Always nice when the One Weird Tricks work for someone. In previous open threads this year, it's been B12 or magnesium for depression. "Everyone's a Little Bit Deficient" - wouldn't it be great if there was a standardized nutritional battery test included with every yearly check-up or psych eval? I'm sure we'd catch many more such cases. Optimally Balanced Diets are rarer than I think anyone acknowledges.
I am always leery of giving out Medical Advice, cause I'm Not A Doctor(tm), but it feels like "have you tried more B vitamins" is an easy low-hanging fruit to pick first. Not just cause of water solubility, but because the effective ULs are either really high or nonexistent. Always worry if I tell someone they could use more <other_nutrient> they'll run off and consume 5000% DV and get something worse than carotenemia. The whole precursor/binding for bioavailability thing is a bit too complex to fit into bite-sized recommendations. (Like I only belatedy realized that I'm probably making a mistake taking vitD supplements while also regularly not getting much calcium...and that's a connection I already knew about! Scott's harped on it for years!)
Ah yeah, the classic Big Ol' Dartboard O' Supplements approach. My current score is:
*1000mcg B12 1/wk (cause the pills are stupidly tiny and effectively un-cuttable, not cause I love extremely high dosages). I'm too poor to regularly eat animal products, dislike fermented plant products, and don't often encounter fortified foods. One of the paradoxical side effects of avoiding much pre-cooked/processed instant American foods...
*125mcg VitD every other day. Love mushrooms and fish, too poor to stuff my face with them at every meal. I work underground, get no direct sunlight in my house, and rarely leave it. Known medication side effect of osteoporosis.
*500mg calcium/250mg magnesium/7.5mg zinc every other day. To go with the VitD, and I've given up trying to punish myself by drinking milk or fortified OJ. (Why can't tap water have more nutrients in it? I love tap water!) Love me some shellfish, but ahistorically expensive. Known medication side effect of osteoporosis.
*Brotein powder with >100% B1, B2, B5, B6, mixed with daily coffee daily. (Chocolate flavouring makes it a "muscle mocha". Surprisingly good, much more palatable than "bullet coffee".) Perfect route to take water-soluble stuff, cause coffee always means an incipient bathroom trip anyway.
Nothing else has seemed worth the cost/benefit ratio, given the things I do regularly eat, and/or how hard it is to truly reach medically-significant deficiency. I sometimes wish I didn't have lactose intolerance and/or actually liked dairy products; those are some extremely convenient nutritional profiles at low cost. (Thanks, government subsidy!) Same thing with vegetables, legumes, seeds, and nuts; I know there's a lot of incredible efficiency there, but blah, I just can't make myself eat such things often enough to matter. "The best diet is the one you'll actually stick to"
o/ B12 person here, checking in. Supplements changed my life (although I have figured out the underlying cause by now and no longer take them).
There's a specific set of symptoms that makes me recommend people just give it a shot (stuff like light/sound sensitivity, increasing troubles with memory, issues sleeping, possibly constipation), since it's over the counter pretty much everywhere AFAIK, and doesn't really have side-effects when 'overdosed'.
Other vitamins I've been more leery of recommending. Vitamin D is a great example of something that can cause an astonishing amount of misery, at least so says my experience with kidney stones (unfortunately-effectively-high-protein low-carb diets and vitamin D supplements are tricky to balance even if you drink A LOT of water, it turns out).
Oh hey, I remember you from a previous Open Thread but couldn't remember exact username. It was, indeed, your posts that inspired me to consider B12 at all, so thanks! I have no idea if it's doing anything particularly meaningful for me (VitD had immediate effects, I really am living the vampire lifestyle), but it's been nice to hear from intelligent folks I trust that, no, actually, Consumer Reports isn't always right about The Vast Dangers Of Big Supplement (You Won't Believe #37!). Loved that magazine growing up, but, wow, I sure absorbed a lot of thoughtless memes.
I'm luckily too poor to afford significant amounts of protein, so carbs are a major component of the gustatory budget. Gonna suck a lot whenever I get that diabetes diagnosis, probably. One of my prescription meds is a diuretic as a side effect, so it's sorta hard for me to not drink lots of water all the time, which I guess is handy too. If really annoying on the disposal end.
The underlying cause of my issues ended up being SIBO ("small-intestine bacterial overgrowth"), which basically means I avoid carbs as much as possible. Some carbs are actually okay, but blanket-avoiding them has just proven to be safest for me; I admittedly don't really have the patience to figure out which kinds of what I can eat. From a time when I was testing around, I know Japanese rice is okay! On the other hand, Basmati rice is terrible. SIBO literature suggests I should be able to eat Jasmine rice, but that's a nope.
Avoiding carbs has really calmed my irritable bowel syndrome from "stomach ache every day" to "no problems unless I break the rule too much". Desserts are fine (in part because plain sugar is easy to digest, so ironically not that much of an issue). I sure love desserts. The dietary change made the far too excitable bacteria in my gut calm down and stop eating all of my B12 before I can absorb it.
I'm also living the vampire lifestyle, and I really should take the occasional D supplement, but right now my bones feel healthy and the 0.0 vitamin D in my blood seems to never have caused me any psychological issues, so I'm just not taking any. Every once and a while I pop one in, but summer isn't when I'll be doing that. I *am* ghostly pale, so I expect even the occasional stray ray of sunshine will probably produce enough vitamin D (that is immediately used by the processes that needs it) for me to survive until winter, at least.
I'm super happy to hear vitamin D helped you! And, honestly, if you don't have issues with carbs, you should eat them. The slow-to-digest types of carbs that are toxic for me are actually better for most people, and unlikely to give you any trouble (especially re: diabetes). :) You're much kinder to your liver with carbs, too. There are some general downsides to carbs that get worse the older you get, but as long as you listen to your body, I can only endorse eating them.
Sorry to hear finances are the bottleneck to flexibility, though (and, if I gather from the rest of this thread, lactose intolerance). It's never nice to not have some options that might be important later down the line. I hope that, should it ever be relevant, you find a way to navigate your troubles.
On Sunday, at the nearby mall, by one of the main entrances. It had Pepsi products. Before that was a week or two ago when I was on the road for a few hours and saw them at rest areas.
I don't know if you're making a "refrigerator running" type of joke or not, but I'll answer seriously in case you aren't.
In the case of the rest areas, I only saw vending machines outside at the smaller ones that only had bathrooms. If the place had a McDonalds or similar, the vending machines were indoors. I'm guessing it was an issue of space. Here's an example of one of the ones I saw: https://goo.gl/maps/smSbcxKQxm78AB8Y8
For the mall, I don't know for a fact that it was allowed *but* I know the same machine has been there for several years. I guess being outside allows them to refill the machines outside of the mall's operating hours without needing keys to the building. Come to think of it, I don't know of any vending machines *inside* that particular mall except a single one in the food court.
I think it might depend on climate. When I lived in the desert Southwest, I'd see them outside of apartments, gas stations, highway rest stops, etc. all the time. Now I live in a much wetter, more humid climate with much colder winters (the Midatlantic) and I think maybe I saw one outdoors at a gas station the last time I drove to West Virginia a few months ago.
Today. At San Diego State University. I stopped to look at one vending machine dedicated to rapid covid tests but there were many others for bottled water and drinks and snacks.
Interesting selection bias on this one: I can only comment if I remember the last time I saw a vending machine outdoors; the more recently it was the more likely I remember.
Sure, in the same way that literally every other defense is going to be ineffective against dataphobes who cling to narratives. If it isn't genetic, what is it? "Culture"? You think that's convincing to anyone?
The downtown area of Lancaster, although not that large, is very different from the rural, Amish area around it. Industrial and some colleges. Plus, a not insignificant portion of the rioters traveled to the unrest from outside Lancaster. The mini-riot ended quick after a judge slapped a million dollar bail on one of the riot instigators.
Lancaster is a pretty effete college town fully of specialty boutiques and an outlet strip with Ralph Lauren and Nautica shops. It's not exactly a central example of what the original comment was getting at. It's like calling Asheville, NC or Burlington, VT "rural."
I wondered about this too when reading Scott's question. I live in an area where putting D on your ballot is a reliable way to lose, and we still had several protests and a lot of community anger with attempts to codify BLM messages into public policy.
There's also the possibility of spillover effects of very strong nationwide anti-police rhetoric, that demoralized the police even in areas where they are generally supported. I think this is possible, but I'm skeptical, especially as a lasting effect.
This makes a lot of sense to me because I think given how few criminals get caught the lack of crime is more about social pressure than actual cost benefit analysis of the behavior.
I remember in college the campus police were basically like stolen money/items/laptops are basically never ever found unless the person is caught in the act, or the item turns up while the criminal commits another crime.
Once someone has gone and taken a bottle from a liquor store or whatever, and nothing happened, and their mom didn't disown them, there is kind of permeant change in what they see as the accept range of personal action.
This sounds correct to me. I recall in college a small convenience store that was located right next to campus. Every Thursday night there was a huge crowd of students there late into the night, and nothing on the shelves. Nighttime theft was huge, to the point the harried employees couldn't do anything to stop it. So they hired a security guard to stand by the door and suddenly all the shelves were full again. Having a security guard in a store with maybe 2 employees otherwise is a massive increase in cost, so it was certainly not optimal. Because it became a requirement, the store paid much higher costs to stay in business.
The new biography of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Muller is very good! Made me wonder if theology can ever be avoided. Maybe all modern controversies simply rehash ancient religious debates.
You can't compliment Cass like that, Scott. I spend like ten hours a day telling him terrible things about himself and it's barely keeping him in check. Saying nice things about him is like feeding a mogwai after midnight - you are courting a full Gremlins 2 situation.
Listen, I think we can all agree Cass is history's greatest monster. But if you think I'm going to sit here and listen to you besmirch good scotch, you've got another thing coming.
I don't know--having someone compliment a person publicly like this shifts the dynamic... different people re-align things.
Basically, by now I've gotten enough training on the DSL-adj Discord in insulting people that my mind is beginning to be capable of generating insults of people. (It's like... this new-ish cognitive pattern; I'm straining at it.) But anyway, this might result in ME dishing more insults his way!
Oh, also, he said something about Quanticle being some kind of significant player in a triumvirate in the founding of DSL... it was probably some Ancient-Roman-Times reference so I didn't follow it. Or get around to Googling it! (Now that I think about it, that might be useful to find out whether it was a compliment or insult... or a backhanded compliment... backhanded insult.. etc.)
I suppose it's possible that the standard explanations (economy, isolation, etc) explain rural homicide, while protests and the knock-on effects on policing, explain urban homicide, but it would certainly be a strange coincidence if mostly unrelated causes increased murder by almost the same amount at the same time in urban and rural places. It would be nice if there were a graph showing the increase in rural homicide, so we could see if it's tightly connected to the same time period or more spread out. My link, as well as what I can read of the paywalled link, seem to indicate that it is more spread out (2 vignettes mention March and April of 2020, while the top paragraph of the full text mentions murders continuing until December).
"The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page."
My quick search can't seem to find a graph, but if someone had stats at the ready, I'd be curious what this really looks like.
My sense is that large sections of rural America are descending into ever greater decay and social breakdown, as parts of the white working class that used to be able to form families and work mostly-steady jobs have now fallen into a basically underclass existence. This has been a 50-year+ trend, exacerbated by things like the opioid crisis, but the crisis is as much an effect of the decay as the cause. Covid might also have accelerated the decay by a few years, caused some mentally unsteady people to break sooner rather than later, but there hasn't been any real change in direction. It's easy to imagine that the rural/white-working-class decline would have continued unabated whether or not Covid or Wokeness ever became a thing.
The decline of cities, by contrast, is much more recent -- they had been improving until Obama's second term, which makes the change in their direction much more curious and easier to pin on BLM/Wokeness.
According to WSJ, the spike in rural areas has been 80% of the spike in urban areas. Percentage wise, there are 62% as many blacks in rural as urban areas. If you see this effect as “police afraid to interfere with black people committing crime,” it’s not surprising you’d see a spike in rural areas too.
The proper test must be to look at the violent crime by state or county, and estimate the effect of Black% on the increase in recent years. The BLM/summery of Floyd model predicts that this coefficient will be positive.
Meth is the only illicit drug significantly favored in non-metro vs large metro areas according to https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/substance-use In SD, which saw the largest increase in homicides in 2020, more people died from meth than opioids, whereas nationally opioid deaths outnumber meth more than 2 to 1.
Rural homicide by state would be fine as an indicator (if it's near-uniform then it's not BLM; if it's concentrated in the South then it potentially is).
Does anyone compile homicide stats by type of police jurisdiction (eg. city police departments vs sheriffs)?
Doubtful you'd find anything more specific than counties, and even that would need a script to sort through. The breakdown for SD alone is 204 pages https://atg.sd.gov/docs/CrimeInSD2020.pdf
Good way of putting it. It's easy to get a big percentage change when you only need a handful of extra murders to do it, but that wasn't the subject of the wsj article so I omitted commentary.
Fwiw I absolutely agree with the police pullback causing the murder spike. Traveling all over the northeast constantly for the last 2 years (and many before) there was definitely a shift in what everyone thought/realized they could get away with, whether it was open-air drug dealing in Manhattan or traffic laws turning into traffic suggestions on the highways. Everyone seemed to know the cops were demoralized and dgaf, whether they lived in a city or not. But that's anecdotal.
This would also be explained by black people tending to live in higher-density areas though, right? If murder rates increased uniformly, then higher-population counties would have a greater absolute increase.
This is states, not counties, and the rates are also population-adjusted. When I talk about an "absolute increase in rates", I mean an increase of say 1 murder per 100,000 people, rather than an increase of 25% from the previous year.
Urban population% by state is not strongly correlated with the absolute increase(0.03) or relative increase(-0.06) from 2019 to 2020.
Urban population% is weakly correlated with murder rates in both years though(about 0.18).
Having nearly finished my Masters, I'm wanting to plan out my PhD, and AI Alignment is an area (among others) that I'm thinking about transitioning into. I'd like to talk to someone doing Real Research in the area (who might potentially be a PhD supervisor). I don't have a lot of contacts at top tier universities yet, so I thought I'd ask here first before trying connections-of-connections.
I've heard Berkeley is the center of that kind of thing. You might try entering one of the open competitions and writing something to see if it's an area you like dealing with.
Academia is dragging its feet a lot when it comes to AI alignment, so the number of specifically AI-alignment PhD positions at universities is very small (though not zero). If you can't secure one of them (but still want to do a PhD), then a more general-purpose PhD might be your best bet. I'd say either pure math or some kind of AI/ML topic, though make sure to not advance AI capabilities during your PhD because that would be very counterproductive to AI alignment (because it would shorten timelines).
There are economists who say that an economics PhD is a license to study (with quantifiable experiments and/or mathematical theory) approximately anything and everything that isn't already a hard science of its own, like physics or chemistry. Afterwards, one can pursue many different paths in both academia, business, or independent study, and there is a chance to find something where ones PhD studies are useful instead of functioning as a piece paper that signals "I am smart".
The two main areas are formal verification (e.g. dafny etc) and state-based provers (verifying the system state space) e.g. for all inputs, the ventilator never turns off, and never enters an unsafe state.
Hypnotherapy is ultimately just another school of therapy. It's established enough that they've done scientific studies on it's effectiveness and, off-hand, it was no worse than the more mainstream alternatives and can be significantly faster under some circumstances. It operates with techniques that are more focused on dealing with the unconscious mind rather than the conscious, and these can seem a little stilly in isolation, but in aggregate are pretty effective.
The mind is still physical, so physical changes can change the mind. Analogously, you could change a computer's behaviour by changing the software, but you could also change the hardware.
Apologies, not quite to the point of therapy, however I was hypnotised by a stage hypnotist many years ago. It was a very strange experience. I was slightly conscious throughout, and knew I was doing weird things but couldn't (wouldn't?) stop myself. I sang pretty well, so other people said, and a big piece of concrete was smashed on my stomach while I was suspended between 2 chairs. It is a life experience I've never fully understood. Later on I used auto-suggestion (self-hypnosis?) to stop smoking cigarettes - I made myself believe the awful taste of a cigarette when one had a bad cold, was the taste I would experience whenever I smoked a cigarette. Still working 40 years later.
40 years later, without hypnosis i still can get a delicious urge to light up. My personal philosophy emphasizes being in a position to say no including to oneself. Sort of tying oneself to the mast.
I was stage hypnotized once, and have attended a couple of them at various events where it was the only entertainment.
Really it just seemed to be getting you relaxed and suggestable, and then relying on a combination of peer pressure, people liking attention, and the permission to do odd things.
I pretended to have sex with a chair for 5 seconds in front of a bunch of extended family including my grandma in the crowd of a couple hundred. But this was at the end of a long string of much less transgressive things I didn't really mind doing. I never really felt hypnotized at all, just relaxed and "playing along", and constantly calculating whether I would actually go through with X. And then when they finally got to that I was like "well I have gone this far, I might as well go along with this before derailing the show".
Probably the most incongruous thing I saw was my first cousin French kiss his own mom (he was probably 19?). But I would note, they, and more generally all the people I have seen who were hypnotized are exactly the type of people who love to be the center of attention and do things for attention, real class clown types.
And to the extent in the shows I have been to I have known the volunteers from the crowd, all of the ones who did the most radical things on stage were these "look at me" class clown types. Not a lot of wallflowers it "works on".
This illustrates why participating in stage hypnosis may not be a great idea. For the susceptible proportion of the population, hypnosis can be potent, and using it for random entertainment purposes may not be ... life-enhancing.
This is the Dodo Bird Verdict; it's accurate, but it's mostly about depression in particular. Depression is often pretty closely related to loneliness, so just having someone to talk to is quite helpful, even if the other guy is mostly trying to talk about how you're secretly attracted to your mother. But if you look at e.g. phobias, those respond pretty much only to cognitive-behavioral therapy.
I am having difficulty conceiving of a pro-choice argument from a utilitarian standpoint. Instead of doing something like QALY, I'll just use Average American Life Year (AALY). Each American has about 79 AALYs. We can imagine that the life of a would-be aborted human is less in terms of well being, but how much less? It's hard to imagine that unwanted babies lives are hardly worth living in most cases. Most people are glad to be alive, and I'm sure it's the same for people who are adopted or live in orphanages.
What is a reasonable discount factor? Imagine something extreme like 50%. That's still 39.5 AALYs. You could argue that would-be humans are a societal burden, but how much disutility are they causing? Perhaps in some extreme cases with disabled fetuses, they are particularly burdensome, but it is difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden.
How much disutility is the mother receiving? It's hard to imagine more than decades worth of non-existence. If you think I'm wrong, then give me some rough estimates of how much the average aborted American life is worth and how much disutility the mother experiences.
We can add more to the side of pro-life if we factor in that aborted humans will have children of their own with their own utility. We can reject fetal personhood while still considering the moral worth of future people - longtermists should be sympathetic to this.
In that case, I'd guess that you would have essentially the same objections to birth control as to abortion. The math is the same. "Sum" utilitarianism (as opposed to "average") only sets a limit on population growth when it reduces average quality of life so far that the total number of utils starts to drop.
But if that's the case and you take the contraception away, what do you do with the people who stop having sex in the first place? Do you “embrace the repugnant conclusion” of forcing them to have children too?
If this AALY metric really is the be-all end all, then hey, a woman cannot bear children from age 0-10, and again from age 45(ish)-death, so that’s only an average of 35 years of fertility. Even if “constant forced child-bearing” during those fertile years reduces their utility value to the point that she’d rather be dead than alive, you’d be offsetting that pain and suffering with whatever utility she gets out of her non-fertile years, plus the 35 x 79AALY lifespans of the kids she was forced to bear.
I hate to be dramatic, but this line of thinking seems to be trending towards a hypothetical society in which rape is a moral duty rather than a crime. Which is why the main lesson of this thread seems to me to be less about the abortion debate and more about the shortcomings of utilitarianism as a moral system.
I don't believe in utilitarianism because it has counter-intuitive conclusions which are morally repugnant. So, yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with you completely. If we are looking at a utilitarian framework and at this limited issue of pro-life v. pro-choice, again, I think pro-life wins. If we expand it to other domains, it starts looking crazy, which I think is an argument against utilitarianism, but not necessarily against utilitarianism being pro-life. If that makes sense.
The repugnant conclusion is that, all else equal, higher fertility rate leading to more lives is better, even if each individual life is slightly worse off. I feel like this could be true. That is very different from “change our government into a totalitarian tyranny that forces people to reproduce against their will, and re-wire societal norms such that this type of oppression becomes stable.”
I agree with you that utilitarianism is problematic. Not inherently so, maybe, but just because no one can have enough information to take into account the societal implications. We say “In a vacuum X outcome would be good. Government, go make X happen” without being able to include into the calculations the part about the government going and doing.
>what do you do with the people who stop having sex in the first place
Are there so many of them that they matter in the grand utilitarian calculus? Populations who have not embraced birth control methods seem grow quite fast because a large number of people will, ahem, engage in procreative activities. "Doing something" with the ones won't necessarily boost the population size growth rates very much.
I mean, taken to it's logical conclusion, this would lead to women have as many children as they can without financial ruin but I don't think most people would point to families of 10+ as maximizing utility. There's clear some level at which children encounter something like decreasing marginal utility.
The median person's intuitive utility estimate, I think, hovers around 2-3 children being optimal. And, presuming they have those 2-3 optimal children, any abortions don't matter and don't really have a marginal impact.
Or, in human terms, if Sarah has 3 kids, that's fine, and if Mary has 5 kids, that's kinda a lot. If Sarah had 6 abortions and Mary had 2, who cares? The overwhelmingly important factor is the number of actual kids.
My rough approximation. I don't imagine a that degree of variation between wanted and unwanted. What do you think is a reasonable discount?
2-3 may be optimal for personal desire, but there is little reason to think 2-3 maximizes net human welfare.
The actual number of kids is what matters, not who comes from which mother. Banning abortion would increase the number of kids. Do you think this would decrease net welfare?
I mean, it's hard to imagine stable systems with significantly larger families. Just to ballpark this, the median household income in the US is ~63k. Presuming an uninterrupted career of 43 years (22-65) that gives us a lifetime earning of ~$2.7 million. USDA gives the ballpark cost of raising a kid at $230k/kid. Keeping this in constant dollars, that means the family is spending 25% of it's lifetime earnings on the kids. Not including taxes, food and shelter for the parents, retirement, or even associated expenses like college funds, just raising the kids.
TBH, raising three kids on $60k a year with both parents working sounds, not brutal, but reasonably tough. Raising even 5 kids on that same budget starts to look really rough and as the number of kids increases and their access to economic resources decreases, the odds of them having bad life outcomes increases and that affects the QALY stats (for both them and society) significantly.
So, one on level, the 2-3 kid standard seems like a Chesterton's Fence of what is affordable for middle income and lower-middle income families, who (at least when this was the norm) set the social standard. You could theoretically bump this up to 5-6 kids but that sounds really rough with two working parents and $60k/yr. And even then, the core issue isn't abortion. Just as we wouldn't care whether a woman with 3 kids had 0 abortions or 5 abortions, we wouldn't care whether a woman with 6 kids had 0 abortions or 5 abortions. The total number of children in the world is not constrained by abortion, it's upper limited by fairly sensible economic realities and currently set by whatever weird cultural force has cratered global birth rates.
"The total number of children in the world is not constrained by abortion, it's upper limited by fairly sensible economic realities and currently set by whatever weird cultural force has cratered global birth rates."
If the limit on children is economic, then abortion policy would not be expected to change the number of children.
However, the limit on children is not economic, as you note in your reference to "cultural force". Modern Americans are extremely rich by historical standards and can afford large families if they choose to have them.
"Modern Americans are extremely rich by historical standards and can afford large families if they choose to have them."
Yeah, yeah they can and Parrhesia is welcome to make a utilitarian maximally-natalist argument if he wants but its not going to have much to do with abortion.
Like, if the formula is "more babies=more people=more total happiness" then at the very least we'll be discussing things like childcare and contraception long before we touch abortion.
Unless the argument is that changing abortion laws will lead to culture change which will lead to a more pro-natalist culture. Which, I dunno, maybe Parrhesia does want to make that argument.
Stuff like banning contraceptive might pass the test too. I actually believe in weak natural rights and a woman's right to choose. I do think that from a utilty maximization perspective, I just can't see how 100% pro-life v. 100% pro-choice doesn't favor the pro-life side. I was hesitant to expand the discussion, because it's going to get super complicated, but increasing the fertility rate seems like a very very good thing from a utilitarian point of view. I picked one way of doing that. Most of the responses seem to be that this results in the repugnant conclusion or other unsavory conclusion, but that doesn't really seem like an argument against what I am saying unless people think their intuitions are sources of moral knowledge, in which case, I think they should be ethical intuitionists rather than utilitarians.
Poor people have more kids, not fewer. This is true when comparing countries, when comparing people within a country, and when comparing the same country at different stages of economic development. Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a fertility rate of 7 children per woman. Also, fertility rates are dropping precipitously across the world, including to well below replacement in developed countries, even as the world becomes richer. So clearly there's something very wrong with the economic argument.
Changing the government into one that could plausibly make and enforce such a mandate would have its own (very negative) utility calculation. Much better would be for intellectuals and social influencers to start sharing and promoting the benefits and joys of large families, rather than doing the opposite like what happens right now.
This argument only works under total utilitarianism. Total utilitarianism has failure modes which align fairly poorly with most people's intuitive expectations of "good outcomes". Other forms of utilitarianism also have failure modes, but, IMO, fewer and less degenerate.
Ethical theories are made for man, not man for ethical theories. There is no objective referrent, external/independent of people's actual preferences over world-states, that points to a specific theory of ethics (i.e. "total utilitarianism"), and says, "That's the one!" If an ethical theory gives you results that you don't like, that does not mean that the problem is with you(r preferences).
To be sure, people have incoherent and inconsistent preferences. This makes formalizing ethics, even at an individual level, a tricky endeavour. It still does not mean that any given formal theory is therefore correct, in a situation where a human displays preferences which seem locally incoherent or inconsistent.
People do make predictable mistakes. Scope insensitivity sure is a cognitive bias! That does not mean that, reflectively, once that wrinkle is ironed out, people will necessarily endorse total utilitarianism.
Chesterton's Fence. If a conclusion seems counter-intuitive, it might be because of something actually wrong with it that you can't yet put your finger on. It might even be hard to identify after mulling it over for a while; some fences separate large, unfamiliar fields.
(It might just be that the counter-intuitive conclusion is truly the better one, and will become intuitive once you happen upon some key insight, but it's risky to just assume that's the case right off.)
> How do you know if a form of utilitarianism "fails"?
For me? When ethical theory recommends actions which I consider as evil/bad. And after careful thinking I do not consider changing my mind on the idea as a good thing.
By that logic, anyone who is capable of having kids with little risk to their own life and isn’t actively doing so is similarly bad from a utilitarian standpoint. Why not further mandate that everyone must be regularly attempting to conceive unless they can show a doctor’s note to get out of it?
I’m pro-natalist, but I generally support incentives to promote desired behavior (eg paid maternity leave) over punishments to discourage undesired behavior (eg prison). I don’t bother justifying my preference on utilitarian grounds, (edit to add: but if I were to do so, it would probably focus on putting high value on the utility of personal freedom.)
Is something wrong with the calculation in your view? How would rate the value of an aborted American life and the disutility of the mother?
Let's say that this argument also said people are bad if they aren't having tons of kids. Does this counter intuitive conclusion mean utilitarianism is wrong?
I edited in my attempt to add in a possible utilitarian justification. Basically: value personal freedom highly enough to justify the desired outcome. I’m not sure if it actually works though.
Your original reasoning is similar to how I find myself pro-natalist, so it generally makes sense to me. I find a bit of utilitarianism useful, but strict adherence not so useful, especially as it tends to end up with ideal states being authoritarian states ruled over by benevolent dictators that tend to have predictably bad real-world failures.
I value personal freedom as well. I just can't imagine personal freedom (negative utility from personal freedom violation) outweighing ~79 years of human life. How many years of human life do you think being coerced into carrying a fetus to term is worth?
Spending the rest of your life with an unwanted child can severely reduce the life quality of yourself and of the child. I guess try to find a way to quantify that? If you grow up with an abusive/neglectful mother (which wouldn’t be 100% of forced births, but still), I’d say your growing up years are less than half as worthwhile as otherwise, maybe 25%? It gets better after that, but coping mechanisms learned under abuse/neglect can have long lasting negative effects.
You could also look at things like increased suicidality from even wanted births (see https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/suicide-risk-during-pregnancy-after-childbirth-on-rise) and imagine that might be a low bound on if someone were forced to carry an unwanted fetus to term. Of course some people might end up killing themselves and the unborn child if abortion isn’t available, but I’d guess that effect is small (I couldn’t find any stats on a quick Google search).
Those are my best bets I guess; I’d be interested to know if you can find a way to incorporate them into your utilitarian framing.
I imagine that many people would put their would-be aborted children up for adoption, but lets imagine that on average the mother would keep the baby and would also be terribly abusive so as to reduce the quality of life of the child to 25% for 19 years and 75% for the remaining 60. 25% * 18 = 4.5. 75% * 60 = 45. Total 49.5 We can imagine that the mother could just abandon the child around age 18, but in the meantime, her welfare could reduced to 25% too making it 13.5 years of lost welfare if she had been afforded the opportunity to abort. So, it's a net positive. Suicide probability would have to increase drastically to make it net negative. We should also add in that the aborted person would also have children of his or her own. I think this more than tips the scale.
This seems extreme, but I still think this is on the side of pro-life from a utility calculation. If we want to just accept natural rights, then you could say a woman has an inviolable right to choose or something. If we accept the utilitarian framework, then we should be willing to make comparisons like this.
Without accepting the moral conclusion, do you think my rough calculations are off? What numbers would you assign to the hypothetical life and mother's disutility?
In general, zero - I would start from a strong assumption that lives aren't interchangeable, and it's not appropriate to coerce someone to sacrifice part of their life for the benefit for another unless they themselves want to.
If I have a month left to live, and you kill me to grant someone else 100 QALYs, that's still murder and an unacceptable violation of my rights, the ends don't justify the means.
Half of those people you're bringing into existence will have no personal freedom. This feels an awful lot like turning humans into paper clip factories. You're making more of something just to make more of something.
This whole discussion is missing any insight into the disutility of pregnancy with the exception of the account by Marginalia. Pregnancy and childbirth are high cost. They are extreme, jarring, terrible experiences for many, whether or not the child is wanted, but frank admissions of this are taboo so the menfolk remain oblivious. If you are looking to quantify disutility to the mother, you have a lot of research to do.
I discussed this in the original post. Just give me a rough estimate of how many life years it's worth in your view. I'm willing to entertain the idea of 9 months being worth 10 - 30 years of life for the sake of the calculation. Do you think it's more?
Taking into account the toll of pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood, I would call it 25 years per child. If you want to get fancy, you could say 35 years for the first child and 20 years for each subsequent child per child. Of course none of this captures the opportunity cost of losing women to being continuously pregnant over doing things like innovating the most effective system for widespread adoption of mosquito net use.
And how much is the life of the average aborted baby worth in your view? And how much is the life of people saved by anti-mosquito measures worth in your view?
Isn't it normal for utilitarianism to say we should be increasing utility and we're falling short whenever we fail to do so (which is to say, all the time)?
"By that logic, anyone who is capable of having kids with little risk to their own life and isn’t actively doing so is similarly bad from a utilitarian standpoint. Why not further mandate that everyone must be regularly attempting to conceive unless they can show a doctor’s note to get out of it?"
That may be true (that capable, but unwilling parents are bad), but it would not justify mandates. Since those people having children would propagate anti-natalist preferences into the future. Being anti-natalist lowers reproductive fitness and loses out against pro-natalist preferences in the long run. Or do you assume that this trait is a very mutable by coercion? Forcing people not be "bad"? I'm skeptical.
From this do you conclude that abortion should be banned, or that quantitative utilitarianism using totally made-up numbers isn't the optimal ethical system?
Even being vaguely utilitarianist myself, i totally agree with this comment.
Utility may very well be quantifiable in principle, but not without modeling second and third etc. order effects on society in the present and in the future and etc. It's difficult.
And also, utility just cannot be an additive quantity. I don't really believe we have today a valid model that let us compute utility.
Just by inventing numbers one can justify any ethical position. I am afraid that utilitarianism is often invoked just to add a veneer of math to make the argument look more formal and rationalist.
As I understand, you care about the total number of people born. The fact that abortion ends one life before it begins does not mean that the total number of born children is reduced. If a woman has abortion, she chooses to not have a child right now, and It think it needs more evidence, that choosing an abortion right now reduces the total number of births, as the woman has the chance to have a child later in life.
Poland, where abortion is mostly banned, notably does not have higher birthrate than neighboring, culturally similar countries, where abortion is mostly allowed. But I guess OP would argue that contraception should be also banned under his interpretation of utilitarianism.
This is a good point. If you assume that a woman will only have (for example) two children in her lifetime, then abortion allows her to choose when the children will be born. She can thus ensure they are born at a point that maximises her utility, while also maximising the utility of the child (she has sufficient time and resources to raise them, and desire to do so).
I'm also curious about this. I'm guessing that making abortion illegal leads to more illegal abortions, and probably slightly more children? Though as a counterexample, if abortion were illegal where I live, I would get sterilized ASAP instead of waiting to see if I change my mind about wanting kids.
That sounds strange. I live in a place where abortion is illegal, and I never hear about people getting sterilized in order to avoid the inconvenience of having to order abortion pills online instead of from a local health provider.
This is by far the best response to the original comment and it's a little annoying he hasn't responded (while continuing responses to other, far weaker critiques). As far as I am aware, there is _very_ little to no evidence that, on average, abortions reduce the number of humans born. They mostly shift timing of birth by some amount.
In other words the entire premise of the question seems to be fundamentally flawed.
If anything, birth control has a _far_ greater impact on the number of humans born.
It's a question I'll have to look into more before writing more up on it. My best response at this moment is that it seems to me that abortion would decrease total fertility, but I don't have good data yet, and need to research more. Howerver, to be fair, this person didn't present any data either, just speculation. I'll investigate it more.
You're right. Perhaps, we should oppose birth control for the same reasons.
I've heard that the average abortion reduces fertility by 1/3 of a birth.
But that's only relevant to the decision to have a particular abortion. That isn't the question you asked. You asked about state policy. The effect of state policy is very difficult to measure. For example, when Spain legalized abortion in 2010, it had no effect on the number of abortions, thus presumably no effect on fertility. But the number of abortions in Spain had skyrocketed over the preceding decade. In truth, it had been legalized incrementally and surreptitiously. One problem with restricting liberty is that people will just lie to you about what the laws are.
How good is the data on things that were generally dark secrets?
Before safe (much less legal) abortion we had A LOT more infanticide. Also a lot of abortions and deaths among women that were never acknowledged or disguised. Ask whether the data indicates a rise in abortions, or a switch from back alley abortions and women drinking abortifacient tea to anything documented.
This is a good argument against abortion IF you are a sort of an utilitarian who accepts repugnant conclusion. But many self-identified utililitarians/consequentionalists don't.
I don't think that moral rules could be "disproven" in any meaningful sense. I just have sort of a pedantic issue with your vocabulary.
There are, with massive oversimplification, two kinds of utilitarians, those who want to maximalize total utility vs those who want to maximalize average utility. In practice, I am pretty confident that most self-identified consequentionalists are the latter, while RC and your argument only applies to the former.
If you would argue that from the standpoint of "total utilitarianism", abortion is indefensible, I would agree.
Btw. if you are curious why I am waffling between using the word consequentionalism vs utilitarianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an elegant explanation of the difference: "Persistent opponents posed plenty of problems for classic utilitarianism. Each objection led some utilitarians to give up some of the original claims of classic utilitarianism. By dropping one or more of those claims, descendants of utilitarianism can construct a wide variety of moral theories. Advocates of these theories often call them consequentialism rather than utilitarianism so that their theories will not be subject to refutation by association with the classic utilitarian theory." (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/)
Yes, my argument was assuming total utilitarianism. My rough impression is that most utilitarians seem like they are total utilitarians, but I guess you have a different impression. Regardless, I will clarify in the future. I appreciate your agreement.
Interesting. Perhaps average utilitarians mostly call themselves consequentionalists, while total utilitarians mostly call themselves utilitarians without adjectives?
In any case total utilitarianism feels weird AF, imho in itself sort of an evidence that it is not exactly popular position.
I think average utilitarianism is even weirder. The only thing that matters is utility, but only as this function called an average. Seems weird to me. It also has unusual conclusions like the sadistic conclusion:
In some cases it would be better to add unhappy people to the world, rather than a large number of happy people.
Avoiding RC has other counter-intuitive conclusions (see: In Defense of Repugnance by Huemer)
According to the same logic, why shouldn't we just treat women as baby factories, and ensure they have as many children as possible? The result is one life lost (that of the woman) against several (ten plus) new lives created. Under the same logic that is a net gain, even though it is clearly abhorrent to treat a woman in this way.
In the end this comes down, as others say, to the repugnant conclusion. If you accept it is better to have a lot of miserable people rather than a few happy people, then why would there be any argument in favour of abortion? If you do not accept it, then it is quite easy to find a pro-choice stance.
Do you think the utility calculation is wrong? How much do you think the unwanted fetus is worth in terms of life years v. the disutility of having an unwanted baby?
You don't have to accept the repugnant conclusion to think the argument works, but what is wrong with the repugnant conclusion anyway? Why is it wrong?
I think it is wrong because the question is too narrow. For example, you ignore the possibility that the women gets an abortion but later has another baby. If she doesn't get the abortion, then that later baby is never born. Which baby provides greater utility? The one that is born at a bad time for the mother, and therefore doesn't get proper care; or the one born when the mother has sufficient resources and desire to raise it properly?
As for the repugnant conclusion (which follows from the logical extreme of your argument), it is wrong simply because most people consider it to be wrong (hence the name). Morality is subjective, we have no way to measure it objectively (even measuring utility is challenging and probably impossible in reality). Moral frameworks are designed to produce an objective way to guide decisions and societies, but if they lead to outcomes that are widely considered wrong then its worth questioning the axioms and steps that lead to those outcomes. In that they are no different to any other theory of nature.
> Morality is subjective, we have no way to measure it objectively
I was with you until this point. We do have a way to evaluate principles objectively, with "reason". This isn't the kind of measurement we have in physics, but it's the reason why we can confidently conclude that slavery is wrong, for instance.
Let’s say we had a runaway poorly aligned AI which aimed to maximize human utility. To do so it systematically breeds humans like factory farmed chickens, building giant robotic prison-like facilities which are just enough to keep their inmates alive and able to interact with each other, but require no more resources per person than this. Humans are engineered not to age, to remove the disutility of death and maximize the time spent in the facilities. Those with genetic abnormalities are bred out of the population to reduce the disutility of disease.
To prevent the possibility of human rebels overthrowing this system, everyone is closely monitored and all military technology is operated by the AI.
Is this a good outcome? If ethics is identical with maximizing total utility, seems like the answer has to be yes.
The RC is reasonable on its own terms. But it is misleading because people usually make two mistakes when thinking about it: 1) Taking for granted that the built-in assumption of a linear trade-off between number of children and average utility is true in reality, and 2) conflating the two ideas “imaginary Society X would be better than what we have today” and “it would better if the government assumed vast power over people’s lives in an attempt to bring to pass Society X.”
I don't see why one would single out abortion specifically when the far, far more common cause of humans not existing is people choosing to not have sex with random strangers.
Even if we accept your utilitarian moral framework (which I don't), don't you need to consider the fraction of people who (a) get an abortion, but then (b) go on to have their preferred nonzero number of kids at a later time which is more suitable to them? Then weigh the tradeoff between having (e.g.) one child born in a few months, vs a different child born in a few years, but to a parent who (e.g.) has more money saved up and a stable long-term relationship with the coparent.
You might also want to consider specifically cases where a woman is at the tail end of child-bearing age and wouldn't be able to have her preferred number of children at a later date. There could be a strong utilitarian case to be made for forcing her to carry the fetus to term.
1. First, fetuses are basically fungible (to a first order). While we know they aren't literally blank slates, _we_ have no information about them, and with nothing learned nothing's lost. And they don't have any way to conceive of or experience the loss themselves.
Women who do want children will end up having very nearly the amount of children they want to have, the question is which children and when.
When mother's want to abort, they typically have a good reason to, that will basically cash out the child being unwanted (horrific to experience for a child) or being disfigured.
Therefore, abortion let's women choose which babies they are going to have, selecting from the larger group, maximizing their own and their children's happiness.
2. On the repugnant conclusion. This has always confused me. The logic chain seems to hinge entirely on this step where you accept that 4X as many people who are 0.5X as happy as better. It's couched in small numbers than that to make it sneak by, but it's expected that simply accept this as obviously true and ive not seen why this must be so. To me it seems obviously _untrue_. Average utility matters, and experience of disutility also matters.
Aesthetically I would prefer a world 2 perfectly happy people to 1 perfectly happy person, but I certainly wouldn't damage perfection to add another person.
I'm typically pro-natalist, because I expect more humans to make _everyone_ happier (on average) at the margin.
The way we make a society of very happy people is by trying to maximize the happiness of each new person. Maximizing the number of people is just an obvious Malthus trap. You're not biting the bullet by "accepting the repugnant conclusion", youre just committing yourself to a bizarre way of counting.
Think of yourself as a consequentialist first - do the things with the best outcomes. Use utilitarianism as a good thought tool to remind yourself that cost-benefit-analysis must be done and let it guide the hard choices, but the point isn't to literally implement a specific accounting scheme.
> Women who do want children will end up having very nearly the amount of children they want to have, the question is which children and when.
This is true, up until a woman has the N children they want. After that, though, an abortion would prevent them from having more children.
If we really want to increase the number of folks having children, abortion is the wrong point of the "pipeline" to be looking. People are choosing not to have children for good reasons, and we won't see more children until we fix them.
This is what happens when you try to reduce moral arguments to a single metric. Someone else could just as easily counter that if you approach the question with a moral framework in which you only consider personal liberty and no other factors, it becomes difficult to conceive of a pro-life argument.
Hard utilitarians, deontological NAP libertarian types, and fundamentalists may prefer it otherwise, but ethical questions are just too complex to be reduced to black-letter law. If they could be, we’d already be living in a centuries-old golden age of simple, universally-understood morality.
I can see that if you’re getting a lot of argument from utilitarians you want to address, but it seems weird. There are so few hard utilitarians in the world that it really mutes the relevance of the hypothetical for the abortion conversation at large. Kind of like writing a “case against abortion for fundamentalist Zoroastrians” – no harm in doing it I suppose, but it seems like a lot of buck very for little bang if it’s really cordoned off to only the audience that would find it relevant to their belief system.
I guess, within that circle, it boils down to how you’re measuring happiness. There seems to be an implicit assumption in your argument that happiness stacks in a very simple arithmetic way. Every year of human life is a happiness block, so wherever you have more humans living more years, by definition you have more happiness.
I guess if I were to challenge the argument on pure utilitarian grounds that’s where I’d start. What makes you think happiness works that way? If one island has 2000 happy people, and another has 1000 happy people, why would we describe the first island as “twice as happy” as the second? Seems incredibly reductive. But then, I guess you have to do something like that, because if you open things up and allow for utility to be subjective (which it invariably is) then you get all your classic utilitarian bugbears – “what if I get 100x more utility from punching you than you get disutility from being punched?”
In the end it becomes hard for me to have the conversation – it just keeps coming back to being about how utilitarianism is busted as an exclusive mode of analysis, rather than being about abortion. Like we’re both just digging with a broken spade but trying to pretend it's not broken.
'I feel that, while you went a level of meta up, this article really encapsulates why I am so hesitant about EA. I have several concerns about VNM utilitarianism applied to a global monolithic scope. My experience discussing them in the EA space is people looking at me funny and something along the lines of “How can you be against it though?”'
In an individual case maximizing (QA)LYs makes sense to me (most of the time). But it breaks down (for me) when we talk about a population.
When we calculate/estimate for all lifeforms how much QALYs they can experience per year I doubt the most optimal lifeform in QALY per $ are humans.
Then the pareto optimum would be a mix of maximizing the total lifetime of the optimal lifeform and scientists.
If you don't want to go all the way you can restrict lifeforms to humans. There are humans who have much better odds of living QALYs than others. Thus - under that model - we should maximize those: Aborting humans with bad odds and breeding those with the best odds on an industrial scale.
Imagine you are walking down the street when an old stranger accosts you and greets you by name, and tells you this story: "One day, many years ago, I was protesting at an abortion clinic. A young woman entered, weeping. She had got pregnant by accident and thought her life was ruined. She said she couldn't afford a kid right now. She said the father wasn't the guy she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, but she was terrified of trying to raise a kid alone. She had career aspirations and thought a kid would just get in the way, earning her eternal resentment. I told her to consider adoption, but she knew that once she saw her baby's face she'd never let it go, despite all the misery it would cause both her and the child. She was determined to get this abortion. Having exhausted the avenues of rational appeal, I drew my trusty sidearm and leveled it at the doctor. I made it clear that I would use deadly force as a last resort to coerce this doctor, and any other she visited, not to abort this fetus. She ended up having that baby, and naming it ${your_name_here}. That baby grew up to be you."
How do you feel towards the old stranger? Are you feeling the most intense feeling of gratitude ever, for their selfless actions that saved your very existence? (I'm not.)
Sorry for not spelling out why I think this is relevant. I'm basically offering another reason why utility maximization might not be the best approach. I thought perhaps someone who'd already accepted "The Repugnant Conclusion" might find in this hypothetical another Conclusion too Repugnant to accept. E.g. ... {content warning: rape} ... what if instead the man says he brutally raped your mother when she was twelve, and he is your father? Do you still feel the utmost gratitude for him causing your existence?
I'm actually not a utilitarian, so you don't have to convince me. That is an odd situation. Surely, everyone is downstream of some forced pregnancy at some point in time. Am I grateful? Uhh...I don't know. That's very strange wording. The person who does that is immoral in my view, but I feel fortunate to exist. Is that cheating your question? I'm not sure, but it's kind of an odd question. I think I would feel disgust, not gratefulness.
When you say you hate your life on this forum that's just one data point of evidence whether you hate your life or not. You've also said that you wouldn't feel any gratitude towards someone who saved you from never existing. That's another data point. One or both of those could be a lie.
I love my life, but I don't look at this fact pattern and think "gratitude." Honestly my response when trying to imagine myself in the situation described was a complex ambivalence, as I imagine most people's would be.
A guy threatened my mom's doctor with death to prevent her from receiving a medical treatment she wanted. Even if that threat ultimately yielded significant benefit for me personally, things aren't so black and white that I'm just going to have unequivocally good feelings about the whole thing.
Killing you. I mean, you really shouldn't adhere to a value system where you call the act of someone ensuring that you never exist a "medical treatment." The old stranger stopped your mom from churning up fetus you and ensured your existence. If I learned that my mom had attempted to kill me before I was born and was only stopped when a person threatened her with a gun. I'm not sure exactly how I would feel with regards to my mom but I would surely appreciate that stranger allowing me to live.
I really think if you don't feel deep gratitude towards the old stranger you haven't thought deeply about the whole 'never getting to exist' thing. Or you've let your mind become so affected by real politik that you've come to think of non-existence as better than disagreeing with the party line.
I didn't say gratitude wasn't part of it, only that it wasn't the *totality* of my feelings.
If you see someone else observe that questions around abortion are morally & emotionally complex, and that their response to learning that they "might have been aborted" is multi-layered, but your response is to think that they haven’t thought about the issue and accuse them of letting their minds be overly affected by politics, I’d gently offer that maybe you’re the one indulging in partisan thinking, to the over-simplification of a complex issue.
I used to think I had this all figured out and had a simple, air-tight pro-life argument that solved everything. Thinking more deeply about it is precisely why I’m not that self-assured about my conclusions anymore.
To offer a parallel example - I find out that a mob boss kidnapped and drugged someone and had one of their kidneys cut out. On the other hand... I'm the guy who got the kidney. I'm certainly glad to have the kidney, but I don't think it'd be strange to say that my feelings on the subject are mixed. Nor do I think that acknowledging that my feelings are complex betrays some kind of shallow or partisan thinking on my part.
Not getting into discussion of complexity. Your analogy fails because you could get the kidneys another way, and because as presented the donator has no relationship with you. The proper analogy is donator is your father, no one else in the world can give you the kidney but your father, and within 9 months following the surgery your father will most likely grow his kidney back. Oh and also your father is consciously making the choice not to give you the kidney.
I would love the shit out of that mob boss because he's literally saving my life. And also fuck my dad why isn't he giving me the kidney willingly? It would be inconvenient for him?
One might want to consider the eugenic effects of abortion. But it is not entirely trivial to correctly calculate e.g. the effects of decreased selection against intelligence and diligence on the probability of human extinction. And this might lead to a pro-abortion conclusion rather than a pro-choice one.
Yes, it's not difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden at all. Just look up the demographics of who gets most abortions.
Existential risks can't even be intelligently discussed among the general population because of low average IQs. To make an extreme example, a world with 1 million people with very high average IQs would probably have higher total utility in the long-term than 8 billion people with current IQs.
"To make an extreme example, a world with 1 million people with very high average IQs would probably have higher total utility in the long-term than 8 billion people with current IQs"
I see your point, but I think that your case is a bit too extreme. 1 million people, even if there were all geniuses, is probably too few to keep a technological civilization going.
I've read estimates that the Earth can sustainably support 1-2 billion people at 1st world levels. Very very roughly speaking, I suspect that that is around "the sweet spot". 1-2 billion people were enough for a thriving civilization in the 19th century. The periodic table, Maxwell's equations, and evolution were all discovered with that population.
'scuse the delay. It turns out that the estimate I'm using is traceable to a rather crappy paper (albeit it was an old one: Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
Volume 15, Number 6, July 1994 - Optimum Human Population Size Gretchen C. Daily, Anne H. Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/BF02211719). They _do_ use energy as the bounding factor in their calculation. In fairness, this is from nearly 30 years ago, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the drop in photovoltaic prices over the decades since then.
Wikipedia has a range of more recent estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population: "Estimates vary widely, with estimates based on different figures ranging from 0.65 billion people to 98 billion, with 8 billion people being a typical estimate.". Of course, this is going to be highly dependent on what assumptions are made about technology. If we had atomically precise manufacturing (aka Drexler/Merkle nanotechnology, https://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-P-K-Eric-Drexler/dp/0471575186 maintaining a large population at 1st world levels becomes vastly easier. In the other direction, with current technology, strictly speaking _no_ level is truly sustainable, because some of the elements we rely on are being extracted from finite deposits and we do not currently have the technology to retrieve them from our wastes.
You're implying there's some key industries that simply can't function economically without larger economies of scale I take it? I don't know enough to dispute or confirm that, so I'll stay agnostic.
The latter two discoveries you cite were discovered in a country with quite a small population though.
"You're implying there's some key industries that simply can't function economically without larger economies of scale I take it? I don't know enough to dispute or confirm that, so I'll stay agnostic."
Yes, that is a reasonable way to look at it.
Just to pick an old technology, consider blast furnaces
This doesn't quite directly answer the question, but it says China has ~250, and makes about half the steel in the world, so it looks like there are around 500 worldwide. Since those supply iron to ~8 billion of us, it looks like one blast furnace needs a market of about 16 million people to be economical. Yes, there are other ways to make iron, but they have a worse tradeoff of quality/uniformity/cost. In the blast furnace case, there is a surface/volume consideration. One can more efficiently keep a large object hot than a smaller one.
To pick another one: There is a minimum size for a nuclear reactor, set by the critical mass.
"Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2020 these provided 2553 TWh, about 10% of the world's electricity." so again we need about 16 million people to make one reactor worthwhile.
Yeah, it's a reasonable argument. On the other hand, a society of geniuses figuring out smaller designs that are also efficient doesn't sound insurmountable. The reason those things are expensive to build is because they're complex, but to 160 IQ people they might be no more complex than a regular house is to a 100 IQ person.
Also, with a small population there would be an abundance of fossil fuels and other resources, so efficiency would be less important.
I think Scott was too quick to dismiss gun proliferation when thinking about the murder rate issue; absolutely there are other factors such as economic hardship and general societal angst, but we really are in uncharted territory after multiple years of record gun sales.
Actually, we're in fairly well charted territory. After multiple years of record gun sales, we now have a country where 42% of American households keep guns and thus ~42% of Americans have ready access to guns. Over the past half century, that value has fluctuated between 37% and 47%, and eyeballing the chart we've been above 42% for most of that period.
We've got a map of this territory, and it doesn't show a strong more guns -> more homicide causal link.
42% of households having guns isn't the same are 42% of people having access to guns. Now that think about it, some of the people in those household are small children, too young to figure out how to get at a secured gun. Probably a lot more people don't want the gun, though I suppose that's not relevant-- gun restrictions don't have an effect on those people.
This might push the percentage of people with access to guns lower, and on the other hand, if that 42% is households with legally owned guns, then the % of people with access to guns could be a lot higher.
I mean, sure, that's a valid critique of the claim. But unless there's some reason to expect these factors to have radically and suddenly changed in 2020, the overarching point remains; gun availability in mid-2020 was not exceptional or outside historical norms.
Fair point, By "~42% of Americans" I meant "~42% of American adults". There will be occasional cases where an adult in a gun-owning household doesn't have de facto access to even a single gun, but I expect these will be roughly balanced by people in non-gun-owning households who have easy access through a nearby family member.
I assume you're citing Pew 2017 since that shows 42% by household (is there a newer reliable study?), which being self-reported ownership would not include many (or any?) illegally owned guns - unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any good measure of the rate of illegal gun ownership, but illegal guns are more likely to be used in crimes and so would be a very important puzzle piece.
But not a piece of the puzzle that is invoked by the "massive spike in gun sales!" during the pandemic/Biden/#BLM era, because that was a count of *legal* gun sales. I haven't seen any evidence of an increase in the number of illegally-owned guns, so "maybe there's lots more illegal guns and maybe that's why there's lots more killing" is doubly speculative.
Maybe I'm jumping too far to a conclusion, but wouldn't the number of illegal guns in circulation be predicted by legal gun sales? In the US (as opposed to i.e. Australia) there isn't much cross-border trafficking or manufacture of illegal guns (modulo the fact that it is legal to manufacture one's own gun... hmm.) Perhaps it'd trail by more than a year or two, though... Not sure.
One place this might break down is if the people who bought guns since Mar 2020 were unusually inclined to use them in crimes relative to the previous run of people who owned guns.
Do we have any reliable way to figure out who is buying guns, and when? If an entirely different set of people bought guns in March-May of 2020, then gun sales could be causative or at least related. My impression is that gun sale spikes are generally the same people who normally buy guns, but I'm certainly open to the idea that 2020 was different in that regard.
ETA - Thinking a bit more, even gun sales spiking isn't really a "cause" as a result or something else. Why a different group of people are suddenly buying guns and then using them to murder sounds like a very important question. Probably a good bit more important than whether guns are being purchased by new types of people.
I have not been very impressed with the quality of data on gun ownership/possession. We know when legal sales rise (by number of ATF background checks), but with poor granularity and no context.
Which is intentional, based on how gun registries have been used in the past. There was a well known instance in NYC where a list of gun owners, with home address, was leaked/published and it led to a wave of break-ins - people trying to steal guns from those that registered the guns. The perception is that any detailed list of gun sales is intended to be used for later confiscation efforts, or to harass gun owners (like leaking the list to potential thieves).
There's no trust in the debate that a registry would only be used for neutral/good purposes.
We haven't even established *if* a different group of people are suddenly buying guns and then using them to murder. The extra murders could be coming from the same group that had been doing murders all along, or a different group that has had guns all along but wasn't murdering people until recently.
You're jumping to a conclusion well ahead of the data, for reasons I can only guess at.
I think you responded to me, and it sounds like you disagree, but your post and my post appear to be saying the same thing. We don't know *if* new people are buying guns, and that seems critical to the question of whether guns are related to the question. I went on to add that even if new people are buying guns *and* using the new guns to commit murder (which I agree we don't know), it appears to be a step in a chain of events, which is not the prime cause we are looking for. There would have to be some reason people are buying guns to commit murder, which is what we are really trying to determine here.
Re: DSL, every time I stop by I'm surprised by how conservative it is. Does anyone know why? Is it a founder effect thing, or that actually everyone is super conservative and it mostly doesn't come out in these threads, or what? In the days that the SSC subreddit hosted the culture war thread its posters were fairly conservative leaning on average, but not to this extent, in my recollection; I haven't stopped by The Motte to see how it's doing these days.
Jack Wilson, first strike for excessive invective.
'Fuck you all. My civility is done here. Your worldview offends me too much to want to continue.'
"
"
Jack Wilson, for profane invective. Second strike.
'You're not the educated part of the blue tribe, you are just one dude. I told you to fuck off after you told me to say infinitely less of what I was saying.
I don't know what the history of the discussion of Trump claiming he won the election was on this board. There's a ton of old threads and I don't think it's my duty to read all of them before I'm allowed to express my opinion about the issue here. The official moderators can make that call.
Do I think Trump and co were out to undermine American Democracy? Yes, I do. Fuck you, once again, for claiming that point isn't even relevant to the conversation, when in fact it is the entire point of the conversation.'
"
"
Jack Wilson gets a third strike for using profane invective against other members.
'You two are arguing about dumb shit. At least show some balls and tell the other to fuck off. Then we can be done with your distractions for a while.'
And it's also much more right-leaning than pretty much anywhere else on the net that isn't explicitly a rightist echo-chamber. This sort of effect is inevitable - the left have almost the whole of the internet to be welcome on, whereas the right is limited to the ever-shrinking reservations of increasing disrepute.
Highly effective censorship looks like no censorship though.
I would probably agree that there is less direct censorship here than in many other communities, but I think there is also a very strong culture of politely making it clear when someone says something unacceptable.
That's a very long thread, so I didn't read all of it, but skimming the early replies and tapping through to various later points at random it mostly just looks like people are glad that a highly shaky judicial-activist decision was overturned? It's extremely hard for me to parse this as right-wing in any meaningful sense; there's a correct procedure to implement stuff like Roe (a constitutional amendment) and you can't just not follow it because you know your desired law won't succeed – in fact, it not succeeding for controversial issues the whole point of the amendment process! Nobody should be allowed to make an end-run around this sort of thing.
I could see this kind of focus on the system itself having primacy over any object-level outcome being a nerd/grey-tribe thing, I guess, but most of all I think it's a civic necessity (just what a nerd would say, I guess!); if there's anything that's been alarming to me over the last two decades of American politics it's the willingness of the left to completely shred the system to achieve their object-level goals, then accuse the right of destroying the system whenever they successfully play by its rules. Maybe that makes me right-wing too, from your perspective? I think that's hard to argue in good faith, though; to me "right" and "left" are about object-level issues and moral or immoral conduct visavi the democratic system itself is sort of orthogonal.
"I seriously doubt those commenters are all pro-choicers who are now happily looking forward to enshrining abortion rights in the legislature the way it should have been done all along."
I doubt that too, but I think there's a strong possibility they're people like me, who could go either way on abortion on the object level or have an opinion but don't regard it as an especially high-priority goal, but who *do* regard judicial overreach and its avoidance as a crucial issue for the nation and its future.
Crucial? I'm not happy with judicial overreach, but e.g. given a choice between having judicial overreach go away and having "cost disease" go away, I'd much rather have the latter solved. ( My POV on Roe and Dobbs is that I like the _policy_ from Roe, but Alito is correct in noting that neither "abortion" nor "privacy" nor "bodily autonomy" is mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. _Personally_, I'd rather have, as trebuchet put it, "enshrining abortion rights in the legislature the way it should have been done all along" )
Most of DSL strikes me as predominantly libertarian, with a smattering of conservatives. The libertarians happen to include a lot of pro-choice advocates. I don't remember the thread OTTOMH, but there's at least one discussing abortion itself, that got plenty of pro-choice defense.
