This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/transgender-cia/520050/?utm_source=atltw
Yet another account of transitioning, this time with a lot of acceptance.
It fits my model that I have no idea of what gender is, but it’s important to a lot of people, so I opt for kindness to people who want to change.
The title of the article is less interesting than it sounds– the author didn’t become a better CIA officer because of any special insight from being a woman, she became a better CIA agent because living as a man was making her distracted and miserable.
I’m with you on this. I don’t normally say it, because too many vocal US feminists currently insist (without quite saying it) that trans women are more important than cis women. But I come from that side of ‘genderqueer’ that experiences gender differences as something that has to be learned and enforced, and my “autism” made it very difficult for me to learn my own “innate” traits successfuly – i.e. if there are any personality traits that are innate in males and not in females, or vice versa, I certainly couldn’t find them by introspection.
That’s what’s inherently problematic about the question of “internalized misogyny”. How can anyone – a cis or trans-woman – convince you that, if they believe certain gender stereotypes to be accurate or true, or have any degree of gender essentialism in their set of beliefs, convince you that they aren’t just brainwashed? How can they prove the credibility of their lived experience vs. your theory that they only hold these beliefs due to nefarious patriarchal forces and not their reason?
Etoile:
It strikes me that this is a distinction that happens often, e.g., with mental biases. On one hand, it’s useful to have the concept that you might be succumbing to some mental bias or thoughtlessly adopting some dumb belief of your society. On the other hand, it’s almost never useful to have that kind of claim tossed around in a discussion, because it’s got a built-in Kafkatrap where the very fact that you disagree is itself proof that you’ve internalized misogynous ideas or you’re a self-hating Jew or your white privilege has blinded you or something.
That’s the nature of the Intersectionality totem pole. A man isn’t welcome to criticize a woman’s behavior unless she’s openly and unambiguously a conservative, since you are lower(or should it be higher?) on the totem pole, you can’t criticize their behavior either.
Analyzing it on a deeper level, you can model political correctness as being about subverting/transcending the traditional Western family structure. A cisgender woman with the above views is not subverting/transcending it, while a transgender women, no matter how “traditional” her views may be, is by her very nature subverting/transcending it. Of course this is just a model and like all models is a simplification, but it fits with real world behavior pretty well.
If a woman in her 70s (like Deidre McCloskey) expresses some outdated gender stereotypes, I’ll probably just roll my eyes internally and leave it alone, whether she started out as male or female.
This is one of those paradoxes of politically correct thought:
There are no differences between men and women.
…but also…
You can feel that you were born in the wrong body.
Also, beauty standards are social constructs.
But gay people are Born This Way.
It’s vitally important everyone work harder and harder to hire more minorities and women, but no individual has ever gotten a job because of those efforts and it’s bigoted to say that such a thing is even possible.
1 in 4 women will be raped while in college.
Also, we should send as many women to college as possible and any father who has reservations about allowing his daughters to attend college is a misogynistic bigot.
Everyone in this subthread banned forever.
…not really, because it would be annoying to have to process bans for so many people, but come on.
I have what must be a very basic question and I’m sure is has been studied in the literature. How many people who transition are doing so because they think they fit better into society’s proscribed gender roles for the other gender?
Here’s what’s in the article: ” I knew I’d “arrived” as a woman when someone made a sexist joke about my driving.”
I’m surprised people are still making jokes about women’s driving– I don’t think I’ve heard one for decades.
Are hunter gatherers more socially skilled than we are? I can see both sides of the argument. One says that of course they are. We put on our sociality as a mask when we go to work or to social events, then go home and watch tv or use social media. Hunter-gatherers don’t “retreat” from socializing. It’s all they do. The other side might say that while that’s true, they also deal with mostly the same people all their life, while we have to meet new people all the time as a matter of living in a big, complex society. It’s not hard to socialize with people you’re perfectly comfortable with. Who’s right?
As your post itself makes clear, this depends heavily on how you define “socially skilled.” If you’re using the phrase to mean several very different things, there’s no one answer possible.
As a separate point, I doubt hunter-gatherer societies are all identical enough to lump into one bucket.
Also: I don’t know what “we” you’re referring to.
Social skills: being able to effectively communicate and connect with different people. Being able to predict how people react to different situations. Being able to effectively avoid or defuse conflict. Having charisma. “Social skills” doesn’t have a clear cut definition but when someone says that this person has higher social skills than another, we know what they mean.
Hunter gatherers are not monoliths but they have enough commonalities that we can obviously talk about them as a group.
“We” is obviously people in developed countries.
I assume they’re using the term as a synonym for outgoing (lit. people-oriented extraversion), which is a drive, not a skill per se (though obviously can lead to the development of skills).
From my experience reading about personality theory, only the innately socially inclined experience the modifications to affect they make in public as “putting on a mask”. Other kinds of people may not even experience this as changing their affect at all. Do you call it “putting on a mask” when someone starts crying during a sad movie?
That isn’t how I use the term. Someone can be outgoing and incompetent about it, making people less likely to enjoy his company, which I would describe as low social skills.
How true is it that hunter-gatherers never “retreat” from socialising? Surely a hunter-gatherer could go into his tent, or go for a walk on his own, in order to get away from the rest of the group for a bit.
Regarding the considerations you mentioned, maybe it’s the case that moderns are better at relatively shallow socialisation with a large number of people, whereas hunter-gatherers are better at developing deep connections with a comparatively small number?
+1 to your first paragraph.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard (and noticed) that people from large cities tend not to smile and greet others (even in more limited social areas such as a hallway at their place of work), whereas people from smaller locales tend to do this.
It’s a logical consequence of density. You’d become very tired of greeting people if you’d greet everyone you meet in a big city.
Yes, this is also what I heard as to the reason for this behavior.
Then there is that awkward phase as small/medium cities start becoming large cities where nobody knows whether they are supposed to greet strangers or not, making walking on sidewalks unbearable as people awkwardly shuffle past each other, possibly mumbling a barely audible greeting or raising their hand by about 4-6″ in a sort of quasi-wave motion.
Also, why should I great everyone at my workplace? I don’t know most of them. I’m vaguely aware of most of the people working on my floor. I don’t know this people. I have nothing to do with this people, except for getting my pay from the same legal entity. But even that isn’t true for all the people in the building.
I greet the people from my team. I greet the people working for the same department. Back when I worked for smaller companies, or in smaller local sites of an company I greeted everyone there.
Well, there is the networking opportunity of getting to know people from other departments, which could be beneficial down the road if you ever need to unexpectedly interact with those departments, if the company does some restructuring and you start having to regularly work with those departments, or if you might in the future want to advance or transfer to another department where the people you meet by saying hello in passing might be (and might even have some authority).
I’m not a very outgoing person, but after about a year or year and a half I knew all 150 people in my last company (barring maybe a handful of new temps that rotated in and out) by name even though I probably only actually had to interact with less than half of them even semi-regularly to do my job. I am 100% confident that this helped me advance as quickly as I did (because my reputation extended past my immediate coworkers essentially to the whole building, at least on some level).
This may or may not be something that you feel is important for you/your career path (and how valuable it is varies from company to company) but that would be at least one reason right there.
Yes 150 people would be the “smaller company” I worked for in the past. But there are a 120 people on this office floor alone. There are four of those floors in this building alone. There are just as many people in the building on the other side of the road (who regularly come over because we
have the better coffeeto have meetings with coworkers in this building.I know the names of most of the people from HR. I am not sure if I have seen one of them since the onboarding meeting.
There is just no chance to know all this people.
With regards to enlightenment and sex scandals:
Isn’t the most likely explanation that this is all nonsense?
Because that seems like the most likely explanation.
Even if it is real, just because someone claims to have achieved enlightenment doesn’t mean they’ve done so. In fact, it strikes me that wandering around and publicly saying you’re enlightened is probably a sign that you’re not, because being enlightened frees you from desires – including the desire for approbation for your enlightenemnt. Being famous for being enlightened seems like an oxymoron unless you are some monk somewhere and it is your students who constantly bring people to you to become enlightened.
Faking enlightenment seems extremely likely due to its social status, and as far as the layperson is concerned, someone who just *sounds* enlightened probably actually passes for enlightened better than someone who *is* actually enlightened, because the person who actually *is* enlightened has nothing to prove to anyone.
Also, “enlightened” people might just seem crazy to the point where few would want to associate with them.
For example: was Diogenes enlightened?
A lot of his responses sound pretty much like exactly the sorts of thing you’d expect someone who was “enlightened” to say.
When scolded for masturbating in public, he said “I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.”
When someone reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, “And I sentenced them to stay at home.”
He once begged alms of a statue, and, when asked why he did so, replied, “To get practice in being refused.”
To the question what wine he found pleasant to drink, he replied, “That for which other people pay.”
When asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, he replied, ‘Because they expect they may become lame and blind, but never that they will become philosophers.’
He was breakfasting in the marketplace, and the bystanders gathered round him with cries of “dog.” “It is you who are dogs,” cried he, “when you stand round and watch me at my breakfast.”
When the slave auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, “In ruling people.”
One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living.”
Alexander [the Great] found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, “I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.”
This is all pretty much the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who was “enlightened”.
He was obviously not “free from desire”, and yet, he was an ascetic who lived a very plain lifestyle who “saw the way of things” very frequently – very literal wisdom from the gutter, given where he lived. But a lot of people hated him because he was a smelly cantankerous vagrant.
So really, if you’re given the choice between some shit-stirring homeless dude who lives in a bathtub and says things that constantly make people angry, and someone who lives in a nice temple and says mild but seemingly deep things all the time and claims to be free from desire, which are you going to choose as being the “wise man”?
I don’t really get the impression that “saying mild things and claiming to be free from desire” is what people who claim or imply enlightenment do. What they do claim is that they are happy practically all the time, which isn’t the same thing. Mostly, it seems that those who explicitly think enlightenment entails freedom from all desire also tend to have a dire view of its achievability.
> What they do claim is that they are happy practically all the time, which isn’t the same thing.
What counts as “happy”? Because if someone asked me whether my life is mostly happy and am I mostly happy and satisfied with what I have, I’d answer “yes”. I am not enlightened in the slightest; I just have a good life.
It seems pretty clear to me that they do not mean this kind of happiness that requires looking at your life overall. (In the context of that concept of happiness, it makes no sense to say that someone is happy “all the time”.) They mean presence of positive feelings and absence of negative feelings moment-to-moment. Perhaps “joyful” is a better word for what they seem to be getting at. Even someone who is happy with their life experiences joy only in a tiny minority of moments. It appears to me the claim of a lot of enlightened people is that a vastly larger proportion of their experiential moments are filled with something like joy.
This tweet of a slide presented to Washington science teachers is entertaining mainly because it makes an explicit statement out of something I think is a commonly held view that is rarely stated. Indeed, it’s often the case that citing the data showing disparities in outcome is enough to get many people to think you’re bigoted–to even mention these disparities is evidence of sin.
This is silly, but that doesn’t make it any less widespread.
Correct. Asians do better than whites on standardized tests because of our broken system in the US.
Whites in the US do better than whites in any other country on the planet, on average.
It seems unlikely that the US system is “broken” unless you think everywhere else is even worse.
That’s an interesting claim. I did some research using the PISA 2015 results, and while it is not quite true, it is almost true, which is very interesting.
Here are the results for US Whites:
science 531
reading 526
math 499
In science, the following predominantly white nations do as well or better: Estonia (534), Finland (531)
In reading, the following predominantly white nations do as well or better: Canada (527), Finland (526)
In math, the following predominantly white nations do as well or better: Switzerland (521), Estonia (520), Canada (516), Netherlands (512), Denmark (511), Finland (511), Slovenia (510), Belgium (510), Germany (506), Poland (504), Ireland (504), Norway (502)
I should add that this isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison, since I am comparing US whites not against white people elsewhere but against entire nations, which typically have some outsider representation. Even Germany, while overwhelmingly white, has some non-white students. But in the case of countries like Finland and Estonia, the non-white populations really do vanish into statistical noise.
But that said, US whites are a very high-performing group, and if considered separately score among the very highest-performing nations and beat nearly all white nations in science and reading. The same can not be said of mathematics, where quite a few nations (white and Asian) do better.
Incidentally, white and Asian scores in the US are very close:
science: white 531, asian 525
reading: white 526, asian 527
math: white 499, asian 498
I would have bet on US Asian scores being significantly higher than US white scores.
IIRC, blacks and hispanics in the US do better than most majority black / hispanic countries, probably because we have better-funded and -run schools. I’m also surprised by the Asian scores not being higher–I wonder if that turns on Asian being such a grab-bag of groups in the US. OTOH, East Asians (China, Japan, Korean, etc.) and South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, etc.) both do really well in the US, so I’m not sure what’s going on.
Asian scores could also be suppressed a bit by extremely recent immigrants who haven’t yet mastered english (my understanding is that any gap closes pretty fast though, so we’re talking like “moved to the U.S. a few years ago” not “moved to the U.S. when five years old took the test at fifteen”.
I don’t know if the U.S. also lumps Pacific Islanders into Asians when collecting the PISA race/ethnicity data either but that’d also affect scores.
The PISA’12 scores seem quite different:
Asians 549
Whites 506
I’m surprised things have changed so much in that time frame. Perhaps this reflects a change in methodology/grouping.
Source:
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_3f_1.asp
Tip I tested successfully: I replaced the Facebook icon on the phone with Kindle – same position on the home screen. On random downtimes instead of clicking fb, I now click Kindle by reflex.
Obligatory XKCD
At Amb. Marie Yovanovich’s testimony today at the impeachment hearing, I heard a Republican Congressman make a prediction: that fewer Americans would support the impeachment proceedings at the conclusion of public testimony than support it currently. According to fivethirtyeight.com, about 48.5% of Americans currently support impeachment proceedings. That number hasn’t dropped below 47.9% in the past month.
Do you think we’ll see a drop in support for impeachment proceedings in the next two weeks? Will there be a large drop in support (say more than 5%) in the next two weeks, like the increase around Sept. 24?
Personally I don’t think support will drop (60% sure) and would be shocked to see a large drop (90% it doesn’t occur). For reference, I’m not American but I think Trump’s actions are appalling.
For discussion, an editor for nationalreview.com, a right-aligned publication, argues that the president’s impeachment defense as executed by Republican congresspeople is “stupid” and “embarrassing”. If the defense works, he argues it will work not through serious arguments or rebuttals but like “a boyfriend or girlfriend who thinks that if they just scream and stomp their feet enough in a public place, they won’t get dumped.” He recognizes that Democrats have the facts on their side, but risk not being taken seriously by the public because Trump has been accused of so much over the last three years.
Is he right? Are there any serious rebuttals (i.e., competing narratives that right-aligned media are comfortable pushing) to be made against the case Democrats are building?
The most common narrative among my right-wing friends on social media is, “What Trump did isn’t wrong, and even if it is, the fact that they’ve highlighted this issue over all the other things they could accuse Trump of shows that the Democrats are stupid/evil/immature (circle one)”.
Some quotes from my facebook page:
Frankly, that (including your more extended comment) would be pretty close to my feelings. I wouldn’t call what the democrats are doing corrupt, and I do think that the latest charges are pretty ridiculous. But I also think that they might work out.
Tarring trump with corruption seems feasible and a reasonable strategy given the collapse of the collusion narrative. And it at least rhymes with earlier charges, so even if these ones aren’t particularly damning, the slow accumulation might be enough to drag trump down. I don’t think it will drag him all the way to impeachment and removal, but it might get him far enough to lose the election.
I’d also say that it’s doing horrible damage to our civil fabric and that they should stop it, but I see why they’re doing it.
I think US politics has collapsed into a defect/defect pattern between the parties at this point, and it’s hard for me to see how it will get better. It’s easier to get attention and retweets by saying awful nasty things about the other side than by anything positive, and that shapes way too much of our national political dialogue. One driver of that is that Twitter seems optimized to capture the attention of the kind of people who become journalists in the US, so most of the people whose job is to report on what’s going on in the country are living deep within a Twitter bubble.
My only real question would be has it collapsed to that, or has it always been that and we’re looking at the past with rose colored glasses? I think you can make a case either way, but I’m not sure how you’d measure it objectively.
On twitter, I work at a journalistic institution, and I definitely agree that a lot of journalists are the sort of compulsively social creatures for whom twitter is like crack. But twitter is also just…easy. You can easily put things out and instantly get hits. You get a constant feed of people saying things, and a huge amount of journalism is just people saying “so and so said X today”. And, as you say, it’s very easy to bubble yourself. It’s probably not good for journalism as a profession, but it’s impossible to ignore.
Case in point
The polling on impeachment inquiry support has been, at best, confusing. For one thing, it is always questionable whether poll recipients understand the distinction between “should hearings be held,” “are the hearings well-founded,” “should the House impeach,” and “should the President be removed.” I think the Republican Congressman is wrong if he’s predicting the hearings will result in any public movement on this question, because I would bet (95% confidence) that a rounds-down-to-zero number of people who are actually watching the hearings will change their mind, or were ever going to change their mind, no matter what information was or was not elicited. So I don’t think support will change much either direction, because nobody who’s paying attention was undecided to begin with.
I don’t know if it’s possible to poll this, but I think a really interesting set of questions would be: (1) what percentage of voters know there’s a difference between Russia and Ukraine as countries (I’d guess less than 60%); (2) what percentage of voters know that “the Russia probe” and “the Ukraine probe” are two different things involving different alleged conduct / facts (I’d guess less than 30%); and (3) what percentage of voters know that the current impeachment proceedings involve “the Ukraine probe” and not “the Russia probe” allegations at all (I’d guess less than 15%). I would bet that those numbers, whatever they are, are also virtually unchanged following the hearings; because again I think anyone actually watching is already vastly more politically engaged than the average voter.
Also, for what it’s worth, Jonah Goldberg in particular (and National Review in general) have been loudly anti-Trump since before 2016, and in my limited experience, Goldberg in particular is not taken very seriously (or at all) among right-leaning partisans, certainly not on any issue relating to Trump. That’s just my impression based on consumption of right-leaning media.
ETA: There was a general discussion of this in the last .25 thread, here. My general impressions, which remain unchanged or strengthened thus far through the “public” phase, are here. Given that the Democrats already disclosed the favorable portions of the “sealed” testimony to the media prior to the public hearings, it seems unlikely there would be any further major surprises negative for Trump that hadn’t come out before. But I guess we’ll see.
I don’t think there’s a serious rebuttal to be made to the core allegation, that Trump was caught using his power as the President to try to embarrass a political rival. It’s just too blatantly true. But I do think it’s likely (80% chance) that Republicans will find an effective rebuttal to some secondary or supporting aspect of the Democrats’ case, or at least a more legitimate process complaint than what they’ve tried to manufacture so far, over the next few weeks, in a way that embarrasses Schiff on, say, the front page of the New York Times. They seemingly can’t subpoena anybody who remains loyal to Trump, so there’s a dangerous information asymmetry: Giuliani won’t confirm anything the witnesses or committee get right, but he will disprove anything they get wrong.
I think the practical question is “is this seriously bad enough to impeach him and remove him from office.” And that’s ultimately a political question, which will be answered largely on party lines. The result is that Trump will not be removed from office. I’m not sure whether he’ll be damaged by the impeachement hearings–I think it would be optimal for the Democrats to keep them dragging on until the election, but I don’t think they can manage that and if they do, it may backfire.
Inclined to agree, but I’m also not sure there’s a serious rebuttal possible to the opposite core claim: that we have an interest in whether there was corruption involved in Hunter Biden’s appointment and that it’s the administration’s job to investigate that. I don’t see how one can dispute that as a general principle. The argument seems to be that this was impermissible since the alleged corruption involves Trump’s likely election opponent, and I can sort of see that — but at the same time, the fact that it involves the likely Democratic candidate for President seems to me to make it more important than usual.
For suspicions of internal corruption, one might make the claim that it would be more seemly for the President to “recuse” himself by handing it off to someone else in the administration (though such a person would still be reporting to him, so perhaps that’s just window dressing). For something that involves other countries, and in fact requires asking cooperation from another head of state, I’m not sure such a handoff would be responsible.
Both those core claims strike me as not only defensible but in fact true. So what does one do? I don’t want the President to be able to use his position to take down his rivals, nor do I want running for office to include immunity for past crimes. Either one seems like the road to a banana republic.
That claim is both far too specific in the first part, and far too generic in the second, in ways that highlight the implicit rebuttal.
“We” may have an interest in whether Americans are engaged in corrupt business practices with foreign corporations, but there’s at least thousands and probably millions of Americans engaged in foreign transactions that are at least suspicious. So, Hunter Biden specifically is at the very top of the list of people “we” have an interest in investigating for corruption? It requires almost willful self-delusion to believe that.
And Hunter Biden clearly is at the top of the list, because it isn’t “the administration” that is investigating, it is Donald J. Trump personally. And Rudy Giuliani, who isn’t even part of the administration. That’s not normal. Identifying specific targets for criminal investigation is not the President’s job, and if he is doing that it is at least evidence that the Attorney General’s office is hopelessly corrupt or incompetent.
But really, if something that claims to be an anti-corruption campaign involves a head of state or government identifying specific private citizens as targets for investigation, then that campaign is going to increase corruption, not reduce it. Really, you want to keep elected officials entirely out of that line of work, and yes that means not electing DAs, but presidents, premiers, or kings meddling in that business is the worst. This is a pretty solid rule, as you’ll discover when it’s e.g. President Warren personally deciding which billionaires to sic the IRS on.
And then there’s the dubious bit about the administration “investigating” anything here. “The administration” includes agencies like the Justice Department and the FBI, specifically for carrying out this sort of investigation. I think I missed the part where Trump asked them to investigate Hunter Biden. Asking the Ukranian government to investigate runs into the problem that Trump believes the Ukranian government itself to be hopelessly corrupt, so how any American national interest is served by that is hard to see without e.g. a serious discussion of how there’s going to be deep US oversight of this particular investigation. But, I seem to have missed that too.
The only specific element of the investigation that Trump and Giuliani seem to have specifically required, was the public announcement by the Ukrainian President that he was investigating the Bidens (and, somehow, Hillary Clinton) for corruption. Which, if there was going to be an actual investigation, you’d probably not want to do at the start of the process because why warn the targets to fire up their shredders?
So, yeah, rebutted. Donald Trump and his allies were not pursuing a national interest in investigating corruption in this case.
And if fighting corruption was also the official policy, it would have been handled through the official channels, instead of having side channels demanding it — and then hiding evidence of what was requested from internal parties.
That would be called “consciousness of guilt” in a criminal setting. You know it’s wrong because you are hiding it, even from your own teammates.
Hmm. For me, much of what you say is covered by my
Hunter may well have been at the top of the list only because Joe is running for President. That's kind of okay with me.
I'll give you the point about him not directing the DoJ and the FBI to investigate, if you really have some reason to believe he didn't. (If in fact he did not, I could get feisty and point out how much effort the DoJ and the FBI have spent on undermining his Presidency from even before it began, and wonder whether he would be entitled to doubt whether they would be of any help at all, but I won’t. Oops, I guess I did.)
Regarding
I’ve already acknowledged that your argument is on solider ground regarding internal corruption. But we’ve already seen Mueller indict a large handful of Russians, knowing well that nothing would come of it. As much as I would like to believe that there are “channels” for getting action out of the Ukraine that don’t require a rapprochement between high elected officials, you’ll forgive me for being doubtful. For what it’s worth, a few years ago Biden seems to have agreed.
I didn’t notice anything in the transcript of the call about making a public announcement, nor any mention of Hillary Clinton at all unless, um, you count Crowdstrike. Has that shown up elsewhere?
I guess the point I was trying to make was this. In an alternate timestream, if it had been Dick Cheney’s kid who got the dubious job while Cheney was VP, and Trump had tried to shake the bushes about investigating that, would you really consider that an abuse of power? Are Joe and Hunter Biden exempt from that scrutiny because Joe is running for President? (If so, why exactly does that make sense?)
How egregious would their alleged crimes have to be before it became something you really wanted to know the facts about before voting for Joe, even if getting those answers required action on Trump’s part?
This is true, but it’s also true that the rival was almost certainly accepting a… not quite bribe, let’s call it a gratuity, and I have a very hard time getting more upset at the person who was trying to reveal what happened than the original offender, even if the revealer was motivated purely by self interest.
well, no. It’s not true. The rival’s kid had taken a cushy job on the strength of his dad’s connections.
Really anyone who objects to the Hunter Biden thing should want Trump impeached on the grounds of blatant nepotism. His own children and son-in-law are blatantly unqualified for their roles and have no business in any sensibly run government.
@Aftagley
That’s why I called it gratuity not a bribe. I think it’s totally unbelievable that Biden didn’t know about it, and didn’t approve of what was going on. I doubt that it got them anything, but I think there’s no chance that Hunter wasn’t given the job in the hope of influencing his father.
@TripleS
His kids aren’t paid, and he’s employed them in similar roles for years. They’re no different in this regard than Valerie Jarrett, and no less qualified than aspiring failed novelist Ben Rhodes.
I’d also like the Bushes, Clintons, and any remaining Kennedys (and descendants and relatives out to 3 degrees) to be forever gone from government for a start.
Hunter Biden has nothing to offer anybody besides crack cocaine and his last name. And I doubt he was trying to sell cocaine to the Ukrainians.
It’s a pathetic display, like Hillary Clinton’s brother selling his own last name. But it isn’t, by itself, corruption.
Family members of powerful people get cushy jobs all the time, and this isn’t illegal. It’s hard to see how you would make it illegal without making it impossible for the children or siblings of the president to make a living.
And not just powerful people. Any sufficiently famous person is likely to have a kid or sibling whose entire career is “I’m related to that famous person” unless the parents (of said relative) did an exceptionally good job of instilling them with their own work ethic.
@albatross11
After years of shouting about the emoluments clause and various trump associates being explicitly attacked for this sort of thing, “everyone does it” rings a bit hollow.
More importantly, however, hunter’s entire adult life appears to have been based on taking cushy gigs from his dad. He first worked at a bank that was a major contributor, then got put on the amtrak board, became a fixer with John Kerry’s kid, got an extremely unusual waiver to join the navy despite being overage, then got terfed out on drug charges, (biden’s explanation was his son’s consumption was accidental), and then started collecting money from foreign governments & got on Burisma’s board.
yes, lots of fame adjacent people can trade on names, as Edward Scizorhands said, he has absolutely nothing to offer except cocaine and his name. It’s very clear in this case that there is no possibility that it wasn’t untoward.
Uhhh, this is a little bit beyond just getting a cushy job because you are famous. Joe Biden took a leading role in America’s foreign policy on Ukraine and demanded the dismissal of an official who had an open investigation into a company on which Hunter Biden was a board member.
The actual circumstances and reasons for dismissal are irrelevant, the fact is that the appearance of impropriety and obvious conflicts of interest are so obviously severe that Joe Biden’s political career should be over. And maybe Trump isn’t the best standard bearer, and maybe this is a “only Nixon can go to China” moment, but aid to Ukraine absolutely should be withheld until Ukraine can do a full investigation and demonstrate to Congress and the President that there is no foul play.
Now I understand that Trump is blatantly corrupt and that in the real world this should pretty much be let go and Trump is probably engaging in actual foul play, but if you are going to try to appeal to my sense of morals, you should actually try to appeal to my cynical Eastern-European, third-generation-accountant, everyone-is-a-bastard morals. And those demand that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden get their asses raked over coals for the better part of a generation.
Just because the only thing Hunter Biden has to offer is his last name doesn’t mean corruption is happening.
People like famous people. And even if you personally do not, you have to realize that, as in a Keynesian beauty contest, other people like famous people. “Hey, you like country music — do you want to have a meeting with Taylor Swift’s brother? He’s on our board!”
The kids of Presidents get into Harvard and Yale, and partly that’s because the kids of hard-driven people are going to be hard-driven people, but also because Harvard and Yale like being able to show off famous people as alumni.
I don’t know what Hunter Biden promised Burisma to get hired. Maybe nothing; maybe he promised them his dad would give them a deal or something. Maybe he promised it and it was all a lie he could never deliver. Hunter doesn’t look like the person who would listen like JFK’s mother and knock these things off.
One reason to hire Hunter is to show off to Western powers that “look, we are a serious company — a relative of the Vice President serves on our board, so obviously nothing corrupt is going on!” Whether that turns out to be true or not is a mixed bag (I don’t feel arsed to look up the famous people on Theranos’s board), but it’s definitely true that people believe that other people believe that famous people lend credibility to things.
Yes, attempts to question or out or punish the IG whistleblower are disgusting.
I mean, there are plenty, particularly if you read the rough transcript.
The phone call is, more or less, not driven by Trump. Biden’s name is brought up vaguely, and in passing. On top of that its a proven fact that Ukraine indeed attempted to materially aid the Clinton campaign in 2016. Its also a fact that Trump holds grudges, and doesn’t like foreign aid. Thus, he likely has a hairtrigger when withholding funds, any reason could result in a hold.
That there is this corruptish Biden action and it hasn’t been investigated, and that Trump would be excoriated for not pushing for an investigation if Biden was instead Dick Cheney makes the defense all the more strong. Can we really impeach the President for doing his job? Isn’t that what we were just told for 3 years? It doesn’t matter if its your political opponent, you should pursue justice and collusion to the ends of the earth, even if you have no evidence to launch an investigation!
Are you referring to the absurd Crowdstrike theory, which is approximately the opposite of a proven fact, or something else?
Lol no not at all.
I’m talking about this:
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukrainian-efforts-to-sabotage-trump-backfire/
Kind of echoing what honoredb said, I think they are going to ride this out by ignoring subpoenas.
At this point, we’re either read testimony or heard from nearly everyone involved in this case and we’ve got a good basic outline of the facts: The President wanted the Ukraine to investigate the dems/Biden and took action to pressure the country into making that happen. The only people we haven’t heard from yet are maybe some folks at OMB who can speak to specifically why the aid was help up.
The thing is, none of these people testifying are top-level officials. None of them actually made decisions or directly heard Trump say anything (Soundland excluded, but he’s already outed himself as a liar). If Trump’s inner circle can successfully ignore subpoenas, republicans can claim that there just isn’t any good evidence linking the president to this directly. Sure, dems will complain, but that nuance won’t make it to the public.
At this point, I think the republicans’ best strategy will be to prevent important people from testifying and just refusing to admit that this smoke implies the existence of fire. Dems should press to get Mulvaney, Guiliani and hopefully Trump to testify.
More accurately, the President wanted Ukraine to publicly announce an investigation so that he could use it as political ammunition; there’s no evidence he cared whether an investigation actually happened.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/470205-8-in-10-say-their-is-little-to-no-chance-they-will-change-their-minds
62 percent of respondents said there is no chance they could change their minds regarding impeachment
19 percent reporting there’s only a small chance of doing so.
8 percent responding that there is “some chance” they could change their mind.
2 percent said there is a strong chance they could change their mind
So large swings are unlikely. Most people have already decided.
That seems extremely implausible.
It is certainly plausible that close to three years of crying wolf about e.g. Trump being a Russian agent and Trump paying off his mistress from the wrong slush fund and so forth, have so discredited the Democratic party in the eyes of Trump’s remaining supporters that the needle can’t move much farther in the anti-Trump direction because nobody on that side is even listening. I hope not, because if true that means Trump can now get away with literal murder or worse, but could be.
That the needle is going to move towards Trump, that people who now favor impeachment will oppose it when they watch the hearings on CSPAN (or see the commentary on Twitter) is unlikely. This time, the Democrats have stuck with a single coherent narrative from the start – that Trump tried to extort a friendly nation, by withholding legally appropriated funds, into publicly accusing the Bidens of being Nogoodniks. And the investigation is now in the phase of hearing public testimony from credible, sympathetic witnesses saying “yep, that’s what happened”. The Democrats are past the time when they were holding secret hearings on little more than Nancy Pelosi’s and Adam Schiff’s say-so, and well past the time when this was just a report by one anonymous whistleblower. And the Republicans are entering the phase where it will be publicly obvious that they are hiding something by blocking obviously relevant witnesses from testifying.
I don’t see how it ever gets better for Trump, until it is over. The only question is whether it gets bad enough for twenty Senators to jump ship. And that’s going to depend on Trump not making too many stupid impulsive mistakes between now and then.
Yeah, *that*’s gonna happen.
Many, yes. Too many is the question. This fight is entirely Trump’s to lose, and any veteran politician would just decline the opportunity and ride it out. The Democrats have cried wolf too many times, the GOP has a lot of margin against a 2/3 vote in the Senate, and their base hates beyond honor or reason the people they see as trying to bring down Their Man.
That man being the quick-tweeting Donald Trump, is the only thing that makes the outcome even in doubt. He may be just the guy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here.
You seem sensible enough.
I’m under the impression the facts are that the funds were given to the Ukrainians, that they didn’t publicly accuse the Bidens, and that the Presidents of both countries have publicly denied any such negotiation/intention. If so, then this reduces down to at best what the proof of intentions of those involved were.
Are you aware of any evidence beyond civil servant gossip that the narrative you describe is true? If so, could you provide a link or two, or a description I can use to find it on Google?
Because the reason I’d think the current hearings will end up with fewer supporters is that people who previously were willing to believe the Democrats in the House had some evidence of the narrative you described have now seen the complete lack of direct evidence in what were supposed to be their best witnesses.
I mean, I personally thought it was at least possible Trump had done something here in terms of a quid-pro-quo (it fits with his NY deal-making personality-type), but I’m extremely underwhelmed by the witnesses thus far presented in the sheer lack of actual evidentiary content.
Because of that, I’d speculate that people who watch hearing-information on more left-wing news sources will get the Democratic accusations and the best gossip from the witnesses, while not seeing any of the points the Republicans make, while people watching more right-wing news sources will get to see the opposite and thus both will be somewhat confirmed in their pre-existing opinions.
The funds appear to have been given to the Ukrainians because John Bolton approved the transfer, shortly before Trump fired him. And, BTW, reality? Please stop trying to turn John Bolton into the good guy; it’s liable to make his brain explode. Or at least his mustache.
We are in the process of turning “civil servant gossip” into sworn testimony. The transcript is a public record, validated by the administration. And failing to carry an extortion attempt to completion doesn’t make you an honest man, it makes you an incompetent crook. Enjoy defending your champion.
So that would be a “No” on there being any direct evidence of the purported attempted extortion, then?
Making a transcript of someone saying their buddy told them that their coworker told them that someone totally did something wrong doesn’t convert it into evidence of a crime. Especially when their accounts are contradicted by the official transcripts of the conversations in question and by the people who were actually parties to those conversations.
I expected a better response from you, I really did.
What do you mean by direct evidence? Witness testimony that person X did Y is the typical example of direct evidence. There’s been a bunch of that.
@snifit,
Yes, a witness stating they observed evidence of crime A (which might be that X did Y) is direct evidence. A witness stating that they heard from L that M told L that (X did Y) would be evidence suggesting they heard that, not that (X did Y), because even if X didn’t do Y, that witness still could be telling the truth about what they heard from L.
As another I-wish-was-hypothetical example, if you as a news consumer read in the NY Times that X did Y and then someone calls you as a witness and you state that you believe X did Y based on that, your statement wouldn’t be anything like what I’d consider actual evidence that X did Y.
Is that clear enough, despite all the letters? 🙂
I predict that this congressman would decline to back up his prediction with a monetary wager. Confidence – 90%
Maaaaaaybe?
I haven’t taken a read on the impeachment polling but looking at RealClearPolitics’ Presidential Approval Rating it looks like disapproval of Trump rose and remained elevated but approval fell and is now rising back up. It’s not impeachment polling but all the impeachment polls have issues. My big takeaway from the polls is how little impeachment has mattered. There was like a month where it really seemed to hurt Trump but he’s been bouncing back and if I take the two year view or the max view this looks really minor. I guess the congressman could technically be right but I’d guess none of the numbers will actually move significantly. 45% of people will always want him impeached and 40% will never want him impeached so I wouldn’t expect big swings.
As for the National Review, that’s not where I’d look for an impassioned defense of Trump.
As for the National Review, that’s not where I’d look for an impassioned defense of Trump.
Right, I would expect that from Trump himself or from Republican congresspeople or from Fox News hosts. But when I see their defenses, they are not “serious rebuttals” to the case Democrats are building that Trump tried to bribe Ukraine for help getting re-elected. They are about The Whistleblower, or about Democrats’ eagerness to impeach, or about how Biden is bad, or complaints that witnesses are too distant from Trump to be useful. I can see how some of these complaints can influence opinion about impeachment, but they don’t address the facts Democrats are establishing. That is worth noticing.
For serious rebuttals to exist, serious accusations must exist. Everything we have evidence for is a thing that is a vague maybe-sorta where the factual timelines contradict the narrative.
Its also like in the Mueller/Comey situation where we are supposed to accept that corrupt conduct, that is obviously observed is cleansed by doing a certain set of rituals, while less corrupt conduct is made more corrupt because the person failed to follow some arcane set of rules no normal person would concoct.
What I’m talking about is: Foreign Collusion. Okay if you launder your activity through a law firm and then a dirt factory and actually end up getting fake dirt. REALLY FREAKING BAD if you agree to a meeting in person, but get nothing.
Investigating political opponents: Okay if you use domestic agencies under your direct control where probable cause is falsified through political dirt generated by unverified 3rd party foreigners known to be politically motivated. REALLY FREAKING BAD if you kinda sorta apply pressure to a foreign government to investigate something that there is public domain evidence that establishes a prima facie case of corruption.
Obviously a lot of people do take them seriously. Let me try to explain.
I think the Democrats are building a case that…kinda doesn’t matter because they’re referencing a standard of conduct that doesn’t apply anymore.
Allow me to give the Democrats this: they’ve proven to my satisfaction that Trump pressured the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the rival presidential nominee, and that’s bad. In fact, it’s Bad and definitely impeachable 20 years ago.
But I’m not confident it is now. We’ve had formal investigations by intelligence agencies into either the president or the likely party candidate for the past 7 years, honestly since the Benghazi investigation morphed into an excuse for dirt digging. In 2016 both the major candidates had FBI investigations into them and in 2020 we’ll have a impeachment inquiry into one over his attempt to investigate the other. This is the new normal.
And Trump had a decent legal excuse to investigate Biden. If nothing else, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine and his deputy alleged in the US press that the Bidens were dirty and worse, as the whistle blower acknowledges (bottom p.4) . With 90% confidence that’s just an excuse for Trump, but it’s still a better excuse than a low-level functionary’s drunk BS, which is how the Russian investigation formally started.
Or, to simplify, Trump got rat-effed, and now is being impeached for trying to rat-eff someone else. And that’s not fair. And the Republican base, whatever else, understands that.
And a lot of the “not serious rebuttals” don’t make any sense if there’s a bright line that the US, whatever else, does not allow investigations into rival presidential candidates. But if you think that’s dead letter, then the whistleblower’s political biases, or the Democratic party’s bad faith, or the corruption of the Bidens, or the weakness of witness become really serious rebuttals.
But if there’s no limit applied to presidents “rat-ff” ing their opponents, then we proceed inevitably to a stage where POTUS meets regularly with the CIA and FSB and says “OK, these are the guys I need literally assassinated so that they can’t upset to comfy thing we’ve all had going on for decades”, and one-party rule forever. We need some sort of rule for how far that’s allowed to go before we impeach.
And it can’t be the “literally assassinate” part, because having them arrested for kiddie-diddling with officially authenticated deepfake evidence works just as well.
Right now, we’re trying to hold the line at three pretty solidly defensible Schelling points. First, don’t use corrupt foreign governments to go after your domestic political opponents. Second, don’t use money congress has authorized for another purpose, to go after your domestic political opponents. Third, if you’re going to use US government agencies to go after your political opponents, do so overtly and with the usual standards of transparency. These have the advantage of being A: obviously wrong and B: actual crimes under current law and C: walls that haven’t fallen yet.
We should all want to keep those walls standing; we shouldn’t use the fact that Trump’s opponents tiptoed into the grey area of one of them to tear down all of them, and we shouldn’t be so eager to keep Donald J. Trump in power that we don’t think about what sort of power we are handing to his eventual Democratic successor. If you do tear down these walls for the sake of a few more years of President Trump, I’d like to know what walls you plan to set up to replace them.
@John Schilling
If the Bidens weren’t so obviously guilty, I would be as concerned about this as you are, but they are. this wasn’t a fishing expedition, it was asking them to help with the gutting and salting.
@John
I concur. This is really bad and I don’t like any place it could end up. However, I’m not confident that an impeachment of Trump will meaningfully constrain future presidents of either party and if the allegations about the whistleblower are true, the lesson of a successful Ukraine impeachment will be “rat-eff your opponent before they can rat-eff you”.
As for your bright lines:
On not involving foreign governments, this is the most defensible one but I’m not clear why getting a foreign government to publicly investigate is significantly worse than the CIA and NSA secretly investigating. Also, didn’t the whole Russia thing start with a tipoff from an Australian diplomat and a lot of information on Russian hacking later on came from US allies?
