Exclusisvist is universal, since anyone can convert to the faith and be saved. Universalism is 'it doesn't matter what you believe, everyone is saved' and soon leads to 'it doesn't matter if you don't believe, everyone is saved (as long as you try to be a good person)'. And then if it doesn't matter what you believe, plainly it doesn't matter if you believe in Thor or Apollo or Marduk, what matters is being a good person. And then Thor or Apollo or Marduk don't exist, the real truth is being a good person by (these values our current society thinks acceptable).
And 'what current society thinks acceptable' changes over time, so the standards of being a good person also change. In one time period, you could be a slave owner and be a good person, in another time period this is impossible.
Well, yes and no, depending on your moral theory. By analogy, consider the shape of the Earth. In one time period, it might be reasonable to believe that it is flat; in another, that it is bowl-shaped, or even round. However, if you get the answer right (or at least closer to the true shape of the Earth than the other guys), you will be able to develop radically transformative technologies, such as maritime navigation or even space travel. Thus, the shape of the Earth is not just an arbitrary matter of opinion, it is a demonstrable fact, which (philosophical presuppositions aside) can be known in the absence of any kind of faith or direct divine revelation.
I think you light on good pragmatic reasons for exclusive monotheism, but I also think this argument is somewhat of a slippery slope.
For one, "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you try to be a good person" seems to me to differ from "it doesn't matter what you believe simpliciter. Namely, it seems to differ insofar as the former requires a true and practical understanding of goodness (which perhaps includes belief in God, faith, etc), whereas the latter does not.
I'm reminded of this quote from the Vedas: "God is one, but the wise call Him by many names." This notion admits moral reality, even monotheism, but perhaps even excludes some gods as unreal. Maybe Thor is out but Apollo is in, for instance. But it also seems to reject the dogmatic protestants-warring-with-catholics dynamic that many people find repulsive about organized religion (a priori anyway).
More to the point, the above comment seems to skirt the question of whether any one particular brand of monotheism is, you know, true. Just because anyone can become a Mormon or a Muslim doesn't mean salvation is found there.
I wasn't impressed by C.S.Lewis. That is, actually I was pretty impressed with how far he managed to get, as well as with his eloquence. But the trajectory of his arguments, as I understood them, appears to be: "Looking at the issue logically as well as empirically, it would fully appear that belief in God is absurd and the Church is corrupt. But such is the beauty of faith that it can overcome such obstacles. You must have faith, true honest faith, because the alternative is nothing but sadness".
But in what way is his faith more beautiful than Muslim faith, for example? I haven't read much of his, but the most famous example, the trilemma, at least makes an attempt at argument for Christianity in particular.
Hey, don't ask me, I think the entire concept of faith is rather silly. But, when I was reading Lewis (which was a while ago, so I could be misremembering), I saw him as a sort of tragic figure. He's obviously an intelligent and compassionate man, who cares very deeply about the well-being of humanity in general and individual humans in particular -- but he's forced by his faith to squeeze himself into weird mental contortions at every turn, just to reconcile his humanism (or, if you prefer, inherent goodness) with his religion.
Admittedly, though, I'm an atheist so my perception is somewhat biased.
This matches my views on Lewis too. He clearly had a great deal of positive moral, philosophical, and psychological insights to offer the world. But looking at his work and reading between the lines, there seem to be a lot of places where his personal intuitions clash with his conservative religious beliefs, and while he tries to reconcile them in various ways, the seams are quite noticeable.
He seemed to hold quite a lot of disdain for the proto-New-Age Christians of his time - the types who rejected more dogmatic and traditionalist interpretations of Christianity, claimed there were many paths to God, and pulled ideas from Gnosticism, paganism, occult beliefs, and Eastern spirituality. From what I remember, his work seemed to mock or vilify those sorts of non-traditional Christians far more than it did overt atheists. Yet in many ways, I suspect he had quite a lot in common with them, probably far more than he would've cared to admit. An actual hardline traditionalist would find Lewis' assertion that "some people must first be made pagans in order to be made Christians" to be blasphemous, and quite a lot of conservative Christians were offended by his claim (made explicitly in his finale to the Narnia series, and implicitly in The Great Divorce) that being a Christian is not *necessary* to go to Heaven, as long as someone is a good person and has faith in *some* form of higher power.
"An actual hardline traditionalist would find Lewis' assertion that "some people must first be made pagans in order to be made Christians" to be blasphemous"
As someone who considers himself pretty darn traditional, this puzzles me. What do you believe a traditionalist would object to in such a statement?
Can you cite me an example of Lewis doing this? I'm a huge Lewis fan, and I'm not making any connections here. Lewis is pretty big on "I believe Christianity because it is logically true, not because I happen to like it." You know, "most dejected and reluctant convert in all England", that sort of thing. I don't even know where I would look to find what you describe...he certainly has some hard things to say about nihilism, that could fit your "alternative is nothing but sadness" comment, but I can't even imagine him writing "Looking at the issue logically as well as empirically, it would fully appear that belief in God is absurd and the Church is corrupt." So an you give me a cite on this?
As I said, it's been a while ago, so I can't give an exact cite -- but that gives me a good excuse to [re]read more Lewis. That said, I do recall him dunking on rank-and-file Christians (as well as the Church) quite a bit in *Screwtape Letters*. Also IIRC, in *Mere Christianity*, he keeps returning to the point that, without God, life would be bleak and hopeless and thus we've got no choice but to believe. He also acknowledges that God is undetectable by scientific instruments (or any kind of instruments) a priori, and hence faith is required to believe in Him.
On a sidenote, I've loved *Leaf by Niggle* ever since I've first read it. I think it showcases Lewis's worldview in a really impactful way that his non-fiction books cannot. Also, it is quite heretical, of course :-)
Two chapters in Mere Christianity were about faith. I think it's valuable to take a look at the first one, as it is not long, and shows why I feel you have misunderstood Lewis when you say he believes that faith is required to believe in him.
"I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.
"That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
"Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so.
"For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
"When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, 'Perhaps she'll be different this time,' and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks.
"There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
"Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
"This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith"
On other words, when Lewis uses the term faith he means continuing to believe in something your reason has already convinced you of, through proof, even when your emotions make you feel otherwise. He certainly doesn't mean believing in something without evidence.
Earlier in the book he does mention empirical science, writing:
"Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, "I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so," or, "I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is "Something Behind," then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way.
"The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?" "Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?"
"Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men."
He then goes on to make an argument about how our observations of our inner lives among other things point us towards God. He never sits down and says "We can't measure God in a test tube, therefore blind faith is required to believe in him." He does not believe that God is a fact that can be proven or disproven through empirical science, but he also doesn't believe that being proven or disproven by empirical science is a prerequisite to a fact existing or being knowable through reason. After all, we know that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles through reason, not empirical science. There's lots of things that cannot be measured that can be known.
As a minor nitpick: "Leaf by Niggle" was written by Tolkien, not Lewis. Lewis did write some heretical epic poetry while he was an atheist though, I heard its alright.
Also, Mere Christianity is definitely aimed at an uneducated audience: if you want somewhat meatier Lewis I would recommend reading his book Miracles. Some kindly pirate has posted the entire thing online here, though the formatting's a bit wonky.
Do you consider Latter-day Saint theology exclusivist?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that Jesus Christ is the only source of salvation and that accessing that salvation requires the use of priesthood authority that is currently only held by the Church (but has been around for most of human history by e.g. Moses or Peter). However the Church also teaches that every person will get an opportunity to accept or reject salvation, even if that chance has to happen for many of them after this life. This is where the doctrine of preaching in the spirit world and the practice of baptism for the dead comes from.
ETA:
The Church also teaches that "God will yet reveal many great and marvelous things to the children of men," which is to say, that while the Church claims to have the best understanding of God currently, that understanding has changed over time as God reveals new truth (and as knowledge is lost when people ignore or reject it), and it will likely continue to change. If you believe in a God that is actively involved in the world then changing changing teachings about him is not a sign of inconsistency.
Beyond that, one problem you are going to have in engaging with "exclusivist" religions is that you are trying to make arguments based on general trends you notice in history and religion. But that kind of argument doesn't concern exclusivists almost by definition. If you point out to a Catholic that most iron age religions practiced human sacrifice he responds "yeah, duh, that's how we know those ones were wrong."
And this isn't necessarily a failure mode. We don't expect physicists to spend much time worrying about how wrong the phlogiston model was. It was wrong, scientists figured out that it was wrong, and science moved on, and so too did popular understanding of heat and energy and now all my 9th grade students know that heat is a form of energy and is related to the motion of atoms even though they don't fully grasp what that means.
If you think of your religion as an exercise in truth-finding in the same way that physicists think of physics then many of the problems you mention mostly go away. It doesn't salvage certain fundamentalist strains of thought that try to freeze a certain dogma from a certain time period, but I suggest that those are fewer than you may think in practice.
> However the Church also teaches that every person will get an opportunity to accept or reject salvation, even if that chance has to happen for many of them after this life.
Somehow, I did not know that ! So, if I was an atheist in life, and then I die and discover first-hand that the afterlife is real (and maybe get a chance to meet some supernatural beings in person), then I can still avoid Hell ? Doesn't this somewhat diminish the utility of faith ?
If I recall correctly, the LDS church doesn't really believe that the general population of humanity is eligible for hell. Rather, depending on how well you've purified and strengthened your soul, and which church rituals you've engaged in, you qualify for various tiers of heaven. The various tiers are, basically, how close you are to God, and it's less of a "you're not allowed into the club", and more of a "self-select based on how much God you can stand being around".
Even the lowest tier is expected to still be better than Earth.
The utility of faith in life without certain knowledge is, in a vague hand-wavey way, that the actual act of becoming a better person is much more practical in life rather than afterlife. Or something like that.
So, even though everyone has a chance to accept Jesus in the afterlife, one still needs to undergo the proper rituals in real life in order to get into the higher tiers of Heaven ? Or can one complete a Heaven-qualification course (so to speak) posthumously, as well ?
You can complete a Heaven-qualification course posthumously. But then, someone currently alive has to do the rituals (called 'ordinances') for you vicariously.
These vicarious ordinances (e.g. baptism for the dead) are done in temples. Since we don't know who will / has accepted the Gospel, we try to do the ordinances for everyone. They are only effective if the person accepts it.
This drives massive research into genealogy. Everyone wants to make sure that their ancestors receive the ordinances and are sealed to their eternal family. There's a promise that people who have been completely forgotten (on Earth) will receive their vicarious ordinances when Christ comes again.
That makes sense -- I knew about the post-mortem baptisms, but not about the specifics. But my question is, why must the ordinances be performed by the living ? Can't devout Mormons in the afterlife perform them as well -- and do so much more efficiently ? After all, the souls in Heaven can presumably work around the clock, and perhaps they could even get access to some kind of a spiritual genealogical database...
The relevant teachings are all almost found in section 76* of the Doctrine and Covenants.
AnonymousCoward correctly recalls that the vast, vast majority of humanity will attain a "degree of glory" all better than life here, but differing in the amount of glory and power and joy available in them. The standard doctrine is that there are three degrees, though there are definitely things that suggest that it is more of a spectrum.
The middle tier includes those "who received not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh, but afterwards received it. These are they who are honorable men of the earth, who were blinded by the craftiness of men. These are they who receive of his glory, but not of his fulness." That suggests that the strategy of "deliberately live as an atheist now and then change your mind if there's an afterlife" disqualifies you for the biggest possible reward.
As for the utility of faith, I'm personally still not sure why it seems so important to God, but it's clear that it is. Joseph Smith taught at times that faith is even the power by which God himself operates. In the Latter-day Saint cosmology God wants us to eventually have all the power and knowledge and glory that He has, and the ability to act in faith must somehow play an important role in that. Why exactly I can't say yet though.
"24 Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
26 Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Thomas does not believe the testimony of the others and remains unconvinced until he sees Jesus for himself. That was a rejection of the truth. The problem becomes more acute for those who will come afterwards and who cannot see Jesus in the flesh for themselves. They may think they are being sensible, but in reality they are rejecting what is true and delaying their union with God.
> They may think they are being sensible, but in reality they are rejecting what is true and delaying their union with God.
Yeah, that's the part that always made me think that Christian minds work in a way that is completely alien to my own. I personally can't force myself to believe something that I think is false. It's not that I'm making a pragmatic choice between two (or more) beliefs; the decision is completely out of my hands. If I think that the sky is blue, then I can still proclaim that it is green; I can live as though it were green; I can lie to everyone around me and maintain that it is green... but I can't lie to myself. In my head, I'll always know it's blue.
As a Christian I largely agree with you here and the importance of "faith as belief" has never resonated with me, and Latter-day Saints put much less emphasis on it than other denominations.
Rather, I think the faith God is looking for is best characterized in Alma 32 from the Book of Mormon: it is 1) the willingness to experiment with spiritual things and 2) after seeing results from those experiments, acting consistently with those results, even in the face of remaining uncertainty. Alma 32 presents an extended analogy comparing faith to a seed: you don't know from looking at it whether it is a good, living seed or a bad, dead one. The first step of faith is to plant it and see if it grows. If it does grow, you have learned something, but you aren't done. From there, the next step of faith is to continue to water it and care for it. You know it's a good enough seed to sprout, but you still don't know whether it will reach maturity, or whether it will bear good fruit. Faith is the willingness to continue to engage in this process of caring and learning in the face of continued uncertainty.
Put another way, God doesn't want you to lie to yourself. But he is very interested whether you will seek out and respond to evidence, and how faithful you will be to whatever you learned from that evidence. This view strongly agrees with The Chaostician's last sentence.
The final chapter of The Book of Mormon pointedly ends with a proposed experiment for its readers "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost."
I know of no Christian creed or teaching that asks people to believe something they believe is false. Believe without compelling evidence, perhaps. As Lewis wrote, "...if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."
Thomas is saved and is an heir of the celestial glory. He's an example for those who come to know the Truth without having faith first. Saul / Paul is another example: he rejected Jesus and even supported the killing of Stephen, until he got clear evidence on the road to Damascus.
What is important in both of these stories is that Thomas and Saul were willing to accept the evidence once they saw it and completely commit their lives to serving Jesus.
I do think that the exclusivity argument is a major problem for a lot of religions. I usually state it as: Is someone who has never heard of Jesus (or Mohammad or ...) because no one in their society had ever heard of them automatically damned?
The Latter-day Saint answer solves this problem. Everyone will get an answer to hear and accept or reject the Gospel between death and resurrection.
It is an open question how many people will accept between death and resurrection. There's one trend in the Church that says that it's harder to change the longer you wait, so you should "not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end". This suggests that only a few people will use this option. But everyone also thinks that all of their ancestors who died without receiving the Gospel will accept it. This suggests that most people will use this option.
>I usually state it as: Is someone who has never heard of Jesus (or Mohammad or ...) because no one in their society had ever heard of them automatically damned?
Leaving aside whether this is just, is there some reason to think it *false*?
This would match, for instance, an entity with a policy to rescue everyone who sends that entity a distress call (the Federation of Star Trek is an obvious fictional case). You don't know that that entity is there, or don't know how to send a distress call it'll receive? That's your problem; it's not obligated to seek you out.
Doctrinal issues only really arise when you claim "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" and *also* that everyone has a real choice to be saved or not as part of omnibenevolence.
AFAIK, the two most popular arguments appear to be:
1). Personal divine revelation: "Our god came to me personally and revealed, beyound any possibility of denial, that our religion is the One True Faith."
2). Specificity of scripture: "All those other religions claim to be the One True Faith, but all of them conspicuously lack X. Our faith has X, and since X is by definition a requirement for truth, our religion is the only one that could be true."
1) This seems to me to fall prey to a similar objection as the main objection. What justifies one personal divine revelation as the One True Faith, while all the others are the damnable tricks of Ye Olde Deluder Satan? OP raises this problem with regard to exclusivist religions and the revelations of their prophets, here it seems to be raised on one's own revelations. The issue at hand seems to be "how do we trust revelation, especially when it claims to be exclusive." Do you disagree?
2) This seems to me to be an appeal to a truth higher than faith (i.e. the Euthyphro Dilemma). Did G-d write the scripture (and definition of goodness) because it is true and holy, or is the scripture true and holy simply because G-d wrote it? Appealing to the objective, intelligible nature of goodness seems to render exclusive faith somewhat obsolete.
Perhaps I am mistaken on these though; I'd like to hear what you think.
Something to consider is that when almost anybody asks this question, there is usually an unspoken amendum that, when left out, makes the question seem a little more devastating than it actually is.
So say there's bob, and he's explicitely asking:
"Given that there's a lot of religions, and they all seem to have equal levels of certainty that their belief systems are right, how could it possibly be reasonable that anyone could have confidence..." and so on.
But usually when I've pursued those arguments, there's an unspoken "given" that is heard and understood by every heathen in attendance that goes something like:
"And, of course, any explanation will have to play by atheist rules - that is, we will assume their beliefs are wrong from the outset, and treat anything consistent with their view of the universe but inconsistent with ours as out-of-bounds in their explanation."
A conversation *without* that assumption can often get at what the question superficially wants to know, i.e. the shape of a particular person's belief and why they hold it. By not saying "Explain to me how you can justify your watch design - and please, none of that bullshit about gears and springs; all right-thinking people know that shit is passe", you might understand the person's preference.
When the assumption is in play, there's no chance of that. Now, there's some places where inclusion of the assumption is more justified than others. We can first imagine a scenario like this:
I show up at your door and tell you I am possessor of the one real truth, and that you must accept it. In this situation, I am the aggressor. Since I am demanding your beliefs change to mirror mine, there's a strong argument that you are justified (i.e. not being a dick, in the common parliance) in asking me to convince you using techniques within the confines of the rule-set you accept - i.e by describing physical realities and making arguments that stem from the physically observed, and no others.
When you reject me for not being able to do this, it's understandable - I was the aggressor, the prosecutor making his case. The burden of proof was, so to speak, on me. And the reasonable social judgment I deserve the varies a bit depending on how I carried myself; if I was calmly and with your permission sketching out my beliefs, desisted once you made your rejection of my explanation clear, etc. (i.e. behaved in a way that seemed to be coming from a place of love) I likely deserve less approbation.
On the flip, I probably deserve a lot of judgment from you and others if I make it clear that I'm using my religion as a tool to "put myself above you", i.e. to cement in my mind a rationale that says you are lesser than me and I greater than you. These things and more matter in the case where I am the aggressor, because I brought the fight to you.
The next part is the harsh part, but I'll try to keep it as clean and nice as possible. In the actual scenario we find ourself in, you found yourself alone and with free time and completely voluntarily brought the fight to the "them". Within the early parts of your question, you show a certain awareness that your question is at least not *entirely* about understanding, and that to the extent your question ends up diverging from pure curiosity it will weaken your position:
"[content notice: I've tried to watch myself, but my tone is probably rather dismissive toward religions in general in this comment]"
And yet something around half your comment is jabs at outgroup, to the detriment of both the clarity and concision of your question and in ways that reduce the likelihood that you will get the clean, calm answers that would help you to gain the understanding you claim to want.
To put it another way: A person of high confidence and self-worth with the same doubts of the truth of religion very likely finds him or herself with the same free time and curiousity you have and does virtually anything but ask the question in the way you did. Yours is the question of a person who very much needs to put people in a position lower than themselves so they can feel elevated, rather than being able to feel elevated and satisfied by what they themselves are absent comparisons.
While I'm confident that getting outside confirmation of preferred in-group status really does bring with it certain satisfactions and a kind of limited value, I would suggest that the necessity of it - that no better options presented themselves to you - is not a fantastic, optimimal situation. I suspect both a higher, more satisfactory value that persists over a longer term could be found if you instead found ways to feel better about yourself that don't rely on favorable comparison to others.
FWIW, I agree with you that most of the prominent apologists are outright charlatans; in fact, they are prominent *because* they engage in endless self-promotion aimed at selling their DVDs or whatever. However, as I said above, I wouldn't be so hasty as to tar all apologists with the same brush. There are plenty of academic theists -- and a vast number of rank-and-file believers -- who espouse some of the views you've listed, honestly and without malice aforethought. Dismissing them all as charlatans would necessitate dismissing the vast majority of humanity, which seems... unwise.
So let's poke into this in two parts, because it's important. First, the claims you say are indefensible, and clearly so, in all ways to the point where it should be clear to other people *just by reading them* that the people promoting them are shitty.
—Atheists reject God because they want to sin and commit crimes.
This one is just... true? You even know it's true. It's not true of *all* atheists, but it's certainly true of some - I have a brother like this. The thing where you see someone who was formerly devout slide into some banned behavior and then-and-only-then "quit" Christianity is absurdly common.
Are you actually seeing the claim "All atheists, entirely, are atheist purely because they want to do crimes, or purely because they want to sin?" somewhere? Where?
—Atheists know God exists, they're just lying about it.
This is actually part of the religious dogma of Christianity, although I can't speak for other denominations. "Lying" is a weird term here, because it covers different ground for different people - I have long since complained that the average rationalist has a definition of lying so narrow it doesn't actually encompass any action that actually exists, for instance.
This is one of the things that's hard because it involves spiritual claims - the actual text of the Bible claims some level of instinctual/spiritual knowledge of the truth each person possesses, printed on their soul to an extent. There's arguments as to how explicit this instinctual knowledge is, so YMMV even among the reasonable.
—Atheists hate God because something bad happened in their life.
Clearly true for many people, and you know it is -- the person who abandons a particular faith "because they just couldn't believe in a god that could do that" is an incredibly common trope.
—Atheists are only atheists because they have a comfortable life, they'll come running for God at the first sign of hardship.
Clearly very probable. The patterns of religious belief country-to-country and state-to-state back this up pretty well. Poverty is well-correlated with religious believe even in particular geographies, etc. This is pretty uncontroversial.
The counterargument is that this is related education/intelligence rather than privation itself (i.e. "of course it's the dumb poor idiots who believe this stuff). That's possible! But the "clear wrongness" you want to get out of this one isn't nearly as clear as you are representing it to be.
—Atheists are only atheists for the positive attention and the money.
I don't have to defend this one - you just accused Christians of the same thing in your original post. It's either fine to do - in which case it's not a real complaint - or it's not fine, and the closest example we have of someone being unreasonable in this way is YOU.
—Atheists are only vocal about being atheists in order to undermine the faith.
I'd have to see what source you are drawing this from to get some nuance on what's actually being said here. There are some ways this is consistent with what everyone observed during the period of new atheism popularity - that tons of people got really, really militantly into atheism and this seemed to be the main draw for them. There are some ways it might not be, but again, source.
—Atheists are religiously illiterate, no one who's truly read/studied the Bible/Quran would ever call themself an atheist.
This one seems clearly wrong, although as with all of these I'd like to see a source. Just the existence of world religion classes and the PhDs that stem from them makes this one pretty impossible; there are people who have studied both books closely (more than I have, for instance) that don't believe.
So of that list, basically one thing is a legitimate clear complaint, several are just right on their face at least as phrased, and one has to do with an actual belief in a spiritual thing that we likely aren't going to agree on.
And that makes it pretty hard to have this conversation without actually asking you where you observed the things you are complaining about - as you've represented them, there's much less problem than you are trying to convince people there is. When some of the items you present as clearly false are just true on their face and others are arguable, it should (but won't) shake your confidence in what your motivations are here.
Where this gets even harder for me is that I think it's pretty clear you are bad-faith on this (others might disagree). So I want to address things like the last point, but I'm also pretty internally confident based on your first post and this onethat you are taking minimally-charitable takes to reinforce your pre-existing viewpoint, etc.
I really don't want to mince words here - I'm very strongly suspicious you are approaching this whole question from a bad-faith positioning, and I'm damn near sure my general guess that this is mostly driven by you just feeling good when you have a lesser group to compare yourself to is true.
With that said, if you do pull individual sources of where you've heard a particular thing, I'd be glad to tell you how common it is, what the orthodox belief actually is within my particular subset of Christianity and so on. But I'm probably not going to reply unless I have specific links to talk about - I don't have a lot of confidence in your ability to present things neutrally/fairly.
Some of them are just factually true or plausible, which is part of why you didn't address them directly. People OFTEN stop believing in god due to particular negative events. It's not everyone, but it's something people say about themselves - I even gave you the usual phrasing.
People OFTEN leave the faith due to a crisis between something they'd like to do that the faith doesn't approve of - see homosexuality for an example that covers hundreds of thousands of Americans, and is an extremely common story.
Hardship and religiosity are associated on a number of levels - national, state, income levels within specific geographical areas, etc. That's not even controversial.
So, again, I'm left to guess at the TONE of how those things were said, which could still make them bad, or particular wordings that might make them bad. And you aren't a trustworthy source - if the chip on your shoulder was any more animated and noticable its mom would be Angela Lansbury. That's why I asked for the specific places you are hearing about these things - they might be genuinely bad, but you aren't a reliable way to find out if they are or aren't.
It absolutely is controversial. Consider that there are also memes among believers saying that people become religious because of hardship, rather than become atheist because of hardship. (For instance, I'm sure you've heard the one about no atheists in foxholes.) You've got two sets of competing memes saying exactly opposite things about the relation between hardship and religion.
"Atheists are atheists because *they don't believe in the stuff*. It's not a choice."
So you're a philosophical determinist? You're born atheist or Christian or Buddhist, and even if you don't outwardly believe that to start with and convert later, nothing actually changed internally- the fixed innate state simply had a chance to express itself? If someone vacillates between religions, or between faith and unbelief, there's still no actual internal changes occurring, they're ACTUALLY still (underlying_belief) the entire time? I'm trying to understand what you mean by this, because I feel like this preposition is probably contributing significantly to the tension between you and RC.
I mean, yeah, @Machine Interface definitely has a chip on his shoulder (as I'd pointed out to him, as well), but I can empathize with his position. I myself have been told these things personally hundreds of times by my friends and acquaintances, and I'm not even any kind of a professional debater. After the 100th time you're told something like "you just hate God because of something bad that happened to you", it's really tempting to stop replying for the 101st time, "actually I've never believed in any kind of deity, as far back as I can remember", and switch to saying "how about you shut your pie-hole". Irrational, admittedly, but very tempting.
This problem is exacerbated by professional apologists, because they never seem to change their tunes. You could go through their DVDs and lectures and debate transcripts 20 years into the past, and you find the same exact arguments. You can find transcript after transcript of people explaining to them in great detail how e.g. evolution does not imply that their great-grandparents were monkeys; and the next day they once again turn around and say, "look at how silly those evolutionists are, they think all of their great-grandparents were monkeys". For this reason, I am inclined to believe that professional apologists are, indeed, charlatans -- but that does not necessarily apply to rank-and-file theists.
"Atheists know God exists, they're just lying about it.
This is actually part of the religious dogma of Christianity, although I can't speak for other denominations."
If your religion's dogma says that all unbelievers are also damned liars, and your religion's dogma doesn't *also* say to be really really tactful when you discuss this with unbelievers, then your religion and all its members will be regarded as arrogant contemptible scoundrels by everyone on the outside. Because either the unbelievers really are damn liars, in which case they they don't want you calling them on it, or they *aren't* lying and so they *know* you are falsely accusing them, or they are damn liars and . And really, I'm only including the first possibility in the strictest sense of charity.
Fortunately, most Christians are at least somewhat tactful about this, so we don't have to write the whole faith off as one of arrogant contemptible scoundrels. The sort of "apologists" Machine Interface has apparently been dealing with, have a lot to apologize for.
Recall that I'm responding to a guy who is out for blood and his versions of what was said. If I say:
"The text of my religion talks about concepts similar to the moral law of god being printed on people's hearts - stuff like how every culture tends to not think too highly of murder (although it still happens) ends up being attributed to design rather than evolution, or whatever.
Similarly, there's supposed to be some inkling in the heart of people that what they are encountering is the truth".
You might still find that insulting, but probably less so than the "ALL ATHEISTS ARE DAMNED LIARS AND GOING TO HELL!" version.
Where I'm in a pickle is, he presented a ton of those examples and about half of what he presented as plain lies were common sense true; i.e. that people leave the faith because of bad events sometimes.
So I have to try to parse every single thing he's saying both by what he's saying and what the person he's representing might have actually said. I *have* to do this, because even knowing it would hurt his argument and saying so, he couldn't resist being uncharitable throughout his initial post.
I have no idea if the original source (I've asked him twice to identify some of the sources, no luck yet) said anything close to what he's saying and I have every indication he's an unfriendly party, especially after dealing with claims of the "saying people leave religions so they can avoid their strictures is a clear lie" sort.
So when I'm dealing with the "atheists know god exists, they're just lying about it" space, I have to deal with not only what he's saying he heard, but the entire conceptual space of what he might have actually heard, since I have no indication he's going to give unbiased accounts about what he observed from unidentified members of an outgroup he dislikes.
Did it ever occur to you that his"bias" is a *result* of mistreatment by the outgroup, so using his bias to distrust what he says about his outgroup might be circular reasoning?
It's like saying that you won't believe in police brutality if you're told about it by someone who claims to be beaten up by the police.
"The text of my religion talks about concepts similar to the moral law of god being printed on people's hearts - stuff like how every culture tends to not think too highly of murder (although it still happens) ends up being attributed to design rather than evolution, or whatever.
Similarly, there's supposed to be some inkling in the heart of people that what they are encountering is the truth".
That's somewhat more tactful than your last phrasing. But, I've looked into my heart far more closely than you have or ever will look into my heart, and I *know* you and your doctrine are wrong about this. I'm guessing OP does too.
So, A: I know that you are arguing from false premises and B: if you continue that argument once I've explained why, I know that you are arrogant enough to assert that you know the content of my heart better than I do, and why am I paying any attention at all to you?
How many people have to tell you that their hearts do not contain this secret thing that you believe all human hearts hold, before you accept that you might be mistaken?
It's not really about "aggression", but rather, pragmatism. Whenever someone makes any positive claim, be it "my God is the One True God" or "I have $20 in my pocket", it is up to him to justify the claim before we can accept it. Otherwise, we'd be compelled to believe in anything that anyone says unless we can provide evidence to the contrary; and, given that there's a nearly infinite number of possible claims out there, we'd be forced to spend our days frantically collecting evidence against Bigfoot, the Tooth Fairy, Voldemort, that pocket-$20, etc. It's just not practical.
To put it another way: Machine Learning almost *can't* be an asshole in the situation where I ring his doorbell and demand he believe something. I'm bringing the fight to him and demanding he believe something in just the way you describe. Ditto if I had made a post saying "Christianity is the one real truth, everything else is false; I demand everyone believes this immediately", especially if the content of the post strongly implies I feel superior to all you filthy unwashed sinners.
In that situation, I'm the guy picking the fight. Nobody should feel pity for me when people don't treat me with kid gloves or make fun of my beliefs - I strapped on gloves, stepped into the ring and dared people to hit me. I can't whine when I get knocked out. This becomes more true the more Machine Learning has been forced to have a particular conversation; I can't demand gentleness or politeness in a fight I picked.
What's happening here is a little bit different. In this case Machine Learning has shown up all on his own; this is an argument and conversation he's chosen for himself. You are demanding I give him the same near-immunity from "being the asshole" I'd give him if I was forcing him into this argument, but that's not what happened - he could have sat around tonight and ate chips in a funny hat, but he chose this instead.
The question he asked is fine - that's what this kind of forum is for. But I'd suggest that you'd take exception if I said something like:
"I have a good faith question about how one can believe abortion is right from a utilitarian perspective, given that it extinguishes an entire human life for the benefit of portion of another human life. I'd ask someone who was pro-choice, but I've found they are a lot of overweight bluehair feminist sociopath murders, haha, right?"
You would very likely read that and think I was being uncharitable to outgroup - that my good-faith question was really just a veiled opportunity to count coup and get validation from my in-group to make myself feel nice. Now say you pointed this out, and another person came in and said:
"Listen, you are the one who is pro-choice; it's not bad to ask about that. Why would you have a problem with someone asking questions? He's asking reasonable, pragmatic questions and asking you to justify your belief"
You'd probably suspect that other person was letting their biases get the better of them and ignoring a bunch of uncharitable and unnecessary insults levied at my outgroup because they identified with the original post and/or mostly agreed that prochoice people were bluehairs and deserved what they got.
Note that this is pretty par for the course for Christian-in-place-where-people-go-to-feel-intellectual, and it's not that shocking to me; it's not hurting my feelings. I'm a big boy who puts on gloves and a mouthpiece and picks fights in front of big groups of people ever week; there's a lot of contexts in which I can't complain about getting hit.
But I meant what I said in the last post. If you believe someone is wrong, that's absolutely fine. If you ask good-faith questions to try to get them to steelman their beliefs and find the most reasonable forms of those, that's fine too. But needing to compare yourself to some lesser group to feel good about yourself isn't a healthy state of being.
I'd much rather Machine Learning dug deep and figured out why he isn't enough for himself - why he needs a lesser outgroup to poke at so he can feel good about himself by comparison instead of feeling good about himself in the isolated abstract.
I *think* you and I are for the most part cool - i.e. at least I like you and I think of you pretty positively. But I do think you should take a look at ML saying this:
"Instead, religious apologists seem to be mostly narcissistic sociopaths who have absolutely no idea about the beliefs of the people they try to convince, who deal in logical fallacies and scientific illiteracy, and in general do an abysmally bad job of convincing anyone to join their faith, mostly spending their life preaching to the choir (and asking the choir for monthly donations, of course)."
And then consider that your reactoin to me pointing out that he's saying this as the agressor in the conversation (i.e. in a conversation he not only could have avoided, but started) is to completely ignore that dynamic, as if he didn't show up unbidden and unharrassed to make a post in which he made as many clever, cheap swipes at his outgroup as he thought he could get away with.
I don't think you'd accept your own hand-wavey dismissal of that level of foul play from most other people in most other contexts.
My only point is that tone arguments have no bearing on evidence or epistemology. I could say, "Guess what, I have $20 in my pocket, isn't that awesome ?", or I could say, "You asshole, I have $20 in my pocket, so suck it !"; but functionally these two statements are totally the same as far as the existence of that $20 is concerned. @Machine Interface is poisoning the well (in his statement that you quoted), but that doesn't automatically mean that what he's saying is false (it doesn't mean that it's true, either).
To put it another way, the topic is, "what are some valid arguments for religious exclusivity ?", and it's a valid topic (IMO) regardless of whether the person who proposed it is being a dick or not.
That said though, while I strive not to paint all people with the same brush, at least some of the prominent religious apologists are definitely stone-cold conmen. They've made apologetics their business; they sell DVDs and build theme parks; and whenever they attend debates, it's pretty obvious that they don't care about the truth, they just care about advertisement. On the other hand, there are plenty of apologists who are sincere in their beliefs, as well; and plenty of those who are just confused.
Unlike @Machine Interface, I personally find the honest religious mindset fascinating; it's the closest I can get to experiencing contact with a truly alien species.
I think it's a valid topic as well, especially since it's relevant to me and my beliefs. I don't actually have a problem with the question being asked by a good-faith person who isn't just trying to claim some scalps, but I think it's pretty clear (YMMV caveat) that's not what Machine Learning is after.
I've had both kinds of conversations, and the problem with the "taking scalps" version is that they aren't actually usually there to understand the belief of the people who have it.
To put it another way, I think you know you could come to me and say "What do Christians think about obvious demon alien Joel Osteen?" and we could have a fun, productive conversation. And I would! We've gone back and forth on shit before without ripping each others throats out (I think).
But when someone comes up and says "given that all your prominent theologians are all dumb, sociopathic thieves, aren't you stupid?" I'm pretty reluctant to even have the conversation - I'm much more likely, as here, to point out that it doesn't seem like they actually want to know and that they also seem to be a very particular kind of dick.
I'm actually glad that you are here because it gives some level of contrast to how I respond to each, FWIW.
Thanks, I appreciate the compliment. I'm not entirely sure who Joel Osteen is, but I hope he's got some tentacles, or at least horns. That said though, I think that @Machine Interface is upset with apologists specifically, not with theologians in general (and in fact, many apologists aren't even theologians). I do think that's a viable distinction, though obviously I don't take it to the extreme that @Machine Interface does.
"Once a society reaches the iron age, ritual human sacrifice either disappears completely or becomes marginal."
This is false. The Iron Age had started by 1000 BC at least in the civilizations of Eurasia. Carthage was still practicing child sacrifice until it was destroyed by Rome in about 150 BC. In India, sati was only ended by British colonialism. It's not even clear if sati was an ancient practice or if it was a form of human sacrifice that began in medieval India. In China, human sacrifice was widely practiced until about 400 BC (until Duke Xian of Qin), then again in the 13&1400s (Yuan & early Ming), then again in the 1600s (early Qing).
It's easy to reach for technological determination of moral progress, but that often doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny. Moral progress is won through difficult, historically contingent struggles by individuals and civilizations.
Lewis wrote in "Mere Christianity" that "If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
"When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others."
Essentially, any truth claim means that you will disagree with everyone who disagrees with you: this tells us nothing about whether any particular truth claim is true. If there is no God, then the vast majority of the human race is in the wrong, and the fact that they are a majority doesn't make a difference. Similarly, if there is a God then that God (or gods) will have a specific nature, and according to that nature some believers in God will be right, and others will be wrong. That tells us nothing about whether God exists. Any claim of truth is exclusivist in nature.
Also, I would argue that not all religions are parochial in nature. Christianity, for instance, began as a heretic sect of Judiasm practiced by a few dozen people in a backwater Roman province: today one third of the world is Christian across every culture and continent. How can something that is accepted by Chinese, Nigerians, Argentinians, American Indians, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, Indians, Mongolians, and everyone in between be characterized as "reflecting the desires and prejudices of very specific individuals and communities at very specific points in space and time"?
I also take issue with the argument "And as human ability for science and rigorous observation advances, miracles retreat from the world." This does not seem to be accurate. Dr. Craig Keener wrote a two volume, 1,200+ page academic work detailing exhaustively that accounts of miracles occurring are as prevalent today as they were historically. People experience and report miracles all the time, and the rate of experiences does not seem to have gone down significantly. You can, of course, argue that miracles do not happen. But if you want to argue that *experiences* of miracles no longer happen as much as they used to then you'll need to content with Keener's work.
Lewis in this quote seems to think "religion" means "Christianity, and maybe Judaism if we stretch it". There are religions that either don't believe in God, or for which there is some belief in God but it's not very central. And Lewis' standards for "some hint of the truth" are odd and seem contrived to give the answer he wants. If you think there's no God, and some religion claims "there is a God but he doesn't actively interfere much", I'd call that "wrong, but near being right" even if Lewis won't.
I mean, I don't know the exact context, but if you take "the main point" to be "acting righteously will be rewarded", then you probably do get "most of the human race would have to have been wrong about this for all of history" in order to adopt an existential or nihilist worldview. There are important doctrinal differences regarding whether those rewards are to occur in this life or a later one, but that basic tenet is essentially invariant among all religions.
(Not saying that this isn't explainable, but it certainly is something needing an explanation.)
I disagree that his claim only applies to Christianity and Judaism. A Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Animist, and ancient Greek pagan all agree on many things: the existence of a supernatural order apart from the material order and the existence of a soul that survives past death, at the most basic level. Christians, Jews, and Muslims agree on something like 90% of reality, differing primarily on the exact nature of Yahweh and the role of Christ. Christians and Hindus agree that the supernatural exists, that the world was created by supernatural beings, that the soul survives death, that there is a supernatural moral order by which people are judged, that there are supernatural beings at large in the world that can affect us, and that the higher supernatural beings (God for Christians, gods for Hindus) are worthy of worship.
I don't know why you think Lewis would say a deist religion isn't "wrong but near being right." I think he would agree with you that they are very close to the truth. "As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others."
Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis became an Anglican instead of Catholic. I’d love see a transcript of some of their conversations. Must have been pretty heady stuff.
"*existing* religions are extremely parochial, reflecting the desires and prejudices of very specific individuals and communities at very specific points in space and time."
Perhaps the insistence on parochial faith-based monotheism is pragmatically more than theoretically true. Like perhaps it's the case that polytheism (and the societies built around it) simply disintegrates after a while, whereas monotheism does not (cf. the Jews). And if it's true in practice, then it's true in theory.
Not sure how this works out when e.g. Christians and Muslims and Jews all meet each other, so I perhaps the above argument works for parochial faith-based monotheism in general, but not for any particular parochial faith-based monotheism.
I only have a layman’s understanding of NPD. I can’t, for example, imagine someone like, say, a certain former POTUS fretting about having this sort of problem.
Self-diagnosing based on a WebMD page is only marginally better than using a horoscope to determine your psychiatric condition.
If you think you have NPD, please see a psychologist and request a formal assessment. If you don't believe in psychology, I'd suggest you should also not believe in NPD.
One important difference between that reporting and this situation though is that the claim is that narcissists admit to being narcissistic because they don’t see anything wrong with it. Therefore, the “worried” part is adding a lot of uncertainty.
In my mind, this is just a medical condition that I need to cure. I'm not forming a judgement on myself as a result of having this condition. I don't know if this is narcissistic.
Personality disorders are terminal short of certain miracles. This is why they're PERSONALITY disorders. It indicates that something is fundamentally dysfunctional about your entire psyche that isn't rooted in brain chemistry imbalance.
If you insist you have a personality disorder and insist on treating it like a disease, I'm obligated to inform you the closest thing to a cure is large amounts of psychedelics, judging by the sheer number of "acid saved my life" stories I'm personally familiar with. Even then, that's a scattershot cure with a non-zero chance of causing a psychotic break. The psychotic break may even be NECESSARY for the cure.
If you spend significant amounts of time thinking about yourself to the point that you self diagnose your mental state and taking internet tests to classify it into various disorders, wouldn't that be an indication of having narcissistic personality disorder?
I was reading something completely unrelated, found this word, looked it up, and found that it resonated with me. Although I do believe I have NPD. This is not proof of it.
Just a notion about utilitarianism-- as the population goes up, larger numbers of people die or get otherwise hurt in disasters. Does this make for an incentive to not go for the highest population so as to have more slack in case of problems?
I think good behavior is an intractably difficult calculation, and trying to get it from a simple comprehensible rule just doesn't work.
What people seem to go with is probably an intuitive combination of utilitarianism, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, and there's no simple rule for balancing them.
It's not that there's no way to think about ethics, just that there are no rules which cover all the edge cases.
I mean utilitarianism is the idea that you should have a utility function and maximize it. Some people say this makes it contentless because it can be applied to any utility function, so it can't tell you what to care about on it's own. But I think that this is actually more useful content than most moral philosophies which make prescriptions but don't coherently tell you how to implement them.
Interesting question. Is it better to consider it in terms of how many people die in disasters, or how many people are left after the disaster? I don't know what the ideal population floor is, but I feel like there is one. "Maximize the floor" is definitely one approach. But it does lead to numerically more deaths.
That was an approach to child-bearing in the past, I think. Have enough so that even if something really bad happens, one or two will survive.
Graphs so far all point in the direction of less death in natural disasters. Slack is a good thing and I think it should be pursued for its own sake, but I don't see an obvious inverse relationship with population, and I don't see it appearing any time soon.
I got a bit triggered by your question though because there's a train of thought that goes to limit good things to prevent bad ones, and I... well, partly dislike it, but I'm mostly terrified of it. The decision we make in our world may well be the decision somebody makes for the human race as a whole with a completely different set of standards for suffering.
There's no inverse relationship *as long as modern civilization is stable*, yes. What were crop yields in the 19th century, again? Do we not rely on modern supply chains to achieve modern crop yeilds?
No, because constantly rising population ensures greater total utility, so long as the average human is perceived to have positive utility. But I'm pretty anti-utilitarian, so.
"No, because constantly rising population ensures greater total utility, so long as the average human is perceived to have positive utility. But I'm pretty anti-utilitarian, so."
This is a little misleading and I think it's misleading in a way that might contribute to some people's distress re: Parfit's repugnant conclusion. Constantly rising population ensures greater utility so long as the average additional human has positive utility AND the utility of the already existing humans doesn't fall by an amount greater than the positive utility of the new humans.
E.g. suppose we have utilities:
{-1, 3, 3} at time one. If at time two we add an additional human with utility 1, that could be a negative outcome if the existence of this human reduces the utility of already existing humans by a >1 total- e.g. if the situation becomes {-1, 2, 2, 1}.
Right. And a utilitarian seriously interested the consequences of any action should try to run the expected utility projections for different scenarios far into future. (Population increases past the carrying capacity and crashes, was the total experienced utility worth it?)
Utilitarians are consequentialists. As such, it is not enough for a scenario to be "worth it". It would have to be "more worth it" than a safer approach that *doesn't* risk global catastrophe. And that's not very likely. (Edit: that said, I think EAs haven't given enough attention to the risk of hitting Earth's carrying capacity IMO - this is not an error with the ethical system per se, it's a mistake, and people of any moral system make mistakes, sometimes with bad consequences. But being concerned on a moral level with such consequences, before they happen, is a distinctively consequentialist kind of thinking. So I hate it when people point to potential bad consequences as evidence against consequentialism, when it's really more like evidence that the critic of consequentialism likes consequentialism and doesn't know it yet!)
Two things happening simultaneously, thing 1 is modern agriculture's increasing the load capacity of the planet and thing 2 is people getting richer and more secure decreasing the species' total desire for children.
Why are you only considering currently existing humans?
I feel we are already well above the long-term carrying capacity of the planet, and species are being driven extinct at an appalling rate.
That said, if you are only to consider the humans alive at any one time, do you feel that ten people suffering (not-quite life threatening) starvation is better than one person who is happy? Why?
So far we're firmly into positive network effects. An extra human born now contributes more than his own share of utilitons+hedons, he's also part of a network that makes his contribution proportional to the size of the network.
There are plenty of bad endings where we have too many people, too little slack, and Moloch rules all. But the current reality is (still) far from that.
I agree: lets wait until every new human is inching much, much closer to the net negative boundary before we start worrying about this. So far more people=more utility is working great, if some far dystopian future finds different they'll most likely have the resources to deal with it.
Depending on how you think about, you could either kill everybody as life is inherently suffering, or have as high a population as possible as life is inherently joyous. It's a philosophical question
'Population Ethics' is an unsolved problem. Actual ways of aggregating utility have an embarrassing habit of either suggesting we should produce as many people as possible, no people at all, or twenty people living in absolute splendor.
People have proposed various solutions like counting people who might exist differently than people who do exist in various ways, but they haven't really won wide approval.
What are "actual ways of aggregating utility"? All I hear is things like "sum utility" or "average utility", which aren't actual ways of doing anything. Utils aren't real and utilty cannot be quantified.
This is a weird take to me. Do you not think that there is pleasure/pain? That people prefer some things to other things? The fact that we can't rigorously quantify something doesn't mean it isn't real. Light didn't become real only upon the invention of the first light meter/method of counting photons.
I agree that currently we are unable to quantify utils in anything other than the very coarsest way (much like we knew it was darker at night and lighter in the day long before we could assign lux values), but I can't think of any compelling argument that should convince one that it is fundamentally impossible.
Maybe it is! But I don't know why one would feel certain in that position right now.
I don't know about Melvin's objection to utils, but here's my take on it.
We get a utility function for a rational decision maker from the VNM utility theorem. Already we have to assume some definition of "rational" that humans don't satisfy, but let's handwave that away.
We cannot say "the" utility function, because we can scale and shift a utility function arbitrarily - this does not affect comparisons between expected utilities. To assign some utility function to a rational decision maker, you have to make some arbitrary decisions.
Having done so, it is meaningless to compare the values of two people's utility functions. Utils aren't real: choosing a unit and a baseline for Alice's utility doesn't say anything about Bob's utility. So adding or averaging utilities is meaningless.
I can imagine some kludgy solutions to this. For example, just as we use the price of a basket of goods to measure inflation, we can use the utility of a "basket of outcomes" to measure utility. If you adjust Alice's and Bob's utility function so that they roughly agree on most of a set like {break an arm, fall in love, lose a bet, pet a kitten, ...} then maybe it makes sense try aggregating their utility functions (and only then can we argue about the right way to do so).
Of course, this procedure has the built-in assumption that Alice and Bob are of equal value, which is questionable if for example Alice is a human and Bob is a malaria-carrying mosquito.
It sounds like your objection is that different people get different amounts of utility from the same thing, which doesn't really seem to be a problem to me. It certainly makes _measuring_ utils more difficult, but I'm not sure how that disproves utils as a concept.
They just sort of seem self evident to me. At their root, they are the idea that humans prefer some things to other things. That's it. Now, you can make the separate argument that the existence of utils isn't enough to justify the larger framework of utilitarianism, or something like that, but I just don's see how one can reasonably disagree with the idea that sentient beings have preferences and that they are happier when they get their preferences and unhappier when they don't.
The larger concepts of utility functions and whatnot are our groping attempts to think about and use utils in more complex,systematized ways, and fine, you can certainly think that we don't have good enough definitions/measurements that these attempts make sense, but to disagree with the more fundamental idea that people get happiness/unhappiness out of certain things (which is all a util is at it's most root) seems weird.
No, the objection is that saying "different people get different amounts of utility from the same thing" requires there to be a common unit in which we're measuring two people's utility, and there is not inherently any such thing.
You can't claim "Alice gets 2 utils from petting a kitten, but Bob only gets 1 util, so Alice gets more utility out of petting kittens than Bob." Bob's utility function is only defined up to scaling, so I can equally well scale it by a factor of 100 from the choice you picked, and say "Alice gets 2 utils from petting a kitten, but Bob gets 100."
When people form a group to execute a task that is more effective than each of them individually working on the task, then you would say that their aggregate utility is greater than the sum total of their individual utilities.
Yeah. The repugnant conclusion is correct—the ethos that states “increase the total amount of happiness in the world” is not defined well enough to handle multiple populations with different sizes.
Feels ad-hocish. Just bite the bullet or abandon utility maximization. I think the repugnant conclusion is true but it doesn't necessarily mean people have an obligation to have a bunch of kids. I have a lower standard for what's morally obligatory.
And yet premodern virtue ethics converge to a functional society and passable mental health, while utilitarian ethics get reduced ad absurdum all the time and give the practitioner crippling anxiety.
I don't think human psychology is compatible with quantifying ethics, as the second- and n-th order negative effects outscale the benefits by orders of magnitude. See also: trolleys, violinists, murderous surgeons, etc etc.
Proposed solution "democratic multimodal utilitarianism": use a weighted average of the utility functions of different forms of utilitarianism, according to how much credence consequentialists put in each.
As long as the Hard Problem of Consciousness is unsolved, we can't declare one particular utility function the winner.
Only if you can show that there would be more net happiness/pleasure/utility/whatever with the smaller population. It's true that disasters harm more people when the population is larger, but there are also more people who live unharmed through any disaster when the population is larger (unless there's some truly global disaster - and even something like the pandemic left many people unharmed and perhaps even better off).
If you could show an example where, say, a city of 2 million was devastated by an earthquake or hurricane, say with a million and a half people injured, but can argue convincingly that the same city with a population of only 1 million would have had fewer than half a million injured, then that would be a start to motivate this.
It also depends on the disaster, doesn't it? If there is a hurricane or earthquake bad enough to wipe out a million people, then a city of 1 million will be totally destroyed, a city of 2 million will be impacted very harshly, a city of 6 million will be hit hard but recover. A city of 100 million mightn't even notice, but a city of 100 million would have a lot of problems already so that suffering was increased.
If we reduced the population everywhere because we wanted to reduce suffering and harm, then when hit by a really bad event, the suffering would actually increase.
Wow, Non-Utilitarian!Holden is pretty dumb. (This is a knock on Holden, not a knock on non-utilitarianism.) Holden either needs to get better at turing-testing competing views, or he needs an actual non-utilitarian to have these debates with.
I am not a utilitarian and I responded to Holden's original article where he builds the foundation of his ethical belief. I think his thinking on that is flawed and so later articles on the basis of this thinking are flawed. I messaged him and linked to my article [1]. I don't think he's responded. I didn't think NUH was dumb.
Perhaps dumb was the wrong word--a better one might be "hamstrung". A real non-utilitarian would object to naked comparisons of worlds A/B/C/D/E as normatively guiding in the first place. The core of non-consequentialism is that it can also matter *how* we *get to* those worlds(edit: and/or where we get there *from*). That principle is nowhere invoked by NUH, which makes him a uniquely bad Turing-test of non-consequentialist views. I'll break that down a bit.
Holden's conversation hinges on arguments about "choosing the best world". On a consequentialist view, this is a critically important question, since the morality of an action is defined (only) by whether it brings about a better world. Therefore, "better than" must be a total order on the class of possible worlds. That's the implicit assumption that makes Parfit's mere addition paradox and repugnant conclusion so troubling.
But this isn't an assumption non-consequentialists have to share. Instead, they can agree that there are weird features (like being a non-total partial order, or even a non-transitive relation) of the "better than" relation among possible worlds, which is why it can't be the only factor in a normative theory.
In less technical language: there are arguments like the mere addition paradox, which show that there's no intuitively consistent way to define one world being "better than" another in all cases. Non-consequentialists (other than NUH) use this as a part of their claim for why ethics can't be solely based on what creates a "better world", since the notion of "better world" doesn't make complete sense. When "better world" logic breaks down, like in those Parfittian paradoxes, normative ethics has to be based on other considerations (like, for example, respecting rights, theories of desert, or any of the other many non-consequentialist theories out there).
I think the sleight of hand which hamstrings NUH happens at the very beginning, when Holden says:
"I often give an example of how one could face a choice between A and B in real life, to make it easier to imagine - but it's not feasible to give this example in enough detail and with enough defense to make it seem realistic to all readers, without a big distraction from the topic at hand."
Again, the core of non-consequentialism is that the means of reaching a world-state can matter, not *just* the end state itself, so restricting the conversation to comparison of world-states without considering how they come about forecloses on NUH's most powerful arguments. I would even go so far as to say that it makes NUH fail to be non-utilitarian *at all*. So I stand by my assertion that he needs actual non-utilitarian interlocutors.
Disasters are generally only a small part of the suffering in the world, and I don't really see any reason to treat them differently from other forms of suffering. Of course, a disaster that wipes out humanity or significantly curtails its future potential is a different story. Non-time-sensitive total utilitarianism, which values the lives of future people equally to those of current people, considers preventing such disasters to be the highest priority.
This is part of a more-general problem. Should we leave more slack in the budget, in our infrastructure capacity, in our military capability? History shows we're incapable of leaving slack in the budget, even though we always end up needing it--unpredictable disasters continue to arrive predictably--and incapable of not leaving it in our military.
Free market economics guarantee that we'll scale production of everything, including people, up and down in response to the environment. But they also guarantee we'll never have enough capacity to deal with black swans.
A good research question is how robustness to disaster scales with population size, or with social complexity. The fact that we always plan for the average case may result in there being some maximum complexity a civilization can achieve, beyond which things break down faster than they can be built up. A civilization is not a sandpile; it becomes more complex as it grows. But OTOH, in evolution, more-complex organisms live longer.
Doesn't this depend on the proportions ? If we gain 100 new people, and 1 of them dies in a disaster while the remaining 99 ascend directly to some post-scarcity quasi-Heaven, then according to Utilitarianism we should hurry up and produce 100 more people...
If you're a negative utilitarian, yes; but if you're a negative utilitarian, you're supposed to be trying to wipe out all sentient life to prevent it from suffering, so most people aren't that.
For normal utilitarians, I think it's fair to expect that the average life is net positive, if for no other reason than revealed preferences based on everyone not killing themselves; so creating more lives is expected positive utility, at least at the current margin.
Slack is nice. It's nice to have green space in cities, toilets that flush, real meat on the table, etc.
The pain from lack of slack cuts in well before people start dying in large numbers. Take the recent epidemic. Red States didn't shut down as much because Red States don't have the same population density. The Red areas have back yards to safely go out in vs. relying on public parks. I shudder to think of what it was like to live in a cramped apartment in New York City when things shut down.
Sure but I don't think there's a strong or necessary relationship between world population, urban density, and societal slack. I'm pretty sure you could manipulate all of those factors independently in designing a society.
If you're a negative utilitarian (minimizing suffering) then yes. A positive utilitarian (maximizing pleasure/happiness), or a mixture of the two branches, may not be convinced.
I think you're overlooking a big assumption there, which is that more people = more good. The phrase the most good for the most people basically translates to "(units of good) * (number of people)." I would assume that at some point the amount of good per person added with each new person would start to decrease and eventually turn negative.
Of course defining "good" is a whole other thing...
Or not :) There's a different model which involves network effects - each extra person ca do/feel/contribute/enjoy so much more when there's more people in the world.
At a first glance the trend checks out - lives used to be shorter and, at least by a few measures, a lot less fun. Then we got pieces of civilization which got life progressively less painful - less war, less death in disease and childbirth and so on; and also more fun, with printing press, radio, tv, tiktok; also with more options to contribute, like both genders and more social stratas in education and workforce.
Nancy is ok to worry about Moloch. If we all end up a Russia-style dictatorship for example where win-win relationships are less common, then yes, it could well be that less people equals better living. But overall we're fortunately not seeing this in the future.
Any tips for getting myself to write on my thesis? I keep pushing it off, it's ridiculous. I don't seem to be able to set myself to work the way I used to do.
Time blocking instead of todo lists, and start with smallish intervals. Time blocking = do absolutely nothing else, except what you've blocked the time for, or just looking at a wall.
i have found what Radu calls "time blocking" to be the best approach for writing type work I am really resisting . I bought a literal hourglass (fun to look at, don't need the internet, etc) (but for 20 minutes, because an hour is probably too long for this technique). Open word document, turn over hourglass. You cannot do anything else until the hourglass is out. Cannot leave chair, cannot browse internet. You can stare at the wall, stare at the screen, or actually work. Once the timer runs out, take a break, repeat. (usually somewhere around 5 minutes in to a block the feeling of resistance dissipates and it gets a lot easier to keep going).
I remember this old ST:TNG parody script that had Data pulling out a physical hourglass (since Windows 95 was popular at the time) whenever he had to do a complicated operation.
Have you tried different times of day? I can produce the most volume when I’m tired. I think the over analytical part of me that slows me down and takes me on tangents dials down a bit. Then I edit next morning.
Change of scenery maybe? I found it helpful to go and work out of a library for a few hours everyday. It also seemed to help me keep working later on in the day when I went home.
Is it because you keep compulsively doing something else? Get a program that can block websites and programs at certain times. I recommend Cold Turkey for desktop and AppBlock for Android.
Funny, I have this exact same combination. They've pretty amazing, but they can only do so much by themselves. Personally, I pin my hopes on adhd medication, though I can't get it legally in my country.
I’ve found tools like Beeminder and Complice to be really helpful in pushing me to address tasks that I don’t want to do. Beeminder is useful for committing yourself to a goal (e.g. say maybe you want to write X words of your thesis per week, though be sure to keep the goal small and achievable). Complice is good for keeping you focused on the broad themes of your goals and helping you reflect on what roadblocks might be preventing you from making progress on them.
What worked for me was to make it my very first task for the day, after eating breakfast. If I did literally anything else before writing, even useful tasks, I would get no writing done all day. If I did it first I could write for 30 minutes to an hour, and then usually also feel motivated for another block in the afternoon.
The best motivator I know is to schedule a meeting with your advisor and promise to send them a draft of your next chapter before that meeting.
Other than that, I set a quota for how much time I had to put into the thesis each day. I'd make it 3 or 4 hours of writing per day, with reading/research counting for half as much as writing. (Trying to force myself to do too much in any one day would lead me to feel like it was impossible and not even try, so it worked better to keep the number smaller.) To make that work, I have to track when I am and am not working, so I have a Word document where I "clock in" and then "clock out" every time I stop to check my email or make a cup of tea or anything else that isn't work.
If I wasted the entire day, then I couldn't play video games that day, which was a bummer. That wasn't always enough to motivate me to meet the quota, but it worked a majority of the time. When I started getting tempted to break my own rule and play video games *anyways*, I signed up for Beeminder and set it to charge my credit card if I broke the rule. Ridiculous, but it worked.
Obviously it wouldn't have to be video games specifically, but the reward needs to be something that (a) you're always keen to do and (b) is immediately available the instant you meet your quota.
I had a teacher have me write a paper with the screen turned off. You just type and type with no editing and maybe forgetting what you're even talking about and just get a bunch of words out. Then writing the actual paper becomes the relatively simpler task of editing.
Had that issue. My solution was to actually rent a place (with real money), keep all my thesis-related stuff there, make sure it has no internet access, and go and write there every weekday. Three months later I had the first draft.
Cal Newport's deep work is a pretty good primer on that. You need to separate deep work from "synchronized" work, and you can do this in both time and space.
I set a rule that I had to write at least a page every weekday. I often kept going and ended up writing several pages, but if not I was satisfied meeting my quota. I also wrote out of order starting with which ever section felt easiest to write at the time.
I just made it my job. Nine to five, Monday to Friday, in the office, sitting at my computer, working on my thesis. I didn't find it any more difficult than doing any other job.
My PhD thesis basically consisted of five or so papers I'd already written. I turned each paper into a chapter (with a few extra tables and figures), stuck an introduction and conclusion on the ends, and called it a thesis.
I think some people get psychologically stuck on the write-up because they think that their thesis should be some kind of Magnum Opus. I freed myself of that expectation and set out to write a perfectly acceptable thesis that would satisfy the requirements. Save your best work for your publishable papers, someone might actually read this.