When it comes to Dobbs, I get the (possibly mistaken) sense that the pro-choice DSLers felt it was bad news, sure, but in the "well, what did you expect" sense rather in the "holy smokes this was unfair in every respect" sense. ISTR some of them even said so.
> Most of DSL strikes me as predominantly libertarian, with a smattering of conservatives
You've certainly spent more time there than I have, but this strikes me as a significant undercount of conservatives (or we're using different definitions).
Going through the most prolific posters (by number of comments), we have
- GoneAnon - "My support for Trump is almost entirely contingent upon him being hated by all the people I hate." is a position I associate with conservatives, not libertarians
- Nybbler - I don't actually know if Nybbler would consider himself to be more conservative or libertarian, so I'll refrain from commenting
- Next few names are neutral or left-leaning, IIRC
- Randy M I believe is a center-right Christian
- Johan Larson I have no idea
- William Boot "looks forward to voting for DeSantis", which is not a position I associate with libertarians
- clutzy is in favor of making sodomy illegal
And that's the top ten. It may be that this methodology is unsound, that this sample is unrepresentative, or that you disagree with my impressions of the above-named users; I'd be interested to hear which you think it is (if any).
We're almost certainly using at least slightly different definitions, if only because I don't have what I'd call a mathematically rigorous theory of political positions (and I'd be surprised if you did, either). Also, we're assigning estimates to people with - to put it one way - temporally varying political vectors with a lot of components.
GoneAnon is ancap-libertarian with a sort of unkempt tone. A lot of conservatives would stop inviting him to their parties soon after they'd started, though I hasten to add this isn't a character judgement on either side. Nybbler posts as if fundamentally blackpilled, and other DSLers have mentioned this with mild annoyance. Both are easily top 2 commenters, and IMO get the pokes they get, mostly because they're so visible. (I even recall Nybbler letting his blackpilling lead him to lament DSL's fall to the left.)
Thing is, I tend to just roll with that - they post so much that I stop paying each post quite so much attention (provided they aren't getting mod reports). I might not be alone in that. This makes it hard to deliver an accurate assessment of the forum's leaning. They undoubtedly skew the leaning in terms of number of posts... but audiences put an unmeasurable amount of importance on each one.
Randy M's Christian, I think, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Meanwhile, his posts tend to have a lot of epistemic humility IMO; I don't feel pressured to agree with him on any particular thing. Johan Larson's more centrist (Canadian as well, incidentally), and is more known for fun what-if posts about his trademark powerful aliens than for political content. I see William Boot as mostly rightward, but maybe libertarian (I forget); he has complicated positions. Ditto clutzy (I don't recall reading anything he wrote wrt sodomy).
I could name other kind-of-right leaners there (Conrad, bean, Julyan Morley, tophattingson) more easily than I could name kind-of-left (Brad, Plumber, bobobob, Ancient Oak). But I also notice that none of them strike me as doctrinaire Democrat or Republican, Blue or Red Tribe, left or right; there is detailed reasoning behind many of their views. (Even GoneAnon and Nybbler, as prolific and predictable as I find them.) "I would vote for Trump" turns out to have a lot more depth than, say, "I oppose Democrats and everything they stand for".
> Randy M's Christian, I think, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Meanwhile, his posts tend to have a lot of epistemic humility IMO; I don't feel pressured to agree with him on any particular thing.
To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that being conservative is incompatible with any of those things. I'm just noting the fact of the conservatism.
Randy M has described himself as being someone who whose views would be regarded as center-right, though I suppose that's compatible with being more libertarian than conservative.
> Ditto clutzy (I don't recall reading anything he wrote wrt sodomy).
> But I also notice that none of them strike me as doctrinaire Democrat or Republican, Blue or Red Tribe, left or right
Certainly I don't mean to suggest anyone on DSL is doctrinaire anything. But I think most people would describe someone who is pro-Trump, pro-life, etc as being conservative, and that a great many people on DSL meet this criteria even if they also hold at least one view which disagrees from the GOP position.
> "I would vote for Trump" turns out to have a lot more depth than, say, "I oppose Democrats and everything they stand for".
I mean, while I do accept that may be true in many cases, I note that "My support for Trump is almost entirely contingent upon him being hated by all the people I hate" is much closer to the second thing than the first. This is a direct quote from https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1115.msg23398.html#msg23398
I'm a pro-choicer who indeed would have preferred "enshrining abortion rights in the legislature the way it should have been done all along." (or, ideally, with a Constitutional amendment explicitly protecting bodily autonomy)
Realistically, Congress has hamstrung itself enough that it winds up doing little for good or for ill.
Would such a constitutional amendment literally protect bodily autonomy, including recreational drug use, prostitution and commercial surrogacy? 'cause that sure sounds like a hard sell to the legislators.
That's one of my major problems with Roe as decided in 1973. No court, including the SC, has taken a hard tack on bodily autonomy or the major underpinnings of Roe. The most relevant recent example, mandated vaccinations, has an entirely backwards view as that of abortion in Roe, in terms of political support/rejection.
If the constitution protects privacy and private decisions made between people and their doctor, then we've done a terrible job making that uniform law. Ergo, Roe reads to me like a conclusion seeking an argument in favor. Some court decisions using similar logic (Loving, Lawrence, Griswold) are balanced by a whole bunch of cases that don't even try to use similar logic (i.e. a million drug law cases, vaccinations, surveillance state, etc.). Often, even when the courts agree with an outcome that may fall under the "privacy" penumbra, they use regular 4th or 5th Amendment arguments.
Yes, at least that is my intent. The drug war has been immensely damaging, and ending it is one of the reasons I want bodily autonomy protected. Consistently, this would also preclude vaccine mandates, which I admit I'm ambivalent about - though for the Covid pandemic specifically, keeping vaccination voluntary looks like the right choice. I agree that it would be a hard sell to the legislators. Realistically, even if Congress were willing, they've made themselves incompetent to even pass budgets, so it won't happen.
Realistically, if Thomas gets his way and e.g. Lawrence v Texas gets revisited, the "limited government" right wing may get back into the business of deciding which sexual positions are legal for consenting adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_States There are a lot of control freaks in state legislatures. Yetch!
Right. One thing about covid-era public health powers is that they were overused given the severity and nature of covid, but you can certainly imagine a pandemic serious enough that they'd make sense.
> That's a very long thread, so I didn't read all of it, but skimming the early replies and tapping through to various later points at random it mostly just looks like people are glad that a highly shaky judicial-activist decision was overturned?
I agree that this is a possible interpretation of a thread where people respond to Roe being overturned with "a great day" and "huzzah" and praise Thomas's concurrence, not joined by any other justice, in which he advocates revisiting Obergefell. I just don't think it's a particularly likely one. I think this response is, in fact, quite strong evidence of being fairly conservative on this topic, at least by local standards. You are welcome to form your own conclusions, of course. (I am certainly not saying that everyone in that thread was necessarily conservative.)
I very much do not want to debate the decision itself here.
I read Thomas' concurrence as saying he wanted to revisit those other decisions *to put them on a less shaky constitutional basis*, but I admit this flies parlously close to debating the decision, which I'm very sympathetic to your not wanting to do. Perhaps giving Thomas the benefit of the doubt is also inherently right-wing? I perhaps naïvely would like to hope it isn't.
At any rate, I'm happy to allow that the individual poster cheering for the Thomas concurrence is most likely right-wing, but is he representative of the timbre of the thread generally? I ask in all good faith since, as I said, I only skimmed it. In the parts I read I didn't think it seemed that most people took an aggressively jubilant anti-abortion tone, whereas for example I did see people saying they were in favor of *both* abortion rights and the overturning, something which I personally can't really classify as overtly right-wing.
Any forum where an user is allowed to take a jubilant anti-abortion stance without being either censored or piled on by the other users is either right-wing or deeply religious leaning.
I think that's claiming way too much. It can just mean that the users of that forum respect and value having a plurality of opinions and expression. For example, in the very same thread being discussed here, DSL user Dinonerd proposes mass-shooting terrorism (Edit: against pro-life states, that is, left-wing terrorism), and he still doesn't get censored or piled on as far as I can see – a few snarky replies of which I happened to catch one, then saw a few more when I went to check.
I took a *lot* of flack for not issuing a strike for that comment. I get it - it was IMO pretty strikeworthy - and was preserved partly because the opposing replies to it were of exemplary quality, and partly because DinoNerd herself backed away from that position before I came across the original post.
> Perhaps giving Thomas the benefit of the doubt is also inherently right-wing? I perhaps naïvely would like to hope it isn't.
Without commenting on the decision itself, I note that support for Thomas's concurrence is, as an empirical question, almost certainly very tightly correlated with being quite conservative. And in actual point of fact the user who wrote that comment is a self-professed white nationalist who explicitly supports criminalizing homosexuality on biblical grounds - https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6788.msg261119.html#msg261119
I'm not saying this person is representative of the whole thread. But I am saying that there are a rather more people in that thread whose response is "a great day" or "Huzzah!" than there are people whose response is "a sad day". I think it is reasonable to interpret this as evidence of people being fairly conservative, on average. If you disagree with this interpretation I am not going to argue about it.
"And in actual point of fact the user who wrote that comment is a self-professed white nationalist who explicitly supports criminalizing homosexuality on biblical grounds"
Ha ha ha! See, that's just the sort of thing I'm not familiar enough with the forum to know about. I agree with your estimation of this person, and frankly I think he's much stronger evidence of the forum being canted to the right than the thread is.
"If you disagree with this interpretation I am not going to argue about it."
Yeah, alright. That's fair. We'll leave this here then.
>who explicitly supports criminalizing homosexuality on biblical grounds
Which means he can't be a strict "constitutionalist", the most reasonable motivation for supporting Thomas, due to that being an explicitly anti-constitional position.
EchoChaos has very unusual views, and definitely doesn't represent DSL at large. DSL is intended to be apolitical, unfortunately has more right leaning people than left leaning people at this time, and Echo is uh... a statistical outlier.
>I could see this kind of focus on the system itself having primacy over any object-level outcome being a nerd/grey-tribe thing
I've seen this argued as an explicitly "Liberal"[1] thing, in the sense of classical/neo-liberalism (not the us-politics definition), where neoliberalism can be roughly defined as "what both actual leftists and rightists can agree to pejoratively call 'liberalism'". (Scott appears to exist somewhere around that intersection, in the libertarian corner)
Near as I can tell, the closest analogue in US-pol-speak is probably "centrist", or perhaps "moderate X"
> if there's anything that's been alarming to me over the last two decades of American politics it's the willingness of the left to completely shred the system to achieve their object-level goals, then accuse the right of destroying the system whenever they successfully play by its rules.
And I've seen this exact thing being argued with the partisanship reversed by the left. [1] (The most egregious example being the break in precedent in not allowing Obama his appointment, and then turning around and being hypocrites when Trump was given one on an even shorter time frame).
So perhaps, like most things in politics, both sides use similar tactics when they're in power and similar tactics when they're not, and the two sets of tactics are mutually exclusive.
"The most egregious example being the break in precedent in not allowing Obama his appointment, and then turning around and being hypocrites when Trump was given one on an even shorter time frame"
I realize I'm courting a derail into relitigating old battles by focusing on this, but the really notable characteristic of that whole episode was that McConnell took pains to not only find a precedent but then outline it carefully ("a president in his last year doesn't get a hearing for an SC candidate *if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party*"). He even amused himself by calling it the Biden Rule since many years before, Biden, as a senator, had suggested the same thing when the shoe was on the other foot. He wouldn't have bothered to do this if he didn't see the protection of the system as critical for legitimacy, *even if* you think he just went ahead and broke it anyway. Democrats who favor court packing don't even gesture at preserving the system, they just seethe openly about losing and vow to crush their enemies at the first opportunity. (And for that matter, why did it take nearly 50 years to reverse Roe? Because they had to do it according to Hoyle. It would have been much faster if they'd just been ready to disregard the norms and systems currently in place.)
That the left then completely disregarded McConnell's reasoning and either wilfully (as it must have been in some cases; *every single* Democrat can't have misunderstood him) or inadvertently (due to being downstream of the wilful distorters in the filter bubble) completely distorted what he said the rule was is just further evidence of the wide gap on this point in my mind. Trump was neither in his last year in McConnell's sense (insofar as he could have won a second term), nor was the Senate controlled by his opponents, so the rule as described by McConnell *already during the Garland episode* obviously wouldn't apply.
>McConnell took pains to not only find a precedent but then outline it carefully ("a president in his last year doesn't get a hearing for an SC candidate *if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party*").
In an attempt to take this argument seriously, I looked this up; of the first two directly relevant google results (from sites which had mediabias accuracy ratings of "high" and "very high" respectively, so I don't think I'm being biased here) I saw no evidence that this was true from the Constitutional Center[1] (there were rejections of individual candidates, yes, but no cases where the senate unilaterally said "we won't confirm no matter who you nominate" the way McConnell did), and the Brookings Institute[2] calls the claim an outright "fabrication" and presents evidence to support that assertion.
>many years before, Biden, as a senator, had suggested the same thing...
Note that "suggested" is wildly different that "put into action". Lots of very radical things are suggested in politics, most far worse than what we are discussing. Actions > rhetoric.
>Democrats who favor court packing
...are, in general, minority radicals in the party[3], joined by a strained portion whose rhetoric toes the party line, but don't sincerely hold the belief and vote accordingly. If we're talking about the methods of undermining democracy that party radicals "favor", we have to compare to the conservative party radicals that literally advocate overturning the results of a democratic election, and I don't think that's a comparison you want to be making. (A belief which a majority of Republican legislators rhetorically supported, right up until the consequences of that support bit them.) (Also note I don't claim that this is the worst radical belief that Democrat-radicals hold, indeed far from it; but that's all the more reason to limit talk to *actions*, rather than the extreme thing any partisan has ever said)
If we're comparing *actual* breaks in precedent rather than proposed ones, I'd wager that the field is in favor of the "nothing will fundamentally change" president's party as far as favoring the machinery of values-neutral governance.
[3] This is talking about elected officials, not the electorate. Obviously, the core electorate skews more radical for both parties, but if we're talking about actions which "shred the system", we should talk about the people who have to actual power to do so.
There's a few problems with this alleged rule - "a president in his last year doesn't get a hearing for an SC candidate *if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party*".
First, it's not the historical rule. Looking at election year nominations, going back, you have this:
I stopped looking after that, though I've heard there are older precedents that go with the rule; but based on those, it seems like the rule is right 5 of 10 times, a coin flip, and the alternative rule of "nominees are confirmed" is right 9 of 10 times. And granting without looking that earlier precedents are more in line with the rule, usually in a case like this you'd point to the more recent examples to see what common practice is.
Second, it's not what Biden said. Biden didn't say the thing about the Senate being the other party, and he brought up Abe Fortas as an example of an ill-fated nomination.
Third, it contradicts what plenty of people said. Lindsey Graham famously said "I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination". No mention of who controls the Senate. And plenty of others said in 2020, in essence "we have the Constitutional power to nominate/confirm someone so we will".
Fourth, and related to the above, the rule makes no sense. If the idea is that the next President should decide, then the party controlling the Senate shouldn't matter. If there's a difference between what happens if the President's party controls the Senate or not, everyone knows it's because the opposition has the power to block the nomination, not that they're doing something principled. The real rule is that both sides will do what they can to put their guys on the court and block the other guys, and everyone knows it.
And on that last point - like I said, plenty of Republicans openly said in 2020 that they were using whatever power they had to put their guys on the court. Why is that different in principle from court-packing? Both are simply disregarding old norms. You can say that court packing is more extreme, and it is more extreme than what has happened already, but it's not really a principled difference, and the current non-court-packing situation has been getting more extreme.
"That's a very long thread, so I didn't read all of it, but skimming the early replies and tapping through to various later points at random it mostly just looks like people are glad that a highly shaky judicial-activist decision was overturned? It's extremely hard for me to parse this as right-wing in any meaningful sense; there's a correct procedure to implement stuff like Roe (a constitutional amendment) and you can't just not follow it because you know your desired law won't succeed – in fact, it not succeeding for controversial issues the whole point of the amendment process! Nobody should be allowed to make an end-run around this sort of thing."
Pretty much this, I'd say. Roe v. Wade is IMO exemplary of an issue that has a surface-level obvious black-and-white tribal setup, while below that surface, it's a lot more complicated. Which reflects the abortion issue itself, for that matter. It's easy to exclaim "pro-choice!" or "pro-life!" and anything that doesn't match whichever position you're in favor of must be The Enemy; however, there were multiple reasons to conclude RvW was badly decided, and some of them assume a basic pro-choice position. (Ginsburg herself criticized it. I don't think she was pro-life.) Some of those reasons were voiced in that thread.
Some of the reasons were indeed "because hinders the pro-life position", sure. But that's just to say DSL has conservatives in its audience.
This is a bit orthogonal to your post but I often hear people talk about abortion/Roe like there are 3 positions you might take - pro-choice, pro-Roe; pro-choice, anti-Roe; pro-life, anti-Roe. With the 2nd being the view that abortion should be legal but the constitution shouldn't be interpreted to say anything about it.
My understanding is that polls consistently show (at least showed, before it was repealed) Roe as being significantly more popular than the pro-life position. So that 2nd position isn't held by as many people as the opposite - pro-life, pro-Roe.
I wouldn't say I "often" hear people say that... but I do hear people say that.
If it's accurate, the calculus for resolving it makes some sense. The pro-choice anti-Roe cohort is probably small, and might be larger if people in the pro-choice pro-Roe cohort perceived it as easy to enact abortion protections in all fifty states, or at least in the states they live in. If it were transactional - a bill introduced that would protection abortion rights without relying on Roe, in as many states as they care about, and that got enough Congressional or state support to go through - they'd likely support it and go along with a repeal of Roe since they're protected anyway. But lawmakers are unlikely to go through that trouble if they think Roe is good enough (or, cynically, they want to be able to play the SCOTUS card when it suits them), so such bills never happen, so that middle cohort never grows.
As for polls, I have a really hard time trusting them for any political question where the controversy level is high. I see simply too many confounders, such as people misunderstanding the question, people interpreting it as a tribal signal, pollsters using leading questions, reporters misreporting the results, etc.
To be precise, the Thunderdome was conceived by Brad and would have been operated by himself and a volunteer moderation-skeptical right-winger with any actions requiring agreement. I say "would have been", because the proposal for a low-moderation space has been vetoed by the global mods.
Was looking forward to seeing that option, shame the owner has the procedures he does. The moderation at DSL has improved, but one of the staff uses 'lazy swipe at outgroup' as a cudgel against those he disagrees with politically. Also, one poster brought up the dynamic tension between being "kind" and being accurate (though he may have used a different word here), and I agree. Some times you have to call a spade a spade.
What do you mean by "conservative"? There are probably a few people who legitimately want eg. Christianity to be enshrined in the US Constitution. But most probably don't, or at least don't care.
If you want to hear all of the moderate left-wing arguments for a topic, you can simply just turn on the TV or radio. That means that arguing for those policy preferences simple isn't that *interesting*. (There's also the same issue when it comes to some very obvious and very un-PC details about race relations in the US. Occasional new people *really* want to talk about the subject, but just don't have anything new or interesting to say on the topic so they are quickly urged to either post about something else or leave.)
Given that, you should expect to see a lot of people interested in discussing the moderate-right viewpoints on issues. If you think the place is too conservative, show up and say something interesting which is left-leaning. Start a productive discussion.
>If you think the place is too conservative, show up and say something interesting which is left-leaning. Start a productive discussion.
I spent some time posting there and it struck me that it was difficult to post on "neutral" non-CW topics, because non-CW OPs have a tendency to become CW after a while. The OP is supposed to tag a CW thread as such, but that rarely means anything in practice because once a thread not tagged as CW receives some CW comments, someone says "This thread needs a CW tag now." undermining the point of such a tag, since this policy renders every thread as CW de facto.
Because the regular commenters lean right, otherwise neutral, originally non-CW threads can turn CW, and it's a good bet that it's in a rightward direction.
Sure, one solution, if one wanted to even-out the political orientation for some reason along a right-left axis, could be that more left-wingers join and engage with good arguments for their positions. It's hard for me to do that because, except for being adamantly pro-choice and anti-Trump, I'm not very far on the left, and arguments about abortion and Trump tend to get heated quickly on both sides, and all my strikes there were on those two subjects. (Of course, I believe it was my interlocutors who started the incivility spiral, and that my strikes were for punching back not for punching first.)
I have seen that effect in action: I'm often active on threads involving Christianity, and no matter what they started about they almost always end up becoming an apologetics debate between atheists and theists. It reminds me of the old days of the internet. But definitely, threads that don't start out as a fight can often end up there.
Being pro-life, pro-Trump, pro-gun-legalization, that sort of thing. Not any individual one of these, just that general cluster of social and policy preferences.
> If you think the place is too conservative, show up and say something interesting which is left-leaning. Start a productive discussion.
I didn't say that it was too conservative, just that I found the extent to which it was conservative surprising.
For what it's worth, I was considering getting involved in the early days, but that was when Enopoletus was still around (I believe this is no longer the case). Since he had previously called me, personally, a "faggot" or a "kike" on more than one occasion, I was not particularly interested in hanging out in the same spaces as him. I don't think this explains the tilt of the board overall - Enopoletus can't have personally insulted _that_ many people - but I suppose it plausibly accounts for part of it.
So, one thing that you might not know is DSL moderates through a strike ladder. First two strikes are a day, then a week then a month then six months etc. So it can take a while for someone to get removed from the community. This sort of thing is good feedback for mods like Paul Brinkley
Also, DSL has an `ignore' button, which you can use to, basically, not be shown posts by people you don't want to engage with. I have Echo on ignore. When Enopoletus was around, I was ignoring him also.
Actually using the ignore button makes the experience a *lot* better.
Eh, I've always found killfiles make threads really annoying to follow. It works fine if everyone else is ignoring them too, or on nested-replies fora like reddit, but neither was the case here.
It's true, I could have put him on ignore and lived with the more annoying UX. But, when the situation arose, I didn't really feel inclined to bother.
Also, I'm neither pro-Trump nor pro-gun, and I'd favor a ~15 week abortion limit (whatever that translates to on the pro choice-pro life spectrum). I still find DSL interesting and valuable.
DSL was founded as a way to keep the SSC comments community going when SSC shut down. The month one community had a lot of conservative commenters, which was what you'd expect for the simple algorithm of "each commenter's chance of migrating to DSL is proportional to the how active they are on the blog". I attribute DSL's political leaning mostly to that founding effect and its consequences (liberals bounce off a forum where "the 2020 election was stolen" is a topic of serious debate).
I've been on DSL since the beginning, I suspect a big part of it is when SSC shut down, all the left leaning people had other places to go, and then went there. As a right leaning guy, who wasn't interested in right wing echo chambers, I didn't really have anywhere that felt like an internet home for me for a few months. I wish we could bring in some more left leaning people. For the record, Ancient Oak is right that Jack Wilson posted invective laden rants relatively frequently. people were banned for far less.
I'm sorry thats your perspective. For the record, I'd really like to see more liberal voices at DSL. I know its easy for people on the left to go through life never hearing a conservative idea, but I don't think it does either of us any good for you to avoid engaging with people outside your in-group
>>> I wish we could bring in some more left leaning people.
>> Trying to be the token lefty has been tried by many, including myself, and it just isn't worth it. You get nothing out of the site.
> I don't think it does either of us any good for you to avoid engaging with people outside your in-group
You ask for more left-wing voices. A self-described lefty tells you they tried engaging, but left when they got nothing out of it. In response, you tell them they avoided engaging. Do you see the issue here?
Ah, you know I understood the original comment as Axioms saying he's tried hanging out in conservative sites, generically, but hasn't actually visited DSL. If he has tried participating at DSL and found he didn't get anything out of it that makes more sense.
Based on the comments I'm seeing above, a self-described lefty with prior (and mistaken) beliefs about conservatives tried to engage, but only within a framework they get to control. This isn't an actual attempt to engage.
You can count me as another somewhat-lefty who spent quite a while engaging in good faith, only to be met with zero charity from the other side when a fundamental, irreconcilable value conflict came up. As long as I accepted the standard DSL framework I was welcome. But in retrospect, it's become clear to me that about half the posters never really wanted to hear my side of the argument, just talk at me. At times I bent over backwards trying to make sense of their worldview, but when it came time for others to put themselves in my shoes I was met with extremely close-minded dismissal.
It has been less than a week since you used your powers as a moderator to veto the creation of a low-moderation subforum. I guess now we'll never know.
>I know its easy for people on the left to go through life never hearing a conservative idea
It is this sort of assertion that can make me irate. Perhaps the statement has some truth-value for some liberal bubbles but consider the environment where you are saying this right now. Is ACX a liberal bubble? Was SSC?
I suspect most liberals on this forum likely expose themselves to conservative ideas from time to time. This part of the blogosphere isn't all that left-leaning. We're basically one degree of separation from Marginal Revolution, Steve Sailer, Robin Hanson, Curtis Yarvin, Dominic Cummings, David Friedman, and other voices that are more or less considered to be on the right. We're also one degree (or less) of separation from, you guessed it: DSL!
Let's concede that are you are at least within earshot of these views.
But consider further: do you take the views of MR, Sailer, Hanson, Yarvin, Cummings, Friedman, and other people who hold conservative or Red Tribe views seriously? That is, as if they are views that can be held by a reasonable, thinking person? (Can you give examples?)
I don’t take Yarvin seriously. I don’t think his views can be held by a reasonable thinking person, only someone who is too smart by half.
I take Sailer seriously as a gauge for what many regular conservatives, as opposed to conservative politicians, really think. Trump basically won the GOP nomination in 2016 by running on a Saileresque platform, although I doubt the influence was direct. Sailer helped me understand that there was a huge disconnect between the Republican Party and a silent plurality of conservatives (who tended to be anti-immigration and antiglobalization) in the decade preceding Trump’s presidency. I suppose one could hear the same ideas listening to Michael Savage in the early 2000s (Borders, Language & Culture!), but Savage always sounded like a nut, whereas Sailer persuaded me to believe there was an underserved political market out there which, later, Trump intuitively knew to service.
I believe a reasonable thinking person can buy Sailer’s ideology of Citizenism, although I find it facile and think it leads quickly into zero-sum thinking about the economy. One idea he had that has stayed with me is that in the USA the worst thing about being poor is having to live around other poor people. That is a very depressing insight.
Hanson - I don’t take his EM stuff seriously, but I take Futarchy seriously. His Homo-Hipocritus ideas are a bit depressing but there is probably something there. His Near/Far Thinking ideas are brilliant, as are some of his aphorisms such as “Politics is not about policy”. I don’t often buy what he takes away from many of his thought-experiments, but I think it’s worthwhile that he wanders into dangerous territory with heretical thoughts about slavery, blackmail, rape, et al.
Cummings I don’t really know much about other than something something Brexit, he reads this blog, and Substack recommends I read his Substack.
Probably most of the David Friedman I’ve read has been his comments on SSC and DSL.I haven’t read Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, although I keep meaning to read some of it. I suppose in general he makes me seriously wonder if cap anarchy can work, and I don’t really know, although I suspect its likely failure mode is something that looks similar to what we already have but with different names for the same things. I believe it was you and Bugmaster who had a very interesting debate over something along those lines a while back. I read David’s dad’s book Free to Choose many years ago, although about all I remember from it was how mining for gold is one of the most useless activities a society can do. And maybe I picked up on the value of “local information” from it, not sure.
I’m a huge fan of Tyler Cowen and have read several of his books, with The Great Stagnation as my favorite. I remember that his big picture analysis of the Great Recession was “We weren’t as rich as we thought.” I’m still not sure that’s correct. I’m also a fan of the Scott Sumner, who doesn’t believe there ever was a real-estate bubble before the GR, and the more time passes the more I think Sumner was correct. His idea for level NGDP targeting using a futures market seems brilliant (or did that idea originate with another economist?) at least as an experiment, although it doesn’t seem that experiment will happen anytime soon. I suppose that idea no longer sounds like a "conservative" one, even though it looks to markets for a solution.
As for religious conservatives, I know plenty of those who are reasonable thinking people. Two people can have reasonable, conflicting views. I don’t think religious conservatives are unreasonable given their own priors and perspective, but my perspective and priors conflicts heavily with theirs -- much in the same way my p&ps conflict with woke progressives.
In college I was much more left wing, practically a socialist. Exposure to conservative thought (not to mention working in private industry) has caused me to believe strongly in markets and the importance of incentives, although I am still a tax & spend liberal at heart.
I get the sense "charitable" is in the eye of the beholder. Based on your comment above, you seem to think a conservative viewpoint is something to be "put up with", whereas I see it as something to understand better.
Do you think conservatives are inherently closeminded? Because that's not the sense I get from frequent conservative comments on DSL.
This is very unkind to religious people (less of this please), but overall a good assessment of DSL. I left DSL over what can be distilled to a lack of charity. I thought that there was some rapport and mutual respect going on even across ideological barriers, but that turned out not to be the case. We had a heated disagreement where civility broke down (mostly my fault really). As I was trying to fix things and lay out my worldview in a comprehensible way, more and more people just started insulting and slandering me, all while maintaining a polite facade. Meanwhile, I was getting repeated strikes because I'm not in the habit of moderating my *tone* as much. I spoke my mind honestly, but only a few people were actually trying to engage.
I think the end of the covid era marked a notable downturn for the forum. During covid, there was a lot of controversial discussion, but it didn't cut through the population across standard ideological lines. But lately, it has felt much more like a standard left vs right battle, and since I vaguely pattern match to the U.S. left (even though that doesn't describe my beliefs well at all) I was repeatedly strawmanned and asked to defend a bunch of absurd claims I never made.
Right off, you insult conservatives in a way that tells me you have a prior belief about their rationality. That is irrational in itself, and casts the entire rest of your comment in a bad light.
I don't know what you mean by "Misery". Is that a town? Or a state of prosperity? If the latter, then you're implying all conservatives live that way. Another insult, and untrue to boot; in turn, that would mean you're mistaken about understanding them "perfectly well".
If being "in an environment full of people who are, ideologically, hostile to your world view isn't inherently valuable", then a lot of conservatives would indeed find most of online media devoid of value, but I don't know what you want me to infer from that, and I'm not even sure you wanted the inference to go in that direction.
Meanwhile, we don't "obsess" over charity, but to the extent we value it, we do because in a world where no one has all the answers, it makes rational sense to compare perspectives and inspect the ones otherwise unavailable to us, in case there's some insight we've missed. That's what it means to be openminded. If, on the other hand, you believe you have all the answers you'll ever need, that's being closeminded... and it's risky. At the least, you're bound for a life of frustration, wondering why other people stubbornly refuse to come around to your Obviously Good answers.
Of course, that's assuming you're going to be interested in things beyond strategy gaming. Maybe you're not, and if so, okay; more power to you. But that also means I can't take your opinion about conservatives being in bubbles seriously; it looks rather the other way around.
>Jack Wilson posted invective laden rants relatively frequently. people were banned for far less.
I made 600 posts and got 5 strikes. That's less than 1% of them. And much of the invective was aimed at politicians I don't like, which, um, the other side got away with doing a lot more often.
The other side didn't flat refer to politicians they don't like by calling them insulting names, as I recall. And as a moderator, I have extra reason to see such comments if they happen, since I tend to see nearly all of the reports.
That one is the deal-killer for me. I'm not going to invest time in a political argument in which I can't even call the politicians who are wrong insulting names.
That's an odd position to hold, at least to me. Why not be satisfied with more factual criticisms - "Politician A is making poor decisions" - instead of directly insulting - "Politician A is an idiot"?
A direct insult more clearly defines your position, but does very little to explain or convince. Are you not interested in explaining or convincing, or does insulting provide some alternate benefit to you?
The politicians in question here are those in Texas who passed the abortion ban earlier in the year, which took effect months before Roe was overturned. It was a cynical move by those politicians. A commenter asserted to me, the day it passed, with gleeful shadenfreude at my dismay, that the Texas Legislature had done what Texas voters wanted, which seems unlikely considering the Texas electorate has, in fact, become increasingly liberal over recent decades (There has been much talk about how Texas may turn blue in the near future due to this liberal turn in its electorate). Texas Republicans are moving away from the median voter not towards him, and I believe that will be their undoing in the long run. Unfortunately in the short run the Democratic Party in Texas also refuses to move toward the center so won't win in November, and Texans will be stuck with the abortion ban that most of the Texas electorate doesn't want.
Polls show most voters in Texas would prefer that abortion be legal for the first trimester, but in the defect/defect path both The Republicans and The Democrats have chosen in Texas, we don't end up with a compromise result that most people would prefer; instead we get the radical stance the legislature and governor have taken, because they are cynical, psychopathic pricks who don't actually care about the will of the people. (Nor do the Texas Democrats.)
I don't believe I'm breaking the 2/3 rule on this forum in writing that, but on DSL you aren't supposed to swipe at your outgroup, and as a Texas voter, The Texas Legislature is my out group.
To answer your question: adding the vulgarity at the end of a rant like that makes it all worth writing in the first place.
Founder effect, plus attrition of left-leaning posters. Which is regrettable but understandable; I'm not sure I'd stick around if the situation were reversed.
As a regular, I know how to tune out the blackpilled right-wing broken records to the point where they are only a moderate annoyance, at least for now. But to any new member coming from a vaguely left-leaning perspective, the group cannot help but appear hostile to them. And there are people who like it that way. I'm not one of them, but I don't know how to get rid of them and they do know how to get rid of left-leaning posters. So here we are, edging towards being the right-wing echo chamber we were always accused of being.
Still, I got at least two good years out of DSL, and it might be good for two more still. That's more than I expected when SSC folded. And maybe the horse will learn to sing.
This comment captures my experience as well: if I didn't ignore half the threads, I'd find DSL much more irritating than it is--and it's not that I disagree with the viewpoints (I'm quite conservative) but the tone/temper/lack of charity is a real problem.
I try not to make it worse, and mostly avoid the "will make me stupider" parts--but it's a challenge. I would ask/invite anyone who's not conservative to join, and just stay out of the heavily political threads--I want more threads on non-political topics.
There's hope for this. Left-wingers like Plumber and bobobob go a long way to keeping a rapport between both sides of the aisle. They like to talk about non-political things; so do many of the righties; this builds good faith on which more political topics can be discussed.
I see a disturbing tendency among some people to scoff at the non-CW topics, as unimportant fluff. The people I'm thinking of write as if the primary function of the forum is for them to get their facts out as efficiently as possible. They don't appreciate that even the most information-dense signal in the world is useless if no one's prepared to receive it.
It doesn't help that the people I'm talking about seem focused on getting their own signal out, and not really interested in receiving in turn. (At least one of them is currently banned, IIRC.)
>What then do we call the ones that came out more than a few years ago? I grok that you're talking about a set that includes Star Wars since 2015, Star Trek since ??? (JJ Abrams, 2009?), Ghostbusters 2016... what is this set's unity? "Make it woke and get free advertising by calling the pre-existing fandom racist/sexist+?"
I do not think you really appreciate how endemic this stuff is.
You're referring to an effect where non-CW stuff drifts into CW territory. That's a noted problem.
I do appreciate how endemic it is to assert that mainline Hollywood product has injected woke content in an unpleasant way. But when you say that, I wonder if you appreciate how endemic unpleasant woke content has become.
This doesn't have to be a rhetorical, "we're surrounded by wokeism; just accept it" claim. You can discuss it. You could push back on that claim on DSL. I'll even concede that you'll get the text equivalent of eyerolls from some DSLers if you did. But do you think people who lament all that woke content get no eyerolls whatsoever, if they say so anywhere else?
And if everyone's response to the prospect of getting eyerolls is to just hang out on forums where they won't, what do you think that does to the system as a whole?
I think result isn't good, and I think the point of having forums like SSC, DSL, et al. is to at least *try* to pull away from that, rather than fall back into the usual grooves.
It might be worth reading further in that thread. Yes, some people will try to hammer the whole wide world into being about their pet issue, but mostly there seems to be an interesting discussion about various long-running media properties and how they went right/wrong.
Reading what two sincere, intelligent, and well-meaning moderators have to say about this topic is oddly saddening. People in general don't like hearing things that fall outside a comfortable stretch from their own positions. That's not a problem, per se, and so there aren't any solutions.
As for people not liking hearing things outside their comfort zone: I notice there are people who express frustration - sometimes to the point of profanity - at how crazy, stupid, evil, etc. other people can be. And I read further and find they're frustrated at people for whom the usual political toggle is flipped. Meanwhile, I'm reading those other people, and notice they often say the exact same thing. Meanwhile meanwhile, I read each side make its case, and I can see how it makes sense *for them*, and I read how they characterize the other side, and it's clearly not the same as the other side characterizes itself. In other words, each side is frustrated, not with the other side, but with its fabricated model of the other side.
You really think that's not a problem? Or are you referring to something else?
Ah, I conflated one of your comments with the references to Schilling and thought you were both moderators over there. I'm not personally familiar, my mistake.
Yes, that we're polarized to the point of not being able to tell the difference between a thing and its opposite (with examples differing depending on what side of the aisle we're talking to) is a problem. I was referring to the human desire for comfort, especially within something they regard as community. Humans don't appear to have evolved to be primarily challenged by their communities. Yes, social norms have always required policing, but always within the context of the harsh cruel world of Nature that lies just outside the little circle of illumination cast by our tribe's watchfires. It's not natural or good for someone to want me to come into his village and stand on the green and tell him and all his kin that they're wrong and should listen to me.
Now, would society be better if there were some kind of greater town square, in which everyone could be exposed to every possible side and piece of information? I suppose so, but folks would just show up en masse to some corner of the square, cause a stink, and leave (terms for this by in/out group are "raid" and "trolling").
I long ago made a habit of trying to acquaint myself with other sides of things, even when doing so is infuriating and painful, but I make no claims to virtue on this account. I suspect I'm driven by psychopathology, and am a terrible nuisance in debate.
Hi all. Reposting from last week's thread as I was a little later to that one than I am to this one.
For any ACX regulars who fancy the idea of being able to build friendships with fellow regulars beyond the confines of these hallowed comment threads: my partners and I have just released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
Already quite a few requests in there from ACX folk to match with! We'll begin 'concierge matching' some of our initial matching users in the coming weeks.
Excellent question - the answer is a combination of careful productisation and targeted outreach.
-Productisation: If we can effectively lead people towards requests that correspond to both known and unknown subjects of interest, we can maximise the likelihood of people being able to find something interesting without necessarily having to search for it. This is what the Shoreline is for, as our research has suggested an awful lot of people would be interested in this service not just to lodge specific requests but to find interesting things that they, as it were, weren't 'looking' for.
-Outreach: We're looking to build 'micro-critical-masses' within specific interest-bound communities (e.g. local athletics, rationalists, gamers etc.). If we can become the go-to service for a handful of specific communities we can validate a great deal of our assumptions and begin building key feedback loops.
It remains to be seen where the exact general critical mass threshold will be found, but if we can create enough of these micro-critical-masses we can begin to serve people effectively long before that larger mass consolidates.
(Will be dealing with the outreach side of the equation presently but we're currently trying to find a replacement for our CTO - if you or anyone else reading this knows of an industrious data science whizz interested in joining a project like this at pre-revenue stage, shoot something over to us a team@imsurf.in . Thanks!)
Hey, I went to your site and asked how your match people. Your reply was "we do it using a proprietary algorithm." That answer tells the questioner nothing whatever. That's not reasonable, and it's a turn-off. How about a real answer?
It's fundamentally going to be based on entity recognition, and figuring out through those extracted entities the degree to which specific requests are matchable.
That's all we can really share at this stage, not least as the algorithm proper is still being built.
If you're interested to help, shoot us something over to team@imsurf.in
It's a very interesting project, but I find I am mostly without good ideas, despite being a psychologist. I think I'd rather put what ideas I have up here, to see what thoughts the crew here has about it. In fact, I'd recommend that you guys put up some questions here, because the ACX hive has a lot of intellectual honey. Ask what should be included in a friend-matching algorithm.
My main thought is that I have only one rule-out: People who consistently come across as far more interested in their own ideas than in anyone else's. Double rule-out for the subgroup of these people who are quick to become mean (sarcastic, insulting, making personal attacks) if their attempt to one-up somebody is met with energetic resistance. After becoming familiar with the regulars here I have mentally tagged some people as definitely of that sort, and others as definitely not. But I don't see how you could get information about presence/absence of that quality from individuals themselves. As a psychologist, I can tell you that self-report measures suck, unless you are asking for simple, concrete information such as favorite books. If you ask people whether they are uninterested in others and ruled by a one-upsmanship script you will not get valid answers.
Yes, I think that sort of thing could create enormous value. I wanted one of Surf’s ‘starts’ as it were to be among the ACX community, and the wider rationalist super-community in general, because firstly I thought the level of engagement would be high and the quality of requests higher still (I’ve been right so far) and because, as you point out, there’s an unusual congregation of incredibly acute intellect on these threads, which could not only be useful for informing some of our decisions about product, but could be very fertile gathering grounds later when we begin to grow and are looking to fill our organisation with extreme and unusual talent.
Ideally it’d be great to organise something formal with Scott to this end, but I haven’t presumed to reach out on that front yet as I don’t know if it’s entirely his bag to do these kinds of collaborations, and he also doesn’t know me personally (beyond a brief interaction whereupon I reached out to him with an invitation to join my small former publication during the NYT/SSC saga; he was highly gracious and humoured me, despite the fact that he must have been fielding six figure offers to go to higher profile organisations, and I think that says enormous amounts about his character). Failing that, and presuming it’s not greeted as spam, I’ll continue to ply the boards here for questions/contributions and sign-ups.
And as regards your very interesting specific suggestion: yeah, I think one of the most important and interesting frontiers in this project at the intersection of psychology and data science (particularly as regards cohort analysis etc.) is going to be the sort of things you suggest. We’re going to put particular efforts into trying to uncover group-behavioural cues that might be predictable from otherwise very obscure traits – that, I don’t know, pessimistic AI-ethicists have the best rate of long-term conversational success, for instance – and that will then allow us to productise more effectively for the best possible incentives.
There's a kind of thread that occasionally appears here -- I forget what it's called -- that lets people put up personal notices of various kinds, and one of the categories is people looking for someone to date. Many of the self-descriptions in the date section sound quite honest and thorough, and some people actually include a paragraph from a previous partner giving their views of the person's good and bad points. Those self-profiles are about the best and most informative kind of public self-presentation I've seen, and I think they'd work well for people seeking friends, too. One person mentioned his achievements and good points, then added "but I'm not for everybody. I'm fat. And also I . . ." Damn, I was impressed by that, and warmed up to the person (not in the market for someone to date, though). Not sure how the algorithm comes in, though. Maybe algorithm part would just be a separate category of information.
The weird thing about the homicide spike in the US is that it seems to be an effect of a general national "mood" of unrest. There was a feeling of distrust and craziness in the air. I realize this isn't at all scientific or even measurable, but I think this is the reason the Covid explanation seems so intuitive to many people. They felt the bad energy and attributed it to Covid.
Now we see this spike didn't happen in other countries and it seems likely that the worst effects of the national bad mood/distrust were due to BLM and protests, more than covid. This makes sense because we have citizens wary of police intervention and police nervous about intervening in the first place. I wouldn't expect this abstract national phenomenon to be limited to big urban areas where the protests took place. Everyone was watching the same news and having the same conversations online. The internet truly unites Americans across regions. So I'm not at all surprised that the spike happened everywhere. The question is: did it indeed happen everywhere or is there just a more random sample of where more murders took place?
I also have a gut feeling about "mood" - I think people feel threatened. In my fairly rural area, I see a lot of t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, etc that are just straight up threats. It's a little shocking to see a soccer mom in an SUV with a sticker on the back depicting an AR15 with text saying "If you want mine, you'd better bring yours."
And does this drive violence? Well, there were two mass shootings within 50 miles of me in the last 24 hours alone...
I am in a very liberal small city in a purple state that borders a very conservative rural county and a very conservative rural state. The city acts as a regional hub for business and shopping so we get a lot of the rural/conservative population coming to the town. I also see the stickers you are talking about. We have also had fascist/neo-nazi/far-right (however you want to call it) flyers and stickers put up on lamp posts a few times.
Though the city and surrounding areas are basically all white, there is a large BLM support system here (made up of mostly white people). There is also a very active Democratic Socialist element. The activism from the far left has never been threatening or used violent language.
Since 2016 my county has added almost 40,000 people and the number of murders is basically flat (10 in 2026 and 9 in 2021, possibly even too low to be statistically significant). Gun suicides are 8x that of gun related homicides.
Based solely on this personal experience, I am not convinced that BLM activities are the cause of a raise in homicides. It may have contributed in a some places but its hard to believe it's the only cause or the largest cause when we also have economic downturns related to COVID and a sharp rise in gun sales.
>“We’re seeing individuals involved in these altercations had firearms with them and they resort to those firearms early on,” said Denver police Cmdr. Matt Clark with the Major Crimes Division. “They’re resolving these conflicts through the use of a firearm.”
>An analysis by the police department showed that domestic violence killings and homicides involving narcotics helped fuel the record number. The department also attributed 22 homicides to arguments or confrontations that spun out of control.
I'd like to see the assertions in those quotes tested. If its true that domestic violence and narcotics are the cause of the violence, that is very damaging to the BLM hypothesis. Also because Denver is not a very black city (only about 5% of the metro area is black).
The groups doing this are mostly the openly fascist ones like TWP and Patriot Front, but there's also a lot of support around here for flirting-with-fascism groups like the 3%ers.
I think you're strawmanning what I said quite a bit here, and also that you didn't read the articles very closely... It's a town (Indiana, not Ohio!), not a big city, and seeing Nazis march by when you're eating dinner (yes, they literally marched by while I was eating dinner) is very noticeable. Having hateful graffiti and stickers show up regularly (not just once) is pretty upsetting.
It's depressing when right-wingers reply to you being upset about the plainly growing threat of fascism with "well antifa and BLM exist, so what's the big deal?" Kinda makes it seem like they're on the side of the fascists, you know?
I can't speak for other cities, but I'm not aware of any BLM-related vandalism here. And I *really* doubt that there are 15 Stalinists in Columbus LMAO. I'm not sure there are 15 people here who realize Stalinism is still a going philosophy.
Speaking as someone who didn't follow the march in question: you seeing a few people marching by with Nazi symbolism on display, and trebuchet saying it was 12 people in a city of almost a million, strike me as consistent claims. They're also consistent AFAICT with you finding that upsetting, and trebuchet claiming that's jumping at shadows. How is your claim a counter to that? "It's not jumping at shadows; you must understand, it's pretty upsetting!"?
As you imply, if 15 Stalinists marched in Columbus and free market advocates were clanging the bells, we could make the same claim about shadows. The free market crowd could say that for every Stalinist willing to march, a hundred are silently watching and nodding. Likewise, maybe you could claim a thousand secret Nazis for those twelve marchers, but I think you'd need to actually claim and support that. (And to speed things up, I can say you'll need a response for all those groups that turn out to be hopelessly infiltrated by undercover FBI agents.)
Meanwhile, the side that doesn't attribute much to a handful of Nazis does indeed have several hundred, no fooling, actually-marching-and-setting-property-on-fire Antifa / BLM rioters to point to.
How much do you think you should make of what goes on in your town as representative of the country at large? My personal experience of 2020 in NYC was getting routinely threatened by BLMers on my nighttime walks while people riotted throughout midtown, whereas I've never even met a right-winger let alone been threatened by one. Geographical heterogeneity is a great reason not to extrapolate from personal experience
I suspect that you could tell a pretty broad story of things going wrong that don't seem directly connected to the protest movement.
I'm not saying that the BLM protests (and their downstream impact on policing) didn't matter, just that it seems reductive (and, for many people, partisan) to narrow in on "BLM caused the murder spike" as opposed to "there is a widespread breakdown in social cohesion, trust in institutions, and public behavior that has manifested in multiple ways, including the BLM riots, Jan 6th, many varieties of crime, etc." Understanding how the 2020 protests may have played a causal role in the web of events is important, but stopping your analysis there and arguing endlessly over that narrow point seems like partisan axe-grinding and not a useful pursuit for making the world a better place.
Yeah, you're thinking in the same direction I am. I think future historians are going to point out that a _lot_ was going on in 2020, and it's going to take us decades to tease out how the different threads all interacted. Many historians still talk about 1967 as a formative year where a lot of trends hit inflection points. 2020 might be just another of those super-eventful years.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to draw what lessons we can now, and I think looking at the role of the protests, and how it may have impacted crime - either directly, or by changing the nature of policing - is important. But we should expect our understanding to evolve as we gather more data and hindsight.
I share your fundamental thesis that we live in a less-stable, low-slack world, though I don't think I'd put the fundamental causes quite the same place you would. Do you have a link to a longer treatment somewhere?
The absolute numbers worry me less than the "what bad shit __hasn't__ gotten worse" aspect. Value Is Fragile. I'm still generally-optimistic about the future and am blessed to live in relative safety and comfort, yet...it's increasingly easy to make a sound rationalization for nesting behaviour. Just sorta hibernate at home until it's 2019 again. Working a frontline service job means I can't not see the huge increase in number of eggshells everyone's walking on all the time now. Almost makes me want to appropriate the woke concept of "microaggressions" - no one's literally getting murdered at my store, but the average daily number of tiny provocations has gone way up. A sort of background radiation of fear and loathing pervades public life, in a way I don't remember from the Before Times. "Sad!"
Car deaths and pedestrian deaths are hardly different phenomena. My understanding is that car deaths and homicides are closely linked in time, a sharp increase after May 2020.
But my understanding is that overdose deaths are different. Their increase was incremental, spread over years, starting in January 2020 before the pandemic. (See Avalanche's link to Yglesias, who chooses to use June-May years or the CDC 12 month rolling average.) I don't think that they reflect increased drug use, but increased spread of fentanyl, not just making strong opioids, but mixed in with stimulants. If so, it's not a society wide change of behavior of users, but a much smaller number of dealers. Direct measure of usage should be possible, but I don't know the numbers.
Added: but this link of month-by-month totals makes it look like overdoses increased steadily over the lockdown, peaking in May 2020, ie, before Floyd. This perfectly fits a story of cabin fever. But then there's another spike in March 2021.
What's The Deal With...hard seltzer? I am trying to understand the success of stuff like White Claw and just not grokking it. So many of those "flavoured bubbly malt beverages" just taste like...sadsack. It's definitely cheap, but there are even more efficient ways to get drunk; also feels like trading off taste and experience purely for dollar value is missing half the point of drinking. Lots of low-ABV% drinks that aren't quite that bottom-barrel, if it's a moderation thing. They also seem to buck the whole, yknow..."natural", "no artificial ingredients" trend that I thought was A Big Deal these days.
My first ever drink was Mike's Hard Lemonade at <several years past legal drinking age>...I grew up painfully aware of the perils of alcoholism, resolved to be sober forever myself, and then whoops fell off that wagon real fast after experiencing cheap crap beer. So like, I get that - no one starts off sipping Japanese whiskey, it's a phase thing. I am not confused when I see college kids loading up their shopping carts with White Claw. But it does confuse me when anyone not in that demographic/shopping for that demographic does. "Surely you know better?" I wanna ask...Even Coors or Heineken or $3 wines can plausibly be bought for cooking purposes rather than drinking. (Beer chili!)
Not that long ago it was Two Buck Chuck. Inflation: cheap wine prices up 50%! Critics counter that grape biofuel subsidies are the true culprit, though...
(Yeah, it's passably non-embarrassing, especially with the label removed. Some of the actual cheap imported wines at That Retailer are notably worse. I don't disparage anyone who buys TBC, it's an efficient market niche.)
When I was in college (and therefore around more people who were drinking than I am now; about 5 years ago) it seemed like hard seltzer had become the go-to for people who disliked the taste of beer but would otherwise have been the sort of people drinking beer, based on their social context and what kind of events they were going to. If that makes sense.
It has the convenience of beer (comes in a can, no mixing) and the relatively slow-pace of beer (you can nurse one for an hour, unlike a shot).
It also seemed to me like the popularity of hard seltzer came on the tails of the popularity of non-alcoholic flavored seltzers like La Croix.
I think you've captured the main points. One important additional advantage over beer is that it's gluten-free. Hard-seltzer is the least offensive option, which matters a great deal when drinking socially.
>It also seemed to me like the popularity of hard seltzer came on the tails of the popularity of non-alcoholic flavored seltzers like La Croix
I think thats a huge part of it. Also, to me, alcohol trends seem to be highly influenced by market and the trends seem to change almost every summer. The big alcohol brands have been really leaning hard on pushing these drinks the past few years. I suspect, because the alcohol is just boiled crappy beer, the margins on hard seltzer are pretty good (doesn't hurt that it often comes in smaller cans for the same prices as lite beer).
I'd forgotten about La Croix, good point. That was a trend I saw grow and die right in front of my eyes and was utterly baffled by (on both tails). I grew up drinking Calistoga and Perrier and whatever, couldn't understand why adding homeopathic levels of fruit flavour made it a Hip New Thing.
...then again, we just started selling Mineral Water, Now In A Metal Bottle (Certified B Corporation, Profits Donated To Saving The World). So things have come full circle. The barberpole model of fizzy beverages turns again.
Interesting, I grew up drinking fruit flavored Polar seltzer, so to me LaCroix was definitely not a "new thing," just a trendy brand... And I think it was a bigger deal outside of New England where Polar reigns king.
The other beer alternative that NW Europe and especially the British Isles has is (hard) cider, which I don't think has really recovered from prohibition in the US.
I've seen various pre-mixed cocktails, sometimes in single-serve cans, other times in bottles that can pour out a few drinks' worth. They don't seem to be nearly as popular as I'd expect - maybe people just prefer mixing their own? I'm sure that's cheaper in the long run, yet having once done the whole "home bar" thing - man, what a pain, especially when one can't sustain a big enough social circle to "entertain" often. Keeping around flattening litres of Coke just in case someone needs a mixer for their mid-tier whiskey, the additional mini-fridge, making excuses to buy lemons and limes. Convenience is Very Expensive, but I think cantails are a pretty good use of it. (Possibly also "cocktail" is so associated with "bar" that it's still a weird concept for people to adopt to on-the-go private drinking.)
Hard cider of all kinds (not just apples anymore!) is sold everywhere, but I think it has a weird reputation as like...not a "real drink". Cheerleader, they'd have been called once. Fruity sweet stuff that's like the polar opposite of what an IPA represents, image-wise. TLP would probably say, "if you're drinking it, it's for you"...I think the lack of a whole wannabe-snob-elitist culture around cider is a (non) selling point for many. Like I see people get into pretentious pissing contests all the time over Knowing(ness) About Beer (or wine, or hard liquor). Never cider. Definitely no gender clustering of that tendency either, heh...
Due to our bizarre alcohol laws and regulations, in the US these premixed drinks are made from beer not the alcohol you would normally used. The beer is boiled to concentrate the alcohol to the required %.
We do have premade cocktails, but in most (all?) US states, anything containing distilled liquor as an ingredient is taxed at the same rate per gallon as if it were itself distilled liquor, even if the final post-mixing ABV winds up being the same as that of beer or wine. That tax rate is much higher than the rate for beer or wine, so those premixed cocktails end up being much more expensive than the equivalent product made out of a non-distilled malt liquor engineered to be as neutral flavored as possible, which retains the ability to be taxed as beer. At some point someone figured out that there's a market for the same stuff but without all the added sugar that typifies the canned cocktail or mike's hard lemonade genres of drinks, and hard seltzer was born
One of the reasons it got so popular is someone figured out a way to brew, rather than distill, all-but-flavorless alcohol. Brewed beverages are taxed at a lower rate than distilled ones, regardless of final ABV, so hard seltzers were able to outcompete the Mike's Hard Lemondades of the world on cost.
And while I agree with you on the merits of White Claw's flavor, apparently lots of other people disagree. It is at their particular sweet spot on the pareto frontier of cost/calories/booze/flavor. Not sure what else is left to be explained.
The calories thing seems to a big factor in anyone I know who drinks them regularly. Also beer generally tastes terrible, some of the seltzers are even worse, but some are better.
Fascinating, I didn't know that! "minor microeconomic advantages due to tax-favoured status" was definitely not in my prior-space at all. So hard seltzers are, in one sense, a government-subsidized drink.
The calories thing I always took as a disingenuous branding of sorts...like...does anyone seriously in their heart of hearts think cutting alcohol calories via light beer and hard seltzer will make an appreciable dent in their daily intake vs any other food group? Similar to how "Organic" or "Gluten Free" or "All Natural" or "No GMO" have been used. (Although if one is drinking hells a lot all the time, I guess there's that. Seems like there's a Larger Problem in that case though...forest for trees.)
I 100% think a lot of people do think that makes a difference. And depending on how much you consume, it totally does!
A 50 cal a day deficit is what a pound every other month? Now in reality people make all sorts of adjustments, so 50 calories saves here or there doesn’t directly translate to weight loss. But I absolutely think rational or not tons of people think that way.
Some of the Crusty Old Alcoholics I know like to muse that Zima was ahead of its time. If it came out today, it'd go gangbusters. Everyone loves a plausibly deniable hard beverage.
I was actually about to post that I have never tried a hard seltzer and don't plan to, but then I realized that wasn't true because of some promotional booth at the Welcome to Rockville festival a few weeks ago in Daytona, but I can't say I remember anything about drinking it.
It's interesting to see your comment here, though, because I read an article on Apple News just two days ago proclaiming the death of this trend. Supposedly, a bunch of planned product launches went south pretty quickly and are being canceled. The author himself was mentioning that he thinks these provide a fairly pleasant taste for maybe a minute or so after opening, but they go flat and lose all flavor very quickly. His hypothesis was they became popular in some hard-drinking recent past of people just flat slamming them, but now they're trying to slow down and savor what they're drinking and realizing these aren't actually good. Plus, there isn't really a large enough market to justify every beverage company having one. White Claw or some other first mover might survive, but the trend was never as big as these companies hoped it would be.
My image was of my sister-in-law drinking it with her buddies, white suburban moms who unironically compile playlists of "bangers" and spend winters in Park City. It's like a mimosa but cheap enough you can drink way more of them. It doesn't seem like that's a very big demographic.
"Millennials Killed Hard Seltzer" - A bold and falsifiable prediction, my favourite kind! I'll be keeping an eye on our store sales - I know the dudes who run the beer and liquor section...
Do you have a link to that article? I'd be curious to read it!
But: "Inflation might have tightened seltzer budgets." That's a strange line. One would either expect the opposite, for inflation to encourage *more* purchases of inferior goods, or be confused as inflation tightens budgets on all types of discretionary spending. Unless she meant people choose to go without drank entirely?
(Also weird to focus on data from an alcohol delivery middleman service...does no one else tabulate such things? Very much a particular SES marker as well...)
Convenient and more drinkable than beer. That's it AFAIK. I like nice whisky and gin, and craft beer and will still get seltzer for casual drinking sessions
Sometimes I think "a liter of cheap vodka and sprite would be more efficient" but also kind of a weird thing to drink socially
Hypothetically, if someone invented the "Splenda of alcohol", a totally zero-calorie way to induce identical inebriation...do you think there'd be a real market for such Diet Alcohol? (Alcohol Zero?)
This is almost certainly a stupid/selective-blindness question, but where's the ACX register of bans? I could have sworn there was a public ban register, but I can't find it now. Was it simply removed, and people are now just disappeared wordlessly? Or was it never brought over from SSC and this is a mnemonic interference pattern?
Scott mentioned that he was going to update the register of bans. Sometime soon, I think.
