.
Let’s assume that people’s performance when taken exams varies around a mean. Bob’s mean is (barely) a failing grade, while Alice’s mean is (barely) a passing grade. However, during one specific exam Bob over-performs and Alice under-performs, so Bob gets a passing grade and Alice a failing grade.
In one way, this is unfair to Alice, since her actual qualities are higher than Bob’s, yet Bob gets the advantages that go with passing the exam.
However, in another way this is not unfair to Alice, since performance on the exam does correlate with people’s actual quality and we can do no better than use an imperfect proxy to determine people’s actual qualities. Given many exams and many Alice’s and Bob’s, it is far more fair to judge them by their performance on the exam(s), than not to do so.
Imagine you own a museum and you give guided tours. But some valuable item(s) isn’t/aren’t well secured, so you’d like to be reasonably sure that you don’t give a tour to a group that contains one or more criminals.
Now, math will tell you that while the difference in probability of being criminal between a random black person and a random white person is small in absolute terms, the probability of a group containing not a single criminal quickly diverges between groups of whites and blacks.
To make the point with some random numbers:
0.98**10=0.817
0.90**10=0.348
So, what is the museum owner supposed to do with that information?
The groups in the museum are most likely not a collection of random people. I’d say that the probabilities that any person in the white group is a criminal is much lower than the average for the whole population, and the same is true for the black group. It’s probably more like 0.999 and 0.997 or something if we’re just throwing around random numbers.
In other words, it won’t provide much useful information.
One aside from this discussion (already discussed on Marginal Revolution):
We have two identifiable groups, A and B. A have a substantially higher crime rate overall than B.
In World #1, employers are allowed to do criminal background checks.
In World #2, employers are forbidden to do criminal background checks.
In which world would you expect more members of group A to be hired?
Bugmaster:
It seems to me that the balance here is:
a. You should incorporate statistical knowledge about racial groups into your decisions because that’s how you make the best decisions.
b. You should remember that humans have tribalism burned in by a million years of evolution, so you need to be really careful you don’t let your brain get hijacked by the tribalism to the point where you let knowledge of those statistics lead you to bad decisions.
c. At a societal level, we may explicitly decide to make less optimal decisions to accomplish other goals. As an example, in the US, the police aren’t allowed to use evidence they gathered illegally against you in a trial[1]. That’s a decision we’ve made–illegally-gathered evidence would make the police more effective, but it woul also encourage more illegal searches, so we’ve decided to accept the inefficiency in order to avoid lots of illegal searches.
[1] The exact way the law works here is subtle and I don’t claim to understand it well–IANAL!
That sounds like a contradiction in terms; by definition, optimal decisions are those decisions that allow you to accomplish your goals most efficiently. Of course, sometimes some of the goals can be mutually incompatible; for example:
In this case, we have conflicting instrumental goals: “put guilty people in jail” vs. “keep innocent people out of jail” and “maintain privacy”. Allowing the police to gather evidence illegally leads to all kinds of abuses of power which degrade the latter two goals, so we have to settle for letting some guilty people go free sometimes.
It’s a tradeoff, and we can measure the results. If we put absolutely everyone in jail, crime will go down to virtually zero, but we’d be living in North Korea. If we disband all law enforcement organizations, abuses of power will go down to virtually zero, but we’d be living in the Thunderdome. The correct setting for this slider is somewhere between these extremes, and it depends on how much we value e.g. privacy vs. security.
The problem I see with discussions of racial bias in statistical predictions is that it’s almost always discussed in absolute terms. I would be perfectly fine with a rule like, “we should artificially down-weight race by X% because we want affluent white customers to subsidize Y% of poor black customers”, or something to that extent — provided that someone can explain the reasoning they used to arrive at X and Y. But I think that stating outright, “we should completely ignore race, or anything that can be used as a proxy for race, because if we don’t then we’re evil”, is the kind of thinking that lands us in North Korea or the Thunderdome.
@Bugmaster
Exactly. I think that the costs of such policies should be recognized and that people should be allowed to speak out against having to endure those costs, without being called racist or otherwise having their human worth questioned for desiring a different balance.
Not always. If it happens that your randomly chosen black person is a woman and your white person is a man, there are more chances that the white man is or will be a criminal than the black woman – the gap in criminality between sexes is larger than between races.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Gender
2010 Incarceration rates by race and gender per 100,000
White non-Hispanic:
– Male 678
– Female 91
Black non-Hispanic:
– Male 4,347
– Female 260
Hispanic of any race:
– Male 1,775
– Female 133
That’s because when a woman commits a crime, she generally gets a lesser sentence, like community service, or fines, or nothing at all.
Source?
Using someone else’s sources because I don’t remember which study I actually reviewed about this…
https://www.reddit.com/r/rbomi/wiki/main#wiki_1._discrimination_in_the_criminal_justice_system
That defines completely valid expectations to be racist. For example, if you select a completely random white person out of all people in the US, and a random black person, it is correct to expect the black person to the more criminal, or more likely to have committed a serious crime, or more likely to commit such in the future. If you want to use this definition for racism, then you need to admit that all correctly-thinking people should be racist, and “non-racism” is only for naive idiots who can’t face reality. Since I don’t really believe this is what you intend, you need a (much) stricter definition of “racism” if you want it to be something that could be called “bad” or “incorrect”.
On the flip side, you’re very rarely likely to encounter someone in a situation where race is the only thing you are able to tell about them. I’d wager that there’s a stronger correlation between male and criminal than black and criminal, and yet we don’t treat every male we encounter as a potential criminal. We assume the person is not a potential criminal unless there’s other more strongly linked markers more commonly associated with criminality.
If someone is black and has none of the other markers more commonly associated with criminal behavior (such as poor or low status) and you assume ‘potential criminal’, you’re demonstrating racial prejudice.
“Black is more likely to be poor, and poor is much more likely to be criminal” is a logical train of thought, but shortening it to “black is more likely to be criminal” fails when you’re dealing with someone who is black and you have reason to believe isn’t poor.
Remember the original context, it was attempting to define racism as “expectations about consequences that follows from race alone”. People certainly do have various expectations that are based on gender! I don’t think this works as an argument in that original context.
Also, if you want to consider risk of being “potential criminal” in particular, “black male” is then a significantly higher-risk group, even if “black female” or “white male” aren’t particularly concerning. If the only information you have access to is race and gender, race still seems very relevant.
You can have more accurate expectations if you get more information, but I don’t think that’s much of a justification for the attempted definition. Expectations based on race are still correct, even if you can refine them when you have other information available.
jw beat me to it but it’s an important question:
If Whiteness is property, how exactly do you plan on disappropriating white people short of mass murder? Contrary to your implications, there aren’t actually any legal privileges for being white: every advantage either comes from being raised in a somewhat-functional culture or from heritable traits like IQ and conscientiousness. I suppose that worsening the culture and deliberately giving people lead poisoning might work but that’s probably not what you’re thinking of.
Another obvious question:
Everything that is currently classified as White Privilege, from supposedly disproportionate academic success and wealth down to overrepresentation in government and underrepresentation in prison applies ten-fold more to the Jewish/Gentile gap as it does to the White/Black gap. So when are you going to start talking about Jewishness as property?
You can twist yourself into pretzels trying to deny that the situations are analogous, but genocide is the inescapable conclusion of privilege theory. There is no way to equalize fundamentally unequal things except to destroy one or both of them.
Mandatory miscegenation.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Those who like to use the term “whiteness” usually draw some kind of line between “being white” and “whiteness”; the latter being more of a social construct than the former (race is a social construct more tenously based in biology than many think, but “whiteness” is a social construct built around that social construct, making it doubly a social construct). This is my understanding, at least.
Those who are intellectually honest and acting in good fith (ie who don’t strategically equivocate between the two, or speak vaguely so it isn’t clear, or just playing with words to get a better job in the faculty lounge/some HR department/whatever) will say that, if white is no longer taken to be good/normal/expected/unmarked/whatever, that’s “whiteness” over and done with.
Historically, prior to colonialism and the trans-atlantic slave trade and this that and the other thing, Europeans didn’t really see themselves as “white” – they defaulted to “smaller” identities. You used to be far more likely to see people talk about “the English race”. There’s an interesting transitional period – where, for example, English people trying to describe India try to describe it by way of analogy to Europe (eg, there are descriptions of India as “ruled by priests” whose “priestcraft” is like that of the Catholics in France or wherever – they’re like Catholics, but moreso!).
Let’s go with a dorky nerd analogy. Old-timey D&D had humans, with three or four classes (the thief/rogue was originally an optional thing, so there’s some trivia right there) and a few other races, which each amounted to a class: elves were kind of fighter/mages with some extra noticing-stuff ability, etc. Humans were able to be multiple things, each demihuman was just one thing – marked in a way humans weren’t. Then, later on, they made it so everyone could have a race and a class – this meant adding racial abilities which previously had been subsumed in the elf, etc “class” – humans got the ability to get to any level in any class (or, depending on how you look at it, were freed of level restrictions). Dual-classing vs multi-classing similarly separated humans from others. Then, 3rd ed, they did away with all that: no level restrictions, humans actually got “special abilities”, multi-classing for all, with non-humans having their multi-classing hampered a little more than humans. One could see this as humans being the default in the original version, and by 3rd ed, “humanness” is no longer the default. When people pissed and moaned that they wanted to play an elven fighter, or that dual-classing/multi-classing didn’t make a lick of sense, or that level caps were stupid, the designers changed it so that humans were just one of many races. They didn’t have to say “ok nobody gets to be a human any more.”
However, once it hits the streets and the internet, and once it percolates out and becomes another factor in faculty politics or campus-activist politics, and so on, a lot of subtlety disappears. That’s not the fault of the concept.
I don’t for buy the argument “Whiteness is different from being white” for one second and neither should anyone else. It’s the same kind of nonsense as “love the sinner; hate the sin.” Their hate is impossible to ignore.
That said, if the argument was to embrace more accurate ethnic identifications I would be all for it. I’m extremely proud of my German heritage and I don’t see much of any similarity between myself and Anglo-Saxons beyond a shared language. The problem is that the anti-racists still want me to pay reparations for things my ancestors and my ethnicity had no part in. If I’m going to be treated like shit for the actions of totally unrelated people centuries ago then those people’s descendants are natural allies.
Yeah, if these people actually believed this nonsense, they’d have enthusiastically embraced and celebrated Rachel Dolezal as one of their own. “Cultural appropriation” would be applauded rather than treated as an unpardonable sin.
Some deep-rooted similarities there, no?
/pedantic
@Nabil al Dajjal
You can say “‘love the sinner, hate the sin'” is bogus, but still recognize that “love the sinner, hate the sin” is what they say, or say they’re saying. It’s different from if they were just straight up saying “hate the sinner, hate the sin.”
Personally, I think it would be great if our society no longer saw white as the “default” and advanced to 3rd edition standards, to continue to use my analogy. That said, the subtlety gets lost and all that, and would-be rent-seekers are always ready to pop out of the woodwork.
Saying “we should stop treating white as the default” is different from “we should have people pay reparations” – is support for reparations universal?
@Matt M
Except that they saw Dolezal as someone who had advanced her career – which, I can’t remember a lot of the specifics, but I remember getting that impression – by pretending to be something she’s not, and by extension, maybe got bennies that should have gone to people who actually were that.
Well, the very notion that people can advance their careers by claiming not to be white would sort of discredit this entire enterprise, would it not?
There are different bubbles. Being black might hurt someone overall, but give them a boost to employment or whatever if they’re within certain circles, certain contexts. This is one of the criticisms of affirmative action type programs: they help middle-class black people, but don’t do much to help poor black people.
Ironically, I’ve seen some people (the only example I can come up with off the top of my head is Ozy, I think) say that in gender studies, being male can be a career boost – because most scholars in that field are not men, and they want to be able to say “look, we have men!” Who’d have thought that one of the places being male would help you was hiring in gender studies faculties?
Eh, I’d be willing to take an admission of “yes, being non-white provides a significant boost to one’s education and career prospects” from the types of people who criticize “whiteness” as a pretty big victory in the broader culture war.
Because those are like, not trivial pieces of modern-day existence.
But which education and career prospects?
You could, and probably do, have a situation where most black people take a hit in their educational prospects, but the ones who can go to university – remember, for the population as a whole, 20-30% people go to university, maybe including college, and it’s probably lower for black people – there’s an admissions boost. Which doesn’t help most black people, and may not even help those who get the admissions boost (google “mismatch theory”; it’s unproven, but it might be for real). To put it cynically, the Ivies etc want to be able to have black students so they can try to get people to overlook the question of “how much of that endowment, originally, came from the slave trade, eh?”
You could, and probably do, have a situation where most black people are discriminated against in employment, but in getting an academic job, or in some government positions, there’s a boost – but that’s still a minority. Or, hell, a black woman who knows how to code – you telling me Google doesn’t want that so they can shout “see we’re not racist” to the rooftops (to be cynical again)? But most black people are not in the running for those jobs.
What there is right now, in the US and elsewhere, is attempts to correct discrimination that benefit a minority of the members of groups discriminated against. They’re not doing a good job of reducing discrimination in general, it would appear.
Because that battle was already won decades ago. Vanishingly little of the remaining differences in outcome are due to discrimination, and in fact many of those differences occur despite discrimination in favor of the less-successful group.
@The Nybbler
I think that statement requires a lot of proof. Didn’t Scott look at the numbers and conclude there were areas in the police/court system where black people were definitely discriminated against?
Anecdotally, guys I know who don’t dress or act different than me – they dress preppy, not sketchy, and they’re not squirrelly (by which I mean the vibe that some people give off like they’re on drugs, having mental health issues, or just psyching themselves up to fight someone), but unlike me, they’re black. Middle-class, like me. They describe stuff – getting hassled by cops, store staff following them around, people crossing the street to avoid them – that I’ve never experienced, and I can’t think of any variable other than race that would have this make sense.
For some reason, I remember a point made by, of all people, Mike Cernovich, before he went full alt-lite huckster. He basically said “imagine what it would be like to have to deal with the TSA as a normal part of life – that’s what it can be like for black guys.”
Also, for a more prominent case, the obvious complaint about Elizabeth Warren.
@dndnrsn
I’m white. I’ve been twice arrested in the course of a traffic stop, and I’ve certainly been followed around in stores. I’m well aware that when the huge guy walks into your personal space and says “May I help you?” he’s not a salesman and he means “get the hell out of the store”. Can I present this as evidence of discrimination against white people? Of course not, because your prior of that is near-zero and your prior of discrimination against black people is near-one.
Saying “discrimination is over” is a big claim. Again, I point back to Scott’s article (I think we can safely assume Scott is not a left-wing activist kinda guy) in which he concludes
My anecdotes, while proving nothing, to me raise the question – what’s the difference between me and these other guys? I don’t know anything about you, I don’t know the vibe you give off, so we can’t say “well, what’s a black guy who otherwise is pretty similar to you get treated like?”
And I did not say that. I said “that battle was won decades ago”. The battle in question being “doing a good job of reducing discrimination in general”. To deny that is to deny that there has been significant reduction in discrimination (against black people) since the days of Jim Crow and before the various Civil Rights Acts. You can argue that there’s just as many racists-by-action around nowadays, doing their discriminatory thing whenever they think they can get away with it, but
1) I think _that_ is the extraordinary claim.
and
2) Even if it were true, you would also need to show they get away with it nearly all the time.
And yet the disparate outcomes remain. Discrimination has become a God of the Gaps; we can rarely find evidence of it, but we know it must be there. I reject that.
There certainly is less discrimination. But there still is discrimination. Moreover, the reduction in discrimination has been very uneven: it has not been across the board for all black people, regardless of class; it has primarily been for middle class and up black people.
There are fewer people who are racist by action, but there are still people who are racist by… Let’s say omission, rather than commission. It also manifests less in terms of consciously held racial biases. There are plenty of people who don’t actually hold racist opinions – their opinions may be very woke, in fact – who behave like racists, in some ways.
I think part of the issue can be blamed on people who ignore the impact of class. Ironically, many of these people think they are fighting the good fight – but given that the black people who have it the worst are poor black people. I’d attribute this at least in part to the way that a certain variety of left-wing politics has become the standard-issue politics in most of academia, with the converse being that academia has had increasing influence over left-wing politics. There are very few poor people present in academia, so, the interests of the poor (of whatever race) are not going to weigh very big. Even the interests of the lower-middle-class are not that represented.
I think that’s the case in many social injustices: the attempts to remedy them have often primarily helped the members of those groups that are, relatively speaking, the best off.
@David Friedman:
Oh, come on.
We’ve been over this before. There is simply no evidence that Warren ever gained an advantage from claiming Native ancestry, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Do you think that the people on the hiring committee who said they had no idea of her ancestry were lying?) This is a dumb argument, and you diminish yourself by making it. You’re better than this.
dndnrsn:
How would we know whether your model of the world was accurate or not? What evidence would allow us to decide whether we live in a world where there is still substantial hidden discrimination, or one where there is very little hidden discrimination?
@dndnrsn
Isn’t this what you’d generally expect? Discrimination in favor of a race/gender/etc will generally benefit those with the background that lets them take advantage of opportunities, letting them make up for their lack of natural skill with smart maneuvering; while discrimination against a race/gender/etc will generally harm those without the acumen to get out of the way.
In general, one of the main advantages of being from a higher class is knowing what’s what.
That’s why I don’t believe in ‘positive discrimination’ because in practice it mainly seems to decrease social mobility even further, while distracting much of the left into thinking they are helping the poor when they surround themselves with (a bit) more ‘diversity.’
@Iain
I think that Mr Friedman was referring to how Warren was/is seen by some, independently of whether that perception is true.
@albatross11
Well, one place to start would be better-designed tests of that sort of thing. The IAT might be nonsense, and attempts to show discrimination in, say, renting or hiring are often poorly designed and have a lot of confounders – usually having to do with class.
@Aapje
Well, if a system of positive discrimination is intended to help the black middle class – say, help the lower-middle class become middle-class, or the middle-middle class become upper-middle class – and it does that, well, it works. That may be a good policy objective. And, who knows, there may be an indirect effect – having a larger, better-off black middle class may help poor black people, indirectly.
But is it sold as that? If a program that, by design or not, does that, but was sold as helping all black people, or as helping poor black people, directly… I think part of the issue here is that a lot of white people – well-meaning or not – tend to do what I was pointing at with my D&D analogy. They see “black people” as one unit, while they break down “white people” into poor, middle-class, rich, urban, rural, etc. It’s outgroup homogeneity bias, of sorts. It’s the same reason that a lot of white people will get nervous around black guys who are not remotely sketchy, when they’re able to differentiate sketchy vs un-sketchy white people.
Of course, there are groups other than “white people” and “black people” so this is very simplified.
Overall, though, I take exception to the idea that because, in some spheres, some black people (generally, the well-off ones) get some kind of preferential treatment of some sort (be it a university quota-type system, or a recruiter who knows that the tech industry is getting flak for being too white – which now apparently also includes Asians, for the purpose of the tech agency – and male) that this proves general, overall preferential treatment for black people. Further, this is the kind of place where people will say stuff like “the people on top being mostly male doesn’t help most men” – and I think this is a similar issue. That a black person with a computer engineering degree would be like candy to a Silicon valley recruiter doesn’t really mean much for most black people, etc.
She listed herself as a minority on a database used by law schools in the hiring process, and the only basis ever offered for doing so was native American ancestry. Having been involved in the law school hiring process, I can assure you that being considered a minority candidate is an asset.
Two universities she worked at described her as a native American. They got that belief somehow and obviously regarded it as a positive feature. Whether she would have been hired without that neither you or I (nor she) knows.
I quote from the Snopes piece on the controversy:
Snopes
I don’t know. Given that it was in the context of a political controversy, it would not be astonishing. And even if it did not come up when she was first hired by Harvard, the fact that Harvard believed her to be Native American would have been an asset thereafter.
@dndnrsn
I don’t see how it can achieve the goals without decent inflow from the bottom. If people who currently control the left mainstream continue to ignore and even worsen the condition of the precariat, then at most they can increase the percentage of black middle and upper middle class a bit by stemming the outflow from the middle class to the lower class. I think this has little gain and high costs, as both the white and black lower class become resentful and may often blame it on racism against themselves.
Negative attitudes against blacks have been decreasing for a long time, but they seem to be stagnating or even ticking up again. This data also suggests that 43% of black people believe that racial equality can never be achieved in the US, while 57% of whites think that discrimination against white people is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks.
You treat this as a stable situation where a minor shift caused by these policies is a boon, but I see these policies as highly destabilizing (and not in the way that pro-black activists would like, except for the (tiny) ‘alt-black’).
Quite a few topics have already become so polarized in the US that both sides assume bad faith all the time, resulting in stagnation. Stagnation is bad for progressives, obviously, so this seems like a bad strategy.
Exactly. The narrative that the nasty white Silicon Valley people are keeping out blacks is not going to achieve very much, except for making the left seem insane in the eyes of many on the right and the center, who notice that Asians are both not white and quite successful in the Valley.
@Aapje
I’m not arguing for or against affirmative action policies or softer versions of that – let’s save that for another time. I’m arguing that specific cases where there’s discrimination in favour of black people don’t prove much regarding the big picture of what discrimination exists in the US right now.
If having a tiny bit of Native American ancestry did in fact help Elizabeth Warren get a position at Harvard, I think that Harvard is more blameworthy here than Warren. It says that when making a “diversity hire,” the main goal is simply to be able to say, “Look, we have a diverse faculty!” regardless of whether or not the new faculty member actually adds any cultural diversity to the campus experience.
@JulieK:
This is actually one of the main reasons that we can be confident that Warren’s claimed ancestry did not help her get a position at Harvard. If you compare Warren’s hiring announcement to the equivalent announcement for the first black woman to get tenure at Harvard Law three years later, it is obvious that Harvard didn’t know or care about Warren’s purported Native American roots. Nobody makes a diversity hire and then keeps it secret — that defeats the point.
At most, that they didn’t care about them when she was first hired.
(Source)
So like the difference between sex and gender? It's as if one said ‘maleness’ for having a male gender and ‘being male’ for having a male sex? Although the actual term most analogous to ‘whiteness’ as the terms are actually used is probably ‘masculinity’.
I think it’s still a bit different. Maleness, masculinity, isn’t the default to the same degree that whiteness, being white, is in our society. But, kinda. And this is my interpretation of what I’ve seen. I’m not a huge fan of social-studies, critical-studies type jargon; I’m not a fan of that whole worldview. But I do think that a world where you recognize that an elf can be a cleric is a good one, so to speak.
So sort of like the difference between “being pedantic” and “pedantry”? As in “there is nothing wrong with being pedantic, but pedantry is ridiculous and a terrible waste of time”.
In other words, I think those who make such distinctions are being pedantic and are passive-aggressively attacking people who identify as “white”.
It’s critical studies type jargon/concepts. I think it’s gonna be alien to a lot of people here; it’s kind of alien to me. But my understanding is that “black” and “being black” are different from “blackness” and “white” and “being white” are different from “whiteness” when it’s used in that context.
@dndsrn:
I can respect the fact that a different field from mine own has different jargon; but only up to a point.
1). Do the separate concepts of “being X” vs. “X-ness” help us make more accurate predictions about anything, as opposed to just having the unified concept “X” ?
2). Do most people, when they use those words, use them in the strict academic context — or do they just mean the unified concept “X” ?
I think it’s a rather poor (easily misunderstood, easily misunderstandable, too equivocable – if spellchecker tells me equivocable isn’t a word, well, it is now; language is a social construct) way to say “in a society that is majority, or even plurality, white, being white is taken as the norm in a way that increases stereotyping of everyone else, and has other detrimental effects.”
Part of the problem is that it’s really easy to not use these words in a strict academic concept, and the cynical part of me thinks that’s part of the reason that the social-studies crew talk like that – they can get emotional punch and weight and put them into what otherwise would be sociological concepts. “A system of racial prejudice and discrimination” doesn’t have the same oomph as “racism.”
If somebody chooses (out of the infinite number of possible terms) to use two terms which are synonymous in natural language for distinct concepts, I have to conclude that that person does not care at all about clarity.
@Robert Jones
Yes, I think one can safely accuse that corner of social sciences academia of lacking clarity. One might even accuse them of having incentives to lack clarity. I know I do.
@Robert Jones
On the contrary. I think the philosophical style of “appending further explanation/definition to a natural language word that gets across most of the meaning” is much clearer (assuming a good-faith charitable read) than hammering out a new neologism or complicated jargon phrase wherever possible. Especially when you have to read it over and over again in the course of an essay
In my view, what is being represented here as the common language meaning of “racist” is already a distortion. A racist, to my ear, is someone who hates other people because of their race, is happy if bad things happen to them. Someone who merely believes that members of some other race are less intelligent or honest or hardworking than members of his race is racially prejudiced, not racist.
That definition is at least as silly (in terms of distance from how the word is commonly used) as “racism = prejudice + power”. I expect that quite a lot, if not a majority, of Southern slave owners didn’t hate blacks, they just thought they were vastly inferior to whites. Were they not racist?
@ilikekittycat
The issue is that in a lot of cases there’s a great deal of confusion – the word as colloquially used doesn’t convey well the new academic meaning, in several cases. The field of social sciences, or part of it, doesn’t appear to be averse to new jargon, tortured writing, etc, either, so appealing to crisp and trimmed-down writing doesn’t really fit.
“There’s a lot of confusion” is sort of like “mistakes were made”–when it’s phrased that way you don’t have to say who created the confusion or made the mistakes.
I would blame the confusion on the party who decided to use a word that is nearly a synonym for evil in a technical way that seems designed to create such confusion.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that “white” is the skin tone, whereas “whiteness” is a set of cultural norms and practices (identified by their opponents as being) most common among “white” people.
Then, as soon as everyone is thoroughly reeducated and renounces these specific practices associated with “whiteness” (e.g. reading stories to children at bedtime), the opponents will declare victory through the “abolition of whiteness”.
In this analysis, “whiteness” is a reincarnation of the older “bourgeois morality” and “middlebrow taste”. White leftists have been projecting their “revolutionary morality” and “avant-garde taste” on people with different skin tones for so long that this association has become thoroughly accepted in their circles. “Petty bourgeois” is passé, “whiteness” is the new and clever rhetorical trick.
I’m not very charitable, am I.
Then they should pick another, less aggressive word for it. But I think they see the motte and bailey opportunities as a feature, not a bug.
If “racism” is just a nebulous, structural thing that’s a pervasive subtext to our entire culture, fine – but then it makes no sense to label any particular person a “racist”, because the degree to which any individual can contribute to or detract from that culture is negligible.
EDIT: I missed that Andrew covered my second point in a parenthetical in the OP. That said, while I appreciate his willingness to bite the bullet and admit that his framework precludes labeling racism as a personal failing, I don’t think that willingness is common.
As noted above, I think that corner of social sciences academia lacks clarity, often seemingly on purpose. The feeling I get is that they have an incentive to be unclear – in the case of “racism”, “white supremacy”, etc they can take a word with a colloquial meaning and a great deal of emotional punch, and then create an “official” definition that’s very easy to apply. When they apply it, they still get a bit of the colloquial meaning’s punch.
I think this is confusing and honestly pretty sleazy at times. I’m not a fan of the softer social sciences. But if you strip off the obfuscatory language, use of terms that already have an emotionally charged colloquial meaning, and all that stuff, you do have some useful concepts. It’s just that, for a variety of reasons, the incentives in those areas of the social sciences reward obfuscatory language, that sort of posturing, etc over clear use of language. I’m sure if one searches, one could find journal articles about how the concept of “clear use of language” is itself problematic, etc.
There are some theories under all that. But their usefulness, I’d say, is disputable, and much of the point of all the rest of that stuff is to avoid those theories being put to the test.
Thank you and I endorse pretty much all of this.
White:
Words in general and charged words in particular are 95% self-reflections and 5% reflections of reality. I don’t try to construct my own definitions but infer meaning of words by how they’re used and the motives of the parties in question.
Historically, I think white was more of an ingroup-outgroup identifier for which north-west Europeans were self-perceived as the center of gravity (With anglos dead center). Certain groups that are European but not northwest European might or might not be considered white depending on the circumstances. (Whether or not they ‘are’ is a complete misunderstanding.
Americans with European heritage have traditionally used it as the ethnic term to describe themselves in contrast to blacks, amerindians, mestizos, etc. Owing to the fact that the distinctions (physical and otherwise) between various northwest european (NWE from now on for short) nationalities are relatively smaller.
What happens naturally is that who you consider part of the out group depends on who you come into contact with and who you regard as a threat or not. ‘White’ has no meaning in a world where you only see and interact with people of european ancestry.
WRT to the “Irish weren’t considered White” – It’s useful to address that here. Remember that the first naturalization acts [talking about the US here] restricted naturalization to free white men of good moral character, later on [some] exceptions were made for free blacks. the Irish had a presence in the US prior to the founding and continued throughout the 19th century. The massive increase in Irish presence in the US and the natural tendency of large ethnic minorities to cluster, to avoid assimilation, and to become ‘noticeable’ by the native population may have prompted some people to view the irish as outgroup and therefore not-white.
In general The late 19th century saw the presence of large groups of non NWE whites, (poles, jews, russians, czechs, etc.) that were large enough to become distinguishable from the native population in a way that previous flows and types of immigrants did not. These groups (in contrast with the chinese who were barred) were not prevented from immigrating to the US but in the 1920s a national origins quota was established to preserve the NWE ethnic character of the US (probably too little too late)
The NWE and non-NWE whites have largely intermarried into a more singular unit and can’t distinguish from each other as easily (physically, behaviorally, culturally). They’re also not as divided as they used to be about religious differences that were often geographically bounded (Catholic, Lutheran, anglican, etc.) — So when people use the Term white nowadays they either mean ‘European’ or ‘European Gentile’ (i.e. my fellow white people)
The D&D analogy has implications that I think would trouble the people arguing that they don’t want white to be the default in the same way that humans were in earlier editions of D&D.
In 3rd edition, racial attributes include penalties to Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Some races are inherently more intelligent than others. If we think of classes as occupations, any race might pursue any class, but some will be better suited to certain classes than others by virtue of their innate abilities. If some races are better suited to certain classes, then there is potentially a best race for a given class, in the sense of complementing and optimizing the most useful abilities.
Many later RPGs that include different races or species often take pains to ensure that racial differences involve very minor, often cosmetic abilities. Alternatively, the races may have different physical attributes, but no differences in cognitive ability.
This might be taking the analogy too far, but seemed to be exactly the sort of problem people had with the racial allegory of Netflix’s Bright.
You’re bringing the deeper D&D analysis. I like. Obviously, the analogy isn’t perfect, since nobody seems to get any extra feats.
(As an aside: anyone how would one set up a characteristics-rolling system to change the curve but still have outliers, eg, have there still be elves with 18 CON, but have the elf CON curve shift to the left of the human?)
@dndnrsn,
The easy-but-unsatisfying answer is to roll percentile dice and consult a lookup table. Exploding dice will spread out the distribution of results, but I wouldn’t suggest actually using them.
Maybe the best bet would be something ugly like 3d6 – 1d4 + 1 (and hard floor at 3, or reroll if under 3, depending on your taste). Needless to say, think twice before giving PCs a stat that skews low (whining and character rerolls will result).
@dndnrsn
On the contrary, I’ve known some people who are both Persuasive and good Negotiators with little or no training. Likewise, many Olympians naturally have Athletic and Quick Reflexes, with Skill Focus from their class levels. I recall thinking some splatbook Feats merely gave a character the opportunity to perform a niche or cool action that seemingly anyone would be able to attempt.