On money, I think this is just a distraction. Foreign aid has never been super important to Americans, much less impeachable, and the US Congress never authorizes money for investigating your political rivals. What’s wrong is politically motivated investigations, not how they’re financed.
Third, on transparency, I think you’re downplaying the violation. Even ignoring the Stzork stuff, there’s no legal line here, we just have to assume the good intent of the people authorizing the investigation.
Or, to rephrase, I don’t think anyone would be comfortable if Trump had ordered the FBI, CIA, and NSA to rat-eff Biden rather than the Ukraine. There’s no line or Schelling points there worth defending; the core problem is that Congress and the President are able to use their powers to investigate their political rivals and any solution/limit needs to address that head-on, not draw lines on how some kinds of politically-motivated investigations are ok and others aren’t.
cassander:
What written law do you think the Bidens violated?
@albatross11 says:
At the absolute least, he’s violating federal ethics guidelines about accepting gifts, which I believe apply to close family members. I know they do for legislative officials. If he encouraged or solicited it, things are much worse. Possibly also conflict of interest laws.
In theory we could find out if that happened by investigation! In practice, I doubt Biden is fool enough to leave a paper trail.
@cassander:
Help who with the gutting and salting? Who, other than Zelensky, did Trump ask to investigate Biden? If there had been some ongoing FBI or Special Counsel investigation to which the Ukrainians could provide evidence, then you’d have a case. But then you’d have to accept US standards of transparency and due process in the overall investigation.
What possible legitimacy would a purely Ukranian, or Ukraine+Giuliani, investigation have had? Do you envision Hunter Biden being extradited to Kiev? Joe Biden spending time in a US prison because Zelinski said “he’s a crook” and had some Ukranian oligarchs offer testimony to that end? Or is it just about defaming Biden’s reputation?
@blipnickels:
I’m pretty certain that if any US president were to ask the CIA and NSA to secretly investigate their political opponents, the CIA and NSA would say no. That may change, and if it does it would be very worrisome. That’s the sort of thing I want to see stopped early here.
And if you think that Clinton and/or Obama had the CIA and NSA secretly investigate Donald Trump, I’m pretty sure you are A: mistaken and B: not paying attention.
But, sure, we can go into 2024 with say President Warren’s CIA tasked with digging up (or making up) the dirt on whoever the Republicans put up to challenge her. The Democrats won’t complain, and when Republicans whine about it everybody will laugh and say “you asked for it”. Unless, maybe, they stop asking for it.
@John Schilling
Excellent, a clear factual disagreement. While the origins of the Russia investigation aren’t as clear as I’d like, the official start appears to be Operation Crossfire Hurricane, a joint NSA, CIA, and FBI into connections between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the election.
The wikipedia article even mentions John Brennan’s testimony in May 2017 to the House Intelligence Committee that a group of officials from the CIA, NSA, and FBI to investigate and in a July interview that he, as CIA director, gave information to the FBI information which “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred.”
This was running in 2016, at the height of the election, against the presidential candidate of the rival party. No one involved could have reasonably been unaware of the political reality of this investigation and it’s impacts; nor is there any reasonable way Obama could have been unaware of this. Nor is there much public evidence about what investigators did what, when, and who knew and authorized it, which is perhaps understandable for top secret agencies but depends very heavily on the target of the investigation believing he was treated fairly.
If you have some other information, I’d love to hear it, but I honestly did not consider this matter under factual dispute, merely the legitimacy thereof.
@John Schilling says:
And, more importantly, accept the rampant leaking, the accusations of “trump is using the CIA to spy on his enemies”, and the immediate collapse of the investigation even if it’s completely legitimate and by the book. Far better to get someone else to throw down the gauntlet, even if your only motivation is justice.
In the eyes of american democrats, more than a trump administration investigation. Not that that’s a high bar, mind you.
the CIA did get caught spying on the senate not all that long ago. I might believe that the CIA would refuse (or at least stonewall) Trump’s request to do that, but not any other president’s unless it was extremely blatant.
Which your cited source describes in the masthead as an “FBI investigation”. I thought I was pretty clear that the FBI and DOJ are supposed to do this sort of thing, in a way that the CIA and NSA aren’t. If the FBI asks the CIA and DOJ to provide specific assistance from their areas of expertise, that’s still a very different thing than the CIA and NSA running their own investigation.
Also completely missing from your cited source is the bit where Obama and/or Clinton initiated any of this. Again, I thought I was pretty clear that there is and ought to be a line between law enforcement agencies deciding to initiate criminal investigations, and politicians directing policemen (or worse, spies) to go after specific political opponents.
The CIA is prohibited by law from investigating US citizens and permanent residents, except under specific and largely incidental circumstances. If the CIA had been investigating Donald Trump, as opposed to investigating Russia and sharing relevant information with the FBI at the request of the FBI, that would have been a very big deal. If the CIA had been doing this because Barack Obama had called John Brennan and said “Investigate the crap out of Donald Trump”, that would have been an even bigger deal. But that doesn’t seem to have happened. And that’s the standard that applies here.
So we’re in agreement that the CIA and the NSA were involved in the investigation of Trump and Russia. We may disagree on the extent or propriety of that involvement, but we agree they were involved, right?
No, nobody is supposed to be doing that sort of thing! No one wants regular investigations of rival presidential candidates, especially around election season. I’m not aware of any FBI investigations into a presidential campaign pre-2016 and we’ve had at least 2 since then. The line where we say “Well, the FBI might be investigating the rival presidential candidate but at least the NSA and CIA aren’t too involved” is a pointless one. In extreme cases (which is probably the best defense of Mueller et al) it may be legally necessary to investigate for the good of the nation but it’s supposed to be so discouraged that even a successful investigation has serious political consequences and a failed one should have apocalyptic ones. Right now there’s no political consequences and that’s Bad.
What’s the story where Obama didn’t OK this? Did a 3 agency investigation into one of the biggest political stories in modern history involving the rival presidential candidate not warrant a mention in the daily brief? Did Brennan go behind Obama’s back and investigate a political rival without telling him? Did Obama secretly disapprove but just couldn’t overrule Brennan et al? Seriously, what’s the story where Obama didn’t know? And not having any transparency on what Obama knew and/or approved of 3+ years later is not an argument in his favor.
So don’t order it yourself, just give your underlings a nod and wink before they go do it? I mean, I agree one is more uncouth, but the end result looks the same.
And as a final note, I’m not sure I trust the CIA and NSA to investigate presidential candidates to any extent. I’m not sure they’ve earned it.
@cassander
Yeah, that’s actually one of my greatest fears. That at some point the Democratics will be ordering investigations into Republicans and Republicans will be ordering investigations into Democrats and who wins will be decided by who various agencies side with.
If the Bidens weren’t so obviously guilty
I object. This assumes things we don’t know.
I think this is your logic:
1. Hunter Biden lent his name to Burisma.
2. Since Hunter Biden is worthless, he must have been selling something corrupt.
3. For this corruption to be valuable, Joe Biden needed to co-operate.
I agree through the middle of step 2: Hunter Biden is worthless. But this does not mean that Biden was necessarily selling something corrupt. While the business world, over time and in aggregate, generally comes to sensible arrangements, individual businesses make incredibly dumb decisions all the time.
Hunter Biden, having nothing else to sell besides his name, was eventually going to find a buyer, even if the buyer gets nothing of value. Economists have studied this.
Your C is clearly untrue, and irrelevant. The Obama admin used government resources to go after its political opponents several times, including Trump. Did so clandestinely every time, and only admitted to the conduct after being found out by outside groups after stonewalling. In many cases it still refuses to admit its conduct and such agents obstruct and defame investigators like IG Horowitz on a regular basis, attempting to discredit his investigation.
And this makes your other “Schelling points” irrelevant because this is the inner wall. Its like saying, “well we can’t have the Carthaginians crossing the Alps, while their armies are already sacking Rome.”
@ Clutzy
I’m really enjoying the arguments here. Honest question:
Can you give more details, or pointers to more details? I see that Carter Page is mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Horowitz, but what are the other examples (besides Trump)?
@Alice
Fox News journalist James Rosen’s phone records (and his parents phone records!) were seized in order to get a source, Stephen Kim. Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator in the investigation and had his international travel limited. Generals David Petraeus and James Cartwright were prosecuted for leaks after being publicly critical of administration decisions in war. In all at least 10 leakers to media about illegal conduct were indicted under Obama (Snowden being the most famous). The IRS targeted conservative groups via a codeword system, and “lost” records that would have been dispositive to intent. The DOJ and Treasury used their regulatory control over banking organizations to force banks like JP Morgan to cut ties with customers that had not violated the law, most prominent among these: Gun dealers and manufacturers. The DOJ (and EPA) used a controversial system known as “sue and settle” to sue politically disfavored companies and then funnel the settlement money to politically favored charities. This policy was recently repealed.
And, of course the crown jewel is Crossfire Hurricane (and its predecessors which go back to at least 2015), where a full blown FBI/CIA/NSA joint operation spied on political opponents based nothing but political propaganda that had not been independently verified (so far as we know, and we usually know Democratic-favoring facts very quickly).
Wasn’t Petreus fired for sharing classified information with his mistress/biographer?
The Obama administration had a shit record of going after whistleblowers, especially after promising to be the most transparent ever, and the press did minimal coverage of it.
@ Clutzy, thanks for the reply/info.
There’s been calls for Trump’s impeachment before his inauguration. And they didn’t stop when the Mueller report came out and said “Sorry boys, no Russian collusion”. So the new reason for impeachment doesn’t really move the needle.
I suspect in a more normal administration, the Ukraine thing would definitely have been a scandal, but it wouldn’t have gone to impeachment quickly if at all, and might have affected electoral chances more. But the whole “Oh yeah we were going to impeach him over Russia, which didn’t happen, but now we’ve got Ukraine which totally did happen so we’ll impeach him over that” thing weakens the sting considerably.
If you want to criticize the Democrats for thinking that having the Trump-hate dialed up to 11 all the time, sure. The Democrats did that, and I thought it was stupid.
But there has been a bump in people who now think Trump should be impeached.
https://www.newsweek.com/majority-now-want-donald-trump-impeached-removed-office-poll-1464316
Probably the most embarassing thing NR has published trying not to look sexist yet.
I’m not following the impeachment stuff so this might be wildly off, but it seems to me that the Democratic strategy has to fail. Barring a recording of Trump doing something wildly illegal the Senate will reject it and the Ds will come across as losing. Is there some meta play here where independents are going to look at an impeachment inquiry that got no results as a positive for the Dems?
Maybe they’ll get something damaging enough to move the electorate. If they keep digging, maybe they’ll even get something that shocks the shriveled consciences of the Republicans in the Senate (and maybe the horse will learn to sing). But mostly, it helps them in their home districts where they can be seen as fighting the good fight against Trump.
I think the most significant effect may be the damage done to Biden, which may give Trump his second term.
The Democratic strategy is to distract Trump from governing and his supporters from demanding he govern. It’s the same goal as the Russia investigation. They’ve done that beautifully. It’s sickening to watch as Trump supporters treat him staying in office as some kind of accomplishment.
I don’t exactly disagree, but having someone in office who isn’t actively trying to destroy you (or things you value), even if he’s accomplishing nothing, is a huge win when the alternative is someone who is trying to destroy you.
Pretty much. Every day Hillary Clinton isn’t President is a gift from God, even if the unfortunate substitute is Donald J Trump.
Since my order of preference is anyone in office and not governing, someone in office and doing stupid things that aren’t all that harmful (e.g. the Wall), and someone in office raising taxes and tearing down entire sectors of the economy (Warren’s socialized medicine)… I’ll take it.
Sure, I’d prefer someone in office governing well… but who ever heard of that happening?
Earlier, I didn’t support impeachment, because I felt that a failed impeachment would overall be more damaging than letting it sit. So if-ever impeachment was started, it had to be good enough to succeed, and it had to be good enough that his defenders (or enough of them) would realize the gig was up.
But I’ve just become so weary. So, so weary, and worn out, and burnt out with all the crap.
I remember back during Bill Clinton’s administration, when Bill betrayed me[1]. He said, to my face[1], that he didn’t do it, and I went with that, and it turned out he was lying to me[1]. I just couldn’t do it any more. I was done.
And, while I still think a failed impeachment is damaging, I also realize that this can be weaponized against me. If a group (either the Senate Republicans or his populist supporters) just commits to defending him no matter what, then nothing can get over that hurdle, and literally anything goes, so fuck it. And the “defend no matter what” group also takes less dramatic solutions off of the table, since Trump can read those signals as easily as me and realize that he can get away with anything.
[1] This wasn’t obviously personally to my face. But that is how I took it.
Thank you for all the replies! I’ll revisit this in two weeks.
Variations among sexual phenotypes are really complicated.
I feel an urgent need to point out that largely sterile mutations are not another sex. They’re a failure to produce a proper one. “2% of live births are genetically abnormal and might not properly develop sexual characteristics” is not an argument for sex being a spectrum.
I’m not sure if I’m right on this, and I’m afraid I’m going to phrase this too awkwardly, but my understanding is that each fetus has the structural potential to develop into either sex, with one path essentially activated by chromosomes as development continues. That is a very simplified version of it, but hopefully it is fairly accurate. In some of the ambiguous cases, especially related to chromosome abnormalities, features of both are present. So while most people fall on one side or the other, the two sexes are not, as I understand it, mutually exclusive. In this sense, it seems fair to say that something spectrum-like exists, even if most people are at the extremes. People may disagree on the significance of the small number of cases, but I think whether or not two categories are mutually exclusive matters quite a bit when we’re claiming we can enforce boundaries. I think of this a lot with regard to embryos and how they can split and recombine. These things are really complicated.
If it’s a spectrum, it’s more like an emission spectrum than a thermal spectrum. Two distinct bright lines, and just a bit of noise around and between.
Yes. I get that it can seem like mere quibbling about a few outliers. But that there can be overlap, such that the outliers are not just “dysfunctional” versions of one or the other, but actually contain elements of both, seems to be very crucial if we’re trying to act like the sexual dichotomy thing is just generally “obvious” and some rule of morality or nature. It is obvious enough that most people appear to be one or the other, and that the roles are generally complementary. But it seems more significant to me, philosophically, that there are people who actually have traits of both sexes than that there are people whose traits do not seem to match easily with either one. That coexistence seems like a red flag for investing a lot in a binary identity structure to the point of being offended by or dismissive of deviations from it. I realize that, socially and functionally, sex will matter a lot, and society will organize around it. But, particularly with controversial personal issues, I think it is important to be honest about the fact that it isn’t actually a dichotomy, even though most people reasonably assumed so for a long time and many still do. Reading old medical textbooks from the 1800s is very interesting with regard to this–most believed it was better, socially, to pretend the dichotomy was real, and lie to their patients. But that’s not the same as it being real, and they pretty early on accepted was false.
I don’t deny the exceptions, but they are few. And most of them cluster pretty closely with the main lines — 47,XXY usually results in a slightly abnormal male phenotype, most of the time, 45,X a slightly abnormal female one, for instance. Being dismissive of exceptions is wrong, but it’s less wrong than being dismissive of the binary structure in the first place.
I don’t see why this makes much difference, when the bimodality is so strong. There’s no clear biological line that separates most categories that humans care about. There’s a clearer line here than for racial or cultural boundaries, but people enforce the hell out of those. Right wing people, left wing people, pretty much just all people. Racial and cultural boundaries maybe aren’t all well justified but almost everyone acts like they are. And then there are lots of categories with no natural boundaries relating to law etc. that people enforce all the time. And a good chunk of those with fairly good reason.
It depends on what type of enforcement. Yes, people will socially enforce sorting people into categories based on literally everything. It is certainly possible for exceptions to a dichotomy not to have much significance in the real world, as the model is “good enough” for most people on a practical level. I’m talking about people who tend to read more into things and who go for certainty. I’m talking about philosophical or religious arguments, or debates in which people are really assuming that there is some major significance attached to sex differences, or appealing to the fact that nature/God made two categories and put people in one of them. Sometimes these things influence law, etc., but they also just influence thinking patterns. Realizing that humans are complex in ways that we’d never imagine is a helpful thing to keep in mind.
I don’t believe in God, and I admit those arguments are usually uninteresting to me but what I have read of Catholic arguments about natural law or Islamic rules about cases like intersex people makes me think they are actually very aware of the complexities and take them into account.
Overall they appear to me to be more rigorous and careful than most secular stories that claim to be all about the nuance. There are more careful secular philosophers like Peter Singer, but Peter Singer reaches all sorts of uncomfortable conclusions on many topics that put him well outside the secular mainstream.
Protestants of various stripes on the other hand, I’ve tended to find… wanting. Not that there aren’t good Protestant theologians or philosophers. I just think the average Protestant worldview tends to be less friendly to complex treatises. Which isn’t necessarily bad, since there are upsides to simpler or less explicit rules and encouraging people to make their own moral decisions.
And law is heinously into particulars so I think it’s pretty inaccurate to claim that law happens to be into unreasonable certainty in this narrow area.
So you leave me in the same place. I can think of bad examples but I can also think of good examples, and whether or not people take into account rare cases has little effect on the overall conclusions they reach about enforcing norms. It’s other commitments, beliefs, or ideas that seem to drive most of conclusions.
@quanta413
Agreed. This is what was on my mind, but I figured I wouldn’t veer off into that direction if no one else would get my reference. I’m not religious either, but find it an interesting topic. Clearly, most leading Catholic and Islamic thinkers haven’t dismissed the idea of sex roles. But many feel no need to furiously assert the dichotomy and deny or even laugh off exceptions. Some do a good job, IMO, discussing nuances and at times reconciling difficult positions. While I know most people are not this sophisticated in their thinking, I feel like we insist on crude reasoning when we don’t have to do so. For example, getting stuck in the life does/does not begin at conception thing. Human life is created at conception, but how many humans that ends up being is dicey for quite a while, with the embryo able to split and recombine and all that. I think that is a pretty good hint that defining “personhood” at the embryo level is not a wildly obvious translation of God’s will. I’m not saying that a good argument can’t be put forth that takes this into account–religious thinkers have come down on both sides. But I think it is the sort of thing that forces a “stop and think” moment that we can generally use more of. And the crude reasoning occurs on all sides of the divide–I’m not calling out pro-lifers specifically at all, I just think this example is good because it is something that seems to have a clear dividing line, but turns out to be more complicated.
Of course, on the secular side, people don’t even try to draw lines that hold up under scrutiny, but refuse to stop using it as a rhetorical technique. Maybe this is hard to do without a broader religious/philosophical grounding, but I don’t really have such a grounding and I find it manageable. I think of people like my grandparents were, pretty intelligent but not highly educated, practical in their approach to life, doing what makes sense and for the most part and having a live and let live approach. They assumed nature/God made two sexes, and they didn’t care that much if people expressed different beliefs, certainly not outside their own family, but they did assume there was something inherently “wrong” about going against what seemed like an obvious order of things. Not until late in life had they heard of intersex conditions, but once they did, it seemed to make quite a change in their perception. Nature/God wasn’t that scrupulous about drawing lines there–some things are complicated. They weren’t suddenly comfortable with gender fluidity, but they seemed to see it as something as foolish to try and control using broad rules, and made peace with that. I think a lot of people are capable of this attitude, and are happy once they realize they aren’t being asked to pretend to ignore an obvious line in the sand, even if they have their own personal set of lines.
Yes, this is a very interesting dynamic. Protestants intentionally broke with unified tradition/authority on these points, and therefore is just a different animal. When there are a bunch of sects breaking off, reconciling inconsistencies doesn’t need to happen. As you said, there are upsides and downsides. At this point, I don’t think many people in any religion in the U.S. spend much time on theology, so I’m not sure how much of an effect it has today. The freedom of choice and belief of modern America has kind of universalized the approach, I think.
I don’t have an issue with making laws relating to sex or gender, but I do have an issue with claiming to be merely codifying nature’s laws rather than making a choice to define things in a way that is workable in real life. We should keep in mind the difference. Man-made laws are inevitably *to some extent* arbitrary, and that is okay, *as long as we do not lose sight of it.*
I agree that it is commitments/beliefs/ideas driving the show, but I think edge cases go a long way in establishing natural limits to many people’s sense of certainty in their ideas. There are a lot of prejudiced people who will point out, to much laughter and derision, that “there are some good ones” in whatever group they are prejudiced against. They notice that they are having trouble actually drawing a line, and it registers with them. Their bigotry is still dangerous, but probably not nearly so much as if their belief existed without a perception of the edge cases. The law very much gets involved with how things are classified and the nature of them, and keeps edge cases very much in mind. And I’m saying that is the best approach.
Right now, we have very goofy simplistic discussions about things that were discussed with nuance by people alive in 1823, despite all their prejudices. People don’t need to act like simpletons to justify proposed limitations, shoehorning everything into their scheme. They can acknowledge the hard cases and make a slightly higher level argument. Whether they fail or succeed, it is the healthier approach for society, acknowledging that trade-offs will be made instead of claiming to codify existing reality. Thank you for your thoughtful response, and sorry for the ranting reply! It was helpful in clarifying my own thoughts.
@quanta413
(My comment instantly disappeared–hope this does not duplicate)
Agreed. This is what was on my mind, but I figured I wouldn’t veer off into that direction if no one else would get my reference. I’m not religious either, but find it an interesting topic. Clearly, most leading Catholic and Islamic thinkers haven’t dismissed the idea of sex roles. But many feel no need to furiously assert the dichotomy and deny or even laugh off exceptions. Some do a good job, IMO, discussing nuances and at times reconciling difficult positions. While I know most people are not this sophisticated in their thinking, I feel like we insist on crude reasoning when we don’t have to do so. For example, getting stuck in the life does/does not begin at conception thing. Human life is created at conception, but how many humans that ends up being is dicey for quite a while, with the embryo able to split and recombine and all that. I think that is a pretty good hint that defining “personhood” at the embryo level is not a wildly obvious translation of God’s will. I’m not saying that a good argument can’t be put forth that takes this into account–religious thinkers have come down on both sides. But I think it is the sort of thing that forces a “stop and think” moment that we can generally use more of. And the crude reasoning occurs on all sides of the divide–I’m not calling out pro-lifers specifically at all, I just think this example is good because it is something that seems to have a clear dividing line, but turns out to be more complicated.
Of course, on the secular side, people don’t even try to draw lines that hold up under scrutiny, but refuse to stop using it as a rhetorical technique. Maybe this is hard to do without a broader religious/philosophical grounding, but I don’t really have such a grounding and I find it manageable. I think of people like my grandparents were, pretty intelligent but not highly educated, practical in their approach to life, doing what makes sense and for the most part and having a live and let live approach. They assumed nature/God made two sexes, and they didn’t care that much if people expressed different beliefs, certainly not outside their own family, but they did assume there was something inherently “wrong” about going against what seemed like an obvious order of things. Not until late in life had they heard of intersex conditions, but once they did, it seemed to make quite a change in their perception. Nature/God wasn’t that scrupulous about drawing lines there–some things are complicated. They weren’t suddenly comfortable with gender fluidity, but they seemed to see it as something as foolish to try and control using broad rules, and made peace with that. I think a lot of people are capable of this attitude, and are happy once they realize they aren’t being asked to pretend to ignore an obvious line in the sand, even if they have their own personal set of lines.
Yes, this is a very interesting dynamic. Protestants intentionally broke with unified tradition/authority on these points, and therefore is just a different animal. When there are a bunch of sects breaking off, reconciling inconsistencies doesn’t need to happen. As you said, there are upsides and downsides. At this point, I don’t think many people in any religion in the U.S. spend much time on theology, so I’m not sure how much of an effect it has today. The freedom of choice and belief of modern America has kind of universalized the approach, I think.
I don’t have an issue with making laws relating to sex or gender, but I do have an issue with claiming to be merely codifying nature’s laws rather than making a choice to define things in a way that is workable in real life. We should keep in mind the difference. Man-made laws are inevitably *to some extent* arbitrary, and that is okay, *as long as we do not lose sight of it.*
I agree that it is commitments/beliefs/ideas driving the show, but I think edge cases go a long way in establishing natural limits to many people’s sense of certainty in their ideas. There are a lot of prejudiced people who will point out, to much laughter and derision, that “there are some good ones” in whatever group they are prejudiced against. They notice that they are having trouble actually drawing a line, and it registers with them. Their bigotry is still dangerous, but probably not nearly so much as if their belief existed without a perception of the edge cases. The law very much gets involved with how things are classified and the nature of them, and keeps edge cases very much in mind. And I’m saying that is the best approach.
Right now, we have very goofy simplistic discussions about things that were discussed with nuance by people alive in 1823, despite all their prejudices. People don’t need to act like simpletons to justify proposed limitations, shoehorning everything into their scheme. They can acknowledge the hard cases and make a slightly higher level argument. Whether they fail or succeed, it is the healthier approach for society, acknowledging that trade-offs will be made instead of claiming to codify existing reality. Thank you for your thoughtful response, and sorry for the ranting reply! It was helpful in clarifying my own thoughts.
Jewish legal literature recognized four sexual categories: male, female, hermaphrodite, and tumtum. The last seems to have been someone whose genitals were not observable, so it wasn’t known if the person was male or female—nobody seems to be sure exactly what medical phenomenon it corresponded to.
There were discussions of what the religious obligations of the last two were, given that males and females had different obligations.
@mtl1882
Thank you for your response. I don’t have much more to say.
I agree that for people who haven’t thought about it much, the existence of exceptions can lead to some changes in their thinking.
@David Friedman
Thanks, that’s very interesting. I’m trying to understand what the tumtum category might correspond to although it sounds like from what you say, no one is 100% sure. I can’t think of any physical phenotype quite like that or at least not permanently like that, especially since hermaphrodite is already a category.
I also saw this video, and thought that the meat of it — explaining various intersex conditions — was good, but the apparent thesis “this proves biological sex is a spectrum, not a binary” just obviously didn’t follow. In addition to what woah said, a “spectrum” implies the kind of continuous distribution where almost every individual is somewhat different from all the others: if you get 50 people in a room and examine the shape & size of their noses, you’ll get a wide variety and no exact matches. But with sex, there are two very specific, overwhelmingly common setups that together make up +98% of the population, and then 1~2% that are somewhat abnormal, often dysfunctional versions of the main two. Sounds like an imperfectly executed binary.
“Sex is two big clusters, a bunch of little clusters, and a few harder cases” isn’t a very catchy title though.
I think Jerry Coyne said “Human sexes are bimodal” which is about as catchy as your “imperfectly executed binary”.
That also applies to elections in the US — does that make Libertarian and Green and independent and Constitution voters “abnormal” or “dysfunctional”?
Um, duh?
They all systematically fail at the central purpose of a party so they are, like, the poster child of dysfunctional. And they are so abnormal that the only on of them that anybody even knows about keeps running on the Democrat ticket to try washing off the stink.
But anyway, it is just a bad analogy.
Minor political parties have a different goal than winning elections. Many people support third parties as a way of getting an otherwise-excluded set of ideas into widespread currency, while recognizing they’re not going to win any elections. The existence of a couple percent of voters who preferred Libertarians to Republicans or Greens to Democrats also offers a pretty clear opportunity to the major parties about a way they could increase their vote totals next time around.
Indeed, the same happens with many presidential campaigns–I’d guess Andrew Yang knows he’s not going to win the Democratic nomination this year, but hopes to get the idea of UBI into the heads of a lot of people. Ron Paul ran for president on the Republican ticket many times; it was obvious he wasn’t going to win, but he got the chance to push back on the whole put-our-endless-wars-on-the-credit-card consensus, and that was worthwhile.
As someone vaguely libertarian (at least compared to what we actually get), I agree that libertarian voters (which would include me around half the time) are definitely abnormal.
And arguably, libertarian thought is almost guaranteed to be dysfunctional as far as winning elections as a political party a multiparty democracy. Taking it seriously pretty much locks you out of all the wheel-greasing and log-rolling that makes politics function.
Maybe greens could be argued to be a potentially viable new mutant (although it looks pretty unlikely) since their ideology may be more compatible with politics and with government. Sort of like Republicans once were a potentially viable new mutant. And then they were one of the big two.
Right—they are certainly outliers, but it seems to me that if we’re trying to make good decisions about, for example, winning third party votes or in any way engaging with third party members politically, it matters quite a bit whether we conceptualize Libertarians and Greens as:
1) Dysfunctional Democrats,
2) Dysfunctional Republicans,
3) Neither, or
4) A Democrat-Republican “hybrid.”
It seems silly to me to think of these people as “really” belonging to one of the major parties but somehow being mistaken about it, or malfunctioning in trying to carry out this membership. When something is broken, it can’t fulfill its intended purpose, but we don’t know the intended purpose of every person. They may agree more with one of the major parties, and benefit more from aligning with it, but for some reason or another, they are opting out.
“Neither” is “playing a different game,” not being bad at being a Democrat or Republican. As is pointed out below, you can argue a third party’s goal is not winning an election, but influencing the election or the conversation, or various other things. They are arguably entirely separate entities, not some watered down version of a major party. Memorable third-party candidates tend not to be derivative–even if their beliefs are close to one party, they are big, quirky, individualistic personalities who are an ideology unto themselves.
When people puzzle over all the independent/swing voters and what they must be thinking, we run into a similar issue. A lot of people will jump in and say most are defective partisans—they say they are independent, but always vote one way. This is a version of “they are really Democrats/Republicans, but something in them malfunctions and creates an impulse to show off and care more about projecting superior thoughtfulness, so they give the wrong answer.” I think this is a thing, but not a huge thing. I bet most of them do tend to vote consistently, but the fact that they are not comfortable committing suggests that perhaps something doesn’t sit right with them and if the other party were to play to that issue, they might “suddenly” shift.
This wouldn’t be bizarre—I think a lot of people are like this. I do not think they are exact Democrat-Republican hybrids, moderates across the board, which is the other explanation commonly given. Some are, but I think most are an abnormal combination of strong stances that are split across parties. I don’t think this makes them a defective Democrat or Republican–the way things are arranged along partisan lines is by no means inherently correct or stable. They can’t really be “both” in this case because they do have to pick one party or the other in voting for a candidate, but they have traits of both. It is wrong to assume that, on an individual level, one belief is mutually exclusive with another just because they are held by different parties. They will have to pick one when they vote, but which party they pick may “suddenly” shift, because their other beliefs didn’t disappear. It’s not safe to assume they’re on one side only, and it’s generally not safe to conflate a “neither” with a hybrid. A neither is playing a different game altogether, and must be dealt with on those terms. They may not believe in participating at all, or they may be getting an insurgency together.
I don’t find that analogy compelling. For one thing, we have reasons to think that the sexes are natural kinds (chromosomal evidence, observation of other animals and even plants) that simply don’t apply to US politics. For another thing, turnout in US elections is generally between 50 and 60%, so Republican and Democrat voters can’t make up 98% of the population.
Also, I think you’ve misunderstood the point about “abnormal” and “dysfunctional”. He wasn’t saying that the 1-2% are dysfunctional because they’re rare, but introducing that as an extra reason to treat them as an imperfectly executed binary.
@The original Mr. X
I didn’t mean it as an analogy for the sexual binary—I know the discussion is mixed in so it is natural to draw that conclusion, but I didn’t mention sex in that post. It was intended as an objection to the characterization of the political system on its own terms. Democrat and Republican are completely man-made categories, *and* you actually do have to vote or register one way or the other, so you can’t be both simultaneously. But I was objecting to the idea that they are the only two options, and everyone else is a failed version of a partisan. In the original post, dysfunctional was defined as failing at the central purpose of the party, which in both cases is getting itself elected. Dysfunction, unlike abnormality, is defined by the idea that something has gone wrong by some standard. As you point out, a lot of people just stay home. Why would we generally define their functionality, or libertarians’, according to the priorities of the two major parties?
Something may arguably be “wrong” here with nonparticipants, but it would seem to be relative to our general society/political system, not partisan identification. It is much easier to define sexual dysfunction, since you can point to reproduction as an “objective” natural purpose, but most kinds of sexual dysfunction occur among people who identify as men or women, and don’t indicate deviations from the binary arrangement. The existence of a tiny third group might indicate an imperfectly executed binary, but it could also mean a third group that exists on its own terms. The former can’t be assumed from numbers alone.
“Dysfunctional” generally implies that there’s something wrong in the thing itself, rather than that it’s simply unable to fulfil its function due to external circumstances or that it does something that someone else finds inconvenient. So a third party which has trouble gaining traction because the US electoral system tends to favour people grouping into two main parties, or a person who chooses not to vote, wouldn’t count as dysfunctional because they’re nothing actually wrong with them, they’re just in an environment that’s unconducive to achieving their goals (in the party example) or behaving in a way that’s inconvenient to party bigwigs (in the voter example).
As for sexual dysfunction, the reason we have different sexes in the first place is because they’re necessary for reproduction. And I think that’s the main reason for considering hermaphrodites and the like to be the results of an imperfectly-executed binary rather than a third gender in their own right — the biological purpose behind males and females is pretty clear, but there’s no clear purpose for having intersex, hermaphrodites, etc. So there seems no plausible reason for human evolution to develop a third group that it exists on its own terms, whereas we do know that things sometimes go wrong in a developing person.
Note that fully functional hermaphrodites, capable of both impregnating and being impregnated, would qualify as a third gender. They exist in many species, but to my knowledge, humans have not produced such a thing.
I agree that “spectrum” is the wrong word, but I’m not sure what the best way of expressing “isn’t a simple bimodality” is.
I believe the video as an argument against the idea that male and female are deep metaphysical truths, when they’re actually pretty contingent and an oversimplification.
@mtl1882 comment
I’m grateful for this– it’s a good explanation of problems with binary thinking. May I repost it to facebook?
Sure–glad it was helpful. For number 4), I should have written “Democrat-Republican Hybrids” instead of making it singular, so you might want to edit that for clarity. Just noticed the mistake!
Thank you.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10216256634911002
Does anyone know how much modern hunter-gatherers use ostracism? I don’t think we can find out about early hunter-gatherers, though I’ll grant there’s a possibility considering the trend of getting more and more information from surprisingly little data.
The usual evo-psych model seems to assume it was a standard punishment, but it seems to me that it would be unlikely if a person was somewhat useful. Ostracism makes more sense if you have people to spare. Instead, I expect that a low-status person in a hunter-gatherer tribe would be steadily harassed– something like the way Sapolsky describes baboon behavior. I’m guessing, though.
I’ve heard a story about Native Americans just abandoning leaders they don’t want, but I don’t know whether it’s true.
Ostracism and murder (or both, where a person is ritually ejected then killed after they lose group protection) appear to vary by culture, environment, and even immediate resource availability. Even among close related eskimo bands, the rates vary widely. I’m not aware if they actually investigated why that might be, though the study just chalked it up to a dearth of resources and called it a day.
However, it’s widely agreed their threat is common and a mechanism of social control. Interestingly, this is not just low ranked people: it appears to be commonly employed against leaders as you describe. People do not like being dominated and overweening leaders can be ejected for basically that.
Native Americans tended to be significantly more organized and complex than pure hunter-gatherer societies. It varies by case but usually when Native Americans abandoned a leader it was more like a king being abandoned by their nobles. The leader would still have a personal retinue but that was still a great reduction in power, capability, and prestige. Genghis Khan’s early life is an example of what that sort of abandonment looked like from the other side of the world: they still had servants and a home and all that but they were by no means important and had to retreat to sub-optimal land.
It’s a matter of independence and a lack of coercive mechanism in that case. Those individual minor chiefs could leave without losing very much materially unless the major chief could punish them. And if most of the leader’s forces left then he was (by definition) losing that ability. Like medieval kings, great chiefs would spend a lot of their time warring against disobedient vassals.
Because of an accident with the temporal electrochromodynamic blah-blah from your earlier adventure in the year 1955, you are now trapped in a university library from the year 2010. You will remain trapped for four years. The library is fully stocked and empty of people, and your handlers have been able to provide you with everything required for basic life support for the four years.
How do you spend this time?
Basic life support in 2010 obviously includes Wifi, so…
I accidentally step on my glasses.
As it happens I did regularly trap myself in a university library in 2010.
How I spent this time was reading lesswrong.
I’d build a huge castle out of books, then sit up in my watchtower and teach myself Russian.
A fully stocked 2010s university library would naturally include computers and an internet connection, so I spend the time playing videogames, browsing reddit, and watching anime. The main difference from how I live now would be I feel less guilty about it due to being trapped, and I make a tonne of money off of bitcoin which I regretted not doing the first time through 2010-14.
What are the design considerations/solutions/tactics for long range missile guidance in space (where long range means your target is in a very different orbit, is in the opposite part of the same orbit, or is orbiting a different body)? I’m thinking hours or days long travel time. Would we expect it to be easy to confuse the missiles by making lowish delta-v maneuvers that result in large trajectory changes, and then reversing the maneuver after the missile adjusts its course? What sort of maneuvers will be most effective for defeating missiles? Or do most engagement scenarios make it relatively easy for the missile to adjust course no matter what the target does? Or does the missile just have such a delta-v advantage that even good maneuvers are easy to match? What’s the long range space missile meta game? What sort of guidance algorithms should the missiles use, and what maneuvers should ships use to defeat them?
Almost certainly this is going to be done the same way long-range missile attacks against moving targets are done on Earth – by periodic midcourse command updates, probably via encrypted tightbeam laser communication. Tracking targets across long range requires specialized sensors that you may find inconveniently large and/or expensive for a relatively small and expendable missile, and it particularly benefits from having multiple sensors looking at the same target from multiple angles. That’s not a job for a missile.
So whoever does that job, collates the information and broadcasts an update to every in-flight missile every mumble minutes, saying “Ensure that your current course is X; activate your terminal guidance sensor at time Y and look for signature Z”.
It’s possible that the platforms which do this could themselves be very missile-like. The Soviets used to (and Russia still may) have a trick for launching say twenty missiles at a distant enemy fleet, one of which would fly at high altitude so that it could track the fleet on radar. And in so doing make itself blooding obvious to anyone with a functioning air defense system, but until it gets shot down it is giving midcourse guidance updates to ninenteen missiles staying low and quiet. When #1 does get shot down, #2 climbs to altitude and takes over that role…
That sounds incredibly complex for Soviet era technology. These were cruise missiles? And autonomous? What kind of distances were they flying?
Antiship cruise missiles, capable of autonomous operations with a range of 500-800 kilometers. First reported example entered service in 1975.
That’s incredible. I find those sorts of engineering challenges without modern computers pretty amazing. bean’s posts about early guided bombs comes to mind, as well as the Link trainer.
Of course, these were never used operationally, so they might have just fallen apart in practice. Or exectuted a perfect coordinated missile swarm attack on an oil tanker twenty miles from the aircraft carrier they were supposed to hit. But just getting it to work in training exercises was a significant accomplishment, I agree.
Third cite credits “a team of scientists and designers of Central Scientific Research Institute Granit headed by its General Director V.V. Pavlov, Hero of Socialist Labour”
In what ways is Canada a freer country than the U.S.?
The big one from a stereotypical American freedom aesthetic perspective is that our litigation system is less of a twisted mess so many more ‘risky’ things are still allowed. Examples include surfaces idiots could slip on but are reasonably safe and Kinder Eggs being sold in stores. The explanation I’ve heard explaining this from my friends in law school is that the Canadian legal system leans on the word “reasonable” in a lot of its statutes and empowers judges to throw out frivolous suits very early, and make the plaintiff pay for the defendant’s legal costs in especially egregious cases.
The big one from a practical perspective is the healthcare system. It’s good enough for most things and you don’t have to worry about bad luck or a lost job + a minor ailment bankrupting you. Including time saved not wrestling with insurance, it’s a better deal for the bottom 80% of the income distribution, and the top 20% isn’t losing much since the US is less than 100 miles away (from all major population centers) if there’s something bespoke that you need.
Wait, could you please elaborate on Kinder Eggs? Don’t they sell them in US?
No, and in fact people have been fined for bringing them in from Canada in their luggage.
Kinder Eggs are banned for sale in the US because the toy inside “constitutes a choking hazard for children” or something to that effect.
Wow. The only precaution with Kinder Eggs we have in our country is the label that says something in the lines of “contains small details that might be inhaled, not suited for children under three.” I’d never guess.
Thanks for the explanation.
There is an egg-shaped Kinder product sold in the US, but it’s a Kinder Joy instead of a Kinder Surprise. Inside, one half of the plastic is filled with a chocolate spread, while the other half has a spoon and toy. It’s probably also worse chocolate – I found it too sweet even by the standards of American candy.
I like both Kinder Surprises and Kinder Joys, and still buy them sometimes, even though I’m an adult now. I find them both okay. One the other hand, I’ve got a sweet tooth.
Food with inedible stuff inside of it is banned under Federal law.