I also observe, however, that the less of a big deal the whole moderating/banning/warning thing is made to be, the better it is for the blog - and that is quite apart from the fact that Scott would rather not have to be banning people left, right and centre.
Thanks! I genuinely appreciate you finding this, but note that it is both significantly obsolete (albeit this is the part Scott intends to rectify imminently) and hard to find on the blog itself – unlike the Mistakes page, it's not in the banner. Is there some other place it's displayed that I missed, or does one actually have to search for it?
Maybe Scott feels the way I do about it - don't go out of your way to make the issue of banning commenters prominent, and it'll aid the community in all sorts of ways.
When was the last time a centrist got banned here? A thin veneer of affected charity or at least Both Sidesism has sure seemed to cover a lot of questionable posting in the past. Which is probably still a better equilibrium, but...letter vs spirit of the law.
Well, Scott just banned some guy for a day for rushing to be the first one to post a comment without having anything to say. I'm sure there are some centrists among people who get that kind of bans.
I sometimes think this with DSL's Index of Bans as well. It's tempting to read it like one's daily fix of sensationalism.
OTOH, I've personally found it a useful reference when someone makes a claim about ban-related issues, such as moderator bias. And given that usage, it has to be publicly viewable; I can't see any way around that. Ideally, it'd be usable as a reference and somehow not also as a sensationalism fix. Just turning the entries into links isn't enough; it's too easy to click through and read the offending post. (I should know; I used to do that on SSC.)
It is a common observation that ideas tend to come when you are not thinking about them, but generally you need to prime your mind first by consciously working on the problem to solve.
Hypothesis 1: your subconscious mind is doing the heavy lifting and, when your conscious mind is relaxed, raises the solution to the level of consciousness.
Hypothesis 2: Like any other part of your body, you can use exercise, nutrition or pharmaceuticals to alter the performance of your subconscious.
So.... Does anyone have any experience on attempting to improve their subconscious idea generation? Either improving the quality or frequency of ideas, or reducing the length of time they take to appear after a conscious attack on a problem? If so, what steps did you take and were they effective?
As you say, think about the problem. Then go to sleep for the night. In the morning, doing some mundane task. (often in the shower, but sometimes driving to the workplace.) A new idea will appear. I'm not sure how to make that faster. The sleep part seems crucial.
I think the single biggest element of "idea creation" is to have thought about and be knowledgeable about a problem. And then create some unstructured time where you are not thinking about anything else. A long drive with no music or book or podcast, a walk in the woods, whatever.
For me that is when I come up with the most creative ideas.
Carrying around a notebook or some other means of __immediately__ pinning an Intriguing New Idea down with permanence has been really important for me. I don't know if this affects "baseline" level of generation, but none of that matters if the ideas aren't legible...a forgotten quality idea is about as useful as not having any idea in the first place. Many Such Cases where I can "remember that I forgot a Really Cool Idea", but because it bubbled up subconsciously via Babble[1], I can't just replicate the process to arrive at same conclusion again. It's quite frustrating.
Quality seems directly proportional to general stress levels, notably sleep. Some level of deprivation can induce interestingly loopy thoughts, but mostly I see a steep drop-off in...well...sanity. That can be okay for creative works, but usually a bad idea for anything practical-related. And at some point, base survival instincts come to dominate all thought processes, crowding out any potential other Ideas. Thinking is indeed exercise, one needs to be in good mental shape for it.
"Medidation" helps with frequency/time interval. I don't mean the formal practice, though that might help too. More the...like...letting one's mind be Open To New Experiences, not Pruning too much random noise out of hand.[2] Being in positions where one can let the mind safely wander helps a lot...that is, I love being in a "flow state" as much as the next person, but I'm absolutely only tunnel-visioning ideas about that narrow focus during said spells. Or like random ideas are the furthest thing from my mind when in actual potential danger, like wandering downtown SF. They come best when doing low-risk, otherwise-mindless things; in the comfortable silences between friends. Any situation where I'd feel comfortable reading a physical book - that's a good idea-generating situation.
I think we spend most of our time not thinking about any specific problem, but I think in the back of our minds we’re still chugging away. So if you assume that the idea is completed at a random point during you day, on average, that would be when you aren’t thinking about it
My kid will turn five in early October, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to give him shots now (the ones for under 5) or wait and give him 5+ ones?
I think the 5+ ones have higher doses and so might be more affective, bit not sure about that.
As far as we can tell, he hasn't gotten COVID so far.
My personal thinking on this (not medical advice - speak to your pediatrician about your specific situation):
Absent any risk factors, the likely benefits of the vaccine don't seem to outweigh the likely risks until someone turns about 30 years old. The risks of COVID-19 are *really* age-skewed towards the elderly.
The best argument I've seen so far in favor of vaccinating at younger ages is that the risk of cardiomyopathy in boys seems to be centered around puberty. This suggests vaccinating either before puberty, or well afterwards (24+).
Any benefit/risk calculus for the vaccine has to factor in the likelihood that a toddler will come into frequent contact with an individual who *is* in the 30+ risk zone or older (e.g. parents and other older relatives like grandparents), the fact that (as anyone that has worked with children knows) small children are *potent* disease vectors, and the significant evidence that the vaccines significantly reduce viral load and transmission (by as much as 50%, from a cursory look).
IMO the individual risks/benefits for young vaccination, factoring in the conservative pro-social benefits, are mostly a wash, and the determination mostly boils down to how at-risk the child's adult social circle is and how much you want to trade off the larger pro-social benefits vs the minor risks to a child's safety.
While children to tend to be potent risk factors _in general_ the evidence that they are exceptional spreaders for COVID is _much_ weaker/nearly absent. For example: as far as I have seen, teachers in in person schooling for example did not appear to be at high risk of catching covid relative to similar peers in the community (article from England, where the schools were _never_ closed, about how teachers did not have statistically significantly higher mortality: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55795608)
Children appear to be less likely to catch COVID and when they catch it, it appears to be less severe (and evidence of correlation between severity and amount of transmission seems to be decently robust).
Adults are far _far_ better protected by having their own vaccine than by children getting vaccinated.
Now, I'm not against child vaccinations, as I think the risk in both directions is low enough to not be worth spending much mental energy on. Were I in a position where I had to make such a choice, I would probably decide entirely on grounds such as "will having/not having the vaccine result in burdensome restrictions for me or my child" which I think far outweigh the actual medical calculus.
Surprisingly seems not to be the case for COVID; anecdotally school outbreaks in my area seemed to mostly consist of the staff spreading it amongst themselves, and one of my own children (who, as you say normally gives us a wide variety of respiratory viruses brought home from school) had Omicron for several days at home with us -- yet failed to pass it on to me (unvaccinated) and my wife (two oldish doses) despite the fact that we didn't much care whether we got it and accordingly took zero unusual precautions. (I guess I didn't eat his leftovers that week; other than that business as usual.)
That aside, expecting children to take on any quantum of risk for the benefit of the grownups would normally be considered kind of evil.
"The best argument I've seen so far in favor of vaccinating at younger ages is that the risk of cardiomyopathy in boys seems to be centered around puberty. This suggests vaccinating either before puberty, or well afterwards (24+)."
Do you have a link handy? I searched for "covid vaccine cardiomyopathy risk" and... well, there's a link to a page at CDC, but it claims that risk is negligible (and CDC likely is motivated to downplay any vaccine risk), so it's probably not what you're referring to.
That's probably a good link and chances are the CDC is completely accurate. The problem is that the risk to small children is so incredibly low that a very low risk of some side effect becomes a more important consideration than normal, and quite possibly a bigger consideration than the underlying issue of COVID. That is, without some underlying risk factors that make COVID a bigger concern (and maybe even with some of those risk factors).
Yeah, my impression is this is one of those places where you're comparing two very low probabilities. Covid is very unlikely to seriously harm a healthy 5 year old, and the vaccine is also very unlikely to seriously harm a healthy 5 year old. That does make working out the risk/reward tradeoff harder. By contrast, the risk/reward tradeoff is really obvious for 60 year olds.
I think whichever choice you make is at most a small mistake. Both vaccines have trivially low risks to young children, and COVID itself has incredibly low risk to young children. For some numbers, at the peak of omicron (also the peak of child hospitalizations), the <5 year old hospitalization rate was 0.0145% (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220316/omicron-increased-hospitalizations-children-cdc.) And about half of those are infants <6mo, which further reduces the risk in your child.
I'm not sure that we have enough data to be confident on whether delaying the vaccine for a few months to get slightly stronger prevention is a good tradeoff. It's REALLY hard to get tight error bars on vaccine effectiveness in <5yos, just because your incidence rate is so low. There were only about 3500 hospitalized under-5-yos in the entire US at the peak of omicron and less than 2000 over 6 months old. The N just isn't there for precise decision-making.
On the other hand, that means that your decision doesn't matter much. The risk from COVID in that population is so low that we have trouble measuring the changes from even highly effective interventions. The difference in safety between the two is so small that it will barely affect your child's overall risk profile (which is dominated by accidents of various sorts rather than diseases.) My advice is to pick whichever one you have a better gut feeling about, or whichever one is easier if you're ambivalent, and not worry about it.
If it'd get you out of some Mild Social Awkwardness or e.g. restrictions imposed by daycares, that's likely worth it. If not - comparing statistically-noise levels of risk on either arm. To the best of my recollection of Zwi Mowshowitz's covid reporting, the 5+ ones are more efficaceous; toddlers are one break in the general "kids essentially totally safe" age grouping, so the tyke vaccines got watered down just to make sure nothing weird happens. (Sorta like how efficacy on pregnant women is necessarily fraught to test, so we err on the side of caution by default.)
There are some considerations for spreading to other people, but...the currently available vaccines only do a modest job of reducing spread. Considering that kids get sick all the time anyway with every pathogen ever, it's likely not worth much extra concern. Known risk factor in dealing with kids, and all.
I realize you weren't considering skipping the COVID vaccine for your kid for now, but perhaps that's something you should give at least some thought.
Just about every grown-up I know got COVID despite being fully vaccinated and boosted; presumably, vaccines are the reason why none of these people died or ended up in a hospital.
However, risks of dying or ending up in a hospital from COVID are negligible for kids, and a number of people are saying that vaccine trials on kids were either done badly, or did not show much by way of efficacy (see, e.g. https://www.commonsense.news/p/us-public-health-agencies-arent-following ).
Add to this that we don't really know what the long-term effects are, add a few horror stories about kids who ended up in a bad way after those vaccinations, and you have to wonder whether COVID vaccines for kids are actually worth it.
I'm not any kind of anti-vaxxer, and our kids are fully vaccinated with everything else, but I think we're going to skip the COVID vaccine for them. What's the use if they'll catch COVID anyway, and the chances of it making them really sick are low enough that we should really be worrying about something else instead?
Same here, there is more cases now in my social circles than there ever was i any of the previous waves. It's not mild, in fact some got hit hard (a very healthy 35yo was really sick for 10d, for example) but nobody got hospitalized. Official story is that it's thanks to vaccine and booster, but Its not clear if no one was hospitalized because:
- the variant are less virulent
- because of the vaccine (and/or booster, and/or previous infection). I do not think it's possible to sort among those possibilities because the number of covid-naive people is now super small, how to tell if the current strain is really dangerous among the non-vaccinated if there is no non-vaccinated (and not previously-contaminated) left?
Maybe in non-western countries, but it seems covid is a non news there nowadays (like it is in the western world in fact)
- or because hospitalization threshold is higher.
For example my mom got hit, quite hard, even had oxygen saturation going down at one time, but after testing to see if infection was also in the lungs (it was not), she was sent home with paracetamol and no paxlovid. This for a 76yo, with covid beds occupation far below capacity....quite a contrast with the first wave (dying in the corridors) and the second wave (you should get tested and monitored in hospital if you are in the at-risk population).
All purely anecdotal, but after 2y of covid, I think I take my own anecdotes instead of "official" covid informations. For example, booster wise, I am a test subject and so is my gf: non boosted, no previous infection (that I know), I got 2 Pfizer and she got 1 Johnson. nothing yet for this wave. And in my circle, all who got hit (more or less hard) were boosted (2 shots + 1 boost). Given those anecdotes, I would need serious convincing to consider getting boosted (serious statistics would have done it previous covid...now, not really, because there is no source left able to produce those stats and that I trust enough.
Does anyone else feel like the internet is better than ever in terms of good content? Yeah, social media sites are cesspools. But I find there’s still plenty of great content; I just have to do the work of finding it.
I'd say there's a higher amount of good content than ever, but the ratio of good content to bad content makes it increasingly hard to find. Plus the "bad content" areas often use SEO tricks to get more attention than they put effort into making better content.
The 'search' process i use is sort of like pagerank, except instead of walking randomly across links on the entire internet, i start with a very small set of 'seeds' that produce consistently great content, and then explore their links.
The key for me seems to be aggressively avoiding social media.
I agree there, although for me, it's podcasts. I have so many great podcasts queued up; written words, not so much, although i suspect the issue is my search algorithm.
Highly recommend Thinking About Things (https://thinking-about-things.com), which sends out interesting articles from blogs I've never heard of a couple times a week.
In terms of content, I think the internet is better than ever - Patreon specifically seems to have been a significant sea-change towards enabling a lot of high-quality but niche content: the ad model for internet revenue meant everyone had to cast as wide a net as possible (leading to a lot of annoying 'click maximizing' behavior), whereas Patreon lets creators be supported by a smaller but more focused group.
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But I think the trend Scott refers to is more in terms of communities, not content: and I do think the web is worse in terms of communities: I do think we've gone from a web consisting of a lot of small independent communities to one consisting largely of a few big corporate social medias like Facebook and Twitter.
There are exceptions (including blogs like this one), but as a whole, I do think it's a pretty major trend.
Granted, this is true of the "web" more than the "internet" as a whole: I think the idea of smaller communities is seeing a big revival on Discord.
To some extent isn't this trivially true since the older good content is mostly still accessible? Or are you specifically talking about new stuff being created?
Somewhat echoing other replies: I've often said that the great thing about the Internet was the Information Explosion, with the catch being the *Mis*information Explosion that came along with it.
Technically, I'm referring to the World Wide Web, rather than the Internet. I remember when it first hit really big (I peg the year as 1994), and finding the good stuff was pretty hard. Google wasn't a thing until 2000; for years we had Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos. Suddenly the Pagerank algorithm came along and all sort of good stuff was much easier to find. Problem is, like any algorithm, it's gameable, so a few years later the misinformation was seeping into the good information again.
To some extent, it's still not that bad, because the misinformation is predictably controversy-seeking. If you want to know about the history of rugs or the lifecycle of anoles, for example, there's a good chance you'll find several articles on them that won't be filled with lies. But it's easy to grow complacent and not realize when you're in ControversyLand.
It's more complicated than this, too. Whatever algorithmic improvements get added to Pagerank by various search engines are not well-publicized, precisely in order to frustrate misinformation sources trying to game it. But that means we now have several search engines claiming to give us good information, but not telling us how. Meanwhile, content bias doesn't always manifest as misinformation; it also shows up as good information being left out. So there's always the chance some search provider is quietly hiding good information, at the behest of the people working there.
I think one problem is the actual misinformation, but another similarly-bad problem is that we no longer have as much of a shared consensus reality. The older version of that was often screwy in a bunch of ways, but even a pretty screwy shared consensus reality makes it easier to coordinate on doing things in ways that its lack does not.
My mental model of everything from covid to education to energy policy to election security is based on such a different set of sources of information than most other people that it's tricky to even have a conversation. I tend to consume information from pretty high-end science and technology sources, and haven't paid much attention to standard media coverage of science/technology/math/stats issues for many years. That's good for me, but it also means that I hardly share a worldview or any common referents with people whose understanding of those issues comes from those media sources.
I think there's evidence that we either never had a shared consensus reality, or what we had was relatively narrow - everyone believed what Cronkite said on the news, but Cronkite wasn't saying a whole lot compared to what a Maddow or Carlson would say today. So everyone who listened to Cronkite naturally felt like everyone was on the same page, and that belief held up when we went to our office lunches and PTA meetings.
In that hypothesis, the reason everyone is more upset now is that the Internet made a great deal of those reality differences visible, when before they were concealed by lack of cheap mass broadcast, and distance. There were always many Western cultures; only now is that fact shoved daily in our faces.
Yea, quantity + selection results in more quality. The downside being a sort of "novelty superstimulus" i.e. internet addiction
Also truly affordable and portable HD video cameras and gymbals and drones for certain types of content. Plus everyone carrying around a high end camera at all times.
There's more good content than ever, but the search costs are increasingly so high that I most often find myself enjoying The Good Shit by myself. The whole...fragmenting of mass culture thing. Yeah, mass culture wasn't actually that *good*, but boy did it have network effects. Sometimes I'd almost rather intentionally downgrade my content diet just so I'd have a statistically significant number of fellow enjoyers to share and discuss it with. (It's just a hard sell trying to convince even a close friend "no, really, this 100-chapter rational web serial is incredible" or "listen to this obscure Finnish band" or "I know this game isn't on Steam but it's totally worth breaking region-lock to play"...Openness to Experience doesn't mean much when one is time-poor. Community is a big part of Good Content.)
My opinion on homicide rates is that the primary factor determining them is mental illness and substance use/abuse. This is because murder is generally irrational, so I don't expect murderers to respond mechanistically to incentives.
It's no secret that the lockdown period has strained the mental health of most people, especially people who are more dependent on extended family and neighborhood socializing.
On the other hand, many "nerds"—introverts, people with higher education, those of us more interested in things and thoughts than social dynamics—have actually benefited from social distancing.
Causality could easily go the other direction, too. Like how schizophrenic people very frequently smoke and undiagnosed ADHD people are usually addicted to some sort of stimulant because those do something to relieve their symptoms, just not as well as prescription medication. Pot can have positive mental health effects, at least in the short term, so it might start as self-medication for existing problems and end up as a habit.
I'm afraid that is complete nonsense. It is the same argument that tobacco companies used to use when they were denying that their products caused lung cancer. They claimed that the correlation was due to cancer sufferers relieving their symptoms with a nice soothing cigarette. It was absurd and malevolent then and it is absurd and malevolent now.
I consider monied interests denying the harms that their product causes in order to make a business off the misery of others for as long as possible to be malevolent and the ability for people to fall for the same silly arguments yet again to be absurd.
The causative link between cannabis use (particularly in adolescents) and later mental illness is very well established, and not even particularly surprising. The only remaining question is whether the mental disorders it induces are also a predictor for insane violence.
I don't think this position is as absurd as you seem to. We live in a world where all good things are correlated with each other (good mental health, good socioeconomic status, low consumption of most drugs, better executive function, larger social networks, lifespan, IQ, healthspan, etc.) and all bad things are mostly correlated with each other (different mental illnesses, physical illnesses, drug abuse (of virtually any sort), death by accident/homicide, plus low amounts of all the forgoing positive traits.)
This makes initial correlations between use of any drug and mental illness unsurprising, and to be expected even if there's no causal link in either direction. Naturally, people researching this aren't idiots and know that, so they attempt to correct for other risk factors. But correcting for confounders is notoriously fraught, and often fails to eliminate all relevant confounders. After all, you can only correct for things you have already measured and put in your spreadsheet. Your measurements are rarely both precise and of the variables you want to measure; you often have to rely on proxies. And you will often simply not measure relevant confounders (since the Giant Ball Of Mutually Correlated Bad Shit are ALL potentially confounding, and many are hard to measure.) Plus, the more stuff you correct for, the bigger N you need for meaningful results. Getting causation from observational data is a nearly insurmountable problem unless your effect sizes are DRAMATIC and your sample sizes are huge. Like, say, lung cancer and tobacco...
(This is why nobody really cares about observational studies on medications, for instance. No matter how careful the researchers are, it's difficult to get strong enough data to even suggest causation to a savvy analyst. They always rely on RCTs, because randomization automatically handles this problem.)
And it's worth noting that even on tobacco, we have a case where causation is almost certainly not entirely tobacco->associated disease: Schizophrenia. There's an overview in a Scott essay from a few years ago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoking-gun/), but I'll summarize.
1.) Schizophrenics smoke a ridiculous amount. 60-80% of them smoke, and on average they spend 27% of their income on tobacco.
2.) Will-be schizophrenics smoke a lot more than normal people, long before they have the disease.
3.) Tobacco use predicts early onset and severity of schizophrenic symptoms.
Given just that info, of course, any reasonable person will suspect that tobacco might just be causing Schizophrenia. Of course, I'm bringing it up as a counter example because there's more data (see also this review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604123/)
4.) Several of the genes linked to schizophrenia are on nicotine receptors.
5.) These genes are one of the strongest genetic predictors for nicotine dependence, independent of schizophrenia
6.) Schizophrenia is treated by nicotine.
7.) Schizophrenics generally have pre-clinical symptoms long before diagnosis.
8.) Identical twins where one smokes have a much smaller increased risk of schizophrenia than fraternal twins, siblings, or the general public, so there is a significant genetic component to the link between tobacco and schizophrenia
It's messy, as all research dives are, and it's not possible to rule out that tobacco causally increases risk for schizophrenia to some extent, but we know at this point that most of the correlation is due to common genetic factors and reverse causation (that it treats schizophrenic symptoms.)
Back to Cannabis, the consensus opinion does seem to be that it can causally increase risk of psychosis, especially schizophrenia. But a) the evidence discussed in the review I read at least was observational with notable limitations which leave some room for doubt and b) we know that reverse cauation and confounded causation via things like common genetic risk factors are actual reasons for these correlations in some cases in the real world.
Given that, I still think it's excessively harsh to be calling other commenters here absurd (and/or malicious). Especially without bringing evidence. (And I'm not really impressed with a google scholar search result...)
Could Ukraine plausibly hire mercenaries to help fight the war against Russia? (With Western financial backing, obviously). I think former American or European soldiers would probably be a bridge too far, but to my understanding many of the mercenaries these days are demobilized infantry from high-conflict countries- Colombia and other places in South America, parts of Africa, etc.
I doubt mercenaries would engage in high-casualty conflict on the front lines (what’s the point of a paycheck if you’re dead?), but could they plausibly help guard the rear, help with logistics, drive trucks, transport the wounded, patrol areas further from the hot zones, etc.- freeing up more native Ukrainian infantry? Former soldiers from say Colombia would come with combat experience- a quick boot camp to get them used to the Ukrainian system, maybe, and then deployment to guarding the western provinces. Could this possibly work at all?
Russia uses their mercenaries (Wagner goup) specifically to do the most dangerous combat work, rather succesfully. But for Ukraine, their problem is that they are in a bit of financial crisis right now. If they would get sufficient Western financial backing, sure, why not
There have been foreign "volunteers" fighting with the government forces in the East of the country against the Russian-speaking separatists for years. This is a 2020 study of links between far-right groups in the US and Ukraine, produced by the Combating Terrorism centre at West Point.
At the outbreak of the war, Zelensky set up an "International Legion" of foreign volunteers, who are apparently incorporated into the UA and paid the same as Ukrainian soldiers, thus avoiding being caught by the definition of mercenaries in the Convention. How many there are is anyone's guess - numbers between 15-20,000 have been quoted but no-one really knows. There has been a lot of press coverage, and some analysis, but I haven't seen any authoritative studies dating from after about April. It seems, though, that most of the recent recruits are motivated less by ideology and extremism, and more by the traditional ideas of danger, excitement and often nostalgia for the military life.
They have no military utility: their importance to Zelensky is as a political symbol of the internationalisation of the war and the anti-Russian struggle, and as a way of continuing to drum up western political support. The fighting is taking place in the East of the country, and requires soldiers who are trained and expert in high-intensity armoured warfare, which very few of these volunteers are. Even if they were, the equipment for them to use is lacking, and few of them will have trained on what does exist. There are a variety of YouTube videos on line showing interviews with some of the volunteers. I haven't watched them all, but most of them express shock at finding out what modern high-intensity warfare is actually like. It's worth pointing out that virtually none of those who have gone to Ukraine will ever have trained for, much less experienced, such operations.
The UA itself has large reserves, and virtually the whole population now seems to have been mobilised. But numbers aren't the problem. If they are to avoid defeat, they need years to train personnel, form units, procure equipment and exercise them together. That's not going to happen.
To my understanding, the volunteers that don't have past combat experience are worthless to Ukraine, and are being actively discouraged.
I think numbers partially are the problem, and that using mercenaries for the less dangerous work or logistical work might help free up some more infantry for the front lines. I could certainly be wrong
Why aren't they getting more of these? Looks like only 90 M777s have been sent so far, and a single M777 costs around $1 million. Why not crank out another thousand?
Because the $1000000 will be what they tell their accountants. The real cost comes from setting up a production line capable of making x howitzers per year. Expanding capacity will be slow and/or expensive.
Ammunition also costs something. Plus the question is how much ammunition the US actually has to spare. Reportedly, the Russians are firing 60000 shells per day (or were, until recently), Ukrainians about a tenth of that.
These are insane numbers that burn through the stockpiles quickly. Except that Russia has shitloads of these shells, more than any other country in the world (including the US). And Ukraine has an additional problem of using several different types of artillery right now with different spare parts and ammunition (their old soviet gear, running out slowly and a lot of ad hoc stuff from the west for which everything has to be shipped from the US).
It is run by an Australian guy who apparently works in logistics, maybe military logistics even (he is quite vague about it) and who makes fascinating 1-hour long powerpoint presentations (no, really!) about the war in Ukraine and related topics, mostly from the perspective of logistics, procurement and military economics.
He talks a lot about exactly these issues (see the linked video for example).
Eyeballing the production numbers, it would probably take three years to "crank out another thousand" M777s, if we ran the production line around the clock. Or we could set up new production lines, but they wouldn't come on-line until next year at least. This isn't World War II, where you could call Singer and say "enough with the sewing machines, we need machine guns" and they'd be making machine guns two months later. This is the era of Just In Time, and now the era of Supply Chain Disruption.
Nobody can build guns, or ammunition, as fast as this war is consuming them. If we decided to do the World War II thing and go full industrial mobilization, tell the American people that there won't be any new cars in 2023, we could meet the Ukrainian demand for guns and ammunition sometime in 2023. But that will be too late.
Until then, it's almost entirely a matter of how much we have in our inventory *right now*, that we can give to Ukraine. And I don't think the United States has a thousand M777s. All of NATO combined probably does, but they're not going to give all of them to Ukraine.
As Tibor notes, that applies to ammunition as well. All NATO combined might have a thousand M777s, but I'm pretty sure all NATO combined is looking at the war in Ukraine and saying "Holy crap did we underestimate how fast a thousand guns will run through ammunition in a real war", And again, we're not going to produce enough to matter this year. How many shells do we have right now, and how many do we think we can spare.
I think that right now it is also ammunition. And there are logistical problems with that, yes. One big problem for Ukraine right now is how diverse their equipment is becoming. They still have a lot of soviet era equipment, but the ammunition is running low and most of production is in ... Russia.
And then they have modern NATO equipment from several countries, a few Ceasars here, a few Panzerhaubitzen there, a couple of HIMARS (though they are very resourceful with them) etc etc.
The former Warsaw pact NATO members have donated most of their Soviet-era equipment (which Ukrainians are trained to use and use the same ammunition and parts they are used to) to Ukraine already. Poland donated a couple of hundred tanks to Ukraine, the Czech republic slightly fewer but still a lot, if US gave them as much as Latvia did (relative to the size of the economy), Ukraine would become a second military power in the world overnight...
But yeah, it is not like they need people. They need ammunition, mostly artillery, and spare parts. And ideally a unified, consistent and systematic approach from the West. Most of the support is very ad-hoc and chaotic. Poland said they were thinking about buying 400 HIMARS from the US. If the US sent a fourth of that number (with enough high quality ammunition) to Ukraine right now that could significantly affect the course of the battle. But instead it is 4 pieces here, 8 pieces there , ...
Slight tangent: I was using the term "artillery" as a reference to the combination of munitions and platforms. I don't know that a tube by itself could qualify as "precision".
Perhaps not how grunts think of it, but what would this old zoomie know?
As you note, there aren't many mercenaries in the world today who would be any use in high-intensity conflict. Basically the Wagner Group, the French Foreign Legion, and that's about it.
As for less casualty-intensive operations in the rear, Ukraine has about a million reservists with recent military training and/or experience, plus probably four or five million more military-age males and martially inclined females who know how to drive trucks, dig trenches, etc, etc. All of whom speak Ukrainian, and all of whom have more skin in the game than any mercenary.
Shortage of raw manpower isn't a problem for Ukraine. This war is going to be decided by who first runs out of guns, runs out of shells, or runs out of men willing to endure being shelled for months on end. Mercenaries can only theoretically help with the last of those, and again, those aren't the kind of mercenaries you can presently buy.
John, do you know Perun? He's an Australian youtuber who talks a lot about military economics, procurement and logistics in context of the Ukraine war. It seems something right down your alley. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
Could someone explain to me how electric lines of force are related to the generation of light? I read a passage about this in an old encyclopedia, but don't understand it. This Youtube video seems to do a good job explaining what electric lines of force are.
I didn't watch the video. To get light (Electro-magnetic radiation) you need the full set of Maxwell's equations. In short, changing electric fields make magnetic fields and changing magnetic fields make electric fields, and there is a long range (far field) solution to the equations that we call light or E-M radiation.
As the video says, "electric field lines" are a visualization tool, not a real thing. The real thing is the electric field, which is roughly the idea that all points in space have a vector attached to them. These vectors attached to each point in space *are* the electric field, and the field both affects and is affected by charged particles.
In addition to the electric field, there is another field (meaning that all points in space have (at least) two vectors attached to them; one being the magnetic field vector, and one being the electric field vector. Once again, the magnetic field is both affects and is affected by charged particles.
Maxwell's Equations provide the full classical (classical meaning pre-quantum mechanics) specification of how the electrical and magnetic fields work. They show that not only do charged particles affect the electric field, but also that each field affects the other. The way they affect each other is subtle, but can roughly be summarized by: Where the electric field is changing, the magnetic field gets stronger, and where the magnetic field is changing, the electric field gets stronger in the opposite direction.
This means that even in the absence of any charged particles, you can set up a system of rising and falling electric field strength, which causes a rising and falling of magnetic field strength, which then causes the electric field strength to rise and fall.... and creates a self sustaining "wave" in the electric and magnetic fields.
That wave is light. (Of course, quantum mechanics makes this slightly more complicated, but it's beyond the scope of my knowledge to explain that compactly.)
I'm looking for a certain type of [offline] community/group/club, and so far my search (in NYC) has not been too successful. The attributes that matter to me:
1. Cross-disciplinary membership and discussion topics; Not skewed towards one particular industry or area (e.g. IT or entrepreneurship)
2. Deeper than surface level (what you can read in the mass media) discussions. Ideally for each topic discussed there would be an expert/professional in the room. A good indication of success here is the ability of the group to engage in "deep tech" discussions.
3. Stable core of participants and at least somewhat regular events (bi-weekly would be ideal frequency).
(4. Not an ethnic or expat-only group)
Some examples and non-examples:
- A specific topic- or interest-based community would violate (1). Also, in my experience, if the event is discoverable publicly (e.g. on Meetup), it gets overrun by hustlers.
- An activity group (sports, wine tasting, tabletop games) would violate (2) - there are rarely any deep discussions not centered on the activity currently performed
- LessWrong and satellites get very close, but they tend to be disproportionately attended by the IT crowd.
- University alumni clubs are an example of a community that satisfies all criteria. Unfortunately, they are not accessible to the outsiders
I would appreciate any leads! At this point in my search I'm fairly certain that the right way is to build such a community from scratch, but learning about the existing groups has been an amazing source of inspiration and best practices.
Fraternal orders (e.g., Elks, Oddfellows)? I know nothing about them but they sound kinda similar to alumni clubs, though they probably draw from a different demographic.
Maybe you can start one by yourself? Retracing the steps to do so might help to find out the other people (if any) trying to do the same thing!
From your description, the key ingredients to maintain a group you desire are recruitment that avoids attracting negative contributors ("hustlers") and retaining enough positive contributors.
For recruitment, here are some ideas:
1. Direct invitation of interesting people from your social sphere. If your social sphere doesn't include enough such people, some work is required to extend it.
1b. If you manage to have a sizeable group that sounds prestigious enough, one can have some luck inviting random academics, mid-tier novelists, etc to give presentations or engage in debates. Full professors are often too busy, but I have known some early career researchers (and some professors emeritus) who are extremely eager to jump at every opportunity to speak about their work.
2. Too discoverable public invitations won't work according to your description., but maybe you can devise a filter:
2a. Post-recruitment filter: Have public events, groups as a "farm league", and a bit more exclusive private group.
2b. Pre-recruitment filter: Put notices in places where several people may see them but not too many people, targeting right demographics. Or make the group membership to sound high-effort.
For retaining people, you need fun activities and positive self-reinforcing feedback.
I recommend Joel Spolsky (VBA for Excel, StackExchange) at JoelonSoftware.com. I would start with the "Tech Lead" articles, but there's very little that's not worth reading in the archives.
For a "best entry point", the set of articles on management methods, which starts here:
Not in programming but I personally found great value in the Situational Leadership Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory) of coaching team members based on their proficiency/confidence on assigned tasks; and the One Minute Manager book provides a lot of the other tools I got through some People Management training courses I took when I was working in a large multinational.
I'm in the same position as you. It would be helpful to understand precisely what you're finding hard (is it "I miss writing code", "I find it hard to give guidance without taking the time to get a full picture of the problem space", "I struggle with organising others", or something else?)
That said, a couple of things that have helped me:
- You need to know what the high-level vision is for the next couple of quarters for the things you own. This is absolutely critical for making prioritisation decisions - you can still do things that don't make progress towards those goals, but it should ideally be a minority of the work.
- Staying close enough to the work to be useful but not so close that you become a bottleneck, is hard. If you have strong engineers on your team, give them the big long-running projects: it develops talent on your team, and avoids you taking on work that then blocks if you get pulled away. Stay close to these projects by doing reviews and taking scheduled time for the group to bring up and discuss any engineering decisions they want input on (Devs generally love a soapbox for their design choices, and you can also use this to monitor quality as well as keep context).
- If you find organisation hard, either delegate some of the meeting/planning admin to someone on your team who likes that stuff, or just take the time to build a system you can stick to. You can't let the team be chaotic; it feels awful for everyone involved and is squarely your responsibility to fix.
- Give praise publicly and often; give critical feedback on private (and be specific about examples and what your expects are).
- Trust your gut to spot badness, but not to diagnose it. If something feels bad to you, it probably is – but you'll often be wrong about the cause (it's common to blame problems on your abilities when the cause is a systemic issue you could tackle another way; it's common to say the team is underresourced when in fact you just lack focus and need to work on clarifying responsibilities and prioritisation).
Some books I found helpful during that transition:
* Will Larson, "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management"
* Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, "Team Geek"
* Michael Watkins, "The First 90 Days"
* [maybe not right away] Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"
More importantly, find some good mentorship! This is very hard to find at most companies, especially in startups. Look for managers who you find to be effective. Ideally someone internal, because what eng management means varies a lot company to company. An external point of view is useful too, but not as urgent.
Lastly, I'd encourage you to adjust how you assess who you think is an effective manager. As an IC, you have a certain view ("from below"). But in the org chart, managers work along three axes: up, across, and down. Some managers who are poor at managing down—for example, disliked by their team—are great at managing across and up. Early in my management career, this helped me understand why the sets "managers get promotions/more scope" and "managers I think are good" weren't as overlapping as I'd expected.
I think the "BLM protests" explanation for the homicide spike is part of the reason, but only part of the reason. I think there are a few factors that weren't explained in that post.
1) The original post assumes that the BLM protests/riots were the only thing going on at that time. However, that was also the end of the covid lockdowns, and generally seemed to be the signal we were "done" with the lockdown part of covid. For some reason, covid seemed to drive people crazy and made them more prone to sudden overwhelming rage. Call it "covid psychosis." (Not sure if this was only in the US or around the world; it seems to be more in the US). Anecdotally, many of the murders seem to be caused by sheer rage or revenge, not gang-related crimes or for any rational reason.
This would also explain the rural murder spike, since rural communities would most likely not change due to anger over police violence, but would be susceptible to post-lockdown rage.
2) Obviously there are many confounding variables in understanding crime rates (see "Freakonomics" for more on that). One clue that a variable might be more correlational than causal is if the trend starts too early. In this case, the murder spike starts right at the BLM protests; in fact, since the stats aren't exact, it might have even started before the protests. That suggests there might be another factor (for example, covid psychosis) causing the spike.
3) Police certainly pulled back in 2020, but I have not seen much written about the original reason they stopped enforcing laws that year--fear of covid. From what I remember around that time, police basically stopped doing anything around March 2020, so whatever missing enforcement there was started before the BLM protests.
I believe in a lot of places, there was a big push to let people out of jail, because everyone could see that packed jails were a great place to have a huge covid wave and a bunch of people dying. And then I think trials and hearings and such were delayed for quite awhile, and I think (someone correct me) became less efficient when they were available because of covid protocols.
Can you explain why 1 and 3 wouldn't cause the same spike in other countries?
The alternative explanations for the homicide spike are things that seem like they should cause a spike in most western countries. But Scott's article shows this is a US only phenomenon.
I can't explain why other countries weren't affected by 1 & 3. But while it does seem clear that generally there was a lot of anger and rage after the lockdowns in the US (and there is a lot of stuff about people behaving badly and irrationally; Ask A Manager had an interesting article and comment thread about that recently, obviously not in reference to murders), and that doesn't seem to have been the case elsewhere. I don't know why.
Similarly, public servants in the US seem to have decided to use covid as a break from doing their jobs. Teachers were generally resistant to go back to teaching (which didn't happen elsewhere), cops seem to have pulled way back (not sure if that happened elsewhere), even in politics, elected officials would flout covid guidelines and no one seemed to care, while trying that over in the UK brought down Boris Johnson's leadership.
Ah a reader of that blog. I still read it out of habit but usually reading the comments generally ruins my mood and makes me want to come here where people are sane.
I definitely agree that there is a mood of flouting rules, maybe cynicism or fatalism? Everyone's driving more aggressively, I think there's a collective feeling that things like the homeless encampments and crime spikes, especially shoplifting, are largely ok or inevitable or something, strong sentiments against employers, landowners, the wealthy, etc.
The Impact Markets discussion reminds me that I'm curious about the effectiveness of prospective prizes. It seems to me that offering a prospective prize (prizes for past accomplishment is a whole nother thing) is a way of shuffling the costs off to the people who are competing for the prize, and also, that it might be hard to come up with a truly useful target., though it's probably easily for math than for anything else.
Has there been work done on the value of prizes to lead to further accomplishment? Have robot fighting competitions led to anything more than entertainment?
Offering a prize instead of direct compensation for work done for your benefit (something like the Netflix prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize) essentially boils down to an all-pay auction: the participants bid with their "effort", and the highest "effort" wins the prize.
Does anyone else wonder why people treat IQ scores like penis size? Every person on here I've seen refer to their own intelligence has never put themselves below the 90th percentile for IQ, which means either most of this community is in the top 10% for IQ, most people are lying about their IQ scores, or that most people do not have an accurate gauge of their own IQ and inflate it ("smarter than average" effect).
Whilst I have no doubt there are very smart people in this community, it seems highly improbable to me that everyone who's happened to comment is in the top 10% for IQ. So the question is, why are many people in this community so insecure about their smarts?
Yeah, personally I view someone on the Internet bragging about their IQ the way I view someone someone who brags about their SAT score even after graduating college - even if they're telling the truth, it makes me assume they haven't actually accomplished anything in the real world that would be more worth bragging about than a score on a test.
Yeah, if the most impressive intellectual thing you've done is do well on a test or get through a hard program of schooling, that's useful information about your raw ability, but not much about what you're going to do with it. If I really believe you have a +5 sigma intelligence, and then you tell me you're a warehouse manager or something, I'm going to wonder why you didn't do any more with the amazing gifts you received.
But the question is why? For instance, I bet if one were to ask everyone in this community if they would rather be more physically attractive or have 5 extra IQ points, most would choose the latter. Assuming you agree, why would people prefer this even though physical attractiveness is probably more useful in most circumstances?
Gosh, no, I'd take the former. There are diminishing returns on IQ, like anything else, and I know what my weak areas are. You gotta get way out into tail territory before speccing super-hard into narrow strengths allows a build to overcome its glaring flaws. I've got these brains that I mostly don't utilize effectively, cause that's just how my revealed preferences ended up...the big hurdles in my life wouldn't be overcome by 5 more Dakka points. (Why would anyone want an N + 5 IQ cashier over an N IQ cashier, past a certain base ability floor?) But being physically attractive enough to actually have a social life at all, nevermind a romantic one - Hell. Fucking. Yes. That is not one of the genetic lotteries I won, and it's caused way more pain and regret in my life than "not being smart enough".
(Fair disclaimer though, girls get judged way more harshly on their physical attractiveness than guys. Perhaps in a setting where I'd even get to "second base" to show off my smarts at all, I'd value IQ more. But that rarely happens in daily life. No one knows how smart you are if you're not attractive enough to be worth talking to anyway.)
Personally, I do a lot of work (when I'm not goofing off on the internet) that requires somewhere close to 100% of my brainpower. I'd probably be able to do more cool stuff if I were a little smarter. Whereas, looking better would be nice, but I'm already married and despite being middle-aged, I'm not looking for a trophy wife/midlife crisis blonde girlfriend, so looking better probably wouldn't help my life much.
Speaking as someone who definitely never went through exactly this phase in high school, I think insecurity is the right diagnosis, but I don't think it's that people are "insecure about their smarts" so much as it is that they have some confidence in their smarts but are insecure about literally everything else, so they cling to the idea of themselves as a "smart person" as the one stable brick they can build an identity around.
That belief is reinforced for me by the way I see a lot of this "do you know how high my IQ is?" stuff seeming to peak in the teens/early twenties, and the bulk of people doing it aging out of it as they get a little bit more personal confidence. Not many people over 50 have told me about their IQ, and those who have... kinda didn't have much else to brag about.
To indulge myself in a hobby-horse for a minute, when you examine things, it's not really all that special to be smart. I mean, if by "smart" someone means the raw cognitive computing power of their brain, it's no more praiseworthy than being unusually tall, or unusually athletic, or any number of the other bell curves a person could be born on the high end of. Unless something is done with that computing power, it's kind of a meaningless distinction. But those empty distinctions can matter a lot when you're young and trying to figure out who you are in the world, so I guess the best thing the rest of us can do is shrug and try to be patient, just as others were patient with us before.
I remember this coming up on the survey results a while back. It also included the option to report SAT and ACT scores. I haven't taken either test (went to community college and transferred to state college instead), and so didn't respond anything. Probably people are more likely to remember their results if they were on the high side, and more likely to take all the tests if they were trying to get into high end programs, pushing the average up.
I don't think it's even common for people to take IQ tests, but one reason you might is GATE programs in elementary schools. Given I was in such a program, I guess that means I tested as having a high IQ at some point, I believe 1st grade, but I absolutely do not remember what the score was. Charitably, though, anyone who would remember such a thing likely scored high, and as far as I understand, childhood scores tend to be higher than adult scores, so those two factors would account for at least a little bit of inflation in who talks about it versus real population averages.
This feels similar to the observation that just about anyone who talks about their arm size seems to universally have at least 17 inches. Maybe they're lying, but if not, I'm sure the only people who bother to measure their arm size at all are people who are specifically doing a lot of training to make their arms bigger.
I can't recall seeing people discussing their IQ. I wouldn't be surprised if the top 10% in IQ is vastly overrepresented. You are in a very weird niche area of interest that appeals to smart "nerds." Also, people who are far above average are more likely to have taken IQ tests. In the United States, many students enter gifted programs if they test 2+ SD over the average and they likely are only going to be tested if they are obviously above average. Also, mentally challenged people are probably tested more. I don't think this indicates insecurity necessarily, but I don't know where you are seeing people discussing this so I can't be sure. Do you have any links?
I think you may be underestimating how stupid the bottom 90% are. To me it seems perfectly plausible that most people who enjoy the types of discussions that take place here would be in the top 10%.
Since it seems that no one else in this thread is gonna be the first to post their intellectual junk measurement: 2230 SAT, 130 WAIS-AV. Definitely not a Wobegon.
I grew up as a gifted child enrolled in GATE programs, AP classes, and so on. Going Somewhere, High Expectations, First Generation To Attend College...the works. Thankfully, the territory after K-12 quickly disabused my I'm-So-Smart map, so I no longer even jokingly entertain thoughts of being Hot Shit mentally. (How could I, I dropped out of college thrice and now work at a grocery store for <$35k/yr.) Especially once discovering SSC/ACX - I feel like the class idiot here more often than not, sometimes able to Guess The Teacher's Password, but definitely in need of years of remedial and summer school to dream of catching up. I have no idea how many SDs the median commenter here really is, but even if yall aren't actually in the 90th IQ percentile, it sure *seems* that way from a relative rube like me.
To answer the direct question: Meritocratic belief in Just-World Fallacy. This community rewards smarts, legible via IQ. The real world rewards seeming smart, legible via credentialism. Given the clearly-advertised incentives, Goodharting becomes a rational move. When in ACX, do as the ACXers do. (Of course, lotsa people here are happy to point to their Scroll of Bona Fides too, as the situation warrants. Quite a lot more of those here than in the general population.)
Or to put it differently: for all the high-minded discussion [R|r]ationalists generate, we punch way below our weight class in terms of actually changing the territory. Sometimes that's just hard to accept. The Adults in the Room *ought* to be the ones running the show...right? I notice this is rarely the case though. So commenting skillfully on ACX is, like, a way to cosplay being Kind Of A Big Deal. (To be clear, that's a valuable service and Scott's serving a real market demand here. I am, after all, a happy paying customer.)
-> " So commenting skillfully on ACX is, like, a way to cosplay being Kind Of A Big Deal."
Jesus that cut deeper than it should have for a lot of people, including me.
-> " This community rewards smarts, legible via IQ. The real world rewards seeming smart, legible via credentialism."
This kind of thing leads me to believe it's a kind of middle-ground, with some lying and some truth. It seems like smarter people probably place a higher value on IQ/smarts than others, and because of that value they're more likely to lie about it to signal more credibility (or to avoid losing credibility).
Also, in the spirit of hypocrisy, I thought I'd say 2230 on the SAT is pretty impressive even if you studied for it, as is 130 on the WAIS? Do you not get bored being a cashier?
Also, I wouldn't consider dropping out as a sign you aren't hot-shit mentally, especially if you're first generation. I have a friend who dropped out of sixth form (high-school in the United States) because he wanted more freedom and was bored. Eventually, he changed his mind and is now studying mathematics at Cambridge. Chris Langan, the man with one of the highest IQ's on record, also dropped out of college to go live on a farm.
Finally, there's a big difference between not being "hot-shit" at a standard college and not being "hot-shit" at an elite university. At elite universities you are dealing with kids who are not only insanely smart but also insanely motivated, so if you don't have both you're likely to feel left behind.
Unstudied unexaminations, just like most of my life. Taken while pretty depressed and off meds. I only got beaten for highest SAT by a single person, who answered *one* more question correctly to get 2240, despite costly intensive prep and tutoring. It's meaningless but I'm still slightly smugly proud of this.
>Do you not get bored being a cashier?
I've written entire huge long essay-comments on this elsewhere, but basically: only if there's nothing for me to do. The one thing I can't stand is a vaccum, those slow days where I'm just standing at a register and no customers are to be found, or business is so slow we end up going home early. For pretty much anything else, I try to seek Pareto frontiers in all I do. You've probably never seen anyone check and bag as fast as I can; I've specifically been practicing ambidexterity just for this purpose. Same thing with other job duties, I'm big on Efficiency and Organization and Process in a way that's super atypical for this level of low-skill blue-collar work. It's not out of slavish devotion to the company, which I now regard with thinly veiled contempt; it's to keep my brain intellectually engaged in an otherwise mostly-physical job.
(If you ever walk by a grocery store after-hours and the speakers are blasting Tchaikovsky, that's me.)
>At elite universities you are dealing with kids who are not only insanely smart but also insanely motivated, so if you don't have both you're likely to feel left behind.
Boom, got it in one. College for me was mostly a hells a convenient ticket to move far, far away from Bumfuck, Nowhereville and Find Myself. The education wasn't the point at all. So I ended up flying cross-country to enroll in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is just a few hairs shy of Ivy League. (Didn't actually apply to Yale etc, back then I did not understand how free ride scholarships correlated with being poor and quota-filling.) Suddenly I was not only no longer the biggest fish in the small pond, but I was swimming with sharks who'd totally eat me for lunch if it'd increase their midterm grade. I only lasted a single semester before crashing and burning. "Outsider Drops Out And Returns Home In Disgrace" is apparently a *very* typical story there. I can fake intellectualism decently well, but not Earnest Striving.
Anyone who finds the discussions here comprehensible probably is in at least the top 10% of intelligence. OTOH, knowing how to use it is as important as having a big one. (Brain, I mean.)
Seems to me that the conclusion "many people are insecure about their smarts" is not justified by the known facts. (Though it may be true for different reasons, of course.)
ACX often discusses complicated and abstract topics, from the perspective of a person with average intelligence. It's not just whether an average person would be able to read the arguments and understand them (I believe they would, with some guidance, partiallly), but whether they would *enjoy* reading this kind of content, given so many alternatives available on the internet. So the people who stay here are quite heavily selected for intelligence, in my opinion.
Also, top 10% is not too high bar. It still means 10000 people out of a city with population 100000. Anecdotally, Mensa is top 2%, and I have been at both Mensa meetups and ACX meetups, and they seemed at least comparable. This is not a fair comparison, because at ACX meetups people have more topics in common, so the debates can be better and deeper. I am just saying that a bar "top 10%" does not seem implausible to me at all. (To make your own conclusion, try comparing e.g. ACX open threads with r/mensa.)
So I believe that at least 95% of ACX readers are in the top 10% of intelligence; and at least 90% of them are in the top 2%. Many people never did an IQ test, so they don't know. So if there are people who are NOT in the top 10% and they know it... they either missed that debate, or decided not to participate (or lied), but I believe that most people just truthfully reported the facts. What else would you want them to do?
The only way to know for sure would be to organize an ACX meetup where the participants would be ambushed by a team of psychologists and administered IQ tests. Not sure if the IRB would approve.
Could we work in some behaviorists using electric shocks to encourage right answers, and social psychologists trying to replicate the Milgram experiments by having some of the subjects administer the shocks? Let's work in as much science as we can, here!
Web forums existed years before the term "Web 2.0" was ever coined, so I feel like it should require more than just being able to post things to a website for it to count.
The introduction of AJAX feels like a natural dividing line to me - the division between a website being a succession of static pages where each request gets you a new page, versus a website being an application where you can manipulate data without needing to load a new page each time.
Unsurprisingly, basically there's a lot of "man for the categories" in the comments where people insist that there's an objective, cut-and-dry way to define genre boundaries while the actual results show that that's largely not the case.
Relatedly, a friend recently asked me to define "[Western] animation" vs "Japanimation" (e.g. anime), and...I found myself spinning categorical wheels in exactly the same way. They did indeed bring up the topic of isekai anime. Makes me wonder if my friend's the OP, heh. Or it's just a line of questioning more than one person happened to have in temporally similar instances.
What's funny is that I never really noticed what made anime anime until I found out that Miyazaki gets mad if you call his movies "anime." He says they're animation, not anime. So I dug deeper and found out that the difference he's alluding to is in terms of animation style. Namely, Japan can pump out so many anime shows because the anime style has developed over time to be visually pleasing while also cheap to animate.
Watch a scene from a Ghibli movie and take note of how much stuff is moving. Movement=money when it comes to animation. The more things move or change the more labor hours are required to animate it. So every time something is changing in a scene its costing money. If you can repeat the same animation over and over it saves money, because you just have to animate it once. So, for example, a shot of stalks of grass bending back and forth in the breeze would be somewhat expensive, but if you loop the animation then you can spread that cost over a larger amount of runtime, saving money. In a Ghibli movie, just like in a classic 2D Disney animated movie, lots of things are moving and changing all the time.
Now pick just about any anime and give it the same test. How much stuff is moving? How many animations are looped? When I actually looked I was really surprised by how little actually moves in most anime. For most scenes people are either standing perfectly still, or moving with a looped walking animation. There are a lot of shots where nothing is moving at all, except perhaps for a little vibration on the highlights of their eyes. In most anime there are only one or two short scenes where a lot of movement is happening, usually a battle of some kind. Even then you usually get very intense scenes with a lot of movement, interspersed with scenes with almost no movement, like a close in shot of one of the fighter's faces as he thinks about what's happening. You can tell they're saving their animation budget for where they need it, and animating as little as possible otherwise.
Once you start looking for it, it's obvious. What's more, its ingenious. Early anime like Speed Racer was obviously made on the cheap, but as the craft and tools of anime have advanced they now hide their cheap nature remarkedly well. Ever wonder why animes have such impressive and dynamic theme song sequences? They spend a lot of money on the theme song so that every episode features some impressive animation, which makes the rest of the show look less cheap and lifeless. Ever notice that some animes that feature dynamic monster fights or the like use a CGI model for the monster instead of 2D animation? That's because animating an object rotating can be extremely expensive, especially if that object has a lot of sticking out parts. Pick up an action figure or something and rotate it in front of you: the objects silhouette changes completely with every movement, which means if you 2D animate it you have to draw something brand new with every frame. If you have a CGI model you can just rotate it without having to redraw anything. After I realized that I started noticing it in other places, like a car chase where the cars were both CGI: making them CGI allowed them to have the cars do tight turns around corners and the like without breaking the bank. People often praise anime for being cerebral and slow paced, allowing characters room to have long conversations and moments of silence. This is a good feature, but it comes directly from trying to save money: two people having a conversation only requires you to animate their mouths and the occasional small movement. When a character is thinking about something, you don't even need to animate the mouth! That's why Goku and Freeza spent so many episodes talking instead of fighting: talking is cheaper.
So, funnily enough, the difference between animation and anime is expense: anime is "limited animation". Obviously there's other obvious differences in art style and plot, but that's the biggest one. Once you notice it you can't unsee it.
Interesting! Maybe I enjoy anime more than non-anime because it's sorta similar to a book in presentation. A relatively still canvas that steps back and gives space for ideas to grow, with few distractions. (It's only in anime that I sometimes slow down to literal frame-by-frame to catch subtly important details, which would get totally lost in the shuffle if more stuff moved.) The "fancy OP" thing is also now glaringly obvious that you point it out, heh. I'd always wonder, "why aren't these insanely cool scenes actually in the show?" Because they'd cost too much!
Also I now have an Adult Argument to give to anyone who criticizes anime as "childish". Which it still totally often is, in fairness, but it's Feature Not Bug. This woulda made me sound So Smart a decade ago, lol.
Cost cutting *is* very central to the DNA of anime - and probably always will be, given how much content is produced how quickly. ... but with apologies to Miyazaki, I don't think you can really draw a dividing line between "anime" and "animation" based on quality.
To me, Miyazaki saying his films aren't "anime", they're "animation" reads the exact same as Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren't "cinema": there's some hypothetical bar of quality that separates the "low quality" stuff from the "high quality" stuff, (and you can always tell the high quality category because it has the foreign name).
Whether you agree or not that it's valuable to try to partition a medium like this, (personally, I think it tends to be more about class preferences) it's certainly not a unique phenomenon to anime.
And, no disrespect to Miyazaki's talents, but if his films used less of the cost-cutting techniques of traditional anime... well, I suspect that's mostly because they're films, not some higher standard of artistic integrity or something. Anime films basically always have more budget relative to their runtime.
EDIT: I guess I should hedge a little and say there is more than just "high quality" filtering - I know Miyazaki has some specific complaints about some of the stereotypical animisms and its catering to "otaku tastes" in general: (that probably makes the comparison to Martin Scorsese's remarks *stronger* as I imagine he has similar thoughts with how Marvel caters to comic fans).
... but valid criticisms of the state of anime or not, I don't think that really justifies trying to make a categorical divide.
I don't care for harem anime and generally try to avoid it, but it seems pretty clear cut to me. A male protagonist finds himself surrounded by a variety of women, often living together or otherwise in close proximity, and with various sexually charged scenarios. I'm sure there are lots of edge cases (are two women a "harem"? or what if there are more than one guy, etc.), but it seems clear cut to me.
Without having to wade into that discussion, is the distinction just a variety of edge cases or more substantive?
> is the distinction just a variety of edge cases or more substantive?
There's definitely some haggling over edge cases, but for me it's more substantive. Like, yeah, as you mentioned, the number (3 seems to be the general consensus minimum: I don't see anything high on the list that's just a love-triangle), and proximity and how "sexually charged it is" are all variables.
It seems the most common definition is "anything where three or more characters have interest in one character is a harem"... and that's a fairly easy definition to mechanically apply, but I'm not sure it actually matches what most people mean by "harem". It can lead to conclusions like "Harry Potter is a harem anime". (Minus the obvious)
Like, my favorite show on the list is Steins;Gate - which is a show about a bunch of nerds who accidentally make a time machine out of a microwave: overall it's mostly a sci-fi thriller... but a number of the characters have interest in the main lead. Does that make it a "harem anime"? To an extent, I guess, but I don't think it's exactly what most people have in mind with the term.
I actually like it more as a sliding scale: "Steins;Gate is 20% harem anime" is a lot more something I can get behind than trying to have a boolean classification for everything.
Well, the VN is much more a harem story than the anime...
I'd dispute that specific example, since there seems an important difference between romantic/sexual interest vs "gratitude for being A Great Friend", but I suppose that's falling into the very trap laid by such a question in the first place. The Categories Were Made For Anime...
Yeah, I considered mentioning the VN aspect of it, as I feel that it just complicates it more. If there's multiple branching versions of the story and in different branches the protagonist ends up with different a difference character, but he never dates more than one at the same time, does that make it less or more of a harem?
In terms of the actual "mechanical" definition of a harem, it seems like less of a harem, but from a tone perspective it seems like more of a harem, due to the power dynamics where the player/protagonist essentially *chooses* which character to end up with.
(If your specific dispute is referring to Mayuri, I don't think you even necessarily need to count her: Kurisu, Ruka/Luka, and Faris are all pretty clearly interested in Okabe - and Maho if we count the sequel)
Well, I haven't rewatched in a long time, but my interpretation was that Christina is the canonical (show) love interest, Stardust Handshake is just a Best Friend + convenient plot device to add immediate moral weight to Doing the Right Thing, Shrine Maiden is in love with *the idea of* Okarin more than the actual man himself (wow, that was a weird arc to watch as an actual trans woman myself...#representation, sigh), and Feyris...is kind of like a Japanese Blance duBois? I think she's sincerely grateful to have "outside fandom" relationships with the Lab Members, but the fact her arc interacts essentially not at all with the Main Story seems to imply she's an afterthought at best. "Oh, crap, we left a loose thread Single Female available, better gin up something in her timeline..."
(I'd ship Shining Finger with Okarin though.)
Anyway, I read S;g as more of a scifi Shoujo Shit. Most harem animes don't stand out quite so explicitly as Clannad, but I think I need to see more of those overtones to lean towards that categorization. Like, I could see Code Geass or Gurren Lagann lumped in that bucket, despite (imo) equally small numbers of direct relationships. Whereas another heavy Key Studios hitter, Angel Beats!, would not be. Despite also taking place in high school. It's more a...vibe...than a direct mechanical classification, really. (I'd probably classify CHAOS;head as a harem anime, except it's so fucked up that it kills the vibe...) Something like, are the interpersonal relationships centered/central to the story, or just genre-savvy set dressing incidental to the plot?
We've got the far right talking about a Jewish conspiracy to "replace" the "white race" with brown people, the median right-winger flying a "Fuck Biden and Fuck You for Voting for Him" flag on his pickup truck, the median young left-winger talking about how we're all going to die of climate change due to climate activists' laughably overstated histrionics*, and the far left talking about guillotining or firing squad-ing all rich people and landlords.