I’ve often seen it argued that Humans are the best race for virtually any class by virtue of their extra Feat, especially when you consider that their number and variety increased with every additional splat.
The d20 open license was the height of splatbookery, though in my heart no splatbook will ever replace the 2nd ed Elf book, the entire point of which was “elves are better than everyone else at everything“.
“White” has always been arbitrary, and continues to be arbitrary. White is the follow on to “Anglo-Saxon”when you stop being able to claim “Anglo-Saxon” is synonymous with “superior and therefore more powerful”.
So after that whole military defeat in 1066?
It doesn’t have to be scientifically accurate, just affixed in the popular mind. This is simply further affirmation that “white” is constructed, rather than endemic.
Julian Carr’s speech at the dedication of “Silent Sam”:
In legal circles, property is (properly, imo) recognized not as an objective thing, but rather as a bundle of rights and entitlements to state power.
From that perspective, jw and your objections look pretty silly.
Right exactly. I got steeped in the law’s concept of property the same semester I read this paper. And then property and (American) racism both started to make a lot more conceptual sense to me.
You are badly misunderstanding/ignoring your opponents’ arguments. Anti-racist activists mention discrimination not infrequently.
I think that’s an overstatement. Advantages might also come from statistical discrimination by other people.
Consider a Hispanic vs a White, both living near the Mexican border. The Hispanic is much more likely to be hassled on the suspicion that he is an illegal immigrant, since almost all illegal immigrants there are Hispanic.
The optimal solution is to basically hand out whiteness certificates to everyone. The best direction for race relations to go in the US is toward a society where everyone is effectively white–that is, nobody gets any extra kicking around for being black or hispanic or Asian or whatever, everyone gets the same treatment and the same rules, etc.
I say this to jw above, but getting rid of a club good doesn’t even kind of suggest killing all the people who are in the club. I get the sense that people are jumping to this because they’re reading other, loopier “anti-racism” rhetoric into Harris’s piece.
Every advantage? Interactions with the police? We may have a straight-up empirical disagreement here.
I don’t see huge waves of gentiles rushing to convert to Judaism or to be perceived as Jewish because it’s the only way to get ahead. There are network benefits to belonging to all kinds of in-groups, but I am going to claim the ones that come with whiteness are especially systematic and pervasive and harmful, and that the ones that come with belonging to a persecuted but successful religious minority are not. At least in the US.
There isn’t any whiteness club. White Like Me is funny, but utterly fictional.
Aside from Tim Whatley, I guess.
And here I thought libertarians took the prize for finding ways to twist everything into a property-rights framework :-)
To be fair, it does offer an interesting perspective on the legal treatment of race, in the era where the white “race” was explicitly privileged under the law. But trying to relate it to race in the contemporary United States is an implausible stretch. Things like,
“White workers often identify primarily as white rather than as workers because it is through their whiteness that they are afforded access to a host of public, private, and psychological benefits”,
really need to be supported rather than just asserted. If you ask most people in the modern world to give an open-ended description of their identy, they are far more likely to mention their job than their race or ethnicity. Even in non-FtF interactions where their race isn’t apparent, or if they are of some ethnicity(*) like “Jewish” or “White Hispanic” which isn’t obvious from appearance. And where the benefit under debate is having a middle-class lifestyle with a house and two cars and reasonable financial security, I’m pretty sure “…because I have a good job at the factory/office and I work hard” is going to come in way ahead of “because I’m white”.
Then we get to,
“Affirmative action begins the essential work of rethinking rights, power, equality, race, and property from the perspective of those whose access to each of these has been limited by their oppression.”
That discussion began a long, long time ago, and I’m pretty sure it began before affirmative action was a thing.
So this reads to me as a discussion of the problems and issues of the past, and if it brings an interesting perspective to those problems then it is one that can’t help but carry the implication that those problems are history. Which isn’t entirely true, so if you want to discuss the problems that remain you’ll probably do better with a different framework.
Also, as you note it doesn’t let you describe some people as Racists and other people as Not Racists, which makes it useless for most of what people seem to care about in the present.
* Race and ethnicity being hopelessly intermingled, and if you tell me there’s a heirarchy where race is clearly more important than job but job is clearly more important than ethnicity I’m going to be very skeptical.
Hmm, random thought:
White:English::Working Class:Carpenter ?
I think that’s too broad. Here are two expectations about consequences that follow from race alone:
1. Someone of sub-saharan African ancestry who spends time in the sun in summer without adequate protection is less likely to get sunburned than someone of Scandinavian ancestry who does the same.
2. Someone of sub-saharan African ancestry who lives in Sweden and does not take vitamin D supplements of some form is more likely to suffer from vitamin D deficiency than someone of of Scandinavian ancestry who does the same.
I don’t think you would want to describe either of those as evidence of racism. Nor, I think, would you want to describe as sexism either the fact that women can get pregnant and men cannot or the fact that women have a longer life expectancy than men.
But there is then a problem drawing lines. David Skarbek has a very interesting book on prison gangs. By his description each is, in effect, a non-geographical nation with the equivalent of a government and a population, and it is important for the functioning of the system that one can tell who is a member of which gang. That can be done with tattoos, but it is often, and perhaps more conveniently, done by visible characteristics of race. So if you are white you do not have the option of joining the black gang, and similarly in the other direction. The reason need not have anything to do with beliefs about race, merely the existence or non-existence of a convenient marker of membership. Does that qualify?
Finally, does statistical discrimination qualify? Suppose you correctly believe that some characteristic is significantly more common in one racial population than another. You are recruiting for a job which depends on that characteristic, there are lots of candidates you could interview and interviewing is costly, so you preferentially choose people to interview in the population more likely to have that characteristic. The result fits your definition–do you want to call it racism?
At a tangent to all of this, I’m bothered by the use of “racism” as the label for a phenomenon that, while real, doesn’t fit the moral and emotional connotations of the term. It feels like linguistic grade inflation, using a strong label for a much weaker related pattern in order to carry over the reactions appropriate to the former to the latter, for which those reactions are not appropriate.
Actually, a fairly high proportion of women can’t get pregnant, mostly due to age. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a third, heading towards a half as lifespans increase and birthrates go down.
I presume that he meant: over the course of their life.
You’re right, Nancy, but it’s illegal to ask an applicant’s age.
That’s not a tangent, that’s a major point, since without the emotional/moral resonance inherent in acts like lynching or using the police to separate school children, the debate over whether someone has a slight advantage in applying for some positions has less urgency to it.
No, that’s transphobia.
(sarcasm)
I’ve read the article. As you mention, it is very much grounded in a US context, both historically and legally. For instance, the author quite rightly notes that chattel slavery gives rise to a tension between the slave’s status as property and their status as a person: I think it might have been informative to consider how this tension was treated by other slave owning societies. Similarly, the question of whether something is property has a specific significance in US law because a person’s property is protected from confiscation without due process by the 5th and 14th amendments of the US Constitution.
This, AIUI, led to the argument of the plaintiff’s counsel in Plessy that the plaintiff had been deprived of his property of whiteness contrary to the 14th amendment. The court did not accept that argument, and I am confused by Harris’ confusion on this point: quite clearly the 14th amendment does not protect a person’s racial identity.
The law (including in the US) has always distinguished between personal (in personam) and proprietary (in rem) rights, i.e. between the rights which are vested in you as a person and the rights that you have by ownership of a certain (possibly intangible) thing. It is inherent in saying that someone has any sort of legal right that the right must be capable of vindication by a court. To say that something is a property right because it is recognised by the court seems to me to collapse all rights to property rights and therefore erases the distinction being made.
That said, there is no disputing as to definitions. If Harris choses to define “property” in a very broad way, then, sure, whiteness is property. But that argument is purely semantic. It doesn’t tell us anything new about whiteness or race generally. This may go back to the point made by our host about “motte and bailey” arguments. I’m not sure that that particular term really nails the problem, but it does seem to me that there is something of a tendency in social justice discourse to expand definitions but then to equivocate with the original narrower definition. This could easily be avoided if people would just clearly and explicitly state their definitions at the outset.
What certainly is true is that the property of being white (however defined) historically conferred certain practical and legal advantages in the US (and elsewhere). What is debateable (or at least debated) is whether the property of being white per se confers such advantages now and whether historical disadvantages justify or require present redress. This I think is the same as the argument about structural or systemic racism: that the history of oppression of black people by white people has given rise to structures/systems which advantage white people and disadvantage black people.
Robinson says that scholars “speak of individual racism and systemic racism”, which seems to acknowledge that those are two things (and also seems quite similar to Scott’s point that in practice we use a combination of the definitions). It’s tempting to think that answers the original confusion (i.e. in “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words”): we all participate in systemic racism but only some people (like Donald Stirling) are individually racist, and all we need to do is be a bit clearer about which type of racism we’re referring to. But that doesn’t work because then we should all be able to agree that a black person can be individually racist against a white person, despite the fact that the former and not the latter suffers from systemic racism, which is the very point our host makes in III of SJ&WWW.
That said, I do think that the taxonomy of definitions in “Against Murderism” is deficient in not addressing the historical context. I suspect that’s because Scott likes his definitions to be context independent, and I strongly sympathise with that view. Nevertheless, it seems like a failure to engage with the actual discourse of race theorists, which is very much historically contingent (the Harris article being a case in point).
How would I accomplish some of these things ? For example, let’s say I wanted to use my whiteness as capital. As far as I understand, doing so would involve trading my whiteness for a share in some corporate venture. At the end of this deal, I will no longer have my whiteness, but I will own the share; the original owner of the share will now have my whiteness, instead.
Mechanically speaking, how does this work ? Do I have to get a suntan and maintain it year-round ? Does the owner of the company in which I’m investing get a “certificate of whiteness”, which legally obligates everyone to treat him as white ? What if he was white already ? Or is the word “capital” being used metaphorically here; if so, what’s the point ?
I believe this is part of a trend towards talking about “human capital”. It makes a certain degree of sense from the point of view of a business. You make some profits and you can either distribute them to your shareholders or reinvest them in the business (capitalise them). You can invest your profits in capital goods as traditionally understood but you could also invest them in improving your workforce, by providing training or going on a recruitment drive, which can be understood as increasing the human capital of your business. This only goes so far though: your accountant isn’t going to agree to record your training budget as capital expenditure.
It can get a bit silly when people talk about “personal capital” as including not only capital as conventionally understood but also individual capabilities, even when innate, i.e. absolutely anything which might possibly generate a return. In this sense talking about whiteness as capital merely asserts that white people have an economic advantage.
It looks like the answer to my last question is, “yes, the word ‘capital’ is indeed being used metaphorically”. But then, I have to ask my followup question again: what’s the point ?
Harris apparently considers certain non-transferrable things as property:
“A medical or law degree is not alienable either in the market or by voluntary transfer. Nevertheless, it is included as property when dissolving a legal relationship.”
As for what it means for something to be capital if you can’t really spend it, maybe the idea is that someone without whiteness would need to invest extra time/money to get something that someone with whiteness already has, and that affords the person with whiteness a certain kind of capital, in a sense?
That’s true in NY. After it abolished most alimony, judges started using an equitable distribution theory to divide the value of a degree earned during the marriage, and even in one memorable case (Elkus v. Elkus, 169 AD2d 134 (1st Dept. 1991)) an opera singer’s voice.
@Bugmaster:
I dunno about using whiteness as capital, but it has definitely been possible for some people to use blackness as capital. Given a regulatory environment in which the government favors “minority-owned businesses” and “female-owned businesses” for various contract opportunities, people who want to jump the queue to get, say, a broadcast license for a radio station, can often do so by finding a person who possesses an attribute such as “blackness” and giving that person a 51% share of the company for 6 months.
These deals mostly go to people who are already celebrities, eg Magic Johnson. It’s rare that an utter nobody would find such a deal. (Or maybe we only hear about the deals involving celebs, because…celebs? Dunno.)
Though I’m generally skeptical of the usefulness (to say nothing of the feasibility) of “taboo-ing” certain words, I definitely think the word “racism” should now be taboo-ed from all truth or consensus-seeking discussion because:
1. Everyone has to explain exactly what they mean every time they use it, meaning it serves no useful communicative function.
2. It is the equivalent in the current discourse of “counter-revolutionary” in Cultural Revolution-era China. You may be able to offer precise, sensible definitions, but you can’t change the fact of it’s being used as a catch-all denunciation of any kind of wrong-think.
Agree and propose the addition of “sexual assault” for basically the same reasons.
Perhaps, but that’s going to make conversations uncomfortably explicit, especially if we taboo a four letter word for generic Canola as well.
Good. It’s a topic where explicitness is very much needed.
I agree, but IMO any discussion regarding any kind of a culture war has to start with tabooing basically all the commonly used terms — because all of them have become little more than verbal weapons at this point.
I’m sympathetic to both points, but there are some very real and long-running harms behind the word, and I would like some kind of shorthand for describing them. The culture war poisons everything, but I still want to be able to talk about the underlying problem. Would you likewise taboo “whiteness?” What about just “white” or “black?”
“White” and “black” are pretty old and, so far as I can tell, still pretty neutral terms. “Whiteness,” on the other hand, like “person of color,” I find overwhelmingly tendentious in its usage and not particularly useful for productively referring to anything one couldn’t just as easily refer to with a more neutral term, like “white,” or “European ancestry,” or something (and “black,” “Hispanic,” “Asian,” “African American*,” or whatever, instead of “PoC”–my problem with that term being that it implicitly singles out one group by its non-inclusion; I think Jews would have reason to be suspicious of anyone frequently employing the terms “Gentile” and “Jewishness” for similar reasons).
*I still remember when we made the shift from calling black people “black” to needing to say “African American” to sound enlightened (I do know some who prefer “Afro-American” to emphasize the “American” part). I wonder if that was the first death knell of the “melting pot” dream of cultural diversity? The day people (white or otherwise) start calling white Americans “European Americans” might be its last?
Interestingly, we seem to have regressed on this point. A century ago, most progressives (Republicans and Democrats alike) were opposed to so-called “hyphenated Americanism.” During WWI, Teddy Roosevelt became one of its most vocal opponents:
If you replace “German-Americans,” “Irish-Americans,” etc., with “African Americans,” “Hispanics,” etc.; and eliminate the concern about foreign sympathies, this could almost have been written today.
Good point; I am not old enough to remember when the different European identities making up white America were a big deal; though I am not a huge TR fan, I think he’s right here: insofar as America is to be a coherent culture and successful democracy (I think the former may be a prerequisite for the latter), any kind of “hyphenated Americans” trend is a detriment to that goal.
This is compelling as rhetoric, but I think it is empirically false.
Canada is more open to hyphen-Canadians than our neighbours to the south. We also have less tension about immigration and multiculturalism: for example, our conservatives compete for immigrant votes just as much as the other parties. To be clear, I’m not claiming a causal link: as dndnrsn likes to point out, Canada’s geographical location lets us pick and choose who gets in. But at the very least it seems clear that hyphenation is not actively detrimental.
Indeed, I think it helps with integration. If you can be considered fully Canadian while maintaining a connection to your ancestral culture, it lowers the stakes, with less of a feeling that you have to choose between your family and your country.
There’s an argument that multiculturalism helped Canadian national unity by taking pressure off Anglo vs French Canadian tensions.
I don’t know about TR’s times, but tension in the US today is primarily along racial, not ethnic lines. There is no tension in the US today between white Americans of Italian and German descent. Canada is not very racially diverse compared to the US so I don’t think it proves much that the majority white population is able to live harmoniously with small numbers of culturally diverse non-whites or even large numbers of culturally diverse whites. When Canada is able to take in large numbers of non-white immigrants without tensions flaring, then I’ll be impressed.
@onyomi
Canada was 72.9% white in 2016; the US was 73.6% in 2015. “White” in the US Census data includes people who by the Canadian data wouldn’t be considered “white” but unless the numbers of those groups was quite large, I don’t see much evidence for your statement that Canada has significantly fewer people who aren’t white than the US.
What about white Americans of Mexican descent?
Tension in the US today is along both racial and ethnic lines, because Americans mostly treat “race” and “ethnicity” as synonyms.
Plus, by US Census definitions, Hispanic is a cultural category – one is either a Hispanic or a non-Hispanic person belonging to some other category. But colloquially it is treated as a racial category.
To add to what dndnrsn has already said: according to the 2016 census, more than 50% of the population of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is non-white. This is about as relevant to local politics as it would be if, say, more than 50% of voters were Catholic — it affects how you tailor your message, sure, but it’s not a significant issue in its own right.
Toronto is a good example. It’s not a city marked by ethnic strife. Rob Ford – who gets compared to Donald Trump, or rather, Trump to Rob Ford perhaps – won with a vastly more diverse voter coalition than Trump did.
@dndnrsn
They are. Hispanic white is around 10%; there’s a little bit for middle-eastern and North Africa.
Is, say, 60% vs a bit over 70% a huge difference, though?
I am interested to learn that the demographics of Canada have changed faster than I thought. I do think it makes a difference that Canada has more immigrants from e.g. China, who historically do pretty well wherever you transplant them, but I am more curious to learn how this works out on the political level.
For example, when it comes to e.g. mayoral elections in Toronto, how does that play out at the coalition level and do the final results, in the form of city government seem functional, as opposed to a bunch of sops to various groups? Is there any sense that everyone shares some kind of “core” Canadian values despite their identity as “hyphenated Canadians”?
Since I have never been to Toronto I am also curious how this works out at the neighborhood level: are there neighborhoods where e.g. white people would be afraid to go at night?
@onyomi:
With regard to safety in Toronto, it depends who you ask. General consensus is that there seems to be there’s a few rough-ish areas, but if you’re not doing anything really reckless you’re fine. This is the same as most Canadian cities. Canada doesn’t really have cities with significant pockets of “don’t go there” or entire cities that are like that with pockets of “OK”, to anywhere the degree the US does. Winnipeg is kinda dicey though, I hear.
With regard to city politics, the real divide in Toronto is the inner suburbs versus the city core. Megacity saw a bunch of municipalities combined together. The suburbs don’t like being taxed for services they don’t get to the same extent as the urban core, while the urban core doesn’t like the sense that the suburbs get a say in how the urban core is managed. Sops to ethnic and cultural groups tend to be fairly piddling; the real sops are stuff like badly-planned public transit expansions out into the suburbs. So it’s geographically-based politics more than ethnic/cultural politics. The inner suburbs elected Rob Ford, who ran on a platform of “respect for taxpayers” and “stopping the gravy train.” The city government is less functional than it could be.
On a federal and provincial level, the Conservatives are much stronger in the outer suburbs than they are in the urban core – in the urban core, the contest is mostly Liberal vs NDP. The 2015 election results are a bit deceiving, because the Liberals did really well – going from third place (a pretty bad defeat, historically) to a majority government. Also, bear in mind that with 3 major parties and first past the post, it’s the norm for a riding to be won by a plurality.
“Core Canadian values” include fretting about what constitutes “core Canadian values” and whether it’s OK to have “core Canadian values”, and also a sense of smugness over anything we do better than the US. And Tim Hortons.
The problem with “racist” in normal practice (not racial theorists, just random people) is that it might mean any of several incompatible things. For example, if someone decries the US criminal justice system as racist, do they mean:
a. The system is full of whites who hate blacks or want to keep them down for political/social reasons, and so those whites conspire to put lots of blacks in prison?
b. The system is biased against blacks in some way that leads to worse treatment for blacks than for whites doing the same thing, not primarily because of intentions but rather because of some other stuff built into the system? (For example, if urban police departments in mostly-black areas tend to be harsher or more corrupt, or if mostly-black jurisdictions tend to have fewer resources for public defenders and the like, you might see blacks getting worse treatment even without anyone trying to get to that outcome.)
c. The system is racist in the sense that it disproportionately locks up blacks, regardless of the reasons or whether or not that represents equal outcomes for equal behavior?
This is a reasonably common thing to read or hear in a political discussion, and its meaning is unclear in ways that matter a lot for trying to decide how to respond. If blacks are disproportionately in prison because of policemen and judges and prosecutors who hate blacks, then we need to get rid of those people and put people in who will treat everyone equally. If blacks are disproportionately in prison because of where most blacks live or having a lower average family wealth, that’s a different kind of problem, and the solutions would look very different. If blacks are disproportionately in prison because they are committing crimes at a much higher per capita rate than whites, that leads to still another set of possible solutions.
If you can’t decide which of those you mean, you can’t even start thinking clearly about the problem.
This is pretty much the situation in which a word should be tabooed in a discussion, right? Basically we notice a pattern wherein some word either:
a. Has multiple shifting/unclear meanings so that when you use it, your disagreements end up being about the definition as often as about any actual material disagreement. Sometimes people use those shifting definitions to win arguments, but probably at least as often the shifting definitions lead to ambiguity in the minds of the arguers.
(Apparently we can’t edit anymore, and I managed to double-post. Great.)
b. The word has enough emotional/moral weight that it becomes very difficult to think in its presence.
Like, if I want to discuss the idea that by growing in the US in the 20th century, you probably absorbed some unconscious attitudes w.r.t. race that you wouldn’t accept if you thought them through, and I start using the word “racism” for that, then we’re probably going to spend all day arguing past each other because we don’t mean the same thing with the word, or arguing because I’ve just told you you’re a racist which in your mind maps to “horrible asshole who wants to mistreat members of other races.” So in that discussion, I’d be better off tabooing the word “racist” and trying to use some other word to get the idea across.
> This is pretty much the situation in which a word should be tabooed in a discussion, right?
Probably. But I can’t help but see based on the posts above that there insistence on tabooing the phrase is an attempt by one side of an ideological debate to win policy goals outright. For many of the above posters, widespread tabooing of the word racist, especially without anything much to replace it, would in and of itself be considered a victory, because they are very hot and bothered about being called racists.
In a larger sense, I don’t think the conversation between the sociologists of race and whatever-you-want-to-call the dominant position on race here is the kind of truth seeking discussion that the concept of tabooing was developed in the context of. The two groups don’t seem to have any much of if any mutual respect on which discussion can be based.
“Don’t call me racist” is not the only, or even the main, policy goal that red tribe seeks.
I fail to see how a taboo on the word racist would inevitably result in, say, the elimination of all affirmative action programs.
Brad:
I’m not saying we should eliminate the concepts described by racism, I’m saying we should stop using “racism” as a shorthand for seventeen incompatible definitions in conversations, because we can’t seem to get anywhere having those conversations because we get hung up on the definitions or the emotional connections of the words. Add new terms as needed to cover the different concepts.
I think for just about any racial issue in the US, the multiple incompatible definitions of racism make it harder to think straight about the issue. And one result of that is that it’s harder to get to any kind of solution.
Matt:
On the other hand, if you can define any open discussion of IQ differences by race as racist and thus morally / politically out of bounds, you can basically make any kind of sensible discussion of affirmative action policies impossible.
@Brad
If a group can only win by using a slur, but not using rational argument, then this presumably means that they can only win by invoking falsehood and probably, by oppression.
Doesn’t that group then deserve to lose (or more realistically: be forced to come up with more reasonably claims and demands)?
@albatross11
My point, and isn’t especially nice but I think it is necessary and true, is that I don’t think the Matt Ms of the world are trying in good faith to get any kind of solution. They don’t even see a problem, well they do but it is the exact opposite of the problem that the people they are critiquing see. In such a situation there’s no reason to change the jargon that’s working for the people that actually in productive dialog with each other.
It’d be like saying that the Catholic Church should taboo transubstantiation because Sanskrit doesn’t have any similar word and so it is getting in the way of Catholic-Hindu dialog. But there is no meaningful Catholic-Hindu dialog, so why bother?
@Matt M
You listen to country music, go to church regularly, watch NASCAR, and drive a pickup truck? Why are you talking about the red tribe?
@Aapje
I reject your premise.
You know Brad, there’s a lot of people here who aren’t me that also think this is a good idea. It wasn’t even my idea in the first place.
And as far as suggesting that I’m not red tribe enough, well, that may be true, but I highly doubt red tribe proper really cares about your opinion on the subject. Just in case you’re really interested in learning more about me, I grew up on country music (going tonight to a country concert at a rodeo no less!). Learned to drive in my dad’s pickup truck. Dabbled in both NASCAR and religion but neither of them really stuck.
I’m sure the red tribe proper doesn’t care about my opinion on this subject. I’m also sure they don’t care about what words sociologists of race use. I don’t know why you brought them up in the first place. My guess was as some kind of self-aggrandizing attempt to speak for a larger group.
@Brad
I assumed that you would be able to understand that my argument doesn’t actually assume that as a premise. Let me write it out a bit more:
If one can win by using a word that has strong negative valence, but not by using rational argument, then it is the valence that makes one win, not reason.
If one can win by using reason, then one doesn’t have to use the word that has strong negative valence, so then it is reasonable to taboo the word, no?
So my argument is not based on the premise that one or the other have to be true, it is an argument that covers all possibilities.
Unless you believe there is a flaw in my argument, in which case it would do better to point it out, rather than make a weird rebuttal that suggests that you fail to understand my argument.
@Brad
Who is currently in productive (“mistake theory”) dialogue about the word “racism” today? And even if sociology departments are able to hold productive discussion with anthropology departments about “racism,” is it not also a concern that Blue America can’t productively discuss “racism” with Red America?
Re. the “transubstantiation” example, a closer analogy would be you have a bunch of Catholics and Hindus all living in the same country and the Catholics are always telling the Hindus how “sinful” they’re being. The Hindus say “hey wait a minute, based on the definition I heard you give of sin last week this thing I just did is not sinful, so stop calling me a sinner.” Catholics respond “look, I don’t know what you Hindus’ problem is: we Catholics have been having all kinds of productive, nuanced discussions about sin for centuries and we totally don’t find it ambiguous.” In such a case, if the Catholics actually care about living harmoniously with the Hindus, as opposed simply to cowing them into feeling bad, they would probably do to come up with some new ways of categorizing and explaining “sin” that make sense to Hindus, even if those didn’t seem necessary when talking among only Catholics.
@onyomi
I think you are extrapolating inappropriately. It’s no doubt frustrating when Scott talks to someone, he hears racist, and he doesn’t know if the colloquial or academic definition is meant. But isn’t a problem at the level of “blue tribe” and “red tribe”. Overwhelming majorities of all political persuasions mean the colloquial definitions when they say racist. When my left wing but not especially thoughtful coworker says Trump supporters are racist he means bigoted against black people or Hispanics, not embedded in a racist power structure. (BTW he would think most of the people in against murderism would qualify and are actually monsters). So in that sense most of the two tribes are speaking the same language, they just don’t agree with each other on the facts.
In terms of productive dialog, the systematic racism folks are currently trying—not especially successfully—to make inroads in the left of center mass of the country. The problem isn’t the word racism. It’s easy enough to deal with a word with multiple meanings and even non Christians are familiar with the notions of “we are all sinners” which means that being called a sinner isn’t necessarily an attack. No, the issue is that the sociologists of race just haven’t convinced very many people yet. When someone writes a book “why I don’t talk about race” she isn’t frustrated with having too conversations with people like Matt M. She frustrated from talking to people on the left that haven’t accepted the systematic racism paradigm, like that coworker. That’s where the at least potentially productive conversation are going on.
There’s no point in making accommodations in that conversational space for the kind of far right views on race that populate the SSC comment section. They aren’t part of the conversation and they aren’t ever going to be part of the conversation. Scott could be, but not Sailerites.
Going back to the first point, if the blue tribe is eventually converted over than there is going to have to be some kind of new shared vocabulary worked out to talk to the red tribe. And that may end up not being the jargon used by the academic sociologist, who will long since lost control of their ideas. But that’s well down the road, if ever, and in any event no accommodation will ever need to be made with the gray tribe because it is and will stay too small to matter.
There’s no point in making accommodations in that conversational space for the kind of far right views on race that populate the SSC comment section. They aren’t part of the conversation and they aren’t ever going to be part of the conversation.
Good to know.
I stand by that. I don’t see any point in engaging with the “race realists”, sailerites, white nationalists, or so on, and as a predictive matter I don’t expect them to be within the Overton window in the mainstream blue or red tribe within my lifetime.
If I was willing to talk to you – because after a statement like that, I’m not – I would point out that the issue isn’t deciding to exclude people with perspectives and viewpoints so far out of your own world view that you can’t actually hold a conversations with them.
The problem is how 1) you don’t limit your exclusions to the far outsiders, 2) you also refuse to exchange ideas with near outgroups, and 3) you keep redefining near group as far outsiders.
But all that’s beside the point. You’ve made your choice, and placed your bets.
The whole reason you’re being asked to taboo the word is that it’s being abused. If it’s being abused, there’s someone whom it’s being abused against.
I suppose you could call that a victory, but a victory over not being abused isn’t the same thing as a victory in which you win an argument. (A nontrivial one, anyway. Of course you can argue about whether it’s okay to abuse words.)
Is that apophasis? I think that’s apophasis.
The original conception of tabooing wasn’t about words being abused against anyone (nice question begging btw) and wanting to stop that, it was about debates over definitions getting in the way of mutual understanding.
MD5: b06298a2eedfe5aa42945b15a18a869d
@Brad
I wish I shared your optimism. (Otherwise agreed.)
If I correctly understand your terminology—perhaps I don’t—a race realist is someone who believes that the distribution of abilities differs significantly from one race to another—for instance that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is lower than that of Europeans and of East Asians higher.
If so, it is a defensible claim and might well be true. Is what you are saying that you are certain that it is false, that if it is true you don’t want to know it so would prefer to avoid arguments that might persuade you of it, that you think it might well be true but don’t want other people to believe it and so want to keep the argument from being heard, or some other alternative that has not occurred to me?
@DavidFriedman
No, a race realist is someone that identifies as a race realist. Taking every opportunity to quote, echo, or link with approval prominent writers that themselves identify as race realists is decent evidence that someone is at least a crypto-race realist. Like neo-nazi I don’t think it is something you can accidentally stumble into.
People have all kinds of beliefs on all kinds of subjects. How someone chooses to identify and what beliefs he chooses to talk about is a much better way of drawing categories than on the basis of possibly inchoate beliefs.
@Brad:
So you define “race realist” as someone who calls himself a race realist and associates with other people who call themselves that.
Does it matter to you whether what they believe is true?
@DavidFriedman
Is self identification circular? If so, is that a bad thing?
What’s wrong with defining Nazis as: 1) people that call themselves Nazis and 2) people that going around all the time quoting Mein Kampf and have a curious passion for knee-high leather boots?
That definition seems far preferable to me than one popular contemporary one which is basically “someone I don’t like”.
Which beliefs? The benefit of this definition is that it is resistant to the motte and bailey tactic. It captures all the characteristics of the group that chooses to so-identify, not just the most innocuous, defensible, narrowly drawn version that might be trotted out in front of unfriendly audiences.
So, what’s the status of people who hold “the kind of far right views on race that populate the SSC comment section” but don’t choose to identify as race realists? In the conversation, or out?
What’s wrong is that it includes Hitler fanboys whose picture of what they admire is wildly wrong, hence wouldn’t support actual Nazi policies, and excludes people whose views are essentially the same as those of the Nazis but who have the sense to realize that calling themselves Nazis will make people less willing to accept those views.
What was wrong with the real Nazis wasn’t what kind of boots they wore, it was what they believed and did. The lesson we should draw is suspicion of people with similar views, not people with similar dress.
That is damning with faint praise. It’s also better than defining Nazis as men with mustaches.
You are saying that the two important characteristics of Race Realists are that they call themselves race realists and associate with other people who call themselves that? Nothing to do with the views that label represents?