(Note: all this applies to physics, your field may vary)
One thing that improved my experience was deciding on, eg, Monday, which things I was going to do on Tuesday. Then repeat every day. It sounds silly, but the simple separation between the moment when I decided which work to do and the moment I actually did it made both of them easier.
Another thing that helps me is setting very small, very trivial goals. For example, perhaps today I decide that one of my goals for tomorrow is to write one paragraph on Topic X. Then what usually ends up happening is that after I finish writing that paragraph, I'm into it and continue writing without even noticing.
Maybe find an IRL friend who will sit with you in the room where you're working, and who would occasionally stop you from going on twitter or reddit or whatever (though hopefully the temptation to do that will drop).
There's a new service "Focusmate" that pairs people up to co-work with webcams on, for accountability. I haven't tried it but it seems like it might help for the same reason.
Procrastinating on a thesis is a very lonely experience that you share with something like 150,000 other people.
There's a whole culture where it's embarrassing to admit to your peers or advisor that you're having issues with procrastination or time management or inspiration. You're allowed to say you need help running some regression but you can't admit you are struggling with the meta-work stuff that is actually epidemic among almost everyone you know. You're in a very weird community.
Maybe you're getting trapped by re-editing every para over and over. For that, some people say it is useful to clearly separate "drafting" and "editing" times. Just get things on the page, no matter how ugly, during the drafting times.
Maybe your struggle is getting started. Finding a separate place dedicated only for drafting can be useful. I've had mixed success though, designating a library as my "writing place" and finding myself reading chapters on minor tangential points instead of making progress on the main points.
I wonder if you could break some academic taboos and hire out the boring parts.
If it's easy to talk through your ideas and hard to write, hire a stenographer to listen to you explain your thesis, edit later.
"Pair drafting" can be like speed-running drafting. It keeps you focused to have someone really staring at what you're doing, it makes you explain ideas clearly enough for a reader. The other member of the pair can be a non-expert and basically just a sounding board that corrects occasional typos and it still works. You might be able to hire a "writing coach" for a few hours a week to help in this way.
Advisors are supposed to be sounding boards, but they're not neutral, so it can be intimidating to tell them the full current situation. Find another zero-judgment person to talk to or check in once a week. Non-advisor faculty or a peer are ok, but that's not zero-judgment. Hiring a therapist could work, and probably should be mandatory for grad students.
For me it changes from light gray to slightly darker gray when hovered, although I'd still never have found it without reading the above. I miss SSC's comment system.
I agree it's too little, but at least they tried, and I'm sure some people have discovered it this way.
If I remember, I discovered it by thinking "there just *has* to be a way", and clicking the line was the only possible way the UI could offer that function.
Has Scott ever written about the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of encounter groups for affecting behavior? I know types of talk therapy aren't what he usually addresses. But I think there was a moment in the 1970s where some people in psychology thought piling on/yelling at people was actually helpful in some way, and then that idea jumped disciplines (and has lived on, both online and IRL). A really coherent writeup of this could be useful in multiple ways.
I definitely second this. My impression, which I'm realizing right now is based on basically nothing, is that public shaming seems to be one of the out and out most effective behavior modification methods there is, especially when the goal is modify the behavior *fast. There's a reason why corporal punishment is a thing in militaries. I think for certain communities in certain situations, public shaming can be a way to modify behavior of a member without reducing their capacity.
There's something to it. I think there's a distinction to be made between situations that are "initiations" in some way, and those that are not. People get jumped into gangs, for example (and if they are able to leave voluntarily, they may get jumped out) so that group violence toward the individual becomes a gate. I think corporal punishment was a thing in the US military at some time in the past, but I'm not sure it is now, one distinction being corporal punishment versus intense exercise plus psychological punishment. And I think the military punishment is formally one person punishing one person, or one person punishing the whole unit, something like that. Situations of multiple people piling on one person may happen, but not formally. Additionally, I think having someone who willingly and quickly takes orders is the goal on the other side of the military initiation, and too much shame is actually counterproductive to that.
So once someone is on the "in" side of that gate, potentially smaller applications of shaming might serve to remind them of their membership and the behavior expectations. Sortof shame-plus-belonging. Or maybe the attitude is "shame is only necessary for those jerks who are not as cool as we are now; shame is what we do to outsiders."
Potentially the shame has to be applied regularly or the membership subsides, or lapses, or people quit, or decide it's weird. Or shame is applied outward instead.
Absent a context that the person actually wants/chooses/intends to be part of, I'm not sure the pile-ons work, or when the context ends, the behavior modification may end. Being piled on by an "enemy" is some form of assault and does not automatically cause behavior modification. Graeber & Wengrow mention "schismogenesis" - the situation of groups of people defining themselves in opposition to each other. Pile-ons might just make that go faster in some contexts.
For a group that people are already part of and are choosing to remain in, teasing and mocking may be more effective than pile-ons for maintaining core behaviors.
Pile-ons are a way of negotiating territory among people who have low to medium loyalty to each other (I think?) It is a way of negotiating dominance. Not actual individual change/growth.
From what I recall reading, the encounter groups tended to cause some amount of change in the individual but it didn't last. And some people did feel assaulted by it.
Rats avoid electric shocks.
It seems to be worth thinking about, because it *seems* logical (sortof) that shaming would work, but there seem to be a lot of social-verbal examples where it doesn't work at all.
Exciting to see meetups in far-flung places that don't have existing communities! e.g. Amman, Bangkok, Ibadan, Mexico City, Playa del Carmen, and Singapore :)
Hey Mingyuan, fyi we had a fab meet-up today in a not so far-flung existing village near Oxford - 14 people, 10 hours of workshops, food, chat and singalong 'live from OxRat'!
What's the right way to view the Chernobyl disaster?
1) The RBMK reactor was not flawed. It had weaknesses, but those weaknesses were known, and didn't cause problems so long as the humans operating the reactor remembered their training.
2) The RBMK reactor WAS flawed. Its weaknesses were so serious that it was unacceptably dangerous to expect human technicians to avoid inflaming them for the expected lifetime of such a reactor. The potential for disaster should have been recognized at the beginning, and the RBMK reactor design changed to add an extra margin of safety.
2. We design cars so people can survive crashes, we design planes to minimize the ability of pilot error to cause catastrophic issues, we have food safety regulations so that properly heating food isn't the only thing between you and food poisoning.
“ When asked what they learned from something that went wrong, junior devs will tell you about a plan to avoid making that mistake again. Senior devs will recognize the inevitability of human failure and explain how they built that assumption into their future planning.” -Tony Cox, one of my former colleagues
2 is generally a good view (any system where you say "if only people would just..." needs to contend with people who won't just), but it's very definitely true for Chernobyl. Not only was the reactor flawed, but the Soviets were aware of the flaws for years, because they'd had similar near-misses in other reactors with the same design. The design wasn't changed, and while they did apparently make some regulatory changes, it was downplayed and the technicians didn't really get that the new rule was a "don't do this or the reactor will explode" sort of problem.
Safety factors that rely on human action to that extent are not very safe; but it took a truly cataclysmic level of dumb shit to get the reactor to melt down.
Option 3) It was all the CIA's fault! Or at least, that was what the Russians were going to say in their own mini-series. Not sure if they ever got around to making it come to think.
Neither. They're overly simplistic notion of failure. Consider the following extensions of the logic.
- Automobiles are not flawed; they have known weaknesses that require human operators to remember their training, which they're legally obligated to prove they've gotten in order to operate a vehicle. After all, most drivers get in zero crashes their whole life!
- Automobiles are flawed; it is unacceptably dangerous to expect human technicians to operate them safely for their whole lifetime, and we need to change the designs to add an extra margin of safety. Why, there are whole industries built around the assumption that cars get into crashes!
The overwhelming majority of major disasters are systemic, that is, you can't pick apart any one cause and say "this alone could have prevented it". While Chornobyl was the worst nuclear accident in history, it wasn't the first or the last - and the others didn't use an RBMK reactor. As a trend, Russian design - particularly in the Soviet era - has lagged on human-factors consideration. You see in every aspect of their design. But you could change the reactor technology, or the user interface, or the procedures, and potentially have avoided a meltdown. Many of the acute deaths could have been prevented with better equipment and training and more open communication, none of which the Soviets were known for.
The right way to think about it is in these two questions: "What total risk are we willing to accept?" and "How does each part contribute to the actual risk?". Because if you want to lower the risk of death for the equivalent amount of power, you'd build *more* nuclear, or at least less coal and oil and hydro and rooftop solar. Even if all we had was RBMK reactors!
Or, consider Fukushima. Even though Fukushima had an obvious external cause, it took several major failures for the tsunami to turn it into a nuclear disaster, including the insufficient sea wall, the insufficient power hardening, and the co-located backup generator. But there were no immediate deaths from radiation exposure, 1600 deaths from the chaotic evacuation, and the future deaths are projected to be anywhere from a few hundred to 1800 due to radiation exposure, of which the Japanese government has recognized 1 so far. Half to an overwhelming majority of even all the *projected* deaths were not directly caused by any design fault in the nuclear plant at all!
If you looked to blame any specific cause, you would not be prepared for the next event. Fukushima is not Chornobyl is not Three Mile Island is not Chalk River. Instead, you need to think systematically about how to achieve your goal, in this case safe operation. Blame is important if someone really messes up; you need to get that person out, but any system where lots of people can die if one person messes up is inherently flawed. More often, blame today prevents safer operations tomorrow.
Just a minor nitpick - is it actually true that most drivers get in zero crashes their whole life? I would not be surprised if most drivers get in zero crashes where any human is injured, but I think minor crashes are really common.
I was going to say just that. I think most of the people who regularly drive cars and whom I know well enough that I'd know it if they once had a minor car crash have had at least one.
Yeah, of four drivers I know/knew well all four have been in a car accident of some description, although only one was injured and that a long time ago in a way modern safety systems would prevent.
It may not be true generally that the overwhelming majority of people don't get in any accidents. It's true of people I know but that could be a flawed sample. In a brief search I couldn't find any credible claims either way, and the only claim I did find was a dead link (but indicated a large number of people get in crashes).
...plus a zillion deaths indirectly caused by Japan, Germany, etc. freaking out and deciding to shut down nuclear power plants and having to produce (or save) energy by other means
2. In particular, the flaws of the RBMK reactor are inherent in its having been designed to serve as both a power plant and a plutonium breeder reactor for nuclear weapons production. AFIK Chernobyl was never used in the latter capacity, but the requirement that it hypothetically could be meant using a flammable graphite moderator rather than water, a positive void coefficient(*) in normal operation, and a "containment" structure with a roof that pops off if you give it a good shove. As already noted, "but our human operators will be so careful they'll never let it go out of control" is an accident waiting to happen.
Nuclear power plants that aren't also meant to be atom bomb factories can be made about as safe as any other kind of power plant, and usually are.
Plutonium breeder reactors for nuclear weapons are intrinsically more dangerous than power plants, but if you're *only* trying to make plutonium you can focus more effectively on mitigating those flaws and you won't be tempted to build the reactor quite so close to a city.
* Means, if the coolant starts to boil away, the reaction rate intrinsically increases and more heat is produced. You really want that to go another way.
I mean, sodium is arguably safer than typical current water reactor designs for a few reasons (and water is obviously safer than ye uld graphite designs.)
1) Radioactive sodium has a half life of 15 hours (and decays to stable magnesium.) If there is a spill, it won't stay hot for nearly as long as the products from a water-based cooling system (water vapor, hydrogen and oxygen).
~~2) Sodium will rapidly (hours or days) solidify if there's a containment leak. It's solid below the boiling point of water. That makes clean up a heck of a lot easier than the gaseous and liquid products from a water cooling system.~~ On second thought, the sodium will catch fire in this scenario and probably stay liquid for a long time.
3) Water containment has to be under very high pressure to keep it liquid at the high temperatures that reactors run at. If there is a containment breach, it will be explosive and spread irradiated pieces of the containment shield and droplets of irradiated cooling liquid over a wide area. (It will also be incredibly deadly to the thousand or so workers at the nuclear plant; more so than a breach of liquid sodium which will only be deadly for the minority of workers near containment.) Liquid sodium, OTOH, operates at atmospheric pressure. A containment failure won't spread sodium farther that the liquid flows before cooling.
4) Because sodium reactors run at a much higher temperature than water reactors with low required flow rates, most current designs can run their cooling in shutdown without any incoming power. (One of the critical failures in Fukushima was that the plant lost external electric power and all its backup generators to the tsunami, leaving it without power to run the cooling needed during shutdown. Its sister plant also lost power and generators, and was saved by plant personnel manually running a 10 mile long power cable through the disaster zone to a functioning substation over the first 24 hours post-tsunami.)
While sodium is obviously more toxic and reactive than water, it seems likely that a liquid sodium reactor will be less dangerous in the event of failure than a water one.
> While sodium is obviously more toxic and reactive than water, it seems likely that a liquid sodium reactor will be less dangerous in the event of failure than a water one.
I disagree. We don't have nearly enough information to come to that conclusion. At-best, we can agree what there are different dangers involved. Given the low rate of problems with traditional water-cooled reactors (and available improvements reducing failure rates by several orders of magnitude) and the lack of engineering data for sodium-cooled reactors, it is quite possible that it's the other way around in-practice.
There have been 20ish functional sodium nuclear reactors. We're far from zero data on them. Yes, we have more data on water ones. But that shouldn't keep us from comparing risk levels.
I think the main reason to ponder Na instead of H2O is to avoid the possibility of H2 explosions, which plague reactors cooled (or moderated) by water when they reach high temperatures. The Zr in the fuel cladding, which is otherwise (from the point of view of its nuclear reactivity) highly desirable in that role, unfortunately reacts with steam at very high temperatures to produce H2. This was exactly the problem at Fukushima, and at least the second explosion at Chernobyl is thought to have been an H2 explosion.
Arguably H2 explosions are a significantly greater risk than a meltdown per se, since historically at least it's those that have breached containment and sent radioactive debris into the environment.
Yeah, though we certainly have some solutions for that. There are continually active glowplugs in containment at the power plant I work at to detonate any stray hydrogen in the air before it can build up to a dangerous amount, and H2 recombiners in the hot side of the cooling system to recombine the H2 into the water.
This is yet another source of electricity-dependence in our safety systems though. And sure, we have multiple redundant backup diesel generators on site. But there's an absolute limit to how much functional redundancy you can get from on-site backups (as Fukushima denonstrated so clearly.)
3. Counting the fatalities in our entire history with 3 nuclear power plant disasters worldwide (an estimated 4000, which are essentially all from Chernobyl), we could have 3 nuclear plant disasters worldwide every 2 days before nuclear power would pass coal-burning electricity (800,000 deaths/year) as a cause of death. (Stats thanks to lazy Googling without careful fact-checking.)
I think its unreasonable to assume that 3 disasters every two days would necessarily only kill 4000 people. Not much would had to have gone wrong for Chernobyl to have killed many more, directly but especially indirectly. Not to mention the economic effects of vast swathes of the world becoming uninhabitable.
"Uninhabitable" is a function of insane levels of risk aversion wrt radiation - If we used the same kind of standards for air pollution that we used for radiation, anywhere near a coal power station would be "uninhabitable", and *all* of China's cities would be ridiculously past the line.
Okay, I'll bite. Per Wikipedia, 8.5e16 Bq of Cs-137 were released in the Chernobyl explosion. Assuming one of those every two days, and given that Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years, one would eventually reach an equilibrium amount of the order of 4.6e20 Bq, give or take ln 2.
Distributed evenly over the surface of the earth, this comes out to 1 MBq/m^2. By contrast, the 510 tons of Co-60 mentioned in the Wikipedia article of the cobalt bomb are 44MBq/m^2. Depending on the migration of the Cesium into homes and through the food chain, this may or may not be enough to kill every human on earth. From my gut feeling, it should be more than 1M death/year.
Um, you have to figure out the number of mSv, the unit of biological dose. This is not a simple matter and I don't know how to do it.
Also, it's impossible to figure out the biological dose just from the number 44MBq/m^2 alone; the radiation source is important because
(1) it's important how the specific radioactive substance interacts with living tissue; I think the reason people focus on caesium so much is because it tends to get lodged in the lungs if inhaled, and because its half-life is irritatingly medium-term.
(2) Becquerel is an inhomogenous unit that tells you little about the radiation hazard. One becquerel is defined as one nucleus decaying per second. But a single decay event can have low energy or very high energy (higher energy is worse.)
1000 mSv (1 Sv) over a short time period tends to cause radiation poisoning, and 5000 mSv is fatal half the time. But people aren't allowed to move back to Fukushuima unless radiation drops below 20 mSv per year. Radiation greater than 20 mSv per year should be enough to cause a few cancer deaths eventually in a large population, but I haven't been able to find any estimate of the number of deaths that would have occurred if everyone had been allowed to return to their homes after a few weeks. And I did look for it! No one is reporting on this and I couldn't find a single scientific paper about it, aside from this one that doesn't quite answer the question: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017300782 ... it's like no one actually cares.
As I recall, the worst-contaminated places had about 50 mSv/year initially. (For comparison, I had a radioactive test recently to check the blood flow in my heart, and I learned online that this test delivers a typical dose of 20 mSv. The test was negative so I still don't know what's wrong with my heart.)
Hmm, tricky. Let's see, Cs-137 emits gammas at 661 keV, so if we have 1 MBq of the stuff we are getting about 105nW of energy in gammas, the dangerous stuff. Let's assume it's all absorbed by a 70kg man standing in that m^2, that gives us about 1.5 nGy/s, which we can pretty much set equal to 1.5 nSv/s for gamma rays. That gives us an annual total dose of 48 mSv. The Department of Energy tells me the typical exposure of Americans to background natural radiation is about 6.2 mSv per year, so this Cs-137 blanket is multiplying that by a factor of 7. That's probably noticeable, epidemiologically, but it seems surprisingly tame. The DoE also tells me that the 48 mSv is about what a mammogram earns you, so basically it sounds like we're talking about giving everyone an extra mammogram or two per year of radiation. That seems detectable with good statistics and a large population, but...well.... quite a bit short of an extra 1 million extra deaths per year, let alone wiping out everybody.
Unless I made some honking enormous mistake there, it would actually seem that the OPs argument is not bad at all -- that even a ridiculous amount of Chernobyls[1] wouldn't do very much to increase the radiation exposure of the world. I guess it's a pretty big planet.
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[1] Also, 8.5e+16 Bq of Cs-137 is about 26 kg, and the production and loss of 13 kg of Cs-137 per day probably requires a stupendous number of nuclear reactors, and of course a pretty impressive level of carelessness operating them.
Estimating anything from an n=3 sample size is questionable, but trying to estimate the mean of a distribution with a low median and mode but a fat right tail from a small sample size is particularly dubious, I'm afraid.
If one nuclear disaster in ten kills a billion people but most of the rest are mostly harmless, that would be entirely compatible with the evidence you cite, and give a much higher death toll than coal.
Obviously, those are intentionally absurd numbers, but I don't know what realistic ones are; I'm just making the point that that calculation isn't at all reliable.
That calculation isn't reliable, but (a) it's the best we've got, and (b) there is no plausible way a nuclear disaster could kill a billion people, or a million.
What's at stake is whether nuclear energy is a good substitute for coal. If it kills less people, AND reduces CO2 production, it's a good substitute. These numbers give 4 orders of magnitude between deaths from nuclear power so far, and deaths from coal in that same time. There's no way you can spin a tale in which it would be reasonable to assume the real mean is 4 orders of magnitude larger than indicated by the data.
'The Chernobyl accident was a seminal influence in the Deep Green movement from 2030 onward, in which nuclear reactors, and subsequently other industrial centres, were detonated to create contaminated grounds where humans were unwilling to live, but nature could persist.'
The reactor was extremely flawed, its flaws were known by the relevant leaders and not known by the operators of them, and its flaws were tolerated because the design was one created to be able to breed plutonium for weapons. I've seen no evidence that Chernobyl was actually ever used to make bomb fuel, but the design existed for and was used based on this consideration. If all that mattered to the people in power was having the safest reactors possible (within certain economic constraints), RBMK would not have been used even if we assume only the knowledge available at the time and not 30+ years of hindsight.
I had also heard that, like at every Soviet construction site, things like rebar would disappear into the grey economy leaving slightly less than the bare essentials for getting the building completed. I read something in grad school (MA in Soviet history) that the general dysfunction of the construction and operation of Chernobyl was what really led Gorbachev to lose faith in the Soviet system.
I think you are right, but also bear in mind the Afghan War was going terribly, with ~14,000 dead, and some have argued the Reykjavik Summit (only 6 months after Chernobyl) had an outsized effect on Gorbachev. It was not generally known at the time, but the highest-ranking KGB officer in London had been for some years a double agent for MI6, and although the KGB had him recalled in 1985 he was snuck out of the country later that year and continued working for the Brits openly.
Reagan of course had a close relationship with Margaret Thatcher, so for years he had unparalleled insight into Soviet leadership (as well as the opportunity to shape what information *they* received about *him*), and when he finally met Gorbachev at Reykjavik it's said it was kind of like playing poker while being able to see your opponent's hand with X-ray glasses.
I’d forgotten about that! I mostly studied material culture, specifically computing in the 1960s, but Gorbachev always struck me as someone who knew he’d been outclassed. Which makes sense, since I think, since Andropov also knew what he was up against.
At one point in the early 80s the KGB found an absolutely tiny CIA surveillance microphone somewhere, and Andropov asked if they had anything similar. The KGB said yes, and showed him a prototype of what they were working on. It was the size of a brick. So Andropov knew that even without the double agents they were losing the intelligence game alongside the technology game, besides everything else.
Mostly (1). I can think of only one serious contributing mistake in the construction of the reactor, which is the lack of the specified fire-resistant roof which resulted in about 1/3 of the eventual deaths from acute radiation sickness among those who had to put the fire out, which would not have started in the first place if the design had been followed.
One could argue also that the generator test that caused the accident should have been completed before the reactor was certified and begun regular operation, as it was supposed to be, which would have made the operators much less reluctant to compromise the safety protocols they did during the test. In both cases we can see yet more evidence of the general Soviet willingness to cut safety corners when political status is at stake.
Otherwise, the behavior of the RBMK was reasonably well-known to its designers, e.g. the instability at low power levels and the difficulty with the positive void coefficient were already well known to Soviet designers in the early 70s, when the first reactors of this design had been operating for a while. A number of changes had been made to the operating protocols as a result, and published to the Chernobyl site, and it's very likely the accident at Chernonyl would not have happened had the parameters for the reactor's operation (and even the conditions specified for the test) been strictly followed by its operators.
Of course, operators in the Soviet era were already known to ignore safety protocols when following them would result in some unfortunate outcome (like aborting a test, or not being able to bring electricity generation back on line in time) that made them look bad to superiors and comissars -- and so we are back again to that inherent flaw in any collectivist system, the pressure on the individual to conform to social expectations even when he knows it may lead to disaster.
Certainly the RBMK is less inherently safe than the common PWR design used in the West in the 60s through 80s. But of course the PWR design is less inherently safe than some other designs, and the RBMK design is more inherently safe than some other truly lunatic designs. Whether you say the design is acceptably or unacceptably inherently safe is a social decision, just as is the question of whether an automobile without airbags or ABS is/is not sufficiently inherently safe. So there are no absolute answers, it depends on your priorities and economics, and what the current state of the art is.
I suppose one could argue that the RBMK design was clearly insufficiently foolproof to be operated by a political system that tended by its nature to maximize the number of fools. Whether you attribute that flaw to the reactor design, or the design of the political system, is perhaps a matter of taste.
To your conclusion, it may be better to weigh blame between 1) the individual operators and 2) the nuclear energy system as a whole, of which the physical infrastructure is one of many parts including staff, training, scheduling etc.
With that in mind the system as a whole shows a flaw, rather than a few operators being grossly out of line with the expected output of the system.
Hmm, no, I think if I have to assign secondary blame, I assign it to the political system, mostly because it was responsible for a number of other ecological disasters, such as the Aral Sea, City 40, Olenya Bay, and so on. Had large scale suicidal Soviet upfuckery been *limited* to Chernobyl I might agree their nuclear energy regime was uniquely broken, but it's not.
One can argue about the advisability of positive void coefficient designs, but I would call tipping the control rods with graphite -- so they accelerate the reaction first -- clearly beyond the pale.
From my understanding, the real problem was the burning graphite. The burning bitumen roof may have delayed efforts to extinguish the fire in the reactor hall, but probably did not contribute much to the spread of isotopes from the core.
Independently of political systems, shit happens. Technical designs must assume that human operators will fail, and consider the consequences of failure. In my opinion, the RBMK is not suitable to be operated by humans near any large population centers. Running it on a moon base with ten people around would be ok.
The fire on in the reactor core was spectacular, but it's unclear it ever did much harm. Most of the nasty isotopes were blown into the air with the two initial explosions, it's not clear how much more the fire added. You have to dig into the weeds of thyroid cancer rates over the next 20 years and see if you can extract signal from the noise. On the other hand, as I said, the necessity of immediately putting the roof fire out needlessly directly exposed 10 people to lethal levels of radiation from the shards of the core on the roof.
It's not possible to design technical systems that will be safe when human operators fail. That would require a system that does not need *any* human supervision at all. When we get strong AI, then we can turn over all decisions and actions to it and...I dunno, all go sit on the beach or something. But until that happy day, my car requires me to *not* run into pedestrians in the crosswalk, and United requires pilots that remember to put the landing gear down before they try to land the plane, and chemical plants require people with PhDs in Chem E to keep the pressure in the giant vat of phosgene well below the bursting limit.
> In my opinion, the RBMK is not suitable to be operated by humans near any large population centers.
An uncontroversial opinion, in 2022. I don't think any Russian nuclear engineers would disagree. Now, if you want to hop back in the time machine to 1973 Moscow, and then it turns out, without the benefit of hindsight or knowledge of 60 years of technology improvement, you have the very same opinion -- that would be actually worth noting.
2 is a good attitude with respect to incompetence, but not with respect to malice. There's no way we could effectively e.g. expunge all info about how to make fertilizer bombs from the internet, let alone prevent *all* other ways for a sufficiently motivated person to wreck havoc. https://xkcd.com/1958/
In the specific case of Chernobyl, it was a level of recklessness which would be very close to the border between incompetence and malice, though still technically the former.
Mostly 2, but I see RBMK as a tradeoff between cost, versatility and safety. RBMK was at the far end of the cost spectrum (or so I assume from its design, I haven't looked up its price): they didn't bother building a containment dome, and they used the cheapest combination of materials inside the reactor: natural uranium + ordinary light water + graphite, a combination that produces the famously dangerous positive void coefficient. Plus they used a sub-par welded inner pressure vessel, unlike western reactors that have a much more costly single-piece pressure vessel. RBMK was also versatile, enabling early extraction of used fuel in order to yield weapons-grade plutonium.
Safety lost out, of course. I bet a more careful design could have been made safer while still using natural uranium, water and graphite, but that type of reactor just doesn't fly outside the USSR, so it's a moot point I haven't heard anyone try to figure out. Just off the top of my head, maybe the designers could have added some kind of emergency shutdown rod cleverly prepared in such a way that the overpressure caused by boiling water would push it into the reactor chamber, or cause it to fall from the top. Repeat for several such rods.
People taking NMN, does anyone else observe adverse effects? While the boost in energy and brainpower is almost instantaneous (tens of seconds for sublingual application), I think I actually noticed visibly accelerated aging on it - receding hairline, wrinkles, first grey hairs within weeks of starting it. It is of course entirely possible I'm simply looking harder, but another person, in their early 30, whom I in my initial enthusiasm gave NMN off-handedly commented "Gah, I look old" shortly thereafter.
Possible explanations:
1) I'm expecting it to turn me 20 and look at myself harder, therefore noticing things I otherwise wouldn't.
2) Bad batch, contaminated with...what?
3) Naturally high NAD+ levels (men in my family age SPECTACULARLY slow) so NMN is overkill that leads to paradoxical reactions, or another idiosyncratic / genetic factor
4) It actually is harmful
Since NMN turned up as the most adhered to nootropic in the last survey here (I think?), there should be copious anecdata, leaking into actual data, and I appreciate any and all comments. Thank you.
About the new gray hairs: Hair grows about half an inch per month. Even if the NMN turned a bunch of hairs gray the very first time you used it, the colorless part of each newly gray hair would only be a fraction of an inch long after a few weeks of using the stuff.
My anecdata after 1 year sublingual powder are: 1) no observed adverse effects; 2) I'm generally energised, but was before too; 3) I'm happy to accept it might have little effect on cellular metabolism, but may have placebo effect and tingles like sherbet!
Sleep, exercise, sunshine, and take a really, really hard look at the things that are stressing you out in your life that you lampshade by acknowledging they're they're stressful, and then honestly examining the extent to which they are driving you up the wall. That last bit tends to be quite helpful.
I'll comfortably say that it's frustrating that my wife is so busy. It's another thing entirely to acknowledge that there's a baser part of me is absolutely infuriated by it, and wants to throw a complete temper tantrum about it. Or the fact that my house is taking forever to close on. Politely, it's a bit stressful. An honest examination of the baser parts of me reveals a part that wants to throttle the smug builder who isn't even polite about it. Normally if a major stress point is going unacknowledged by me it'll show up as wrist/hand pain while typing, but it can show up as chronic fatigue, back pain, etc. for others.
Aerobic exercise, going to bed at a regular time, sleeping until you feel able to get up, avoiding sugar, splitting food up into at least 5 meals a day, doing interesting things.
-Regular sleep/wake cycle with no naps (unless you literally can't stay awake of course), spending enough time in bed to consistently get 8 hours sleep (you may not be able to get a full 8 hours consistently or initially but you have to give yourself the chance to)
-Maximum of one caffeinated drink per day taken around the time you have breakfast
- Cut out or at the very least significantly cut back alcohol consumption (if you drink), especially in the hours leading up to bedtime
- Get plenty of sunlight, especially early in the day, and avoid bright light before bed including from screens. Consider trying a vitamin D supplement in winter.
- Daily exercise starting even with a brisk walk once a day and then perhaps building up to multiple walks, cycling or resistance training - whatever you find the most enjoyable and are able to stick to and not have to spend half an hour convincing yourself to do each day. I downloaded audible and listen to books when I go walking each day so it becomes an enjoyable book listening activity rather than exercising
- Try and eat healthier, more vegetables and much less sugar is a goal that is hard to go wrong with. You don't need to go full green smoothie with 17 different micronutrient supplements, just cut out the junk and add in the big obvious healthy stuff like leafy greens. Doing some basic meal prep on Sunday night (if you work Mon - Fri) can make it so much easier to stick to healthy eating during the week when you're tired after work, for example. Just cutting up some onion, garlic, broccoli and bell pepper and bagging it up and cooking a big batch of brown rice can be a game changer because you can just stir fry it when you get home with some soy sauce or oyster sauce or something and you've got a tasty nutritious stir fry in 10 minutes tops.
- Identify any sources of stress in your life, eliminate them if possible or at least recognise that stressing about them is not helpful and instead try focusing on things that are within your control. If possible, try seeing a psychologist. Even if you don't feel like you have any mental health issues, there may things you're so used to stressing about or have negative cognitive behaviours around that you don't even recognize that you're doing it any more.
-Delete any social media that isn't strictly used for directly communicating with your friends and family
- Consider taking up meditation. Sam Harris' app is quite good and you can get it for free for a year if money is an issue: https://wakingup.com/
This is just a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach - some of it may be not related to your specific problem. Though everything I've listed is an example of a very healthy behavior so there's no risk in trying them out
When you're chronically fatigued, all of this can seem overwhelming and that you simply don't have the energy for it. But if you can just work up enough energy and willpower to get started with regular exercise, for example, most people find that this actually gives them energy rather than consuming what precious little of it you have.
My first piece of advice would be to check how well you're breathing, particularly while you're asleep. Sleep apnea causes a truly staggering amount of fatigue. There are quite a few possible causes, but many of them are shockingly easy to treat - eg. many people have dust allergies, and would benefit hugely from vacuuming their bedroom far more thoroughly. Food intolerances can also cause sinus inflammation or excess mucus.
Are you talking generic chronic tiredness, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Exercise is good advice for the former but frequently actively harmful for the later. If unsure, focus on weight training rather than cardio - it's cardio that causes damage in CFS patients, while weight training brings you the desired benefits just as well if not better than cardio anyway.
Sunshine and fresh air are going to be generically helpful, but probably minor effects on physical energy. Great for mood issues, though, and mild depressions can feel like fatigue.
Get a blood test to check your vitamin and mineral levels, plenty of deficiencies (and a few excesses) can cause fatigue. A huge fraction of menstruating women are anaemic, for example, and vitamin B deficiencies are not uncommon either, with ~10% odds of a genetic mutation that hinders the body's ability to metabolise B12.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. It’s interesting you mentioned breathing. As a child, I was told I had nonallergic rhinitis (but, the doctor seemed to be a quack). I may want to look into that a bit more.
Previously, I would take a B-12 methylcobalamin vitamin, but I haven’t in a while. Going to start retaking that.
A lot of my chronic fatigue-ish symptoms were psychosomatic. I found the best cure is progressively getting used to scheduling more and more of your time on useful and rewarding activities. On days off when I'm bored and have nothing to do I get basically instantly depressed, including somatic symptoms (postural hypotension up to seeking medical advice from several doctors, went away by its own after the lifestyle problems got fixed). The human body is a weird machine.
Also, sleep helps. Dawn simulator alarm clocks are an amazing lifehack in the winter, even if it seems your circadian rhythm is alright, they make it alright-er.
I don't know whether this will help, but apparently there's such a thing as serious chronic fatigue where even a little exercise leads to exhaustion. I'm not saying that's what you've got, you haven't described your symptoms, but if even small ordinary amounts of exercise knock you out, more exercise might not help.
It's comments like this--right on the borderline between maximal sarcasm and bright-eyed naïveté--which give me hope for the future of ironic internet humor.
In ye olden times, trolling used to mean something...
I agree that in the current political climate, we are not likely to try my experiment of recruiting lots of high skill/educated/talented immigrants, so it's not, even it it appears so, "bright eyed naivete." But I really think that would be a good policy. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I agree that it would be a good policy. Canada has been doing this in a race-blind manner since 1976, and Australia and New Zealand copied Canada's points system in the 1980s; all of those countries have higher % foreign-born than the US while simultaneously having much less internal dissent re: immigration. The 2016-era "populist backlash" only hit the governments that were letting in significant numbers of low-skill immigrants against the will of a majority of their people, not the ones letting in an even larger number of higher-skill immigrants with a good track record of assimilating within a single generation. As far as I'm concerned, the Canadian policy has already been proven to be better than the US's current policy beyond all reasonable doubt.
As for the political climate, I'm cautiously optimistic that competition from China will break the deadlock. After the end of the Cold War, the US had enough slack to afford some highly inefficient policies without endangering its global leadership position, but there's less slack now. To be clear, I believe it would be better for the world as a whole if China had a moderate leader like Deng Xiaoping in charge, instead of the more authoritarian Xi; but a positive side-effect of the China we actually have to deal with is a healthy incentive to clean up our own act.
Most economists think so. Most non-economists think there would be some important problems to open borders that might be even worse than global poverty, but I have yet to see a convincing case that this would be true.
There's no convincing *economic* argument against open borders. All the arguments against it tend to be on the lines of cultural/social politics (e.g. wanting to retain an ethnic character of a country). That has sentimental value for some people, and I don't underestimate its potency. Non-economic factors can often overpower logical economic ones.
Besides, few people think of themselves as "global citizens".
I think we understand the economic benefits and cultural costs (if any) much better for a marginal increase in immigration. And like most good things, immigration suffers from decreasing returns.
there is the ELF index, ethno-linguistic fractionalization. Countries that are more homogenous do better economically, have higher social trust, less corruption, and experience less crime.
No, it's not spurious correlation, and it's not because African countries are more diverse, trust me, people have considered all the obvious objections.
I think it's absolutely obvious that having a culturally homogenous society, that speaks the same language, and follows the same religion (or no religion), is good.
True, you dismiss my viewpoint without any arguments, and call it 'illogical sentimental factors'. But then I can symmetrically dismiss your viewpoint without argument as 'globohomo propaganda'.
Of COURSE there's convincing economic arguments. You can't have hundreds of millions of poor, unskilled low IQ migrants moving to rich countries and expect that they'll all just not only have jobs, but all have jobs where they make enough money to provide more in taxes than they will cost the government in welfare and the massive physical and social infrastructure increases that will be needed to sustain them.
The ONLY way its "economically beneficial" is if you only care about GDP and nothing more.
I think the maximum number of low skilled workers that we could allow to enter in order to increase the real incomes of existing residents would be more than enough to start driving down wages of low skilled workers. Again, the policy is to attract highly skilled workers (where skills are more complimentary, not strictly substitutes.
This assumes there would be state-provided welfare for "hundreds of millions of poor, unskilled low IQ migrants". If I can imagine "open borders", I can imagine "welfare-restrictions", too. "Imagine ..." (Lennon). - Now Prof. Bryan Caplan is happy to accept: "work visa if you show a work-contract and a rent-contract" as open borders. Singapore and Switzerland are "open" under similar restrictions. And have bigger shares of foreigners (SGP: 38 per cent of labour force ; Swiss: 25% of population) than more "liberal do-goody" states (Germany: 12.5%). Now, whose economy is doing better? ... (20th cent. FOX jingle) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgRm6Qgscc
Okay. Let everyone living in Burundi (population 12 million, ranked the poorest country in the world or thereabouts) emigrate to the USA and plonk them down in the Bay Area, home of rich techies! (We're going on the popular image here).
What happens next? I know how to plough with an ox plough, I know how to plant and grow rice, I can weave on a hand loom. What do the Burundians do to get jobs in the Bay Area industries?
Probably live in the new slums and do black market labour. Those techies living eight to a house (because the rent is too damn high) can now each have their own personal servant or even two each, and our Burundians can sleep in a tent in the back yard (if there is a back yard).
And probably the Burundians *will* be doing better than if they stayed back in Burundi - now they're earning a whopping $50 a week from being a housemaid, valet, yard boy etc.! And our techies are living a lifestyle of personal service they could never have afforded before, with a cook, groundskeeper, scullery maid, laundry maid and so forth!
So our economists are very happy that things are going swimmingly. Yes, the Burundians are now third-class serfs, but hey, it's still an improvement over what they used to have!
Don't forget the public schools! Eyeballing the cost of Bay Area private schools, and the difference in property values between e.g. East Palo Alto and Palo Alto, the negative externality inflicted by this level of low-skill immigration on each typical two-child couple is on the order of $1 million. But I'm sure that's worth ~$1000/year in savings from cheaper services.
If you think America would prosperous without any limits on third world immigration (which, make no mistake, would lead to hundreds of millions of immigrants within a decade of the policy being enacted, mostly from third world countries), you have to believe America's prosperity has nothing to do with:
-The people who make up the current population including their intelligence, their cultures, their values, their abilities, their criminality or lack thereof
- The politics of the US, because with open borders America politics becomes 'whatever the foreign majority vote for', and given that none of the countries they came from resembled the US at all, its going to be very different to what the US currently is
So either you think that physical capital is enough to sustain an unlimited number of migrants, or you think that the US has magical dirt that allows it to be wealthy no matter what
I'm not for (is anyone?) open borders but your concurs which might apply at any level of immigration ignores that a) people come already partially acculturated by US media and become more aculturated over time. The "magic" dust is institutions like rule of law, security of property, a far above average business climate, etc.
I think you have this backwards. The United States is rich precisely *because* it had a policy of open borders and massive immigration of the global poor in the 19th century.
Open borders doesn’t mean non-citizens get to vote.
"Open borders doesn’t mean non-citizens get to vote."
How do you know John Smith is not a citizen, as distinct from the John Smith of the same ethnic background who is a citizen? Seeing as how checking ID or requiring proof is seen as voter suppression?
I don't think many or most illegal immigrants/non-citizens (and that includes people legally in the country) are voting when they shouldn't be, but I'd also not be surprised if some of them were, not meaning to commit fraud but assuming that they can vote because a polling card was dropped in the letterbox.
If the case you were talking about were even occurring for 1 in a thousand cases, then we would have hundreds of thousands of people showing up to vote and discovering that their box has already been checked at the polling place and turned away. They don’t let two ballots get cast for the same registration.
In order for this to happen, you would need someone with the same name registered in the same precinct to go to the polling place before the registered voter with that name does. Sure, it can happen, but it’s a smaller worry than the number of people who lose their chance to vote because they suddenly needed to run to the grocery store to get breakfast for their family and their entire daily schedule was shot.
Whatever citizenship checking is cost effective should be done at registration, not on voting days.
BTW have you ever tried to get people to register and or turn out to vote? The idea that we need to be super-vigilant to make sure that non-citizens do not vote is really naive. And that's why measures that make it harder to vote look like an intention to skew the outcomes toward the preferences of some citizens over others.
When someone proposed a solution to something that hypothetically could be, but for which there is no evidence that is actually IS a problem, one suspects the "solution" has a different objective. State laws to combat Sharia and the teaching of CRT also come to mind.
Yes, there are states like Singapore, which consistently expels pregnant guest workers, and the United Arab Emirates, which denies citizenship to most children and even grandchildren of non-Arab immigrants.
However, the US fought a civil war over a form of second-class citizenship, and the resolution was that the US wouldn't continue doing the second-class-citizenship thing. A century later, there was a Civil Rights movement that reinforced this philosophy.
So if you consider the distinction between immigrant and citizen to be relevant, it is reasonable to expect you to explicitly state that what you're saying doesn't apply to the US, and for others to treat you as arguing in bad faith if you fail to do so.
What exactly is it that you are saying "doesn't apply to the US"?
In the US, you don't get to vote unless you're a citizen who is over 18 years of age. To become a citizen as an adult, you need to go through a process to become a permanent resident (which often takes several years), and then continue to reside in the country for five more years before you become a citizen. If you are born in the United States, you are automatically a citizen, but you still don't get to vote until you're 18.
You point out that some countries can be extremely punitive to the children of immigrants. But I wasn't talking about the right to punish people for their parentage. I was talking about how immigrants don't get to vote until they've become citizens, which is just as true in the United States as elsewhere. There is no "foreign majority", and they don't get to vote until they've been naturalized.
When the US had near-zero barriers to immigration, it also had near-zero barriers to anything else, and a near-zero welfare state. They types of housing and employment opportunities available then have all been eliminated by do-gooders.
America is rich because it had a lot of unexploited resources, empty space, and the benefit of discoveries in science, industrialisation and so forth being made by others. This allowed it a head start, and the progress ramped up on that.
America now, and the problem of hundreds of millions of new immigrants, is the same problem the Old World countries had before they could head off to the new open lands of America.
Economics flow from culture. You can't do business in a low-trust anarchy, or at least, it's a very different kind of business than you'd do in a high-trust society.
I agree and I really wish politicians and users of social media had not found it advantageous to sow mistrust or the other party for partisan advantage.
But I do not think that higher immigration especially of high income/education/skill immigrants would lower social trust.
I honestly don't think many economists have thought about totally open borders. I can't see why anyone would try. Most economists are persuaded that a marginal increase in flows of people (that would still be millions) would be good.
I think that most formal economic modeling actually assumes open borders, and it's very hard to make a formal model that includes anything like real-world restrictions on migration! (It's easy to make models with nearly sealed compartments, but not ones where there is a moderate amount of legal flow with various different levels of legal restrictions, as well as illegal ways to circumvent some of the restrictions.)
No. Basically you just make a model which sums mutually consistent marginal changes is labor force flows with the parameters calibrated with individual country data. Now that would not model what policies could produce those marginal changes.
These models are total junk though. They treat people as 100% interchangeable and extrapolate marginal immigration rates we have today to the immigration of vastly greater number of qualitatively different immigrants.
Do economists assume more people = more consumption = more production = more wealth? The opposite of Malthus?
Because I wonder if economic theory has caught up to increasing automation, increasing productivity with fewer workers, and the increasing need for specialised knowledge to have 'good' jobs. Johann Schmidt could immigrate from a farm in Germany any time between 1910-1970 and get a job on the Ford production line and his kids would be John Smith and Sally Smith who would move up the class ladder, but I think there's less likelihood of that today. The production lines for former farm labourers are now in China and other overseas countries, and Johann needs to have marketable skills, preferably in the knowledge economy.
Economists (to be really simplistic) assume that more people (more labor) => more production but with diminishing returns and that the whole "production function" shifts up with new technological developments. If we allow for heterogeneous labor, then more of one kind of labor (or imports embodying that kind of labor) will reduce returns to that kind and raise returns to other kinds. Under not very restrictive assumptions, the increases (assuming the increase started from an artificially restricted amount) will be greater than the losses and the losers could be compensated. So economists generally favor both freer trade and less restrictive immigration.
As a political matter they have not worried (enough) about whether in fact the losers have been or would be compensated.
Open borders in the US would lead to societal collapse. Even the richest country in the world cannot assimilate hundreds of millions of unskilled foreigners, there would be mass unemployment, physical and social infrastructure would be overwhelmed, crime would explode, social trust would evaporate, mean IQ would plummet, there would be mass homelessness, our politics would become totally decided by these people. It would be absolute chaos. And once it happens, that's it, there's no going back. If it turns out to be as catastrophic as it looks like it would be, bad luck, there's no fixing it. The US would be permanently ruined. The living standards of current Americans would absolutely plummet and you're foolish if you think they're going to sit back and let this happen. It would be reckless to believe there WOULDN'T be civil war under such a scenario.
People look at a comparatively small number of immigrants who are skewed towards educated/skilled compared to the global average and then extrapolate that into thinking that an unlimited number of immigrants subject to zero selection criteria would have the same impact which is just insane. Europe struggles to assimilate
Even if there were some marginal improvement in the wellbeing of the immigrants themselves (which would rapidly diminish as the number of immigrants increases), this is going to be wiped out by the much broader impacts on technological and scientific progress that the US previously provided and would mean that China would become the most powerful country in the world which would be catastrophic for liberal democracy and all the good it creates.
I had to drag out this old trope, but I feel like this is just a glaring obvious example of 'magic dirt' ideology. The people who would come here were poor people in poor countries. Why would they stop being poor here? Why would America not become as poor as the places they come from? You have to believe that the people in a country have no impact on the success of a country (otherwise we become as poor as countries full of those people), you have to believe the politics of a country has no bearing on the success of a country (because these foreigners now decide our politics since they become a majority), you have to believe culture doesn't matter, you have to believe IQ doesn't matter, you have to believe values don't matter. The ONLY thing that could possibly allow America to stay wealthy and successful is it's accumulated capital. But there's only so much of this, it can be moved, and in any case America's greatest asset is its HUMAN capital, and this would not be enough to sustain countless low IQ migrants.
Open borders is the worst policy proposal I've ever heard.
It's proponents are so confident in it despite the fact that they cannot point to cases of mass third world immigration working on a much smaller scale today.
At least those are among the risks. With the exception of Bryan Kaplan, no one actually advocates for unrestricted immigration. We need to focus the immigration debate on how to attract a large but not unlimited number of highly skilled and talented immigrants, say a couple of million per year to start. If that goes as well as I think then we could increase the number, but the point is to attract enough to be selective.
As I mentioned in another comment, it might have been reasonable to believe in 1992 that a massive liberalization of immigration policy was the most efficient way to help the world's poor. Although China had really started taking off by that time, it was still unclear whether India, Indonesia, and other similarly poor countries ever would. And if those countries were destined to remain stuck, it would probably be better to improve the lives of those we could admit than improve the lives of none of them at all.
But the world of 2022 is remarkably different. *All* of the largest poor countries have enjoyed multiple decades of practically nonstop 5+% annual economic growth. A combination of cheap Internet (allowing smart poor people in the most remote villages to teach themselves practically anything), Soviet communism's loss of credibility, and generous American reverse-mercantilist policy enabled even mediocre Indian, Indonesian, etc. leaders to preside over explosive, broad-based catchup growth. One of the top emerging problems is that we probably provided *too* much help to China, without providing sufficiently strong incentives for good global citizenship on their part; the Democrats and Republicans may have many disagreements, but they are united on this point.
The continental US has had open borders with Puerto Rico for many decades. In 1992, the Puerto Ricans' trajectory looked pretty good, relative to Chinese/Indians/Indonesians/etc., and while it was unclear how much we could scale that example up, it was reasonable to believe that we hadn't already reached the point of negative returns. But in 2022, there's just no contest. Even though the literal GDP per capita numbers still look better for Puerto Ricans, that can't possibly compete with the scale of what has been going on in China/India/Indonesia/etc. (and we know from the 2016 "populist backlash" that low-skill immigration cannot be sustainably scaled up much further in Western democracies anytime soon).
As for "selective immigration would seem to have the opposite effect", that's a valid concern, and it is reasonable to tune US immigration policy to limit "brain drain" when necessary. But this is really only a problem when the high-skill immigration only flows in one direction. In practice, it's bidirectional. In China, the case I'm most familiar with, many leading companies were either founded by a "haigui" or have one in a top position. I'm less familiar with India, but I would be shocked if this wasn't also happening there to a large enough degree that India is best off letting the flow of students into Western universities continue, and taking its chances on enough of them returning.
Finally, the world has changed a lot since 1924. The population of Mexico in 1924 was lower than it's believed to have been in 1519; one cannot say the analogous thing today. And the cost of travel is MUCH lower. And there's a much larger welfare state today. All of these factors push the cost/benefit analysis in favor of more restriction... after it had already tilted in that direction, due to the "closing of the American frontier", in the early 1900s! (Why do you think the Immigration Act of 1924 passed in the first place?)
There are, of course, major forces pushing in the other direction, too; in particular, we've gotten a lot better at exporting our culture and "pre-assimilating" even nonwhite foreigners. And I think this trend can eventually win out, and we can have a world where most countries voluntarily converge towards open borders. (There are far more Indians and Chinese today who can function in a Western society, without being a net drain, than there were in 1992!) But the order of operations is of paramount importance here. If, instead of just following the will of the people and letting them liberalize immigration at a rate they're comfortable with, as is happening in Canada, you keep trying to prematurely force the borders open, prepare to see more Trumps.
We are far from that point, but I agree that it would be possible to allow enough unskilled workers to have an impact on wages of other low skilled workers.
"You have to believe that the people in a country have no impact on the success of a country (otherwise we become as poor as countries full of those people), you have to believe the politics of a country has no bearing on the success of a country (because these foreigners now decide our politics since they become a majority), you have to believe culture doesn't matter, you have to believe IQ doesn't matter, you have to believe values don't matter."
On the contrary, I think our culture and values do matter, quite a great deal. In fact, I think our culture and values are so great that immigrants who come here will naturally adopt our own culture and values over time, and even if they don't, their children will. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
My father immigrated to the U.S. from an extremely conservative and devoutly religious North African country, and within a few years of moving here, he was practically indistinguishable from any other Wall Street businessman aside from his accent. He had a house in the suburbs of New Jersey, drank at the pub with his co-workers, invited his friends over to have barbeques and watch football (the North American kind, although he never lost his interest in soccer either). He still had a conservative streak - he certainly didn't approve of my lifestyle choices, for instance - but not to a degree that was outside the Overton Window in this country. Notably, he admired both Obama and Romney, and thought either of them would make for a great President; he certainly wasn't advocating for our policies to become more like his home country's.
And all it took was one generation to get to me, an agnostic, libertine, socially progressive queer girl who has virtually nothing in common with the people of my father's home country beyond maybe skin tone. Cultural assimilation is a far more powerful force than you're giving it credit for.
What seems to happen, assuming the problem is poverty, bad government and possibly crime in the home country, is that immigrants show up, work, and send money home. They aren't causing huge deterioration in the destination country.
I can think of a half dozen scenarios why it wouldn't, but I can't really think of any where it would necessarily do so. I've heard this claim made before, but I've never read any details of the mechanism of how this would work. If you can explain the mechanism better, I could better understand why.
I think the mechanism is based on the simple observation that when people migrate from poorer countries to richer ones, they tend to end up a lot wealthier. The question, of course, is how far this scales. Many argue that too much immigration would result in the destruction of the very institutions that make the rich country rich. Tyler Cowen, for instance, is skeptical that open immigration wouldn't result in "killing the golden goose".
Well, I have to finish my book report, but real quick, I think of all sorts of issues that would cause suboptimal results. For instance, housing and jobs. Say we have a million people arrive on our shores from Ukraine, we'd have to find a way to house them and find them jobs. I can see a huge lag between their arrival and final day when everyone is settled and in a prosperous state. Seems like it would take a lot state allocated capital to make this happen, and I'm not sure it would fly politically with our fellow citizens who are below a the median that outsiders are receiving extra subsidies. Anyway...
I suggest calling on people to share space in their houses with Ukrainians. I'm willing to do that, but don't know how. My government allows "unlimited" Ukrainians but isn't helping to arrange house-sharing and doesn't point me to an organization that could help arrange it. This is bad strategy. (But hopefully most Ukrainians can return home soon.)
Is this a better question than "Would open global immigration be a highly effective means of increasing global utility?" 'Coz they could give very different answers.
No, it would destroy the greatest engine of scientific, technological, political and social progress in the history of humanity i.e. western civilization. Unless you believe that the west has magic dirt, making the current population of the west minorities in their countries would destroy the things that makes them great, and if you think that the country is divided now, wait until there's hundreds of million foreigners making Americans' life miserable.
And there's no chance in hell China or Russia for example would ever do it, which means that China and Russia become the most powerful countries in the world without the US to stop them doing whatever they want (hint: it won't be stuff that maximises global utility).
Migrant *labour* is generally considered a net positive, certainly on the margin of today's immigration regimes, but plausibly for even huge migrant flows. Migrant *voters*, though, pose a strong risk to democracies if their numbers become large, and migrant *dependants* have the potential to be large drain of welfare systems, at least in theory.
There are also considerations of immigration rates - suppose one plausibly argues that the US could have sustained double it's immigration rates through the 20th century (based on the fact that its immigration was that high in the 19th). That does *not* mean that having all of the difference immigrate at once tomorrow would be fine - cultural assimilation is one concern, but pure physical infrastructure is another. Many American cities already struggle to have their infrastructure keep up with local population growth (mostly as a result of ineptitude, but still)
Actually it is more of a struggle for a city to deal with population decline than increase. Dallas v Detroit, anyone? Of course governance also matters, but that is partly circular, better governance allows for growth
And migrant labour is attractive because it can be paid a lot less than native labour. Economists seem to think (I may be maligning them) that this is a net benefit because the poor migrants here are still doing better than if they were at home, and the native industries are getting cheaper labour and so pricing their goods more cheaply for the consumer market.
Whether it's socially or morally beneficial to keep a set of people as a serf class doesn't seem to be considered. 'We'll make you legal so long as you agree to work for lower wages'?
"This is partly because, even when wages and benefits are increased, there are still not enough U.S. citizens applying. The current agricultural workforce is also aging, requiring younger workers to replace them. Immigrants have filled these shortfalls in the workforce for decades, but in recent years, fewer immigrants are coming to the U.S. to work in agriculture, a result of current U.S. immigration policy and rising incomes in Mexico."
If they can make more money at home, they don't want to work hard jobs for lower pay in the USA. If you increase the pay to be attractive, now the labour is too expensive and prices have to rise.
No. It would end the West as we know it. No more high trust societies. No more Bernietopias. No more ecotopias.
Why build for the future if strangers get to enjoy what you build? How can you tell which form of social organization is better if migrants arbitrage away your welfare system?
When go-getters from developing countries take all the low hanging fruit self-employment business niches, you lose an important social safety valve. Some people don't like working for The Man, and most of them cannot code. For example, Washington DC has a large restive Black population composed of people who could be doing the jobs taken by immigrants. I would rather such populations be gainfully employed instead of going in and out of jail.
The world sees our overflowing jails and bad neighborhoods and decides that the American Way is not optimal. And that's why they don't replicate what we are going right.
To begin with, there's a definite reason to control immigration that, depending on your definition, maybe isn't economics: let everyone in, and pretty soon you'll wonder why there's a Herpes Simplex-ZX7 epidemic within your borders.
Meanwhile, my GF makes a hobby out of identifying invasive plants like kudzu and English ivy, and removing them when possible. They crowd out everything else just because of how they grow. There's an analogous argument against open immigration.
To expand on a point 'a real dog' made elsewhere in this thread: I think a great deal of economic activity works on trust. Lack of trust is like friction in physics: it slows everything down. If an employer hires someone for labor and has to check that laborer's work, that's more expensive than if the laborer himself is motivated to deliver to spec. And sometimes there's more than one good way to run a business, but everyone still needs to do it the same way, whatever way that is. Economies become more efficient when they spend less on checks or conversion (or cleaning up after the fact), so naturally we want everyone's customs to be on the same page.
If one guy moves into a country with millions, that's noise. Long as he isn't Ed Gaim, he'll be fine. OTOH, if three million move into a country with one million, that's not immigration; that's takeover, even if no shots are fired. Somewhere in the middle is about 1% of a country's population coming in every year as immigrants, on top of the newest generation spinning up (they have to be trained in the native customs, too, but at least there's about 18 years to do it). The cost of bringing that many people up to speed will be nontrivial, and if you don't pay it, then you'll soon see hardy enclaves of people doing their stuff their way, and raising their kids to do it that way, too. Even if their way is productive, it still won't be the same as the rest of the state. That's friction. A little friction can be fun (as they say), but too much? Not pleasant.
And to the extent that part of the native custom is about how to conduct economic activity without fraud - to put it bluntly, a few countries accept bribery as part of the cost of doing business, to asphyxiating levels - letting in huge numbers of people used to that paradigm will result in a high-corruption, low-prosperity enclave, even if it gets along all right with the natives.
All of this suggests to me that the most lucrative long term course of action is as follows:
* control the rate of immigration, in the nature of a filter, measuring how well immigrants fit with whatever the native customs are
* tightening that control enough to reduce activity lost to "friction" (corruption, fraud, etc.) to some "comfortable" level
* putting as much resources as we can afford into lowering that "comfort" threshold, which would allow the country to relax the filter (economically speaking, the sweet spot would be where either lowering the threshold in order to relax the filter or tightening the filter to save on lowering the threshold would both raise their total expense)
* putting affordable resources toward naturalization, and treating naturalization as a process for raising the fitness of immigrants with native custom (similar sweet spot as above)
This argument seems like it should work just as well at the state level, county level, and city level. It would even work at the neighborhood level - say that no one is allowed to enter downtown Austin unless they can prove that they are aware of local customs and live by them.
There are in fact checks for invasive species at the border of some states (like California), and you can do these things without closing borders.
Yes, sometimes borders are enforced at sub- or supra-national levels. And sometimes the national level makes the most sense. It depends on the transaction costs involved.
One: what DoJ said. Two: I was interpreting "immigration control" as "any restriction whatsoever on open immigration", which totally includes filters that let immigrants who satisfy condition C pass inward with a hat tip and "enjoy your stay".
If we define immigration control as closing borders, then I suppose I could still see defending it, but in conditions I think we'd consider extreme, possibly Hollywood-level, "did a werewolf bite you"-level extreme. Which is to say, not likely. Is anyone here calling for a total moratorium on all immigrants?
If the idea is just that we should check whether people crossing certain lines are doing so for the purposes of violence, or trade in dangerous organisms/explosives/whatever, and let everyone through who isn't, I'd be totally on board with that. That's what I mean by "open borders".
What I object to is the current system where some people are denied passage just because of where they were born, and/or because they are traveling in hopes of getting a job.
I can see that, yeah. Ideally, I think that's what I would prefer.
I think that still leaves a gray area where we have some cohort of people applying, we have reason to believe some number of them are dangerous, but we have no way of knowing exactly who, and the most accurate test we have is "member of this cohort". So now we have to choose between risking some danger, or banning the whole cohort (and risking danger of a political stripe). Or perhaps rolling to disbelieve and claiming there's no such scenario because we can always produce a better test by spending X dollars to narrow the cohort size - but I think that still leaves us with a group of "might be dangerous" and we're going to feel bad if any of them turn out to be safe. What do you make of that?
I wonder (no I don't :)) why immigration opponents continue to discuss unrestricted immigration and not just a large increase in immigration of highly skilled/talented/educated people.
But why should we invite in highly skilled/talented/educated people? Our university system is quite capable of producing our own h-s/t/e's. The reason we've opened our borders to foreign highly h-s/t/e's is to lower the wages of America's h-s/t/e's. The H1-B visa system is designed to lock foreign workers into a form of peonage—their employer holds their visa contract, and they cannot move on to more lucrative job offers without another employer to sponsor them and a huge burden of paperwork. Thus wages of the educated middle class are kept down. Thank heavens there's a limit on how many are admitted each year!
I refer you to two excellent columns by Robert X. Cringely about the H1-B visa scam...
In case there was a doubt, I'm in favor of open immigration (Open need not mean unregulated. We could regulate the spread of disease. We could say that the migrant must obey the existing rules of destination place, etc.)
However you define "open", how about "open" immigration for countries that give us reciprocal "open" immigration rights? Fair is fair. AFAIK, most other countries are much more stringent about immigration than the US.
Are you kidding? Poorer countries are just as stringent or even more so than the US — that is unless you can bring several million dollars worth of currency to invest. It's almost impossible to get a *work* visa into India (yet India exports its workers to the US and UK). Thailand? You'd need to marry a Thai. As for wealthier countries like Canada and Australia, they want you to have a job waiting for you and to be young enough to pay into their welfare system (45 is the cutoff of Australia). There are a bunch of countries you can buy your way into. Some Caribbean countries will let you purchase citizenship for a $5-$10 million donation to their treasury.