Certainly not a country singing kumbaya.
* if you live on the Ganges in Dhaka, sure, your odds of dying from climate catastrophes are high enough to worry. But no, upper-middle class child living in the suburbs of a major American city, you are not going to perish because the global mean temperature rises another 2 deg C. We should absolutely try to mitigate climate change because millions of people dying is bad, but the overreaction only breeds complacency.
in terms of increasingly viewing the opposition as literally standing in the way of you living to old age (and thus potentially increasing acceptance of violence to achieve political goals)? not really.
I'm a SocDem, obviously I agree more with the left-winger side. But the climate doomerism is absolutely contributing to the fractured mental health of my generation. Imagine being 14 years old and the entire activist class you're surrounded by in your liberal bubble is telling you the planet will be unlivable by 2050. Certainly can't help the social media-induced depression and anxiety!
Has anyone informed Greta, First of Her Name, Thunberg yet? Or the Sunshine Movement?
I'm sympathetic to the youthful idealism around climate - it's nice someone has energy and hope for the fight yet! - yet every time I hear some young progressive proudly (or despairingly) claiming they won't, can't, have kids Because Climate...that makes me die a little inside. Talk about a self-own. Meanwhile all the skeptics and deniers are gonna keep on having kids, as well as billions of people not living in First World bubbles rich enough to ponder generational abstinence. What happens next is...yeah. Not great, for anyone!
I don't think that "national mood" is a good explanation, because there's no obvious immediate causal link between "national mood" and actual murders.
I'm not saying there can't be a link between "national mood" and murder rates, I'm just saying that I think there should be some kind of intermediate cause in there somewhere.
Actual murders are very specific events that occur for very specific reasons. There's probably a more-or-less constant background of "random" murders due to psychotic episodes, jilted lovers, and the like. On top of that you've got a lot of murders related to gangs or organised crime; these seem to be much more variable in time and place and depend on things like relationships between gangs, how many other gang-related murders have happened recently, how likely they are to get away with it, and so forth.
I feel like we could get a lot closer to an explanation if we knew _who_ these extra people getting murdered are.
"I feel like we could get a lot closer to an explanation if we knew _who_ these extra people getting murdered are."
Agreed! And for solved murders, it would be helpful to break them down by primary motive, and see how the incremental murders in the change since e.g. Jan 2020 are being motivated.
I get that "mood" isn't really a quantifiable thing, but do you have a citation for the median-ness of the postulated non-far right-winger? The other medians seem, on average, to be more or less accurate.
I guess it's a knee-jerk skepticism, since the media trying to convince me I'm going to die of climate change is also the same media trying to convince me about imminent fascist takeover by deplorables (or whatever). Gell-Mann amnesia and all that.
Only 21% of the GOP respondents said Biden legitimately won the election. And perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic to conflate that with the truck flag, but even here where I live (southern NJ), if I drive around for 10 minutes I *will* see at least one Fuck Biden flag and plenty of Trump flags, either at home flagpoles or flying from passing pickup trucks.
That's a particularly bad polling question, and even 31% of independents say that Biden's win was not "legitimate." I would love to see the same question for Trump in 2016. Prediction - Democrats have very high numbers for "Trump not legitimate."
First of all, I think we need a definition of "legitimate" that separates out "won through voting fraud" and "the media reporting on Trump/Biden was skewed" or some other lesser reaction. This response conflates them all in a way that seems designed to inflate the numbers saying illegitimate.
Yeah, Tito's is pretty good if you're into that kind of thing. Tito is actually WASP-y upper class guy who started a micro-distillery and then grew it. He gives money to the causes you'd expect from that background. The company also throws some really good public events if you're ever in Texas.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
Meanwhile, here is a rather good interview with Chomsky (as well as a load of other discussions) about Large Language Models and what they can tell us about intelligence.
A decade ago it was an active debate, nowadays I rarely hear about it any more. I don't think there has been enough additional data collected in the last ten years to convince skeptics they were wrong; if anything the evidence seems to be accumulating on the "no big deal" side as various predictions of doom have failed to bear out.
I'm as skeptical about climate change as I always have been. Which is to say, I'm pretty sure that anthropogenic global warming is real but also that the consensus prediction of its magnitude and effects are substantially overstated. But I'm sick and tired of talking about it to mostly-deaf ears, so you probably won't hear me say so unless you specifically ask (and in a context where I'm confident you'll listen and the bystanders won't mob me, e.g. here).
The same from the left really. No one is gonna change their mind, Democrats don't really wanna fight for it in the USA, even Europe mostly does feel good stuff and "accords". We can't even provide free lunch in America much less fight climate change. I'm moderately skeptical of the timeline, and pretty pro nuclear, for a social democrat, and I'm not sure what the point is about "screaming into the abyss" about climate change. We're either screwed or not and western oligarchy much less eastern autocracy isn't gonna do anything meaningful on it. Better to fight on more basic issues.
Performative climate concern from the center right mainstream has faded now that Trump is out. No one cares what social democrats or anyone farther on the axis thinks. Why would conservatives/libertarians waste time arguing about something that no one in power cares about.
That's what believing but not being willing to fight for it look like. There's intra-party consensus that it's happening and We Should Do Something, but not so much intra-party consensus that they are willing to lose elections by trying to push big legible items.
So instead you get a lot of mostly illegible regulatory state actions + throwing climate-whatever into any spending bill that looks like it has a chance of passing.
Build Back Better is an interesting case of this. Of the $3.5 trillion over 10 years spending pile, somewhere between $500 billion and $750 billion was climate change related. So Democrats cared enough to give it ~20% of their "total spending power", but didn't care enough to trim the $3.5 trillion down to $1.7 trillion like Manchin wanted.*
*Manchin had very early on made it clear that he was open to climate spending (with kickbacks for West Virginia), PROVIDED that the total was only $1.7 trillion. Schumer signed an agreement with him about that spending limit but then sat on it for months, and after the spending limit came out the House Democrats produced a bill that spent $1.7 trillion over 5 years instead of $3.5 trillion over 10 years and Joe Manchin said "no" and the House Democrats said "we aren't changing it again AGAIN" and Manchin said "fine" and then inflation worries started coming in and people got distracted and now it looks like even $1.7 trillion is off the table BUT there might be something to do with drug pricing passed this year maybe.
Very much agree. But anyone self-describing as at all sceptical about climate change will have been called a denier too many times to mention. On wikipedia one is considered a euphemism for the other. I even remember Scott saying that for climate scepticism to be true, a whole branch of science would have to be overturned - that-s certainly not what I mean by climate scepticism.
In fact, if you merely quote WG1 of the IPCC you'll sound, to most people, like a hard-core sceptic.
Agreed. Plus if you mention any degree of skepticism at all around almost any people, you get called the worst kind of horrible things, and everything thinks you must be completely stupid to be a "denier".
To the extent there is a public "debate", I think it is now over what to actually do (not do) policy-wise. Progressives apparently do not want a direct carbon tax (I'm basing this on evidence such as the referendum on gas taxes which failed in liberal WA), but prefer indirect, non-revenue generating taxation caused by the cancelling of oil & gas property lease auctions and shutting down pipelines.
I'm agnostic on how big of a problem climate change might be but believe strongly that if we're going to address the issue, let's do it through promoting nuclear power and other low-carbon technologies not by restricting the supply of cheap energy (EDIT: Well, except for coal, but only because coal releases worse things than CO2).
In other words, it has become a pragmatic fight rather than a theoretical one.
Realistically, anything you do that substantially lowers quality of living for your citizens is super hard to sustain in a democracy. At current technology levels, lowering CO2 emissions substantially seems to also lower quality of living (via raising prices for energy and thus for lots and lots of products), which is usually an election-loser, and unpopular even in places where there's not an election in a couple years to worry about.
This implies to me that if we come up with useful responses to AGW, they will mostly be technology that lets you emit way less CO2 at the same quality of life (think LED bulbs), some kind of very efficient carbon sequestration, or geoengineering. Convincing billions of people to take a 5-10% hit on their quality of life in order to help out future generations is something you can definitely do on an individual level, but it's almost impossible to do as a collective action that has to be coordinated by nearly the whole world to be effective.
[eta] Low-cost nuclear plants (if they could be built without crippling regulation and decades of NIMBY wars), fusion plants if we could get them working, highly efficient energy storage that let you make much more use of renewables, a really high-efficiency continent-wide grid to move the electricity from where the wind is blowing now to where the AC needs to be on now, electric cars that are fun consumer products instead of geeky tech toys--that's the kind of stuff we need, IMO. Elon Musk has done more for addressing AGW than the whole last 30 years of politicians who are Deeply Concerned about AGW.
Germany gets to pin the blame on a foreign enemy, Russia (and never mind that they could have been way way better prepared for this and it didn't take an oracle to realise Russia was a menace - maybe it was arguable 15 years ago but 2014 should have made it obvious to everyone). I do think that meaningfully changes the electoral situation compared to a change motivated by ideals
As far as pragmatic actions go - it is still present.
Greenpeace activists do not treat global warming as a real danger, as they keep sabotaging nuclear power.
People are not willing to take any actions more than symbolic.
What happens is limited almost entirely to what people wanted anyway or irrelevant or chaotic protests without any plan. Or Sri Lanka style thoughtless actions which make everything worse.
Perhaps, but the person who did that might not be "not thinking cancer is a real danger", they're just misinformed on the cost-benefit ratio of chemotherapy.
Yes, they do not consider global warming as something much more important than other dangers.
Then either global warming is not a big problem according to them, or they are detached from reality if they consider contamination caused by nuclear power as a bigger problem.
My irl friend group was recently non-ironically expressing great pleasure in the Sri Lankan collapse, as some sort of rise-up-against-false-consciousness liberation movement of The People, blah, blah. Failed States: the future of freedom!
And that's why I don't express climate skepticism around them anymore. When Bad Things are Actually Good, Good Things are Actually Bad is sure to follow. It just seems difficult for many liberals and leftists to parse that one can believe AGW is a real thing, without swallowing the entire climate hook, like, and sinker. Which is tragic, cause these are exactly the sorts of people who might actually do anything at all to advance solutions, so they're the *most* valuable people I want to save from climate nihilism. (Not to imply that those on the right uniformly deny AGW, but it's definitely off-brand. Higher-hanging fruit, there., persuasion-wise)
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm having a hard time parsing your IRL friend group's reaction to Sri Lanka. The language you use is left-coded, but the sentiment seems like anarchy-coded eschatology? Do they have reactions to other world events that would inform my mental model? And do you think their mindset is common, or is it more localized to them?
Well, Not All Friends, I'm lazy enough with obfuscating doxxable details here that I don't wanna create too much rope to hang them with.
But yes, many openly identify as socialist, and I mean full-on Marxist rather than "everyone's a socialist in college" or "Universal Healthcare, Said The Cactus Person" style woo. Big on BLM, Boo Capitalism, Republicans Evil Fascists, Equity Equity Equity, Stop Killing Us, I Just Want Equal Rights For Everyone, Affirmative Action (Merit Is ___ist), pronouns, transgender maximalism (self-interested, I don't think I actually have any cishet friends anymore), pro-choice, Kill The Landlords, veganism or at least "carnist" guilt, No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism, Structural _____, Privilege, Russia Bad, Antivaxx Evil, Covid Proves Western Decadence, blockading Pride parades to protest corporatism. The usual SJW grab bag, in other words. I can't pass their Ideological Turing Test myself, but reactions to world events would be about what you'd expect from the Tumblr-academic crowd, most times.
Anarchy is more the influence of one particular antifa friend who's very in the Burn It All Down camp in addition to all those typical SJW grievances. That person's been out protesting on the streets more than once, and likes to talk admiringly of Black Bloc tactics and so on. Almost none of the rest of us are that far left, but it's definitely a meme that's raised the non-statist waterline within friend group. There was some rather uncritical approval of looting during summer 2020, for example, even though I'm sure most of them marched in the actual Mostly Peaceful Protests for Noble Reasons.
Eh, I think typical SJW wokeist stuff is common in the Bay Area writ large, but the particular degree of anarchy blackpill is probably a very localized thing. I meet many people who've been to protests...but there's protests, and there's Protests. They show up with cute signs and pink pussy hats, not all-black outfits with combat boots and medical supplies. Just not that many of the latter type, so I doubt it's that widespread an influence (though it's a loud one: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/antifa-is-a-fatherless-child )
Okay, I think I get the gist now. Thank you for taking the time to deliver it.
Your "burn it all down" fellow reminds me of That Guy in my more righty acquaintances group - the sort who's full ancap, press the button, do it tomorrow, damn the piles of skulls - or the sort who's full social conservative, ban homosexual behavior now, US is a Christian nation, deport all atheists - the sort I wouldn't want to be personally associated with, but to the extent I'm on the right, then I know that guy gets lumped with me more than your guy does.
Which just makes me really dislike lumping everyone in binary categories like that. Which in turn compels me to avoid falling into that trap, and weirdly, that means if I'm wearing my righty hat and I see someone with their lefty hat, yes, but right now they're complaining about how they get judged by the weakest of their weakmen, I can't help but feel more camaraderie with that guy than with quite a few "fellow righties", you know?
Likewise when I'm wearing my lefty hat, libertarian hat, etc.
Overall, I keep noticing examples of taking any one popular ideology a few steps too far, and the people over there who notice it too, and it makes me prefer to just better understand where everyone *actually* stands. So gists like this help.
~All girls and femmes, actually (it's the Bay Area, there are no cishet males here) - but yes, that's a good point. Weak Men Are Superweapons, and simultaneously, those who believe strongly in weakmen...think they're strongmen. This is often baffling from an outside view. I'd like to think I can easily poke holes in my own beliefs and ideologies, cop to which arguments are powerful and which are tenuous. Perhaps it's easier cause I'm never surrounded by like-minded folks, so I'm used to being on the defensive instead of protected by Ingroup. (It frustrates me that the Bay Area is one hotspot of Rationalism, yet there are none to be found in my small corner of it.) But then I also can't easily protest said views, despite realizing it's important to do so, because it just turns into a motte and bailey. The end result is just not talking about politics at all, mostly.
If I had to locate myself via political sympathy rather than actual beliefs, I guess I'd be center-right with a side helping of libertarian. So to a modern progressive, I'm some kind of nutjob reactionary right-wing extremist, not much distinguishable from a culty Bible thumper. Which is confusing cause, like many that used to be on the center-left ("classic liberal", "conservative Democrat/liberal Republican"), I feel like I haven't shifted all that much, but the political rug got pulled left from under me. So the new bedfellows have been somewhat strange, but at least I'm not contorting myself more than 1 standard deviation to understand their views. Whereas flowing left with the tide puts me firmly in Alien Ideas territory. At least the right-hatters don't Well Acktually(tm) me about the Important Distinction Beteen Liberals And Leftists. Only one side loves throwing up Semantic Stopsigns as Trivial Inconveniences to conversation, I feel. Beware.
Guilt By Association always seems like a disingenuous attack. I'm not friends with my friends cause I share their (to me, often wacko, and vice versa for them) beliefs, I'm friends cause that's who's available to play boardgames and otherwise geek out with. You know, that good old classic bipartisan friendship that I'm told doesn't exist anymore by Robert Putnam and the like. Plus there's every social incentive in the world to double down on performing one's ideology a few steps too far...the inevitable consequence of a culture where "moderate" has become a dirty slur. RINOs on one end, Progressive Mobilization Delusion on the other. Whenever someone, say, the MSM proclaims "there are no swing voters/silent majority", I'm like...oh, so what you really mean is, you don't wanna put any effort into persuading me. That's cool. I suppose impure votes count for 3/5ths at the ballot box, or whatever.
My biggest concern with most of the climate alarmism over the last 20 years (about as long ago as I can remember following the conversation) is that the solutions to climate change seem mostly indistinguishable from what environmentalists have been seeking since long before. Many of the stances that environmentalists held pre-climate-debate (deforestation, pollution, shutting down the oil industry) align pretty well with reducing carbon emissions and other effects of the climate debate, but not all of them.
Two thing stand out very clearly to me, which reduce my alarm and increase my skepticism about climate environmentalists. 1) No matter how egregious the worry about carbon emissions, nuclear power is treated as if it's worse, even though it's the only known and operable solution to baseload power that doesn't require carbon and is scalable to our needs. 2) Almost no one is advocating that we abandon low lying areas near the ocean, or moving to places further from the equator. I would expect Al Gore (or name the rich environmentalist of your choice) to be buying lots of land in Siberia or central Canada. Instead, land and housing prices on the coasts seem to be increasing as much as ever, and interior land in cooler climates not going up much or at all still.
These things don't mean that climate change isn't real, but it certainly reflects on the timelines we are most likely to hear about and the overall scope of severity that may happen. Al Gore made specific predictions of doom within 10 years, 16 years ago. He was neither the first, nor the last, to make such predictions. Instead, we seem to be seeing slow and fairly steady changes in temperature (on the scale of alarmists at least), and the economics continue to reflect a lack of panic.
>is that the solutions to climate change seem mostly indistinguishable from what environmentalists have been seeking since long before.
Meanwhile the solution to any economic crisis is what conservatives always wanted, etc. ,etc.
>Almost no one is advocating that we abandon low lying areas near the ocean, or moving to places further from the equator. I would expect Al Gore (or name the rich environmentalist of your choice) to be buying lots of land in Siberia or central Canada.
No disagreement that conservatives also find a way to shoehorn in their preferred policies anywhere they can. Unless you're arguing that Republicans are economically correct when they always want to lower taxes (or pick your economic issue of choice), then you seem to be agreeing that environmentalists lose credibility when seeking the same solutions to a wide variety of problems.
Capitalists do a great job of pricing in expected changes. Prices in low-lying areas should be going down, and inland/cooler places should be more expensive. That we're really not seeing that is at least a strong indicator that the majority of people don't believe the climate is changing as quickly or harmfully as predicted.
Has anyone hear read the "48 Laws of Power"? Reading it has made me realize that I was missing a lot of insight into how people really are, that may be obvious to most other folks.
I've read it. It's pretty entertaining and well-written. As the years have passed, and I have gained more and more experience dealing with people, I don't think anything in it has struck me as being horribly incorrect.
It was long ago. I vaguely remember that each chapter separately made sense (and provided anecdotal evidence), but there was no coherent overall strategy because advice from one chapter directly contradicted advice from another chapter.
For example, you should trust your old friends and mistrust the opportunists who only joined you after you got powerful because they will just as easily betray you (says chapter X). Except, your old friends have actually always resented you and schemed to destroy you, but your former enemy converted to an ally will be super-loyal to you because he cannot take your friendship for granted (says chapter Y, both providing a historical example of a fool who did/didn't trust his childhood friend and therefore got murdered).
In a shocking and unforseeable development, it turns out that people care a lot about things that affect their personal well-being, and will pretty reliably fight to prevent things that will make them worse off.
YIMBY is a play on NIMBY, as I'm sure you're aware. The number of NIMBY's with actual back yards is probably orders-of-magnitude greater than that of YIMBY's. As a rhetorical position, YIMBY makes sense to counter NIMBY. As you are alluding to, it's probably not a strong reflection of reality on the ground.
Likely the same as ones described as NIMBYs and blocking project on land they own.
Both are used to describe not literal backyards, but metaphorical ones (nearby projects on their street/in their city, nuclear power plant in their country etc).
I recently had some thoughts about a possible connection between cognitive dissonance and autism. I'm posting here in the hope that someone more knowledgeable on the subject will give it a quick read and tell me "That's not how it works" or "You might actually be on the right track." I'm a layperson (as my notes to self clearly show) and can't really justify spending time studying psychology to find out if my arguments are fundamentally flawed.
I imagine a difference in strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance (or relatedly, dealing with uncertainty) could be due to a neurological difference. As for comorbidities/co-conditions in general, I find chronic stress to be a huge confounding factor, especially if it starts at an early age.
Also, thanks for the recommendation. Predictive processing is certainly interesting and though I have some notes already on how to incorporate its concepts and terminology, I'll have to read up on it more to have anything worth sharing.
As you note, I think defining terms more carefully than the relative catch-all of "cognitive dissonance" might help narrow things down; CD is more symptomatic rather than causative.
Thanks for the links, especially the first one. I have a rough draft of how it all fits into the predictive processing framework and I think you're right that terms/concepts other than cognitive dissonance and rationalization are a better fit.
On a recent post, there was some discussion about how present-day Socialist parties in Europe have historically socialist roots but in countries such as France where those parties have been popular the ideology has been Socially Democratic for a long time now. The name Socialist persists but it's just a brand name at this point, much like the NBA team The Lakers is a brand name that no longer has anything to do with The Land of 1000 Lakes.
My question here is about Germany's Christian-Democrats (CDU). I can't tell from reading Wikipedia to what extent they still consider themselves to be a Christian party. I've long assumed that, like the Socialist Party in France, it's just a brand name that nobody wants to change, but maybe my assumptions are wrong.
So, for those who know: Is the CDU still considered to be a Christian party?
Yes. The CSU, their Bavarian partner is actually US level right wing. Wanted to put crosses and other stuff in all the public schools. The CDU is slightly more moderate but very much a religious party. Key to remember not to compare this stuff to American evangelicals, though.
I just saw this in their last pre-election manifesto and it relates to your question. (Deepl-Translation:) We work to ensure that we remain a society that sticks together: Young and old, strong and weak. Our Christian view of humanity provides us with a compass for this: individual freedom and community responsibility are not opposites, but rather they are mutually dependent. With the principles of the social market economy, we ensure that everyone in our country receives good medical and nursing care and that everyone who needs help is helped. We ensure a reliable pension and a new start for private pension provision so that it is more worthwhile.
I don't think they are as right-wing ... but maybe depends on what you're looking at.
As for the cross, they were in public schools since pre-historic times (or so it feels), and then some parents complained and filed for court, because they thought their kid would be traumatized. And then the whole debate started.
I quite strongly disagree. There are a few (very few) ethical political points where CDU positions are influenced by christian ethics, for example abortion laws.
But in >95% of all political affairs, the CDU is simply a moderately (especially from US perspective) conservative party. Meaning that they are economy-friendly, and that they are somewhat averse against cultural change (e.g., immigration, gay rights). But this is the same stuff that you find in any conservative party, also in totally non-religious eastern European countries.
The CSU, the "sister party" of CDU, is a slightly more extreme version of CDU, but in no way comparable to US right wing level. And christianity is not core program of the party. Yes, there was the debate about crosses in public schools four years ago, but it's indicative that we need to go years back to find an example which touches on christianity. This was much more signalling against cultural change than it was about christianity per se.
An example is the CVP (Christian-democratic people's party) in Switzerland, which just merged with another party and got rid of the Christian branding entirely.
There is a joke that the CSU is neither Christian, nor social, and it's also not a union.
That's only an anecdote, not an answer ... I'm happy to write a bit more, just passing by for a min now ... in the meantime: how would you operationalize 'Christian party'? I mean, how would you recognize or what would you expect/ not expect to decide whether it's Christian or not?
Well, first of all, I'd expect all the members to identify as Christian, if that is the identity of the party. In other words, a Jewish person couldn't join the party and openly identify as having a Jewish faith instead of a Christian one. Is that the case?
a) do they explicitely state they believe in the Christian God, refer to being a 'Christian party' in their basic documents
b) do they recur to Christian values (explicitely) when explaining their policies and how much are their policies influenced (also inexplicitely) by Christian values (b-2)
c) what do they suggest with regard to our two official churches and general different religions in Germany and EU
d) what about symbolic actions, do they pray in public, swear to the bible, etc
e) how much are their policies actually aligned with what Christianity teaches.
I won't go into e), and for a)-d), I think it'd be relevant to look at the Grundsatzprogramm (basic document with values, changed rarely) and the most current pre-election programme, and into how they actually behave in everyday politics. A lot of this is obviously very contextual on culture, state-church relations. That's the basic set-up, I will look it up. Sorry if you were expecting a short answer?
"a Jewish person couldn't join the party and openly identify as having a Jewish faith instead of a Christian one". Oh, that sort a provision would be very illegal in Germany.
Not directly relevant, but note that the Christian Democrat International, of which the CDU is a member, changed its name to Centrist Democrat International in 2001. I believe that this was after admitting a bunch of non-Christian parties, such as from Albania and Algeria.
First, some background (until +++): there is no state religion in Germany, however Germany is not secular in a way France is for example. There is a lot of cooperation among the state and two official Churches, which is the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church. Among others, when being employed you tick a box whether you belong to one or the other (or not), and if yes, the state deducts a special tax from your salary and passes it on to the Catholic or Protestant Church. That's the Churches' main source of income. Also, religion is a regular subject in school, two hours per week from first to last grade. Mostly you have the choice of catholic or protestant or joining the ethics class instead. In some places they offer Jewish classes, and from what I read there are experiments with Buddist and Muslim. There are also evangelicals and free churches, which are more rare and don't profit from the special status of the two offical Churches.
Most of our holidays are Christian holidays. Oh, and we don't work on Sundays. I mean, shops are not allowed to open on Sundays, if they don't have special permit (which is granted only in exceptional cases).
Freedom of religion is a fundamental value, safeguarded in the Grundgesetz (Basic Law, which is almost like a Constitution except for legal nitpick).
Parties are member organizations, CDU and CSU together have around 530 000 members. It's the party who decides who runs for chancellor. Currently there are six parties represented in the German Bundestag, and coalition governments are the norm.
Parties develop 'Grundsatzprogramme' – general statements on values, principles and policy – and update them every other decade or sth. like this (I will call it statement of principles). Parties also write 'Wahlprogramme' (pre-election plan, published before each election, laying out what they are planning to do, if elected). If you want to know a party's position on a certain topic, it makes sense to look to those two documents + look at the actual behaviour. The CDU/CSU have a statement of principles from 2007, and are currently working on a new one to be presented in the next two years. There is however already an initial document on values, confirmed just recently. Which is convenient, because it's recent and it's short. I'll call it value statement. ;) So much for the intro.
+++
I doubt it would be legal to build a party that allows only members of a certain faith, it would likely contradict the Basic Law. I'm also pretty sure a 'Volkspartei' (traditionally a big party which tries to integrate opinions from broader parts of society) wouldn't want to do this anyway.
Now, for the other criteria (as in my comment below):
a) I didn't find any direct mentioning of 'we are a Christian party' or 'we believe in …' neither in the value statement nor in the pre-election plan. Not too surprising – but I guess it was different somewhen, certainly in the last century. I found 'responsibility before God and man' used in one place.
b) Explicit recurrance to christian values.
Yes, this can be found. Quite clearly and explicitely in the value statement, usually in the form of a committment to a 'christliches Menschenbild' (a christian understanding/ imagine of man / humankind). It's also prominently on their webpage, when they talk about their statement of principles.
In addition, they use the word 'creation' when talking about protection of the natural environment. It doesn't mean in any way that they reject evolution – most Christians I know would believe that evolution was a way to implement creation. But it's nevertheless a clear reference to Christianity – the Green Party for example would never use the term 'creation' as an underpinning for their environmental policies.
In the pre-election plan, we find the reference to christian values again – though only six times (when counting explicit usage of the word 'christian') in a 140 pages document. Typically again it's used as the Christian view of humanity or humankind (importantly, it's actually referring explicitely to the individuum, not humanity as a whole. I'll stick with deepl's translation for the moment. Maybe it'd be closer to the original to say: christian image of man ?).
It's linked to protection of creation / environment, supporting families, supporting workers rights, and generally social cohesion.
Some examples:
'Unser christliches Menschenbild verpflichtet uns zur Bewahrung der Schöpfung' (Our Christian view of humankind obligates us to care for and preserve creation.) or: We work to ensure that we remain a society that sticks together: Young and old, strong and weak. Our Christian view of humankind provides us with a compass for this: individual freedom and community responsibility are not opposites, but rather they are mutually dependent.
From their value statement:
II. What defines us.
(1) The Christian understanding of man
The basis of Christian Democratic politics is the Christian understanding of the human being. At the center is the inviolable dignity of the human being. Every human being is wanted, unique, unavailable and should live freely and self-determined. This view of humanity guides our political actions. At the same time, the CDU is committed to the traditions of the Enlightenment and is open to all people who - regardless of their own religious convictions - share its fundamental values. (deepl-translation,not corrected for detail).
I do not recall any CDU/CSU politician to explitely argue for any kind of policy because of Christian values. Okay, my exposition to such events may be limited. The last time I recall anybody explicitely say sth. Christian-leaning it was Merkel in a town-hall meeting right after the refugee 'crisis', when somebody explained how they were afraid of christian faith in Germany being overrun by Islam. She replied with sth. like: well, if people are so much into Christianity, maybe go to Church a bit more or participate in Church life, churches are often empty and could make use of more engagement to strenghten Christianity.
I will put some longer citations together in the next comment. And I won't go in depth into b-2 now, because time. The (relatively) short value statement is actually an interesting read if you want to understand German politics (and how much or not they are similar to US conservatives). I guess deepl will manage a solid translation.
A very general disclaimer especially for the pre-election plan is: don't read it literally. It contains a lot of information, *if* you know the context and the debates of the date. But it's very often very much reading between the lines (which is easy when you understand the code). Also, often it's referring to 10 different goals everybody would support – and you need to understand the emphasis and the in between-the-lines to figure out, which of those has a priority for shaping everyday politics. This doesn't make those plans worthless – pre-election plans differ a lot between the different parties. Just a warning not to rest your interpretation on a literal or too selective reading of single sentences.
c) From their pre-election plan: they want to keep religion classes in school, free Sundays, religious holidays and they acknowlegde the importance of the churches. They explicitely commit to freedom of religion. No surprises here. As a side-note, they emphasise, that imams preaching and teaching in Germany should be able to speak German, to enable better integration.
'We consider it a valuable part of our Basic Law that it separates state and religion on the one hand and on the other hand allows religion to enrich our society.' (Pre-election plan).
d) Without cross-checking the details: finishing an oath for office with 'so help me God' is pretty normal, it's rather an active act not to do it. Beeing married in a Christian church is normal, and just living with your partner has also been normalized enough (the first one might give a few extrapoints within CDU/CSU membership); attending an important Christian service or a Christian funeral is also normal. Praying in public is very much not what you would do, and referencing God in your policies is also very much what you wouldn't do. I think this holds true for all parties. Being religious or not is pretty much seen as being everybodies private business. I might not have paid too much attention to it, but I think the open committment of CDU/CSU to Christianity in public speeches is very limited. You telling your party buddies that you just attended a Sundays Catholic service could easily raise eyebrows among Green Party members in Berlin, and would get a different reaction among CSU members in Bavaria.
e) There are certain policies, that are mentioned as being build on christian values (protecting the environment, workers rights, social cohesion). Despite this, CDU/CSU are not the parties which supports those issues the most. Rather on the contrary – the greens typically would be the most prominent in protection of the environment and the social democrats are known for emphasising workers rights and social cohesion. The CDU/CSU would be strongest in wanting to support traditional family roles and strongest in supporting the above described role of churches, religious holidays. On a broader note, if Christianity emphasises 'love thy next as you love yourself' one could question, whether the policies of CDU/CSU are more altruistically oriented than those of other German parties. I would say they aren't … but I also pre-comitted to not go too deep into exploring that question.
Now, of course I'm curious whether you think all that together qualifies for being 'a Christian party' or not.
Also, if you read that far, would you care for giving me some info that you did so, please? Either a comment – one word is enough – or a like (as there is no dislike, which I'm kind of happy about). I'm totally ignorant to which extend longer texts in the comments on topics beyond the mainstream interests are being read, and you'd help me to find out.
I struggled to find good translations for Menschenbild, Wahlprogramm, Grundsatzprogramm und I cheated a bit around Grundwertecharta. If you have any recommendations on any of those, I'd be happy to know.
Substack has started adding paragraphs to their RSS feeds in the format of "XYZ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber." The paragraphs aren't differentiated by being block quotes or italics or anything, so I end up breaking my reading flow as I fail to notice them until I'm already halfway across. I find it more than a bit annoying because I'm already a paid subscriber (not that SS can tell from the RSS feed).
Has anyone else seen this? If so, have you found any workarounds?
I remember reading once about the connection between autism and constipation, and those seemingly-unrelated concepts suddenly "clicked". Identical levels of digestive discomfort are apparently much more discomforting for some than others. Also ties into picky eating habits, once one starts to learn what goes down easily or not. (I think this helps explain my longstanding vegetable aversion. Every rational prior in my brain tells me they're good and it'll get easier if I eat lots all the time, but it's so hard to shake the "punishment" valence.)
Low-grade health issues in general strike me as a likely cause for a lot of misery. I managed to suffer through mild vitamin B12 deficiency, constipation and bloating for more than a decade. I only fixed it after the deficiency got bad enough to get diagnosed. (Turned out all of these things were related - SIBO - although I only found *that* out a few months ago!) In all this time, I got increasingly depressed and demotivated and was honestly struggling to realise *why*; I had a great life by all objective measures, so why was I struggling along? That my "minor" health issues were actually a much bigger deal than I subjectively thought they were didn't occur to me.
When I took B12 supplements, it took me about two weeks to swing from depressed to optimistic. Some of that was from the positive outlook, of course, but I noticed that it was actually *much harder* for me to have negative thoughts at all. Even when I went out of my way to criticise something, there wasn't anything that took me to a route of dejected depression. (Previously, even if I went out of my way to think positively about something, there was no route to a 'natural' feeling optimism; there was a rational one that filled the niche and was useful, but very different in feeling.) Which makes sense, obviously, my depression had physiological causes, but it was still *eerie* in a way that's honestly hard to convey to people who haven't had similar experiences. It felt like a complete personality transplant.
I'm confused by this line from point (3) of this post:
> the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today,
It's my understanding that the corporatization of the web is part of Web 2.0. Interactive sites used to be niche / community driven, and corporate-owned sites were read-only. Then Web 2.0 came, and large corporations began making mass-market websites that collected and published user-created content.
I also can't find any reference to BBS that isn't a recent blockchain / Web 3.0 thing.
How hard is it to assassinate high-ranking politicians? (a great question to post in a public discussion!)
I was thinking about the war in Ukraine and how a death of this or that individual could affect its outcome. Obviously, the Russians tried to kill Zelensky at the beginning of the invasion and failed. After a few more attempts, they gave up. Would say CIA do "better" or is it really that difficult?
I also noticed that at the beginning of the war, Zelensky regularly posted videos from his office (which you can probably find even on google maps) and while the "precision strikes" Russia boasts about are probably far from that precise, I guess that if you fired 10 kalibr rockets aimed at Zelensky's office at the time he is likely going to be recording those videos, there is a good chance one of them hits. So either the rockets are even less precise than I thought or the Russians decided at some point that killing Zelensky was no longer going to bring them any major advantage in the conflict (in fact, it could galvanize both the Western support and Ukraine resistance even further). Do you agree with that?
This also lead me to think about whether killing Putin would help. I guess that his assassination would be much harder to pull off and the risk in case of a failure and discovery (realistically, it would probably have be an attempt by the US or with a lot of US operational support) could spell a disaster for international politics (it would probably be even more dangerous than sending NATO navies to clear out the Black Sea of Russian presence...). So I guess those are good reasons not to attempt the assassination at all. But if you could guarantee success and a degree of deniability (which might be impossible), would it help? I guess it would paralyze the Russian state for a while which would help in the short therm, but it could lead to even more aggression and perhaps even an (open) mobilization in Russia. I guess that you'd have to kill the entire Russian high command which is probably impossible.
Then I thought about Lukashenko. He is extremely unpopular in Belarus and if he died, Belarus would have a revolution after which they would likely switch sides and openly support Ukraine in the conflict. Russia would be too busy to intervene and if the attempt did not succeed, the fallout would be much more limited. The army of Belarus is insignificant and unlikely to actually want to fight Ukrainians except for a few regime loyalists. At the same time, they keep a part of the Ukrainian military in check and they provide their territory and infrastructure to the Russians. They also have a sizeable stock of soviet-era artillery and tanks and if they flipped sides, gave/leased half of their military equipment to Ukraine and denied Russians in their territory this would be a significant blow to Putin (also the Russian economy would take a hit)...so it actually seems like quite a good idea to kill him (perhaps even through a local agent given how much people there actually hate Lukashenko) and I wonder if it could take place.
With Castro, you can see two ingredients that make assassinations hard to achieve: the desire to preserve plausible deniability ("It wasn't the CIA that killed him! It was the Mafia, or a jilted ex-lover," etc.), and the challenge of finding people willing to die in the attempt.
I think this last part is a big part of the reason why political assassinations are overwhelmingly domestic. You can't bribe someone to risk near-certain death. But there will always be some tiny number of people willing to risk near-certain death to kill a political leader, either for political, personal, or insane reasons. In theory, perhaps they could get in touch with foreign intelligence in pursuit of some sort of logistical support, but in practice I'm not aware of this ever happening. Either because that's not the way their minds are operating (who wants to die just to be remembered as a traitor and foreign stooge?), or because it's more likely to be counter-productive (what if I propose killing El Presidente to the CIA/KGB, and they decide to turn me in, or it puts me on the radar screen of local counter-intelligence/secret police?)
I think the closest thing to this is when leaders of a potential coup check in with the US to make sure it has their backing (e.g. Pinochet/Allende), but that's rather different from a classic assassination.
As Drethelin notes, killing well-protected VIPs is actually quite hard, even when you have a national intelligence service backing you up. Doubly so during an actual invasion, when they no longer have to make scheduled public appearances to maintain their poll ratings, because everybody knows they can't afford that risk. Hollywood makes this look easy, like it would almost always have succeeded if it weren't for one fortuitous bit of heroism. Castro is the reality.
And being able to use cruise missiles, doesn't necessarily change that. First off, Zelenskyy probably doesn't spend very much time in the place that you can google as being "his office". If he puts out videos from there for the appearance of normalcy, there's a good chance he was only in the office long enough to make that video, and not at any predictable time. Second, cruise missiles aren't bomb-teleporters. The Russian ones usually don't reach their targets, at least if the target is protected by something like the Ukrainian air defense system. And when they do, against a defended target there will be at least a minute or two of warning, and that's enough time for Zelenskyy's bodyguards to get him to the shelter in the basement.
Putin or Lukashenko's security may be less prepared for that sort of thing right now, but they're probably good enough for the more usual sort of assassination attempt. And the escalatory risks of a cruise missile attack on Moscow or Minsk, are nothing we want to deal with.
Does Lukashenko make public appearances? I mean it took one crazy guy with a rifle to kill Kennedy (or Shinzo Abe). Is it really that hard for a trained sniper with military-grade equipment? I guess it has to be, but I don't know why...although I guess it is not that difficult to understand. It is probably enough for the secret police to monitor all possible vantage points when someone like Lukashenko shows up in public.
American Presidents have the disadvantage, even post-Kennedy, of needing to make scheduled public appearances in bignum locations around the country. On the other hand, the Secret Service is numerous and capable. For a dictator like Putin or Lukashenko, they're probably making their scheduled appearances at a relatively limited number of sites in the capital (or, like Kim Jong-Un, making pop-up visits that aren't announced until after the fact). So identifying possible sniper nests and keeping them secure or at least surveilled becomes a more tractable problem.
Now that I think about it, that air defense system is due even more credit here. I don't know how important the Ukrainian Government Building is to the peace of mind of Ukrainians, but if it's anything like the White House, if someone could blow it up even without getting the Head of State, that'd still be a Big Deal.
And you can't hustle the UGB into its own basement when the early warning system lights up, which means that air defense system is doing its job really well, probably mostly in terms of deterrent. Obviously, any nation trying to pull that stunt also has the fear of international aftermath in addition to "can we even get past air defense", but some madman with a bomb and a scheme might not care.
The "nudge" hypothesis for behavior modification has gotten a lot of attention for a long time. It would be interesting, but not shocking, if the statistics didn't back it up.
I was under the impression that Cass/Sunstein style "nudges" were one part of social science that got buried by the Replication Crisis. Can't find any Serious rebuttals off the top of my head though, just a couple "ugh, *that* publication" links randomly cluttering up my browser history:
Regarding point 3, I've been reading and watching a lot on Web 0.1 and it's collection of decentralized dialup BBS's and their effects shaping modern social media. There is a book called The Modem World that discusses this specific topic or 300 hours of raw interviews that were recording 20 years ago detailing just about every aspect imaginable on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary)
It looks brilliant, but one thing that undercuts the realism is the fact that you shoot down several Japanese planes in the space of a few minutes. Even in a major air-to-air engagement like this, most fighter pilots would score no kills, the minority that did would only get one kill, and a pilot who scored two kills would have reason to brag among other pilots for the rest of his life.
This makes me wonder: I know there are fighter plane games that closely reproduce real-world physics and the performance characteristics of the real planes, so when mass air battles are held in those games, meant to simulate actual engagements like the Battle of Midway or one day during the Battle of Britain, do the loss/kill ratios ever approach what they actually were in real life? Or are the results always unrealistic, as they are in the clip?
I don't think there's really a market for a flight sim that could accurately simulate Midway in depth (everyone wants to be the guy who shoots down 50 Zeros in 5 minutes, no one wants to be the guy who spends an hour achieving zero kills and then gets taken out), but I think piloting would be your problem more so than physics, and that's true whether they're human or AI. And in truth, piloting probably had a lot to do with kill ratios in the Pacific, since Japan had real problems training replacement pilots.
Of course, there IS a market for games that can simulate WW2 battles accurately at a tactical or strategic level (without simulating physics), and the leader, for better or worse, is the Hearts of Iron games. I'm not a pro at HOI4 and haven't played for years, but my sense is that while the HOI games always have this mind-numbing level of detail in everything they simulate, it never results in realism and instead just opens up really weird ahistorical tactics that game the system, like having navies that consist entirely of submarines, or an air force that consists of nothing but fighters, or a really weird and ahistorical infantry division composition being totally dominant.
Though I think HOI4 might also be getting slowly better on this front, but my guess would be that if you tried your best to recreate an exact historical scenario, you still wouldn't get a realistic kill ratio in air battles.
War thunder is a free to play simulation game that includes airplanes, and in realistic (limited ammo in air, plausible physical constraints on the planes) 8v8 battles, you still often get top players with 2-3 kills each, but it's in part due to the fact that a portion of each team will probably be flying bombers/CAS/not give a fuck and are much less of a threat than regular fighters.
The fact that it's a video game, however, almost certainly rule out the "spend 1h doing nothing" scenario, since you don't log in to do nothing (while I'd very much be satisfied with living to see another empty day in a real war)
I spent hours and hours as a child drawing pictures of battered B-17s over target, dropping their bombload whilst shooting down three or four BF-109 Luftwaffe fighters at the same time.
Imagine my disappointment to read much later that in real life B-17s were credited with shooting down 23 fighters per 1000 missions.
It would have been more realistic to focus on B-29s over Japan; with their computer-aided remotely aimed gun turrets, it was not uncommon to shoot down multiple fighters per mission. (Another factor was the short supply of experienced Japanese fighter pilots by late 1944 through 1945.)
I mean, the B-17 is an awesome image to a boy. A "Flying Fortress", bristling with guns. I remember seeing the Memphis Belle film in theaters with my dad as a kid in 1990, which wasn't the greatest piece of cinema ever, but my imagination was captured by the idea of the Flying Fortress.
My read is that the B-17's ineffectiveness against fighters is still a debated topic. For a while I felt the consensus was that they'd have done about as well if they put toy guns in those turrets, but maybe that's being reassessed somewhat. Their guns were effective enough when flown in proper formation and could cover one another. The Germans tended to get kills on aircraft that had broken formation.
My sense is that the B-17's guns are like the wildebeest's horns. Lions have a highly favorable K:D ratio against the wildebeest, but does that mean the wildebeest's horns are useless against lions? No, it means that strong lions hunt weak wildebeest, while strong wildebeest are generally avoided by lions. And if a fight is going poorly for the lion, it can retreat, and the wildebeest will not pursue.
Lions are forced to be opportunistic in which wildebeest they target and work together to bring them down. They can't just stroll into a herd and devour them as if they were sheep. So it was with B-17s and German fighters.
The flying scenes in Memphis Belle were brilliant. The story was utterly predictable, not very accurate historically, and yet made for a very enjoyable movie.
The producer, Catherine Wyler, took on the project in part to honour her father, William Wyler, who had made "The Memphis Belle", a WW2 propaganda film.
I don't know the answer to your question, but there are a fair few real-life combat pilots who play DCS, and the strategies and tactics used are usually real ones.
In the bacteria/archaea that use CRISPR-Cas-9, when making an mRNA transcript of a stored piece of viral DNA, how is it determined which DNA strand to make an RNA transcript from?
I know that in standard mRNA transcription, there are often specific sequences on a strand that indicate where transcription should start. But the sequences surrounding the stored viral DNA are palindromic, so it seems like if there is such an indicator/promoter sequence, it should be on both strands.
Does it not matter which strand you copy, since in the end you are comparing it to incoming viral DNA using the Cas-9 protein, and which strand you copy doesn’t affect whether you recognize the incoming viral DNA?
I am not very familiar with methods for measuring serotonin in people, so I'm uncertain what to make of the results. My main takeaway as an outsider is that this doesn't shift my beliefs very much, but does highlight ongoing issues in the field. Does anyone here have a more informed opinion on this or other aspects of the review?
Looked up hedonium shockwave after you mentioned it in an earlier post. Entire galaxy having an orgasm. Pretty hard not to choose that! Question is, what sound would the galaxy make.
Why isn't popcorn ever a side dish with a meal? Seems that it would be about the nutritional equivalent of fries or chips. Is it a space or timing issue in the kitchen? Would nobody want it?
I was amazed at how many people on here rushed to the defense of BLM on the post about the Ferguson effect, when time and time again it is shown that BLM is a black nationalist movement that does not care about principled objection to police brutality and instead just react in a tribalistic way against any instance of their ingroup being hurt by the outgroup.
Case in point, the shooting of Andrew Sunberg by police following a six-hour standoff after Sunberg shot a neighbor he had been stalking has lead to angry BLM protests. And of course, along with that, the MSM disinformation machine has gone into overdrive looking for excuses to justify this black rage, portraying Sunberg as a veritable angel who did nothing wrong. And of course, the narrative of choice *every single time* there has been a high profile instance of black violence is that the offender was "mentally ill"/having a "mental health crisis". Maybe its true sometimes, maybe its not. But 1) This literally NEVER applies to white men/offenders deemed BAD by the media and 2) If police can't shoot somebody LITERALLY TRYING TO MURDER OTHER PEOPLE, mental health crisis or not, it's open and shut case that BLM isn't a movement against police brutality.
Which, of course, is another strike against the defunders
Always nice when the One Weird Tricks work for someone. In previous open threads this year, it's been B12 or magnesium for depression. "Everyone's a Little Bit Deficient" - wouldn't it be great if there was a standardized nutritional battery test included with every yearly check-up or psych eval? I'm sure we'd catch many more such cases. Optimally Balanced Diets are rarer than I think anyone acknowledges.
I am always leery of giving out Medical Advice, cause I'm Not A Doctor(tm), but it feels like "have you tried more B vitamins" is an easy low-hanging fruit to pick first. Not just cause of water solubility, but because the effective ULs are either really high or nonexistent. Always worry if I tell someone they could use more <other_nutrient> they'll run off and consume 5000% DV and get something worse than carotenemia. The whole precursor/binding for bioavailability thing is a bit too complex to fit into bite-sized recommendations. (Like I only belatedy realized that I'm probably making a mistake taking vitD supplements while also regularly not getting much calcium...and that's a connection I already knew about! Scott's harped on it for years!)
Ah yeah, the classic Big Ol' Dartboard O' Supplements approach. My current score is:
*1000mcg B12 1/wk (cause the pills are stupidly tiny and effectively un-cuttable, not cause I love extremely high dosages). I'm too poor to regularly eat animal products, dislike fermented plant products, and don't often encounter fortified foods. One of the paradoxical side effects of avoiding much pre-cooked/processed instant American foods...
*125mcg VitD every other day. Love mushrooms and fish, too poor to stuff my face with them at every meal. I work underground, get no direct sunlight in my house, and rarely leave it. Known medication side effect of osteoporosis.
*500mg calcium/250mg magnesium/7.5mg zinc every other day. To go with the VitD, and I've given up trying to punish myself by drinking milk or fortified OJ. (Why can't tap water have more nutrients in it? I love tap water!) Love me some shellfish, but ahistorically expensive. Known medication side effect of osteoporosis.
*Brotein powder with >100% B1, B2, B5, B6, mixed with daily coffee daily. (Chocolate flavouring makes it a "muscle mocha". Surprisingly good, much more palatable than "bullet coffee".) Perfect route to take water-soluble stuff, cause coffee always means an incipient bathroom trip anyway.
Nothing else has seemed worth the cost/benefit ratio, given the things I do regularly eat, and/or how hard it is to truly reach medically-significant deficiency. I sometimes wish I didn't have lactose intolerance and/or actually liked dairy products; those are some extremely convenient nutritional profiles at low cost. (Thanks, government subsidy!) Same thing with vegetables, legumes, seeds, and nuts; I know there's a lot of incredible efficiency there, but blah, I just can't make myself eat such things often enough to matter. "The best diet is the one you'll actually stick to"
o/ B12 person here, checking in. Supplements changed my life (although I have figured out the underlying cause by now and no longer take them).
There's a specific set of symptoms that makes me recommend people just give it a shot (stuff like light/sound sensitivity, increasing troubles with memory, issues sleeping, possibly constipation), since it's over the counter pretty much everywhere AFAIK, and doesn't really have side-effects when 'overdosed'.
Other vitamins I've been more leery of recommending. Vitamin D is a great example of something that can cause an astonishing amount of misery, at least so says my experience with kidney stones (unfortunately-effectively-high-protein low-carb diets and vitamin D supplements are tricky to balance even if you drink A LOT of water, it turns out).
Oh hey, I remember you from a previous Open Thread but couldn't remember exact username. It was, indeed, your posts that inspired me to consider B12 at all, so thanks! I have no idea if it's doing anything particularly meaningful for me (VitD had immediate effects, I really am living the vampire lifestyle), but it's been nice to hear from intelligent folks I trust that, no, actually, Consumer Reports isn't always right about The Vast Dangers Of Big Supplement (You Won't Believe #37!). Loved that magazine growing up, but, wow, I sure absorbed a lot of thoughtless memes.
I'm luckily too poor to afford significant amounts of protein, so carbs are a major component of the gustatory budget. Gonna suck a lot whenever I get that diabetes diagnosis, probably. One of my prescription meds is a diuretic as a side effect, so it's sorta hard for me to not drink lots of water all the time, which I guess is handy too. If really annoying on the disposal end.
The underlying cause of my issues ended up being SIBO ("small-intestine bacterial overgrowth"), which basically means I avoid carbs as much as possible. Some carbs are actually okay, but blanket-avoiding them has just proven to be safest for me; I admittedly don't really have the patience to figure out which kinds of what I can eat. From a time when I was testing around, I know Japanese rice is okay! On the other hand, Basmati rice is terrible. SIBO literature suggests I should be able to eat Jasmine rice, but that's a nope.
Avoiding carbs has really calmed my irritable bowel syndrome from "stomach ache every day" to "no problems unless I break the rule too much". Desserts are fine (in part because plain sugar is easy to digest, so ironically not that much of an issue). I sure love desserts. The dietary change made the far too excitable bacteria in my gut calm down and stop eating all of my B12 before I can absorb it.
I'm also living the vampire lifestyle, and I really should take the occasional D supplement, but right now my bones feel healthy and the 0.0 vitamin D in my blood seems to never have caused me any psychological issues, so I'm just not taking any. Every once and a while I pop one in, but summer isn't when I'll be doing that. I *am* ghostly pale, so I expect even the occasional stray ray of sunshine will probably produce enough vitamin D (that is immediately used by the processes that needs it) for me to survive until winter, at least.
I'm super happy to hear vitamin D helped you! And, honestly, if you don't have issues with carbs, you should eat them. The slow-to-digest types of carbs that are toxic for me are actually better for most people, and unlikely to give you any trouble (especially re: diabetes). :) You're much kinder to your liver with carbs, too. There are some general downsides to carbs that get worse the older you get, but as long as you listen to your body, I can only endorse eating them.
Sorry to hear finances are the bottleneck to flexibility, though (and, if I gather from the rest of this thread, lactose intolerance). It's never nice to not have some options that might be important later down the line. I hope that, should it ever be relevant, you find a way to navigate your troubles.
Until then, enjoy the carbs! I do miss them. :)
On Sunday, at the nearby mall, by one of the main entrances. It had Pepsi products. Before that was a week or two ago when I was on the road for a few hours and saw them at rest areas.
What causes them to go outside? Are they allowed to?
I don't know if you're making a "refrigerator running" type of joke or not, but I'll answer seriously in case you aren't.
In the case of the rest areas, I only saw vending machines outside at the smaller ones that only had bathrooms. If the place had a McDonalds or similar, the vending machines were indoors. I'm guessing it was an issue of space. Here's an example of one of the ones I saw: https://goo.gl/maps/smSbcxKQxm78AB8Y8
For the mall, I don't know for a fact that it was allowed *but* I know the same machine has been there for several years. I guess being outside allows them to refill the machines outside of the mall's operating hours without needing keys to the building. Come to think of it, I don't know of any vending machines *inside* that particular mall except a single one in the food court.
The mall near me has vending machines inside only. I figure it's because people spend a lot more time inside than outside.
Yesterday, at the public safety training center I was at.
I think it might depend on climate. When I lived in the desert Southwest, I'd see them outside of apartments, gas stations, highway rest stops, etc. all the time. Now I live in a much wetter, more humid climate with much colder winters (the Midatlantic) and I think maybe I saw one outdoors at a gas station the last time I drove to West Virginia a few months ago.
Two weeks ago, at long wharf in Boston.
Today. At San Diego State University. I stopped to look at one vending machine dedicated to rapid covid tests but there were many others for bottled water and drinks and snacks.
Interesting selection bias on this one: I can only comment if I remember the last time I saw a vending machine outdoors; the more recently it was the more likely I remember.
If you don't want to flip through a whole PDF, the cartoon is also available here, on Imgur:
https://i.imgur.com/VTlwdE6.jpeg
NOTE: This is still just as NSFW as it was above.
I don’t think brilliant people are insecure about their smarts. I have never met one who knew his/her IQ or had any interest in it.
Agreed. I think obsessing over IQ is for those who feel that they have something to prove.
What did the deleted comment say?
Or, you know, those who want to defend against victim oppression narratives that assume inequality must be the product of discrimination etc.
That defense is highly unlikely to be effective in practice, and may be negatively effective.
Sure, in the same way that literally every other defense is going to be ineffective against dataphobes who cling to narratives. If it isn't genetic, what is it? "Culture"? You think that's convincing to anyone?
I don't know what the deleted comment said, but let's just make it clear that this does not imply that IQ isn't crucially important.
Is it important if you're hanging sheet rock?
No, it's important for explaining inequality in society and the political consequences of said inequality.
The downtown area of Lancaster, although not that large, is very different from the rural, Amish area around it. Industrial and some colleges. Plus, a not insignificant portion of the rioters traveled to the unrest from outside Lancaster. The mini-riot ended quick after a judge slapped a million dollar bail on one of the riot instigators.
I also think there is an underestimation of how racially diverse a lot of rural areas are.
But I agree the article does present problems for Scott's (and partially my, I tended to agree with him) thesis.
> it had Black Lives Matter-related rioting
What made the event a "riot" versus a protest?
Lancaster is a pretty effete college town fully of specialty boutiques and an outlet strip with Ralph Lauren and Nautica shops. It's not exactly a central example of what the original comment was getting at. It's like calling Asheville, NC or Burlington, VT "rural."
I wondered about this too when reading Scott's question. I live in an area where putting D on your ballot is a reliable way to lose, and we still had several protests and a lot of community anger with attempts to codify BLM messages into public policy.
There's also the possibility of spillover effects of very strong nationwide anti-police rhetoric, that demoralized the police even in areas where they are generally supported. I think this is possible, but I'm skeptical, especially as a lasting effect.
This makes a lot of sense to me because I think given how few criminals get caught the lack of crime is more about social pressure than actual cost benefit analysis of the behavior.
I remember in college the campus police were basically like stolen money/items/laptops are basically never ever found unless the person is caught in the act, or the item turns up while the criminal commits another crime.
Once someone has gone and taken a bottle from a liquor store or whatever, and nothing happened, and their mom didn't disown them, there is kind of permeant change in what they see as the accept range of personal action.
This sounds correct to me. I recall in college a small convenience store that was located right next to campus. Every Thursday night there was a huge crowd of students there late into the night, and nothing on the shelves. Nighttime theft was huge, to the point the harried employees couldn't do anything to stop it. So they hired a security guard to stand by the door and suddenly all the shelves were full again. Having a security guard in a store with maybe 2 employees otherwise is a massive increase in cost, so it was certainly not optimal. Because it became a requirement, the store paid much higher costs to stay in business.
The new biography of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Muller is very good! Made me wonder if theology can ever be avoided. Maybe all modern controversies simply rehash ancient religious debates.
Thanks. Probably going to read that based on reviews.
You can't compliment Cass like that, Scott. I spend like ten hours a day telling him terrible things about himself and it's barely keeping him in check. Saying nice things about him is like feeding a mogwai after midnight - you are courting a full Gremlins 2 situation.
Might be my fault. I brought some decent scotch to one of the meetups, and he might have been running on that for months.
Listen, I think we can all agree Cass is history's greatest monster. But if you think I'm going to sit here and listen to you besmirch good scotch, you've got another thing coming.
Think.
And hey, I won't disparage good scotch. I'm just saying, it's like a powerful tool. In the wrong hands...
Seems plausible.
But as we say in this house, "Everything I know about alcohol I learned from Dwarf Fortress."
Keep an eye on the cats.
Ahh, yes, cats. I understand some forts have not ahem, -cough- solved that problem. Or, ahem, used that, ahem, RESOURCE to solve some other problem...
Really, I'm not automatically too worried about the cats. I'm just glad one need not fear the OP carp so much anymore!
I don't know--having someone compliment a person publicly like this shifts the dynamic... different people re-align things.
Basically, by now I've gotten enough training on the DSL-adj Discord in insulting people that my mind is beginning to be capable of generating insults of people. (It's like... this new-ish cognitive pattern; I'm straining at it.) But anyway, this might result in ME dishing more insults his way!
Oh, also, he said something about Quanticle being some kind of significant player in a triumvirate in the founding of DSL... it was probably some Ancient-Roman-Times reference so I didn't follow it. Or get around to Googling it! (Now that I think about it, that might be useful to find out whether it was a compliment or insult... or a backhanded compliment... backhanded insult.. etc.)
Quanticle was one of the founding global mods, but he retired about 6 months in. (Johan Larson retired ~18 months in).
The WSJ article is paywalled, but there are some more specifics here: https://www.wsj.com/story/murder-rates-soar-in-rural-america-bb431022
I suppose it's possible that the standard explanations (economy, isolation, etc) explain rural homicide, while protests and the knock-on effects on policing, explain urban homicide, but it would certainly be a strange coincidence if mostly unrelated causes increased murder by almost the same amount at the same time in urban and rural places. It would be nice if there were a graph showing the increase in rural homicide, so we could see if it's tightly connected to the same time period or more spread out. My link, as well as what I can read of the paywalled link, seem to indicate that it is more spread out (2 vignettes mention March and April of 2020, while the top paragraph of the full text mentions murders continuing until December).
Here's one way to bypass the paywall:
https://archive.is/www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251
This works for some, but not all, paywalls -- type in "archive.is/" after "https://".
Works.
White county Arkansas is mentioned. Seems pretty white
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_County,_Arkansas
There's a town called Alabaster, Alabama. May win the whiteness award.