That is, pardon the expression, crazy.
@DavidFriedman
I am frankly more amazed that Brad has spoken out many times against painting certain (left-wing) groups with a broad brush & for making this space less hospitable to them and now advocates for the opposite for other (right-wing) groups.
Regardless of whether it is useful to ignore race realist arguments, rather than address them, I would argue that Brad has now completely jumped the shark with his hypocrisy.
Feel free to quit responding already, since I have zero interest in reading endless numbers of sanctimonious, bad faith posts from the Dutch alt right.
And people think the lack of left-wing SSC commenters is a mystery…
@DavidFriedman
As far as the former go, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I’m content to call it a duck even if that might capture some animals that are just really into cosplay.
In terms of the latter, you’ll notice that my list is not exclusive to “race realists” (N.B. the scare quotes were there in the original). I also mentioned Sailerites, white nationalists, and etc.
That said, I don’t think beliefs, standing by itself, is nearly as important as you make it out to be. Someone that believes that Jews are a menace that ought to eliminated is not a big worry if he never says or does anything on the basis of these beliefs.
Since it seems to be your underlying question, I’ll just go ahead an answer it–I do think that spending a lot of time talking about racial IQ differences is Bayesian evidence (evidence, not proof) of racism in the animus sense. Whether or not it turns out to be true, doesn’t make a difference to the question of whether or not that correlation (i.e. between enthusiasts of racial IQ differences and animus racists) exists today.
@rlms Because they (The ones that post frequently) can’t hack it with actual discussion and descend into personal attacks frequently and without consequence? This is embarrassing.
Seriously Brad, I want to agree with you here, but you’re fulfilling so many straw lefty stereotypes that I wish you wouldn’t. That you keep doing this and getting away with it is starting to really highlight the special treatment we’re getting because Scott is worried other leftists will come after him. Even if you can’t be civil, can you at least be less proud about being completely unwilling to engage with people who disagree?
There isn’t a lack of left-wing commenters. It’s just a space where the left isn’t a majority.
Unless by “left”, you mean socialists of the old-school variety. And yeah, there aren’t many of those, but they got ejected from most “left-wing” spaces too.
I’m gonna agree with Brad here. This is a place where we talk a lot about people’s consciously hidden or subconsciously self-deceptive motives: let’s consider that someone promoting “race realism” or whatever may not, in fact, be driven entirely by a pure-as-the-driven-snow dedication to The Truth?
@Barely Matters
Having some liberals, not leftists, post here, isn’t some kind of protective talisman. The sort of pseudo-leftists Scott is worried about will come after each other, after liberals, after actual leftists. Being a party member in good standing won’t help. The idea that Scott tolerates more from people who are, I must reiterate, centre-left, because that’s some kind of protection, is thus odd. Brad is a high-quality poster who can get a little bit snippy sometimes, but there are plenty of high-quality posters here who can get a little bit snippy sometimes. Anyway, it’s supposed to be 2 of true, necessary, kind, not 3.
EDIT: @quanta413
There’s a few actual socialists here. Honestly, actual socialists are probably overrepresented among the left here versus their prevalence in the left overall.
Brad:
What if I’m less interested in who’s on which side than I am in who has a better model of reality, and so can make better predictions about how various proposed policies will work out, or can propose new policies that are more likely to work out well? In that case, it seems like I should prefer people who express beliefs about reality that are correct, regardless of whose tribe those beliefs support.
If you want to decide who hates blacks, yes, people talking all the time about the black/white IQ gap probably have a disproportionate number of members who also hate blacks. And yet, if you want to find someone to make a good prediction about how, say, the No Child Left Behind program was going to work out, or to make an accurate prediction of how it would work out to set aside 1/8 of the positions in the math olympiad for blacks (and some much smaller fraction for Asians), then you should also look for people who know what the IQ statistics look like for those groups.
Similarly, if you want to figure out who secretly hates America, finding the ones who predict that our next glorious invasion and occupation in the Middle East will turn into a bloody, expensive boondoggle that never ends is probably a pretty good way to do it–among those who say such things, a disproportionate number will be secret America haters. But they’re probably also the ones with the most accurate predictions, too.
This really should have been “walks like a goose”, and I am upset that you missed out on such a clear opportunity.
PS: While I’m sure most of us have a mental list of people who are not worth engaging with, I am unconvinced that making those opinions explicit is either kind or necessary.
What’s wrong is that it if someone is wondering, “Why does everyone agree (modern-day) Nazis are monsters?” it does nothing to answer their question.
This reminds me of the time shortly after I came to study in Israel that I asked someone to explain to me the difference between the national-religious and ultra-orthodox and he told me that in one group the men wear knitted kipas and in the other, black hats. The problem with is definition is not that it was inaccurate (it wasn’t) but that it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, namely why is this distinction so important in Israeli society?
@dndnrsn
Name three. Possibly you could if you looked through a few previous threads, but I certainly couldn’t come up with three off the top of my head, or from posters in this OT. I think it might be easier to find commenters who are members of David Friedman’s immediate family than ones who think nationalising industries is a positively good idea (or ones who identify as part of the feminist movement).
@albatross11
I’ll admit that I mixed positive and normative claims together, but I think positive claims predominate.
I’ve claimed:
– The two groups [sociologists of race and whatever-you-want-to-call the dominant position on race here] don’t seem to have any much of if any mutual respect on which discussion can be based.
– there’s no reason to change the jargon that’s working for the people that actually in productive dialog with each other
– In terms of productive dialog, the systematic racism folks are currently trying—not especially successfully—to make inroads in the left of center mass of the country. The problem isn’t the word racism. … No, the issue is that the sociologists of race just haven’t convinced very many people yet.
– There’s no point in making accommodations in that conversational space for the kind of far right views on race that populate the SSC comment section. They aren’t part of the conversation and they aren’t ever going to be part of the conversation. Scott could be, but not Sailerites.
– no accommodation will ever need to be made with the gray tribe because it is and will stay too small to matter.
This, I think, is a coherent argument rooted in positive claims. Boiled down: that the debate right now is between advocates for the concept structural racism and the larger left and center left in the United States. That this debate would not be more productive for anyone by the inclusion of whatever-you-want-to-call the people bearing population IQ studies. And further, I predict that the latter group will never become large or influential enough that they will need to be reckoned with. On the other hand what we call the “red tribe” will need to be brought on board if it is ever to become a national consensus, but doing so now is premature, because they haven’t even convinced the blue tribe yet.
I think(!) you are pushing back on “would not be more productive” by advancing the idea that if they are right than there are important policy implications that we’d be better off taking into account. But I don’t think that’s sufficient, you haven’t said whether you think dialog is realistically possible. If not, what’s the point of speculating about if it would be productive were dialog possible?
@rlms
Multiheaded, Freddie, and herbert herbertson have all posted in this thread, and Multiheaded is definitely a socialist; I believe the latter two are also. So, there’s three in this OT. There’s other socialists who are part of the broader rat/adj community as well.
What does it mean to “identify as a member of the feminist movement”?
EDIT: In any case, I’d wager that 3 socialists in however many left wingers is probably a higher % of actual socialists than you’d get in a random sample of American left wingers, or whatever. There aren’t very many real socialists these days.
Fair enough, although I think this is the first thread multiheaded has posted in for a long while, and none of them are particularly prolific commenters (Freddie and multiheaded are disproportionately prominent for how much they write due to their blog and commenting in the Good Old Days respectively).
Say someone identifies as part of the feminist movement if they call themself “feminist” without qualification, and that isn’t misleading.
I would call myself feminist without qualifications. Not sure how isolated that makes me.
If we were to describe the major trends among frequent commenters, there’d be
-a large chunk of people whose politics would probably get considered mainstream American centre-to-centre-left, overall, except for their (in my view excessive, often extremely) negative response to “social justice” or “identity politics” or whatever you want to call it
-some American centre-right people, but in a way that doesn’t shout “normal Republican.” Less socially conservative, if not less hawkish then less bellicose.
-some people who would get considered by most far-right, but not [sniffs, drinks tea with pinkie out] vulgar about it, at least compared to the standard of vulgarity among the internet far-right. I gather there were more far-right people before I showed up; they were also more vulgar, or at least, more aggressive.
-some centre-left people who are lukewarm about the stuff that absolutely terrifies the first group. I consider myself in this group.
There’s not enough socialists/commies to really make up their own “group” here, yeah, but they’re a minority in the real world too.
The first group is the largest, and gets coded as right, because here the “are ya right or left, stranger?” question is basically “do you fear the hairdye NKVD”. The other 3 groups are, I don’t know the exact proportions; I haven’t been keeping track of who has what opinion.
As for the other issue – what’s “qualification”? This is kind of the question – if someone says they’re “a feminist, except for x” are they not a feminist?
To be more general – the thing that makes me lukewarm about whatever-you-want-to-call-campus-activist-left stuff is that I think the increasing tightness of parts of the left with academia and with student government has been bad for both, I think there’s a decent chunk of people who adopt such positions hypocritically (eg decry racism but have an all-white friend group), I think the decreasing focus on class has had bad effects… But when I consider their positions in plain language instead of social-studies jargon, I find that I see a lot of sense there, and the stuff that doesn’t make sense is often artifacts of the stuff I don’t like rather than anything about the concepts in and of themselves. See my attempts to spell out what “whiteness” means using plain language and D&D analogies: if I’m correct that my interpretation is the general idea, I think that “this society assumes whiteness to be the unmarked, default norm in a way that is harmful” is a useful and true concept. In conclusion, all political thinking should be expressed in D&D analogies.
EDIT: The vast, vast majority of feminists are not social studies-inflected. If my mom’s a feminist, then by the same standard, I’m a feminist. If she’s not a feminist, well, that will come as a surprise to her.
@dndnrsn
Unless you’re classifying libertarians as center-right or far-right, you’re missing a huge chunk of commenters here.
Some people who call themselves libertarian could maybe be classified as center-right, but that wouldn’t be the standard example. Far-right doesn’t make sense as a classification for libertarians since that group also would include commenters who disagree with libertarians on most issues.
I was mostly bundling them into the “centre-right” because this place is, economically, probably more libertarian-ish than the norm. They’re not part of the far right around here, really.
@dndnrsn
Fair enough. I agree. I think this place skews heavily economically towards “libertarian” or “neoliberal” or what-have-you.
Is there such a thing as Ingroup Homogeneity Bias?
I’d say it’s fair to claim that the central case of libertarian is centre-right, and I’d also say that “libertarian-ish” is pretty descriptive of the typical center right commenter here.
That being said, the coalition of non-american right wingers is a non-negligible part of the commentariat and we demand to be taken seriously!
On the internet everyone’s an American.
[a beaver cries a single maple syrup tear]
Also feminist, so we’re up to at least two, though perhaps I am not a particularly prolific commenter.
@quanta413
Economically speaking, I’d also note that there’s a population of people here who accept that the market works in roughly the ways that free marketeers say it works, but who still favour, say, social welfare programs. The response is “well, I guess we have to design better social welfare programs”.
For example, this is the kind of place where you might encounter someone who thinks that the government should just give people money instead of having programs that give them goods or services. Or who might have an idea for promoting affordable housing using government spending that doesn’t involve public housing or rent controls or whatever.
Brad:
I’d say:
a. I don’t think mainstream dialog on race in the US is particularly productive. See the discussion I posted elsethread about rhetoric about our racist criminal justice system for an example of why. Or just turn on the TV.
b. Many of the statements of fact that commonly get labeled as racist (and almost always bring a suspicion of some kind of racial hatred) are immediately relevant for understanding the world, and for figuring out how to actually address existing social problems.
Specifically, if you want to talk about the performance gap in education between blacks and whites, but you don’t know about (or can’t mention) the large difference in average IQ scores, you are missing critical information for understanding what’s going on, and that’s going to lead you to a bunch of erroneous conclusions and bad policy prescriptions. (Note that the thing IQ scores are designed for, and are best at, is predicting educational performance.) Mainstream discussions of educational policy, and actual educational policies, ignore this *all the time*.
Something similar happens with crime rates. If you want to understand why so many black men are in prison, or why blacks are shot by the police at a higher rate than whites, it’s *really important* to know that black men commit crimes at many times the rate of white men. If you don’t know that (or can’t mention it out loud), you’re not going to understand any of what’s going on there.
If you want to productively address any kind of social problem, you need an accurate picture of the world. Ceding the accurate picture of the world in those areas to the alt-right/h.bd types seems like a really awful idea.
True.
But if there is good evidence for the differences and social pressure for pretending there isn’t, it is also Bayesian evidence of honesty.
In the same way that attacking people who point out such evidence is Bayesian evidence for dishonesty–for wanting people to believe things that are not true.
Correct, but the better the evidence is the weaker your correlation is and the stronger mine is.
Part of the problem is that the respectable orthodoxy isn’t “we don’t know whether there are significant heritable differences,” which might possibly be true, it’s “we know there are not significant heritable differences,” which is clearly false. That assumption is needed for the routine jump from the existence of differing outcomes to the existence of discrimination.
Would you be willing to agree that the existence of differing outcomes–black/white income, for example–is Bayesian evidence for the existence of innate differences as well as Bayesian evidence for the existence of discrimination?
@dndnrsn
I didn’t see any of True, Necessary, or Kind in there.
To tell you the truth, I think Aapje embodies progressive ideals of equality and compassion a whole lot better than Brad does, so calling him the Dutch Alt Right is a pretty serious slur.
At this point I think you’re being intentionally obtuse about the fact that labeling someone ‘far right’ for being anything more conservative than Gawker is a veiled threat in respectable circles. I take a lot of exception to people trying to edge out someone like Aapje who by all appearances is advocating for everything the left actually stands for, but disagrees with their methods, by labeling them as the hated enemy.
Seriously, if one’s metric takes someone who openly advocates for intersectional equality among races, genders, classes, etc, and still codes them as ‘far right’ because they think that the current leveling methods will make things worse if IQ turns out to be hereditary and differ along racial lines, then their metric is idiotic. That is not the kind of leftism that I want to be a part of, and I don’t appreciate the idea that falling in line this way is somehow intrinsic to being a good progressive, and thus anything else is ‘far right’. This is something I hope everyone else is watching and taking account of, especially Scott, because if this labeling can be thrown at Aapje, it can be thrown at any one of you next.
Otherwise, I actually agree with you that Brad is a high quality poster. He also has a habit of frequently attacking people, often being completely unprincipled, and sometimes being straight up dishonest. I’d hope to encourage the good and push back against the latter parts.
You personally were quite outspoken about nerdy groups policing their own for bad behavior in the previous thread. So how about living up to the ideal for which you were just advocating? This is what it actually looks like from the inside.
@Barely Matters
If you want to adopt the position that anti-feminism and enthusiasm for H BD are the real progressive positions, I can’t stop you. You’re using a definition seemingly held by only two people on this planet, but I suppose that’s your right. You occasionally see black guys on street corners in NYC preaching the message that African-Americans are the real Jews and the white people that claim to be Jewish are all frauds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But there’s no slur involved in using the definitions of words that are in popular circulation rather than Barely matters’ private definitions.
Moving on, I’m not sure your what this crusade of yours is supposed to be about. You seem to constantly want to invoke Scott as if you think he is closely reading this thread and will take your not very subtle suggestion to ban me. That’s not how this works. I’d suggest instead using the newly fixed report button or emailing him.
In the unlikely event that these posts are intended to convince me of anything, all I can say is that you are far from persuasive and getting further away by the minute.
For the record, I believe that there may possibly be non-negligible group-level racial differences and very probably non-negligible group-level gender differences. So I do not believe that equal outcome on the group-level can necessarily be achieved by having equal & fair treatment on the individual level. Basically, nature is to some extent fundamentally non-egalitarian.
I do believe that there is a substantial cultural influence that produces greater inequality than what is natural & that lessening this will generally improve human well-being. However, equality is ultimately a tool to achieve an end and should not be an end in itself. I also believe that humans are fundamentally not rational & may quite possibly need things like excluding identities, gender roles, enemies, etc, etc to be happy. If so, the best option is probably to redirect these needs to relatively safe avenues as much as possible (like spectator sport may do for some of these), because completely suppressing them might not merely cause unhappiness, but probably a very dangerous backlash.
I see those who try to maximize equal outcomes at all costs similar to how I see Marxist-Leninists: Utopian thinkers who deny that nature binds their choices/possible outcomes. I believe that the disconnect between reality and the ideal, cannot but corrupt the Utopians, both in their actions and their reasoning. It’s not a coincidence that communist societies tend to be very corrupt and murder-prone. It is not a coincidence that SJ people tend to so often have prejudices about race and gender that are strongly divergent from scientific fact & that they so often fail to act consistently with their ideals.
On economics, I agree with Marxist-Leninists that capitalism is coercive and creates a hierarchy where people with certain traits are getting treated better. I disagree that given the restrictions of the natural world, we can in the short term do better without capitalism. Instead, we can do not much better than to have moderate capitalism. It is also very hard to predict what interventions will do and we need to move carefully, accepting that change is difficult and takes time. We should constantly check whether the interventions actually work: ‘Measure Twice, Cut Once.’
On social issues, I have a very similar point of view, where I favor trying to move towards the ideal, but with the understanding that we may not be able to do better than some level of equality.
From my perspective, I am very moderate, yet get accused of being an extremist, because I do not accept absolutist, non-scientific claims. Perhaps that makes me a radical moderate?
@Brad
No Brad, what I’m saying is that being against the current methods of feminism is not the same as opposing it, and likewise with other aspects of the progressive endeavor. My point is that *you* are the one trying to smear ‘does not immediately shut down any HB D talk’ into ‘enthusiasm for HB D (Probably with horrible cryptoracist intentions)’, and that is a seriously dirty move that I, and many other people who would like to make things better, would like to see a whole lot less of.
If you’re trying to tell me that labeling people like Aapje as ‘Alt Right’ isn’t a slur, then I invite everyone else reading to note an instance of Brad being painfully dishonest in his culture warring, and decide for themselves if they think this is someone they would like to encourage.
As I’ve said before, I don’t want you banned, I just want a) for it to be common knowledge that this is scummy behaviour, and b) ideally for you to cut it out. I invoke Scott because I think “Labeling otherwise good people as ‘alt right (probably cryptoracists)’ for their disagreement with modern progressive methods” is the single most likely behavior to have this blog shut down and its author’s life destroyed, and so I want to push back hard against it being normalized.
As is often the case Brad, I know I’m unlikely to change your mind here. This is for everyone else. If everyone else reading is actually cool with what you’re doing and wants more of it, then I suppose I’ll just shrug too and go along on my way.
@David Friedman
Honesty and dishonesty are not entirely symmetric. Outside of some special contexts, like testimony for example, we general don’t consider silence to be dishonest. Further, while I agree that saying a true thing is Bayesian evidence of honesty, in the general case it is rather weak evidence. Most people say many true things throughout every day of their lives once they can talk.
For something to be stronger evidence we need, at the risk of being reductive, if saying a particular truth is expensive. That’s individual and context dependent.
Yes.
@albatross11
I think much of what you’ve said and much of what I said that you are responding to are not in direct contradiction of each other. One may think it is unfortunate if we live in a world where both sets of claims are true, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.
The bottom line is that if you want to taboo ‘racism’ you need to convince the people that are using the term ‘racism’. It does no good to convince the people they aren’t. If you want to convince such people you need to step into their shoes, and understand that they think they are correct just as you think you are correct. For the overwhelming majority of people, on any side of any issue, “do this thing because it’ll make it easier for me to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong” is not very compelling. Not even most self identified Rationalists I bet, even though that should be right up their ally.
@Barely matters
As I understand it, Brad’s beef with Aapje is that Brad thinks “is as does” regarding posting – what people post about reveals what’s important to them, rather than what they say they believe.
Personally, I think more that calling it left or right is tricky, but that clearly one of the defining questions in this place is “how do you feel about modern-day social justice-type progressivism”?
I’m also not sure at what point being opposed to methods crosses over in being opposed to goals.
Regarding rudeness, or whatever, I don’t really see Brad be rude other than the occasional snippy one-liner, which again is pretty dang good by the standards of the internet. That’s “quotes Monty Python” level, not “drives women out of the D&D group with harassment” level. I also don’t think that identifying someone as far-right here marks them as the Insidious Enemy, in this context.
@Brad
Hey, who knows, with all this Mallory-Farrakhan business, maybe this idea will be the next big thing in woke circles?
@dndnrsn
This is clearly not true in my case, since riding my racing bike is pretty important to me and I’ve not talked about it very much here (because certain topics are not for certain audiences or even something that I’d want to comment on, rather than do).
What’s important to a person is also informed by their needs and emotions, which are often linked to their beliefs, but which are not the same thing. A person who likes to talk about sex doesn’t necessarily have political beliefs centered around sex. That person may just be very horny, much of the time.
Also, certain topics may be common in a person’s comments because that person struggles with them, while other very strong beliefs are not something that the person cares to discuss. For example, I favor very strict gun control (although in part because of the Dutch circumstances), but I find the many topics on gun control here very boring.
Also, I have had some extensive debates about climate change, but somehow Brad doesn’t seem to think that this is important to me and disbelieved me when I said that I voted for the Greens. When people seem to get a false sense of how strongly and how often I debate certain topics, because they confuse their own emotions when reading my comments for my emotions, the entire idea of judging my true beliefs by my comments becomes projection.
It’s even more complicated when you think that people cannot achieve their goals with their methods.
—
Anyway, there are many reasons to make comments and ‘exhaustively explaining your entire worldview’ is not a common reason for me. I am an
assholecontrarian, so I like to question things. Some topics also deserve a lot of questioning…Correct and immediately relevant. Making true statements that are strongly disapproved of by the current orthodoxy is expensive for some but not all people. If you live somewhere in the rural South where all your white neighbors believe, whether or not they say, that blacks are stupider than whites, offering evidence that average black IQ is lower than average white IQ isn’t costly for you, although citing evidence that East Asian IQ is on average higher than white IQ and Ashkenazi higher still might be.
But if you are a professional academic, or a Silicon Valley coder, or in any of a wide variety of other roles, it can be very costly. Hence saying it, assuming you have reason to believe it is true, is evidence of honesty. Examples would be James Damore, Charles Murray, or James Watson.
Yeah, Jews are pretty pale. I don’t know how long they’ll be able to stay on the good side of the woke movement at this rate. What with Israel moving to annex more of its settlements and getting busy deporting African migrants.
Obviously, little will actually change, but the lead in was too easy. And Farrakhan’s been an anti-semite and a marginal influence at most at the elite level since forever. Nothing real is going to change.
Honestly, at this point, I’m just going to assume bad faith of anyone calling themselves a race realist or espousing race realist ideas, unless there’s overwhelming evidence that they’re actually just genuine truth-seekers and not edgy anti-SJW contrarians or dyed-in-the-wool racists looking for an excuse to justify their racism. As a general rule I try not to assume bad faith of anyone, but there are exceptions; I’m not going to engage bona fide Nazis or Stalinists in good faith, for instance. And I consider race realists, at best, half a step above actual self-identified white supremacists and neo-Nazis and tankies.
@DavidFriedman
I don’t have much doubt that those three believe the things they said are true. Dishonesty in that sense isn’t an accusation I’ve frequently seen made against them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists somewhere.
My point wasn’t that they were not dishonest but that their behavior was positive evidence of honesty–in contrast to people who agree about the evidence but keep their mouths prudently shut.
Someone who refrains from saying something that is true because doing so would be costly isn’t actively dishonest, but he is less positively honest than someone who says the same thing because it is true. And the former position shades into the position of someone who doesn’t explicitly deny the true statement but takes care to imply that he doesn’t believe it.
@dndnrsn
Man, you’re the only one saying this, and it completely gerrymanders the categories. “how do you feel about modern-day social justice-type progressivism”? ignores everything about ones stance on gun control, abortion rights, redistribution, equality, social services, immigration, drug criminality, other criminal justice etc. And because it ignores 90% of the political space it’s absurd to the point where I don’t know how you can say it with a straight face. Do you think it promotes clarity somehow to label otherwise clearly left thinking people as ‘the right’ in opposition to their own identification? Why would you think that’s the defining line?
I’d say that line is crossed when the goals specify the methods, and not before. As an example, there is a current dustup in Alberta with their paramedic’s association. They’ve recently made a huge heel turn with the provincial takeover of Alberta Health Services that many paramedics think is lowering the standard of care provincewide, translating to real harms for their constituents. The College of Paramedics has responded with official communications stating that criticism of the regulating body is ‘dishonouring the profession’ of paramedicine, and could be professionally punishable as such.
These situations are directly parallel. I love my job, and I care about my patients, and me advocating for them, even when the problem is coming from the governing regulatory body – Especially when the problem is coming from the governing regulatory body – is not betrayal of that duty, no matter what they might say to shut down the criticism. I sincerely hope you don’t disagree here.
Ok cool, how about I keep pointing them out when I see them then, and the degree to which that becomes really, really annoying will indicate the frequency?
Are you sure you’re not giving special treatment just because you agree with him here? Because I’d wager if someone told a woman in your gaming group “You’re a shit gamer and I don’t take anything you say seriously!”, you’d react a little more strongly than you are. If not, why not?
Well I’m sure it’ll make Scott feel much better to hear that. Nothing to worry about at all then! Needless to say, I don’t think this one stands up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
edit:
Hooboy, this one doesn’t look any better, given that in the next few comments another poster has stated:
Hopefully “espousing race realist ideas” has a tighter definition and requires a higher standard of evidence than for someone like Brad to declare someone as having an “Enthusiasm for HB D”, but right now it’s not looking good for the “Far right does not mark someone as an Insidious Enemy” case.
@DavidFriedman
First a technical point, you said “refrains from saying something that is true” but I think that should have been “refrains from saying something that he believes to be is true”.
On the larger issue, I think where we diverge, at least if I’m reading the implied connotations correctly, is that I don’t think saying things one believes to true is always admirable. Silence is often a virtue and in some circumstances even saying something one believes not to be true can be virtuous.
@barely matters
You’re misunderstanding me. I’m talking about here. On SSC, the question “so how you feel ’bout them student activists scream-crying at Bret Weinstein or whoever” is what divides people. “Left” vs “right” is an inadequate way of putting it, but the left-vs-right thing has had problems for a long time. If someone says “oh man SSC is so right-wing” they’re not saying that in terms of the opinions around here on climate change or gun control or what form of healthcare is best or abortion rights or redistribution or anything like that. They’re saying it based on the fact that this is a space where the general attitude is against the campus-activist-style left or whatever you want to call them.
I don’t disagree. I think of it this way – someone might sincerely think, say, that second-wave feminism was on the right track, and that the third-wave and onwards trends in feminism have been a blind alley. But if they spend far more time carping on the latter than talking up the former…
Sure.
The standards for face-to-face communication are different from online communication. The tone here is vastly better than most of the internet, but it’s still more aggressive than in-person. That’s just how it is. And it isn’t necessarily about anonymity making people rude – I find this place much more pleasant than arguing on Facebook.
And there’s a lot more people here. My gaming group is half a dozen people. I have to deal with a couple of problems – no harassment, but one interpersonal problem and one gaming-related problem – and it’s really worrying me. Here I could just resolve to ignore someone.
I’m talking about here, again. Scott doesn’t worry about the people here deciding he’s some crypto-deplorable and hounding him out of police society. Likewise, having the right opinions in a space with the wrong opinions won’t protect you – “sure, I was in that place full of witches, but you see I was arguing against witchcraft” won’t protect anyone. On the left, on the right, in cases where it isn’t even coded, often knowing too much about the bad guys is itself cause for suspicion. That’s certainly the case with the kind of left-wingers people around here are often afraid of.
I’m going to have to go with Abe Lincoln here and say that calling a “tail” a “leg” doesn’t make it so. A pro-choice, gun control supporting proponent of single-payer healthcare and a large UBI supported by a high and graduated income tax is not right wing, no matter what they think about the “hairdye NKVD”. One’s view on Social Justice does not cleave the left wing from the right wing. It cleaves a section of the left wing from the rest of the left wing and everyone else.
Let me give the opposite example: is someone who – despite describing themself as a leftist, a radical, etc – never expresses any serious anti-capitalist views or demands for radical change in that regard (they shittalk capitalism but it’s all window dressing), if an American they at most want the US to have a social welfare system like Canada’s, but is 100% on board with the most
strawmanperson of strxw version of critical studies-style social views and worldview a left-winger? How far left? Are they a leftist or a radical?Further, is there an “absolute” left/right scale? How do we norm it? If we norm it by the standards of the US, are the Canadian Tories a centrist party, the Liberals a left-wing party, the NDP a bunch of frothing Bolsheviks?
I’d call them a left-winger, since it seems pedantic to limit the modern left (at least in the Anglosphere) to the economic centralization axis. They’re probably not a socialist, through that might be a function of the local Overton window; a lot of the people like this that I’ve met have been happy to cheerlead for bona-fide socialism historically or abroad, and I’d expect them to go for it if it ever got any traction at home.
I might be happy with calling them a radical, too, depending on exactly how far they’re going with the identity politics thing. There are certainly flavors of Critical Studies ideology that call for radical change along the axes they’re interested in — overthrowing the patriarchy is not much like seizing the means of production, but patriarchy as they conceptualize it is so widespread and so foundational to culture that it’s hard to imagine it being much less disruptive.
My point is that most people, when judging the question “are they left, and how far?” would focus on that one thing, instead of saying “well there’s one outlier but they’re pretty dishwater for the most part.” A lot of people here talking about them would call them a radical, far-left, a leftist, etc. I’d call them centre-left, on the whole.
I’d also note that a lot of people whose stated preferences include radical-sounding stuff like “destroying the patriarchy”, when you examine what they say and what they show themselves to want point-by-point, are barely even reformists, let alone radicals.
In this context it might be correct both to call them center-left and a radical, with the caveat that their radicalism’s limited to identity issues. “Radical” is more a description of methods than of positions, after all.
But a bigger issue in this context is that while the left wing’s a big enough tent to include someone with milquetoast progressive views on some things and radical views on others, I’m not sure the alt-right is a big enough tent to include someone with milquetoast progressive views on anything. It’s a smaller group to begin with, and it’s almost defined by its hostility to compromise.
@dndnrsn:
Afaik, the first wave feminism was on the right track; the second wave already had a branch of radical feminists, some of them with really mad ideas, like Valerie Solanas with her SCUM Manifesto. Probably, in the second wave, the normal feminists still outnumbered the radicals; but now, after the targets of normal feminists were mostly accomplished in the western world, the radicals clearly dominate the stage and the word “feminist” became associated with these extreme types – and that’s a pity, imo.
You’re right about that – but to many people, including people here, their milquetoast-y other positions wouldn’t come into it.
There’s also a chance they aren’t really a radical. This ties to what Freddie was saying elsewhere in this thread – that you’ve got a situation where “Marxist iconography but liberal beliefs is the order of the day” – I think there’s a parallel to that. Being a radical is cool. You’ve got people who say they want to smash the patriarchy but when you look at what they actually want, some of what they’re saying wouldn’t be out of place in the Victorian period (I’m thinking specifically of people whose analysis of gender relations paints women as fragile, nonagentic victims).
Brad’s one liner was snippy. I don’t think Aapje is part of the alt-right. But I agree with Brad that it’s not just the overall content of someone’s views, but what they spend more versus less time on.