Canada scores marginally higher (freer) than the US on the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index. Canada is 8th; the United States is 12th.
Canada also places higher (freer) on the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index. Canada is 5th; the United States is 17th.
That’s a bit surprising, actually. I would have bet on Americans having more economic freedom, with Canada having the edge, if anywhere, in personal freedom. But I’ll take this excuse to celebrate. Woo! Canada, fuck yeah!
This shows once again that DC libertarians can’t be trusted.
From wikipedia:
All right, that caught my interest. The Internet only appears to know about this from two books by the same author, from which the Wikipedia text is lifted almost verbatim. Surely, this is merely the invention of some deranged mind?
The major difference in economic freedom is a measure they’re calling ‘fiscal health.’ It doesn’t seem to be explained or defined on their site. That’s one of the reasons I always dislike these sort of country-measurement things. I was actually surprised by how much information Heritage included, usually all you can see is a ranking.
Ah, so they’re deficit hawks. Canada seems to have a substantially lower national debt. Which seems to me like a stupid thing to include in “economic freedom,” but as usual they can’t resist including their favorite hobby horses.
Deciding that debt is equivalent to deferred taxation (if taxation counts negatively) doesn’t strike me as a terrible idea. Although more formalism would be nice.
As seen from Europe, Canada does seem freer on the protectionist angle, much more willing to sign trade agreements with various countries in the same time as the US renegate on existing agreements and impose new tarrifs like there’s no tomorrow.
That seems like you’re measuring the rate of change of protectionism, as opposed to the actual level of protectionism in place.
The culture is more easy-going in certain ways. So adding on to @Hypoborean’s point about the litigation system, there is also less of a cultural tendency to resort to the law. I haven’t checked the numbers, but I expect the number of police per capita is lower*; they are certainly less militarized. If it actually comes to asserting your rights or defending yourself in court, you have more guarantees in the U.S., but being less likely to be in such a situation to begin with is going to benefit the average person.
Another point to consider is that the federal government is relatively weak, resulting in a lot of local control. It’s pretty routine for provincial premiers to be elected with basically a mandate to challenge the federal government on some point or other, for example.
*In rural parts of the prairies, police response times often exceed an hour. Farmers and other residents are frustrated that all the police can do about theft is help fill out insurance claims. There have been some infamous cases recently where landowners have faced lawsuits or charges for firing [what they claimed were] warning shots that [ricocheted or had a hangfire and] injured or killed trespassers/attempted thieves.
I’ve just flipped through Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith’s comic book argument for open borders. One thing I noted: after addressing a variety of arguments against immigration (including ones related to economics, culture, crime, and the IQ gap), Caplan turns to the question of how likely open borders are to actually get enacted. He mentions, as a reason for pessimism/skepticism that anything will change, that we (the USA) don’t even have open borders with Canada. Caplan asserts that there’s no reason for this at all, just inertia and political apathy. It’s rare for Bryan Caplan to deny outright that any arguments against his favored policy even exist. Does anyone here want to dispute this? Why shouldn’t the United States have an open border with Canada?
I can see how there’s no good reason that’s relevant at this moment.
The best counterargument I can come up with is that once you open a border, closing it may not be easy. There’s no guarantee Canada and the U.S. will remain on friendly terms forever or that the biggest security hole will be the southern border of the U.S. It’s hard to see how this would change in the next few decades but it’s possible. Maybe a terrible pandemic occurs and starts spreading through Canada. You’re going to want to lock the border down tight and quarantine any recently arrived Canadians, and that’s going to be harder if you’ve let people move completely freely back and forth for decades and stopped checking who is crossing at checkpoints.
It seems farfetched, but I also don’t think the border between the U.S. and Canada is causing much damage either. On the other hand, I also doubt the current U.S. government would enforce serious quarantine procedures in time in the event of a pandemic even if they could, so my scenario is probably moot.
FWIW current thinking on how to deal with a pandemic doesn’t involve sealing any borders because (a) people travel so much by air it will have hopped the border long before you decide to close it, (b) closing the border messes up global supply chains of the medical equipment we’d need to fight the pandemic that is, at that point, already inside our borders, and (c) if you keep the border open but aggressively screen people coming it it would be easier to catch infected people than fully closing the border and having to worry about people sneaking into the country anyways.
(At least according to some people at the CDC that the podcast Science Versus got to interview)
This assumes a single infection means more infections don’t matter. A real pandemic(as opposed to the media’s “swine flu pandemic”) is pretty unlikely, but my hope is people won’t listen to these experts if it does.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/disaster-in-the-south-pacific/
If you can actually stop 100% of infected people entering the country, that’s obviously the preferred solution. However, seeing as the US does not and likely never will have that capacity, the expert consensus is the “best practices accounting for realistic constraints.”
Note that, for example, (c) is designed to catch as many infected people at the border as possible, using quarantine periods to clear people coming from high-risk areas as necessary.
Basically, I think this is a case of the expert consensus arguing against the equivalent of an immune system overreaction since they see and worry about that, and them not realizing that so many people don’t think about this that an under reaction (not increasing screening at the borders) is even possible.
Also note that the most recent horrific disease that emerged was essentially frozen in its tracks because the Western world was willing to deploy military + medical personnel to isolate it at its source, and now we have a vaccine for it so future outbreaks are less dangerous.
…the comment thread on the West Hunter blog post that you linked hasn’t exactly aged well, seeing as the “liberal” response to Ebola worked.
I think he meant to link to this one.
It has held up fine–Cochran correctly pointed out that ebola wouldn’t spread far in American conditions, but that you could reduce the number of American medical workers who got it by reducing the number of people with ebola who were let in. He’s also right that if there were a super-contagious highly-lethal disease, we’d need to stop all traffic in from infected regions. Though realistically, we probably couldn’t, and so we’d have a whole lot of deaths.
Alexander Turok’s answer about (a) is true although it’s possible for a pandemic to be so bad that you should abandon all hope of containing it. At that point though, you’re screwed no matter what you do. But usually the less people you have entering the country and the better you track who is entering, the more chance you have of getting potential carriers isolated, finding who they came into contact with and isolating them, etc.
But I don’t think (b) makes sense, and I think (c) is practically equivalent to “we’re going to close the border if it’s warranted” but said in a manner to avoid causing a negative response.
For (b), it’s possible to import critical goods while sealing the border against the free movement of people although depending on the level of safety you need it may make things significantly more expensive and lower the volume of imports. But that’s ok, because most imports are not as critical as not having 1-10% (or god forbid more) of the population die. Other countries aren’t trying to spread the pandemic. Everyone is invested in each country clearing the pandemic as quickly as possible and invested in not letting the pandemic spread. I also have difficulty believing the stock of medical supplies doesn’t outstrip the window you need to cover while you rearrange import procedures.
(c) only makes sense if you’re not going to have an open border. Not all infections can be easily detected with a quick test at all stages of infection. If the infection has an incubation period, then “aggressive screening” means you’d have to quarantine anyone coming in for however long the incubation period is before letting them cross or do some incredibly invasive screening of their recent health status (which is risky, difficult, and so time consuming anyways that you should probably just follow quarantine procedures). The border is all but closed if everyone who wants to cross has to wait in isolated quarantine for a week while their health is monitored.
And it’s going to be a lot easier to impose the necessary quarantine procedures at the crossing if you kept your border checkpoints and border patrol well staffed and maintained.
You’re assuming a lot more sensibility on the part of the “close borders” crowd than actually exists though. Remember that in 2014 we had Donald Trump screaming to “Let zero people from Africa into America”, not “Make sure everyone coming from countries with proven infections clears quarantine.” And that was when <5,000 people had died. Think about how loud that perspective is going to be if the global death toll crosses one million, heading for tens of millions.
(c) is the right way to reduce infections crossing the border, and makes much more sense than the actual commonly proposed (representative example, not strawman) "slam the border shut and let zero people through" approach.
Slam the border shut taken to max would also suggest stopping trade, since you wouldn't want to risk your border personnel interacting with crewmembers of foreign trade ships, hence the relevance of (b). For one example, most of the US's IV bags are currently made in Puerto Rico [which is technically part of the US but you and I both know would end up on the wrong side of a hard quarantine wall if one was imposed].
quanta:
I’d expect the quarantine thing to happen if there were a sufficiently scary contagious disease circulating. Though it’s quite possible that it would be done too late, or otherwise mishandled. My sense is that the US public health people are quite competent, but our political leadership is mostly pretty lousy.
@Hypborean
The original question was “Are there any good arguments for not having open borders” where open borders means “no border controls” or close enough as to make no difference. The context is a book by Bryan Caplan who is extremely strident about these things. Caplan claimed there are literally no good arguments for not having an open border with Canada. That’s crazy talk.
What Donald Trump or Trumpists thinks isn’t relevant.
(c) is slightly nicer than complete closure, but if you have to hold people in quarantine for a week (or a month!), total border crossings are going to be extremely limited. The normal number of trips Canadians make to the U.S each year is in the millions. If every entrance requires a one week stay in an isolation unit (much less a month), that millions is going to decline precipitously. My guess is by 99% or more. There isn’t enough space prepared to isolate many people, and almost no one is going to take a vacation that first requires a one week stay in isolation. So almost all vacations are out. Almost all business trips are out. Only extremely limited travel would occur.
Cutting travel by orders of magnitude and holding anyone attempting to enter under quarantine as long as necessary is closer to sealing the border completely than leaving it open.
(c) scales almost arbitrarily close to a full lockdown (depending on how long the quarantine period is, etc.). The idea that incentives to cheat are too strong and you can’t stop the cheaters if you fully lockdown, but incentives to cheat aren’t a big deal and you can stop all the cheaters if you only hold the few people still allowed through in an isolation unit for a week(s) is nonsense. If you think cutting the number of border crossings by however many orders of magnitude it takes and tacking on however many weeks of quarantine it takes is a reasonable precaution, it makes no sense to think that just slamming the border shut is impossible and won’t be effective at stopping pandemic spread. If you can’t slam the border shut, then you can’t manage to cut travel by orders of magnitude and hold who is left in quarantine either.
Slamming the border shut is not as nice (since now no specialists are traveling out to help people where the pandemic is) and in many cases would be an overreaction (lots of diseases can’t be transmitted without close contact), but it’s still effective.
@albatross11
Eh… maybe. I agree our political leaders would be lousy at this (except in so much as they succeed by accident for reasons like “They like closing borders for other reasons”), but I’m not sure whoever is holding the reins at the CDC could be relied on. Even if they’re mostly good, it’d only take one bad boss at the wrong time. And there hasn’t been a serious widespread contagious pandemic in the U.S. for so long (HIV was widespread in one sense but not in the way I’m thinking; it was too highly concentrated in some groups), that I expect a lot of American people would underreact to a pandemic which could screw everyone if the people who think it’s no big deal manage to remove a competent CDC head who made the right choice.
People asking things like this is something I find completely baffling. The United States has an absolute right to control its borders and who comes in. This is our house. What on earth is the federal government for if it’s not securing the nation? Hard to do that if you’re not keeping track of who’s coming in.
Open Borders doesn’t mean that the government can’t keep track of who’s coming in, just that it lets everyone in, unless there’s a really good reason. That the US has a right to control its borders and who comes in doesn’t mean that it has to exercise this right and prevent people from coming in for no reason.
The difference is, apparently most people think “we don’t want to let you in” is “a reason”, not “no reason.”
The flip side is that the country most likely to object is Canada. They’re more worried about guns coming across the border, and the healthcare system would have to figure out how to manage with US insurance or something.
Echoing CatCube’s point socially / politically. This sort of argument is dead obvious but also registers as NaN to libertarians like Bryan Caplan because they endorse “there’s no such thing as a society” arguments on steroids. If you don’t believe me, look at his borderline-farcical writing on the subject (https://www.econlib.org/the-berlin-wall-in-or-out/, https://www.econlib.org/the-berlin-cage-a-dialogue/) and note that he endorses the rights of Home Owner’s Associations restricting entry to a neighbourhood but not a government restricting entry to a country. Libertarian anti-government bias is rotting his brain on this topic (and I like his writing on a lot of other things!)
But, if you want to get down to economic brass tacks, the reason why America doesn’t have an Open Border with Canada is very obvious: Canada lets in 350,000 people a year from around the world (a mix of government’s best estimate of economically-optimal level of high skilled immigration and the private sector requesting visas for people they’ve already made job offers to). If these high skilled immigrants could move to the US instead, many of them would, so Canada would respond by letting in more high skilled immigrants until immigration to Canada again reached the Canadian-economic-optimum. This would massively increase immigration to the US.
Yes, most of it would be high-skilled, and it would almost certainly be beneficial, but it would also be scary, uncontrolled, and foreign. All obvious reasons not to do so, for anyone with a sense of healthy sense of risk aversion.
Open borders absolutely don’t mean that people who aren’t citizens of the countries that have open borders can easily move in legally. It doesn’t mean that in the EU, and wouldn’t mean it in the US’ case.
Sure, Canadian visa holders could move illegally, but the same thing that prevents them from coming to the US with a visa and overstaying would prevent them from doing so.
Illegal immigrants only have access to illegal, i.e. terrible, unsafe, and back breaking jobs. A doctor in Canada won’t come to the US to work as a maid or a field worker in the US. Canada isn’t that poor*, and the US isn’t that rich.
Legal immigrants from Canada would only include Canadian citizens, as it does in the EU. In the EU, only citizens have a permanent right to settle in another country, as opposed to the right to move. Yes, a permanent resident in France, or somebody that has a French visa, can go to Spain for a week to visit Barcelona without an additional visa. But the permanent resident doesn’t have the right to settle in Spain (unless they happen to be a EU citizen or a spouse thereof).
*For countries that are, like Cuba, this does actually happen.
Overstaying a visa is the number one entry method for illegal immigrants in the US.
Yes, it is. But these people chose to immigrate to Canada, and jump through the hoops in Canada.
As easy as emigrating to Canada may be, it sounds implausible to me that getting a work visa for Canada would be easier than getting a tourist visa for the US.
I may believe that a Canadian tourist visa holders could cross the border to the US, and then overstay his visa. I find it harder to believe that a work visa holder would overstay in the US.
And, as the Canadian work visa holders are mostly quite qualified workers, that kind of job can’t be done illegally. Isn’t it better to be a doctor in Canada than a maid in the US?
Isn’t this a Motte and Bailey on the phrase “Open Border”?
If you have literally zero border checks on the US/Canada border, it’s pretty easy for immigrants to Canada to work for a US company in the US but be paid “in Canada”, legally.
I don’t think it’s motte and bailey.
In the world, the most open borders there are are inside the EU, for intra-EU. Sure, these borders may not be exactly like the platonic ideal of open borders, but the EU free movement of people is the most achievable thing we have done when it comes to open borders.
Somebody who gets paid in Canada would be paying Canadian taxes, would be sending kids to Canadian schools, would get Canadian medical insurance, etc. Even if they frequently travel to the US for work meetings, they would still be living in one country. The IRS could trivially found such tax fraud, and companies would not like to be in trouble with the IRS.
As I said, well paid jobs like engineers and doctors are resource intensive and can’t be done illegally. Such shady and illegal methods won’t work big-scale.
It’s definitely what Caplan means by it; see his book.
Hypoborean banned for one month. Please make at least a little effort to keep your arguments object-level and not talk about how bias is rotting other people’s brains.
There are two main arguments I see:
1. There is a sense that as soon as you concede this, Caplan will scream “and that just proves how RACIST” you are. That may not be fair, as he being a libertarian is a different breed from the liberal open borders activist.
2. There’s a mutual admiration coalition between blue America and Canada, and so there’s understandable hostility to the idea of letting Canadians freely migrate.
I don’t think this attitude is strategically wise, as there is nothing historically pre-ordained to create such a coalition. And the border with Canada does have some harmful effects. In my company we have a Canadian co-worker who we are allowed to work with when he’s in Canada. When he comes to America, he’s only allowed to meet with us, not work with us, and the border officials try to catch him with their stupid “gotcha” game. That kind of thing is completely pointless and pushes intelligent people into the arms of the globalists. I say America, Canada, and Britain should reunite. We can throw out our “living” constitution, Canada can throw out that ugly leaf flag, and, as soon as the Queen dies, Britain can throw out the royals.
America would need about 700% more chill on the federal level for Canada to even consider merging. AKA, we’d need at a minimum an arrangement that let us keep our healthcare system the way it was, ensured that we aren’t on the hook for America’s out of control deficit, and let Quebec keep being obstinately French.
And honestly, once we did that the main difference would be getting Canada to spend a reasonable amount on its military, which is something I think we absolutely should do but most Canadians disagree with me for the hard to argue against reason of “why bother, America’s right there.”
There’s a huge difference between:
a. Eliminating all or most border checks at a peaceful border–something we could do with Canada pretty easily, I think.
b. Eliminating immigration controls with Canada, so anyone could come to the US from Canada to live and work.
Either one could be done, but they’re quite different policies.
Probably the #1 reason is bureaucratic necessity. There are many people who are allowed to travel to the US/Canada via passport or VISA, but are not supposed to stay long term. If you want to illegally immigrate to America, you just “vacation” in Toronto, then hop on over to the US, and viola, you’ve disappeared.
If two countries agree to have open borders between them they end up de facto having the immigration policy of the more liberal of the two (or the most liberal possible combination of the two) vis-a-vis the rest of the world. A pro if you share Caplan and Weinersmith’s view about universal desirability of open borders but a con if you don’t.
Well, there’s the pretty obvious thing where the people around you are a pretty big impact in your life, so you kind of want a say in who’s around you and that extends to politics/policy, which immigration pretty clearly influences.
Did Caplan lay out the legal challenges behind open borders with Canada? Like, I’m no legal expert, but I’m pretty sure the US allows dual citizenship and quick google search pointed to it being a Supreme Court decision, Afroyim v Rusk. So wouldn’t open borders with Canada not create more Americans but instead a ton of Canadian-Americans, because why would you give up Canadian citizenship if you didn’t have to? And how would that work? Like, how would 5-20 million new Canadian-American voters affect things? How do taxes work, especially with FACTA? How do the various entitlement programs interact? Can sick Canadians living in Seattle return to Canada for medical care? Does Canada even still exist in a few generations because with birthright citizenship everyone who gets US citizenship automatically passes it onto their kids, even if they return to Canada, right? How does Canada feel about this?
Maybe I’m wrong on this, but it seems like there’s a ton of practical problems Caplan would need to address first. And solving those practical problems would involve either Canada or the US, or both, to dramatically change their current laws and policies. Which kind of gets back to the current situation where both populations don’t want their laws and policies changed in that way and maybe they should be left alone to do as they wish.
Not quite right. Birthright citizenship means that if you are born in the US you are a US citizen, with certain narrowly defined exceptions (the only one that applies to anyone today is children of foreign diplomats).
A child born to a US citizen parent outside the US is not necessarily a US citizen- it depends on whether, and for how long, the US citizen parent has lived in the US.
In general, while these practical problems may exist, other sets of countries with open borders (such as the EU, or the UK and Ireland even before the EU) have solved them.
Some reasons (from a US perspective):
– An open border allows criminals to take advantage. For example, by fleeing to Canada.
– You can get an undesired waterbed effect. For example, if Canada cracks down on certain negative behavior more than the US, Canadians can migrate to the US to take advantage of the laxer rules. If the US taxes certain groups more, they can more easily evade those taxes by moving to Canada. Or Canadian homeless can move for climate reasons, burdening the US/Californian welfare system.
– You lose control over migration policy. Whomever Canada allows in, is allowed into the US.
– Migration dilutes/changes culture (of course, the US is already a very culturally diluted place)
– You lose some control over labor-supply (for example, my country has for a long time restricted the number of doctors by limiting the number of people getting to study medicine, to prevent oversupply of doctors).
– The resulting migration can burden certain regions. For example, if open borders causes lots of Canadian programmers to move to SV, it can drive up the housing prices even more.
– Open borders can make it easier for Canadians to influence US politics, for example by protesting in Washington, making it seem like more American favor that cause than actually do.
– Open borders can contribute to overtourism.
– Open borders = more travel = more pollution.
– Open borders = more travel = more pandemic risk.
– Open borders can make it easier for people/globalists to form international bubbles, driving people in the country apart.
– Taxation issues you get with having people live/work in multiple countries.
Why wouldn’t you want an oversupply of doctors?
Are (IIRC) dutch (or American in this case) people too healthy?
Maybe you guys are tired of grandpa living so long and just want him to expire already?
Doctors are high status experts and we want to be seen as respecting high status experts. So the number of new males M.D.s fell by 40% since the 1970s.(See https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/03/the_high_price.html) I see three explanations:
1. The pool of men who could potentially be doctors has declined due to some unexplained fall in capability within that pool.
2. The men in that pool are equally capable, but are now turning away from a high-paying, high-status job in search of greener pastures elsewhere.
3. Insiders are colluding to restrict supply.
Isn’t the obvious reason (4) There are more female MDs taking up places that would otherwise go to men?
^This. Specifying male doctors, especially over this time period, is nonsensical given the stated arguments.
It’s the same in France (with current push from the government to remove the quota), and here are my guess (supplemented by wikipedia) at to why:
-Effective lobying by the doctors: the less they are, the more important and the larger their market share.
-A strong culture of government planning, because you wouldn’t, in fact, want an oversupply of doctors.
-A fear of runaway cost for the socialized healthcare system. The state fixes the minimum price of a doctor appointment, and reimburse most of it (some can charge extra, but with, i believe, reduced reimbursment rates). If you have more doctors appointments (which could be possible if you have more doctors), your system -which was already bleeding money until recently, when it started to lower investments- have to reimburse more appointments.
-Keeping the cost of the (almost entirely paid by the state too) medical university down, by limiting the number of students.
But here you are importing doctors so you don’t pay for their education anyway.
@JPNunez
There are indications that medicine expands to keep doctors busy*. So fewer doctors may help to control costs.
We may be over-treating quite a few people. Fewer doctors may reduce this issue.
Also, doctors need costly and demanding training, that burdens the health system (note that Scott had trouble finding a residency spot, because he was a burden on the system, like all doctors that still lack practical training)**.
* In the case of the US, with over-treatment of those with good insurance and the rich, even as those without insurance are under-treated (although even then in a very costly way, as many seem to use very expensive emergency care and don’t get treated for easily solved problems).
** This is not a reason against migration from a country where doctors don’t need remedial training, but is a reason for education quota’s. Note that being dependent on supply from other countries is risky, as the country may make policies that drop the supply to zero or even cause doctors to remigrate.
I very much doubt that a meaningful number of Dutch grandpas die way too soon because of a lack of doctors.
Canada doesn’t want to import America’s Southern border illegal immigration problem. There are other reasons, but that’s the big one.
It’s notable that in my lifetime, Canada had a mostly open border with the US. There were border checks, but you didn’t need a passport – any ID card would do – and it was normal for Canadians to drive from Canadian point A to Canadian point B through the US, sometimes with plenty of stuff that would be dutiable if it were staying in the US. And in my parents’ generation, Canadians moved to the US on the drop of a hat, with little or no impediment – at least if they were white.
Because then it has approximately Canada’s immigration laws with the rest of the world, and Americans as a whole aren’t up for that. And for that matter, it’s not clear that Canadians are up for that.
There are probably an order of magnitude more people in the world whose first-place choice of where to move is the United States, then Canada. But it is generally easier to immigrate to Canada. So if it is known that one can immigrate to Canada and then just hop over to the United States, lots of people are going to do that instead of trying to immigrate to the United States directly. And if Canada decides that it’s multicultural society requires 300,000 new immigrants per year, but expects than 90% of the people who show up aren’t going to stick around, they have to issue three million visas every hear and hope they got that percentage right.
It doesn’t take much border and immigration control to prevent all this mess, but it takes more than none.
I want to dispute the point about inertia. As @DinoNerd alludes to, the Canada-U.S. border is getting less open than it used to be. For example, my grandmother was a Canadian citizen and resident but attended high school in the U.S. because it was closer. More recently, (until after 9/11 when it became more of a hassle to cross) residents of Canadian border communities used to think nothing of crossing the border for something as simple as filling up their car’s gas tank at a lower tax rate.
In the 80s and 90s I would cross the US-Canadian border without thought. I have less occasion to try recently, but I have not bothered (even when presented with the opportunity) in the past 20 years.
I’m not really impressed with any of the arguments against open borders between US and Canada. I’d like to see it somewhat like the EU, although I suppose that wouldn’t be possible without some over-arching treaties between the two countries to resolve immigration, health care, guns, etc.
But really, the problem is that it is becoming HARDER to go between the countries. You used to just need a US driver’s license to travel into Canada, but now you need to use a passport. Why the heck has it gotten harder? I suppose it is mostly because of terrorism paranoia, much like TSA theater. I just wish people would get over it.
And I’ve heard these extra difficulties are a really big deal for those who live close to the border. It doesn’t bother me too much because I don’t have much cause to go into Canada. But I’ve heard that up in northern Minnesota they have lots of folks who actually live and work in different countries, and also folks shop at each others’ stores, etc. I am kind of curious how this works in more urban areas by the border, such as Detroit/Windsor or Niagara/Niagara.
I recently crossed the Niagara/Niagara border at the Rainbow Bridge; it was easy. Yes, you need a passport, but that’s a once-every-ten-years difficulty. I came back through Buffalo; that crossing had more of a wait, but if you do it regularly you can sign up for the NEXUS thing where you demonstrate to both countries you’re a good and loyal
clone who would never exceed your security levelcitizen, there’s a fast track; there’s also a NEXUS-only crossing just north of the tourist-focused Rainbow Bridge.The crossings which accept commercial vehicles looked horrible though, with trucks backed up for miles.
I’m not sure why the U.S. shouldn’t have an open border with Canada, but shouldn’t Canada, given their relatively higher level of social services, bar entry to U.S. citizens? Isn’t healthcare/tax arbitrage the biggest reason against open borders outside of demographic arguments?
Let’s say the liberal democracies of the world decided they want to divest themselves from China as much as possible, mainly for political purposes(as opposed to more narrow economic concerns like balance of trade and effects on the labor market). What’s the best way to do that?
Probably make a credible commitment to long-term pushing trade to zero. Slowly ramp up trade barriers, starting low but automatically increasing over time and eventually reaching insane levels, to allow time for factories to migrate to other low-manufacturing-cost countries? Combined with trade treaties the destination replacement countries that helped give those countries preferred market access in exchange for reforms that allowed them to scale up their manufacturing sectors faster.
Massive investment in India, Bangladesh etc.
Start a neocolonial Great Game in Africa.
History repeats itself, first as myth…
How does my carbon footprint shrink or grow if I buy a car new and run it until it wears out right to the junkyard as compared to buying cars at 100-130k miles and running them until a similar death?
Your own footprint will likely be higher, as older cars are less efficient, but provided someone’s going to run that car into a junkyard, I don’t think it matters globally. The people using only the end-of-life of cars are balanced by the people buying cars new and selling them before end-of-life.
That depends. A 1987 Toyota Corolla (avg. ~37mpg) is more efficient than a 2013 Corolla (avg. ~31 mpg). I know because I owned both — in the same city, with roughly the same amount of driving and the same split of highway to city driving — and kept track of my gas mileage.
Also, as they age some cars tend to run into problems that reduce their efficiency and increase their carbon footprint while others tend to run into problems that are unrelated to these things. I got rid of my 87 Corolla because it became structurally unsound from all the rust; mechanically it was in great shape. A lot of modern cars have engines that are not designed to run much over 100k miles, but their bodies are manufactured in a way that resists rust and those types of problems far better than older cars did.
That’s because a 2013 Corolla is much bigger than a 1987 Corolla.
Yes. A lot of newer cars are a lot bigger than older versions of the same model.
The point is, it’s less efficient.
Sure it’s less efficient. But that just means someone in the market for a car the size of new Corolla wouldn’t be looking at an older Corolla. Also in 2007 the fuel-economy test procedures changed.
Separate idea: is there anything to be said for the way new cars are sold (transported to dealerships where they sit on big paved lots) vs. used cars (either following a similar dealership model, or being sold person-to-person via stuff like Craigslist)? Seems like the dealership method would be more carbon-intense, but maybe I’ve got that backward.
I think in Nybbler’s mental model, SOMEBODY has to have the car delivered to the dealership at some point, since for almost everybody cars aren’t made locally. Since all used cars were at one point new cars, and since you are either taking up a used car or taking up a new car if you have a car, he’s saying there’s equilibrium – if you stay in the car-owning system, either you have a car delivered or you take a used car forcing someone else to have a car delivered.
What happens if the ratio of those who prefer to buy used cars relative to those who prefer to buy new ones changes significantly?
For instance if it increased, would manufacturers respond by making cars that break down faster, as a way to make buying a used car less worthwhile to more people? It seems like the manufacturers would have an incentive to respond this way, and plenty of manufacturers already get away with poor reliability, so this would mean buying a used car creates a situation that incentivizes carbon emissions. But maybe there’s a hole in my logic somewhere.
This is sort of my model as well, but I do wonder about it. When I go to the junkyard, there’s tons of cars in it that are small honda or small toyotas with 150-200k; this isn’t anywhere near the full lifespan of one of those cars, usually. I feel like your/my model works perfectly in a perfectly closed system where the “this car is dead” point is the same for everyone, but I suspect there might be some stretchy around the edges, so to speak, in a “me buying a new car when my car is at 180k contributes to 180k is a dead car norms” sense.
Full disclosure: I don’t actually care about being environmentally sound, but I do care a lot about maintaining high mileage cars for some reason.
Reflections on My Decision to Change Gender
This is a really interesting article in Quillette by economist Deidre McCloskey, about her experiences transitioning from a man to a woman in her 50s, and how it’s all worked out for her.
I read the first bit of it, but stopped at the point where she farcically mis-applied the birthday paradox (which appears to have been removed in a later edit, now that I look at it).
What did you get out of it?
I found it very interesting to read her story, which I didn’t know before. I knew she was a prominent economist who had changed genders, but not the rest of it–her ex-wife and kids still not speaking to her, for example. (And who knows what their side of the story would look like? It’s clear that Donald’s decision to become Deidre must have traumatized the hell out of them.) Or her discussion of having lost interest in sex after the surgery–I’m not surprised by that, but I hadn’t heard before of that as a likely side-effect of the surgery. (I’m not sure how common it is, but I bet it’s quite common, given the loss of the testes and all the hormone treatments.)
That is surprising that there was that degree of estrangement.
Not so surprising to me. The ex wife feels betrayed, the feeling of betrayal leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate takes away all reason and responsibility, and she goes full Dark Side all over the children.
(I didn’t read the piece, so I have no opinion on how this happened in this particular case. Just pointing out there are plausible and common causalities that may apply.)
It doesn’t surprise me at all, and I expect we’re getting a self-serving gloss from Deirdre. It reminds me of a distant friend of the family who came out as gay in his 50’s and left his wife and kids. If he’d left them for his young secretary, everyone would have come down on him as a bad guy. Instead he seemingly expected to get plaudits for his “courage” because of the homosexual element. From his wife and kids’ perspectives, he was just an asshole.
That bugged me a bit too (I don’t expect economists to make mistakes like that; I’d probably give a pass to most people), but it didn’t matter to the rest of the article.
It was interesting, but the story was also sad and sort of unpleasant. I got the impression that McCloskey has been a self-absorbed person before and after transitioning. There was also a flavor of gender essentialism to some of the story that I found distasteful but is pretty common. To be clear, I believe there are significant sexual differences so that’s not that implication that bothers me. From the article,
It’s good to help out, but a change in inclination to vacuum is not meaningful in the way McCloskey implies it is.
Yikes. That’s very much gender-as-1950’s-stereotypes.
In general (and from my admittedly limited personal observations), male-to-female transgender people appear to heavily apply female stereotypes, to the point that they sometimes behave or dress more like clichés of women than actual, modern women.
Isn’t gender essentialism* kinda central to the whole exercise?
I mean, without that, what’s the point?
* Presumably we both take “gender essentialism” to mean: “men do this; women do that”.
I take it to mean this, but with respect to things that could go either way or are obviously caused partly by cultural differences. Like are skirts for women, for men, or for both? In the U.S. skirts are thought of as being for women, but in Scotland some men have worn skirts in the form of a kilt (for a few hundred years or so). Who takes out the trash and who vacuums? Neither requires strength and different straight couples have different arrangements here even if one is more common. What colors are considered for boys or for girls? Etc. These are different types of facts than “What sex typically has greater grip strength?” And then gender essentialism treats the observed patterns as somewhat more than just patterns.
As far as I can tell (although it’s hard) some nonbinary people want to wear clothing that’s not the typical choice, have somewhat unusual sexual preferences, maybe somewhat gender atypical hobbies (but you’ll likely find more straight cis people with gender atypical hobbies), but they don’t seem invested in gender essentialism (unlike McCloskey). I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of transgender people are the same way; some people slide their self-categorization around over time.
Transgender individuals who believe in gender essentialism may get more attention, but I don’t know if that’s because those beliefs are common among transgender people or because those stories are just somehow more interesting/enraging to people.
What McCloskey is implying should also be distinguished from transgender people who say they have a more biologically female brain in a male body or vice-versa which is more a claim about certain sexual characteristics than about gender.
McCloskey says specifically:
and
Once we’ve eliminated both biology and lived experience, we don’t have very many places to go, other than performative womanhood – which implies some manner of gender essentialism.
To be sure, I agree with you both regarding the issues with such gender essentialism (like pretty much all culture, it’s far from universal) and the fact that even within McCloskey’s own culture, a lot of people might not share that specific version of gender essentialism, whether trans or no.
I’m not sure transgenderism even makes sense without gender essentialism. What does it mean to say “I don’t care if society thinks I’m a man, I’m *really* a woman” if there isn’t some sort of objective female essence which makes me a woman?
For some people, it could be a socially acceptable way to wear the clothing of the other biological sex and send other signals typically associated with the opposite sex. An aesthetic choice if you will.
Like I said, there are also some transgender people who claim they have a male brain in a female body. This is a claim about sexual characteristics rather than gender.
But I agree that to a large extent, it’s hard to come up with a story that isn’t at least somewhat gender essentialist.
I took that as McCloskey speculating on her relative’s gender stereotypes, not saying she believed it.
That’s a more charitable reading, but the article as a whole made me think that McCloskey held many stereotypes as more true or right than they were.
I heard Barbara Tvsersky interviewed on Sam Harris’s podcast, and one of the things she mentioned was how we use gesturing to think, to aid in communication, etc. Even pacing, drumming our fingers, etc. seem to be ways we aid our own thinking.
Expanding on that, could it be said that our minds would likely work quite differently if we didn’t have the bodies we have? If so, what are the implications for the concept of “mind uploading”?
Mind uploads would have virtual bodies, and would think in the same way.
Why would mind uploads have virtual bodies? Just for continuity / sanity’s sake?
Most uploads will want one, and there’s no real cost associated with it.
Being represented by a virtual body isn’t the same as the real experience of having a body (and using one to think). To simulate that experience, there’s got to be a real cost, namely in computing power — if it’s possible at all.
Also, is this mind being uploaded supposed to include the gut-brain axis?
“Being represented by a virtual body isn’t the same as the real experience of having a body (and using one to think).”
Wouldn’t it be the same if we could emulate it and feed the emulated sense data to the emulated brain? Seems like it would be as easy/impossible to emulate a body as a brain.
If gesturing or pacing back and forth generates something we can think of as data, I’m not clear on how that data is supposed to work with the data generated by, say, recalling a memory, or feeling hungry, or solving a math problem, or playing an instrument, or scratching an itch. I’m not clear on how any of these, distilled to “data”, are supposed to work together in a way that approximates the experience of having a mind while existing only as information in a computer network.
Is this just because I’m not read up on mind uploading (which I admit I’m not), or is it because there’s no “there” there to be clear about?
It might not be exactly the same, but you’d get used to it. Having hands to wave around, that is zero cost relative to emulating all the neurons of the brain. Nothing on the inside of the hands needs concern the program.
Gesturing or pacing exists as data fed into the emulated brain, and is processed in the same way gestures are processed by our physical neurons.
I guess a key question is whether implementing the gesture is associated with thinking, or implementing the gesture in relation to your environment is associated with thinking. I would expect that what matters to the brain is you choosing to move your hands (I often ‘talk with my hands’, and I expect I would do so even in a sensory deprivation tank), not the slight wind pattern on my skin caused by the gesture.
If it’s just being able to make those movements as a way to jog memory, that’s would almost certainly be very easy to simulate.
Spoilers for Fall.
The same way internet language has evolved to account for the lack of bodies? The development of linguistic connotations to communication formats as greentext, e x t r a s p a c e s, italics, or reappropriation of coding concepts (bang!paths, markup tags /s), or, of course, the return of second-hand visuals via emoji. 🙂
The way we think about communicating via various mediums changes depending on both the medium and the language. Code-switching is actually more of a third language, than the speaker thinking the same way in each of the constituent languages.
Based on my two years’ experience sending my kids to two different elementary schools here, my local school district appears to place an emphasis on independence over accuracy, at least when it comes to writing. For example they don’t correct kids who write letters or numbers backward, and they encourage kids to write phonetically if they’re not sure how to spell a word.
Is this a sound practice? My 1st grader writes a lot for fun. Should I be bugging her to make sure her 2s don’t look like 5s and that she’s spelling words properly? Or should I worry that this would stifle her urge to write, and rest assured the accuracy will come later?
I think the ideal is to learn to read and write well enough that the errors don’t greatly impede communication, then go for enthusiastic quantity and practice makes perfect. But the question of where that optimum is, is tricky. We tolerate sloppiness from elementary school students that we wouldn’t from adults, which is good, but if your daughter writes lots of stuff that nobody wants to read because of the mistakes, that’s going to be as discouraging as calling out the mistakes.
So far my wife and I, and sometimes grandparents, are the audience. (Not counting stuff she writes in school.) We read everything she writes and for the most part overlook her mistakes so long as we can tell what it’s supposed to mean.
I would say you probably know your daughters limits better than the school, so you should go ahead and correct her until just before the point of frustration.
All the mistakes have to be fixed eventually, but a lot of that will come with more experience reading as well.
My mom has always been annoyed that this was the approach used for my younger siblings. I work in education, and I definitely see the appeal of it in some sense–it stops kids from freezing up because they don’t know how to do things exactly right. But I’ve noticed the kids I work with increasingly have no sense of phonetics and can’t spell. They seem to memorize each word individually, which is hugely inefficient. They see “intersect” and read “interest,” which is something we all do occasionally, but they do it constantly. I think it is hard to balance making a kid self-conscious with making them learn how to do it correctly in many cases, but from my experience I lean toward “bugging her,” but doing it in a way that isn’t discouraging or too perfectionist.
Explain the issue to her and ask her if she would like to have you point out mistakes.
My younger son learned to spell because he didn’t want the people he was interacting with online, mostly much older than he was, to think he was stupid.
“Not looking stupid” is one of the strongest learning motivators. A great thing about the internet is that it motivates me to research something more fully to avoid looking stupid.
Be careful with that, because for different personalities (like mine) it can be a great de-motivator also.
I would like to congratulate you on the behalf of all children of the world. I’m seriously touched.
I imagine that as they read more books, they will self correct.
Does writing 2s backwards affect their arithmetic? That seems like a subject where more attention to detail is warranted.
There is a chance the reverted 2s will be mistakenly read as 5s later.
Once I tutored math a boy who wrote “+”, “×”, “x”, “y”, and “4” almost the same; an asymmetric cross rotated by an uncertain angle. Half of his problems were caused by inability to read what he wrote previously. (Another half was not having an idea what he was doing, e.g. he could reduce “40/20” to “4/2”, but he stopped there. He was quite surprised to learn that “4/2” is somehow related to “4÷2”.)
I am not saying all people who write weirdly are like that, but I would immediately get suspicious.
Personal anecdote, that is how I was taught in second grade, and the opposite of how I was taught in third grade. Transitioning from anything goes to one specific way was an unpleasant experience. Currently, my handwriting is atrocious, to the the point of my colleges making should have been a doctor jokes, and my spelling is fairly bad, with spellcheck being my saving grace. That said, I got through law school and work in HR, both writing intensive, so it didn’t hold me back. I still find writing to be a uniquely unpleasant activity. Not sure what you should make of this, especially since I’m just one person.
My personal preference is to separate drafts/rough writing and clean text.
So have her draft whatever she wants for personal use, and then rewrite the text with proper spelling. Of course, with time you start to write correctly from the beginning, but I find that having to check the spelling of “bureaucrat” or other words like that in the middle of the writing process breaks my train of thought.
I think encouraging standards in stuff you write for other people as opposed to yourself is good. A lot of notes from uni I made where useful for me, for example, because they would refer to metaphors/concepts I have in my head. But being aware that other people don’t get what I’m saying because I need to put what’s in my head into the paper makes me more aware of gaps in my explanations.