And another paywall bypasser. https://12ft.io/
Very elegant.
"The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page."
Rural crime blm? Probably not. Seems like the Procrustean bed with this subject. Here's a link looking at the wsj story
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/10/blame-rural-crime-wave/
Funny enough, here's the WSJ talking about soaring rural crime in 2018:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nothing-but-you-and-the-cows-and-the-sirens-crime-tests-small-town-sheriffs-1526122800
My quick search can't seem to find a graph, but if someone had stats at the ready, I'd be curious what this really looks like.
My sense is that large sections of rural America are descending into ever greater decay and social breakdown, as parts of the white working class that used to be able to form families and work mostly-steady jobs have now fallen into a basically underclass existence. This has been a 50-year+ trend, exacerbated by things like the opioid crisis, but the crisis is as much an effect of the decay as the cause. Covid might also have accelerated the decay by a few years, caused some mentally unsteady people to break sooner rather than later, but there hasn't been any real change in direction. It's easy to imagine that the rural/white-working-class decline would have continued unabated whether or not Covid or Wokeness ever became a thing.
The decline of cities, by contrast, is much more recent -- they had been improving until Obama's second term, which makes the change in their direction much more curious and easier to pin on BLM/Wokeness.
4: Hm, I think Spencer's grants round is still open until July 22nd? https://programs.clearerthinking.org/FTX_regranting_2022_application.html
Sorry, I'm not sure how I made that mistake, I've fixed it above.
Black people make up about 8 percent of rural population, compared to 13 percent of the urban population.
https://ruralhome.org/wp-content/uploads/storage/research_notes/rrn-race-and-ethnicity-web.pdf
According to WSJ, the spike in rural areas has been 80% of the spike in urban areas. Percentage wise, there are 62% as many blacks in rural as urban areas. If you see this effect as “police afraid to interfere with black people committing crime,” it’s not surprising you’d see a spike in rural areas too.
The proper test must be to look at the violent crime by state or county, and estimate the effect of Black% on the increase in recent years. The BLM/summery of Floyd model predicts that this coefficient will be positive.
Seems a pretty straightforward analysis.
Here is the data, source is Wikipedia - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRuJVmAoL7U7dqL8RvBJArcvs1wNPJxcZ-WT-NqrQIBIuuyIm7fVQjIVnIfCaQS9slr90dnx-0RtcQU/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true
Also of note to the original statement regarding rural crime is that methamphetamine overdose deaths (and presumably use) increased 35% in 2020, according to DEA - https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2021/01/14/dea-2020-year-review-combatting-serious-drug-related-threats-during
Meth is the only illicit drug significantly favored in non-metro vs large metro areas according to https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/substance-use In SD, which saw the largest increase in homicides in 2020, more people died from meth than opioids, whereas nationally opioid deaths outnumber meth more than 2 to 1.
Meth use significantly increases the likelihood of involvement in violent crime https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774467/#:~:text=Among%20violent%20offenders%20only%2C%20sedatives,opposed%20to%20non%2Dfatal%20violence.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32916517/
States are too crude for this.
Rural homicide by state would be fine as an indicator (if it's near-uniform then it's not BLM; if it's concentrated in the South then it potentially is).
Does anyone compile homicide stats by type of police jurisdiction (eg. city police departments vs sheriffs)?
Doubtful you'd find anything more specific than counties, and even that would need a script to sort through. The breakdown for SD alone is 204 pages https://atg.sd.gov/docs/CrimeInSD2020.pdf
Runner up for increase MT is a little easier to navigate but is nothing I know how to import data from https://dataportal.mt.gov/t/MBCC/views/CIM-ViolentCrime/Dash_ViolentCrime_StatsbyCounty?iframeSizedToWindow=true&%3Aembed=y&%3AshowAppBanner=false&%3Adisplay_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz_share_link
Ravalli and Missoula jump out as large increases, both are less than 1% black.
Some correlation with the homicide graph peaks and valleys and this one, for drug testing - https://www.millenniumhealth.com/news/signals-report-vol-4/
So in 2019, the correlation between black% and murder rates was 0.62
In 2020 it was 0.72
And yet the *change* in murder rate between 2019 and 2020 was barely correlated with black%(-0.02)
Not sure how if that makes sense?
I guess if you look at change as the absolute increase in murder rates rather than relative change, then the correlation with black% is 0.50
Good way of putting it. It's easy to get a big percentage change when you only need a handful of extra murders to do it, but that wasn't the subject of the wsj article so I omitted commentary.
Fwiw I absolutely agree with the police pullback causing the murder spike. Traveling all over the northeast constantly for the last 2 years (and many before) there was definitely a shift in what everyone thought/realized they could get away with, whether it was open-air drug dealing in Manhattan or traffic laws turning into traffic suggestions on the highways. Everyone seemed to know the cops were demoralized and dgaf, whether they lived in a city or not. But that's anecdotal.
This would also be explained by black people tending to live in higher-density areas though, right? If murder rates increased uniformly, then higher-population counties would have a greater absolute increase.
This is states, not counties, and the rates are also population-adjusted. When I talk about an "absolute increase in rates", I mean an increase of say 1 murder per 100,000 people, rather than an increase of 25% from the previous year.
Urban population% by state is not strongly correlated with the absolute increase(0.03) or relative increase(-0.06) from 2019 to 2020.
Urban population% is weakly correlated with murder rates in both years though(about 0.18).
Having nearly finished my Masters, I'm wanting to plan out my PhD, and AI Alignment is an area (among others) that I'm thinking about transitioning into. I'd like to talk to someone doing Real Research in the area (who might potentially be a PhD supervisor). I don't have a lot of contacts at top tier universities yet, so I thought I'd ask here first before trying connections-of-connections.
I've heard Berkeley is the center of that kind of thing. You might try entering one of the open competitions and writing something to see if it's an area you like dealing with.
Academia is dragging its feet a lot when it comes to AI alignment, so the number of specifically AI-alignment PhD positions at universities is very small (though not zero). If you can't secure one of them (but still want to do a PhD), then a more general-purpose PhD might be your best bet. I'd say either pure math or some kind of AI/ML topic, though make sure to not advance AI capabilities during your PhD because that would be very counterproductive to AI alignment (because it would shorten timelines).
>general-purpose PhD
There are economists who say that an economics PhD is a license to study (with quantifiable experiments and/or mathematical theory) approximately anything and everything that isn't already a hard science of its own, like physics or chemistry. Afterwards, one can pursue many different paths in both academia, business, or independent study, and there is a chance to find something where ones PhD studies are useful instead of functioning as a piece paper that signals "I am smart".
There is a field tangent to AI Alignment which is formal verification of AI/ML systems. You should look into that as well.
Do you have any recommendations on where to start?
I haven't seen a good book. I did find: https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/
The two main areas are formal verification (e.g. dafny etc) and state-based provers (verifying the system state space) e.g. for all inputs, the ventilator never turns off, and never enters an unsafe state.
Scott, any chance you could write an article about therapeutic uses of hypnosis?
Is there any evidence that hypnosis even works?
BTW, Scott wrote some articles that all methods of therapy work with surprisingly similar effectiveness.
Do you have particular clinical endpoints in mind when you say "works," or is this just sort of a vague, snarky question?
If the former, David Spiegel's research at Stanford might be a place to start:
https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/david-spiegel#publications
BTW, I have no strong opinions about hypnosis. I just prefer precision to snark.
I also agree with the "Dodo bird"/"common factors" hypothesis regarding psychotherapy. I just don't think it particularly tells against hypnosis.
> Do you have particular clinical endpoints in mind when you say "works," or is this just sort of a vague, snarky question?
I associate hypnosis with charlatans and scammers and its fictional representation where it is shown as super-powerful mind control.
Overall the question reads to me like question about therapeutic uses of unicorn horn.
But maybe I am wrong and there is a good evidence that hypnosis works, as in "it can have some effects"
Hypnotherapy is ultimately just another school of therapy. It's established enough that they've done scientific studies on it's effectiveness and, off-hand, it was no worse than the more mainstream alternatives and can be significantly faster under some circumstances. It operates with techniques that are more focused on dealing with the unconscious mind rather than the conscious, and these can seem a little stilly in isolation, but in aggregate are pretty effective.
Yes?
No. It’s all in the mind.
When an ailment lies in the mind, where else would it's treatment lie?
Exactly.
The mind is still physical, so physical changes can change the mind. Analogously, you could change a computer's behaviour by changing the software, but you could also change the hardware.
I was joking. Of course it’s all in the mind but that’s all that’s being claimed.
A bit off topic but sometimes I wonder if there really is a bright line here.. "code is data" and all that
Apologies, not quite to the point of therapy, however I was hypnotised by a stage hypnotist many years ago. It was a very strange experience. I was slightly conscious throughout, and knew I was doing weird things but couldn't (wouldn't?) stop myself. I sang pretty well, so other people said, and a big piece of concrete was smashed on my stomach while I was suspended between 2 chairs. It is a life experience I've never fully understood. Later on I used auto-suggestion (self-hypnosis?) to stop smoking cigarettes - I made myself believe the awful taste of a cigarette when one had a bad cold, was the taste I would experience whenever I smoked a cigarette. Still working 40 years later.
Very occasionally I can via a huge effort of will wake myself from an intolerable dream. Is the dream a hypnosis like thing?
40 years later, without hypnosis i still can get a delicious urge to light up. My personal philosophy emphasizes being in a position to say no including to oneself. Sort of tying oneself to the mast.
I was stage hypnotized once, and have attended a couple of them at various events where it was the only entertainment.
Really it just seemed to be getting you relaxed and suggestable, and then relying on a combination of peer pressure, people liking attention, and the permission to do odd things.
I pretended to have sex with a chair for 5 seconds in front of a bunch of extended family including my grandma in the crowd of a couple hundred. But this was at the end of a long string of much less transgressive things I didn't really mind doing. I never really felt hypnotized at all, just relaxed and "playing along", and constantly calculating whether I would actually go through with X. And then when they finally got to that I was like "well I have gone this far, I might as well go along with this before derailing the show".
Probably the most incongruous thing I saw was my first cousin French kiss his own mom (he was probably 19?). But I would note, they, and more generally all the people I have seen who were hypnotized are exactly the type of people who love to be the center of attention and do things for attention, real class clown types.
And to the extent in the shows I have been to I have known the volunteers from the crowd, all of the ones who did the most radical things on stage were these "look at me" class clown types. Not a lot of wallflowers it "works on".
This illustrates why participating in stage hypnosis may not be a great idea. For the susceptible proportion of the population, hypnosis can be potent, and using it for random entertainment purposes may not be ... life-enhancing.
This is the Dodo Bird Verdict; it's accurate, but it's mostly about depression in particular. Depression is often pretty closely related to loneliness, so just having someone to talk to is quite helpful, even if the other guy is mostly trying to talk about how you're secretly attracted to your mother. But if you look at e.g. phobias, those respond pretty much only to cognitive-behavioral therapy.
I am having difficulty conceiving of a pro-choice argument from a utilitarian standpoint. Instead of doing something like QALY, I'll just use Average American Life Year (AALY). Each American has about 79 AALYs. We can imagine that the life of a would-be aborted human is less in terms of well being, but how much less? It's hard to imagine that unwanted babies lives are hardly worth living in most cases. Most people are glad to be alive, and I'm sure it's the same for people who are adopted or live in orphanages.
What is a reasonable discount factor? Imagine something extreme like 50%. That's still 39.5 AALYs. You could argue that would-be humans are a societal burden, but how much disutility are they causing? Perhaps in some extreme cases with disabled fetuses, they are particularly burdensome, but it is difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden.
How much disutility is the mother receiving? It's hard to imagine more than decades worth of non-existence. If you think I'm wrong, then give me some rough estimates of how much the average aborted American life is worth and how much disutility the mother experiences.
We can add more to the side of pro-life if we factor in that aborted humans will have children of their own with their own utility. We can reject fetal personhood while still considering the moral worth of future people - longtermists should be sympathetic to this.
same amount as aborted
Utilitarian leads to stranger results, see "repugnant conclusion"
Right. I accept the repugnant conclusion.
Well, for me repugnant conclusion is a fatal flaw of that model.
What is your preferred ethical theory?
I do not really have one, but mostly virtue ethics (heavily influenced by Christianity), with consequentialism for tactics.
Utilitarianism seemed interesting but all formulation lead to some absurd conclusions.
Gotcha. Thank you!
In that case, I'd guess that you would have essentially the same objections to birth control as to abortion. The math is the same. "Sum" utilitarianism (as opposed to "average") only sets a limit on population growth when it reduces average quality of life so far that the total number of utils starts to drop.
Yes, that seems right.
Many Thanks!
But if that's the case and you take the contraception away, what do you do with the people who stop having sex in the first place? Do you “embrace the repugnant conclusion” of forcing them to have children too?
If this AALY metric really is the be-all end all, then hey, a woman cannot bear children from age 0-10, and again from age 45(ish)-death, so that’s only an average of 35 years of fertility. Even if “constant forced child-bearing” during those fertile years reduces their utility value to the point that she’d rather be dead than alive, you’d be offsetting that pain and suffering with whatever utility she gets out of her non-fertile years, plus the 35 x 79AALY lifespans of the kids she was forced to bear.
I hate to be dramatic, but this line of thinking seems to be trending towards a hypothetical society in which rape is a moral duty rather than a crime. Which is why the main lesson of this thread seems to me to be less about the abortion debate and more about the shortcomings of utilitarianism as a moral system.
I don't believe in utilitarianism because it has counter-intuitive conclusions which are morally repugnant. So, yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with you completely. If we are looking at a utilitarian framework and at this limited issue of pro-life v. pro-choice, again, I think pro-life wins. If we expand it to other domains, it starts looking crazy, which I think is an argument against utilitarianism, but not necessarily against utilitarianism being pro-life. If that makes sense.
The repugnant conclusion is that, all else equal, higher fertility rate leading to more lives is better, even if each individual life is slightly worse off. I feel like this could be true. That is very different from “change our government into a totalitarian tyranny that forces people to reproduce against their will, and re-wire societal norms such that this type of oppression becomes stable.”
I agree with you that utilitarianism is problematic. Not inherently so, maybe, but just because no one can have enough information to take into account the societal implications. We say “In a vacuum X outcome would be good. Government, go make X happen” without being able to include into the calculations the part about the government going and doing.
>what do you do with the people who stop having sex in the first place
Are there so many of them that they matter in the grand utilitarian calculus? Populations who have not embraced birth control methods seem grow quite fast because a large number of people will, ahem, engage in procreative activities. "Doing something" with the ones won't necessarily boost the population size growth rates very much.
Did you think somebody who thinks deep and hard about utilitarianism hasn't heard of that before?
No, but I expect that some people who read this have not thought deep and hard about utilitarianism.
Ding ding ding.
Why is a 50% discount extreme?
I mean, taken to it's logical conclusion, this would lead to women have as many children as they can without financial ruin but I don't think most people would point to families of 10+ as maximizing utility. There's clear some level at which children encounter something like decreasing marginal utility.
The median person's intuitive utility estimate, I think, hovers around 2-3 children being optimal. And, presuming they have those 2-3 optimal children, any abortions don't matter and don't really have a marginal impact.
Or, in human terms, if Sarah has 3 kids, that's fine, and if Mary has 5 kids, that's kinda a lot. If Sarah had 6 abortions and Mary had 2, who cares? The overwhelmingly important factor is the number of actual kids.
My rough approximation. I don't imagine a that degree of variation between wanted and unwanted. What do you think is a reasonable discount?
2-3 may be optimal for personal desire, but there is little reason to think 2-3 maximizes net human welfare.
The actual number of kids is what matters, not who comes from which mother. Banning abortion would increase the number of kids. Do you think this would decrease net welfare?
I mean, it's hard to imagine stable systems with significantly larger families. Just to ballpark this, the median household income in the US is ~63k. Presuming an uninterrupted career of 43 years (22-65) that gives us a lifetime earning of ~$2.7 million. USDA gives the ballpark cost of raising a kid at $230k/kid. Keeping this in constant dollars, that means the family is spending 25% of it's lifetime earnings on the kids. Not including taxes, food and shelter for the parents, retirement, or even associated expenses like college funds, just raising the kids.
TBH, raising three kids on $60k a year with both parents working sounds, not brutal, but reasonably tough. Raising even 5 kids on that same budget starts to look really rough and as the number of kids increases and their access to economic resources decreases, the odds of them having bad life outcomes increases and that affects the QALY stats (for both them and society) significantly.
So, one on level, the 2-3 kid standard seems like a Chesterton's Fence of what is affordable for middle income and lower-middle income families, who (at least when this was the norm) set the social standard. You could theoretically bump this up to 5-6 kids but that sounds really rough with two working parents and $60k/yr. And even then, the core issue isn't abortion. Just as we wouldn't care whether a woman with 3 kids had 0 abortions or 5 abortions, we wouldn't care whether a woman with 6 kids had 0 abortions or 5 abortions. The total number of children in the world is not constrained by abortion, it's upper limited by fairly sensible economic realities and currently set by whatever weird cultural force has cratered global birth rates.
"The total number of children in the world is not constrained by abortion, it's upper limited by fairly sensible economic realities and currently set by whatever weird cultural force has cratered global birth rates."
If the limit on children is economic, then abortion policy would not be expected to change the number of children.
However, the limit on children is not economic, as you note in your reference to "cultural force". Modern Americans are extremely rich by historical standards and can afford large families if they choose to have them.
"Modern Americans are extremely rich by historical standards and can afford large families if they choose to have them."
Yeah, yeah they can and Parrhesia is welcome to make a utilitarian maximally-natalist argument if he wants but its not going to have much to do with abortion.
Like, if the formula is "more babies=more people=more total happiness" then at the very least we'll be discussing things like childcare and contraception long before we touch abortion.
Unless the argument is that changing abortion laws will lead to culture change which will lead to a more pro-natalist culture. Which, I dunno, maybe Parrhesia does want to make that argument.
Stuff like banning contraceptive might pass the test too. I actually believe in weak natural rights and a woman's right to choose. I do think that from a utilty maximization perspective, I just can't see how 100% pro-life v. 100% pro-choice doesn't favor the pro-life side. I was hesitant to expand the discussion, because it's going to get super complicated, but increasing the fertility rate seems like a very very good thing from a utilitarian point of view. I picked one way of doing that. Most of the responses seem to be that this results in the repugnant conclusion or other unsavory conclusion, but that doesn't really seem like an argument against what I am saying unless people think their intuitions are sources of moral knowledge, in which case, I think they should be ethical intuitionists rather than utilitarians.
Poor people have more kids, not fewer. This is true when comparing countries, when comparing people within a country, and when comparing the same country at different stages of economic development. Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a fertility rate of 7 children per woman. Also, fertility rates are dropping precipitously across the world, including to well below replacement in developed countries, even as the world becomes richer. So clearly there's something very wrong with the economic argument.
IDK most people I know from large families seem happier than those from small families. Should large families be mandated if this is true?
Changing the government into one that could plausibly make and enforce such a mandate would have its own (very negative) utility calculation. Much better would be for intellectuals and social influencers to start sharing and promoting the benefits and joys of large families, rather than doing the opposite like what happens right now.
Shouldn't natural selection take care of this in any case? Laissez faire seems like the way to go here.
This argument only works under total utilitarianism. Total utilitarianism has failure modes which align fairly poorly with most people's intuitive expectations of "good outcomes". Other forms of utilitarianism also have failure modes, but, IMO, fewer and less degenerate.
What is wrong with counter intuitive conclusions? How do you know if a form of utilitarianism "fails"?
Ethical theories are made for man, not man for ethical theories. There is no objective referrent, external/independent of people's actual preferences over world-states, that points to a specific theory of ethics (i.e. "total utilitarianism"), and says, "That's the one!" If an ethical theory gives you results that you don't like, that does not mean that the problem is with you(r preferences).
To be sure, people have incoherent and inconsistent preferences. This makes formalizing ethics, even at an individual level, a tricky endeavour. It still does not mean that any given formal theory is therefore correct, in a situation where a human displays preferences which seem locally incoherent or inconsistent.
People do make predictable mistakes. Scope insensitivity sure is a cognitive bias! That does not mean that, reflectively, once that wrinkle is ironed out, people will necessarily endorse total utilitarianism.
I’d go even further and argue that strong commitments to abstract ethical theories are a major source of concretely unethical behavior.
It’s especially true when the system of ethics is divine command, following God’s will, etc, but also comes up elsewhere.
Chesterton's Fence. If a conclusion seems counter-intuitive, it might be because of something actually wrong with it that you can't yet put your finger on. It might even be hard to identify after mulling it over for a while; some fences separate large, unfamiliar fields.
(It might just be that the counter-intuitive conclusion is truly the better one, and will become intuitive once you happen upon some key insight, but it's risky to just assume that's the case right off.)
> How do you know if a form of utilitarianism "fails"?
For me? When ethical theory recommends actions which I consider as evil/bad. And after careful thinking I do not consider changing my mind on the idea as a good thing.
By that logic, anyone who is capable of having kids with little risk to their own life and isn’t actively doing so is similarly bad from a utilitarian standpoint. Why not further mandate that everyone must be regularly attempting to conceive unless they can show a doctor’s note to get out of it?
I’m pro-natalist, but I generally support incentives to promote desired behavior (eg paid maternity leave) over punishments to discourage undesired behavior (eg prison). I don’t bother justifying my preference on utilitarian grounds, (edit to add: but if I were to do so, it would probably focus on putting high value on the utility of personal freedom.)
Is something wrong with the calculation in your view? How would rate the value of an aborted American life and the disutility of the mother?
Let's say that this argument also said people are bad if they aren't having tons of kids. Does this counter intuitive conclusion mean utilitarianism is wrong?
I edited in my attempt to add in a possible utilitarian justification. Basically: value personal freedom highly enough to justify the desired outcome. I’m not sure if it actually works though.
Your original reasoning is similar to how I find myself pro-natalist, so it generally makes sense to me. I find a bit of utilitarianism useful, but strict adherence not so useful, especially as it tends to end up with ideal states being authoritarian states ruled over by benevolent dictators that tend to have predictably bad real-world failures.
I value personal freedom as well. I just can't imagine personal freedom (negative utility from personal freedom violation) outweighing ~79 years of human life. How many years of human life do you think being coerced into carrying a fetus to term is worth?
Like I said, I’m not sure if the framing works.
Spending the rest of your life with an unwanted child can severely reduce the life quality of yourself and of the child. I guess try to find a way to quantify that? If you grow up with an abusive/neglectful mother (which wouldn’t be 100% of forced births, but still), I’d say your growing up years are less than half as worthwhile as otherwise, maybe 25%? It gets better after that, but coping mechanisms learned under abuse/neglect can have long lasting negative effects.
You could also look at things like increased suicidality from even wanted births (see https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/suicide-risk-during-pregnancy-after-childbirth-on-rise) and imagine that might be a low bound on if someone were forced to carry an unwanted fetus to term. Of course some people might end up killing themselves and the unborn child if abortion isn’t available, but I’d guess that effect is small (I couldn’t find any stats on a quick Google search).
Those are my best bets I guess; I’d be interested to know if you can find a way to incorporate them into your utilitarian framing.
I imagine that many people would put their would-be aborted children up for adoption, but lets imagine that on average the mother would keep the baby and would also be terribly abusive so as to reduce the quality of life of the child to 25% for 19 years and 75% for the remaining 60. 25% * 18 = 4.5. 75% * 60 = 45. Total 49.5 We can imagine that the mother could just abandon the child around age 18, but in the meantime, her welfare could reduced to 25% too making it 13.5 years of lost welfare if she had been afforded the opportunity to abort. So, it's a net positive. Suicide probability would have to increase drastically to make it net negative. We should also add in that the aborted person would also have children of his or her own. I think this more than tips the scale.
This seems extreme, but I still think this is on the side of pro-life from a utility calculation. If we want to just accept natural rights, then you could say a woman has an inviolable right to choose or something. If we accept the utilitarian framework, then we should be willing to make comparisons like this.
Without accepting the moral conclusion, do you think my rough calculations are off? What numbers would you assign to the hypothetical life and mother's disutility?
In general, zero - I would start from a strong assumption that lives aren't interchangeable, and it's not appropriate to coerce someone to sacrifice part of their life for the benefit for another unless they themselves want to.
If I have a month left to live, and you kill me to grant someone else 100 QALYs, that's still murder and an unacceptable violation of my rights, the ends don't justify the means.
Then you are not a utilitarian. That's fine, but my argument is aimed at utilitarians.
Half of those people you're bringing into existence will have no personal freedom. This feels an awful lot like turning humans into paper clip factories. You're making more of something just to make more of something.
My argument is only under present conditions. If life became horrible, the calculus would change.
This whole discussion is missing any insight into the disutility of pregnancy with the exception of the account by Marginalia. Pregnancy and childbirth are high cost. They are extreme, jarring, terrible experiences for many, whether or not the child is wanted, but frank admissions of this are taboo so the menfolk remain oblivious. If you are looking to quantify disutility to the mother, you have a lot of research to do.
I discussed this in the original post. Just give me a rough estimate of how many life years it's worth in your view. I'm willing to entertain the idea of 9 months being worth 10 - 30 years of life for the sake of the calculation. Do you think it's more?
Taking into account the toll of pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood, I would call it 25 years per child. If you want to get fancy, you could say 35 years for the first child and 20 years for each subsequent child per child. Of course none of this captures the opportunity cost of losing women to being continuously pregnant over doing things like innovating the most effective system for widespread adoption of mosquito net use.
And how much is the life of the average aborted baby worth in your view? And how much is the life of people saved by anti-mosquito measures worth in your view?
Isn't it normal for utilitarianism to say we should be increasing utility and we're falling short whenever we fail to do so (which is to say, all the time)?
https://betonit.substack.com/p/you-dont-have-to-be-a-moral-saint
"By that logic, anyone who is capable of having kids with little risk to their own life and isn’t actively doing so is similarly bad from a utilitarian standpoint. Why not further mandate that everyone must be regularly attempting to conceive unless they can show a doctor’s note to get out of it?"
That may be true (that capable, but unwilling parents are bad), but it would not justify mandates. Since those people having children would propagate anti-natalist preferences into the future. Being anti-natalist lowers reproductive fitness and loses out against pro-natalist preferences in the long run. Or do you assume that this trait is a very mutable by coercion? Forcing people not be "bad"? I'm skeptical.
From this do you conclude that abortion should be banned, or that quantitative utilitarianism using totally made-up numbers isn't the optimal ethical system?
Even being vaguely utilitarianist myself, i totally agree with this comment.
Utility may very well be quantifiable in principle, but not without modeling second and third etc. order effects on society in the present and in the future and etc. It's difficult.
And also, utility just cannot be an additive quantity. I don't really believe we have today a valid model that let us compute utility.
Just by inventing numbers one can justify any ethical position. I am afraid that utilitarianism is often invoked just to add a veneer of math to make the argument look more formal and rationalist.
As I understand, you care about the total number of people born. The fact that abortion ends one life before it begins does not mean that the total number of born children is reduced. If a woman has abortion, she chooses to not have a child right now, and It think it needs more evidence, that choosing an abortion right now reduces the total number of births, as the woman has the chance to have a child later in life.
Poland, where abortion is mostly banned, notably does not have higher birthrate than neighboring, culturally similar countries, where abortion is mostly allowed. But I guess OP would argue that contraception should be also banned under his interpretation of utilitarianism.
This is a good point. If you assume that a woman will only have (for example) two children in her lifetime, then abortion allows her to choose when the children will be born. She can thus ensure they are born at a point that maximises her utility, while also maximising the utility of the child (she has sufficient time and resources to raise them, and desire to do so).
I'm also curious about this. I'm guessing that making abortion illegal leads to more illegal abortions, and probably slightly more children? Though as a counterexample, if abortion were illegal where I live, I would get sterilized ASAP instead of waiting to see if I change my mind about wanting kids.
That sounds strange. I live in a place where abortion is illegal, and I never hear about people getting sterilized in order to avoid the inconvenience of having to order abortion pills online instead of from a local health provider.
This is by far the best response to the original comment and it's a little annoying he hasn't responded (while continuing responses to other, far weaker critiques). As far as I am aware, there is _very_ little to no evidence that, on average, abortions reduce the number of humans born. They mostly shift timing of birth by some amount.
In other words the entire premise of the question seems to be fundamentally flawed.
If anything, birth control has a _far_ greater impact on the number of humans born.
It's a question I'll have to look into more before writing more up on it. My best response at this moment is that it seems to me that abortion would decrease total fertility, but I don't have good data yet, and need to research more. Howerver, to be fair, this person didn't present any data either, just speculation. I'll investigate it more.
You're right. Perhaps, we should oppose birth control for the same reasons.
I'm going to look into how much abortion reduces total fertility. If it doesn't at all, then it wouldn't matter. I suspect it does.
I've heard that the average abortion reduces fertility by 1/3 of a birth.
But that's only relevant to the decision to have a particular abortion. That isn't the question you asked. You asked about state policy. The effect of state policy is very difficult to measure. For example, when Spain legalized abortion in 2010, it had no effect on the number of abortions, thus presumably no effect on fertility. But the number of abortions in Spain had skyrocketed over the preceding decade. In truth, it had been legalized incrementally and surreptitiously. One problem with restricting liberty is that people will just lie to you about what the laws are.
Do you have a citation on the 1/3 birth reduction? I'm trying to look into it more to get more exact figures.
How good is the data on things that were generally dark secrets?
Before safe (much less legal) abortion we had A LOT more infanticide. Also a lot of abortions and deaths among women that were never acknowledged or disguised. Ask whether the data indicates a rise in abortions, or a switch from back alley abortions and women drinking abortifacient tea to anything documented.
Here is one data point, linked to at Marginal Revolution yesterday: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30248#fromrss
This is a good argument against abortion IF you are a sort of an utilitarian who accepts repugnant conclusion. But many self-identified utililitarians/consequentionalists don't.
What's wrong with the repugnant conclusion anyway? I don't see how saying it leads to RC disproves my argument.
I don't think that moral rules could be "disproven" in any meaningful sense. I just have sort of a pedantic issue with your vocabulary.
There are, with massive oversimplification, two kinds of utilitarians, those who want to maximalize total utility vs those who want to maximalize average utility. In practice, I am pretty confident that most self-identified consequentionalists are the latter, while RC and your argument only applies to the former.
If you would argue that from the standpoint of "total utilitarianism", abortion is indefensible, I would agree.
Btw. if you are curious why I am waffling between using the word consequentionalism vs utilitarianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an elegant explanation of the difference: "Persistent opponents posed plenty of problems for classic utilitarianism. Each objection led some utilitarians to give up some of the original claims of classic utilitarianism. By dropping one or more of those claims, descendants of utilitarianism can construct a wide variety of moral theories. Advocates of these theories often call them consequentialism rather than utilitarianism so that their theories will not be subject to refutation by association with the classic utilitarian theory." (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/)
Yes, my argument was assuming total utilitarianism. My rough impression is that most utilitarians seem like they are total utilitarians, but I guess you have a different impression. Regardless, I will clarify in the future. I appreciate your agreement.
Interesting. Perhaps average utilitarians mostly call themselves consequentionalists, while total utilitarians mostly call themselves utilitarians without adjectives?
In any case total utilitarianism feels weird AF, imho in itself sort of an evidence that it is not exactly popular position.
I think average utilitarianism is even weirder. The only thing that matters is utility, but only as this function called an average. Seems weird to me. It also has unusual conclusions like the sadistic conclusion:
In some cases it would be better to add unhappy people to the world, rather than a large number of happy people.
Avoiding RC has other counter-intuitive conclusions (see: In Defense of Repugnance by Huemer)
According to the same logic, why shouldn't we just treat women as baby factories, and ensure they have as many children as possible? The result is one life lost (that of the woman) against several (ten plus) new lives created. Under the same logic that is a net gain, even though it is clearly abhorrent to treat a woman in this way.
In the end this comes down, as others say, to the repugnant conclusion. If you accept it is better to have a lot of miserable people rather than a few happy people, then why would there be any argument in favour of abortion? If you do not accept it, then it is quite easy to find a pro-choice stance.
Do you think the utility calculation is wrong? How much do you think the unwanted fetus is worth in terms of life years v. the disutility of having an unwanted baby?
You don't have to accept the repugnant conclusion to think the argument works, but what is wrong with the repugnant conclusion anyway? Why is it wrong?
I think it is wrong because the question is too narrow. For example, you ignore the possibility that the women gets an abortion but later has another baby. If she doesn't get the abortion, then that later baby is never born. Which baby provides greater utility? The one that is born at a bad time for the mother, and therefore doesn't get proper care; or the one born when the mother has sufficient resources and desire to raise it properly?
As for the repugnant conclusion (which follows from the logical extreme of your argument), it is wrong simply because most people consider it to be wrong (hence the name). Morality is subjective, we have no way to measure it objectively (even measuring utility is challenging and probably impossible in reality). Moral frameworks are designed to produce an objective way to guide decisions and societies, but if they lead to outcomes that are widely considered wrong then its worth questioning the axioms and steps that lead to those outcomes. In that they are no different to any other theory of nature.
> Morality is subjective, we have no way to measure it objectively
I was with you until this point. We do have a way to evaluate principles objectively, with "reason". This isn't the kind of measurement we have in physics, but it's the reason why we can confidently conclude that slavery is wrong, for instance.
Let’s say we had a runaway poorly aligned AI which aimed to maximize human utility. To do so it systematically breeds humans like factory farmed chickens, building giant robotic prison-like facilities which are just enough to keep their inmates alive and able to interact with each other, but require no more resources per person than this. Humans are engineered not to age, to remove the disutility of death and maximize the time spent in the facilities. Those with genetic abnormalities are bred out of the population to reduce the disutility of disease.
To prevent the possibility of human rebels overthrowing this system, everyone is closely monitored and all military technology is operated by the AI.
Is this a good outcome? If ethics is identical with maximizing total utility, seems like the answer has to be yes.
For a utilitarian maybe yes. But I'm not a utilitarian.
The RC is reasonable on its own terms. But it is misleading because people usually make two mistakes when thinking about it: 1) Taking for granted that the built-in assumption of a linear trade-off between number of children and average utility is true in reality, and 2) conflating the two ideas “imaginary Society X would be better than what we have today” and “it would better if the government assumed vast power over people’s lives in an attempt to bring to pass Society X.”
I don't see why one would single out abortion specifically when the far, far more common cause of humans not existing is people choosing to not have sex with random strangers.
This sounds like a build up to the world's worst chat up line.
Do you think my argument works if we just compare pro-life v. pro-choice?
“Repugnant conclusions for thee, but not for me”, is it?
No
Even if we accept your utilitarian moral framework (which I don't), don't you need to consider the fraction of people who (a) get an abortion, but then (b) go on to have their preferred nonzero number of kids at a later time which is more suitable to them? Then weigh the tradeoff between having (e.g.) one child born in a few months, vs a different child born in a few years, but to a parent who (e.g.) has more money saved up and a stable long-term relationship with the coparent.
I'm doing a write up and I will try to account for this.
You might also want to consider specifically cases where a woman is at the tail end of child-bearing age and wouldn't be able to have her preferred number of children at a later date. There could be a strong utilitarian case to be made for forcing her to carry the fetus to term.
Yeah, it's less likely to be offsetted with a future birth.
Two things
1. First, fetuses are basically fungible (to a first order). While we know they aren't literally blank slates, _we_ have no information about them, and with nothing learned nothing's lost. And they don't have any way to conceive of or experience the loss themselves.
Women who do want children will end up having very nearly the amount of children they want to have, the question is which children and when.
When mother's want to abort, they typically have a good reason to, that will basically cash out the child being unwanted (horrific to experience for a child) or being disfigured.
Therefore, abortion let's women choose which babies they are going to have, selecting from the larger group, maximizing their own and their children's happiness.
2. On the repugnant conclusion. This has always confused me. The logic chain seems to hinge entirely on this step where you accept that 4X as many people who are 0.5X as happy as better. It's couched in small numbers than that to make it sneak by, but it's expected that simply accept this as obviously true and ive not seen why this must be so. To me it seems obviously _untrue_. Average utility matters, and experience of disutility also matters.
Aesthetically I would prefer a world 2 perfectly happy people to 1 perfectly happy person, but I certainly wouldn't damage perfection to add another person.
I'm typically pro-natalist, because I expect more humans to make _everyone_ happier (on average) at the margin.
The way we make a society of very happy people is by trying to maximize the happiness of each new person. Maximizing the number of people is just an obvious Malthus trap. You're not biting the bullet by "accepting the repugnant conclusion", youre just committing yourself to a bizarre way of counting.
Think of yourself as a consequentialist first - do the things with the best outcomes. Use utilitarianism as a good thought tool to remind yourself that cost-benefit-analysis must be done and let it guide the hard choices, but the point isn't to literally implement a specific accounting scheme.
> Women who do want children will end up having very nearly the amount of children they want to have, the question is which children and when.
This is true, up until a woman has the N children they want. After that, though, an abortion would prevent them from having more children.
If we really want to increase the number of folks having children, abortion is the wrong point of the "pipeline" to be looking. People are choosing not to have children for good reasons, and we won't see more children until we fix them.
>When mother's want to abort, they typically have a good reason to
That depends on what you define to be a "good reason". If it is
> the child being unwanted (horrific to experience for a child) or being disfigured
Then that consistently turns out to be in the 3-5% percent range of all abortions in the US. The vast majority of abortions is convenience.
This is what happens when you try to reduce moral arguments to a single metric. Someone else could just as easily counter that if you approach the question with a moral framework in which you only consider personal liberty and no other factors, it becomes difficult to conceive of a pro-life argument.
Hard utilitarians, deontological NAP libertarian types, and fundamentalists may prefer it otherwise, but ethical questions are just too complex to be reduced to black-letter law. If they could be, we’d already be living in a centuries-old golden age of simple, universally-understood morality.
Yes, but I'm trying to make it from a utilitarian perspective specifically because it seems like many are pro-choice.
I can see that if you’re getting a lot of argument from utilitarians you want to address, but it seems weird. There are so few hard utilitarians in the world that it really mutes the relevance of the hypothetical for the abortion conversation at large. Kind of like writing a “case against abortion for fundamentalist Zoroastrians” – no harm in doing it I suppose, but it seems like a lot of buck very for little bang if it’s really cordoned off to only the audience that would find it relevant to their belief system.
I guess, within that circle, it boils down to how you’re measuring happiness. There seems to be an implicit assumption in your argument that happiness stacks in a very simple arithmetic way. Every year of human life is a happiness block, so wherever you have more humans living more years, by definition you have more happiness.
I guess if I were to challenge the argument on pure utilitarian grounds that’s where I’d start. What makes you think happiness works that way? If one island has 2000 happy people, and another has 1000 happy people, why would we describe the first island as “twice as happy” as the second? Seems incredibly reductive. But then, I guess you have to do something like that, because if you open things up and allow for utility to be subjective (which it invariably is) then you get all your classic utilitarian bugbears – “what if I get 100x more utility from punching you than you get disutility from being punched?”
In the end it becomes hard for me to have the conversation – it just keeps coming back to being about how utilitarianism is busted as an exclusive mode of analysis, rather than being about abortion. Like we’re both just digging with a broken spade but trying to pretend it's not broken.
Utilitarianism may be rare in the world but it is common in the rationalsphere.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pohTfSGsNQZYbGpCy/criticism-of-ea-criticism-contest?commentId=EygGXPgxCBhrdFT99
'I feel that, while you went a level of meta up, this article really encapsulates why I am so hesitant about EA. I have several concerns about VNM utilitarianism applied to a global monolithic scope. My experience discussing them in the EA space is people looking at me funny and something along the lines of “How can you be against it though?”'
In an individual case maximizing (QA)LYs makes sense to me (most of the time). But it breaks down (for me) when we talk about a population.
When we calculate/estimate for all lifeforms how much QALYs they can experience per year I doubt the most optimal lifeform in QALY per $ are humans.
Then the pareto optimum would be a mix of maximizing the total lifetime of the optimal lifeform and scientists.
If you don't want to go all the way you can restrict lifeforms to humans. There are humans who have much better odds of living QALYs than others. Thus - under that model - we should maximize those: Aborting humans with bad odds and breeding those with the best odds on an industrial scale.
I wanted to restrict it to pro-choice v. pro-life. But you are correct. Animal welfare probably outweighs human welfare by a great deal.
Imagine you are walking down the street when an old stranger accosts you and greets you by name, and tells you this story: "One day, many years ago, I was protesting at an abortion clinic. A young woman entered, weeping. She had got pregnant by accident and thought her life was ruined. She said she couldn't afford a kid right now. She said the father wasn't the guy she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, but she was terrified of trying to raise a kid alone. She had career aspirations and thought a kid would just get in the way, earning her eternal resentment. I told her to consider adoption, but she knew that once she saw her baby's face she'd never let it go, despite all the misery it would cause both her and the child. She was determined to get this abortion. Having exhausted the avenues of rational appeal, I drew my trusty sidearm and leveled it at the doctor. I made it clear that I would use deadly force as a last resort to coerce this doctor, and any other she visited, not to abort this fetus. She ended up having that baby, and naming it ${your_name_here}. That baby grew up to be you."
How do you feel towards the old stranger? Are you feeling the most intense feeling of gratitude ever, for their selfless actions that saved your very existence? (I'm not.)
I am grateful to be alive, so maybe. But that's pretty irrelevant to my argument.
(I should've added: I think reciprocity makes a better moral foundation than utilitarianism.)
That's fine, but I am trying to make an argument using utility maximization.
Sorry for not spelling out why I think this is relevant. I'm basically offering another reason why utility maximization might not be the best approach. I thought perhaps someone who'd already accepted "The Repugnant Conclusion" might find in this hypothetical another Conclusion too Repugnant to accept. E.g. ... {content warning: rape} ... what if instead the man says he brutally raped your mother when she was twelve, and he is your father? Do you still feel the utmost gratitude for him causing your existence?
I'm actually not a utilitarian, so you don't have to convince me. That is an odd situation. Surely, everyone is downstream of some forced pregnancy at some point in time. Am I grateful? Uhh...I don't know. That's very strange wording. The person who does that is immoral in my view, but I feel fortunate to exist. Is that cheating your question? I'm not sure, but it's kind of an odd question. I think I would feel disgust, not gratefulness.
If you're not grateful you must really hate your own life.
Your deduction does not match my lived/imagined experience. You might want to revisit some of your assumptions.
When you say you hate your life on this forum that's just one data point of evidence whether you hate your life or not. You've also said that you wouldn't feel any gratitude towards someone who saved you from never existing. That's another data point. One or both of those could be a lie.
I love my life, but I don't look at this fact pattern and think "gratitude." Honestly my response when trying to imagine myself in the situation described was a complex ambivalence, as I imagine most people's would be.
A guy threatened my mom's doctor with death to prevent her from receiving a medical treatment she wanted. Even if that threat ultimately yielded significant benefit for me personally, things aren't so black and white that I'm just going to have unequivocally good feelings about the whole thing.
>medical treatment she wanted
Killing you. I mean, you really shouldn't adhere to a value system where you call the act of someone ensuring that you never exist a "medical treatment." The old stranger stopped your mom from churning up fetus you and ensured your existence. If I learned that my mom had attempted to kill me before I was born and was only stopped when a person threatened her with a gun. I'm not sure exactly how I would feel with regards to my mom but I would surely appreciate that stranger allowing me to live.
I really think if you don't feel deep gratitude towards the old stranger you haven't thought deeply about the whole 'never getting to exist' thing. Or you've let your mind become so affected by real politik that you've come to think of non-existence as better than disagreeing with the party line.
I didn't say gratitude wasn't part of it, only that it wasn't the *totality* of my feelings.
If you see someone else observe that questions around abortion are morally & emotionally complex, and that their response to learning that they "might have been aborted" is multi-layered, but your response is to think that they haven’t thought about the issue and accuse them of letting their minds be overly affected by politics, I’d gently offer that maybe you’re the one indulging in partisan thinking, to the over-simplification of a complex issue.
I used to think I had this all figured out and had a simple, air-tight pro-life argument that solved everything. Thinking more deeply about it is precisely why I’m not that self-assured about my conclusions anymore.
To offer a parallel example - I find out that a mob boss kidnapped and drugged someone and had one of their kidneys cut out. On the other hand... I'm the guy who got the kidney. I'm certainly glad to have the kidney, but I don't think it'd be strange to say that my feelings on the subject are mixed. Nor do I think that acknowledging that my feelings are complex betrays some kind of shallow or partisan thinking on my part.
Not getting into discussion of complexity. Your analogy fails because you could get the kidneys another way, and because as presented the donator has no relationship with you. The proper analogy is donator is your father, no one else in the world can give you the kidney but your father, and within 9 months following the surgery your father will most likely grow his kidney back. Oh and also your father is consciously making the choice not to give you the kidney.
I would love the shit out of that mob boss because he's literally saving my life. And also fuck my dad why isn't he giving me the kidney willingly? It would be inconvenient for him?
One might want to consider the eugenic effects of abortion. But it is not entirely trivial to correctly calculate e.g. the effects of decreased selection against intelligence and diligence on the probability of human extinction. And this might lead to a pro-abortion conclusion rather than a pro-choice one.
Yes, it's not difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden at all. Just look up the demographics of who gets most abortions.
Existential risks can't even be intelligently discussed among the general population because of low average IQs. To make an extreme example, a world with 1 million people with very high average IQs would probably have higher total utility in the long-term than 8 billion people with current IQs.
"To make an extreme example, a world with 1 million people with very high average IQs would probably have higher total utility in the long-term than 8 billion people with current IQs"
I see your point, but I think that your case is a bit too extreme. 1 million people, even if there were all geniuses, is probably too few to keep a technological civilization going.
I've read estimates that the Earth can sustainably support 1-2 billion people at 1st world levels. Very very roughly speaking, I suspect that that is around "the sweet spot". 1-2 billion people were enough for a thriving civilization in the 19th century. The periodic table, Maxwell's equations, and evolution were all discovered with that population.
'scuse the delay. It turns out that the estimate I'm using is traceable to a rather crappy paper (albeit it was an old one: Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
Volume 15, Number 6, July 1994 - Optimum Human Population Size Gretchen C. Daily, Anne H. Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/BF02211719). They _do_ use energy as the bounding factor in their calculation. In fairness, this is from nearly 30 years ago, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the drop in photovoltaic prices over the decades since then.
Wikipedia has a range of more recent estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population: "Estimates vary widely, with estimates based on different figures ranging from 0.65 billion people to 98 billion, with 8 billion people being a typical estimate.". Of course, this is going to be highly dependent on what assumptions are made about technology. If we had atomically precise manufacturing (aka Drexler/Merkle nanotechnology, https://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-P-K-Eric-Drexler/dp/0471575186 maintaining a large population at 1st world levels becomes vastly easier. In the other direction, with current technology, strictly speaking _no_ level is truly sustainable, because some of the elements we rely on are being extracted from finite deposits and we do not currently have the technology to retrieve them from our wastes.
You're implying there's some key industries that simply can't function economically without larger economies of scale I take it? I don't know enough to dispute or confirm that, so I'll stay agnostic.
The latter two discoveries you cite were discovered in a country with quite a small population though.
"You're implying there's some key industries that simply can't function economically without larger economies of scale I take it? I don't know enough to dispute or confirm that, so I'll stay agnostic."
Yes, that is a reasonable way to look at it.
Just to pick an old technology, consider blast furnaces
https://questionanswer.io/how-many-blast-furnaces-are-there-in-the-world/
This doesn't quite directly answer the question, but it says China has ~250, and makes about half the steel in the world, so it looks like there are around 500 worldwide. Since those supply iron to ~8 billion of us, it looks like one blast furnace needs a market of about 16 million people to be economical. Yes, there are other ways to make iron, but they have a worse tradeoff of quality/uniformity/cost. In the blast furnace case, there is a surface/volume consideration. One can more efficiently keep a large object hot than a smaller one.
To pick another one: There is a minimum size for a nuclear reactor, set by the critical mass.
"Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2020 these provided 2553 TWh, about 10% of the world's electricity." so again we need about 16 million people to make one reactor worthwhile.
Yeah, it's a reasonable argument. On the other hand, a society of geniuses figuring out smaller designs that are also efficient doesn't sound insurmountable. The reason those things are expensive to build is because they're complex, but to 160 IQ people they might be no more complex than a regular house is to a 100 IQ person.
Also, with a small population there would be an abundance of fossil fuels and other resources, so efficiency would be less important.
Gun sales increased in both rural and urban areas, increasing homicide
He's already explained why gun sales don't explain it. Gun sales over the past 20 years do not track the homicide rate.
I think Scott was too quick to dismiss gun proliferation when thinking about the murder rate issue; absolutely there are other factors such as economic hardship and general societal angst, but we really are in uncharted territory after multiple years of record gun sales.
Actually, we're in fairly well charted territory. After multiple years of record gun sales, we now have a country where 42% of American households keep guns and thus ~42% of Americans have ready access to guns. Over the past half century, that value has fluctuated between 37% and 47%, and eyeballing the chart we've been above 42% for most of that period.
We've got a map of this territory, and it doesn't show a strong more guns -> more homicide causal link.
Not only is the American territory well charted here, we have international data (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_guns_by_country) about which countries have the highest percent of households with guns
42% of households having guns isn't the same are 42% of people having access to guns. Now that think about it, some of the people in those household are small children, too young to figure out how to get at a secured gun. Probably a lot more people don't want the gun, though I suppose that's not relevant-- gun restrictions don't have an effect on those people.
This might push the percentage of people with access to guns lower, and on the other hand, if that 42% is households with legally owned guns, then the % of people with access to guns could be a lot higher.
I mean, sure, that's a valid critique of the claim. But unless there's some reason to expect these factors to have radically and suddenly changed in 2020, the overarching point remains; gun availability in mid-2020 was not exceptional or outside historical norms.
Fair point, By "~42% of Americans" I meant "~42% of American adults". There will be occasional cases where an adult in a gun-owning household doesn't have de facto access to even a single gun, but I expect these will be roughly balanced by people in non-gun-owning households who have easy access through a nearby family member.
I assume you're citing Pew 2017 since that shows 42% by household (is there a newer reliable study?), which being self-reported ownership would not include many (or any?) illegally owned guns - unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any good measure of the rate of illegal gun ownership, but illegal guns are more likely to be used in crimes and so would be a very important puzzle piece.
But not a piece of the puzzle that is invoked by the "massive spike in gun sales!" during the pandemic/Biden/#BLM era, because that was a count of *legal* gun sales. I haven't seen any evidence of an increase in the number of illegally-owned guns, so "maybe there's lots more illegal guns and maybe that's why there's lots more killing" is doubly speculative.
Maybe I'm jumping too far to a conclusion, but wouldn't the number of illegal guns in circulation be predicted by legal gun sales? In the US (as opposed to i.e. Australia) there isn't much cross-border trafficking or manufacture of illegal guns (modulo the fact that it is legal to manufacture one's own gun... hmm.) Perhaps it'd trail by more than a year or two, though... Not sure.
One place this might break down is if the people who bought guns since Mar 2020 were unusually inclined to use them in crimes relative to the previous run of people who owned guns.
Do we have any reliable way to figure out who is buying guns, and when? If an entirely different set of people bought guns in March-May of 2020, then gun sales could be causative or at least related. My impression is that gun sale spikes are generally the same people who normally buy guns, but I'm certainly open to the idea that 2020 was different in that regard.
ETA - Thinking a bit more, even gun sales spiking isn't really a "cause" as a result or something else. Why a different group of people are suddenly buying guns and then using them to murder sounds like a very important question. Probably a good bit more important than whether guns are being purchased by new types of people.
I have not been very impressed with the quality of data on gun ownership/possession. We know when legal sales rise (by number of ATF background checks), but with poor granularity and no context.
Which is intentional, based on how gun registries have been used in the past. There was a well known instance in NYC where a list of gun owners, with home address, was leaked/published and it led to a wave of break-ins - people trying to steal guns from those that registered the guns. The perception is that any detailed list of gun sales is intended to be used for later confiscation efforts, or to harass gun owners (like leaking the list to potential thieves).
There's no trust in the debate that a registry would only be used for neutral/good purposes.
We haven't even established *if* a different group of people are suddenly buying guns and then using them to murder. The extra murders could be coming from the same group that had been doing murders all along, or a different group that has had guns all along but wasn't murdering people until recently.
You're jumping to a conclusion well ahead of the data, for reasons I can only guess at.
I think you responded to me, and it sounds like you disagree, but your post and my post appear to be saying the same thing. We don't know *if* new people are buying guns, and that seems critical to the question of whether guns are related to the question. I went on to add that even if new people are buying guns *and* using the new guns to commit murder (which I agree we don't know), it appears to be a step in a chain of events, which is not the prime cause we are looking for. There would have to be some reason people are buying guns to commit murder, which is what we are really trying to determine here.
Re: DSL, every time I stop by I'm surprised by how conservative it is. Does anyone know why? Is it a founder effect thing, or that actually everyone is super conservative and it mostly doesn't come out in these threads, or what? In the days that the SSC subreddit hosted the culture war thread its posters were fairly conservative leaning on average, but not to this extent, in my recollection; I haven't stopped by The Motte to see how it's doing these days.
(Just to pick an example at random, the thread for the Dobbs SCOTUS decision: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6939.msg269063.html )
May have something to do with the lack of censorship. It attracts more right-wing people.
The notion that there is a lack of censorship there is laughable.
Lack, no. But really limited.
If you are the same Jack Wilson, then...
From "The Index of Bans"
"
Jack Wilson, first strike for excessive invective.
'Fuck you all. My civility is done here. Your worldview offends me too much to want to continue.'
"
"
Jack Wilson, for profane invective. Second strike.
'You're not the educated part of the blue tribe, you are just one dude. I told you to fuck off after you told me to say infinitely less of what I was saying.
I don't know what the history of the discussion of Trump claiming he won the election was on this board. There's a ton of old threads and I don't think it's my duty to read all of them before I'm allowed to express my opinion about the issue here. The official moderators can make that call.
Do I think Trump and co were out to undermine American Democracy? Yes, I do. Fuck you, once again, for claiming that point isn't even relevant to the conversation, when in fact it is the entire point of the conversation.'
"
"
Jack Wilson gets a third strike for using profane invective against other members.
'You two are arguing about dumb shit. At least show some balls and tell the other to fuck off. Then we can be done with your distractions for a while.'
"
>Lack, no. But really limited.
I believe that is called "retreating to the motte".
So which bannings/strikes are the bailey? I can think of some, but they aren't of liberal posters, but rather of far-right posters.
The bailey is "lack of censorship".
Of course there is some censorship, but it's vastly more like a free-for-all than ACX or SSC.
I'd say its even a bit more free for all then r/themotte.
There is extremely little censorship in the comments section here.
And it's also much more right-leaning than pretty much anywhere else on the net that isn't explicitly a rightist echo-chamber. This sort of effect is inevitable - the left have almost the whole of the internet to be welcome on, whereas the right is limited to the ever-shrinking reservations of increasing disrepute.
Any comment section that isn't explicitly left-wing sooner or later becomes right-wing.
Ha! Very good!
nice
Cthulu may swim left, but Molloch swims right?
Highly effective censorship looks like no censorship though.
I would probably agree that there is less direct censorship here than in many other communities, but I think there is also a very strong culture of politely making it clear when someone says something unacceptable.
That's a very long thread, so I didn't read all of it, but skimming the early replies and tapping through to various later points at random it mostly just looks like people are glad that a highly shaky judicial-activist decision was overturned? It's extremely hard for me to parse this as right-wing in any meaningful sense; there's a correct procedure to implement stuff like Roe (a constitutional amendment) and you can't just not follow it because you know your desired law won't succeed – in fact, it not succeeding for controversial issues the whole point of the amendment process! Nobody should be allowed to make an end-run around this sort of thing.
I could see this kind of focus on the system itself having primacy over any object-level outcome being a nerd/grey-tribe thing, I guess, but most of all I think it's a civic necessity (just what a nerd would say, I guess!); if there's anything that's been alarming to me over the last two decades of American politics it's the willingness of the left to completely shred the system to achieve their object-level goals, then accuse the right of destroying the system whenever they successfully play by its rules. Maybe that makes me right-wing too, from your perspective? I think that's hard to argue in good faith, though; to me "right" and "left" are about object-level issues and moral or immoral conduct visavi the democratic system itself is sort of orthogonal.
"I seriously doubt those commenters are all pro-choicers who are now happily looking forward to enshrining abortion rights in the legislature the way it should have been done all along."
I doubt that too, but I think there's a strong possibility they're people like me, who could go either way on abortion on the object level or have an opinion but don't regard it as an especially high-priority goal, but who *do* regard judicial overreach and its avoidance as a crucial issue for the nation and its future.
Crucial? I'm not happy with judicial overreach, but e.g. given a choice between having judicial overreach go away and having "cost disease" go away, I'd much rather have the latter solved. ( My POV on Roe and Dobbs is that I like the _policy_ from Roe, but Alito is correct in noting that neither "abortion" nor "privacy" nor "bodily autonomy" is mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. _Personally_, I'd rather have, as trebuchet put it, "enshrining abortion rights in the legislature the way it should have been done all along" )
Most of DSL strikes me as predominantly libertarian, with a smattering of conservatives. The libertarians happen to include a lot of pro-choice advocates. I don't remember the thread OTTOMH, but there's at least one discussing abortion itself, that got plenty of pro-choice defense.
When it comes to Dobbs, I get the (possibly mistaken) sense that the pro-choice DSLers felt it was bad news, sure, but in the "well, what did you expect" sense rather in the "holy smokes this was unfair in every respect" sense. ISTR some of them even said so.
> Most of DSL strikes me as predominantly libertarian, with a smattering of conservatives
You've certainly spent more time there than I have, but this strikes me as a significant undercount of conservatives (or we're using different definitions).
Going through the most prolific posters (by number of comments), we have
- GoneAnon - "My support for Trump is almost entirely contingent upon him being hated by all the people I hate." is a position I associate with conservatives, not libertarians
- Nybbler - I don't actually know if Nybbler would consider himself to be more conservative or libertarian, so I'll refrain from commenting
- Next few names are neutral or left-leaning, IIRC
- Randy M I believe is a center-right Christian
- Johan Larson I have no idea
- William Boot "looks forward to voting for DeSantis", which is not a position I associate with libertarians
- clutzy is in favor of making sodomy illegal
And that's the top ten. It may be that this methodology is unsound, that this sample is unrepresentative, or that you disagree with my impressions of the above-named users; I'd be interested to hear which you think it is (if any).
We're almost certainly using at least slightly different definitions, if only because I don't have what I'd call a mathematically rigorous theory of political positions (and I'd be surprised if you did, either). Also, we're assigning estimates to people with - to put it one way - temporally varying political vectors with a lot of components.
GoneAnon is ancap-libertarian with a sort of unkempt tone. A lot of conservatives would stop inviting him to their parties soon after they'd started, though I hasten to add this isn't a character judgement on either side. Nybbler posts as if fundamentally blackpilled, and other DSLers have mentioned this with mild annoyance. Both are easily top 2 commenters, and IMO get the pokes they get, mostly because they're so visible. (I even recall Nybbler letting his blackpilling lead him to lament DSL's fall to the left.)
Thing is, I tend to just roll with that - they post so much that I stop paying each post quite so much attention (provided they aren't getting mod reports). I might not be alone in that. This makes it hard to deliver an accurate assessment of the forum's leaning. They undoubtedly skew the leaning in terms of number of posts... but audiences put an unmeasurable amount of importance on each one.