@a reader
See above; I don’t think they’re really radicals. “Let’s get rid of gender and everyone wears identical jumpsuits and we take drugs to suppress sex differences” is radical. (True fact: the RPG Paranoia is, in fact, radically feminist) “Men and women are so irreconcilable that they should just live in two separate societies and negotiate to deal with producing children” is likewise radical. A lot of third-wavers think they’re radical, but all they’re bringing to the table is a shitty liberalism informed by a worldview born of certain social studies ideas and a little bit of percolated-in second-wave radical feminism.
I’d also question your idea that the goals of “normal feminists” were completely accomplished.
Plus – first wave feminists had some wacky ideas, like “throwing yourself in front of a horse is a great way to get attention“, and Prohibition.
I agree that it is not always admirable, although I suspect I view the exceptions as rarer than you do. Telling a burglar where you have hidden your money, for example, is not admirable.
But it is evidence of honesty–one might almost say compulsive honesty.
The way I usually put your point is that there are some statements that are both true and dangerous–and this is one of them.
The question then is whether beliefs about the racial distribution of abilities are in that category. I think they are not, I suspect you think they are, or at least that if they are true they are still dangerous.
Suppose it is true that the average IQ of Afro-Americans is somewhat lower than that of whites and of East Asians somewhat higher. What bad consequences follow from people believing it? In contexts such as college admissions or employment people usually have much better information than given by race, so don’t have to use race as a proxy. The black with high SAT scores is probably smarter than the white or the Asian with somewhat lower scores and will be viewed as such.
Supposing it is true, what bad consequences follow from people believing it is false? The obvious one is identifying racial differences in outcomes as due to discrimination when they are not. That has some fairly obvious undesirable results—if not obvious we could discuss them.
Further bad consequences follow from people believing that anyone who denies that it is false is a bad person and should be subject to (at least) social pressure to make him not deny it.
If the belief actually is false, on the other hand, if the distribution of abilities is about the same for all racial groups, then the belief that it isn’t does have bad consequences.
So I don’t think this one fits the category of “true but dangerous” even if it is true.
@dndnrsn
I understand your stance perfectly. That’s not what I was asking though. What you’re saying isn’t just “The way it is”, it’s just the way you’re asserting it is. And I asked you *Why* you’re saying it should be that way? Do we gain some kind of clarity by calling people who act consistently with being left wing and identify as left wing as “Far right”? There are some major, major downsides to this plan, and I don’t see any upside. Fill me in.
Go on, finish your sentence instead of making implications.
The conclusions you seem to be drawing here make about as much sense as a lifeguard concluding that everyone he sees at work must be part fish, because they spend 90% of the time he sees them in the water. Even closer, it’s like someone who only sees you at martial arts classes who calls you a thug and a wife beater because 100% of the times he sees you, you’re punching and choking people into submission! (And if it walks like a wife beater, and chokes like a wife beater, then maybe we should spread that around and warn the neighborhood, right?)
In reality, we know that we’re only seeing people in a very specific environment, and understand the limits of our own knowledge about the rest of their life. Thinking we can make judgements about how they are the rest of the time accurate enough to discount their own reports is pure hubris. When that crosses the line into labeling them using terms that could get them fired or ostracized, and that they don’t even agree with, it’s at best reckless enough to be reprehensible, and at worst a deliberate attack.
Again, no way. This comment section is nicer than facebook specifically because we have a norm that if you want to hang here, you have to be nice (And if not, you bring evidence. See the previous section on why evidence isn’t being brought here). It’s no more appropriate to make personal attacks on people here than it is in person, and I’m actually amazed that this is even in dispute.
Don’t burn down the commons just because it helps advance a point you agree with. This is how we lose rare good spaces like this one.
If you want to talk about ‘here’, how about using a different term that’s not easily confused for something more sinister? Call me a little protective, but I get pretty annoyed when I see what looks like people sharpening the very sticks that their allies throw at our host. So, if it’s just a matter of differing definitions and you’re really not trying to play shitty games like threatening and undermining people by assigning them membership to groups a large plurality of people are onboard with punching on sight, then would you mind changing up your wording a little bit to make the distinction clear and eliminate the confusion? This seems like a reasonable and small request, given the nature of how this plays out.
“Wow, this place really hates identity politics and campus socjus!”, works fine and is much more accurate than “Wow, this place is far right.”
@dndnrsn
Perhaps, but you have to keep in mind that ‘narcissism of small differences’ is a thing. Or outgroup vs fargroup as we tend to call it.
I don’t think that this is merely a fallacy, because:
– it is correct to give less concern to very toxic, but very weak groups, because while their ideals are very bad, what they themselves actually accomplish is minimal (disproportionate responses may actually often do more damage). A less bad ideology with far more power to actually achieve their goals causes more damage.
– it is correct to incorporate your ability to effect change in what you debate. I can criticize the lack of gay rights in Russia all day long, but I think it would accomplish very little, compared to criticizing Western issues. After all, the audience here is very Western and the inferential distance with Westerners is a lot smaller than with Russians.
– those with problematic opinions who are closer to you do actually have a bigger impact on your life, so it makes perfect sense to care more about combating them, if you are not purely altruistic (and who is?)
—
Also, given that others also have a voice, it makes sense to focus on issues/PoVs that:
– are under-discussed*
– you can advocate well for
* Of course, you can argue that I sought some level of comfort by seeking a space where some of my opinions are not under-discussed locally as they are in other contexts, but then we are getting back to me not being purely altruistic, but concerned about my own well-being.
—
Also, I see writing down one’s thoughts and having people comment on them as a way to examine the limits of certain beliefs. The debate environment dictates the topics where this process works best, so it makes perfect sense to filter the comments that one makes based on this, not just by what one wishes to discuss.
I certainly decide against making certain comments here.
@DavidFriedman
It can prejudice people against believing that individual black people they meet are competent, which one may consider undesirable altogether. Also, even if you think that it is fine that people make decisions based on group-level facts, they may still have a tendency to weigh evidence about the person too weakly, because cognitive dissonance may make it hard for people to hold both beliefs at the same time.
If purporting to achieve equality of outcome was not a strong political goal of some groups, I would be a lot more sympathetic to the idea that commoners should be shielded from some truths a bit.
I would, personally, prefer to abandon the left-right definition on this, because whether or not one fears the gender studies department doesn’t really have a great deal to do with old-timey French parliament sitting patterns, or whatever the left-right terminology game from. But to most people outside this space, “anti-social justice” and “neutral or pro-social justice” maps to left-right, or whatever. I don’t think Aapje is far right, myself. But I can see why someone might think he was.
I think people should try to diversify what they post about so everyone can have a fuller picture of everyone’s opinions. Imagine if, say, DavidFriedman only posted about climate change. He would no longer be “David Friedman, economics guy, ancap, SCA enthusiast” – he would be “that guy who doesn’t think climate change is real”, or whatever. We should have a diversity of posts. One of the reasons this place isn’t a garbage fire is that people talk about other stuff, and when we’re talking about roleplaying games, fantasy novels, battleships, people who usually disagree are nice to each other. The idea that you can be friendly with the other side when politics aren’t being discussed tends to be an unpopular idea for ideologues on both sides.
So, this is a good point. I hadn’t thought of it like that. I would hope, however, that people here would adjust their posting to try and reflect their full character better. I used to bitch a lot more about the annoying kids I know from university; I realized that I was doing it too much, so I resolved to represent my own largely left-wing views more, and to bitch about the annoying kids only in relation to how I felt they were contributing to “the left” as a broad group shooting itself in the foot. Just kidding! Mostly I just started posting about roleplaying games more, ramped up the dumb jokes, and made more of an effort to shit on Wehraboos.
To continue your analogy: martial arts gyms often have “that guy” who people avoid because he is an asshole, or is prone to doing dangerous stuff in an attempt to “win” a sparring round, or whatever. And there’s a great deal of socializing outside of trying to break someone’s arm off. The guys who push me into the ground know I do other stuff, likewise I know the people who push me into the ground do other stuff.
I don’t, however, think that somebody would get ostracized or fired based on someone here calling them something here – it’s not “huh, this person looks like a witch; let’s see what the other people who hang out in witch territory think of them”.
OK. Granted. I make an effort to be nice. I might be too nice. You think that rudeness messes up the commons, and it can. I also think that if this becomes, more than it is, “a place where people go to hate on social justice”, that too messes up the commons. SSC is one of the few places I know of where the issues we discuss here get discussed without either everyone ritually denouncing witches in case someone thinks they’re a witch, and without the place being overrun by the bad kind of witches. It’s not a place where one “lets down the team” by mentioning uncomfortable facts, whether that team is Team Hexenhammer or Team Let’s Make Babies into Levitation Ointment.
I don’t think that’s entirely, or even mostly, because of standards of politeness. To be brutally honest, it’s probably largely because enough people here have the weird kind of brains where we don’t grok that teams are basically how most people do things. I bet that of the people here who watch sports, we’re probably more likely than the norm to think it’s fair when the ref/ump calls our guy/team on a foul. Right now we’re a place where, sure, some people think we’re witches, but you can also easily find far-right people talking about how this place is full of commies, how it’s cowbirded all to hell and gone, etc.
OK. Let’s put it this way. I don’t think being anti-socjus or idpol or having a distaste for hairdye outside of anime or however one wants to put it makes one far right, necessarily. But a lot of people think it does. More seriously, to me, there is a tendency for people who feel threatened by that sort of thing to drift towards dicey people on the far right, or, depending how you look at it, those dicey folks know that this is a good recruiting strategy. My opinion is that the backlash in response to the obnoxious campus activists is more dangerous than they are.
I prefer the former, yes. In terms of splitting the SSC comment section into “teams”, “anti-socjus” vs “pro-socjus” often provides more information than “left” and “right”. I think this place, everyone should focus a little bit less on socjus, and more on battleships, or roleplaying games.
@DavidFriedman
I’d very much agree. But my prior is to have a negative reaction to “compulsive honesty” (to be adjusted one way or the other depending on circumstances) not a positive one.
Again I would like to insist on maintaining the distinction between true and sincerely believed to be true.
With the caveat above regarding ‘true’, I’d also quibble with dangerous. Dangerous implies a universality, or close to it. Something like the the design of a hydrogen bomb. The question here is more about context, forum, and for-lack-of-a-better-word proselytizing.
If a man likes his sexual partner to bark like a dog during sex, that’s true, something he believes to be true, and in no way dangerous. But nonetheless it is something it is only appropriate to discuss in very limited circumstances, e.g. in private conversation with a sexual partner.
So what we really have here is three sets of beliefs: 1) belief in the underlying facts of the matter, 2) that the speaker thinks his what he believes to be true ought to be common knowledge, and either 3a) he feels strongly enough about #2 that he is willing to pay high costs to try to make it so or 3b) for whatever intrinsic personality reasons (e.g. “compulsive honesty” or “likes to be seen as contrarian”) those costs are outweighed for reasons not specific to the issue at hand.
(about me)
Not relevant to the points of your post, which on the whole I agree with, but my view is that climate change is real. What’s wrong with the current orthodoxy is the (conservative!) assumption that change is necessarily bad.
The first time you said that I agreed with you, although I didn’t bother to say so since the point was obvious. This time I don’t.
The fact that a statement that is sincerely believed can be dangerous isn’t in the least surprising–consider a sincere belief in a bogus cancer cure. The fact that a statement that is actually true can be dangerous, that we are sometimes better off having people not know true things, is less obvious and so more interesting.
Your 2 is what my “true and dangerous” point is about.
Getting back to the race realism issue … . If we were not in a society with strong and legally enforced norms of non-discrimination, it’s possible that knowledge of different IQ distributions (assuming they are real) would do net damage due to human irrationality, although I don’t think it’s obvious that it would. But in our society, it’s like the effect in a hospital of everybody insisting that normal body temperature is 101°F and requiring all doctors and nurses to act on that belief.
At a tangent, my standard example of “true but dangerous” is the moral case for jury nullification.
I don’t plan to do this anytime soon (assuming character means “range of interests and values” and not “virtues and vices”).
Mostly I post on topics other people start with things that haven’t been said that I think are defensible and interesting or humorous and inoffensive (with local modifiers applied for all those criteria, of course).
@DavidFriedman
My apologies. I couldn’t recall whether it was one of those or “global warming is real and probably bad but nonanthropogenic” – I tend not to follow the nitty-gritty of climate change stuff.
@Randy M
Perhaps “post on a wider number of topics of interest” is a better way to put it.
I’ve found that on various topics that interest me, no people or very few are interested in engaging. That is:
– fine
– a reason for me not to post on these topics
Not that either. My guess is that it is in substantial part anthropogenic, although climate is sufficiently complicated to make allocating causation hard. Even the lower estimates of climate sensitivity imply that the increase in CO2 should be having some effect.
The problem is that climate change has both good and bad effects, both large and uncertain, and I don’t believe we know enough to sign the sum. That was my view of population growth forty years ago and events since then fit that better than they fit the then popular orthodoxy.
@dndnrsn
I agree with the first part, but you’re really tapdancing around the point. This is either about ‘here’ or it’s not, you can’t just equivocate between the two whenever it’s convenient. If we’re talking about things in relation to this space, and we agree that left/right doesn’t make sense in this space, and we double dog swear that we’re not trying to torpedo people with snarl labels *outside* this space, then we should probably stick to terms that actually cut at the joints locally.
In an ideal world where I had infinite amounts of time, wifi, and other people’s interest, I’m right there with you. It would be nice, but I’m way out in the frozen swamp of a wasteland on a job, so I can load comments to read, but only get a few minutes to write back in the evenings. I’m entirely with you that building bridges is a worthwhile endeavor, and I can resolve to do that more when I get some time.
That said, there is something to be said about utilizing the point of a given space. I don’t think the other people at the boxing gym want to hear about pickup strategies, they just want to throw on their gloves and punch. The comparative advantage this place has is that it has essentially cornered the market on being a space where one can voice opinions they consider important but otherwise socially suppressed with people who aren’t complete mouthbreathers. I’m sure I could find people at a pro life rally or r/thedonald who aren’t into socjus, but I want to hang with that crew even less than the campus hairdye warriors, (Who, as annoying as I find their politics, still comprise much of my in person friend group). The only other place I’ve found where people talk like this is, of all the unexpected possible places, burning man afterparties. And even there people approach this like they’re playing the Russian Spy game.
Yeah, but I’m presuming that’s not you, and that sure as hell isn’t Aapje. That’s what makes the label that much more insulting. If you were going out of your way to give your holds an extra squeeze after they tapped, then sure, maybe the guy would have a point. But people who do the equivalent here while being on the anti socjus side of the spectrum get banned almost instantly. If you notice an example where that isn’t happening, point me at it and I’ll stand right beside you in imploring that they cut that shit out.
Sure, and for what it’s worth, I think your tone is exemplary when it comes to defusing and deescalating conflict. If everyone else argued with your style, this whole thread wouldn’t have even occurred. My original issue was that it seems like someone is accusing people of being witches, which is the fastest way to destroy that tenuous balance we’ve otherwise struck.
I do have some trouble with the way some of our people argue by stringing together content free snarl words, and I have even more trouble because it always seems to come from the same side. Even worse that it’s the one that I generally consider myself to be on. It’s never the shitlords who call something ‘a vitriolic, hate filled screed of bile and…’, then when you remove the fnords you notice the sentence is empty. That’s twitter posted on facebook tier and I wish I could convince people to knock it off and argue actual points, because in my understanding, arguing actual points is what we do at SSC. This is why I’m so often disappointed and think that the people who I usually disagree with absolutely run circles around some of our best speakers. Which in turn is why I’ve bothered to speak up at all.
For real, I’m with you 100% on this point, but I think you’re mixing up the cause and effect. I feel this one firsthand, because seriously, I feel a lot of pressure to go to that side. I’ve yet to be called a Nazi or an Alt Right whatever personally, but I’ve seen a lot of people in my social circle say things that I think are extremely reasonable, be labeled problematic, and be excommunicated. And every time it happens it hammers home “I’m only still in good standing because I know to keep my mouth shut. These people would hang me if they could.”. I feel a lot of pressure to sympathize with the other side, because compared to my ‘compassionate’ progressive friends, they’re a lot less likely to attack anyone who doesn’t fall in line.
If you don’t want people who agree with you to cross the floor to the dark side, stop pushing them that way, and even more topically relevant, stop actively forcing them into that box when they don’t want to be there in the first place.
I know people who have done this, and it’s terrifying to see the slide from decent person, to troll, to legit national socialist. I get the sense that you think this just happens out of some kind of personal failing, but from this angle, it looks a lot like the Brads are pushing the process along. He probably even means well, but assigning people the name of your enemy against their will is the “drone double tapping a terrorist’s funeral” of left wing internet culture warring.
I’m talking about here. I don’t assign people “far right” or whatever based on disagreements with them. And I think what was at stake here was a snippy one-liner. I don’t think Brad was trying to work some dark arts. Also, see the end of this post.
I think people should try to diversify what they post about so everyone can have a fuller picture of everyone’s opinions.
OK. Pick a topic for future reference:
1. Battleships.
2. Medieval Arabic recipes.
3. BJJ/weightlifting: should you do it? (Yes)
4. RPGs: do they have enough numbers?
5. Fantasy/sci fi without sex scenes that actively make sex look bad.
But the thing that keeps this place from becoming “nothing but bitching about socjus, 24/7″ which can very easily lead into “let’s use our magic to lame some cows!” is the other stuff. Every battleship post helps keep this place from turning into an all-culture-war-all-the-time cesspool.
(As an aside, one might find people talking about pickups in a martial arts gym, on the basis that the kind of takedowns that most people just call “takedowns” plus a few others are called “pickups” sometimes in judo. Although they’ve been removed from the competition rules.)
Who on the anti-socjus spectrum gets banned instantly? There were some Death Eaters way back, most I think before I started posting here, who got banned, but they were way more abrasive and rude than Brad, or anyone who posts here now, ever has been. Often they took shots at Scott or his relationship. There was one Holocaust denier who got banned for arguing in bad faith – he came in with the usual “oh I found this interesting website does anyone want to critique it”, started playing hole-in-the-bucket, and was found elsewhere talking about his clever plan to redpill the normies. There was a WN-aligned alt-right guy recently who I think got banned, but he was pretty clearly doing the trolling tactic where one makes short statements, asks questions, waits for other people to do their homework, then dismisses it with a word – again, bad faith. People of the hairdye crowd who behaved the way they do in, say, videos of them screaming at professors, would get banned very, very quickly. They don’t come here, because they don’t like the epistemic standards around here, just like we don’t go chill with them, because we don’t like their epistemic standards.
Who’s “our”? And the “shitlords” have plenty of stupid meaningless snarl-words. I’m sure that if you went and expressed some centre-y opinions on their territory, you wouldn’t get carefully worded intellectual defences of their positions. They’d say your eggs were getting kicked out of your nest by a mysteriously large hatchling, or just be anti-Semitic, or whatever.
OK, this is getting kind of jumbled. Anyway.
So, pushing people, being pushed, how do we define this? I have repeatedly stated I don’t like the campus activist left types, for various reasons (tl;dr: many exhibit self-serving motives and focus more on that than on what they say they’re doing, general habit to ignore class, optimized for campus and activist-left environments in a way that’s creating a much scarier backlash out in the real world – I’m way more scared of actual Nazis than obnoxious college kids). I think they have no sense of optics, for the third reason (optics is “respectability politics” after all).
But one has to be pushed. And I think there is a personal failing going on there. The failure to realize that annoying college kids who might get you fired are nowhere near as bad as actual Nazis (or white nationalists, or white supremacists, or their mitlaeufer). You’re blind if you think that these guys are less likely to turn against people who don’t fall into line. Right now they have no power, but fuck sake, enough of them are talking about “the day of the rope” and “helicopter rides” and “6 million more”. The Nazis “committed” themselves to work peacefully within the system, until they took control of it, and fairly soon started putting people in prison camps and murdering wayward elements within their own party, old opponents with whom they had a score to settle, and one guy who happened to have the same name as someone they meant to kill. It got worse after that.
Brad is, as I am, centre-left. Liberals, who, after all “get the bullet too.” If the hairdye NKVD rolls in and finds out that folks here been hoarding grain and some own upwards of two pigs, they’re not gonna say “well done, comrades! You have infiltrated the nest of the hated Pepe-Kulak counterrevolutionary-fascist elements!” You’re right of centre (aren’t you?) and you talk about being afraid of the, uh, undercut Chekha. So’s everyone. I’ve heard people in academia with very left politics talk about “Jordan Peterson making some good points about how it’s an echo chamber” but only in private. I remember seeing an article after the mosque shooting in Quebec about how “mass shootings are done by white men” in which it gave 4 examples of mass shootings (so, not actual statistics) and only 2 of the shooters were white – so even cherrypicking stats the article was saying that mass shooters in Canada were less white than the norm. Couple people on Facebook posted it. I’m probably going to vote NDP (wild-eyed commies by American standards) in the next federal election, Liberal in the next provincial (to keep Doug Ford out), I’m not even a Conservative (centrist Democrats by American standards), and I know full well if I point out “one, this is the opposite of good statistics, two, even without good statistics, it’s proving the opposite” I know I’m in for some shit, so I didn’t. It’s stifling and obnoxious. Some of these people are super reasonable one on one, but when there’s an audience, it’s all factually inaccurate preening and the most tissue-thin propaganda. But I ignore it, because being annoyed is a minor thing, and the Nazis are much worse. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire” is a bad call when the frying pan is barely even on the stove. Imagine everything was the opposite, and your choice was obnoxious-ass 2003-vintage “why do you hate America so much that you don’t want us to invade a country on flimsy pretext you moonbat” Republicans, or tankies.
@dndnrsn
This language is rather silly but whatever. The hairdye NKVD in America is basically center left with some Marxist stylings. Yeah, there are a few true Marxists in there somewhere, but they are outnumbered by the less pure center left types. The Marxist stylings are mostly shed when they graduate, whether they transition into campus administrative positions or corporate equality and inclusion offices or just get bored and go do normal people things.
So of course they are only annoying to you and Brad. They’re ~ 3/4 ideological allies, and they aren’t going to try to get you fired.
Of course, actual Neo-Nazis (not Trump, I mean guys with 1488 tatoos etc.) probably would try to deport or murder a solid chunk of us given a shot (I’m going to be either deported or shot and buried if they decide that all your ancestors have to be from Europe), so the Neo-Nazis are morally worse. But they have 0 influence in any public or private institution. There is racism that hurts people, but the vast majority of incidents are not due to Neo-Nazis (although Neo-Nazis are overrepresented as perpetrators of course, since even if there are only a few thousand of them it is their thing).
@Barely Matters
Way back in the thread at this point. But I think anyone who slides into National Socialism just because they got ostracized from a few spaces is a menace. They’d end up on the other side of crazy as Antifa foot soldiers given a few tweaks. I do my best to avoid people of either variety.
@quanta413
Oh, definitely. They’re not real Marxists or radicals or whatever. That’s one of my hobbyhorses – they’re shitty liberals (liberals who don’t believe in free speech, for example).
I think you’re underestimating how savage that quarter difference can make things. Bret Weinstein is/was “deeply progressive” – did that help him?
Obviously Trump and actual WNs, etc, aren’t the same thing. And the WN groups and so on aren’t releasing their membership numbers, so we don’t know if they actually have gotten a shot in the arm. The backlash isn’t big, right now. Trump was getting elected was not primarily about, say, young white guys who’d ordinarily be boring democrats getting pissed off by some of the stuff they encountered at university, or whatever.
But I think history shows that some seriously scary customers can go from “fringe, nobody listens to those guys, are you nuts, they’re nobodies” to “wait, they got how much of the vote?” or “huh, they’ve seized the parliament” awfully quickly. And I think part of what makes me a wussy centre-left milquetoast is because I think the real gap is between “far” and “centre” not between left and right – I think Republicans are definitely too right-wing for my tastes, certainly by Canadian standards, they’re bad, but they’re a stable sort of bad. People who think Republicans are just less Nazi Nazis worry me, because, what if we’re heading for the second-time-farce version of the centre-right deciding that they like their chances better with the sketchy tattoo crowd, and the centre-left deciding that they don’t want to ally with those to their left because they don’t like getting called “social fascists”? I might be imagining things, of course. But the failures that are possible belong to lots of people, and people in the centre have made bad calls about what tiger they can ride, or can ride out, before. It’s not just “those meanie lefties made us think our buddies were these guys with the striking colour schemes.”
If you go back to a lot of cases where things went really, really bad, not that many people saw it coming.
Eh, given his response of darkly hinting that sometimes hiding the truth is a virtue, I kinda do at this point. YMMV, but I’m happy that people who saw this thread will be more likely to keep an eye out for further shenanigans. That’s fine as a resolution as far as I’m concerned.
I mean, there was the guy last week who got banned within hours of his first post because of a ‘snippy one liner’ that used the word ‘hatefacts’. Dan something?
Yes, obviously. I don’t see them on SSC. When was the last time you saw someone whip out the word ‘c.uck’ here and not be banned? Same goes for echoes and permutations of Soy.
I’m talking about the weird verbal tick common to our leftword friends of using every bodily disgust signifier they can think of, and then forgetting to include an actual point. How even a politely worded disagreement with what they’re saying becomes “spewing hatred filled bile while on a crusade of sexist, racist, ***ist, ***phobic lies”. We have that here frequently. Again, I can point it out for you next time I see it. Give me a heads up the next time you see someone use c.uck.
The typical was this plays out is when people are excluded from the camp for disagreement on the fine details. The best example writ large is the last election, with team Hillary telling the BernieBros “You will fall in line! You will vote for her or you’re human garbage.”, and enough of them said “Well, ok then I guess…”, and the rest is ridiculous, tragicomic history.
I’ve gotta say for the rest of your paragraph though, I’m happy for you that you’re in a good environment where you’ve never seen this stuff, but man are you lacking empathy for people who have been on the receiving end. The guy I’m thinking of specifically who is all but lost at this point was on the receiving end of some pretty serious targeted campaigns that would be unambiguously harassment if it were coming from anyone without complete immunity. It was made worse by the fact that his career was in social work and he needed up to date background checks to continue working, and as soon as they learned that, it was trivial to get a few complaints on his record. I really wish that rabbit hole wasn’t what he took out of the ordeal, but I can absolutely understand why he did. To answer Quanta at the same time, if things were different and it was some skinhead group who was targeting him in the same way, I wouldn’t have held it against him if he’d become a crazed Antifa heavy.
Beyond that, man, I’ve seen people threaten to self harm and call the cops on guys I know. I’ve heard the phrase “Who do you think they’re going to believe?” without joke or irony, and I consider myself lucky that it’s never been pointed at me.
Again, I’m glad you’ve never seen it, but fuck dude, playing it down to “They’re getting upset over some mean words from harmless college kids!? What a bunch of whiners!” is a serious failure of understanding. Once the justice system is involved and wielded as a cudgel, it’s not a matter of just not being able to sit with the cool kids in the lunchroom anymore.
Obviously an actual nazi is worse than some SJ powerplayer. There are also two orders of magnitude fewer nazis than hardcore SJs, more if you filter for who is actually in power and writing laws. I’m against both, but I draw the opposite conclusion than you do, in that I think it’s more important to stand up the the group that is actually advancing their agenda. I’m willing to bet everything I have plus my life that nazis will never be a serious threat again, and that you might as well be afraid of Huns or Mongols kicking down your wall and burning your village. I’m well aware of the prewar history here, and I’m sure you know all about the nazis specifically using attacks against them to galvanize public opinion in their favour.
Not by any metric besides “Is against people who use ‘social justice’ as an excuse to be shitheads”. I’m left of the canadian center in just about every category, as a lifetime NDP voter and occasional activist. In my younger days, I called Bush Jr. a “Baby Eating Nazi” during a CBC interview at a protest outside the parliament. Cringeworthy as that one is, I don’t think my left wing bonafides are lacking.
I really wish you’d quit being dramatic to try to trivialize this. We both know neither of us are going to be ‘up against the wall’ in front of a campus firing squad. There are actual things going on that are bad enough to warrant attention without having six figure death tolls. One of them is just the complete missed potential to actually achieve the (quotes omitted) social justice movement’s stated goals, which I think are excellent and worth fighting for, even if I think the current group wearing the mantle is doing it so terribly that they’re doing their opponents’ recruiting work for them.
That was in a thread where someone – who honestly, I think was probably trolling, given a level of repeatedly misinterpreting something, having it explained, doing it again – was getting dogpiled by several people. It was a polite dogpile, as the ones around here tend to be. But while everyone else was saying “you’re wrong, you’re misinterpreting this, here’s why, here’s some facts” one guy just posted what amounted to “hatefacts lmao” – if he’d provided some content, and tacked on a snarky bit about “hatefacts” at the end, would he have been banned?
I mean, are there any actual campus-activist-left-style people here? The style of snarl words they use doesn’t seem to pop up a great deal here, in my experience.
Do we see that here frequently, by common posters, not by the people who show up for a thread or two then disappear, or reappear under a different name?
That’s more fucked than anything I’ve seen, yeah. But I’ve seen people whose opinions aren’t anything outside of the Conservative mainstream – not even the right wing end of the Conservative mainstream, like, not even people who backed Leitch – get publicly denounced, with the assumption being that they’re racist borderline-fascists. There’s people I’ve stopped engaging with, or stopped engaging with publicly, because it’s like walking on eggshells; anyone who disagrees with them is evil.
And, I’m not saying “they’re getting upset! Whiners!” but the damage the septum-piercing Stasi can do is… I guess it’s like airplane crashes vs car accidents, right? You can worry about the former, and feel bad for people who die or lose relatives in airplane crashes, but car accidents are much more of a threat that we have to deal with. I’m not analogizing the latter to anything, though.
Oh, the next time there’s right-wing totalitarians, they’re probably not gonna look like the right-wing totalitarians we’re on the lookout for. Ditto left-wing totalitarians, although would-be left-wing totalitarians get tolerated a bit more than their right-wing counterparts. But the reason the Nazis got into power was that people couldn’t rub their crystal balls and see “huh this ain’t gonna go well; they actually do mean that stuff they’re saying”.
And I’m totally agreed that part of the reason shit went so bad was that the conservatives ended up deciding they would side with the far right, and the liberals etc just sort of figured they didn’t want to team up with the far left. I said as much earlier. But this is what I mean when I say the backlash is worse: the KPD was extremely unlikely to get into power, but fear of them brought the NSDAP into power.
So, then, we’re in the same boat, I guess.
This is fairly close to what I think, and I’ve said as much elsewhere. A lot of lefty activist types, when you pay attention to what they actually do, aim all their activity at enhancing their position in campus politics, shooting for campus jobs, or in corporate speaking or HR gigs, or in professional activism (in Canada, the whole CFS-to-PIRG pipeline and so on) And I know a surprising number of people who have left-wing bona fides, but the annoying campus people upset them to a degree where I worry they might cut off their nose to spite their face.
@dndnrsn
No idea. Given that the previous poster had just articulated that certain facts were xxxist and thus off the table for discussion, I, having never heard it before and being unaware of the term’s history of use, thought the it was pretty on the nose.
I notice it frequently with the star poster of this thread. There are a few others, but you’re right that this space is a lot better about it than most.
I think they’re different from plane crashes in a very specific way; that they’re intentionally used to chill the behaviour of huge swathes of people, with the threat that it can happen to anyone who doesn’t fall in line. So, in the most egregious case of the past year and a half, the one where a girl was straight up caught trying to blackmail a friend of mine that if he didn’t come and talk to her, she would hit her head against his door and call in a domestic abuse in progress.
a) The dude is lucky that his friends were there to witness it, because what are the odds that anyone would believe him? (Usually when I tell this story, the first response is “Well, how do you know he didn’t actually do it, huh?” We believe survivors, and all.)
b) Nearly as bad, when my girlfriend (Who knows the guy better than I do) tries to warn people that she did this, the response from our hairdyed compatriots is frequently “Oh her? Yeah, she did this to her last boyfriend too”, and “Ah well, she’ll figure herself out eventually”, as if she’s the one we’re worried about here. Bluehair don’t care.