Maybe I'm being too mathematical, but I'm used to thinking of "open" as letting anyone in who wants to. That means zero regulation. Otherwise, if regulations are permitted, then I could construct a scenario where I keep adding regulations until no one gets in, and yet we're still calling it "open".
What kinds of regulation are you still allowing in an "open immigration" scheme, in your sense?
If there was a pandemic which was spread by the movement of people then I think it would probably be justifiable as a public health measure.
If someone was using migration to avoid legitimate prosecution for crime, that might count as a reasonable regulation.
It might also be reasonable to say you have to come in through these places and register as a guest.
Kant, called the moral claim to seek refuge or respite in the lands of another, a “universal right of hospitality,” provided that the intentions of the foreigner upon arriving on foreign lands were peaceful. So requiring peaceful intent might be reasonable.
But none of these minor regulations affects affects what might be called "generally open". I'm not a libertarian nut.
The right of hospitality seems to be in line with effective altruism.
If the earth is for everyone then generally free movement seems to make sense.
Everything in physics can be thought of as a "useful abstraction". If you look at the standard model, you won't find any mention of atoms, fluids, para-magnetism, or anything like that. However, we study particular phenomena and models when they're experimentally or pedagogically useful. Atomic models help us understand chemistry, solar spectroscopy, virtually everything we associate with "matter."
States of matter are fundamental in a similar way. We have a good theories of phase transitions using thermodynamic variables. We can also have good phase transition models.
I'm not totally sure what the distinction you're drawing is, but the fact that I think we can be pretty confident that an alien species with a moderate level of scientific understanding would draw the lines in the same places makes me lean towards "fundamental constants".
Probably more useful than "states of matter" is the idea of a "phase transition". This is a more general concept than the physical world. You can find phase transitions in all sorts of abstract mathematical systems (as well as physical systems like harmonic resonators that might look very different from structured atoms/molecules). It turns out that for many substances there are multiple solid phases and multiple liquid phases that are also separated by phase transitions. I'm not sure whether that means that "solid" and "liquid" are somehow arbitrary divisions among these phases, but it at least means you need something more than just phases to separate them. ("Supercritical fluids" make a phase that is not clearly either liquid or gas, from what I understand.)
I'm no expert, but as I understand it, glasses and liquid crystals are phases in between solid and liquid, and the most interesting thing about supercritical fluids is that, though there's a phase transition between liquid and gas, there's no phase transition between liquid and supercritical, and no phase transition between supercritical and gas.
And viscoelastic behavior is found in both "liquids" and "solids", and it also kind of blurs the distinction between them.
So some phase transitions are more real than others.
There is indeed a phase transition between a supercritical fluid and the gas/liquid part of the phase diagram. It's called a "second order" phase transition, to distinguish it from the ordinary "first order" phase transitions, such as exist between a liquid and gas, or gas and solid. It is a phase transition between there being a (first order) phase transition and there not being one.
One way to understand it is that a first order phase transition happens when you have two (or more) local minima in your free energy functional, and which one is the lowest varies with temperature, pressure, et cetera. When you are at a temperature and pressure where which local minimum is the global minimum is switching, and momentarily two of them are both the global minimum, then you have a first order phase transition. As you pass through the phase transition conditions, the most stable state of the system hops from one minimum to the other.
By contrast, a second order phase transition is when, as you change temperature, pressure, et cetera, one free energy minimum splits into two, setting up the possibility of a first order phase transition.
Incidentally, one of the signatures of a phase transition is divergent susceptibilities, meaning the system no longer responds negatively to stresses -- Le Chatelier's Principle no longer holds. For example, in the case of the solid-liquid (first order) phase transition, the temperature does *not* respond to heating by rising (instead more of the solid phase melts). So for example it is in principle impossible to achieve thermal equilibrium between two thermodynamic (i.e. infinite) systems on their respective liquid-solid transition lines. No matter how much heat flows, the temperature will never equalize, because instead the hotter system just converts liquid to solid as it loses heat and the colder system just converts solid to liquid -- both without changing their temperature. The process only stops, and thermal equilibrium reached, if in fact the two systems are *not* infinite, and sooner or later one of them runs out of solid or liquid and moves off the solid-liquid phase transition line.
A similar effect happens at second order phase transitions. For example, at the critical point in fluid systems, the system stops responding with increased pressure to momentary decreases in volume, so you get in principle arbitrarily large density fluctuations in response to tiny perturbations from the environment. (The environment pushes a little bit, the system contracts but does *not* increase its resisting pressure, so the environment continues pushing...) These large density fluctuations are what gives fluids so-called "critical opalescence" near the critical point:
On a scale from "really really undeniably real" to "a useful fiction we use for classification" they're much closer to the really really real end of the spectrum.
I think a good measure of how "real" a classification system is is how often we run into edge cases that we have difficulty putting in one category or another. For instance, we never run into an atom that is ambiguously maybe-silicon maybe-phosphorus, whereas in biological taxonomy we have all sorts of examples where the idea of "species" breaks down a bit, and in classifying genres of music we find unclassifiable edge cases all the damn time. In thermodynamics we find that the distinction between liquid and gas ceases to exist at high pressures, but this doesn't change the fact that liquid and gas are two very different things, separated by a phase change, at lower pressure.
They are emergent properties of systems with many (in principle infinite) degrees of freedom, based on the properties of the forces of interaction between them. Id est, for any system made of identical particles which have some volume each particle excludes to the other, but no long-range interactions, you will always have at least one solid crystalline phase and a gaseous phase, with which is stable depending on the density, or more precisely on the ratio between the density and the inverse size of the excluded volume.
If you add in attractive forces with less than an infinite range, then you will normally also develop the possibility of a liquid phase, where which is stable depends on the ratio of the temperature and the characteristic energy of the attraction. (Although normally the distinction only exists for a certain range of densities, unlike the case for the solid-gas distinction.)
These are very general conclusions, and they don't really depend very much on the details of the interacting degrees of freedom. They can be atoms, of course, but also even macroscopic particles behave this way, and abstract models that have nothing to do with physical reality.
We would not really call them fundamental constants, however, because they are not manifest in the interaction of small numbers of degrees of freedom, e.g. one or two or even a few thousand particles. Strictly speaking, they only turn up without cavil in the thermodynamic limit, when there are an infinite number of degrees of freedom, so that's why I call them "emergent."
The phase of some atoms of some element are, according to this five minutes of wikipeida I just read, basically defined by the degree of connectivity between them. Solid is super connected, liquid is less connected, gas is barely connected, and plasma is basically the thing is exploding (so little connection that the nuclii are just flying around without electrons).
So in my estimation they are defined by that degree; and they are *not simply a useful taxonomy.
I'm an undergrad with an interest in biomedical research and doctoring. My current plan is to get an MD and aim for a physician-scientist type role, but combo MD/PhD programs through the MSTP look appealing. I'm told people do research with just an MD, but it's unclear to me how this works in practice. Getting a PhD seems riskier and less flexible in terms of job prospects, so I'm wary. If anyone has anecdotes, useful data, or just opinions on the comparative benefits/costs of MD/Ph.D./MD+PhD/some alternative I don't know about, I'd love to hear them (even if it's not directly related to medical science).
I don't know which program or program combo you should do, but I can tell you that there's *a lot* a person needs to understand about statistics and research design in order to do good research -- also in order to understand and judge the research that's already been done in his or her field of interest. A lot of MD's are really naive about research, and don't notice even ridiculously large flaws having to do with control groups, confounds, bad stats, etc.
If the thing you know for sure about your current situation is you want to get your MD, my advice would be first to focus on graduating then focus on the MD as a singular goal afterwards.
Thinking too far ahead can get you lost, and cause you to fail to pay attention to important aspects of your current and near-term education. When things are combined e.g. MD+PhD their boundaries and defining properties become unclear. Research is difficult and extremely time-consuming, and is best done with some career experience to filter it through. With these in mind I would put the PhD thing in a distant basket of "things you might like to think about in 5 years".
I'm a programmer, so no personal knowledge. But. The place where I work we have mostly MDs and a few MD+PhD. The MDs are primarily clinicians, but most of them publish here and there. The MD+PhDs are mostly researchers, but have a few patients and do a day or two of clinic work each week. So, it looks to me like both can work, but if you want research to be your main thing, you're better bet is going for the MD+PhD. YMMV, of course.
Current PhD student here who knows a few MD/PhDs. If you want to be a doctor, get an MD. If you want to only do basic science research, get a PhD. If you want to see patients and develop therapies, run clinical trials, or work on much more translational resesarch, an MD/PhD is a good choice. The programs are extremely competitive, so make sure you read up heavily on what you can do to maximize your success as an applicant. Also, MD/PhD students are typically expected to finish their PhDs in 4 years, maybe 5, so if you have a long and ambitious project you want to do, that might be tougher. You can definitely do research with just an MD -- it's probably much harder to get grants for basic science research, but if you collaborate with bio-focused labs, grants will be easier to come by. Becoming a doctor requires a lot of poorly paid, grueling work, over many years, so you really have to commit to the long run, especially if you're doing a PhD in the middle of your MD. Look specifically for MSTP programs -- they are the most prestigious and typically provide the best funding packages.
What do you think? Both, will the market cash out on its three year time frame, and what do you think is the case about the subject personally. Please do read at least one article in the series before commenting if you haven’t read it yet.
The modern obesity crisis in the US started in the 01970s, which is after the end of the biggest pollution problems in the US. So it's probably not contamination overall, but it might be some particular contaminant that started showing up around that point.
The breakfast burrito was invented in 1975, just saying.
Not the breakfast burrito specifically, but the culture of gluttony that made "breakfast burrito" seem like a reasonable thing to eat may have really taken off in the 1970s.
Another interesting historical note is that the Big Mac is from 1968. The interesting thing about the Big Mac is that it now seems tiny compared to any of the burgers from your local yuppie burger place.
I mean, a breakfast burrito is basically components of the classic english breakfast wrapped up in a tortilla shell.
If you replace tortilla shell with bread and butter or toast and add some pudding, you're no different than long preexisting breakfasts. I doubt this transition is meaningful. (It's also basically equivalent to the Cornish pasty/meat pies favored as working lunches through the industrial revolution; wrap protein, tons of fat, and some carbs in a dough package for easy containment and eating at mine/factory-worker lunch-times.)
Even if contaminants cause obesity it seems very unlikely consensus will move from where it is now to "SMTM was right". If the theory is true then experts have spent somewhere between decades and a century not noticing, what's supposed to change in another three years?
It's a really short timeline to be sure, but as it's a startup I'm not really sure how long Manifold Markets will be around so I wanted to see movement on a time horizon I'm fairly confident the site will still exist within.
What changes: scientists read SMTM and decide to investigate. Most are turned down for funding, but a few get funding and do a positive study, which is eventually published, creating momentum for more investigation.
2025 is way too soon for something like that - without sudden overwhelming evidence being discovered, paradigm shifts like that take a long time. 2035 or 2045 might be more reasonable end dates for when the idea might catch on (assuming it's true). Even then 2035 is pushing it.
Yeah I agree. Did 3 years just b/c I'm not sure how long a startup will be around and I'm not sure how much appetite there is for really long term bets. More interested in seeing movement than in the absolute value.
For the first time since the pandemic began, my significant other recently went out of town without me. It was only for a week, but I was essentially alone the whole time -- I saw a friend for a few hours one day, and had a few Zoom meetings here and there, but was just mostly alone. It felt pretty psychologically intense, even with the awareness that it was just for a week and things are open now and I was lucky to have had someone for the actual lockdowns etc.
Did anyone spend most of the pandemic like this? Hope you’re all doing OK.
"Did anyone spend most of the pandemic like this? Hope you’re all doing OK."
Yes, practically my entire life? I've been working from home the past two years and loving it. I don't like people, I don't like going outside my front door and having to interact with people, and I don't have significant others. So I spend my time alone and I don't miss human interaction (it does make me laugh to see people writing earnest plaints about 'touch starvation' but you do you, normal rest of the human race).
If I believed in reincarnation, I might think in a previous life I was one of the desert hermits who lived in a cave and was fed by ravens and never saw another human being for thirty years.
Speaking of being a desert hermit, I see you as a Pugio from the second to last story in the Glassbeadgame. (I imagine if I went to confession to you, you'd punch me).
I just had a lengthy discussion with a South Asian woman named Maya about “The Indian Story” in the GBG, and it’s depiction of maya. I think it’s the last of the ‘posthumous’ stories after the death of the protagonist.
I'm not terribly social myself, and sometimes think it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we all died off and left the planet to the armadillos et al., who seem to be better at enjoying life than we are. Do you warm up to animals? If so, wishing you lots of amusement and companionable hanging out with members of other and possibly better species.
There should be a "pod" system where multiple households having at most 4-5 people can hang out together during a pandemic. The group of 5 needs to be semi-fixed over a period of time, to reduce cross-contamination.
That's way too difficult to organize in an official manner - is the government going to assign you to a pod, or at least track which pod you join and make sure nobody gets left out - and of course it was Absolutely Imperative that we have a legible, government-mandated system for dealing with COVID.
"Your pod is your household", is simple and legible, so that's what we got.
We had this system in the UK - people living alone could "bubble" with one other household (of any size), and mutually visit each other.
Obviously the Government couldn't enforce it, but generally the UK public followed Covid rules because we wanted to, rather than because we were forced.
When my health became worse and I stopped going into university, I became pretty depressed, despite living with my parents an seeing friends on the weekends. When the pandemic put a halt to the weekend in-person socialisation, that intensified enormously. interaction with other human beings is hugely important! when I got a girlfriend, and then she moved in with me before another lockdown hit, it was a lot less bad, but I do still notice that I'm more lethargic when I haven't gone to in person social events for a couple of weeks
POLITICS THREADS ARE DEAD! LONG LIVE POLITICS THREADS!
In honor of the new regime:
As a leftoid, I have to accept that my comrades are gonna do some cringe shit, and just role with it. I feel that most people further left than the Dems have just decided that we have to tolerate some stuff we don't like, up to a point. (Asadists and such can fuck right off). This is easy because it rarely actually gets codified into law.
This is not the case on the right.
I've always wondered to what extent people to the right of me own their alignments dumb shit; eg. the "Don't say gay" bill and the Texas abortion bounties.
Do you guys actually want those things, but dislike the bills themselves? Is there internal shit flinging I don't see about it? Do ya'll feel embarrassed about it, or just roll with it?
Basically, how do people in the right think about the above things?
I'm not a right winger. But the idea that crazy leftist ideas don't get put into practice doesn't appear to square with reality. There's plenty of weird leftist legal stuff happening in deep blue territory.
As for the two bills, the standard lines I've heard are (respectively) that they really do want to ban abortion and that speech codes are necessary because teachers are not sufficiently respectful of parent's wishes with their children. They don't seem embarrassed by it and generally react to the idea that they should be as if it's just liberal propagandists who are lying about what the bills actually say. Sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
Speaking of leftoid cringe shit, congratulations on the "don't say gay" thing. You guys managed to get a catchy if false description of what is in that bill into the media, and now everyone thinks "oh my, the wicked and backwards Florida legislature is forbidding schools from even mentioning gay people exist".
Whereas the text of the Parental Rights in Education Bill covers a lot more than that:
(g) The right to consent in writing before a biometric scan of his or her minor child is made, shared, or stored.
(h) The right to consent in writing before any record of his or her minor child's blood or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is created, stored, or shared, except as required by general law or authorized pursuant to a court order.
I don't know about you, but if schools were taking blood samples from my child, I certainly would want to know all about that. But things like this are not what we're hearing about. I would have been more sympathetic to the protests about gayness, save that the teachers talking about "this bill will prevent me from discussing things with my students" seem *awfully* keen, from the interviews they're giving, to discuss intimate details of their personal lives with the children they're teaching.
>I don't know about you, but if schools were taking blood samples from my child, I certainly would want to know all about that. But things like this are not what we're hearing about.
I agree with you, but was that a real issue or something stuck in the bill because it would be villainous to be against that point? I don't know the answer, but it seems like one of those land-mines politicians insert into bills so they can later say "(So and so) was in favor of schools taking children's blood from them without their parents' consent!" when in fact so and so voted against the bill for other reasons.
This is basically just the inverse of a wrecking amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_amendment). Instead of sticking an unquestionably terrible provision in an otherwise popular bill to prevent it from being passed, they're sticking an unquestionably good provision - preventing schools from taking blood/DNA samples or biometric scans of students without their parents' knowledge or permission, which is something that *virtually everyone supports* - in an otherwise terrible bill.
There are already laws that prevent teachers from talking to students about their sex lives in explicit detail. We don't need to make it doubly illegal, especially when it's being done in such a hamfisted way. The law as written completely prohibits teachers from even acknowledging the existence of queer people, and prevents discussion of a wide range of topics that I would consider perfectly appropriate for a classroom.
And while some conservatives try to argue that it only prevents those topics from being discussed in kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms, the actual wording of the law prevents LGBT issues from being discussed “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” The definition of "age appropriate" and "developmentally appropriate" is intentionally left vague, and I could easily imagine angry parents and local courts deciding that any mention of any LGBT-related issue in any classroom isn't "developmentally appropriate," even if it's a 12th grade classroom full of students in their late teens.
The issue here is that the bill allows parents to bring a lawsuit for whatever the fuck reason they want; with all legal fees covered by the school district.
Eg, I am uncomfortable with teachers inserting their GENDER IDIOLOGY by using any pronouns whatsoever. I sue. I lose, because that's fucking stupid. The school still pays all the legal fees.
Hopefully it gets struck down, because that shit seems like a dumb armsrace to get into.
This is the group led by a parent who pushed for, and got the controversial policy about transgender students in schools adopted. And then on the heels of that we got the genderfluid student committing two separate sexual assaults.
They're very anxious about precisely what a teacher says during class time:
And Mx. Cris Candice Tuck is the sometimes I'm a mom, sometimes I'm a dad parent who rode the Loudoun County school board until they adopted policy 8040:
If that were the case, I wouldn't be that strongly opposed, but I would still think it was redundant since Florida already has a law prohibiting sexual content from being taught to students in or before fifth grade. Again, I think laws that effectively try to make already illegal things "doubly illegal" tend to be useless at best and cause quite a great deal of harm at worst.
The reason for the level of objection is because people don't believe that the bill was written in good faith. From their point of view, it wasn't written in such vague language simply because the legislators who drafted it were lazy or sloppy or dumb, nor because (as you suggested earlier) most legislation is written in relatively vague terms as a matter of course. Instead, they believe that it was purposefully designed to be vague in order to deliberately allow for potential abuses.
Does it deserve more media coverage than the War on Ukraine or the Uyghur Genocide in China, even assuming that the accusations of it being written in bad faith are true? No, but neither does most of what gets attention from American news outlets, whether left, right, or center.
The "kindergarten through grade 3" language is not in the bill; you can read it in Deiseach's link above. On the bottom of page 6 there's a provision that basically says any state employee that urges kids to keep secrets from their parents "may be subject to disciplinary action". The only places this draft mentions sexuality are on page 9, which gives parents the right to opt out of sex ed, and on page 8, which calls for school districts to develop procedures to opt their children out, and to keep parents informed about what is going on at school. I find all these provisions to be perfectly reasonable. The teachers are not being banned or even threatened with punishment for discussing sexuality or anything else in the classroom, they are merely required to keep parents and give them an avenue to remove their child if they do not approve of what is being discussed in class.
Thank you for the correction, here is the relevant paragraph:
"3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
I agree "age appropriate" is vague language, but you see, my problem is when I see all the media stories and the teachers and others complaining that this means they can't discuss every single detail of their personal lives with their class of five year olds does make me raise an eyebrow.
Do teachers share this level of personal detail with their classes today? Not in my day, but that was back with the dinosaurs. If he's that worried, just say "I went paddleboarding this weekend" or "I went paddleboarding with my friend". If he is complaining that he has to hide who he is, then talk to the school board about it. I have to admit, I'm cynical that a kindergarten class is independently raising questions and wanting to discuss his personal life with him, and that he's not the one introducing it. The complaint is "I can't say I have a partner or explain what 'partner' means" but the level of exaggeration ("I'm AFRAID") does make it sound like there is rather more detail involved that he wants to provide than simply " what partner means is..."
If he's spending more time in the classroom nattering about what he did on the weekend and where he and his boyfriend went shopping and showing them photos of "that's me and my partner paddleboarding" than teaching the kids to read and write, I think parents do have a right to say "shut up and do your job".
a) yes, teachers do share a lot about their personal lives in modern k12, in high school every first day of class with a new teacher involved a lengthy slideshow about them and their family and interests. Not all teachers were as in depth but I heard about the entire extended family of a few, grandparents and step siblings and so on. I did go to small, slightly woo schools, but it’s not rare.
b) if his fear is that he won’t be legally allowed to say he has a boyfriend or his partner is a man, I’m not sure why you bring up the school board?
c) the idea that teachers shouldn’t be wasting time talking about personal lives is a different than the idea that gay/bi/trans teachers, specifically, can’t. The fear (which I think is honestly felt) is that it’ll reinforce the idea of lgbtiaansjskd+ as inappropriate or obscene. Considering the culture at large and existence of the internet, I think these fears are overblown, but I can understand the concern. I think if there was a bit about teachers being allowed to be “out” to their students for clarity there would be way less handwringing.
I support bans on exposing children to sexual content (which, again, were already on place long before this particular law was passed). I'd even be fine with some fairly strict restrictions on that front, as long as they were applied to heterosexual and homosexual content evenly. I just want some consistency.
Children should not be taught about the mechanics of gay sexual acts (or straight sexual acts) in explicit detail, I think we can all agree on that. But there's plenty of hetero romantic content that kids are already exposed to all the time: hand holding, kissing, public displays of affection. My problem is that the same things which are seen as completely innocuous when done by straight couples are suddenly viewed as inappropriate, explicit, and socially disruptive when done by queer people. I remember straight male teachers in grade school showing us pictures of their girlfriends, straight women talking about how excited they were to be getting married soon, teachers with their significant others at official school dances. Yet if a gay man showed students a picture of him with this boyfriend, or a lesbian talked about how excited she was to marry her soon-to-be wife, there would no doubt be outraged conservative parents shouting about how their children were being "indoctrinated" or even groomed. That's what I'm pushing back against.
In that regard, this isn't even a phenomenon exclusive to schools. I've heard no shortage of social conservatives and alt-lite internet pundits talk about how they don't have a problem with gay people existing, they just don't want homosexuality being "shoved in their faces." And to the extent that they're upset about mostly-naked people in leather bondage gear marching in public Pride parades, I can sympathize. But more often than not, they're upset about something that would be totally uncontroversial if it happened with a straight couple: two female characters kissing on a TV show, two men holding hands in the park, or even just someone mentioning their same-sex partner at the office. So when they say they don't have a problem with queer people, what it really means is that they don't have a problem as long as queer people stay in the closet and the rest of society can continue to pretend that homosexuality and transsexuality don't exist. And that double standard gets kicked into overdrive whenever children are involved.
My littlest kid is in preschool. His teacher just left for the rest of the year because she had a baby. This was discussed over the course of the last several weeks so the kids in the class would know it was coming. Had the preschool teacher been a guy, he could have explained that his wife was about to have a baby and that he would be leaving for the rest of the year to help with the new baby.
What if the teacher had been a lesbian, and her wife was having a baby? Could she have prepped her kids that she was going to be gone because she was having a baby? What if one of the kids asked why they couldn't see her tummy getting bigger? Or asked about her husband? What is she supposed to say? Does she just not say anything and then one day she disappears and there's a sub for the rest of the year? I wouldn't consider the kids to be well served in that case. My kid would have been really upset if Mrs. D had just disappeared, but because he understood what was happening he was excited for her and made the transition easily.
I think this shit is mean, and I think that's the point.
That's the scaremongering, and *that's* the point.
Is it really going to happen that is Ms. Smith who is a married lesbian takes time off when her wife is pregnant, and she can't say a word in class, and if she does UNSPECIFIED BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN?
I don't think there's a problem with Ms. Smith saying she'll be gone and a new teacher will be here, and she is taking time off for a new baby, and no she isn't having the baby, her wife is. The class may ask "Wow, can girls get married?" and she can say "yes".
I don't see a problem. Some parents may disapprove, and that's something for them to discuss with their kids at home.
The problem is (a) what is age-appropriate? and (b) does it arise organically or do you have the rainbow-flag wavers who want to jump at any chance to tell small kids way more than they need to know (do five year olds need to know about "non-binary, ace, bi, and pan" as in the Blue's Clues videos? I don't think so, but even if they do, there's a difference between natural questions arising and Teacher Raine Bowe bustling in to give loads of details about "sexual attraction is this for them and that for those and does anyone want to talk about masturbation?")
While I think this news story is overwrought (the lectures happened at a summer camp, so kids were attending voluntarily and they seem to be older teenagers), I also think that going on Twitter talking about how your nephews started masturbating as soon as they could talk and this is why you are really excited to tell small kids it's okay to masturbate is *not* helping your cause:
>I don't see a problem. Some parents may disapprove, and that's something for them to discuss with their kids at home.
I don't either. But this is happening in the classroom. Is it instruction? Why not? It's coming from the instructor and it's discussing sexual norms (or at least family formation norms).
>and if she does UNSPECIFIED BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN?
They're clearly specified. The parents raise a complaint with her boss, who has seven days to get back with them. If they don't like what they hear, they get on at the next school board meeting and raise it there. If they still don't like what they hear, the request a special magistrate, which they get, at district expense. And if they *still* don't like what they hear, they can sue. (The lawsuit is on their dime unless they win, near as I can tell.)
All of which would be stressful as hell as a parent-to-be wondering why you didn't just keep your damn mouth shut. Or, you know, Don't Say Gay.
It's not scaremongering. It's the point of the damn bill.
No one is arguing for discussing masturbation with 1st graders. *That's* scaremongering.
A child who hasn't yet experienced puberty does not need to be educamated on 'choosing a gender', as some are suggesting. The smartest school districts do not teach 'sex education'.
The fact that you use the term 'don't say gay bill' tells me that you get your news only from one perspective. When you do that it is very difficult to understand the people that you imagine are your political opponents. My advice would be for you to aquire a wider range of information sources.
Sooo....I have thought about those bills, and have decided that given the pros and cons, I am ok with making it a law that it's not okay to abort a child just because the mother has accused the father of rape.
I also note that it is far, far less likely that a woman seeks an abortion due to rape (a very very fringe case) than it is that a woman seeks an abortion without discussing with the father the fate of his child.
It occurs to me (as someone who made several comments in the abortion subthread a few OTs ago) that there's a "bad cases make for bad law" factor to consider here. As in: how many women are accusing the father of rape in order to get that abortion? Maybe that's seldom enough that we can investigate them as criminal fraud(?) rather than go for a law that blanket-bans all abortions justified solely on rape. But I honestly don't know either way.
It also bothers me on Goodhart levels. Suppose the law permits terminating any pregnancy caused by rape. The catch is that the rape gets reported. The consequence is that a state gets a surge in rape reports, to the point that the men get a huge negative reputation (1 in 4 are rapists! etc.), that turn out to only be because there's a lot of women who saw "report rape, get easy abortion" as the easiest way out of a difficult situation. Esp. if the rape accusation doesn't require an actual conviction; just a report from the woman. Whatever the case, we'd end up looking at rape crimes differently.
I would care a lot more about this if the Left didn't use a small number of cases every year to justify further disarming 100 million legal gun owners in the country. Until they stop that, sauce, goose, gander, etc.
I agree about the risks & bad side effects of a rape exception for elective abortion. (I don't include reputation risks for men as a whole, but then I might run with a different set of guys.)
'Bad cases' - yeah, it's pretty much a given, I think, that abortion related cases are difficult. The conflict comes from making choices that many people find hard and life altering. Which is where we need the law to be a guard rail - "yes, this will change your life and you don't want this outcome. But the right option is this, and that other option is off the table." The law has this effect for many things - financial ruin, theft, assault, inheritance.
Ooh, ooh, ooh! Can we talk about retrospective accusations of lack of consent in demi-sexual encounters? Because I would be *very* fucking interested in ripping your face off when it comes to "I was pressured into activity I did not want" when it comes to little misses in college being talked into it by their activist friends that the making-out they did with a boy was, in fact, a form of rape.
Given that it happened to one of my nephews, who was accused of this, and then tried walking into the sea to commit suicide, he was so upset about the accusation and the potential effects it could have on him; this nephew has been very sensitive, withdrawn, and anxious since he was a toddler and he emphatically is *not* the kind to force himself on an unwilling partner. Thank Christ he had good friends who were worried about him, tracked him down, and stopped him in time. Meanwhile, I have no idea what happened the little bitch but I'm sure she continued to wallow in her trendy, imported from the USA college activism, victimhood. I heard nothing at all about any consequences for *her* of such accusations.
So let's talk about consent and accusations of rape, shall we? Or maybe if you shut your yap about 'gotchas', I'll do the same for you.
Because the, by using specific examples, the original comment came off as poorly-veiled, low-effort swipe on these specific examples instead of as a sincere desire to hear a different perspective. Whether or not the OP really was sincere, the responses here are not surprising.
Imagine the middle-school bully saying "I'm sorry for how I've treated you in the past. I really want to get to know you and understand your perspective. What's it like being the kind of person who would wear that ugly outfit in public?"
As someone who thinks politics is turd, and who isn't particularly rooting for either side in the matters being debated here, I think I'm reasonably well qualified to give a fair-minded reading of what OP's intent was in referring to "the "Don't say gay" bill and the Texas abortion bounties" as examples of "dumb shit" that some on the right are into. I think OP genuinely believed that the Florida bill and the Texas abortion law (or whatever it is) are things that most people on the right consider cringy — consider nonsense that a few fringe elements of the right support. I do not think OP was taking a swipe at the right by mentioning the Florida & Texas whatevers.
Apparently OP was wrong in how the Florida & Texas whatevers are viewed by the right. That is not proof that OP sucks ass. It is just evidence that it is hard for people to understand each other.
Presumably there do exist some ideas promoted by some on the right that the majority of those on the right *do* think are cringy and absurd. What the fuck are they? Get a couple of them out on the table, then it will be possible to discuss the question OP asked, which was kind of an interesting one I thought: How do the 2 tribes deal with their crazy fringe elements?
The specific examples were a bit like "If I admit that the very very very fringemost people on my side are wrong, will you also admit that these mainstream positions held by your side are wrong?"
Because invoking "it's a rapist's charter" is not an appeal to emotion?
If your side is going to play that card, I'm going to say the liberal-progressive side is touting for a murderer's charter, because I think driving someone to attempting or commiting suicide is murder.
As to the proportion of abortions carried out because of rape/incest, it is hard to quantify. The Guttmacher Institute carried out a survery in 2014 and they did include some questions about "were you coerced into sex":
Has the man with whom you got pregnant
ever hit, slapped, kicked, or otherwise
physically hurt you?
-1 Yes -2 No
38. Has he ever forced you to do anything
sexual when you didn’t want to?
-1 Yes -2 No
39. Is this pregnancy the result of a man
forcing you to have sex when you didn’t
want to have sex?
-1 Yes
-2 No
-3 Don’t know
Their conclusions are that most abortions are down to poverty.
16 states require providers to give some information about the patient's reason for seeking the procedure.
10 states ask whether the abortion was performed because of a threat to the patient's health or life.
7 states ask whether the abortion was performed because of rape or incest.
15 states ask whether the abortion was performed because of a diagnosed fetal abnormality.
9 states ask whether the abortion was performed for other reasons (e.g. the patient's economic or familial circumstances).
But yes, indeed, a rapist will use the proposed bills to make money off his victim. That's the major problem there.
Tell you what, I'll make you a deal; legal abortion for rape/incest, no legal abortion otherwise.
There's an estimation of 5% pregnancies by rape and 1% abortion for rape. Let's give in on 5% abortions for rape. That means 95% of abortions will no longer be legal. Happy with that? Because we know the abortion rights lobby is all about rape/incest and no other reason, right?
Preface: I'm generally anti-abortion, and I understand that the person you're replying to was needlessly unreasonable and disrespectful of his fellow commenters.
I agree I was mean in my response. But you don't get to use the most offensive example you can think of (rapists or their rapey families suing the saintly doctor who provided an abortion for the poor, poor woman who got raped) and then turn around when reminded that abortion for rape is a tiny number and cry about being insulted.
Too heated for this site, though. Culture War is a terrible fit for here. I will cool down and step back.
That Florida bill is for show. The particular kind of child abuse they're talking about is certainly egregious, and should be vigorously prosecuted. When individuals reach their majority, the decision (and consequences) are theirs, not their deranged parents'. Arizona's governor got it right.
This seems like outgroup homogeneity bias. People always see the idiots on their own side as an irrelevant bunch of kooks, while the idiots on the _other_ side seem like the core of the movement.
As for the Texas abortion bill, it seems like a clever hack. I don't think it's anyone's idea of what an ideal set of abortion legislation would look like, but for people who are interested in that sort of thing it may be the best that can be done until Roe vs Wade gets overturned. (For the record I'm personally pro-abortion but anti-Roe)
Yes, I think it's both safe and fair to say that there is a bunch of stupid crap on every side of every political divide, left right up down centre across and back in again.
I mean, if it ends up working, then we'll have broader problems because 'sure it's a right, but any private citizen can sue you if you exercise it' will not stay limited to abortion.
It's only a problem if juries routinely return 'guilty' verdicts when those suits are filed. And if *that* happens -- what does that tell you about the general public support for the right?
It's sort of discouraging that people seem to think that will be the outcome in Texas. It's basically admitting that you think the right is in fact deeply and broadly unpopular, and if put to the kind of acid test that a jury trial ends up being, with highly specific facts about a particular person and incident under scrutiny, then 12 random citizens will almost always vote it down. Is that really what pro-abortion people generally believe?
I would guess that if Texas implemented a similar law allowing one citizen to sue another for owning a gun, or not having it properly licensed, et cetera, then Texas gun owners would laugh and say "good luck with that," expecting Texas juries to routinely return 'not guilty' verdicts to such lawsuits, and maybe even awarding fees and costs to the defendant to discourage them.
The process is the punishment - if every suit goes to an actual jury, then they'll be very costly even if you win your defence. Only if courts routinely throw out the cases is that not true
Up to a point, sure. But the process is expensive for plaintiffs, too. It costs money and time to file the lawsuit in the first place. To do it with any hope of success you need to get yourself a lawyer to draft the complaint and represent you in pre-trial motions, and a lawyer will generally charge you a $20,000 retainer up front for a case you want to take to trial, if he doesn't think the case has such an outstanding chance of success (with a giant payout) that he's willing to risk taking it on a contingency basis.
In practice, the chilling effect of the prospect of lawsuits only works for big faceless corporations with deep pockets facing lawsuits from highly sympathetic plaintiffs, little old ladies and single mothers and such. In principle the fact that my neighbor could sue me for any number of frivolous reasons -- "Dude! Your stupid tree dropped leaves all over my driveway and I slipped on one and broke an ankle! Incoming lawsuit! -- doesn't have any serious effect on ordinary life, because few individuals have the time and money to be randomly indulging their vengeful impulses.
I think the fear occasioned by the Texas law is different, and probably quite reasonable, because, first, the defendants *are* going to be big faceless organizations with deep pockets, e.g. Planned Parenthood, annual revenue ~$1 billion -- there are no folksy mom-n-pop abortion clinics -- and the potential plaintiffs *are* going to be sympathetic little folks, e.g. some single-mother Hispanic dying of cancer outraged that PP aborted the only grandchild she might ever hold, when her 16-year-old got knocked up (and the 16-year-old is now filled with remorse and regrets it, says she was pressured into it by the counselor). It's not hard to see a Texas jury handing over a few $million in a case like that -- and *only* cases like that would be brought by lawyer sharks looking for a payout, as they always are.
But the fact remains that *if* Texas juries were of the general opinion that a woman had the right to cut a baby out of her womb any time, for any reason, full stop, then after the first half-dozen verdicts for the defendants lawyers would stop taking the cases without chunky retainers, and the whole thing would peter out. So the ultimate decision point is: what do Texans who sit on juries think, by and large?
1) Jury nullification is much more effective than it is.
2) That juries are some sort of random selection representative of the state as a whole (how confident is your not-hypothetical in california gun-owner? Or for that matter one who brought their gun with them to Austin?)
3) That the target is only very rarely the extremely sympathetic gun owner/abortion receiver. The way the law is written is to target basically anyone involved. You think you can't find a Jury in Austin to fine Glock?
4) Rights are expressly not supposed to be subject to this sort of community standard. If they were, then free speech would be far narrower than it is (hello compulsory pledge of allegiance and flag burning bar), rights of assembly likewise (goodbye any protest not popular in the area it's occurring).
5) Rights are supposed to be rights even if the exerciser is unsympathetic.
6) Oh, and if you win, you get your attorney fees paid by the other side, but only if you're the plaintiff. So, your whole 'won't be worth it to sue' is simply false.
2) Er...that's why they pick juries by random selection from the voter rolls. They're pretty much ipso facto representative of the county. You can argue some counties will be more sympathetic to the plaintiff, and some to the defendant, so there will be some lumpiness in the results, but the essential question is, across the entire state, of which type of county do you have more? If the answer is "those that would strongly support the defendant you betcha!" then it seems dubious to me the law would've passed in the first place. It seems likely Texas lawmakers know their consituents.
3) It will *always* be a sympathetic plaintiff and an unsympathetic defendant. That's how tort law generally works, no lawyer with a brain files any other type of lawsuit. The question is -- how many of each are there? Yes, you could certainly get one (1) Austin jury to award $1 million out of Glock's pockets. Good luck duplicating that dozens of times across the entire state, in which case Glock just regards this as a cost of doing business, like a random occasional state license fee. If Planned Parenthood can have the same level of success, they have nothing to fear from this law.
4) Sure, but I don't agree abortion is a constitutional right. Feel free to point me to the plain text in the US or Texas Constitutions that says otherwise, or some long English common law tradition that supports it as a natural right. In my opinion Harry Blackmun basically just pulled a right to abortion out of his ass because it suited the political climate of 1973, so I am completely unimpressed with any argument that says it enjoys a status superior to the will of the majority. Speaking strictly as to its legal merits, this is one of the dumbest and least justified decisions by the Supreme Court ever, ranking right up there with Dred Scott and Plessy.
That doesn't mean I would support criminalizing abortion, mind you. It just means I think the question belongs squarely within the purview of the majority to decide.
2) Yes, that's why I expressly reference state vs. smaller areas. The point is that you can forum shop fairly easily with any large organization.
3) Yes? But the point is, they don't have to sue the woman who's had her rapist's fetus aborted, they can just make it so she can't do that, by suing every provider out of existence.
4) Except it currently is a constitutional right! This is a standard is-ought problem. Which is the point. If you want to argue that it shouldn't be, go right ahead, but so long as it remains a constitutional right, this sort of structure is wildly dangerous.
You wouldn't consider it a problem to have to defend against a lawsuit if that lawsuit ultimately failed? I envy the amount of free time you have, and spare cash for lawyers, and calm confidence that the legal system always produces the right outcome.
I certainly would consider it a problem personally. That's why I wouldn't make a career of providing abortions. For that matter, it's also why I wouldn't ever be an obstetrician, since they get sued even more often and have to fork out enormous insurance premiums.
But that has nothing to do with what I said. I said it wouldn't be a problem socially, meaning this model isn't going to change the general nature of the social contract. There's nothing new here, it's just yet one more way of having the majority decide the issue.
And I also said it sounds like the people who are pissed about it are pissed exactly *because* they think the majority is going to weigh in here, and decide agaisnt them. That's pretty bad optics. It's basically admitting that what you want is to impose your minority viewpoint on the whole state. You'd better have a damn good reason for that -- something a lot more persuasive than "gosh this is sure inconvenient for my happy swinging free sex youthful libertine lifestyle, or for my ability to persuade the hot girl in calculus class that saving herself for marriage is silly."
There are many implementations of majority rule. In the extreme case, 51% of the population can legitimately decide to execute the remaining 49% for violating community standards. The only question is practicality - is the minority capable of successful resistance.
Obviously that's a thought experiment/straw man/bailey. But let's say that 51% of the population demand that all pregnancies end in birth. Miscarriages don't exist; if the baby isn't born alive, it's someone's fault. Babies are never conceived by rape ; either rape never occurs (only false accusation of rape), or consent is required for impregnation to occur. They know this to be true, having been assured it by their religious and political leaders.
That's OK, by your definition of majority rule. We'll bury some of the mothers, jail or bankrupt anyone who experiences a spontaneous miscarriage, and pile up the babies at the local garbage dump for would be adoptive parents to collect. Community values win.
At what point is it not OK? Suppose 51% of the population considers Christianity to be a pernicious religion, and decides to ban it? Same law, except the offense I can sue my neighbour for is attempting to inculcate false/pernicious beliefs.
Suppose only 49% of the local population believes that abortion and/or Christianity is despicable and worthy of punishment, but they are very loud and enthusiastic. Well funded, too, since neighbouring areas and/or very rich people predominantly agree with them?
How about 30%? 10%?
I'm looking for the motte here. But not just in terms of numbers.
What rules are trivial enough/harmless enough that it's OK to impose them based on the wishes of 51% of the population? Or 51% of the voting population? Or 51% of those elected by 51% of the voting population?
The US explicitly exempts religion from things that can be imposed by 51%. Except when it comes in by the back door, as "morality" or abortion. I think we should either enforce the religion ban more scrupulously, possibly reducing division, or get rid of it entirely, and start discussing banning everyone's favorite justification for violence, child abuse, slavery, and similar.
The US Constitution (not to mention many State constitutions) explicitly protect gun ownership. Abortion protections have been incoherently manufactured.
Also, the US Congress passed the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to specifically address people filing nuisance lawsuits against people in the gun business. Yet they still get filed and have enough of an impact to generated multi-million-dollar settlements to this day.
Yes? Anyone you know have a real problem getting a gun? Nobody I know does, and I live in the most absurdly anti-gun state in the Union. There is no guarantee in this vale o' tears that those things to which you have a right will not only be possible but easy, free from nuisance and friction from the fact that 300 million other people occupy this polity with you.
I get classified as right-leaning (and occasionally right of Genghis Khan) but I think of it more as "people who are classified right agree with me on a lot of these" rather than "I agree with the right leaning people." (FWIW)
In the steelman/most charitable read that I can do of your hypothesis, "cringe", "dumb shit" and even "rarely" are doing a great deal of work here. I think that you just *don't get* how incredibly bone-headed, offensive, and just plain dumb a lot of left-sourced ideas and policies are. Or - more likely - you don't see how bone-headed, offensive, and 'cringe' they seem to me (and other people on the right.)
It might be helpful to think of not just one Overton window, but multiple ones - and two distinct ones for the two political camps/tribes. Stuff like pronouns, dyed hair, land acknowledgements, celebration of overt homosexual activity - all eye-roll/retch inducing at best to one side. Flag waving, tractors, military groupie ism, and "My Town" (Montgomery Gentry) probably have the same effect.
As for stuff that the left does politically that gets my goat -
- to be clear, on my best days, this is just a difference in values, I oppose these things but understand the give and take of a democracy, you win some, you lose some. It's only on my worst days that I remember that in American politics, there is the stupid party and then there is the evil party and I'm on the dumb side of the river -
- Attempting to legalize abortion up to the day of birth. Defund the police. Pigford 'reparations'. "You didn't build that". BLM sit-ins & kneel-ins at Congress. John Lewis's funeral. California regulations on gasoline, agriculture, carcinogen labeling, firearms...wait, better make that 'California regulations' period. Cargo planes full of cash to the Iranians. "Undocumented aliens" & the whole 'kids in cages' smear campaign.
I could go on, but please don't tempt me to do so. I would rather talk about why I don't find banning elective abortions cringe and why I am deeply troubled by the indoctrination I see going on with my neices in public schools - or, frankly, I'd rather hear you talk about - as a quasi rationalist - why you support any of the problematic positions I listed above. Perhaps - if we try - we could bring more light than heat to the various issues.
"Attempting to legalize abortion up to the day of birth."
I don't support this. Most left-liberals I know don't support this. (In fact, the only person I know who *does* support it is a New Atheist right-libertarian.) It's not actually legal anywhere in the country, and there has been very little push to make it legal.
"You didn't build that."
I literally don't know what this is even referring to.
"John Lewis's funeral."
Again, I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What was wrong with Lewis's funeral? It was a bipartisan event where a Republican ex-President was among the distinguished speakers.
"Cargo planes full of cash to the Iranians."
I don't know what you're referencing here either. At present, the U.S. only gives $917,676 per year in foreign aid to Iran, which is far less than we give to most other developing countries (for contrast, we give over $1 BILLION per year to Iraq). If you're referring to some other, illicit situation happening in secret, then consider me doubtful; that sounds like exactly the sort of baseless conspiracy theory that gets shared by the same types of people who spend hours rambling about Benghazi and think Obama was actually an Islamic fundamentalist from Kenya.
Considering that this was the repayment of a debt that we'd owed for decades, I don't find it objectionable. I personally think individuals and organizations should repay their debts even in situations where they're no longer on good terms with their debtors. If we were actually engaged in an active hot war with Iran, then obviously we shouldn't give them any money until after the war ends and a peace has been negotiated, but for any situation less extreme than that, I think paying them back is the right call.
Still, given that Iran is a major geopolitical rival of ours with hostile intent towards our regional allies, I can understand why conservatives would oppose this decision too. In that regard, I don't find criticism of Obama's decision to be objectionable either, even if I don't agree with it.
What I *do* find objectionable is the sort of narrative that tends to emerge around things like this, particularly among certain types of right-wing populists, wherein Obama is not merely portrayed as a weak or overly idealistic leader who puts honor/morality before pragmatism, but as an actual traitor who secretly hates America and wants our enemies to win. If the right-wing criticism of Obama's foreign policy was more like old-school conservative criticism of Jimmy Carter, I'd be more inclined to simply agree to disagree. (I'll even admit that, given recent events, McCain and Romney were right about Putin and Obama was wrong.) But a very vocal subset of the right treats Obama less like Carter and more like Bin Laden himself.
"You didn't build that" was a statement by Obama in one of his campaign speeches. The full quote is as follows:
"Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT." (emphasis mine.)
This is lifted from a longer speech that makes it clear that the "that" in question is the roads and bridges, as part of a broader point RE: the social contract and how successful people in society aren't atomic Great Men who built themselves ex nihilo and depended on a strong social support structure to reach the place where they are today (and thus have some kind of obligation to their community or society at large). Right-wing pundits immediately jumped on the ambiguity of phrasing in order to suggest that Obama was impugning hard-working small business owners by suggesting they don't DESERVE their success, and in fact may be plotting to take their property and possessions as part of his master plan to initiate some kind of socialist class warfare in America (ah, the days when class warfare was seen as the biggest threat instead of a race-war). Anyone who believes I am misrepresenting Obama's speech may read it in full here and draw their own conclusions about whether this speech is one being given by some neo-Leninist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that#Speech
"Anyone who believes I am misrepresenting Obama's speech may read it in full here and draw their own conclusions about whether this speech is one being given by some neo-Leninist"
I definitely wouldn't think that, since any actual Marxist-Leninist would vehemently reject the sort of "we're all in this together" argument that Obama was making, on the grounds that it was too *charitable* towards business owners. After all, it fundamentally asserts that business owners being able to thrive is a good thing - they just didn't accomplish it alone and should be expected to give something back to society, in exchange for everything that society has given them. A true Leninist would argue that business owners were parasites who never should've been allowed to thrive in the first place.
"The liberal argument is that the rich, having been lucky and successful, should be obligated to give back to the system which has done so well for them. [...] The ethical (Socialist) case for social democratic reforms is that we should use the state to actively fight back against the economy — the state is a tool for the working class to claw back more of the value they created and ought to have all the rights to, but which the system siphoned out of their hands. This is a very different logic than the Liberal case, which is that we should use the state to supersede the economy, meaning to give people more than they have earned, because they are human beings, and human beings ought to live good lives."
The line has some extra bitterness in that the present US government didn't build any of that either - most US infrastructure is from generations ago, and has in many cases not even been maintained in the last 40 years let alone updated and improved upon.
A conspiracy theory reminiscent of the Iran CONTRA Affair, perhaps? The USG has a long history of illicit secrets (see eg. the spying that Snowden blew the whistle on, for a more recent example), plenty of conspiracies are real, and I wouldn't be shocked if the trend to associate "conspiracy theories" with people who think the moon landing was faked was in fact itself the result of a CIA conspiracy psy-op
"Attempting to legalize abortion up to the day of birth."
I don't support this. Most left-liberals I know don't support this. (In fact, the only person I know who *does* support it is a New Atheist right-libertarian.) It's not actually legal anywhere in the country, and there has been very little push to make it legal."
Well the duly elected (D)-after-the-name blackface aficionado governor of the state of Virginia does. Surely you're not claiming that he's less representative of the Democratic party than you are?
That isn't true. Virginia currently allows abortion until the 25th week of pregnancy, which is admittedly later than a lot of other states, but still nowhere near allowing it "up to the day of birth." Governor Northam did not oppose this, he simply fought against Republican efforts to prohibit abortion after 20 weeks instead.
Realistically, the difference between 20 weeks and 25 weeks isn't all that big of a deal, considering most abortions happen far earlier. So the entire pro-life vs. pro-choice debate in Virginia during Northam's Governorship was actually pretty tame, and I would consider it a rather low-stakes conflict for both sides. Virginia being the fairly moderate purple state that it is, neither a complete ban on abortion nor legalization of abortion until birth were ever actually on the table.
"So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon, told Washington radio station WTOP. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
From ye olde Beeb:
"The Democrat who sponsored the measure said it would allow abortions at any point in pregnancy up until the point of childbirth in certain cases."
But believe what you want to, I'm not the boss of you.
Northam was referring to situations where third-term abortions were performed because the mother's health was in serious danger. This is a rare conditional exception only allowed under the most extreme circumstances (only 2 third-term abortions have been performed in Virginia since 2000). This isn't remotely the same as legalizing third-term abortions in a more general sense - at least, no more than allowing surgeons to perform amputations is equivalent to legalizing dismemberment. It's also worth noting that even in these rare cases where third-term abortions is allowed because the mother's life is in danger, the doctors are still obligated to keep the baby alive outside of the mother's body if it's viable (barring further exceptions for cases where the baby is severely deformed, guaranteed to die within a matter of days anyway, in extreme pain, etc.).
For the 99.9% of pregnant women who aren't in severe and potentially life-threatening danger, abortion is only legally allowed in Virginia until the 25th week of pregnancy. This is an indisputable fact, and you can feel free to look it up yourself if you don't believe me.
As for some of the stuff I do actually (at least partially) agree with:
"Defund the police."
I think the problem with this is more unclear messaging than anything else. You have some liberals who use it to mean "demilitarize the police, they don't need APVs and machine guns, it's both a waste of money and makes them seem more like a foreign occupation force than like public civil servants." You have others who use it to mean "take away some funding from police and use it to fund other types of emergency responders instead, so we can send proper mental health professionals to deal with troubled and unstable people, instead of sending cops who might be inclined to treat them as criminals and escalate the situation." And then you have the radical far-left anarchist types who use it to mean "literally abolish the police completely so we can have a totally lawless, stateless society," which most liberals would consider to be absolutely ridiculous and unworkable, but it still gets lumped together with the more reasonable interpretations in the public eye.
"Pigford 'reparations'."
Given the circumstances, I actually do think the court's decision in this case was justified and correct. And I say that as someone who doesn't support "reparations" in the broader sense of just giving out money to the descendants of African-American slaves. As for the claim that the reparations program ended up being used fraudulently, obviously that's a bad thing to the extent that it happened, but I'm skeptical that it happened to anywhere near the degree that conservative pundits claim. Even if it did, all that proves is that the federal government botched the execution, not that the initial court decision was wrong.
""Undocumented aliens" & the whole 'kids in cages' smear campaign."
I oppose the border camps on both moral and practical grounds. I will concede that some liberals used it as a specific bludgeon against Trump while selectively ignoring the fact that the same thing happened under Obama, and is now continuing to happen under Biden. And I can definitely understand why that sort of hypocrisy might seem frustrating to people on the right. But I opposed these policies back during the Obama administration too, and continue to oppose them now; it was never a "gotcha" against Trumpers for me, I'm just actually, genuinely opposed to the idea of keeping children in what effectively amount to internment camps, regardless of which President or political party happens to be overseeing those camps at any given time.
There's nothing unreasonable about the 'Don't say Gay' bill. The left want to control people's speech, so the right fights back. It doesn't remotely compare the excesses of woke nonsense pervading every institution in the country.
I don't see anything wrong with prohibiting the public schools from talking to K-3 students about sex and sexuality. That stuff clearly belongs at home, at that tiny tender age, even assuming your average 7-year-old would even understand what the hell you're talking about.
So I'm 100% happy to own that one, and I see no indication that anyone on the right (or what I would consider the center) feels differently. It doesn't embarrass me a shred, and indeed if I were to come across someone who *did* without embarassment support the idea of a sexuality-education curriculum in kindergarten, I'd consider that person a little strangely obsessed with sexuality, and children, two things that don't really go together well. Definitely I'd want such a person to get a background check before being allowed to volunteer in the classroom.
It's worth noting that the particulars of the implementation and wording of that bill are very strange, it's not simply banning sex ed below a certain age. Similarly, the Texas anti-abortion bill - empowering individuals to sue for violations of the law rather than doing things as the State is *weird* and probably largely an attempted end-run around constitutional restrictions on what the state can prohibit.
Edit: I'm basing this off discussion I've seen elsewhere, and I'm not a lawyer nor an American so read with a healthy pile of salt.
The only part that has anything to do with sex is 100.42 section 8(c)3, which reads in its entirety as "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
That doesn't seem like strange wording to me. Indeed, by the standards of the law it seems unusually plain and sensible, even modest, and one would think pretty uncontroversial. Who thinks it's rather important on the contrary that there be regular classroom instruction in sexual orientation in grades K-3? As I said, I would find someone with that as a high social priority a little disturbingly interested in the sexual awareness of young children.
Just to give you an example: How would you feel if someone sued you (a school district, in this case I guess.) for using the any of : "He, She, Husband, Wife, Boy, Girl" as gendered words?
'cause the bill allows that. I'm 100% sure some leftist is gonna do it too, cause the bill also guarantees that the state will cover legal costs, regardless of the outcome.
First of all, people can file a lawsuit for any reason they like, it doesn't have to be reasonable. If you want the law to limit lawsuits being filed to only those which are "reasonable" by some standard, or have any chance at all of succeeding, you need to begin by entirely overhauling the tort system[1]. So let's stick with the world as it actually is.
And in that world, school districts get sued all the time already, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for stupid reasons. Indeed, that's a fact o' life when you're a big organization. It happens to Google and Wal-Mart, too. So the idea that there is something *new and scary* happening here is unrealistic. There isn't, and if I ran a Florida school district I doubt I'd see any need to beef up our legal staff -- already substantial -- to handle a big uptick in lawsuits, especially because the law here is gratifyingly specific in terms of what we have to do to have a pretty bulletproof defense. You kind of have to be grossly incompetent or wilfully defiant to open yourself up to losing a suit.
Most school district lawsuits are over "special needs" kinds of stuff, these days -- assertions that the school district isn't meeting the needs of this student or that with some kind of asserted disability. Can I assume that as a man of the left the fact that school districts would be sued a lot more often was *not* a reason you might have opposed Title IX, the ADA, or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation ACt of 1973? If so, well...sauce, goose, gander. Once you accept that the hammer of the lawsuit is appropriate to achieve *your* social aims, you can't very well argue your opponents are being uniquely vicious in also deploying it, at least, not if you want to be logically consistent.
Finally, I find your specific example incomprehensible. While I am not a lawyer, I see nothing in the text of the bill that would give such a lawsuit a snowball's chance in hell of not being simply dismissed the moment a district lawyer spends 15 minutes putting together a motion to do so. I'm not even 100% sure I understand what you mean by using "gendered" words, since English nouns don't have a gender. If you're saying someone might file a lawsuit because a kindergarten teacher called a boy a boy...uh, well, see above. I can't imagine a Florida judge taking more than 30 seconds to dismiss it, once he or she stops laughing.
Finally, I don't see anything in the bill that guarantees legal costs regardless of outcome. Indeed, the only provision in the bill is in (c)7(b)(II), which says "...A court may award damage and ahall award reasonable attorney fees and costs to a parent who receives declaratory or injunctive relief." So obviously the plaintiff needs to first win his or her suit before he can hope for getting his costs covered.
This is not at all unusual in tort law generally -- courts can and do frequently award costs to the winner of a civil suit. The reason it's spelled out in this law is that ordinarily a school district, being an arm of the state, enjoys sovereign immunity and can't be sued at all, certainly can't be held liable for someone's costs in doing so. The Legislature has to specifically waive that immunity for lawsuits to be heard at all, which is what they're doing here.
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[1] You'd probably need to also kill off 85% of the plaintiff lawyers, which is OK by me.
Request the Commissioner of Education to appoint a special magistrate who is a member of The Florida Bar in good standing and who has at least 5 years' experience in administrative law. The special magistrate shall determine facts relating to the dispute over the school district procedure or practice, consider information provided by the school district, and render a recommended decision for resolution to the State Board of Education within 30 days after receipt of the request by the parent. The State Board of Education must approve or reject the recommended decision at its next regularly scheduled meeting that is more than 7 calendar days and no more than 30 days after the date the recommended decision is transmitted. The costs of the special magistrate shall be borne by the school district. The State Board of Education shall adopt rules, including forms, necessary to implement this subparagraph.
Does it ? I mean, yes, technically you can sue anyone over anything, but that's not exclusive to this one bill. IANAL by any means, but the plain reading of that passage would imply that saying "here are some delicious cookies my wife baked yesterday" would be allowed; whereas saying, "my wife baked some cookies yesterday after we, ah, kissed all night because that's what married couples do, ask me how" would be disallowed. And even then, it would only be disallowed in the context of classroom instruction during official class hours, not in general.
Indeed, it's much more likely someone on the progressive side *will* sue a school district for using "husband/wife" or "mother/father" than that someone on the right will sue over "you said 'gay'!!!!"
Well, yeah, the Texas anti-abortion bill is clearly a hack intended to get around Roe v. Wade. It's a pretty brilliant hack, too (IMO), since it allows the state of Texas to retain a lot of control over anti-abortion enforcement, while completely ignoring any federal restrictions, by distributing enforcement over private individuals. I mean, if I were a Supreme Court judge, I'd probably go "LOL, I see what you did there, now it's indictment time for you", but I guess they don't have the power to do that...
I do not want brilliant hacks to bypass checks and balances to exist or be rewarded. I'm endlessly baffled by fellow right-wingers who are ready to cut down every wall in the land to get at the Devil. NO, THOSE WALLS PROTECT YOU TOO.
FWIW I have right-wing as well as left-wing friends, and I see this attitude from both sides. The overall impression is that the other side is so irrational and/or evil that talking to them is pointless; and their policies are so harmful as to constitute an existential threat. Therefore, stopping them should be our primary goal, to the exclusion of all other goals, such as e.g. maintaining our venerable democratic institutions.
Sometimes I ask my friends, "do you want a civil war ? Because that's how you get a civil war", but the answer is usually, "well if there's a war than obviously my side will score an early and decisive victory anyway, so bring it". Again, both sides say this.
The left perspective is, for example: Republicans will delay a judicial conformation for n months as "Too close to an election", then immediately turn around and force through their pick after their guy lost.
Obama tried to govern with them; he gave them concision after concession, and they still refused to participate in government.
It is pointless to treat the republican party as members partners in government. They would rather "Drown the government in a bathtub" than lose give up an inch at any point for any reason.
So, what the dems are currently doing (pretending that they are part of a functional society like the good old days) is foolish. The republicans treat the democrats like they are enemies, not opposition. The Democrats need to do the same.
They won't though, because the are procedure worshipping neo-liberals.
I don't mind the kids in his class knowing Mr Jones is gay. I don't mind Mr Jones telling them his boyfriend is named Brian. I do mind Mr Jones claiming he is cowering in fear and cannot do his job unless he can tell his class of five year olds every single detail about his personal life.
So far as I can tell, nothing in the Florida law prevents Mr Jones from introducing his boyfriend or husband to the class in a matter of fact way, if the latter happens to turn up in the normal way, and if the kids have basic questions ("Do you love each other? Are you married? Do you live together?") they can ask and within some reasonable limits (e.g. not "Where do you poke your penis since he doesn't have a vagina?" should that even happen) he can answer, just as if Mr Jones had suffered the amputation of a hand and the kids wanted to poke at his prosthesis and ask if he was born that way.
If the kids' questions get too weird (which seems generally very unlikely), Mr Jones is expected to tell them this is one of those subjects not suitable for classroom discussion, like the details of how you wipe your ass when you are missing your right hand, why little Joey's father is in jail, or what exactly happened to little Suzy's mother that we call "rape," and they should ask their parents for more help in private at home. All of which seems like basic classroom decorum, mutual respect, and good manners to me already.