Randy M's Christian, I think, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Meanwhile, his posts tend to have a lot of epistemic humility IMO; I don't feel pressured to agree with him on any particular thing. Johan Larson's more centrist (Canadian as well, incidentally), and is more known for fun what-if posts about his trademark powerful aliens than for political content. I see William Boot as mostly rightward, but maybe libertarian (I forget); he has complicated positions. Ditto clutzy (I don't recall reading anything he wrote wrt sodomy).
I could name other kind-of-right leaners there (Conrad, bean, Julyan Morley, tophattingson) more easily than I could name kind-of-left (Brad, Plumber, bobobob, Ancient Oak). But I also notice that none of them strike me as doctrinaire Democrat or Republican, Blue or Red Tribe, left or right; there is detailed reasoning behind many of their views. (Even GoneAnon and Nybbler, as prolific and predictable as I find them.) "I would vote for Trump" turns out to have a lot more depth than, say, "I oppose Democrats and everything they stand for".
> Randy M's Christian, I think, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Meanwhile, his posts tend to have a lot of epistemic humility IMO; I don't feel pressured to agree with him on any particular thing.
To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that being conservative is incompatible with any of those things. I'm just noting the fact of the conservatism.
Randy M has described himself as being someone who whose views would be regarded as center-right, though I suppose that's compatible with being more libertarian than conservative.
> Ditto clutzy (I don't recall reading anything he wrote wrt sodomy).
I am thinking of https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6788.msg264192.html#msg264192, though I suppose "I am interested in hearing from people who believe X" does not necessarily imply "I believe not-X". There's also https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6809.msg262929.html#msg262929.
> But I also notice that none of them strike me as doctrinaire Democrat or Republican, Blue or Red Tribe, left or right
Certainly I don't mean to suggest anyone on DSL is doctrinaire anything. But I think most people would describe someone who is pro-Trump, pro-life, etc as being conservative, and that a great many people on DSL meet this criteria even if they also hold at least one view which disagrees from the GOP position.
> "I would vote for Trump" turns out to have a lot more depth than, say, "I oppose Democrats and everything they stand for".
I mean, while I do accept that may be true in many cases, I note that "My support for Trump is almost entirely contingent upon him being hated by all the people I hate" is much closer to the second thing than the first. This is a direct quote from https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1115.msg23398.html#msg23398
Weighting by volume is misleading. A single post by Schilling or Erusian, say, probably carries more weight in a thread than twenty by nybbler.
I'm slightly uncomfortable agreeing with you, but I think you're absolutely right.
I'm a pro-choicer who indeed would have preferred "enshrining abortion rights in the legislature the way it should have been done all along." (or, ideally, with a Constitutional amendment explicitly protecting bodily autonomy)
Realistically, Congress has hamstrung itself enough that it winds up doing little for good or for ill.
Would such a constitutional amendment literally protect bodily autonomy, including recreational drug use, prostitution and commercial surrogacy? 'cause that sure sounds like a hard sell to the legislators.
That's one of my major problems with Roe as decided in 1973. No court, including the SC, has taken a hard tack on bodily autonomy or the major underpinnings of Roe. The most relevant recent example, mandated vaccinations, has an entirely backwards view as that of abortion in Roe, in terms of political support/rejection.
If the constitution protects privacy and private decisions made between people and their doctor, then we've done a terrible job making that uniform law. Ergo, Roe reads to me like a conclusion seeking an argument in favor. Some court decisions using similar logic (Loving, Lawrence, Griswold) are balanced by a whole bunch of cases that don't even try to use similar logic (i.e. a million drug law cases, vaccinations, surveillance state, etc.). Often, even when the courts agree with an outcome that may fall under the "privacy" penumbra, they use regular 4th or 5th Amendment arguments.
Yes, at least that is my intent. The drug war has been immensely damaging, and ending it is one of the reasons I want bodily autonomy protected. Consistently, this would also preclude vaccine mandates, which I admit I'm ambivalent about - though for the Covid pandemic specifically, keeping vaccination voluntary looks like the right choice. I agree that it would be a hard sell to the legislators. Realistically, even if Congress were willing, they've made themselves incompetent to even pass budgets, so it won't happen.
Realistically, if Thomas gets his way and e.g. Lawrence v Texas gets revisited, the "limited government" right wing may get back into the business of deciding which sexual positions are legal for consenting adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_States There are a lot of control freaks in state legislatures. Yetch!
Right. One thing about covid-era public health powers is that they were overused given the severity and nature of covid, but you can certainly imagine a pandemic serious enough that they'd make sense.
> That's a very long thread, so I didn't read all of it, but skimming the early replies and tapping through to various later points at random it mostly just looks like people are glad that a highly shaky judicial-activist decision was overturned?
I agree that this is a possible interpretation of a thread where people respond to Roe being overturned with "a great day" and "huzzah" and praise Thomas's concurrence, not joined by any other justice, in which he advocates revisiting Obergefell. I just don't think it's a particularly likely one. I think this response is, in fact, quite strong evidence of being fairly conservative on this topic, at least by local standards. You are welcome to form your own conclusions, of course. (I am certainly not saying that everyone in that thread was necessarily conservative.)
I very much do not want to debate the decision itself here.
I read Thomas' concurrence as saying he wanted to revisit those other decisions *to put them on a less shaky constitutional basis*, but I admit this flies parlously close to debating the decision, which I'm very sympathetic to your not wanting to do. Perhaps giving Thomas the benefit of the doubt is also inherently right-wing? I perhaps naïvely would like to hope it isn't.
At any rate, I'm happy to allow that the individual poster cheering for the Thomas concurrence is most likely right-wing, but is he representative of the timbre of the thread generally? I ask in all good faith since, as I said, I only skimmed it. In the parts I read I didn't think it seemed that most people took an aggressively jubilant anti-abortion tone, whereas for example I did see people saying they were in favor of *both* abortion rights and the overturning, something which I personally can't really classify as overtly right-wing.
Any forum where an user is allowed to take a jubilant anti-abortion stance without being either censored or piled on by the other users is either right-wing or deeply religious leaning.
I think that's claiming way too much. It can just mean that the users of that forum respect and value having a plurality of opinions and expression. For example, in the very same thread being discussed here, DSL user Dinonerd proposes mass-shooting terrorism (Edit: against pro-life states, that is, left-wing terrorism), and he still doesn't get censored or piled on as far as I can see – a few snarky replies of which I happened to catch one, then saw a few more when I went to check.
She.
I took a *lot* of flack for not issuing a strike for that comment. I get it - it was IMO pretty strikeworthy - and was preserved partly because the opposing replies to it were of exemplary quality, and partly because DinoNerd herself backed away from that position before I came across the original post.
> Perhaps giving Thomas the benefit of the doubt is also inherently right-wing? I perhaps naïvely would like to hope it isn't.
Without commenting on the decision itself, I note that support for Thomas's concurrence is, as an empirical question, almost certainly very tightly correlated with being quite conservative. And in actual point of fact the user who wrote that comment is a self-professed white nationalist who explicitly supports criminalizing homosexuality on biblical grounds - https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6788.msg261119.html#msg261119
I'm not saying this person is representative of the whole thread. But I am saying that there are a rather more people in that thread whose response is "a great day" or "Huzzah!" than there are people whose response is "a sad day". I think it is reasonable to interpret this as evidence of people being fairly conservative, on average. If you disagree with this interpretation I am not going to argue about it.
"And in actual point of fact the user who wrote that comment is a self-professed white nationalist who explicitly supports criminalizing homosexuality on biblical grounds"
Ha ha ha! See, that's just the sort of thing I'm not familiar enough with the forum to know about. I agree with your estimation of this person, and frankly I think he's much stronger evidence of the forum being canted to the right than the thread is.
"If you disagree with this interpretation I am not going to argue about it."
Yeah, alright. That's fair. We'll leave this here then.
I mean, EchoChaos is probably in a minority of one among regular DSL posters on those topics, but yes he exists and participates
>who explicitly supports criminalizing homosexuality on biblical grounds
Which means he can't be a strict "constitutionalist", the most reasonable motivation for supporting Thomas, due to that being an explicitly anti-constitional position.
It’s nutpicking though. I don’t think the commenter in question is representative of dsl at large
EchoChaos has very unusual views, and definitely doesn't represent DSL at large. DSL is intended to be apolitical, unfortunately has more right leaning people than left leaning people at this time, and Echo is uh... a statistical outlier.
>I could see this kind of focus on the system itself having primacy over any object-level outcome being a nerd/grey-tribe thing
I've seen this argued as an explicitly "Liberal"[1] thing, in the sense of classical/neo-liberalism (not the us-politics definition), where neoliberalism can be roughly defined as "what both actual leftists and rightists can agree to pejoratively call 'liberalism'". (Scott appears to exist somewhere around that intersection, in the libertarian corner)
Near as I can tell, the closest analogue in US-pol-speak is probably "centrist", or perhaps "moderate X"
> if there's anything that's been alarming to me over the last two decades of American politics it's the willingness of the left to completely shred the system to achieve their object-level goals, then accuse the right of destroying the system whenever they successfully play by its rules.
And I've seen this exact thing being argued with the partisanship reversed by the left. [1] (The most egregious example being the break in precedent in not allowing Obama his appointment, and then turning around and being hypocrites when Trump was given one on an even shorter time frame).
So perhaps, like most things in politics, both sides use similar tactics when they're in power and similar tactics when they're not, and the two sets of tactics are mutually exclusive.
[1] The particular instance I'm thinking of that argues both is Ian Danskin's "The Alt-Right Playbook: You Go High, We Go Low": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A
"The most egregious example being the break in precedent in not allowing Obama his appointment, and then turning around and being hypocrites when Trump was given one on an even shorter time frame"
I realize I'm courting a derail into relitigating old battles by focusing on this, but the really notable characteristic of that whole episode was that McConnell took pains to not only find a precedent but then outline it carefully ("a president in his last year doesn't get a hearing for an SC candidate *if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party*"). He even amused himself by calling it the Biden Rule since many years before, Biden, as a senator, had suggested the same thing when the shoe was on the other foot. He wouldn't have bothered to do this if he didn't see the protection of the system as critical for legitimacy, *even if* you think he just went ahead and broke it anyway. Democrats who favor court packing don't even gesture at preserving the system, they just seethe openly about losing and vow to crush their enemies at the first opportunity. (And for that matter, why did it take nearly 50 years to reverse Roe? Because they had to do it according to Hoyle. It would have been much faster if they'd just been ready to disregard the norms and systems currently in place.)
That the left then completely disregarded McConnell's reasoning and either wilfully (as it must have been in some cases; *every single* Democrat can't have misunderstood him) or inadvertently (due to being downstream of the wilful distorters in the filter bubble) completely distorted what he said the rule was is just further evidence of the wide gap on this point in my mind. Trump was neither in his last year in McConnell's sense (insofar as he could have won a second term), nor was the Senate controlled by his opponents, so the rule as described by McConnell *already during the Garland episode* obviously wouldn't apply.
>McConnell took pains to not only find a precedent but then outline it carefully ("a president in his last year doesn't get a hearing for an SC candidate *if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party*").
In an attempt to take this argument seriously, I looked this up; of the first two directly relevant google results (from sites which had mediabias accuracy ratings of "high" and "very high" respectively, so I don't think I'm being biased here) I saw no evidence that this was true from the Constitutional Center[1] (there were rejections of individual candidates, yes, but no cases where the senate unilaterally said "we won't confirm no matter who you nominate" the way McConnell did), and the Brookings Institute[2] calls the claim an outright "fabrication" and presents evidence to support that assertion.
>many years before, Biden, as a senator, had suggested the same thing...
Note that "suggested" is wildly different that "put into action". Lots of very radical things are suggested in politics, most far worse than what we are discussing. Actions > rhetoric.
>Democrats who favor court packing
...are, in general, minority radicals in the party[3], joined by a strained portion whose rhetoric toes the party line, but don't sincerely hold the belief and vote accordingly. If we're talking about the methods of undermining democracy that party radicals "favor", we have to compare to the conservative party radicals that literally advocate overturning the results of a democratic election, and I don't think that's a comparison you want to be making. (A belief which a majority of Republican legislators rhetorically supported, right up until the consequences of that support bit them.) (Also note I don't claim that this is the worst radical belief that Democrat-radicals hold, indeed far from it; but that's all the more reason to limit talk to *actions*, rather than the extreme thing any partisan has ever said)
If we're comparing *actual* breaks in precedent rather than proposed ones, I'd wager that the field is in favor of the "nothing will fundamentally change" president's party as far as favoring the machinery of values-neutral governance.
[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/presidents-vs-opposing-senates-in-supreme-court-nominations
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/09/24/mcconnells-fabricated-history-to-justify-a-2020-supreme-court-vote/
[3] This is talking about elected officials, not the electorate. Obviously, the core electorate skews more radical for both parties, but if we're talking about actions which "shred the system", we should talk about the people who have to actual power to do so.
There's a few problems with this alleged rule - "a president in his last year doesn't get a hearing for an SC candidate *if the Senate is controlled by the opposing party*".
First, it's not the historical rule. Looking at election year nominations, going back, you have this:
1988, Republican President, Democratic Senate, nominee confirmed.
1968, Democratic President, Democratic Senate, nominee rejected.
1940, Democratic President, Democratic Senate, nominee confirmed.
1932, Republican President, Republican Senate, nominee confirmed.
1916, Democratic President, Democratic Senate, nominee confirmed.
1912, Republican President, Republican Senate, nominee confirmed.
1892, Republican President, Republican Senate, nominee confirmed.
1888, Democratic President, Republican President, nominee confirmed.
1888, Democratic President, Republican President, nominee confirmed (2nd time)
1880, Republican President, Democratic Senate, nominee confirmed
I stopped looking after that, though I've heard there are older precedents that go with the rule; but based on those, it seems like the rule is right 5 of 10 times, a coin flip, and the alternative rule of "nominees are confirmed" is right 9 of 10 times. And granting without looking that earlier precedents are more in line with the rule, usually in a case like this you'd point to the more recent examples to see what common practice is.
Second, it's not what Biden said. Biden didn't say the thing about the Senate being the other party, and he brought up Abe Fortas as an example of an ill-fated nomination.
Third, it contradicts what plenty of people said. Lindsey Graham famously said "I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination". No mention of who controls the Senate. And plenty of others said in 2020, in essence "we have the Constitutional power to nominate/confirm someone so we will".
Fourth, and related to the above, the rule makes no sense. If the idea is that the next President should decide, then the party controlling the Senate shouldn't matter. If there's a difference between what happens if the President's party controls the Senate or not, everyone knows it's because the opposition has the power to block the nomination, not that they're doing something principled. The real rule is that both sides will do what they can to put their guys on the court and block the other guys, and everyone knows it.
And on that last point - like I said, plenty of Republicans openly said in 2020 that they were using whatever power they had to put their guys on the court. Why is that different in principle from court-packing? Both are simply disregarding old norms. You can say that court packing is more extreme, and it is more extreme than what has happened already, but it's not really a principled difference, and the current non-court-packing situation has been getting more extreme.
"That's a very long thread, so I didn't read all of it, but skimming the early replies and tapping through to various later points at random it mostly just looks like people are glad that a highly shaky judicial-activist decision was overturned? It's extremely hard for me to parse this as right-wing in any meaningful sense; there's a correct procedure to implement stuff like Roe (a constitutional amendment) and you can't just not follow it because you know your desired law won't succeed – in fact, it not succeeding for controversial issues the whole point of the amendment process! Nobody should be allowed to make an end-run around this sort of thing."
Pretty much this, I'd say. Roe v. Wade is IMO exemplary of an issue that has a surface-level obvious black-and-white tribal setup, while below that surface, it's a lot more complicated. Which reflects the abortion issue itself, for that matter. It's easy to exclaim "pro-choice!" or "pro-life!" and anything that doesn't match whichever position you're in favor of must be The Enemy; however, there were multiple reasons to conclude RvW was badly decided, and some of them assume a basic pro-choice position. (Ginsburg herself criticized it. I don't think she was pro-life.) Some of those reasons were voiced in that thread.
Some of the reasons were indeed "because hinders the pro-life position", sure. But that's just to say DSL has conservatives in its audience.
This is a bit orthogonal to your post but I often hear people talk about abortion/Roe like there are 3 positions you might take - pro-choice, pro-Roe; pro-choice, anti-Roe; pro-life, anti-Roe. With the 2nd being the view that abortion should be legal but the constitution shouldn't be interpreted to say anything about it.
My understanding is that polls consistently show (at least showed, before it was repealed) Roe as being significantly more popular than the pro-life position. So that 2nd position isn't held by as many people as the opposite - pro-life, pro-Roe.
I wouldn't say I "often" hear people say that... but I do hear people say that.
If it's accurate, the calculus for resolving it makes some sense. The pro-choice anti-Roe cohort is probably small, and might be larger if people in the pro-choice pro-Roe cohort perceived it as easy to enact abortion protections in all fifty states, or at least in the states they live in. If it were transactional - a bill introduced that would protection abortion rights without relying on Roe, in as many states as they care about, and that got enough Congressional or state support to go through - they'd likely support it and go along with a repeal of Roe since they're protected anyway. But lawmakers are unlikely to go through that trouble if they think Roe is good enough (or, cynically, they want to be able to play the SCOTUS card when it suits them), so such bills never happen, so that middle cohort never grows.
As for polls, I have a really hard time trusting them for any political question where the controversy level is high. I see simply too many confounders, such as people misunderstanding the question, people interpreting it as a tribal signal, pollsters using leading questions, reporters misreporting the results, etc.
founder effect, evaporative cooling of group beliefs (leftists tended to leave over time ) - see https://www.lesswrong.com/s/M3TJ2fTCzoQq66NBJ/p/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p
Also, lack of censorship and not banning people for conservative opinions.
Also, old-style forum and being conservative is likely correlated.
Also, what others mentioned.
> Also, lack of censorship and not banning people for conservative opinions.
You heard about the Thunderdome, right? "Lack of censorship" does a bad job explaining what's going on there.
The thunderdome) which I have yet to visit) was conceived and is operated by Brad, one of DSL’s prominent left wingers.
To be precise, the Thunderdome was conceived by Brad and would have been operated by himself and a volunteer moderation-skeptical right-winger with any actions requiring agreement. I say "would have been", because the proposal for a low-moderation space has been vetoed by the global mods.
I hadn’t followed the thunderdome saga closely enough to realize that it had been vetoed.
Was looking forward to seeing that option, shame the owner has the procedures he does. The moderation at DSL has improved, but one of the staff uses 'lazy swipe at outgroup' as a cudgel against those he disagrees with politically. Also, one poster brought up the dynamic tension between being "kind" and being accurate (though he may have used a different word here), and I agree. Some times you have to call a spade a spade.
What do you mean by "conservative"? There are probably a few people who legitimately want eg. Christianity to be enshrined in the US Constitution. But most probably don't, or at least don't care.
If you want to hear all of the moderate left-wing arguments for a topic, you can simply just turn on the TV or radio. That means that arguing for those policy preferences simple isn't that *interesting*. (There's also the same issue when it comes to some very obvious and very un-PC details about race relations in the US. Occasional new people *really* want to talk about the subject, but just don't have anything new or interesting to say on the topic so they are quickly urged to either post about something else or leave.)
Given that, you should expect to see a lot of people interested in discussing the moderate-right viewpoints on issues. If you think the place is too conservative, show up and say something interesting which is left-leaning. Start a productive discussion.
>If you think the place is too conservative, show up and say something interesting which is left-leaning. Start a productive discussion.
I spent some time posting there and it struck me that it was difficult to post on "neutral" non-CW topics, because non-CW OPs have a tendency to become CW after a while. The OP is supposed to tag a CW thread as such, but that rarely means anything in practice because once a thread not tagged as CW receives some CW comments, someone says "This thread needs a CW tag now." undermining the point of such a tag, since this policy renders every thread as CW de facto.
Because the regular commenters lean right, otherwise neutral, originally non-CW threads can turn CW, and it's a good bet that it's in a rightward direction.
Sure, one solution, if one wanted to even-out the political orientation for some reason along a right-left axis, could be that more left-wingers join and engage with good arguments for their positions. It's hard for me to do that because, except for being adamantly pro-choice and anti-Trump, I'm not very far on the left, and arguments about abortion and Trump tend to get heated quickly on both sides, and all my strikes there were on those two subjects. (Of course, I believe it was my interlocutors who started the incivility spiral, and that my strikes were for punching back not for punching first.)
I have seen that effect in action: I'm often active on threads involving Christianity, and no matter what they started about they almost always end up becoming an apologetics debate between atheists and theists. It reminds me of the old days of the internet. But definitely, threads that don't start out as a fight can often end up there.
> What do you mean by "conservative"?
Being pro-life, pro-Trump, pro-gun-legalization, that sort of thing. Not any individual one of these, just that general cluster of social and policy preferences.
> If you think the place is too conservative, show up and say something interesting which is left-leaning. Start a productive discussion.
I didn't say that it was too conservative, just that I found the extent to which it was conservative surprising.
For what it's worth, I was considering getting involved in the early days, but that was when Enopoletus was still around (I believe this is no longer the case). Since he had previously called me, personally, a "faggot" or a "kike" on more than one occasion, I was not particularly interested in hanging out in the same spaces as him. I don't think this explains the tilt of the board overall - Enopoletus can't have personally insulted _that_ many people - but I suppose it plausibly accounts for part of it.
So, one thing that you might not know is DSL moderates through a strike ladder. First two strikes are a day, then a week then a month then six months etc. So it can take a while for someone to get removed from the community. This sort of thing is good feedback for mods like Paul Brinkley
Also, DSL has an `ignore' button, which you can use to, basically, not be shown posts by people you don't want to engage with. I have Echo on ignore. When Enopoletus was around, I was ignoring him also.
Actually using the ignore button makes the experience a *lot* better.
Eh, I've always found killfiles make threads really annoying to follow. It works fine if everyone else is ignoring them too, or on nested-replies fora like reddit, but neither was the case here.
It's true, I could have put him on ignore and lived with the more annoying UX. But, when the situation arose, I didn't really feel inclined to bother.
Also, I'm neither pro-Trump nor pro-gun, and I'd favor a ~15 week abortion limit (whatever that translates to on the pro choice-pro life spectrum). I still find DSL interesting and valuable.
DSL was founded as a way to keep the SSC comments community going when SSC shut down. The month one community had a lot of conservative commenters, which was what you'd expect for the simple algorithm of "each commenter's chance of migrating to DSL is proportional to the how active they are on the blog". I attribute DSL's political leaning mostly to that founding effect and its consequences (liberals bounce off a forum where "the 2020 election was stolen" is a topic of serious debate).
Exactly. I think the existence of the comparatively left-leaning comments on ACX also further encourages the evaporative cooling effect.
I've been on DSL since the beginning, I suspect a big part of it is when SSC shut down, all the left leaning people had other places to go, and then went there. As a right leaning guy, who wasn't interested in right wing echo chambers, I didn't really have anywhere that felt like an internet home for me for a few months. I wish we could bring in some more left leaning people. For the record, Ancient Oak is right that Jack Wilson posted invective laden rants relatively frequently. people were banned for far less.
I'm sorry thats your perspective. For the record, I'd really like to see more liberal voices at DSL. I know its easy for people on the left to go through life never hearing a conservative idea, but I don't think it does either of us any good for you to avoid engaging with people outside your in-group
>>> I wish we could bring in some more left leaning people.
>> Trying to be the token lefty has been tried by many, including myself, and it just isn't worth it. You get nothing out of the site.
> I don't think it does either of us any good for you to avoid engaging with people outside your in-group
You ask for more left-wing voices. A self-described lefty tells you they tried engaging, but left when they got nothing out of it. In response, you tell them they avoided engaging. Do you see the issue here?
Ah, you know I understood the original comment as Axioms saying he's tried hanging out in conservative sites, generically, but hasn't actually visited DSL. If he has tried participating at DSL and found he didn't get anything out of it that makes more sense.
Based on the comments I'm seeing above, a self-described lefty with prior (and mistaken) beliefs about conservatives tried to engage, but only within a framework they get to control. This isn't an actual attempt to engage.
You can count me as another somewhat-lefty who spent quite a while engaging in good faith, only to be met with zero charity from the other side when a fundamental, irreconcilable value conflict came up. As long as I accepted the standard DSL framework I was welcome. But in retrospect, it's become clear to me that about half the posters never really wanted to hear my side of the argument, just talk at me. At times I bent over backwards trying to make sense of their worldview, but when it came time for others to put themselves in my shoes I was met with extremely close-minded dismissal.
It has been less than a week since you used your powers as a moderator to veto the creation of a low-moderation subforum. I guess now we'll never know.
>I know its easy for people on the left to go through life never hearing a conservative idea
It is this sort of assertion that can make me irate. Perhaps the statement has some truth-value for some liberal bubbles but consider the environment where you are saying this right now. Is ACX a liberal bubble? Was SSC?
I suspect most liberals on this forum likely expose themselves to conservative ideas from time to time. This part of the blogosphere isn't all that left-leaning. We're basically one degree of separation from Marginal Revolution, Steve Sailer, Robin Hanson, Curtis Yarvin, Dominic Cummings, David Friedman, and other voices that are more or less considered to be on the right. We're also one degree (or less) of separation from, you guessed it: DSL!
Let's concede that are you are at least within earshot of these views.
But consider further: do you take the views of MR, Sailer, Hanson, Yarvin, Cummings, Friedman, and other people who hold conservative or Red Tribe views seriously? That is, as if they are views that can be held by a reasonable, thinking person? (Can you give examples?)
I don’t take Yarvin seriously. I don’t think his views can be held by a reasonable thinking person, only someone who is too smart by half.
I take Sailer seriously as a gauge for what many regular conservatives, as opposed to conservative politicians, really think. Trump basically won the GOP nomination in 2016 by running on a Saileresque platform, although I doubt the influence was direct. Sailer helped me understand that there was a huge disconnect between the Republican Party and a silent plurality of conservatives (who tended to be anti-immigration and antiglobalization) in the decade preceding Trump’s presidency. I suppose one could hear the same ideas listening to Michael Savage in the early 2000s (Borders, Language & Culture!), but Savage always sounded like a nut, whereas Sailer persuaded me to believe there was an underserved political market out there which, later, Trump intuitively knew to service.
I believe a reasonable thinking person can buy Sailer’s ideology of Citizenism, although I find it facile and think it leads quickly into zero-sum thinking about the economy. One idea he had that has stayed with me is that in the USA the worst thing about being poor is having to live around other poor people. That is a very depressing insight.
Hanson - I don’t take his EM stuff seriously, but I take Futarchy seriously. His Homo-Hipocritus ideas are a bit depressing but there is probably something there. His Near/Far Thinking ideas are brilliant, as are some of his aphorisms such as “Politics is not about policy”. I don’t often buy what he takes away from many of his thought-experiments, but I think it’s worthwhile that he wanders into dangerous territory with heretical thoughts about slavery, blackmail, rape, et al.
Cummings I don’t really know much about other than something something Brexit, he reads this blog, and Substack recommends I read his Substack.
Probably most of the David Friedman I’ve read has been his comments on SSC and DSL.I haven’t read Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, although I keep meaning to read some of it. I suppose in general he makes me seriously wonder if cap anarchy can work, and I don’t really know, although I suspect its likely failure mode is something that looks similar to what we already have but with different names for the same things. I believe it was you and Bugmaster who had a very interesting debate over something along those lines a while back. I read David’s dad’s book Free to Choose many years ago, although about all I remember from it was how mining for gold is one of the most useless activities a society can do. And maybe I picked up on the value of “local information” from it, not sure.
I’m a huge fan of Tyler Cowen and have read several of his books, with The Great Stagnation as my favorite. I remember that his big picture analysis of the Great Recession was “We weren’t as rich as we thought.” I’m still not sure that’s correct. I’m also a fan of the Scott Sumner, who doesn’t believe there ever was a real-estate bubble before the GR, and the more time passes the more I think Sumner was correct. His idea for level NGDP targeting using a futures market seems brilliant (or did that idea originate with another economist?) at least as an experiment, although it doesn’t seem that experiment will happen anytime soon. I suppose that idea no longer sounds like a "conservative" one, even though it looks to markets for a solution.
As for religious conservatives, I know plenty of those who are reasonable thinking people. Two people can have reasonable, conflicting views. I don’t think religious conservatives are unreasonable given their own priors and perspective, but my perspective and priors conflicts heavily with theirs -- much in the same way my p&ps conflict with woke progressives.
In college I was much more left wing, practically a socialist. Exposure to conservative thought (not to mention working in private industry) has caused me to believe strongly in markets and the importance of incentives, although I am still a tax & spend liberal at heart.
+1, with the caveat that you do sometimes get some good bread/ 'taschen recipes out of it
+1
The only other place to go is The Motte, which people complain about being too conservative for similar reasons.
The Motte ceased to have intelligent effortful posts some time ago.
I really like DSL as a place for smart/charitable people (with notable exceptions.) I do find it a bit addictive though. :)
I get the sense "charitable" is in the eye of the beholder. Based on your comment above, you seem to think a conservative viewpoint is something to be "put up with", whereas I see it as something to understand better.
Do you think conservatives are inherently closeminded? Because that's not the sense I get from frequent conservative comments on DSL.
This is very unkind to religious people (less of this please), but overall a good assessment of DSL. I left DSL over what can be distilled to a lack of charity. I thought that there was some rapport and mutual respect going on even across ideological barriers, but that turned out not to be the case. We had a heated disagreement where civility broke down (mostly my fault really). As I was trying to fix things and lay out my worldview in a comprehensible way, more and more people just started insulting and slandering me, all while maintaining a polite facade. Meanwhile, I was getting repeated strikes because I'm not in the habit of moderating my *tone* as much. I spoke my mind honestly, but only a few people were actually trying to engage.
I think the end of the covid era marked a notable downturn for the forum. During covid, there was a lot of controversial discussion, but it didn't cut through the population across standard ideological lines. But lately, it has felt much more like a standard left vs right battle, and since I vaguely pattern match to the U.S. left (even though that doesn't describe my beliefs well at all) I was repeatedly strawmanned and asked to defend a bunch of absurd claims I never made.
Right off, you insult conservatives in a way that tells me you have a prior belief about their rationality. That is irrational in itself, and casts the entire rest of your comment in a bad light.
I don't know what you mean by "Misery". Is that a town? Or a state of prosperity? If the latter, then you're implying all conservatives live that way. Another insult, and untrue to boot; in turn, that would mean you're mistaken about understanding them "perfectly well".
If being "in an environment full of people who are, ideologically, hostile to your world view isn't inherently valuable", then a lot of conservatives would indeed find most of online media devoid of value, but I don't know what you want me to infer from that, and I'm not even sure you wanted the inference to go in that direction.
Meanwhile, we don't "obsess" over charity, but to the extent we value it, we do because in a world where no one has all the answers, it makes rational sense to compare perspectives and inspect the ones otherwise unavailable to us, in case there's some insight we've missed. That's what it means to be openminded. If, on the other hand, you believe you have all the answers you'll ever need, that's being closeminded... and it's risky. At the least, you're bound for a life of frustration, wondering why other people stubbornly refuse to come around to your Obviously Good answers.
Of course, that's assuming you're going to be interested in things beyond strategy gaming. Maybe you're not, and if so, okay; more power to you. But that also means I can't take your opinion about conservatives being in bubbles seriously; it looks rather the other way around.
>Jack Wilson posted invective laden rants relatively frequently. people were banned for far less.
I made 600 posts and got 5 strikes. That's less than 1% of them. And much of the invective was aimed at politicians I don't like, which, um, the other side got away with doing a lot more often.
The other side didn't flat refer to politicians they don't like by calling them insulting names, as I recall. And as a moderator, I have extra reason to see such comments if they happen, since I tend to see nearly all of the reports.
That one is the deal-killer for me. I'm not going to invest time in a political argument in which I can't even call the politicians who are wrong insulting names.
That's an odd position to hold, at least to me. Why not be satisfied with more factual criticisms - "Politician A is making poor decisions" - instead of directly insulting - "Politician A is an idiot"?
A direct insult more clearly defines your position, but does very little to explain or convince. Are you not interested in explaining or convincing, or does insulting provide some alternate benefit to you?
The politicians in question here are those in Texas who passed the abortion ban earlier in the year, which took effect months before Roe was overturned. It was a cynical move by those politicians. A commenter asserted to me, the day it passed, with gleeful shadenfreude at my dismay, that the Texas Legislature had done what Texas voters wanted, which seems unlikely considering the Texas electorate has, in fact, become increasingly liberal over recent decades (There has been much talk about how Texas may turn blue in the near future due to this liberal turn in its electorate). Texas Republicans are moving away from the median voter not towards him, and I believe that will be their undoing in the long run. Unfortunately in the short run the Democratic Party in Texas also refuses to move toward the center so won't win in November, and Texans will be stuck with the abortion ban that most of the Texas electorate doesn't want.
Polls show most voters in Texas would prefer that abortion be legal for the first trimester, but in the defect/defect path both The Republicans and The Democrats have chosen in Texas, we don't end up with a compromise result that most people would prefer; instead we get the radical stance the legislature and governor have taken, because they are cynical, psychopathic pricks who don't actually care about the will of the people. (Nor do the Texas Democrats.)
I don't believe I'm breaking the 2/3 rule on this forum in writing that, but on DSL you aren't supposed to swipe at your outgroup, and as a Texas voter, The Texas Legislature is my out group.
To answer your question: adding the vulgarity at the end of a rant like that makes it all worth writing in the first place.
Founder effect, plus attrition of left-leaning posters. Which is regrettable but understandable; I'm not sure I'd stick around if the situation were reversed.
As a regular, I know how to tune out the blackpilled right-wing broken records to the point where they are only a moderate annoyance, at least for now. But to any new member coming from a vaguely left-leaning perspective, the group cannot help but appear hostile to them. And there are people who like it that way. I'm not one of them, but I don't know how to get rid of them and they do know how to get rid of left-leaning posters. So here we are, edging towards being the right-wing echo chamber we were always accused of being.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
Still, I got at least two good years out of DSL, and it might be good for two more still. That's more than I expected when SSC folded. And maybe the horse will learn to sing.
This comment captures my experience as well: if I didn't ignore half the threads, I'd find DSL much more irritating than it is--and it's not that I disagree with the viewpoints (I'm quite conservative) but the tone/temper/lack of charity is a real problem.
I try not to make it worse, and mostly avoid the "will make me stupider" parts--but it's a challenge. I would ask/invite anyone who's not conservative to join, and just stay out of the heavily political threads--I want more threads on non-political topics.
There's hope for this. Left-wingers like Plumber and bobobob go a long way to keeping a rapport between both sides of the aisle. They like to talk about non-political things; so do many of the righties; this builds good faith on which more political topics can be discussed.
I see a disturbing tendency among some people to scoff at the non-CW topics, as unimportant fluff. The people I'm thinking of write as if the primary function of the forum is for them to get their facts out as efficiently as possible. They don't appreciate that even the most information-dense signal in the world is useless if no one's prepared to receive it.
It doesn't help that the people I'm talking about seem focused on getting their own signal out, and not really interested in receiving in turn. (At least one of them is currently banned, IIRC.)
This is currently the top thread, and it is not marked CW:
"How does it feel to live long enough to see all your favorite franchises go down in flames?"
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,7129.0.html
This is the second reply:
>What then do we call the ones that came out more than a few years ago? I grok that you're talking about a set that includes Star Wars since 2015, Star Trek since ??? (JJ Abrams, 2009?), Ghostbusters 2016... what is this set's unity? "Make it woke and get free advertising by calling the pre-existing fandom racist/sexist+?"
I do not think you really appreciate how endemic this stuff is.
You're referring to an effect where non-CW stuff drifts into CW territory. That's a noted problem.
I do appreciate how endemic it is to assert that mainline Hollywood product has injected woke content in an unpleasant way. But when you say that, I wonder if you appreciate how endemic unpleasant woke content has become.
This doesn't have to be a rhetorical, "we're surrounded by wokeism; just accept it" claim. You can discuss it. You could push back on that claim on DSL. I'll even concede that you'll get the text equivalent of eyerolls from some DSLers if you did. But do you think people who lament all that woke content get no eyerolls whatsoever, if they say so anywhere else?
And if everyone's response to the prospect of getting eyerolls is to just hang out on forums where they won't, what do you think that does to the system as a whole?
I think result isn't good, and I think the point of having forums like SSC, DSL, et al. is to at least *try* to pull away from that, rather than fall back into the usual grooves.
It might be worth reading further in that thread. Yes, some people will try to hammer the whole wide world into being about their pet issue, but mostly there seems to be an interesting discussion about various long-running media properties and how they went right/wrong.
Reading what two sincere, intelligent, and well-meaning moderators have to say about this topic is oddly saddening. People in general don't like hearing things that fall outside a comfortable stretch from their own positions. That's not a problem, per se, and so there aren't any solutions.
(Who's the other moderator?)
As for people not liking hearing things outside their comfort zone: I notice there are people who express frustration - sometimes to the point of profanity - at how crazy, stupid, evil, etc. other people can be. And I read further and find they're frustrated at people for whom the usual political toggle is flipped. Meanwhile, I'm reading those other people, and notice they often say the exact same thing. Meanwhile meanwhile, I read each side make its case, and I can see how it makes sense *for them*, and I read how they characterize the other side, and it's clearly not the same as the other side characterizes itself. In other words, each side is frustrated, not with the other side, but with its fabricated model of the other side.
You really think that's not a problem? Or are you referring to something else?
Ah, I conflated one of your comments with the references to Schilling and thought you were both moderators over there. I'm not personally familiar, my mistake.
Yes, that we're polarized to the point of not being able to tell the difference between a thing and its opposite (with examples differing depending on what side of the aisle we're talking to) is a problem. I was referring to the human desire for comfort, especially within something they regard as community. Humans don't appear to have evolved to be primarily challenged by their communities. Yes, social norms have always required policing, but always within the context of the harsh cruel world of Nature that lies just outside the little circle of illumination cast by our tribe's watchfires. It's not natural or good for someone to want me to come into his village and stand on the green and tell him and all his kin that they're wrong and should listen to me.
Now, would society be better if there were some kind of greater town square, in which everyone could be exposed to every possible side and piece of information? I suppose so, but folks would just show up en masse to some corner of the square, cause a stink, and leave (terms for this by in/out group are "raid" and "trolling").
I long ago made a habit of trying to acquaint myself with other sides of things, even when doing so is infuriating and painful, but I make no claims to virtue on this account. I suspect I'm driven by psychopathology, and am a terrible nuisance in debate.
Hi all. Reposting from last week's thread as I was a little later to that one than I am to this one.
For any ACX regulars who fancy the idea of being able to build friendships with fellow regulars beyond the confines of these hallowed comment threads: my partners and I have just released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
You can check it out here https://www.imsurf.in/
Already quite a few requests in there from ACX folk to match with! We'll begin 'concierge matching' some of our initial matching users in the coming weeks.
Looks good. How will you solve the critical mass problem?
Excellent question - the answer is a combination of careful productisation and targeted outreach.
-Productisation: If we can effectively lead people towards requests that correspond to both known and unknown subjects of interest, we can maximise the likelihood of people being able to find something interesting without necessarily having to search for it. This is what the Shoreline is for, as our research has suggested an awful lot of people would be interested in this service not just to lodge specific requests but to find interesting things that they, as it were, weren't 'looking' for.
-Outreach: We're looking to build 'micro-critical-masses' within specific interest-bound communities (e.g. local athletics, rationalists, gamers etc.). If we can become the go-to service for a handful of specific communities we can validate a great deal of our assumptions and begin building key feedback loops.
It remains to be seen where the exact general critical mass threshold will be found, but if we can create enough of these micro-critical-masses we can begin to serve people effectively long before that larger mass consolidates.
(Will be dealing with the outreach side of the equation presently but we're currently trying to find a replacement for our CTO - if you or anyone else reading this knows of an industrious data science whizz interested in joining a project like this at pre-revenue stage, shoot something over to us a team@imsurf.in . Thanks!)
Hey, I went to your site and asked how your match people. Your reply was "we do it using a proprietary algorithm." That answer tells the questioner nothing whatever. That's not reasonable, and it's a turn-off. How about a real answer?
It's fundamentally going to be based on entity recognition, and figuring out through those extracted entities the degree to which specific requests are matchable.
That's all we can really share at this stage, not least as the algorithm proper is still being built.
If you're interested to help, shoot us something over to team@imsurf.in
It's a very interesting project, but I find I am mostly without good ideas, despite being a psychologist. I think I'd rather put what ideas I have up here, to see what thoughts the crew here has about it. In fact, I'd recommend that you guys put up some questions here, because the ACX hive has a lot of intellectual honey. Ask what should be included in a friend-matching algorithm.
My main thought is that I have only one rule-out: People who consistently come across as far more interested in their own ideas than in anyone else's. Double rule-out for the subgroup of these people who are quick to become mean (sarcastic, insulting, making personal attacks) if their attempt to one-up somebody is met with energetic resistance. After becoming familiar with the regulars here I have mentally tagged some people as definitely of that sort, and others as definitely not. But I don't see how you could get information about presence/absence of that quality from individuals themselves. As a psychologist, I can tell you that self-report measures suck, unless you are asking for simple, concrete information such as favorite books. If you ask people whether they are uninterested in others and ruled by a one-upsmanship script you will not get valid answers.
Yes, I think that sort of thing could create enormous value. I wanted one of Surf’s ‘starts’ as it were to be among the ACX community, and the wider rationalist super-community in general, because firstly I thought the level of engagement would be high and the quality of requests higher still (I’ve been right so far) and because, as you point out, there’s an unusual congregation of incredibly acute intellect on these threads, which could not only be useful for informing some of our decisions about product, but could be very fertile gathering grounds later when we begin to grow and are looking to fill our organisation with extreme and unusual talent.
Ideally it’d be great to organise something formal with Scott to this end, but I haven’t presumed to reach out on that front yet as I don’t know if it’s entirely his bag to do these kinds of collaborations, and he also doesn’t know me personally (beyond a brief interaction whereupon I reached out to him with an invitation to join my small former publication during the NYT/SSC saga; he was highly gracious and humoured me, despite the fact that he must have been fielding six figure offers to go to higher profile organisations, and I think that says enormous amounts about his character). Failing that, and presuming it’s not greeted as spam, I’ll continue to ply the boards here for questions/contributions and sign-ups.
And as regards your very interesting specific suggestion: yeah, I think one of the most important and interesting frontiers in this project at the intersection of psychology and data science (particularly as regards cohort analysis etc.) is going to be the sort of things you suggest. We’re going to put particular efforts into trying to uncover group-behavioural cues that might be predictable from otherwise very obscure traits – that, I don’t know, pessimistic AI-ethicists have the best rate of long-term conversational success, for instance – and that will then allow us to productise more effectively for the best possible incentives.
There's a kind of thread that occasionally appears here -- I forget what it's called -- that lets people put up personal notices of various kinds, and one of the categories is people looking for someone to date. Many of the self-descriptions in the date section sound quite honest and thorough, and some people actually include a paragraph from a previous partner giving their views of the person's good and bad points. Those self-profiles are about the best and most informative kind of public self-presentation I've seen, and I think they'd work well for people seeking friends, too. One person mentioned his achievements and good points, then added "but I'm not for everybody. I'm fat. And also I . . ." Damn, I was impressed by that, and warmed up to the person (not in the market for someone to date, though). Not sure how the algorithm comes in, though. Maybe algorithm part would just be a separate category of information.
The weird thing about the homicide spike in the US is that it seems to be an effect of a general national "mood" of unrest. There was a feeling of distrust and craziness in the air. I realize this isn't at all scientific or even measurable, but I think this is the reason the Covid explanation seems so intuitive to many people. They felt the bad energy and attributed it to Covid.
Now we see this spike didn't happen in other countries and it seems likely that the worst effects of the national bad mood/distrust were due to BLM and protests, more than covid. This makes sense because we have citizens wary of police intervention and police nervous about intervening in the first place. I wouldn't expect this abstract national phenomenon to be limited to big urban areas where the protests took place. Everyone was watching the same news and having the same conversations online. The internet truly unites Americans across regions. So I'm not at all surprised that the spike happened everywhere. The question is: did it indeed happen everywhere or is there just a more random sample of where more murders took place?
I also have a gut feeling about "mood" - I think people feel threatened. In my fairly rural area, I see a lot of t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, etc that are just straight up threats. It's a little shocking to see a soccer mom in an SUV with a sticker on the back depicting an AR15 with text saying "If you want mine, you'd better bring yours."
And does this drive violence? Well, there were two mass shootings within 50 miles of me in the last 24 hours alone...
I am in a very liberal small city in a purple state that borders a very conservative rural county and a very conservative rural state. The city acts as a regional hub for business and shopping so we get a lot of the rural/conservative population coming to the town. I also see the stickers you are talking about. We have also had fascist/neo-nazi/far-right (however you want to call it) flyers and stickers put up on lamp posts a few times.
Though the city and surrounding areas are basically all white, there is a large BLM support system here (made up of mostly white people). There is also a very active Democratic Socialist element. The activism from the far left has never been threatening or used violent language.
Since 2016 my county has added almost 40,000 people and the number of murders is basically flat (10 in 2026 and 9 in 2021, possibly even too low to be statistically significant). Gun suicides are 8x that of gun related homicides.
Based solely on this personal experience, I am not convinced that BLM activities are the cause of a raise in homicides. It may have contributed in a some places but its hard to believe it's the only cause or the largest cause when we also have economic downturns related to COVID and a sharp rise in gun sales.
I think more detailed analysis is need, looking at the type of conflicts that produce assaults or murders. For instance here is an article about the rise in murders in Denver (about 90 min from me): https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/colorado/articles/2022-03-14/denver-recorded-96-homicides-in-2021-highest-since-1981
The key passages:
>“We’re seeing individuals involved in these altercations had firearms with them and they resort to those firearms early on,” said Denver police Cmdr. Matt Clark with the Major Crimes Division. “They’re resolving these conflicts through the use of a firearm.”
>An analysis by the police department showed that domestic violence killings and homicides involving narcotics helped fuel the record number. The department also attributed 22 homicides to arguments or confrontations that spun out of control.
I'd like to see the assertions in those quotes tested. If its true that domestic violence and narcotics are the cause of the violence, that is very damaging to the BLM hypothesis. Also because Denver is not a very black city (only about 5% of the metro area is black).
My town is a purple spot in a sea of dark red, and thus attracts negative attention from anti-LGBT/anti-BLM reactionaries.
We've had the flyers and stickers too, along with marches and vandalism against LGBT/BLM-supporting churches and businesses.
(Since someone was skeptical:
Nazis marching - https://www.therepublic.com/2017/09/12/organization-labeled-as-hate-group-had-practice-march-in-columbus-mayor-condemns-racist-ideology-upon-which-this-group-was-founded/
Hateful graffiti -https://www.therepublic.com/2021/04/04/police_investigate_white_supremacist_graffiti-4/)
The groups doing this are mostly the openly fascist ones like TWP and Patriot Front, but there's also a lot of support around here for flirting-with-fascism groups like the 3%ers.
I think you're strawmanning what I said quite a bit here, and also that you didn't read the articles very closely... It's a town (Indiana, not Ohio!), not a big city, and seeing Nazis march by when you're eating dinner (yes, they literally marched by while I was eating dinner) is very noticeable. Having hateful graffiti and stickers show up regularly (not just once) is pretty upsetting.
It's depressing when right-wingers reply to you being upset about the plainly growing threat of fascism with "well antifa and BLM exist, so what's the big deal?" Kinda makes it seem like they're on the side of the fascists, you know?
I can't speak for other cities, but I'm not aware of any BLM-related vandalism here. And I *really* doubt that there are 15 Stalinists in Columbus LMAO. I'm not sure there are 15 people here who realize Stalinism is still a going philosophy.
Speaking as someone who didn't follow the march in question: you seeing a few people marching by with Nazi symbolism on display, and trebuchet saying it was 12 people in a city of almost a million, strike me as consistent claims. They're also consistent AFAICT with you finding that upsetting, and trebuchet claiming that's jumping at shadows. How is your claim a counter to that? "It's not jumping at shadows; you must understand, it's pretty upsetting!"?
As you imply, if 15 Stalinists marched in Columbus and free market advocates were clanging the bells, we could make the same claim about shadows. The free market crowd could say that for every Stalinist willing to march, a hundred are silently watching and nodding. Likewise, maybe you could claim a thousand secret Nazis for those twelve marchers, but I think you'd need to actually claim and support that. (And to speed things up, I can say you'll need a response for all those groups that turn out to be hopelessly infiltrated by undercover FBI agents.)
Meanwhile, the side that doesn't attribute much to a handful of Nazis does indeed have several hundred, no fooling, actually-marching-and-setting-property-on-fire Antifa / BLM rioters to point to.
How much do you think you should make of what goes on in your town as representative of the country at large? My personal experience of 2020 in NYC was getting routinely threatened by BLMers on my nighttime walks while people riotted throughout midtown, whereas I've never even met a right-winger let alone been threatened by one. Geographical heterogeneity is a great reason not to extrapolate from personal experience
This is where I'm at, too. There's just too much evidence that _lots_ of things are breaking down in crime and crime-adjacent areas.
To pick some random things, car deaths also increased greatly in 2020/2021:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
... and pedestrian deaths are up:
https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Full-Report22
... and drug overdoses:
https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
I suspect that you could tell a pretty broad story of things going wrong that don't seem directly connected to the protest movement.
I'm not saying that the BLM protests (and their downstream impact on policing) didn't matter, just that it seems reductive (and, for many people, partisan) to narrow in on "BLM caused the murder spike" as opposed to "there is a widespread breakdown in social cohesion, trust in institutions, and public behavior that has manifested in multiple ways, including the BLM riots, Jan 6th, many varieties of crime, etc." Understanding how the 2020 protests may have played a causal role in the web of events is important, but stopping your analysis there and arguing endlessly over that narrow point seems like partisan axe-grinding and not a useful pursuit for making the world a better place.
Yeah, you're thinking in the same direction I am. I think future historians are going to point out that a _lot_ was going on in 2020, and it's going to take us decades to tease out how the different threads all interacted. Many historians still talk about 1967 as a formative year where a lot of trends hit inflection points. 2020 might be just another of those super-eventful years.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to draw what lessons we can now, and I think looking at the role of the protests, and how it may have impacted crime - either directly, or by changing the nature of policing - is important. But we should expect our understanding to evolve as we gather more data and hindsight.
I share your fundamental thesis that we live in a less-stable, low-slack world, though I don't think I'd put the fundamental causes quite the same place you would. Do you have a link to a longer treatment somewhere?
"Do you have a link to a longer treatment somewhere?"
I think a large fraction of the loss of slack is covered by Scott's "cost disease" post:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
What do you think of it? I find dectupled inflation-corrected costs frightening.
This is the the most illuminating response on the topic yet posted and should be highlighted as such.
Matt Yglesias wrote about this widespread breakdown back in January, I'm sure the data trends have held: https://www.slowboring.com/p/all-kinds-of-bad-behavior-is-on-the
The absolute numbers worry me less than the "what bad shit __hasn't__ gotten worse" aspect. Value Is Fragile. I'm still generally-optimistic about the future and am blessed to live in relative safety and comfort, yet...it's increasingly easy to make a sound rationalization for nesting behaviour. Just sorta hibernate at home until it's 2019 again. Working a frontline service job means I can't not see the huge increase in number of eggshells everyone's walking on all the time now. Almost makes me want to appropriate the woke concept of "microaggressions" - no one's literally getting murdered at my store, but the average daily number of tiny provocations has gone way up. A sort of background radiation of fear and loathing pervades public life, in a way I don't remember from the Before Times. "Sad!"
Car deaths and pedestrian deaths are hardly different phenomena. My understanding is that car deaths and homicides are closely linked in time, a sharp increase after May 2020.
But my understanding is that overdose deaths are different. Their increase was incremental, spread over years, starting in January 2020 before the pandemic. (See Avalanche's link to Yglesias, who chooses to use June-May years or the CDC 12 month rolling average.) I don't think that they reflect increased drug use, but increased spread of fentanyl, not just making strong opioids, but mixed in with stimulants. If so, it's not a society wide change of behavior of users, but a much smaller number of dealers. Direct measure of usage should be possible, but I don't know the numbers.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
Added: but this link of month-by-month totals makes it look like overdoses increased steadily over the lockdown, peaking in May 2020, ie, before Floyd. This perfectly fits a story of cabin fever. But then there's another spike in March 2021.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-surged-first-half-2021-underscoring-urgent-need-action
What's The Deal With...hard seltzer? I am trying to understand the success of stuff like White Claw and just not grokking it. So many of those "flavoured bubbly malt beverages" just taste like...sadsack. It's definitely cheap, but there are even more efficient ways to get drunk; also feels like trading off taste and experience purely for dollar value is missing half the point of drinking. Lots of low-ABV% drinks that aren't quite that bottom-barrel, if it's a moderation thing. They also seem to buck the whole, yknow..."natural", "no artificial ingredients" trend that I thought was A Big Deal these days.
My first ever drink was Mike's Hard Lemonade at <several years past legal drinking age>...I grew up painfully aware of the perils of alcoholism, resolved to be sober forever myself, and then whoops fell off that wagon real fast after experiencing cheap crap beer. So like, I get that - no one starts off sipping Japanese whiskey, it's a phase thing. I am not confused when I see college kids loading up their shopping carts with White Claw. But it does confuse me when anyone not in that demographic/shopping for that demographic does. "Surely you know better?" I wanna ask...Even Coors or Heineken or $3 wines can plausibly be bought for cooking purposes rather than drinking. (Beer chili!)
All Modelos are wrong, some Modelos are useful.
(Motte and Bailey's Irish Cream for me, personally.)
Not that long ago it was Two Buck Chuck. Inflation: cheap wine prices up 50%! Critics counter that grape biofuel subsidies are the true culprit, though...
(Yeah, it's passably non-embarrassing, especially with the label removed. Some of the actual cheap imported wines at That Retailer are notably worse. I don't disparage anyone who buys TBC, it's an efficient market niche.)
As I understand it, hard seltzer few calories than beer, so it's a "healthier" alternative for people who want to drink weak alcohol all day.
When I was in college (and therefore around more people who were drinking than I am now; about 5 years ago) it seemed like hard seltzer had become the go-to for people who disliked the taste of beer but would otherwise have been the sort of people drinking beer, based on their social context and what kind of events they were going to. If that makes sense.
It has the convenience of beer (comes in a can, no mixing) and the relatively slow-pace of beer (you can nurse one for an hour, unlike a shot).
It also seemed to me like the popularity of hard seltzer came on the tails of the popularity of non-alcoholic flavored seltzers like La Croix.
I think you've captured the main points. One important additional advantage over beer is that it's gluten-free. Hard-seltzer is the least offensive option, which matters a great deal when drinking socially.
>It also seemed to me like the popularity of hard seltzer came on the tails of the popularity of non-alcoholic flavored seltzers like La Croix
I think thats a huge part of it. Also, to me, alcohol trends seem to be highly influenced by market and the trends seem to change almost every summer. The big alcohol brands have been really leaning hard on pushing these drinks the past few years. I suspect, because the alcohol is just boiled crappy beer, the margins on hard seltzer are pretty good (doesn't hurt that it often comes in smaller cans for the same prices as lite beer).
I'd forgotten about La Croix, good point. That was a trend I saw grow and die right in front of my eyes and was utterly baffled by (on both tails). I grew up drinking Calistoga and Perrier and whatever, couldn't understand why adding homeopathic levels of fruit flavour made it a Hip New Thing.
...then again, we just started selling Mineral Water, Now In A Metal Bottle (Certified B Corporation, Profits Donated To Saving The World). So things have come full circle. The barberpole model of fizzy beverages turns again.
Interesting, I grew up drinking fruit flavored Polar seltzer, so to me LaCroix was definitely not a "new thing," just a trendy brand... And I think it was a bigger deal outside of New England where Polar reigns king.
Does America have pre-mixed cans of gin and tonic or jack and coke (e.g. https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/all-spirits-and-liqueurs-/gordons-gin---tonic-250ml )? These fulfill the above criteria while being made out of recognisable ingredients.
The other beer alternative that NW Europe and especially the British Isles has is (hard) cider, which I don't think has really recovered from prohibition in the US.
It's not hard to find hard cider in the U.S. I used to like it before I got used to beer, but it's too sweet for me now.
I don't know why it never caught on with the people who drink White Claw. Price, maybe.
I've seen various pre-mixed cocktails, sometimes in single-serve cans, other times in bottles that can pour out a few drinks' worth. They don't seem to be nearly as popular as I'd expect - maybe people just prefer mixing their own? I'm sure that's cheaper in the long run, yet having once done the whole "home bar" thing - man, what a pain, especially when one can't sustain a big enough social circle to "entertain" often. Keeping around flattening litres of Coke just in case someone needs a mixer for their mid-tier whiskey, the additional mini-fridge, making excuses to buy lemons and limes. Convenience is Very Expensive, but I think cantails are a pretty good use of it. (Possibly also "cocktail" is so associated with "bar" that it's still a weird concept for people to adopt to on-the-go private drinking.)
Hard cider of all kinds (not just apples anymore!) is sold everywhere, but I think it has a weird reputation as like...not a "real drink". Cheerleader, they'd have been called once. Fruity sweet stuff that's like the polar opposite of what an IPA represents, image-wise. TLP would probably say, "if you're drinking it, it's for you"...I think the lack of a whole wannabe-snob-elitist culture around cider is a (non) selling point for many. Like I see people get into pretentious pissing contests all the time over Knowing(ness) About Beer (or wine, or hard liquor). Never cider. Definitely no gender clustering of that tendency either, heh...
Due to our bizarre alcohol laws and regulations, in the US these premixed drinks are made from beer not the alcohol you would normally used. The beer is boiled to concentrate the alcohol to the required %.
We do have premade cocktails, but in most (all?) US states, anything containing distilled liquor as an ingredient is taxed at the same rate per gallon as if it were itself distilled liquor, even if the final post-mixing ABV winds up being the same as that of beer or wine. That tax rate is much higher than the rate for beer or wine, so those premixed cocktails end up being much more expensive than the equivalent product made out of a non-distilled malt liquor engineered to be as neutral flavored as possible, which retains the ability to be taxed as beer. At some point someone figured out that there's a market for the same stuff but without all the added sugar that typifies the canned cocktail or mike's hard lemonade genres of drinks, and hard seltzer was born
One of the reasons it got so popular is someone figured out a way to brew, rather than distill, all-but-flavorless alcohol. Brewed beverages are taxed at a lower rate than distilled ones, regardless of final ABV, so hard seltzers were able to outcompete the Mike's Hard Lemondades of the world on cost.
And while I agree with you on the merits of White Claw's flavor, apparently lots of other people disagree. It is at their particular sweet spot on the pareto frontier of cost/calories/booze/flavor. Not sure what else is left to be explained.
The calories thing seems to a big factor in anyone I know who drinks them regularly. Also beer generally tastes terrible, some of the seltzers are even worse, but some are better.
Fascinating, I didn't know that! "minor microeconomic advantages due to tax-favoured status" was definitely not in my prior-space at all. So hard seltzers are, in one sense, a government-subsidized drink.
The calories thing I always took as a disingenuous branding of sorts...like...does anyone seriously in their heart of hearts think cutting alcohol calories via light beer and hard seltzer will make an appreciable dent in their daily intake vs any other food group? Similar to how "Organic" or "Gluten Free" or "All Natural" or "No GMO" have been used. (Although if one is drinking hells a lot all the time, I guess there's that. Seems like there's a Larger Problem in that case though...forest for trees.)
I 100% think a lot of people do think that makes a difference. And depending on how much you consume, it totally does!
A 50 cal a day deficit is what a pound every other month? Now in reality people make all sorts of adjustments, so 50 calories saves here or there doesn’t directly translate to weight loss. But I absolutely think rational or not tons of people think that way.