Salutations. I leave you with a Chinese-ified parody of a classic American song. [CF’s assistant here: I tried to talk him out of this, but he’s got me frond-whipped. -Ludovico]
this is excellent.
“My heart with Redness fills/like Chairman Mao[‘s]”? But I got what you meant, and while it doesn’t add a syllable and mess with the meter, I’d consider it acceptable to keep the slightly misstructured parallelism if “Mao” sounds better than “Mao’s” when sung.
The rhyme scheme is aabcccb so “Mao” is correctly rhymed with “bow”
Oh man, I’m so tolerant of slant rhymes I didn’t even think of that! Made me think, if you wanted to use “Mao’s” for the more grammatically correct parallel structure, you could go back and change “bow” to “boughs” (as anything with “bows” would seem forced); it would take some reworking, but somehow “boughs” seems an appropriate word in a patriotic song.
@Lignisse, @danridge, thank you both for chiming in. I finished this before @danridge posted his 2nd reply, so it repeats some of what he said there.
@Lignisse, you are correct that I rhymed “Mao” with “bow”, and that “Mao’s” would throw off the rhyme — but the rhyme is not the issue. @danridge was pointing out an even more grievous error!
A slavish devotion to meter and rhyme has left me flat-footed in Red territory, for it is semantically strange to say “my heart fills with Redness, like Chairman Mao” (dropping the inversion.) The structure here is one of implied parallelism: the previous quotation can be seen as a paraphrase of “my heart fills with Redness, like Chairman Mao fills with Redness“, and it’s semantically strange to say that a person fills with something. If I wanted to say that my heart filled with Redness, the way that Chairman Mao’s heart filled with Redness, then that would be alright, for I would be comparing two hearts. But, as written? It’s neither jack nor shit!
I can rescue the stanza in at least three ways:
– “My heart with Redness fills / Through Chairman Mao” [i.e. “Through Chairman Mao, my heart fills with Redness”]
– “My heart with Redness fills / Praise Chairman Mao!”
– “No new land, thou!” up top, and then the end of the stanza as given
Note that, if you wish to preserve the “-/au/” rhyme, I hereby urge you not to rhyme with “kowtow”. This is a borrowing from Chinese, and while in English it is usually pronounced so that both syllables rhyme with “cow”, in Chinese, both syllables rhyme with “row”. I leave you to figure out your own repaired stanza using “kowtow” somewhere.
I will see to it that you, @Lignisse, receive a Llama of Gratitude, and that you, @danridge, receive a Greater Llama of Gratitude. Unfortunately, it will be a few days before my assistant sends them by post. Once I’ve finished dictating this message, I must savagely punish him for letting such an error slip through — so he will be rather hard-up for a while!
[No! Not the frond-whip! I can’t–]
LUDOVICO! CEASE YOUR COMMENTARY, TYPE THESE WORDS, AND BARE YOUR BOTTOM! AT ONCE!
Dear Canyon Fern, the Greater Llama will be adequate compensation for keeping you out of the death camps, as would be a fitting punishment for filling our great leader with anything, even in song. Please give Ludovico a few lashes from me, along with my regards!
“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
When did kids stop getting this drilled into them and start equating disagreement with harm and violence?
I doubt your assessment that anyone who had means of punishing bad-mouthers internalized this message.
“It’s what’s on the inside that counts” has also seemed to drop from the standard preschool curriculum…
One pattern through history I don’t think people take enough notice of. In times of stringent morality, goodness almost invariably becomes more associated with obedience to certain forms rather than any sort of ‘inner light’.
I think Bojack Horseman captures a lot of the liberal id. In it, Diane Nguyen says: “I don’t think I believe in “deep down”. I kinda think all you are is just the things that you do.” I suspect that most people in hock to elite cultural norms would agree with some version of that statement.
Really? I’d say the opposite. Modern norms seem obsessed with rooting out the deep down at the expense of weighing actions.
I think both of you are right and “modern left” (And others too) is spread far and wide through various stages of ingroup-outgroup games. They want to give an excuse to ingroup by finding external factors that turned good people inside of them sour, and they would infer internal malice of the outgroup that did nothing wrong.
On the other hand they will strike against tropes suggesting outgroup’s inner goodness, that call for their charity something like “I’m a good guy inside if only there was woman’s love to redeem me”.
Well, I suppose it depends on your point of view. Do you take the attempts to root out past racist/sexist incidents as an attempt to figure out what the person believes ‘deep down’ or to punish their violations of the moral code ex post facto? Personally I see it as the latter.
I was in 4th grade in the early 90s, and I recall my homeroom teacher then explicitly calling out that specific saying as wrong-headed, and that we should all consider words to be more hurtful than sticks and stones, because while sticks and stones can harm our body, words can hurt our feelings.
I have no idea how common this was at the time; I went to a private school, one of those semi-old ones that had been around since like 1900 preparing the kids of the elites and all that, which was all-male (still is today, I think) and required everyone to wear blazers and ties and loafers and etc., in a blue part of a blue state. So my experience wasn’t typical.
I was in 4th grade in the late 90s, and had the same experience in a public elementary school. In a probably-blue part of a red state.
I’m guessing your homeroom teacher has never had her body hurt, and thinks it inconceivable that such a thing could ever happen.
Is it that unreasonable? Most people go their whole lives without suffering a serious assault from another person. Based on the US current violent crime rate and life expectancy, you have a 73.94% chance of never being the target of a violent crime – and I suspect the actual odds are better still, as violent crime tends to be statistically clustered.
It seems pretty unreasonable to me. There are a lot of ways to suffer physical pain besides being jumped. You don’t have to be that unlucky to break an arm, get very sick, or something like that. I’d guess something like that happens to maybe not most people, but at least a large chunk, like 30% or more.
It’s also the sort of thing where you should be able to roughly figure out how bad physical injury is from observing other people’s response to it. It’d be incredible to not at least know a few people who have suffered serious physical pain.
I’d say the vast majority of boys have committed and been victims of assault. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I hit someone or got hit growing up.
@LesHapablap:
How severely, though? In this context, I think the relevant category is violent injuries of comparable severity to the wounds caused by verbal bullying. Which is all a bit fuzzy and subjective, of course, but I think very minor violence (kids punching each other in the arm, that kind of thing) is both extremely common and mostly irrelevant here. Rates of more serious violence presumably vary hugely across countries, social classes, and so on, but in my world I think >95% would technically have been involved in some kind of violence, while maybe <20% would have been involved in anything significant and maybe ~5% in anything serious.
edit: those numbers (while obviously pulled out of nowhere anyway) were meant to apply to kids and teens interacting with each other (and honestly I was mostly thinking of school and school-related situations), not to victims of domestic abuse or to adults across a whole lifetime
>Most people go their whole lives without suffering a serious assault from another person
I don’t know where you went to middle school, but I guarantee a bunch of them were pummeled. So were some of the upthread homeroom teacher’s students. You and she didn’t notice because they’re losers and beneath notice.
FWIW, if my memory is correct and if my teacher wasn’t lying, your guess is wrong. I have no idea if he ever had his body hurt, but he did tell us once that he was stationed in the middle east during the Gulf War, and how he had a genuine fear of being hurt or killed when he was there. He did note, however, that he had a greater fear of killing someone else than of being killed, i.e. that to him, the result of him shooting someone during a battle and killing them would have been worse to him than the result of him being shot during the battle and being killed.
The 2 great hazards of life are boredom and pain. Boredom is by far the more difficult to avoid, but Pain is by far the worst of the two.
The teacher is entirely safe, and they have forgotten even the shadow of Pain. Their life is a monodimensional game of avoiding boredom. From this perspective, words are far worse than blows.
They observe those who are struck bouncing back in minutes or hours, and it does not speak to any part of their experience. But they understand the pain of a cutting insult, and their empathy is engaged in a way that it isn’t for strikes.
The students understand that their fellows can impose pain, and the teacher is a fool, but the teacher has the power to impose boredom, and this is enough to compel their obedience, and so they do not openly gainsay their overseer.
Probably about the time there was increasing awareness of people who were emotionally abused…
It seems to me that the change is a bit of a pendulum swing too far in the other direction. What would be great is if people spent more time learning about and teaching shame resilience. That would be a good method for actually solving the problem of emotional distress and abuse.
Perhaps growing up in a world with internet where there are legions of anonymous people that delight in being absolutely awful to everybody has changed the perspective of many on this? You encounter jerks in real life, but not remotely at the frequency of doing anything on the internet.
@Urstoff >
Most weeks I see far less verbal abuse on-line than I hear spoken, I’d say I encounter more jerks in “meatspace” than “cyberspace”, but I usually do plumbing repairs in a county jail most weeks as part of my job and hear the inmates yelling at each other and often me when I pass by the cells.
With the books, meals, and cable television the jail wouldn’t be all that bad but for the company.
Fair enough; I think the statement can be amended with “In the upper-middle social classes that set these sorts of social norms…”
Of course there’s xkcd on this:
https://xkcd.com/1216/
In particular, the mouseover: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.”
I prefer “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can make you doubt yourself till the end of your days”
As a general rule, they’re apples and oranges, but words are significantly less terrifying. Even a relatively mild physical blow can potentially cause damage that will leave you sore for some time. Greater strength yields lost teeth, broken bones. Up the ante a bit, you’re talking permanent, life-altering damage or death. Yeah, years of verbal abuse can give you lifelong emotional problems, but two minutes with an angry husband with a baseball bat can leave you physically crippled with multiple health problems requiring lots of expensive and possibly unpleasant therapy, escalating bills, chronic pain, reduced capabilities to perform basic life functions, and yeah, probably emotional problems too.
So all in all, I’d say sticks and stones are definitely something to be taken more seriously than words.
Yeah, the people arguing for the equivalence of words and stones have probably only been worded, not stoned.
I would expect a whole lot of them have gotten stoned, pretty frequently.
It’s all about the relevant levels of severity though, right? At the top end you can be murdered or driven to suicide, and at the bottom end you can enjoy some playful pushing and shoving or friendly teasing. So both categories can cover the full spectrum of severity.
In a relatively safe environment like the schools I went to, I was at much greater risk of being non-trivially hurt by words than by fists. And I would guess that even in rougher environments, below a certain age it’s pretty rare for kids to do lasting physical damage to each other.
Obviously in some other situations the range of physical harms to be realistically feared goes much higher than that of verbal harms.
I’ve been beaten as a child and had generally shitty mother.
The beatings were by far the least damaging thing.
(though i think that the saying is cringeworthy)
It’s one thing to say that words do less damage than physical attacks, though I’ve seen people with abusive parents say that they would rather have a beating than be harangued for hours, but it’s another thing to say that words don’t hurt at all.
Well, it’s a childish rhyme meant to give children some backbone and a defense against insults
@Cliff
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
I think that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Who really doesn’t understand that it’s a thing for children to say to bullies?
I have actually never heard anyone say this seriously. Every single use of the phrase has been someone calling it out as incorrect.
I am 27 years old.
I’m not quite twice your age, and I’ve heard it said seriously – but as an aspirational goal more than a statement of fact. You should not allow yourself to be harmed by the words of people who mean you harm. And you can asymptotically approach that goal if you work at it, so try.
I think people understood this better in the olden days.
Right on, and furthermore, just because you want people to be able to endure harsh words doesn’t mean you want them to have to.
Yeah that’s pretty much my take on it. With words, to a large extent, your reaction to it is subject to your volition and choice, or at least you should strive for it to be (and as you say one can be asymptotically successful at this). For sticks and stones, not so.
Like Dragonmilk below, I heard it seriously in elementary, and not seriously by high school.
I’m approximately the same age as Two McMillion, and I’ve heard it both ways, but internalized it the way John Schilling states. It helps that my parents taught it to me that way. I definitely plan on teaching that to my kids, you need thick skin in the modern era.
I’m a few years older than Two McMillion, and I definitely heard it seriously when I was very young (kindergarten?)
As John Schilling notes, it was used not to exonerate verbal bullies but to cheer up their victims.
It was also said by kids as a sort of all-purpose comeback. It really did ring true to us. (At my school it would not be taken as a suggestion)
I heard it quoted over the intercom in first grade, though with only partial approval. I think. That was in 1989 or so.
I’m 31, and in elementary school, it was taught seriously, while by the time I was in high school, it was derided.
I question the implicit assumption here – I’m not sure that slogan was ever taken seriously.
I’m 71. It was definitely a thing.
A similar thought that I currently hold in high regard is by Epictetus: It is not he who hits me or insults me who hurts me but rather my opinion of the thing.
I’m 51 and I heard “Sticks and stones may break my bines but words will never hurt me” seriously taught and said by teachers and other adults in Berkeley and Oakland, California when I was a child in the 1970’s, and it surprises me to learn that the phrase still isn’t taught.
For my cultural background Berkele snd Oaklamd Berkeley were probably even more “Left” then than now, the first Republicans I encountered (besides my mothers parents) that I knew were Republicans (but I didn’t know what a Democrat was in the ’70’s either) were girls from the hills and their brothers in the ’80’s, and they were more “blue tribe”, I only met a few “red tribe” Republicans in the ’90’s, and then I met a lot of “red tribe” Republicans in the 21st century, and no longer meet “Blue-Tribe Republicans” face-to-face.
Both “Blue-Tribe” and “Red Tribe” Democrats and Leftists I still encounter, men are mostly red tribe, women blue, red tribe Republican men are common, Republican women are rare.
It was and it still is by a lot of people.
I’m 42, so younger than your other respondents, and of course it was (and should be) taken seriously.
I would expect this to be a parental thing, not a school or institutional thing. Schools and institutions in general probably don’t want to be seen as encouraging verbal abuse (or “fighting words” in older terms) just because it causes problems for them down the road. My parents used this phrase, unironically, when I was young – but as a coping mechanism, not as a normative statement. They also instructed me not to use angry and abusive words, which they wouldn’t have done if such words were entirely ineffectual.
I think perhaps that is the sense that is missing or seems to be changing – coping and resilience versus empathizing and dwelling-upon. I think even when this phrase was used, people recognized that words could cause problems. But the emphasis was that the problems should be overcome, and that minimizing the hurt (by emotional resilience, recognizing that one’s emotions can and should be controlled) was the best response. In contrast, now I think we have more of a focus on engaging the injury, empathizing with the victim, and encouraging the victim to treat his pain very seriously. This helps acknowledge the pain, but also makes the victim more defined by their pain rather than by their resilience in defeating the hurt; we are more likely to give kudos for having certain feelings than for overcoming our feelings. That seems like the reason the phrase has gone from “genuine advice” to “ironic example of outdated or bad advice.”
I think this is exactly right. It was always meant as a coping mechanism or a response to verbal abuse and speaks more to the values of trying to be resilient. It doesn’t mean that words are actually pain free or that anyone ever thought that was the case.
Edit: maybe I shouldn’t say always. I was born early 80s and I always took it that way. In middle school we had a “lifeskills” teacher that taught us a new one: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can break my heart.” She was hippieish.
Gosh, you sure seem peeved by words on the internet. Perhaps it’s not drilled in nearly enough, then?
I think the “getting this drilled into them,” part was the problem. If a large enough group gets anything drilled into them, they’ll get it wrong, that is not as quasi-stoicism, ‘your words have only the weight and impact I choose to give them,’ but rather as excuse, ‘what? I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s not like I hit you.’ Not direct quotes. And this leads quite directly to ‘words can definitely hurt me, this is bullshit.’
I’ll also note something I noticed in elementary school, when there was a real shift from ‘kids playing’ to ‘no violence,’ which meant that the balance of power really shifted to kids who were better with their words and leaving the more traditional bully as basically powerless, as their main recourse would get them instantly expelled.
I think this is exactly right. Norms have changed over time to be way less tolerant of letting children face physical pain. I’m sure there are still kids getting ‘pummeled’, as Andrew says, but at zero-tolerance schools it’s now an after-school activity instead of a normal part of recess. But kids still gotta find some way to decide and show status at school when everyone’s watching, so the psychological games have ramped up to compensate. Teachers probably changed their sticks-and-stones advice as a reaction to this.
Another element is that kids are possibly more sensitive than they used to be, for the same mysterious reason that rates of anxiety, depression and autism are going up in the general population.
Helicopter parenting?
How does this fit in with spanking as punishment? I’m not a parent or an expert, but I have never believed the anti-spanking research because it seems like a prime spot for motivated reasoning in social science. And if you have to punish a kid, you have to inflict some mental anguish on him. What’s the difference if that anguish is from a spanking versus some non-violent punishment?
So if someone disagrees with the ‘sticks and stones’ message, surely they are equating words with physical violence, and therefore they would be fine with spanking? Or would they claim that there are non-violent punishments that don’t result in any mental anguish? In which case how can they work as punishment?
For what it’s worth, I received persistent verbal abuse from third grade to twelfth, mostly about being short and having feet that turn out. I somewhat calmed down about the height thing by my thirties. For some reason, the stuff about my feet didn’t stick as much, possibly because I thought it was crazy to pay that much attention to how feet were oriented.
In any case, I didn’t get a lot of being told I should be tougher, but any pressure in that direction was just more evidence that I couldn’t expect kindness.
I did get told “Just ignore them”, but I now believe that any advice that starts with “just” is a way of ignoring the difficulties of whatever is being recommended.
Whatever happened to all that boring repetition about evolutionary psychology? You know, the idea that being assigned low status feels like a death threat because of ostracism.
Seriously, does it actually work to tell children they should ignore insults?
At least in my case, ignoring insults resulted in escalation to hitting. On the other hand, so did yelling back…
(no sticks and stones at least, it wasn’t that rough a neighborhood)
I didn’t always or maybe even usually succeed, but my life as a child would have sucked a lot more if I hadn’t tried to ignore ostracism and insults. I am extremely thankful that there were adults in my life who tried to impart some level of stoicism. For example, if a child cried when hurt at Tae Kwon Do practice, the master would often say things like “Why are you crying? Stop crying!” or “Crying doesn’t help.”. Learning to put up with physical pain can help with learning how to put up with wounded feelings. Although that particular route doesn’t work for everyone.
If adults had told me to complain about things, etc. it would have been a lot worse. Sometimes children smell weakness and prey on it. You’ve got to ignore them or somehow make it unpleasant for them. Complaining or asking them to be nicer makes it worse. Running to adults also usually doesn’t work, kids are pretty good about finding the line of what they can get away with, and making a habit of snitching is looked down on.
I think the thing people forget when they try to draw some sort of equivalence is that someone causing you physical pain causes emotional trauma. It’s a twofer. Not only are you physically hurt and could be injured, but it’s a blow to the psyche to have someone casually cause you physical pain just for laughs. Even if you can ignore the physical pain itself (which I think is a good thing to attempt), you may be physically injured.
I had people hit me, and I had people insult me. I’d take being insulted tens of times over even being hit with something that just stings and leaves no permanent damage. Now if someone actually tried to seriously injure me? Even something as minor as a bloody nose or black eye? I can’t even imagine how bad the insult would have to be to compare. It’d take a ton of work to create the sort of emotional damage with words or schemes that someone could cause by throwing a punch.
Now there are words that can be said that can hurt comparably to getting physically injured, but I’m thinking of things like your family disowning you (which is way up there on the scale).
Learning to put up with physical pain can help with learning how to put up with wounded feelings
Is there any non-anecdotal evidence for this?
Doubtful. My guess is at best you could collect many anecdotes, collate them, and call it epidemiology. Not many IRB’s are going to let you shock people while attempting to teach them stoicism and then see how they react to being insulted.
But maybe somebody crazy tried something in the 19th century.
The same problem holds for any studies of this sort of thing though, so I’d be surprised if the evidence is going to get much better than anecdotes or collections of anecdotes.
So we do the experiment in China?
You might be able to find a group of kids who have gone through certain diseases or injuries and then compare to them to control groups
A difference in differences study? So the “treatment” and control groups are matched on characteristics until the accidental injury occurs? That’s an interesting idea. Although you also want to separate a treatment group based upon who was trying to learn stoicism just after the injury (or started learning it at some point in time) which complicates things. So there’s the uninjured-unstoic group, the uninjured-stoic group, the injured-unstoic group, and the injured-stoic group.
It seems like it’d be difficult to get a big enough sample and good follow up, but worthwhile and interesting if you can pull it off. The ecological validity is probably high at least.
Not always, but in my case it turned out find. I was always a weird kid, and was insulted for how I dressed and presented myself, but I didn’t care what anyone else thought and just ignored it. The only thing that did get to me was a girl that started constantly pushing me, which did make me cry, but I tattled in her, and never got physically bullied again. The verbal bullying just rolled off of me, and though I didn’t have Many friends, I was overall happy. Maybe if I took it personally and changed how I presented myself, I would have had more friends, but considering how weird I am, that was still probably unlikely, and I would have struggled for nothing.
What’s up with comments like this? Why don’t you ask if people think it’s true, or if others perceive kids as equating disagreement with harm and violence, rather than assuming everyone agrees they’re true and asking how it happened?
If we legalized insider trading, how much of the prohibitions on it would re-appear in the form of companies forcing their employees to sign agreements not to do it, and then being able to sue them for fraud if they do it anyway?
Almost none? Insider information usually accretes to C-level employees first; I can’t see those same employees restricting their ability to make money. It’d just be considered a perk of the job.
What about the board?
IME, the board doesn’t exert much influence over governance in modern companies unless things go very wrong. There’s a reason why we single out “activist” investors and boardmembers – they’re exceptions to the rule.
People of SSC, speaking with my sister this morning, I found out that my niece is graduating high school in a few weeks, a semester early. In the spring of what would have been her senior year, she’ll continue working (as a waitress) and take a college class at the community college, to get a sense of what it’s like (this is at her parent’s insistence). However, despite being reasonably bright (As and Bs in school) she doesn’t enjoy school and will probably not opt to go that route. What will she do instead? She isn’t really looking past early graduation. So, ideas, suggestions? What would you do if you were 18 and wanted to build a life, or kill a couple of years until a life came along? Trades? Travel? Peace Corp? The Service? I recall someone linking some sort of program planting trees for the summer. What are good options for bright, un-academic young people?
Asking for three reasons. One, because I would like to have some things to suggest to my sister, two, because, when I thought about it, I realized I had no idea what my answer would be, and three, one of my kids will likely be in a similar boat in about ten years.
Purely anecdotal, but I had several friends do Peace Corps or AmeriCorps. I got the impression they were somewhat disappointed and a little disillusioned with the experience; they thought they’d be saving the world and the experience didn’t necessarily provide the emotional benefits they were expecting.
Another couple friends did work/travel combo platters where they’d work (e.g. bartending) for a while for savings, then take a couple months off to spend the money on cheap long-term travel. That seemed somewhat more positive.
I wonder if disillusionment might be a valuable early experience.
Leslie Fish said that finding a toy didn’t match the advertisement made her a cynic for life.
The clearest case of disillusionment I can remember was in my early twenties, when I spent a summer as a congressional intern, mostly working with a group that was producing a fact book on state and local finance. I discovered a fact that was clearly true, clearly important, and had the opposite of the implication the people I was working with, who were academics, favored. They refused to include it. Doubtless I was naive, having grown up in a very atypical family bubble, but the idea that academics would deliberately let politics trump truth in their professional work shocked me.
That’s part of the reason that, fifty years later, I am skeptical of the current climate orthodoxy. I know that academics will be dishonest when doing so is useful to them because I saw it happen, and it’s pretty easy to see the potential implications. If lots of people are a little dishonest, concealing evidence in one direction and exaggerating that in another, the combined effect can be conclusions which all of them, each trusting the work of other people they agree with, believe are correct, when a fair examination of the evidence would conclude they were not.
+1
This is one reason why “noble lies” are so destructive.
Do you mean to say that it’s political partisanship that plays into climate science? But wasn’t it bipartisan when it first appeared and that it’s global so US politics shouldn’t affect it decisively?
It’s partly ideological, which isn’t the same thing as party partisanship. But even without ideology, once an orthodoxy is established, possibly on very weak initial evidence, there is pressure of various sorts to go along with it. As best I recall, either the charge or the mass of the electron was incorrectly estimated initially, and for quite a while later measurements failed to correct the error.
In the case of climate, the fact of warming since about 1911 seems well established. The primarily human causation is plausible—but as of the last thing I saw from the IPCC, they were only claiming confidence on that for warming since the mid-20th century. The projections of future warming are quite uncertain, as one can see by looking at the range of outcomes from the different models in IPCC reports, and the general pattern so far has been to overestimate future temperature. The projections of the climate effects are still more uncertain—the IPCC first claimed that AGW was increasing droughts, then retracted that claim in a later report, and the much hyped effect on hurricanes does not seem to be supported by evidence so far, and I gather depends on very uncertain theoretical analysis. Go on from that to the extreme uncertainty about effects of technological change and economic growth over the next century, and there is lots of room for people to consistently make judgement calls that point in the direction they want, well short of the sort of deliberate dishonesty that I described in a different context.
To see the mechanics of such pressure in an entirely different case … . There has been some discussion in the PTSD thread of a 1970’s psychiatric textbook that claimed that father-daughter incest wasn’t really a problem. Imagine that you were a researcher today who came up with evidence supporting that claim. Would you publish?
By coincidence i just read about Nobel Prize in Economics for Nordhaus (2018) and i am… sad? I mean, from what i read… my opinion of at least the Nobel economics comitee dropped a lot.
I also read something about…. uh, a medical scientist rediscovering simple mathematical formula and getting cited 75 times after publishing it in good journal.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0416250/medical-researcher-rediscovers-integration
Sorry of drifting off topic, but i just wanted to say i am unable to disagree with you about disappointment in scientists today 😀
Even though i like and respect science very much in general, and that includes climate science. My example are more like – at least the poor medical chap, not sure about Nordhaus – of mistake, not conflict.
Though, come to think of it, you’re economist, right? What do you think about that Nordhaus’ Nobel?
(btw, I would publish – but then i am notoriously, say, amoral, and then i would get fired so it wouldn’t matter)
Prior to his getting it, I commented on him several times on my blog. I haven’t looked at the technical details of his modeling so can’t speak to it, but I interpret his behavior as attempting to come as close as he can to sounding as if he agrees with the current orthodoxy without saying things that he believes are untrue. I think my blog comments should make clear the basis for that opinion.
I am curious what the fact was, the orthodox position it contradicted, and the ostensible reason given by the academics in question.
The fact was that the baby boom was coming out of the schools and into the work force. For the previous decade, the ratio of schoolchildren to workers had been going up, so maintaining a constant per pupil expenditure required increasing taxes. For the next decade the ratio was going down, so you could maintain constant per pupil expenditure with falling taxes, or increased with constant. The fact book was on state and local finance, and K-12 schooling was far and away the largest expenditure of state and local governments. It was a demographic fact about people already born, so clearly true, and implied a reduced need for state and local taxes, so clearly relevant.
The people I was working with wanted voters to believe that states and localities needed more money and I was offering a reason why they needed less. As best I recall, they offered no reason not to include my fact–they just didn’t include it. I was a congressional intern on loan to them from a congressman’s office (via the Joint Economic Committee, which he had lent me to for four days a week), so in no position to insist on an explanation.
That same summer I encountered another and unrelated piece of dishonesty. But that was from the Agriculture department, not academics I knew and worked with, so didn’t shock me. I discussed it in a passage on sunk costs in Hidden Order and, I think, Price Theory .
What is she interested in? Good at?
Nothing special that I know of. She’s a fairly stereotypical teenage girl. She likes watching tv, listening to music, and hanging out with her friends.
She has an aptitude for math. I tried to get her interested in engineering a couple of years ago but didn’t get anywhere.
Maybe try out the math is fun angle? Or composing electronic music?
That’s cringe tho. I’d say focus on the money. Everyone likes money even if only some admit it.
So your advice is to suggest webcamming? ;D
I recommend the former rather than the latter. Ideally she’d have some sort of life goals already she could work towards.
Does she want a family? If so, this should be a priority. Because it doesn’t always ‘just happen’ and missing this, or potentially worse, making a poor choice or even just choosing too late, will negatively impact her life more than missing a vacation or being in a different retail job. If she wants a mate, she should consider what she wants in a husband, what that kind of person will want from her, and put herself in environments where she can find those types of men. Take classes, go to church perhaps, get a job that will let her interact with people–waitress seems pretty good for this.
I was in her position, and wandered into college because everyone assumed that’s what you did if you had any aptitude at all, even just before the turn of the century. Worked out pretty well, but now the costs seem higher and the benefits lower, relative. So finding a different job that can support herself without it would be great if she has no passion for academics. My younger sister is managing a restaurant, which she has a degree for, but I think that path is open to a diligent waitress without a degree as well.
She’s not currently interested in having a family. My sister doesn’t expect that she’ll have grandchildren, though of course, people can and do change their minds. Making life choices to husband hunt isn’t going to be a strategy she’s at all interested in.
Okay. Lots of people who do just assume it will happen, which isn’t a good strategy.
Long-term, without a college degree, her career options are going to be limited. I’d strongly advise against supporting her not going to college. Short-term, she might consider Americorps, or a Conservation Corps. It sounds like she should figure out what she’s passionate about before trying to make a career.
Is this true? I have the impression that the trades are a good option, and are interested in getting more women. Anyone know if that’s true? Plumber, if you’re around, would you tell a kid to go into your line of work?
Trade apprenticeship programs are hard to get into, and are (AFAIK) not as well-paying as people commonly think, due to limited hours. It’s a better option than retail, but not as good as getting a good degree at a cheap college.
@JonathanD says:
November 14, 2019 at 10:00 am
There’s been some efforts to get more women into the trades since the ’70’s, for some apprentice programs in California click here
Compared to what?
“…First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising
Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work…”
–Bertrand Russell in 1932
Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value of Work by Matthew Crawford well convinced me that “white-collar” work is often soul (or at least morale) destroying, while “blue collar” work is just more body destroying, and as far as I can tell paid employment is more tolerable the more
1) you’re paid
2) you’re praised
3) your respected
4) you feel your efforts matter
5) your efforts are successful
6) the less time you spend at it
7) the less pain you feel
8) you have a feeling of agency
9) you aren’t required to lie/cheat/steal (though a few thrive and enjoy doing so, there’s many jobs in marketing and sales for them, a flexible conscience is highly sought by employers, but usually those employers cheat their employees as much as they encourage their employees to cheat the customers).
The (few) women I’ve known to make it in the trades were either unusually tough or they drifted to the more cerebral aspects of the trades (working more like architects/engineers and less like laborers), they were also a bit more likely to be night class teachers at my unions school (one-in-fifty of the teachers instead of one-in-a hundred in the field), one memorable lady would go to every union meeting and knit during it.
The pay as a journeyworker plumber/steamfitter in my local union is about $50 an hour, a bit more if your working on a high rise in San Francisco, a bit less if your working government, low rise or up north, but to get to journey status you have to have enough non-union work experience (self-emoloyed counts) plus be effective/skilled enough to be kept on after hire or you need to start as an apprentice, and a first year apprentice is paid about a third of a journeymen wage (sorta like how a first year public school teacher is paid a low wage, but 10+ years of seniority gets you good pay), so the odds of a pay cut at first while going into harder work is strong, and that’s not including the night classes an apprentice must pass – unless you learn to weld first in which case if your the only welder on the crew at the job site your supposed to get journeyman rate, it takes passing some tests (both written and hands-on) and 9,000 on-the-job hours to reach journey status, the only time an exception is made (that I remember) was during the last recession when volunteering for Habitat For Humanity counted as on-the-job hours, though a few came in young via “work experience” that they claim they got from their family business (“An apprenticeship is five years, how are you a journeyman at 20?” “Oh, I worked for my Dad”).
The trades I’ve seen with the most women have been (in order) electricians, low paid general laborers (usually Spanish speaking), air conditioning repair, and then steamfitters, while I’ve seen a few women plumbers they’re rarer than in the trades I’ve listed above, and I’ve never seen a woman fire sprinkler fitter.
Frankly my apprenticeship years were some of the most miserable of my life, school was far easier – but your not paid for school and there’s no guarantee of a job upon graduation, including the extra pain from injuries and just how miserable apprenticeship was I’d say that the pay and status I now have became worth it ten years after I started as an apprentice (it’s now just over 20 years since I tested in and was accepted into the apprenticeship).
Even so, except for the very worse ones, the occasional on-the-job injury is better than most days of working retail sales when either your customers are annoying, or you like the customers and the owner wants you to cheat them.
There’s also “B.S.” jobs were looking busy when there really isn’t much productive to actually do, which is more stressful than having tasks that feel actually productive to do, this is endemic in large organizations and even small ones on slow days with “bird dog” bosses, and this may happen with blue collar jobs as well when you can’t get the tools and parts needed, but usually there’s ultimately something measurable to achieve (is it built/fixed?) so that situation doesn’t last as long until either the business fails or someone competent in ordering material replaces the managers in a small shop, the best jobs I’ve had have been small shops, but so have the worse as “How dare you duck when I throw things at you!” bosses are the jobs you’re most likely to be able to get first.
In my experience government employment is better than most private employment as being ordered to lie/cheat/steal is much less, but annoying “innovations” from upper management who are apparently trying to look busy make it worse than working for the best small shops, but work stops for the best as well as the worst shops, especially during deep recessions, but (thankfully) government doesn’t stop as there’s always someone to keep jailed.
My advice for someone young is to look over the lists of government jobs, their qualifications, and their openings every month for at least a year, which are much more clear than the ‘black box’ that is private industry, and decide on what jobs to pursue, unfortunately for most of them private industry experience, schooling, and/or previous government experience (found in remote small towns/rural counties far away) is usually required, so planning a path is often necessary.
Enlist – either in the Navy, Coast Guard or Chair Force.
Get some discipline, work experience and cool life stories. A life’s worth of veteran benefits and free college down the line if she wants it will greatly improve her future opportunities.
I worked in construction until I was 23 before going to college.
Things I suggest looking at:
1) Store/chain restaurant shift management – the hourly pay can be decent and the experience is valuable long-term.
2) The military
3) Some of the trades
4) IT onsite help desk work
None of my siblings who work have college degrees. Two massage therapists, an electrician, a truck driver, an IT help desk person – all of them seem to be doing well.
Try to get her to change her mind. Explain that she doesn’t have to enjoy it, she should do it because society pays her to do it.(Whether it should is another matter.)
If she isn’t willing to go to college, none of that do-gooder stuff is going to help her. If she wanted to objectively help people she’d be better off working in the area of her comparative advantage and donating earnings to charity. I doubt planting trees is her area of comparative advantage.
There aren’t any, except maybe the military. I would say find some job where she has some chance of moving up to a managerial position, then after showing her work ethic, threaten to quit for a real or imagined better opportunity if she doesn’t get it. Rince and repeat.
I didn’t mean it for the charity benefits, just that it sounded like a fun way to spend a summer. I remember thinking at the time that I wished I’d heard of when I was the right age. This would be more in the screw around for a few years before deciding what to do camp. I think the Conservation Corp that @broblawsky was it, though I had thought it was a paying gig.
Planting trees sounds to me like it would be fun for a few hours/days, then brutal and repetitive thereafter. If she is different, she could consider working as a lumberjack or some other brutal outdoor labor job.
With young people like that, I tend to try and figure out if they know what they want to do. This can be vague but if they have a pretty firm sense of direction, that’s fine. For example, if they say, “I really want to help stop global warming, I’ve wanted to since I was a freshman.” or “I really want to be a singer.” or “I really want to start a beauty company.” or anything that’s generally goal oriented.
If they don’t have that, I recommend they gain the most high paying, generally useful skills I can. Usually coding or accounting/finance or things of that nature. If they do, then I try and sit them down and build out a viable career path. And then figure out what the first steps they need to take it are. At eighteen, almost anything is still possible. And if they take six months to really focus on it they can make a ton of progress in setting themselves up for success.
Edit: Ignore the people that say academics are the only pathway to success. That’s true of certain industries but not at all true of others. It all depends on what you want to do. Now, I do agree a college degree is generally beneficial but if you have a realistic plan you stick to that doesn’t require a college degree, you’ll usually be fine. (You’ll notice having a ‘reasonable plan they’ll stick to’ is more than most college students have though…)
This is basically true. There’s coding and there are union jobs where you need an “in” to get, and there’s harsh, dirty, dangerous outdoor jobs.
You’ll escape poverty which is usually due to stupid decisions, but college is still a much better deal.
Quite the contrary, I know many people who are quite successful and didn’t go to college. It’s slightly less likely than those who did. The main difference is some people who went to college were able to just kind of stumble forward on a general path to success. “Oh, I got a degree in whatever, got my first internship at whatever, went on to become a whatever professional…” whereas the non-college people tended to have a plan they stuck to and executed. The non-college professionals who just wandered around usually turned out much worse for wear.
To give some examples, I know someone who went out of high school to do music. She didn’t have an in and she’s not a big name but she’s stuck to it and now works in that industry helping with sound mixing and a few other odd things. She makes good money. Another guy got started in real estate and now owns over a million dollars in rentals (owns, not manages) in his late thirties. Another guy I knew is basically retired after having become a successful jingle writer for local commercials and is now trying (and failing) to get famous off ‘real’ music. And another guy I know started coding at 17 and is now making well into six figures at a major tech company. Another person started a blue collar company, became a multimillionaire, and now lives in Czechia with his ex-model wife.
You can say these are exceptional and they are exceptional in a general sense. But most people I’ve seen who have a focused plan and stick to it do fine. Maybe not get super wealthy, but a nice middle to upper middle class life. The key was they were dedicated to the work and they developed skills that people would pay them for. As I said above, most eighteen year olds (most people frankly) don’t have that much drive though.
The problem is it gets harder every year to “start” without a college degree.
Maybe. I know plenty of people getting started in real estate today. They’re not doing great just this moment because the market is slowing down but otherwise they seem fine…
My anecdata is almost opposite yours.
Most of the people I know who are under 50, don’t have a college education, and are doing well didn’t stick to one thing: they worked hard consistently, at a variety of things, until some combination of identifying what they were good at and being in the right place at the right time got them over the transition from “working hard at whatever comes to hand” to “good at something that they are well paid for.”
I’ll give one of my sisters as an example: she worked as a house cleaner, a waitress, a nanny, at a Starbucks, eventually went to massage school but kept working as a waitress until she had a solid client list. She’s not yet 30, and owns her place (a 1 bedroom condo) outright.
@SamChevre
Keep in mind, my advice presupposes the person has a strong interest and a demonstrated talent in it. I said that if they didn’t have those things, they should learn the most generally useful and profitable skills. They can then experiment.
Maybe some program like Au Pair would interest her? It means an experience of living in another country and also learning a foreign language, which can be useful for her later in her career.
As for degree, in my field (IT) it is possible to find a job without a degree as long as your skills are good enough, even if the diploma makes it much more comfortable. But if she doesn’t have any interest in programming, then that’s, obviously, not the greatest path.
I do not know much about other fields, but anecdotally, a degree is important. Even the easier jobs more often than not require some form of education in-between secondary school and university (is there any US analogue for that?)
I’d ask her what are the reasons she doesn’t want to go to university. Maybe it is possible to solve them without refusing the very idea.
Sending someone to college when she don’t know what she wants to do with her life (and doesn’t find academics engaging in the first place) sounds like a recipe for listless underachievement and wasted money. Far better, I should think, to let expensive training wait until she has figured out what to train for.
I would suggest letting this kid take a gap year, with the explicit goal of figuring out what she wants to do with her life. Let her live at home, and offer funds for whatever investigations she need to do. Do not offer funds for fun and games. If she wants pocket money, let her take whatever job she can get, which probably won’t be anything great with neither training nor experience.
I suggest a gap year spent travelling on the cheap around Europe or India or Australia/NZ. She’ll gain a bit of maturity and meet lots of people her own age. She’ll probably need her parents to help fund it.
Would be good to know what her hobbies are, if she has any bad habits, what her parents do and how rich they are, that sort of thing.
Yeah, the gap year is definitely what I would do if I were 18 again. She doesn’t have any standout hobbies that I’m aware of. She drinks and gets high, but not to excess as far as I’m aware, and her family is middle middle or upper middle class.
Does the French Foreign Legion accept women?
No, somewhat famously, with exactly one exception.
Sounds like a business opportunity for an enterprising young woman to exploit…
Me personally:
-Conservation corps. Fun if you like working innawoods and don’t get stuck handing out lunches in fire camp or picking up trash on the road, and can be a decent way into a decent-paying job as a climbing arborist or a power lineman (I know several guys who did this) or fighting fire (but that’s kind of its own ball of wax, there.).
-Tree-planting. Not a charitable enterprise or anything, it’s part of the logging industry (at least as seasonal work in Canada), just working way out innawoods and quite fun if you like that sort of thing.
-Military.
-Don’t like the ocean enough to say commercial fishing but I can see the appeal otherwise.
But these are all fairly male-coded and absent further information I don’t know that I’d throw them out as serious suggestions for your situation. Au pair seems like a decent idea. Maybe WWOOF?