What the law appears to rule out is Mr Jones (or his school, or school district) working up a specific extended curriculum on his or their own that sets out to teach the 5-year-olds all about sex and sexual identity. If that's his, or their, thing, then they need to wait at least until 4th grade, and then consult with some random state board of stuffed shirts -- child psychologists, teachers with enormous tenure, assorted educrats and lawyers, the usual rabble -- who will set standards for this the way they set standards for biology and history (which are also traditionally fraught). Badly, of course, but with the modest saving grace that they represent the Will o' The People, bless their hearts.
I really really think you have to strain a bit to ignore the problems here. If that gay teacher is married and mentions a same sex spouse, even in passing, that can be filtered through an innocent kid and hostile parents as classroom instruction about how gay people can get married, a thing the parents may well not agree with.
And then what? There's a three or four step process that is entirely at the district's expense where the parent can complain, escalate, call in a special magistrate and finally bring an action.
So what to do? Maybe don't hire any gay people if you're a school district. Too much trouble. And if you're a gay teacher? Probably best just not to say anything. Or, as people on my side of the aisle are calling it, Don't Say Gay.
And, again, I think this is the point, the bailey, and the whole "all we mean is textbooks and lesson plans" is the motte.
Paranoid nonsense. You want to fret about slippery slopes, that ship left circa Obergefell. The State is going to establish curriculum standards in this area, because the district will ask them to do so in self-defense, if nothing else, and because there *are* people who want this kind of instruction.
So then there will *be* an official definition of what constitutes "an education curriculum" in this area, and after a while there will be some set of decisions reached by special masters and courts that further refine the definition of that term -- and I am very confident it will *not* include "random comments about his personal life that a teacher shares with his kids," any more than an observation that you're suffering from an antibiotic-resistant infection would trigger some statute that you are sneaking in instruction in evolution, or that if the band volunteer mom says "if we all pitch in $5 we can get the teacher a nice end of the year present" she can be nailed for teaching mathematics without a certificate.
You want a guarantee that nobody will interpret the statute crazily? Check in with St. Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates, such guarantees don't exist in this mortal vale. We rely on people to be reasonable, and, if they aren't, we rely on other people -- administrators, other teachers and parents, the court system, juries, the voters and local community -- to make them straighten out. It's not really possible to write down in the law a precise algorithm for reasonableness and then have every living soul robotically and perfectly execute it. If this doesn't work for you, you shouldn't really be living in a republic.
I don't think I'm being paranoid. And I don't think I'm describing someone being crazy. I think this is the intended use, and I think we'll be seeing it.
The stuff about keeping Raine Bowe from teaching first graders how to masturbate is the nonsense. That wasn't happening (and shouldn't!). That's the scare tactics to get this shit in place.
There are vastly more pedophile public school teachers than pedophile priests. Unfortunately for them, the Priest's Union doesn't make sufficiently large campaign donations.
I don't know much about the "don't say gay" bill itself, but I generally am entirely in favor of everything up to and inclusive of word-by-word scripts of what k-12 teachers are allowed to say, so long as said scripts are created/enforced by elected officials or some other voting mechanism.
Public school teachers are agents of the state. They aren't magic pixies that just materialize out of thin air; they are government employees hired by the government to deliver government-mandated messaging to kids whose parents potentially face pretty severe penalties if they don't allow the government to do so.
In a situation where the government (or an individual agent of the government acting within the discretion the government had given them) decided that my kids should spend the entire schoolday learning about geology (and only geology) nobody would find it weird if I lobbied the government to change the content to be more varied. Nobody would be surprised or offended (besides geologists) if the government listened to me and a sufficiently intimidating amount of other like-minded voters and made some rules to enforce our wishes.
I've found everyone intuitively understands that agents of the government should ultimately answer to voters in the normal way that's always happened (i.e., voters elect people who do things they think will get them reelected) right up to the point at which they really, really want the government to act contrary to the will of the voters.
Once a person wants the government to act contrary to the will of their constituency, all that goes out the window and suddenly government agents deserve 100% free speech and zero voter accountability. It's weird, but luckily the solution is "keep voting for representatives who direct their agents in ways you like", so it's not a gigantic problem.
there is a bit of a discussion to be had as to whether state law is appropriate when school boards exist, and when not all schools are government run, but I do agree with the thrust of your point that the voters should ultimately have a say (whether directly or via the platforms of elected representatives) in the public school curriculum
The right-wing equivalent of Asadists is like, actual monarchists and they are indeed viewed as silly. The comparison you're making is like a right-winger going "C'mon, we all shun the guys with swastika tattoos on their faces but this isn't the case on the left, look at all these crazy lefties talking about white privilege."
+1. The right feels the same way about it's crazies as the OP describes, but disagrees about who the crazies are. I like the Texas and Florida bills, those seem fairly central Republican. The white-supremacists and Q-Anon prophets, those are crazies who are embarrassing.
It's not even that. You've got people openly marching under the hammer and sickle, and everyone's supposed to pretend that they're not Stalin-level evil.
I'm late to the argument, but here's one thing I still have to add.
Your media bubble not only forgot to inform you about the contents of the Florida bill, it also forgot to inform you that the Florida bill is quite popular in Florida on both sides.
This article has links to 2 polls, one of which specifically targeted likely Democratic voters:
""Should students in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade be taught about sexual orientation in the classroom by their teachers?" Floridians for Economic Advancement asked "likely Democratic voters" in a poll from March 17 to March 20.
Approximately 52% of Democrat-leaning voters replied that they do not approve such education, with only 36% of those polled voicing support for teaching kindergarten through third-grade classes about sexuality. Twelve percent said that they were not sure."
(I would have expected a much bigger advantage here, but I am guessing it's a combination of the divide between people who have kids and those who do not have kids and of the divide between people who think and those who just repeat talking points.)
> "Should students in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade be taught about sexual orientation in the classroom by their teachers?"... 52% of Democrat-leaning ... do not approve
"Should the teacher X" is not an inverse form of the question "should the teacher be legally prohibited from X", so this poll result isn't measuring what you seem to think it is.
The bill is also vague about what exactly it is banning, so that even if you asked people if they support what the bill says, their interpretation of the bill could easily differ from that of a court. Arguably the confusion is intentional: "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." Who writes state standards? Will those standards be vague too? Will the standards change when the legislature does? Not at all clear to me...
How is the interpretation of the bill by the people supposed to radically diverge from the interpretation by a court? Are you forgetting that "a court" means a jury, and a jury is made up of....the people?
IANAL but I thought judges interpreted law, created precedents and then wrote "jury instructions" with those interpretations. Secondly, any time there is more than one interpretation, nobody knows what interpretation will win out in court, and even if you win the case, you still lose because months of court proceedings are stressful and time-consuming. For these reasons, no one wants a court case against them, so people and their bosses tend to use conservative interpretations so as not to be the first one to be sued (assuming this is a civil thing). Thirdly, as I was saying, laws whose practical meaning is impossible to discern by themselves, because they incorporate other texts by reference are rarely deciphered by the public.
This piece suggests that COVID policies like lockdowns and vaccine passports were deliberately designed to be biased based on race and class, basically a way for white political leaders to screw over Blacks, Hispanics, etc. while pretending to be neutral by using “identity politics” as a deception.
While I’m not sure I can fully agree with the author’s POV, he does raise some interesting questions that I don’t have answers to:
1. Whether governments knew in advance about the demographics of folks who would be affected by COVID policies.
2. Whether scientists are researching things objectively with COVID and the vaccines, or if it’s possible that they’re influenced by politics/funding/other considerations.
3. Whether many/most white liberals really are racist without admitting it (he gives the examples of “good schools” and gentrification in addition to pandemic policies). I don’t think this is an accurate judgment, but I’m a white male liberal myself so it’s possible I’m biased here.
Has anyone else thought about this or seen similar pieces in the COVID context?
In my experience, the most common mechanism(*) for outcomes that favor elites over ordinary folks, is that the folks making the decisions are members of the elite in question, or at least aspire to it, and are more or less consciously thinking about "folks like us". To the extent they think about folks not like (their) us, it's commonly in oversimplified ways (they are all the same, or fall into very few categories, mostly informed by stereotype rather than personal acquaintance).
That's not to say some don't go out of their way to make life harder for certain groups, generally of folks not like them, but I tend to prefer not to attribute to malice anything adequately explained by ignorance and/or stupidity(**).
In this case, the folks making the decisions would generally have been digital natives, living in relatively large/isolated homes, owning automobiles, and mostly able to work from home.
Pretty much all of the idiocy I've seen mandated from on high with regard to covid has been adequately explained by decisions being made by prosperous college-educated office workers.
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(*) Well, that and opportunities for personal profit, but that mostly doesn't seem to explain these disparities.
(**) Note also that this kind of ignorant decision making is generally regarded as a component of "systemic racism", when the decision makers are predominantly white. I avoid phrasing that as the decision makers "being racist without realizing it", as that phrasing tends to add more heat than light. Also, I don't have any statistics about the racial distribution of the decision makers, whereas "office worker", "college educated", and "under retirement age" come with the territory - no statistics required.
He starts off with Christopher Columbus and ends with Black Panther and apparently the Wakandan Space Programme is going to colonise the stars (because White People Cannot).
I don't know about you, but I think I hear a grindstone whirring away furiously in the background. I am willing to bet that he would equally write an article that "It's Racism" had governments adopted the opposite approach. Or if there was a recommendation to wear balaclavas in cold weather. Or pretty much anything you like.
This is just black nationalist nonsense. The same people enacting these covid policies stood by and allowed blacks to riot and loot without barely a slap on the wrist, are enacting soft on crime policies that help the majority black criminal populations in these cities, support colleges discriminating against white applicants in favor of less capable black applicants, in favor of government and corporations giving hiring preferences to black applicants, in favor of teaching black nationalist talking points in schools, and so on.
"Good schools" are a myth. There's NO evidence that there are "good schools" independent of the student population, and school voucher lottery programs show that the student matters more than the school ever will.
Hanlon's Razor applies. The consensus COVID response was hastily designed by upper-middle-class political and media elites, so it was optimized for causing minimal inconvenience to upper-middle-class elites (who are incidentally mostly white). If those policies had harsher effects on other demographics, it's because upper-middle-class elites have a hard time seeing things from other people's point of view, and were in too much of a hurry to bother. Not a unique failing of the upper middle class, to be sure, but they were the ones who had the power to screw up in a big way on this one.
It seems obvious to me that lockdown and similar policies disproportionately hurt the poor, as all crises tend to do. Because blacks and hispanics are poorer on average, it makes sense that they were hurt more on average, but calling this "deliberately designed" is misleading at best.
In other words, this is a typical instance of identity politics infringing on socialism's turf, because the socialist framework in still largely unacceptable in American discourse. Of course, there are also not purely economical reasons for poorness of certain racial groups, but the discourse is even less equipped to deal with those.
Thanks everyone for your responses, they helped to put a finger on what I was thinking in an abstract sense but couldn’t find the words to frame the argument.
I agree with the idea that these policies have disparate impacts on the poor, on Black people, etc. but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were designed to do so specifically. (analogy: correlation vs. causation) While “systemic racism” is a thing, the power differential may be a better explanation for the impacts. Though it does seem like a bit of a “turtles all the way down” issue, as then I’m thinking on whether the power differentials themselves are justified.
I will say that personally I’ve supported lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc., you could say by default, as I figure the experts generally know what they’re doing. But I also realize now after reading your responses that I’ve had the privilege of being upper-middle-class and working from home over the past 2 years. So I can see how someone in a different position might take a different view of things.
[Narrator Voice] The experts did not in fact know what they were doing [/Narrator Voice]
But, yeah, if you're too distracted to think it through from multiple perspectives, it's an easy mistake to make. If the *experts* are too distracted to think it through from multiple perspectives, then you get big problems.
We're posting on Astral Codex Ten because we're looking for help in reviewing/critiquing our manuscript: "God vs the Multiverse: A rational argument for the existence of one God of the universe."
Elie has a PhD in mathematics and Aaron has a bachelor's in physics. We've spent many hours over the past ten years working on the book, trying to make it as clear and convincing as we could.
The book has three parts. The first part develops an argument for an intelligent cause from the fine tuning of the constants and initial conditions. The second part analyzes and critiques multiverse theory. The third part develops a logical and intuitive idea of God (without any discussion of any religion).
While it's written without formalisms in order to be accessible to nonacademics, it involves a significant amount of physics and philosophy. We're trying to find people proficient in physics and/or philosophy (or just smart people) to review it for any significant errors or omissions on our part before we get it published. Also, we want to know if there are weak points (e.g. logically unjustified assumptions, handwaving, etc. ) in our argument that makes it unconvincing.
If you're interested in reviewing it, please contact us ezimmer7 at gmail dot com.
Fine tuning strikes me as immediately nonsensical. God could have made us survive in the cold vacuum of space if he wanted to. Souls existent independent of the material world and its physical constraints, so there's no reason we couldn't have just been immaterial souls all along. Fine tuning only makes sense if you assume we have to exist not only materially, but as these very particularly kinds of material things and not something radically different based on the prevailing physical laws of a counterfactual universe.
It's a much bigger claim, and much harder to convincingly show, that the laws of nature are fine tuned for intelligent life. It is especially people who are trying to argue for religion, and a special relationship between God and humans, that need to argue that the purpose of the universe is for intelligent life. Someone who wants to make that argument (and a lot of people present fine tuning that way) run into problems similar to the one you are describing.
But in our book we are only trying to establish the existence of an intelligent cause for the universe as whole (e.g. atom, molecules, planets, life, stars, galaxies, etc.) We assume nothing special about human beings other than that we are a small part of an amazingly complex and diverse universe.
"there's no reason we couldn't have just been immaterial souls all along"
Those exist already and are called angels. For humans to exist, we need bodies. Don't ask me why God wanted humans, but He did.
Anyway, is it any more ridiculous than the idea that aliens are in fact simulating the entire universe and we're just entities in a really fancy computer?
The simulation hypothesis is just another way of believing in God - it's a way to be religious for people who don't feel comfortable with the normal religious vocab.
Ordinarily I would be a little tempted, but alas I have just finished a book mostly about a fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, so I'm kind of fed up with the business right now.
For what it's worth, I will say you could be novel in this space, and perhaps address the more thoughtful skeptics more usefully, if you would take a stab at saying *how* you think your God could fine tune the universe. It doesn't really seem sufficient to just wave your hands and say "oh God can do anything" because that gets us close to the child's Sunday-school question of whether God can make a stone so heavy He can't lift it, can cause something to be both black and white, can make a triangle (on a Euclidean plane) with more than 180 degrees in its angles, and so on. If "God" is just a one-syllable way of saying "a process too complicated to explain or understand" then it doesn't seem sufficiently different from what Richard Dawkins would say -- in particular, there's no obvious reason why it has to be connected to the concept of God that has a particular interest in human souls.
I think what really bugs me about arguments in this space is that they leave far too much to the imagination. God is like you and I, except...more powerful. But that's like saying you and I are like bacteria, except...more sophisticated. And surely there's a much *bigger* difference between me and God than there is between me and a bacterium.
So when we say "there could be an entity that is just like you but with the ability to create a Universe to its specification" a priori I have no idea what to imagine, just because too much work is being done by the "just like you but" part of the sentence. Nothing that is mostly like me could possibly create universes. Contrariwise, I'm highly dubious that something that could create universes would be anything at all like me. So...help me out here. Get into what the nature of God must be, in order for Him to be recognizably like me, somehow, persumably concerned about me, but also able to build universes from scratch. How does He affect matter? What is the passage of time like for Him? What was He doing in the infinity years before the Big Bang? Why would He create a universe full of stunted bacteria like ourselves, when presumably He could instead create one full of entities more His equal -- they could have a right good time, creating universes and talking about cosmic stuff, not having to listen to a bunch of mortal insignificant motes piss and moan about their sins, misfortunes, and pathetically limited fates.
I definitely understand your frustration with many books that use the fine tuning argument to posit some complex idea of god that leaves as many questions as it answers (if not more). An idea of god that is like you and me, just bigger, is intellectually problematic and unsatisfying. (Btw, which book did you read?)
The third part of our book is devoted to elucidating a rationally satisfying idea of a simple God. We address (we hope convincingly) many key questions such as Richard Dawkins's question of "Who designed the designer?" as well as Steven Weinberg's question of "What does 'God' even mean? It's just a placeholder for a big question mark!"
With regards to your question of exactly how God caused the universe, we develop an analogy between the fundamental action of an electron (a fundamental particle with no subcomponents) and the fundamental actions of God. According to QED (the fundamental physics theory of light and electrons), it is not possible to reduce the 3 fundamental actions of electrons and photons to any simpler actions. Just like physics is unable to reduce a fundamental action to any more basic concepts (i.e. you cannot explain how an electron absorbs a photon in more fundamental categories), so too we cannot understand God's fundamental actions through any more basic concepts. But we can understand why we cannot understand something fundamental in terms of something simpler.
With regards to your questions of sins, misfortune, souls, etc., we simply do not attempt to address the issue of why bad things happen to good people. Our book is not about God's relationship to humans. We would be very happy if we could convincing establish the existence of an intelligent cause for the universe. We know that might not be what some people want, but we felt that if we overreached (as many books do), we would lose the entire argument.
Well, I guess I need to read the book and not ask you to reveal its contents for free on the Web ha ha....but...I am nonplussed by what you mean by a fundamental action of an electron. I'm familiar with the concept of action, both classically and its quantum mechanical extension, but that doesn't inhere in a particle, it's a property of a trajectory, so that doesn't seem like what you mean. Maybe you mean the fact that the number of electrons is quantized, which falls out of the fact that the conjugate variables of the field fail to commute? And I grant you that this is a completely arbitrary axiom, which underlies all of quantum mechanics. But...again, a key question here is: *can* you construct a physics of fundamental particles in which the conjugate field variables *do* commute? Maybe not! If nothing else, so far as I know you don't get an exclusion principle, which means no excluded volume, and everything can in principle occupy the same point of space like a giant weird Bose-Einstein condensate. Maybe the universe can only have spatial extent if the exclusion principle holds -- which means the conjugate variables can't commute -- which requires quantization.
I guess another way to put that is: a thing only needs an explanation for its nature *if* its nature could be otherwise. And our ability to imagine, or inability to imagine, it otherwise is neither here nor there -- since we are quite capable of faulty imagining, that is, our imagination pictures can be logically inconsistent.
I will grant you my point of view here is shading towards something not entirely inconsistent with the ontological argument for the existence of God. It would be quite interesting if someone could make a good argument that a Universe *without* God the Creator is logically self-contradictory -- like a universe in which π = 4 (exactly). I'd pay money to see that show, box seats.
Anyway, I appreciate your willingness to expound on the book topics in advance, and tackle some initial critiques with grace. Best of luck to you, this is a hell of a lot more interesting thing to do with your time than prognosticate the next squalid political phase transition, or whether 20,000 or 80,000 people have to die to decide the colors of the flag over Kyiv.
I've enjoyed the back and forth, Carl. I do mean something a bit different by fundamental actions, but you're right that to get into that is probably too much for this forum. It might not take a book to explain, but maybe a chapter. :)
One last thought. I do genuinely believe that the argument from the constants of nature is far superior to anything else I've come across, but it has to be organized and presented in the right way. A lot of people bungle it, often because they're trying to prove a specific religion or an idea of God that relates to humans in a different way than any other part of the universe. This makes it far less convincing, to the point where the listener believes the whole thing is a bad argument.
"Nothing that is mostly like me could possibly create universes."
Hallelujah, that does for the simulation argument! And transhumanism. So this is why people are pinning their hopes on Fairy Godmother AI - it won't be human-like, it will be god-like and thus can do the impossible for humans things.
"What is the passage of time like for Him? What was He doing in the infinity years before the Big Bang? Why would He create a universe full of stunted bacteria like ourselves, when presumably He could instead create one full of entities more His equal -- they could have a right good time, creating universes and talking about cosmic stuff"
You are still thinking of God in "just like us" terms there. As for "what was He doing before the Big Bang", there's the secular materialist answer to "what existed before the Big Bang is a meaningless question".
God exists in eternity, not in time. What was He doing? Enjoying the economy of love in the Three Persons of the Trinity.
Well, since I think the simulation argument is silly and transhumanism is naive in the extreme, I'm with you on the first part.
Yes, I am indeed thinking of God for the purposes of this discussion as just like us -- because my experience is *that is a key argument* in the "fine-tuning" argument for His existence[1]. A major chunk of the logic goes something like this:
1. We can't imagine any natural physical process that gives us a First Cause, the original uncaused cause, because it's either a silly infinite regression or pops out of the blue in an arbitrarily but suspiciously precise way.
2. But *we* in a our daily lives (assuming arguendo free will) are little uncaused causes all the time. That's 90% of what we think it means to be human -- that we can originate stuff for no reason, right out of our imaginations, and tune our creations to satisfy urges of creativity, affection (for our creations), or even duty.
3. So if we just imagine something analogous in its thinking and nature to us -- only with warp engines for fingers, can move stars by blinking -- why, that would efficiently explain the Universe, and shazam we have God the Creator.
If you subtract the "just like us" part, and just imagine some enormous force, an uncaused cause that *need not* be at all like human beings -- could be like a giant all-powerful bacterium, or virus, or Rube Goldberg pinball machine -- then this stops being the familiar notion of God, and just becomes some weird giant contraption that might as well be some dedicated atheist philosopher's suggestion that the universe tunnels out of nothingness because one hypothetical 12-dimensional membrane collided with another.
That is, if you want to argue that God the Creator exists because of the nature of Creation, you kind of have to keep the bit about Man being made in the Image of Christ, or running it in the other direction, God must be in some very key aspects like us, only the Platonic ideal or something. Otherwise you may be proving some First Mover exists but you've lost any connection to what we are willing to call God, at least if we're outside the real of animism.
So *in the context of the argument* I think my questions are very fair. If you're going to say the nature of Creation implies the existence of God the Creator, you better show me His fingerprints -- and by that I do *not* mean any similarity in motive or urges to what human beings do when they bake cookies, because that's the easy part. I mean a similarity to what we do when Leonardo chisels marble to uncover "David" -- I mean, show me the grooves, infer the dimensions of the chisel, how the metal flakes off the stone just so. It's the manus not the mens at issue.
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[1] As is probably obvious by now, I generally dislike all the teleological arguments for the existence of God. I find them far less plausible than random testimony.
By the way I don't consider "What happened before the Big Bang?" a meaningless question (from the strictly physics point of view). It's certainly a difficult question, but it's neither meaningless nor a priori unanswerable. It is entirely possible that we might someday put limits on what might have existed "before" the Big Bang, in the sense that aspect X or Y is a logical prerequisite of the Big Bang, or Z and T would rule it out. Physics doesn't suggest any mystical quality to the Big Bang, in the sense that all the known laws of physics were created in that instant, and might have been created some other random way. We have no reason to think that's true, and the simplest assumption is to assume it's not.
The Big Bang is much more prosaic -- it's just a point in spacetime where the Universe has no spatial extent, only temporal. Formerly it's no different than the case where the Universe does not evolve, that is it has spatial extent but not temporal, a giant frozen still life. It's a little weird to our prosaic human notions of existence, but it's not the magical denouement it's sometimes seen (and presented) as.
It sounds like your objection is that from your experience with the fine tuning argument you think it is essentially based on an analogy between humans and God. Meaning, humans can freely choose specific parameters, ergo God must be a bigger and better human who can freely choose the laws and constants of nature. I can see why you would have an objection to that.
We argue a bit differently. We start from the natural mystery in fundamental physics of how to explain the value of the constants of nature (even without fine tuning). Are the constants truly fundamental or do they have a cause? And if they do have a cause, is there anything we can legitimately infer about their cause?
Fine tuning comes in as a solution to this mystery. It is knowledge science has gained about the constants. Fine tuning shows that the value of the constants is determined by the universe that results from them (i.e. they have that value because other values wouldn't result in a universe with atoms, stars, galaxies, etc.). This is different from the standard efficient causation (based on passed events), but is rather teleological causation (based on the resultant universe).
We argue that this indicates an explanation for the value of the constants based on teleology; that their values are as they are for the purpose of producing a complex ordered universe. A cause that selects the proper values for the purpose of producing the universe is acting intelligently. In a sense, this is how we are defining intelligence, as selecting a particular for the purpose of achieving some goal.
There is nothing about this line of reasoning that demands God be essentially like humans. It is true that humans also act intelligently (at least sometimes), but that is an accident that is unessential to the argument. Even if there were no humans to draw an analogy from, we would be justified in arguing that the cause of the constants acted intelligently in selecting their values.
Well...sort of. The main source of my objection to the fine-tuning argument is that I don't consider anyone to have made a good argument that the laws of physics *are* fine-tuned -- that is, that they actually could have values different than they are. I find that..suspicious.
For example, suppose I were to argue that the value of π was "fine-tuned" -- that just because it has the value 3.141592653... in this universe means nothing, it could easily be equal to 4 or 112 or -6 in some other universe. That seems a priori dubious. The value of π arises from pure mathematics, from the definition of a circle and the definition of a Euclidean plane. It's not logically consistent that it could have any other value than it does. Same with e or any other mathematical constant. These values may look strange and arbitrary to us -- but they're not, they only *look* that way because *we* have chosen arbitrary number systems (e.g. based on how many fingers we have, and based on our preference for simple addition as the primary arithmetic operation) to record the value of π. We could probably find a system of mathematical notation in which π took on the value and meaning of "1" and nobody suggests the value of 1 is fine tuned. So I don't think we can draw any conclusions from what might seem to be the strange and precisely "tuned" value of π.
What about the fine-structure constant, though? Could *that* be different? The thing is...we have no idea. We know of no reason it can't be, just as we know of no a priori reason why the ratio between the mass of the proton and the mass of the electron couldn't be slightly different value. But that does not mean there *isn't* such a reason. One might quite reasonably suspect that any fundamental constants that drop out of physics are as logically unique as π, because one might reasonably suspect that whatever the laws of the Universe are, they are unique -- like the solution to intersecting lines, there is in fact only one set of laws that is fully self-consistent -- and that it is *not* in fact possible to construct any kind of Universe at all with α equal to any other than ~1/137.
The only way to know for sure that it *is* possible for the constants to have other values is to find a universe where they did, or at the least construct one theoretically that is complete in all respects -- except α ~ 1/1400 in this one (which is quite a challenge). So it's kind of in the same category as arguments about abiogenesis: the only way for those who believe in chemical evolution to demonstrate that it's possible is to discover another world with a totally different form of life on it. Otherwise, it remains possible that life on Earth is a weird unique accident, or the result of divine intervention.
Now, one way of arguing the case that the universe could be "tuned" differently is to outline how it actually could be -- to provide hints of the actual mechanism. For example, consider Alcubierre and his famous demonstration that a faster-than-light "warp" drive is actually theoretically possible. He demonstrated that mathematically. Now...to actually build it, you would need to be able to control staggering amounts of both ordinary and "dark" matter (which we don't even know exists, let alone know how to manipulate). So that's practically completely out of the question. But the point is, it *does not* violate GR, it's consistent with the physics we know, so it's a pretty good argument that at least in principle FTL travel is not utterly ruled out.
That's kind of what I mean. Demonstrate that *if* you could, say, move quasars around at 99% of the speed of light, or move all the dark matter in the universe to one pole, or rebalance the amounts of matter and antimatter -- or anything that isn't utterly out of the question theoretically, merely wholly impractical for beings like ourselves -- and that *this* would actually change the measured value of a fundamental constant (like α), and then I would say you have made a strong argument. Like Alcubierre, you would have made a good argument that differing values of these constants is at least not *inconsistent* with what we know about physical reality.
And how does this relate to the God concept? Well, if the mechanism by which we argue the values can be changed amounts to something that seems too inhuman, or too mechanical, then we end up wandering away from the concept of God as some Platonic ideal of human nature (or equivalently that humans are a distorted and diminished image of God, which Genesis 1:27 asserts). So tackling the idea of the *how* these constants could be fine-tuned does double duty: (1) it makes an argument that they *are* in fact fine-tuned, and it's not just that we haven't found the relationships that nail them down, and (2) if the "how" is not too strange, at least in some aspects, it makes a good argument that Something of which we are a distant shadow could be the fine-tuner -- and with both (1) and (2) in hand, I'd have to say one has a very powerful argument.
Carl, I know we agreed to end the conversation above, but I just wanted to address an issue or two from this comment in case anyone else was interested in it.
You're raising a good question about how we know the constants could have been different. If for instance the fine structure constant could be expressed as some combination of π’s and e’s (mathematical constants), then perhaps it has something to do with the geometry of a circle or logarithms. If this were the case, then it would be reasonable to hope that the fine structure constant is an inevitable mathematical consequence of a final theory.
But try as they might, physicists have been unable to discover any relationship between the constants of nature and the mathematical constants. This is not for lack of effort - there have been a lot of smart people trying very hard for over 100 years now (the fine structure constant was first discovered in 1916). Since to all appearances these numbers are not mathematically significant, we are faced with a mystery: how can a unique final theory generate precise numbers such as 137.035999139, which seem to have absolutely no mathematical significance?
In his book QED written in 1985, Feynman tells a humorous story about this dubious attempt. He says that every year papers come out which attempt to express the fine structure constant as some complicated combination of π’s and e’s, and as soon as scientists measure the fine structure constant to a further decimal point they all come out wrong. Remember, the constants of nature are only known by measurement, so there’s no telling how many decimal points they ultimately have (or even if they ever terminate).
The absolutely key idea to remember is that all these points are pertinent before the discovery of fine tuning. Once scientists discovered that the value of the constants were not arbitrary, but were in fact the precise values needed for our ordered universe, the approach of the mathematical constants becomes even more dubious. According to this approach, the relationship between the values (which are determined entirely by mathematical logic) happen entirely by chance to be the exact values needed to produce our universe. This is very difficult to believe and it ignores the knowledge science has discovered of fine tuning.
Yes, the alien simulation argument is pretty ridiculous to me too, considering it has the exact same problem as the God hypothesis: it doesn't explain where the aliens themselves come from. In that regard, saying "everything came from God" or "everything came from the aliens who made the simulation we live in" or even just "everything came from a singularity that exploded into the universe when the Big Bang happened" doesn't actually answer the fundamental question at all, merely pushes it one step further back.
Granted, I don't have an answer myself and strongly suspect the question to be fundamentally unanswerable. Maybe it's some kind of infinite cycle with no true beginning and no end. Maybe it's just the result of some kind of mathematical process akin to cellular automata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton), where a system that could have started as a simple binary kept growing in complexity until it became a universe with all sorts of distinct waves and particles and fundamental constants. Admittedly, those ideas are probably still just begging the question in the same way as the God/alien hypothesis, but they make a certain sort of sense to me.
I'm not sure why there needs to be a reason at all for something to exist rather than nothing. The idea of nothing at all existing is difficult to comprehend -- I can certainly understand any one particular thing not existing, or I can imagine an empty universe, in which no material thing (or energy other than the vacuum energy) exists, but in which spacetime still has existence and meaning. But I can't imagine nothing at all existing.
However, to be fair, I have similar problems with infinity. That is, it's difficult to imagine an extent of...things, not restricting ourselves to this universe in the sense of what blew up out of the Big Bang and is still expanding...being infinite, in space and time. If everything is infinite, then relatively speaking everything I know, or could know. or indeed any chunk of what is no matter how large, is relatively speaking zero in extent, a vanishingly small percentage of what is. Can't really get my head around *that* any more than the idea that everything is finite in extent -- what is 'outside' that which is? Or came 'before' or will come 'after'?
Even in the simplest terms, it's not really possible for me to comprehend being alive for a finite time in an infinite time extent, nor being alive (as God must be) for an infinite time.
Poor gods, designer gods, industrially industrious gods. Gods of science, gods of the intellect, whose very existence hangs on the mental acrobatics of philosophers producing proofs. Engineer gods endlessly fine-tuning the fine-structure constant like a bored teenager who burns his tedium playing videogames. How many half-formed universes will they leave behind? Micromanaging gods keeping accounts of sins and virtues, voyeur gods raising mighty eyebrows at your sexual self-pleasure, do they get turned on too? Gods with egos the size of mountains to match their human co-creators, jealous gods, demanding gods, despondent gods. Do they pray to us too in their moments of weakness? Gods like beasts of burden, bribed by rituals to keep the eclipses timely and the rains abundant. Gods of war, coerced by prayers to bless the armies of each warring camp in turn, before they go and merrily kill each other. Do they too get excited watching the action? Gods of religion, bound by the rules of doctrine, contorting themselves within the prisons created by pointy theologians. Gods of the world, harnessed to uphold the inevitably corrupt institutions of their host societies. Do they ever wish they could start a revolution, or even vote?
To hell with all that! Set your gods free! God or gods or goddesses, god or absence of god, universal principle of all or nothing, gods of consciousness, gods of love or gods of indifference. Gods of the poets, mysterious force of the mystics... ever elusive effulgent scent, through you all questions are not answered, but simply undone!
I don't really have time to be here on this thread let alone review the whole book, but here's a question: why "fine tuning" instead of "design"?
If I were designing a universe, it would look very, very different from this one, even if I refrained from designing any life forms. And if I were designing life forms, they would be very, very different (not anything consistent with the theory of evolution, certainly.)
But isn't the purpose of work to have time to think?
We use "fine tuning" to refer to precise quantitative values, like 137.035999084. We use "design" to refer to the qualitative elements and relationships found in something like the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
"If I were designing a universe" is a fun game, but of dubious argumentative value. It's hard to know what universe I would have made if I hadn't already observed this one. One thing I do know is that I never would have come up with all the amazing things science keeps discovering throughout the universe.
I didn't mean to brush off your question. I honestly don't know how to think about what kind of universe I would make if I could. I'm not even sure I would make a universe.
Well, as an engineer (and anti-simulation-hypothesisist) I find it an interesting thing to think about. But for a serious God-theorist it seems more important still.
Here's another two questions: assuming an omnipotent intelligence created the universe, what must its goal have been, and what technique or process might Ze have used to select the specific decisions that Ze made?
Yes, I know that the answer is "I don't know" and "we don't know". Nevertheless any reasonable theory must make sense, and therefore there must exist at least one answer to these questions that makes sense. If you can't find even one story that fits together well and is not easily rebuffed, then you don't have much of a theory.
I would be surprised if answers to these two questions are not easily rebuffed by critics of the "intelligence" hypothesis. For instance, consider this question: could the intelligence use experimentation, creating many universes to witness each one's development, in an effort to find something Ze likes?
If the answer is yes, why couldn't the intelligence just churn out a series of many universes with random parameters until it finds one that does something it considers interesting? (Well, because if it could do that, then it wouldn't really need *intelligence*, it could just churn out random universes forever, a few of which would work out okay, and that's where we live. Occam's Razor would then demand the removal of God from the theory, or at least the removal of intelligence.)
If the answer is no, then why not? But also, if the answer is no, then the intelligence would have to be very careful what parameters Ze selects, since Ze cannot simply try again if the first attempt fails. How would it choose a good set of parameters? Can Ze mentally simulate a billion years of consequences to confirm that a specific choice of parameters will act roughly as desired (keeping in mind that our universe, in contrast to other easily-imaginable universes, took a ridiculously long time to develop conditions in which life is possible)? If yes, what is the distinction between a perfect simulation within God's perfect mind and a "real" universe? Because it seems like these simulations are basically realities, and since this God is truly omnipotent, Ze could create an unlimited number of them. If no, then what other method could Ze use to make such a difficult choice? (I expect the question to be handwaved away by saying with something that amounts to "well Ze just used Zis intelligence!")
Having said all that, our empiricists are convinced that intelligence is largely (if not entirely) mechanical in nature, and it was only people who believed this who were able to produce things like self-driving cars and machines that draw pictures and compose music. I've never heard of a Christian AGI expert, have you? AIs are 100% mechanical as far as anyone can tell, and human intelligence must be (at least mostly) mechanical in order to explain both the brain, and the way brain damage works. Indeed, it was biological brains which inspired AI neural networks in the first place. But of course, if there is even a single drop of mechanical intelligence inside God zimself, then God already existed, from the very beginning, within a universe that can support mechanical intelligence (a rule-governed space that follows rules and thus has mechanics, with the property that the rules not only make mechanical intellgence possible, but have somehow already produced it). But that would mean God did not need to design a universe; at most ze would need to replicate more of the kind of universe in which Ze already found Zimself. The ability to design a universe would thus be a wholly unnecessary miracle.
Therefore, it would seem that you need to posit a God with purely non-mechanical intelligence, but this means it is fundamentally different from any life on Earth. No non-mechanical intelligence is known to exist on Earth or anywhere else. But how do you reconcile that explanation with Christian, Islamic and Jewish ideas of a God that is humanlike? Was God, a non-mechanical intelligence, hoping to replicate his own non-mechanical intelligence in a mechanical form? (I don't think "yes" would be a reasonable answer here in light of other kown facts like, well, the age of the universe and the body of evidence for the theory of evolution; the only reasonable conclusion, to me, is "no", that if a God created the universe, Ze hasn't demonstrated to us that Ze had any intention to create mechanical life, nor any interest in it, beyond maybe creating the first cell before abandoning Earth 4 billion years ago.)
But all of the above is sort of a red herring to me, for two reasons. Firstly, on an intuitive level I would offer what, to me, is the most compelling problem of all: any God-theory of creation does not solve the ultimate question of creation. Because the moment we use God as the answer to "what created the universe", we should immediately notice that God is something, which leads us to the question "what created God", which is no easier to answer than "what created the universe". I was a Christian for about 30 years and recognized this problem long before I left. The only way I remember anybody trying to address this is to say something like "well, no one created God, He Always Existed", an explanation as convincing as "it's turtles all the way down". I could ask "how do you know this?". One might respond "The Bible says so, Genesis 1:1", and then I could point out that "Genesis 1:1 refers to 'a beginning'", but that would allow the premise that the Bible is true, so...
Or I could take a different tack, asking instead "if God has always existed, then he existed for an infinite length of time, which implies that He waited for an infinite amount of time before creating the universe. Didn't He get bored? Infinitely bored, even? Why did He wait an infinite length of time before creating the universe?" This is an extraordinarily perplexing idea, and for this reason, when I was a Christian, I never believed that God always existed. But if you reject "He always existed" then you accept that God has a beginning, and then we must ask what created God, and when I was a Christian, this was very perplexing indeed. (By the way, I reject the infiniteness of time in both directions; I think the future does not exist yet, so there is no infinite future nor past. Space could be the same way: utterly unlimited, yet still finite.)
Second, after deconversion, I was persuaded by EY that actually "what created God" is a *harder* question than "what created the universe", from the perspective of Occam's Razor (an important tool for comparing any two theories regardless of subject matter (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor)). Whatever God is, Ze isn't simple. Ze seemingly must be more complex than the rules governing the universe itself. It seems to me that the entire space of all possible complete God theories together, seems to require orders of magnitude more bits of description, i.e. does not come within several orders of magnitude of the simplicity of [the best] non-God theories, and thus non-God theories are more likely to be true, at least according to this technique that works well in science. (Note 1: N theories can easily require fewer bits of description than a single theory; as EY puts it, "more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world". But this is not necessary; what I'm actually trying to say is that any union of N theories takes up more probability space than 1 theory. Note 2: "God did it" sounds like a simple theory but isn't, just as "The computer did it" doesn't imply that the computer is simple.)
Your questions are very good and legitimate. I can see why the answers you were given are largely unsatisfying. Unfortunately, this isn't really a good forum for explaining an entire new framework for thinking about these issues. It would take a book. :)
I'm curious whether you discuss the anthropic principle in your argument, and how it figures into discussion of the exact values of physical constants.
We do discuss it some with regards to the multiverse. There is an ironic twist to the historical disagreement between religionists and scientists regarding the importance of humanity in the universe. As opposed to religionists, scientists (at least since Darwin) have historically downplayed the role and significance that humans play in the grand cosmos. However, for multiverse scientists to use the fine tuning of the constants to support the multiverse, they need to make recourse to fine tuning for intelligent life alone. In their framework, the fact that our universe also happens to contain galaxies, stars, planets, molecules, etc. is just an accident of those other objects being included in the most typical way to get intelligent life (i.e. humans).
The reason for this is as follows: multiverse scientists use fine tuning to explain why we happen to find ourselves in the one universe with the “right” constants to enable intelligent observers. However, all that’s really necessary is that the constants be fine tuned for intelligent life alone. For this theory to also explain the other amazing features of our universe, multiverse scientists must claim that these features are mere consequences of a typical universe with intelligent life.
In contrast to scientists’ ordinary historical attitude, multiverse scientists have assigned human beings a central role relative to all other features of our universe. As such, the line of reasoning used to explain the fine tuning, design, and order of our universe as a mere illusion is typically referred to by multiverse scientists as anthropic reasoning or the anthropic principle.
On the other hand, our argument is based upon the complexity and structure of all the features of our universe (which includes, but is not limited to intelligent life). We claimed that the fine tuning, design, and order of our universe are genuine, and naturally point to an intelligent cause. The implication is that an intelligent cause fine tuned, designed, and ordered our universe for the purpose of bringing out all the vast complexity and structure in our universe. Because this argument does not demand or imply the centrality of human life in particular, we do not use the multiverse scientists’ “anthropic” terminology in our argument.
Are you saying that you simply ignore the anthropic principle entirely?
> all that’s really necessary is that the constants be fine tuned for intelligent life alone
Fine tuning is sufficient but not necessary, as I mentioned offhandedly in a much bigger comment.
> multiverse scientists have assigned human beings a central role
No, mainstream thinking is that human beings have an utterly ephemeral role. Despite this, we think about ourselves a lot; we have a central role in our own world. For reference:
> The anthropic principle is the principle that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, given that we could only exist in the particular type of universe capable of developing and sustaining sentient life.
So, it is not that scientists assign humans a central role. Rather, scientists observe that they ARE observers, and therefore they must exist in a context where observers are possible (or else not exist at all). We do not witness the inside of the sun, or the inside of Jupiter, or the inside of a black hole, or even the core of the Earth itself. Nor do we feel outer space. We exist only in locations where we can exist. If you think of each planet as its own universe, it is interesting, but not surprising, that we find ourselves in one small region (namely the surface) of the Third Universe From The Sun.
We don't ignore the anthropic principle in our book. We explain why it's necessary for multiverse theory but not for the argument for an intelligent cause of the constants.
Multiverse scientists explain the observed value of the constants by saying that human beings (intelligent observers) could only exist in a universe with those values. The reason we observe those values, when most universes in the multiverse have different values, is because we are in the typical universe with intelligent observers.
In contrast, our argument for an intelligent cause of the universe is essentially unaffected by whether or not the universe has intelligent life.
First, the ten must have something at least slightly different from each other, by virtue of which you call them ten gods and not just one identical entity. Also, they must have something in common, by virtue of which you call them all 'gods'.
Now, we can ask, did one god cause the universe (and the other nine just watched) or all ten together?
If it was only one god, then the other nine are superfluous. There is no reason to posit them as they don't explain anything. While we couldn't prove they didn't exist, there would be no indication from the universe that they did exist (as opposed to at least one which does explain the universe).
If all ten gods acted together to make the universe, we could ask a slight variation of Richard Dawkins's question "Who designed the designers?" Insofar as each of the ten gods contributed something special based on their own unique quality, it is reasonable to ask what caused each of them to have just the right qualities where only all ten working together could make this amazing universe?
The point being that positing ten gods does not answer the question of who fine tuned the constants, but rather begs the question of who designed (or fine tuned if the gods have quantitative parts) the ten gods? Only one God with no fine tuned parts is a satisfactory solution, because we can understand why it is not reasonable to ask who designed and fine tuned one God with no parts.
> Only one God with no fine tuned parts is a satisfactory solution, because we can understand why it is not reasonable to ask who designed and fine tuned one God with no parts.
Why can we ask that question for ten Gods but not for one? Why is it not reasonable to ask who designed and fine tuned one God with no parts?
Ten gods with parts invite an explanation for what designed and fine tuned them such that they all properly work together to be able to make the universe. One God with no parts is a fundamental existence that is irreducible to any simpler existence.
Let's use science as an analogy. Science can explain a molecule in terms of its atoms, and an atom in terms of its electrons and quarks. Electrons and quarks are fundamental particles that (as far as we know) are not comprised of anything simpler. A fundamental particle is by definition not reducible to a simpler explanation.
Similarly, ten gods with parts can be explained by something simpler. But you can't explain one God with no parts by anything simpler. The very method of reduction to simpler concepts finds a limit at something absolutely simple.
So we can understand why one God with no parts cannot be designed and fine tuned, because the question is only sensical with regards to things with parts. But it would merely be an arbitrary thought taboo to say that ten complex gods are not designed and fine tuned by something else more fundamental than them.
If you're asking how do we know that there is only one God with no parts, then I'd have to respond that we wrote a book that tries to show why that is the case.
But if you mean why is one God with no parts unable to be reduced to something simpler, then I can answer. The reason is that there are two ways to reduce something. Either you can reduce the number of entities (explain 10 gods by 9 or fewer gods) or you can reduce the number of parts something has (explain one proton with three parts by reducing it to the interaction of things with no parts like quarks).
Either way, one God with no parts can't be reduced to fewer entities (as nothing is less than one) or to something simpler (as there can't be anything with less than zero parts).
I always thought the anthropic principle was a fully general slam dunk against any fine tuning type arguments. Do you (try to) rebut it?
If anything, finetuning arguments make me even less amenable to the possibility of design (at least that prioritizes humanity) because it really draws attention to how actually abysmally our universe is arranged to support us. It is almost entirely inhospitable vacuum, dead rocks and balls of plasma. We can just eek out a marginal existence on the surface of one of those rocks.. how can anyone think this is for us?
The anthropic principle means different things to different people, which is partly why it's a confusing term. There's also the strong and weak versions. In general, it is something that multiverse scientists must posit on some level in order for multiverse to be a plausible solution to the fine tuning of the constants.
We can't really show that the universe is not fine tuned specifically for life, but we think the burden of proof is on those that claim our universe and its laws are the typical universe with intelligent observers. It is certainly not obvious that that is true. (The Boltzmann Brain Paradox is one good argument against it.)
Additionally, those who want to use fine tuning to posit a special place for intelligent life need to establish that there is clear evidence of fine tuning for intelligent life specifically (and not just as an accident of fine tuning for atoms, stars, etc.). We don't get involved with this in any extensive way because we are not taking a position one way or the other on divine providence.
The prime mover is a cosmological argument. Our argument from fine tuning is a design or teleological argument based on special features of the universe and its laws.
It is different from the design argument is biology. The fine tuning argument from physics deals with the fundamental basis of scientific reality. In fact, the apparent design in biology is a result of the fine tuning in physics (through the intermediary of chemistry).
" Our argument from fine tuning is a design or teleological argument based on special features of the universe and its laws."
I think the "unliklihood" of any particular arrangement of the fundamental constants is a unconvincing argument for the existence of God because, for me anyway, there is absolutely no reason to think that the constants or fundamental forces of the universe could have been anything else than exactly what they are.
I am curious, do you accept the validity of intelligent design as opposed to "random" evolution? Because it seems to me your argument and that argument are essentially the same.
I've never really heard a good refutation of the prime mover argument, it's certainly not a "proof" but it always felt very "proofy" to me. What comes before and after time itself? That's where God is for me.
All three of your questions are related. I'll respond to them all, but in a different order.
1) We are accepting the biological theory of evolution, but we argue that it is only possible because of the fine tuning and design found in the fundamental laws of physics. The big difference between the two is that biology is dealing with a derivative science, and hence is more susceptible to the "God of the gaps" critique; physics is dealing with the fundamental basis of reality, and as such is less susceptible to that same problem.
One way to see the superiority of the argument from physics as opposed to biology is to look at the opposing scientific theories. In biology, the scientific response to the intelligent design argument is evolution through natural selection (a well established scientific theory), while in physics the opposing theory is the multiverse (a speculative theory with no hope of ever having empirical support).
2) The reason we don't use the prime mover or first cause argument is because scientist can (and do) claim that the prime movers are the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Our argument against that is the laws of physics exhibit fine tuning (in their quantities) and design (in their qualitative relationships), which indicate they are not the ultimately fundamental realities but rather also have a cause.
3) There's is nothing intrinsically illogical about saying the values of the constants are brute facts with no explanation. But, it's a very ugly theory to say that the fundamental reality is 25 numbers like 137.035999139, and more importantly, it ignores the scientific knowledge of fine tuning - that these values are the precise ones needed to bring about our ordered complex universe.
Would people be interested in a substack that walks through fermi estimates of random things?
I find back of the envelope calculations really valuable for lots of things (as a trader it’s also a pretty natural habit) - often having an order of magnitude estimate helps appreciate the scale (or lack thereof) of something, and can be a useful prioritization technique. I wonder if people would find it useful to see examples worked out?
I myself would be, but truthfully that feels like sort of a one-time long deep dive visit where I read dozens of posts at once, rather than something I'd return to every day
Reminds me of the "What If?" spinoff of xkcd; would probably improve the readership if you took question submissions rather than trying to come up with your own.
Short sample to pique interest inspired by my staring out the window on ride to the airport - how many trees are there in the world? Goal: come up with a 1 OOM wide interval containing google’s answer.
(1) I’ve heard Canada has a lot of trees, so I’ll est that # and scale it up. My point guess is Canada has 20% of the world’s trees.
(2) What’s Canada’s land area? I know the US is 10 mil km2, my point guess is Canada is 1x as large.
(3) I think most trees are in forests - point est 90%.
(4) What % of Canada is covered in forest? Point est 40%.
(5) How densely are trees in forests packed? Imagine a uniformly spaced 2d grid, I think each tree about a human length from its nearest neighbor, so let’s say 2m. So point guess 1 tree / 4m^2.
Putting it together:
- (2) + (4) + (5) -> Forests in Canada have 1 trillion trees.
- (3) gets us to ~1.1 trillion trees in all of Canada.
- (1) gets us to ~5.5 trillion trees in the world.
I’ll equally space the interval around this in log terms, so let’s say 1.8trillion - 18trillion for my final interval.
So seems like ~all my error was from 1/3/5, I’m guessing (3) was not large here and 1/5 were the big one.
Let me know if you found this interesting / what might make it even better (trees are cool and all, but how much do people care about the particular thing being estimated having more practical relevance?)
In particular I think was probably ~4x too high on the avg tree density in forests, based on the fact that I was 2x too high on what % of trees are in canada and still ended up ~2x too high on point est (5.5t vs 3t)
Scott, there’s pretty much no way I’ll submit a book review on time. But I am putting it out here on this public forum that I WAS going to submit a book review of Pascal’s _Pensées_, and it was going to be incredible. I’ll await my honorable mention.
I thought that last year's reviews were all a bit too similar in their subject matter, so I decided to review the "least likely to be reviewed on ACX" book I could find on my shelves, which turned out to be a circa 2009 travel guide to Peru, a country that I thought about going to but never actually went to.
I was going to write a really poignant review of this book, which would be based around life's melancholic gap between plans and reality, and the sadness of making plans that never come to fruition -- not because they become impossible nor because we lose interest, but just because they forever stay in that grey area of things that we kinda want to do, but don't want to do strongly enough to actually make them happen. If my desire to go to Peru ever reached 100% then I could get on a plane and go there; if it ever reached 0% then I'd forget it and be happy, but instead I'm stuck in the grey zone of unfulfilled weak desire. Maybe I'll go to Peru one day, maybe I won't, but it doesn't really matter, because I'll still have thousands of unfulfilled weak desires just as powerful.
Anyway, given the theme of the review I suppose it's perfectly appropriate that I never got around to writing the review. Add another unfulfilled desire to the list.
Excellent review! I could write one about my old guide book to Malawi. ("There is no country with such name" a friend said.). I'll just copy yours. Said it all.
I wrote a two-part expository paper on Bayesianism in philosophy for Philosophy Compass about a decade back. During the pandemic, I've started making videos where I read out full papers that I've assigned my students to read, with some commentary at places where I think an undergrad might either get tripped up by some unexpected vocabulary or might miss a reference. I finally got to the point in one of my classes where I assigned my own papers on Bayesianism, so I did videos on them.
If anyone thinks they might be interested, the videos are here:
(And if you're interested in other topics in analytic philosophy of language or epistemology, it's possible you'll find some of my other videos relevant as well, and you can probably find them from those.)
I'd also be interested if anyone has any feedback or advice on how to do videos like this. (I definitely appreciate that long-format video is not a great way to get a lot of people engaged, so I'm not necessarily interested in comments that repeat that point, but if anyone has thoughts on how to show students what is going on in a long reading, I'd be glad to hear.)
"having a right to exist - if the Kremlin denies it" - is not a privilege "large chunks of Russian population" have, either. I know English, German, Russian, have a son in Ukraine. And I have no need to update the tiniest bit after the news from Bucha. What'd you folks expect?!? They have/had torture prisons in the "separatist areas": Stanislav Aseyev (google, wikipedia)
Heller Weg: Geschichte eines Konzentrationslagers im Donbass 2017-2019
Have been reading a lot about nuclear fusion's progress in recent years. Part of me is cynical that it's yet another instance of fusion being "just 10-15 years away" for the next half century.
But the progress does seem substantial this time. Tyler Cowen summed it up last year:
What encourages me is that this progress seems to be occurring from many directions, both in terms of countries as well as approaches, so it appears to be more broad-based than a narrow vector of a single company/institution doing well, where everything would hinge on them.
Am I being carried away or is there more substantial progress time 'round compared to previous false dawns?
My take is that, after 50 years of being "30 years away" from fusion, we are only "20 years away" now.
For some reason, a lot of people read that and think "it will happen in less than 5 years". It will not. It might be 20 years, it might also be physically impossible to run a commercially-viable reactor.
I definitely think they're far closer to producing net positive power out of it, and wouldn't be surprised if they've got that by 2030. The question then just becomes whether it can be commercially viable - you could have a fusion reactor that works perfectly well, but is still too expensive to operate such that it becomes a niche device.
It's not as close as fusion researchers give the impression of, because they're not including all of the energy when they talk about 'net positive'. The kind of net positive they refer to is a long way from true net positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&ab_channel=SabineHossenfelder
Keep in mind that the original "20 years away..." form 50 years ago finished the sentence with "if you fund our research", which the US government did not do. I think present fusion progress is roughly on track for cumulative money spent, it just hasn't until very recently attracted the billions of dollars it needs, and the current funding is still not enough to do it *quickly*
I've become very cautious of any predictions on timeframes larger than five years, preferably 1-2 years or less.
It's not even that these predictions are necessarily wrong, just that a sufficiently long timeframe reads to me more like - "We think this is possible, but have no way to tell for sure or properly gauge the amount of time or effort it will take, so we'll put out a number that is within the working lives of mid-career professionals working on this project, without forcing them to produce measurable results in the near future."
Seems to me like there are a few ways you can get the engineering to work out on paper, its just crazy expensive and complicated so getting over the risk-investment hump is taking forever.
I’ve seen Anatoly Karlin cited here a few times, and decided to look into him. Boy was that quite the rabbit hole to go into.
The guy seems cruel, arrogant, petty. He unhesitatingly lies, openly sneers at those with opposing views, reflexively doubles down when presented with evidence. I tried to apply maximum charitability, yet even ignoring this horrible optics and gratuitous use of terms like ‘globohomos’, he remains one of the least interesting authors I’ve encountered in two decades of internet use. Somehow though, his views keep appearing within Scott’s blog.
But surely there has to be a Russian nationalist or avowed fascist that isn’t also the living embodiment of bad faith. I’m not being facetious, I know some very kind and thoughtful fascists and monarchists; is it so hard to find one that blogs?
Karlin is a (very) long-time commentator on Scott's blog, and he's proposed some legitimately very interesting ideas, particularly in his "Apollo's Ascent" and "Age of Malthusian Industrialism" series: https://akarlin.com/start/
(Both pieces take some very un-PC ideas for granted, but are still quite interesting and original.)
Some of his other writings can be entertaining as well, like his series contrasting US/UK/Russia, written around the time when he moved. He's always been a *very far*-right author, though, and the conflict with Ukraine seems like it's kind of broken his brain, while an earlier version of him might have been more skeptical (this man wrote "Russia's Technological Backwardness" in 2016; much as the trends in that article were positive it was kind of insane to think the country was radically different six years later).
No, I think your impression is accurate. He often just copies the views of Scott on his blog a few weeks/months on his blog, which is why I don't get why people think he's original. It's not even the worst offense. I think your interpretation of him as consistently arguing/acting in bad faith and being habitually untruthful is correct. It's not even about being far-right per se.
He is featured as a readily available example of Kremlin point of view. Whether this is correct, I am not sure, but regardless of that, Kremlin point of view is going to be pretty repugnant to most readers here, so
It might be useful to have a baseline - what fraction of people currently floss regularly (say, averaging more than 4 times in a week over the past year)? what fraction of people currently floss irregularly (more than 0.5 times a week, but less than 4 times a week)? what fraction of people currently basically don't floss (less than 0.5 times a week)? what fraction of people have spent a year in one state and then spent a year in another state?
I'm currently in the "floss regularly" camp, but I can't remember if I started during or shortly before the pandemic. (Probably during, because I got into a lot of regular care habits during the pandemic.) I think I might have spent a few years regularly flossing a while back, but I think most of my life I was probably in the "basically never" camp.
The biggest change I've noticed is that flossing itself is easier and less painful when I do it regularly. There are some foods, like raw whole apples and popcorn (and sometimes broccoli), where I prefer to floss immediately after eating it, because it gets caught between my teeth. But I don't think I've noticed anything else particularly relevant (though I haven't down-shifted my flossing any time recently.)
I’ve had the same oral hygienist for 30 years. I came to fear the metal tools he would use to clean my teeth and gums every six months if I wasn’t flossing regularly pretty quickly.
In the last 28 year there have only been a handful of days where I didn’t floss at least once a day. Once the habit is established it’s pretty easy to keep up with.
I've always hated flossing and never done it regularly. I also don't brush as often as I should. I have never had a cavity or really anything wrong with my teeth. I don't think my experience is typical.
I floss regularly myself. My contribution to this discussion: dentists seem to disagree about whether you should floss before or after brushing; there’s pros and cons either way. But flossing after brushing is a big behavior modification trick: you see all the stuff stuck to your floss and know counterfactually that would have stayed in your teeth all night if you hadn’t flossed. Now I feel very gross if I go a day without flossing.
My gum health without flossing was pretty bad. A half-hour of agony at the dental hygienist mostly fixed that, but flossing in between helps a lot. I still don't do it very regularly, but most of my initial objection was that it hurt and that was a function of the poor gum health that flossing treats.
Fun fact: German per head use of floss-line per year: 50 cm. - I guess it is less. I did it for some time, helped me, but too much hassle. Nowadays I use those interdental bursts or soft-picks, if I feel like it. Much more fun. - I will be dead in 20 years or so, and not from US. I won't waste my last decades flossing. I don't need teeth to read.
A friend of mine uses and swears by a water flosser. Like a small jet of water from a handheld tank and pipe that you press against the gaps in your teeth. I tried it and while it seems way easier to do than normal flossing, it didnt feel like it penetrated in between my teeth as much as i felt it needed to. Anyone know anything about the efficacy of these?
> "Some data suggest that regular flossing, in addition to brushing, mitigates gum disease, but there is only “weak, very unreliable” evidence that it combats plaque."
The bigger takeaway from the article is that genetics and diet appear to be the biggest factors in the health of one's teeth, not interventions like flossing and dental procedures.
I have a low-sugar diet and brush daily with an electric toothbrush, and these days I have my teeth professionally cleaned twice a year. Before that, I had a bit of a phobia and hadn't seen a dentist in 10+ years, but my teeth were absolutely fine. I don't floss, as it's painful and seems to only ever lead to bleeding and tenderness. According to the dentist, my teeth are in top condition for my age, even the baby tooth that was never replaced by an adult tooth.
Ha! True story: My longtime kindly dentist (who read the Atlantic article and confirmed it was more or less accurate) retired, and I was anxious the dentist the practice brought on to replace him was potentially going to be a bullshit artist.
But she - young and exceptionally beautiful in that way that reminds you that we don't live in movies because people like her are only ever in them, not in real life - cooed over my healthy baby tooth and told me it would likely hang with me for life!
I intermittently and not-purposefully give up flossing, I really don't recommend it. Every time I go back to it even after a day I'm just like, "ugh, that stuff was just *sitting in my *mouth".
1. Are relatively young ppl getting the next booster (vaccine dose #4, booster #2)? The pros are obvious (mRNA vaccines seem super-effective in preventing serious cases). What are the cons?
I'm asking specifically for two relatively healthy 50 yos and a healthy 21 yo, and the vaccine so far for all three is Moderna. We had our booster #1 in October. The then-20yo had the half dose Moderna.
2. How would you time it? Is there a new wave for sure? When will it peak in Central Texas?
3. How do you distinguish between covid and spring allergies? How many rapid tests or pcr tests, taken in what pattern? (i.e. for e.g. take just one rapid, trust the results?).
1. Technically, people under 50 in the United States aren't approved to get a fourth dose unless they have some immunosuppressed condition. I think the main con is the day of feeling yucky afterwards, but the main pro is less than you suggest - I've heard suggestions that, for someone who got a second booster four months after the first, another six months later, the total protection is not very different from someone who is just ten months out from the first booster. It seems (from the *very* little I've read, so take this with a lot of grains of salt) that the main benefit of second boosters is just in the first few months after the second booster.