My guess would be one factor is that some people don't like wine or beer, but would be embarrassed to drink alco-pops as adults
Some of the Crusty Old Alcoholics I know like to muse that Zima was ahead of its time. If it came out today, it'd go gangbusters. Everyone loves a plausibly deniable hard beverage.
I was actually about to post that I have never tried a hard seltzer and don't plan to, but then I realized that wasn't true because of some promotional booth at the Welcome to Rockville festival a few weeks ago in Daytona, but I can't say I remember anything about drinking it.
It's interesting to see your comment here, though, because I read an article on Apple News just two days ago proclaiming the death of this trend. Supposedly, a bunch of planned product launches went south pretty quickly and are being canceled. The author himself was mentioning that he thinks these provide a fairly pleasant taste for maybe a minute or so after opening, but they go flat and lose all flavor very quickly. His hypothesis was they became popular in some hard-drinking recent past of people just flat slamming them, but now they're trying to slow down and savor what they're drinking and realizing these aren't actually good. Plus, there isn't really a large enough market to justify every beverage company having one. White Claw or some other first mover might survive, but the trend was never as big as these companies hoped it would be.
My image was of my sister-in-law drinking it with her buddies, white suburban moms who unironically compile playlists of "bangers" and spend winters in Park City. It's like a mimosa but cheap enough you can drink way more of them. It doesn't seem like that's a very big demographic.
"Millennials Killed Hard Seltzer" - A bold and falsifiable prediction, my favourite kind! I'll be keeping an eye on our store sales - I know the dudes who run the beer and liquor section...
Do you have a link to that article? I'd be curious to read it!
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/07/white-claw-hard-seltzer-tastes-bad/670492/
Thank you. It figures that it's written by the same Atlantic pundit who mainstreamed "Premium Mediocre".
Venkatesh Rao: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/
->
Amanda Mull: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/its-all-so-premiocre/606775/
But: "Inflation might have tightened seltzer budgets." That's a strange line. One would either expect the opposite, for inflation to encourage *more* purchases of inferior goods, or be confused as inflation tightens budgets on all types of discretionary spending. Unless she meant people choose to go without drank entirely?
(Also weird to focus on data from an alcohol delivery middleman service...does no one else tabulate such things? Very much a particular SES marker as well...)
My dad’s girlfriend gave us some White Claw with the intro “Try this- it’s disgusting.” We tried it, and agreed.
I only have so many glasses I can reasonably fill with booze in my year, so I’ll be sticking with drinks I legit enjoy.
Convenient and more drinkable than beer. That's it AFAIK. I like nice whisky and gin, and craft beer and will still get seltzer for casual drinking sessions
Sometimes I think "a liter of cheap vodka and sprite would be more efficient" but also kind of a weird thing to drink socially
As always the answer to questions like this is people have different tastes than you.
Many people wish to be drunk but not fat.
Hypothetically, if someone invented the "Splenda of alcohol", a totally zero-calorie way to induce identical inebriation...do you think there'd be a real market for such Diet Alcohol? (Alcohol Zero?)
unfortunately ethanol itself has calories
but yes I think there'd be a huge market for it
Thread 233 is full of thanks :p .. Thank you
This is almost certainly a stupid/selective-blindness question, but where's the ACX register of bans? I could have sworn there was a public ban register, but I can't find it now. Was it simply removed, and people are now just disappeared wordlessly? Or was it never brought over from SSC and this is a mnemonic interference pattern?
Scott mentioned that he was going to update the register of bans. Sometime soon, I think.
I also observe, however, that the less of a big deal the whole moderating/banning/warning thing is made to be, the better it is for the blog - and that is quite apart from the fact that Scott would rather not have to be banning people left, right and centre.
"Scott mentioned that he was going to update the register of bans. Sometime soon, I think."
Yes, this is actually what prompted the question. It made me think, where *is* this register of bans? I swear I used to be able to find it.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
Search term: "astral codex ten ban registry"
Thanks! I genuinely appreciate you finding this, but note that it is both significantly obsolete (albeit this is the part Scott intends to rectify imminently) and hard to find on the blog itself – unlike the Mistakes page, it's not in the banner. Is there some other place it's displayed that I missed, or does one actually have to search for it?
Maybe Scott feels the way I do about it - don't go out of your way to make the issue of banning commenters prominent, and it'll aid the community in all sorts of ways.
>banning people left, right and centre.
When was the last time a centrist got banned here? A thin veneer of affected charity or at least Both Sidesism has sure seemed to cover a lot of questionable posting in the past. Which is probably still a better equilibrium, but...letter vs spirit of the law.
Well, Scott just banned some guy for a day for rushing to be the first one to post a comment without having anything to say. I'm sure there are some centrists among people who get that kind of bans.
I sometimes think this with DSL's Index of Bans as well. It's tempting to read it like one's daily fix of sensationalism.
OTOH, I've personally found it a useful reference when someone makes a claim about ban-related issues, such as moderator bias. And given that usage, it has to be publicly viewable; I can't see any way around that. Ideally, it'd be usable as a reference and somehow not also as a sensationalism fix. Just turning the entries into links isn't enough; it's too easy to click through and read the offending post. (I should know; I used to do that on SSC.)
I liked reading the old ban list and see what people were banned for and read the comments. But perhaps I'm an oddball with morbid curiosity.
It is a common observation that ideas tend to come when you are not thinking about them, but generally you need to prime your mind first by consciously working on the problem to solve.
Hypothesis 1: your subconscious mind is doing the heavy lifting and, when your conscious mind is relaxed, raises the solution to the level of consciousness.
Hypothesis 2: Like any other part of your body, you can use exercise, nutrition or pharmaceuticals to alter the performance of your subconscious.
So.... Does anyone have any experience on attempting to improve their subconscious idea generation? Either improving the quality or frequency of ideas, or reducing the length of time they take to appear after a conscious attack on a problem? If so, what steps did you take and were they effective?
As you say, think about the problem. Then go to sleep for the night. In the morning, doing some mundane task. (often in the shower, but sometimes driving to the workplace.) A new idea will appear. I'm not sure how to make that faster. The sleep part seems crucial.
I think the single biggest element of "idea creation" is to have thought about and be knowledgeable about a problem. And then create some unstructured time where you are not thinking about anything else. A long drive with no music or book or podcast, a walk in the woods, whatever.
For me that is when I come up with the most creative ideas.
Carrying around a notebook or some other means of __immediately__ pinning an Intriguing New Idea down with permanence has been really important for me. I don't know if this affects "baseline" level of generation, but none of that matters if the ideas aren't legible...a forgotten quality idea is about as useful as not having any idea in the first place. Many Such Cases where I can "remember that I forgot a Really Cool Idea", but because it bubbled up subconsciously via Babble[1], I can't just replicate the process to arrive at same conclusion again. It's quite frustrating.
Quality seems directly proportional to general stress levels, notably sleep. Some level of deprivation can induce interestingly loopy thoughts, but mostly I see a steep drop-off in...well...sanity. That can be okay for creative works, but usually a bad idea for anything practical-related. And at some point, base survival instincts come to dominate all thought processes, crowding out any potential other Ideas. Thinking is indeed exercise, one needs to be in good mental shape for it.
"Medidation" helps with frequency/time interval. I don't mean the formal practice, though that might help too. More the...like...letting one's mind be Open To New Experiences, not Pruning too much random noise out of hand.[2] Being in positions where one can let the mind safely wander helps a lot...that is, I love being in a "flow state" as much as the next person, but I'm absolutely only tunnel-visioning ideas about that narrow focus during said spells. Or like random ideas are the furthest thing from my mind when in actual potential danger, like wandering downtown SF. They come best when doing low-risk, otherwise-mindless things; in the comfortable silences between friends. Any situation where I'd feel comfortable reading a physical book - that's a good idea-generating situation.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pC6DYFLPMTCbEwH8W/p/i42Dfoh4HtsCAfXxL
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pC6DYFLPMTCbEwH8W/p/rYJKvagRYeDM8E9Rf
I think we spend most of our time not thinking about any specific problem, but I think in the back of our minds we’re still chugging away. So if you assume that the idea is completed at a random point during you day, on average, that would be when you aren’t thinking about it
Hi, a question about COVID vaccine.
My kid will turn five in early October, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to give him shots now (the ones for under 5) or wait and give him 5+ ones?
I think the 5+ ones have higher doses and so might be more affective, bit not sure about that.
As far as we can tell, he hasn't gotten COVID so far.
My personal thinking on this (not medical advice - speak to your pediatrician about your specific situation):
Absent any risk factors, the likely benefits of the vaccine don't seem to outweigh the likely risks until someone turns about 30 years old. The risks of COVID-19 are *really* age-skewed towards the elderly.
The best argument I've seen so far in favor of vaccinating at younger ages is that the risk of cardiomyopathy in boys seems to be centered around puberty. This suggests vaccinating either before puberty, or well afterwards (24+).
Do you have data about risk or is this your intuition?
Any benefit/risk calculus for the vaccine has to factor in the likelihood that a toddler will come into frequent contact with an individual who *is* in the 30+ risk zone or older (e.g. parents and other older relatives like grandparents), the fact that (as anyone that has worked with children knows) small children are *potent* disease vectors, and the significant evidence that the vaccines significantly reduce viral load and transmission (by as much as 50%, from a cursory look).
IMO the individual risks/benefits for young vaccination, factoring in the conservative pro-social benefits, are mostly a wash, and the determination mostly boils down to how at-risk the child's adult social circle is and how much you want to trade off the larger pro-social benefits vs the minor risks to a child's safety.
While children to tend to be potent risk factors _in general_ the evidence that they are exceptional spreaders for COVID is _much_ weaker/nearly absent. For example: as far as I have seen, teachers in in person schooling for example did not appear to be at high risk of catching covid relative to similar peers in the community (article from England, where the schools were _never_ closed, about how teachers did not have statistically significantly higher mortality: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55795608)
Children appear to be less likely to catch COVID and when they catch it, it appears to be less severe (and evidence of correlation between severity and amount of transmission seems to be decently robust).
Adults are far _far_ better protected by having their own vaccine than by children getting vaccinated.
Now, I'm not against child vaccinations, as I think the risk in both directions is low enough to not be worth spending much mental energy on. Were I in a position where I had to make such a choice, I would probably decide entirely on grounds such as "will having/not having the vaccine result in burdensome restrictions for me or my child" which I think far outweigh the actual medical calculus.
>small children are *potent* disease vectors
Surprisingly seems not to be the case for COVID; anecdotally school outbreaks in my area seemed to mostly consist of the staff spreading it amongst themselves, and one of my own children (who, as you say normally gives us a wide variety of respiratory viruses brought home from school) had Omicron for several days at home with us -- yet failed to pass it on to me (unvaccinated) and my wife (two oldish doses) despite the fact that we didn't much care whether we got it and accordingly took zero unusual precautions. (I guess I didn't eat his leftovers that week; other than that business as usual.)
That aside, expecting children to take on any quantum of risk for the benefit of the grownups would normally be considered kind of evil.
"The best argument I've seen so far in favor of vaccinating at younger ages is that the risk of cardiomyopathy in boys seems to be centered around puberty. This suggests vaccinating either before puberty, or well afterwards (24+)."
Do you have a link handy? I searched for "covid vaccine cardiomyopathy risk" and... well, there's a link to a page at CDC, but it claims that risk is negligible (and CDC likely is motivated to downplay any vaccine risk), so it's probably not what you're referring to.
That's probably a good link and chances are the CDC is completely accurate. The problem is that the risk to small children is so incredibly low that a very low risk of some side effect becomes a more important consideration than normal, and quite possibly a bigger consideration than the underlying issue of COVID. That is, without some underlying risk factors that make COVID a bigger concern (and maybe even with some of those risk factors).
Yeah, my impression is this is one of those places where you're comparing two very low probabilities. Covid is very unlikely to seriously harm a healthy 5 year old, and the vaccine is also very unlikely to seriously harm a healthy 5 year old. That does make working out the risk/reward tradeoff harder. By contrast, the risk/reward tradeoff is really obvious for 60 year olds.
I think whichever choice you make is at most a small mistake. Both vaccines have trivially low risks to young children, and COVID itself has incredibly low risk to young children. For some numbers, at the peak of omicron (also the peak of child hospitalizations), the <5 year old hospitalization rate was 0.0145% (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220316/omicron-increased-hospitalizations-children-cdc.) And about half of those are infants <6mo, which further reduces the risk in your child.
I'm not sure that we have enough data to be confident on whether delaying the vaccine for a few months to get slightly stronger prevention is a good tradeoff. It's REALLY hard to get tight error bars on vaccine effectiveness in <5yos, just because your incidence rate is so low. There were only about 3500 hospitalized under-5-yos in the entire US at the peak of omicron and less than 2000 over 6 months old. The N just isn't there for precise decision-making.
On the other hand, that means that your decision doesn't matter much. The risk from COVID in that population is so low that we have trouble measuring the changes from even highly effective interventions. The difference in safety between the two is so small that it will barely affect your child's overall risk profile (which is dominated by accidents of various sorts rather than diseases.) My advice is to pick whichever one you have a better gut feeling about, or whichever one is easier if you're ambivalent, and not worry about it.
Yeah, Makes sense. Thanks for the detailed answer!
If it'd get you out of some Mild Social Awkwardness or e.g. restrictions imposed by daycares, that's likely worth it. If not - comparing statistically-noise levels of risk on either arm. To the best of my recollection of Zwi Mowshowitz's covid reporting, the 5+ ones are more efficaceous; toddlers are one break in the general "kids essentially totally safe" age grouping, so the tyke vaccines got watered down just to make sure nothing weird happens. (Sorta like how efficacy on pregnant women is necessarily fraught to test, so we err on the side of caution by default.)
There are some considerations for spreading to other people, but...the currently available vaccines only do a modest job of reducing spread. Considering that kids get sick all the time anyway with every pathogen ever, it's likely not worth much extra concern. Known risk factor in dealing with kids, and all.
I realize you weren't considering skipping the COVID vaccine for your kid for now, but perhaps that's something you should give at least some thought.
Just about every grown-up I know got COVID despite being fully vaccinated and boosted; presumably, vaccines are the reason why none of these people died or ended up in a hospital.
However, risks of dying or ending up in a hospital from COVID are negligible for kids, and a number of people are saying that vaccine trials on kids were either done badly, or did not show much by way of efficacy (see, e.g. https://www.commonsense.news/p/us-public-health-agencies-arent-following ).
Add to this that we don't really know what the long-term effects are, add a few horror stories about kids who ended up in a bad way after those vaccinations, and you have to wonder whether COVID vaccines for kids are actually worth it.
I'm not any kind of anti-vaxxer, and our kids are fully vaccinated with everything else, but I think we're going to skip the COVID vaccine for them. What's the use if they'll catch COVID anyway, and the chances of it making them really sick are low enough that we should really be worrying about something else instead?
Same here, there is more cases now in my social circles than there ever was i any of the previous waves. It's not mild, in fact some got hit hard (a very healthy 35yo was really sick for 10d, for example) but nobody got hospitalized. Official story is that it's thanks to vaccine and booster, but Its not clear if no one was hospitalized because:
- the variant are less virulent
- because of the vaccine (and/or booster, and/or previous infection). I do not think it's possible to sort among those possibilities because the number of covid-naive people is now super small, how to tell if the current strain is really dangerous among the non-vaccinated if there is no non-vaccinated (and not previously-contaminated) left?
Maybe in non-western countries, but it seems covid is a non news there nowadays (like it is in the western world in fact)
- or because hospitalization threshold is higher.
For example my mom got hit, quite hard, even had oxygen saturation going down at one time, but after testing to see if infection was also in the lungs (it was not), she was sent home with paracetamol and no paxlovid. This for a 76yo, with covid beds occupation far below capacity....quite a contrast with the first wave (dying in the corridors) and the second wave (you should get tested and monitored in hospital if you are in the at-risk population).
All purely anecdotal, but after 2y of covid, I think I take my own anecdotes instead of "official" covid informations. For example, booster wise, I am a test subject and so is my gf: non boosted, no previous infection (that I know), I got 2 Pfizer and she got 1 Johnson. nothing yet for this wave. And in my circle, all who got hit (more or less hard) were boosted (2 shots + 1 boost). Given those anecdotes, I would need serious convincing to consider getting boosted (serious statistics would have done it previous covid...now, not really, because there is no source left able to produce those stats and that I trust enough.
Does anyone else feel like the internet is better than ever in terms of good content? Yeah, social media sites are cesspools. But I find there’s still plenty of great content; I just have to do the work of finding it.
Basically agree - there's more good content than ever, but there's also SO much crap.
I'd say there's a higher amount of good content than ever, but the ratio of good content to bad content makes it increasingly hard to find. Plus the "bad content" areas often use SEO tricks to get more attention than they put effort into making better content.
The 'search' process i use is sort of like pagerank, except instead of walking randomly across links on the entire internet, i start with a very small set of 'seeds' that produce consistently great content, and then explore their links.
The key for me seems to be aggressively avoiding social media.
Which "seeds" do you use?
This substack and a few others, listed here.
I feel that way about music. But I have a harder time finding good written content, to my tastes.
I agree there, although for me, it's podcasts. I have so many great podcasts queued up; written words, not so much, although i suspect the issue is my search algorithm.
Highly recommend Thinking About Things (https://thinking-about-things.com), which sends out interesting articles from blogs I've never heard of a couple times a week.
In terms of content, I think the internet is better than ever - Patreon specifically seems to have been a significant sea-change towards enabling a lot of high-quality but niche content: the ad model for internet revenue meant everyone had to cast as wide a net as possible (leading to a lot of annoying 'click maximizing' behavior), whereas Patreon lets creators be supported by a smaller but more focused group.
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But I think the trend Scott refers to is more in terms of communities, not content: and I do think the web is worse in terms of communities: I do think we've gone from a web consisting of a lot of small independent communities to one consisting largely of a few big corporate social medias like Facebook and Twitter.
There are exceptions (including blogs like this one), but as a whole, I do think it's a pretty major trend.
Granted, this is true of the "web" more than the "internet" as a whole: I think the idea of smaller communities is seeing a big revival on Discord.
To some extent isn't this trivially true since the older good content is mostly still accessible? Or are you specifically talking about new stuff being created?
Somewhat echoing other replies: I've often said that the great thing about the Internet was the Information Explosion, with the catch being the *Mis*information Explosion that came along with it.
Technically, I'm referring to the World Wide Web, rather than the Internet. I remember when it first hit really big (I peg the year as 1994), and finding the good stuff was pretty hard. Google wasn't a thing until 2000; for years we had Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos. Suddenly the Pagerank algorithm came along and all sort of good stuff was much easier to find. Problem is, like any algorithm, it's gameable, so a few years later the misinformation was seeping into the good information again.
To some extent, it's still not that bad, because the misinformation is predictably controversy-seeking. If you want to know about the history of rugs or the lifecycle of anoles, for example, there's a good chance you'll find several articles on them that won't be filled with lies. But it's easy to grow complacent and not realize when you're in ControversyLand.
It's more complicated than this, too. Whatever algorithmic improvements get added to Pagerank by various search engines are not well-publicized, precisely in order to frustrate misinformation sources trying to game it. But that means we now have several search engines claiming to give us good information, but not telling us how. Meanwhile, content bias doesn't always manifest as misinformation; it also shows up as good information being left out. So there's always the chance some search provider is quietly hiding good information, at the behest of the people working there.
I think one problem is the actual misinformation, but another similarly-bad problem is that we no longer have as much of a shared consensus reality. The older version of that was often screwy in a bunch of ways, but even a pretty screwy shared consensus reality makes it easier to coordinate on doing things in ways that its lack does not.
My mental model of everything from covid to education to energy policy to election security is based on such a different set of sources of information than most other people that it's tricky to even have a conversation. I tend to consume information from pretty high-end science and technology sources, and haven't paid much attention to standard media coverage of science/technology/math/stats issues for many years. That's good for me, but it also means that I hardly share a worldview or any common referents with people whose understanding of those issues comes from those media sources.
I think there's evidence that we either never had a shared consensus reality, or what we had was relatively narrow - everyone believed what Cronkite said on the news, but Cronkite wasn't saying a whole lot compared to what a Maddow or Carlson would say today. So everyone who listened to Cronkite naturally felt like everyone was on the same page, and that belief held up when we went to our office lunches and PTA meetings.
In that hypothesis, the reason everyone is more upset now is that the Internet made a great deal of those reality differences visible, when before they were concealed by lack of cheap mass broadcast, and distance. There were always many Western cultures; only now is that fact shoved daily in our faces.
Yea, quantity + selection results in more quality. The downside being a sort of "novelty superstimulus" i.e. internet addiction
Also truly affordable and portable HD video cameras and gymbals and drones for certain types of content. Plus everyone carrying around a high end camera at all times.
There's more good content than ever, but the search costs are increasingly so high that I most often find myself enjoying The Good Shit by myself. The whole...fragmenting of mass culture thing. Yeah, mass culture wasn't actually that *good*, but boy did it have network effects. Sometimes I'd almost rather intentionally downgrade my content diet just so I'd have a statistically significant number of fellow enjoyers to share and discuss it with. (It's just a hard sell trying to convince even a close friend "no, really, this 100-chapter rational web serial is incredible" or "listen to this obscure Finnish band" or "I know this game isn't on Steam but it's totally worth breaking region-lock to play"...Openness to Experience doesn't mean much when one is time-poor. Community is a big part of Good Content.)
My opinion on homicide rates is that the primary factor determining them is mental illness and substance use/abuse. This is because murder is generally irrational, so I don't expect murderers to respond mechanistically to incentives.
It's no secret that the lockdown period has strained the mental health of most people, especially people who are more dependent on extended family and neighborhood socializing.
On the other hand, many "nerds"—introverts, people with higher education, those of us more interested in things and thoughts than social dynamics—have actually benefited from social distancing.
It would be interesting to see if murder rates track cannabis consumption, particularly amongst adolescents. Mental health problems apparently do.
I'd have to find the study (edit: found it: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10826089009058873), but drinking and violence are heavily correlated and Americans have been drinking quite a bit more over the last few years.
Causality could easily go the other direction, too. Like how schizophrenic people very frequently smoke and undiagnosed ADHD people are usually addicted to some sort of stimulant because those do something to relieve their symptoms, just not as well as prescription medication. Pot can have positive mental health effects, at least in the short term, so it might start as self-medication for existing problems and end up as a habit.
I'm afraid that is complete nonsense. It is the same argument that tobacco companies used to use when they were denying that their products caused lung cancer. They claimed that the correlation was due to cancer sufferers relieving their symptoms with a nice soothing cigarette. It was absurd and malevolent then and it is absurd and malevolent now.
Do you have evidence for this? Calling another poster's position absurd and malevolant without evidence is REALLY harsh.
I consider monied interests denying the harms that their product causes in order to make a business off the misery of others for as long as possible to be malevolent and the ability for people to fall for the same silly arguments yet again to be absurd.
The causative link between cannabis use (particularly in adolescents) and later mental illness is very well established, and not even particularly surprising. The only remaining question is whether the mental disorders it induces are also a predictor for insane violence.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=cannabis+mental+illness&oq=cannabis+#d=gs_qabs&t=1658212601279&u=%23p%3DoI_VHefqpS0J
I don't think this position is as absurd as you seem to. We live in a world where all good things are correlated with each other (good mental health, good socioeconomic status, low consumption of most drugs, better executive function, larger social networks, lifespan, IQ, healthspan, etc.) and all bad things are mostly correlated with each other (different mental illnesses, physical illnesses, drug abuse (of virtually any sort), death by accident/homicide, plus low amounts of all the forgoing positive traits.)
This makes initial correlations between use of any drug and mental illness unsurprising, and to be expected even if there's no causal link in either direction. Naturally, people researching this aren't idiots and know that, so they attempt to correct for other risk factors. But correcting for confounders is notoriously fraught, and often fails to eliminate all relevant confounders. After all, you can only correct for things you have already measured and put in your spreadsheet. Your measurements are rarely both precise and of the variables you want to measure; you often have to rely on proxies. And you will often simply not measure relevant confounders (since the Giant Ball Of Mutually Correlated Bad Shit are ALL potentially confounding, and many are hard to measure.) Plus, the more stuff you correct for, the bigger N you need for meaningful results. Getting causation from observational data is a nearly insurmountable problem unless your effect sizes are DRAMATIC and your sample sizes are huge. Like, say, lung cancer and tobacco...
(This is why nobody really cares about observational studies on medications, for instance. No matter how careful the researchers are, it's difficult to get strong enough data to even suggest causation to a savvy analyst. They always rely on RCTs, because randomization automatically handles this problem.)
And it's worth noting that even on tobacco, we have a case where causation is almost certainly not entirely tobacco->associated disease: Schizophrenia. There's an overview in a Scott essay from a few years ago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoking-gun/), but I'll summarize.
1.) Schizophrenics smoke a ridiculous amount. 60-80% of them smoke, and on average they spend 27% of their income on tobacco.
2.) Will-be schizophrenics smoke a lot more than normal people, long before they have the disease.
3.) Tobacco use predicts early onset and severity of schizophrenic symptoms.
Given just that info, of course, any reasonable person will suspect that tobacco might just be causing Schizophrenia. Of course, I'm bringing it up as a counter example because there's more data (see also this review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604123/)
4.) Several of the genes linked to schizophrenia are on nicotine receptors.
5.) These genes are one of the strongest genetic predictors for nicotine dependence, independent of schizophrenia
6.) Schizophrenia is treated by nicotine.
7.) Schizophrenics generally have pre-clinical symptoms long before diagnosis.
8.) Identical twins where one smokes have a much smaller increased risk of schizophrenia than fraternal twins, siblings, or the general public, so there is a significant genetic component to the link between tobacco and schizophrenia
It's messy, as all research dives are, and it's not possible to rule out that tobacco causally increases risk for schizophrenia to some extent, but we know at this point that most of the correlation is due to common genetic factors and reverse causation (that it treats schizophrenic symptoms.)
Back to Cannabis, the consensus opinion does seem to be that it can causally increase risk of psychosis, especially schizophrenia. But a) the evidence discussed in the review I read at least was observational with notable limitations which leave some room for doubt and b) we know that reverse cauation and confounded causation via things like common genetic risk factors are actual reasons for these correlations in some cases in the real world.
Given that, I still think it's excessively harsh to be calling other commenters here absurd (and/or malicious). Especially without bringing evidence. (And I'm not really impressed with a google scholar search result...)
Especially when I’m essentially repeating something Scott has said in the past.
Adolescent drug use has been flat for a long time and fell sharply due to COVID: https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2021/12/percentage-of-adolescents-reporting-drug-use-decreased-significantly-in-2021-as-the-covid-19-pandemic-endured
And since 1990, drug use is NOT increasing among adolescents: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-drug-use-disorders-by-age?time=earliest..2019&country=~USA
There is no way in hell adolescents make up a large enough proportion of murderers for this to even matter.
They may not be adolescents when the effects of their long term mental damage begins to manifest.
Could Ukraine plausibly hire mercenaries to help fight the war against Russia? (With Western financial backing, obviously). I think former American or European soldiers would probably be a bridge too far, but to my understanding many of the mercenaries these days are demobilized infantry from high-conflict countries- Colombia and other places in South America, parts of Africa, etc.
I doubt mercenaries would engage in high-casualty conflict on the front lines (what’s the point of a paycheck if you’re dead?), but could they plausibly help guard the rear, help with logistics, drive trucks, transport the wounded, patrol areas further from the hot zones, etc.- freeing up more native Ukrainian infantry? Former soldiers from say Colombia would come with combat experience- a quick boot camp to get them used to the Ukrainian system, maybe, and then deployment to guarding the western provinces. Could this possibly work at all?
Russia uses their mercenaries (Wagner goup) specifically to do the most dangerous combat work, rather succesfully. But for Ukraine, their problem is that they are in a bit of financial crisis right now. If they would get sufficient Western financial backing, sure, why not
There have been foreign "volunteers" fighting with the government forces in the East of the country against the Russian-speaking separatists for years. This is a 2020 study of links between far-right groups in the US and Ukraine, produced by the Combating Terrorism centre at West Point.
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-in-the-united-states-and-ukraine/
At the outbreak of the war, Zelensky set up an "International Legion" of foreign volunteers, who are apparently incorporated into the UA and paid the same as Ukrainian soldiers, thus avoiding being caught by the definition of mercenaries in the Convention. How many there are is anyone's guess - numbers between 15-20,000 have been quoted but no-one really knows. There has been a lot of press coverage, and some analysis, but I haven't seen any authoritative studies dating from after about April. It seems, though, that most of the recent recruits are motivated less by ideology and extremism, and more by the traditional ideas of danger, excitement and often nostalgia for the military life.
They have no military utility: their importance to Zelensky is as a political symbol of the internationalisation of the war and the anti-Russian struggle, and as a way of continuing to drum up western political support. The fighting is taking place in the East of the country, and requires soldiers who are trained and expert in high-intensity armoured warfare, which very few of these volunteers are. Even if they were, the equipment for them to use is lacking, and few of them will have trained on what does exist. There are a variety of YouTube videos on line showing interviews with some of the volunteers. I haven't watched them all, but most of them express shock at finding out what modern high-intensity warfare is actually like. It's worth pointing out that virtually none of those who have gone to Ukraine will ever have trained for, much less experienced, such operations.
The UA itself has large reserves, and virtually the whole population now seems to have been mobilised. But numbers aren't the problem. If they are to avoid defeat, they need years to train personnel, form units, procure equipment and exercise them together. That's not going to happen.
To my understanding, the volunteers that don't have past combat experience are worthless to Ukraine, and are being actively discouraged.
I think numbers partially are the problem, and that using mercenaries for the less dangerous work or logistical work might help free up some more infantry for the front lines. I could certainly be wrong
Boots on the ground are not the rate-limiting resource for Ukraine, precision long-range artillery is.
Why aren't they getting more of these? Looks like only 90 M777s have been sent so far, and a single M777 costs around $1 million. Why not crank out another thousand?
Logistics are hard, especially with supply chains in their current state.
Because the $1000000 will be what they tell their accountants. The real cost comes from setting up a production line capable of making x howitzers per year. Expanding capacity will be slow and/or expensive.
Ammunition also costs something. Plus the question is how much ammunition the US actually has to spare. Reportedly, the Russians are firing 60000 shells per day (or were, until recently), Ukrainians about a tenth of that.
These are insane numbers that burn through the stockpiles quickly. Except that Russia has shitloads of these shells, more than any other country in the world (including the US). And Ukraine has an additional problem of using several different types of artillery right now with different spare parts and ammunition (their old soviet gear, running out slowly and a lot of ad hoc stuff from the west for which everything has to be shipped from the US).
I've been watching this channel on youtube for a while now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMEpxX7rS5I
It is run by an Australian guy who apparently works in logistics, maybe military logistics even (he is quite vague about it) and who makes fascinating 1-hour long powerpoint presentations (no, really!) about the war in Ukraine and related topics, mostly from the perspective of logistics, procurement and military economics.
He talks a lot about exactly these issues (see the linked video for example).
Eyeballing the production numbers, it would probably take three years to "crank out another thousand" M777s, if we ran the production line around the clock. Or we could set up new production lines, but they wouldn't come on-line until next year at least. This isn't World War II, where you could call Singer and say "enough with the sewing machines, we need machine guns" and they'd be making machine guns two months later. This is the era of Just In Time, and now the era of Supply Chain Disruption.
Nobody can build guns, or ammunition, as fast as this war is consuming them. If we decided to do the World War II thing and go full industrial mobilization, tell the American people that there won't be any new cars in 2023, we could meet the Ukrainian demand for guns and ammunition sometime in 2023. But that will be too late.
Until then, it's almost entirely a matter of how much we have in our inventory *right now*, that we can give to Ukraine. And I don't think the United States has a thousand M777s. All of NATO combined probably does, but they're not going to give all of them to Ukraine.
As Tibor notes, that applies to ammunition as well. All NATO combined might have a thousand M777s, but I'm pretty sure all NATO combined is looking at the war in Ukraine and saying "Holy crap did we underestimate how fast a thousand guns will run through ammunition in a real war", And again, we're not going to produce enough to matter this year. How many shells do we have right now, and how many do we think we can spare.
I think that right now it is also ammunition. And there are logistical problems with that, yes. One big problem for Ukraine right now is how diverse their equipment is becoming. They still have a lot of soviet era equipment, but the ammunition is running low and most of production is in ... Russia.
And then they have modern NATO equipment from several countries, a few Ceasars here, a few Panzerhaubitzen there, a couple of HIMARS (though they are very resourceful with them) etc etc.
The former Warsaw pact NATO members have donated most of their Soviet-era equipment (which Ukrainians are trained to use and use the same ammunition and parts they are used to) to Ukraine already. Poland donated a couple of hundred tanks to Ukraine, the Czech republic slightly fewer but still a lot, if US gave them as much as Latvia did (relative to the size of the economy), Ukraine would become a second military power in the world overnight...
But yeah, it is not like they need people. They need ammunition, mostly artillery, and spare parts. And ideally a unified, consistent and systematic approach from the West. Most of the support is very ad-hoc and chaotic. Poland said they were thinking about buying 400 HIMARS from the US. If the US sent a fourth of that number (with enough high quality ammunition) to Ukraine right now that could significantly affect the course of the battle. But instead it is 4 pieces here, 8 pieces there , ...
Slight tangent: I was using the term "artillery" as a reference to the combination of munitions and platforms. I don't know that a tube by itself could qualify as "precision".
Perhaps not how grunts think of it, but what would this old zoomie know?
As you note, there aren't many mercenaries in the world today who would be any use in high-intensity conflict. Basically the Wagner Group, the French Foreign Legion, and that's about it.
As for less casualty-intensive operations in the rear, Ukraine has about a million reservists with recent military training and/or experience, plus probably four or five million more military-age males and martially inclined females who know how to drive trucks, dig trenches, etc, etc. All of whom speak Ukrainian, and all of whom have more skin in the game than any mercenary.
Shortage of raw manpower isn't a problem for Ukraine. This war is going to be decided by who first runs out of guns, runs out of shells, or runs out of men willing to endure being shelled for months on end. Mercenaries can only theoretically help with the last of those, and again, those aren't the kind of mercenaries you can presently buy.
John, do you know Perun? He's an Australian youtuber who talks a lot about military economics, procurement and logistics in context of the Ukraine war. It seems something right down your alley. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
If you don't I think you might be interested.
Could someone explain to me how electric lines of force are related to the generation of light? I read a passage about this in an old encyclopedia, but don't understand it. This Youtube video seems to do a good job explaining what electric lines of force are.
https://youtu.be/mtkzGd1p0Gw
I didn't watch the video. To get light (Electro-magnetic radiation) you need the full set of Maxwell's equations. In short, changing electric fields make magnetic fields and changing magnetic fields make electric fields, and there is a long range (far field) solution to the equations that we call light or E-M radiation.
As the video says, "electric field lines" are a visualization tool, not a real thing. The real thing is the electric field, which is roughly the idea that all points in space have a vector attached to them. These vectors attached to each point in space *are* the electric field, and the field both affects and is affected by charged particles.
In addition to the electric field, there is another field (meaning that all points in space have (at least) two vectors attached to them; one being the magnetic field vector, and one being the electric field vector. Once again, the magnetic field is both affects and is affected by charged particles.
Maxwell's Equations provide the full classical (classical meaning pre-quantum mechanics) specification of how the electrical and magnetic fields work. They show that not only do charged particles affect the electric field, but also that each field affects the other. The way they affect each other is subtle, but can roughly be summarized by: Where the electric field is changing, the magnetic field gets stronger, and where the magnetic field is changing, the electric field gets stronger in the opposite direction.
This means that even in the absence of any charged particles, you can set up a system of rising and falling electric field strength, which causes a rising and falling of magnetic field strength, which then causes the electric field strength to rise and fall.... and creates a self sustaining "wave" in the electric and magnetic fields.
That wave is light. (Of course, quantum mechanics makes this slightly more complicated, but it's beyond the scope of my knowledge to explain that compactly.)
This was a fantastic explanation, thank you.
Will the full review ranking be posted? This may influence what I'll do with my review.
I'm looking for a certain type of [offline] community/group/club, and so far my search (in NYC) has not been too successful. The attributes that matter to me:
1. Cross-disciplinary membership and discussion topics; Not skewed towards one particular industry or area (e.g. IT or entrepreneurship)
2. Deeper than surface level (what you can read in the mass media) discussions. Ideally for each topic discussed there would be an expert/professional in the room. A good indication of success here is the ability of the group to engage in "deep tech" discussions.
3. Stable core of participants and at least somewhat regular events (bi-weekly would be ideal frequency).
(4. Not an ethnic or expat-only group)
Some examples and non-examples:
- A specific topic- or interest-based community would violate (1). Also, in my experience, if the event is discoverable publicly (e.g. on Meetup), it gets overrun by hustlers.
- An activity group (sports, wine tasting, tabletop games) would violate (2) - there are rarely any deep discussions not centered on the activity currently performed
- LessWrong and satellites get very close, but they tend to be disproportionately attended by the IT crowd.
- University alumni clubs are an example of a community that satisfies all criteria. Unfortunately, they are not accessible to the outsiders
I would appreciate any leads! At this point in my search I'm fairly certain that the right way is to build such a community from scratch, but learning about the existing groups has been an amazing source of inspiration and best practices.
Fraternal orders (e.g., Elks, Oddfellows)? I know nothing about them but they sound kinda similar to alumni clubs, though they probably draw from a different demographic.
Mensa, maybe? I think they have offline meetings the same way ACX's community does.
I'm curious to know what others may come up with.
Maybe you can start one by yourself? Retracing the steps to do so might help to find out the other people (if any) trying to do the same thing!
From your description, the key ingredients to maintain a group you desire are recruitment that avoids attracting negative contributors ("hustlers") and retaining enough positive contributors.
For recruitment, here are some ideas:
1. Direct invitation of interesting people from your social sphere. If your social sphere doesn't include enough such people, some work is required to extend it.
1b. If you manage to have a sizeable group that sounds prestigious enough, one can have some luck inviting random academics, mid-tier novelists, etc to give presentations or engage in debates. Full professors are often too busy, but I have known some early career researchers (and some professors emeritus) who are extremely eager to jump at every opportunity to speak about their work.
2. Too discoverable public invitations won't work according to your description., but maybe you can devise a filter:
2a. Post-recruitment filter: Have public events, groups as a "farm league", and a bit more exclusive private group.
2b. Pre-recruitment filter: Put notices in places where several people may see them but not too many people, targeting right demographics. Or make the group membership to sound high-effort.
For retaining people, you need fun activities and positive self-reinforcing feedback.
I'm a programmer that's gotten into management in the last year, and I am finding it difficult. Does anyone have any resources that would be helpful?
I have found Sarah Drasner's writing on this subject to be helpful: https://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/writing
She just did a talk on management, the recording is coming soon: https://leaddev.com/events/engineering-management-rest-us-sarah-drasner-conversation
As well as some if the writing on this site: https://staysaasy.com
> Does anyone have any resources that would be helpful?
Get out of management.
I recommend Joel Spolsky (VBA for Excel, StackExchange) at JoelonSoftware.com. I would start with the "Tech Lead" articles, but there's very little that's not worth reading in the archives.
For a "best entry point", the set of articles on management methods, which starts here:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/07/three-management-methods-introduction/
Not in programming but I personally found great value in the Situational Leadership Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory) of coaching team members based on their proficiency/confidence on assigned tasks; and the One Minute Manager book provides a lot of the other tools I got through some People Management training courses I took when I was working in a large multinational.
I'm in the same position as you. It would be helpful to understand precisely what you're finding hard (is it "I miss writing code", "I find it hard to give guidance without taking the time to get a full picture of the problem space", "I struggle with organising others", or something else?)
That said, a couple of things that have helped me:
- You need to know what the high-level vision is for the next couple of quarters for the things you own. This is absolutely critical for making prioritisation decisions - you can still do things that don't make progress towards those goals, but it should ideally be a minority of the work.
- Staying close enough to the work to be useful but not so close that you become a bottleneck, is hard. If you have strong engineers on your team, give them the big long-running projects: it develops talent on your team, and avoids you taking on work that then blocks if you get pulled away. Stay close to these projects by doing reviews and taking scheduled time for the group to bring up and discuss any engineering decisions they want input on (Devs generally love a soapbox for their design choices, and you can also use this to monitor quality as well as keep context).
- If you find organisation hard, either delegate some of the meeting/planning admin to someone on your team who likes that stuff, or just take the time to build a system you can stick to. You can't let the team be chaotic; it feels awful for everyone involved and is squarely your responsibility to fix.
- Give praise publicly and often; give critical feedback on private (and be specific about examples and what your expects are).
- Trust your gut to spot badness, but not to diagnose it. If something feels bad to you, it probably is – but you'll often be wrong about the cause (it's common to blame problems on your abilities when the cause is a systemic issue you could tackle another way; it's common to say the team is underresourced when in fact you just lack focus and need to work on clarifying responsibilities and prioritisation).
You may find the Level Up newsletter useful. It has weekly links to articles on tech & leadership. https://levelup.patkua.com/
Some books I found helpful during that transition:
* Will Larson, "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management"
* Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, "Team Geek"
* Michael Watkins, "The First 90 Days"
* [maybe not right away] Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"
More importantly, find some good mentorship! This is very hard to find at most companies, especially in startups. Look for managers who you find to be effective. Ideally someone internal, because what eng management means varies a lot company to company. An external point of view is useful too, but not as urgent.
Lastly, I'd encourage you to adjust how you assess who you think is an effective manager. As an IC, you have a certain view ("from below"). But in the org chart, managers work along three axes: up, across, and down. Some managers who are poor at managing down—for example, disliked by their team—are great at managing across and up. Early in my management career, this helped me understand why the sets "managers get promotions/more scope" and "managers I think are good" weren't as overlapping as I'd expected.
I think the "BLM protests" explanation for the homicide spike is part of the reason, but only part of the reason. I think there are a few factors that weren't explained in that post.
1) The original post assumes that the BLM protests/riots were the only thing going on at that time. However, that was also the end of the covid lockdowns, and generally seemed to be the signal we were "done" with the lockdown part of covid. For some reason, covid seemed to drive people crazy and made them more prone to sudden overwhelming rage. Call it "covid psychosis." (Not sure if this was only in the US or around the world; it seems to be more in the US). Anecdotally, many of the murders seem to be caused by sheer rage or revenge, not gang-related crimes or for any rational reason.
This would also explain the rural murder spike, since rural communities would most likely not change due to anger over police violence, but would be susceptible to post-lockdown rage.
2) Obviously there are many confounding variables in understanding crime rates (see "Freakonomics" for more on that). One clue that a variable might be more correlational than causal is if the trend starts too early. In this case, the murder spike starts right at the BLM protests; in fact, since the stats aren't exact, it might have even started before the protests. That suggests there might be another factor (for example, covid psychosis) causing the spike.
3) Police certainly pulled back in 2020, but I have not seen much written about the original reason they stopped enforcing laws that year--fear of covid. From what I remember around that time, police basically stopped doing anything around March 2020, so whatever missing enforcement there was started before the BLM protests.
Were convicts sent free? I thought it was only people waiting for trial.
I believe in a lot of places, there was a big push to let people out of jail, because everyone could see that packed jails were a great place to have a huge covid wave and a bunch of people dying. And then I think trials and hearings and such were delayed for quite awhile, and I think (someone correct me) became less efficient when they were available because of covid protocols.
Can you explain why 1 and 3 wouldn't cause the same spike in other countries?
The alternative explanations for the homicide spike are things that seem like they should cause a spike in most western countries. But Scott's article shows this is a US only phenomenon.
I can't explain why other countries weren't affected by 1 & 3. But while it does seem clear that generally there was a lot of anger and rage after the lockdowns in the US (and there is a lot of stuff about people behaving badly and irrationally; Ask A Manager had an interesting article and comment thread about that recently, obviously not in reference to murders), and that doesn't seem to have been the case elsewhere. I don't know why.
Similarly, public servants in the US seem to have decided to use covid as a break from doing their jobs. Teachers were generally resistant to go back to teaching (which didn't happen elsewhere), cops seem to have pulled way back (not sure if that happened elsewhere), even in politics, elected officials would flout covid guidelines and no one seemed to care, while trying that over in the UK brought down Boris Johnson's leadership.
Ah a reader of that blog. I still read it out of habit but usually reading the comments generally ruins my mood and makes me want to come here where people are sane.
I definitely agree that there is a mood of flouting rules, maybe cynicism or fatalism? Everyone's driving more aggressively, I think there's a collective feeling that things like the homeless encampments and crime spikes, especially shoplifting, are largely ok or inevitable or something, strong sentiments against employers, landowners, the wealthy, etc.
The Impact Markets discussion reminds me that I'm curious about the effectiveness of prospective prizes. It seems to me that offering a prospective prize (prizes for past accomplishment is a whole nother thing) is a way of shuffling the costs off to the people who are competing for the prize, and also, that it might be hard to come up with a truly useful target., though it's probably easily for math than for anything else.
Has there been work done on the value of prizes to lead to further accomplishment? Have robot fighting competitions led to anything more than entertainment?
Offering a prize instead of direct compensation for work done for your benefit (something like the Netflix prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize) essentially boils down to an all-pay auction: the participants bid with their "effort", and the highest "effort" wins the prize.
Does anyone else wonder why people treat IQ scores like penis size? Every person on here I've seen refer to their own intelligence has never put themselves below the 90th percentile for IQ, which means either most of this community is in the top 10% for IQ, most people are lying about their IQ scores, or that most people do not have an accurate gauge of their own IQ and inflate it ("smarter than average" effect).
Whilst I have no doubt there are very smart people in this community, it seems highly improbable to me that everyone who's happened to comment is in the top 10% for IQ. So the question is, why are many people in this community so insecure about their smarts?
Yeah, personally I view someone on the Internet bragging about their IQ the way I view someone someone who brags about their SAT score even after graduating college - even if they're telling the truth, it makes me assume they haven't actually accomplished anything in the real world that would be more worth bragging about than a score on a test.
Yeah, if the most impressive intellectual thing you've done is do well on a test or get through a hard program of schooling, that's useful information about your raw ability, but not much about what you're going to do with it. If I really believe you have a +5 sigma intelligence, and then you tell me you're a warehouse manager or something, I'm going to wonder why you didn't do any more with the amazing gifts you received.
But the question is why? For instance, I bet if one were to ask everyone in this community if they would rather be more physically attractive or have 5 extra IQ points, most would choose the latter. Assuming you agree, why would people prefer this even though physical attractiveness is probably more useful in most circumstances?
Gosh, no, I'd take the former. There are diminishing returns on IQ, like anything else, and I know what my weak areas are. You gotta get way out into tail territory before speccing super-hard into narrow strengths allows a build to overcome its glaring flaws. I've got these brains that I mostly don't utilize effectively, cause that's just how my revealed preferences ended up...the big hurdles in my life wouldn't be overcome by 5 more Dakka points. (Why would anyone want an N + 5 IQ cashier over an N IQ cashier, past a certain base ability floor?) But being physically attractive enough to actually have a social life at all, nevermind a romantic one - Hell. Fucking. Yes. That is not one of the genetic lotteries I won, and it's caused way more pain and regret in my life than "not being smart enough".
(Fair disclaimer though, girls get judged way more harshly on their physical attractiveness than guys. Perhaps in a setting where I'd even get to "second base" to show off my smarts at all, I'd value IQ more. But that rarely happens in daily life. No one knows how smart you are if you're not attractive enough to be worth talking to anyway.)
Personally, I do a lot of work (when I'm not goofing off on the internet) that requires somewhere close to 100% of my brainpower. I'd probably be able to do more cool stuff if I were a little smarter. Whereas, looking better would be nice, but I'm already married and despite being middle-aged, I'm not looking for a trophy wife/midlife crisis blonde girlfriend, so looking better probably wouldn't help my life much.
> most people are lying about their IQ scores
Who would ever lie on the internet?!
Speaking as someone who definitely never went through exactly this phase in high school, I think insecurity is the right diagnosis, but I don't think it's that people are "insecure about their smarts" so much as it is that they have some confidence in their smarts but are insecure about literally everything else, so they cling to the idea of themselves as a "smart person" as the one stable brick they can build an identity around.
That belief is reinforced for me by the way I see a lot of this "do you know how high my IQ is?" stuff seeming to peak in the teens/early twenties, and the bulk of people doing it aging out of it as they get a little bit more personal confidence. Not many people over 50 have told me about their IQ, and those who have... kinda didn't have much else to brag about.
To indulge myself in a hobby-horse for a minute, when you examine things, it's not really all that special to be smart. I mean, if by "smart" someone means the raw cognitive computing power of their brain, it's no more praiseworthy than being unusually tall, or unusually athletic, or any number of the other bell curves a person could be born on the high end of. Unless something is done with that computing power, it's kind of a meaningless distinction. But those empty distinctions can matter a lot when you're young and trying to figure out who you are in the world, so I guess the best thing the rest of us can do is shrug and try to be patient, just as others were patient with us before.
I don't recall anyone mentioning their own IQ. Only on threads I don't follow, I guess?
Personally, I've never taken an IQ test.
I remember this coming up on the survey results a while back. It also included the option to report SAT and ACT scores. I haven't taken either test (went to community college and transferred to state college instead), and so didn't respond anything. Probably people are more likely to remember their results if they were on the high side, and more likely to take all the tests if they were trying to get into high end programs, pushing the average up.
I don't think it's even common for people to take IQ tests, but one reason you might is GATE programs in elementary schools. Given I was in such a program, I guess that means I tested as having a high IQ at some point, I believe 1st grade, but I absolutely do not remember what the score was. Charitably, though, anyone who would remember such a thing likely scored high, and as far as I understand, childhood scores tend to be higher than adult scores, so those two factors would account for at least a little bit of inflation in who talks about it versus real population averages.
This feels similar to the observation that just about anyone who talks about their arm size seems to universally have at least 17 inches. Maybe they're lying, but if not, I'm sure the only people who bother to measure their arm size at all are people who are specifically doing a lot of training to make their arms bigger.
I can't recall seeing people discussing their IQ. I wouldn't be surprised if the top 10% in IQ is vastly overrepresented. You are in a very weird niche area of interest that appeals to smart "nerds." Also, people who are far above average are more likely to have taken IQ tests. In the United States, many students enter gifted programs if they test 2+ SD over the average and they likely are only going to be tested if they are obviously above average. Also, mentally challenged people are probably tested more. I don't think this indicates insecurity necessarily, but I don't know where you are seeing people discussing this so I can't be sure. Do you have any links?
I'm too lazy to find the threads and comment sections they are in, but I'm confident it will happen again so I'll be sure to tag you when it does 👍🏽
My weenie is smaller than average, my IQ might be below average for ACX... I don't think there is a correlation between them.
I think you may be underestimating how stupid the bottom 90% are. To me it seems perfectly plausible that most people who enjoy the types of discussions that take place here would be in the top 10%.
Since it seems that no one else in this thread is gonna be the first to post their intellectual junk measurement: 2230 SAT, 130 WAIS-AV. Definitely not a Wobegon.
I grew up as a gifted child enrolled in GATE programs, AP classes, and so on. Going Somewhere, High Expectations, First Generation To Attend College...the works. Thankfully, the territory after K-12 quickly disabused my I'm-So-Smart map, so I no longer even jokingly entertain thoughts of being Hot Shit mentally. (How could I, I dropped out of college thrice and now work at a grocery store for <$35k/yr.) Especially once discovering SSC/ACX - I feel like the class idiot here more often than not, sometimes able to Guess The Teacher's Password, but definitely in need of years of remedial and summer school to dream of catching up. I have no idea how many SDs the median commenter here really is, but even if yall aren't actually in the 90th IQ percentile, it sure *seems* that way from a relative rube like me.
To answer the direct question: Meritocratic belief in Just-World Fallacy. This community rewards smarts, legible via IQ. The real world rewards seeming smart, legible via credentialism. Given the clearly-advertised incentives, Goodharting becomes a rational move. When in ACX, do as the ACXers do. (Of course, lotsa people here are happy to point to their Scroll of Bona Fides too, as the situation warrants. Quite a lot more of those here than in the general population.)
Or to put it differently: for all the high-minded discussion [R|r]ationalists generate, we punch way below our weight class in terms of actually changing the territory. Sometimes that's just hard to accept. The Adults in the Room *ought* to be the ones running the show...right? I notice this is rarely the case though. So commenting skillfully on ACX is, like, a way to cosplay being Kind Of A Big Deal. (To be clear, that's a valuable service and Scott's serving a real market demand here. I am, after all, a happy paying customer.)
-> " So commenting skillfully on ACX is, like, a way to cosplay being Kind Of A Big Deal."
Jesus that cut deeper than it should have for a lot of people, including me.
-> " This community rewards smarts, legible via IQ. The real world rewards seeming smart, legible via credentialism."
This kind of thing leads me to believe it's a kind of middle-ground, with some lying and some truth. It seems like smarter people probably place a higher value on IQ/smarts than others, and because of that value they're more likely to lie about it to signal more credibility (or to avoid losing credibility).
Also, in the spirit of hypocrisy, I thought I'd say 2230 on the SAT is pretty impressive even if you studied for it, as is 130 on the WAIS? Do you not get bored being a cashier?
Also, I wouldn't consider dropping out as a sign you aren't hot-shit mentally, especially if you're first generation. I have a friend who dropped out of sixth form (high-school in the United States) because he wanted more freedom and was bored. Eventually, he changed his mind and is now studying mathematics at Cambridge. Chris Langan, the man with one of the highest IQ's on record, also dropped out of college to go live on a farm.
Finally, there's a big difference between not being "hot-shit" at a standard college and not being "hot-shit" at an elite university. At elite universities you are dealing with kids who are not only insanely smart but also insanely motivated, so if you don't have both you're likely to feel left behind.
Unstudied unexaminations, just like most of my life. Taken while pretty depressed and off meds. I only got beaten for highest SAT by a single person, who answered *one* more question correctly to get 2240, despite costly intensive prep and tutoring. It's meaningless but I'm still slightly smugly proud of this.
>Do you not get bored being a cashier?
I've written entire huge long essay-comments on this elsewhere, but basically: only if there's nothing for me to do. The one thing I can't stand is a vaccum, those slow days where I'm just standing at a register and no customers are to be found, or business is so slow we end up going home early. For pretty much anything else, I try to seek Pareto frontiers in all I do. You've probably never seen anyone check and bag as fast as I can; I've specifically been practicing ambidexterity just for this purpose. Same thing with other job duties, I'm big on Efficiency and Organization and Process in a way that's super atypical for this level of low-skill blue-collar work. It's not out of slavish devotion to the company, which I now regard with thinly veiled contempt; it's to keep my brain intellectually engaged in an otherwise mostly-physical job.
(If you ever walk by a grocery store after-hours and the speakers are blasting Tchaikovsky, that's me.)
>At elite universities you are dealing with kids who are not only insanely smart but also insanely motivated, so if you don't have both you're likely to feel left behind.
Boom, got it in one. College for me was mostly a hells a convenient ticket to move far, far away from Bumfuck, Nowhereville and Find Myself. The education wasn't the point at all. So I ended up flying cross-country to enroll in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is just a few hairs shy of Ivy League. (Didn't actually apply to Yale etc, back then I did not understand how free ride scholarships correlated with being poor and quota-filling.) Suddenly I was not only no longer the biggest fish in the small pond, but I was swimming with sharks who'd totally eat me for lunch if it'd increase their midterm grade. I only lasted a single semester before crashing and burning. "Outsider Drops Out And Returns Home In Disgrace" is apparently a *very* typical story there. I can fake intellectualism decently well, but not Earnest Striving.
Anyone who finds the discussions here comprehensible probably is in at least the top 10% of intelligence. OTOH, knowing how to use it is as important as having a big one. (Brain, I mean.)
Seems to me that the conclusion "many people are insecure about their smarts" is not justified by the known facts. (Though it may be true for different reasons, of course.)
ACX often discusses complicated and abstract topics, from the perspective of a person with average intelligence. It's not just whether an average person would be able to read the arguments and understand them (I believe they would, with some guidance, partiallly), but whether they would *enjoy* reading this kind of content, given so many alternatives available on the internet. So the people who stay here are quite heavily selected for intelligence, in my opinion.
Also, top 10% is not too high bar. It still means 10000 people out of a city with population 100000. Anecdotally, Mensa is top 2%, and I have been at both Mensa meetups and ACX meetups, and they seemed at least comparable. This is not a fair comparison, because at ACX meetups people have more topics in common, so the debates can be better and deeper. I am just saying that a bar "top 10%" does not seem implausible to me at all. (To make your own conclusion, try comparing e.g. ACX open threads with r/mensa.)
So I believe that at least 95% of ACX readers are in the top 10% of intelligence; and at least 90% of them are in the top 2%. Many people never did an IQ test, so they don't know. So if there are people who are NOT in the top 10% and they know it... they either missed that debate, or decided not to participate (or lied), but I believe that most people just truthfully reported the facts. What else would you want them to do?
The only way to know for sure would be to organize an ACX meetup where the participants would be ambushed by a team of psychologists and administered IQ tests. Not sure if the IRB would approve.
Could we work in some behaviorists using electric shocks to encourage right answers, and social psychologists trying to replicate the Milgram experiments by having some of the subjects administer the shocks? Let's work in as much science as we can, here!
> I’ve been reading a lot recently on the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today
Web 2.0 *is* the 'corporate web of today'.
As far as I can tell, the entire narrative of Web 2.0 is based on pretending that forums and BBSs didn't exist.
(And true BBSs actually predate the web altogether and should maybe be called Web 0.0 or Web -1.0 or something)
Web forums existed years before the term "Web 2.0" was ever coined, so I feel like it should require more than just being able to post things to a website for it to count.
The introduction of AJAX feels like a natural dividing line to me - the division between a website being a succession of static pages where each request gets you a new page, versus a website being an application where you can manipulate data without needing to load a new page each time.
I imagine this is niche appeal, but if you ever wanted a case-study in "Categories are Made for Man, not Man for the Categories": r/anime trying to determine what counts as a "harem anime". https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/w1xe0o/what_even_counts_as_a_harem_i_asked_ranime_about/ (There was a previous one by the same poster on "isekai anime")
Unsurprisingly, basically there's a lot of "man for the categories" in the comments where people insist that there's an objective, cut-and-dry way to define genre boundaries while the actual results show that that's largely not the case.
I know a haram anime when I see it.
I don't know the actual origins of this image, but: https://s3.narvii.com/image/no4733tf3jt4niqewbb7s6ppclelkxbq_hq.jpg
Relatedly, a friend recently asked me to define "[Western] animation" vs "Japanimation" (e.g. anime), and...I found myself spinning categorical wheels in exactly the same way. They did indeed bring up the topic of isekai anime. Makes me wonder if my friend's the OP, heh. Or it's just a line of questioning more than one person happened to have in temporally similar instances.
I lol'd.
What's funny is that I never really noticed what made anime anime until I found out that Miyazaki gets mad if you call his movies "anime." He says they're animation, not anime. So I dug deeper and found out that the difference he's alluding to is in terms of animation style. Namely, Japan can pump out so many anime shows because the anime style has developed over time to be visually pleasing while also cheap to animate.
Watch a scene from a Ghibli movie and take note of how much stuff is moving. Movement=money when it comes to animation. The more things move or change the more labor hours are required to animate it. So every time something is changing in a scene its costing money. If you can repeat the same animation over and over it saves money, because you just have to animate it once. So, for example, a shot of stalks of grass bending back and forth in the breeze would be somewhat expensive, but if you loop the animation then you can spread that cost over a larger amount of runtime, saving money. In a Ghibli movie, just like in a classic 2D Disney animated movie, lots of things are moving and changing all the time.