How’s the waitress thing working out for her? Waitressing at a good restaurant can be quite lucrative for a young woman with a knack for it; paid my stepsister’s bills until she earned her CPA and she wasn’t living poor. But it’s not a career, and earning potential will fall off pretty rapidly in a decade or so if she hasn’t burned out beforehand.
If she is making good money and not hating it, then the important thing is to make sure she doesn’t go too long without planning for what comes next. Insisting that she ditch waitressing ASAP because it’s a professional dead end is going to cost you credibility and cost her a chance to make money that she can use to finance whatever the next step turns out to be. Could be that’s managing and ultimately buying out the restaurant she waits tables at now. Could be saving enough money to quit and backpack around the world for a year, then try something new. At eighteen, it’s not urgent that she answer that question this year, but she should be at least thinking about it.
But barring any specific interests on her part, it is unlikely that any specific plan you suggest for her is going to be significantly better than a year in a good waitressing job while thinking about what comes next.
As far as I know, waitressing is going fine. My idea here isn’t to tell her she’s doing something wrong, it’s just to let her know she has some options.
I’m from the same small midwestern town she is. When I was her age, I was one of 20 finalists for a 10 full ride scholarships to some relatively prestigious California university (I don’t remember which one.) The final step in the process was going out there for an interview, at which point I simply gave up. California seemed like the moon to me. I’m worried that she has the same provincialism I did at her age, so I thought I’d try to give her a sense of some of the choices she has that she might not know about. It’s possible (probable really) that I’m really collecting advice to give to my 18 yo self, and her issues, whatever they are, are totally different from mine.
Is it reasonable to point her at this discussion?
I wouldn’t advise that. People can be kind of weirded out that they are being discussed by a bunch of strangers on the Internet without their knowledge.
If provincialism is the problem, there’s a good chance that travel is the solution. Or possibly lots of reading, if travel is right out.
The question is how to nudge her towards travel, if she’s not already inclined to it. Inviting her on a family vacation to someplace cool might work as a start. I won’t suggest “forgetting” to buy her a return ticket and giving her hitchhiking money instead, because that would be mean.
Have her work retail through the holiday season. Then she’ll be champing at the bit to do anything that will ensure that she never has to work retail ever again.
Not going to college is a great idea. I’d be looking to get her into one of the more intellectual trades, i.e. electrical or avionics etc. Employers are tripping over themselves trying to get more women into trades, she should be a shoe-in for a good apprenticeship if she’s half smart.
What makes you think she is going to like either the trades or the service? Has she expressed any interest in blue-collar work?
As always, there are 3rd shift openings at our factory. The starting pay is around $19/hour, with a practically guaranteed bonus of 10% per year, and pretty good benefits. I am sure after 6 months of that, and comparing it to the experience of college-educated, salaried employees, she will revisit her decision to not attend college.
High (bachelors or a bit below) level apprenticeship?
If they’re a thing wherever you are.
She should consider long term opening her own small business. College is great for future employees, but not as useful for future small business owners. If her parents saved money for college, she could use that as start up capital to open a business. Short term, she should try to get jobs in the industry she wants to open her small business in. Even if they pay minimum wage, they’ll teach her more than college would. Suggest it and see if she’s interested.
Is it true that shifting your monitor’s colour balance to a redder one is good for your eyes? I’ve recently heard about it, and I’m curious. However, I wasn’t able to find any research, can anyone suggest some articles on this topic?
I think the common wisdom is that changing it to redder helps helps one fall asleep more easily, since it’s lower in blue light which hampers melatonin release or something like that. I’ve never heard anything about it being better for the eyes, except maybe just easier to look at.
No idea if it’s an old wives’ tale or if it’s real, though. At least major companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple believe it enough to implement it in their OS software, but, of course, that doesn’t tell us much about its veracity.
I have installed a program called f.lux that adjusts the color of your monitor according to your sleep cycle following that idea. In my experience it can be somewhat effective in making falling asleep easier, and it is just generally more pleasant to use the computer late at night.
I have also experimented with different lightbulb colors for my desk. I settled on a small incandescent light bulb surrounded by white glass, over which I place a red paper cover I made myself. When I need more light I can just remove the cover, but generally I find that it is just the right amount of light for my night-time computer use.
I wonder how are the ongoing political developments in Bolivia viewed from certain political viewpoints, as they may cause perplexion. For example:
“Socialism fails again”
The claims that I’ve seen speak of rates of poverty moderate and extreme, the illiteracy rates and unemployment rates have dropped significantly during the reign of “the socialists”.
“I don’t know. Possibly the numbers are cooked”
Any actual evidence for that?
“It was a tyranny… Or, at any rate, the former Bolivian regime made such breaches of the rule of law, that it was natural and healthy for that house of cards to be toppled.”
The available accusations against the former regime are apparently without evidential backing, and in conflict with claims such as that “no electoral irregularities or fraud” by election observers based in Washington DC.
On the other hand, the unlawfulness of the new president is clear.
“This is a globalist regime change, and globalism is a leftist ideology”
It makes it leftists against leftists.
“Yes, that’s typical of the Left: recall Trotskyists vs. Stalinists, etc.”
I recall reading how the Left is united and goal oriented, in contrast to the Right.
“Maybe both claims are truthful at different levels, or looking from different perspectives.”
Fair enough. BTW, president Trump came out with words of support of the new regime, which makes him back the globalist left, whose interests overlap with those of the Bolivian millionaires, and at this point I can’t even be ironic: I’m truly disoriented.
Socialist regimes tend to promote education and employment, but then they fail, don’t they? Criticism of socialism usually doesn’t claim that gravy train will never come, only that it will inevitably crash somewhere down the line.
This is incorrect.
Here is are the main complaints coming from the OAS:
1. Without letting anyone, especially monitoring agencies, know, election data was rerouted to a private server before getting to monitors/auditors. The official computers/servers were also not properly secured. This means that the underlying data can’t be trusted anymore.
2. A bunch of written records are likely to have been forged.
3. Pre-written election procedures were not followed, and there was not a strong chain of custody over the electoral results. Some records have apparently been destroyed.
4. Initial reports had a Morales up by a margin of 7.3% with only 84% of the votes cast. Had this margin held, there would have been a second election. The final reports had over 10% (the margin needed for morales to win outright).
First-off, CEPR isn’t some unbiased election observation joint, and they definitely aren’t affiliated with the USG. They are a left leaning economic think tank that’s got a history of being pro-bolivarian. That doesn’t discount their argument, but it should be considered when you are essentially relying on them to go against the OAS and the people of Bolivia.
In there rebuttal to OAS, CEPR only talks about OAS’s 4th point, and makes the argument that it’s conceivable that his margins could have run up another couple of points on the late-returning ballots. CEPR doesn’t talk at all about any of the security/chain of custody/forging accusations. The data they are using to validate Morales is likely to be tainted; they can’t just use that data to prove he’s correct.
I’m posting this as a complete outside observer with no special knowledge of the details of this event, but who shares a very similar level of skepticism to Levantine regarding the legitmacy of ousting Morales.
This does not seem correct. The CEPR argue against points 1-3 when, in their report, they claim that the OAS has failed to show adequate evidence for irregularities or tampering. I’m very curious to know what evidence you have for your claims 1-3, especially number 3, as that would radically shift my understanding of the events as they unfolded. Your argument begs the question because you seem to take OAS’s claims as factual, whereas the opposing argument is that the OAS seems not to have empirical proof.
To reinforce some of Levantine’s inital skepticism as to the unbiased nature of OAS’s claims, how can we trust the OAS when, once the OAS claimed that there were irregularities in the election, Morales agreed to a full audit by the the OAS, and yet they refused to do so, forgoing a full audit and instead releasing only a preliminary audit with no empirical data? They have also been incredibly quiet as events have now unfolded in Bolivia.
Speculation and conjecture are not enough of a foundation to destabalize an entire country, plunge it into violence, and allow for the rise of a an interim president who seems to be an openly white-supremecist christian fundamentalist to an empty legislature. The ritualistic placing of a bible over the indigenous flag (and then burning the flag) and claims that “Bolivia is once again a Christian nation” do not seem to be in keeping with conscientious objections for the sake of a stable democracy and instead seem to be exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see after a successful coup by radical forces. After resigning, Morales and other members of his party had to flee Bolivia in fear of their safety, and other members of the Mas are even scared to return to the legislature. This doesn’t seem like a normal resignation due to election fraud, but a military style coup.
Hopefully you can see why there’s a lot of room to be skeptical about this situation. The “yes-this-is-a-coup” take is “The U.S. state department and the OAS helped start a coup by Bolivia’s right-wing forces as the latest attempt to destablize leftist governments in south america.” As much as I would love to dismiss this, it unfortunately seems to ring at least half true.
Just to be clear: have you read the OAS’s report and if so, do you accept that what they are saying is potentially truthful? Not trying to attack you or anything, but that’s the source document I’ll be referring back to in answering this question. If you haven’t, check it out and let me know what you still disagree with.
The claim here is “the OAS is sitting on a final report” or is for some reason restricting data, correct? Do you mind linking to a good source on this one? I haven’t seen any sources backing up that idea.
Disagree. If believe that your system is corrupt enough where conclusive evidence of government wrongdoing will never be uncovered without sustained action, then protesting is ethically mandated.
The legislature is empty because the socialist party refuses to join. They have a good reason for not doing so, but the option at this point is either “No President” or “President approved without a quorum” both options are bad, I personally think that a vacuum is worse.
As for openly white supremacist, I honestly don’t know. A look through normal media reporting on this event doesn’t back this claim. I think the best source for this point I found was Jacobin, but, you know… Jacobin. If she’s being honest and her goals are merely to arrange for a new set of fair elections within 3 months then her personality and biases hopefully won’t matter either way. If she doesn’t arrange free elections, they should also be protested.
Again, I’m not seeing any credible sources alleging this happened. It does seems exactly like the kind of thing that radical forces would do, or the kind of thing that pro-bolivarian propaganda outfits would claim had happened to mobilize the base.
Yes they fled, no there’s no good evidence that anything unlawful would have happened to them had they stayed. It’s WAY cushier to be a leader-in-exile than a disgraced former president/leader in country.
And here we get to the crux of my annoyance/disagreement. I don’t honestly believe that the upright folks at the state department decided to secretly work with shadowy forces in some random country no one in the US cares about just to stick it in the global eye of leftism. It’s not the cold war anymore, no one cares about small time leftist leaders anymore.
Who possibly benefits from doing this? What rationale supports this idea? Do you honestly think that that during an impeachment process for meddling in another country’s internal politics that the Trump department decided to go off and stage a coup? or maybe that a shadowy cabal of leftist-hating FSO’s decided to go rogue and take down Morales? What would anyone gain for this?
CEPR are not “election obsevers”, they are a think tank that happens to employ this guy, who generously decided, given the trust due to him as a neutral source, to write a paper with a simulation that is supposed to offer an explanation for the observerd irregularities. He did not himself observe the election, and people who actually did concluded that there was probably fraud.
I decided to separate out the critique of your facts vs. a critique of your ideas.
Morales is Morales, he only represents the broader movement of his ideas as much as say, Trump represents fiscal conservatism or Putin represents (checks Putin’s current party) the people of Russia. Morales isn’t some avatar of socialism, especially not to the people of Bolivia. He’s a complex man with a complex history; it’s very possible for him to have done some good early on and now be a national issue.
Morales running for this election is a national farce. The constitution prevents him from another term. A referendum from 2016 showed that the people of Bolivia didn’t want him to run for another term. The only reason he’s running is that the Supreme Court and Constitution was overruled by a tribunal. He’s grown increasingly erratic and has made choices internally that have alienated a bunch of people.
Occam’s razor – is it more likely that Trump has decided to Back a shadowy network of the globalist left and Bolivian millionaires, or that he finds the evidence that the election was rigged compelling?
“The claims that I’ve seen speak of rates of poverty moderate and extreme, the illiteracy rates and unemployment rates have dropped significantly during the reign of “the socialists”.”
I think these claims are misleading.
Here is a graph of Bolivian poverty rates over time. Morales was elected in 2006. It’s hard to tell but mostly looks like continuation of preexisting trend.
Here is Bolivian literacy rate over time. It looks like it did worse under Morales than before him.
Here is unemployment. Again, it looks like a trend that started before Morales continued into his administration, but in general the unemployment rate is higher now than when he was elected.
Low confidence that my interpretation of this is perfect, but even lower confidence in whatever source you’re using.
FWIW, the X-axis for the literacy rate is messed up, making it look like the taper off is sharper than it really is.
A pleasant little video about the physics of paint drying.
However, I can’t find anything about the stages water goes through from room temperature to boiling.
Last spring I took Transport Phenomena and one of the problems for convective mass transfer involved paint drying evaporatively. I seem to recall a joke among some of the students that solving the problems was less interesting than watching it in real time…
Funny that, because I have pondering the mystery if why, as water comes to a boil, the pitch it makes gets lower in frequency. Seems a little odd, when you think about the idea of more energy = faster/more reactions. I can think of reasons why it could be, but I don’t know the real reason.
Haven’t found any particular good explainers of the phenomenon.
I’m not certain what you mean by this, but if you can elaborate, I might have some ideas.
This effect is perhaps most easily observed with an electric kettle for boiling water, although I think it happens with pretty much any water as it comes to a boil. Of note, there is not any kind of “whistle spout”, just so that it’s clear I am talking about the noise made by the water itself.
As the water heats up near the boiling point, the kettle will start to give off a sort of “fizzing” or “static” sound. This is separate from a periodic ticking sound that I believe accompanies the expansion of the metal as it heats. As the water continues to increase in temperature this fizzing sound begins to deepen in tone, eventually becoming sort of a low rumble just before the water comes to a full boil.
I’d have to test it, but as a preliminary hypothesis: Increasing temperature means larger bubbles (more liquid water being converted into steam). The “fizzing” sound you hear as water simmers is most likely just that: fizzing. Tiny bubbles forming and collapsing.
As for why a bigger bubble makes a deeper sound, I’m not sure: The walls of the bubble have more surface area and thus resonate more slowly? Except that the popping sound is the water striking itself as the bubble collapses, isn’t it? So more surface area hitting itself…well, same thing, slower vibration/resonance, lower pitch?
Not an acoustic engineer or physicist but that would be my guess.
@Trofim_Lysenko:
Yeah, that’s why I said I can come up with potential reasons why it might be. I think you’re thoughts and mine are similar.
The other, slightly different, thought was that larger bubbles = fewer bubbles = slower frequency of bubble formation.
I would suggest that larger bubbles means larger air cavity, which means the wavelength of sounds created is longer. Longer wavelength = lower frequency = deeper sound.
Related
@woah77:
Very interesting article. Thank you. That does seem like the right explanation.
Kettles are loudest before boiling (I think about 70-80 C its the loudest) because of bubbles forming and collapsing in on themselves. Basically, before water boils all these little bubbles of water vapor form at the hotter parts of the vessel, but because they are surrounded by water that isn’t at the boiling point yet, they quickly cool down and collapse in on themselves, this is a fairly violent process when viewed on a small scale.
As the kettle gets hotter, the bubbles dont collapses as quickly or violently, and obviously once it is boiling they don’t collapse at all.
Education doesn’t reliably lead to prosperity on either an individual or group level. I welcome theories about have does lead to prosperity.
This comment is inspired by Millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did—despite being better educated
I’m pretty sure it’s mostly national IQ (not as much personal).
Education is a luxury good. We buy it because we’re rich, it doesn’t make us rich.
Does it seem as though national IQ dropped that much?
Ballpark guess would be that national IQ among millennial is about 3-5 points lower than boomers based simply on population averages because millennials are less white, slightly more Asian and substantially more Hispanic than boomers.
That’s not a lot, but it could explain the 20% difference.
Education probably dropped young Americans’ wages because of the opportunity cost of being in school for four more years, that’s four fewer years of job skill development.
Is there data that shows that average IQ fell in the US over the last 30 years? I’m skeptical….
It seems like a somewhat fallacious comparison. Young people have to compete with entrenched geezers to whom IQ and education is less crucial, because they entrenched. It’s as mistaken to compare them as to compare them across country lines.
It only really makes sense to compare millenials with millenials.
How often are millennials actually competing with geezers (by which I assume you mostly mean boomers) for the same job or promotion?
Millenials aren’t competing with boomers for the same promotion; they are competing with people who already have the job they want to get that job.
And that happens all the time in academia, for example, where you may have much more accomplished young researchers trying to get a professorship their older colleagues got much more easily (and are refusing to leave; many academics retire into their seventies).
So, exceptions include academia, public libraries, and other fields where there are few positions and people tend to cling to them until late retirement. But it seems like in general the pattern of millennials competing against boomers in a meaningful way is not prominent.
Wouldn’t this apply to any union position where seniority matters for employee retention or hiring preference?
Sure. Like I said, “fields where there are few positions and people tend to cling to them until late retirement”.
It’s comparing millennials with boomers in the past when they were young.
They’re not comparing millennial now vs. boomers now. They’re comparing millenials now vs. boomers at the same age some decades ago.
Edit: Ninja’d
The stereotype of Boomers is that in their youth they could easily get hired by just walking in the office. I guess they didn’t have the same kind of competition.
In either case, it seems unreasonable to try and compare sizes of different pies.
Wow, is that the stereotype? It is very very wrong. At least for middle boomers like me that came of age in the ’70’s. There was so much competition because of course we were baby boomers so there were so many of us. It was very hard to find jobs in the ’70’s.
Yeah, the easy hire stuff was discussed in this subthread. It’s mostly pre-boomer.
For certain fields I expect it differs, but I’d guess the legal field is somewhere between 5 and 10x as competitive for recent law school grads as when Boomers and even Gen Xers were graduating.
Older attorneys joke about how their C’s got degrees at mid-tier schools and then they got hired at a big firm, worked 8 years, made partner, etc. Now if you have C’s the only way you’d get hired is if you are at a top 20 school, or if your daddy is hiring you.
The only exception to that is minority candidates that are skilled. A minority with a B+ average will get like 10 offers.
This is a plausible implication from the article, which blames the recession. Recession leads to people’s savings being reduced, making the difference for a lot of them between retiring and staying in the workforce. More of them in the latter category means more available labor, and thus lower wages.
That’s simplifying a little. 20YOs aren’t competing directly with 50YOs, but 50YOs staying at work means fewer 40YOs getting the jobs the 50YOs left behind, which means fewer 30YOs getting the jobs the 40YOs would have left behind, etc.
It doesn’t look like they normalized across types of education. Getting a degree in art history probably isn’t employment-useful, whereas a degree in engineering or nursing probably is.
Also, how much of that was based on the unique economic conditions following WWII? Could it be that we are back to what would be considered “normal” employment conditions?
Boomers started their careers during a time of strong economic growth and unusually low wealth inequality, millennials started their careers during the 2007 financial crisis and unusually high wealth inequality.
1. By “prosperity” I take it you mean in a narrow financial sense. (Intuitively, I factor having kids into my personal definition of prosperity.)
2. By “education” I take it you mean both the sheer credential aspect and the structured learning meant to go behind it, rather than just one or the other.
3. One’s own education might not lead to prosperity, but the education of others certainly does. I never went to school to get a degree in what I do for a living, but what I do for a living depends in large part on computer systems. The science, development, and programming of those systems is something other people got educations for, and without them doing that I might not have my job. This is just one example and there are countless others to show how education has led to prosperity on the individual and group level — just not my education in this instance.
Those are good questions.
What I meant by prosperity is pretty much income, though what can be bought with the income is also relevant.
Children end up being a matter that’s kind of like the education and prosperity question– what circumstances enable people to turn prosperity into children
What I had in mind for education was the conventional notion of education. It probably should include craft training, but it usually doesn’t.
My underlying notion is that at least some of what’s learned in school is useful, but there needs to be a part to make that education useful, and I think a lot of people believe education is the solution to poverty and don’t think enough about what social systems are needed to make that education useful.
And I agree that there can be too much education just in terms of time spent.
Education does often lead to people delaying having kids, which probably does have a lot to do with financial prosperity.
The report doesn’t lay out its methodology in detail, but does say that they used Federal Reserve Survey data to compare 25-34 year olds’ inflation adjusted income in 1989 and 2013.
As Tim Worstall points out some (but almost certainly not all) of the spread may be explained by understandable factors.
1) If more education is required for the same jobs, millenials have years less work experience in those jobs.
2) I’m a little sceptical of anything that compares two specific years, but I can’t rule out that 1989 and 2013 are a fair comparison.
3) If it’s true that the CPI is overstating inflation, comparisons becme very difficult.
I love the “despite” in that sentence. It speaks to so much of what is wrong about the education system. Why on earth would you expect that people who spent several years getting degrees of extremely questionable utility would make more money than people who spent their time working and getting actual experience?
The basic math is also questionable. Millenials have more and better durable goods than boomers did at the same age, they live in larger (per person) and nicer homes, and have vastly better medical care. If they were truly making less money, they’d have to be giving something up somewhere, but they don’t appear to be.
I agree the CPI is overstating inflation, but an obvious thing they are giving up is children.
they’re having fewer than the early boomers, but spending a lot more money on each one. I’m not sure that child related consumption is down, it’s certainly up since the birthrate stopped dropping in the mid 70s.
Does anyone have information on the proportions of different sorts of degrees boomers vs. millennials have?
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph
I think that’s too broad – ideally we’d want to look at, say, business curricula across the decades and what proportion is practical skills (or proxies like ‘literary references any educated person will appreciate’ -> better networking).
How much of this wealth gap shows up when you factor in:
1. Our education cost way more than yours did and we have significant student loan debt when starting out our careers?
2. The fact that boomers destroyed manufacturing as a viable career path for the less well educated?
3. The fact that housing/cost of living prices have increasing way above wages throughout the entire time we’ve been on the job market?
I agree that these are all extremely important factors.
1. How much of that increase is a result of poorly designed student loans and the growth in non-faculty staff at universities? Or new and fashionable programs (e.g. women’s studies) that need to be subsidized by traditional programs (e.g. engineering)? Or the fact that IQ testing for jobs is now essentially illegal and everybody who wants an entry-level white collar job needs a degree in “psychology” or something?
2. Free trade with third world nations got you cheap flat screen TVs and stuff, at the expense of your social fabric.
3. Immigration increases the demand for housing and the supply of labor.
Just going to note here: it’s often the traditional humanities that are being subsidized, not just the fashionable programs. My university wouldn’t have a theology department or a bunch of others if not for core curricular requirements.
Fair point. I should revise to say “additional programs” that need to be subsidized.
I’d say “tech and trade.”
The finding accounts for inflation, so it already counts the housing price increase(.food, durables, ect. decreased.)
I’ve always been somewhat skeptical that housing costs are really properly accounted for in inflation metrics, at least in part because changes in housing costs vary so much by locality and housing type.
Goodhart’s law has to be at least part of it, and I question the claim that millennials are “better educated” when what is established is only that they have more credentials.
If college degrees are for A: upper-class people who need to upper-class “finishing school” and B: unusually promising poor to middle-class people deemed most likely to succeed in professional careers, then education will be highly correlated with economic success. If college degrees are for everyone because college degrees cause economic success, then college degrees will be much more weakly correlated with economic success.
+1 to this. Assume that income roughly translates to “possessing skills or gifts capable of creating material value in society,” that is, you get more income as your skills add more value. If you start with an education credential for the most-naturally-gifted 20%, you would expect their high skills (hopefully improved by the education) to produce substantial income later relative to their peers in the bottom 80%. If you now brute-force the education credential to encompass the top 40%, you would expect their skills to produce less income relative to their peers in the bottom 60%, because the possessors of the credential are likely to be less-skilled and thus lower-producing overall.
So if the value of a Bachelors degrees has decreased, I’d agree that comparing millennials and boomers isn’t worthwhile. Are there any degrees who’s value hasn’t eroded that you reasonably compare?
Medical degrees, possibly?
I don’t think comparing degrees is the right approach: what you want to compare are percentiles. So the ~60th percentile Millenial has a bachelors degree–how are they doing relative to a 60th percentile Boomer.
I think Millenials are much worse off. You have to be much further up the income distribution to own a house in a neighborhood where most children have the same parents they did when they were a month old, on a single income.
The article wants to blame the problem on the recession. Meanwhile, I assume the claim is that ( better education => more income ) because ( better education => better skill => more income ). If that’s the case, then there’s a potential weak point from a traditionalist’s perspective: maybe ( better education => better skill ) is false.
What subjects are all those bachelor’s degrees in? And what are the baseline requirements for a BS in a given subject in 2018, vs. the same BS in 1978?
Alexander Turok’s link above suggests the stereotypical right wing CW take is wrong: there was no surge in X Studies degrees. Arts, humanities, psychology, and sociology look pretty stable since 1995. That dark line between criminal justice and economics is cultural studies, which has been less than 1% the entire time.
Health has been growing since 2004. Education steadily decreased; journalism steadily increased. The big gain appears to have been business, which blew up in 1970-80 and stuck around 20% of the total majors since then.
The biggest possible problem I see is that there are over twice as many people with degrees as there were in 1970. There’s simply more people. And that chart only covers the US; the market has globalized significantly since then. That’s probably the most accurate take, not to mention the boring one. (Hypothesis: the median income worldwide went up.)
Instead of “better education => better skill => more income “, how about “better education => better skill => more income iff good use of sufficient capital => more income “?
If this theory is right, then we need an explanation for why there’s less capital and/or worse use of it.
We do, aye. …The obvious capital factor there is land, and there’s less of that per person now. But there are many more forms of capital as well, naturally. Which brings us to the earlier claim about the US manufacturing base. How many factories are still in operation, and what is their average GDP? (And their average GDP per person they employ?)
The value of land is mostly based on proximity to humans. More humans -> More land that’s valuable due to proximity to humans, so this is not a limited factor. If you want to look at land when stripped of its value due to proximity to humans, look at farmland in Kansas, there’s no increase in the real price of that. The problem with high housing costs is in political decisions not to allow people to develop it. In other words, it’s a choice.
@Nancy Lebovitz says:
Labor, resources, and relariver power lead to prosperity, but before I get into that, the reason more education no longer leads to higher wages is supply, demand, and what I call “the standing audience effect”:
At a theater with seats one person stands up to get a better view of the performance, now with their view blocked the person behind them stands up to make the difference, and then the person behind them does as well, soon most are standing instead of sitting comfortably in their seats.
With the collapse of wages for the less educated due to de-unionization, automation, and China’s entry in the W.T.O. the relative wage premium for college diplomas went up so more of the young went to college, eventually supply of graduates overtook demand.
From: The Rise and Fall of the College Graduate Wage Premium
The question then is what kept wages up for “low skilled” workers in the mid 20th century?
High membebership in “Industrial” (instead of “craft”) unions.
From: the September 2018 NBER Digest
The loss of the power of “low skilled” workers to negotiate for wages nearer to the median has driven more to attempt college (the percentage of graduates is higher now then before, and so is “some college” but no diploma.
The irony is that the sheer numbers of the “Millennial” generation is enough to force a better deal for themselves through political means, as you guys could easily out vote we of older generations if you got organized.
Why don’t you?
There are more Baby Boomers than Millennials, so outvoting isn’t feasible.
@Aapje,
Not in the U.S.A. anymore.
From Pew Research: “…Millennials are expected to overtake Boomers in population in 2019 as their numbers swell to 73 million and Boomers decline to 72 million…”, where American Millennials are outnumbered is in the voting “turnout rate“, if the young bothered to vote at the same percentage or higher they’d be the majority of the electorate.
Here is 2018 polling data on The Generation Gap in American Politics, as you can see the “Silent generation” (born between 1928 and 1945) and the “Millennial generation” (born between 1982 and 1996) are the most different in generational political views (those born earlier and later are too small a percentage of the population to bother polling), with the “Boomers” (those born between 1946 and ’64) mostly sharing political views close to the Silents, and “Generation X’ers” (born between 1965 and ’80) having views closer to those of Millennials.
I’m thinking of the Political Confessional: The Woman Who Thinks Older People Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Vote that was discussed at an open SSC thread a few weeks ago, if her generation bothered to vote at the same percentage as their elders they’d win, but they won’t so they don’t, hence her beef with how her elders vote when really it’s that her contemporaries that are to blame for not already dominating the electorate with higher turnout.
I took a look at that article. It appears the claim of lower income is based on this report. It’s based on the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances. The Survey of Consumer Finances is based on household, not individual data. We know people are marrying less; also, in 1989 (their baseline year), almost 60% of married couples were two-earner households. This seems like a significant confounder.
Time in school (which is what they measure as “education”) can, but doesn’t necessarily, lead to higher earnings in someone’s overall life. For example, much of the results are pre-baked in based on the selection of the type of people (smarter, more conscientious) people who end up having more time in school.
That said, the linked article is flawed, if nothing else because comparing younger adults between generations and noting that those who spent longer in school aren’t doing as well than earlier misses that the ones spending longer in school started their career 4-5 years later. When people change jobs for large raises every 3-5 years for the first couple of decades, those missing years of work experience can make a huge difference in the statistics, even if 20 years later they end up on a higher eventual job level.
So not saying it’s not true, but IMHO not enough information and like vs. like comparison included to actually know.
When a Supreme Court gets involved in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign:
The Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, India is so ancient that no one knows when it was built. What we do know is that it is mentioned in several Sanskrit Puranas and the Tamil Sangam literature, ancient texts whose dates are disputed themselves. It is known to have at least eight secret vaults.
On 27 June 2011, five vaults were opened on the orders of the Supreme Court of India, in response to a petition seeking transparency in the temple’s management. A vast amount of treasure was found,, including hundreds of thousands of gold coins dating to the Roman Empire’s trade with Southwest India, and even earlier (up to 200 BC).
I am really disappointed that at no point Supreme Court seemed to have been squished by a giant rolling boulder.
I would expect that this is due to the fact that a Supreme Court is likely to have a higher than normal number of (rules) lawyers…
I’ll get my coat.
It’s not so much Indiana Jones as Bugs Bunny
Following up on the fitness test discussion below:
What are good exercises for working my abs? I already do deadlifts, but want to hit the abdominals more directly.
I have access to a full gym with a lot of equipment, but some of it I know I don’t want. The sit-up machine makes my back hurt for days, and not in a DOMS way.
Ab rolls and leg raises are my core ab moves.
Planks.
Ab wheel’s pretty good, if your gym has one.
I forget the exact name for them, but hanging leg drops are one of the most intense isolating ab exercises I know. It’s essentially the opposite of a leg raise, which forces much stricter form. I can’t even do the full straight leg version of it because of its difficulty. First you jump up and hang from a pull up bar by your hands (like you’re doing a pull up). Raise your legs, but leave your knees bent. You want to raise them until you knees are all the way up to your chest. That’s your starting position. Drop them from your chest until your legs are at 90 degrees, but don’t let it go all the way back down. Bring your knees back up to your chest again then controlled lowering to 90 degrees again. You basically have to engage your abs the entire time.
Other than that, I like medicine ball twist crunches and planks.
Food for thought: I’ve read accounts that twists and curls are potentially bad for the spine. It’s a matter of time before the disks herniate. (Me: they’re probably fine if you’re “careful”, but I don’t know what “careful” would entail.)
Sources that advise not twisting and wrenching your spine advise doing core exercises that keep the spine relatively static. So, planks, pushups, that thing where you lean on a workout ball and keep your balance, etc.
Dragon flag progressions (they’ll almost definitely be too hard to do at first but getting there is valuable). And planks.
If you are looking for “good-looking” abs to impress, you might also consider that fat-burning exercise in general contributes heavily to that, as six-pack-abs are in large part just low fat-percentage-person-abs. In fact, low enough to be dangerous.
Of course, if you’re just looking to be able to do something specific physical and think stronger abs will help that, it’s a different story, but then you might just want to do that specific physical thing as well.
It’s a little of Column A, a little of Column B. Last time I finished my cut, I think I was around 12 of so PBF, and they were not showing, so I am trying to make things better for the next time around.
So “Age of Empires II” comes out tomorrow. I’m already downloading it from Steam.
Anyone else excited and is planning to play online?
I hope you mean Definitive Edition!
I just bought it – how good are you?
Voobly never worked for me in the past (network issues). So I never got too much into online play. Last time I could beat the hardest AI in HD, but not two mediums at the same time.
My Steam name is my real name, so I don’t want to share it publically. Care to give yours?
Steam name is what’s here, with an additional 3 at the end
Can’t find you like that. You must have set your privacy settings to the max, perhaps.
Give me a friend code please.
Shoot me an e-mail via ganggang3ster at the google mail service
Good news, everyone! I’m teaching Talk to Transformer theology!
Article 1. Whether the existence of God is self-evident?
Objection 1. It seems that the existence of God is self-evident. Now those things are said to be self-evident to us the knowledge of which is naturally implanted in us, as we can see in regard to first principles. But as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. i, 1,3), “the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in all.” Therefore the existence of God is self-evident.
Objection 2. Further, a thing’s being what it is by its own nature is self-evident. But God is the first cause of all things, as stated above (I-II:4:4; I-II:8:2). Therefore God’s existence is self-evident.
Objection 3. Further, if it is impossible for a thing to exist unless it be what it is, it would not be possible for God to
Objection 2. Further, those things are said to be self-evident which are known as soon as the terms are known, which the Philosopher (1 Poster. iii) says is true of the first principles of demonstration. Thus, if we take the definition of “a body,” as, for example, when we are told that a body is an extension of space, then all we know is the definition, and not the definition in relation to any subject. Therefore, if we have a knowledge of things in themselves, and of that which belongs to them through their own nature, then we know these things in themselves and not in relation to any subject.
P(1)- Q(57)- A(3)- RO(1) —
In this way, when we know what a thing is in itself, the knowledge of the object in relation to the subject is not necessary for the knowledge of the thing. Hence it is said: “He knows his own man, and his own eye, and his own foot
When the nature of a whole and of a part is known, it is at once recognized that every whole is greater than its part. But the thing which we cannot grasp as it is, is greater than its parts; and it is impossible to understand anything, as it is, as though it were not. But if that thing which we can understand, if it were possible to understand it, could be considered as not existing, what will be our notion of the essence of the gods, as they exist in their being? If, for instance, we know of them that they are immortal, that they have bodies without parts, that they have the same properties as ourselves; if these things are known to be true, it is evident that the essence of the gods is different from their bodies, from their bodies, from the properties of their bodies, and from the properties of their souls. And that this will be the case is proved by the
As soon as the signification of the word “God” is understood, it is at once seen that God exists. For by this word is signified that thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. But in such words as these the mind of the poet is in danger of being arrested. For as he would have it, the “god” is not the same in all countries. The Greeks use the word “god” for a person or thing, a body, or a substance, while in the Latin the word is used to signify any thing whatever. For as we have in our language the word “father,” or “brother,” and “man,” or “woman,” so, likewise, we have the word “god.” Now in the Latin, the word “god” signifies not a thing, but only a person. For in the Latin “gods” are persons. For as we have in our language “father,” “brother,” and “man,” so, likewise, we have in
That which exists actually and mentally is greater than that which exists only mentally. Therefore, if there is an ultimate reality outside of space and time that we call “the world” and “everything that is,” then there would have to be a being of a kind of “God” who, if he existed, would have an infinite understanding of that reality.
To understand what I mean by this, consider this: In the universe there is matter, energy, and space. In the universe, “every atom is made up of three different components: light, matter, and energy.” In the universe, if there was a God, he could see all of these things, could know all of these things, and he would have infinite knowledge of the universe.
But the problem is, if there is a God, then he would have to be perfect. For if he was perfect, then he would know everything, and thus he would also have infinite knowledge of everything, and that’s just a logical impossibility.
This is why
Since as soon as the word “God” is understood it exists mentally, it also follows that it exists actually. Therefore, God exists in the same way as everything else exists, viz., in the mind and in the brain.
[14] Furthermore, the same reasoning is valid for other intelligibles, e.g., the ideas of numbers, and the senses.
[15] Furthermore, the divine substance is an intelligible, which is something that is in potency. Hence it does not exist in act. But the divine substance does not exist in act; it exists actually. Therefore, it does not exist as a divine essence; for a thing’s actuality is to exist in act.
[16] Again, the intellect knows itself in act, for it knows itself by itself. But an intellect does not know itself by itself if the intellect is considered as being in act, because
The proposition “God exists” is self-evident. However, we can understand this as a metaphysical proposition, which requires a priori, non-empirical premises to be true.
In this section, we explain how one might use “self-evident” to refer to non-empirical, non-empirical, non-empirical, and so on propositions. We also show that if we consider what it means for a proposition to be self-evident, we can use a non-self-evident definition to provide a useful definition for self-evidentity, which is equivalent to the definition given by the non-self-evident proposition.
A proposition that is self-evident, but does not meet the necessary condition that it must be empirically justified, is known as “self-evident”. A proposition that is self-evident but does not meet the necessary condition that it must be logically justified, is known as “self
What’s the term for a Turing test where you try to convince the other person you’re completely insane? Whatever that test is called, I’d say Terminator passed it.
Do you think you’re insane?
No. Not in the least.
What was it like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone for that interview?
It was like I was in a dream or something. The thing that really stood out in my mind was the headline, “It’s not about the money. It’s about the music.” I remember feeling like that, and I had a great time being on that cover.
Did it seem like a big deal to you?
Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to say because it wasn’t until later that I really started to realize how huge it was.
Did it feel like you could do anything?
Yes, definitely. I remember being on the cover of Rolling Stone and feeling like, “I can do this.” I thought I could write my own material and do what I wanted to do.
It was the only time that you were on the cover
Wow didn’t realize you were quoting the Transformer until the latest sentence trailed off. I was trying to guess the celebrity.
This has taught me that bad theology is indistinguishable from Time Cube.
Are there four simultaneous parts to bad theology? In my view, yes. One, it assumes that God is a person. Second, it assumes that the person of God has free will. Third, it assumes that the free will of the person of God has no moral dimensions. Fourth, it assumes that God’s free will is not constrained by His nature. In the same way, some of the arguments for the existence of God rest on the assumption that God has free will and that God has no moral dimensions.
For those who believe that God is not a person, what then is the relation of God to the universe? How do the statements of Scripture concerning the creation of the universe and the origin of man, for example, relate to this relationship? How is the relation between the human person and the universe to be understood? To answer these questions, it would seem that it is necessary to consider both the metaphysical as well as the theological aspects of the relationship of God to the universe. This is not literally true. Many theologians believe that God did not necessarily create everything with the same extreme precision He created Adam and Eve. For example, the universe seems to be very old.
Calvin and Hobbes:
Summarize John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion
In 1538, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), a French writer and philosopher, published his first book, Leviathan. His work, widely considered one of the most influential works in the history of Western thought, is known as the founding text of modern political philosophy.
This book argues that humans must rule over themselves. “By what means will they not be slaves, but also masters of themselves?” he asks.
Hobbes argues that all people have the right to a self-governed life, including the right to govern themselves and their property. Hobbes says that this right comes from God. “All men have a natural right of property in themselves,” he writes. He goes on to argue that a person’s right to his own life does not come from a contract or a government; it is inherent in humans.
In his discussion of the political, Hobbes argues that “the first duty of men
Wait, is Thomas Hobbes a time traveler?
Is it bad that I now want to write an entire bullshit philsophy book by prompting this thing and picking out the best couple paragraphs for each prompt.
There’s nothing quite like discovering John Bolton agrees with you to make you question whether or not you’re correct about something.
I still think I am, but I admit being on the same side as Mr. Bolton, who I have previously described as ‘wrong about everything’ does give me pause.
Unless you’re part of his base, Donald Trump has almost certainly hired a lot of people that you broadly disagree with. And really, that qualifier may be unneccessary. Donald Trump has then thrown a large fraction of the people he’s hired under the bus, as soon as they became an annoyance or inconvenience to him. That’s going to result in a lot of people whom you generally disagree with, agreeing with you about the low moral character of Donald Trump.
So, yeah, Bolton generally falls into “your approval fills me with shame” territory, but I say go with it just this once.
What if both Bolton and Joe Biden agree with you? Which they probably do in this particular case.
It’s kinda rough, yeah, but I deal with it by saying that there are some evil people with principles, and many with none. Just because your principles align with an evil person’s doesn’t necessarily mean yours are incorrect.
I hold your same viewpoint on Bolton, but I see his current stance on the President as a good thing. If my claim is “the current President’s conduct is outside of any bounds of reasonable or proper behavior” then having someone from the far other end of the spectrum agreeing with me is strong confirmation that I’m correct.
(A) People who got fired/forced out of a job are generally regarded as a reliable witnesses about their boss’s conduct.
(B) on the spectrum of “do we like trump” Bolton is not on the far end of the spectrum from you. Someone on the far side of the spectrum would be someone who has/had a record of supporting trump and changed his mind. and my threshold for supporting is higher than “was willing to take his dream job under”.
Did you mean unreliable?