So what’s the takehome, and what’s the recourse in this situation? Just never do anything that might make a woman angry, and if you do, just accept that you’re going to tangle with armed police?
The fact that we all recognize that this is a systemic hole, where any guy this happens to is going to be put into a straight up Kafkan nightmare, and this can be done by any woman who happens to decide that she wants to ruin someone… and still no one in this group cares enough to stand up to a known repeat offender because it might harm the narrative?
In short, this sounds less like plane crashes, and more being stalked by wolves (And the wolves are now freely roaming your streets. They’re also designated ‘endangered’, so it is a crime to retaliate against them)
I’m with you here. Out of curiosity though, who are we counting as the ‘far left’ that the liberals didn’t want to team up with?
They do, but it’s bigger than just campus jobs. Similarly to the previous case, they have the edge in a small absolute number of places, those places are selected intentionally and are the top of, well, just about everything. The best, highest paying job sectors are captured, the best schools, government positions, courts, and legislators. Police even to some extent around here. I keep hearing from my peers who are trying to join that the current stance for RCMP recruiters is ‘if you’re white and male, don’t even bother’.
In terms of cutting of one’s nose to spite their face, I think there may be good reason to do so if you’ve got skin cancer. If a genie offered me the choice to take Mary Koss out of her office at the DoJ, but in exchange it would put 10 legit typical neonazis onto the streets, I would take it in a heartbeat, because I think she does more distributed harm than those 10 tiki torch pricks possibly could.
To give a counteranalogy, SJ’s to Nazis are like Mosquito bites vs Sharks attacks. One is big and scary but is contained, the other is small and annoying but manages to cause colossal amounts of widespread human suffering.
I think you’re conflating a couple different things. That, in the right context, a false accusation of domestic abuse or similar can be ruinous – that’s not a new thing, and that’s not the same thing as “student scream-crying at professor because said prof committed a brutal microinvalidation”. Which is a pretty current thing – it’s become a lot more noticeable in the last 5 or 10 years.
And I’d note “the right context” – in some places, based on the people concerned, not much might be done in response to such accusations. One can find both horror stories of obviously innocent people who got their lives wrecked, and horror stories of obviously guilty people who got away with it again and again. The narrative in which women are saintly, fragile creatures, who would never lie, and need to be protected against the brutes, isn’t a new one either – one can find it at many points in the past; it’s a basic element of patriarchal norms: “women need good men to protect them from the bad men” (what gender are the cops and the prison guards, mostly; what gender are the legislators?)
The KPD (commies). I’m being a bit lazy in calling the SPD “liberals”, as while I think by the late 20s they’d moved away from actual socialism, “liberal” can have several meanings. When actual leftists, or pseudo-leftists, use “liberal”, they usually mean “wussy centre-left person who doesn’t realize that in order to fight The Enemy one must do everything I want pronto”. (No, I’m not being very charitable) I say “pseudo-leftist” because I don’t think the scream-crying crew are actual leftists – they don’t actually want very radical change, they just want 10 mil for a student centre at which they will be employed, or whatever.
Again I think there’s two different things going on here. It’s not that, for example, the RCMP is dominated by gender studies majors or whatever. It’s that the RCMP is praying that if they hire more women and more visible minorities, the sexual harassment problems in the RCMP and the RCMP’s history of racism will go away, or at least people will be distracted. It’s a bandaid solution.
Again, I wouldn’t put Koss into the same bucket. She’s been doing her thing for decades. She’s an influence on some of the current zeitgeist – she’s part of the late-80s movement that saw ideas often associated with radical feminism percolate into liberal feminism. It’s become a big part of pseudo-leftist stuff, and it’s all grossly retrograde: a patriarchal worldview in which men are big scary beasts (with agency) and women are fragile innocent victims (without agency) is not dismantled by advancing those same notions. There’s a lot of patriarchal norms cloaked in a bit of left-wing talk floating around, and those definitely cause a lot of harm, but that’s not a complete overlap with obnoxious campus leftist types. Laws and social customs that treat men as responsible for their actions and women as inherently less capable of taking responsibility aren’t actually left wing, any more than Jim Crow lynch mobs were feminist on account of being “community response to gender-based violence” or whatever.
EDIT: I suppose this makes more sense if I mention that a concept I consider pretty key is that there are certain things – patriarchal norms, say – that recur commonly among human societies. Either there’s something biological going on, or historical conditions led to millennia of socialization, depending on if you’re a biodeterminist or a social constructionist. Or, very probably, a mix of the two. These recurring features are thus “baked in” in a way that’s very hard to defeat, and are influential, and so those who think they are dismantling them often reinforce them, without really knowing it. In this case, someone may think they’re smacking gender roles upside the head, but if their ideology amounts to girls being sugar, spice, etc, and boys being snails, puppy dog tails, etc, they are likely doing very little to actually break down gender roles.
@dndnrsn
I think that most of all this comment has been clarifying. I think that most of our misunderstandings are stemming from us talking about completely different groups of people when we say SJW/HairdyeNKVD. Everything that we’ve talked about makes way more sense to if you just mean the actual college crybullies themselves. Of course they’re smalltime enough not to worry about. I’m about as worried about them as I am about 4chan basement dwellers or incels rising up to wreak havoc.
When I use the term, I’m talking about the larger group who is making policy. I’m talking about the Kosses, the Trudeaus, the leadership of NOW, the Title IX courts, the groups that empower google’s HR department enough that the company itself is terrified to cross them.
I’m talking about the people who make it so that my boss can openly provide substandard medical resources and cannot be removed because of the understanding that she’ll get the band together and protest the pipeline running through their sacred lands if the prime contractor fires us.
I’m talking about the group that has amassed enough power to scare the goddamn Mounties enough that they’re willing to hamstring their effectiveness by rejecting applicants of the local majority, just in the vain hope that they’ll be left alone.
Right, but I don’t live the the bible belt or on an Amish commune, so can you think of any situation I might find myself in where I’d be safe in the case of an accusation? I can’t actually think of any.
Yes, this exactly. This is exactly what I mean when I say SJW. This is why I say that someone like Aapje upholds actual left wing principles better than the group you just described, and get sneered at for using ‘a definition seemingly held by only two people on this planet’. My problem with SJ stuff *is* that they’re fiercely regressive under the guise of fighting the good fight. If this is not what you term as SJW, do you have a better, convenient term that describes this group? I would be perfectly willing to switch to that if it promotes clarity in communication and helps avoid tarring ‘the left’ with an unfairly broad brush.
Yes, we’re very much on the same page now.
In today’s climate, political violence is not much of a thing in the US. On the left, it’s groups committing very, very low-level violence, of the show-up-and-shoving-match-and-maybe-someone-gets-punched – there’s no alt-right Horst Wessels, because nobody’s been killed; Richard Spencer is backing down in the face of relatively minor resistance. On the right, there’s occasional lone-wolf and very rarely organized killings – the far right has a larger body count than the far left in the US today – but it’s still small potatoes compared to all other homicides in the US. But today’s climate is actually pretty good. If there’s serious economic problems that put lots of currently-employable people out of work, result in lots of military personnel getting “laid off”, hyperinflation, whatever, that will be something to worry about. Right now even the hottest “culture war” stuff is just LARPing.
I’ve snipped a bunch here. A few thoughts.
a. Most of what you’re describing is, well, energy that could go into threatening the system being coopted by the system. For example, Title IX scariness is just universities switching from “the easiest way to defend the university’s interests is to tell rape victims to shut up” to “the easiest way to defend the university’s interests is to defenstrate the occasional guy.”
b. The activist left has a book about dealing with sexual assault and harassment within its own bubble. There’s definitely people getting away with all sorts of shit, everywhere. Whenever some big-name Male Feminist (including cishet white guys) gets outed as an abuser or whatever, it’s usually something that goes back a ways, not the first incident going public. There’s usually people, within those feminist circles, covering for men who abuse women (and, when you look at various stats, consider how many must cover for women who abuse) – this seems to be something peculiar to sex-related offences; I can’t imagine anti-racist activists covering for a “we need to be good white allies” type if they were a vicious racist in private.
So, two things:
a. “Social justice warrior” is basically an idiom. “Social justice” likewise is an idiom. I don’t use the term, or the acronym, because it’s coded – I’m not the sort of person who calls people that. Which is why I like to use silly synonyms, or if I’m being more serious, just gesture vaguely at “that kind of campus-style lefty activist, you know, that kind.”
Two people I know who themselves are involved in lefty activist circles have in my presence referred to someone as an “SJW” – the shorthand was, this is someone who has a certain set of beliefs and a certain worldview (“social justice” being a form of left-wing politics heavily informed by critical studies and focusing relatively less on class and relatively more on race, gender, etc) and pursues them in a certain way. Undertones that this is a person who is personally not very pleasant, and has found a convenient banner to march under (one of these friends was referring to someone who is extremely difficult to deal with and wields accusations of one or another sort of “problematic” behaviour within activist groups to get the upper hand in either jockeying for position or in personal disputes). In both cases, that these left-wing activists were calling others “SJWs” indicates they don’t think of themselves as such. It’s about meta-level principles and worldview more than object-level policy proposals, and it’s as much about attitude and milieu as anything else – and my emphasis is on attitude; one of my friends was describing someone where on paper the two of them look really similar; and yet one is someone I’m friends with who I could discuss something contentious with, and the other is someone who makes agreeing with them seem like you’re stepping awfully close to saying the wrong thing.
b. So, let’s say you’ve got two people, both say “I liked [social movement] up until 1985, then it jumped the shark”. If one spends a lot more time defending the pre-1985 version, and the other attacking the post-1985 version, that doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but it’s a clue. A lot of “I liked this then it got crappy” is just a smokescreen – it’s like how Republicans like to quote prooftexted bits of MLK to make it sound like he’d support them these days. It’s why I dialled back my easily-expressed annoyance at the rent-seekers and hypocrites (and hypocritical rent-seekers, don’t forget them) I encountered in university, and focused instead on trying to argue my left-wing politics more around here. The former is just more snarl noises if it’s in a vacuum, while the latter is “this is what we should do instead, guys.”
@dndnrsn
Yep, agreed
Right, the problem is that the people who said “Let’s just throw women under the bus to keep ourselves in the clear!” were total shitheads. I was (and am) against them when they said that. The fact that they’re no better now is of no comfort at all, especially given that their reach has been expanding thanks to the interconnected nature of the modern world.
The reason I asked for examples of places where it falls the other way is because I can’t think of too many. Religious cults, third world countries, extremely rich and powerful abusers. For all intents and purposes, there is no balance here, it’s just advantage: accuser as far as the eye can see.
There’s not a whole lot wrong with the final two paragraphs, but it still leaves us without a term to talk about the edifice of people being regressive shitheads under the banner of left wing progress. My understanding was that this is what people mean by SJ (Which includes, but is not limited to the campus hairdye crybullies), though I know that this is not how you parse the term. I feel that this group needs to be addressed frequently, and think that saying the full length ‘regressive shitheads hiding under the banner of left wing progress’ would get me reflexively labeled as alt right even faster than ‘essjaydubs’.
I’m with you that one has to actually argue for what they want to see, but we do that, and frequently.
Add funding to male social services to match the existing female only infrastructure. Allow male only clubs to the same extent that we do female only clubs. Recognize ‘made to penetrate’ as actual rape. Start prosecuting clear cut false rape accusations as perjury under oath. Still take accusations as serious and cause for investigation, be more fucking diligent with storing and analyzing rape kits. Open up the study to include all missing and murdered native *people*. Acknowledge that power is, was, and will forever be local, so groups of minorities can absolutely be racist or sexist towards the majority. Fix the antiquated marriage and commonlaw equalization laws (In this case, so that my girlfriend and I can move in together without me being on the hook to give her half my income if she should later change her mind) to recognize and uphold spousal contracts. Ditch the Duluth model and recognize that women are perpetrators of domestic assault at rates similar to men. Ditch the default of women being presumed to be the custodial parent. Do some real research into HB,D stuff so we can actually understand what is going on and get a better picture of why racial dynamics are so resistant to being helped by every solution we’ve tried (And at best, rule out the effects of racially innate IQ differences as a cause once and for all), while moving away from the current connection equating IQ and moral worth. If we’re going to call ourselves the ‘pro science’ party, start actually fucking updating our beliefs when presented with new evidence, even (and especially) when it goes against the narrative. Engage with and discuss problems with people instead of writing them off as ‘the enemy’, because this is how we get on the same page and come to agreement; dubbing someone your enemy is the fastest way to make them your enemy. Be intersectional if you want, but take it all the way, even if that means realizing the people who were ‘oppressors’ before are usually dispriviliged on some axis (Even if this makes it hard, because you really, really want to collectively shit on someone as a bonding ritual with your friends). Look into UBI programs and hope to find a way to make the numbers work, even if it means raising taxes substantially.
I feel like I/we talk about, propose, and advocate for positive solutions like these all the time. It’s just so trivial for the ‘”GroupName_TBA, Formerly SJW” crew to say “Oh, just an MRA, no need to listen”, “Oh, just a race realist, don’t bother”, “Just another angry white dude alt right troll, don’t feed him”.
This is why I think it’s important to cover both bases. Advocate strongly, and express that those kind of (Often race and gender based) identitarian shutdowns aren’t welcome.
But they weren’t saying it because they’re bad people. They’re saying it because most people – probably including us – are in CYA mode. Protecting the institution is more important than protecting the little kids or the co-eds, and it’s more important than protecting people who might be falsely accused, or whose behaviour is shitty but not criminal.
Every social circle has someone who gets away with this kind of shit. I can name several guys I know from university who behaved badly towards women in ways that could in theory be prosecuted by the legal system – I know there are whispers about them, which I believe. The amount of flak for it depended on their social status within the community, not on what they were accused of: the guy few people likes will get hit harder for being a groper than the popular guy will for rape. This was in a left-wing university context, where being a fairly ordinary conservative is pretty much out of the Overton window. At least one of these guys is a noisy wokeman nowadays.
If men get away with it, women do even more (although they probably do “it” less). There was one person, she treated her boyfriend in a way that, had it been the other way around, we would have recognized it as abuse. Not terrible abuse, but definitely abuse. Mostly our response to this was to make fun of him for being whipped, and later I realized, man, that was shitty of us.
I don’t think that’s the case. It’ll get you marked as concern trolling, probably. Perhaps sarcasm is the best approach: “ah yes, you’re right, we must indeed keep Those Men, You Know The Kind, away from our women. Why, only last week, one of them had the temerity to glance at my unsullied virgin daughter! Of course, I horsewhipped the brute.” Say this in a Foghorn Leghorn voice.
[snipped a bunch]
a. probably more social services are needed for men, but I doubt it needs to be 1-1. Regardless of stats involving levels of abuse, more serious abuse (the kind that puts people in the hospital or the morgue) is largely male-on-female. Combining everything from savage beatings to low-level emotional abuse into an “abuse” category often obscures things. A lot of what’s needed is “cultural tools” – eg, people should recognize that behaviours that are abusive in men are also abusive in women. And people need to recognize that there isn’t some switch that gets flipped from “100% A-OK behaviour” to “abuse” – someone’s behaviour can be shitty without rising to the level of abuse. That isn’t about funding. But here I am saying that it’s hard to change culture, for whatever reason – so, I’m not sure what to do.
b. I’m of the opinion that Horrible Banned Discourse is tripe. It looks stronger than it is because those who would be expected to stand against it have decided that IQ isn’t real or is entirely environmental. I predict that if intelligence is studied it will be found to be probably about half genetic, and that significant ethnic differences by and large do not exist. I question your statement that racial dynamics are resistant to being helped – there are some stereotypes that have changed drastically over the past 100 years (the stereotype of East Asians was not “wow, they’re really smart!“), there’s that whole thing where you had at least one expert saying, shrug, “the Irish just have a lower IQ than the English and there’s nothing can be done” and that gap disappeared all of a sudden, etc.
I can see why some people want it to be verboten, though. A lot of its adherents certainly seem to have motivations other than pure-hearted truth-seeking, to say the least. You can’t have a debate over the truth with someone who’s acting in bad faith. There’s some people who really want to get to the bottom of genetics and intelligence, but there’s also a long history of the cart pulling the horse with regard to justifying oppressive social norms, conquest, etc.
I don’t know, man. Ruining people’s lives for your own convenience is pretty much how I’d define ‘bad person’. I personally think this accounts for some 95% of all the evil in the world. YMMV though.
Ok, so being that you keep answering a different question than I’d asked, I’m going to take that as an answer in and of itself. It’s not that you’re saying there are actually any environments in the modern world (cults and the third world excluded) where a woman’s claims won’t be blanket privileged, it’s just that certain powerful and charismatic people can still get away with it. That’s less an indicator of some kind of balance and most a subset of ‘powerful people tautologically get away with things’.
People behave as a function of what they expect to get away with. For a few years I worked in a club that had women dancing on the top floor and men downstairs. Seriously, the way the average female audience member behaved would have had her escorted out on a stretcher if they had been a guy watching the girls.
I wish I could agree with this, but it fits right into the ‘the left are the real bigots’ bingo square and can be reflexively ignored. I honestly think EssJay is the lesser evil here, because even if people don’t like the connotation, essentially nobody denies that there are bad faith actors hiding out on the left, and everyone has a vivid picture of what that looks like.
And yeah, sarcasm works to a point, but that’s already frogtwitter’s domain because the Left Can’t Meme.
I mean, when it comes to shelters, homelessness would be the relevant stat, and men have been on the losing end of that one forever. The typical justification for battered women’s shelters over male or co ed shelters is that women are less financially able to house themselves than men, which is flat out not the case anymore. If the argument is that women generally have lower incomes than men, then make shelters for low income people, and they’ll naturally serve more women anyway (Provided that justification is correct, I personally don’t think it accurately predicts need of social services)
This is my solution for most programs that currently utilize racial metrics for determining need. If you want to help blacks and hispanics because they’re typically poorer, then just fucking make your program available to the poor and it’ll disproportionately serve minority populations naturally, while also helping the members of other groups who don’t seem to have as much ‘privilege’ as their gender and ethnicity would suggest.
This definitely. In the modern day, I think culture changes one lawsuit at the time. This is why the thing I worry most about is these old cultural biases being enshrined in law. If it becomes legally allowable to openly discriminate against men or whites, then I think the culture becomes much harder to shift back into balance. This is one thing that I’m grudgingly glad for Trump on, in that I think if Hil had gone to Washington the US supreme court would have been stacked with one of exactly these people, with downstream effects continuing for decades.
This is why above everything else, I think the “prejudice + power: It’s not bad when we do it” meme is the most dangerous of everything floating around. Even if we assume that the current people using it are acting in good faith (Which is doubtful), once it becomes law other less scrupulous actors will flood in to utilize it.
Absolutely, and that would be a win. So let’s fucking crack this case open and put it away once and for all.
Sure, and I’d concede that some stereotypes have been more stubborn than others, and also that some are just there for weird realpolitik reasons (Heard any ‘Pollacks are stupid’ joke in the last decade?) and dry up as soon as the situation changes.
That said, the AZN stereotype sure didn’t change because of affirmative action or any social intervention. Same goes for the Italians, ditto for the Irish, and double that for Jews.
I think the argument ‘”science” has said things like this before, and it’s always been wrong (and usually racist)’ is a really strange one. It’s a fully general counterargument, because literally any scientific idea fits this criteria: People were wrong, until they weren’t (we think). We wouldn’t dream of saying “Ok, we’ve had cosmology wrong every time before, and always for weird religious reasons involving crystal spheres and heliocentrism. I know this time it sounds better, but look at our track record”. If the argument is that this time our models of the allow us to make accurate predictions, then… *jazzhands*
Personally, I think HB.D ends up being another lesser evil, in that it lets us resolve the ‘problem’ of extreme Jewish achievement without resorting to either denial or conspiracy.
I’m not ready to concede that you can’t debate facts with people who aren’t arguing in good faith, because *gestures to the aforementioned group* (Edit: Woah, I mean the EssJays, not Jews) this would mean that the dominant force in modern society is largely unreachable and the only solution is /pol style war and underground psyops. I don’t really want to have to start digging a bunker quite yet, so I’m inclined to try to reason with them as long as possible. There’ve gotta be some people out there who actually believe in the principles themselves, rather than just attacking the people the cool kids attack.
I’m curious why you predict that. Visible heritable differences, such as height or skin color, vary with race. Lots of stuff varies with gender, including things not directly related such as height.
It’s hard to be confident about ethnic differences given both lots of noise in the signal and the pressure against an open discussion, but why would you expect them not to exist? Gender differences you would expect, a priori, to probably exist, since we are as if optimized for reproductive success and the genders differ precisely in their role in reproduction.
Certainly, and I agree with you that most evil in the world is not by people who set out to do evil, but I think that various examples show that it’s due to people being placed in positions where evil is beneficial, required, etc, not due to some flaw in their own character. Those who don’t do evil when it’s beneficial or whatever, or don’t simply look the other way (that’s more common than actually doing evil, are the least common ones – they’re morally especially good, rather than most people who do evil being morally especially bad.
Cultures where wife-beating or whatever is still either acceptable, or “unacceptable but we don’t talk about it”, are still common enough worldwide that it seems odd to write them off. To phrase what I was saying more clearly: the amount of power and charisma you need to get away with being a rapist or an abuser is not that big. You don’t gotta be a bigtime CEO, just a well-liked guy on campus, have some kind of seniority in activist circles, whatever.
Homeless shelters and domestic-abuse shelters are kind of different cases, aren’t they? I don’t know that anybody argues that homeless men are better able to afford shelter than homeless women. The arguments I’ve seen, beyond simple emotive “women deserve protection more” rhetoric (which is, as with many other things, an old patriarchal norm, not something feminists came up with in the 70s), is that women sleeping rough are more at risk than men. For domestic abuse shelters, it’s usually that women are at a higher risk of getting murdered by partners than men.
I favour universal programs, actually; with regard to means-tested stuff, they have the disadvantage that they require bureaucracy, create perverse incentives (take a job that will put you above the cutoff? No way!), and embitter those a tad above the cutoff (lower middle class people, mostly). Racially-based programs lose the perverse incentives (cases of people claiming to be a different race to get benefits are pretty rare) but the embittering factor is bad. Probably better to avoid having pissed-off lower-middle-class white people waiting for a demagogue who actually delivers.
With regard to AA programs, what were they meant to do? They seem to have helped social mobility within the black middle class: LMC becoming MMC, etc. If they were meant to help poor black people, they haven’t helped that well. They haven’t created perverse incentives for users in the way that some other contemporary social programs did (badly-designed needs-tested stuff). They have created some perverse incentives for employers and clients.
It’s not “science was wrong when it said phlogiston existed, so science is always wrong”, it’s that in some cases the tail wags the dog. Theories of racial difference (hell, theories of the existence of races in the way we understand them today) followed from the sudden profitability of colonialism, slavery, etc: they were primarily a way to justify things already done, to salve the consciences of those doing them, and justify further things in that vein. Likewise, models in which everything orbited the earth were heavily driven by religiously-derived ideas about the earth being special because, well, we’re on it, aren’t we? And we’re certainly special.
And yet the group “those advocating for horrible banned discourse” has significant overlap with “people who believe anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.” Their conspiracy theories tend to be a bit different from both the religious anti-Jewish conspiracy theories of yore (which were heavily based around blood libel) and early-20th century anti-Semitic biological theories (which had to simultaneously claim that this group was inferior and pulling all the strings, and which still hold on with the racists who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge someone might be smarter than their group). The anti-Semitic conspiracy theories popular among the aychbeedee crowd tend to be something like “they’re superior, and they know it, and they’re covering up that fact, and shutting down anything that leads there.” It’s still a conspiracy theory, and it’s still pretty ugly, because “well, sure, they’re smarter, but there’s not many of them” goes nowhere good.
What do you mean by “bad faith”? I think you can say there’s five levels of “faith” rather than just two:
1 (most-good): someone actually believes something on the basis of the facts or whatever, and it hurts them
2: someone believes something, and it’s neutral
3: someone believes something, but coincidentally it happens to benefit them
4: someone thinks they believe something because it’s true, but they’re fooling themselves; they really believe it because it benefits them – the tail is wagging the dog
5: someone pretends to believe something they don’t, because it benefits them (or because they’re trolling or whatever) – they’re an outright bad actor.
Most people fall into 2-4; people who believe something entirely for the purest of motives and it’s something that harms them are very rare. Someone who is false-flagging or trolling or whatever is at 5 – they’re certainly acting in bad faith. Most people of whom I disapprove on epistemic grounds (and this includes most horrible banned discoursers, I think) fall into 4, because people are generally very good at self-deception, and self-deception works better than intentional deception. You could potentially collapse 2 and 3. I’m also not sure where you’d fit in “pious frauds”.
If you find you can’t argue with someone of the “campus left activist” style, they aren’t necessarily a 5. People of that variety usually have adopted a rather different system of epistemology than people here. Their reasons for adopting it may be good or bad, and they may be fooling themselves; but our reasons may be good or bad, and we may be fooling ourselves. Very few people there or here are sitting there chuckling to themselves “ha ha, little do they know my belief in subjectivity and lived experience/objectivity and hard facts is in fact a ruse to benefit myself!”
(Of course, taking this a level further – clearly my belief that people subconsciously choose their opinions to benefit themselves was chosen because it benefits myself by letting me think of myself highly for having “cracked the code”)
(And of course my recognition that this might be the case for myself is just blowing smoke up my own ass squared or cubed)
@DavidFriedman
I buy the explanation that the uncommonly high intelligence of humans is primarily about dealing with social interactions, and while the environments of different groups of people have varied, the need to deal with social interaction hasn’t. As for the comparison with gender, the “toolkit” needed for any group to survive anywhere varies less (especially considering that social interaction/status game requirements are pretty static) probably varies less than it does between the genders in the same place. That’s my impression at least.
More anecdotally, that some posited innate ethnic intelligence differences have disappeared before leads me to believe that they were not measuring actual innate intelligence, and that this will continue to be the case in future.
Not really, as far as I know. The shelter that I worked at was a Men’s general (Ie, the only kind available for men), but later opened up to accommodate battered women as well. There’s significant overlap between shelters, and really the defining factor of some women’s shelters is that men are specifically excluded (Both on the staff and as tenants).
As far as I’ve ever known, that’s the standard go-to. The idea is that if a man needs to flee his home, he’s expected to check into a hotel. This option is available to women (Especially women with kids) as well, but the objection is that women often don’t have the means to pursue it, whereas men do (if you squint and don’t look too hard)
Amen to this.
And it’s relative badness slides on a scale depending on how well those lower-middle-class whites are doing. If there aren’t too many who are in dire straights it’s probably net positive, but you’d better hope things are going as well for the privileged class as the rhetoric says, because if not it’s going to drive a whole lot of negative sentiment that comes out in the ballot box.
The take that AA programs aren’t meant to help poor minorities, rather are to help middle class ones is definitely a new one for me.
I don’t think I buy into that quite as much as you do. People have always hated other tribes, and have always noticed groups from different places look and act differently. Slavery has always been profitable as far back as we have written history and presumably beyond. The world is tighter and more interconnected now, so I have sympathy for the idea that there was no ‘racism’ per say when no one traveled more than 50km from their home at any point. After that point, y’know, once sailing became a thing people did I’m pretty sure racial stereotyping has been relatively constant, and by and large along lines we would recognize today.
I think this is another one of our points of minor disagreement. I really don’t care if bad people also think something. Hitler and I both love dogs and icecream. HB.D doesn’t in and of itself rule out conspiracy, but without it, I can’t see any way to get around it (Or at least some form of structural societal privilege).
Given that a group is achieving way, way higher than one would expect, you really only have a few possibilities. 1) They’re just unusually talented, 2) They are being propped up and given advantages that others don’t have, 3) They’re not actually excelling and you’re antisemitic for saying so.
3 was the typical route that has been pushed, and until the internet came along you could kind of get away with it. The echos group might be toxic, but their ‘coincidence noticer’ really got its point across. At this point Scott et al. are happy to point out Jewish achievement in nobel prizes, chess, income, essentially every worthwhile field.
So now here we are, unable to deny the success. If you try to third way it, like saying “Oh, they just have a really good ‘culture’ of setting themselves up for success, so that’s ok”, then the obvious response is that the success of other whites over minorities is equally likely to be ephemeral ‘culture’ or whatever other mechanism you propose. Trying to contort the definition of ‘structural’ privilege to apply to the majority, but not a group that holds like 20 times more prestigious awards than their numbers would suggest and out earns practically everybody is just insane.
Honestly, I think Ashkenazim as a group probably are just about a standard deviation smarter than the average white, with predictable effects at the thin tails of the curve. There are obviously also network and ingroup effects (I mean, just try to work in acting without running into a few of those), but I think HB.D is the most likely case for most of the discrepancy.
One thing I’m glad for, is that thinking another race is smarter than my own clears me of being racist XD
Now, this is another neat bit of inferential distance. I wasn’t thinking of ‘bad faith’ as ‘doesn’t believe their own argument’. I’d always understood it as ‘Belief that the other person is the enemy and does not warrant a fair hearing.’ People pulling the ‘arguments are soldiers’ thing are in a case where there is overlap between our two definitions, wherein they both don’t necessarily believe their stance (Although you’re correct that people seem easily able to believe whatever they need to), and are actively using the argument as a cudgel to destroy an enemy first and foremost.
I find with the campus activists it’s just the most obvious version of bad faith (Outside of intentionally adversarial systems like law or actual war), because their system openly encourages this by promoting *ahem* “epistemologies” that attempt to ignore majority voices as a point of virtue. It’s all autoethnography from here on out.
I’ve seen this claim made before – or, alternatively, the claim that they worked for the black middle class, but not the black lower class.
First, why do people hate the other tribe? Because they have stuff we want to take, or we have stuff they want to take, or vice versa. Preferring your own kind to strangers is one thing, but really disliking the stranger requires there be a reason beyond “they ain’t us.” Second, consider “race”. Go back enough and you’ll see people saying “English race”, “French race”, etc; you won’t see the more recent conception of there being three or four or five races. The boundaries were drawn differently: Compare seeing a room of people and saying “well, there’s one Englishman, one Chinese, one German, one Ethiopian, one Italian, one Korean, one Senegalese” versus saying “well, there’s three white people, two Asian people, and two black people”. If we develop to the point that we go out and conquer the galaxy and encounter aliens, or if aliens come and try to kick us around, suddenly there will be an incentive for us to make it “humans” and “aliens”.
Usually the cultural explanation is the one: the logic goes “a group that’s successful but not the majority must have a culture that helps them out, because they don’t have the ability to rig the game in the same way that the majority can.”