Now pick just about any anime and give it the same test. How much stuff is moving? How many animations are looped? When I actually looked I was really surprised by how little actually moves in most anime. For most scenes people are either standing perfectly still, or moving with a looped walking animation. There are a lot of shots where nothing is moving at all, except perhaps for a little vibration on the highlights of their eyes. In most anime there are only one or two short scenes where a lot of movement is happening, usually a battle of some kind. Even then you usually get very intense scenes with a lot of movement, interspersed with scenes with almost no movement, like a close in shot of one of the fighter's faces as he thinks about what's happening. You can tell they're saving their animation budget for where they need it, and animating as little as possible otherwise.
Once you start looking for it, it's obvious. What's more, its ingenious. Early anime like Speed Racer was obviously made on the cheap, but as the craft and tools of anime have advanced they now hide their cheap nature remarkedly well. Ever wonder why animes have such impressive and dynamic theme song sequences? They spend a lot of money on the theme song so that every episode features some impressive animation, which makes the rest of the show look less cheap and lifeless. Ever notice that some animes that feature dynamic monster fights or the like use a CGI model for the monster instead of 2D animation? That's because animating an object rotating can be extremely expensive, especially if that object has a lot of sticking out parts. Pick up an action figure or something and rotate it in front of you: the objects silhouette changes completely with every movement, which means if you 2D animate it you have to draw something brand new with every frame. If you have a CGI model you can just rotate it without having to redraw anything. After I realized that I started noticing it in other places, like a car chase where the cars were both CGI: making them CGI allowed them to have the cars do tight turns around corners and the like without breaking the bank. People often praise anime for being cerebral and slow paced, allowing characters room to have long conversations and moments of silence. This is a good feature, but it comes directly from trying to save money: two people having a conversation only requires you to animate their mouths and the occasional small movement. When a character is thinking about something, you don't even need to animate the mouth! That's why Goku and Freeza spent so many episodes talking instead of fighting: talking is cheaper.
So, funnily enough, the difference between animation and anime is expense: anime is "limited animation". Obviously there's other obvious differences in art style and plot, but that's the biggest one. Once you notice it you can't unsee it.
Interesting! Maybe I enjoy anime more than non-anime because it's sorta similar to a book in presentation. A relatively still canvas that steps back and gives space for ideas to grow, with few distractions. (It's only in anime that I sometimes slow down to literal frame-by-frame to catch subtly important details, which would get totally lost in the shuffle if more stuff moved.) The "fancy OP" thing is also now glaringly obvious that you point it out, heh. I'd always wonder, "why aren't these insanely cool scenes actually in the show?" Because they'd cost too much!
Also I now have an Adult Argument to give to anyone who criticizes anime as "childish". Which it still totally often is, in fairness, but it's Feature Not Bug. This woulda made me sound So Smart a decade ago, lol.
Cost cutting *is* very central to the DNA of anime - and probably always will be, given how much content is produced how quickly. ... but with apologies to Miyazaki, I don't think you can really draw a dividing line between "anime" and "animation" based on quality.
To me, Miyazaki saying his films aren't "anime", they're "animation" reads the exact same as Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren't "cinema": there's some hypothetical bar of quality that separates the "low quality" stuff from the "high quality" stuff, (and you can always tell the high quality category because it has the foreign name).
Whether you agree or not that it's valuable to try to partition a medium like this, (personally, I think it tends to be more about class preferences) it's certainly not a unique phenomenon to anime.
And, no disrespect to Miyazaki's talents, but if his films used less of the cost-cutting techniques of traditional anime... well, I suspect that's mostly because they're films, not some higher standard of artistic integrity or something. Anime films basically always have more budget relative to their runtime.
EDIT: I guess I should hedge a little and say there is more than just "high quality" filtering - I know Miyazaki has some specific complaints about some of the stereotypical animisms and its catering to "otaku tastes" in general: (that probably makes the comparison to Martin Scorsese's remarks *stronger* as I imagine he has similar thoughts with how Marvel caters to comic fans).
... but valid criticisms of the state of anime or not, I don't think that really justifies trying to make a categorical divide.
I don't care for harem anime and generally try to avoid it, but it seems pretty clear cut to me. A male protagonist finds himself surrounded by a variety of women, often living together or otherwise in close proximity, and with various sexually charged scenarios. I'm sure there are lots of edge cases (are two women a "harem"? or what if there are more than one guy, etc.), but it seems clear cut to me.
Without having to wade into that discussion, is the distinction just a variety of edge cases or more substantive?
> is the distinction just a variety of edge cases or more substantive?
There's definitely some haggling over edge cases, but for me it's more substantive. Like, yeah, as you mentioned, the number (3 seems to be the general consensus minimum: I don't see anything high on the list that's just a love-triangle), and proximity and how "sexually charged it is" are all variables.
It seems the most common definition is "anything where three or more characters have interest in one character is a harem"... and that's a fairly easy definition to mechanically apply, but I'm not sure it actually matches what most people mean by "harem". It can lead to conclusions like "Harry Potter is a harem anime". (Minus the obvious)
Like, my favorite show on the list is Steins;Gate - which is a show about a bunch of nerds who accidentally make a time machine out of a microwave: overall it's mostly a sci-fi thriller... but a number of the characters have interest in the main lead. Does that make it a "harem anime"? To an extent, I guess, but I don't think it's exactly what most people have in mind with the term.
I actually like it more as a sliding scale: "Steins;Gate is 20% harem anime" is a lot more something I can get behind than trying to have a boolean classification for everything.
Well, the VN is much more a harem story than the anime...
I'd dispute that specific example, since there seems an important difference between romantic/sexual interest vs "gratitude for being A Great Friend", but I suppose that's falling into the very trap laid by such a question in the first place. The Categories Were Made For Anime...
Yeah, I considered mentioning the VN aspect of it, as I feel that it just complicates it more. If there's multiple branching versions of the story and in different branches the protagonist ends up with different a difference character, but he never dates more than one at the same time, does that make it less or more of a harem?
In terms of the actual "mechanical" definition of a harem, it seems like less of a harem, but from a tone perspective it seems like more of a harem, due to the power dynamics where the player/protagonist essentially *chooses* which character to end up with.
(If your specific dispute is referring to Mayuri, I don't think you even necessarily need to count her: Kurisu, Ruka/Luka, and Faris are all pretty clearly interested in Okabe - and Maho if we count the sequel)
Well, I haven't rewatched in a long time, but my interpretation was that Christina is the canonical (show) love interest, Stardust Handshake is just a Best Friend + convenient plot device to add immediate moral weight to Doing the Right Thing, Shrine Maiden is in love with *the idea of* Okarin more than the actual man himself (wow, that was a weird arc to watch as an actual trans woman myself...#representation, sigh), and Feyris...is kind of like a Japanese Blance duBois? I think she's sincerely grateful to have "outside fandom" relationships with the Lab Members, but the fact her arc interacts essentially not at all with the Main Story seems to imply she's an afterthought at best. "Oh, crap, we left a loose thread Single Female available, better gin up something in her timeline..."
(I'd ship Shining Finger with Okarin though.)
Anyway, I read S;g as more of a scifi Shoujo Shit. Most harem animes don't stand out quite so explicitly as Clannad, but I think I need to see more of those overtones to lean towards that categorization. Like, I could see Code Geass or Gurren Lagann lumped in that bucket, despite (imo) equally small numbers of direct relationships. Whereas another heavy Key Studios hitter, Angel Beats!, would not be. Despite also taking place in high school. It's more a...vibe...than a direct mechanical classification, really. (I'd probably classify CHAOS;head as a harem anime, except it's so fucked up that it kills the vibe...) Something like, are the interpersonal relationships centered/central to the story, or just genre-savvy set dressing incidental to the plot?
I'll second that "mood" is a good explanation.
We've got the far right talking about a Jewish conspiracy to "replace" the "white race" with brown people, the median right-winger flying a "Fuck Biden and Fuck You for Voting for Him" flag on his pickup truck, the median young left-winger talking about how we're all going to die of climate change due to climate activists' laughably overstated histrionics*, and the far left talking about guillotining or firing squad-ing all rich people and landlords.
Certainly not a country singing kumbaya.
* if you live on the Ganges in Dhaka, sure, your odds of dying from climate catastrophes are high enough to worry. But no, upper-middle class child living in the suburbs of a major American city, you are not going to perish because the global mean temperature rises another 2 deg C. We should absolutely try to mitigate climate change because millions of people dying is bad, but the overreaction only breeds complacency.
in terms of increasingly viewing the opposition as literally standing in the way of you living to old age (and thus potentially increasing acceptance of violence to achieve political goals)? not really.
I'm a SocDem, obviously I agree more with the left-winger side. But the climate doomerism is absolutely contributing to the fractured mental health of my generation. Imagine being 14 years old and the entire activist class you're surrounded by in your liberal bubble is telling you the planet will be unlivable by 2050. Certainly can't help the social media-induced depression and anxiety!
Has anyone informed Greta, First of Her Name, Thunberg yet? Or the Sunshine Movement?
I'm sympathetic to the youthful idealism around climate - it's nice someone has energy and hope for the fight yet! - yet every time I hear some young progressive proudly (or despairingly) claiming they won't, can't, have kids Because Climate...that makes me die a little inside. Talk about a self-own. Meanwhile all the skeptics and deniers are gonna keep on having kids, as well as billions of people not living in First World bubbles rich enough to ponder generational abstinence. What happens next is...yeah. Not great, for anyone!
I don't think that "national mood" is a good explanation, because there's no obvious immediate causal link between "national mood" and actual murders.
I'm not saying there can't be a link between "national mood" and murder rates, I'm just saying that I think there should be some kind of intermediate cause in there somewhere.
Actual murders are very specific events that occur for very specific reasons. There's probably a more-or-less constant background of "random" murders due to psychotic episodes, jilted lovers, and the like. On top of that you've got a lot of murders related to gangs or organised crime; these seem to be much more variable in time and place and depend on things like relationships between gangs, how many other gang-related murders have happened recently, how likely they are to get away with it, and so forth.
I feel like we could get a lot closer to an explanation if we knew _who_ these extra people getting murdered are.
"I feel like we could get a lot closer to an explanation if we knew _who_ these extra people getting murdered are."
Agreed! And for solved murders, it would be helpful to break them down by primary motive, and see how the incremental murders in the change since e.g. Jan 2020 are being motivated.
I get that "mood" isn't really a quantifiable thing, but do you have a citation for the median-ness of the postulated non-far right-winger? The other medians seem, on average, to be more or less accurate.
I guess it's a knee-jerk skepticism, since the media trying to convince me I'm going to die of climate change is also the same media trying to convince me about imminent fascist takeover by deplorables (or whatever). Gell-Mann amnesia and all that.
As a statistician by education, I'm all too aware a lot of modern polling approaches pseudoscience, but polls like this are pretty damning:
https://polsci.umass.edu/toplines-and-crosstabs-december-2021-national-poll-presidential-election-jan-6th-insurrection-us
Only 21% of the GOP respondents said Biden legitimately won the election. And perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic to conflate that with the truck flag, but even here where I live (southern NJ), if I drive around for 10 minutes I *will* see at least one Fuck Biden flag and plenty of Trump flags, either at home flagpoles or flying from passing pickup trucks.
That's a particularly bad polling question, and even 31% of independents say that Biden's win was not "legitimate." I would love to see the same question for Trump in 2016. Prediction - Democrats have very high numbers for "Trump not legitimate."
First of all, I think we need a definition of "legitimate" that separates out "won through voting fraud" and "the media reporting on Trump/Biden was skewed" or some other lesser reaction. This response conflates them all in a way that seems designed to inflate the numbers saying illegitimate.
If you're near Seattle, there's going to be a summer ACX/LW meetup on Wednesday, Aug 3rd:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-seattle-summer-meetup
https://www.facebook.com/events/749612359504536/
https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/286780806/
I didn't previously have good reasons for choosing one brand of alcohol over another, but now I do: https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/b612-foundation-announces-2-3-million-in-leadership-gifts-806880675.html
Drink Tito's Vodka, the only X-risk-prevention-aligned product on your bartenders shelf.
Yeah, Tito's is pretty good if you're into that kind of thing. Tito is actually WASP-y upper class guy who started a micro-distillery and then grew it. He gives money to the causes you'd expect from that background. The company also throws some really good public events if you're ever in Texas.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
https://withdata.io/election/media/
Do you have a UK General Election model?
Not at the moment, but building one wouldn’t be too hard.
Meanwhile, here is a rather good interview with Chomsky (as well as a load of other discussions) about Large Language Models and what they can tell us about intelligence.
https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q
TLDW: Zero. They are good engineering projects, and have some useful properties, but they tell us nothing about the science of intelligence.
Whatever happened to climate change skepticism?
A decade ago it was an active debate, nowadays I rarely hear about it any more. I don't think there has been enough additional data collected in the last ten years to convince skeptics they were wrong; if anything the evidence seems to be accumulating on the "no big deal" side as various predictions of doom have failed to bear out.
Do you mean serious climate change skepticism? Koonin's recent book is, at least, skeptical:
https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matters/dp/1950665798
If you mean unserious climate change skepticism, it's very much still around.
Yeah "Unsettled", by Koonin is reviewed (twice) in the ~100 book reviews. I bought the book, because of the reviews and liked it.
> if anything the evidence seems to be accumulating on the "no big deal" side as various predictions of doom have failed to bear out
weather is not a climate, but given ongoing situation in Western and South Europe...
Related: Has anyone looked at whether there is seasonal variation in support for policies against global warming?
I'm as skeptical about climate change as I always have been. Which is to say, I'm pretty sure that anthropogenic global warming is real but also that the consensus prediction of its magnitude and effects are substantially overstated. But I'm sick and tired of talking about it to mostly-deaf ears, so you probably won't hear me say so unless you specifically ask (and in a context where I'm confident you'll listen and the bystanders won't mob me, e.g. here).
I doubt I'm alone in this.
+1
The same from the left really. No one is gonna change their mind, Democrats don't really wanna fight for it in the USA, even Europe mostly does feel good stuff and "accords". We can't even provide free lunch in America much less fight climate change. I'm moderately skeptical of the timeline, and pretty pro nuclear, for a social democrat, and I'm not sure what the point is about "screaming into the abyss" about climate change. We're either screwed or not and western oligarchy much less eastern autocracy isn't gonna do anything meaningful on it. Better to fight on more basic issues.
Performative climate concern from the center right mainstream has faded now that Trump is out. No one cares what social democrats or anyone farther on the axis thinks. Why would conservatives/libertarians waste time arguing about something that no one in power cares about.
That's what believing but not being willing to fight for it look like. There's intra-party consensus that it's happening and We Should Do Something, but not so much intra-party consensus that they are willing to lose elections by trying to push big legible items.
So instead you get a lot of mostly illegible regulatory state actions + throwing climate-whatever into any spending bill that looks like it has a chance of passing.
Build Back Better is an interesting case of this. Of the $3.5 trillion over 10 years spending pile, somewhere between $500 billion and $750 billion was climate change related. So Democrats cared enough to give it ~20% of their "total spending power", but didn't care enough to trim the $3.5 trillion down to $1.7 trillion like Manchin wanted.*
*Manchin had very early on made it clear that he was open to climate spending (with kickbacks for West Virginia), PROVIDED that the total was only $1.7 trillion. Schumer signed an agreement with him about that spending limit but then sat on it for months, and after the spending limit came out the House Democrats produced a bill that spent $1.7 trillion over 5 years instead of $3.5 trillion over 10 years and Joe Manchin said "no" and the House Democrats said "we aren't changing it again AGAIN" and Manchin said "fine" and then inflation worries started coming in and people got distracted and now it looks like even $1.7 trillion is off the table BUT there might be something to do with drug pricing passed this year maybe.
NIMBYism is a powerful force in its own right; it doesn't need much help from Gaian environmentalism to shut down a pipeline or a drilling operation.
Very much agree. But anyone self-describing as at all sceptical about climate change will have been called a denier too many times to mention. On wikipedia one is considered a euphemism for the other. I even remember Scott saying that for climate scepticism to be true, a whole branch of science would have to be overturned - that-s certainly not what I mean by climate scepticism.
In fact, if you merely quote WG1 of the IPCC you'll sound, to most people, like a hard-core sceptic.
That's where I fall too.
Agreed. Plus if you mention any degree of skepticism at all around almost any people, you get called the worst kind of horrible things, and everything thinks you must be completely stupid to be a "denier".
+1
To the extent there is a public "debate", I think it is now over what to actually do (not do) policy-wise. Progressives apparently do not want a direct carbon tax (I'm basing this on evidence such as the referendum on gas taxes which failed in liberal WA), but prefer indirect, non-revenue generating taxation caused by the cancelling of oil & gas property lease auctions and shutting down pipelines.
I'm agnostic on how big of a problem climate change might be but believe strongly that if we're going to address the issue, let's do it through promoting nuclear power and other low-carbon technologies not by restricting the supply of cheap energy (EDIT: Well, except for coal, but only because coal releases worse things than CO2).
In other words, it has become a pragmatic fight rather than a theoretical one.
Realistically, anything you do that substantially lowers quality of living for your citizens is super hard to sustain in a democracy. At current technology levels, lowering CO2 emissions substantially seems to also lower quality of living (via raising prices for energy and thus for lots and lots of products), which is usually an election-loser, and unpopular even in places where there's not an election in a couple years to worry about.
This implies to me that if we come up with useful responses to AGW, they will mostly be technology that lets you emit way less CO2 at the same quality of life (think LED bulbs), some kind of very efficient carbon sequestration, or geoengineering. Convincing billions of people to take a 5-10% hit on their quality of life in order to help out future generations is something you can definitely do on an individual level, but it's almost impossible to do as a collective action that has to be coordinated by nearly the whole world to be effective.
[eta] Low-cost nuclear plants (if they could be built without crippling regulation and decades of NIMBY wars), fusion plants if we could get them working, highly efficient energy storage that let you make much more use of renewables, a really high-efficiency continent-wide grid to move the electricity from where the wind is blowing now to where the AC needs to be on now, electric cars that are fun consumer products instead of geeky tech toys--that's the kind of stuff we need, IMO. Elon Musk has done more for addressing AGW than the whole last 30 years of politicians who are Deeply Concerned about AGW.
Germany gets to pin the blame on a foreign enemy, Russia (and never mind that they could have been way way better prepared for this and it didn't take an oracle to realise Russia was a menace - maybe it was arguable 15 years ago but 2014 should have made it obvious to everyone). I do think that meaningfully changes the electoral situation compared to a change motivated by ideals
> Whatever happened to climate change skepticism?
As far as pragmatic actions go - it is still present.
Greenpeace activists do not treat global warming as a real danger, as they keep sabotaging nuclear power.
People are not willing to take any actions more than symbolic.
What happens is limited almost entirely to what people wanted anyway or irrelevant or chaotic protests without any plan. Or Sri Lanka style thoughtless actions which make everything worse.
> Greenpeace activists do not treat global warming as a real danger, as they keep sabotaging nuclear pow
Well, maybe they think they are both dangers.
Perhaps, but the person who did that might not be "not thinking cancer is a real danger", they're just misinformed on the cost-benefit ratio of chemotherapy.
Yes, they do not consider global warming as something much more important than other dangers.
Then either global warming is not a big problem according to them, or they are detached from reality if they consider contamination caused by nuclear power as a bigger problem.
Nuclear power splits their coalition, so they're not going to emphasize it as a political matter, even if it would be a good idea.
My irl friend group was recently non-ironically expressing great pleasure in the Sri Lankan collapse, as some sort of rise-up-against-false-consciousness liberation movement of The People, blah, blah. Failed States: the future of freedom!
And that's why I don't express climate skepticism around them anymore. When Bad Things are Actually Good, Good Things are Actually Bad is sure to follow. It just seems difficult for many liberals and leftists to parse that one can believe AGW is a real thing, without swallowing the entire climate hook, like, and sinker. Which is tragic, cause these are exactly the sorts of people who might actually do anything at all to advance solutions, so they're the *most* valuable people I want to save from climate nihilism. (Not to imply that those on the right uniformly deny AGW, but it's definitely off-brand. Higher-hanging fruit, there., persuasion-wise)
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm having a hard time parsing your IRL friend group's reaction to Sri Lanka. The language you use is left-coded, but the sentiment seems like anarchy-coded eschatology? Do they have reactions to other world events that would inform my mental model? And do you think their mindset is common, or is it more localized to them?
Well, Not All Friends, I'm lazy enough with obfuscating doxxable details here that I don't wanna create too much rope to hang them with.
But yes, many openly identify as socialist, and I mean full-on Marxist rather than "everyone's a socialist in college" or "Universal Healthcare, Said The Cactus Person" style woo. Big on BLM, Boo Capitalism, Republicans Evil Fascists, Equity Equity Equity, Stop Killing Us, I Just Want Equal Rights For Everyone, Affirmative Action (Merit Is ___ist), pronouns, transgender maximalism (self-interested, I don't think I actually have any cishet friends anymore), pro-choice, Kill The Landlords, veganism or at least "carnist" guilt, No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism, Structural _____, Privilege, Russia Bad, Antivaxx Evil, Covid Proves Western Decadence, blockading Pride parades to protest corporatism. The usual SJW grab bag, in other words. I can't pass their Ideological Turing Test myself, but reactions to world events would be about what you'd expect from the Tumblr-academic crowd, most times.
Anarchy is more the influence of one particular antifa friend who's very in the Burn It All Down camp in addition to all those typical SJW grievances. That person's been out protesting on the streets more than once, and likes to talk admiringly of Black Bloc tactics and so on. Almost none of the rest of us are that far left, but it's definitely a meme that's raised the non-statist waterline within friend group. There was some rather uncritical approval of looting during summer 2020, for example, even though I'm sure most of them marched in the actual Mostly Peaceful Protests for Noble Reasons.
Eh, I think typical SJW wokeist stuff is common in the Bay Area writ large, but the particular degree of anarchy blackpill is probably a very localized thing. I meet many people who've been to protests...but there's protests, and there's Protests. They show up with cute signs and pink pussy hats, not all-black outfits with combat boots and medical supplies. Just not that many of the latter type, so I doubt it's that widespread an influence (though it's a loud one: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/antifa-is-a-fatherless-child )
Okay, I think I get the gist now. Thank you for taking the time to deliver it.
Your "burn it all down" fellow reminds me of That Guy in my more righty acquaintances group - the sort who's full ancap, press the button, do it tomorrow, damn the piles of skulls - or the sort who's full social conservative, ban homosexual behavior now, US is a Christian nation, deport all atheists - the sort I wouldn't want to be personally associated with, but to the extent I'm on the right, then I know that guy gets lumped with me more than your guy does.
Which just makes me really dislike lumping everyone in binary categories like that. Which in turn compels me to avoid falling into that trap, and weirdly, that means if I'm wearing my righty hat and I see someone with their lefty hat, yes, but right now they're complaining about how they get judged by the weakest of their weakmen, I can't help but feel more camaraderie with that guy than with quite a few "fellow righties", you know?
Likewise when I'm wearing my lefty hat, libertarian hat, etc.
Overall, I keep noticing examples of taking any one popular ideology a few steps too far, and the people over there who notice it too, and it makes me prefer to just better understand where everyone *actually* stands. So gists like this help.
~All girls and femmes, actually (it's the Bay Area, there are no cishet males here) - but yes, that's a good point. Weak Men Are Superweapons, and simultaneously, those who believe strongly in weakmen...think they're strongmen. This is often baffling from an outside view. I'd like to think I can easily poke holes in my own beliefs and ideologies, cop to which arguments are powerful and which are tenuous. Perhaps it's easier cause I'm never surrounded by like-minded folks, so I'm used to being on the defensive instead of protected by Ingroup. (It frustrates me that the Bay Area is one hotspot of Rationalism, yet there are none to be found in my small corner of it.) But then I also can't easily protest said views, despite realizing it's important to do so, because it just turns into a motte and bailey. The end result is just not talking about politics at all, mostly.
If I had to locate myself via political sympathy rather than actual beliefs, I guess I'd be center-right with a side helping of libertarian. So to a modern progressive, I'm some kind of nutjob reactionary right-wing extremist, not much distinguishable from a culty Bible thumper. Which is confusing cause, like many that used to be on the center-left ("classic liberal", "conservative Democrat/liberal Republican"), I feel like I haven't shifted all that much, but the political rug got pulled left from under me. So the new bedfellows have been somewhat strange, but at least I'm not contorting myself more than 1 standard deviation to understand their views. Whereas flowing left with the tide puts me firmly in Alien Ideas territory. At least the right-hatters don't Well Acktually(tm) me about the Important Distinction Beteen Liberals And Leftists. Only one side loves throwing up Semantic Stopsigns as Trivial Inconveniences to conversation, I feel. Beware.
Guilt By Association always seems like a disingenuous attack. I'm not friends with my friends cause I share their (to me, often wacko, and vice versa for them) beliefs, I'm friends cause that's who's available to play boardgames and otherwise geek out with. You know, that good old classic bipartisan friendship that I'm told doesn't exist anymore by Robert Putnam and the like. Plus there's every social incentive in the world to double down on performing one's ideology a few steps too far...the inevitable consequence of a culture where "moderate" has become a dirty slur. RINOs on one end, Progressive Mobilization Delusion on the other. Whenever someone, say, the MSM proclaims "there are no swing voters/silent majority", I'm like...oh, so what you really mean is, you don't wanna put any effort into persuading me. That's cool. I suppose impure votes count for 3/5ths at the ballot box, or whatever.
My biggest concern with most of the climate alarmism over the last 20 years (about as long ago as I can remember following the conversation) is that the solutions to climate change seem mostly indistinguishable from what environmentalists have been seeking since long before. Many of the stances that environmentalists held pre-climate-debate (deforestation, pollution, shutting down the oil industry) align pretty well with reducing carbon emissions and other effects of the climate debate, but not all of them.
Two thing stand out very clearly to me, which reduce my alarm and increase my skepticism about climate environmentalists. 1) No matter how egregious the worry about carbon emissions, nuclear power is treated as if it's worse, even though it's the only known and operable solution to baseload power that doesn't require carbon and is scalable to our needs. 2) Almost no one is advocating that we abandon low lying areas near the ocean, or moving to places further from the equator. I would expect Al Gore (or name the rich environmentalist of your choice) to be buying lots of land in Siberia or central Canada. Instead, land and housing prices on the coasts seem to be increasing as much as ever, and interior land in cooler climates not going up much or at all still.
These things don't mean that climate change isn't real, but it certainly reflects on the timelines we are most likely to hear about and the overall scope of severity that may happen. Al Gore made specific predictions of doom within 10 years, 16 years ago. He was neither the first, nor the last, to make such predictions. Instead, we seem to be seeing slow and fairly steady changes in temperature (on the scale of alarmists at least), and the economics continue to reflect a lack of panic.
>is that the solutions to climate change seem mostly indistinguishable from what environmentalists have been seeking since long before.
Meanwhile the solution to any economic crisis is what conservatives always wanted, etc. ,etc.
>Almost no one is advocating that we abandon low lying areas near the ocean, or moving to places further from the equator. I would expect Al Gore (or name the rich environmentalist of your choice) to be buying lots of land in Siberia or central Canada.
Maybe an alarmist isn't the same as a defeatist.
No disagreement that conservatives also find a way to shoehorn in their preferred policies anywhere they can. Unless you're arguing that Republicans are economically correct when they always want to lower taxes (or pick your economic issue of choice), then you seem to be agreeing that environmentalists lose credibility when seeking the same solutions to a wide variety of problems.
Capitalists do a great job of pricing in expected changes. Prices in low-lying areas should be going down, and inland/cooler places should be more expensive. That we're really not seeing that is at least a strong indicator that the majority of people don't believe the climate is changing as quickly or harmfully as predicted.
Maybe everyone is tending towards the middle. Denialists don't deny the GW is anthropogenic any more, for instance.
Has anyone hear read the "48 Laws of Power"? Reading it has made me realize that I was missing a lot of insight into how people really are, that may be obvious to most other folks.
I tried to read it and it sounded like a bunch of made-up bullshit to me. I don't think it's how people "really" are.
I've read it. It's pretty entertaining and well-written. As the years have passed, and I have gained more and more experience dealing with people, I don't think anything in it has struck me as being horribly incorrect.
On the other hand, I would like to see someone go through the book and fact-check all the history stories.
Yeah the stories seem not very convincing.
It was long ago. I vaguely remember that each chapter separately made sense (and provided anecdotal evidence), but there was no coherent overall strategy because advice from one chapter directly contradicted advice from another chapter.
For example, you should trust your old friends and mistrust the opportunists who only joined you after you got powerful because they will just as easily betray you (says chapter X). Except, your old friends have actually always resented you and schemed to destroy you, but your former enemy converted to an ally will be super-loyal to you because he cannot take your friendship for granted (says chapter Y, both providing a historical example of a fool who did/didn't trust his childhood friend and therefore got murdered).
What fraction of people who describe themselves as "YIMBY" actually own back yards?
In a shocking and unforseeable development, it turns out that people care a lot about things that affect their personal well-being, and will pretty reliably fight to prevent things that will make them worse off.
By definition, any YIMBYs back yard is likely to be short-lived.
YIMBY is a play on NIMBY, as I'm sure you're aware. The number of NIMBY's with actual back yards is probably orders-of-magnitude greater than that of YIMBY's. As a rhetorical position, YIMBY makes sense to counter NIMBY. As you are alluding to, it's probably not a strong reflection of reality on the ground.
Likely the same as ones described as NIMBYs and blocking project on land they own.
Both are used to describe not literal backyards, but metaphorical ones (nearby projects on their street/in their city, nuclear power plant in their country etc).
To be honest, I'm more of a YIYBY, myself.
I recently had some thoughts about a possible connection between cognitive dissonance and autism. I'm posting here in the hope that someone more knowledgeable on the subject will give it a quick read and tell me "That's not how it works" or "You might actually be on the right track." I'm a layperson (as my notes to self clearly show) and can't really justify spending time studying psychology to find out if my arguments are fundamentally flawed.
It's less than 1000 words: https://gist.github.com/dianefyte/52bafe26020183ff996efc56c06729b2
I imagine a difference in strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance (or relatedly, dealing with uncertainty) could be due to a neurological difference. As for comorbidities/co-conditions in general, I find chronic stress to be a huge confounding factor, especially if it starts at an early age.
Also, thanks for the recommendation. Predictive processing is certainly interesting and though I have some notes already on how to incorporate its concepts and terminology, I'll have to read up on it more to have anything worth sharing.
Broad-stroke correct afaik. Scott has occasionally written about autism and cognitive processing:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ (section 10)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism
As you note, I think defining terms more carefully than the relative catch-all of "cognitive dissonance" might help narrow things down; CD is more symptomatic rather than causative.
Somewhat tangentially, "clinging stubbornly to bad priors and trying to change the territory, rather than updating the map" is certainly seen in educational contexts: https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/repetition-may-limit-scope-of-skills-in-people-with-autism/
Thanks for the links, especially the first one. I have a rough draft of how it all fits into the predictive processing framework and I think you're right that terms/concepts other than cognitive dissonance and rationalization are a better fit.
On a recent post, there was some discussion about how present-day Socialist parties in Europe have historically socialist roots but in countries such as France where those parties have been popular the ideology has been Socially Democratic for a long time now. The name Socialist persists but it's just a brand name at this point, much like the NBA team The Lakers is a brand name that no longer has anything to do with The Land of 1000 Lakes.
My question here is about Germany's Christian-Democrats (CDU). I can't tell from reading Wikipedia to what extent they still consider themselves to be a Christian party. I've long assumed that, like the Socialist Party in France, it's just a brand name that nobody wants to change, but maybe my assumptions are wrong.
So, for those who know: Is the CDU still considered to be a Christian party?
Yes. The CSU, their Bavarian partner is actually US level right wing. Wanted to put crosses and other stuff in all the public schools. The CDU is slightly more moderate but very much a religious party. Key to remember not to compare this stuff to American evangelicals, though.
Are they working to get the government out of major economic sectors, like labor or healthcare?
No, they aren't.
I just saw this in their last pre-election manifesto and it relates to your question. (Deepl-Translation:) We work to ensure that we remain a society that sticks together: Young and old, strong and weak. Our Christian view of humanity provides us with a compass for this: individual freedom and community responsibility are not opposites, but rather they are mutually dependent. With the principles of the social market economy, we ensure that everyone in our country receives good medical and nursing care and that everyone who needs help is helped. We ensure a reliable pension and a new start for private pension provision so that it is more worthwhile.
I don't think they are as right-wing ... but maybe depends on what you're looking at.
As for the cross, they were in public schools since pre-historic times (or so it feels), and then some parents complained and filed for court, because they thought their kid would be traumatized. And then the whole debate started.
I quite strongly disagree. There are a few (very few) ethical political points where CDU positions are influenced by christian ethics, for example abortion laws.
But in >95% of all political affairs, the CDU is simply a moderately (especially from US perspective) conservative party. Meaning that they are economy-friendly, and that they are somewhat averse against cultural change (e.g., immigration, gay rights). But this is the same stuff that you find in any conservative party, also in totally non-religious eastern European countries.
The CSU, the "sister party" of CDU, is a slightly more extreme version of CDU, but in no way comparable to US right wing level. And christianity is not core program of the party. Yes, there was the debate about crosses in public schools four years ago, but it's indicative that we need to go years back to find an example which touches on christianity. This was much more signalling against cultural change than it was about christianity per se.
An example is the CVP (Christian-democratic people's party) in Switzerland, which just merged with another party and got rid of the Christian branding entirely.
There is a joke that the CSU is neither Christian, nor social, and it's also not a union.
That's only an anecdote, not an answer ... I'm happy to write a bit more, just passing by for a min now ... in the meantime: how would you operationalize 'Christian party'? I mean, how would you recognize or what would you expect/ not expect to decide whether it's Christian or not?
Well, first of all, I'd expect all the members to identify as Christian, if that is the identity of the party. In other words, a Jewish person couldn't join the party and openly identify as having a Jewish faith instead of a Christian one. Is that the case?
No, certainly not. Both CDU and CSU are open to persons of all faith.
Oh, OK. In that case, what does make it Christian?
I would probably look to five criteria:
a) do they explicitely state they believe in the Christian God, refer to being a 'Christian party' in their basic documents
b) do they recur to Christian values (explicitely) when explaining their policies and how much are their policies influenced (also inexplicitely) by Christian values (b-2)
c) what do they suggest with regard to our two official churches and general different religions in Germany and EU
d) what about symbolic actions, do they pray in public, swear to the bible, etc
e) how much are their policies actually aligned with what Christianity teaches.
I won't go into e), and for a)-d), I think it'd be relevant to look at the Grundsatzprogramm (basic document with values, changed rarely) and the most current pre-election programme, and into how they actually behave in everyday politics. A lot of this is obviously very contextual on culture, state-church relations. That's the basic set-up, I will look it up. Sorry if you were expecting a short answer?
>Sorry if you were expecting a short answer?
No, that's interesting. I was wondering to what degree the party is nominally/really Christian, and that gives me some idea. Thanks.
"a Jewish person couldn't join the party and openly identify as having a Jewish faith instead of a Christian one". Oh, that sort a provision would be very illegal in Germany.
Not directly relevant, but note that the Christian Democrat International, of which the CDU is a member, changed its name to Centrist Democrat International in 2001. I believe that this was after admitting a bunch of non-Christian parties, such as from Albania and Algeria.
First, some background (until +++): there is no state religion in Germany, however Germany is not secular in a way France is for example. There is a lot of cooperation among the state and two official Churches, which is the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church. Among others, when being employed you tick a box whether you belong to one or the other (or not), and if yes, the state deducts a special tax from your salary and passes it on to the Catholic or Protestant Church. That's the Churches' main source of income. Also, religion is a regular subject in school, two hours per week from first to last grade. Mostly you have the choice of catholic or protestant or joining the ethics class instead. In some places they offer Jewish classes, and from what I read there are experiments with Buddist and Muslim. There are also evangelicals and free churches, which are more rare and don't profit from the special status of the two offical Churches.
Most of our holidays are Christian holidays. Oh, and we don't work on Sundays. I mean, shops are not allowed to open on Sundays, if they don't have special permit (which is granted only in exceptional cases).
Freedom of religion is a fundamental value, safeguarded in the Grundgesetz (Basic Law, which is almost like a Constitution except for legal nitpick).
Parties are member organizations, CDU and CSU together have around 530 000 members. It's the party who decides who runs for chancellor. Currently there are six parties represented in the German Bundestag, and coalition governments are the norm.
Parties develop 'Grundsatzprogramme' – general statements on values, principles and policy – and update them every other decade or sth. like this (I will call it statement of principles). Parties also write 'Wahlprogramme' (pre-election plan, published before each election, laying out what they are planning to do, if elected). If you want to know a party's position on a certain topic, it makes sense to look to those two documents + look at the actual behaviour. The CDU/CSU have a statement of principles from 2007, and are currently working on a new one to be presented in the next two years. There is however already an initial document on values, confirmed just recently. Which is convenient, because it's recent and it's short. I'll call it value statement. ;) So much for the intro.
+++
I doubt it would be legal to build a party that allows only members of a certain faith, it would likely contradict the Basic Law. I'm also pretty sure a 'Volkspartei' (traditionally a big party which tries to integrate opinions from broader parts of society) wouldn't want to do this anyway.
Now, for the other criteria (as in my comment below):
a) I didn't find any direct mentioning of 'we are a Christian party' or 'we believe in …' neither in the value statement nor in the pre-election plan. Not too surprising – but I guess it was different somewhen, certainly in the last century. I found 'responsibility before God and man' used in one place.
b) Explicit recurrance to christian values.
Yes, this can be found. Quite clearly and explicitely in the value statement, usually in the form of a committment to a 'christliches Menschenbild' (a christian understanding/ imagine of man / humankind). It's also prominently on their webpage, when they talk about their statement of principles.
In addition, they use the word 'creation' when talking about protection of the natural environment. It doesn't mean in any way that they reject evolution – most Christians I know would believe that evolution was a way to implement creation. But it's nevertheless a clear reference to Christianity – the Green Party for example would never use the term 'creation' as an underpinning for their environmental policies.
In the pre-election plan, we find the reference to christian values again – though only six times (when counting explicit usage of the word 'christian') in a 140 pages document. Typically again it's used as the Christian view of humanity or humankind (importantly, it's actually referring explicitely to the individuum, not humanity as a whole. I'll stick with deepl's translation for the moment. Maybe it'd be closer to the original to say: christian image of man ?).
It's linked to protection of creation / environment, supporting families, supporting workers rights, and generally social cohesion.
Some examples:
'Unser christliches Menschenbild verpflichtet uns zur Bewahrung der Schöpfung' (Our Christian view of humankind obligates us to care for and preserve creation.) or: We work to ensure that we remain a society that sticks together: Young and old, strong and weak. Our Christian view of humankind provides us with a compass for this: individual freedom and community responsibility are not opposites, but rather they are mutually dependent.
From their value statement:
II. What defines us.
(1) The Christian understanding of man
The basis of Christian Democratic politics is the Christian understanding of the human being. At the center is the inviolable dignity of the human being. Every human being is wanted, unique, unavailable and should live freely and self-determined. This view of humanity guides our political actions. At the same time, the CDU is committed to the traditions of the Enlightenment and is open to all people who - regardless of their own religious convictions - share its fundamental values. (deepl-translation,not corrected for detail).
I do not recall any CDU/CSU politician to explitely argue for any kind of policy because of Christian values. Okay, my exposition to such events may be limited. The last time I recall anybody explicitely say sth. Christian-leaning it was Merkel in a town-hall meeting right after the refugee 'crisis', when somebody explained how they were afraid of christian faith in Germany being overrun by Islam. She replied with sth. like: well, if people are so much into Christianity, maybe go to Church a bit more or participate in Church life, churches are often empty and could make use of more engagement to strenghten Christianity.
I will put some longer citations together in the next comment. And I won't go in depth into b-2 now, because time. The (relatively) short value statement is actually an interesting read if you want to understand German politics (and how much or not they are similar to US conservatives). I guess deepl will manage a solid translation.
A very general disclaimer especially for the pre-election plan is: don't read it literally. It contains a lot of information, *if* you know the context and the debates of the date. But it's very often very much reading between the lines (which is easy when you understand the code). Also, often it's referring to 10 different goals everybody would support – and you need to understand the emphasis and the in between-the-lines to figure out, which of those has a priority for shaping everyday politics. This doesn't make those plans worthless – pre-election plans differ a lot between the different parties. Just a warning not to rest your interpretation on a literal or too selective reading of single sentences.
Need to split the comment ...
Back to the criteria:
c) From their pre-election plan: they want to keep religion classes in school, free Sundays, religious holidays and they acknowlegde the importance of the churches. They explicitely commit to freedom of religion. No surprises here. As a side-note, they emphasise, that imams preaching and teaching in Germany should be able to speak German, to enable better integration.
'We consider it a valuable part of our Basic Law that it separates state and religion on the one hand and on the other hand allows religion to enrich our society.' (Pre-election plan).
d) Without cross-checking the details: finishing an oath for office with 'so help me God' is pretty normal, it's rather an active act not to do it. Beeing married in a Christian church is normal, and just living with your partner has also been normalized enough (the first one might give a few extrapoints within CDU/CSU membership); attending an important Christian service or a Christian funeral is also normal. Praying in public is very much not what you would do, and referencing God in your policies is also very much what you wouldn't do. I think this holds true for all parties. Being religious or not is pretty much seen as being everybodies private business. I might not have paid too much attention to it, but I think the open committment of CDU/CSU to Christianity in public speeches is very limited. You telling your party buddies that you just attended a Sundays Catholic service could easily raise eyebrows among Green Party members in Berlin, and would get a different reaction among CSU members in Bavaria.
e) There are certain policies, that are mentioned as being build on christian values (protecting the environment, workers rights, social cohesion). Despite this, CDU/CSU are not the parties which supports those issues the most. Rather on the contrary – the greens typically would be the most prominent in protection of the environment and the social democrats are known for emphasising workers rights and social cohesion. The CDU/CSU would be strongest in wanting to support traditional family roles and strongest in supporting the above described role of churches, religious holidays. On a broader note, if Christianity emphasises 'love thy next as you love yourself' one could question, whether the policies of CDU/CSU are more altruistically oriented than those of other German parties. I would say they aren't … but I also pre-comitted to not go too deep into exploring that question.
Now, of course I'm curious whether you think all that together qualifies for being 'a Christian party' or not.
Also, if you read that far, would you care for giving me some info that you did so, please? Either a comment – one word is enough – or a like (as there is no dislike, which I'm kind of happy about). I'm totally ignorant to which extend longer texts in the comments on topics beyond the mainstream interests are being read, and you'd help me to find out.
I struggled to find good translations for Menschenbild, Wahlprogramm, Grundsatzprogramm und I cheated a bit around Grundwertecharta. If you have any recommendations on any of those, I'd be happy to know.
Here are the three links to the pre-election plan: https://www.csu.de/common/download/Regierungsprogramm.pdf
the value statement https://assets.ctfassets.net/nwwnl7ifahow/1HEdtjRCAN8Shf1ihdkYco/bc2b167d0a79037131078d1538eb61bf/CDU-Grundwertecharta.pdf
the webpage I cited:https://archiv.cdu.de/artikel/die-grundsatzprogramme-der-cdu
I will later put the longer passages into the next comment, as promised. If there is any interest.
Not the OP but just wanted to thank you or this analysis, I found it very interesting!
Substack has started adding paragraphs to their RSS feeds in the format of "XYZ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber." The paragraphs aren't differentiated by being block quotes or italics or anything, so I end up breaking my reading flow as I fail to notice them until I'm already halfway across. I find it more than a bit annoying because I'm already a paid subscriber (not that SS can tell from the RSS feed).
Has anyone else seen this? If so, have you found any workarounds?
I was sick for a good bit of yesterday-- my symptoms were minor-- a little vomiting and some painful gas which went on for a while.
What was amazing was how knocked out I was-- I didn't have a lot of attention available and less initiative.
Now I'm wondering how much of people's capacity is lost as a result of low-grade digestive problems, not to mention worse problems.
I remember reading once about the connection between autism and constipation, and those seemingly-unrelated concepts suddenly "clicked". Identical levels of digestive discomfort are apparently much more discomforting for some than others. Also ties into picky eating habits, once one starts to learn what goes down easily or not. (I think this helps explain my longstanding vegetable aversion. Every rational prior in my brain tells me they're good and it'll get easier if I eat lots all the time, but it's so hard to shake the "punishment" valence.)
Low-grade health issues in general strike me as a likely cause for a lot of misery. I managed to suffer through mild vitamin B12 deficiency, constipation and bloating for more than a decade. I only fixed it after the deficiency got bad enough to get diagnosed. (Turned out all of these things were related - SIBO - although I only found *that* out a few months ago!) In all this time, I got increasingly depressed and demotivated and was honestly struggling to realise *why*; I had a great life by all objective measures, so why was I struggling along? That my "minor" health issues were actually a much bigger deal than I subjectively thought they were didn't occur to me.
When I took B12 supplements, it took me about two weeks to swing from depressed to optimistic. Some of that was from the positive outlook, of course, but I noticed that it was actually *much harder* for me to have negative thoughts at all. Even when I went out of my way to criticise something, there wasn't anything that took me to a route of dejected depression. (Previously, even if I went out of my way to think positively about something, there was no route to a 'natural' feeling optimism; there was a rational one that filled the niche and was useful, but very different in feeling.) Which makes sense, obviously, my depression had physiological causes, but it was still *eerie* in a way that's honestly hard to convey to people who haven't had similar experiences. It felt like a complete personality transplant.
I'm confused by this line from point (3) of this post:
> the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today,
It's my understanding that the corporatization of the web is part of Web 2.0. Interactive sites used to be niche / community driven, and corporate-owned sites were read-only. Then Web 2.0 came, and large corporations began making mass-market websites that collected and published user-created content.
I also can't find any reference to BBS that isn't a recent blockchain / Web 3.0 thing.
Can anyone explain what I'm missing?
Is this what you're looking for? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
How hard is it to assassinate high-ranking politicians? (a great question to post in a public discussion!)
I was thinking about the war in Ukraine and how a death of this or that individual could affect its outcome. Obviously, the Russians tried to kill Zelensky at the beginning of the invasion and failed. After a few more attempts, they gave up. Would say CIA do "better" or is it really that difficult?
I also noticed that at the beginning of the war, Zelensky regularly posted videos from his office (which you can probably find even on google maps) and while the "precision strikes" Russia boasts about are probably far from that precise, I guess that if you fired 10 kalibr rockets aimed at Zelensky's office at the time he is likely going to be recording those videos, there is a good chance one of them hits. So either the rockets are even less precise than I thought or the Russians decided at some point that killing Zelensky was no longer going to bring them any major advantage in the conflict (in fact, it could galvanize both the Western support and Ukraine resistance even further). Do you agree with that?
This also lead me to think about whether killing Putin would help. I guess that his assassination would be much harder to pull off and the risk in case of a failure and discovery (realistically, it would probably have be an attempt by the US or with a lot of US operational support) could spell a disaster for international politics (it would probably be even more dangerous than sending NATO navies to clear out the Black Sea of Russian presence...). So I guess those are good reasons not to attempt the assassination at all. But if you could guarantee success and a degree of deniability (which might be impossible), would it help? I guess it would paralyze the Russian state for a while which would help in the short therm, but it could lead to even more aggression and perhaps even an (open) mobilization in Russia. I guess that you'd have to kill the entire Russian high command which is probably impossible.
Then I thought about Lukashenko. He is extremely unpopular in Belarus and if he died, Belarus would have a revolution after which they would likely switch sides and openly support Ukraine in the conflict. Russia would be too busy to intervene and if the attempt did not succeed, the fallout would be much more limited. The army of Belarus is insignificant and unlikely to actually want to fight Ukrainians except for a few regime loyalists. At the same time, they keep a part of the Ukrainian military in check and they provide their territory and infrastructure to the Russians. They also have a sizeable stock of soviet-era artillery and tanks and if they flipped sides, gave/leased half of their military equipment to Ukraine and denied Russians in their territory this would be a significant blow to Putin (also the Russian economy would take a hit)...so it actually seems like quite a good idea to kill him (perhaps even through a local agent given how much people there actually hate Lukashenko) and I wonder if it could take place.
It is very very hard. The CIA tried to kill Castro for years (possibly decades! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro#Later_attempts ) and never succeeded.
In addition, assassinating Putin would probably lead to world war 3.
With Castro, you can see two ingredients that make assassinations hard to achieve: the desire to preserve plausible deniability ("It wasn't the CIA that killed him! It was the Mafia, or a jilted ex-lover," etc.), and the challenge of finding people willing to die in the attempt.
I think this last part is a big part of the reason why political assassinations are overwhelmingly domestic. You can't bribe someone to risk near-certain death. But there will always be some tiny number of people willing to risk near-certain death to kill a political leader, either for political, personal, or insane reasons. In theory, perhaps they could get in touch with foreign intelligence in pursuit of some sort of logistical support, but in practice I'm not aware of this ever happening. Either because that's not the way their minds are operating (who wants to die just to be remembered as a traitor and foreign stooge?), or because it's more likely to be counter-productive (what if I propose killing El Presidente to the CIA/KGB, and they decide to turn me in, or it puts me on the radar screen of local counter-intelligence/secret police?)
I think the closest thing to this is when leaders of a potential coup check in with the US to make sure it has their backing (e.g. Pinochet/Allende), but that's rather different from a classic assassination.
As Drethelin notes, killing well-protected VIPs is actually quite hard, even when you have a national intelligence service backing you up. Doubly so during an actual invasion, when they no longer have to make scheduled public appearances to maintain their poll ratings, because everybody knows they can't afford that risk. Hollywood makes this look easy, like it would almost always have succeeded if it weren't for one fortuitous bit of heroism. Castro is the reality.
And being able to use cruise missiles, doesn't necessarily change that. First off, Zelenskyy probably doesn't spend very much time in the place that you can google as being "his office". If he puts out videos from there for the appearance of normalcy, there's a good chance he was only in the office long enough to make that video, and not at any predictable time. Second, cruise missiles aren't bomb-teleporters. The Russian ones usually don't reach their targets, at least if the target is protected by something like the Ukrainian air defense system. And when they do, against a defended target there will be at least a minute or two of warning, and that's enough time for Zelenskyy's bodyguards to get him to the shelter in the basement.
Putin or Lukashenko's security may be less prepared for that sort of thing right now, but they're probably good enough for the more usual sort of assassination attempt. And the escalatory risks of a cruise missile attack on Moscow or Minsk, are nothing we want to deal with.
Does Lukashenko make public appearances? I mean it took one crazy guy with a rifle to kill Kennedy (or Shinzo Abe). Is it really that hard for a trained sniper with military-grade equipment? I guess it has to be, but I don't know why...although I guess it is not that difficult to understand. It is probably enough for the secret police to monitor all possible vantage points when someone like Lukashenko shows up in public.
American Presidents have the disadvantage, even post-Kennedy, of needing to make scheduled public appearances in bignum locations around the country. On the other hand, the Secret Service is numerous and capable. For a dictator like Putin or Lukashenko, they're probably making their scheduled appearances at a relatively limited number of sites in the capital (or, like Kim Jong-Un, making pop-up visits that aren't announced until after the fact). So identifying possible sniper nests and keeping them secure or at least surveilled becomes a more tractable problem.
Now that I think about it, that air defense system is due even more credit here. I don't know how important the Ukrainian Government Building is to the peace of mind of Ukrainians, but if it's anything like the White House, if someone could blow it up even without getting the Head of State, that'd still be a Big Deal.
And you can't hustle the UGB into its own basement when the early warning system lights up, which means that air defense system is doing its job really well, probably mostly in terms of deterrent. Obviously, any nation trying to pull that stunt also has the fear of international aftermath in addition to "can we even get past air defense", but some madman with a bomb and a scheme might not care.
Does Scott, or anyone else with better statistics knowledge than I, have any thoughts on this article:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2200300119
The "nudge" hypothesis for behavior modification has gotten a lot of attention for a long time. It would be interesting, but not shocking, if the statistics didn't back it up.
I was under the impression that Cass/Sunstein style "nudges" were one part of social science that got buried by the Replication Crisis. Can't find any Serious rebuttals off the top of my head though, just a couple "ugh, *that* publication" links randomly cluttering up my browser history:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/nudges-effectiveness/418749/
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/26/21154466/research-education-behavior-psychology-nudging (okay, at least it's Kelsey Piper, she's One Of Us)
Regarding point 3, I've been reading and watching a lot on Web 0.1 and it's collection of decentralized dialup BBS's and their effects shaping modern social media. There is a book called The Modem World that discusses this specific topic or 300 hours of raw interviews that were recording 20 years ago detailing just about every aspect imaginable on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary)
I just found this clip of a video game about the Battle of Midway.
https://youtu.be/m02izKBoL1g
It looks brilliant, but one thing that undercuts the realism is the fact that you shoot down several Japanese planes in the space of a few minutes. Even in a major air-to-air engagement like this, most fighter pilots would score no kills, the minority that did would only get one kill, and a pilot who scored two kills would have reason to brag among other pilots for the rest of his life.
This makes me wonder: I know there are fighter plane games that closely reproduce real-world physics and the performance characteristics of the real planes, so when mass air battles are held in those games, meant to simulate actual engagements like the Battle of Midway or one day during the Battle of Britain, do the loss/kill ratios ever approach what they actually were in real life? Or are the results always unrealistic, as they are in the clip?
I don't think there's really a market for a flight sim that could accurately simulate Midway in depth (everyone wants to be the guy who shoots down 50 Zeros in 5 minutes, no one wants to be the guy who spends an hour achieving zero kills and then gets taken out), but I think piloting would be your problem more so than physics, and that's true whether they're human or AI. And in truth, piloting probably had a lot to do with kill ratios in the Pacific, since Japan had real problems training replacement pilots.
Of course, there IS a market for games that can simulate WW2 battles accurately at a tactical or strategic level (without simulating physics), and the leader, for better or worse, is the Hearts of Iron games. I'm not a pro at HOI4 and haven't played for years, but my sense is that while the HOI games always have this mind-numbing level of detail in everything they simulate, it never results in realism and instead just opens up really weird ahistorical tactics that game the system, like having navies that consist entirely of submarines, or an air force that consists of nothing but fighters, or a really weird and ahistorical infantry division composition being totally dominant.
Though I think HOI4 might also be getting slowly better on this front, but my guess would be that if you tried your best to recreate an exact historical scenario, you still wouldn't get a realistic kill ratio in air battles.
War thunder is a free to play simulation game that includes airplanes, and in realistic (limited ammo in air, plausible physical constraints on the planes) 8v8 battles, you still often get top players with 2-3 kills each, but it's in part due to the fact that a portion of each team will probably be flying bombers/CAS/not give a fuck and are much less of a threat than regular fighters.
The fact that it's a video game, however, almost certainly rule out the "spend 1h doing nothing" scenario, since you don't log in to do nothing (while I'd very much be satisfied with living to see another empty day in a real war)
I spent hours and hours as a child drawing pictures of battered B-17s over target, dropping their bombload whilst shooting down three or four BF-109 Luftwaffe fighters at the same time.
Imagine my disappointment to read much later that in real life B-17s were credited with shooting down 23 fighters per 1000 missions.
It would have been more realistic to focus on B-29s over Japan; with their computer-aided remotely aimed gun turrets, it was not uncommon to shoot down multiple fighters per mission. (Another factor was the short supply of experienced Japanese fighter pilots by late 1944 through 1945.)
I mean, the B-17 is an awesome image to a boy. A "Flying Fortress", bristling with guns. I remember seeing the Memphis Belle film in theaters with my dad as a kid in 1990, which wasn't the greatest piece of cinema ever, but my imagination was captured by the idea of the Flying Fortress.
My read is that the B-17's ineffectiveness against fighters is still a debated topic. For a while I felt the consensus was that they'd have done about as well if they put toy guns in those turrets, but maybe that's being reassessed somewhat. Their guns were effective enough when flown in proper formation and could cover one another. The Germans tended to get kills on aircraft that had broken formation.
My sense is that the B-17's guns are like the wildebeest's horns. Lions have a highly favorable K:D ratio against the wildebeest, but does that mean the wildebeest's horns are useless against lions? No, it means that strong lions hunt weak wildebeest, while strong wildebeest are generally avoided by lions. And if a fight is going poorly for the lion, it can retreat, and the wildebeest will not pursue.
Lions are forced to be opportunistic in which wildebeest they target and work together to bring them down. They can't just stroll into a herd and devour them as if they were sheep. So it was with B-17s and German fighters.
The flying scenes in Memphis Belle were brilliant. The story was utterly predictable, not very accurate historically, and yet made for a very enjoyable movie.
The producer, Catherine Wyler, took on the project in part to honour her father, William Wyler, who had made "The Memphis Belle", a WW2 propaganda film.
The most realistic combat flight simulator these days is DCS, Digital Combat Simulator. I don't play it myself, but watch these clips for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkKexYsIFoQ - Dogfight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWFRZSNbjRQ - Landing on a carrier, compared to a real landing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BImXac9x_w0 - Real pilot reaction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgDZ4BLk0Pw - Real pilot dogfighting a youtuber
I don't know the answer to your question, but there are a fair few real-life combat pilots who play DCS, and the strategies and tactics used are usually real ones.
A question on CRISPR-Cas9:
In the bacteria/archaea that use CRISPR-Cas-9, when making an mRNA transcript of a stored piece of viral DNA, how is it determined which DNA strand to make an RNA transcript from?
I know that in standard mRNA transcription, there are often specific sequences on a strand that indicate where transcription should start. But the sequences surrounding the stored viral DNA are palindromic, so it seems like if there is such an indicator/promoter sequence, it should be on both strands.
Does it not matter which strand you copy, since in the end you are comparing it to incoming viral DNA using the Cas-9 protein, and which strand you copy doesn’t affect whether you recognize the incoming viral DNA?
New "umbrella" review out re: the relationship between depression and serotonin: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 (open access).
I am not very familiar with methods for measuring serotonin in people, so I'm uncertain what to make of the results. My main takeaway as an outsider is that this doesn't shift my beliefs very much, but does highlight ongoing issues in the field. Does anyone here have a more informed opinion on this or other aspects of the review?
First came across this on r/nootropics (removed, initially on r/science https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w3jalq/the_main_areas_of_serotonin_research_provide_no/)
Looked up hedonium shockwave after you mentioned it in an earlier post. Entire galaxy having an orgasm. Pretty hard not to choose that! Question is, what sound would the galaxy make.
Why isn't popcorn ever a side dish with a meal? Seems that it would be about the nutritional equivalent of fries or chips. Is it a space or timing issue in the kitchen? Would nobody want it?
Popcorn is usually served cold or warm, but not as hot as a hot meal?
I was amazed at how many people on here rushed to the defense of BLM on the post about the Ferguson effect, when time and time again it is shown that BLM is a black nationalist movement that does not care about principled objection to police brutality and instead just react in a tribalistic way against any instance of their ingroup being hurt by the outgroup.
Case in point, the shooting of Andrew Sunberg by police following a six-hour standoff after Sunberg shot a neighbor he had been stalking has lead to angry BLM protests. And of course, along with that, the MSM disinformation machine has gone into overdrive looking for excuses to justify this black rage, portraying Sunberg as a veritable angel who did nothing wrong. And of course, the narrative of choice *every single time* there has been a high profile instance of black violence is that the offender was "mentally ill"/having a "mental health crisis". Maybe its true sometimes, maybe its not. But 1) This literally NEVER applies to white men/offenders deemed BAD by the media and 2) If police can't shoot somebody LITERALLY TRYING TO MURDER OTHER PEOPLE, mental health crisis or not, it's open and shut case that BLM isn't a movement against police brutality.