Agreed, but that’s not the spectrum I’m talking about. I’m talking about the pre-Trump political spectrum that used to exist. Sure, if we radically reorient political norms to only account for one variable, I guess we’re now on the same side, but that’s a bizarre stance to take, IMO.
woops, that should say “not reliable”
It’s not about re-orienting norms, it’s about selecting the relevant spectrum. If bolton was saying “Trump’s moves in asia are far too aggressive” then I’d sit up and listen, because on the hawkishness spectrum, bolton is way out there from me. But one’s position on the hawkishness spectrum isn’t correlated at all with the “is trump corrupt” spectrum, especially when the two of them have just parted under less than amicable circumstances.
I think that’s the point. “I know that my opinion on Trump’s corruption and unfit-ness isn’t ideologically driven because people’s positions on ideological issues aren’t correlated at all with ‘Is Trump corrupt?’” (Or at least, aren’t as tightly correlated as you’d expect. I’m sure a broad survey would find plenty correlation.)
Motivated reasoning may also apply. People are more likely to view people they disagree with as evil (conflict theory). So the idea that someone they disagree with happens to be corrupt is much more credible.
Hence the idea of “statement against interest” and similar. John Bolton thinking that someone else is too aggressive demonstrates that someone is definitely aggressive. Likewise if eg. Hillary Clinton came out and claimed that Trump had done nothing wrong.
But statements from an opponent for one reason have no reason to be uncorrelated with statements about another reason. The *issues* might be unrelated, but the *statements* aren’t necessarily.
Considering Trump’s history of claiming he fired people who say they resigned, his willingness to hire his enemies and his tolerance of them in office, I believe Bolton when he said he resigned voluntarily.
It’s not hard to think of people who supported him from the beginning who don’t like him now, Ann Coulter, John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, ect. In fact it’s much harder to think of notable people who supported him from the beginning and are still supporting him now.
Jeff Sessions.
I believe his approval rating with republicans is still ~90%.
Can I just say I love the headline “John Bolton drops bombshell”?
Not sure where this is most likely to be seen by our dear Scott, so I’ll leave it here.
I don’t know whether you’re in the habit of taking requests for book reviews, but: I’ve been reading “The Master and His Emissary” by Iain Mcgilchrist and have almost reached the end. The thesis of the book revolves around left-right hemisphere differences in the brain’s function, and the author claims that shifts in the relative dominance of left- vs right-hemisphere ways of viewing the world may explain cultural shifts throughout western history. He posits that the left hemisphere, which he characterises as rational and context-insensitve, has in the modern age obtained an unhealthy degree of dominance.
Broadly the book looks like a critique of rationalism and the enlightenment, two things I’m mostly positively-inclined towards. Some of his arguments seems persuasive, others seem to take several speculative leaps too far. But much of it hinges on neuropsychological claims which I don’t feel well-equipped to assess. The book seems to lie pretty squarely in the middle of the Venn diagram of SSC’s areas of interest, and I’d be very curious to read Scott’s review of it, were he to do one.
Does this theory explain any facts about the world that other frameworks struggle to?
Hasn’t the whole left/right hemisphere model of creativity vs rationality been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point?
The US Army is phasing in a new fitness test:
If I understand the article correctly, the new standards will not be adjusted for age and sex.
What’s the rationale? Some of these are so standard as to be boring, the sprint, drag, and carry is unusual but kinda makes sense (sprint to cover, hump ammo boxes, drag a wounded buddy), but the leg tuck, power throw, and hand-raising thing are just plain weird.
Here’s one critic’s take on why the old test should be replaced.
The official rationale is that the new test “better predicts and trains for performance in combat” or something similar.
The actual rationale, I strongly suspect, is to lower standards* as part of the combat arms gender integration push.
*Mitigated somewhat because the sprint/drag/carry and ball throw prevent really tiny women from using high scores on isometric exercises to score too highly, but the test is just flat-out easier to pass in general than the old one.
It’s probably both.
It really shows how mindkilled our society is on gender right now. The number of woman who want to fight in combat and would be good at it is a fraction of a fraction. Their parents don’t want it. The male soldiers probably don’t want it. The feminists who talk about it don’t want to join the military. It’s so transparently performative.
And the kind of women who do want to join combat probably don’t want to get in through the lowering of standards.
Who wants to be the only girl in a combat team when everybody knows you got in through lower standards and will probably be a drag in a combat situation?
@ana53294
I’ve seen a decent number who do want that.
If the choice is between getting a special benefit or giving up your desired job, many are surely going to opt for the former.
What if you assume there will never be a mass-combat situation? A few raids like they did on Bin Laden’s compound, Americans as the “training” force as in Syria, but no Iraq-style mass casualty combat.
You’d be wrong. There have been multiple “mass combat situations” in the past ten years alone, including a modern peer-to-peer mechanized war (this one almost makes the cut, too).
It’s true that Joint Special Operations Command has gotten into the habit of “fighting wars” by sending a handful of elite operators to call in airstrikes while the poor wogs sustain thousands of casualties in the process of actually seizing territory against armed resistance, but this is a lot different than claiming that the US Army is never going to have to supply the main body of an operation ever again.
The Israeli military, the Soviets in WWII, and the Kurds strongly suggest that in a modern mass-combat setting you *do* actually put a lot of your able-bodied women on the line and they perform well. The Kurdish case is especially notable since they’re all volunteers, not conscripts.
That’s significantly more than “a fraction of a fraction.”
Don’t confuse functionally peacetime (only high aggression men sign up for the military for thrill-seeking) with an actual homeland threat situation.
The Israelis primarily draft women for second-line positions. They have a few mixed battalions, which have traditionally been used as border guards. That’s a rather different thing from out-and-out combat, and I suspect the IDF knows it. The Soviets made use of women as tank drivers, snipers and pilots. They did not use female infantry AFAIK. (Snipers and infantry are not the same thing, even if the US recruits most snipers from the infantry.) In neither case did they put “a lot” of their women on the front line. The IDF has less than 4% of its women in combat units, and that includes things like artillery and fighter pilots. (Of course, the total percentage in combat units is something I don’t know, and given Israel, could be anything.) I’m not familiar enough with the Kurdish situation to speak to them, but things that happen in that kind of nasty, multifaceted war are not necessarily good guides for how to set up a good military.
Of all three cases, the Kurds are the ones closest to the knife’s edge of extinction and thus closest to what you’d expect to be pushing the bounds of the “actually doable” as opposed to “preferred”, and they do field all-female and majority-female infantry units. Interesting book if you want some visceral updates to your mental model of the Kurds: “We Came From Fire” by Joey Lawrence.
As for the other cases you cited, for the Soviets tank drivers, snipers, and pilots are still combat roles, and in the Israeli case 4% of combat roles being women is still significantly more than the “fraction of a fraction” that Wrong Species cited, unless they are using “fraction” to mean “1/3.5”
I’m not disputing that there’s a clear gender difference in preference for combat. I’m just pointing out that we have examples that suggest that its extremity has a social component, since we have societies that have effective fighting forces with decidedly non-trivial women participation.
Oh, quick clarification — are you claiming that “combat” is just “frontline infantry” and doesn’t include pilots, artillery, tank drivers, etc? Because I would define a combat role as “anyone with a major chance to kill an opposing soldier in a major war.”
If I thought that the people pushing sex integration on the American military would be fine with 1-4% female units, and disproportionately few of those going on to be high-ranking leaders (something that requires exceeding physical standards continually for many years well into middle age rather than making the cut for a single contract in late teens/early 20s) I might be more on board with it, but I don’t so I’m not.
I think “anyone with a major chance to be killed by an opposing combatant in a major war.” would be better. Otherwise you’re including people flying an Avenger UAV over the combat theatre from their comfy airconditioned office 7,000 miles away in Creech AFB Nevada as a combat role, which doesn’t feel quite right to me.
Unfortunately at this point it includes every civilian so we need even more specific definition…
This is strangely worded. What does that mean?
You lower your body all the way to the ground, and to show that you have reached the ground, you lift your arms and stick them out to the sides. You then pull them back in, and do the up-push part of the push-up.
I’m guessing this done to make the push-ups harder to cheat on. With normal push-ups, people have a strong tendency to lower themselves down only part way.
@johan_larson
Wouldn’t this be somewhat offset by getting a brief rest period between every push up? How long are you allowed to drag out the part where you stick your arms out to the side? If that’s longer than each pushup itself, then you are saving a lot of energy. Also, if you’re lowering your body all the way to the ground, you can let gravity take you a little more towards the end than if you have to support your body at all times.
I think you can stay down as long as you want between pushups, but it’s a timed exercise. You are graded on how many you can do in two minutes.
The big concern I see with this is that you can store a lot of energy in your arms on the down stroke, that you can release when straightening them on the up stroke. Or to put it another way, you can bounce. I do this all the time when I do pushups, and if I do hands-up, I’m going to miss that bounce a lot.
That said, I also sometimes wonder if I’m dropping as far as I ought to, and hands-up pretty much means I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Might be worth it for me.
The hand-raise pushups are harder than regular pushups, even when the latter are performed without “cheating”, not only for the reason Paul Brinkley noted but also because the new test doesn’t allow you to move your arms around and work slightly different muscle groups as you go.
Damn, wasn’t expecting to see this on SSC. Anyway, I pretty much agree with what Rob Shaul says here:
https://mtntactical.com/knowledge/7-major-problems-proposed-army-combat-readiness-test-proposed-replacement-apft/
The situp is a horrible exercise, not so much because it’s ‘tested but because the average soldier probably does hundreds of situps every week, something I’m absolutely convinced is responsible for a lot of chronic back injuries. If that time was spent picking up heavy objects (deadlift) it probably won’t hurt more people and would actually be training something useful.
I think this is pretty much spot on from the perspective of planning your own individual training but not very helpful in designing a test that a lot of people can take at once with minimal equipment. The hanging leg raises/”leg tuck”/”pull-up bar heel taps” seem like a decent compromise as a test event, or perhaps the buddy-carry component of the USMC CFT. (Though the USMC CFT also makes more sense as the second tier of a two-tier testing system, with the PFT being the first tier.).
The Army can afford a bunch of trap bars. Mark Milley, currently the Army Chief of Staff, used base-maintenance funds to install a room full of squat racks in every battalion when he was the commander of the 10th Mountain Division.
Apparently pull-ups are a problem for women. It can take considerable training for a woman to do even a single legit pull-up.
The USMC used to have pull-ups in their fitness test for both men and women, with the minimum set at one pull-up for women, but switched to flexed-arm hangs.
You say “bug”, I say “feature.”
I think we are both comfortable with considerable gender skew in the military. Some bodies are just better at some jobs.
But I have to wonder whether the pull-up is the right test for assessing combat effectiveness. It seems so artificial. When the heck does one pull oneself up without using the legs at all? I suspect something like a body drag or even a deadlift would be more useful. And really, are barbells harder to find than pull-up bars?
Second question first: yeah. I’ve build multiple pull-up bars, no sweat, under $100 for 6 count, heavily used and holding up fine, common materials (pressure treated 4x4s, 1.5″ pipe, concrete), dirt floor. A bar and accurate weights are going to cost significantly more, and more yet if you want bumpers or a platform in order to avoid cracking the concrete with repeated tests. If you’re training for pull-ups rather than testing a whole unit, you probably don’t even need a bar–I’ve chinned off the tops of doors, tree branches, whatever.
OK, first question. You have a point, but imo:
1) the significant difference in ease of administration outweighs the marginal benefit of extra specificity, especially considering that leaders at the NCO level will be able to informally evaluate the performance of the soldiers under their command in specific combat tasks during pre-deployment workups anyway (the real role of the fitness test is to winnow the applicant pool at the very beginning)
2) I think it’s worth having at least one test of something like upper-body strength in the test battery rather than trying to mimic every possible odd-lift/drag/carry scenario. Even if you had a deadlift or a buddy carry, I think it would make sense to include chins (or ammo-can presses as in the CFT, or the new dead-stop pushups, or whatever.).
How is a deadlift comparable to a pull up? Deadlife is a fine exercise, but it is lower body exercise, not upper body. A pull up is not perfect, but it is an excellent measurement of your ability to pull yourself over the top of something (like a fence) and your ability to pull a teammate towards you (such as over an obstacle, or a wounded teammate behind cover).
While I’d say that most things are covered by a weighted long distance run, combat readiness is all about diverse skill sets. As an athlete who still exercises, the new test is somehow less diverse in the muscles it tests than if they just used Pushup/Pullup/2 Mile/100M. Which is kinda pathetic.
Do you have data suggesting that women actually perform badly in modern infantry combat? I haven’t seen anything suggesting that Kurdish women’s units suffered disproportionate casualities fighting ISIS (and with a total body count of 11,000, I assume the data set would be pretty representative).
(Note that I haven’t seen a study breaking it down either way, and yes absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but if there was a problem on the ground you’d think you’d have heard about the Kurds having to adjust to compensate for subpar units)
Well, the army/marines have done extensive testing in controlled exercises. Female and mixed units in those have slightly lower scores.
But you’ll never get great data on this from actual battlefields, because if it is true generals, admirals, etc will re-arrange how they deploy female units to avoid giving them the toughest assignments.
How much lower is slightly lower? Is it enough to suggest that doubling the potential recruiting pool isn’t worth the degradation in performance, or is it something that could be worked around in a mass-mobilization war so it might be worth building some of the infrastructure for it in peacetime?
(Curious about your personal opinion on it since you’ve read more than I have)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2394531-marine-corps-force-integration-plan-summary.html
Here is a relevant article summary.
My biggest concerns are probably speed and injuries. Speed is essential for all missions, particularly modern ones where we don’t really fight wars, we engage in a series of skirmishes and groups of soldiers are dispersed, then have to support each other when backup is called for.
The injury problem is really bad (its why I also argue that we should stop encouraging women to play basketball, and instead play a sport that isn’t designed to destroy female ACLs). Having injuries on a unit depletes its strength when deployed, when injuries happen in the field, its much worse. Knee, hip, back, or ankle injuries essentially turn you into an extra ruck for a fellow soldier. Also, this might be my big brother-ness showing through, but I think its insane to think that units that are mostly composed of men are going to be able to cope with female and male casualties equally as well. Extra risks will be taken to rescue injured females, and deaths will be taken especially hard.
Thanks for the link!
Those injury rates do seem wild. If that’s the case, it seems like either the Marines should commit to peacetime experimentation training on kit and practices to see if that can be brought down, and in the meantime reserve mobile / offensive combat roles to be male-only, or male + the rare handful of women who can meet 50th percentile male marine standards.
“Also, this might be my big brother-ness showing through, but I think its insane to think that units that are mostly composed of men are going to be able to cope with female and male casualties equally as well. Extra risks will be taken to rescue injured females, and deaths will be taken especially hard.”
If common, this would suggest gender-segregated units would be more rational in combat situations, although the Kurds fielding gender-mixed units suggests this is cultural.
@Hypoborean, piggybacking off of @Clutzy
I don’t have a document reference, but an anecdote: when I was an executive officer in a training unit at Fort Leonard Wood (about 2006-2007) the Medical Corps was running an experiment in giving incoming female Soldiers osteoporosis medication because of the alarming number of complex fractures observed: stuff like fracturing the head of the femur off. I want to emphasize that these were primarily 18-year-old females, not ones closer to 39.
They didn’t persist in doing it, so I guess they didn’t see decreases in injuries due to the tests. But it was something that was definitely worrisome to the Pentagon.
@Hypoborean
The problem with reducing weight is that a lot of technological progress is working against this. There is a lot of stuff that is extremely beneficial to soldiers, making it hard to leave it home.
For example, the average body armor for a soldier weighs 26 pounds. This has reduced lethal injuries a lot compared to a ‘naked’ WW II soldier, but it is a lot of weight.
The only real solution is probably a very capable way to transport stuff using a robot, exoskeleton or such.
Ho. Ly. Fuck.
That’s not quite the hardest thing to break, but it’s pretty damn close. I was thinking of small tib/fib fractures or something where you become nearly immobile but can be repaired fairly easily. “Broken hip” isn’t pretty. It also likely goes from “gets around pretty easily in a wheelchair” to “probably bed-bound”.
@Aapje
Yes, but both those ideas are currently unworkable, pending revolutions in materials science. The biggest of the current issues is simply energy storage and efficiency. Of course, solving that with a new generation of ultra-dense, ultra-light, ultra-efficient batteries would in and of itself be a very big step towards lightening the load of a modern first world military…which is why that’s something militaries are already pursuing.
@johan_larson
I know I’m a bit late to this, but:
I was able to have the experience of participating in an advanced obstacle-style course set up for doing physiologic research for combat-related tasks as well as evaluation of the effects of different gear packs on various tasks. Probably the two hardest tasks for the group I was in were (1) a body drag (as you point out), and (2) clearing a relatively high wall. Both tasks were noticeably even more difficult for the women in the group. Clearing the high wall was definitely aided by upper body strength in the same direction as a pull-up. It was difficult enough that they had actually installed some of those rock climbing wall footholds, but there was still a decent distance over which you kinda needed to pull yourself up and over. There were also a couple similar tasks to get up/through windows, but in this particular course, they weren’t as high.
What makes this even more weird is that we already had one abortive run at a new PT Test and program, back when I was in, the one with the heavy emphasis on medicine balls and so on. One that was abandoned, AFAIK, because it required too much equipment and took too long to execute…
Personally, I don’t think the only reason for the new one is to make it easier for females to pass, but I definitely think it was a reason. Time will tell if that matters or not. My guess, given injury rates from OIF/OEF, is that we’ll see time-delayed issues, and if training standards are lowered, that’s going to exacerbate the issues but won’t affect the time delay.
The deadlift thing does sound like it would take forever compared to the other exercises, was my first thought.
The medicine ball throw sounds like a recipe for funny accidents.
Hmm…. That’s interesting in a “what the heck are they thinking” way. Yes, combat is no respector of age or sex, but this is Army-wide. You’re either going to fail a huge number of women/older men or have it be completely trivial for the young men. Maybe you could normalize it by MOS, which wouldn’t be the worst idea.
Yes. There will be a second test called the “Occupational Physical Assessment Test” that will comprise of:
Standing Long Jump
Seated Power Throw
Strength Deadlift
Interval Run (Beep Test)
So, grunts will likely have higher standards than Yeomen. Which makes sense, at least IMO.
Remember the conversation about women in combat?
“How can anyone justify excluding women from combat? A woman who is just as capable as any man should be able to have the same opportunities. This is just common sense.”
“But they aren’t going to be held to the same standard, they’re going to be held to a lower standard.”
“Well, let’s suppose they were held to the same standard.”
“But they won’t.”
“Let’s suppose they will.”
“They won’t.”
…
The male-female physical gap is worse in some areas than others, and you could easily design a test that plays to women’s relative strengths. The Canadians did this when they couldn’t get enough women to pass their existing test. I’m not sure that’s what’s going on here (the DoD is under different management that may be actually making an effort on this, and the presence of what looks to be arm strength events is evidence to that effect) but it wasn’t an idle worry.
Sure. But modifying the standards to benefit women still violates the spirit of “hold to the same standard,” even that won’t be enough.
I’m not sure I get your point. My worry was/is that the implementation isn’t being done by people who have the utmost dedication to combat efficiency and making sure women are capable of the same standards men are held to. It’s being done/driven by people who want equality rather than effectiveness, and are willing to butcher the standards to get it. The Canadians did this, with their infantry fitness test having a casualty evacuation section with someone of the same body weight.
Are you sure about that, @bean?
Here is the current Canadian Forces fitness test. I don’t see anything about adjustments for body weight.
@bean,
My point is that they said they would hold men and women to a different standard. According to the link they aren’t. They say they will do so in a year. I would say “fool me one, shame on you,” but I was never fooled.
@Johan
This was the combat test, not the general one. Sadly, I’d have to go looking for links on this, but I believe it came from a pro-women in combat source.
Bean, I did a bit more research on current Canadian Forces fitness tests. As far as I can tell, there are two.
The first is FORCE Fitness, based on Sandbag Lift, Intermittent Loaded Shuttles, Sandbag Drag, and 20 Metre Rushes. This test is required of everyone in the Canadian Forces.
The second is FORCE Combat, which is like FORCE Fitness, but is performed with 25 kg of battle gear. It also includes a 5 km march, with 35 kg of gear. I think this one is only required of soldiers in combat arms.
Basically, I don’t see anything to indicate that these tests are adjusted for the bodyweight of the soldier being tested. I think your information may be out of date.
Do you have data suggesting that women actually perform badly in modern infantry combat? I haven’t seen anything suggesting that Kurdish women’s units suffered disproportionate casualities fighting ISIS (and with a total body count of 11,000, I assume the data set would be pretty representative).
(Note that I haven’t seen a study breaking it down either way, and yes absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but if there was a problem on the ground you’d think you’d have heard about the Kurds having to adjust to compensate for subpar units)
Three posts to the same thread saying almost exactly the same thing, is a bit excessive.
Reported the above comment for spamming the same question in multiple comments which I’m pretty sure is being asked in bad faith.
Sorry, what is the procedure here? Three different sub-threads with different people (I confirmed they were different usernames before posting) were all talking about the same thing, and the same point is relevant in each case. Should I have posted once and then referenced the first in the other two places? I assumed this was more convenient for people.
And no, it’s not being asked in bad faith. I think the existence of modern fighting forces who are up against existential threats making extensive use of female recruits is strong evidence that they can be effective.* Is there some obvious counter-argument that I’m missing?
*Trivially, the idea that upper body strength has become mostly detached from fighting performance in an era where accurate high long rifles are not especially heavy seems straight-forward enough to me?
Modern warfare imposes an even heavier load:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a25644619/soldier-weight/
“Modern warfare imposes an even heavier load:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a25644619/soldier-weight/”
Modern warfare as practiced by the US military involves humping large amounts of kit, yes.
Two questions about this:
(1) How aligned is being able to do a pull-up with moving with body armor? I’d expect gender variance to be lower (but still non-trivial) on a test involved moving under load than on a pull-up contest. If the goal is about war-fighting not dick-measuring, having one standard everyone must pass that is actually related to the role should be the priority.
(2) How necessary / beneficial is this amount of kit? The US army doesn’t exactly have a good track record with pure-infantry* operations post WWII {Vietnam Occupation, Iraq Occupation, Afghanistan Occupation}. One of the reasons the Kurds can easily field mixed-gender and women-only combat units is their operational doctrine emphasizes light infantry (no body armor) tactics favoring mobility (source “We Came From Fire” by Joey Lawrence), since in Rojava they get a lot of their institutional knowledge from PKK guerrilla fighters (with decades of experience fighting the Turkish government).
Maybe you can make the argument that heavy US infantry is superior to light infantry, and the Kurds only picked the latter because they were too underequipped for American-style tactics to be an option. BUT. The US-equipped and trained Iraqi security forces completely fell apart in 2014 against the ISIS blitz while the Kurdish forces in Rojava and the Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan held, so at the very least morale trumps equipment handily. And even when the Iraqi forces had time to get back together, most of the fighting to retake ISIS territory was done by Kurds (they did all of the fighting in Syria and also contributed 1/3 of the forces to retake Mosul)**.
Basically, I don’t think the evidence for “upper-body-strength is critical for infantry performance” is as clear-cut as you think.
*Pure-infantry meaning small-scale unit skirmishing, as opposed to larger operations with artillery and air support, which the US still dominates when they happen {First Gulf, Second Gulf}
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016%E2%80%932017)
The Battle of Mosul is especially interesting because the Peshmerga suffered significantly fewer casualties than the Iraqi army (relevant for trying to compare operational / doctrinal effectiveness), but I acknowledge that that’s not a definitive differentiator because “According to reports, the Peshmerga met little resistance on the eastern front, while Iraqi and PMF fighters coming from the south faced tougher resistance from ISIL.” Whether ISIL chose to resist the Iraqi forces more strongly was down to ISIL hoping to break their morale again or ISIL thinking could more easily beat their heavy infantry than the Peshmerga light infantry*** or ISIL thinking the heavy infantry was more threatening is unclear.
***My current reading is mostly limited to PKK-affiliated Kurds in Rojava [Syria], so I don’t know for certain the Peshmerga was using similar light infantry tactics.
Yes: what you have is evidence of an organization resorting to lower standards in desperate straits. The US military is not such an organization.
You’re wrong. If anything these weapons make the problem worse, because ammunition supply (=weight) is directly proportional to how long a given unit can remain engaged in combat, and since operating a firearm doesn’t require much physical exertion compared to e.g. shoving back against a shield wall, there’s far less downside to exhausting yourself getting into position. Carrying 80 lbs into battle would have been suicidal for a Roman legionary but has been the norm for heavy-weapons teams for a hundred years now.
This problem is less serious in the defense and for garrison duty. Here’s a prediction: the more garrison/occupation/defensive duty a Kurdish formation performs, the more female it is. The more attack/assault/shock missions a Kurdish formation conducts, the more male it is.
So which is it? Is physical strength being incorrectly assessed, does it not matter, or should the US military alter its tactics in order to make it matter less?
If it’s the last one, is it because you think the Kurds are tactically superior to the Americans in some objective sense, or is it just because their tactics are relatively easier for women to carry out?
My guess would be that the Iraqis sent their most heavily equipped formations against the most difficult objectives, and those units got into the toughest fights and took the most losses.
Perhaps they should have sent less well equipped skirmishers to seize those objectives based on your theory that light infantry is simply better than heavy/mechanized forces, which would have resulted in a quicker and easier victory. I don’t think it’s very likely, personally.
@Hyperborean
Don’t confuse losing a war due to bad strategy with not being able to execute infantry ops. As an example, in the battle at COP Keating, US forces were attacked with complete tactical surprise and at a 3.5 to 1 disadvantage and still inflicted much larger casualties. For the full spectrum of operations from platoon to division, the US is as good as ever, it just can’t turn tactical victories from piling up enemy bodies into strategic victory.
The fitness of individual troops is much more relevant to tactical success (which we can still do handily), and orthogonal to tying those tactical successes into a larger plan (where we fall down in COIN, in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq).
@CatCube
Interesting (and probably useful) anecdata!
Do you think that definitively proves that American modern gear load-out is optimal?
Also, is there a possibility that operational doctrine (bad strategy) is partially driven by kit choice? The adjective I often hear about American forces in Iraq/Afghanistan is “lumbering”, which could suggest that the doctrine of staying holed up in fortresses and doing only heavily armoured reconnaissance / interfacing operations is partially downstream of the fact that the modern American infantryman isn’t at all equipped to operate for extended periods of time outside of a FOB/COP.
Also, is there any relevance to the fact that the action you cited is the kind of “defensive” action that amount of gear physically carried would affect less? (See sfoil’s point about garrison duty vs. shock troops)
@sfoil:
“Yes: what you have is evidence of an organization resorting to lower standards in desperate straits.”
Isn’t this begging the question? Another common thing that happens when in desperate straits is that organization preference collapses and they resort to doing whatever is optimal. How would we distinguish those two cases?
“You’re wrong. If anything these weapons make the problem worse, because ammunition supply (=weight) is directly proportional to how long a given unit can remain engaged in combat, and since operating a firearm doesn’t require much physical exertion compared to e.g. shoving back against a shield wall, there’s far less downside to exhausting yourself getting into position. Carrying 80 lbs into battle would have been suicidal for a Roman legionary but has been the norm for heavy-weapons teams for a hundred years now.”
Carrying lots of weight happens now but not in the past =/= strength is more important now than in the past. In the past hand-to-hand combat effectiveness was fairly clearly dependent on strength, whereas marksmanship is not, so strength matters for logistics, but there are many workarounds.
Also, haven’t you heard of Marius’s mules? “To keep these baggage trains from becoming too large, Marius had each man carry as much of his own equipment as he could, including his own armor, weapons and 15 days’ rations or about 50–60 pounds (22.5–27 kg) of load total.” And that was in an era with worse nutrition and smaller men.
“This problem is less serious in the defense and for garrison duty. Here’s a prediction: the more garrison/occupation/defensive duty a Kurdish formation performs, the more female it is. The more attack/assault/shock missions a Kurdish formation conducts, the more male it is.”
Possibly true, but if this is the main distinguishing factor then that’s more evidence that there’s room without compromising effectiveness in a lot of frontline combat roles, especially since US forces are heavily mechanized.
“So which is it? Is physical strength being incorrectly assessed, does it not matter, or should the US military alter its tactics in order to make it matter less?”
That’s the whole question, isn’t it? There’s strength as it’s currently assessed, there’s strength for lugging kit, and there’s how much kit optimally should be lugged. Anti-women-in-combat-roles internet posters seem really confident in all three steps in that chain, when any one of them changing would significantly affect the suitability of women for even “shock” combat roles…and I think we’ve already established that women can handle many other non-“shock” combat roles, which is also something that seems to aesthetically offend conservatives.
“If it’s the last one, is it because you think the Kurds are tactically superior to the Americans in some objective sense, or is it just because their tactics are relatively easier for women to carry out?”
I think evidence from the Middle East for modern large-scale combat against technologically inferior opponents is suggesting that light infantry is viable in that combat setting. If that’s the case, since the US military is suffering a manpower shortage (missed its recruiting target at least last year, might continue if the economy stays good), forming light infantry combat formations would be sensible holding all non-military considerations constant. And yes, my position is that if military effectiveness is not degraded by doing so, opening up more roles in the military to women is a good thing. YMMV. Of course, the Kurds suffered 11,000 combat fatalities fighting ISIS. If someone could show that heavy infantry would have suffered fewer casualties accomplishing the same task*, then the American public’s extreme sensitivity to combat deaths would strongly suggest against forming light infantry formations.
“My guess would be that the Iraqis sent their most heavily equipped formations against the most difficult objectives, and those units got into the toughest fights and took the most losses.”
The Iraqi Army and Peshmerga were functionally two separate armies that are allied and fighting in linked but distinct fronts [think British + Americans in WWII], not one combined force. The Iraqi Army attacked from the SOUTH and the Peshmerga from the EAST. So, unless there’s something about the geography of Mosul that causes all the toughest objectives to be in the south of the city, your explanation doesn’t hold up.
The actual variation seems to be where ISIS chose to concentrate its fighting force, but the explanation for why they chose to do so against the Iraqi Army is unknown.
“Perhaps they should have sent less well equipped skirmishers to seize those objectives based on your logic that light infantry is better than heavy/mechanized forces, which would have resulted in a quicker and easier victory. I don’t think it’s very likely though.”
Quick note here:
Heavy vs. light infantry is very independent of mechanized vs. not mechanized. You could easily have not-heavily-laden infantry operating from trucks + tanks, and you could easily have heavily-laden-infantry operating independently. If one was trying to reduce the amount of kit an American soldier had to carry, increasing mechanization would likely be one way to do it.
*Speed might also be a factor here.
P.S. How do you block-embed quotes without the “reply” button?
One aside: if you have a job designed to be done by people of the strength and robustness of youngish adult men, then it will be really hard for youngish adult women, 70-year-old men, or 13-year-old boys to do it. That’s true, even if there’s nothing inherent in the job that precludes it being done by women, old men, or boys.
Imagine if we had a force of intelligent gorillas we could set to work in some demanding environment. The jobs would often scale to their strength, and it would be all but impossible for even a very strong man to do the job. And that would be true, even if the job was some normal human thing like being a janitor. The vacuum cleaner would weigh 150 lbs, the mop handle would be seven feet long, and the cleaning supplies stored on an overhead shelf would all be these huge 50 lb containers of soap and wax and such. Why not? It’s more efficient, and no problem at all for someone with the strength of a gorilla.
“One aside: if you have a job designed to be done by people of the strength and robustness of youngish adult men, then it will be really hard for youngish adult women, 70-year-old men, or 13-year-old boys to do it. That’s true, even if there’s nothing inherent in the job that precludes it being done by women, old men, or boys.”
This is an interesting different flavour of military readiness impacts. IE, if all you did was add women to frontline combat units, you would degrade readiness, but you could probably design an equal readiness unit if you were designing to take the differing gender composition into account.
Depending on how you spin it, it can easily be used as an argument for both sides.
Except, in the specific case of the military, that the enemy gets to set the conditions as well.
Is this a joke? 11k American infantry with no air support could have handled ISIS easily if they were allowed to engage optimally. The handicap US forces have compared to Kurds/etc is they are ALWAYS on enemy soil. That’s why they wear body armor, because every window is a potential enemy. The Kurdish women infantry can blend right back into the population. In addition, and US politicians almost revel in handicapping them strategically.
At the height of ISIS 11k Marines + a cavalry unit could march out of Baghdad smash ISIS, then turn southeast and smash Assad’s armies, then go take a dip in the Mediterranean and drink with some IDF friends.
@Clutzy
“Is this a joke? 11k American infantry with no air support could have handled ISIS easily if they were allowed to engage optimally. The handicap US forces have compared to Kurds/etc is they are ALWAYS on enemy soil. That’s why they wear body armor, because every window is a potential enemy. The Kurdish women infantry can blend right back into the population. In addition, and US politicians almost revel in handicapping them strategically.
At the height of ISIS 11k Marines + a cavalry unit could march out of Baghdad smash ISIS, then turn southeast and smash Assad’s armies, then go take a dip in the Mediterranean and drink with some IDF friends.”
So, I don’t know for certain, but I think you are severely underestimating the number of casualties inherent in trying to pry out an opponent of an urban setting (especially if you are assuming you have no air support, as you do). That goes double for one as adept at setting up booby traps and using suicide bombers (car and otherwise) as ISIS was.
Do you have a credible reference point for this level of over performance by the US military against an irregular force? Breaking the morale of a conventional force caught in the open (First, Second Gulf) doesn’t count.
Assad is SW of ISIS turf, BTW.
Also, what is it about ‘home turf’ that makes a Kurdish light infantry woman holding a rifle immune to bullets fired from “any window”?
@The Nybbler
“Except, in the specific case of the military, that the enemy gets to set the conditions as well.”
If you were reliant on excessive mechanization, then sure, there would likely be an enemy response which would degrade readiness. But that’s not necessarily true of all force configurations.
@Hypoborean
I think you have cause and effect backwards. The kit choice is driven by the need to minimize casualties. To demonstrate the mentality, every single death that occurs in theater must be investigated by a major or higher, who has to produce a report detailing the circumstances and what factors contributed to the death. This report is provided to the family members (I don’t know if they were allowed to keep a copy, or just see it.) Imagine being the guy who said that his troops didn’t need body armor.
The reason that you see less infantry fighting in Afghanistan is because the enemy desperately avoids it. If they allow their troops to engage US troops in a pitched battle, we’ll turn it sideways and shove it up their ass. They, quite rationally, choose to make use of hit-and-run tactics and IEDs. This is where they have a distinct advantage, and they make excellent use of it.
Take the COP Keating example above. The US completely screwed the pooch on siting that base: they had rising terrain surrounding the base, it couldn’t be supplied easily, and there wasn’t much strategic advantage to the site. AIUI, their brigade engineer got a (deserved) career-ending memorandum of reprimand for allowing that COP to be sited there following the battle.
On the Taliban side, they made truly excellent use of terrain, they had a well-executed attack with the rule-of-thumb 3:1 advantage, and they maintained surprise. The Wikipedia page said they lost 150 troops according to US reports; let’s cut that in half to account for optimistic “body count math.” They would still have lost 10 times the number of people the US did. And like I said: this was an exquisitely-planned operation that occurred at a time and place of their choosing.
Lavish training and equipping that western forces use provide a distinct advantage in war: we can make terrible mistakes and still avoid massive tactical defeats. OTOH, the Taliban can do everything right and still take 10:1 casualties (or worse).
Now, they got a strategic victory out of it, because they got to be the people that ran the US Army off of a base, and they were willing to lose the 80-150 people to do that. At the end of the day, strategic victories are the only ones that count, so they have the edge. But it’s more subtle than the loadout. In Vietnam, they had closer to what you seem to be treating as the “ideal” loadout: they’d give their troops an LBE, an M-16, and a slap on the ass and tell them to go out and kill Charlie. We lost about 1/10th the number of US troops in Afghanistan as we did in Vietnam and over a longer period, while only being marginally more successful.
I don’t know what the larger strategic solution is; if I did, I’d probably still be in the Army and working my way towards general. I just doubt it’s as simple as ditching body armor.
Yes, indeed that is difficult, if that was what I was discussing. Rather, I was simply discussing allowing the Marines to smash the ISIS armies wherever they found them, and engaging as the military command decides, unencumbered by politicians. I am well aware that the standard tactics of non-American forces include all assortments of war crimes, like using human shields and not wearing uniforms. This makes your comparing their infantry tactics to ours all the more absurd. Even in a Battle of Stalingrad-like situation ISIS and Assad forces would be wiped out by US troops. Indeed, even with modern weapons those groups would easily lose to NAZI shock troops using 1942 era weapons. That is how massive the skill gap is.
I don’t see how that is relevant to what tactics we should employ. The tactics of light infantry in modern warfare as practiced by the Kurds are warcrimes, and if American soldiers used them they would be court marshaled.
#1 Yes, E-W mindfart
#2 they are not fighting in hostile territory. They fought defensive wars against ISIS and were the ones in the windows. In their offensive operations they were re-taking friendly and familiar territory where all Kurdish civilians would have been evacuated or would have aided their rooting out of enemies. Liberating cities is easier than conquering.
Your response to Nybbler equally confuses me. The readiness problem is not mech related, it is pacifism related. We do not determine where and when we strike (outside the special forces operations like the ones that took out Bin Laden and Al-Bagdadi), we fight almost all battles on enemy terms in enemy territory responding to surprise attacks.
“Yes, indeed that is difficult, if that was what I was discussing. Rather, I was simply discussing allowing the Marines to smash the ISIS armies wherever they found them, and engaging as the military command decides, unencumbered by politicians. I am well aware that the standard tactics of non-American forces include all assortments of war crimes, like using human shields and not wearing uniforms. This makes your comparing their infantry tactics to ours all the more absurd. Even in a Battle of Stalingrad-like situation ISIS and Assad forces would be wiped out by US troops. Indeed, even with modern weapons those groups would easily lose to NAZI shock troops using 1942 era weapons. That is how massive the skill gap is.”
{Citation needed}
If the American mode of warfighting is so vastly superior to the homebrew blitz, why did the Iraqi armed forces so lavishly trained and equipped by America fall apart like a first year law student’s argument? Between Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Vietnam, I’m not seeing a lot of evidence for the tactical superiority of the American war-fighting mode, unless you’re saying it’s 0% transferable to allied forces.
How confident are you of the comparison of Stalingrad to the present? The hypothesis that modern rapid fire weapons + the ease of installing explosive defenses thanks to modern miniaturized electronics have made urban combat deadlier for the attacking force seems reasonable at face value.
“I don’t see how that is relevant to what tactics we should employ. The tactics of light infantry in modern warfare as practiced by the Kurds are warcrimes, and if American soldiers used them they would be court marshaled.”
I haven’t seen any evidence of the Kurds using human shields. Do you think not wearing a uniform is a really critical part of Kurdish military success?
“#2 they are not fighting in hostile territory. They fought defensive wars against ISIS and were the ones in the windows. In their offensive operations they were re-taking friendly and familiar territory where all Kurdish civilians would have been evacuated or would have aided their rooting out of enemies. Liberating cities is easier than conquering.”
Look at the map. The Kurds pushed past the Kurdish ethnic-majority areas into the “ISIS heartland” of disaffected Sunni Arabs who were the first support base of ISIS.
“Your response to Nybbler equally confuses me. The readiness problem is not mech related, it is pacifism related. We do not determine where and when we strike (outside the special forces operations like the ones that took out Bin Laden and Al-Bagdadi), we fight almost all battles on enemy terms in enemy territory responding to surprise attacks.”
I genuinely don’t understand this response. The discussion of military readiness has mostly focused on speed / carry capacity of soldiers, both of which would be much less relevant in defending a fixed position like COP Keating, n’est pas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Outpost_Keating
The Iraqi Armed Forces were not trained or equipped to US Standards, nor did we even try. The general consensus when I was in Iraq was that their most elite SF units were trained to about the level of an active-duty US infantry unit at best, if not a reserve/NG unit, while the ING and NIA regular formations were, in general, a bad joke. A few minutes googling should provide you with a host of anecdotes that illustrate the sort of endemic issues we observed.
The modern American mode of warfighting is a combination of US wealth and access to modern technology (which we don’t generally try to export to countries like Iraq because we know they can’t afford to equip themselves that way, and if we equip them to that level they can’t afford or choose not to -maintain- the equipment) and more importantly a distillation of western and especially German principles of command and leadership developed and refined over the past few hundred years along with a specific culture.
That culture and those principles of command and leadership can be transmitted, but it requires a much more invasive and controlling relationship than the one we were trying to maintain between the US Forces and the nascent Iraqi government. More fundamentally, the Iraqi Army of the time had serious morale and loyalty problems and no particular willingness to fight and die for the government at the time. That says a lot about the state of the Iraqi government, but not a lot about the way they were trained.