I also think you’re wrong assuming that people on the left can’t do the sort of typographic-symbol based stuff. There’s a history of left-wing anti-Zionism shading really easily into anti-Semitism, before Stalin died there was an anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR that would likely have gotten worse had he not died when he did (“rootless cosmopolitan” is primarily a Soviet slur, not a right-wing slur; the charges – that they were loyal to them and theirs worldwide rather than to the USSR – are indistinguishable from a lot of contemporary and more recent anti-Semitism), there’s a history of anti-Semitism among African-Americans (who generally get coded as left-wing unless they are Republicans; people frequently forget that black nationalism is still nationalism) that’s flared up most recently in this business involving Women’s March organizers having some links to Farrakhan. There’s also simultaneously been a complete ignorance when convenient of the history of discrimination, including the world’s worst genocide still within living memory, against Jews – when Bret Weinstein says “hey maybe I don’t like being ordered to leave the campus because of my ethnicity” he’s just some entitled white man who doesn’t understand what discrimination is. As the Holocaust, and de facto discrimination against Jews in schools, employment, etc fades into out of memory and into history, I think we will start seeing people on the left go from “this [department/workplace/industry] is too white” to “gee, you know what else this place is, too?” Because it’s probably going to get codified in some social-studies department instead of an imageboard, they’re probably going to use highfalutin jargon instead of punctuation marks and dank memes.
Noted reliable source Wikipedia defines “bad faith” as
and goes on to say
Someone who says “you are the enemy, my holy books/expert sources say you are the enemy, you cannot be negotiated with, gonna smite ya” is not acting in bad faith. If they don’t really believe you’re bad but want to smite you so they can take your stuff, that’s bad faith. If they believe you’re bad and can’t be negotiated with, but raise a flag of truce and pretend to negotiate so they can get some other guys to sneak up behind you and smite you, that’s bad faith.
I don’t think it even requires that. My understanding of the Robber’s Cave experiment is that it demonstrates that all you really need for groups to hate each other is to be vaguely aware that the other group exists
It seems like this works with any identifier, intentional or innate, and race is just one of those that is extremely hard to change or fake (For most people)
All I see there is the priorities changing, complete with all the humanity of weird alliances of convenience. If aliens were to attack tomorrow, I’d fully expect that you’re right and we’d all pull it together and be a globally unified community to fight them off. And then as soon as the last xeno was thoroughly liquefied, the old feuds would come roaring back. If it’s not these races, it’s more specific gradations. If it’s not at the national level, it can be warring city states. If the community isn’t large enough to support cities, families can feud for generations in exactly the same way. I think this is an innate human tic of conflict with whoever we define as ‘other’ today.
Two things here. First, I think this stance completely ignores how centralized and top down power is today. With government and corporate structure coming down from the top as it does, it doesn’t take very many people in the right positions to dominate. See South Africa for a good example, while thinking about the adage “Give me control the money of a country and I care not who makes its laws.”.
Secondly if we are going to stick to the line that having good culture that results in systemic advantage is only bad if one is the majority, independently of whether they occupy a disproportionate share of the top positions, why does this flip so easily when we start talking about misogyny/misandry? Men are clearly not a majority of the population, being a hair under 50% by their 20’s, and less to whatever extent we think the nonbinary crowd comprises more than a rounding error. If we’re talking about tails wagging dogs, it seems really convenient to equivocate back and forth as we feel like. White men Men are valid targets for oppressor status, despite being only ~31% of the US population because they hold disproportionate power, and 1/3 is enough to rig the game. Jews aren’t, they clearly hold even more disproportionate amounts of power but they’re not the majority. And to be clear, I don’t think either group deserves oppressor status.
Oh, I didn’t mean to give them impression that I think people on the left are immune here. Completely the opposite. To reiterate, I think that acceptance of Jewish achievement without HB.D as an explanation practically requires antisemitism when coupled with notions of disparate impact and aggressive privilege theory. I’m not surprised at all that universities are starting to clash with Israel more and more.
Well by that definition I’ve been using the term completely wrong then!
So in the example I gave of treating one’s interlocutor as an enemy to be destroyed by hook or by crook, it would only be bad faith if there were a pretense of civil discussion. Which I can see how I would make that error, being that this is the case in virtually all the places I’ve seen claims of bad faith applied. Today I Learned.
Just quick thoughts in general.
1. There still has to be some sort of proximity. Tell the English back in the middle ages about the Japanese, or vice versa, and what hoot do they give? Move it up to the 30s, and all of a sudden they’re butting up against each other. My point is that concepts of racial difference/supremacy are usually ad hoc explanations to justify the way things are in a society, the nasty stuff we want to do to other people, etc. It doesn’t go “these people are inferior, so it’s OK to take their stuff”, it goes “these people have stuff we want that we’re pretty sure we can take, so, they’re inferior”. Just world fallacy.
2. Power relations in society are really complicated and we all want to make them easy to understand. Everyone gets confused when it’s not easy to understand. Every now and then you have a situation where the polarities flip, or where there’s massive inconsistency: eg, the Woke know that accusations by white women against black men in the Jim Crow South were all fake, but an accusation by a white woman against a black man now must be believed, right? Meanwhile, that same case will be where American right-wingers all of a sudden give a hoot and a half about black guys getting due process.
3. What you’re saying still doesn’t explain that horrible banned discourse and anti-Semitism seem pretty tight. Sure, it’s a different kind of anti-Semitism from the late 19th/early 20th century kind that lives on among some neo-Nazi types – the horrible banned discourse anti-Semites have dropped the dissonance-inducing “they’re inferior so how are they pulling the strings?” But they still think there’s some kind of conspiracy or something similar – it’s become “these people are superior and pull the strings but they don’t want to admit it/they’re lying to themselves about it“.
I think it’s entirely plausible we’ll see two strong anti-Semitisms at the same time: one horrible banned discourse as described, one left-wing “they say their disproportionate presence in rich powerful groups is due to studying hard and other positive values, but really they’ve rigged the game“.
4. I think that this ties into 2 – the epistemology of the critical studies crowd, they might have a point there. “Play by the rules, let’s be polite, let’s discuss this rationally” can be pretty sleazy if it’s said by someone who just picked your pocket. There’s clear cases where people purporting to be objective and so forth weren’t; often they were fooling themselves too. That said, a focus on anecdotal evidence (“lived experience”) runs into the problem that if you poll American Christians they’ll often say they’re more oppressed than Muslims, or American white people they’ll often say they’re more discriminated against than black people. Both of which claims, when you look at statistics and so on, are on the whole bunk. But how do you know whose anecdotes to listen to? The “lived experience” model seems to rely on received wisdom to figure out whose anecdotes are true and whose anecdotes are bogus. This seems significantly less effective than looking at the statistics, because duelling statistics is easier to resolve than duelling received wisdom. But I can still see where they’re coming from.
Replies to quick thoughts in general.
1. There does have to be some proximity, you’re right. I think “I want their stuff” misses the mark to a degree, but it can happen that way. I also don’t think they’re entirely ad hoc justifications. A lot of it strikes me as being the outcome diminished social trust and cultural legibility, iterated over many interactions. My own ‘people’ are legible, and I have an idea of how to act, what is likely to make them happy or angry, what the local norms are. When two cultures share space but don’t understand one another, misunderstandings frequently turn hostile. If I hold the door for you because that’s a nice gesture in my culture, but I don’t realize that in your culture holding the door implies ‘you’re too weak to do this yourself, also fuck your mother, swine!’, and you rise to the insult, it’s not going to take long before stories circulate and your culture gets a reputation for unpredictable violence. From there it can become a self fulfilling prophecy. Double that when there’s a language barrier, and triple that when religion or other things people care very strongly about but can’t be checked via empirical fact is involved.
2. I think the groups are just unprincipled and inconsistent. I don’t think it’s actually more complicated than people playing at ideals for effect, and maybe even believing them as long as they don’t cost much to uphold, but then folding on them when they become inconvenient them and being exceptionally good at ignoring cognitive dissonance. I find people, ideologues especially, get the most angry when you say something that provokes cognitive dissonance. Way more than if you just said something counter to their view.
3. I can’t say this strongly enough: I really, really, REALLY don’t care if bad people also think something that I think is correct. It’s enough of an alarm to double check your math and proceed with caution, but it’s certainly not enough to change my mind about an idea in and of itself. I think some absolutely awful people are big into consent culture, but I’m not going to abandon it it just because they’re reprehensible. In my experience from people I’ve spoken with, HB.D concepts are expressed by plenty of people who aren’t in your horrible groups (Unless you make the argument completely circular and claim that holding those views at all makes one racist or otherwise horrible).
With that point in mind, I also don’t think it’s acceptable for groups to attempt to push ideas out of the overton window, and then complain that the people who hold the view are dirty rotten deplorables, which proves that the idea is bad in the first place. Weren’t we just talking about ad hoc justification?
I completely agree with you on multiple types of antisemitism, and even extend that dynamic to racism/sexism/otherisms, wherein the movements fighting against monsters end up becoming monsters themselves as we discussed earlier. People just really suck at not abusing power.
4. I would not grant them a point here, because I think this ignores the bigger picture. Politeness and rules is an imperfect system, but the other options are worse. Ironically more than worse, they’re exactly the systems the crit studies crowd are trying to fight, just with different groups of people holding the power.
By eschewing the system of rules and politeness, you’re left with picking winners and losers. And the way those are chosen is straight up bias of who the chooser prefers. This alone should tell you that there’s a game afoot. One does not go to fight an opponent they think is more capable of inflicting damage undermining the restrictions on causing damage. Iraq isn’t going to the UN saying “And you know what? Even if we don’t have them, we think nuclear armed countries *should* be able to throw them around wherever they want!”, and if they did, I would be really suspicious about hidden centrifuges deep in caves.
The fact that this group is arguing to replace a system of rules with a system of fiat, tells us that they expect to be the ones with the power to make the choices. If I replace “received wisdom” with “Whoever is more charismatic and has the support of more powerful people” then I’m with you.
The sad reality as I see it, is that a lot of the grievance studies crowd doesn’t have a whole lot going for them, and know that if they play by the rules they’ll be outcompeted hard and wind up as 40 year old baristas with PhD’s. Which understandably doesn’t give them much incentive to play fair. When it comes down to it, the rust belt Trump supporting factory deplorables and career acedemics who can’t make tenure have pretty similar job and life prospects unless they can “change the system”. The factors jobs aren’t coming back, and no one wants to hire someone with a degree in critical race studies (And there sure aren’t enough professor positions for every lifetime academic). So I can see why they would prefer to burn it all to the ground, rather than just suck quietly, but it doesn’t mean I support either of them doing so.
“If we play fair I can’t win!” is a shitty justification in any context I can think of. Even if they go one step meta and yell “I’m not cheating, YOU’RE cheating!” as they flout the rules.
1. Outside of subtle situations like that, though, we’ve got a long history of “these people have stuff we can take/these people are trying to take our stuff; they must have failings past having nice takeable stuff/being jerks trying to take our stuff.”
2. Yeah, most people are unprincipled and inconsistent, and we all gotta be careful we aren’t being.
3. I’m not saying that the truth or falsehood of a position has to do with the people holding it. I’m saying that I don’t think your position that aychbeedee provides a way to think about these things that doesn’t lead to anti-Semitism reflects reality, because people who hold horrible banned discourse views tend to be more anti-Semitic than the norm.
4. So, I think we need to break this down into two things. One is the position that boils down to “you say it’s a fair game, but it’s not a fair game.” Like, say, playing Monopoly with someone who starts off with more money than you: even if the rules are fair – they aren’t sneakily rerolling their dice or whatever – they’ve still got an advantage. And if you start to suspect they’re fudging with the dice… One way this position manifests is in its epistemology: “let’s have a reasoned, fair debate” can be seen as something supported by people who have an advantage in reasoned, fair debate. Or, it can be seen as something supported by people who have an unfair lead and want to distract you, or are outright cheating, and want to snooker you. These are different worldviews, and I don’t think one is so manifestly correct that the other can just be written off.
On the other hand, there’s the behaviour of rent-seekers who use that rhetoric to seek benefits for themselves like you see on campuses, among a lot of professional-activist types, etc. Imagine if all of a sudden America started thinking about the plight of poor Appalachian whites: not poor whites in general, but the mostly Borderer-descended poor Appalachian whites who can be regarded as having gotten a pretty shitty deal in a way that goes beyond “they’re poor”. There would be a difference between poor Appalachian people saying “look, right now we can’t compete fairly with you, because you’re not being fair to us; we don’t have the resources, you have a fair start, and when you say it’s fair, that’s bogus!” and middle-class people of Appalachian or partial Appalachian descent busting into the college president’s office screaming that they want ten million dollars right now to build an Appalachian Student Centre and they want expansions to the Appalachian Studies Program. Which, of course, will both mean some jobs for themselves, but probably won’t do anything for the folks back in the hollers.
I think there’s a difference between saying “hey, this game is rigged, unrig the game!” and trying to play the game underhanded yourself.
2. It’s pretty hard. We do what we can while trying to keep stock of our limits.
3. I don’t think that follows. My stance is that of the people who believe in a) disparate impact (Ie, that differential outcomes are prima facie evidence of systemic oppression), b) that systemic oppression, defined as prejudice plus power, should be redressed through social and legal policy, and c) that Jews have rates of achievement and occupy positions of power at some 15x the per capita rate of white men, all of them will either advocate for solutions we would consider antisemitic or are being unprincipled on at least one of these axes. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for most of the people who believe in a) and b), as I’ve yet to meet one that can apply these in a principled way without arbitrarily picking and choosing winners.
Just because AichBeeDee provides a path to an internally consistent worldview that doesn’t punish Jews (And Asians), doesn’t mean it frequently does, as the people on the other side aren’t terribly principled either. It could also have to do with the fact that failure to denounce AichBeeDee fast enough has intentionally been made a thoughtcrime in much of society, so it’s not entirely surprising that the people still willing to talk about it skew shitward. Again, it’s dirty pool to create a situation, and then use that situation as proof that creating it was justified.
4. The problem is then that the argument is completely circular, and only serves to further convince people who already agree with it. I think there is prejudice and discrimination. I do not think there is prejudice and discrimination fueling many of the problems where it is claimed. If you want to claim that groups have an unfair lead, you have to go and actually convincingly show that. You can’t just assert it, and then claim that being asked to show it is part of the unfair system. The answer to an unfalsifiable position isn’t ‘that’s right’ or ‘that’s wrong’, it’s a recognition that we can’t know until we devise a better test to falsify one way or the other.
And when someone is arguing an unfalsifiable position, and saying that the solution is to just shut up and start giving them money and benefits until they tell you to stop, I’m inclined to suspect something underhanded is going on.
This, I think, illustrates a sorta tragic but good sense part about life. Ties go to the status quo, because we know that the status quo is viable (If not perfect, and definitely having some weaknesses). If you want to change the status quo, you *Should* have to bring better than even justification, because this creates better outcomes than in the counterfactual where anyone can bust in with a just so story and and change things to benefit themselves at the expense of others.
3. So, you’re saying one will lead to bad stuff, and the other only leads to bad stuff because people think it’s witch territory, leading to being full of witches?
4. Well, I think that in a lot of cases, it’s not incredibly hard to show that there’s discrimination or whatever. Whether that’s by statistics, or even by intellectually honest use of anecdotes (eg, let’s say one of our hypothetical Appalachians has a story about getting treated badly because they’re a Borderer. If they get hassled by cops, and know their Cavalier, Puritan, and Quaker buddies don’t, even when otherwise they’re behaving the same, that’s at least a clue there’s some anti-Borderer bias going on. If what they complain about is something that they and all their friends experience, it seems rather odd to ascribe it to that bias).
It’s not a “well we can’t prove this so LOOK OVER THERE” situation. Part of it is an epistemic approach that comes out of social studies departments, some areas of philosophy, etc that devalues hard statistics and such. Part of it is that rhetorically being able to spit out a few dozen compelling stories, even if those stories are a teeny tiny drop in the bucket, beats being able to say “based on evidence, Borderer-Americans are 27% more likely than the average to be wrongfully convicted” or whatever. Statistics get used as punctuation or for effect rather than in an enlightening manner. Of course, this second bit isn’t just limited to the parts of the left we’re talking about – “anecdotes plus out of context statistics” is incredibly common.
3. I’m saying that the one leads to bad stuff, because it locks the movement into mandatory inconsistency and mental gymnastics to avoid doing bad stuff, (which I’m also considering to be ‘bad stuff’)
I think on the other side that people don’t need a reason to hate on historically hated groups, so they’ll find a way in spite of whatever data is in front of them. AichBeeDee can definitely lead to persecution jews coupled with different axoims. Like if instead of “We need to hunt down privilege and level it” they subscribed to “They mentally outgun us, so we need to take them down now before they get a chance to definitively rule over us”, then they could absolutely make antisemitic hay out of a positive group IQ difference.
I’m saying that the people who think Blacks are less intelligent, and thus we should rule them, but Jews/Asians are more intelligent, thus we should destroy them are, aside from just being straight up self interested warmonger pricks, being just an inconsistent in their attempts to pick and choose winners and losers by fiat as the EssJays.
I place a lot more stock in internal consistency than I think most people do (It is my impression that the fans of SSC tend to do so as well, for good or for social suicide).
And to finish, this is not “People think this is witch territory”, it’s “This has *Intentionally* been made into witch territory so as to stifle conversation”. I’m really not going to believe that this taboo is just some strange organic quirk that happened to fall together.
4. Yes, and I’d heartily agree with you. In all those cases where it can be convincingly shown, I’m up for getting people out and leveling that shit. If black people are being discriminated against for jobs by virtue of blackness alone, then let’s break down that wall. Likewise if women are getting overlooked because of their gender alone, we fix it. I’m also adamant about this.
But when they start moving up meta levels, and saying “ok, a black person who is in all ways similar to a white is now treated equally or even slightly better off, but because fewer blacks perform to the same level, the standards are RACIST!”, then count me out. Anyone who says “Meritocracy” is a microaggression can fuck themselves. At that point, they’re not asking for equality, they’re asking for special treatment and lower standards, to the detriment of anyone who relies on the service being provided.
I’m even somewhat sympathetic to the idea that certain groups still have lingering disadvantages from past wrongs. If we could come up with a plan to say “Ok, this is how we’re going to redress the problem, and then we’re fucking even steven”, I’d be onboard. As long as it’s “Just keep giving me stuff until I say stop”, then I think we both know that it’ll never be enough, because minorities are people, and people are shitheads when they’re given blank cheques.
I think it actually is worse than “I can’t prove it…And look over there!”, when it’s usually done as “I can’t prove it, and fuck you you racist! White men like you don’t get to define what racism is!” (I saw this exact argument put forward today on FB, and wished there were a “Love this for the irony alone” button)
3. Well, some people outright say “we should be on top, because we’re us, checkmate” or have views that boil down to that. They usually don’t extend to other people the same courtesy. I imagine they’re the sort of people who think that cheating is OK if the ref doesn’t see it, except when the other guy cheats and gets away with it.
As for why it’s witch territory, it’s almost entirely a reaction to the bad shit that got done under the banner of “science” in various places – not just Germany – in the early-middle 20th century. It’s not like people sat down and schemed to make it unacceptable. It’s a pretty normal reaction.
4. There’s 4 arguments against meritocracy, or against justifying things as meritocracy:
a. “This isn’t a meritocracy, but it could be – however, we’re fooling ourselves if we think it is now, and pretending it is now is harmful”
b. “This isn’t a meritocracy, and it can’t be, because the people on top, whoever they are, will always rig things and then say it’s a fair game”
c. “The very concept of meritocracy is offensive because you can’t actually say anything has more merit than anything else”
d. “Meritocracy is dangerous because if it works, it will result in a society where those on top truly are the most capable, able to completely dominate those below them”
Most left-wingers today fall into b or c. d is what one finds in The Rise of the Meritocracy, which I always shill hard here. I think a worrying tendency is the tendency to go to c the hardest. In general, I think it’s bad that certain parts of academia and left-wing politics, especially a certain sort, have gotten more and more entwined: bad for academia and bad for the left.
This has kind of drifted. Should we continue in 98.25?
3. Yeah, there’ll always be those people. The strong point of a ‘universal culture’ as Scott puts it is that by keeping those people in check we can all enjoy the benefits of a diversity of fringe cultural strengths.
It’s a knee jerk reaction, and a poor one as far as I’m concerned. We’re circling back around to the point we talked about earlier how ‘science’ always gets it wrong until it eventually gets it right, and in any case where the outcome actually matters, people will be hurt by the mistake. The answer isn’t to lock down discussion to stop ‘science’ from trying again, because the opposite of a mistake isn’t likely to be correct either.
Imagine if we looked back and said “You know, Medicine is just… always wrong. Think of all the people who died due to treppaning people to release evil spirits. Or how we tried to balance their humors and ended up bleeding them to death. Don’t even get me started on electroshock therapy that’s still practiced today! Horrible things have been done to people in the name of “Medicine”. Anyone who wants to cut people open because they think it makes them better (Check out this fucking guy) is a sadist and needs to be stopped. There’s no way they can think they’re right this time after being wrong so many times”.
Now, the goofy part about this is it’s not even wrong. There are a ton of interesting examples of interventions that we’re finding out now, might not actually be helping anyone at all. Prehospital is my field, so that’s where my examples come from, but for instance: some services don’t use rigid boards for spinal immobilization after trauma, and incredibly, their patient outcomes don’t seem to suffer for it. There is mounting evidence that Rapid Sequence Intubation, (Putting in a breathing tube before getting to the hospital. I get the sense that you already know this, but just in case) doesn’t actually lead to better rates of patients surviving to discharge, though it sure as hell helps the rates of survival to the hospital.
So even our modern medicine is wrong in ways that literally kill people despite our best efforts. Just the same, tabooing even trying to get a better picture of what is going on because of those deaths is so much worse.
4.
Those all seem so easily dismissed though. A and b are just “This meritocracy isn’t meritocracy enough”, which isn’t a fault with meritocracy, it’s a fault with our current system. And I would completely agree that those are problems that we need to solve for meritocracy to work.
c. is just nihilism. Unless someone is at the point where they totally deny the existence of any value or utility at all, then ‘merit’ can be defined in terms of whatever brings that value. There not being a single, clearly defined measure of value that is preferred by all people doesn’s stop the concept of people being rewarded commensurately for providing that subjective value.
d. is dismal, but it’s also the best possible case. What is their alternative? That power be vested in the incompetent so they can use it unwisely, so that when they fuck it up everyone can form teams and fight them out of power to replace them with other incompetents? Even more people will suffer that way than in the worst case of an oppressive caste system! Help me out here, because that seems flat out unhinged.
I agree with you that c is probably the worst here, because that just obfuscates things into complete chaos, which then creates a vacuum for power to fill however it wants.
This has been all over the place. I’ve had fun though. Thanks. Catch you on the next one.
This is pretty much the situation in which a word should be tabooed in a discussion, right? Basically we notice a pattern wherein some word either:
a. Has multiple shifting/unclear meanings so that when you use it, your disagreements end up being about the definition as often as about any actual material disagreement. Sometimes people use those shifting definitions to win arguments, but probably at least as often the shifting definitions lead to ambiguity in the minds of the arguers.
Disagree. The alternative to dealing with one term that occasionally mutates confusingly (in the way common words do in any language) is a euphemism treadmill, where a bunch of alternatives come into fashion and then get replaced just as quickly. “Retarded” is a charged and unclear word (Are we talking Down Syndrome? Is Aspergers included? Severe ADHD?) but we’re not better off for having 5 years of discussion about “mentally handicapped” and then 5 years of discussion about “differently abled” and then 5 years of discussion about “developmentally disabled,” especially for people rereading these terms in the future without our cultural contexts.
You’re right that just coming up with more and more euphemisms isn’t a great solution, but just keeping the same flawed concepts forever isn’t great either.
I think the solution is to get more specific and clear with language. If someone has ADHD, say ADHD. If they have a low IQ, say that. I’m not sure if we gain a lot from having a vague umbrella term for a variety of unlike conditions, it just contributes to stereotyping.
Granted, “disabled” can be a useful legal concept when people can’t work fulltime for various medical reasons and are getting financial assistance from the government. But outside of those contexts, I’m not sure a term like “intellectually disabled” contributes much.
I agree with avoiding blanket labels here. As someone who works with those considered developmentally disabled or disabled by way of mental handicap, the onus is on us (the service providers) and the general public to understand the details of each conditional label, ie ADHD, Asperger’s etc… plus the particular way that condition manifests itself in the person, or if there are co morbid conditions as well that play a role
Possibly related: An attempt to understand race theory on the subreddit
I’d like to see more exchange between Scott and Robinson as well, although there is one annoying factor on Robinson’s end that seems to make their exchanges less productive than they could be. (I say this as someone who agrees with Robinson’s basic claim that Scott isn’t sufficiently charitable to SJ activists.)
The problem is that Robinson is prone to elementary logical errors that it’s hard to imagine Scott ever making. For example, Scott wrote:
In response to which, Robinson wrote:
So in short, Scott says “It’s obvious that the consequence picture of racism is wrong, because racially disparate consequences aren’t a sufficient condition for racism–an act (like sparing the lives of rich white people) can have disparate racial consequences without being racist.”
Robinson rebuts by saying “I agree the consequence picture of racism is wrong, because racially disparate consequences aren’t a necessary condition for racism. An act can be racist without having disparate racial consequences if it is prejudiced.”
Then Robinson seems to think he has shown Scott’s objection is beside the point. But it isn’t, because on the view of racism Robinson advocates, disparate consequences are still supposed to be sufficient for racism. And Scott’s example still shows that disparate consequences obviously aren’t sufficient.
If I’m understanding it correctly, this seems pretty similar to the “unpacking the invisible knapsack” model of white privilege, which isn’t new. It’s the entire basis of the social justice concept of privilege, and they apply it in the same way to traits like maleness, straightness, etc.
And I think it’s pretty flawed. Whiteness is a vague, subjective, ever-changing identity category, not a definable resource. A property or resource can be sold or given away, but “whiteness” is entirely defined by other people’s perceptions of you (generic “you,” since I don’t know if you’re white); it’s not something you possess so much as a label that society assigns you. And it can’t be renounced, because it’s not within your control to begin with.
And look what happens when someone, like say Rachel Dolezal, tries to pass as a POC. People did not like it. Indeed, she was accused of “appropriating” other people’s identity, which would seem to suggest that–at least in some social circles–blackness rather than whiteness is perceived as a commodity or resource, and someone who tries to claim it inappropriately is regarded as engaging in a type of fraud or theft.
I don’t think this is a great way of thinking about race, in general.
Consider the concept of human capital. It’s obviously not a perfect analogy to financial capital: for example, I can’t sell my human capital or give it away, and I don’t know what it would mean to renounce it. Nevertheless, it is a useful thing to talk about. Why can’t the same be true of “whiteness”?
This is a relatively innocuous example of a problem I see throughout this whole thread. If you can find a bit of conceptual murkiness, you are somehow justified in throwing out the whole shebang. Similarly, the existence of people who will yell at you to check your privilege invalidates the entire concept.
We don’t apply these same standards to other issues. When we’re talking about the War on Nerds, nobody asks for peer-reviewed papers showing statistically significant anti-nerd bias, or dismisses the entire notion because it’s hard to draw a line between nerds and geeks. A poll about conservatives feeling uncomfortable in tech will be accepted at face value; the equivalent poll about black people or women would have its methodology dissected under a microscope.
It’s easy to see when your own group is being treated unfairly. It’s a lot harder to notice when it’s happening to somebody else. This is normal. Empathy is hard.
That’s a powerful cognitive bias. Especially if you want to think of yourself as a rationalist, you should be leaning into that bias as hard as you can. You should be scrutinizing every argument, to make sure you aren’t just falling into the same old trap. Your standards for concluding that there is discrimination against your ingroup should be twice as high as discrimination against your outgroup.
Right now, it seems like a lot of us have them set half as high.
Taking into account Rachel Dolezal (or whatever) specific case, blackness was seen as a valuable asset in certain circles, in certain fashions. NOT whiteness.
Like, I would agree with you on the nerds and conservative pieces, but I’d say they’d only face discrimination in specific contexts and specific areas. A conservative in suburban Kansas is not discriminated against, even if a conservative in academia might be. A nerd might have a realllllllll tough time getting a date, but a nerd’s obsessive interest might be a benefit in getting a better job with more money, and would be an asset if you are in a SV firm.
I’d say I’d prefer not to be born black in modern America, but if I could simply swap my skin color right now, holding everything else equal? I think I’d be in a pretty good spot if I were black, and disadvantaged if I were Asian and trying to get into either Northwestern or U of C. And if I painted my face black to try to PASS as black, people would be REALLY pissed.
1. I predict that you would not enjoy the outcome of swapping your skin to black, particularly if you are a bigger man. Obviously neither of us have any way to prove our side, though, so we can agree to disagree.
2. I don’t know anything about your life, but in the general case “holding everything else equal” does quite a lot of work. As just one example, the average white kid in America is in a significantly better school than the average black kid.
3. I assume that your confidence about doing well as a black person is at least partly based on the ability to take advantage of affirmative action, a situation in which blackness is plausibly an advantage over whiteness. Rachel Dolezol is another case in which being black might count as an advantage. These are, in large part, exceptions that prove the rule.
Take Dolezol first. The circle in which being black was a “valuable asset” for her was as president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. This is a counter-example to a general trend in the same way that the ubiquity of conservatives as leaders of the College Republicans proves that there’s no problem with conservatives on campus. If a liberal feigned conservative principles so she could put “President of the College Republicans” on her CV, you’d likewise expect people to be pissed.
Affirmative action is interesting because the argument is so circular. Affirmative action exists because people agreed that being white was an advantage, and it seemed necessary to counterbalance that advantage. Using that counterbalance as evidence that blackness is advantaged is therefore silly, particularly when it is used as evidence that affirmative action should be abolished: “Because we saw a problem and put a program into place to address it, that problem must not exist and we should abolish the program.”
Blackness is an advantage in specific contexts that have been explicitly designed to help black people. Whiteness is a general set of advantages that permeate society. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
“Holding all else equal” is intended to do a lot of work, because we’re looking at race-as-capital in specific situations. How the advantages to certain races in certain situations accrue doesn’t really make a difference that certain races have certain advantages in different situations.
Affirmative Action was invented in a different political and social context. It’s perfectly possible that conditions on the ground have changed in a way that no longer reflects the conditions in which it was implemented, and the whole institution simply remains a vestigial institution like, say, behavioral interviews.
AA is a program poorly adjusted to handle society-level discrimination in the way structural racism exists. If the police state is biased slightly against black people and therefore throws a bunch of black people in prison, it does not follow that a young black man from an intact black family in a successful neighborhood needs a leg up from affirmative action.
To the extent this happens, this is an unearned gain for the young black man. It does nothing to lessen, increase, argue against, argue for, or affect in any other way, systemic oppression against OTHER black people.
That’d be totally expected from a society that is both classist AND racist, because you would have entrenched classes AND races, and blacks within the higher class would enjoy unearned privileges in some contexts.
The other problem of AA is that institutions that believe strongly in inclusion probably don’t NEED the AA, and institutions that don’t believe in inclusion won’t PRACTICE AA. The two aren’t correlated, they are inversely correlated. Like, 1960s AA probably isn’t going anywhere without strict government mandates, 2010s “diversity” probably has more buy-in. This doesn’t prove that the 1960s was less racist than 2010 because it may have practiced AA less, and actually suggests the opposite.
Suggesting that white is strictly dominant over black in all contexts at all times is really an incredibly strong claim. I don’t have any confidence in supporting that.
That’s a stronger definition of white privilege than I think is necessary. I would instead suggest: “being white is a general advantage over being black in enough contexts that we should be concerned about it”. And, hey, you don’t even have to embrace that watered down version wholeheartedly. All I’m saying is that, as a matter of epistemic hygiene, you should hold yourself to a high standard of proof before rejecting that hypothesis.