2. I would time it when it seems clear that there is going to be another wave. At the moment, Central Texas doesn't obviously seem to be getting another wave. I live in Brazos County, and also follow the Austin and Houston metro areas on the NYTimes covid tracker page. Over the past few weeks, there have been several periods where one or more of these places has had some increase in cases, but it's unclear that any of them have gotten the sustained ramping increases that we've been seeing in some of the Northeast, or the spikes we've seen in parts of west Texas. And even those two phenomena still seem to be growing substantially more slowly than the corresponding parts of the delta wave, let alone the omicron wave. If one of these three areas is sustaining case counts above 20 per 100,000 people per day for a week or more, and there seems to be continued increase there or in the others, that might be a good time to time a booster.
Otherwise, I'd time the booster for October, like I do for flu shots.
3. I've discovered a few systematic allergy symptoms and time frames. In Central Texas, one of my biggest allergy seasons is December to March (what they call "cedar fever", though there's no fever, and I think it's junipers rather than cedars). A distinctive feature I note about the allergies is that I get an itch in the roof of my mouth. The past two days I've had somewhat different symptoms, though I suspect they're also an allergy (maybe a different one?) - headache, and a bit of a puffy feeling in my face. My temperature has remained low, and today I've been diligent about washing my hands and face and wearing a mask when I step outside, and it seems to be keeping it more moderate (though by the end of a two hour walk, I had some sniffles even with the mask, that went away when I got home and washed my hands and face thoroughly).
I was doing rapid tests at home twice a week during January and February, on days when I went to campus to teach. I've only done one in the past few weeks though.
Do you think the nyt is even updating the Travis county positivity rates? It went from 3% to 4% and has been stuck there for over a week now. The local govt sites are so terribly organized. JHU doesn't have county level data i can view.
The zvi link was useful. Key point id forgotten about : "antibodies control infection,
while T cells control disease severity." Which of these affect long covid? I worry about even mild covid as long covid seems poorly understood. Maybe it can hurt health lifelong though. This article strangely ignores long covid.
I haven’t been paying attention to positivity rates, but perhaps I should, so I hadn’t noticed it stick.
I think the reason there is very little devoted to long COVID there is that it seems likely that long COVID is strongly connected to severe COVID. I haven’t heard of anyone who got long COVID without a severe case, except in March 2020.
I don't qualify as a "young person", and I'm not in Texas. (I'm in my mid-60s). Here's how I'm going about making these decisions.
- Longer between boosters probably gives better immunity long term than the minimum delay allowed
- I can (and do) monitor the local covid statistics. They aren't as accurate as they used to be, except for hospitalizations and deaths, so there's less early warning of a spike, but I can still see spikes growing, just not as clearly as before.
- Immunity wanes faster the older you are, all else being equal. If a healthy 90 year old needs a booster after 4 months, the appropriate delay can be scaled up roughly for a healthy 70 year old or a healthy 50 year old. And scaled down for someone who isn't so healthy. We don't have good stats on this, sadly, but some of the data from Israel may be helpful.
- If you've had covid, as well as being vaccinated, that's at least equivalent to an extra booster.
- I personally got my first two covid shots while undergoing chemotherapy. It's reasonable to assume that I didn't get as much immunity as I would have if I'd been healthy at the time. We don't have data that can predict how much I'm likely to have missed. I was fully healthy for my first booster.
- I can and do change my behaviour during a local covid peak, as does everyone in my household.
Net result:
- I've decided to wait about 6 months after my first booster, rather than four. Without the chemo, I'd wait longer.
- This is subject to revision based on any solid research I encounter between now and the end of July.
In your place, I'd wait even longer, and then get a Pfizer booster, so as to get some of the mix-and-match benefit. And unless the 21 year old has something serious wrong with them, they aren't eligible yet.
I'm 50, also got Moderna. Was sick for 4 days with each shot. Didn't get the first booster. Got COVID (probably Omicron), was sick for about 8 days with no noticable lasting effects. At this point I would not get any booster. Their effectiveness against current strains (either Omicron classic or BA.2) is weak and fleeting.
I found COVID to not really feel like allergies; it felt like the flu. Main distinguisher is body aches and a general feeling of sickness, whereas seasonal allergies are the waterworks and itchy eyes and maybe a sinus headache.
I got the pfizer booster simultaneously with the flu shot and felt completely energized for weeks at least. Like what the niagen was supposed to do but didn't much. I was a little tired after the second shot but not much. Made me wonder if some of the negative reactions to the vaccine aren't via suggestability. Negative reactions are much more tweetable. Then the polling only reinforces it once it's already out there.
Maybe the negative reactions to COVID are via suggestibility, and if we'd just publicized that COVID made you feel like you'd taken a nice recreational dose of heroin, nobody would have died.
I am not sufficiently suggestible that other people saying they had poor reactions to the vaccine would lead to me sleeping 11-12 hours per day for 3 days after receiving the vaccine (with intense exhaustion and aches while awake.)
I couldn't sleep 11 hours ordinarily. 8 is a tough sell for my body a lot of the time, even with support from diphenhydramine hcl. There's no way a COVID vaccine had more suggestive sleepiness power than actually taking an actual sleep med.
Like most things immunology, different people had radically different experiences with it. We don't need psychosomatic explanations for this; immune systems are notoriously idiosyncratic.
I just want to suggest the possibility of a psychosomatic component moving the distribution of what is experienced and also a reporting bias. People are very keen to report their suffering. I'm told suggestibility is why placebos have an effect.
It's not the vaccine that has some sort of suggestiveness principle contained within analogous to the mythical microchip but rather the information bath the vax takes place in. Your experience can have had its degree influenced by your mind.
Right... Which is why I went with a comparison that has an even stronger information bath. Sleep meds that have historically helped me and many others sleep are strongly suggestive of sleeping better. I'm quite confident that if someone replaced my bottle of benadryl with identical sugar pills I would still have some effect due to the suggestion.
The vaccine is far less associated with sleeping more in my mind, and so any such suggestive effects should be far weaker. Instead, it had a much much larger and unambiguous effect.
Slightly off topic but for what it's worth i find even a half tab of benadryl pushes sleep but I hate the way it makes me feel in the morning. 3mg melatonin for me. How much of that is placebo I don"t know.
At a little over 20, I don’t plan to. I think a fairly good risk of feeling yucky for two days, done twice a year, doesn’t really sound better than risking catching COVID at my age. Once I’m old enough that COVID’s death chances are comparable to my other activities’ I’ll probably reconsider it
1. Yeah, I'm going to do it. The risk is pretty low, and while the day after is annoying, it's worth it for the enhanced immunity.
2. It's hard to say. Not everywhere is showing the case counts anymore, and Utah is moving towards weekly case counts. I guess if we get two weeks going up in a row I'd get the 4th shot if it's available.
3. No easy way to do it, unfortunately. I'd just take a test, and if it comes back negative assume that it's spring allergies unless the symptoms seem unusually bad or you get new ones. Make sure to let anyone you know that is severely immunocompromised know and protect accordingly around you just in case.
Shouldn't the real tech revolution in currency just be getting dollars (or maybe euros, or even the yen or yuan) into the hands of consumers in the developing world? From what I can tell, dollars are in extremely high demand in every 2nd or 3rd world country with an unstable currency, which is most of them- and it is explicitly outlawed in every single one. On HN there was a recent discussion about currencies and everyone from the developing world said 'God all we want is stable dollars, and the local government makes it illegal'. Every article I read about currency instability in the developing world indicates that there's a black market for dollars, and enormous demand for them.
Cryptocurrency has existed for 13-14 years now, and famously does not get used for actual payments very much. Its main role seems to be a new vehicle for financial speculation, not payments. Meanwhile, 3rd world countries can grudgingly use the US dollar if pushed- El Salvador, Ecuador, Panama and Zimbabwe all officially use it. Wouldn't the real revolution not be crypto, but just an electronic payment system where the US dollar just supplants the official currency of say every Latin American country? If you're not keen on the dollar, it could be the euro- it could even be the yuan, perhaps China will push it on small countries in its orbit
The biggest beneficients of crypto are rich people subject to currency controls in e.g. China, and people trading on black markets in the developed world. The rest are along for the Ponzi ride.
How much capital to pump your shitcoin can you get out of Africa?
I feel like I've been waiting nearly 30 years for an open payments protocol (Visa and PayPal are proprietary and limited in use) - hopefully the cryptocurrency community can at least deliver that in the way you suggest!
> Fernanda Pirie is an anthropologist specializing in the development and use of law in what western thinkers used to call 'primitive' societies.
In this sentence, the reviewer is referring to a concept by using quotes around a defunct/discouraged term for the concept. He could suggest a suitable new name for the concept, but he hasn't. He could also explicitly deny that the concept is valid, but he hasn't. Is there a name for this practice?
Can you think of more examples with all of the above conditions? I'd be especially interested if there are examples without an element of controversy.
Is it possible he doesn't suggest a new name because he finds nothing wrong with the old name yet feels compelled to use scare quotes to demonstrate to his colleagues he realizes he is supposed to?
I wondered about that. But the reviewer is a retired conservative who is willing to share unpopular opinions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sumption,_Lord_Sumption#Political_views). That's why I felt it was more likely he objects to either the concept or the term, and found it strange he wasn't following through in a way that clarified his objection.
Newspeak comes to mind, in the sense that the practice seeks to abolish a word and concept without replacement. I have seen this before though alas I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head. Usually it serves as a signal to stop reading when people can’t use the right word or even concept for fear offending, or at least signaling that they think it offensive.
Well, in this case he is simply: quoting. "what western thinkers used to call" plus then the quote: "primitive". kinda 'double quoting', I admit. He could NOT suggest a suitable new name for the concept in THIS sentence. He could have added: I will use the term 'tribal societies' from now on.
Does anybody have pointers to writing that addresses technical analysis in trading from a rigorous angle?
I am of the camp that 95% of technical analysis is bunkum, but there is 5% that interests me. For example, the truism that booms happen gradually, whereas crashes happen suddenly, is a form of technical analysis. Or the fact that all leveraged order books have long and short squeezes is something relevant to my inquiry.
I am even interested in studies that dispute any value of technical analysis because that sharpens my knowledge of that space. For example, there is the study of a professor who asked his students to look at a bunch of charts and make predictions. The students made all sorts of pronouncements based on things like "momentum," and then the professor revealed that the charts were from coin flips.
Efficient market hypotheses would also qualify as relevant. The hypothesis says that in mature markets there is no "found money" from hacking greeks or worrying golden crosses.
When I search for the subject, unfortunately, I just bump into studies that reinforce the chart-reading nonsense. The best I ran into was Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris.
I'm not sure that the 5% of TA that you find interesting is actually TA. Vanilla econ and investor psychology texts can deal with these without the baggage or trappings of 'analysis'. If you want rigour and hate TA, read Taleb's Dynamic Hedging and the papers that followed it, all of which are free to download IIRC. The target audience is quants and mathematical physics types, which I assume is consistent with your request.
EMH says that you have to earn your profits, which means that good luck finding obvious trends from easily available data, but it is still possible to make substantial profit by doing deep dives into companies' books, physically going to their premises to check conditions there (eg. hiring people to count how many cars are parked outside of their local Walmart and aggregating the data nationally), etc. I have no idea whether that stuff falls under "technical analysis", I think it's "fundamentals" or something.
I was told TA works because people believe in TA, so you're just mutually predicting each other and reaching some kind of equilibrium. Sounds neat so it's probably bullshit.
I'm glad! I'm not currently in a "I should learn how to film stuff" emotional state, but I do get into those occasionally and I'll remember this for next time.
The only self-help book i've found that actually helped was How To Be Miserable by Randy J Paterson - as the name implies it's a Screwtape Letters-esque take that reframes a goal the reader naturally wants by inverting it.
The combination of goal-orientedness and its relatively rapid-fire nature (the book covers 40 points in 4 categories) means it actually covers a lot of ground, rather than the usual 'one or two good ommonsense points stretched out needlessly to sell a book', so that the average person will probably get a fair chunk of useful insight they hadn't thought of. The negative framing isn't *just* engaging whimsy either - it helps you to identify all the misery-increasing strategies you're already inadvertently using so you can stop doing them.
If you're not depressed it won't help you as much as it helped me, but it would probably help most people at least a little. The downside is this means the book is actually quite bad at keeping its promise of increasing the misery in your life.
I have recently been wondering about actual harm of a nuclear war while comparing media descriptions of "bad things" and actual "bad things". First example might be Covid-19/food shortages etc. Yes prices went up, yes people died, but not nearly as many as it seemed from the descriptions (don't get me wrong: it still was bad and it was right to try everything we had to avoid it).
Similarly, the great oil shortage where we "would run out" as advertised in the 90s... there is still a lot of oil around.
We have one data point: Japan got nuked twice in the 1940s. It is doing quite well as a country right now.
So, my question: how bad would the outcome of a few nukes being launched be? Say, Ukraine gets nuked and in retaliation some Russian place gets nuked as well and Putin dies, and that's it.
And how bad would the outcome of most nukes in possession of NATO/Russia being launched (I guess the US might save some to deter China in the post-war scenario)?
True, though MIRVs punch above their weight in terms of destructive ability due to the non-linear relationship between kilotonnage and blast radius (i.e. multiple smaller bombs spread out are more damaging than a single massive bomb)
Each? Or in total? The typical modern warhead in the US arsenal yields about 300-475kt, which is 20-30x the Hiroshima yield of 15kt. There are about 1500 of these actively deployed, another 1500 or so in reserve.
Very pollyannish to just pick a reset to a mere 19th century or early 20th century point and rebuild from there. We've left the resources of that time far behind. Oil is no longer close to the surface. Soil is on chemical life support. There is no do over. We would not simply clear away current tech and knowledge and find underneath it the old physical world of those times.
Agreed. We're on the global industrial paradigm until we either a) develop manufacturing technologies and energy sources that free us from global production and supply chains or, b) regress back to the 19th century and become too energy-constrained to ever claw our way back out.
Nuclear warfare is a great way to force the issue and, unless I've missed something, we're nowhere near scenario b at this point.
Hmm, could we do without oil? Let's say that we relied on nuclear fission for electrical power, and oil was only used for agriculture. Private cars or water craft were no longer allowed to use oil-based fuel and we had no commercial aircraft.
It would be a very different world, but it might be doable.
Part of the problem is that you need fossil fuels to make all of the components needed for a nuclear reactor - all the steel and concrete, just for starters. Not to mention all the fuel and fuel-powered industry needed to mine, transport and refine uranium into usable fissile material. So bootstrapping yourself back to nuclear power from charcoal and biofuel after the apocalypse wrecks all your infrastructure is an absolute bastard.
The most likely scenario for any 'recovered' society following a general collapse would be an average 18th to early 19th-century standard of living, with spots of high technology here and there. One can imagine manually-dug mines (pity the workers) working the few remaining near-surface deposits, with charcoal and wood-gas-powered equipment allowing limited rail infrastructure and electrification. One or two cities may have the wherewithal to pull together enough effort and industry to produce something like a primitive light-water reactor, which would probably allow for general electrification over a small area (ditto for cities blessed to be nearby large sources of hydropower). There might still be limited manufacture of electronics and machines as we know them today (I imagine that militaries would still want access to armoured vehicles, jets, radios and and radar sets), but it would be expensive, specialist stuff rather than mass-market consumer goods.
This sort of stagnation could go on for a very long time - perhaps hundreds of years - before any sort of revolutionary change is able to take hold. The end state of such a society might not look anything like ours - having developed along completely different lines under a much more constrained resource milieu.
Do you really need fossil fuels to create steel and concrete? Steel needs a source of carbon, but that doesn't have to come from coal and AFAIK there are no ingredients in concrete that require them either.
Concrete is made by burning limestone and clay in a rotary furnace to form clinker, then grinding the clinker into powder. You need lots of fuel to burn to do this. Ditto steel - you need an enormous amount of coke (coal heated in an oxygen-free environment to drive off impurities as coal gas) to make pig iron, and then an enormous amount of electricity to run an arc furnace or similar (assuming you go that route).
You could do some of this using charcoal (and historically some blast furnaces were fired this way), but any sort of industrial production would ravage the world's forests in short order. You could also theoretically do some of this stuff with concentrated solar, but again you're looking at an order of magnitude less in terms of production, and a chicken-and-egg problem in making the solar plant itself when you have no way to produce steel or glass cheaply. Hydropower has the same issue - you need lots of concrete and steel to give it a proper go.
And none of this is even considering the issue of rarer resources needed to make the common stuff (iron ore, for instance) usable in industry. Fireclay needed for refractories comes with (or under) coal deposits, so as our coal gets worked out so too does our source of refractories. And a lot of seemingly-common metals needed for alloys are now mined in rather a few places worldwide (ie: copper, manganese, vanadium and chrome) and would need to be shipped long distances to be used. Metals useful for industrial chemistry (eg: platinum) are even worse, with one or two countries often producing the bulk of supply. So any attempt to make an industrial revolution is also going to require reliable trans-oceanic bulk shipping. Unless you're keen to get back into sails in a big way (in which case your maximum tonnage would be something like half of what a WW2 liberty ship could carry), then you need steel and fuel to make cargo ships.
Basically; our entire modern world is founded on the back of cheap thermal energy produced by burning fossil fuels (themselves representing millions of years of stored solar energy), and without this easily-available energy the entire process of industrialisation (and the bulk international trade that supports it) stalls.
But wouldn't there be plenty of power plants and fuel for them in other countries untouched by war, like, for instance, all of South America?
EDIT: I suppose a good response to this is in Toxn's post below:
"I don't know if this helps, but an idea of the scale of the problem can be had in looking at what would happen to countries that aren't nuked. Take where I live: a rather large middle-income country which presently produces a surplus of food... "
You can download a 1979 report by the US Office of Technology Assessment (RIP) called "Effects of Nuclear War", which is hundreds of pages of data on just that question. IIRC the worst-case scenarios estimated about half the population in the countries involved would die within the year. I think that was counting fatalities from starvation and thirst. Best-case scenarios IIRC were under 10 million deaths in the US, but I read it 40 years ago so don't believe me.
An interesting point is that the deaths that a single Russian nuclear submarine could cause is IIRC more than half deaths as the entire Russian arsenal could cause. That's because 1 Russian nuclear missile sub carries enough missiles to carpet-nuke dozens of big cities, which is already almost half of the population; and (wild guess) a quarter of the population is too spread-out to be targeted even with thousands of missiles.
Eh...I don't think so, not really. The most modern Russian SSBN is the Borei class, of which there are only 5, which if fully armed has 16 missiles with potentially 6 warheads each, with yields ~150kt or so. For a Los Angeles size city you would need all 6 warheads to seriously kill a significant fraction of the population right away, so you're only getting ~1 dozen[1], although much smaller cities like Madison or State College could readily be wiped out with just one 150kt blast.
Anyway, this pales in comparison to the Russian SRF, which comprises something like ~300 missiles carrying up to ~1,200 warheads.
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[1] Of course this assumes the sub survives to launch its missiles at all. Generally the USN prides itself in having an attack sub at all times within torpedo range of every Russian SSBN at sea. One assumes that should hostilities break out, the American attack sub commander's Job #1 is to immediately sink the target he's been shadowing, and they should probably be able to do that within 5-10 minutes. Not a lot of time to get your birds into flight.
If only a couple nukes got launched, the world would be basically fine. Ukraine would have anywhere from 10,000+ to 1,000,000+ casualties depending on where the nuke landed, Russia would have up to a couple million casualties, and then Russia would get flattened (since in this hypothetical, they only launch one nuke; without nukes, nothing really saves Russia from being steamrolled by the US + EU).
If most of the nukes in possession of NATO/Russia went off, the majority of the human population of the Earth would die. It's been speculated that a mild nuclear winter could be caused by as few as 100 nukes, and there are around 3,000+ actively ready nukes between the US and Russia (with the runner ups having a relatively negligible amount- France has 300, for reference). A full nuclear exchange would cause a severe nuclear winter lasting up to 10 years; obviously, we don't have the food stores to last 10 years without the ability to grow crops.
There are organizations that are looking in advance into how to solve this problem:
If the hypothetical technologies envisioned by these groups are developed further, we could see some developed countries surviving the nuclear winter. The countries that were directly involved in the nuclear exchange wouldn't be in a good enough condition to mass-produce and implement these advanced technologies in a 6-month timespan (about how long we'd have to start eating from alternative sources), and developing countries would pretty much all starve to death.
This current projection is actually quite good! It's much better than it used to be before these ideas were even a thing; back in the Cold War, the understanding was "Nuclear winter takes humans to the brink of extinction, possibly to be saved by rare groups of breeding pairs of people that survived in doomsday prep shelters (who would be disproportionately wealthy, of course).
As food technology improves, we can expect that the ease with which we could mitigate a nuclear winter's effects will increase. Eventually, at some point in the next few decades, we'll probably be at a level where we (the US + EU) can survive even if our infrastructure has been damaged by direct nuclear attacks. Places like developing African countries, however, or already-starving regimes like North Korea, will probably be in perpetual danger of complete collapse and mass starvation for the foreseeable future.
I don't know if this helps, but an idea of the scale of the problem can be had in looking at what would happen to countries that aren't nuked. Take where I live: a rather large middle-income country which presently produces a surplus of food. Which is a pretty good start. Unfortunately, we're also an export-driven economy with dependence on foreign goods and markets. Which means that we've de-industrialised to the point that we'd need years (if not decades) to run back up to the point of even being able to make fuel, fertilizer and spare parts for our stock of trains, tractors, powerplants and the like.
Even if we were completely excluded from the direct effects of nuclear warfare (ie: no fallout, no nuclear winter), a disruption to the global supply chain caused by most of the world's busiest port cities vanishing from the map would probably result in our government collapsing (or being forced into Great Patriotic War-level decisions regarding production and food supply) and a huge chunk of our population dying of hunger.
In short - even being half a world away from a nuclear war would probably ruin most of the surviving nations on earth and force us all back to, at best, a 19th-century level of production and population. This would, not to put too fine a point on it, be one of the largest die-offs in the history of our species, and would probably put the kibosh on any thoughts of expanding off-world for good.
A scenario with only a few nukes launched is largely fine for people not living in the target cities, but also unlikely. Any nuclear launch probably triggers a massive launch of all the targets nukes in retaliation (if the target has nukes at all). A NATO/Russia exchange would devastate humanity just from the direct casualties, let alone any consideration of possible "nuclear winters".
If you want to model a 'limited' nuclear exchange, an India/Pakistan war is probably the most plausible option. Both sides have dozen or hundreds of nukes, but it won't go global. Such an exchange would be utterly disastrous for the subcontinent, obviously, but my understanding of modern research is that the "nuclear winter" would be bad but far from catastrophic for the rest of the world - comparable to a big volcanic eruption. The trade disruptions would be substantial, but neither India nor Pakistan are as central to global trade as eg the USA or China, so civilisation would survive. Circa a Billion deaths would still make it by far the worst tragedy humanity has ever suffered, though.
How sure is that? India-Pakistan nuke exchange - even if full - might well lead to 200 million, or 500, 750 ... 1 billion seem just as arbitrary as many other numbers. Any studies? (To stay with the spirit of the question, not to disagree!). A nuke on the Kremlin plus strikes on all known Russian-nuke sites might well stop any counter-strike. No Putin left to push a button. Or just a few from one submarine. And there is now some US missile defense.
>A nuke on the Kremlin plus strikes on all known Russian-nuke sites might well stop any counter-strike. No Putin left to push a button. Or just a few from one submarine. And there is now some US missile defense.
1) Each nuclear silo essentially requires a direct hit with a nuclear weapon in order to be destroyed. They can resist staggering amounts of overpressure and must be scoured out of the ground with the plasma of the fireball itself.
2) The Russians would launch while your missiles are in the air. A nuke can't destroy anything before reaching its target, and these systems are designed for rapid response. ICBMs at the very least are not fast enough; IRBMs are faster (hence the now-scrapped INF treaty and before it the Cuban Missile Crisis), but still potentially not fast enough.
3) Russia has ABM too (and so much SAM that air attack deep into Russia is pointless), so a single nuke fired per silo is not sufficient to guarantee that that silo will not fire any more missiles (leaving aside the ones already fired via point #2).
4) Good luck finding 10+ of their 11 SSBNs before they can fire. You'll need it.
5) The orders to launch will go out regardless of whether Putin is killed. Russia has chains of command just like we do, and nuking Moscow is so outrageous that any potential hesitance on their part to engage would be immediately erased. Even if you get the entire human C&C, there is the Perimetr system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand), which is designed to automatically tell Russian forces to launch if it detects that Russian cities are getting nuked (it isn't normally switched on, but right now it almost certainly is given Putin publically put Russian nuclear forces on alert).
The Russian nuclear force is *designed around* the potential for NATO to attempt an alpha strike. That is the whole point. It is not easily circumvented.
Strikes me as far too pessimistic, and assuming the Russian SRF are about 2 orders of magnitude more competent than the Army is proving to be. How likely is that?
(2) Sure, the Russians would launch on warning -- if they got it early enough, and had enough time. That's why we have SLBMs. They get 10 minutes, not 30. Given how many of their land-based launchers are mobile, I'm dubious they can get them all off the ground in time. (Also, mobile launchers aren't nearly as hard as silos.)
(3) The Russian ABM only protects Moscow.
(4) The Russians only have 5 modern SSBNs in total, and certainly don't have 10 of any kind at sea at any given time. Maybe 4 or 5 would be my guess. And historically, at least, it has been easy to locate them, and they are routinely shadowed by US hunter subs, who are prepared to sink them on a few minutes' notice. They're normally picked up by fixed sonar arrays when they leave base. There's an enormous gap between Russian and US submarine competence, and experience.
(5) Well that's why you hit the strategic assets first. Then it doesn't matter whether Putin is still alive, he's got nothing with which to shoot.
I'm not advocating a first strike, mind you, but my WAG is that there's at least a 50/50 chance we'd get away with it. Kind of make a horrible mess in Asia and Eastern Europe tho, which is pretty darn antisocial.
#2: I agree that many of the nukes, perhaps most, would be destroyed on the ground (launch-on-warning doesn't allow use of one's entire arsenal). Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot.
#3: my understanding is that their newer SAMs can target ballistic missiles, and those are everywhere. Hardly a guaranteed defence, but not a guaranteed failure either.
#4: Fair.
#5: Agreed that C&C is irrelevant without nukes to shoot, but Mark suggested a strike on the Kremlin to remove "the button" and hence I felt it necessary to respond.
Well, I agree with you that a first strike is at this point a seriously bad idea -- I did say I thought the odds were 50/50 it would work, and I personally wouldn't be wanting to flip a coin on whether we'd have the devastation of losing that bet -- even if it's far less than civilization-ending, it would be crappy in a way that makes the Great Depression seem like boomtimes. And even if it *works* it would cause misery and destruction all across Asia and Eastern Europe that I would not want on my conscience.
Of course, what's going on in Ukraine is also evil in a way we really haven't seen there since 1945, so...it's a tough one. I'm all for a little strategic ambiguity, being clear that we're *not certain* we won't do it, or not certain what might push us over the line. Beyond that, I would hope we have people in the Pentagon and at Langley who are racking their evil little psychopath brains, trying to think of ways to cut short the evil without the blunt big hammer. We'll see, I guess.
"Strikes me as far too pessimistic, and assuming the Russian SRF are about 2 orders of magnitude more competent than the Army is proving to be. How likely is that?"
The Russians have space launch vehicles that are literally just repurposed ICBMs and SLBMs; they work ~90% of the time. That includes SLBMs launched from their SSBNs on what would have been test/training exercises but with the dummy warheads replaced by a satellite because someone paid them some cash.
And the best reporting out of Ukraine says that their short-range ballistic and cruise missiles work ~40% of the time. These are going to be lower priority for them than strategic nuclear weapons, but maybe the strategic missiles they use for space launch are cherrypicked, so OK, take the geometric mean and get 60% reliability for their strategic weapons.
I'd have estimated 70% before the latest unpleasantness, but it doesn't matter if it is 60 or even 40%, 40% of the Russian nuclear arsenal, even of their second-strike retaliatory arsenal, is going to kill many tens of millions of people and destroy industrial infrastructure that is going to take decades to rebuild (if we can hold our civilization together for those decades).
"We'll just destroy all their leaders and all their weapons in a Glorious First Strike, and even if we don't get them all, well, those ignorant commie peons don't understand technology like our boys (no offense), so they won't be able to really hurt us", was the fantasy most likely to get a billion or so people killed during the Cold War; maybe now the number is "only" a hundred million people, it's still a really bad plan. Do not take strategic advice from Buck Turgidson.
OK, so you are saying it's only somewhat too pessimistic, instead of far too? I'm OK with that.
Anyway, I'm not talking about their vehicles, I'm talking about their command and control human infrastructure and logistics, and whether the 2 million rubles allocated for maintenance on launch platform X actually went into that or got siphoned off to buy somebody's yacht. This is exactly the kind of "tail" stuff that the Ukrainian war is demonstrated the Russians have apparently been quietly getting badly wrong.
Also, kind of a difference between an orbital launch vehicle that you can take weeks to get ready with a team of 100 who focus on it full-time, and whether *this* launcher that has been sitting around for 30 years is *actually* going to get off the ground on 15 minutes warning like it's supposed to. Whether they can do the latter is not proved by whether they can do the former. Which is kind of why the USAF does test Minuteman test launches from Vandenberg every now and then, just to check. My impression is that the Russians don't take the same kind of care to test stuff -- in part because the consequences to mid-level commanders if they *don't* work are much more severe.
I would not have known it was anti-Russia if you hadn't said so. Is the paperclip supposed to look like a diagonal slash, like on a non-smoking sign? Why is it a paperclip? Does it have something to do with A.I. safety?
It looks more like a Russian flag than something anti-Russian. Without your clarification, I would more likely assume you were Russian. Given the current climate around Russia, someone putting a Russian flag as their profile pic would almost certainly have to be significantly pro-Russian to be willing to declare their nationality.
Perhaps a red circle with a line through it, instead of the paperclip?
If you're going to pick on my wording, then I get to pick on yours.
First, it's not just Mariupol. It's all of Ukraine, at this point, as well as a lot of Ukrainian and Russian ex-pats, people with relatives over there and so on (and by the way, I'm one of those). Notice I didn't say "everyone". I said "a lot of people".
Second, we're getting stories of mass graves, shot up cars with bodies insides, corpses of civilians in the streets.
If he thinks a Russian flag in his profile is currently a good choice if the context is appropriate, I'm not going to argue. But I thought he should be aware of what it looks like to many people. He did ask.
I can think of some appropriate contexts for a Russian flag, but I think we agree that a paperclip on top doesn't seem to do it.
Thanks for the feedback and sorry. It was intended to say that Putin/Russia is like the paperclip maximizer, which is to say a soulless, heartless evil machine that treats human beings like resources.
Fun fact: The reason Boston didn't burn un 1968 was James Brown and anyone else who had honors seminar with Maureen O'Dowd at Northeastern Univ had this drilled into their head
Okay, you’ve set off some historical research here. We have the James Brown concert keeping the peace after the MLK assassination figured out. Can’t find a way to loop a Maureen O’Dowd into the picture tho.
I was around when it happened just a wee lad of -20 or so. [I was 15]
I listened to the Communist Party framing of his funeral from Radio Havana on my build it yourself Heath Kit short wave. That was my first exposure to up is down, white is black propaganda. Race issues in the US were a favorite topic for the CP.
The Nicholas Brothers. I believe Michael took lessons from them at one time. This is their most famous routine, taken from the movie "Stormy Weather" (this clip is colorized, but the original is easy to find): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMbeDhG9fU . I have never seen better.
My first ever paper was published this week!! It's to do with the evolutionary theory of ageing, in its mathematical form developed by Hamilton (1966) and extended by Caswell (1978), Baudisch (2005) and others. [reposted from the subscribers-only hidden open thread]
The general idea is that natural selection cares less about late life than early life (e.g. compare a gene killing you in infancy, to a gene killing you only in middle age after you've likely already had a few kids). This was figured out intuitively in the 40s and 50s by Haldane, Medawar, and Williams; then formalized by William D. Hamilton in 1966. (He's the same guy who developed kin selection theory; you may know about him if you read Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene"). He used mathematical demography tools to quantify "how much natural selection cares" about genes slightly modifying age-specific fecundity or log survival probability.
Hal Caswell (1978) did related work, for stage-specific reproduction and survival probability; e.g. for "larva vs. pupa vs. adult", instead of for "0-year-olds vs. 1-year-olds vs. 2-year-olds vs. ...".
Annette Baudisch (2005) did related work, again for age structure, but clarifying Hamilton's assumptions and possible alternatives to them. The reason Hamilton used "log survival probability" is that he assumed genes multiply survival probabilities; she considered e.g. genes that multiply hazard rates instead (see the twitter thread or the paper).
My paper shows that Caswell (1978) and Hamilton (1966) also had different assumptions: Caswell assumed that genes add to survival probabilities instead of multiplying them. My paper also shows how their equations are related to each other.
My paper was a comment on Roper et al. (2021). Their reply points out that although they cited Caswell (1978), the equations they gave were actually eqns 1 and 2 from Caswell (2010), which did have the same assumptions as Hamilton after all; otherwise they agree with the analysis, and give a table comparing the various equations.
Scott, what time are book reviews due on 4/5/22? At the end of the day? In what time zone? Also, I'm assuming that "book reviews are due on 4/5" effectively means "don't edit your Google doc after 4/5"--that the submission links you to the page given, rather than copying it at the time of submission..
- The Kwaio language, spoken by the Kwaio in the Solomon Islands, keeps changing because an ancestor's name can become sacred/taboo, but also Kwaio names often include common words as part of them. So e.g. if an important ancestor dies whose name had "fish" in it, then it becomes taboo to say "fish" in front of the descendants enforcing the taboo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knv1OSMW2rU
- Ths "Altaic hypothesis" proposed that Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic (and maybe also Korean and Japonese) were one language super-family. It was a big nerd fight, including one prominent defection. Mainstream opinion now is that it's false, and the language similarities that exist are mostly loan words and other influence due to contact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0zkHH6ZOEk
[latter two both from the cool YouTube channel NativLang]
> The Kwaio language, spoken by the Kwaio in the Solomon Islands, keeps changing because an ancestor's name can become sacred/taboo, but also Kwaio names often include common words as part of them.
I'm glad that our own taboo system is not quite so niggardly.
So for *reasons* I've been looking around at sort of social sim games. The most common stuff you see is The Sims and clones, mobile/web games, Japanese dating sims and school sims, and hybrids like the Persona series. I guess some western RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Pathfinder sort of work. Japan has some "erotic strategy" games which personally shock and appall me but seem to be quite popular like the Rance series.
The other obvious example is Crusader Kings but while the social world is wide it isn't very deep. Well neither is Persona really, just a few handcrafted situations.
One game I was recommended from a mobile/web dev type that I know was interesting. Kudos 2. Pretty distinct as a day in the life sim because it is more menus and maybe paper dolls rather than The Sims. Also you wouldn't naturally expect a game like that from the developer of Gratuitous Space Battles and Democracy 2. Very 90s/2000s regular person life game. Well you can be a nuclear physicist I guess.
What I've never been able to track down is a bit niche. Well maybe The Sims: Medieval. A fantasy sim where you can do various stuff like be an adventurer or a noble or the head of a magic academy or a merchant. So like Patrician, a map and menu game, but with characters. Obviously in 3D you have stuff like the Guild though it is limited to merchants and light politics.
So what I am saying is do people want to play more living world stuff? Or better yet have you played it and where is it? If you look at Kudos 2, Academagia and Patrician 3 and and maybe even some visual novel stuff, you'll see why I'm not satisfied with Crusader Kings. Ironically the 3d model stuff is actually a negative to me. I like the mechanical aspect. Which sounds weird talking about social simulations.
Is there anything like that?
I would trade off dialogue, handcrafted visual novel art, and such for mechanics. I'd also like my situation to exist in a broader context like a map and menu game vs something super contained like Academagia or a dating sim. I like procedural stuff because of the scope.
CK3 is general is trash to me. Some of the modders do interesting or even insane stuff. I don't care at all about the 3d models stuff. If anything I oppose it since it expends resources that could be used for something interesting. The Court system itself is almost entirely stat sticks with a bunch of, absolutely shit, "events". For instance the even about a character being deposed by their child literally finds one of your best vassals and magically deposes them to create the event.
And of course the whole footstool part or the fart nonsense.
CK3 character interactions are dull as dirt. Like, forget dialogue and art, there's no variety, they are incredibly shallow, and they don't connect with the wider world at all. And there is no sense of time.
Being real time hurts CK games a lot because you can't have interesting or complex things happen because time keeps moving plus Paradox is so multiplayer obsessed and obviously long pauses in multiplayer is a no no.
I've heard good things about Kenshi in terms of living world, but never played it. Not sure how deep the social aspect is, but apparently every NPC is recruitable (!).
Kenshi doesn't have a super deep social aspect and it is very rough. But it is pretty unique as an open world sim. Sort of like Paradox games it probably wouldn't make it in an even slightly competitive market but no one else really does the same thing.
If you do not care about consistency, then "X does not exist" and "actually, X is good" both oppose the complaints about X. The former has the advantage that you do not have to discuss the details of X, and that if you lose this battle, you still get the second chance with the latter.
My experience is the same as Resident Contrarian's. It's a social event with people who share a common interest. If you want to know more specifics, e-mail a meetup organizer in your area and ask them what their meetups are like.
The prompt: Your doorbell rings, and on opening it you see someone who looks suspiciously like a missionary. He immediately justifies your suspicion by explaining he has had a special and wonderful revelation, and now knows that which is worth knowing. He proposes to share this knowing with you, and reveals the name of his new belief system: He is Religitarian.
The challenge::
Propose a set of beliefs that make sense to label as "religitarian" that, should you join, will not result in you dying in a weird culty way.
Orthogonal pro-tip: Statistically the most effective way to turn away Mormon missionaries is to claim Catholicism- they consider it the most backwards of religious sects
Trying to recruit them back to the Roman Catholic church via quoting nicene creed saves you even more time
The protestant version of this is arguing about the trinity with them. From what I've understood from the outside, most forms of counter-proseletizing end up with your address getting flagged for future avoidance. I get it from a purely mechanical perspective - you don't want the heretics turning your youth away from the truth.
While Latter-day Saint missionaries do have a way of marking houses to avoid, it is almost universally ineffective past 3 months or so because of how missionaries get moved around.
Also, in all my life as a church I have never heard a reliable story of missionaries being told to avoid someone because of a risk of the missionaries getting converted. If missionaries avoid someone who argues theology with them it is because it is a waste of time for missionaries to argue theology with people. There are always other people out there who are actually looking for something new and it is much more effective to leave and find them.
I definitely know plenty missionaries who leave the church after serving a mission, but it's never been because of theological arguments that they heard while serving.
FWIW I don't think my mental image of this includes an actual conversion so much as "this guy spent like 20 minutes trying to convince us God the Father and Jesus were literally the same person".
Yeah, my point main is that it's not a very efficient strategy because 1) it takes 20 minutes of your time 2) you're like the third person this month that's done this so you're not telling them anything they haven't heard before and 3) it takes way, way more than this to make missionaries remember your house beyond about 3 months because of how they get transferred around (in theory there's a way for missionaries to leave records to help each other avoid duplicating effort etc but it rarely works in practice)
This is so far away from my experience as a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) missionary that I wonder where you came up with it. Learning that someone was Catholic had zero effect on whether we would keep talking to them. Even if we did consider Catholicism the most backwards of religious sects (we don't??), the whole point is to be out proselytizing so why would that turn us away?
The most reliable way to turn away Mormon missionaries is to say "I'm sorry, I'm not interested in discussing religion. Have a nice day." and close the door.
The next most reliable way is to clearly be someone who is insincere in their interest in the missionaries, either for the purpose of counter-proselytizing or for messing with them. This takes more time, though, so I'm not sure why anyone would prefer it.
There is no reliable way to keep the missionaries away for >~ 3 months beyond luck. (And so credibly threatening physical violence that your house becomes part of the oral lore of the area. This takes more than you think, though; missionaries have seen a lot.)
I'm not sure I understand the challenge. Are you saying that if e.g. Mormons knock on your door, and you convert, then the chances of you dying in a "weird culty way" dramatically increase ? I don't think this accurate; at least, not in all cases. I mean, I will grant you some increased probability of culty death, but many of these door-to-door religions are reasonably safe (as far as culty death is concerned, anyway, they might be unsafe for other reasons).
No association with specific existing religions is intended; if anything I suspect that converting to LDS would probably increase your life expectancy more than anything.
Well, then your challenge could be trivially answered by modifying some minor aspect of existing religions. For example, maybe the Religitarians are exactly like Mormons, but they also believe that one should wear green clothing on February 29th.
"Religitarian" suggests someone who eats...religions? The religious? The challenge is to give some sensible meaning to the coinage "that will not result in you dying in a weird culty way".
Well, if they eat the religious, and they are themselves a religion, then there seems to be a clear conflict of interest right there. Remaining atheist is your only salvation ! :-)
I searched "research brainstorming bad" - most of the results cited the main failure modes being a) not being accommodating of people's neurodiversity and individual preferences for how they contribute to discussions; and b) the initial public responses tend to shepherd subsequent responses in both tone and desired outcome.
Insofar as Brainstorming is a subset of "Office Meeting", most office meetings are very poorly run and a waste of everyone's time anyway, so I'd say the badness of brainstorming (in that format) is an inherited trait. Getting people to privately, anonymously propose ideas (NB: to a smart, organised facilitator) is probably the way to go. Then there can be a group thing where people are asked to filter the ideas through some stipulated criteria.
From what I remember reading, brainstorming - as defined as 'throwing out as many ideas as possible while avoiding criticism to create the widest possible base for inspiration' - is much less effective than constructive discussion of those ideas including criticism. That aside, I agree with Sloan in that the badness of brainstorming is more related to the badness of office meetings, and putting any blame or weight on the presence or absence of brainstorming in something strikes me as overly reductive and foolish.
I have recently gone through admissions season, and it didn't go quite as well as I had hoped (or expected). I ended up with a single offer from an institution that I am not especially excited about, although they are probably objectively a pretty good fit (I am also waitlisted for a very good school, but it's probably too late right now). I am graduating with a math degree and a computer science degree, and I am wondering if it is a good idea to lean into CS at this point in my life instead of trying to go into the grind that is academia.
Those of you who have done math phds, how is your life going right now? Do you regret it? Would you go to a school that you are only somewhat excited for?
I haven't finished my (math) PhD yet, but I have decided that afterwards I'm leaving the academic math side of things and doing some specific CS things that feel like a much better fit. I wish I'd found this other area before starting the PhD, so that I could have focused on that from the start, but I only found it because of the new environment that doing the PhD provided, so I can't truly say I regret it.
What I do regret is even looking for PhD positions when it should have been obvious from my previous experience that research was not for me. So if I have any advice at all, is to try to figure out if there is any chance you're "going into the grind" for reasons that on reflection you wouldn't stand behind, such as outside pressure, some vague notion of status, the feeling that this is what your script is telling you to do, etc.
If you do end up doing a PhD: make sure you have a good advisor. The only way I can think of determining this is asking their previous (research) students directly, although it might be tricky to do so through cold emails. Furthermore, a department with many people who can serve as your peers is very helpful. PhDs can be incredibly lonely and isolating experiences.
Can't second this advice enough. I finished my Physics PhD a few years back, and made basically every mistake described above: I went into it because I felt like I'd wonder if I could hack it for the rest of my life if I didn't, I wasn't particularly enthused about the research itself, and I had a shitty advisor (terrifically smart man - godawful teacher and mentor). I now work in communications tech and am, surprise of surprises, actually happy.
I would say this: if you don't already have a good idea of what it is you want to study, and even who you want to study with, don't go. You do need to genuinely care about what you're researching in order to not go crazy during the process. Of course you may find some topic during the course of your intro classes that really appeals to you (and where the low-lying fruit isn't already completely picked, sorry topologists), but that's really rolling the dice.
I did a math PhD and I loved it. The best time in my life. If I could have found a way to drag out my thesis and take longer to finish, I would have. I learned a lot of stuff that is surprisingly applicable in the real world (and got me my current job) as well as a ton of incredibly interesting and totally useless stuff (some of which I was curious about since I was young). Several of my classmates were absolutely miserable and hated every second of it. Impostor syndrome, absent advisors, the feeling that they were trapped, or that they were wasting their lives studying something no one else would ever care about and would never be able to make an original contribution of their own.
Everyone is different. If, like me, you have a burning need to know that outweighs your need for food or sleep, then whether or not you go to grad school is just a question of what environment you think will help you learn fastest. I would have gone to a school that I was only somewhat excited for as long as they offered housing and enough money to survive while I focused on learning and trying to refine my own ideas. I'm guessing that you aren't exactly like me in that regard - and I don't think it's necessary to be like me to enjoy grad school. But I think it has to be your own path, your own ideas that you are pursuing.
That sounds really fun! I think I am in the same boat as you; a burning desire to know things that outweighs a lot of other stuff. If you ended up well employed because of it, that is also very reassuring.
2. Very well. The road I traveled down had many twists and turns, but I ultimately went from "failed child prodigy" status at the time of grad school admission to "globally-recognized expert" in a relevant field today.
3. Hell no. While I never became effective at producing math research papers, and basically "failed out" of getting a prestigious advisor, the faculty were able to guide my lost soul toward the field of nonparametric statistics -- a field I had never heard of before entering the program, but which has provided rather useful context for my subsequent work in industry. Sure, if I had known back then what field I would eventually establish myself in (I'm not a statistician today), I could have taken a more direct path, and such a path wouldn't have involved a math PhD. But I didn't have such a clear vision; given that, the school did a great job.
4. Do they seem to be excited for you? The math PhD program I went to was a tier below my undergrad institution in academic prestige, but partly as a consequence, they clearly valued me highly. In contrast, the slightly-higher-ranked CS grad school that accepted me came off as rather indifferent.
Thanks for the response, it is really helpful to hear perspectives of people who have actually taken these paths.
So you work in industry now? What was the transition like? Did you have work experience before moving into industry?
The school seems somewhat excited for me, and I already know many of the people there so grad school would likely be an enjoyable few years of my life should I choose to attend. Mostly what is worrying is thinking about what this means for the me 20 years down the line; a future me that takes a CS job right now would probably be wealthy and living a good life, whereas taking the phd might mean a tossup between a good life doing interesting research vs being underemployed teaching trigonometry to freshmen. The school that I got into is reasonably prestigious, but not enough that I feel confident that the latter case will not happen, which is what makes me not especially excited.
Research > CS Job >>>>> trigonometry. If a phd at a fairly good but not extremely good institution who stays in academia is doomed to trigonometry, then that affects my decision a lot. Hence, also, why I am very interested in people's paths from academia to industry.
After undergrad, I started work as a software engineer, without any intention to return to grad school at all. I was tired of school, and I seemed to be in possession of a skillset valuable enough to render further formal education unnecessary.
But that didn't work out for me. Maybe I wouldn't have washed out of that first job if I had started drinking coffee then instead of missing out on that most basic of nootropics until age ~30; or maybe I simply wasn't mature enough at the time. Anyway, the bottom line is that I actually did try the "take a CS job, become wealthy and live a good life" plan first; I only turned to grad school when I failed at plan A.
As embarrassing as it was to "fail to sell out", I don't regret trying. And if you haven't tried at least a CS internship yet... yeah, I'd bet on the expected utility from dipping your toe in those waters to be higher than from heading directly to math grad school. Partly because you are right to fear trigonometry -- I do know other people who graduated from the same program I did who are teaching in community college today, etc. -- and partly because unless you're a truly outstanding research talent, nothing much is lost in postponing the start of grad school a bit. You can choose to go later, when you're either really excited to study something deeply and academia is a better place than e.g. an industrial lab to do so, or you're as lost as I was.
As for transitioning back to industry after grad school: I didn't "retry plan A". Instead, I spent several years doing work that didn't pay better than a postdoc, but which was in a field I viewed as having a "talent gap" in EA terms, and which I strongly cared about. I wasn't wrong about the talent gap, and this time around I was motivated and caffeinated enough to make extraordinary contributions, primarily in the software tooling space. Then I started receiving engineer instead of postdoc wages; and now I've more or less achieved financial independence, about a decade after the PhD, almost by accident.
I have a PhD in math from Cambridge (so, not quite your position, in that I got accepted into the exciting institution). I enjoyed it a lot, didn't enjoy postdoc-ing, left to industry after a few years; I'm currently in engineering / optics and enjoying myself a lot. Some thoughts:
1. I enjoyed my PhD experience. Many people don't. I doubt it's worth it for the three letters (or for the built-up character or whatever) if you aren't enjoying yourself.
2. I like hanging out with math nerds, so I found PhD to be a pleasantly sociable experience. On the other hand, I found my postdoc to be quite lonely, because there weren't many of us around, and we were clearly too old for the graduate students but too young for the professors, and also people had largely paired up and moved off campus by that point. I can see this hitting people earlier than in my experience.
3. If you leave to industry with a PhD, your salary will start having a "PhD bonus" (but I'm not sure it translates into a net lifetime win, given the several years on PhD student budget). You're also more likely to get more interesting technical tasks -- there's a small number of interesting jobs that seem to be reserved for people with PhDs these days. Not all my colleagues have PhDs, but my colleagues tend to run 30 years older than me; the younger ones overwhelmingly do.
4. I don't have a strong opinion on how a good fit with the advisor compares against a more prestigious school; you could make a case for either one. For undergrad, I'd lean hard into school quality; for a postdoc, you want a good working group much more than you care about the rest of the university; grad school is somewhere in between.
5. You're unlikely to use the contents of your PhD in industry -- heck, you're unlikely to use most of your undergraduate math in industry. If you leave, you might have to fend off people who will ask you "but isn't this wasting your education".
So this is an update of my predictions regarding outcome of Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-216/comment/5641841?s=r. I've refined conditions for categories based on helpful feedback. This does not invalidate previous predictions, since previously I've had that in mind without explicitly saying so.
9 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (down from 10 % on March 21).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
26 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (up from 15 % on March 21).
65 % on unambiguous Russian victory (down from 75 % on March 21).
Russian victory is defined as Russia getting something it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, this does NOT count as Russian victory.
Commentary:
Overall bad two weeks for Russia. I would not call them „good“ for Ukraine, since it is subjected to horrific destruction, but it is now closer to not-losing the war.
Some things that happened were bad for Ukraine. Biden made a speech in Warsaw**, where he framed the conflict as a struggle between liberal democracy and tyranny, revealed that his goal is to undermine Russian regime, and that his strategy to get non-aligned word on our side is via moral suasion, i.e. asking them whether they want to be on the right side of history. This is imho pretty anti-convincing to decision-makers in e.g. Ankara or New Delhi, and other similar places, whom Ukraine desperately needs to get on its side.
Other bad thing for Ukraine has been recent Hungarian elections, which are a proof of concept that even in the EU and in the country formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, you can achieve strong election victory on the platform of observing strict neutrality in the war.
More significant than that are imho Russian reverses. Firstly, there is a Russian pullback from north Ukraine. They tried to spin it as gesture of good will, which is an obvious BS. Probably chief reason for it is that supplying their army through Belarus with its poor infrastructure is just unworkable. As a result, huge Ukrainian garrison of Kyiiv can be partially redeployed somewhere else. Shortening of the front should be good for a side with less firepower, i.e. Ukraine, because of the declining marginal value of the additional gun per kilometer of the front.
Secondly, credible reports of Russian atrocities in Bucha will boost morale of the Ukrainians and Western support for Ukraine. Unlike some other Russian atrocities, like kidnapping of Ukrainian officials or not allowing civilian population of besieged cities to leave, this is directly contrary to Russian strategic interest, and my guess is that it is not directed from the top, but instead those are crimes committed by undisciplined soldiers on a rampage. I doubt that boost, which Ukraine will get from it, is going to be sufficient for them to not loose; real problem for Russia is that perhaps Bucha is just a tip of the iceberg. If reports of similar atrocities start to surface all over Ukraine, that truly might sink Russian chances of victory.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
What's the new Russian master plan? See if the Ukrainians run out of bullets before the Motherland runs out of ignorant conscript boys from the far East?
It looks as though Russia is no longer trying to seize major cities like Kyiv, Odessa, and maybe Kharkiv and is instead focusing on capturing the rest of the Donbas and securing the land bridge to Crimea.
So they say. My read is that this is just Baghdad Bob booshwa and the brute fact is that they're getting their ass kicked. They're hoping that doesn't repeat out East, but...we'll see. They've made a lot of mortal enemies by what they did in Mariupol. It wouldn't surprise me if quite a lot of people in the East who were neutral or mildly pro-Russian now can't wait to slit a Russian throat.
Not to mention the BTGs transferred from Kyiv to the East aren't exactly fresh from the depot, with spanking new weapons, plenty of ammunition, and good supply lines. Troops that have just been routed at great loss aren't usually super eager to go somewhere else and do it all over again.
Well, Wile E. Coyote had a plan for a nice Road Runner dinner, too. But personally I think the verb "plan" is a little iffy in this context. So far the Russian effort shows just about every aspect of warfighting *other than* what one would ordinarily call planning. A more amateurish (if ghoulish) production would be hard to imagine. It's right up there with the Hutus saying "huh let's take our machetes and go hack all the Tutsis to bits." Then what? Um...cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess.
In the last 2 weeks, Ukraine has made significant advances on the field in 3-4 different areas: around Kyiv (this might count as two: NW Kyiv and E Kyiv / Chernihiv), around Sumy, and around Mykolaiv. Russia has made much more modest gains around Izium.
I'm surprised that, after 2 weeks of mostly Ukrainian battlefield success, you chose to adjust the chance of their unambiguous victory down. Things have gone better than I expected, so I would adjust it up, maybe from 10% to 15%.
I agree that Biden's speech was an unforced error. But I don't think it's nearly as important as battlefield success. In part, because I'm not sure that Kyiv desperately needs Ankara and New Delhi on its side. This is a European war and European support is most important - both in terms of getting military equipment and in terms of economic sanctions. India adding sanctions on Russia would not be nearly as game changing as Europe cutting off its oil and gas imports. Focusing diplomatic efforts on Europe is still the right choice for Ukraine.
I agree that what is happening on the battlefield is more important than what Biden says. This is why I've reduced chances of Russian victory.
I still think that Ukrainian victory would require something unexpected, like total breakdown of Russian economy, which did not get more or less likely over previous 14 days, or some huge military disaster. By withdrawing their forces from the north, Putin imho basically decided to play it safe, since one plausible way to such a disaster would be succesful Ukrainian counter-attack around Kyiv.
Your definition of "unambiguous Russian victory" seems like it would be satisfied if Russia gains de facto control of one additional acre of Luhansk, and Ukraine agrees not to try and reclaim it (until the next war). Even if the cost of that acre is the virtual destruction of the Russian Army and long-term crippling of the Russian economy by western sanctions.
That seems like an exceedingly ambiguous "victory" to me, and I think I'm more interested in the probabilities within the position space that you're calling "Russian victory".
I mean, this reflects Putin's priorities? If we try to define Russian war goals as something which makes utilitarian sense, we quickly find out that the only way to win this war for them is not to wage it.
I'm pretty sure Putin's "conquer the Donbass" priority is not satisfied by infinitesimal gains, and I am pretty sure that his "do not destroy the Russian Army" priority is not wholly eclipsed by the reward of infinitesimal gains in the Donbass, so no, I don't think that reflect's Putin's priorities.
It might reflect an extremely simplistic model of Putin's priorities in which everything is expressed as ordinally-ranked binaries, but that's not even a useful abstraction.
Yeah, I take your point, I was being somewhat flip. I needed clear resolution criteria and territorial gains are good for that. If Russian army is destroyed, Russia will not be able to hold onto any gains in Donbass or anywhere else; in fact, in that case we should expect Ukrainian gains. Getting any territory at all without concessions to Ukraine requires first militarily defeating Ukrainians and then having sufficient resources to repulse their counter-attack.
At the same time, I think that there is no way that war will be anything but economic disaster for Russia, and in this sense it is unwinnable, but that Putin does NOT have Russian economic health as his highest priority. I have my speculations what his real priorities are, but those are just that, speculations, and they might be totally wrong. But if e.g. GDP growth would be among them, he would not start this war.
I'm not sure if I'm missing a joke, but this is not an experiment to see if you can set up community meetups without communicating when and where in real life. The coordination problem in question is when to organize meetups, because it's hard to know when the best time is for people to be interested and available. The Schelling point is "organize them around the time Scott announces them".
I'm not really sure if it counts as a Schelling point if some central authority says "Hey, here's a Schelling point, do this".
But now I'm wondering how many cities actually have natural Schelling points. In Sydney there's a definite Schelling point to meet someone, it's the Town Hall steps. In Melbourne it's underneath the clocks at Flinders St station. But I'm not aware of what the equivalent points in other cities would be. Do other cities have a default meeting spot that everyone acknowledges is just "the place" to meet someone if you're meeting them downtown?
I was reading this article (https://doomberg.substack.com/p/farmers-on-the-brink) about difficulties in agriculture (TLDR: a confluence of factors predicts a high probability of global food shortages in the near future), and saw this sentence: "Ammonia is derived directly from natural gas, and the price of natural gas outside of the US has gone vertical".
Now, it turns out that natural gas is an enormously important ingredient in all sorts of industrial processes, so much so that the ramifications of reducing its use for environmental reasons are many. This is no doubt true of many raw materials so I was wondering if there are any online resources for exploring supply chains - perhaps a graph database of some sort where you can follow a product back through its precursors to raw materials. At the very least, this would allow people to see where replacement processes need to be developed or enable policy makers to fully consider the results of their policies.
That's a really good idea. I'm sure the ingredients for this exist - individual companies and consulting firms would have it mapped for specific industries, inputs, and outputs - but I'm not sure aware of a public comprehensive database. Honestly would be a great EA / Progress Studies project.
Given how easy it is to find an evo psych explanation for anything, an interesting test might be this: if you *can't* imagine such an explanation, update significantly towards your hypothesis being untrue.
The only evolutionary explanation I know of for the existence of non-same-sex-attracted people (gay & asexual) is the hypothesis that it's adaptive to have someone in the family who doesn't have children and is therefore able to help raise children of genetic relatives, and/or take over if those parents die.
This seems like a fairly weak explanation, because intuitively it still seems far more adaptive to just have children of one's own.
Therefore, I significantly updated towards social & non-genetic biological explanations for lack of same sex attraction.
That's not quite applying your original idea though, since now we're in the game of evaluating the strength of evo psych explanations. Your OP was about whether or not you can find one at all.
You're right. I was trying to get across how convoluted the explanation is and the fact that I didn't think of it, but *someone* thought of it, so this isn't really an example.
It's really hard to think of an example where no evopsych explanation is available, exactly because it's so easy to make up just-so stories.
Maybe we'll try something that's obviously false, like "humans love eating microplastic". There is evidence for this, in a sense (we keep finding microplastics in stuff humans eat, and recently also in humans, plus those plastics are there due to human activity). But there's no reasonable evopsych explanation for this, because microplastics didn't even exist in the ancestral environment and if they had, eating them would have been very bad.
The fact that I had to choose such an obviously false example may not bode well for the usefulness of my filter, though.
About helping Ukraine. As in helping Ukraine fight: Roland Bartetzko was a soldier in Germany, later fought in Croatia and for the KLA (Kosovo) and in Croatia. Now with French journalist in Ukraine. https://www.quora.com/profile/Roland-Bartetzko He is for years a popular writer on quora. Read him in peace-times. You can send him helmets and vests. Or money to buy them. https://www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-to-help-Ukraine-fight-Russia - Now, is this a good idea? Is it EA? - Scott, if you take this down as too inflaming, that'd be legit. I just really wonder. Bought Roland's book now. Wonder about donating.
People in medicine or biotech - What are your favorite *free* resources/newsletters for staying up to date with interesting developments? --A medical student
Scott, I am considering submitting a book review on a topic that I am an expert in. Should I respond to follow up questions in the comments? For example, Lars Doucet might have commented an unusually large amount on the review of Georgism. On the one hand, I want to help people understand as much about it as possible. On the other hand, if I do it too much, it might disrupt the anonymity.
I also have a review of a different book that I could submit instead if this is likely to be a problem.
Is there a city which has successfully built enough housing to drive down prices? If there are many, which one is the best example? All cities I can think of which has seen lower housing prices has done so by becoming "unattractive" (e.g. Detroit). What's the best YIMBY example of making housing more affordable?
Some Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta allow much more new development and much more affordable housing, compared to cities with similar populations and growth rates in the BosWash or California.
This isn't exactly what you're looking for because they've continually had more construction and lower housing prices. The example you're looking for would have low construction and high housing prices for a while, then reversed that trend with a lot of new construction.
A quick google shows me that home prices are steadily rising in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta, even though prices aren't that expensive. So they are kind of the opposite of what I'm looking for.
Great question. It's hard to think of specific examples because it's uncommon for a city to have a sudden change in policy with nothing else going on at the same time.
Still, I think it's fair to say that the principle that "building more housing should make housing more affordable" is certainly not a slam dunk, evidence-wise. On one hand, the normal laws of supply and demand ought to apply. But on the other hand, adding more people to a city induces more demand to live in that city, so the net result of building more housing units in a city may (counterintuitively) be higher prices.