For a good overview of the issues, this article hits most of the high points, as does Kenneth Pollack’s “Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness”.
@Hypoborean
What is your actual argument here? That, largely on the basis of a propagandistic photojournal, you believe that “the Kurds” are the best army in the world, and since “the Kurds” (say they) use a bunch of women combatants — there are pictures! — therefore if anyone is interested in copying “the Kurds” and thus maybe dethroning them as the world’s best fighting force, they should Hire Women? Because that’s what I gather your position is. You’ve sometimes come closer to suggesting that a woman with a rifle is usually better than a stuffed mannequin, something uninteresting that I don’t think anyone disputes.
The current position of the US military on gender integrated units, after repeated failed attempts in more or less good faith to convince everyone involved that it was good policy on its own merits, is: This is happening, now shut up or fuck off. This statement was accompanied quite soon after by a marked lowering in physical fitness standards for new recruits. I and many others suspect these two things are related. Maybe we’re wrong, or it doesn’t matter anyway because this is part of making the United States armed forces more like the world’s premier military, The Kurds. But I think the real motivation is probably ideological and aesthetic.
I continue to be in shock about the lack of understanding coming from these responses. The Kurds are a decent fighting force…for the Mid East, which is like damning with faint praise. The American military is on a different level of quality in all areas.
Its also like you just ignore reality. Yes fighting without uniforms is critical to modern Middle Eastern military force, because they suck at actual combat (see the Iraqi army). Yes hiding among women/children (or where US forces can’t know whether there are women/children) is key to their success, otherwise they would get crushed either with air power, artillery, or just infantry storming the building and loosing on them without fear of killing children.
Almost all US military failures are caused by political considerations. Not because our troops aren’t significantly more effective.
@Clutzy
“I continue to be in shock about the lack of understanding coming from these responses. The Kurds are a decent fighting force…for the Mid East, which is like damning with faint praise. The American military is on a different level of quality in all areas.
Its also like you just ignore reality. Yes fighting without uniforms is critical to modern Middle Eastern military force, because they suck at actual combat (see the Iraqi army). Yes hiding among women/children (or where US forces can’t know whether there are women/children) is key to their success, otherwise they would get crushed either with air power, artillery, or just infantry storming the building and loosing on them without fear of killing children.
Almost all US military failures are caused by political considerations. Not because our troops aren’t significantly more effective.”
You and I agree that the Iraqi Army sucks at actual combat. Where we differ is our assessment of the Kurds. The Kurds were badly underequipped vs ISIS formations using looted American gear (from the Iraqi army it routed), human shields, suicide tactics, and excellent martyr morale [combined sufficient to blitz conquer a third of Iraq before the emergency application of American airpower and Iranian troops] and still beat them.
On the topic of uniforms, you just shifted the goalposts, possibly without realizing it. The Kurds didn’t wear uniforms when fighting ISIS, but they weren’t blending into the population. Not wearing ISIS mandatory beards and having women walking around holding guns and not in niqabs makes “this is an enemy combatant” dead obvious. So, the Kurds were essentially having a clean straight up fight and doing well.
I’m aware that in the case of US occupations of Iraq , the enemy’s operational doctrine involved hiding amongst the civilian population to avoid annihilation by US airpower. But ISIS’s 2014-2019 caliphate was…not that? They were holding territory and manning checkpoints throughout that timeframe. When they were threatening to conquer Baghdad, they were doing that IN THE OPEN. And even the Taliban in Afghanistan aren’t so cut and dried. Like the Viet Cong and their jungles, extremely rugged terrain makes hiding from air power possible. Wide open deserts outside of cities with no cover make you a sitting duck, sure (First Gulf, Second Gulf, Libya), but even the moderate urbanization of Syria made engaging in a cheap Libya style regime change operation unfeasible, if the news reports c.2013-4 were at all accurate. The key variable here seems to be “is there cover”, where hiding among the civilian population is only one of many kinds of cover. The Taliban’s infrastructure in Afghanistan includes a lot of mountain fortresses in unpopulated areas that we straight-up can’t find, and never tried to locate on foot even with >100,000 troops in the country.
Upthread we had made a clear distinction between frontline combat roles (“infantry”) and snipers and tank pilots and artillery. When you say 11,000 American troops could conquer all of 2014 Syria without a single airplane, did you mean 11,000 “infantry” or a balanced force of 11,000 with a mix of support artillery, tanks, snipers, etc? The second becomes a lot more plausible, but also gets back to “The US Military is organizationally excellent” much more than “a single GI is worth X Kurds due to superior training.” Also relevantly to our gender discussion, the second “balanced” force would have LOTS of combat roles completely compatible with women combatants without sacrificing a lick of combat readiness.
Lastly, it’s this “just infantry storming the building and loosing on them without fear of killing children” that I think is the key point of contention here. Do you have evidence of American general infantry superiority over opponents equivalent to high morale ISIS fighters c.2014 when force multipliers like air support, proper artillery, etc are removed? Because the results of the Tet Offensive suggest otherwise (American tactical victory, but definitely not crushingly [2:1 casualty ratio, is my understanding, although decomposing that into American vs. South Vietnamese engagements is tricky], and that was on dug-in defense with a theater numerical advantage and aircraft and artillery support). Would you argue that the sub-Battle of Hue is a fairer (and more favourable) assessment of American GI performance?
Maybe you can clarify which “political constraints” would need to be removed and how you estimate that would have effected a counterfactual major historical battle? Say, how it would have reduced the number of troops needed to win the Second Battle of Fallujah (2004)?
P.S. I appreciate you continuing to come back to this. You have a deeper background on this than I do and I’m glad you’re taking the time to try to straighten out my layperson’s-attempting-to-sift-real-information-from-the-news approach. I’m trying to work out if your extreme confidence in the US military aligns with my existing model {organizational excellence, capable of massive strategic victories against known opponents, largely through combined-forces operations, individual infantry struggle against parity competitions when opponents’ guerrilla tactics successfully force the latter} or requires an update {American infantry in isolation also vastly superior to even best-in-region opponents}
@sfoil
“What is your actual argument here? That, largely on the basis of a propagandistic photojournal, you believe that “the Kurds” are the best army in the world, and since “the Kurds” (say they) use a bunch of women combatants — there are pictures! — therefore if anyone is interested in copying “the Kurds” and thus maybe dethroning them as the world’s best fighting force, they should Hire Women? Because that’s what I gather your position is. You’ve sometimes come closer to suggesting that a woman with a rifle is usually better than a stuffed mannequin, something uninteresting that I don’t think anyone disputes.
The current position of the US military on gender integrated units, after repeated failed attempts in more or less good faith to convince everyone involved that it was good policy on its own merits, is: This is happening, now shut up or fuck off. This statement was accompanied quite soon after by a marked lowering in physical fitness standards for new recruits. I and many others suspect these two things are related. Maybe we’re wrong, or it doesn’t matter anyway because this is part of making the United States armed forces more like the world’s premier military, The Kurds. But I think the real motivation is probably ideological and aesthetic.”
…where did I say the Kurds were the best fighting force in the world? They are an underequipped infantry force lacking airpower, artillery, or tanks. I’m not at all disputing America’s clear organizational superiority in mass-scale combat.
I’ve using them as a relevant example of a functional fighting force that includes a significant number of women that has actually been pushed to anywhere close to its limits (which can’t be said of most militaries on the planet post-WWII). If the people vehemently opposed to gender integration of the armed forces were correct that it would massively impair readiness, ONE WOULD EXPECT the gender-integrated Kurdish forces to underperform rather than overperform in competitions with male-only Middle Eastern forces.
Similarly, I assume you don’t dispute that a female tank pilot, artillery crew, or sniper is going to be so close to identical in military readiness that it’s unlikely to matter (although maybe I shouldn’t assume this, since your “a woman with a rifle is usually better than a stuffed mannequin” comment is practically a self-straw-man). So the MEAT of the dispute rests in frontline infantry, and looking at an all-infantry force’s performance in recent history could be enlightening.
They never did any of that in the open against US forces. They did it against other, super crappy Middle East forces. Remember how it took like 1 month to beat ISIS once we started actually trying? All those guys at checkpoints returned to the sewers. But yes, that they flee to various covers that are expensive to search is the issue. Also, like with the Taliban, they don’t wear big “Taliban” flags once they go into the mountains, they just look like any other nomad.
I imagined the 11k having snipers, and light cavalry at least, tanks and heavy artillery would make it a total whitewash. But you are right, the US Military is organizationally excellent and that comes from many things including the strength of individual American troops, and even moreso the small units they form. I would never explicitly claim 1 American = 5 ISIS or something, but I would say 1 rifle squad (usually 12 people led by a sergeant), or 1 rifle platoon (3 squad, a Lt., and other leadership, and usually support like medical corp) typically exceed the value of 5X that number of ISIS soldiers.
Vietnam does indeed serve as a lowpoint for American GI individual performance (but I don’t think you’ll ever get some sort of objective citation comparing 1-1). Standards were lowered very heavily in Vietnam see, e.g. this article. In addition the Tet offensive is the low of that low. Hue is still more representative for sure.
Political constraints are particularly important in urban warfare. The battle of Fallujah is an example of how inability to utilize bombardment of enemy positions results in more deaths on your own side, and a difficulty securing positions. As how Vietnam was a war that could have been won if there was political will to poke around into China, Fallujah 2 probably never happens if Fallujah 1 was carried out properly with proper bombardment and cleanup teams.
@Hypoborean
This is not the impressive achievement you seem to think it is. Suicide tactics make it -easier- to defeat an opponent in a conventional combat environment, not harder. Human shields are of limited utility against Iraqi and Kurdish forces which aren’t particularly discriminating about them, something Amnesty International was rather upset about if you read their report on the battle of Mosul. So yes, part of it is that they were fighting in ways the US has generally refrained from, and the other part is that their opponent was not actually that impressive.
The “Looted American Gear” consisted primarily of MRAPs, M117s, a literal handful of arty pieces which did not contribute meaningfully compared to their existing supply of mortars and other indirect fire weapons, and some small arms. Meanwhile, the Kurds were supported by multi-national air strikes and Iraqi and Iranian artillery (remember that mortar and artillery fire is the primary casualty-causing tool of the modern ground force), and had been furnished with additional equipment by the US beginning in 2014. Reports claiming that the Peshmerga were badly underequipped vs. ISIL are, to be frank, false. They were at worst comparably equipped.
On top of this, as previously pointed out to you, the Kurds did not actually bear the brunt of the fighting. It’s also worth noting we’re talking about the Iraqi Peshmerga, who have in their ranks approximately 500-600 female soldiers. Total. This was not the YPG.
Bottom line, ISIS was not and is not a professional fighting force. They were and are quite nasty in a counter-insurgency environment, but the main reason they were able to make major territorial gains is that they were effectively unopposed for most of that time (see my point about the Iraqi army and especially its political weakness, which you have tried to interpret as a failure of American military doctrine for some reason). The extent to which they were able to take and hold territory is the extent to which professional militaries were unwilling to commit to the effort required to take it away from them, because while you can hurt someone badly with air strikes and artillery, you need boots on the ground to take and hold territory and in more than “advisor” numbers.
Something I think you are failing to understand is that there is quite literally no comparison between major/conventional combat operations (Syrian Civil War, ISIL invasion of Iraq, OIF March-April 2003, OEF October-December 2001, Desert Storm January-February 91, Large parts of the Vietnam war, etc) and Counter-Insurgency or STASO operations. Trying to use performance in one to make arguments about the other is entirely specious. It is not a matter of “is there cover or not”, or “is the terrain dense and complicated (urban/mountain/jungle) or simple and open?”. I feel like to have a productive discussion you need to back up and get an understanding for the difference between these environments and especially the ROE and doctrines involved. There is nothing preventing a conventional military from wiping the floor with a group like ISIL in an urban environment except for the simple fact that no modern professional military’s political leadership cared enough to spend the blood, treasure, and political capital required, instead preferring to provide limited indirect support while relying on local proxies/allies to provide the boots.
The closest US analog to Kurdish and Iraqi performance in the Battle of Mosul are OIF and OEF battles like 2nd Fallujah, Tal Afar, Samarra, Tora Bora, etc. All have the same conclusion: Hybrid/insurgent type forces attempting to go toe-to-toe with the American military, in -any- environment, including mountain fortresses (Tora Bora) and built up cities (2nd Fallujah, Tal Afar, Samarra) get their asses kicked, and hard. In fact, there is continuity of a lot of ISIL’ tactics between the two in large part because ISIL grew out of and learned a lot from both AQI and the Taliban.
I will pause to note that I actually agree with the broad, top-level premise of “it is not a priori impossible to include a non-zero number of females in modern combat arms roles without compromising readiness”. However, as we have just discussed, the Kurds are a very weak reed to use as the basis of that argument, especially if you want to take the stronger form you seem to of “there is no reason not to adjust the standards until women are able to serve in combat arms roles in numbers close to their percentage of the population.”
I’m going to focus my discussion here on your errors of fact regarding the Kurds, ISIL, and military operations more generally, however. If you really want, I can go into your errors of fact regarding the nitty-gritty details of physical readiness standards and job-specific requirements either in this thread or the 141.25 OT. The short version is that you are handwaving away significant challenges, and don’t seem to understand what a lot of these jobs actually entail.
@Hypoborean, let me suggest you be a bit more selective in what you quote from others’ posts. It’s good to establish context, but really long quotations just waste screen real estate.
Also, you are enclosing your quotations in quotation marks. The usual practice around here is to use the Quote button to wrap the quoted text in [blockquote][/blockquote] tags.
War isn’t a controlled competition. If it weren’t for American support, ISIS would probably own Kobane/Rojava now until either the SAA or the Turks drove them out. Not because the YPG sucks or has women in it or sucks because of women but just because they were in a bad spot. I think the YPG uses women about the same way that most first world militaries use women now: in combat support roles that include the very real possibility of killing and being killed. They also have a need, which first world militaries do not have, to form second-tier occupation/garrison units; this (YPJ) looks like where the comparatively larger proportion of women “combatants” among the Syrian Kurds comes from.
You’ve repeatedly said that when the Kurds do things one way and the Americans another, that the Kurds’ way is better:
Maybe what you mean is that it’s better to have good morale/elan or whatever than good equipment or even superior physical fitness. That’s respectable. But the US wants all of it: they want to have the best fitness, the best equipment, and the most elan. If having the ability to carry a lot of heavy shit is better than not having the ability, then that’s what the US wants. As a side note about something that’s not too intuitive:
Mechanization is the cause of how much Americans carry around, not the solution. By reducing the maximum distance you need to carry things, you end up increasing the maximum amount carried.
I do dispute it. Crewing a tank or a howitzer is not as taxing as what is expected out of an infantryman, but it is far more physically demanding than you probably think it is. You think that operating a tank is like driving your car or that firing a howitzer is covering your ears and pulling a lanyard; it is not. Here is what firing an artillery piece involves; the M777 shown is the lightest and most automated piece of its class that has ever existed.
I would expect that under a fair integration regime, the infantry would be less than 1% female and the armor and artillery branches would be perhaps 5%. This is approximately the case in the Canadian forces. Likewise, while I don’t know much about flying, after 25 years of gender integration about 6% of the USAF’s pilots are women. I think these numbers are acceptable. I’m not sure the people pushing gender integration think these numbers are acceptable.
How can you tell whether a new fitness test is doing a better or worse job of qualifying soldiers for combat? For military life generally?
I would guess that the requirement for an overall fitness test, as opposed to job-specific tests, comes from the doctrine that all soldiers are supposed to be able to fight if they must. Even the accountants and the cooks are supposed to be able to serve as competent (but probably not actually good) infantrymen. This seems like a useful idea in dangerous territory.
With that in mind, I think what I would do is design some sort of test that includes all kinds of things that infantry combatants might be required to do, particularly when fighting in provisional and defensive situations: firing rifles, evacuating wounded, transporting ammunition, all sorts of things. Base it as much as possible on the experiences of actual veterans. I expect you could do this with a 24-hour test, and that test could produce an aggregate score that reasonably well measures how well a soldier would perform as an infantry combatant. Eyeball the scores and the actual performance, and draw a line of minimum acceptable performance.
If we could afford to, we’d put all soldiers through this test regularly, to make sure they are in fact still effective fighters. But that’s too complicated and expensive. So we need a quicker, cheaper test that does almost as well. Measure the performance of troops of widely varying performance in the 24-hour test in various simpler physical tests. Then find a few that in combination correspond closely to performance on the original test. Congratulations, that’s your new physical fitness test for everybody.
It’s at least possible that what would emerge from such a process is something quite different from physical fitness standards as they are. We could be wrong about what makes an effective combatant, particularly in marginal cases. Maybe.
And, yes, get ready for the fact that your new test is probably going to be hard on older men and women in general. There is going to be some gray area in measuring something as complicated as overall combat effectiveness. I’m not really sure whether this is best handled by tweaking the tests within the bounds of uncertainty to give underperforming groups the benefit of the doubt, or setting the bar pretty low for everybody, or having slightly different standards for different demographic groups, or giving 5% explicit waivers from the otherwise uniform standards. It’s a hard problem, even with the best of intentions.
See other parts of the thread for discussion of Kurds, Soviet Army, Israeli army + female combatants.
(Not sure if this is the correct cross-reference method; John Schilling complained when I directly posted a point in multiple places)
Where this gets really tricky is that not all combat specialties need the same kinds of fitness. For example, one group that really hates the fitness standards is pilots–absolutely critical for modern combat, but good vision and lots of experience are far more critical than strength.
It looks like, although the test is scored the same for everyone, the minimum required score is different for different job types.
link
It doesn’t completely address the issue you brought up, but it’s a nod to it, at least.
@Beck.
Thank you for reminding me to check the standards in detail. They are significantly lower. More specifically, it looks to me as if they simply renormed the ACFT 70 on the APFT Female 17-21 70. That’s the equivalent of a 30-40 on equivalent events on the Male 17-21 APFT, So significantly lower.
Does anyone know how the previous standards were chosen?
The problem of feminism, a woman’s perspective:
The problem with a patriarchal society, perhaps first expressed by Plato, is that it locks 50% of the population out of fields where they could flourish. The more arbitrary (as opposed to biology-based) gender roles get, the more unjust this is: one might justly exclude pregnant women/mothers of young children from being construction workers, but it’s totally unfair to not teach girls Greek or Latin if boys learn it.
Unfortunately, while something we might call “feminism” might have been necessary to open up gendered material to girls, it became an ideology all about demanding equal outcomes rather than equitable access to excellence. If academic fields, etc. have to be dumbed down when they’re opened to women, it creates the pernicious implication that women aren’t really equal. But I think this has to do not with women’s nature but with feminism being just a piece of a broader ideology of equal outcomes: e.g. only 2% of the population used to go to high school and college, now high school has been compulsory throughout living memory and “free college for everyone” is entering the Overton Window.
I wonder if there was a women’s rights movement in the Hellenistic period. 😛
People being richer explains more consumption of a wide array of products, but only for some products do you see the demands for subsidies and mandates.
Quite the scary thought.
Some other things going on there, I think:
One, lots of women (not all by far, of course) like things neat and clean, polite and respectful and collaborative; and they like male attention. Then they arrive in a male space (e.g., military, gaming, physics) and don’t find any red carpet waiting; and discover uncouth language, jokes, opinions; and then complain about feeling “unwelcome”, even if most of the men don’t actually have any ill will towards them.
Another seems like a fundamental view of sex as bad, and therefore all things sexual – from sexual attention to pornography to men in general – are bad. That’s not all feminists, but definitely a subset.
I would argue that women tend to desire less crudeness and be less crude, but that is not the same as desiring and being polite, respectful and collaborative. Basically, passive aggression is a different form of aggression, not the absence of it; gossip is a different form of criticism/undermining/etc than direct criticism, not the absence of it; etc.
It’s not surprising that women tend to be less competent at getting their way in spaces where more male norms are dominant, just like men tend to be less competent at winning female status competitions.
Note that more ‘masculine’ women frequently prefer male environments, where they can compete a lot better than in feminine spaces.
Sure, though the feeling of being unwelcome in normal male norms happens without being gossipy, cliquy, and passive-aggressive at the outset. And also, I don’t think most women who go into fields that were at some point male do so to “colonize” the male space or anything, or to get attention. Reasons such as salary and actual love of the topic predominate.
But I speak of the feelings above from personal experience. For example, you join a team at work and nobody is like ‘hey! great, I’m Bob and this is Joe, we’re so excited to have you, how was your drive this morning?!” – just “hey”, and back to work. They don’t say hello in the mornings, don’t share any personal information at lunch, don’t really respond to small talk. It feels like you’re being ignored or disliked, when in fact it’s just that the team never engaged in small talk before and doesn’t extend gratuitous courtesies to relative strangers. (“That can happen with any gender combination!” Yes, but it seems to happen more often when it’s a girl joining a male team and not a mixed gender team, and certainly not the other way around.)
But I take these sorts of things philosophically: the friction of male-female interaction is natural and a consequence of each gender (on balance) having different strengths, which emerge as beneficial when they become a family: facing adversity together, supporting each other, raising kids. It evens out in the workplace with a little time and proximity, since most men don’t hate women and vice versa.
I think that all of us have experiences where we mismatch with the existing (sub)culture. This is fine as long as we recognize that different people have different needs, desires and such, and new entrants have to adapt to a large extent (or find another group).
What can definitely happen the other way around is that the new entrant is very unhappy with the intrusiveness, passive aggressiveness, etc of a more feminine environment. There is no reason why the more feminine approach is necessarily better than the more masculine approach.
A mixed team (where I’m referring to attitudes, not necessarily to what is in the pants) can benefit from the strength of both attitudes, but also suffer from the weaknesses of both. Some people can do very badly with the masculine or with the feminine approach.
IMO, a healthy approach is to teach people the benefits and downsides of each approach, not to lionize one as being universally superior. I think that a big problem today is the idea of the universally superior culture/approach, that is supposedly inclusive and suitable for everyone, which is just a delusion.
IMO, it also drives gendered hatred, because society feeds a high level of entitlement, rather than the idea that masculine/feminine cooperation requires compromise and that it is OK for both approaches to exist in more pure forms.
Instead, the entitlement that is being fed in women and the double standards results in resentment by men. The lack of room for fair compromise results in duplicitous behavior to achieve a reasonable quid-pro-quo, which results in resentment by women. The general lack of trust results in bad faith assumptions, which cause more resentment and low trust behavior.
Aapje:
That seems plausible. It’s notable that women in sports and the military are much more likely to be lesbians than in the general population–it seems plausible that this has to do with being generally more masculine and so finding more male-adapted norms appealing. OTOH, it’s also possible it’s just path dependency–I’m not sure how you’d check.
Do you have a source for that? It strikes me as the sort of folk wisdom that “everybody knows, and doesn’t comport with my anecdata or that of the other veterans and the law enforcement officers I know. More stereotypically masculine interests/hobbies and in some cases affect than the baseline l, sure, but that seems to me to be attl besr weakly correlated with homosexuality or bisexuality.
What would path dependency mean? Lesbians in the military acting as role models? But lesbians were banned from, eg, the US military, making it difficult to be public role models.
According to this 2015 RAND survey (after the end of DADT), 7% of active duty women identify as lesbians. So that confirms albatross’s literal statement that it’s much higher than in the civilian population, even controlling for age, but it’s only 1 in 14, which is probably consistent with Lysenko’s observations
One interesting question – are there proportionately fewer het women in sports etc. (compared to lesbians) because acting “masculine” makes women less attractive to males, and het women care about that, so avoid such activities – or because more masculine people (including women) are attracted both to sports etc. and to relationships with women?
I’ve no idea how these could be disentangled by research. But as a non-gender-essentialist, the “trying to avoid being unattractive” argument feels more plausible.
The baseline numbers for lesbianism I’ve seen vary from around 2-5% for the general population. I guess if we take that 2% number as correct then 7% would be “much more” (more than 3x) likely to be gay. On the other hand, as Doug notes, the difference is still so small in real-world terms (especially with females being a minority in uniform in a lot of areas) that I think you’d be hard-pressed to notice.
And I apologize for the myriad typos in my last post. I was posting from a cell phone and my thumb typing skills are rather limited.
There are definitely less heterosexual women in sports. So much so that a retired WNBA player said there was a toxic lesbian culture in the league that is hostile to hetero women.
I don’t think its because of what men think. In HS all us guys were trying to date the soccer girls and vball girls, and yes the cheerleaders, but that is also basically a sport nowadays. I dont know the reason, but its pretty implausible for it to be that based on my EXP. OTOH, by the time I got to college almost all the women’s softball team members (who lived on the Frosh floor below mine) were already lesbians. So whatever it is, some sports might incidentally select for it.
Anecdotally, given what I heard from a few female “bisexual” friends (who seem to only date other women), female team sports are pretty much all lesbian or “bisexual”.
But gender essentialism is, you know, true.
Not arguing for forcing women out of the workforce or anything, but you can frame “housewife as luxury” in the light that now, wives *have* to work even when they wouldn’t otherwise choose to to afford things that are not really considered “luxuries” anymore – house, car – for which otherwise one income would have sufficed. If work is a bad thing (as proponents of UBI say it is), then you’re forcing work and home life stress on women who would like to have stayed home with their kids, but need to send those kids to daycares instead and be in, say, the corporate rat race. From that perspective, it doesn’t feel like being “that much richer”.
Before wives worked as much but after WWII, families generally lived in smaller houses and were more likely to have only one car. I’m not so sure wives _have_ to work if they are willing to live with a standard of living more similar to what a family in the 1950s would have on the husband’s salary alone.
I don’t think that housing option is really available if you want to live in a good safe neighborhood with good schools. At least not in the US. Only having one car doesn’t really save you much money either, cars are pretty cheap.
Sure they are. Vast majority of good school districts have modestly-sized townhomes
There was no concept of rights in Ancient Greece, people thought in terms of virtue. Virtue for a woman was giving her husband lots of healthy children and rising them as proper citizens, virtue for a man was being a great soldier/statesman/philosopher. For this reason, it was considered unvirtuous for a woman to study philosophy instead of focusing on being a good wife and mother. As far as I know, the Epicurean school was the only major school of philosophy that taught women, and Epicureans were considered the weirdos of the philosophical community.
On the other hand, the girls were taught Greek.
All the truly literate people of the age were speaking cuneiform.
Cuneiform is a script named after the wedge-shaped tool used to cut wet clay with the script’s characters.
So all the truly literate people spoke cutting words.
Because back then bards were OP.
Clay tablets were also heavy, so only pressing matters were addressed in print.
It may not just have been the Epicureans. Diogenes Laertius tells us there were women in Plato’s academy. He’s generally assumed to be faithfully reporting what his sources told him, and so of variable reliability depending on the quality of the source he’s citing on any given occasion. We do not have any surviving copies of whichever sources told him that story, but the usual practice among historians is to trust him unless what he says is explicitly contradicted by earlier evidence or obviously absurd. Still, perhaps the usual practice is too generous; historians do seem to have a preference for having some story to having no story, and so if there’s a surviving story that seems reasonably plausible and isn’t contradicted by any other surviving evidence, there’s a tendency in general for historians to repeat it as fact, even if the quality of the source is highly questionable. So probably should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think a discussion of equal opportunity vs equal outcomes might work better when separated from the rest of this comment.
But if we’re sticking with feminism, I’d want to add a lot more nuance.
– Girl #1. Wants to be an engineer, spends her free time building and designing things; isn’t allowed into engineering school.
– Girl #2. Graduates from engineering school, and then can only get jobs that pay less than her male classmates, and have fewer opportunities for advancement – because that’s how her society treats women.
– Girl #3. Graduates from engineering school. Gets the same entry level jobs as her classmates. But after that is routinely picked on and excluded by coworkers, whose main/only interest in interacting with her are to either “chat her up” as a prospective girlfriend, or express their dislike and anger at having women treated the same as them.
– Girl #4. Doesn’t know what she wants; is steered into being a housewife-and-mother in spite of her potential engineering brilliance.
– Girl #5. Wants to be a housewife, but is pushed into engineering because “we need more women in engineering” and she has at least some talent for it. Or pushes herself into engineering for that reason.
– Girl #6. Wants to be a housewife, but has engineering talent, and is pushed into engineering because “society desperately needs more engineers”. The same thing happens to her brother.
Note that most of the above is seperate from any concerns about “women’s nature”, because we’re talking about one girl in each case, not the average experience of all girls. In my experience, most people of either gender won’t be either happy or skillful in engineering jobs.
From where I sit, equal outcomes is BS, but being aware of subtle barriers – and taking action against them – is not. Fixing case 1 is not enough. But at some point – and opinions differ on where that point might be – striving for equality creates more problems than it solves. I’m sympathetic to girl #5 – if she’s pushing herself into engineering to create better balance – but believe she’s making a mistake, both for herself and for her society.
I’d like to point out that Girl #1, if she truly is designing things, is not going to be unable to attend Engineering Schools due to a lack of ability. That’s not a subtle barrier.
I’d also point out that #4 and #6 seem to be the result of collectivist needs and not actually matters of “equality”. If society truly needs more housewives or engineers, it makes sense to be pushing people towards those things, and it is the responsibility of the individual to “selfishly” advocate for their own desires.
I find it a little odd that you don’t have a case for “Graduates and gets the same entry level position as her peers, but (while not mistreated) is treated as an equal by her coworkers in a manner she finds unpleasant or uncomfortable, and leaves the field as a result” which seems to me to be the most common reason for leaving.
I was trying to roughly describe a range, not cover all the possibilities, and I probably erred on the side of omitting cases I don’t see as problematic.
Yes, on one interpretation, 4 could be about social needs, though what I actually intended it to imply was merely unthinking default values.
6 was intended to be about collectivist needs, and their possible conflict with freedom – nothing at all to do with equality.
And yes, #1 was intended to be a completely unsubtle barrier. The only way that girl can attend engineering school, or work as an engineer, is if she can successfully pass as male, and is willing to do so.
Note that the normal way “society needs more engineers” is communicated to women and men who might have been happier in some other field involves lots of little green pieces of paper with presidents on them. Alice deciding she’d rather work as an engineer than stay home with her kids because she can make a pile of extra money if she continues to work seems like things working exactly the way they should, to me.
OTOH, if Alice’s job is adapted for single men and married men with stay-at-home wives, it may be very hard for her to have a family and also keep her job. This is similar to having jobs adapted for gorillas, right? If Alice takes a couple months of maternity leave for each child she has, and occasionally needs to take an extra sick day to care for a sick kid, and is less able to travel than her male colleagues because her kids need to have one of their parents at home, that can limit her career even if nobody’s trying to keep women down. (Balancing things also means that her husband will be somewhat limited in similar ways.) I work in an organization with very family-friendly de facto policies, and we have probably 3x the female/male ratio in our group than in the broader field, probably partly for this reason.
@albatross11
I think we’re in violent agreement, except maybe at a level of subtle details. Case 6 is not a feminist problem, and case 5 tends to be a problem caused by feminism.
Family-indifferent and family-unfriendly policies are hard on anyone who has children, or other domestic responsibilities. They tend to be somewhat harder on females, for reasons both biological and cultural, but I’d rather see them addressed in non-gendered ways.
Yeah, I’m not proposing any particular solutions here–just saying this is an issue I’ve seen come up with women moving into an overwhelmingly-male occupation.
It irks me a bit in the aviation industry that women are favored in nearly every part of the process: more scholarships available, easier to build free flight time, much easier time getting jobs. Yet there is always a push to get more women into flying and a lot of guilt-tripping, since they do have to put up with some sexual harassment and occasional comments about ‘female pilots.’
Maybe this comment is inappropriate here and if so I apologize. I don’t mean to be rude or unwelcoming.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right” comes to mind.
Not sure what you mean by that.
The thing that really bothers me is that I see articles saying we all have to do more, or press releases on facebook from companies championing their hiring bias toward women, and I can’t comment on it because it is all public. So it all goes unchallenged, except occasionally by typically older women or clueless guys who comment on these things saying ‘hey this is really unfair actually.’
Movements change to adapt to meeting their goals. The modern world is like 95% of everything early feminists might have hoped for–the law makes few distinctions between men and women and those few are overwhelmingly in womens’ favor, every occupation is open to women on equal terms, women can divorce their husbands and find another/go it alone/marry a woman if they wish, the police and courts take domestic violence fairly seriously, men who leave a woman with a baby are on the hook for money to support it, etc. We don’t live in a utopia, so all those things work imperfectly, but ISTM that a woman in 1900 would see the world of womens’ rights 2019 as an ideal that would probably be impossible to achieve.
So the movement had to change goals or cease to exist, and movements don’t like to cease to exist. “Let women into engineering colleges” was a really important victory, but once it has been won, what’s the next victory?
Nit: Giving up on prohibition before completely eradicating alcoholism means it’s never going to be more than ~85% of everything early feminists might have hoped for. But I don’t think the current feminist movement is going to go back and revisit that cause.
Interest survey for an effortpost series I’m considering.
I have a copy of the 1985 first edition of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War by James Dunnigan and Austin Bay. The book runs through various geopolitical hotspots and ongoing (at the time) conflicts, giving background on each: historical and geographic context, the major players in the conflict, the direct participants and their apparent strategies, levels of interest of the US and Soviet Union in the conflict, and (most interesting for our purposes) the authors’ assessment of the likelihood of various potential outcomes for the conflict. The likelihoods are explicitly expressed in percentage terms.
The book’s predictions are now 34 years in the past, which strikes me as ample time for us to look back on the predictions and assess them against what actually happened. I propose to look at their predictions for conflict discussed in turn, score the actual outcome against their predictions, and at the end do a calibration analysis of how well the authors’ predictions turned out.
The conflicts (in the order they appear in the book) are:
1. Lebanon
2. Israel and the Middle East
3. The Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula [particularly the Iran-Iraq war]
4. Afghanistan
5. Libya and Chad
6. Zaire
7. South Africa
8. The Philippines
9. Korea
10. El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras
11. Suriname and the Caribbean
12. The Falklands [the book was published 3 years after the 1982 Falklands war]
13. Albania and Yugoslavia
14. Spain and Catalonia
15. The Central Front [Germany and the prospect of direct conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact]
I’d be interested.
I have a copy of the same book, and I’d forgotten about those predictions. So, yeah, some interest here. Now I have to try and remember who else was in that sort of predicting business; I know Dunnigan wasn’t the only one.
34 years ago was 1985. The problem is that the US / USSR divide was then so pertinent to international affairs it seems to me any predictions won’t be anywhere close. I don’t think anyone was predicting the collapse of the USSR in 1985. I would be kind of interested in the predictions just as a look at an alternate universe, but nothing to help us in future predictions.
I don’t think the conflicts (except Afghanistan and Central Europe) were very deeply US/USSR conflicts, even though I’m sure both sides to varying degree supported compatible factions out of habit. But yes, interested in any case.
Without going into too much detail for the sake of spoilers (I’ll treat their predictions here in detail in the second-to-last installment of the series), Dunnigan and Bay actually did list and assign probabilities to two scenarios in which the Cold War would end with the Soviet side collapsing to purely internal factors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Amalrik#Will_the_Soviet_Union_Survive_Until_1984?
Book published in 1970 hypothesized that the USSR would get into a war with China. It’s military would be pulled east, and the USSR would fall apart.
See also Star Trek– Chekhov was Russian, not Soviet.
But why should I rely on my memory when there’s a wikipedia page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union
I’d definitely be interested, in part because I’m curious to see how much the collapse and breakup of the USSR and the end of the cold war threw off predictions at the time.
That sounds like a lovely book!
Is the prediction-part seperated in the text, so that one can make ones own prediction first, before being influence by the author?
Not fully separated, but the predictions are in a clearly-labeled section near the end of each chapter. There’s plenty of time for a reader to think about their own predictions before reading those of the authors.
I’m extremely interested to see how they did.
Sounds kind of weird to pick Catalonia as a bigger military problem than the Basques in the 80s. Even now that would be a reach.
It actually looks sort of prescient? Catalonia is much closer to leaving Spain than Basque country is, based on recent political activity.
I’d bet that the book will be completely wrong on the subject, there is no way anybody could have predicted the modern conflict in the 80s.
My guess is that the authors just looked at how, back then, Catalonia was very slowly and by political means, gaining more and more independence, and speculate that at some point they would be virtually independent and no conflict would be necessary (which probably was the plan of Catalonian politicians in the 80s, but obviously hasn’t happened).
It’s just impossible to extrapolate the modern Spanish political landscape by looking at the relatively calm Spanish politics in the 80s (unless somehow the authors were extremely prescient and looked back to the 2000 last years of Spaniards tearing each others throat apart, and extrapolate that 80s were a fluke. If they did that, I’ll tip my hat and buy the book).
The reasons why Catalonia is a bigger problem than the Basques started in 1979, with the Constitution, so if they were aware of the deep workings of how these things were worked out, it’s understandable.
The Basques have a much better deal than the Catalans. They have their own tax agencies (4 of them; Biscay, Alava, Gipuzkoa, Navarre), whereas tax in Catalonia gets collected by the central government. The Basques do give money to Madrid, but the amount gets decided by a billateral deal that needs to be approved by both Madrid and Vitoria. The thing is, Basques are smart and only negotiate a deal when the government in Madrid doesn’t have an absolute majority. And if a new deal isn’t negotiated, the previous one applies, so it never gets worse. Catalonia gets the handouts Madrid gives them, like the rest of Spain.
Basques (Basque Country+Navarre) are 5.9 % of the Spanish population and 6.3 % of GDP. Catalonia is 16% of GDP and population. It’s much harder, and more expensive, to bribe the Catalans than the Basques. Basques are cheaper to bribe.
Didn’t know about this book; might put it on my own list to read, and am definitely curious about how the predictions pan out!
That is really surprising. I actually went and checked that whoever wrote that list hadn’t patter-matched the modern conflict, as back in the 80s the big issue in Spain was Basque separatism (“big” as in regular bombings and dead people on both sides, the things happening in Catalonia these days are pretty mild in comparison).
I’m really curious if the book predicted the modern conflict (and if my current reading list wasn’t humongous I’d give it a shot).
So I went to Costco for the first time this past weekend.
What are things that Costco offers that are cheaper than other supermarkets? I primarily bought lasagna, steak, and hot chicken wings.
Lots of things are cheaper at Costco, but they come in larger quantities. So a 32 oz. jar of pasta sauce is close to the price of a 16 oz. jar at Safeway, but then you have to have room for a 32 oz. jar, and be able to go through it before it molds in your fridge.
Most of the foods are cheaper, sometimes by a lot. The booze is usually a little cheaper. The household durables vary.
If the Costco has a gas station, it’s likely to be cheaper than almost any other gas station around. (Based on my Bay Area experience.) The tire center is usually cheaper, but is more likely to be out of your particular tire size than Big-O or Firestone.
Clothing is usually a little cheaper for similar quality, but the selection is very limited compared to a real clothing store. Books even more so.
What’s the economic justification for having membership fees which doesn’t rely on “let’s sell a lot of memberships to suckers who won’t use them?”
Keeping out the riff-raff.
Costco also has membership requirements which are pretty easy for most regularly-employed people to meet. Back in the day, they would automatically print your check for you, and their membership criteria patterned with “not likely to bounce checks”.
These days, with everyone paying by card, that’s less of a concern, but there might be issues with chargebacks.
It’s possible that specializing in large-sized products makes for less shop-lifting.
Well, it lowers* the frequency and complexity of transactions to “once per membership period” rather than “once per use of the services/facilities/etc”. Similar reason to why bars have tabs as opposed to cash for every drink, just expanded over a longer time period.
Also (from the organization’s perspective) it’s generally easier to communicate with members, which has advertising and maintenance benefits (for the latter, “we’ll be taking X down on Y date; plan accordingly”.)
They have to count everything people buy, so it seems to me that it’s just going from N transactions to N+1 transactions.
Somewhat similar but opposite to your initial thought, there’s a sort of sunk-cost fallacy where people want to get use out of their Costco membership. Additionally, they might not consider the fact that their low prices are partially due to those fees (as Costco aren’t dependent on markup to make money).
Costco also has a rather different brand placement scheme than most supermarkets where most items only have a few brands. This allows them strong leverage with its suppliers.
Lock-in/upsell: once you’ve paid the fee, you’re likely to try to get your money’s worth by doing a significant portion of your shopping at Costco. The upsell aspect of this comes in with the membership tiers, with “Executive” tier charging a higher fee in return for effectively a lower price (a 1% rebate) with a break-even of about $500/month in Costco purchases relative to the basic membership.
The lock-in comes not just from the sunk cost fallacy: by front-loading about 2/3 of their profits into the membership fee (Costco’s membership fee revenue is about 2/3 of their total operating profit), they can make the same overall profit selling goods at a lower direct markup. So from the customer’s perspective, once you’ve bought the membership, it makes sense to keep shopping at Costco because the marginal prices are lower.