PS: With respects to affirmative action, note that there’s no contradiction between thinking that:
A) whiteness is generally an advantage and blackness is an advantage in certain narrow contexts; and
B) affirmative action as currently implemented is ineffective.
I don’t have a strong opinion about affirmative action programs one way or the other. I suspect that the benefits are smaller than their supporters believe, and the harms are smaller than their detractors claim. My only point about AA here is that its existence can’t reasonably be used to disprove the concept of white privilege.
It could be, but it isn’t; in practice “whiteness” is used to obscure or to stigmatize rather than reveal.
Trying to examine the concept results in invalidating it. “Whiteness” and “privilege” are just these invisible amorphous things supporting white people above black people, regardless of actual circumstances; if (black) Darnell got a minority scholarship to Harvard and (white) Cletus got a felony record for poaching a deer to feed his family on his 18th birthday, Cletus is still a beneficiary of this “whiteness” and “privilege”. Even if you go back to the original “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” examples, you find many which weren’t true at the time, and more that aren’t true now.
Imaginary counter-examples are not proof.
Moreover, your imaginary counter-examples don’t even work. The concept of privilege doesn’t say that black people can’t ever succeed, or white people can’t ever fail. It says that when Darnell gets to Harvard on his minority scholarship, he’s going to have subtle disadvantages relative to Hunter, who got in on a legacy scholarship, and when Cletus goes to prison he’s going to have subtle advantages over Jamal, who got busted for selling pot.
Is that true? Maybe. Is it such a stupid idea that merely examining the concept suffices to invalidate it? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Like I said, invisible amorphous things.
Yep. Invisible and amorphous.
So it notes that at some prisons, time spent in solitary varies between races of prisoners, but fails to provide any evidence one way or another whether or not the frequency or severity of violations resulting in time spent in solitary varies between races of prisoners at those prisons. The linked Armstrong paper is all speculation with a side of Implicit Association Test. There’s nothing there.
@Iain
That can have different causes. One possibility is that certain ethnic groups may behave more aggressive. For example, because they more often have a macho cultural upbringing and/or because criminals within certain ethnic groups may more often be part of aggressive criminal subcultures (like gangs). It’s possible that poor people are more aggressive criminals and/or cannot conform with prison life well & that certain ethnic groups have many more poor criminals. It’s also possible that the guards are racist. It can also be a combination of causes. The article assumes that racism of the guards is the only and entire cause, which is exactly the kind of jumping to conclusions, based on prejudice, that we unfortunately see often.
—
We’ve seen in the past that similar prejudiced assumptions about discrimination by those in power led to applying blinding in the recruitment process, generally with minimal results or even causing fewer minorities to be hired.
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Note that if (for example) a macho upbringing is a cause, then that is not an injustice perpetrated by one ethnic group against the other or by the state against citizens, but done by parents to their children. I would not consider that the fault of the system, although possibly society/the government can convince some macho parents to become non/less-macho parents.
Heh, don’t we mean “done by their peer group”?
Or is perception of machisimo one of the few things parenting can affect?
@The Nybbler:
I assume you are not deliberately trying to prove my original point, but honestly it is kind of hard to tell. Again:
In what world is “although I have no evidence to prove it, I can imagine an alternative explanation for this data; therefore, it’s all nonsense and I can safely ignore it” a reasonable approach?
For reference:
Yeah, definitely nothing there. You are a rational observer, making an unbiased assessment of the data.
Edit to add
@Aapje:
I honestly couldn’t care less whether there are alternative explanations for the specific claims in this specific article. I care about a consistent pattern of thought in the SSC comment section, in which certain types of claims are subjected to much stricter analysis and rejected on much weaker grounds than others.
The evidence is all of disparate impact and none of disparate treatment. If out of a population of 100 Drazi, 50 green and 50 purple, 30 are executed for murder, 10 purple and 20 green, the evidence for “purple privilege” is ridiculously weak if I have no idea what the actual offense rates by the purples and greens are.
@Randy M
Fair enough, but that’s still generally intra-ethnic.
@Aapje
On the one hand you have a point. On the other hand, you just gave us an article with a heavy bias & in a direction that is very common. It’s not exactly surprising that contrarians would focus on countering the common bias, much more than rarer biases.
@The Nybbler:
Given evidence of disparate impact, should one conclude:
A) there must be disparate treatment.
B) there must be some other explanatory factor.
C) there might be some of both, and we should look into this further.
You jumped straight to B. Why?
It’s not like there’s no evidence for C. The bit that I quoted above, showing that the disparity in treatment was proportional to the discretion wielded by the prison officers, was only a click away. Instead, you looked at the references just long enough to find the phrase “implicit association”, which gave you the green light to stop thinking.
@Aapje (assuming that by “@Aapje” you meant “@Iain”):
I am far from surprised by the response. Indeed, I described the expected pattern in advance. My point is that:
a) SSC’s aggressive “contrarianism” is selectively applied.
b) There is a distinct pattern to the topics that are subjected to such rigorous analysis: something bad happening to “people like us” is accepted much less critically than the alternative.
This is normal. It happens everywhere. I am frequently guilty myself. But it’s still a clear cognitive bias, and for a community that prides itself on rationality I do not think we are doing a great job of managing it.
Just wanted to chime in that I agree with Iain on the point that it’s not hard to find decent evidence of discrimination and of other factors. Both factors contribute although in highly varying amounts to different things.
My personal belief (low confidence) is that some things the media to drum on tend to be largely due to other factors (current differences in home loan rates, policing differences in major cities), but there’s also reasonable evidence for discrimination. What Iain linked. Some of the studies cold-calling with different names. People’s experiences. But mostly the giant stack of law that was changed about 50 years ago. It takes a few generations for the people who wanted to sustain that to suddenly stop behaving as such and for the beliefs they propagate to their children to change. On top of that, even if everyone had magically started behaving in a perfectly ideal manner as soon as the law changed and all groups were magically identical, you’d expect a few generations before past differences washed out.
Current thinking often seems wrong to me though. Blatantly bad interpretations of correlation; beliefs verging on conspiracy theory. And usually solutions that won’t work; some even harmful.
I did not “jump straight to B”. I instead rejected that it was evidence of “A” (disparate treatment). This is not quite fair, because it’s very weak evidence of A . But I think it’s quite natural when seeing two groups receiving differing quantities of punishment, to ask whether those two groups committed differing quantities of offenses — and without that data, to reject jumping straight to bias. My prior for “more punishment” -> “more crime” is fairly high.
Complaining about selective demands for rigor isn’t very useful unless you have specific examples on the other side. I used to see that complaint all the time in a group where people would point out problems with articles showing how men in tech suck; pointing to other examples in the same group where other bad articles were equally torn apart didn’t seem to convince complainers.
@quanta413
My general feeling from reading stuff is that, badly-designed studies aside (eg, looking for apartment rentals with different names without considering class connotations of different names), discrimination often pops in for otherwise well-intentioned people the less information they have. This is why stuff like “ban the box” backfires so badly – keeping employers from asking if prospective employees had criminal records didn’t reduce discrimination against black and Hispanic people, it led to to the opposite, it would appear. That, and perverse incentives (eg, it’s much harder to sue an employer for discriminating in hiring than in firing, which will lead employers to avoid hiring people they think would have a better shot of winning a suit in the latter case).
@Iain
I’m not participating in SSC Pride marches and am quite cynical about the human capacity for rationality, so I don’t particularly feel let down, because I don’t have such high standards in the first place. How many people here actually believe that Rationality is a panacea for irrationality anyway? How many people have even read the Sequences? Don’t a lot of people just like what Scott writes and like nerdy debates?
Also, we are not being paid to rigorously analyse all sides of a topic, so it’s not surprising that people just debate/get into what interests them.
@dndnrsn
I agree. And it’s the other differences that make behaving in a discriminatory manner tempting even to the well or neutrally intentioned. Especially like with ban the box. Can’t ask if the applicant is a felon? Use your grey matter to guess! You’ll probably use race as a partial proxy accidentally or not, but no one can prove it. The law is especially stupid because it’s sometimes true that the employer can also get in trouble for hiring a felon (e.g. medical assistant type jobs). Then they have to run a background check after the fact anyways.
I think the disparate impact doctrine has had perverse effects. Sure you can give your employees a test resembling an IQ test if you prove that it’s all job related and the disparate effects are purely due to differences in the underlying population, but why risk an uphill battle? Judges and juries don’t understand statistics. Easier to require college degrees even for some jobs where a paper test would tell you just as much. And that screws poor people, who are disproportionately minorities.
I haven’t read the Sequences. I believe that rationality is relevant to human affairs. I identify more with the 18th century rationalists, the tradition of Hume and Smith, than with the modern rationalist movement.
Consider the concept of human capital. It’s obviously not a perfect analogy to financial capital…Nevertheless, it is a useful thing to talk about.
Matter of opinion. I’ve always considered it kind of a weird and dehumanizing concept. And the same objections apply. There’s no way to create an accurate measure of someone’s overall economic worth as a human being; it’s context-dependent. People probably don’t object to it as often because it’s not politically charged, but that doesn’t mean the concept makes sense.
We don’t apply these same standards to other issues. When we’re talking about the War on Nerds, nobody asks for peer-reviewed papers showing statistically significant anti-nerd bias
Who’s “we”? Plenty of people would object to the term War on Nerds. Use it seriously in a political conversation, and the average person will probably either laugh or be totally confused. Even if you’re talking specifically about the rationalist sphere, if the issue of anti-nerd (or anti-autistic) bias comes up, you’ll see a lot of debate and disagreement about whether it’s actually useful to think along those lines, or what it even means to be a nerd. Nerd identity politics can get tiresome, tribal and over-generalizy in the same way that SJ identity politics can. So if your argument is “that idea doesn’t get challenged so why should this idea get challenged?” it’s invalid, because yes, that idea does in fact get challenged and scrutinized in the exact same way. And anyway, “other people get away with lazy generalizations so why shouldn’t I?” is kind of a weak argument.
A poll about conservatives feeling uncomfortable in tech will be accepted at face value;
No it won’t. Not even here. Again, have you even seen the comment section of SSC? People argue and disagree a lot.
the equivalent poll about black people or women would have its methodology dissected under a microscope.
Depends on where you are. If you’re arguing that in general people tend to be less careful about scrutinizing things they already agree with, yes, of course that’s true. But to argue that society as a whole scrutinizes thing X more than thing Y is incorrect, because it assumes that society has only one set of values. Though, again, I’m kind of unclear about whether you’re making assertions about society as a whole or this subculture in particular.
It’s easy to see when your own group is being treated unfairly. It’s a lot harder to notice when it’s happening to somebody else. This is normal. Empathy is hard.
Implying that people who disagree with you are simply lacking empathy is an ad hominem non-argument. And kind of passive-aggressive. It’s in the same category as telling people to “calm down” and implying that they’re too emotional about the issue to think clearly. Or saying “sorry my opinion triggers you” or something along those lines. It’s an attempt to derail by shifting the focus away from the issue and onto the person arguing a position.
And yes, this kind of psychologizing-in-place-of-evidence happens on both sides of any issue. Doesn’t make it less of a derail.
Just as an addendum to my original comment about this issue: I realize Rachel Dolezal is an atypical example because not many people physically alter their appearance to that degree. But there are quite a few light-skinned, mixed race people who opt to identify as people of color. So I guess my earlier comment that no one can choose to opt out of whiteness isn’t strictly correct. Some people can and do.
Sorry, this was probably a bit unfair to you. I used your comment as a convenient place to hang my argument, but it was directed more broadly.
To clarify: by “we”, I mean “the SSC comments section”. I disagree that every issue is “challenged and scrutinized in the exact same way” here as “being white is generally an advantage over being black”; as evidence, I will gesture at the above conversation.
Accusing me of ad hominem misses the point. I’m not making an issue-level claim at all. I’m making an argument about how we should evaluate claims, given that we have to do so as actual human beings, not emotionless logic-bots. That is not an argument that it is possible to make while pretending that everybody is an emotionless logic-bot.
(The context being reservations about the term “human capital.”)
That’s equally true of a machine or a factory, which doesn’t prevent us from thinking of those as capital goods.
The underlying idea of capital is that you can produce more if you are willing to bear a cost now for a larger benefit in the future—use your resources to build a tractor, even though you can’t eat tractors, because you will end up with more wheat than if you had spent your resources initially producing wheat. That applies to investment in your own education just as much as to investments in physical capital goods.
To clarify: by “we”, I mean “the SSC comments section”. I disagree that every issue is “challenged and scrutinized in the exact same way” here as “being white is generally an advantage over being black”
The comment section here does tend to be right-leaning (though based on survey results, perception of which way the bias leans depends pretty strongly on one’s own political orientation). But every community has its biases, and I generally find this one to be more tolerant of dissenting opinions than most.
Yes, a lot of people are disagreeing with you and challenging your position. Maybe it feels like they’re not giving you the benefit of the doubt. But the fact that they’re still engaging with you and responding in detail to your claims is evidence of a certain degree of tolerance, IMO. In many communities, dissenting voices are either banned outright, mocked, or dismissed as trolls.
And no, of course people aren’t logic-bots. But most people are already aware of this, so responding to disagreement and counter-arguments with, “Have you considered you may have cognitive biases?” is not very useful in general.
I also don’t think “being white is generally an advantage over being black” is the claim being debated here. I don’t think anyone here would deny that minority populations are disproportionately affected by certain problems, on average. The “whiteness as a commodity” argument is a much more specific claim about how whiteness functions in society.
That applies to investment in your own education just as much as to investments in physical capital goods.
I understand the general concept, but I’m not sure it applies to people in the same way it applies to a tractor. A machine performs a single function so it’s easier to predict what its value will be in the future.
If I go to school and study a trade so I can get a better job, I’m increasing the probability that I’ll earn more money in the future, but it’s still just a potential. Market conditions may change and turn my degree into just a fancy piece of paper. Or maybe I’ll stumble into another, completely unexpected job which requires no training but actually turns out to be way more lucrative than the job I spent years training for.
I know people with huge amounts of student debt who are earning very little, and people with little formal education who are doing quite well for themselves. The very idea that college helps people earn more money in the future is being called into question now, more and more.
I probably should not butt in because I am European and we tend to treat these things differently, but how is it even possible to discuss white-on-black harm without discussing black-on-white harm? For example, if black-on-white murder tends to result disproportionally in the death penalty, shouldn’t one add the observation that it is a far more common kind of murder than white-on-black or white-on-white? When educated whites don’t listen to the personal experiences of harm suffered told them by educated blacks, shouldn’t one see it in a context of the harm less-educated whites suffered from less-educated blacks, like the kind of violent behavior that induced them to sell their property at a low price and white-flight into the suburbs? How can one discuss educational injustice without the violent and generally learning-resistant behaviors of black students in inner city schools that makes the job of teachers disproportionally difficult?
I know the usual argument goes like this. This behavior cannot possibly be genetic, because it would be racist to say that. Therefore it must be environmental. Environment means society. Society is under the control of whites. So whites are responsible for any black bad behavior.
The mistake here is thinking 1) society is entirely malleable 2) by a power above 3) whites are to be seen collectively as one actor, agent, who has nearly infinite power over how society runs.
The problem is with 2) and 3). Maybe society is entirely malleable, it is very hard to say if it is true or not. But the social environment is created by everybody’s everyday actions, not by a power from above. Traumatized parents traumatize their children. Traumatized children may grow into gang members and have an influence on non-traumized ones. And so on. And whites don’t just form one collective block of collective responsibility. They are unhappy about their politicians. They are unhappy about corporations. They cannot even make them fix that bothers them, how could they make them fix what bothers others?
My point. Even whe admitting a clearly left-leaning starting point, namely 1) behavior is socially conditioned 2) society is malleable 3) whites having more resources and influence also have more responsibility in shaping society, it does not follow that racism-as-victimology in an oppressor-oppressed framework is useful. Because everybody is shaping the social environment. There are lots of interactions. Blacks create much of the social environment that shapes them and shapes their behaviors. This affects them. This also affects whites who may decide not to live anywhere near them as self-defense. Blacks are not helpless victims who just passively suffer and do nothing. The whole thing should be seen as a complicated web of mutual interactions. Sure, teachers matter a lot for students, but the students behavior also determines if the teacher is capable of teaching. They both have an effect on each other. They both create the school environment that in turn shapes the future of the students.
My perspective as a European is different, so maybe I should stay out of this discussion, nobody is worried in Germany that maybe Muslims may be underrepresented on company boards and France even outright prohibits gathering any racial statistics so there are a lot of guesses based on sickle cell anemia. But you see in many places on this continent the situation of the Roma, Sinti, gypsy minority is comparable to the blacks in the US and the discussion is nowhere near as one-sided as this. It is more mutual, there is an understanding we should be doing more for them but also the understanding that they are harming us as well, and themselves too and there is plenty in their culture and behavior that they need to fix. So we attribute more agency to them, and are more conscious how the racism of whites can be at least partially based on bad experiences.
Indeed and I would argue that not only is the responsibility mutual, but that progress can only be made if there is an effort on all sides to self-improve.
Way to paint with a really, really broad brush.
[Warning: useless stream-of-consciousness and general silliness.] The timing of this open thread really worked to my advantage in being able to post one of the first comments (in fact, I could easily have posted the very first comment but chose to eat lunch instead). But of course the more hurried I am in trying to post one of the earliest comments, the less insightful and Necessary my comment is likely to be.
On the one hand, comments that are higher up in the comments section are more visible and therefore more likely to bring productive interactions; on the other hand, less insightful and Necessary comments (such as this one) are less likely to get a response at all, let alone a worthwhile one. For each of us, given an open thread that we see the instant it first appears, I suppose there’s a function of how long we wait before commenting which can be maximized at a certain time; maybe one day I’ll find that optimal timing, but that day is not today. 🙂
Purely in the interests of proving you wrong, I will confess to having solved this dilemma once or twice by preparing posts in advance and then pasting them into the “Reply” field the moment a new OT becomes available.
I sometimes wait for the next open thread too. I always feel bad for people who post something interesting right before I know a new thread is going up. Of course, they can always repost it if they really want to.
Ditto. For a day or so after a newer OT has gone up I’ll sometimes check for replies to my comments on a now-old OT, but I never check for new top-level posts on old OTs.
Seeing an OP that starts “Continuing from discussion…” is always A-OK in my mind.
A couple of months ago, Scott linked to an article in the Times which discussed the possibility of “insta-curing” phobias with a mix of the beta-blocker propranolol and exposure therapy. He also asked if anyone with a phobia and access to propranolol wanted to try it and let him know how it works. It so happens I came up with this very idea on my own a couple of years ago while trying to get over my phobia of talking to women. The result was a familiar one: no panacea behind door number 87546, just another goddamned goat.
I watch the psychiatric literature like a hawk. Nobody gives a shit about this. I know we’re in your consulting rooms. Does nobody wonder what exactly this neurosis is? Where are the evolutionary psychologists at? A psychological condition with the primary effect of preventing gene propagation? I’m the only one that thinks this odd?
Toss out some theories, Scott. I’m sure there’s plenty of wizards reading your blog that have thought about this. Maybe if we put our pathetic virgin heads together we can come up with some ideas. If not, women are stuck with the Henrys. And if I’m too scared to put myself out there, how can I fault them for it?
Anxieties and phobias may not be the same thing.
I think social anxiety is mostly a learned behavior. Everyone I’ve met who has it who has opened up to me (or the internet where I could read it) has had lots of experience with being teased for being different, or lots of frustration at being unable to find people to relate to due to a high IQ and/or somewhat unique way of looking at the world. So you’ve discovered that lots of people are difficult to get along with, hence you’re wary about meeting new people that are likely to be difficult to get along with.
Throw in the current climate of “listen and believe” with women throwing accusations around like they don’t matter (because of having been told that nobody takes accusations seriously, despite the evidence to the contrary), and I don’t blame any intelligent man for being hesitant to approach a strange woman. I’m amazed that any approaching of strange women happens at all.
I pulled this out as it is murderously important. Every single person I’ve met with social anxiety has either an extensive history of bullying or a specific traumatic incident to cite. It simply doesn’t seem to happen absent of these factors. Correlation may not equal causation, but sometimes it really does waggle its eyebrows very suggestively.
Eh, I think I have mild social anxiety (i.e. not serious enough to have sought professional help) and can’t really think of any particular incidents or pattern of teasing/bullying.
I have never been bullied, I’ve had no troma growing up and am in my mid-thirties. I’ve always been nerdy but social, had plenty of girlfriends, I would go clubbing regularly, until about two years ago. Now it takes me an hour of stress and anxiety before going out to a simple appointment. I believe this has been triggered by the loss of a friend, two years ago. I went from a social person to a total recluse who fears going outside.
Maybe “a specific traumatic incident” works but I would certainly not associate it to bullying, from my specific personal experience.
I am fairly strongly socially anxious and have never been bullied or had any similar experience.
Joining the chorus:
I used to have quite severe social anxiety, but I faced very limited (and almost entirely non-physical) bullying as a child, and “teased for being different” didn’t really describe it.
Counter-examples noted. It occurs to me that, as a once-bullied individual with PTSD (not connected to the bullying), I probably implicitly select for those individuals with (social anxiety) & empathy(bullied | traumatised) and select against others due to the obvious availability heuristics.
There’s definitely a class of what I call “not allowed to watch the Simpsons” kids who were raised by grandparents, or by very traditional Mormons, etc. etc. that are totally inoffensive people that don’t get bullied or even really acknowledged by peers and end up socially anxious because they make it to 18 and enter the real world without ever having had the foundation to establish bonds outside the family
I might as well provide a data point here as having been bullied extensively but not having any social anxiety at all EXCEPT for a rather severe phobia of approaching women in a romantic/sexual way or initiating anything non-platonic (merely talking to women is no problem for me and I befriend women, including very attractive straight women, all the time). I can’t think of any traumatic incident in my past where approaching a woman non-platonically went badly that may have caused this, it’s just the way I’ve always been. Of course having been around the constant feminist rhetoric that revolves around how tired women are of being approached the wrong way… well, that’s definitely not helping, but it wouldn’t be honest of me to characterize that as the root of my problem when it was clearly already there to begin with.
@SaiNushi, I think it’s easy to underestimate how dependent our level of exposure to that particular feminist point of view is on what social/professional bubble we’re each immersed in. I suspect a lot of men (and women) aren’t much exposed to it at all. And as for the men who are but are bold and aggressive anyway… let’s just say from my observations many of them firmly believe in not pausing to consider much of anything at all before zeroing in on their targets.
I have social anxiety and was bullied when I was young. It started around puberty, and I definitely remember the anxiety developing as a direct result of the bullying. Before that point, I don’t think I ever felt shy or anxious around other people. I was always an introvert, but back then it just a preference to be alone or engaging in quiet one-on-one play. Then after it started I developed an aversion to social contact and started becoming more and more withdrawn.
And the effects never really went away. I’m in my thirties and I’ve still got that tendency to withdraw. It’s a lot less severe than it used to be, but any situation where I feel uncertain about what the “correct” behavior is makes me really anxious. I feel like I can’t really be myself, like I need to follow scripts or present an image, because just speaking off the cuff is way too risky.
And regarding the current climate around gender relations…yeah, I have to say I’m really glad to not be a heterosexual male in the dating market right now. With my issues, I’m pretty sure I’d be a nervous wreck.
The “bad experiences with peers in one’s formative years” hypothesis is true as far as it goes, but I have to say I don’t think it is very far. Ever read the statistics on fear of public speaking in the general public? Were wedgies really that ubiquitous? It doesn’t add up to me. I can only speak from personal experience but I was never bullied. Sure I had my personality quirks and idiosyncracies but my whole life I’ve had (male) friends and I’ve done well working at jobs where there is a substantial, if not high degree of meeting and greeting with strangers, networking, etc.
I’ve read a lot of subjective accounts and descriptions of anxiety/phobia. I do think there is a difference. When people describe social anxiety as “constantly worrying what other people are thinking about them” and all the usual stuff, I frankly have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t “worry” what girls think about me–at least not when I’m in a social situation with one. I can’t. My brain shuts down entirely. I don’t have thoughts about what people are thinking about me, what I feel is purely affective and can only be described as terror. The feelings come before the thoughts–probably why I’ve never had any luck with CBT.
Anyway I guess anxiety is a very personal thing and people experience it differently. Your points about the current “listen and believe” climate are well taken and Aaronson’s comment 171 was as beautiful, accurate, and courageous an analysis of the societal factor as I’ve ever read. Still, obviously it has to be only one component or else our species would be in grave danger indeed…
(really a response to all previous comments)
Well, I did specify that it was everyone I’d met who was able to open up to me, and gave two different reasons as an either/or.
I have met a lot of people, from many different walks of life, with many different world-views. Not all of those with social anxiety that I’ve met have been willing to open up, and most of those were on irc at the time. What I gave was a hypothesis based on pattern-matching my own experiences. I’m definitely interested in finding out if those of you who said you were never bullied had other issues with relating to your peers in your younger years, as per the second half of what I said.
And as Chalid says below, it’s possible that the social anxiety existed first, and caused weird behavior which led to bullying. I know that I didn’t have social anxiety until I was bullied, because I moved between states right before first grade, and had lots of friends before I moved. In first grade, I was far behind my peers, since I wasn’t taught to read in kindergarten like they were, so was teased, which I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know how to deal with. Another move between first and second grade, and in second grade I wasn’t behind my peers but was still bullied, and I gave up on making friends. Lack of experience with talking to new people and having a positive reaction led to social anxiety, which is mitigated any time I get a bunch of experience with socializing. But of course, I’m only one data point, and I was weird to my classmates before they teased me.
Stating the obvious here, but you can’t rule out the possibility of the causation going the other way, that people who have social anxiety or predispositions in that direction are more likely to be teased.
I wasn’t teased or bullied in school. The teachers and administrators didn’t like me very much, with predictable effects relating to my trust in institutions, but I was pretty popular with the other kids for a while. Playground games can get sort of hierarchical — it was basically improv, with some people creating and shaping the scenes and some people following along. I wasn’t really the king of the playground, but I did make a point of peeling off a subculture and being king of that whenever I bounced from one small elementary school to another (i.e. got expelled for disciplinary issues), and I was pretty good at that.
Then I went to a huge public middle school in the inner city and that didn’t work anymore, so I retreated to the internet and did the same thing there for a decade or so. I recently decided that I have to stop living on the internet and deleted everything, and now I feel like absolute shit — I’m not the cult leader of the playground anymore! I never learned to deal with that! And maybe that’s where it came from — I read “not at least locally high-status” as “universally despised”, and “not effortlessly literate in the local social norms” as “a hopelessly incompetent impostor with no right to be there”, because I didn’t get acclimated to it when I was young.
The one peer-related problem I ran into was that the other high-status boys sometimes hated my guts and politicked against me, with probability approaching 1 over time (and now high-status men sometimes do — it’s always men (well, cis men or trans women; IME, social dynamics tend to go by ASAB), I have no idea why), and I was never good enough at politics to be secure in my position, or to mount a decisive counterattack. Over time, I started figuring it wasn’t worth it and retreating, but that was and is a conscious calculation that takes effort to maintain.
I think a strong feedback loop is involved. It’s no secret that women like confidence — I’ve never even heard a woman deny it, as they often do with other traits that are demonstrably attractive. The other side of that is that if a man lacks confidence — for any reason– the lack of confidence itself makes him less likely to succeed.
I got beaten up a lot as a child, and I was teased for being weird pretty much all my life. As a teenager I was no good at approaching girls, and that’s persisted for decades. I have many of the traits that are said to be attractive (tall, fit, reasonably handsome, well-groomed, courteous, kind, highly intelligent, professionally successful). I have the feeling that I just lack the skills, skills I can’t develop if I don’t succeed now and then. I feel that I could reverse the cycle if I just had a good teacher, but society treats any such teachers and their students as barely better than rapists.
(And yes, this “listen and believe [women]” lunacy doesn’t help.)
Social psychologist Brian G. Gilmartin has coined the term “love-shyness” for this and I think it used to have a Wikipedia article (now only a short article in German). I don’t know if there’s any useful research in that thread.
“Where are the evolutionary psychologists at?”
I don’t know about any real evolutionary psychologists, but here is my just-so explanation: In small tribal societies where everyone knew each other making overt sexual or romantic advancements could result in social punishments if rejected, so it made sense to have a trait for sexual cautiousness – especially towards strange people, as they were part of the neighboring/rivaling tribes. Men would have essentially be forced to get familiar with every woman of their own tribe and advance more gradually. Modern cities generally encourage making faster and more overt sexual advancements. Someone on the tail end of sexual cautiousness could plausibly struggle in modern world.
…or maybe it’s about more general genetic predispositions (social cautiousness?) that can be domain-specifically disproportionately magnified by learning? It would make sense that your genes would allow you to adapt in a wide range of different cultures, so maybe your genes have “misinterpreted” that you live in an arranged-marriage culture on something. Smart and/or generally cautious etc. people might pick some cues more easily than others. I like this latter hypothesis better.
I can confirm that an English Wikipedia article existed, and I can get a copy of it if anyone wants it, or even a copy of the entire edit history if you want that.
I have Gilmartin’s book on my shelf. It’s been years since I read it but I don’t remember being particularly impressed. Still at least it was on his radar as a distinct condition.
Your evolutionary explanations make sense to me, but as is my usual gripe with EP, the therapeutic value of the paradigm seems to be insufficiently worked out. I get that science is aimed at explaining, rather than treating, but you would think clinicians would have done more with these ideas since the whole EP craze kicked off a few decades ago.
I’ve been very interested in fear extinction (which I think is the same thing as what you’re referring to) these last couple of years due to trying to cure some highly distressing conditioned anxiety. Something that might be worth trying is black seed oil, it’s a pretty potent HDAC inhibitor which has some evidence for working to permanently lessen conditioned anxiety. It’s good for you in lots of other ways too, though it messed up my digestion a bit, so you might want to be careful in dosing at first.
Thanks for the tip, I will look into it. I actually meant to read up on black seed oil a while ago because a co-woker mentioned it had done wonders for his blood sugar. Anything new I want to try demands a bit of research as I am on an irreversible MAOI, but I will definitely read up on it when I have some free time this week.
Anything else interesting you’ve learned in your fear extinction readings you care to share?
“Black” is not a plant. What the heck is “black seed oil”?
The name of the plant is ‘black seed’, not ‘black’. It's Nigella sativa (but sometimes confused with Bunium bulbocastanum).
And, oddly enough, I used the seeds, which are indeed black, in a medieval Islamic recipe that was one of the things I served at the meetup Saturday.
Oh, okay! Yeah, definitely look into any possible interactions. It’s pretty serotonergic and has a bunch of other actions, and I think HDAC inhibitors often interact in weird ways with other compounds.
Disclaimer: No neuroscience background, just really need to learn about this for my own benefit.
Here are some other things with varying degrees of evidence for fear extinction (mostly when coupled with exposure to the fearful stimuli):
1. Other HDAC inhibitors, including dietary ones like curcumin and sodium butyrate, as well as more powerful pharmacological ones like Vorinostat and valproic acid. Ketone bodies too. I’m just a layman but HDAC inhibitors seem to be the most promising category of fear extinction agents to me. Black seed oil probably deserves special consideration here since it’s been used as a general health tonic for hundreds of years in many parts of the world (i.e. considered pretty safe), is quite a powerful HDACi of the correct subtypes (all the relevant ones implicated in fear extinction, I believe) and also is pretty GABAergic, which should help by lowering your acute anxiety reaction even while ”recording” the resulting habituation to conditioned stimulus to your epigenome. I haven’t seen any studies looking at it specifically in regards to fear extinction, but there are some interesting anecdotes circulating.