I'm personally of the view that we should aim more towards increasing the desirability of second-tier cities rather than cramming ever-increasing numbers of people into a few giant megalopolises.
Seattle is often cited in this. However I think its that housing prices in Seattle didnt rise as much as they did in other cities with similar rates of population growth and household income. There was also a brief period in like 2015 maybe where Washington DC had a few dozen large apartment complexes open in the space of a year as the area around Navy Yard/Nationals Park was developed. Rents dropped by like 8%; however the rate of building wasn't sustained so prices have gone back up.
I don't think you would be able to find a case of building enough housing to drive down prices in absolute terms only relative terms. Like most any market, the supply of housing will always lag demand by at least some small amount, otherwise the profit a developer can make would quickly drop to 0.
I'm Ukrainian, currently in US on tourist visa, along with my family (wife+kid). Due to current events, we can stay in US, or move to UK, or Canada. I'm a software developer with 10 yrs experience (mostly backend, python, node, all kinds of databases, data science, and some ML as well), and I'm pretty good at it. Wife is staying home until baby turns 2 or so, then aspires to be a programmer, too (I'm helping her learn, she seems to have a knack for it). Currently I'm freelancing, making low six figures, but paying very little taxes as a Ukrainian contractor; and I have an offer from a US company for gig work at $85/hr.
The options as I currently see them:
Pro US (SFBA):
* professional opportunities
* probably easiest to get financing for my own thing, should I decide to do it
* probably highest total comp if I get to FAANG (I strongly believe I can). Strong free speech protections. Nice climate, if we move to CA.
Contra US:
* Healthcare costs.
* housing costs
* California is super-expensive (but should be Ok on FAANG comp).
* Gun violence.
* even with FAANG comp, we will be ~90th percentile at best
* we love big European cities
* wife's status is unclear (she isn't Ukrainian, so doesn't get TPS automatically). She will be unable to travel (at all) for a number of years
pro-UK:
* we love big European cities
* no problems with residence status, or travel
* probably safer
* closer to home
contra-UK:
* London is massively expensive (but still cheaper than SFBA probably)
* fewer opportunities, lower salaries (but FAANG is hiring there as well)
* daycare is expensive (but somehow people afford it anyway?)
Also, we're looking into Canada, but I don't see how that improves upon above two options.
Basically, the way I see it - things might be expensive, but my SWE income will be at 90th percentile in CA and probably 95th in London, so we should be able to get by ok. And London is probably nicer than CA (is it?). But - there's more chance to work on exciting stuff in CA (I'd love to do massive scale stuff, or something space-related, etc).
I think gun violence isn't a huge factor, but the health care mess (not just the monetary costs, but also the difficulty of navigating the system) is a quality of life hit.
Stay in the US, don't go to California. California is a train-wreck politically and economically, with taxes through the roof and large parts of it literally on fire a lot of the time. Tech workers have been fleeing California in droves.
I'm not sure what gave you the idea that crime is a particularly big issue everywhere in the US. It's a big issue in some big cities (in particular, some in CA), but you don't have to go to one of those cities. For someone in your business, it's easy to find a job somewhere where crime is not much of an issue, and housing prices are less of an issue. And if you have a permanent job, you'll get health insurance from your employer. Health insurance doesn't solve all of your healthcare problems, but it makes paying a lot easier.
Yes, US is not Europe. But some places (including some big cities) are beautiful enough, especially in the right weather, that hopefully you might be able to enjoy them.
I will second this: look at the US outside California. Gun crime is a very isolated issue--if you aren't involved in the drug trade, it's almost invisible.
I'll plug western MA where I live as an area to look: near NYC and Boston, cheap, very safe, nice weather, and a big Russian-speaking community.
Also, Boston offers views as close to a European big city as one can get in the US. It's a lovely place to visit in good weather. (I'm not sure I want to recommend living right there permanently, but temporarily it's not a bad option.)
Oh, and I just typed "most European city in the US" into Google, and it seems a lot of people think it's Boston.
>Gun crime is a very isolated issue--if you aren't involved in the drug trade, it's almost invisible.
True, but. If the kids go to public schools, they'll be doing active shooter drills alongside the other disaster drills. (In St Louis, they do Fire, Tornado, Earthquake, and Active Shooter.) That's not exactly gun crime, but it's adjacent and it's avoidable by moving to a polity without regular mass shootings. So if that sort of thing bothers you (OP), keep it in mind as a factor.
I think this is a pretty poor take. There is not really a "max exodus" from California. Yes, some people have been leaving in large part due to high COL and taxes, but also the high COL largely derives from the fact that it is an amazing place to live in the first place. People do not want to leave, they are priced out.
I would not move to California blindly but professionals typically get paid more to work there than elsewhere. If you are a SWE with a job offer in Cali it is not difficult to just run the numbers to see if it makes sense.
I think your take is pretty poor, also. California used to be an amazing place to live. Is it still so? A lot of people seem to disagree with you.
Last year, there was an attempt to recall the California governor. 38% of people who showed up to vote wanted him recalled. The number would've probably been a lot higher if people hadn't been worried that a Republican would take his place if he's recalled. The fact that this attempt happened at all means the voters' patience has been stretched really thin.
This was followed by attempts to recall a number of other elected officials. San Francisco successfully recalled all of its school board that was eligible to be recalled. SF's DA recall election is coming up in June. It's unclear if Los Angeles voters will succeed in collecting enough signatures to attempt to recall their DA, but the effort is going on.
This is not happening elsewhere in the country. A lot of California elected officials seem to be especially bad.
Mind-blowingly bad news from California come all the time. Right now, California is trying to reform teaching math in schools, moving algebra to high school, because racial equity. Yesterday, a contract surfaced showing the person leading the reform effort getting paid by the school system $5,000 per hour as a contractor. The rest is here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-math-wars-get-ugly-Accusations-of-17060072.php . It feels like we get news like that from California all the time.
With everything that's in news about California all the time, I can't recommend to anyone to live there. And it's not just tech people who are moving out - it's tech companies that are.
You're overinterpreting Californian political culture a little bit. California has a long history of direct democracy -- there are very strong initiative and recall provisions in the law, and it is routine that in *every* election there is some form of direct democratic action on the ballot -- an initiative, a proposed constitutional amendment, recall of this official or that. Even if it only bubbles up to national awareness every now and then, it's going on all the time. (Not that I think this is a good idea, by the way ha ha. Direct democracy almost never is.)
Doesn't mean California doesn't have problems. It certainly does, but so does every state. It's not the dumpster fire some people suggest, although it's also not paradise, or even necessarily the best state to pick for a given situation.
I do agree that if I were in the programming biz and deciding where to live de novo, I'd probably look more at Salt Lake City than the Bay Area, if given the choice. But that's based on tax law, cost of living, demographic and business culture destiny, a little bit of traffic, and the fact that I'm OK with weather.
Poltically, it has it's act together; and if you live in city you will never see a wild fire; and country outside the coasts is iffy vis a vee being a shit hole.
Also, we don't have weather in this state. The coldest it gets is like, 58 degrees. Maybe.
You can't throw a rock without taking out a p lead in any major city.
Depending on your compensation, you will pay less in total taxes in CA; the real issue is property tax. You will be getting screwed paying taxes on a house you buy now, and there's no real way around it
You're either trolling and trying to start another flame war, or you really don't get it what it takes to make an argument that actually convinces someone. (Hint: throwing the word "shit" at everything you don't like isn't it.)
If you think you can make FAANG (and if you think that is a good thing), then the US is probably your best bet. But don't move to the Bay Area until you get that FAANG job.
"Gun violence" is basically a non-issue unless you make a point of hanging around with a lot of criminals. Or I suppose if you wind up deciding to kill yourself, but in that case you'd presumably and temporarily be considering the gun violence a plus. Odds of your being shot by someone else, if you live a generally peaceable life, are lost in the noise of life's ordinary risks.
Health care, is a mess. For *most* Americans, health care is very good, reasonably trouble-free, and costs very little out of pocket. And that's going to include pretty much everyone in FAANG world. But a lot of people fall through the cracks, and as a freelancer you might be one of them. Or your wife might. So that's something to look into, but it will depend on specifics like which state you wind up living in.
If you're having more kids do Canada. Your wife will get a year paid leave and a year at part time with each kid, and the childcare is subsidized. (Disclaimer: may not apply to immigrants, you'll have to check.)
How much do you care about climate? I know people who are driven up the wall by the English lack of seasons or by the Californian droughts or by the Texan summers. (I'm kinda in that camp myself, which is a part of why I live in Minnesota.) I also know people who really love the English lack of weather.
If I were making the decision, I'd likely go wherever I know most people, on the grounds that life as an immigrant is hard enough, and having people around who can help you navigate the bureaucracy is surely helpful. (I was 12 when we moved from Russia to the US, so it was my parents making the decision.)
A random thought -- I don't know how annoying Ukraine is about renewing your passport from abroad; Russia is quite obnoxious. When I studied in the UK, the requirement of going to the consulate to submit documents in person was "an hour by train" which is totally doable. Now that I live in Minnesota, the same requirement is "a plane flight to New York City" and is a lot more annoying (and expensive!).
People talk a lot about high COL, but at the high end salary differences swamp it. For example you might make 200k as a SWE in california and have 100k COL+taxes. In Texas maybe your COL+taxes are only 50k, but you only make 120k (just an example but I think they are loosely reasonable as someone with similar credentials to you). Remote work changes this dynamic of course, but generally I'm encouraging you to try to put hard numbers on things so you can compare quantitatively
It highly depends on what kind of job you actually land. I don't think 200-300k+ SWE jobs are the norm in California, but they certainly exist. IMO landing one would overdetermine the choice to move there, if it was a prerequisite
Healthcare costs are not very significant in the 6 figure salary range; you'll almost certainly get decent benefits from your job. Gun violence also immaterial, as you'll naturally avoid places where it might be a consideration anyways (it is not evenly distributed geographically or socioeconomically)
Ukrainian from FAANG here. Do not bet on timing of joining FAANG, a lot of pure luck is involved in passing the interviews. Yet if you are really confident that you will get there then you will, but again — eventually, passing any particular interview is not guaranteed. Do not listen to other comments about "California is done", it is not, especially so if you are an immigrant, Americans are great people but they are silly about what matters and what does not. That said, Bay Area is really expensive, even more so for a family with a single earner, so preferably move in there only after landing a job in FAANG/modern startup. They will also pay your relocation costs. To land a job in SFBA it's absolutely unnecessary to stay there, any serious company that you would want to work at will cover your trip for the interview. So you can hang out somewhere cheap meanwhile. Health care is a pickle and to get it, you preferably need to be employed, better employer = better healthcare so prioritize getting a better job ASAP. Be mindful of your visa status and do NOT do anything that can be construed as work American company pays for while your current visa status does not allow that.
This all was about the US, you can get to FAANG satellite office in Canada and eventually transfer to the US too. All in all though, I'd try my luck on TPS but if you get stuck without getting into FAANG, Canada should be more chill, or so I've heard.
Was anyone who thinks history is fairly predictable saying there was going to be a big war about now? Predicting it, say, five years ago?
As I understand it, the generations theory says that once in every cycle, there's what I call the great social machine. Idealist leaders, cynical seconds in command, cooperative people at the bottom, and the great machine deals with a problem or produces a civil war.
As I heard the theory, the big fight would be about abortion, and it was certainly looking that way, but now I wonder whether the issue will be dealing with Russia and rebuilding Ukraine. (I'm assuming Russia will lose.) Possibly rebuilding Russia will also be on the agenda.
From an American perspective, the invasion of Ukraine one stands out not because of its size (it's not even the deadliest war happening right now); it stands out because of our unusual reaction to it.
In the Book Review thread I announced that I was going to do one. Integrity requires that I report that I did not even finish reading the book, much less writing a review. Maybe next year, though imagining I'll be less busy then is a bit optimistic.
Unless you're hoping to do a book review in the future, it might be worth posting the title and why you thought the book was worth reviewing. Or maybe just the title.
At first I was going to review "The Discarded Image" by C. S. Lewis, which I have read before (probably should have stuck with that, but oh well). It's about the medieval model of the universe: how the average medieval person thought the world worked from what we would call a "scientific" standpoint, and how that gives important context when reading medieval to early-modern literature. It's neat nerdy stuff.
But then I switched gears to reviewing "Dominion" by Tom Holland. It's more recent, more relevant, and I thought would make for a more interesting review. It's about the long lasting cultural impact of Christianity on the west, with a particular emphasis on how modern Western values is pretty distinctly Christian, though we don't recognize that because we don't know the values that existed before Christianity. Unfortunately with an infant in the house and my wife working while also working on another degree...I just didn't have time to sit down and read the whole book.
I really should have stuck with the Discarded Image, I've read it before so I could have just skimmed it again. I guess I still could, if I started writing now? But it wouldn't be my best work. And I'm still terribly busy. So I think not.
Excuse me laughing here, but I have both "The Discarded Image" in my Kindle for PC and while I haven't read "Dominion", I have watched the Tim O'Neill interview with Tom Holland about it:
All I remember from The Discarded Image is the part about how modern people think of astrology and magic as the same sort of thing, but in the Renaissance, people thought of them as very different-- astrology was a deterministic universe, while magic was about human power to change things.
Yes! To the average medieval man, the idea of Saturn influencing plagues on Earth was of a kind to the average modern man's idea that the Sun's gravity keeps the Earth in orbit. To them it was just how the world worked, and the point of astrology readings was to try to predict how the planet's influences would affect your life in particular, like a weatherman trying to predict what the weather will be like next week given the factors he can see now.
In "The Abolition of Man" Lewis writes:
"There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse."
Today (Monday) my wife asked the Google home "what's the news today" and it says something like "Ukraine accused Russia of killing hundreds of civilians in Bucha. Russia says it was staged..."
Then I see a Times of Israel headline: "Russia denies killings in Bucha, calls images of bodies ‘another production’ by Kyiv"
So let's think back for a moment. Japan killed 100,000+ civilians in the Manila Massacre.
Imagine how modern media might report this: "Philippines accuses Japan of genocide. Japan says it didn't.* (blah blah blah) Footage allegedly of the massacre could not be confirmed as genuine at press time."
It's such bullshit. This is no time for "he said, she said" reporting. Surely we wouldn't see this kind of reporting in 1945?
But hey if you want to think it's just "another production by Kyiv", sure, much of the media invites you to believe that if you want. Of course, they do not mention that Russian has been lying throughout the entire Ukraine conflict, all the way back to 2014.
> Russian soldiers have not occupied government buildings and surrounded Ukrainian military bases on the Crimean Peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted Tuesday during a news conference near Moscow at which he gave an account of recent events that contradicts reports from the ground. [...] Is Putin concerned about a war breaking out? "No, because we will not go to war with the Ukrainian people." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/03/04/285653335/putin-says-those-arent-russian-forces-in-crimea
* I know Japan wouldn't have cared what anyone else thought about it, but suppose they did
> Ukrainians were quite happy with the shortest way to peace via a blitzkrieg [....] This was the method used to “pacify” home antifascists in Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mariupol, and other Russian cities — the method of total terror. And ordinary Ukrainians were fine with it. Denazification is a set of actions aimed at the nazified bulk of the population, who technically cannot be directly punished as war criminals.
> Those Nazis who took up arms must be destroyed on the battlefield, as many of them as possible. No significant distinction should be made between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the so-called “nationalist battalions,” as well as the Territorial Defense, who have joined the two other types of military units. They are all equally complicit in the horrendous violence towards civilians, equally complicit in the genocide of the Russian people, and they don’t comply with the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis must be punished in such a way as to provide an example and a demonstration. [...]
> However, besides the highest ranks, a significant number of common people are also guilty of being passive Nazis and Nazi accomplices. They supported the Nazi authorities and pandered to them. A just punishment for this part of the population can only be possible through bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as carefully and sparingly as possible relates civilians. The further denazification of this bulk of the population will take the form of re-education through ideological repressions (suppression) of Nazi paradigms and a harsh censorship not only in the political sphere but also in the spheres of culture and education.
If you've seen e.g. Operator Starsky's videos, you know the Ukrainians often call Russians Nazis now too, which is an interesting symmetry [edit: actually Starsky prefers the term "fascist", my bad]. But Russia uses "Nazi" as a pretext for the war itself, whereas Ukrainians fight because "they invaded our country, are trying to take away our freedom and democracy, are murdering us by the thousands, and utterly destroying our cities", and "Nazi" happens to be a concise and cathartic way of summarizing behavior that closely resembles WWII Nazis (aside from ethnic cleansing, I assume).
RIA says that no, really, Ukrainians are FULL-ON ACTUAL NAZIS, maybe worse than the scum we fought in WW2, so they must not join the EU:
> Ukrainian Nazism [is not] a “light version” of the German Nazism of the first half of the 20th century. Quite the opposite: since Ukrainian Nazism is free from such “genre” norms and limitations (which are essentially a product of political technologies), it can spread freely just like a basis for any Nazism — both European and, in its most developed form, the American racism. That’s why there can be no compromise during denazification, as in the case of the “no to NATO, yes to EU” formula. The collective West is in itself the architect, source, and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism [....] Ukronazism poses a much bigger threat to the world and Russia than the Hitler version of German Nazism.
Ahh, so EU and US are full of nazis too! It's interesting how the word "Nazi" doesn't have any apparent meaning. In fact they explicitly say that the EU/US "nazis" are free from traditional Nazi "genre norms". So it's not that westerners act like WWII nazis, you see, it's that we are simply... "nazis". Get it? Maybe if we read enough propaganda we can figure out what "nazi" means in Putinstan, but it seems worse than Scott Alexander's Worst Argument In The World: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member." Putinstan goes a step further by lying about X being in the category "nazi" to begin with. Putin asks Russians to take their emotional reaction to Nazis and apply it to the whole of Ukraine, apparently on the basis that there's a small number of actual Nazis in Azov Regiment (which originally formed in response to Russian aggression), even while Ukraine is less antisemitic than surrounding countries including Russia (https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/news/antisemitism-in-europe-ukraine-turns-out-to-be-the-most-friendly-to-jews/).
> in order to achieve the denazification goals, the support of the population is necessary [...] it will take some time for people to recover from the shock of military hostilities, to be convinced of Russia’s long-term intentions [...] It’s impossible to foresee exactly in which territories such a mass of the population will constitute a critically needed majority. The “Catholic province” (Western Ukraine, made up of five oblasts) is unlikely to become part of the pro-Russian territories. The exclusion line, however, will be found experimentally. Behind the line, a forcibly neutral and demilitarized Ukraine will remain, with the formally banned Nazism and hostile to Russia. This is where the haters of Russia will go. The threat of an immediate continuation of the military operation in case of non-compliance with the listed requirements must become a guarantee of the preservation of this obsolete Ukraine in a neutral state. Perhaps this will require a permanent Russian military presence on its territory. From the exclusion line to the Russian border, there will be a territory of potential integration into the Russian civilization, which is inherently anti-fascist.
The mad ravings continue, calling for Russian "Nuremberg Trials" against Ukraine post-war, for "re-education through ideological suppression of Nazi paradigms and a harsh censorship", for "elimination of armed Nazi formations" meaning "any armed formations of Ukraine", for "people’s self-government institutions" (not to be confused with democracy I guess), "installation of the Russian information space", etc.
Then it rambles about how "Russia did everything possible to save the West in the 20th century" but alas, failed, and so the "values of historical Europe" will only live on in Russia, where they will be "not worrying about the fate of the West" with its "Western totalitarianism". On the plus side, Russia will continue "leadership in the global process of decolonization", no doubt with the full support of its colonies in Ukraine, Georgia and so on. Man I have got to read 1984 someday.
Well, the main reason we think "Nazi" is a bad thing to be is not any political philosophy subtleties, but because they lined ordinary people down to the age of 5 along trenches and machine gunned them to death. Given that the Russians appear to have been doing just that in Ukraine, although not yet at German levels of efficiency, I'd say from the general public's general point of view, it's the Russians who are being "Nazis."
We just got a yorkeepoo puppy; right now feeding him with standard dry food, but in the long run planning to cook at home. Any suggestions on a good guide for a balanced diet?
One specific question I'd like to learn more about: how much can we reduce meat before it starts adversely affecting his health?
Sorry. It’s a parody of a dog food commercial trying to make dog owners feel guilty about not spending more for a premium brand of pet food. A Saturday Night Live bit.
I'm not sure about the general movement's stance, but personally I think that it is not altruistic for me own a dog or a cat. However, given that I do (non-altruistically) own a dog i still would like to do it in a more altruistic way.
1. Why would using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine be of "little utility"? Is it just a matter of Ukrainian tactical dispersion, or is there something else relevant?
2. Is there some reason the scenario of "Russia strategically nukes Ukraine" isn't addressed there (or is it addressed in some way I couldn't decipher)? I'm thinking something like "Ukraine wins on the ground, takes back 2015 borders and then pursues into Crimea, Russia considers Crimea an integral Russian territory and nukes Kiev/Odessa/Kharkiv". This would be a horrific act, but wouldn't be an act of war against NATO; how likely this (or similar "Ukrainian cities nuked but no attack on NATO" outcome) is and what would happen then are things I'd appreciate some input on.
Scientific American has a very doom-and-gloom article about it, but the basic point is that a nuke is a nuke, and it will leave you with radiation on the ground if you use it. Not much good taking over Ukraine if all the territory is glow-in-the-dark and sends your occupying troops home with radiation sickness:
My own personal opinion is that if Putin does start flinging nukes around, it would be as part of a spiteful 'eff you' when forced to abandon Ukraine, if the Russian forces get driven out. Dog in the manger stuff - if he can't have it, he's going to make sure it's broken so nobody else can have it.
I mean, (more) radioactively-contaminated Ukraine isn't ideal, but it is still of positive value to own so I'm not sure this would sway a selfish actor (also, fallout isn't permanent, although deaths from it are). I do thank you for reminding me that tacnukes and counter-force unavoidably cause local fallout, though (as unlike city-killers they must be groundburst to work).
That's silly. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't even temporarily abandoned. Ordinarily if you want maximum destruction of something fragile like a city you use an airburst (as was done in both the Japanese cities) to maximum the blast radius. That leaves you with very little fallout, because by design the fireball barely touches the ground, and so sweeps up very little material from the ground to be rendered radioactive.
Scientific American is no longer a reliable guide to any remotely politicized field of science, and nuclear war is about as political as it gets.
Nuclear weapons do not make any great amount of territory uninhabitable for any great length of time unless you go out of your way to make it so. As Carl notes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on site, and promptly. And of course the Russians went out of their way to take and occupy Chernobyl.
Airburst tactical nuclear weapons over major Ukrainian logistical hubs would offer a very substantial advantage to Russia in this war, and would only slightly reduce the value of Ukraine as a prize. Heck, their current plan seems to envision Western Ukraine as a permanent ghetto for "Russia-hating Nazis", so I suspect a radioactive crater in Lviv might be considered a plus from their point of view.
I don't know much about 1, but ad 2, I think that chances of Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine are fairly low. Military and political are NOT separate magisteria. If Russia is badly losing the war, that almost by definition means there is a socio-economy-political breakdown in Russia. If there is a political breakdown, likelihood that Putin's orders would be obeyed is low.
Relatively low, perhaps. Absolutely low... well, here are my counterpoints.
1) Loyalty of nuclear weapons operators is a matter of national security, both in the sense of "won't fire unless ordered" (else unintended WWIII) but also in the sense of "will fire when ordered" (else deterrent is useless). These would seem to me like very-high-priority when assigning highly-loyal personnel (not quite top, but close). Hence, for Putin's orders to not be obeyed by people selected very strongly for obedience to Putin's orders would imply that Putin literally can't find enough loyal people in Russia - a very strong condition.
2) Russia has a lot of missile silos and ballistic missile submarines, and if a few or even half of them refuse to launch that still leaves more than enough to hit Ukraine (which to my understanding has no BMD capabilities). A correlated refusal would probably imply that there is a correlating agent i.e. someone not Putin has assumed control of the Russian military and is giving orders that supersede his - and that someone would then have the ability to nuke Ukraine, so it's not clear that this scenario nullifies the possibility of Ukraine getting nuked.
I do not think that nuclear weapons operators in Russia are personally loyal to Putin. They are probably loyal to Russia.
Fortunately, Russian Federation, while it is an authoritarian regime, is not a personalized despotism, like Iraq was under Saddam, or USSSR under Stalin. If there is a political breakdown, they have mechanisms how to change the president (even without, you know, assassinating him), so Putin is no longer formally authorised to launch nuclear weapons. And most importantly, he knows that. Ordering nuclear attack as his last order in office would be monumentally stupid.
This is a reasonable place to say that the doomsday clock really gets on my nerves. There's no reason to think they have enough information to be so quantitative.
Oh, I don't think the UCS has very *much* political influence. But playing with the clock is a dirt-cheap way for them to exert a *little* political influence, and that's more important to them than e.g. dispassionately informing the public.
(1) Strikes me as very unlikely and probably mistaken. I think it far more likely Putin uses a tactical than strategic nuke in the Ukraine. There are all kinds of useful targets, e.g. airbases, weapons depots and/or convoys, Zelensky's approximate location, if it's not known exactly, any accumulation of Ukrainian armor, which they would probably need to really clear the Donbas. Plus it's probably less likely to provoke NATO, and there might not be some giant flaming wreck of a city with burning children to see on the TV, which tends to make people upset -- that fact and its importance in the modern world may be gradually seeping in to the Russian mind, ordinarily firmly closed against notions that your public image matters.
I think the strategic ambiguity here is that a strategic nuke on a Ukrainian city might allow some harmful debris to waft across a NATO border, or something like that. Or NATO could just have already decided that the moment a nuclear explosion is detonated in the Ukraine, it's all out war on Russia and the Tridents are in the air 90 seconds later. It's possible for people to get in that headspace, and they wouldn't necessarily be telling us if they were. MAD doctrine would actually call for being deliberate ambiguous about what constitutes an Article 5 provocation.
I don't know how to assess the likelihood of what you outline. I don't have a good mental model of Putin's decision process right now, since he's proven himself to be way less rational or even intelligent than I would have assumed. Maybe he's got tertiary syphilis or AIDS or something, and his mind is going. I also don't have any sense at all for how the people around him are thinking -- are they really all prepared to see him take Mother Russia into the vortex? Maybe so.
I've been snapping and snarling like a dog further down in this comment thread, so have something a little less contentious.
For Friday week, I hope you all enjoy your Satanic hot cross buns:
"Hot Cross Buns are inextricably linked to Easter and to Christianity. But in reality, they probably have pre-Christian origins. ‘Cross Buns’ were baked to celebrate Eostre, a Germanic Goddess of Fertility, after which the season of Easter is said to be named. Eostre was a voluptuous blonde maiden, always depicted surrounded by little birds, bunnies and other baby animals, as well as spring flowers. Cross Buns were baked for the spring festival to celebrate this Goddess. The four quarters of the cross on top of each bun were said to represent the phases of the moon, while the cross itself symbolised rebirth after winter."
Except this is all a bundle of nonsense, as explained by our old pal:
We have no idea what Eostre's hair colour was, she wasn't depicted surrounded by anything, and she may or may not have been Germanic but we have no idea because there is a grand total of one (1) reference to her by name alone, by an English cleric, writing about the derivation of Anglo-Saxon month names. The bunnies, butterflies, and hot cross buns are all later accretions by anti-Catholic polemicists, Wiccans and neo-pagans searching for history to back up their traditions, and the online atheists of the height of the New Atheism stripe.
It would be good if a side effect turned out to be that we treat obesity more seriously, especially in the US. Diabetes seems like a major effect comorbidity for Covid.
One large effect in the U.S. may be the partial breakdown of the public school system, with many more people choosing alternatives, whether home schooling or small group schooling.
It's not that the first person who posts always has their post deleted; rather, every deleted top-level post gets moved to the beginning (I've confirmed this through reading posts and subsequent comments before and after they were deleted, but you can also observe the timestamps).
My hypothesis: the comment sorting algorithm wants to hide deleted comments, so it places them at the "end", except it assumes people sort by most recent instead of chronologically.
Its possible that when the post is deleted the timestamp in the database is also deleted. Then the sorting algorithm used for Chronologically puts these all first. I'd bet a cup of coffee there is a jira ticket sitting in some backlog at substack for this very bug.
Is there a site like this: https://eocinstitute.org/meditation/141-benefits-of-meditation/#/ but for exercise (or other healthy habits, reading, fasting, music, in-person socialization)? I have consistently found this one helpful for motivating me towards meditation, and I'd like to use it to do the same towards other habits.
The LIFE app is pretty decent for fasting, has nice milestones (with somewhat sketchy pubmed citations) that appear sequentially to show the benefits as your fast gets longer. It does help that the effects are immediate and extremely noticeable.
I wouldn't treat the rest as 'healthy habits', that's some messed up extrinsic motivation.
Scott: were there plans to give people besides you access to the "raw" google docs for the book review contest? I think elsewhere it was told to you that it was relatively trivial to figure out the author of a document, which at the time didn't seem to be common knowledge.
>2: I'm provisionally abandoning the "odd numbered open threads are no politics" rule. I always forgot about this myself, everyone else always forgot,
I waited to post a few things (or posted them in the previous open thread) because the current open thread was no-politics. I did also get a different feel from the two sorts.
Not super-fussed over the change, but just adding a data point.
I’m not sure how this post is going to come off as my house is being re-sided today and people are pounding on all four walls. I have to stick around for questions so bedlam it is.
I did one of those spit tests for a genealogist cousin and it came back with most of my heritage being from the North Caucuses - horse people? - with some Jewish sprinkles.
So what happened to my mother’s parents that came here from Turino? 0% Italian or other Mediterranean by their analysis.
I probably should go back and review mitosis and meiosis for myself but I’m lacking patience and focus at the moment.
Edit
After a couple more hours of this I’ll be ready to confess to the JFK hit. This is getting on my nerves. The crew leader who speaks Spanish *and* English isn’t here today so our communication is being done through an app.
What does “apúrate, apúrate que es un tornado” mean anyway? [joke to relieve tension - my tension]
Holy shit, these guys are pretty daring. Just watched a mid air step between ladders. I hope to fuck these guys are being paid a decent wage.
Further edit
Official sunset in a couple minutes and the hammers are still knocking away. Long day for them and for me.
My dad’s folks were from Poland so no big surprise about the Jewish part or the Caucuses.
My last biology course was in high school so I am pretty darn weak in this area. Still it seem surprising that no Mediterranean heritage shows up. My mom’s family sure looks Italian. Dark skin and hair. Her family photos look like they could have been taken at the wedding scene at the beginning of The Godfather.
There's little to no difference between looking Italian and looking Jewish. Also I just now looked up the peoples of the Caucuses and they kind of look like that too.
I wasn’t really curious about this and did the test as a favor for a relative who seems caught up in it. The results did kind of surprise me tho. Maybe they just took the wrong baby home from the hospital. :)
I would treat a clash between the test and other things you know about your family history as more likely to be an error in the test than an error in your family history.
I don't understand idealism in politics. Seems like a contradiction in terms. The whole point of having a society is that we figure out how to agree enough, to compromise enough, such that we aren't fighting each other. The only thing that makes us *better* than the other apes is that we work together.
Whatever the rules of our society, the rules themselves are secondary, by a large margin--a margin as wide as a chasm-- compared to us agreeing upon some rules that allow us to work together.
It makes sense that some people propose idealistic rules as something to work toward or to argue about against other proposed idealistic rules. But it makes zero sense in practice to stand by a political ideal--and fight for it. Because in fighting for an ideal you destroy the purpose of society in the first place. The purpose was that we figure out a way to get along and work together.
Let's say we want to have a football game. If we don't have the game, nobody wins. Not a hard concept to understand.
Democracy seems like the best idea so far us apes have come up with to compromise and get along.
I'm writing this as a place-holder,
We need to find an even better way to compromise than our current democracies, because they seem to be slowly failing us for various reasons. The biggest problem, I think, is that people have forgotten that the whole purpose of democracy is compromise, because compromise is the secret sauce that makes us better than the other apes.
How do we compromise better? I see 2 possibilities: a change in constitutional structure of our nation states or a change in values. Neither sounds easy. Of the two, I think a change in values is easier. Our current values are much different from the Romans than our constitutional structure.
How do we change our values? I don't know, but I think the answer to that is extremely important.
1) Our current compromise is suboptimal and I don't think agitating for a change is likely to break the camel's back (generally the argument of political parties).
2) Current compromise is literally worse than state of nature (generally the argument of terrorists or vigilantes).
Before you hit out at #2 *too* hard: people being genocided. That said, a lot of people using #2 don't really understand the alternative.
I'm self-banned from DSL for a few more weeks but want to put down this idea for threads there.
I do recommend more people here participate in DSL, as it's good for long discussions on a topic. The current political tone of DSL is conservative, but it doesn't have to stay that way!
My idea for some new thread topics on DSL is: Man vs. Man. Who Was Greater? The idea being to pit one historical figure against another and debating who was greater, just for the fun of it. It could be between contemporaries, say: John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson, for instance. Or it could be Cicero vs. Churchill, St. Augustine vs. Rousseau, Jesus vs. Buddha, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar vs Muhhamad Ali, Godel vs. Bach, Euler vs. Diderot, etc.
The spirit of the debates should be this: The proposer of the debate should be honestly as indifferent as possible to who is the better man. It should not be a culture war fight, at least not intentionally. The best proposed contests would be those in which the winner of the contest is the most difficult to know Ex-Ante and also probably Ex-Post. The point is to have a good debate over some interesting historical figures without getting into current idiotic culture war issues.
A sort of light hearted Plutarch’s Lives thing? Could be fun. My mind drifts to Lauren Bacall vs Sophia Loren vying for women who melt my heart, transfix my gaze, make me weak in the knees…
On second thought, that one would be entirely subjective.
I may be interviewing at Palantir. It’s clear they do some good but also seems like they do some things I’d rather not be a part of. Not sure how to think about this. I’d appreciate anyone else’s thoughts on this
Exclusisvist is universal, since anyone can convert to the faith and be saved. Universalism is 'it doesn't matter what you believe, everyone is saved' and soon leads to 'it doesn't matter if you don't believe, everyone is saved (as long as you try to be a good person)'. And then if it doesn't matter what you believe, plainly it doesn't matter if you believe in Thor or Apollo or Marduk, what matters is being a good person. And then Thor or Apollo or Marduk don't exist, the real truth is being a good person by (these values our current society thinks acceptable).
And 'what current society thinks acceptable' changes over time, so the standards of being a good person also change. In one time period, you could be a slave owner and be a good person, in another time period this is impossible.
Well, yes and no, depending on your moral theory. By analogy, consider the shape of the Earth. In one time period, it might be reasonable to believe that it is flat; in another, that it is bowl-shaped, or even round. However, if you get the answer right (or at least closer to the true shape of the Earth than the other guys), you will be able to develop radically transformative technologies, such as maritime navigation or even space travel. Thus, the shape of the Earth is not just an arbitrary matter of opinion, it is a demonstrable fact, which (philosophical presuppositions aside) can be known in the absence of any kind of faith or direct divine revelation.
I think you light on good pragmatic reasons for exclusive monotheism, but I also think this argument is somewhat of a slippery slope.
For one, "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you try to be a good person" seems to me to differ from "it doesn't matter what you believe simpliciter. Namely, it seems to differ insofar as the former requires a true and practical understanding of goodness (which perhaps includes belief in God, faith, etc), whereas the latter does not.
I'm reminded of this quote from the Vedas: "God is one, but the wise call Him by many names." This notion admits moral reality, even monotheism, but perhaps even excludes some gods as unreal. Maybe Thor is out but Apollo is in, for instance. But it also seems to reject the dogmatic protestants-warring-with-catholics dynamic that many people find repulsive about organized religion (a priori anyway).
More to the point, the above comment seems to skirt the question of whether any one particular brand of monotheism is, you know, true. Just because anyone can become a Mormon or a Muslim doesn't mean salvation is found there.
What do you think?
Really? I'm pretty sure that most religious people think that they have some compelling evidence, if not easily shareable.
C S Lewis makes a good case for Christianity in several of his books. Aldous Huxley makes a good a case for pantheism in ‘The Perennial Philosophy’.
Edit.
Of course Huxley’s argument isn’t exclusivist.
I wasn't impressed by C.S.Lewis. That is, actually I was pretty impressed with how far he managed to get, as well as with his eloquence. But the trajectory of his arguments, as I understood them, appears to be: "Looking at the issue logically as well as empirically, it would fully appear that belief in God is absurd and the Church is corrupt. But such is the beauty of faith that it can overcome such obstacles. You must have faith, true honest faith, because the alternative is nothing but sadness".
But in what way is his faith more beautiful than Muslim faith, for example? I haven't read much of his, but the most famous example, the trilemma, at least makes an attempt at argument for Christianity in particular.
Hey, don't ask me, I think the entire concept of faith is rather silly. But, when I was reading Lewis (which was a while ago, so I could be misremembering), I saw him as a sort of tragic figure. He's obviously an intelligent and compassionate man, who cares very deeply about the well-being of humanity in general and individual humans in particular -- but he's forced by his faith to squeeze himself into weird mental contortions at every turn, just to reconcile his humanism (or, if you prefer, inherent goodness) with his religion.
Admittedly, though, I'm an atheist so my perception is somewhat biased.
This matches my views on Lewis too. He clearly had a great deal of positive moral, philosophical, and psychological insights to offer the world. But looking at his work and reading between the lines, there seem to be a lot of places where his personal intuitions clash with his conservative religious beliefs, and while he tries to reconcile them in various ways, the seams are quite noticeable.
He seemed to hold quite a lot of disdain for the proto-New-Age Christians of his time - the types who rejected more dogmatic and traditionalist interpretations of Christianity, claimed there were many paths to God, and pulled ideas from Gnosticism, paganism, occult beliefs, and Eastern spirituality. From what I remember, his work seemed to mock or vilify those sorts of non-traditional Christians far more than it did overt atheists. Yet in many ways, I suspect he had quite a lot in common with them, probably far more than he would've cared to admit. An actual hardline traditionalist would find Lewis' assertion that "some people must first be made pagans in order to be made Christians" to be blasphemous, and quite a lot of conservative Christians were offended by his claim (made explicitly in his finale to the Narnia series, and implicitly in The Great Divorce) that being a Christian is not *necessary* to go to Heaven, as long as someone is a good person and has faith in *some* form of higher power.
"An actual hardline traditionalist would find Lewis' assertion that "some people must first be made pagans in order to be made Christians" to be blasphemous"
As someone who considers himself pretty darn traditional, this puzzles me. What do you believe a traditionalist would object to in such a statement?
Can you cite me an example of Lewis doing this? I'm a huge Lewis fan, and I'm not making any connections here. Lewis is pretty big on "I believe Christianity because it is logically true, not because I happen to like it." You know, "most dejected and reluctant convert in all England", that sort of thing. I don't even know where I would look to find what you describe...he certainly has some hard things to say about nihilism, that could fit your "alternative is nothing but sadness" comment, but I can't even imagine him writing "Looking at the issue logically as well as empirically, it would fully appear that belief in God is absurd and the Church is corrupt." So an you give me a cite on this?
As I said, it's been a while ago, so I can't give an exact cite -- but that gives me a good excuse to [re]read more Lewis. That said, I do recall him dunking on rank-and-file Christians (as well as the Church) quite a bit in *Screwtape Letters*. Also IIRC, in *Mere Christianity*, he keeps returning to the point that, without God, life would be bleak and hopeless and thus we've got no choice but to believe. He also acknowledges that God is undetectable by scientific instruments (or any kind of instruments) a priori, and hence faith is required to believe in Him.
On a sidenote, I've loved *Leaf by Niggle* ever since I've first read it. I think it showcases Lewis's worldview in a really impactful way that his non-fiction books cannot. Also, it is quite heretical, of course :-)
Two chapters in Mere Christianity were about faith. I think it's valuable to take a look at the first one, as it is not long, and shows why I feel you have misunderstood Lewis when you say he believes that faith is required to believe in him.
"I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.
"That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
"Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so.
"For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
"When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, 'Perhaps she'll be different this time,' and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks.
"There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
"Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
"This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith"
On other words, when Lewis uses the term faith he means continuing to believe in something your reason has already convinced you of, through proof, even when your emotions make you feel otherwise. He certainly doesn't mean believing in something without evidence.
Earlier in the book he does mention empirical science, writing:
"Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, "I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so," or, "I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is "Something Behind," then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way.
"The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?" "Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?"
"Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men."
He then goes on to make an argument about how our observations of our inner lives among other things point us towards God. He never sits down and says "We can't measure God in a test tube, therefore blind faith is required to believe in him." He does not believe that God is a fact that can be proven or disproven through empirical science, but he also doesn't believe that being proven or disproven by empirical science is a prerequisite to a fact existing or being knowable through reason. After all, we know that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles through reason, not empirical science. There's lots of things that cannot be measured that can be known.
As a minor nitpick: "Leaf by Niggle" was written by Tolkien, not Lewis. Lewis did write some heretical epic poetry while he was an atheist though, I heard its alright.
Also, Mere Christianity is definitely aimed at an uneducated audience: if you want somewhat meatier Lewis I would recommend reading his book Miracles. Some kindly pirate has posted the entire thing online here, though the formatting's a bit wonky.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Miracles-C_S_Lewis.pdf
Gah, good point, I totally confused the two Inklings with each other. Mea culpa.
I don't know whether it matters for your point, but Leaf by Niggle is by Tolkien.
Gah, good point, I totally confused the two Inklings with each other. Mea culpa.
Do you consider Latter-day Saint theology exclusivist?
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that Jesus Christ is the only source of salvation and that accessing that salvation requires the use of priesthood authority that is currently only held by the Church (but has been around for most of human history by e.g. Moses or Peter). However the Church also teaches that every person will get an opportunity to accept or reject salvation, even if that chance has to happen for many of them after this life. This is where the doctrine of preaching in the spirit world and the practice of baptism for the dead comes from.
ETA:
The Church also teaches that "God will yet reveal many great and marvelous things to the children of men," which is to say, that while the Church claims to have the best understanding of God currently, that understanding has changed over time as God reveals new truth (and as knowledge is lost when people ignore or reject it), and it will likely continue to change. If you believe in a God that is actively involved in the world then changing changing teachings about him is not a sign of inconsistency.
Beyond that, one problem you are going to have in engaging with "exclusivist" religions is that you are trying to make arguments based on general trends you notice in history and religion. But that kind of argument doesn't concern exclusivists almost by definition. If you point out to a Catholic that most iron age religions practiced human sacrifice he responds "yeah, duh, that's how we know those ones were wrong."
And this isn't necessarily a failure mode. We don't expect physicists to spend much time worrying about how wrong the phlogiston model was. It was wrong, scientists figured out that it was wrong, and science moved on, and so too did popular understanding of heat and energy and now all my 9th grade students know that heat is a form of energy and is related to the motion of atoms even though they don't fully grasp what that means.
If you think of your religion as an exercise in truth-finding in the same way that physicists think of physics then many of the problems you mention mostly go away. It doesn't salvage certain fundamentalist strains of thought that try to freeze a certain dogma from a certain time period, but I suggest that those are fewer than you may think in practice.
> However the Church also teaches that every person will get an opportunity to accept or reject salvation, even if that chance has to happen for many of them after this life.
Somehow, I did not know that ! So, if I was an atheist in life, and then I die and discover first-hand that the afterlife is real (and maybe get a chance to meet some supernatural beings in person), then I can still avoid Hell ? Doesn't this somewhat diminish the utility of faith ?
ex-mormon perspective:
If I recall correctly, the LDS church doesn't really believe that the general population of humanity is eligible for hell. Rather, depending on how well you've purified and strengthened your soul, and which church rituals you've engaged in, you qualify for various tiers of heaven. The various tiers are, basically, how close you are to God, and it's less of a "you're not allowed into the club", and more of a "self-select based on how much God you can stand being around".
Even the lowest tier is expected to still be better than Earth.
The utility of faith in life without certain knowledge is, in a vague hand-wavey way, that the actual act of becoming a better person is much more practical in life rather than afterlife. Or something like that.
So, even though everyone has a chance to accept Jesus in the afterlife, one still needs to undergo the proper rituals in real life in order to get into the higher tiers of Heaven ? Or can one complete a Heaven-qualification course (so to speak) posthumously, as well ?
You can complete a Heaven-qualification course posthumously. But then, someone currently alive has to do the rituals (called 'ordinances') for you vicariously.
These vicarious ordinances (e.g. baptism for the dead) are done in temples. Since we don't know who will / has accepted the Gospel, we try to do the ordinances for everyone. They are only effective if the person accepts it.
This drives massive research into genealogy. Everyone wants to make sure that their ancestors receive the ordinances and are sealed to their eternal family. There's a promise that people who have been completely forgotten (on Earth) will receive their vicarious ordinances when Christ comes again.
That makes sense -- I knew about the post-mortem baptisms, but not about the specifics. But my question is, why must the ordinances be performed by the living ? Can't devout Mormons in the afterlife perform them as well -- and do so much more efficiently ? After all, the souls in Heaven can presumably work around the clock, and perhaps they could even get access to some kind of a spiritual genealogical database...
The relevant teachings are all almost found in section 76* of the Doctrine and Covenants.
AnonymousCoward correctly recalls that the vast, vast majority of humanity will attain a "degree of glory" all better than life here, but differing in the amount of glory and power and joy available in them. The standard doctrine is that there are three degrees, though there are definitely things that suggest that it is more of a spectrum.
The middle tier includes those "who received not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh, but afterwards received it. These are they who are honorable men of the earth, who were blinded by the craftiness of men. These are they who receive of his glory, but not of his fulness." That suggests that the strategy of "deliberately live as an atheist now and then change your mind if there's an afterlife" disqualifies you for the biggest possible reward.
As for the utility of faith, I'm personally still not sure why it seems so important to God, but it's clear that it is. Joseph Smith taught at times that faith is even the power by which God himself operates. In the Latter-day Saint cosmology God wants us to eventually have all the power and knowledge and glory that He has, and the ability to act in faith must somehow play an important role in that. Why exactly I can't say yet though.
* https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/76?lang=eng
Possibly based on John 20:24-29
"24 Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
26 Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Thomas does not believe the testimony of the others and remains unconvinced until he sees Jesus for himself. That was a rejection of the truth. The problem becomes more acute for those who will come afterwards and who cannot see Jesus in the flesh for themselves. They may think they are being sensible, but in reality they are rejecting what is true and delaying their union with God.
> They may think they are being sensible, but in reality they are rejecting what is true and delaying their union with God.
Yeah, that's the part that always made me think that Christian minds work in a way that is completely alien to my own. I personally can't force myself to believe something that I think is false. It's not that I'm making a pragmatic choice between two (or more) beliefs; the decision is completely out of my hands. If I think that the sky is blue, then I can still proclaim that it is green; I can live as though it were green; I can lie to everyone around me and maintain that it is green... but I can't lie to myself. In my head, I'll always know it's blue.
As a Christian I largely agree with you here and the importance of "faith as belief" has never resonated with me, and Latter-day Saints put much less emphasis on it than other denominations.
Rather, I think the faith God is looking for is best characterized in Alma 32 from the Book of Mormon: it is 1) the willingness to experiment with spiritual things and 2) after seeing results from those experiments, acting consistently with those results, even in the face of remaining uncertainty. Alma 32 presents an extended analogy comparing faith to a seed: you don't know from looking at it whether it is a good, living seed or a bad, dead one. The first step of faith is to plant it and see if it grows. If it does grow, you have learned something, but you aren't done. From there, the next step of faith is to continue to water it and care for it. You know it's a good enough seed to sprout, but you still don't know whether it will reach maturity, or whether it will bear good fruit. Faith is the willingness to continue to engage in this process of caring and learning in the face of continued uncertainty.
Put another way, God doesn't want you to lie to yourself. But he is very interested whether you will seek out and respond to evidence, and how faithful you will be to whatever you learned from that evidence. This view strongly agrees with The Chaostician's last sentence.
The final chapter of The Book of Mormon pointedly ends with a proposed experiment for its readers "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost."
I know of no Christian creed or teaching that asks people to believe something they believe is false. Believe without compelling evidence, perhaps. As Lewis wrote, "...if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."
Thomas is saved and is an heir of the celestial glory. He's an example for those who come to know the Truth without having faith first. Saul / Paul is another example: he rejected Jesus and even supported the killing of Stephen, until he got clear evidence on the road to Damascus.
What is important in both of these stories is that Thomas and Saul were willing to accept the evidence once they saw it and completely commit their lives to serving Jesus.
I do think that the exclusivity argument is a major problem for a lot of religions. I usually state it as: Is someone who has never heard of Jesus (or Mohammad or ...) because no one in their society had ever heard of them automatically damned?
The Latter-day Saint answer solves this problem. Everyone will get an answer to hear and accept or reject the Gospel between death and resurrection.
It is an open question how many people will accept between death and resurrection. There's one trend in the Church that says that it's harder to change the longer you wait, so you should "not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end". This suggests that only a few people will use this option. But everyone also thinks that all of their ancestors who died without receiving the Gospel will accept it. This suggests that most people will use this option.
>I usually state it as: Is someone who has never heard of Jesus (or Mohammad or ...) because no one in their society had ever heard of them automatically damned?
Leaving aside whether this is just, is there some reason to think it *false*?
This would match, for instance, an entity with a policy to rescue everyone who sends that entity a distress call (the Federation of Star Trek is an obvious fictional case). You don't know that that entity is there, or don't know how to send a distress call it'll receive? That's your problem; it's not obligated to seek you out.
Doctrinal issues only really arise when you claim "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" and *also* that everyone has a real choice to be saved or not as part of omnibenevolence.
AFAIK, the two most popular arguments appear to be:
1). Personal divine revelation: "Our god came to me personally and revealed, beyound any possibility of denial, that our religion is the One True Faith."
2). Specificity of scripture: "All those other religions claim to be the One True Faith, but all of them conspicuously lack X. Our faith has X, and since X is by definition a requirement for truth, our religion is the only one that could be true."
1) This seems to me to fall prey to a similar objection as the main objection. What justifies one personal divine revelation as the One True Faith, while all the others are the damnable tricks of Ye Olde Deluder Satan? OP raises this problem with regard to exclusivist religions and the revelations of their prophets, here it seems to be raised on one's own revelations. The issue at hand seems to be "how do we trust revelation, especially when it claims to be exclusive." Do you disagree?
2) This seems to me to be an appeal to a truth higher than faith (i.e. the Euthyphro Dilemma). Did G-d write the scripture (and definition of goodness) because it is true and holy, or is the scripture true and holy simply because G-d wrote it? Appealing to the objective, intelligible nature of goodness seems to render exclusive faith somewhat obsolete.
Perhaps I am mistaken on these though; I'd like to hear what you think.
Something to consider is that when almost anybody asks this question, there is usually an unspoken amendum that, when left out, makes the question seem a little more devastating than it actually is.
So say there's bob, and he's explicitely asking:
"Given that there's a lot of religions, and they all seem to have equal levels of certainty that their belief systems are right, how could it possibly be reasonable that anyone could have confidence..." and so on.
But usually when I've pursued those arguments, there's an unspoken "given" that is heard and understood by every heathen in attendance that goes something like:
"And, of course, any explanation will have to play by atheist rules - that is, we will assume their beliefs are wrong from the outset, and treat anything consistent with their view of the universe but inconsistent with ours as out-of-bounds in their explanation."
A conversation *without* that assumption can often get at what the question superficially wants to know, i.e. the shape of a particular person's belief and why they hold it. By not saying "Explain to me how you can justify your watch design - and please, none of that bullshit about gears and springs; all right-thinking people know that shit is passe", you might understand the person's preference.
When the assumption is in play, there's no chance of that. Now, there's some places where inclusion of the assumption is more justified than others. We can first imagine a scenario like this:
I show up at your door and tell you I am possessor of the one real truth, and that you must accept it. In this situation, I am the aggressor. Since I am demanding your beliefs change to mirror mine, there's a strong argument that you are justified (i.e. not being a dick, in the common parliance) in asking me to convince you using techniques within the confines of the rule-set you accept - i.e by describing physical realities and making arguments that stem from the physically observed, and no others.
When you reject me for not being able to do this, it's understandable - I was the aggressor, the prosecutor making his case. The burden of proof was, so to speak, on me. And the reasonable social judgment I deserve the varies a bit depending on how I carried myself; if I was calmly and with your permission sketching out my beliefs, desisted once you made your rejection of my explanation clear, etc. (i.e. behaved in a way that seemed to be coming from a place of love) I likely deserve less approbation.
On the flip, I probably deserve a lot of judgment from you and others if I make it clear that I'm using my religion as a tool to "put myself above you", i.e. to cement in my mind a rationale that says you are lesser than me and I greater than you. These things and more matter in the case where I am the aggressor, because I brought the fight to you.
The next part is the harsh part, but I'll try to keep it as clean and nice as possible. In the actual scenario we find ourself in, you found yourself alone and with free time and completely voluntarily brought the fight to the "them". Within the early parts of your question, you show a certain awareness that your question is at least not *entirely* about understanding, and that to the extent your question ends up diverging from pure curiosity it will weaken your position:
"[content notice: I've tried to watch myself, but my tone is probably rather dismissive toward religions in general in this comment]"
And yet something around half your comment is jabs at outgroup, to the detriment of both the clarity and concision of your question and in ways that reduce the likelihood that you will get the clean, calm answers that would help you to gain the understanding you claim to want.
To put it another way: A person of high confidence and self-worth with the same doubts of the truth of religion very likely finds him or herself with the same free time and curiousity you have and does virtually anything but ask the question in the way you did. Yours is the question of a person who very much needs to put people in a position lower than themselves so they can feel elevated, rather than being able to feel elevated and satisfied by what they themselves are absent comparisons.
While I'm confident that getting outside confirmation of preferred in-group status really does bring with it certain satisfactions and a kind of limited value, I would suggest that the necessity of it - that no better options presented themselves to you - is not a fantastic, optimimal situation. I suspect both a higher, more satisfactory value that persists over a longer term could be found if you instead found ways to feel better about yourself that don't rely on favorable comparison to others.
FWIW, I agree with you that most of the prominent apologists are outright charlatans; in fact, they are prominent *because* they engage in endless self-promotion aimed at selling their DVDs or whatever. However, as I said above, I wouldn't be so hasty as to tar all apologists with the same brush. There are plenty of academic theists -- and a vast number of rank-and-file believers -- who espouse some of the views you've listed, honestly and without malice aforethought. Dismissing them all as charlatans would necessitate dismissing the vast majority of humanity, which seems... unwise.
So let's poke into this in two parts, because it's important. First, the claims you say are indefensible, and clearly so, in all ways to the point where it should be clear to other people *just by reading them* that the people promoting them are shitty.
—Atheists reject God because they want to sin and commit crimes.
This one is just... true? You even know it's true. It's not true of *all* atheists, but it's certainly true of some - I have a brother like this. The thing where you see someone who was formerly devout slide into some banned behavior and then-and-only-then "quit" Christianity is absurdly common.
Are you actually seeing the claim "All atheists, entirely, are atheist purely because they want to do crimes, or purely because they want to sin?" somewhere? Where?
—Atheists know God exists, they're just lying about it.
This is actually part of the religious dogma of Christianity, although I can't speak for other denominations. "Lying" is a weird term here, because it covers different ground for different people - I have long since complained that the average rationalist has a definition of lying so narrow it doesn't actually encompass any action that actually exists, for instance.
This is one of the things that's hard because it involves spiritual claims - the actual text of the Bible claims some level of instinctual/spiritual knowledge of the truth each person possesses, printed on their soul to an extent. There's arguments as to how explicit this instinctual knowledge is, so YMMV even among the reasonable.
—Atheists hate God because something bad happened in their life.
Clearly true for many people, and you know it is -- the person who abandons a particular faith "because they just couldn't believe in a god that could do that" is an incredibly common trope.
—Atheists are only atheists because they have a comfortable life, they'll come running for God at the first sign of hardship.
Clearly very probable. The patterns of religious belief country-to-country and state-to-state back this up pretty well. Poverty is well-correlated with religious believe even in particular geographies, etc. This is pretty uncontroversial.
The counterargument is that this is related education/intelligence rather than privation itself (i.e. "of course it's the dumb poor idiots who believe this stuff). That's possible! But the "clear wrongness" you want to get out of this one isn't nearly as clear as you are representing it to be.
—Atheists are only atheists for the positive attention and the money.
I don't have to defend this one - you just accused Christians of the same thing in your original post. It's either fine to do - in which case it's not a real complaint - or it's not fine, and the closest example we have of someone being unreasonable in this way is YOU.
—Atheists are only vocal about being atheists in order to undermine the faith.
I'd have to see what source you are drawing this from to get some nuance on what's actually being said here. There are some ways this is consistent with what everyone observed during the period of new atheism popularity - that tons of people got really, really militantly into atheism and this seemed to be the main draw for them. There are some ways it might not be, but again, source.
—Atheists are religiously illiterate, no one who's truly read/studied the Bible/Quran would ever call themself an atheist.
This one seems clearly wrong, although as with all of these I'd like to see a source. Just the existence of world religion classes and the PhDs that stem from them makes this one pretty impossible; there are people who have studied both books closely (more than I have, for instance) that don't believe.
So of that list, basically one thing is a legitimate clear complaint, several are just right on their face at least as phrased, and one has to do with an actual belief in a spiritual thing that we likely aren't going to agree on.
And that makes it pretty hard to have this conversation without actually asking you where you observed the things you are complaining about - as you've represented them, there's much less problem than you are trying to convince people there is. When some of the items you present as clearly false are just true on their face and others are arguable, it should (but won't) shake your confidence in what your motivations are here.
Where this gets even harder for me is that I think it's pretty clear you are bad-faith on this (others might disagree). So I want to address things like the last point, but I'm also pretty internally confident based on your first post and this onethat you are taking minimally-charitable takes to reinforce your pre-existing viewpoint, etc.
I really don't want to mince words here - I'm very strongly suspicious you are approaching this whole question from a bad-faith positioning, and I'm damn near sure my general guess that this is mostly driven by you just feeling good when you have a lesser group to compare yourself to is true.
With that said, if you do pull individual sources of where you've heard a particular thing, I'd be glad to tell you how common it is, what the orthodox belief actually is within my particular subset of Christianity and so on. But I'm probably not going to reply unless I have specific links to talk about - I don't have a lot of confidence in your ability to present things neutrally/fairly.
Some of them are just factually true or plausible, which is part of why you didn't address them directly. People OFTEN stop believing in god due to particular negative events. It's not everyone, but it's something people say about themselves - I even gave you the usual phrasing.
People OFTEN leave the faith due to a crisis between something they'd like to do that the faith doesn't approve of - see homosexuality for an example that covers hundreds of thousands of Americans, and is an extremely common story.
Hardship and religiosity are associated on a number of levels - national, state, income levels within specific geographical areas, etc. That's not even controversial.
So, again, I'm left to guess at the TONE of how those things were said, which could still make them bad, or particular wordings that might make them bad. And you aren't a trustworthy source - if the chip on your shoulder was any more animated and noticable its mom would be Angela Lansbury. That's why I asked for the specific places you are hearing about these things - they might be genuinely bad, but you aren't a reliable way to find out if they are or aren't.
>That's not even controversial.
It absolutely is controversial. Consider that there are also memes among believers saying that people become religious because of hardship, rather than become atheist because of hardship. (For instance, I'm sure you've heard the one about no atheists in foxholes.) You've got two sets of competing memes saying exactly opposite things about the relation between hardship and religion.
"Atheists are atheists because *they don't believe in the stuff*. It's not a choice."
So you're a philosophical determinist? You're born atheist or Christian or Buddhist, and even if you don't outwardly believe that to start with and convert later, nothing actually changed internally- the fixed innate state simply had a chance to express itself? If someone vacillates between religions, or between faith and unbelief, there's still no actual internal changes occurring, they're ACTUALLY still (underlying_belief) the entire time? I'm trying to understand what you mean by this, because I feel like this preposition is probably contributing significantly to the tension between you and RC.
I mean, yeah, @Machine Interface definitely has a chip on his shoulder (as I'd pointed out to him, as well), but I can empathize with his position. I myself have been told these things personally hundreds of times by my friends and acquaintances, and I'm not even any kind of a professional debater. After the 100th time you're told something like "you just hate God because of something bad that happened to you", it's really tempting to stop replying for the 101st time, "actually I've never believed in any kind of deity, as far back as I can remember", and switch to saying "how about you shut your pie-hole". Irrational, admittedly, but very tempting.
This problem is exacerbated by professional apologists, because they never seem to change their tunes. You could go through their DVDs and lectures and debate transcripts 20 years into the past, and you find the same exact arguments. You can find transcript after transcript of people explaining to them in great detail how e.g. evolution does not imply that their great-grandparents were monkeys; and the next day they once again turn around and say, "look at how silly those evolutionists are, they think all of their great-grandparents were monkeys". For this reason, I am inclined to believe that professional apologists are, indeed, charlatans -- but that does not necessarily apply to rank-and-file theists.
"Atheists know God exists, they're just lying about it.
This is actually part of the religious dogma of Christianity, although I can't speak for other denominations."