Loss prevention. The membership give Costco two advantages here. One is that the fee keeps nonmember out of the store, so you don’t have much of a problem with people coming in only to shoplift. Another is that when you sign up and pay the fee for the first time, Costco gets a wet signature from you on a membership agreement. One of the terms in this agreement grants Costco the contractual right to search your bags and check your merchandise against your receipt. A lot of places do this without a membership card, but Costco (because of the signed agreement) has the right to physically stop you if you refuse, while non-membership stores (e.g. Walmart) rely on social pressure to get people to consent to the inspection on the way out of the store.
Consistency of revenue. Groceries and grocery-like big box stores tend to have very volatile revenues, requiring them to maintain access to more working capital (cash equivalents and untapped lines of credit). Costco mitigates this by front-loading much of their profits into the membership fees. Since they know when their existing memberships are up for renewal, they can predict more of their revenue than a similar non-membership store would be able to.
Customer data collection. The same stuff Safeway does when you swipe your discount card, Costco does when you swipe your membership card. They have a model of who their customers are, what they tend to buy and when, how price sensitive they appear to be, what kinds of promotions and advertising they respond to, etc, cross-tabulated by geography and demographics. This model lets them spend their marketing and promotions money more effectively and better predict how much of what kinds of inventory they should stock at any particular time. Obviously, you can do this without a membership fee, but by requiring a membership to shop there at all, Costco ensures 100% customer participation in their data-collection program and thus comes out with more complete data.
Probably low profit margins on products.
From a quick google search, the profit margin for grocery stores is 1-3%. Let’s say the average store makes 2%. That means if you spend $1,000 there, the store makes $20 in profit.
The average American spends $4,636 a year on groceries, which is worth ~$93 to a supermarket. A Costco membership is $60 a year. So yeah, the membership fee seems minor but the margins are so low that the membership fee is quite a chunk of money for Costco.
Having said that, @Anthony’s answer matches my experience. Costco’s niche is discount groceries for the middle class; the membership fee filters out the poor, who find discount groceries elsewhere.
That’s not quite the right way to look at it – profit margin for a store is different from unit economics. Let’s say an item costs the store $10.20. A 2% profit margin doesn’t mean their cost is $10. It means that the store itself, if all it sold was that item, and sold 10,000 of them for the month, would have had 102k in revenue, but its costs were 100k.
However, if for some reason they only sold 9,000 of those items, they’d only get 91.8k, but their costs include rent, payroll, utilities, shipping, etc., so it would still be close to 100k.
They could just as easily get that extra money by raising prices by ~1.5%, which would deter shoppers in the same way as the membership fee, if you assume shoppers are assumed to be behaving rationally.
Not in the same way. Marginal cost is 1.5% higher, which results in buying less.
Costco’s been compared to services like gym memberships, but there’s a key difference, with a gym membership, you pay once a year and can freely come and go, with Costco, you pay once a year, and then every time you shop. It does nothing to relieve transaction headache for the buyer nor transaction costs for the seller, it just adds another transaction onto the pile. And gyms usually let you pay for use in absence of a membership, this functions as a form of price discrimination, as a rational agent who uses the service a lot has a greater incentive to price-shop than the occasional user. This isn’t discrimination, it’s exclusion of occasional users, exactly the people who will if they find themselves in the store be less cost-conscious and thus more profitable from the store’s standpoint. So if the answer is price discrimination, it must be discrimination WITHIN the group of people who buy membership.
Let’s think about the incentives here. Suppose there are two people who shop only at Costco and buy exactly the same amount of the same kind of product, only one buys the cheaper brand and the other the more expensive brand. As the first is more likely to be price-conscious, it makes sense for Costco to use membership fees to lower the cost of the cheaper products by more than it lowers the cost of the expensive product. The problem here is that it could accomplish the same goal by just plain lowering the price of the cheaper products. The membership fees don’t allow it to do anything it can’t already do.
Another possibility is that this is a form of price discrimination against single people and in favor of families. Suppose there are two people who buy exactly the same types of products and the same brands of products, but different amounts because one is a single person and the other is buying for a family. This makes intuitive sense, the second person will spend more money and thus “get more out of” their membership. The problem with this is that, as with the quality hypothesis, there’s a simpler way of getting at this, they could just provide discounts for buying in bulk. But this may fail at Costco’s scale, as it’s already selling things in bulk, and at this point the ordinary advantages of buying in bulk to families would invert. This is because a single person can stock up on food for himself and still have a comfortable time pushing the cart around the store. Someone buying for a family would need to lug multiple carts around, or else make multiple trips from the store to the car, or make more frequent trips to Costco. In other words, in a normal supermarket, the marginal cost to the single person and family member of choosing a bulkier product is about equal, but in Costco where carts are more likely to be overflowing in the later case, it’s easier for the single person. However, it should be noted that many products are perishable, the single person is simply unable to buy two months worth of milk, whereas someone shopping for a family can buy that much and know it will be consumed within two weeks.
Another possibility: it’s a discount for forgoing the variety that is other stores. Someone who is willing to do this is likely to be a cheapskate, and is thus offered a discount over the person who has the membership but does half their shopping at Wal-Mart.
The most depressing explanation that involves semi-rational agents is the riff-raff argument. I have a hard time wrapping my head around why people would care. I can’t say I don’t care about social status, but whenever I see the people of Wal Mart my self-esteem increases as I think to myself “I may be a loser relative to some people, but I’ll always be better than these freaks.”
Oh, I love to talk about grocery shopping! (Lameness acknowledged.)
I’m a reluctant Costco shopper. I find it fairly unpleasant, but I kept careful track for a while and confirmed that we really do save money by shopping there.
That said, we don’t save as much money as my friends feel like they do by shopping there. It depends how you shop. I typically buy produce and meat elsewhere when they’re on sale and then choose my meals accordingly. That means I can stock up on items when they’re at loss leader prices, which are notably cheaper than Costco’s prices. Also I try to grow fruits and veggies. But if you have more money than time, or you want to buy what you want when you want it without fiddling with fliers or coupons, Costco is a good general choice (unless you have an Aldi….I miss Aldi.).
One thing to consider is if you will end up eating more of expensive foods. When I buy a giant tub of Feta cheese or a big bag of walnuts, neither goes uneaten and both are cheaper per-ounce than elsewhere. But it costs more than eating cheddar and peanuts from Walmart. Depending on your goals, that’s a free upgrade or a missed opportunity to lower your grocery bill.
Some things I can’t really comment on. We don’t tend to buy a lot of packaged snacks, but when I have, things like tortilla chips and crackers are cheaper per ounce there. I also don’t do a lot of non-grocery shopping there, so I don’t know what’s going on over in the office supply or electronics sections, but the big section in the middle with rotating clothing and season items usually has good prices. My vacuum cleaner was $50 less than it was on Amazon. I don’t have a chest freezer, so I can’t really buy much in their frozen section, but IIR their frozen berries and veggies are cheaper than elsewhere.
All that said, these are our Costco money-saving go-to items:
cheese (basically all types and varieties)
yogurt (flavored individual cups are cheap, plain tubs are over-priced; this annoys me)
butter
milk
eggs
rotisserie chicken
nuts
bread
espresso capsules
spices
yeast
cocoa powder
chocolate chips
cheerios
oats
honey
olive oil
Wow! I bought a tub of yogurt thinking there was a volume discount, I’ll have to go with the cups then. Good to know!
I lot of people also mentioned the chicken, and I’ll have to grab honoey and olive oil next time too.
Tubs are definitely cheaper (per ounce) than cups when I shop. I suppose how much depends on what type or brand of yogurt you’re looking at (and certainly if you’re cross-comparing tub of brand X with cups of brand Y it is possible that Y’s cups are cheaper than X’s tub).
Unavoidable cross-comparing of brands is the issue at our Costco. They sell Yoplait flavored yogurt in cups for something under .08/oz, but the only yogurt they sell in tubs is organic greek yogurt for some exorbitant price I can’t recall. So mostly I buy conventional generic yogurt in a tub at other stores. It’s cheaper, I can get plain when I want it, and I don’t have to throw away all those cups. Making it is cheaper still, but I’ve gotten out of the habit.
I have the same problem with applesauce. I’d happily buy a six-pack of 42oz jars of store-brand applesauce, but all Costco wants to sell me is a case of those those stupid tiny pouches – no thank you.
One thing to consider that most people don’t even think of buying at Costco is actually large purchases. Like cars or trips.
If you don’t like bargain shopping, haggling or otherwise dealing with salespeople, Costco often allows decent deals without most of that.
For many, that’s not really a problem for most purchases, but still is for those bigger purchases.
The main down point is a very small selection and often not the most trendy ones.
Bulk packaged items. Like the poster above me says, Costco is especially good at things like spices, olive oil, cheese, coffee, cleaning products, mayo, butter, etc. You will, however, have huge quantities. Sometimes this is a problem: Costco frozen vegetable bags take up half my freezer. Their coffee bean bags are not conveniently sized. Their olive oil containers require me to reorganize my entire cabinet.
They have Kirkland liquor brands which are also good deals.
Their meat is fairly priced, but generally more expensive than you would find elsewhere. This is in part because the Costco items are of slightly higher quality. Produce at Costco, IMO, is a no-no. It’s not competitively priced, the selection is far too small, and it’s never particularly fresh.
Costco sells big name bread, but I have terrible luck: they always seem to go moldy fast.
Costco also has exceptionally good quality control, IME. Kirkland is an excellent brand, and if you see something in the Costco stores, it’s probably good quality. Like, Black Friday is coming up. A lot of places advertise cheap TVs. My FIL got one. TCL 4-series. Costco carries the 5- and 6-series, at competitive prices. I don’t see the crappy TV models in their stores at all.
Also, I should add that I do not find Costco more competitive than the local Jewel when Jewel has its 40-50% off sales. However, Costco has every-day low prices, so it is easier to just buy it at Costco than it is to buy it at Jewel. Also, buying bulk items at Costco allows me to buy produce/meat at a different store that I actually like, which overprices their typical grocery items. I don’t care, because I buy that stuff from Costco.
What bulk items that you get there can last a while?
Things we get from Costco:
-Toilet Paper
-Paper Towels
-Kleenex
-oils: peanut, olive, canola. They do not have Sesame Oil
-Spices: smoked paprika especially, since I use a LOT of it. But also garlic powder, onion powder, and the kind of spices you’d throw in an apple cider
-Chicken broth, though only the cans
-Whole Peeled Tomatoes (though those cans are HUGE! I use them for making pasta sauce)
-Snacks: my wife likes their….I dunno what. Something. I know how it looks. She’s 9 months pregnant, so at this point I just roll with it.
-Butter
-Frozen veggies
-Pecans/walnuts
-DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET A WHOLE LAMB?! Do you want to come over and eat a whole lamb?!
-Coffee, for sure
Other bulk items like rice, flour, sugar, are wayyyyy too large to be practical, and the marginal savings aren’t important for most households.
I also forgot: they have excellent prime-grade meat, though in large package sizes. So if you have friends coming over and want a nice meal, their prime steaks are a no-brainer.
@A Definite Beta Guy >
Congratulations and best wishes to you!
Thanks, I increasingly feel like we need it…well, hopefully we know what we are doing.
@A Definite Beta Guy
I’ll add my congratulations. Wish you guys all the best.
Be careful about saying stuff like this, I might actually show up.
Ha ha. When it comes to kids, no one knows what they’re doing. We all just wing it, and figure it out as we go. So don’t be too concerned if you feel completely ignorant sometimes about what to do with a sick kid or a crying kid, or whatever. Just do the best you can.
We stopped renewing our Costco membership when we did the math and found Aldi had it beat, even without factoring in the membership fees. Especially since Aldi has vastly expanded their offerings over the past few years.
It seems to me Costco’s “Kirkland” and other store-branded items compete with the high-end items you’d buy at normal grocery stores (I think I even saw this written once in Costco’s marketing materials), and Costco definitely beat them on price — sometimes even before considering the bulk discount. But if you don’t care about high-end items…
We hung in there for a while for the free samples & $1.50 hot dogs (going was like an event), and the discounted gas, but we finally had to concede it’s not worth it.
Our closest Aldi is half an hour away without traffic that can be snarled to nearly an hour, while the Costco is about fifteen minutes away…and to be honest, my wife bought the membership first and I facepalmed, so now we need to use it
It’s not a bad thing if going Aldi instead isn’t realistic. Still way better than a lot of conventional supermarkets, especially if you want higher-quality items.
I love Aldi, but the commute distance (driving an hour round trip for groceries would not be worth any amount of marginal cost savings to me) probably makes Costco worth it for you on that alone. As others have mentioned, you should absolutely fill up with gas there, as they are usually quite a bit cheaper and you can make up a lot of your membership fee just with gas savings.
I’ll also dissent a little on selection. Aldi has definitely expanded their offerings, but Costco has more variety (both in different brands and different products) by probably an order of magnitude.
Modafinil. I had a Costco membership for a year before the first Costco opened in OKC, because their modafinil costs a third of what it does anywhere else, which means the membership pays for itself within 3 months.
Under Federal (State?) law, any such pharmacy is required to let you use them without a membership. Without knowing the details of their pricing, I suspect you could have legally used their pharmacy without the membership. Of course, sometimes the door greeters need to be “educated” about this.
I had a membership once, but found it wasn’t cost effective. Everything is packaged in sizes that are absurdly large for a single person or couple, even if they always ate at home, let alone if they also have subsidized workplace cafeterias etc. I don’t buy enough durable goods per year to justify the membership cost, and while they have some excellent foods (judging by what people say when I ask where they got whatever they brought to the pot luck), we simply couldn’t finish any of it before it went bad.
On the good side – we were still using garbage bags and similar items from Costco for perhaps as much as 5 years after our one year of membership.
Things might be slightly better for us now – I believe these experiments happened before we bought a free standing freezer – but probably not good enough. (Does anyone have anecdata about Costco’s frozen foods, particularly frozen foods packaged such that you don’t need to cook/thaw the whole package at once?)
I don’t have a membership at the moment — I had one briefly after college but ran into some of the same problems you did. Now that I look again, though, it seems Costco’s gas averages about forty cents a gallon less than other stations in the area; if you burn ten gallons a week, those membership fees would pay for themselves three and a half times over in gas alone.
The one near me always has a line for the gas station, though.
We buy quite a few frozen food from Costco and haven’t ever run into a problem with it. We have bought individually packaged goods and “bunch of stuff in a bag” frozen goods and haven’t had an issue with any of it. This includes meat, processed food and veggies.
Frozen stuff is fine, but if you have a free standing freezer, what do you want to put in it? Since you are shopping for 1-2, you need to portion out and get a vacuum seal to properly freeze your Costco meat. You could buy roasts and keep them in your freezer, but those are only useful if you have family or friends coming over. 2 people are never going to blow through a standard 3-4 lb roast, unless you really like leftovers.
Baby products like diapers, wipes, and formula are definitely cheaper at Costco/Sam’s Club than at Wal-mart or other stores. Toiletries are also cheaper, but like others already said, things are cheaper because you buy them in huge quantities. For those items I listed, that makes sense, but for other things it’s not always as useful.
Costco membership pays for itself in gas alone, if you also have the credit card. The gas is often 10 cents cheaper than anything in the region, and then you get 4% cashback on the card. The card also is nice for travel, because it doesn’t have any foreign transaction fees.
Their frozen food is consistently cheaper, though as mentioned, it’s in bulk. I like having individual-portion frozen lunches at work, rather than heating leftovers, so for that I’m definitely saving half a dollar or more per lunch via Costco. If you’re careful about waiting for items to go on sale, their non-food items are also often better deals than at other stores.
For food, though, I’ve been able to optimize by hitting up dollar stores and farmer’s markets.
Flour in 25 lb bags is very inexpensive. Boneless legs of lamb are not cheap, but I think they are cheaper than anything similar at a regular grocery store. Their big artichokes are inexpensive compared to artichokes in a grocery store.
Those are a few examples I have noticed.
Inspired by a question in the MWI post, let’s have some fun with anthropic reasoning:
God creates two universes, one which operates according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the other some non-MWI interpretation. In both universes, an observer rolls a die and, if the result is anything else than six, paints his house red and stops rolling the die. If he rolls a six, he paints it blue and then rolls it again the next day. One hundred days later, God appears to the inhabitants of every house in every world and asks them to guess if they are in the MWI or non-MWI universe. If they guess correctly that they are in MWI universe, they receive a reward of 1$. If they guess correctly that they are in the non-MWI universe, they get a reward of 10$. If you are an observer in this situation, what is your guess?
Second variation: Like the first, except that God sends a tornado to kill the observer if he paints his house red.
Third variation: Like the first, except that there is only one universe, and God flipped a coin and created one or the other.
Fourth Variation: Like the third, except that God sends a tornado to kill the observer if he paints his house red.
Fifth Variation: Like the third, except now God and his coin is used as a metaphor for the correct theory, based on your physics knowledge you think there is an equal probability of one or the other being true. An experiment is proposed which will definitively answer the question. You are offered 1$ if you correctly guess that the experiment will establish that MWI is true, and 10$ if you correctly guess that non-MWI is true.
Sixth Variation: Like the fifth, except that painting your house red triggers a false vacuum which destroys you and the universe.
In which variation would you go for the 1$ versus the 10$, and why? Is there an answer that is always correct in all the variations?
Each MWI version of me will further splinter so as to take both bets, so the point is moot.
Realizing this, the non-MWI me will reason that since he cannot coherently take himself to be about to make both bets while trying to decide which bet to make, he cannot coherently think of himself as being in the MWI universe. If constrained by honesty, then, he has to bet against being in the MWI universe.
In the case of the non-MWI version of me, he is correct ex hypothesi. Many MWI versions will reason the same way and be incorrect. Other MWI versions will reason differently and some will not reason at all — they’ll flip a coin, look for an omen, etc. Some will forget about the bet and go to lunch. C’est la vie.
(edited for clarity)
That’s like saying “In a MWI universe a version of me will buy a lottery ticket, so whether it’s to my advantage to do so is moot.”
If this is the coherent and logical thing to do for him, then it is also the coherent and logical thing to do for his MWI counterpart, as there is no way for either to tell the difference.
I know you meant these as counter-arguments, but I’m fundamentally in agreement with both of your statements.
In terms of whether I will buy the ticket, it is moot, because: Some future versions of me will deliberate and conclude that buying the ticket is in my advantage and buy the ticket. Other future versions of me will deliberate and conclude that buying the ticket is in my advantage but then not buy the ticket. Others future me’s will deliberate and conclude that buying the ticket is not in my advantage but still buy the ticket. Others future me’s will deliberate and conclude that buying the ticket will not be in my advantage and then not buy the ticket. Other versions will cast a horoscope for the question and buy the ticket. Other versions will cast a horoscope for the question and not buy the ticket. And so on.
So from the perspective of present me, whether buying the ticket is advantageous to me is irrelevant to whether I will buy the ticket, because I will buy the ticket and also not buy the ticket, and both for every reason imaginable.
I don’t disagree. The only difference will be that those MWI versions of me that conclude they are in a non-MWI universe will be incorrect in that belief.
(edited for clarity and spelling)
> To demonstrate his party’s support for enterprise, he said a future Tory government would double funding for research and development to £18bn in the next Parliament, which would amount to the “biggest ever increase in support for R&D”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50398838
Wonder whose idea that could have been…
Some thoughts on job demographics and affirmative action inspired by looking at my local union’s monthly newsletter:
As usual there were pictures of the crews on large jobs with the names of who’s pictured, but one page had a “Pensioners get-together”, and I was able to contrast the demographics of those who were union plumbers and steamfitters then and now.
The oldtimers are all white, mostly with Italian last names, Irish last names are the second most common, other nationalities family names a distant third, the guys today (and I do mean guys, sometimes women are working on a crew, but less than one in a hundred) are mostly white, but no longer only, Spanish last names are more common than Italian now, black faces are about one-in-ten (so less than the percentage of San Franciscans 20+ years ago, but more than the percentage today), Asian faces are about one-in-twenty, which is far less than the percentage of Asian-ancestry San Franciscans anytime in the last 50 years.
A bit more than 20 years ago I tested to get into the plumbing apprenticeship programs of every local union within 50 miles of my home, San Francisco did tests, then interviews, and from the results had three different “lists” of potential apprentices: Asian, Black, and White with some formula for deciding how many from each list were admitted, while San Jose just accepted apprentices based on who scored highest on the written tests. Since San Jose had a place for me about a year before San Francisco did (when San Francisco called I decided to stick with San Jose because I didn’t want to quit the company I was assigned to and repeat a year at what would be lower pay, a decision I latter regretted when traffic got worse and I felt like I spent a year driving on the highway), and since after making Journeyman I switched locals in 2011, I have a sense of the different demographics of the San Francisco’s local compared to San Jose’s.
San Francisco’s tests+interviews+racial quotas system produced apprentices that were only slightly more representative of the demographics of the area than San Jose’s written tests only selection method did with one exception: San Jose had a bit more women (more like one-in-eighty than one-in-a hundred) than San Francisco, and the electricians union had an “English language reading comprehension” test in addition to the arithmetic and “mechanical aptitude” tests, and they have more women and less non-whites than other building-trades do, and a thought was inspired by that:
Lots of ink and pixels have been spilled on how CEO’s are mostly white male, almost as much ink and pixels have been spilled on “STEM” academic fields being mostly male, but it’s been decades (if ever) since there’s been much fuss made over how the building trades are mostly men, or that nurses are mostly women.
Since CEO’s often rule us and/or receive financial rewards more than most others it’s not surprising that their demographics is discussed, but why ‘STEM’ so much more than construction and nursing?
Is it just folks squabbling more for jobs that don’t injure/kill as much (nurses are well known to break their backs moving patients, job injuries and deaths in most ‘blue-collar’ trades are more than in ‘white-collar’ ones), or is it something else?
[FWLIW, a few months ago “Pipe-Lines” had on it’s front page endorsements of Democratic Party candidates and a story of my union donating to a local Catholic school, and while both are the same things my union has done for decades, I thought of how we’re supporting institutions belonging to different sides in @Scott Alexander’s tribes, but I couldn’t think of a coherent question or statement out of that, so you get the AA question instead]
I think status has a lot to do with it. Well, status and image. Potential for injury does factor in, but other factors like helping people in a meaningfully visible way, working somewhere you will likely meet someone of a status you are attracted to, having an occupation that results in people taking you more seriously, and other similar motivations would dominate that in my opinion.
It is my impression (having paid attention to who talks loudest about men dominating STEM) that those who want more women in STEM are seeking to influence how STEM occupations function and seize influence over those institutions. Basically the push isn’t driven by a host of women who desire to enter such a field, but by people who believe that if a bunch of women are in that field, they’ll be better situated to influence it.
That said, it’s my impression that even with the gallons of ink spilled, that women aren’t actually much more likely to enter such fields because it isn’t actually interesting to them.
Personally, I think trying to encourage more people, in general, to get a trade would benefit everyone. Fewer people in tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt, more people with practical skills to work on their own homes, more people likely to buy their own homes. All around growth in the middle class and improvement of society.
Money is a factor, too. Tradesmen can make respectable middle-to-upper-middle-class incomes, while STEM workers (specifically, programmers and programmer-adjacent positions) at FAANG and similar companies can make ridiculous amounts of money (*). A two-income couple, both of whom are successful mid-career programmers at FAANG-like companies, can easily have a combined income that puts them in the top percentile of household income (the usual threshold for “The 1 Percent”).
There are a handful of careers that are widely considered reasonable pathways for a bright, conscientious, motivated person from a middle-class background to become rich without winning the lottery (either literally, or figuratively in terms of becoming a rock star, bestselling author, startup tycoon, etc). Doctors and lawyers are the two careers that I can think of that have traditionally fit this bill. Newly-minted doctors have been close to gender-parity for at least two decades (**), so most of the battle is mostly won there. Lawyers appear to have a similar pattern: close to parity at graduation for some time, and a 2:1 ratio among all active professionals in the field. STEM jobs, particularly FAANG programmers, skew overwhelmingly male throughout the professional pipeline.
So from the perspective of an advocate who wants to work to ensure women have equal access to opportunities to become rich in their own right, attacking STEM in general and FAANG in particular makes quite a bit of sense. CS graduates currently skew something like 80/20 male, and FAANG companies typically run overall gender ratios something like 70/30 male with the women disproportionately in less-technical (designers, tech writers, etc) or non-technical (HR, legal, finance, admin) roles. On the numbers alone, there looks like there’s a lot more remaining opportunity to improve women’s professional fortunes in tech than in medicine or the law.
(*) Source: I am a successful mid-career programmer at a FAANG-like company (Adobe), and I’ve previously worked for others (Google and Microsoft).
(**) KFF.org has new med school graduates as being 47% female and 53% male as of 2018, and pretty stable before that as far back as their dataset goes (2002). Professionally active physicians skew about 2:1 male (64% to 36%), though: not sure how much of this is mostly-male older cohorts of doctors still being in the workforce, and how much is a gender-correlated disparity in attrition rates of doctors leaving the profession early after graduating from med school.
All of that is more or less my point, with the stipulation that most of those pushing for women to take that path aren’t the ones on it. So why people are pushing for it seems more ideological than well being oriented in motivation. The push is for more women to join the societal elite so that, presumably, they will put money into the programs that got them there, furthering the influence of those who pushed them there.
I’m a little more charitable in my interpretation of the advocates’ motives here. I expect sincere ideological commitment to gender equality to be the primary motivation here, with the thrill of perceiving oneself to be a driving part of a significant shift in society for the better as a close second. Cynical seeking of money and power for its own sake is likely a factor for some, but I doubt it’s one of the dominant motivations.
I might be slightly uncharitable, but it’s coming from a place of watching and interacting with those pushing the “We need more women in STEM” line. Ideological commitment to gender equality that only applies to high status positions isn’t gender equality. As Plumber pointed out: There is no strong push for women to go into high paying trades like crane operators or electricians, who can easily make as much as most entry level engineers and do so with less debt and in greater numbers.
Just getting a medical degree/license isn’t enough (in practice) to practice medicine in the US. You also need to complete a residency. For reasons I don’t fully understand, residency spots only exist in-practice where Medicare/Medicaid is subsidizing them. This ends up being the gating factor in the number of doctors who are actually available to practice. And the number of spots for each specialty is limited. If there is a gender disparity in the number of years worked by physicians, and being a physician is a social good of some kind, should we specifically skew residency spots towards men?
Thing is, the hand-wringing over lack of women in the field goes back long before it was possible to make ridiculous amounts of money in it. There were worries about women not going into advanced math and science classes (the acronym STEM not being a thing yet) in the 1980s, and talk about the lack of women in the profession at least since the 1990s (probably before, but that’s when I entered the profession)
Nobody worries about the lack of women in construction except for the purpose of pointing out the inconsistency.
This changed over time. Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order which required affirmative action based on gender and race for government contractors, where a major reason seems to have been the disparities in construction.
The modern SJ movement changed, IMO in part due to the general increase in disgust by the elite for blue collar workers.
It’s more you don’t hear about this on Twitter; however, we’re required by the 8(a) program to privilege small women- and minority-owned construction companies wherever possible. (And veteran-owned, and service-disabled veteran-owned–there’s probably other targets I don’t know about. It’s not just what we’d conventionally call “affirmative action” targets.)
If we have a contract that’s outside the capabilities of small business (or lacks sufficient interest from small businesses that we feel we won’t have sufficient competition) we contractually obligate our prime contractors to privilege these same type of small businesses in their subcontracts.
@CatCube
That seems rather discriminatory for tall women and minorities.
Construction firms owned by women is a lot different than the actual construction workers being women; my understanding is there’s a lot of wife-and-husband firms organized to take advantage of the woman-ownership set-asides.
The people who wring their hands at not enough women etc in STEM are the same ones who follow Neil DeGrass Tyson and pages like I F****** Love Science. STEM is what they care about so STEM is what they write about.
I’m not sure about that. Tyson and IFLS are strictly about S, not TEM, and even there they’re more about the aesthetics of science than its actual mechanics. Your average IFLS reader has probably looked at a couple hundred pictures of fractals but they’d find a discussion of the mathematics behind them painfully boring.
They might want more women in STEM as an expression of those aesthetics, though.
Beautiful women in STEM is not a bad thing.
The issue is that a gender parity push is linked to feminism, which is an anti-aesthetic ideology. 😛
This statement on feminism seems like a broad (heh) generalization.
First wave feminism was aesthetic neutral. Second wave feminism could be described as anti-aesthetic, but the third wave was (imo) strongly based around embracing aesthetics and fourth wave has been, again, aesthetically neutral.
You could be right: you certainly are about First wave. When did “beauty standards are oppressive” come in?
Third wave is associated in my mind with anti-aesthetics such as “aposematic” hair colors, slut walks, transtrenderism and fat celebration, often combined.
I’ve no idea what fourth wave is about. Are child drag queens third wave or fourth wave?
EDIT:
From Wikipedia I’m getting the impression that fourth wave is just third wave on Twitter.
I’d take some flack for saying it, but that kind of thought crept in during 2nd wave feminism.
A component of the third wave was the desire to redefine beauty, or at least expand its definition; it was the idea that beauty could present itself in multiple different ways, not just one single, restrictive definition. Like, those components you listed are anti-aestehtic to you, but the people advocating for the weren’t trying to destroy the concept of beauty, just push for their definition of beauty to be recognized.
Yeah, I’m not sure if 4th wave is developed enough to be talked about one way or the other. #metoo seems like an important development, but time will tell.
Part is self interest of women who want to use muh diversity as an excuse to grab high paying, high status, comfortable jobs, part is the ideologues who want to claim that the patriarchy exists, and cherry picked evidence about CEOs and high-earning engineers demographics look better than the demographics of plumbers (no offense), miners, construction workers or agricultural workers. There is obvious overlap between the two, as they play into each other: you can use patriarchy as a justification for why we need more diversity, which then gets activists into positions of power where they can push your ideology even more.
The thing that’s really puzzling to me is why no one really fusses over gender imbalance in finance. It’s at least as gender-skewed as tech is, it’s basically a desk job like tech, and it pays comparably well.
Pulled-out-of-my-ass theory: people who care about this stuff live in California, and there are lots of tech companies in California but few banks and hedge funds.
There is worry about women in finance, and not just for the upper ranks. I see quite a few articles in the FT about the lack of women in hedge funds and such.
Although most of these articles focus on the higher levels, they do complain about other things. It may be because the FT seems to have a grudge with the Big Four consultancies, though.
Sure, but the only people who talk about women in finance are directly associated with the industry. There’s very little external attention, certainly much much less than STEM gets.
Alternative pulled-out-of-ass theory: the sort of people who you’d expect to fuss over gender imbalances in finance would tend to regard the field as an irredeemable pit of iniquity no matter who was working in it, and thus have little interest in trying to purify it.
Possibly the women who are in finance like it just the way it is and don’t want additional competition, and so don’t attempt to make an issue of it.
When you say finance, are you talking about things like investment banking and commodities trading? My field is accounting, and I think that women are now in the majority.
Investment banking, investment management and prop trading, broker dealers and the like. Think of the business activities of a place like Goldman Sachs.
I recently went through new-hire orientation at a large hedge fund (and this was not primarily a quant hedge fund). There were about 20 new hires in the room and only one woman.
I’ve been through five jobs now and have had a total of three woman team members (two of whom have left the industry), and zero women anywhere in my management chain.
Maybe most people who really care about gender imbalance think that finance is bad.
Like how nobody’s complaining that most burglars are men.
Maybe, but I bet a bunch of them have 401Ks, and most of those 401Ks are managed by men, so you’d think they’d see a problem.
I have seen complaint about gender imbalance in finance for what it’s worth. Not a lot, but then I don’t obsess about this sort of story.
@Plumber
Society is increasingly separating in an academically-educated and a lesser-educated bubble. The academics often consider the lesser-educated sphere to be very sad and undesirable, or even evil. Something that people need to be liberated from, where possible.
The axiom that ethnicity and gender are not inherently limiting then leads to the conclusion that large numbers of blacks and women could escape from
hellthe lesser-educated bubble by way of anti-racism/feminism.Note that programming is a lot like a trade in many ways, albeit often with very good compensation. So it seems to trigger the disgust response by many in the academically-educated bubble, yet also envy due to the high compensation and anger/envy at the power of IT is society.
These two motivations then result in:
– a desire to transform IT into a proper Profession
– a desire to have many more women and blacks
The rift between white blue collar workers and the political establishment also happened because the academically-educated bubble stopped caring about the well-being of plumbers and nurses.
You are offered to work for some filthy rich people for a year. They will implant a chip in your brain that will make it impossible for you to disobey them and most likely will take you in a secluded place where nobody you know will see you, but that’s not a guarantee, they might sometimes take you to public run errands for them or as a bodyguard. After a year the chip will be removed alongside with any memory you made of the year. They are very secretive. You’ve seen people who took this offer before, and they don’t see sick or maimed or anything like this.
Would you accept it and for how much money? I need it, for, uhm, a book.
Could be selection bias. Presumably by definition you’re not seeing the ones who never came back or were so altered as to make their public appearance noteworthy.
If you have the guarantee that the people you’re seeing are representative, however, then probably not too much of a premium over your normal earning power. Paid medical test subjects usually make thousands, not hundreds of thousands, per study.
@ARabbiAndAFrog >
When I was young, single, and childless I may have taken the offer for about what I now earn in a year, today I’d want my wife’s permission and at least 10,000x what I earn in a year, unless it’s my wife’s idea, in which case I’d ask for half that, and if she’d accepted even less for my absence for a year I’d say marriage counseling may be needed!
1. Cost to employ me at a normal 9-5 for a year at my current earning rate: 100k
2. Adjustment for a strenuous/terrible job*: 50K
3. Cost of a year of my life’s memory: 50k
4. Unemployment cost* (assuming I can’t just go back to my old job after a year off): 20k
5. Extra cost if I can’t put this job on my resume (and have a yearlong gap on my work history that I’ll need to explain): 20k
6. Cost of damaging my existing relationships: 15k
7. Opportunity cost of finding relationships during that year: 5k
8. Opportunity cost of not advancing my career during that year: 25k
9. MISC: 15k
So yeah, somewhere in the range of $300k for me. This is assuming they cover room and board during the employment period, then I’d want whatever that cost + $300k
ETA: This is all with a firm confidence that I won’t die, that the surgery is known to be safe and that there are a semi-substantial number of people around who have been through this procedure and come out the other end perfectly fine. If that is not the case, this amount increases exponentially.
This is exactly how I’d valuate it as well except…
3. 500k – I really, really enjoy my life and value the experience of living it, which includes the memories I make and recall. I’d value a year of memories from my early childhood at 50k since they’re hazy and few anyway, but a recent year of memories is gonna cost way more.
6. 5m – I think this is the number my wife and I would feel comfortable with. It would basically be a big carrot to get her through a year without me, and give her plenty to spend on the best nanny/ies for our kids to make the year as stress-free as possible.
9. I value my benefits at around 25k.
Also, maybe it’s possible to reduce #s 2, 5, and 8 if the job is as interesting and relevant to my career as my current job.
To your ETA I would also add that the nature of the work itself doesn’t put me in substantial danger, at risk of going to jail, etc.
This seems like a real “Russian roulette” kind of bet – you’re betting that the brain surgery won’t be botched on either end, that you won’t die during the year (which, if you’re a bodyguard, might be a real risk), and that your employers won’t kill you at the end of the year on general principle. I think I’d want at least $10 million; it’s not a suicide mission, but death seems very likely.
I’d set a minimum of “enough that I can retire after the year plus compensation for being away from my family that long with risk of death”, so something on the order of $10-20 million.
I suspect when I was a young man without attachments it would have been much lower, and I would guess that the low end is something like $100-200k.
200K was about the going rate for a year’s stint as a moderately skilled civilian contractor in Afghanistan or Iraq circa 2009, IIRC. And that’s probably a pretty good analogy to this, so that’s probably a pretty accurate figure.
Probably right. Advantage to Iraq/Afghanistan on one hand because part of the charm of Iraq and Afghanistan was having exciting war stories to tell attractive women. On the other, this seems a bit safer?
I kinda disagree. It feels like there should be some cost for a years worth of my memories. Those experiences are what define me and shape my future actions; you’re basically buying a chunk of my existence here. I think that deserves some kind of compensation.
I don’t kinda disagree, I highly disagree. Afghanistan or Iraq may be very much hazardous and not much fun, but the experience would also provide a lot of interesting experiences that would enrich one’s life in the future. Not remembering anything would be a tremendous downside. You would be sacrificing a year of your life. I don’t think I’d accept the offer for any amount of money, because I am paranoid. But even if I trusted the employers totally to take care of me for the year, I would charge a whole lot to use up a year of my life.
Though if you are at risk for PTSD…
It sounds shady as Hell and extremely risky. I’m not sure there is an amount I would do it for, but we’re talking hundreds of millions before I even consider it. If I can come back in a position to greenlight my own movies, well, maybe that’s worth the risk.
The assurance “You’ve seen people who took this offer before, and they don’t see sick or maimed or anything like this” is not a very strong guarantee of safety.
I’m tempted to say “I’ll do it but only for TEN BILLION DOLLARS” but they could just kill me on the last day and never have to pay anything. (Or they could just keep me mind controlled indefinitely and have me lie about it.)
“The people who do this are very secretive” sounds like the opposite of the sort of “we definitely won’t keep you mind controlled indefinitely to avoid having to pay you” guarantee that I would want.
If you caught me before college and offered me enough to retire on, I’d consider it seriously, enough to do a lot more research investigating how safe it had actually been for others. Otherwise no.
I’ve discussed a similar concept before with some other SSC readers. Well, it was a totally different hypothetical scenario, but one that was also answered by the value of one year of life. My answer would be $200,000 (like hls2003 said, assuming the survivors are representative), though some other people I spoke to demanded much higher compensation for the lost year.
Have you read the Philip K Dick story about this?
“Paycheck.”
But don’t let that discourage you, I’m sure you’re going in a different direction with the idea.
It’s actually a very small part of a story of post-apocalypse, mind-control, body-snatching aliens and cowboy squids, I’ve just decided to gauge some attitude people might have on this way of living.
Also Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse.”
Sound like a good story. How does it compare to “Faith of Our Fathers”?
No. At least not as I currently am. At the end of law school before I got my current, very nice, job, I would have been tempted, in exchange for enough money to at least get me back to ‘not in horrendous debt,’ so 100-150k. I think I still would have said no do to a moderate phobia (as much as one can be phobic about fictional things) about mind control.
This is one of those deals where no plausible monetary offer would suffice due to the ill-defined risks, and the more the offer is raised above the plausible, the more it sets off the Admiral Ackbar alarm. So, the expected value of even taking the time to negotiate with the guy is probably negative. YMMV.
So you’re planning on making a Dollhouse remake?
I don’t know how I feel about the show. A bit bland, perhaps.
No, I wouldn’t. I’d be more concerned about the people I don’t see, who took the offer.
If I don’t see anyone maimed, I’d have to assume they’ve all been killed.
Seeing at least a couple people with injuries would be more reassuring.
Money is worthless, if I can’t trust myself to be intact or alive to spend it.
Or not being turned into a puppet.
I ain’t gonna surrender my brain, if such a thing is possible.
Besides the chip would probably kill me.
I can’t even obey myself most of the time. To make me obey anything non-trivial,
they’d have to do neurological changes to the degree, that it would no longer be me.
I’d consider it, if they could perfectly restore my brain to the state it was before.
But mere amnesia? Meh….
EDIT:
[after some further reflection]
No. Definitely no. My time is too valuable for that. Loosing a year? I got shit to do. No money in the world could give me back my time.
The utility in being arbitrarily rich in a year is not as high as the utility of being myself for a year.
What necessity could money buy, that I not already have? And what possible need could I have for non-necessities?*
And nothing of what I lack can be bought for money either.
*
Sure, I’d enjoy a Yacht and a color-matching sports-car, but I know them to be trinkets.
Absolutely no. The obedience part would be sufficient for the “absolutely no”. With just the memory.. naa, still absolutely no.
Exactly. I am a man, not a machine.
Much less a number.
That’s the worry. They might take you to *Wales*.
You know how cold the water at Portmeirion is, even at the height of summer?
Instant no from me, regardless of monetary compensation.
I refuse as well. I believe in the invisible hand of economy, which means that I should work in areas in which I’m better than typical people, and blind obedience isn’t one of those areas. Either they’re not paying enough to be worth, or if they’re paying enough, there’s probably some catch and I don’t want to try it.
And if their offer seems serious, I’d probably also report them to the police (+3680555111) the next day, because what they did to the previous volunteers sounds like pretty illegal.
There will be a Slate Star Codex meetup this Saturday evening at 631 D St NW Apartment 841, Washington, DC, from 7pm to midnight. For questions about details, or if you can’t get into the building, email me at robirahman94 at google’s mail service.