2. Hunger. In mice, fasting for at least 16 hours increases fear extinction.
3. Methylene blue
4. D-cycloserine
5. Not quite the same thing as fear extinction, but playing Tetris shortly after a traumatic event reduces fearful memories of the event
6. I think Fluoxetine may be alone among SSRIs in facilitating fear extinction, rather than just masking the symptoms?
7. Meditation and hypnosis (can’t find a link right now, sorry) supposedly cause epigenetic changes via HDAC. Could maybe be why they help with getting past bad experiences for some people. I mean, hypnosis helps some people quit smoking, and that’s another big use of HDACi’s – removing drug addiction from your epigenome.
Would love to see the list added to if anyone else knows more about this stuff.
Curcumin? Would turmeric tea work? I have more ground turmeric lying around than I know what to do with, so if there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, I’ll make a batch and start drinking it regularly to see what happens.
Could bullying from inside the family be part of it?
I have no evolutionary theory, it just seems to me that some families will scapegoat a child, sometimes in ways which seem to be aimed at damaging the child’s reproductive chances.
My nuclear family consists of a mother that has never re-married or dated since divorcing my father and a sister who refuses to speak to my father, as far as I can tell, mostly out of loyalty to my mother. Both comitted feminists. I can’t say I felt bullied by them, but I did get the distinct, implicit message my whole life that “maleness” was an essentially bad thing thing that ought to be repressed for the good of oneself and the world.
I certainly was something of a scapegoat, but this in many ways this was far from unreasonable. My sister was a straight A student and I (just barely) graduated from high school with a heroin addiction. Can’t really get indignant about being the black sheep when you’ve jumped in a vat of ink…
Anyway I don’t know if you were asking about my specifics or drawing inferences from your own life but yes, I’m sure family dynamics play a role in later romantic sucess (or lack thereof).
Actually, I wasn’t thinking about myself specifically (and I’m not inclined to write about the relevant details here) or you specifically.
The details which come to mind for me is a couple of women whose families put a lot into hammering on them being ugly. (Both were kind of average, I’d say.) One of them has had a love life but no children. The other has had neither.
I can’t help wondering whether your black sheepness had something to do with your immediate family being prejudiced against you– not necessarily a matter of revenge, maybe a disinclination to bother because no first-class reward is being offered.
I’m not really sure I see the woman with a love life but no children as in some way having a problem, unless of course she wants children and is unable to make that happen for reasons x, y, and z. Obviously her sister is less fortunate. I know plenty of people that lead fullfiled–often even more fulfilled–lives without having children. I cannot say the same for someone with a conspicusous absence of a love life. (Except in cases of asexuality, volunary celibacy and the like I guess.)
I’m don’t really understand your comment about my black sheepness having to do with revenge or disinclination to bother. Either way, today I am coming up on seven years sober and I am a straight A student in university majoring in neuroscience. I’m a few years older than most of my classmates, but better late than never is my attitude. My sister dropped out of university her sophmore year and has yet to go back or really find a career path or an aim in life and my mom talks to me at times about how she worries about her. Life is funny. Most of my extended family seems to think I’m a paragon of mental health and emotional stability (without ever wondering why I’ve never brought a girl home for thanksgiving???)
I say this to point out that family dynamics are a lot less static than most people assume. Some black sheep get it together, some get it halfway together. But if you’re going to take healing seriously, I think you have to at least question the assumption that family (peers, bullying, etc) is(/are) destiny. This problem does not exist in my past. It exists for me now. Today. As I type this, it is my problem. Is it worth investigting the past to for clues to the present? Always, but to get stuck examining seems to me both to err pragmatically, in terms of addressing the problem, as well as a moral failing for avoiding my reflection as it exists today.
This sounds a lot more serious to me than you make it out to be. I hope I avoid coming across as hyperbolic when I say this… I can imagine a lot of different childhood experiences that could lead an adult to write that sentence and I don’t know the details of your particular experience. That said, I suspect I’d view a large fraction (> 30%) of childhood experiences that would lead to that sentence as abusive.
I understand what you’re going through is difficult, and what works for one person may not necessarily work for others. For me, CBT and Mindfulness helped me overcome my depression and social anxiety related disorders 10 years ago.
Since you mentioned reading a lot of literature, I will assume you’ve at least tried mindfulness exercises without much avail. I don’t know if you’ve also done meditation, but I can recommend at least one “double-action” that may at least help you: take up knitting.
Knitting can help reduce stress and improve fine motor skills in addition to helping your brain activity http://shine365.marshfieldclinic.org/wellness/benefits-of-knitting/ You’ll also find that knitting groups are predominantly (though not entirely) female. I would recommend you not focus on trying to build an intimate relationship and instead just spending the first few months practicing and exposing yourself to different knitting groups. Eventually, you’ll gain confidence in knitting, and any improvements to your mood will be able to spill over into confidence. In addition, you’ll be building your social networks. While there are many SJW sociopaths in any scene, there are many knitting groups/yarn-shops/fiber artists that are struggling (economically and socially) and would be happy to accommodate any new student regardless of gender/identity/sexuality. You can leverage this social network to talk to women outside of a courtship context (gaining more confidence) and also use those contacts to try indirect-courtship (“Hey, I’m single. Do you know any single friends?”) If the social climate concerns you, I know that there are many knitters that span the entire political spectrum, and it’s very easy to screen for them.
I have to wonder do you have male friends who you are comfortable enough with that they know the extent of your problem? If I was your friend I would be interested in trying to see if I could do some sort of exposure therapy, find some very nonthreatening woman and see if you could talk to her. Maybe use a script.
Do you have this issue talking to women in non-social settings, stores and the like?
In my case, it doesn’t feel like anxiety or phobia so much as an absolute certainty that no woman could ever possibly find me attractive, so there’s no point in trying.
I realize this belief is irrational and probably false, yet something in me continues to believe it all the same.
@BBA
It’s one of the unspoken of advantages* for women that being pursued far more often provides a much better idea of how attractive they are. I personally have a tiny number of ambiguous data points that might suggest that on a shallow level I was not completely unattractive in the past. It’s…not very encouraging.
* Of course, there are also disadvantages (#metoo)
I experience the exact same feeling as BBA; it’s been gradually creeping up on me over the years and is now about 90% engulfed me.
@Aapje: the “unspoken of advantage” you speak of is indeed an advantage for many if not most fairly young women, but one could argue it’s a disadvantage for women who are perceived as less attractive who, in not being pursued, receive evidence of that fact more easily than men do.
@liskantope
I think we need to separate out the impact of feeling unattractive and the impact of being unloved.
Being unreasonably optimistic about one’s attractiveness is presumably good for the ego in itself, but also probably harmful to one’s ability to attract mates by lowering standards or improving oneself, which is bad for the ego. So men might have a boosted ego on average due to the one effect and a depressed ego due to the other. What effect is stronger is then unclear.
Also, the gender disparity in sexual needs may enable women to attract much more attractive partners for sex (or even just any partner), compared to men, which may be an ego boost that is less available to men. Although as I’ve argued before, that may cause women to then be too optimistic about their attractiveness as girlfriends, causing unreasonably optimism on that front.
@Aapje
There is also a boost in attractiveness from increased confidence to consider. I would wager that that usually balances and possibly outweighs the disadvantage of working off incorrect information about your attractiveness when searching for a mate.
I was very similar to how you describe yourself for a long time, including knowing it was irrational but being unable to stop. but was eventually able to overcome it. So don’t give up hope of changing, I guess.
You seem to be using jetpack for your mail subscriptions right?
Here’s a bit of info on how to customize it.
You probably want something like this in the functions.php of your theme:
add_filter( 'jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories', 'exclude_these' );
function exclude_these( $categories ) {
$categories = array( 'category-slug', 'category-slug-2');
return $categories;
}
Perhaps one could add it as a very small plugin so as to keep it separate.
Anyway, I’m available on reddit (arvinja), e-mail (arvin@arvinja.com) or discord (Arvin#3914) if you should need any help.
> I recently put a couple of responses to an online spat up here
If it helps, it was a really fun read. Felt good to see this pattern of debate happen to other people too. Next move would classically be a sharp turn sideways coupled with a subtle ad hominem.
Reading the patterns in this gave me a lot of piece of mind. Just recognising stuff like “generalizing specific statements” now makes me one a lot more amused than frustrated.
I wish I hadn’t deleted my emails so quickly and knew where to access this back-and-forth…
Check the subreddit.
There is a link on the subreddit for Scott’s first response to the Current Affairs article, but I don’t see anything beyond that. (Maybe I should look this up on Current Affairs.)
Yes, I hope you will continue sending these pieces to the mailing list.
My comment on “Against Murderism”:
By framing the question as “Are A, B and C racists?”, you’re accepting the premise that racism is a cardinal sin. I’d rather see us trying to discuss, without using the word “racism,” “Was what A B or C did wrong?”
You don’t even need “wrong.” “Was what A, B, and C did part of a pattern of behavior with regard to race that has consequences some of which we disapprove of?”
We should also ask whether the behaviour is responsive to incentives.
The Schopenhauer book you linked to (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten a.k.a. The Art of Controversy [most common English translation of the title] or The Art of Being Right) is also available, in a more readable form, here. (And it is a truly excellent—and entertaining—read; I heartily recommend it to everyone here. It’s rather short, too.)
medium.com seems popular for this.
1. Can someone recommend a good book on evolution? I have a background in physical chemistry if that makes any difference.
2. (conditional on this not being covered by 1): What’s your mental model of evolution? Someone on the subreddit invoked a gradient descent metaphor, where I’m guessing you imagine a species as some point on a manifold, you imagine selection as a gradient towards a more fit species, and evolution (with respect to some fixed environment) corresponds to discovering local minima. While I’m sure there are a lots of things wrong with this, it at least helped me think about questions I hadn’t thought of before. I’d like an even better metaphor.
A sieve. When we look around we see lots of rocks (from planets and all the way down to sand and gravel), because rocks tend to stick around. Same with humans – through some quirk of natural laws, we’re right now, in this context, a rather stable form of matter.
It’s definitely not a tower building up or anything. Though one can’t help but see some local concentration of negentropy, and it might be that your real question is why this happens. I don’t know.
As for books, I’m sure there will be better suggestions, but I liked a lot “Homicide” by Daly and Wilson. It’s about a specific subject, but I guess this just makes it a more hands-on approach rather than dry.
Lots of researchers in evolutionary biology use fitness landscapes as a useful abstraction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape
The gradient descent framework is pretty decent, but it fails to engage with some of the more interesting questions if the gradient itself is held constant. Fitness landscapes are basically a dynamic version, where you get to play with feedback between position *in* the landscape, and the shape *of* the landscape.
You need to be a bit more specific. It’s an enormous field. If you just want some general popular reading, then maybe The Selfish Gene?
Here are some questions I’m interested in finding the answer to. I’m pretty sure they’re all very basic, so I guess I’m looking for a very basic book:
What does the evolutionary history of a given extant species ‘look like’ — do you draw a straight line from bacteria to whatever its current form is, or is it more like long periods of stability with intervening periods of rapid change?
I have a rough idea that evolution proceeds through small, random mutations, and any time such a mutation happens to increase fitness, the offspring of the organism carrying it outcompetes the rest of the species. Is this accurate? Can you trace the evolution of a given extant species as a sequence of most-recent-common-ancestor organisms in this way?
When I think of a human having some sort of mutation, I tend to automatically think of something bad, like a missing limb or something. Is there a good example of a fitness-increasing mutation that we’ve seen in the past hundred years or so? Or how often should we expect to see such things?
To my understanding, that is mostly correct. Sometimes an evolution can result in it outcompeting other species, though – if different species have different ranges, an increase in the fitness of one can push others away by taking their food or whatnot.
The most notable fitness-increasing evolutions in recent human history are alcohol and lactose tolerance. Both increase your available sources of calories, and alcohol is also an antibacterial, which gets more relevant as humanity got more common and thus human-infecting pathogens started to be more common. Both were in the last tens of thousands of years, not the last hundred, but think this through. That’s about 4 generations, in a species that only has a handful of children. Even if everything went perfectly, a mutation from a hundred years ago would only be present in a few dozen people today at most.
On the one hand, in representative cases, a mutation from a hundred years ago wouldn’t usually be present in much more than a few dozen people. On the other hand, this clearly isn’t the best case, at most. Gengis Khan’s lineage was purportedly represented by over 20,000 individuals by one century after his birth.
Fair. I should probably have said “even if everything went unusually well”, because the perfect-case scenario is in the thousands as you say.
This is a bit contentious, at minimum it’s safe to say that the evolutionary process works at different speeds at different times.
This sort of thing is generally covered under the rubric of population genetics, I’d recommend Principles of Population Genetics.
Theoretically at least, sure. In practice the fossil record is a bit spotty, we haven’t even found the common ancestor of chimps and humans. But we can use genetics to do this tracing to a certain extent.
This stuff is mostly covered in population genetics, too. De novo mutations are almost always either deleterious or neutral. The most famous example of a recent fitness-increasing mutation is probably lactase persistence, which actually arose independently (and with different mechanisms) 3 times and spread extremely quickly. 100 years is just 4 generations, not enough time to spread widely.
Do you agree with wikipedia’s claim that punctuated equilibrium is a theory? Do you defend it against the charge of not even wrong?
If we ignore some of the sillier stuff Gould has said, it basically boils down to a claim that evolutionary change has tended to cluster in time. Seems like a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to me…
Silly things like: this can be observed in the fossil record? At some point when a theory has been reduced to trivialities, it’s not the same theory. Perhaps it’s not even a theory at all.
I just read the WP article on punctuated equilibrium. Does anybody know what the real criticism are? It seems like the obviously correct description to me¹, and the criticism section in WP consists mostly popular scientists making assertions and name-calling each other. I do hope it runs deeper than that.
¹ If you view evolution as a gradient ascent process optimizing each species’ fitness, it makes sense that each species will sooner or later end up in some local maximum. Unless something drastically changes the fitness landscape, it makes sense that we would see very little evolution, since the gradient will be negative in all directions – i.e. a Nash equilibrium. So long periods of stability, until a volcano erupts, a dam breaks, an asteroid strikes, or a disease wipes out most of a species. One way to corroborate this would be if several species showed rapid evolution simultaneously. Do they?
This is a bad model for evolution. The fitness landscape is always changing, the ‘gradient’ will change every time you attempt to get closer to that hypothetical maximum. A behavior or adaptation that was bad or neutral a century ago can find itself good. It is also a mistake to view all (and maybe even most) changes as small. Sexual reproduction, and especially sexual selection within that, can lead to novel outcomes well outside what you would expect from individual mutation rates within a generation.
My take is that nobody really says it’s wrong; it’s clear that evolution can sometimes take place very rapidly. The objection is mainly that Gould presented this idea as if nobody else had ever noticed it before and as if it turned conventional Darwinianism on its head, which many others felt was overstating the contribution.
There’s a lovely short book called Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest by Kim Sterelny that I found very illuminating back when I noticed how much they seemed to despise each other.
An entertaining comment on Gould by someone I tend to disagree with on other subjects:
(Paul Krugman)
Yes, the landscape changes, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad model for evolution, and I think the system would still tend to end up in some equilibrium. Alternatively, I suppose it could get trapped in an evolutionary cycle (any evidence for this?), or keep gradually changing forever (which would indicate an absence of fitness maxima or deviation from gradient ascent, I think – both seem very unlikely to me).
I’m not really following this, only scanning it. But I’d just like to make a quick comment here.
Cycles do happen on some sort of level. For example, side-blotched lizards. There are three different types of male, and they out-compete each other scissors-paper-stone style.
This is evolution in the sense that changes in allelic frequencies is evolution (i.e. it is, in that this is what evolution is made of, but a lay-person might need persuading since it doesn’t involve larger-scale change).
If you want ‘larger’ cycles, I think they’re perhaps harder to find, for various reasons. They may tend to be less cyclic and more repetitive, in that it involves an evolutionary trajectory ending in extinction, rather than a change within a lineage.
Along these lines, I like The Ancestor's Tale (Richard Dawkins, 2004), which traces back everybody's favourite species Homo sapiens. Definitely pop science, and given the paucity of the fossil record, it's not so much about the actual common ancestors as the larger groups of cousins that share these ancestors with us. But it really gives one a sense for the sweep of history, besides pointing out what it is that makes each of our clades special in its own particular way.
Not quite. Most beneficial mutations are lost through “bad luck” (e.g., a mutant hare with a more effective digestion system is eaten by a fox before leaving offspring). It was estimated by Haldane that a mutation that increases by x percent has a 2x chance (for small values of x) of spreading through the population.
“and any time such a mutation happens to increase fitness, the offspring of the organism carrying it outcompetes the rest of the species. ”
It’s at least as plausible that the offspring with the beneficial mutation outcompete the rest of the species locally.
Or the organisms with the mutation might move into a different niche, leaving the original version more or less in place. (I think this is right– let me know whether it’s wrong.)
@I have a background in physical chemistry.
@I’m looking for a very basic book.
On the ‘background in physical chemistry’ end, I recommend Brooks and Wiley, Evolution as Entropy. On the ‘looking for a very basic book’ end, I recommend Arthur, The Origin of Animal Body Plans. Evolution as Entropy obviates a lot of middlebrow twaddle about evolution being some kind of Jedi goodness that fights the eevil of entropy. The Origin of Animal Body Plans is a fun read.
Chris Adami’s Introduction to Artificial Life is a fun one on the “background in physical chemistry” end.
I have a rough idea that evolution proceeds through small, random mutations, and any time such a mutation happens to increase fitness
One thing to note is that fitness and environment interact; a mutation/genetic variance can be extant, but rare, for a long time, and then suddenly come to be dominant because of environmental change makes it much more important to fitness. The standard example is bacterial resistance to penicillin. There were probably always variances from bacterium to bacterium, but for a long time it made little difference; then penicillin became a widely-used drug, and now some degree of penicillin resistance is fairly common.
This is one explanation for the ‘punctuated equililbrium’ observations: it isn’t that mutations happen in bursts, but that high-stress environments changes selects aggressively among extant variances, and does this for many species at one.
I’ve heard people say that if humanity stopped using a given antibiotic for 10(?) years, that the bacteria lose the resistance to it, because maintaining the resistance to it has an energy cost and bacteria that don’t would outcompete and replace those that still do.
How true is this?
how true is this
The principle is largely true but varies greatly from pathogen to pathogen, drug to drug, and adaption to adaption. Some recent adaptions have actually been more efficient.
As antimicrobial drugs have fallen from common use – often because of resistance but also because less toxic or more convenient drugs have been discovered – resistance to those drugs decreases, sometimes to the point of making them useful again.
Tends to take more like twenty years, not ten, and some don’t ever recover.
Also, getting control of drug use world wide is… not terribly easy.
I imagine the more effective it is initially, the longer it would take for the evolved resistance to fade.
How true this is depends quite a bit on the nature of the bacterium, and how the resistance works.
If the resistance is ‘innate’ – that is, due to a change in whatever the drug is interacting with, then it may be lost after selection is removed. If there’s a fitness cost involved then it’ll probably go away for the most part.
If the resistance is due to a mechanism to get rid of the drug (altering the molecule, or exporting it), then it’s relatively easy to regulate if there’s a cost – for example tetracycline resistance imposes a fitness cost on the cell; there has evolved a regulatory system which turns off the resistance gene when tet isn’t around. This makes the resistance genes relatively ‘cheap’ to carry.
Whats worse is that this second type of genes are often carried by plasmids, or other mobile elements which can spread from cell to cell. This means that almost all bacteria can lose the plasmid (and resistance), but it can rapidly spread through the population when selection is turned back on.
One thing to bear in mind when making analogies is that evolution works on populations, not individuals. So concepts like “most recent common ancestor” is really an abstraction, there wasn’t necessarily any such species, and certainly not an individual. I tried to describe this a while ago, and am curious whether you find it useful or interesting (or misleading and wrong – feedback appreciated either way).
http://blog.malde.org/posts/evolution.html
I don’t think I understand. Given two organisms, can’t you construct two family tree, note the lowest point at which the trees have a node in common, and call this the MRCA? Is the MRCA of all living humans not found by constructing ~7 billion family trees and choosing the lowest point where all trees have a node in common?
ast ron: yes, you could do that (except for the practical difficulties), and I guess it is a meaningful definition of MRCA. That family tree may not be representative of anything in the genetic material, however, and it isn’t what you get from genetic methods – especially not those focusing on a small part, like the Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA.
One difficulty, ast ron, is that the MRCA might not be unique. Trivially, the MRCA for me and my sibling is either of our parents. You can make well-defined ones by things such as looking for the mitochondrial MRCA or the y-chromosome MRCA.
When considering “family trees” for genetics purposes, it’s often smart to think of a tree for a specific locus in your DNA. You can look at each locus and say that it came from one specific grand parent or the another. Then you can ask what the MRCA between you and I are for that specific locus – this is well defined because I received that locus from one parent, one specific grandparent, one great-grandparent, etc. and so did you. Eventually these were the same. However, we will have different MRCAs for different loci.
Interestingly, since you have two copies of each chromosome, you can ask what the MRCA is for the same locus on on each of your two copies of a chromosome. This in general will be quite far back and will take very different paths for different loci (thanks recombination!). In fact, this means that one person is about as good an information source as two people are when it comes to probing backwards into time and that researchers can do things like reconstruct the population size of various sub-populations by taking the DNA of just a single member of that population.
I’ll start by recommending The Selfish Gene. It’s a classic for a reason!
One thing I learned from it is that it often makes more sense to think about evolution from a gene perspective than a species perspective. Some things are understood better that way. Bear in mind that most genes occur across many species.
Mutations are rare, but species are quite diverse. Humans are one “specie” but we carry millions of different competing genes among us already. So evolution is rarely that one brand new mutated gene appears and takes over some niche, but more that some rare gene or combination of genes that already existed rise up due to whatever reasons.
I could say more, but I’ve probably already said enough half truths 🙂
Bind Watchmaker is also good. Dawkins’ biology books in general really.
The Blind Watchmaker is very much written as an introduction to evolution for the curious reader, whereas The Selfish Gene is Dawkins’ particular take on a particularly intriguing area of evolutionary biology. IMO his early books are better than his later ones.
> What’s your mental model of evolution?
Wikipedia is the closest analogy to most people’s real-world experiences. A change is made semi-randomly – if it’s a good change it stays, and if it’s a bad change it gets wiped away quickly. What counts as “a good change” will depend on circumstances, and on time, but there’s usually a fairly obvious direction of what “good” entails given circumstances.
(This is also a pretty decent explanation of business formation in a capitalist economy)
selection as a gradient towards a more fit species
The difficult thing is to get it through your head that nobody or nothing is optimising or selecting for anything. Environmental pressures drive species to extinction all the time, and this is as much part of evolution as “a more fit species results and survives”.
We have to use some means to talk about it and language is all we have, so that things keep slipping in that sound like “meaning” or “purpose” even if we constantly remind ourselves “Nature is blind, there’s no thought at work there, even vast impersonal forces are not aiming for or away from anything, they are just rubbing up against what’s out there, the same way the sea smooths rocks”.
My very, very crude model: there is this bunch of living stuff in a place and there are all kinds of things happening in that place and some of the living stuff goes on living and some doesn’t because of that, and over very long times the living stuff differentiates. And we can track the changes to a greater or lesser degree and say “this living stuff here now is related to that living stuff back then, and got this way because of this is how”.
Hey, you’re forgetting divine intervention!
Secular evolution. The creation of the entire universe and all that is in it, visible and invisible, is not under discussion here 🙂
I’ve enjoyed The Princeton Guide to Evolution. It covers the whole field as minimally as possible, such that you get the broadest overview of everything while still getting content that is useful and true, and ends each section with extensive references for bits you want to go deep on.
Not a book, but personally I really refined my intuitions on how evolution works listening to Dr Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on Human Behavioral Biology which as a dude who got a liberal arts degree, I was able to follow pretty well. For what you seem to be interested in, lectures 2-9 are the most useful though later lectures do build off these.
He’s also recently published a book called Behave that is clearly very closely based on those lectures, which is also worth reading.
FWIW, he’s not really explaining evolution per se, rather he’s interested in explaining why behaviours happen, from both a proximal (i.e. neurons, hormones, etc) and a distal (culture, evolution) perspective. So evolution gets discussed, but it’s certainly not a guide to it or anything like that.
1) I found Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett to be one of my favourite books on evolution. Dennett views evolution as an algorithmic process, he was a computer scientist before becoming a philosopher, and the whole book is wonderfully clear and playful. He’s also commendably absolutist; for Dennett evolution explains everything from the origins of life to consciousness and and culture. He’s quite blunt in his disappointment with other writers whom he feels give too much ground to dualism and the like. He’s also a virtuoso thought experimentalist.
See also Bacteria to Bach and for the more philosophy of mind focussed: Freedom Evolves.
2) Gradient ascent for me. I doubt I test it enough to know if it’s a good model.
I’m fairly sure Dennett has no formal background in CS, which barely existed in his undergraduate days. He may well be the sort of philosopher who teaches himself to code out of personal interest.
My mental model of evolution is selection working on variation, leading to weirder than hell. The results of evolution make sense in some sense, but they aren’t very predictable except when they are. Not that you can predict those little islands of predictability.
It isn’t *always* weirder than hell. Sometimes you get a lot of similar-looking species of little brown birds. I have a simple faith that one of those little brown bird species will turn out to have some very strange feature which will get mentioned by science journalism.
Book recommendations: Douglas Futuyma, “Evolution”, for the biological aspects. Daniel Dennett, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, for the philosophical implications.
I’m surprised Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll hasn’t been mentioned yet. Mixing developmental biology and evolution provides a wonderful perspective on evolution. A lot of the morphological changes in evolution are due to changes during development, so understanding how these interact helps provide a clearer model of biological evolution.
We can now concretely see what genes and regulation factors exactly change throughout time, and explain the variability across organisms.
The metaphor evoked by this book would be something like a function with a small number of parameters that generates another function, which itself is evaluated for fitness. Having a generating function in this way makes it much easier for mutations to cause high-level changes (like sprouting another set of limbs, different scales, or eyes in a different place / shape).
I enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.” It sums up a lot of the ideas he pursued during his career. One of them is punctuated equlibrium. Another is the importance of randomness in the history of life: random events such as asteroid strikes may have had a huge impact on the history of life. Still another idea is that the past evolutionary history of species helps to shape their future. This is tied in with ideas about evo devo and “body plans.” Most controversially, Gould discusses hierarchical and species selection theories.
Gould also delves into the history of evolutionary thought in great detail. For example, he explains what the Modern Synthesis was, and why people don’t agree with it today.
I’d also second the recommendation for “Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo.” It gets into the nitty gritty of how evolutionarily adapted organisms actually work, at a programmatic level. Like, there are hormones which control each stage of development, and an overall body plan which gets built during gestation.
I think gradient descent is a very bad metaphor for evolution. In gradient descent, you have a fixed fitness function that you are optimizing. Evolution isn’t like that. Organisms interact with each other. For example, flowering plants require pollinating insects. You can’t consider the “fitness” of flowers and bees in isolation, because they’re all part of an ecosystem. Even if you could consider the fitness of organisms in isolation, the environment is constantly changing, and adaptations that are good for one environment might be quite bad for another.
Function-minimization type thinking tends to lead you into what Gould would call the “Great Chain of Being” fallacy, where you try to stack-order every organism by how good it is. Human at the top, obviously, and bacteria at the bottom. But there’s nothing to suggest evolution “works” this way. Bacteria may be quite more successful than humans in many Darwinian ways.
This may sound like a dumb suggestion, but as long as you don’t mind missing out on the genetic side of things (or better, supplementing it with a second book) I recommend The Origin of Species. It’s not actually a very difficult book, and it covers a great deal of the sort of evidence that a geneticist probably won’t cover as well (some will, but some won’t). It’s full of great empirical examples, and the mode of scientific inquiry in it is somewhat distinct from physics and chemistry and a good thing to get contact with. I think it’s also very well written. I would recommend it even if it wasn’t considered a classic of the field.
The ideas covered in it are also still surprisingly fresh. There has been progress since then, but it’s not like reading Newton’s Principia. It was written in English and is still relatively close to modern work (except for the total lack of knowledge of genetics).
I’ve noticed a lot of the above responses also focus on the selective side of evolution. But the mutation side of evolution is extremely important. Stochastic effects are also very important- like genetic drift (Kimura’s neutral theory of molecular evolution is important as a baseline for understanding what happens absent selection).
Things like gradient descent, or simulated annealing, or hey, let’s have genetic algorithms for meta value, are all very well in a way, but aren’t the whole story. Interesting things start to happen when the environment isn’t fixed. Partly there’s environment change caused by geological changes, there’s evolution and migration of interacting species such as predators, prey, competitors, there’s within-species stuff, if you like to use landscape metaphors (as in gradient descent) then the landscape changes.
“Within-species stuff” – species evolve, individuals don’t. But if you think about the environment of an individual within a species as including many of that individual’s conspecifics as mates, children, competitors, herdmates etc., then as the species evolves the environment experienced by individuals within the species changes, altering the selection pressures.
How you think about the changing landscape IMO is shaped by which particular area of biology catches your mind. For a paleontologist, the fossil record is long and has poor time resolution. Arguably what you see in the fossil record has more to do with the way the (local) optima change over time than progress towards those (local) optima. For an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour in the wild… behaviour often doesn’t fossilise well so the time resolution of the fossil record is less of a concern, and the within-species stuff is really important.
If you’re interested in the grand sweep of evolutionary history, then the phrase “random walk” comes up quite a bit. I think the idea is that natural selection causes species to track changes in the evolutionary landscape, and the changes in the evolutionary landscape are what causes a lot of the movements seen in the fossil record. So a model for large-scale evolutionary history might be an explosion of branching random walks. Covering a much bushier space than a random walk caused by genetic drift without selection would cover, of course.
“What’s your mental model of evolution?”
This has turned out to be a really great question. The answers have been generally accurate, but still very different from each other.
It wouldn’t surprise me if what various people emphasis says something about their general approach to things, like preferred level of abstraction and how interested they are in change vs. principles.
It took me a while to come round to it, but I now think of life to be a thick, slowly moving viscus current, as deep as the oceans, as tall as the skys, broad as all the world and as long as time.
The life river is made up of genes instead of drops of water, and the genes stick tight into packets that we call individual organisms and the organisms tend to clump together into species. Tend to. The genes are constantly copying themselves (with errors and with out) and wandering away from their home organism/species and trying to glom onto another such. Sometimes two different clumps merge. Some times several clumps just fall apart.
Mitochondria ended up in our cells like this. Same-same we ended up with wheat, and bananas.
And all the while the river is slowly moving on to the future.
Ewald is my favorite writer on the evolution of infectious disease virulence. I read “The Evolution of Infectious Diseases” two decades ago. I imagine he has something better out by now.
Also, Raup’s book “Extinction” is an interesting quick read about what drives species extinct.
My mental model for evolution is similar to what you describe except I’d specify that ‘fitness’ is entirely dependent on environment. Changing the environment changes the fitness. Like a fish out of water.
Though responses to environmental stressors can be generalized. Dodos ‘evolved’ (not devolved) to become flightless when they lacked predators. Why waste energy? The constant stress of predation from one species prepares an animal for predation by other species. Evolved defenses against dessication prepare an organism to survive in outer space.
You could try Koonin’s “The Logic of Chance” (at least the first few chapters).