If your religion's dogma says that all unbelievers are also damned liars, and your religion's dogma doesn't *also* say to be really really tactful when you discuss this with unbelievers, then your religion and all its members will be regarded as arrogant contemptible scoundrels by everyone on the outside. Because either the unbelievers really are damn liars, in which case they they don't want you calling them on it, or they *aren't* lying and so they *know* you are falsely accusing them, or they are damn liars and . And really, I'm only including the first possibility in the strictest sense of charity.
Fortunately, most Christians are at least somewhat tactful about this, so we don't have to write the whole faith off as one of arrogant contemptible scoundrels. The sort of "apologists" Machine Interface has apparently been dealing with, have a lot to apologize for.
Recall that I'm responding to a guy who is out for blood and his versions of what was said. If I say:
"The text of my religion talks about concepts similar to the moral law of god being printed on people's hearts - stuff like how every culture tends to not think too highly of murder (although it still happens) ends up being attributed to design rather than evolution, or whatever.
Similarly, there's supposed to be some inkling in the heart of people that what they are encountering is the truth".
You might still find that insulting, but probably less so than the "ALL ATHEISTS ARE DAMNED LIARS AND GOING TO HELL!" version.
Where I'm in a pickle is, he presented a ton of those examples and about half of what he presented as plain lies were common sense true; i.e. that people leave the faith because of bad events sometimes.
So I have to try to parse every single thing he's saying both by what he's saying and what the person he's representing might have actually said. I *have* to do this, because even knowing it would hurt his argument and saying so, he couldn't resist being uncharitable throughout his initial post.
I have no idea if the original source (I've asked him twice to identify some of the sources, no luck yet) said anything close to what he's saying and I have every indication he's an unfriendly party, especially after dealing with claims of the "saying people leave religions so they can avoid their strictures is a clear lie" sort.
So when I'm dealing with the "atheists know god exists, they're just lying about it" space, I have to deal with not only what he's saying he heard, but the entire conceptual space of what he might have actually heard, since I have no indication he's going to give unbiased accounts about what he observed from unidentified members of an outgroup he dislikes.
Did it ever occur to you that his"bias" is a *result* of mistreatment by the outgroup, so using his bias to distrust what he says about his outgroup might be circular reasoning?
It's like saying that you won't believe in police brutality if you're told about it by someone who claims to be beaten up by the police.
"The text of my religion talks about concepts similar to the moral law of god being printed on people's hearts - stuff like how every culture tends to not think too highly of murder (although it still happens) ends up being attributed to design rather than evolution, or whatever.
Similarly, there's supposed to be some inkling in the heart of people that what they are encountering is the truth".
That's somewhat more tactful than your last phrasing. But, I've looked into my heart far more closely than you have or ever will look into my heart, and I *know* you and your doctrine are wrong about this. I'm guessing OP does too.
So, A: I know that you are arguing from false premises and B: if you continue that argument once I've explained why, I know that you are arrogant enough to assert that you know the content of my heart better than I do, and why am I paying any attention at all to you?
How many people have to tell you that their hearts do not contain this secret thing that you believe all human hearts hold, before you accept that you might be mistaken?
It's not really about "aggression", but rather, pragmatism. Whenever someone makes any positive claim, be it "my God is the One True God" or "I have $20 in my pocket", it is up to him to justify the claim before we can accept it. Otherwise, we'd be compelled to believe in anything that anyone says unless we can provide evidence to the contrary; and, given that there's a nearly infinite number of possible claims out there, we'd be forced to spend our days frantically collecting evidence against Bigfoot, the Tooth Fairy, Voldemort, that pocket-$20, etc. It's just not practical.
To put it another way: Machine Learning almost *can't* be an asshole in the situation where I ring his doorbell and demand he believe something. I'm bringing the fight to him and demanding he believe something in just the way you describe. Ditto if I had made a post saying "Christianity is the one real truth, everything else is false; I demand everyone believes this immediately", especially if the content of the post strongly implies I feel superior to all you filthy unwashed sinners.
In that situation, I'm the guy picking the fight. Nobody should feel pity for me when people don't treat me with kid gloves or make fun of my beliefs - I strapped on gloves, stepped into the ring and dared people to hit me. I can't whine when I get knocked out. This becomes more true the more Machine Learning has been forced to have a particular conversation; I can't demand gentleness or politeness in a fight I picked.
What's happening here is a little bit different. In this case Machine Learning has shown up all on his own; this is an argument and conversation he's chosen for himself. You are demanding I give him the same near-immunity from "being the asshole" I'd give him if I was forcing him into this argument, but that's not what happened - he could have sat around tonight and ate chips in a funny hat, but he chose this instead.
The question he asked is fine - that's what this kind of forum is for. But I'd suggest that you'd take exception if I said something like:
"I have a good faith question about how one can believe abortion is right from a utilitarian perspective, given that it extinguishes an entire human life for the benefit of portion of another human life. I'd ask someone who was pro-choice, but I've found they are a lot of overweight bluehair feminist sociopath murders, haha, right?"
You would very likely read that and think I was being uncharitable to outgroup - that my good-faith question was really just a veiled opportunity to count coup and get validation from my in-group to make myself feel nice. Now say you pointed this out, and another person came in and said:
"Listen, you are the one who is pro-choice; it's not bad to ask about that. Why would you have a problem with someone asking questions? He's asking reasonable, pragmatic questions and asking you to justify your belief"
You'd probably suspect that other person was letting their biases get the better of them and ignoring a bunch of uncharitable and unnecessary insults levied at my outgroup because they identified with the original post and/or mostly agreed that prochoice people were bluehairs and deserved what they got.
Note that this is pretty par for the course for Christian-in-place-where-people-go-to-feel-intellectual, and it's not that shocking to me; it's not hurting my feelings. I'm a big boy who puts on gloves and a mouthpiece and picks fights in front of big groups of people ever week; there's a lot of contexts in which I can't complain about getting hit.
But I meant what I said in the last post. If you believe someone is wrong, that's absolutely fine. If you ask good-faith questions to try to get them to steelman their beliefs and find the most reasonable forms of those, that's fine too. But needing to compare yourself to some lesser group to feel good about yourself isn't a healthy state of being.
I'd much rather Machine Learning dug deep and figured out why he isn't enough for himself - why he needs a lesser outgroup to poke at so he can feel good about himself by comparison instead of feeling good about himself in the isolated abstract.
I *think* you and I are for the most part cool - i.e. at least I like you and I think of you pretty positively. But I do think you should take a look at ML saying this:
"Instead, religious apologists seem to be mostly narcissistic sociopaths who have absolutely no idea about the beliefs of the people they try to convince, who deal in logical fallacies and scientific illiteracy, and in general do an abysmally bad job of convincing anyone to join their faith, mostly spending their life preaching to the choir (and asking the choir for monthly donations, of course)."
And then consider that your reactoin to me pointing out that he's saying this as the agressor in the conversation (i.e. in a conversation he not only could have avoided, but started) is to completely ignore that dynamic, as if he didn't show up unbidden and unharrassed to make a post in which he made as many clever, cheap swipes at his outgroup as he thought he could get away with.
I don't think you'd accept your own hand-wavey dismissal of that level of foul play from most other people in most other contexts.
My only point is that tone arguments have no bearing on evidence or epistemology. I could say, "Guess what, I have $20 in my pocket, isn't that awesome ?", or I could say, "You asshole, I have $20 in my pocket, so suck it !"; but functionally these two statements are totally the same as far as the existence of that $20 is concerned. @Machine Interface is poisoning the well (in his statement that you quoted), but that doesn't automatically mean that what he's saying is false (it doesn't mean that it's true, either).
To put it another way, the topic is, "what are some valid arguments for religious exclusivity ?", and it's a valid topic (IMO) regardless of whether the person who proposed it is being a dick or not.
That said though, while I strive not to paint all people with the same brush, at least some of the prominent religious apologists are definitely stone-cold conmen. They've made apologetics their business; they sell DVDs and build theme parks; and whenever they attend debates, it's pretty obvious that they don't care about the truth, they just care about advertisement. On the other hand, there are plenty of apologists who are sincere in their beliefs, as well; and plenty of those who are just confused.
Unlike @Machine Interface, I personally find the honest religious mindset fascinating; it's the closest I can get to experiencing contact with a truly alien species.
I think it's a valid topic as well, especially since it's relevant to me and my beliefs. I don't actually have a problem with the question being asked by a good-faith person who isn't just trying to claim some scalps, but I think it's pretty clear (YMMV caveat) that's not what Machine Learning is after.
I've had both kinds of conversations, and the problem with the "taking scalps" version is that they aren't actually usually there to understand the belief of the people who have it.
To put it another way, I think you know you could come to me and say "What do Christians think about obvious demon alien Joel Osteen?" and we could have a fun, productive conversation. And I would! We've gone back and forth on shit before without ripping each others throats out (I think).
But when someone comes up and says "given that all your prominent theologians are all dumb, sociopathic thieves, aren't you stupid?" I'm pretty reluctant to even have the conversation - I'm much more likely, as here, to point out that it doesn't seem like they actually want to know and that they also seem to be a very particular kind of dick.
I'm actually glad that you are here because it gives some level of contrast to how I respond to each, FWIW.
Thanks, I appreciate the compliment. I'm not entirely sure who Joel Osteen is, but I hope he's got some tentacles, or at least horns. That said though, I think that @Machine Interface is upset with apologists specifically, not with theologians in general (and in fact, many apologists aren't even theologians). I do think that's a viable distinction, though obviously I don't take it to the extreme that @Machine Interface does.
"Once a society reaches the iron age, ritual human sacrifice either disappears completely or becomes marginal."
This is false. The Iron Age had started by 1000 BC at least in the civilizations of Eurasia. Carthage was still practicing child sacrifice until it was destroyed by Rome in about 150 BC. In India, sati was only ended by British colonialism. It's not even clear if sati was an ancient practice or if it was a form of human sacrifice that began in medieval India. In China, human sacrifice was widely practiced until about 400 BC (until Duke Xian of Qin), then again in the 13&1400s (Yuan & early Ming), then again in the 1600s (early Qing).
It's easy to reach for technological determination of moral progress, but that often doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny. Moral progress is won through difficult, historically contingent struggles by individuals and civilizations.
Lewis wrote in "Mere Christianity" that "If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
"When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others."
Essentially, any truth claim means that you will disagree with everyone who disagrees with you: this tells us nothing about whether any particular truth claim is true. If there is no God, then the vast majority of the human race is in the wrong, and the fact that they are a majority doesn't make a difference. Similarly, if there is a God then that God (or gods) will have a specific nature, and according to that nature some believers in God will be right, and others will be wrong. That tells us nothing about whether God exists. Any claim of truth is exclusivist in nature.
Also, I would argue that not all religions are parochial in nature. Christianity, for instance, began as a heretic sect of Judiasm practiced by a few dozen people in a backwater Roman province: today one third of the world is Christian across every culture and continent. How can something that is accepted by Chinese, Nigerians, Argentinians, American Indians, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, Indians, Mongolians, and everyone in between be characterized as "reflecting the desires and prejudices of very specific individuals and communities at very specific points in space and time"?
I also take issue with the argument "And as human ability for science and rigorous observation advances, miracles retreat from the world." This does not seem to be accurate. Dr. Craig Keener wrote a two volume, 1,200+ page academic work detailing exhaustively that accounts of miracles occurring are as prevalent today as they were historically. People experience and report miracles all the time, and the rate of experiences does not seem to have gone down significantly. You can, of course, argue that miracles do not happen. But if you want to argue that *experiences* of miracles no longer happen as much as they used to then you'll need to content with Keener's work.
http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/miracles/335370
Lewis in this quote seems to think "religion" means "Christianity, and maybe Judaism if we stretch it". There are religions that either don't believe in God, or for which there is some belief in God but it's not very central. And Lewis' standards for "some hint of the truth" are odd and seem contrived to give the answer he wants. If you think there's no God, and some religion claims "there is a God but he doesn't actively interfere much", I'd call that "wrong, but near being right" even if Lewis won't.
I mean, I don't know the exact context, but if you take "the main point" to be "acting righteously will be rewarded", then you probably do get "most of the human race would have to have been wrong about this for all of history" in order to adopt an existential or nihilist worldview. There are important doctrinal differences regarding whether those rewards are to occur in this life or a later one, but that basic tenet is essentially invariant among all religions.
(Not saying that this isn't explainable, but it certainly is something needing an explanation.)
I disagree that his claim only applies to Christianity and Judaism. A Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Animist, and ancient Greek pagan all agree on many things: the existence of a supernatural order apart from the material order and the existence of a soul that survives past death, at the most basic level. Christians, Jews, and Muslims agree on something like 90% of reality, differing primarily on the exact nature of Yahweh and the role of Christ. Christians and Hindus agree that the supernatural exists, that the world was created by supernatural beings, that the soul survives death, that there is a supernatural moral order by which people are judged, that there are supernatural beings at large in the world that can affect us, and that the higher supernatural beings (God for Christians, gods for Hindus) are worthy of worship.
I don't know why you think Lewis would say a deist religion isn't "wrong but near being right." I think he would agree with you that they are very close to the truth. "As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others."
Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis became an Anglican instead of Catholic. I’d love see a transcript of some of their conversations. Must have been pretty heady stuff.
"*existing* religions are extremely parochial, reflecting the desires and prejudices of very specific individuals and communities at very specific points in space and time."
But enough about Social Justice.
SJ also believes in supernatural entities and original sin.
What does that mean this week?
Perhaps the insistence on parochial faith-based monotheism is pragmatically more than theoretically true. Like perhaps it's the case that polytheism (and the societies built around it) simply disintegrates after a while, whereas monotheism does not (cf. the Jews). And if it's true in practice, then it's true in theory.
Not sure how this works out when e.g. Christians and Muslims and Jews all meet each other, so I perhaps the above argument works for parochial faith-based monotheism in general, but not for any particular parochial faith-based monotheism.
Sure thing - read more TLP, focus more on what others need.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/can_narcissism_be_cured.html
Thanks, I'm really enjoying his posts on narcissism!
I’m not an authority here, but I’d think if you are worried about having narcissistic personality disorder, you probably don’t have it.
I mean...I tick off almost all boxes on the WebMD page.
I only have a layman’s understanding of NPD. I can’t, for example, imagine someone like, say, a certain former POTUS fretting about having this sort of problem.
Sure, he definitely has it worse. Also, the anonymity that the internet provides me gives me more courage to expose my deficiencies
I don't think gunflint is correct.
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/280718
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103469
I don't think that's correct.
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/280718
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103469
Self-diagnosing based on a WebMD page is only marginally better than using a horoscope to determine your psychiatric condition.
If you think you have NPD, please see a psychologist and request a formal assessment. If you don't believe in psychology, I'd suggest you should also not believe in NPD.
Thank you for this response to the OP!!
I’m also a layman, but I immediately remembered a battery of news stories indicating that he might. Here’s a link to one: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-how-to-identify-a-narcissist-with-one-simple-question-20140805-story.html
One important difference between that reporting and this situation though is that the claim is that narcissists admit to being narcissistic because they don’t see anything wrong with it. Therefore, the “worried” part is adding a lot of uncertainty.
In my mind, this is just a medical condition that I need to cure. I'm not forming a judgement on myself as a result of having this condition. I don't know if this is narcissistic.
Personality disorders are terminal short of certain miracles. This is why they're PERSONALITY disorders. It indicates that something is fundamentally dysfunctional about your entire psyche that isn't rooted in brain chemistry imbalance.
If you insist you have a personality disorder and insist on treating it like a disease, I'm obligated to inform you the closest thing to a cure is large amounts of psychedelics, judging by the sheer number of "acid saved my life" stories I'm personally familiar with. Even then, that's a scattershot cure with a non-zero chance of causing a psychotic break. The psychotic break may even be NECESSARY for the cure.
If you spend significant amounts of time thinking about yourself to the point that you self diagnose your mental state and taking internet tests to classify it into various disorders, wouldn't that be an indication of having narcissistic personality disorder?
I was reading something completely unrelated, found this word, looked it up, and found that it resonated with me. Although I do believe I have NPD. This is not proof of it.
You beat me to it. :)
Just a notion about utilitarianism-- as the population goes up, larger numbers of people die or get otherwise hurt in disasters. Does this make for an incentive to not go for the highest population so as to have more slack in case of problems?
I think good behavior is an intractably difficult calculation, and trying to get it from a simple comprehensible rule just doesn't work.
What people seem to go with is probably an intuitive combination of utilitarianism, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, and there's no simple rule for balancing them.
It's not that there's no way to think about ethics, just that there are no rules which cover all the edge cases.
I mean utilitarianism is the idea that you should have a utility function and maximize it. Some people say this makes it contentless because it can be applied to any utility function, so it can't tell you what to care about on it's own. But I think that this is actually more useful content than most moral philosophies which make prescriptions but don't coherently tell you how to implement them.
Interesting question. Is it better to consider it in terms of how many people die in disasters, or how many people are left after the disaster? I don't know what the ideal population floor is, but I feel like there is one. "Maximize the floor" is definitely one approach. But it does lead to numerically more deaths.
That was an approach to child-bearing in the past, I think. Have enough so that even if something really bad happens, one or two will survive.
Graphs so far all point in the direction of less death in natural disasters. Slack is a good thing and I think it should be pursued for its own sake, but I don't see an obvious inverse relationship with population, and I don't see it appearing any time soon.
I got a bit triggered by your question though because there's a train of thought that goes to limit good things to prevent bad ones, and I... well, partly dislike it, but I'm mostly terrified of it. The decision we make in our world may well be the decision somebody makes for the human race as a whole with a completely different set of standards for suffering.
There's no inverse relationship *as long as modern civilization is stable*, yes. What were crop yields in the 19th century, again? Do we not rely on modern supply chains to achieve modern crop yeilds?
No, because constantly rising population ensures greater total utility, so long as the average human is perceived to have positive utility. But I'm pretty anti-utilitarian, so.
Yes, I read this as a fairly convincing anti-utilitarian argument.
"No, because constantly rising population ensures greater total utility, so long as the average human is perceived to have positive utility. But I'm pretty anti-utilitarian, so."
This is a little misleading and I think it's misleading in a way that might contribute to some people's distress re: Parfit's repugnant conclusion. Constantly rising population ensures greater utility so long as the average additional human has positive utility AND the utility of the already existing humans doesn't fall by an amount greater than the positive utility of the new humans.
E.g. suppose we have utilities:
{-1, 3, 3} at time one. If at time two we add an additional human with utility 1, that could be a negative outcome if the existence of this human reduces the utility of already existing humans by a >1 total- e.g. if the situation becomes {-1, 2, 2, 1}.
Right. And a utilitarian seriously interested the consequences of any action should try to run the expected utility projections for different scenarios far into future. (Population increases past the carrying capacity and crashes, was the total experienced utility worth it?)
Utilitarians are consequentialists. As such, it is not enough for a scenario to be "worth it". It would have to be "more worth it" than a safer approach that *doesn't* risk global catastrophe. And that's not very likely. (Edit: that said, I think EAs haven't given enough attention to the risk of hitting Earth's carrying capacity IMO - this is not an error with the ethical system per se, it's a mistake, and people of any moral system make mistakes, sometimes with bad consequences. But being concerned on a moral level with such consequences, before they happen, is a distinctively consequentialist kind of thinking. So I hate it when people point to potential bad consequences as evidence against consequentialism, when it's really more like evidence that the critic of consequentialism likes consequentialism and doesn't know it yet!)
As I understand it most projections have the world population leveling off and declining over the next few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Two things happening simultaneously, thing 1 is modern agriculture's increasing the load capacity of the planet and thing 2 is people getting richer and more secure decreasing the species' total desire for children.
Why are you only considering humans?
Why are you only considering currently existing humans?
I feel we are already well above the long-term carrying capacity of the planet, and species are being driven extinct at an appalling rate.
That said, if you are only to consider the humans alive at any one time, do you feel that ten people suffering (not-quite life threatening) starvation is better than one person who is happy? Why?
So far we're firmly into positive network effects. An extra human born now contributes more than his own share of utilitons+hedons, he's also part of a network that makes his contribution proportional to the size of the network.
There are plenty of bad endings where we have too many people, too little slack, and Moloch rules all. But the current reality is (still) far from that.
I agree: lets wait until every new human is inching much, much closer to the net negative boundary before we start worrying about this. So far more people=more utility is working great, if some far dystopian future finds different they'll most likely have the resources to deal with it.
Not all self-identified utilitarians endorse repugnant conclusion.
This is the answer of traditional utilitarianism. There is negative utilitarianism, too.
What do you mean by "slack"? How would having less people make recovery easier?
Depending on how you think about, you could either kill everybody as life is inherently suffering, or have as high a population as possible as life is inherently joyous. It's a philosophical question
'Population Ethics' is an unsolved problem. Actual ways of aggregating utility have an embarrassing habit of either suggesting we should produce as many people as possible, no people at all, or twenty people living in absolute splendor.
People have proposed various solutions like counting people who might exist differently than people who do exist in various ways, but they haven't really won wide approval.
What are "actual ways of aggregating utility"? All I hear is things like "sum utility" or "average utility", which aren't actual ways of doing anything. Utils aren't real and utilty cannot be quantified.
If you start from the assumptions that utility is real, and can be aggregated, you still don't know how.
This is a weird take to me. Do you not think that there is pleasure/pain? That people prefer some things to other things? The fact that we can't rigorously quantify something doesn't mean it isn't real. Light didn't become real only upon the invention of the first light meter/method of counting photons.
I agree that currently we are unable to quantify utils in anything other than the very coarsest way (much like we knew it was darker at night and lighter in the day long before we could assign lux values), but I can't think of any compelling argument that should convince one that it is fundamentally impossible.
Maybe it is! But I don't know why one would feel certain in that position right now.
I don't know about Melvin's objection to utils, but here's my take on it.
We get a utility function for a rational decision maker from the VNM utility theorem. Already we have to assume some definition of "rational" that humans don't satisfy, but let's handwave that away.
We cannot say "the" utility function, because we can scale and shift a utility function arbitrarily - this does not affect comparisons between expected utilities. To assign some utility function to a rational decision maker, you have to make some arbitrary decisions.
Having done so, it is meaningless to compare the values of two people's utility functions. Utils aren't real: choosing a unit and a baseline for Alice's utility doesn't say anything about Bob's utility. So adding or averaging utilities is meaningless.
I can imagine some kludgy solutions to this. For example, just as we use the price of a basket of goods to measure inflation, we can use the utility of a "basket of outcomes" to measure utility. If you adjust Alice's and Bob's utility function so that they roughly agree on most of a set like {break an arm, fall in love, lose a bet, pet a kitten, ...} then maybe it makes sense try aggregating their utility functions (and only then can we argue about the right way to do so).
Of course, this procedure has the built-in assumption that Alice and Bob are of equal value, which is questionable if for example Alice is a human and Bob is a malaria-carrying mosquito.
It sounds like your objection is that different people get different amounts of utility from the same thing, which doesn't really seem to be a problem to me. It certainly makes _measuring_ utils more difficult, but I'm not sure how that disproves utils as a concept.
They just sort of seem self evident to me. At their root, they are the idea that humans prefer some things to other things. That's it. Now, you can make the separate argument that the existence of utils isn't enough to justify the larger framework of utilitarianism, or something like that, but I just don's see how one can reasonably disagree with the idea that sentient beings have preferences and that they are happier when they get their preferences and unhappier when they don't.
The larger concepts of utility functions and whatnot are our groping attempts to think about and use utils in more complex,systematized ways, and fine, you can certainly think that we don't have good enough definitions/measurements that these attempts make sense, but to disagree with the more fundamental idea that people get happiness/unhappiness out of certain things (which is all a util is at it's most root) seems weird.
No, the objection is that saying "different people get different amounts of utility from the same thing" requires there to be a common unit in which we're measuring two people's utility, and there is not inherently any such thing.
You can't claim "Alice gets 2 utils from petting a kitten, but Bob only gets 1 util, so Alice gets more utility out of petting kittens than Bob." Bob's utility function is only defined up to scaling, so I can equally well scale it by a factor of 100 from the choice you picked, and say "Alice gets 2 utils from petting a kitten, but Bob gets 100."
When people form a group to execute a task that is more effective than each of them individually working on the task, then you would say that their aggregate utility is greater than the sum total of their individual utilities.
Yeah. The repugnant conclusion is correct—the ethos that states “increase the total amount of happiness in the world” is not defined well enough to handle multiple populations with different sizes.
Feels ad-hocish. Just bite the bullet or abandon utility maximization. I think the repugnant conclusion is true but it doesn't necessarily mean people have an obligation to have a bunch of kids. I have a lower standard for what's morally obligatory.
"twenty people living in absolute splendor."
I think with the currently available technology, 20 is just too few to enable a life of absolute splendor for any of them.
And yet premodern virtue ethics converge to a functional society and passable mental health, while utilitarian ethics get reduced ad absurdum all the time and give the practitioner crippling anxiety.
I don't think human psychology is compatible with quantifying ethics, as the second- and n-th order negative effects outscale the benefits by orders of magnitude. See also: trolleys, violinists, murderous surgeons, etc etc.
Proposed solution "democratic multimodal utilitarianism": use a weighted average of the utility functions of different forms of utilitarianism, according to how much credence consequentialists put in each.
As long as the Hard Problem of Consciousness is unsolved, we can't declare one particular utility function the winner.
Only if you can show that there would be more net happiness/pleasure/utility/whatever with the smaller population. It's true that disasters harm more people when the population is larger, but there are also more people who live unharmed through any disaster when the population is larger (unless there's some truly global disaster - and even something like the pandemic left many people unharmed and perhaps even better off).
If you could show an example where, say, a city of 2 million was devastated by an earthquake or hurricane, say with a million and a half people injured, but can argue convincingly that the same city with a population of only 1 million would have had fewer than half a million injured, then that would be a start to motivate this.
It also depends on the disaster, doesn't it? If there is a hurricane or earthquake bad enough to wipe out a million people, then a city of 1 million will be totally destroyed, a city of 2 million will be impacted very harshly, a city of 6 million will be hit hard but recover. A city of 100 million mightn't even notice, but a city of 100 million would have a lot of problems already so that suffering was increased.
If we reduced the population everywhere because we wanted to reduce suffering and harm, then when hit by a really bad event, the suffering would actually increase.
Very much worth reading Holden Karnofsky's latest 'cold take' - https://www.cold-takes.com/debating-myself-on-whether-extra-lives-lived-are-as-good-as-deaths-prevented/#challenge-2 - and even funnier in the podcast version with Holden as 'Utilitarian Holden' and his missus as 'Non-utilitarian Holden' (which in my feminist ears automatically lends credibility to that side!)
Wow, Non-Utilitarian!Holden is pretty dumb. (This is a knock on Holden, not a knock on non-utilitarianism.) Holden either needs to get better at turing-testing competing views, or he needs an actual non-utilitarian to have these debates with.
I am not a utilitarian and I responded to Holden's original article where he builds the foundation of his ethical belief. I think his thinking on that is flawed and so later articles on the basis of this thinking are flawed. I messaged him and linked to my article [1]. I don't think he's responded. I didn't think NUH was dumb.
[1] https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/contra-karnofsky-on-future-proof
Perhaps dumb was the wrong word--a better one might be "hamstrung". A real non-utilitarian would object to naked comparisons of worlds A/B/C/D/E as normatively guiding in the first place. The core of non-consequentialism is that it can also matter *how* we *get to* those worlds(edit: and/or where we get there *from*). That principle is nowhere invoked by NUH, which makes him a uniquely bad Turing-test of non-consequentialist views. I'll break that down a bit.
Holden's conversation hinges on arguments about "choosing the best world". On a consequentialist view, this is a critically important question, since the morality of an action is defined (only) by whether it brings about a better world. Therefore, "better than" must be a total order on the class of possible worlds. That's the implicit assumption that makes Parfit's mere addition paradox and repugnant conclusion so troubling.
But this isn't an assumption non-consequentialists have to share. Instead, they can agree that there are weird features (like being a non-total partial order, or even a non-transitive relation) of the "better than" relation among possible worlds, which is why it can't be the only factor in a normative theory.
In less technical language: there are arguments like the mere addition paradox, which show that there's no intuitively consistent way to define one world being "better than" another in all cases. Non-consequentialists (other than NUH) use this as a part of their claim for why ethics can't be solely based on what creates a "better world", since the notion of "better world" doesn't make complete sense. When "better world" logic breaks down, like in those Parfittian paradoxes, normative ethics has to be based on other considerations (like, for example, respecting rights, theories of desert, or any of the other many non-consequentialist theories out there).
I think the sleight of hand which hamstrings NUH happens at the very beginning, when Holden says:
"I often give an example of how one could face a choice between A and B in real life, to make it easier to imagine - but it's not feasible to give this example in enough detail and with enough defense to make it seem realistic to all readers, without a big distraction from the topic at hand."
Again, the core of non-consequentialism is that the means of reaching a world-state can matter, not *just* the end state itself, so restricting the conversation to comparison of world-states without considering how they come about forecloses on NUH's most powerful arguments. I would even go so far as to say that it makes NUH fail to be non-utilitarian *at all*. So I stand by my assertion that he needs actual non-utilitarian interlocutors.
Disasters are generally only a small part of the suffering in the world, and I don't really see any reason to treat them differently from other forms of suffering. Of course, a disaster that wipes out humanity or significantly curtails its future potential is a different story. Non-time-sensitive total utilitarianism, which values the lives of future people equally to those of current people, considers preventing such disasters to be the highest priority.
This is part of a more-general problem. Should we leave more slack in the budget, in our infrastructure capacity, in our military capability? History shows we're incapable of leaving slack in the budget, even though we always end up needing it--unpredictable disasters continue to arrive predictably--and incapable of not leaving it in our military.
Free market economics guarantee that we'll scale production of everything, including people, up and down in response to the environment. But they also guarantee we'll never have enough capacity to deal with black swans.
A good research question is how robustness to disaster scales with population size, or with social complexity. The fact that we always plan for the average case may result in there being some maximum complexity a civilization can achieve, beyond which things break down faster than they can be built up. A civilization is not a sandpile; it becomes more complex as it grows. But OTOH, in evolution, more-complex organisms live longer.
Doesn't this depend on the proportions ? If we gain 100 new people, and 1 of them dies in a disaster while the remaining 99 ascend directly to some post-scarcity quasi-Heaven, then according to Utilitarianism we should hurry up and produce 100 more people...
If you're a negative utilitarian, yes; but if you're a negative utilitarian, you're supposed to be trying to wipe out all sentient life to prevent it from suffering, so most people aren't that.
For normal utilitarians, I think it's fair to expect that the average life is net positive, if for no other reason than revealed preferences based on everyone not killing themselves; so creating more lives is expected positive utility, at least at the current margin.
Slack is nice. It's nice to have green space in cities, toilets that flush, real meat on the table, etc.
The pain from lack of slack cuts in well before people start dying in large numbers. Take the recent epidemic. Red States didn't shut down as much because Red States don't have the same population density. The Red areas have back yards to safely go out in vs. relying on public parks. I shudder to think of what it was like to live in a cramped apartment in New York City when things shut down.
Sure but I don't think there's a strong or necessary relationship between world population, urban density, and societal slack. I'm pretty sure you could manipulate all of those factors independently in designing a society.
If you're a negative utilitarian (minimizing suffering) then yes. A positive utilitarian (maximizing pleasure/happiness), or a mixture of the two branches, may not be convinced.
I think you're overlooking a big assumption there, which is that more people = more good. The phrase the most good for the most people basically translates to "(units of good) * (number of people)." I would assume that at some point the amount of good per person added with each new person would start to decrease and eventually turn negative.
Of course defining "good" is a whole other thing...
That's why I said 'at the current margin'.
Or not :) There's a different model which involves network effects - each extra person ca do/feel/contribute/enjoy so much more when there's more people in the world.
At a first glance the trend checks out - lives used to be shorter and, at least by a few measures, a lot less fun. Then we got pieces of civilization which got life progressively less painful - less war, less death in disease and childbirth and so on; and also more fun, with printing press, radio, tv, tiktok; also with more options to contribute, like both genders and more social stratas in education and workforce.
Nancy is ok to worry about Moloch. If we all end up a Russia-style dictatorship for example where win-win relationships are less common, then yes, it could well be that less people equals better living. But overall we're fortunately not seeing this in the future.
Any tips for getting myself to write on my thesis? I keep pushing it off, it's ridiculous. I don't seem to be able to set myself to work the way I used to do.
Time blocking instead of todo lists, and start with smallish intervals. Time blocking = do absolutely nothing else, except what you've blocked the time for, or just looking at a wall.
i have found what Radu calls "time blocking" to be the best approach for writing type work I am really resisting . I bought a literal hourglass (fun to look at, don't need the internet, etc) (but for 20 minutes, because an hour is probably too long for this technique). Open word document, turn over hourglass. You cannot do anything else until the hourglass is out. Cannot leave chair, cannot browse internet. You can stare at the wall, stare at the screen, or actually work. Once the timer runs out, take a break, repeat. (usually somewhere around 5 minutes in to a block the feeling of resistance dissipates and it gets a lot easier to keep going).
I will definetely try that. Just for the aesthetics of the hourglass on my desk.
If I went that far, I’d probably want to add an astrolabe and some other old time artifacts to the décor. Not sure where this would all end. :)
I remember this old ST:TNG parody script that had Data pulling out a physical hourglass (since Windows 95 was popular at the time) whenever he had to do a complicated operation.
Have you tried different times of day? I can produce the most volume when I’m tired. I think the over analytical part of me that slows me down and takes me on tangents dials down a bit. Then I edit next morning.
100% agree, Pomodoro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) really helped me knock out pages of my dissertation
Also want to second the suggestion downthread of using beeminder, I set a goal of ~10 hours a week dissertating (Research, writing or editing) and that was another great motivator: https://bmndr.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/754b626a-59ae-4597-8285-5f307b6a55f4.png
To keep from cheating I printed out the papers I was referencing so I didn't have an excuse to waste time looking for new ones.
Doing most of my writing early in the morning, ~7am-9am, before anyone else showed up to lab, helped to
The problem with that (for me personally) is that I have no problem at all staring at the wall for twenty minutes. :(
Change of scenery maybe? I found it helpful to go and work out of a library for a few hours everyday. It also seemed to help me keep working later on in the day when I went home.
Is it because you keep compulsively doing something else? Get a program that can block websites and programs at certain times. I recommend Cold Turkey for desktop and AppBlock for Android.
Funny, I have this exact same combination. They've pretty amazing, but they can only do so much by themselves. Personally, I pin my hopes on adhd medication, though I can't get it legally in my country.
I’ve found tools like Beeminder and Complice to be really helpful in pushing me to address tasks that I don’t want to do. Beeminder is useful for committing yourself to a goal (e.g. say maybe you want to write X words of your thesis per week, though be sure to keep the goal small and achievable). Complice is good for keeping you focused on the broad themes of your goals and helping you reflect on what roadblocks might be preventing you from making progress on them.
What worked for me was to make it my very first task for the day, after eating breakfast. If I did literally anything else before writing, even useful tasks, I would get no writing done all day. If I did it first I could write for 30 minutes to an hour, and then usually also feel motivated for another block in the afternoon.
Set up a food reward for it.
I get special meat treats when I do hard brain stuff, because apparently I am +-85% of the way to being a dog.
The best motivator I know is to schedule a meeting with your advisor and promise to send them a draft of your next chapter before that meeting.
Other than that, I set a quota for how much time I had to put into the thesis each day. I'd make it 3 or 4 hours of writing per day, with reading/research counting for half as much as writing. (Trying to force myself to do too much in any one day would lead me to feel like it was impossible and not even try, so it worked better to keep the number smaller.) To make that work, I have to track when I am and am not working, so I have a Word document where I "clock in" and then "clock out" every time I stop to check my email or make a cup of tea or anything else that isn't work.
If I wasted the entire day, then I couldn't play video games that day, which was a bummer. That wasn't always enough to motivate me to meet the quota, but it worked a majority of the time. When I started getting tempted to break my own rule and play video games *anyways*, I signed up for Beeminder and set it to charge my credit card if I broke the rule. Ridiculous, but it worked.
Obviously it wouldn't have to be video games specifically, but the reward needs to be something that (a) you're always keen to do and (b) is immediately available the instant you meet your quota.
+1 having to produce a draft with a concrete deadline for a person whose opinion I respect
There’s a free coursera course called learning how to learn they has basic but practical tips on this, maybe check that out
Try writing to somebody else about it. Some tips about that: https://dianaberlin.com/posts/journaling-in-practice
I had a teacher have me write a paper with the screen turned off. You just type and type with no editing and maybe forgetting what you're even talking about and just get a bunch of words out. Then writing the actual paper becomes the relatively simpler task of editing.
Had that issue. My solution was to actually rent a place (with real money), keep all my thesis-related stuff there, make sure it has no internet access, and go and write there every weekday. Three months later I had the first draft.
Cal Newport's deep work is a pretty good primer on that. You need to separate deep work from "synchronized" work, and you can do this in both time and space.
I set a rule that I had to write at least a page every weekday. I often kept going and ended up writing several pages, but if not I was satisfied meeting my quota. I also wrote out of order starting with which ever section felt easiest to write at the time.
I just made it my job. Nine to five, Monday to Friday, in the office, sitting at my computer, working on my thesis. I didn't find it any more difficult than doing any other job.
My PhD thesis basically consisted of five or so papers I'd already written. I turned each paper into a chapter (with a few extra tables and figures), stuck an introduction and conclusion on the ends, and called it a thesis.
I think some people get psychologically stuck on the write-up because they think that their thesis should be some kind of Magnum Opus. I freed myself of that expectation and set out to write a perfectly acceptable thesis that would satisfy the requirements. Save your best work for your publishable papers, someone might actually read this.
(Note: all this applies to physics, your field may vary)
One thing that improved my experience was deciding on, eg, Monday, which things I was going to do on Tuesday. Then repeat every day. It sounds silly, but the simple separation between the moment when I decided which work to do and the moment I actually did it made both of them easier.
Another thing that helps me is setting very small, very trivial goals. For example, perhaps today I decide that one of my goals for tomorrow is to write one paragraph on Topic X. Then what usually ends up happening is that after I finish writing that paragraph, I'm into it and continue writing without even noticing.
Maybe find an IRL friend who will sit with you in the room where you're working, and who would occasionally stop you from going on twitter or reddit or whatever (though hopefully the temptation to do that will drop).
There's a new service "Focusmate" that pairs people up to co-work with webcams on, for accountability. I haven't tried it but it seems like it might help for the same reason.
Procrastinating on a thesis is a very lonely experience that you share with something like 150,000 other people.
There's a whole culture where it's embarrassing to admit to your peers or advisor that you're having issues with procrastination or time management or inspiration. You're allowed to say you need help running some regression but you can't admit you are struggling with the meta-work stuff that is actually epidemic among almost everyone you know. You're in a very weird community.
Maybe you're getting trapped by re-editing every para over and over. For that, some people say it is useful to clearly separate "drafting" and "editing" times. Just get things on the page, no matter how ugly, during the drafting times.
Maybe your struggle is getting started. Finding a separate place dedicated only for drafting can be useful. I've had mixed success though, designating a library as my "writing place" and finding myself reading chapters on minor tangential points instead of making progress on the main points.
I wonder if you could break some academic taboos and hire out the boring parts.
If it's easy to talk through your ideas and hard to write, hire a stenographer to listen to you explain your thesis, edit later.
"Pair drafting" can be like speed-running drafting. It keeps you focused to have someone really staring at what you're doing, it makes you explain ideas clearly enough for a reader. The other member of the pair can be a non-expert and basically just a sounding board that corrects occasional typos and it still works. You might be able to hire a "writing coach" for a few hours a week to help in this way.
Advisors are supposed to be sounding boards, but they're not neutral, so it can be intimidating to tell them the full current situation. Find another zero-judgment person to talk to or check in once a week. Non-advisor faculty or a peer are ok, but that's not zero-judgment. Hiring a therapist could work, and probably should be mandatory for grad students.
Am I missing something, or is it not possible to compress/roll up comment threads in the Substack app?
I have tried pressing in all the intuitive places and nothing happens, but maybe I’m missing something really obvious.
Hehe. Been there. It's the thin line on the left of the comment/thread. Very unintuitive, yes.
I tried this but it doesn’t work for me. Maybe I need to download the latest version of the app?
Ah, the app. Ups. Didn't know there's an app :\
You have just made my life so much better! Thank you!
The line should subtly change appearance when hovered over to show it's clickable.
Pretty basic UI design failure.
For me it changes from light gray to slightly darker gray when hovered, although I'd still never have found it without reading the above. I miss SSC's comment system.
Oh, you're right, it does change.
I agree it's too little, but at least they tried, and I'm sure some people have discovered it this way.
If I remember, I discovered it by thinking "there just *has* to be a way", and clicking the line was the only possible way the UI could offer that function.
Awesome! Thanks.
Kevin said it best: You have just made my life so much better! Thank you! !!!
Yea they reeeally need to add this to the app
Has Scott ever written about the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of encounter groups for affecting behavior? I know types of talk therapy aren't what he usually addresses. But I think there was a moment in the 1970s where some people in psychology thought piling on/yelling at people was actually helpful in some way, and then that idea jumped disciplines (and has lived on, both online and IRL). A really coherent writeup of this could be useful in multiple ways.
I definitely second this. My impression, which I'm realizing right now is based on basically nothing, is that public shaming seems to be one of the out and out most effective behavior modification methods there is, especially when the goal is modify the behavior *fast. There's a reason why corporal punishment is a thing in militaries. I think for certain communities in certain situations, public shaming can be a way to modify behavior of a member without reducing their capacity.
There's something to it. I think there's a distinction to be made between situations that are "initiations" in some way, and those that are not. People get jumped into gangs, for example (and if they are able to leave voluntarily, they may get jumped out) so that group violence toward the individual becomes a gate. I think corporal punishment was a thing in the US military at some time in the past, but I'm not sure it is now, one distinction being corporal punishment versus intense exercise plus psychological punishment. And I think the military punishment is formally one person punishing one person, or one person punishing the whole unit, something like that. Situations of multiple people piling on one person may happen, but not formally. Additionally, I think having someone who willingly and quickly takes orders is the goal on the other side of the military initiation, and too much shame is actually counterproductive to that.
So once someone is on the "in" side of that gate, potentially smaller applications of shaming might serve to remind them of their membership and the behavior expectations. Sortof shame-plus-belonging. Or maybe the attitude is "shame is only necessary for those jerks who are not as cool as we are now; shame is what we do to outsiders."
Potentially the shame has to be applied regularly or the membership subsides, or lapses, or people quit, or decide it's weird. Or shame is applied outward instead.
Absent a context that the person actually wants/chooses/intends to be part of, I'm not sure the pile-ons work, or when the context ends, the behavior modification may end. Being piled on by an "enemy" is some form of assault and does not automatically cause behavior modification. Graeber & Wengrow mention "schismogenesis" - the situation of groups of people defining themselves in opposition to each other. Pile-ons might just make that go faster in some contexts.
For a group that people are already part of and are choosing to remain in, teasing and mocking may be more effective than pile-ons for maintaining core behaviors.
Pile-ons are a way of negotiating territory among people who have low to medium loyalty to each other (I think?) It is a way of negotiating dominance. Not actual individual change/growth.
From what I recall reading, the encounter groups tended to cause some amount of change in the individual but it didn't last. And some people did feel assaulted by it.
Rats avoid electric shocks.
It seems to be worth thinking about, because it *seems* logical (sortof) that shaming would work, but there seem to be a lot of social-verbal examples where it doesn't work at all.
Exciting to see meetups in far-flung places that don't have existing communities! e.g. Amman, Bangkok, Ibadan, Mexico City, Playa del Carmen, and Singapore :)
Hey Mingyuan, fyi we had a fab meet-up today in a not so far-flung existing village near Oxford - 14 people, 10 hours of workshops, food, chat and singalong 'live from OxRat'!
10 hours? Workshops? Er,ok. I guess. 🤷
i am going to try again to organize one in a small town , no one showed up last year, is there a forum for the meetups in particular?
What's the right way to view the Chernobyl disaster?
1) The RBMK reactor was not flawed. It had weaknesses, but those weaknesses were known, and didn't cause problems so long as the humans operating the reactor remembered their training.
2) The RBMK reactor WAS flawed. Its weaknesses were so serious that it was unacceptably dangerous to expect human technicians to avoid inflaming them for the expected lifetime of such a reactor. The potential for disaster should have been recognized at the beginning, and the RBMK reactor design changed to add an extra margin of safety.
2
2. We design cars so people can survive crashes, we design planes to minimize the ability of pilot error to cause catastrophic issues, we have food safety regulations so that properly heating food isn't the only thing between you and food poisoning.
2
“ When asked what they learned from something that went wrong, junior devs will tell you about a plan to avoid making that mistake again. Senior devs will recognize the inevitability of human failure and explain how they built that assumption into their future planning.” -Tony Cox, one of my former colleagues
2 is generally a good view (any system where you say "if only people would just..." needs to contend with people who won't just), but it's very definitely true for Chernobyl. Not only was the reactor flawed, but the Soviets were aware of the flaws for years, because they'd had similar near-misses in other reactors with the same design. The design wasn't changed, and while they did apparently make some regulatory changes, it was downplayed and the technicians didn't really get that the new rule was a "don't do this or the reactor will explode" sort of problem.
1.5).
Safety factors that rely on human action to that extent are not very safe; but it took a truly cataclysmic level of dumb shit to get the reactor to melt down.
Option 3) It was all the CIA's fault! Or at least, that was what the Russians were going to say in their own mini-series. Not sure if they ever got around to making it come to think.
Neither. They're overly simplistic notion of failure. Consider the following extensions of the logic.
- Automobiles are not flawed; they have known weaknesses that require human operators to remember their training, which they're legally obligated to prove they've gotten in order to operate a vehicle. After all, most drivers get in zero crashes their whole life!
- Automobiles are flawed; it is unacceptably dangerous to expect human technicians to operate them safely for their whole lifetime, and we need to change the designs to add an extra margin of safety. Why, there are whole industries built around the assumption that cars get into crashes!
The overwhelming majority of major disasters are systemic, that is, you can't pick apart any one cause and say "this alone could have prevented it". While Chornobyl was the worst nuclear accident in history, it wasn't the first or the last - and the others didn't use an RBMK reactor. As a trend, Russian design - particularly in the Soviet era - has lagged on human-factors consideration. You see in every aspect of their design. But you could change the reactor technology, or the user interface, or the procedures, and potentially have avoided a meltdown. Many of the acute deaths could have been prevented with better equipment and training and more open communication, none of which the Soviets were known for.
The right way to think about it is in these two questions: "What total risk are we willing to accept?" and "How does each part contribute to the actual risk?". Because if you want to lower the risk of death for the equivalent amount of power, you'd build *more* nuclear, or at least less coal and oil and hydro and rooftop solar. Even if all we had was RBMK reactors!
Or, consider Fukushima. Even though Fukushima had an obvious external cause, it took several major failures for the tsunami to turn it into a nuclear disaster, including the insufficient sea wall, the insufficient power hardening, and the co-located backup generator. But there were no immediate deaths from radiation exposure, 1600 deaths from the chaotic evacuation, and the future deaths are projected to be anywhere from a few hundred to 1800 due to radiation exposure, of which the Japanese government has recognized 1 so far. Half to an overwhelming majority of even all the *projected* deaths were not directly caused by any design fault in the nuclear plant at all!
If you looked to blame any specific cause, you would not be prepared for the next event. Fukushima is not Chornobyl is not Three Mile Island is not Chalk River. Instead, you need to think systematically about how to achieve your goal, in this case safe operation. Blame is important if someone really messes up; you need to get that person out, but any system where lots of people can die if one person messes up is inherently flawed. More often, blame today prevents safer operations tomorrow.
Just a minor nitpick - is it actually true that most drivers get in zero crashes their whole life? I would not be surprised if most drivers get in zero crashes where any human is injured, but I think minor crashes are really common.
That line rang false to me too. High speed crashes are rare but scrapes when parking are very much not.
@Thor Odinson I wouldn't consider bumper parking to be a safety issue.
I was going to say just that. I think most of the people who regularly drive cars and whom I know well enough that I'd know it if they once had a minor car crash have had at least one.
Yeah, of four drivers I know/knew well all four have been in a car accident of some description, although only one was injured and that a long time ago in a way modern safety systems would prevent.
It may not be true generally that the overwhelming majority of people don't get in any accidents. It's true of people I know but that could be a flawed sample. In a brief search I couldn't find any credible claims either way, and the only claim I did find was a dead link (but indicated a large number of people get in crashes).
Re: Fukushima
...plus a zillion deaths indirectly caused by Japan, Germany, etc. freaking out and deciding to shut down nuclear power plants and having to produce (or save) energy by other means
2. In particular, the flaws of the RBMK reactor are inherent in its having been designed to serve as both a power plant and a plutonium breeder reactor for nuclear weapons production. AFIK Chernobyl was never used in the latter capacity, but the requirement that it hypothetically could be meant using a flammable graphite moderator rather than water, a positive void coefficient(*) in normal operation, and a "containment" structure with a roof that pops off if you give it a good shove. As already noted, "but our human operators will be so careful they'll never let it go out of control" is an accident waiting to happen.
Nuclear power plants that aren't also meant to be atom bomb factories can be made about as safe as any other kind of power plant, and usually are.
Plutonium breeder reactors for nuclear weapons are intrinsically more dangerous than power plants, but if you're *only* trying to make plutonium you can focus more effectively on mitigating those flaws and you won't be tempted to build the reactor quite so close to a city.
* Means, if the coolant starts to boil away, the reaction rate intrinsically increases and more heat is produced. You really want that to go another way.
Bill Gates is trying to make breeder reactors great again.
And instead of graphite, his traveling wave reactor uses liquid sodium. Talk about Blue Screen of Death potential...
I mean, sodium is arguably safer than typical current water reactor designs for a few reasons (and water is obviously safer than ye uld graphite designs.)
1) Radioactive sodium has a half life of 15 hours (and decays to stable magnesium.) If there is a spill, it won't stay hot for nearly as long as the products from a water-based cooling system (water vapor, hydrogen and oxygen).
~~2) Sodium will rapidly (hours or days) solidify if there's a containment leak. It's solid below the boiling point of water. That makes clean up a heck of a lot easier than the gaseous and liquid products from a water cooling system.~~ On second thought, the sodium will catch fire in this scenario and probably stay liquid for a long time.
3) Water containment has to be under very high pressure to keep it liquid at the high temperatures that reactors run at. If there is a containment breach, it will be explosive and spread irradiated pieces of the containment shield and droplets of irradiated cooling liquid over a wide area. (It will also be incredibly deadly to the thousand or so workers at the nuclear plant; more so than a breach of liquid sodium which will only be deadly for the minority of workers near containment.) Liquid sodium, OTOH, operates at atmospheric pressure. A containment failure won't spread sodium farther that the liquid flows before cooling.
4) Because sodium reactors run at a much higher temperature than water reactors with low required flow rates, most current designs can run their cooling in shutdown without any incoming power. (One of the critical failures in Fukushima was that the plant lost external electric power and all its backup generators to the tsunami, leaving it without power to run the cooling needed during shutdown. Its sister plant also lost power and generators, and was saved by plant personnel manually running a 10 mile long power cable through the disaster zone to a functioning substation over the first 24 hours post-tsunami.)
While sodium is obviously more toxic and reactive than water, it seems likely that a liquid sodium reactor will be less dangerous in the event of failure than a water one.
> While sodium is obviously more toxic and reactive than water, it seems likely that a liquid sodium reactor will be less dangerous in the event of failure than a water one.
I disagree. We don't have nearly enough information to come to that conclusion. At-best, we can agree what there are different dangers involved. Given the low rate of problems with traditional water-cooled reactors (and available improvements reducing failure rates by several orders of magnitude) and the lack of engineering data for sodium-cooled reactors, it is quite possible that it's the other way around in-practice.
There have been 20ish functional sodium nuclear reactors. We're far from zero data on them. Yes, we have more data on water ones. But that shouldn't keep us from comparing risk levels.
I think the main reason to ponder Na instead of H2O is to avoid the possibility of H2 explosions, which plague reactors cooled (or moderated) by water when they reach high temperatures. The Zr in the fuel cladding, which is otherwise (from the point of view of its nuclear reactivity) highly desirable in that role, unfortunately reacts with steam at very high temperatures to produce H2. This was exactly the problem at Fukushima, and at least the second explosion at Chernobyl is thought to have been an H2 explosion.
Arguably H2 explosions are a significantly greater risk than a meltdown per se, since historically at least it's those that have breached containment and sent radioactive debris into the environment.
Yeah, though we certainly have some solutions for that. There are continually active glowplugs in containment at the power plant I work at to detonate any stray hydrogen in the air before it can build up to a dangerous amount, and H2 recombiners in the hot side of the cooling system to recombine the H2 into the water.
This is yet another source of electricity-dependence in our safety systems though. And sure, we have multiple redundant backup diesel generators on site. But there's an absolute limit to how much functional redundancy you can get from on-site backups (as Fukushima denonstrated so clearly.)
A negative SCRAM reaction as well: emergency shutdown temporarily *raised* reactivity instead of dropping it.
3. Counting the fatalities in our entire history with 3 nuclear power plant disasters worldwide (an estimated 4000, which are essentially all from Chernobyl), we could have 3 nuclear plant disasters worldwide every 2 days before nuclear power would pass coal-burning electricity (800,000 deaths/year) as a cause of death. (Stats thanks to lazy Googling without careful fact-checking.)
I think its unreasonable to assume that 3 disasters every two days would necessarily only kill 4000 people. Not much would had to have gone wrong for Chernobyl to have killed many more, directly but especially indirectly. Not to mention the economic effects of vast swathes of the world becoming uninhabitable.
"Uninhabitable" is a function of insane levels of risk aversion wrt radiation - If we used the same kind of standards for air pollution that we used for radiation, anywhere near a coal power station would be "uninhabitable", and *all* of China's cities would be ridiculously past the line.
Okay, I'll bite. Per Wikipedia, 8.5e16 Bq of Cs-137 were released in the Chernobyl explosion. Assuming one of those every two days, and given that Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years, one would eventually reach an equilibrium amount of the order of 4.6e20 Bq, give or take ln 2.
Distributed evenly over the surface of the earth, this comes out to 1 MBq/m^2. By contrast, the 510 tons of Co-60 mentioned in the Wikipedia article of the cobalt bomb are 44MBq/m^2. Depending on the migration of the Cesium into homes and through the food chain, this may or may not be enough to kill every human on earth. From my gut feeling, it should be more than 1M death/year.
Um, you have to figure out the number of mSv, the unit of biological dose. This is not a simple matter and I don't know how to do it.
Also, it's impossible to figure out the biological dose just from the number 44MBq/m^2 alone; the radiation source is important because
(1) it's important how the specific radioactive substance interacts with living tissue; I think the reason people focus on caesium so much is because it tends to get lodged in the lungs if inhaled, and because its half-life is irritatingly medium-term.
(2) Becquerel is an inhomogenous unit that tells you little about the radiation hazard. One becquerel is defined as one nucleus decaying per second. But a single decay event can have low energy or very high energy (higher energy is worse.)
1000 mSv (1 Sv) over a short time period tends to cause radiation poisoning, and 5000 mSv is fatal half the time. But people aren't allowed to move back to Fukushuima unless radiation drops below 20 mSv per year. Radiation greater than 20 mSv per year should be enough to cause a few cancer deaths eventually in a large population, but I haven't been able to find any estimate of the number of deaths that would have occurred if everyone had been allowed to return to their homes after a few weeks. And I did look for it! No one is reporting on this and I couldn't find a single scientific paper about it, aside from this one that doesn't quite answer the question: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017300782 ... it's like no one actually cares.
As I recall, the worst-contaminated places had about 50 mSv/year initially. (For comparison, I had a radioactive test recently to check the blood flow in my heart, and I learned online that this test delivers a typical dose of 20 mSv. The test was negative so I still don't know what's wrong with my heart.)
Hmm, tricky. Let's see, Cs-137 emits gammas at 661 keV, so if we have 1 MBq of the stuff we are getting about 105nW of energy in gammas, the dangerous stuff. Let's assume it's all absorbed by a 70kg man standing in that m^2, that gives us about 1.5 nGy/s, which we can pretty much set equal to 1.5 nSv/s for gamma rays. That gives us an annual total dose of 48 mSv. The Department of Energy tells me the typical exposure of Americans to background natural radiation is about 6.2 mSv per year, so this Cs-137 blanket is multiplying that by a factor of 7. That's probably noticeable, epidemiologically, but it seems surprisingly tame. The DoE also tells me that the 48 mSv is about what a mammogram earns you, so basically it sounds like we're talking about giving everyone an extra mammogram or two per year of radiation. That seems detectable with good statistics and a large population, but...well.... quite a bit short of an extra 1 million extra deaths per year, let alone wiping out everybody.
Unless I made some honking enormous mistake there, it would actually seem that the OPs argument is not bad at all -- that even a ridiculous amount of Chernobyls[1] wouldn't do very much to increase the radiation exposure of the world. I guess it's a pretty big planet.
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[1] Also, 8.5e+16 Bq of Cs-137 is about 26 kg, and the production and loss of 13 kg of Cs-137 per day probably requires a stupendous number of nuclear reactors, and of course a pretty impressive level of carelessness operating them.
Oh did you did you see my bit about that? https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/jtm6hm/how_bad_is_meltdown_world/
Estimating anything from an n=3 sample size is questionable, but trying to estimate the mean of a distribution with a low median and mode but a fat right tail from a small sample size is particularly dubious, I'm afraid.
If one nuclear disaster in ten kills a billion people but most of the rest are mostly harmless, that would be entirely compatible with the evidence you cite, and give a much higher death toll than coal.
Obviously, those are intentionally absurd numbers, but I don't know what realistic ones are; I'm just making the point that that calculation isn't at all reliable.
That calculation isn't reliable, but (a) it's the best we've got, and (b) there is no plausible way a nuclear disaster could kill a billion people, or a million.
What's at stake is whether nuclear energy is a good substitute for coal. If it kills less people, AND reduces CO2 production, it's a good substitute. These numbers give 4 orders of magnitude between deaths from nuclear power so far, and deaths from coal in that same time. There's no way you can spin a tale in which it would be reasonable to assume the real mean is 4 orders of magnitude larger than indicated by the data.
'The Chernobyl accident was a seminal influence in the Deep Green movement from 2030 onward, in which nuclear reactors, and subsequently other industrial centres, were detonated to create contaminated grounds where humans were unwilling to live, but nature could persist.'
The reactor was extremely flawed, its flaws were known by the relevant leaders and not known by the operators of them, and its flaws were tolerated because the design was one created to be able to breed plutonium for weapons. I've seen no evidence that Chernobyl was actually ever used to make bomb fuel, but the design existed for and was used based on this consideration. If all that mattered to the people in power was having the safest reactors possible (within certain economic constraints), RBMK would not have been used even if we assume only the knowledge available at the time and not 30+ years of hindsight.
I had also heard that, like at every Soviet construction site, things like rebar would disappear into the grey economy leaving slightly less than the bare essentials for getting the building completed. I read something in grad school (MA in Soviet history) that the general dysfunction of the construction and operation of Chernobyl was what really led Gorbachev to lose faith in the Soviet system.
I think you are right, but also bear in mind the Afghan War was going terribly, with ~14,000 dead, and some have argued the Reykjavik Summit (only 6 months after Chernobyl) had an outsized effect on Gorbachev. It was not generally known at the time, but the highest-ranking KGB officer in London had been for some years a double agent for MI6, and although the KGB had him recalled in 1985 he was snuck out of the country later that year and continued working for the Brits openly.
Reagan of course had a close relationship with Margaret Thatcher, so for years he had unparalleled insight into Soviet leadership (as well as the opportunity to shape what information *they* received about *him*), and when he finally met Gorbachev at Reykjavik it's said it was kind of like playing poker while being able to see your opponent's hand with X-ray glasses.
I’d forgotten about that! I mostly studied material culture, specifically computing in the 1960s, but Gorbachev always struck me as someone who knew he’d been outclassed. Which makes sense, since I think, since Andropov also knew what he was up against.
At one point in the early 80s the KGB found an absolutely tiny CIA surveillance microphone somewhere, and Andropov asked if they had anything similar. The KGB said yes, and showed him a prototype of what they were working on. It was the size of a brick. So Andropov knew that even without the double agents they were losing the intelligence game alongside the technology game, besides everything else.
Mostly (1). I can think of only one serious contributing mistake in the construction of the reactor, which is the lack of the specified fire-resistant roof which resulted in about 1/3 of the eventual deaths from acute radiation sickness among those who had to put the fire out, which would not have started in the first place if the design had been followed.
One could argue also that the generator test that caused the accident should have been completed before the reactor was certified and begun regular operation, as it was supposed to be, which would have made the operators much less reluctant to compromise the safety protocols they did during the test. In both cases we can see yet more evidence of the general Soviet willingness to cut safety corners when political status is at stake.
Otherwise, the behavior of the RBMK was reasonably well-known to its designers, e.g. the instability at low power levels and the difficulty with the positive void coefficient were already well known to Soviet designers in the early 70s, when the first reactors of this design had been operating for a while. A number of changes had been made to the operating protocols as a result, and published to the Chernobyl site, and it's very likely the accident at Chernonyl would not have happened had the parameters for the reactor's operation (and even the conditions specified for the test) been strictly followed by its operators.
Of course, operators in the Soviet era were already known to ignore safety protocols when following them would result in some unfortunate outcome (like aborting a test, or not being able to bring electricity generation back on line in time) that made them look bad to superiors and comissars -- and so we are back again to that inherent flaw in any collectivist system, the pressure on the individual to conform to social expectations even when he knows it may lead to disaster.
Certainly the RBMK is less inherently safe than the common PWR design used in the West in the 60s through 80s. But of course the PWR design is less inherently safe than some other designs, and the RBMK design is more inherently safe than some other truly lunatic designs. Whether you say the design is acceptably or unacceptably inherently safe is a social decision, just as is the question of whether an automobile without airbags or ABS is/is not sufficiently inherently safe. So there are no absolute answers, it depends on your priorities and economics, and what the current state of the art is.
I suppose one could argue that the RBMK design was clearly insufficiently foolproof to be operated by a political system that tended by its nature to maximize the number of fools. Whether you attribute that flaw to the reactor design, or the design of the political system, is perhaps a matter of taste.
To your conclusion, it may be better to weigh blame between 1) the individual operators and 2) the nuclear energy system as a whole, of which the physical infrastructure is one of many parts including staff, training, scheduling etc.
With that in mind the system as a whole shows a flaw, rather than a few operators being grossly out of line with the expected output of the system.
Hmm, no, I think if I have to assign secondary blame, I assign it to the political system, mostly because it was responsible for a number of other ecological disasters, such as the Aral Sea, City 40, Olenya Bay, and so on. Had large scale suicidal Soviet upfuckery been *limited* to Chernobyl I might agree their nuclear energy regime was uniquely broken, but it's not.
One can argue about the advisability of positive void coefficient designs, but I would call tipping the control rods with graphite -- so they accelerate the reaction first -- clearly beyond the pale.
From my understanding, the real problem was the burning graphite. The burning bitumen roof may have delayed efforts to extinguish the fire in the reactor hall, but probably did not contribute much to the spread of isotopes from the core.
Independently of political systems, shit happens. Technical designs must assume that human operators will fail, and consider the consequences of failure. In my opinion, the RBMK is not suitable to be operated by humans near any large population centers. Running it on a moon base with ten people around would be ok.
The fire on in the reactor core was spectacular, but it's unclear it ever did much harm. Most of the nasty isotopes were blown into the air with the two initial explosions, it's not clear how much more the fire added. You have to dig into the weeds of thyroid cancer rates over the next 20 years and see if you can extract signal from the noise. On the other hand, as I said, the necessity of immediately putting the roof fire out needlessly directly exposed 10 people to lethal levels of radiation from the shards of the core on the roof.
It's not possible to design technical systems that will be safe when human operators fail. That would require a system that does not need *any* human supervision at all. When we get strong AI, then we can turn over all decisions and actions to it and...I dunno, all go sit on the beach or something. But until that happy day, my car requires me to *not* run into pedestrians in the crosswalk, and United requires pilots that remember to put the landing gear down before they try to land the plane, and chemical plants require people with PhDs in Chem E to keep the pressure in the giant vat of phosgene well below the bursting limit.
> In my opinion, the RBMK is not suitable to be operated by humans near any large population centers.
An uncontroversial opinion, in 2022. I don't think any Russian nuclear engineers would disagree. Now, if you want to hop back in the time machine to 1973 Moscow, and then it turns out, without the benefit of hindsight or knowledge of 60 years of technology improvement, you have the very same opinion -- that would be actually worth noting.
2 is a good attitude with respect to incompetence, but not with respect to malice. There's no way we could effectively e.g. expunge all info about how to make fertilizer bombs from the internet, let alone prevent *all* other ways for a sufficiently motivated person to wreck havoc. https://xkcd.com/1958/
In the specific case of Chernobyl, it was a level of recklessness which would be very close to the border between incompetence and malice, though still technically the former.
Mostly 2, but I see RBMK as a tradeoff between cost, versatility and safety. RBMK was at the far end of the cost spectrum (or so I assume from its design, I haven't looked up its price): they didn't bother building a containment dome, and they used the cheapest combination of materials inside the reactor: natural uranium + ordinary light water + graphite, a combination that produces the famously dangerous positive void coefficient. Plus they used a sub-par welded inner pressure vessel, unlike western reactors that have a much more costly single-piece pressure vessel. RBMK was also versatile, enabling early extraction of used fuel in order to yield weapons-grade plutonium.
Safety lost out, of course. I bet a more careful design could have been made safer while still using natural uranium, water and graphite, but that type of reactor just doesn't fly outside the USSR, so it's a moot point I haven't heard anyone try to figure out. Just off the top of my head, maybe the designers could have added some kind of emergency shutdown rod cleverly prepared in such a way that the overpressure caused by boiling water would push it into the reactor chamber, or cause it to fall from the top. Repeat for several such rods.
>a combination that produces the famously dangerous negative void coefficient
Positive, not negative.
Ack, yes! Whatever was I thinking. Positive void coefficient of reactivity => steam bubbles increase nuclear reaction
People taking NMN, does anyone else observe adverse effects? While the boost in energy and brainpower is almost instantaneous (tens of seconds for sublingual application), I think I actually noticed visibly accelerated aging on it - receding hairline, wrinkles, first grey hairs within weeks of starting it. It is of course entirely possible I'm simply looking harder, but another person, in their early 30, whom I in my initial enthusiasm gave NMN off-handedly commented "Gah, I look old" shortly thereafter.
Possible explanations:
1) I'm expecting it to turn me 20 and look at myself harder, therefore noticing things I otherwise wouldn't.
2) Bad batch, contaminated with...what?
3) Naturally high NAD+ levels (men in my family age SPECTACULARLY slow) so NMN is overkill that leads to paradoxical reactions, or another idiosyncratic / genetic factor
4) It actually is harmful
Since NMN turned up as the most adhered to nootropic in the last survey here (I think?), there should be copious anecdata, leaking into actual data, and I appreciate any and all comments. Thank you.
That sounds very odd, especially reading up about it online where it's supposed to be anti-aging.
Maybe stop taking supplements and start ingesting natural sources of it, and see what happens?
"NMN is found in fruits and vegetables such as edamame, broccoli, cabbage, cucumber and avocado".
I love my greens, but you'd probably need to chomp through quite a few kilos per day to get the same dose as a few mg of powder
About the new gray hairs: Hair grows about half an inch per month. Even if the NMN turned a bunch of hairs gray the very first time you used it, the colorless part of each newly gray hair would only be a fraction of an inch long after a few weeks of using the stuff.
My anecdata after 1 year sublingual powder are: 1) no observed adverse effects; 2) I'm generally energised, but was before too; 3) I'm happy to accept it might have little effect on cellular metabolism, but may have placebo effect and tingles like sherbet!
What are your most helpful tips for chronic fatigue?
Sleep, exercise, sunshine, and take a really, really hard look at the things that are stressing you out in your life that you lampshade by acknowledging they're they're stressful, and then honestly examining the extent to which they are driving you up the wall. That last bit tends to be quite helpful.
I'll comfortably say that it's frustrating that my wife is so busy. It's another thing entirely to acknowledge that there's a baser part of me is absolutely infuriated by it, and wants to throw a complete temper tantrum about it. Or the fact that my house is taking forever to close on. Politely, it's a bit stressful. An honest examination of the baser parts of me reveals a part that wants to throttle the smug builder who isn't even polite about it. Normally if a major stress point is going unacknowledged by me it'll show up as wrist/hand pain while typing, but it can show up as chronic fatigue, back pain, etc. for others.
You could have a separate medical condition, but I first learned about this one Less Wrong and it has been extremely helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Mindbody-Prescription-Healing-Body-Pain/dp/0446675156/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1630864993&refinements=p_27%3AJohn+E.+Sarno+MD&s=books&sr=1-1&text=John+E.+Sarno+MD
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I will look into that book. I am a law student, so lots of stress…
One fun solution would be that you literally have trouble making ATP at rest, so cardio would make you better at that and less fatigued
On that note, maybe creatine supplementation? There's evidence it helps load ATP within the brain as well.
Aerobic exercise, going to bed at a regular time, sleeping until you feel able to get up, avoiding sugar, splitting food up into at least 5 meals a day, doing interesting things.
-Regular sleep/wake cycle with no naps (unless you literally can't stay awake of course), spending enough time in bed to consistently get 8 hours sleep (you may not be able to get a full 8 hours consistently or initially but you have to give yourself the chance to)
-Maximum of one caffeinated drink per day taken around the time you have breakfast
- Cut out or at the very least significantly cut back alcohol consumption (if you drink), especially in the hours leading up to bedtime
- Get plenty of sunlight, especially early in the day, and avoid bright light before bed including from screens. Consider trying a vitamin D supplement in winter.
- Daily exercise starting even with a brisk walk once a day and then perhaps building up to multiple walks, cycling or resistance training - whatever you find the most enjoyable and are able to stick to and not have to spend half an hour convincing yourself to do each day. I downloaded audible and listen to books when I go walking each day so it becomes an enjoyable book listening activity rather than exercising
- Try and eat healthier, more vegetables and much less sugar is a goal that is hard to go wrong with. You don't need to go full green smoothie with 17 different micronutrient supplements, just cut out the junk and add in the big obvious healthy stuff like leafy greens. Doing some basic meal prep on Sunday night (if you work Mon - Fri) can make it so much easier to stick to healthy eating during the week when you're tired after work, for example. Just cutting up some onion, garlic, broccoli and bell pepper and bagging it up and cooking a big batch of brown rice can be a game changer because you can just stir fry it when you get home with some soy sauce or oyster sauce or something and you've got a tasty nutritious stir fry in 10 minutes tops.
- Identify any sources of stress in your life, eliminate them if possible or at least recognise that stressing about them is not helpful and instead try focusing on things that are within your control. If possible, try seeing a psychologist. Even if you don't feel like you have any mental health issues, there may things you're so used to stressing about or have negative cognitive behaviours around that you don't even recognize that you're doing it any more.
-Delete any social media that isn't strictly used for directly communicating with your friends and family
- Consider taking up meditation. Sam Harris' app is quite good and you can get it for free for a year if money is an issue: https://wakingup.com/
This is just a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach - some of it may be not related to your specific problem. Though everything I've listed is an example of a very healthy behavior so there's no risk in trying them out
When you're chronically fatigued, all of this can seem overwhelming and that you simply don't have the energy for it. But if you can just work up enough energy and willpower to get started with regular exercise, for example, most people find that this actually gives them energy rather than consuming what precious little of it you have.
Thank you for taking the time to write this, I really appreciate it!
My first piece of advice would be to check how well you're breathing, particularly while you're asleep. Sleep apnea causes a truly staggering amount of fatigue. There are quite a few possible causes, but many of them are shockingly easy to treat - eg. many people have dust allergies, and would benefit hugely from vacuuming their bedroom far more thoroughly. Food intolerances can also cause sinus inflammation or excess mucus.
Are you talking generic chronic tiredness, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Exercise is good advice for the former but frequently actively harmful for the later. If unsure, focus on weight training rather than cardio - it's cardio that causes damage in CFS patients, while weight training brings you the desired benefits just as well if not better than cardio anyway.
Sunshine and fresh air are going to be generically helpful, but probably minor effects on physical energy. Great for mood issues, though, and mild depressions can feel like fatigue.
Get a blood test to check your vitamin and mineral levels, plenty of deficiencies (and a few excesses) can cause fatigue. A huge fraction of menstruating women are anaemic, for example, and vitamin B deficiencies are not uncommon either, with ~10% odds of a genetic mutation that hinders the body's ability to metabolise B12.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. It’s interesting you mentioned breathing. As a child, I was told I had nonallergic rhinitis (but, the doctor seemed to be a quack). I may want to look into that a bit more.
Previously, I would take a B-12 methylcobalamin vitamin, but I haven’t in a while. Going to start retaking that.
Eliminate caffeine, social media, passive video consumption, and alcohol.
Ironclad sleep schedule.
Vigorous exercise at least every other day.
Unprotected exposure to sunshine every day possible.
Anecdata:
A lot of my chronic fatigue-ish symptoms were psychosomatic. I found the best cure is progressively getting used to scheduling more and more of your time on useful and rewarding activities. On days off when I'm bored and have nothing to do I get basically instantly depressed, including somatic symptoms (postural hypotension up to seeking medical advice from several doctors, went away by its own after the lifestyle problems got fixed). The human body is a weird machine.
Also, sleep helps. Dawn simulator alarm clocks are an amazing lifehack in the winter, even if it seems your circadian rhythm is alright, they make it alright-er.
I don't know whether this will help, but apparently there's such a thing as serious chronic fatigue where even a little exercise leads to exhaustion. I'm not saying that's what you've got, you haven't described your symptoms, but if even small ordinary amounts of exercise knock you out, more exercise might not help.
Would open global immigration be a highly effective means of reducing global poverty?
Maybe. Let's experiment with more recruited immigration and see.
It's comments like this--right on the borderline between maximal sarcasm and bright-eyed naïveté--which give me hope for the future of ironic internet humor.
In ye olden times, trolling used to mean something...
I agree that in the current political climate, we are not likely to try my experiment of recruiting lots of high skill/educated/talented immigrants, so it's not, even it it appears so, "bright eyed naivete." But I really think that would be a good policy. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I agree that it would be a good policy. Canada has been doing this in a race-blind manner since 1976, and Australia and New Zealand copied Canada's points system in the 1980s; all of those countries have higher % foreign-born than the US while simultaneously having much less internal dissent re: immigration. The 2016-era "populist backlash" only hit the governments that were letting in significant numbers of low-skill immigrants against the will of a majority of their people, not the ones letting in an even larger number of higher-skill immigrants with a good track record of assimilating within a single generation. As far as I'm concerned, the Canadian policy has already been proven to be better than the US's current policy beyond all reasonable doubt.
As for the political climate, I'm cautiously optimistic that competition from China will break the deadlock. After the end of the Cold War, the US had enough slack to afford some highly inefficient policies without endangering its global leadership position, but there's less slack now. To be clear, I believe it would be better for the world as a whole if China had a moderate leader like Deng Xiaoping in charge, instead of the more authoritarian Xi; but a positive side-effect of the China we actually have to deal with is a healthy incentive to clean up our own act.
I took the comment as serious, and also a good idea.
Hint: don't use permanent visas.
Also politically infeasible, of course. People see even less value in experimentation than they see in foreigners.
Most economists think so. Most non-economists think there would be some important problems to open borders that might be even worse than global poverty, but I have yet to see a convincing case that this would be true.
There's no convincing *economic* argument against open borders. All the arguments against it tend to be on the lines of cultural/social politics (e.g. wanting to retain an ethnic character of a country). That has sentimental value for some people, and I don't underestimate its potency. Non-economic factors can often overpower logical economic ones.
Besides, few people think of themselves as "global citizens".
I think we understand the economic benefits and cultural costs (if any) much better for a marginal increase in immigration. And like most good things, immigration suffers from decreasing returns.
Has anyone ever made a convincing model of the economic value of social trust? Or is that dimension just ignored because it is hard to quantify?
there is the ELF index, ethno-linguistic fractionalization. Countries that are more homogenous do better economically, have higher social trust, less corruption, and experience less crime.
No, it's not spurious correlation, and it's not because African countries are more diverse, trust me, people have considered all the obvious objections.
I think it's absolutely obvious that having a culturally homogenous society, that speaks the same language, and follows the same religion (or no religion), is good.
True, you dismiss my viewpoint without any arguments, and call it 'illogical sentimental factors'. But then I can symmetrically dismiss your viewpoint without argument as 'globohomo propaganda'.
I would go further, I think you can easily make an economic argument against open borders, if all of the relevant factors are considered.
Of COURSE there's convincing economic arguments. You can't have hundreds of millions of poor, unskilled low IQ migrants moving to rich countries and expect that they'll all just not only have jobs, but all have jobs where they make enough money to provide more in taxes than they will cost the government in welfare and the massive physical and social infrastructure increases that will be needed to sustain them.
The ONLY way its "economically beneficial" is if you only care about GDP and nothing more.
I think the maximum number of low skilled workers that we could allow to enter in order to increase the real incomes of existing residents would be more than enough to start driving down wages of low skilled workers. Again, the policy is to attract highly skilled workers (where skills are more complimentary, not strictly substitutes.
This assumes there would be state-provided welfare for "hundreds of millions of poor, unskilled low IQ migrants". If I can imagine "open borders", I can imagine "welfare-restrictions", too. "Imagine ..." (Lennon). - Now Prof. Bryan Caplan is happy to accept: "work visa if you show a work-contract and a rent-contract" as open borders. Singapore and Switzerland are "open" under similar restrictions. And have bigger shares of foreigners (SGP: 38 per cent of labour force ; Swiss: 25% of population) than more "liberal do-goody" states (Germany: 12.5%). Now, whose economy is doing better? ... (20th cent. FOX jingle) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgRm6Qgscc
Okay. Let everyone living in Burundi (population 12 million, ranked the poorest country in the world or thereabouts) emigrate to the USA and plonk them down in the Bay Area, home of rich techies! (We're going on the popular image here).
https://www.wfp.org/countries/burundi
What happens next? I know how to plough with an ox plough, I know how to plant and grow rice, I can weave on a hand loom. What do the Burundians do to get jobs in the Bay Area industries?
Probably live in the new slums and do black market labour. Those techies living eight to a house (because the rent is too damn high) can now each have their own personal servant or even two each, and our Burundians can sleep in a tent in the back yard (if there is a back yard).
And probably the Burundians *will* be doing better than if they stayed back in Burundi - now they're earning a whopping $50 a week from being a housemaid, valet, yard boy etc.! And our techies are living a lifestyle of personal service they could never have afforded before, with a cook, groundskeeper, scullery maid, laundry maid and so forth!
So our economists are very happy that things are going swimmingly. Yes, the Burundians are now third-class serfs, but hey, it's still an improvement over what they used to have!
Don't forget the public schools! Eyeballing the cost of Bay Area private schools, and the difference in property values between e.g. East Palo Alto and Palo Alto, the negative externality inflicted by this level of low-skill immigration on each typical two-child couple is on the order of $1 million. But I'm sure that's worth ~$1000/year in savings from cheaper services.
> work visas ...
That's a bullshit usage of "open borders".
"Open borders" means letting everyone in.
One of the historic experiments was the US between say 1880 and 1924.
I think both the US and Europe would be in far worse condition without that migration of so-called low skilled low iq masses.
Why is America rich?
If you think America would prosperous without any limits on third world immigration (which, make no mistake, would lead to hundreds of millions of immigrants within a decade of the policy being enacted, mostly from third world countries), you have to believe America's prosperity has nothing to do with:
-The people who make up the current population including their intelligence, their cultures, their values, their abilities, their criminality or lack thereof
- The politics of the US, because with open borders America politics becomes 'whatever the foreign majority vote for', and given that none of the countries they came from resembled the US at all, its going to be very different to what the US currently is
So either you think that physical capital is enough to sustain an unlimited number of migrants, or you think that the US has magical dirt that allows it to be wealthy no matter what
I'm not for (is anyone?) open borders but your concurs which might apply at any level of immigration ignores that a) people come already partially acculturated by US media and become more aculturated over time. The "magic" dust is institutions like rule of law, security of property, a far above average business climate, etc.
I think you have this backwards. The United States is rich precisely *because* it had a policy of open borders and massive immigration of the global poor in the 19th century.
Open borders doesn’t mean non-citizens get to vote.
"Open borders doesn’t mean non-citizens get to vote."
How do you know John Smith is not a citizen, as distinct from the John Smith of the same ethnic background who is a citizen? Seeing as how checking ID or requiring proof is seen as voter suppression?
I don't think many or most illegal immigrants/non-citizens (and that includes people legally in the country) are voting when they shouldn't be, but I'd also not be surprised if some of them were, not meaning to commit fraud but assuming that they can vote because a polling card was dropped in the letterbox.
If the case you were talking about were even occurring for 1 in a thousand cases, then we would have hundreds of thousands of people showing up to vote and discovering that their box has already been checked at the polling place and turned away. They don’t let two ballots get cast for the same registration.
In order for this to happen, you would need someone with the same name registered in the same precinct to go to the polling place before the registered voter with that name does. Sure, it can happen, but it’s a smaller worry than the number of people who lose their chance to vote because they suddenly needed to run to the grocery store to get breakfast for their family and their entire daily schedule was shot.
Whatever citizenship checking is cost effective should be done at registration, not on voting days.
BTW have you ever tried to get people to register and or turn out to vote? The idea that we need to be super-vigilant to make sure that non-citizens do not vote is really naive. And that's why measures that make it harder to vote look like an intention to skew the outcomes toward the preferences of some citizens over others.
When someone proposed a solution to something that hypothetically could be, but for which there is no evidence that is actually IS a problem, one suspects the "solution" has a different objective. State laws to combat Sharia and the teaching of CRT also come to mind.
Yes, there are states like Singapore, which consistently expels pregnant guest workers, and the United Arab Emirates, which denies citizenship to most children and even grandchildren of non-Arab immigrants.
However, the US fought a civil war over a form of second-class citizenship, and the resolution was that the US wouldn't continue doing the second-class-citizenship thing. A century later, there was a Civil Rights movement that reinforced this philosophy.
So if you consider the distinction between immigrant and citizen to be relevant, it is reasonable to expect you to explicitly state that what you're saying doesn't apply to the US, and for others to treat you as arguing in bad faith if you fail to do so.
What exactly is it that you are saying "doesn't apply to the US"?
In the US, you don't get to vote unless you're a citizen who is over 18 years of age. To become a citizen as an adult, you need to go through a process to become a permanent resident (which often takes several years), and then continue to reside in the country for five more years before you become a citizen. If you are born in the United States, you are automatically a citizen, but you still don't get to vote until you're 18.
You point out that some countries can be extremely punitive to the children of immigrants. But I wasn't talking about the right to punish people for their parentage. I was talking about how immigrants don't get to vote until they've become citizens, which is just as true in the United States as elsewhere. There is no "foreign majority", and they don't get to vote until they've been naturalized.
When the US had near-zero barriers to immigration, it also had near-zero barriers to anything else, and a near-zero welfare state. They types of housing and employment opportunities available then have all been eliminated by do-gooders.
America is rich because it had a lot of unexploited resources, empty space, and the benefit of discoveries in science, industrialisation and so forth being made by others. This allowed it a head start, and the progress ramped up on that.
America now, and the problem of hundreds of millions of new immigrants, is the same problem the Old World countries had before they could head off to the new open lands of America.
Economics flow from culture. You can't do business in a low-trust anarchy, or at least, it's a very different kind of business than you'd do in a high-trust society.
I agree and I really wish politicians and users of social media had not found it advantageous to sow mistrust or the other party for partisan advantage.
But I do not think that higher immigration especially of high income/education/skill immigrants would lower social trust.
I honestly don't think many economists have thought about totally open borders. I can't see why anyone would try. Most economists are persuaded that a marginal increase in flows of people (that would still be millions) would be good.
I think that most formal economic modeling actually assumes open borders, and it's very hard to make a formal model that includes anything like real-world restrictions on migration! (It's easy to make models with nearly sealed compartments, but not ones where there is a moderate amount of legal flow with various different levels of legal restrictions, as well as illegal ways to circumvent some of the restrictions.)
No. Basically you just make a model which sums mutually consistent marginal changes is labor force flows with the parameters calibrated with individual country data. Now that would not model what policies could produce those marginal changes.
These models are total junk though. They treat people as 100% interchangeable and extrapolate marginal immigration rates we have today to the immigration of vastly greater number of qualitatively different immigrants.
Which is why they should be used only for estimating marginal changes. The next million B1 visas ought to be pretty similar to the last million.
Do economists assume more people = more consumption = more production = more wealth? The opposite of Malthus?
Because I wonder if economic theory has caught up to increasing automation, increasing productivity with fewer workers, and the increasing need for specialised knowledge to have 'good' jobs. Johann Schmidt could immigrate from a farm in Germany any time between 1910-1970 and get a job on the Ford production line and his kids would be John Smith and Sally Smith who would move up the class ladder, but I think there's less likelihood of that today. The production lines for former farm labourers are now in China and other overseas countries, and Johann needs to have marketable skills, preferably in the knowledge economy.
Economists (to be really simplistic) assume that more people (more labor) => more production but with diminishing returns and that the whole "production function" shifts up with new technological developments. If we allow for heterogeneous labor, then more of one kind of labor (or imports embodying that kind of labor) will reduce returns to that kind and raise returns to other kinds. Under not very restrictive assumptions, the increases (assuming the increase started from an artificially restricted amount) will be greater than the losses and the losers could be compensated. So economists generally favor both freer trade and less restrictive immigration.
As a political matter they have not worried (enough) about whether in fact the losers have been or would be compensated.
Open borders in the US would lead to societal collapse. Even the richest country in the world cannot assimilate hundreds of millions of unskilled foreigners, there would be mass unemployment, physical and social infrastructure would be overwhelmed, crime would explode, social trust would evaporate, mean IQ would plummet, there would be mass homelessness, our politics would become totally decided by these people. It would be absolute chaos. And once it happens, that's it, there's no going back. If it turns out to be as catastrophic as it looks like it would be, bad luck, there's no fixing it. The US would be permanently ruined. The living standards of current Americans would absolutely plummet and you're foolish if you think they're going to sit back and let this happen. It would be reckless to believe there WOULDN'T be civil war under such a scenario.
People look at a comparatively small number of immigrants who are skewed towards educated/skilled compared to the global average and then extrapolate that into thinking that an unlimited number of immigrants subject to zero selection criteria would have the same impact which is just insane. Europe struggles to assimilate
Even if there were some marginal improvement in the wellbeing of the immigrants themselves (which would rapidly diminish as the number of immigrants increases), this is going to be wiped out by the much broader impacts on technological and scientific progress that the US previously provided and would mean that China would become the most powerful country in the world which would be catastrophic for liberal democracy and all the good it creates.
I had to drag out this old trope, but I feel like this is just a glaring obvious example of 'magic dirt' ideology. The people who would come here were poor people in poor countries. Why would they stop being poor here? Why would America not become as poor as the places they come from? You have to believe that the people in a country have no impact on the success of a country (otherwise we become as poor as countries full of those people), you have to believe the politics of a country has no bearing on the success of a country (because these foreigners now decide our politics since they become a majority), you have to believe culture doesn't matter, you have to believe IQ doesn't matter, you have to believe values don't matter. The ONLY thing that could possibly allow America to stay wealthy and successful is it's accumulated capital. But there's only so much of this, it can be moved, and in any case America's greatest asset is its HUMAN capital, and this would not be enough to sustain countless low IQ migrants.
Open borders is the worst policy proposal I've ever heard.
It's proponents are so confident in it despite the fact that they cannot point to cases of mass third world immigration working on a much smaller scale today.
At least those are among the risks. With the exception of Bryan Kaplan, no one actually advocates for unrestricted immigration. We need to focus the immigration debate on how to attract a large but not unlimited number of highly skilled and talented immigrants, say a couple of million per year to start. If that goes as well as I think then we could increase the number, but the point is to attract enough to be selective.
Selective immigration would seem to the opposite effect. We do not have poverty (in global sense) here.
The issue is not to maximize the US, it's to maximize the world by reducing global poverty.
The essentially open immigration to U.S. from 1850 to 1924, did not make America poorer. It reduced global poverty.
As I mentioned in another comment, it might have been reasonable to believe in 1992 that a massive liberalization of immigration policy was the most efficient way to help the world's poor. Although China had really started taking off by that time, it was still unclear whether India, Indonesia, and other similarly poor countries ever would. And if those countries were destined to remain stuck, it would probably be better to improve the lives of those we could admit than improve the lives of none of them at all.
But the world of 2022 is remarkably different. *All* of the largest poor countries have enjoyed multiple decades of practically nonstop 5+% annual economic growth. A combination of cheap Internet (allowing smart poor people in the most remote villages to teach themselves practically anything), Soviet communism's loss of credibility, and generous American reverse-mercantilist policy enabled even mediocre Indian, Indonesian, etc. leaders to preside over explosive, broad-based catchup growth. One of the top emerging problems is that we probably provided *too* much help to China, without providing sufficiently strong incentives for good global citizenship on their part; the Democrats and Republicans may have many disagreements, but they are united on this point.
The continental US has had open borders with Puerto Rico for many decades. In 1992, the Puerto Ricans' trajectory looked pretty good, relative to Chinese/Indians/Indonesians/etc., and while it was unclear how much we could scale that example up, it was reasonable to believe that we hadn't already reached the point of negative returns. But in 2022, there's just no contest. Even though the literal GDP per capita numbers still look better for Puerto Ricans, that can't possibly compete with the scale of what has been going on in China/India/Indonesia/etc. (and we know from the 2016 "populist backlash" that low-skill immigration cannot be sustainably scaled up much further in Western democracies anytime soon).
As for "selective immigration would seem to have the opposite effect", that's a valid concern, and it is reasonable to tune US immigration policy to limit "brain drain" when necessary. But this is really only a problem when the high-skill immigration only flows in one direction. In practice, it's bidirectional. In China, the case I'm most familiar with, many leading companies were either founded by a "haigui" or have one in a top position. I'm less familiar with India, but I would be shocked if this wasn't also happening there to a large enough degree that India is best off letting the flow of students into Western universities continue, and taking its chances on enough of them returning.
Finally, the world has changed a lot since 1924. The population of Mexico in 1924 was lower than it's believed to have been in 1519; one cannot say the analogous thing today. And the cost of travel is MUCH lower. And there's a much larger welfare state today. All of these factors push the cost/benefit analysis in favor of more restriction... after it had already tilted in that direction, due to the "closing of the American frontier", in the early 1900s! (Why do you think the Immigration Act of 1924 passed in the first place?)
There are, of course, major forces pushing in the other direction, too; in particular, we've gotten a lot better at exporting our culture and "pre-assimilating" even nonwhite foreigners. And I think this trend can eventually win out, and we can have a world where most countries voluntarily converge towards open borders. (There are far more Indians and Chinese today who can function in a Western society, without being a net drain, than there were in 1992!) But the order of operations is of paramount importance here. If, instead of just following the will of the people and letting them liberalize immigration at a rate they're comfortable with, as is happening in Canada, you keep trying to prematurely force the borders open, prepare to see more Trumps.
"Why do you think the Immigration Act of 1924 passed in the first place?"
Because WASP America hated Southern and Eastern Europeans!!
We are far from that point, but I agree that it would be possible to allow enough unskilled workers to have an impact on wages of other low skilled workers.
"You have to believe that the people in a country have no impact on the success of a country (otherwise we become as poor as countries full of those people), you have to believe the politics of a country has no bearing on the success of a country (because these foreigners now decide our politics since they become a majority), you have to believe culture doesn't matter, you have to believe IQ doesn't matter, you have to believe values don't matter."
On the contrary, I think our culture and values do matter, quite a great deal. In fact, I think our culture and values are so great that immigrants who come here will naturally adopt our own culture and values over time, and even if they don't, their children will. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
My father immigrated to the U.S. from an extremely conservative and devoutly religious North African country, and within a few years of moving here, he was practically indistinguishable from any other Wall Street businessman aside from his accent. He had a house in the suburbs of New Jersey, drank at the pub with his co-workers, invited his friends over to have barbeques and watch football (the North American kind, although he never lost his interest in soccer either). He still had a conservative streak - he certainly didn't approve of my lifestyle choices, for instance - but not to a degree that was outside the Overton Window in this country. Notably, he admired both Obama and Romney, and thought either of them would make for a great President; he certainly wasn't advocating for our policies to become more like his home country's.
And all it took was one generation to get to me, an agnostic, libertine, socially progressive queer girl who has virtually nothing in common with the people of my father's home country beyond maybe skin tone. Cultural assimilation is a far more powerful force than you're giving it credit for.
A good story but not one that will be reassuring to the people who are worried about immigration. :)
What seems to happen, assuming the problem is poverty, bad government and possibly crime in the home country, is that immigrants show up, work, and send money home. They aren't causing huge deterioration in the destination country.
Was Europe made worse by the mass migration to this country between 1850 and 1924?
These seemed to be all the same kinds of claims made by WASPs about those Southern and Eastern Europeans, Irish Catholics, and Chinese.
I can think of a half dozen scenarios why it wouldn't, but I can't really think of any where it would necessarily do so. I've heard this claim made before, but I've never read any details of the mechanism of how this would work. If you can explain the mechanism better, I could better understand why.
I think the mechanism is based on the simple observation that when people migrate from poorer countries to richer ones, they tend to end up a lot wealthier. The question, of course, is how far this scales. Many argue that too much immigration would result in the destruction of the very institutions that make the rich country rich. Tyler Cowen, for instance, is skeptical that open immigration wouldn't result in "killing the golden goose".
Well, I have to finish my book report, but real quick, I think of all sorts of issues that would cause suboptimal results. For instance, housing and jobs. Say we have a million people arrive on our shores from Ukraine, we'd have to find a way to house them and find them jobs. I can see a huge lag between their arrival and final day when everyone is settled and in a prosperous state. Seems like it would take a lot state allocated capital to make this happen, and I'm not sure it would fly politically with our fellow citizens who are below a the median that outsiders are receiving extra subsidies. Anyway...
I suggest calling on people to share space in their houses with Ukrainians. I'm willing to do that, but don't know how. My government allows "unlimited" Ukrainians but isn't helping to arrange house-sharing and doesn't point me to an organization that could help arrange it. This is bad strategy. (But hopefully most Ukrainians can return home soon.)
Is this a better question than "Would open global immigration be a highly effective means of increasing global utility?" 'Coz they could give very different answers.
No, it would destroy the greatest engine of scientific, technological, political and social progress in the history of humanity i.e. western civilization. Unless you believe that the west has magic dirt, making the current population of the west minorities in their countries would destroy the things that makes them great, and if you think that the country is divided now, wait until there's hundreds of million foreigners making Americans' life miserable.
And there's no chance in hell China or Russia for example would ever do it, which means that China and Russia become the most powerful countries in the world without the US to stop them doing whatever they want (hint: it won't be stuff that maximises global utility).
China and Russia are not that attractive for immigration.
Btw, many Russians complain government lets too many people from Central Asia in.
Migrant *labour* is generally considered a net positive, certainly on the margin of today's immigration regimes, but plausibly for even huge migrant flows. Migrant *voters*, though, pose a strong risk to democracies if their numbers become large, and migrant *dependants* have the potential to be large drain of welfare systems, at least in theory.
There are also considerations of immigration rates - suppose one plausibly argues that the US could have sustained double it's immigration rates through the 20th century (based on the fact that its immigration was that high in the 19th). That does *not* mean that having all of the difference immigrate at once tomorrow would be fine - cultural assimilation is one concern, but pure physical infrastructure is another. Many American cities already struggle to have their infrastructure keep up with local population growth (mostly as a result of ineptitude, but still)
Actually it is more of a struggle for a city to deal with population decline than increase. Dallas v Detroit, anyone? Of course governance also matters, but that is partly circular, better governance allows for growth
And migrant labour is attractive because it can be paid a lot less than native labour. Economists seem to think (I may be maligning them) that this is a net benefit because the poor migrants here are still doing better than if they were at home, and the native industries are getting cheaper labour and so pricing their goods more cheaply for the consumer market.
https://www.fwd.us/news/immigrant-farmworkers-and-americas-food-production-5-things-to-know/
Whether it's socially or morally beneficial to keep a set of people as a serf class doesn't seem to be considered. 'We'll make you legal so long as you agree to work for lower wages'?
"This is partly because, even when wages and benefits are increased, there are still not enough U.S. citizens applying. The current agricultural workforce is also aging, requiring younger workers to replace them. Immigrants have filled these shortfalls in the workforce for decades, but in recent years, fewer immigrants are coming to the U.S. to work in agriculture, a result of current U.S. immigration policy and rising incomes in Mexico."
If they can make more money at home, they don't want to work hard jobs for lower pay in the USA. If you increase the pay to be attractive, now the labour is too expensive and prices have to rise.
No. It would end the West as we know it. No more high trust societies. No more Bernietopias. No more ecotopias.
Why build for the future if strangers get to enjoy what you build? How can you tell which form of social organization is better if migrants arbitrage away your welfare system?
When go-getters from developing countries take all the low hanging fruit self-employment business niches, you lose an important social safety valve. Some people don't like working for The Man, and most of them cannot code. For example, Washington DC has a large restive Black population composed of people who could be doing the jobs taken by immigrants. I would rather such populations be gainfully employed instead of going in and out of jail.
The world sees our overflowing jails and bad neighborhoods and decides that the American Way is not optimal. And that's why they don't replicate what we are going right.
To begin with, there's a definite reason to control immigration that, depending on your definition, maybe isn't economics: let everyone in, and pretty soon you'll wonder why there's a Herpes Simplex-ZX7 epidemic within your borders.
Meanwhile, my GF makes a hobby out of identifying invasive plants like kudzu and English ivy, and removing them when possible. They crowd out everything else just because of how they grow. There's an analogous argument against open immigration.
To expand on a point 'a real dog' made elsewhere in this thread: I think a great deal of economic activity works on trust. Lack of trust is like friction in physics: it slows everything down. If an employer hires someone for labor and has to check that laborer's work, that's more expensive than if the laborer himself is motivated to deliver to spec. And sometimes there's more than one good way to run a business, but everyone still needs to do it the same way, whatever way that is. Economies become more efficient when they spend less on checks or conversion (or cleaning up after the fact), so naturally we want everyone's customs to be on the same page.
If one guy moves into a country with millions, that's noise. Long as he isn't Ed Gaim, he'll be fine. OTOH, if three million move into a country with one million, that's not immigration; that's takeover, even if no shots are fired. Somewhere in the middle is about 1% of a country's population coming in every year as immigrants, on top of the newest generation spinning up (they have to be trained in the native customs, too, but at least there's about 18 years to do it). The cost of bringing that many people up to speed will be nontrivial, and if you don't pay it, then you'll soon see hardy enclaves of people doing their stuff their way, and raising their kids to do it that way, too. Even if their way is productive, it still won't be the same as the rest of the state. That's friction. A little friction can be fun (as they say), but too much? Not pleasant.
And to the extent that part of the native custom is about how to conduct economic activity without fraud - to put it bluntly, a few countries accept bribery as part of the cost of doing business, to asphyxiating levels - letting in huge numbers of people used to that paradigm will result in a high-corruption, low-prosperity enclave, even if it gets along all right with the natives.
All of this suggests to me that the most lucrative long term course of action is as follows:
* control the rate of immigration, in the nature of a filter, measuring how well immigrants fit with whatever the native customs are
* tightening that control enough to reduce activity lost to "friction" (corruption, fraud, etc.) to some "comfortable" level
* putting as much resources as we can afford into lowering that "comfort" threshold, which would allow the country to relax the filter (economically speaking, the sweet spot would be where either lowering the threshold in order to relax the filter or tightening the filter to save on lowering the threshold would both raise their total expense)
* putting affordable resources toward naturalization, and treating naturalization as a process for raising the fitness of immigrants with native custom (similar sweet spot as above)
This argument seems like it should work just as well at the state level, county level, and city level. It would even work at the neighborhood level - say that no one is allowed to enter downtown Austin unless they can prove that they are aware of local customs and live by them.
There are in fact checks for invasive species at the border of some states (like California), and you can do these things without closing borders.
Enter "theory of the firm".
Yes, sometimes borders are enforced at sub- or supra-national levels. And sometimes the national level makes the most sense. It depends on the transaction costs involved.
One: what DoJ said. Two: I was interpreting "immigration control" as "any restriction whatsoever on open immigration", which totally includes filters that let immigrants who satisfy condition C pass inward with a hat tip and "enjoy your stay".
If we define immigration control as closing borders, then I suppose I could still see defending it, but in conditions I think we'd consider extreme, possibly Hollywood-level, "did a werewolf bite you"-level extreme. Which is to say, not likely. Is anyone here calling for a total moratorium on all immigrants?
If the idea is just that we should check whether people crossing certain lines are doing so for the purposes of violence, or trade in dangerous organisms/explosives/whatever, and let everyone through who isn't, I'd be totally on board with that. That's what I mean by "open borders".
What I object to is the current system where some people are denied passage just because of where they were born, and/or because they are traveling in hopes of getting a job.
I can see that, yeah. Ideally, I think that's what I would prefer.
I think that still leaves a gray area where we have some cohort of people applying, we have reason to believe some number of them are dangerous, but we have no way of knowing exactly who, and the most accurate test we have is "member of this cohort". So now we have to choose between risking some danger, or banning the whole cohort (and risking danger of a political stripe). Or perhaps rolling to disbelieve and claiming there's no such scenario because we can always produce a better test by spending X dollars to narrow the cohort size - but I think that still leaves us with a group of "might be dangerous" and we're going to feel bad if any of them turn out to be safe. What do you make of that?
I wonder (no I don't :)) why immigration opponents continue to discuss unrestricted immigration and not just a large increase in immigration of highly skilled/talented/educated people.
But why should we invite in highly skilled/talented/educated people? Our university system is quite capable of producing our own h-s/t/e's. The reason we've opened our borders to foreign highly h-s/t/e's is to lower the wages of America's h-s/t/e's. The H1-B visa system is designed to lock foreign workers into a form of peonage—their employer holds their visa contract, and they cannot move on to more lucrative job offers without another employer to sponsor them and a huge burden of paperwork. Thus wages of the educated middle class are kept down. Thank heavens there's a limit on how many are admitted each year!
I refer you to two excellent columns by Robert X. Cringely about the H1-B visa scam...
https://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-about-h-1b-visas-could-hurt-us-all/
https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/15/the-h-1b-visa-program-is-a-scam/
Yes, we should make it possible for H1B kinds o people to come w/o tying them to a particular workplace.
In case there was a doubt, I'm in favor of open immigration (Open need not mean unregulated. We could regulate the spread of disease. We could say that the migrant must obey the existing rules of destination place, etc.)
However you define "open", how about "open" immigration for countries that give us reciprocal "open" immigration rights? Fair is fair. AFAIK, most other countries are much more stringent about immigration than the US.
A fair point. The cosmopolitan right to hospitality should be universal.
In the meantime reciprocity is the transitory state.
But I think countries with more stringent immigration controls are not generally poorer than the US.
Are you kidding? Poorer countries are just as stringent or even more so than the US — that is unless you can bring several million dollars worth of currency to invest. It's almost impossible to get a *work* visa into India (yet India exports its workers to the US and UK). Thailand? You'd need to marry a Thai. As for wealthier countries like Canada and Australia, they want you to have a job waiting for you and to be young enough to pay into their welfare system (45 is the cutoff of Australia). There are a bunch of countries you can buy your way into. Some Caribbean countries will let you purchase citizenship for a $5-$10 million donation to their treasury.
The spread of a global pandemic is certainly a potential downside.
But open need not mean unregulated.
Maybe I'm being too mathematical, but I'm used to thinking of "open" as letting anyone in who wants to. That means zero regulation. Otherwise, if regulations are permitted, then I could construct a scenario where I keep adding regulations until no one gets in, and yet we're still calling it "open".
What kinds of regulation are you still allowing in an "open immigration" scheme, in your sense?
If there was a pandemic which was spread by the movement of people then I think it would probably be justifiable as a public health measure.
If someone was using migration to avoid legitimate prosecution for crime, that might count as a reasonable regulation.
It might also be reasonable to say you have to come in through these places and register as a guest.
Kant, called the moral claim to seek refuge or respite in the lands of another, a “universal right of hospitality,” provided that the intentions of the foreigner upon arriving on foreign lands were peaceful. So requiring peaceful intent might be reasonable.
But none of these minor regulations affects affects what might be called "generally open". I'm not a libertarian nut.
The right of hospitality seems to be in line with effective altruism.
If the earth is for everyone then generally free movement seems to make sense.
What does "open" mean? Everyone gets automatic citizenship to the country of their choosing?
Are “states of matter” fundamental constants or reality or simply a useful taxonomy?
Useful taxonomy, like any categorization scheme.
You mean phases, like solid, liquid, gas, etc?
Speaking as a (bio)chemist they're pretty real.
Everything in physics can be thought of as a "useful abstraction". If you look at the standard model, you won't find any mention of atoms, fluids, para-magnetism, or anything like that. However, we study particular phenomena and models when they're experimentally or pedagogically useful. Atomic models help us understand chemistry, solar spectroscopy, virtually everything we associate with "matter."
States of matter are fundamental in a similar way. We have a good theories of phase transitions using thermodynamic variables. We can also have good phase transition models.
I'm not totally sure what the distinction you're drawing is, but the fact that I think we can be pretty confident that an alien species with a moderate level of scientific understanding would draw the lines in the same places makes me lean towards "fundamental constants".
Probably more useful than "states of matter" is the idea of a "phase transition". This is a more general concept than the physical world. You can find phase transitions in all sorts of abstract mathematical systems (as well as physical systems like harmonic resonators that might look very different from structured atoms/molecules). It turns out that for many substances there are multiple solid phases and multiple liquid phases that are also separated by phase transitions. I'm not sure whether that means that "solid" and "liquid" are somehow arbitrary divisions among these phases, but it at least means you need something more than just phases to separate them. ("Supercritical fluids" make a phase that is not clearly either liquid or gas, from what I understand.)
I'm no expert, but as I understand it, glasses and liquid crystals are phases in between solid and liquid, and the most interesting thing about supercritical fluids is that, though there's a phase transition between liquid and gas, there's no phase transition between liquid and supercritical, and no phase transition between supercritical and gas.
And viscoelastic behavior is found in both "liquids" and "solids", and it also kind of blurs the distinction between them.
So some phase transitions are more real than others.
There is indeed a phase transition between a supercritical fluid and the gas/liquid part of the phase diagram. It's called a "second order" phase transition, to distinguish it from the ordinary "first order" phase transitions, such as exist between a liquid and gas, or gas and solid. It is a phase transition between there being a (first order) phase transition and there not being one.
One way to understand it is that a first order phase transition happens when you have two (or more) local minima in your free energy functional, and which one is the lowest varies with temperature, pressure, et cetera. When you are at a temperature and pressure where which local minimum is the global minimum is switching, and momentarily two of them are both the global minimum, then you have a first order phase transition. As you pass through the phase transition conditions, the most stable state of the system hops from one minimum to the other.
By contrast, a second order phase transition is when, as you change temperature, pressure, et cetera, one free energy minimum splits into two, setting up the possibility of a first order phase transition.
Incidentally, one of the signatures of a phase transition is divergent susceptibilities, meaning the system no longer responds negatively to stresses -- Le Chatelier's Principle no longer holds. For example, in the case of the solid-liquid (first order) phase transition, the temperature does *not* respond to heating by rising (instead more of the solid phase melts). So for example it is in principle impossible to achieve thermal equilibrium between two thermodynamic (i.e. infinite) systems on their respective liquid-solid transition lines. No matter how much heat flows, the temperature will never equalize, because instead the hotter system just converts liquid to solid as it loses heat and the colder system just converts solid to liquid -- both without changing their temperature. The process only stops, and thermal equilibrium reached, if in fact the two systems are *not* infinite, and sooner or later one of them runs out of solid or liquid and moves off the solid-liquid phase transition line.
A similar effect happens at second order phase transitions. For example, at the critical point in fluid systems, the system stops responding with increased pressure to momentary decreases in volume, so you get in principle arbitrarily large density fluctuations in response to tiny perturbations from the environment. (The environment pushes a little bit, the system contracts but does *not* increase its resisting pressure, so the environment continues pushing...) These large density fluctuations are what gives fluids so-called "critical opalescence" near the critical point:
https://youtu.be/DIGdbmJvFUw
Thank you!
Yes.
On a scale from "really really undeniably real" to "a useful fiction we use for classification" they're much closer to the really really real end of the spectrum.
I think a good measure of how "real" a classification system is is how often we run into edge cases that we have difficulty putting in one category or another. For instance, we never run into an atom that is ambiguously maybe-silicon maybe-phosphorus, whereas in biological taxonomy we have all sorts of examples where the idea of "species" breaks down a bit, and in classifying genres of music we find unclassifiable edge cases all the damn time. In thermodynamics we find that the distinction between liquid and gas ceases to exist at high pressures, but this doesn't change the fact that liquid and gas are two very different things, separated by a phase change, at lower pressure.
They are emergent properties of systems with many (in principle infinite) degrees of freedom, based on the properties of the forces of interaction between them. Id est, for any system made of identical particles which have some volume each particle excludes to the other, but no long-range interactions, you will always have at least one solid crystalline phase and a gaseous phase, with which is stable depending on the density, or more precisely on the ratio between the density and the inverse size of the excluded volume.
If you add in attractive forces with less than an infinite range, then you will normally also develop the possibility of a liquid phase, where which is stable depends on the ratio of the temperature and the characteristic energy of the attraction. (Although normally the distinction only exists for a certain range of densities, unlike the case for the solid-gas distinction.)
These are very general conclusions, and they don't really depend very much on the details of the interacting degrees of freedom. They can be atoms, of course, but also even macroscopic particles behave this way, and abstract models that have nothing to do with physical reality.
We would not really call them fundamental constants, however, because they are not manifest in the interaction of small numbers of degrees of freedom, e.g. one or two or even a few thousand particles. Strictly speaking, they only turn up without cavil in the thermodynamic limit, when there are an infinite number of degrees of freedom, so that's why I call them "emergent."
The phase of some atoms of some element are, according to this five minutes of wikipeida I just read, basically defined by the degree of connectivity between them. Solid is super connected, liquid is less connected, gas is barely connected, and plasma is basically the thing is exploding (so little connection that the nuclii are just flying around without electrons).
So in my estimation they are defined by that degree; and they are *not simply a useful taxonomy.
I'm an undergrad with an interest in biomedical research and doctoring. My current plan is to get an MD and aim for a physician-scientist type role, but combo MD/PhD programs through the MSTP look appealing. I'm told people do research with just an MD, but it's unclear to me how this works in practice. Getting a PhD seems riskier and less flexible in terms of job prospects, so I'm wary. If anyone has anecdotes, useful data, or just opinions on the comparative benefits/costs of MD/Ph.D./MD+PhD/some alternative I don't know about, I'd love to hear them (even if it's not directly related to medical science).
I don't know which program or program combo you should do, but I can tell you that there's *a lot* a person needs to understand about statistics and research design in order to do good research -- also in order to understand and judge the research that's already been done in his or her field of interest. A lot of MD's are really naive about research, and don't notice even ridiculously large flaws having to do with control groups, confounds, bad stats, etc.
If the thing you know for sure about your current situation is you want to get your MD, my advice would be first to focus on graduating then focus on the MD as a singular goal afterwards.
Thinking too far ahead can get you lost, and cause you to fail to pay attention to important aspects of your current and near-term education. When things are combined e.g. MD+PhD their boundaries and defining properties become unclear. Research is difficult and extremely time-consuming, and is best done with some career experience to filter it through. With these in mind I would put the PhD thing in a distant basket of "things you might like to think about in 5 years".
I really disagree, programs like MSTP are made for people with OP's career goals in mind. -MD student
Follow Sanjee Baksh on twitter- https://mobile.twitter.com/S__Baksh
He's my favorite and posts a lot about careers/goals/struggles with the MD/PhD route
Plus his public disses of how uncharacterized matrigel and FBS are is my love language
I'm a programmer, so no personal knowledge. But. The place where I work we have mostly MDs and a few MD+PhD. The MDs are primarily clinicians, but most of them publish here and there. The MD+PhDs are mostly researchers, but have a few patients and do a day or two of clinic work each week. So, it looks to me like both can work, but if you want research to be your main thing, you're better bet is going for the MD+PhD. YMMV, of course.
Current PhD student here who knows a few MD/PhDs. If you want to be a doctor, get an MD. If you want to only do basic science research, get a PhD. If you want to see patients and develop therapies, run clinical trials, or work on much more translational resesarch, an MD/PhD is a good choice. The programs are extremely competitive, so make sure you read up heavily on what you can do to maximize your success as an applicant. Also, MD/PhD students are typically expected to finish their PhDs in 4 years, maybe 5, so if you have a long and ambitious project you want to do, that might be tougher. You can definitely do research with just an MD -- it's probably much harder to get grants for basic science research, but if you collaborate with bio-focused labs, grants will be easier to come by. Becoming a doctor requires a lot of poorly paid, grueling work, over many years, so you really have to commit to the long run, especially if you're doing a PhD in the middle of your MD. Look specifically for MSTP programs -- they are the most prestigious and typically provide the best funding packages.
Posted a prediction market for slime mold time mold’s hypothesis about chemical contaminants being the cause of the modern obesity crisis:
https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-the-contaminant-hypothesis-of
What do you think? Both, will the market cash out on its three year time frame, and what do you think is the case about the subject personally. Please do read at least one article in the series before commenting if you haven’t read it yet.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
I read that article a while ago.
The big problem I had with it was this: why isn't China fat now? They're far more polluted with pretty much everything than the West is at this stage.
The modern obesity crisis in the US started in the 01970s, which is after the end of the biggest pollution problems in the US. So it's probably not contamination overall, but it might be some particular contaminant that started showing up around that point.
The breakfast burrito was invented in 1975, just saying.
Not the breakfast burrito specifically, but the culture of gluttony that made "breakfast burrito" seem like a reasonable thing to eat may have really taken off in the 1970s.
Another interesting historical note is that the Big Mac is from 1968. The interesting thing about the Big Mac is that it now seems tiny compared to any of the burgers from your local yuppie burger place.
Yes, there are several things that happened that decade.
I mean, a breakfast burrito is basically components of the classic english breakfast wrapped up in a tortilla shell.
If you replace tortilla shell with bread and butter or toast and add some pudding, you're no different than long preexisting breakfasts. I doubt this transition is meaningful. (It's also basically equivalent to the Cornish pasty/meat pies favored as working lunches through the industrial revolution; wrap protein, tons of fat, and some carbs in a dough package for easy containment and eating at mine/factory-worker lunch-times.)
Even if contaminants cause obesity it seems very unlikely consensus will move from where it is now to "SMTM was right". If the theory is true then experts have spent somewhere between decades and a century not noticing, what's supposed to change in another three years?
It's a really short timeline to be sure, but as it's a startup I'm not really sure how long Manifold Markets will be around so I wanted to see movement on a time horizon I'm fairly confident the site will still exist within.
What changes: scientists read SMTM and decide to investigate. Most are turned down for funding, but a few get funding and do a positive study, which is eventually published, creating momentum for more investigation.
2025 is way too soon for something like that - without sudden overwhelming evidence being discovered, paradigm shifts like that take a long time. 2035 or 2045 might be more reasonable end dates for when the idea might catch on (assuming it's true). Even then 2035 is pushing it.
Yeah I agree. Did 3 years just b/c I'm not sure how long a startup will be around and I'm not sure how much appetite there is for really long term bets. More interested in seeing movement than in the absolute value.
For the first time since the pandemic began, my significant other recently went out of town without me. It was only for a week, but I was essentially alone the whole time -- I saw a friend for a few hours one day, and had a few Zoom meetings here and there, but was just mostly alone. It felt pretty psychologically intense, even with the awareness that it was just for a week and things are open now and I was lucky to have had someone for the actual lockdowns etc.
Did anyone spend most of the pandemic like this? Hope you’re all doing OK.
Yes, I've spent the last 10 years like that. What would the alternative be? Physically meeting a human multiple times a week??
At least an office. I suppose I did not realize how much psychological weight small talk at the office was carrying all those years
"Did anyone spend most of the pandemic like this? Hope you’re all doing OK."
Yes, practically my entire life? I've been working from home the past two years and loving it. I don't like people, I don't like going outside my front door and having to interact with people, and I don't have significant others. So I spend my time alone and I don't miss human interaction (it does make me laugh to see people writing earnest plaints about 'touch starvation' but you do you, normal rest of the human race).
If I believed in reincarnation, I might think in a previous life I was one of the desert hermits who lived in a cave and was fed by ravens and never saw another human being for thirty years.
Speaking of being a desert hermit, I see you as a Pugio from the second to last story in the Glassbeadgame. (I imagine if I went to confession to you, you'd punch me).
I just had a lengthy discussion with a South Asian woman named Maya about “The Indian Story” in the GBG, and it’s depiction of maya. I think it’s the last of the ‘posthumous’ stories after the death of the protagonist.
That's a great story. That novel is spectacular, but only for the right person.
Hesse and Thomas Mann were really giants of 20th century lit.
Oh, I hope I wouldn't! Though I probably would be "Look, why are you doing the same dumb shit over and over?"
It would, I'm sure, be verbal.
humans, schmumans... c'mon Deiseach gis a hug "~}
I wouldn't even hug my mother, so you're out of luck there, pal. I've been touch-averse all my life 🤷♀️
I'm not terribly social myself, and sometimes think it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we all died off and left the planet to the armadillos et al., who seem to be better at enjoying life than we are. Do you warm up to animals? If so, wishing you lots of amusement and companionable hanging out with members of other and possibly better species.
No, I'm not at all sentimental about pets and don't have any.
I do like flowers, the sea, rivers, trees, and the Moon, though (when I was a kid, the willow trees at the bottom of our garden were my friends) 😀
Hear hear. People suck.
Sounds quite comfy. For the rest of us the hedgehog's dilemma is a bitch.
How do you think "lockdowns" work for people who didn't have roommates? Yes, this was the reality for many of us for much of 2020.
There should be a "pod" system where multiple households having at most 4-5 people can hang out together during a pandemic. The group of 5 needs to be semi-fixed over a period of time, to reduce cross-contamination.
That's way too difficult to organize in an official manner - is the government going to assign you to a pod, or at least track which pod you join and make sure nobody gets left out - and of course it was Absolutely Imperative that we have a legible, government-mandated system for dealing with COVID.
"Your pod is your household", is simple and legible, so that's what we got.
We had this system in the UK - people living alone could "bubble" with one other household (of any size), and mutually visit each other.
Obviously the Government couldn't enforce it, but generally the UK public followed Covid rules because we wanted to, rather than because we were forced.
It worked extremely well!
There are few advantages to introversion, but one of them is that being alone is just...relaxing.
When my health became worse and I stopped going into university, I became pretty depressed, despite living with my parents an seeing friends on the weekends. When the pandemic put a halt to the weekend in-person socialisation, that intensified enormously. interaction with other human beings is hugely important! when I got a girlfriend, and then she moved in with me before another lockdown hit, it was a lot less bad, but I do still notice that I'm more lethargic when I haven't gone to in person social events for a couple of weeks
Yes. It sucks. And a lot of people at work are agitating to make it permanent.
POLITICS THREADS ARE DEAD! LONG LIVE POLITICS THREADS!
In honor of the new regime:
As a leftoid, I have to accept that my comrades are gonna do some cringe shit, and just role with it. I feel that most people further left than the Dems have just decided that we have to tolerate some stuff we don't like, up to a point. (Asadists and such can fuck right off). This is easy because it rarely actually gets codified into law.
This is not the case on the right.
I've always wondered to what extent people to the right of me own their alignments dumb shit; eg. the "Don't say gay" bill and the Texas abortion bounties.
Do you guys actually want those things, but dislike the bills themselves? Is there internal shit flinging I don't see about it? Do ya'll feel embarrassed about it, or just roll with it?
Basically, how do people in the right think about the above things?
I'm not a right winger. But the idea that crazy leftist ideas don't get put into practice doesn't appear to square with reality. There's plenty of weird leftist legal stuff happening in deep blue territory.
As for the two bills, the standard lines I've heard are (respectively) that they really do want to ban abortion and that speech codes are necessary because teachers are not sufficiently respectful of parent's wishes with their children. They don't seem embarrassed by it and generally react to the idea that they should be as if it's just liberal propagandists who are lying about what the bills actually say. Sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
Speaking of leftoid cringe shit, congratulations on the "don't say gay" thing. You guys managed to get a catchy if false description of what is in that bill into the media, and now everyone thinks "oh my, the wicked and backwards Florida legislature is forbidding schools from even mentioning gay people exist".
Whereas the text of the Parental Rights in Education Bill covers a lot more than that:
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/241/BillText/er/PDF
(g) The right to consent in writing before a biometric scan of his or her minor child is made, shared, or stored.
(h) The right to consent in writing before any record of his or her minor child's blood or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is created, stored, or shared, except as required by general law or authorized pursuant to a court order.
I don't know about you, but if schools were taking blood samples from my child, I certainly would want to know all about that. But things like this are not what we're hearing about. I would have been more sympathetic to the protests about gayness, save that the teachers talking about "this bill will prevent me from discussing things with my students" seem *awfully* keen, from the interviews they're giving, to discuss intimate details of their personal lives with the children they're teaching.
But it was great PR, so good work there!
>I don't know about you, but if schools were taking blood samples from my child, I certainly would want to know all about that. But things like this are not what we're hearing about.
I agree with you, but was that a real issue or something stuck in the bill because it would be villainous to be against that point? I don't know the answer, but it seems like one of those land-mines politicians insert into bills so they can later say "(So and so) was in favor of schools taking children's blood from them without their parents' consent!" when in fact so and so voted against the bill for other reasons.
This is basically just the inverse of a wrecking amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_amendment). Instead of sticking an unquestionably terrible provision in an otherwise popular bill to prevent it from being passed, they're sticking an unquestionably good provision - preventing schools from taking blood/DNA samples or biometric scans of students without their parents' knowledge or permission, which is something that *virtually everyone supports* - in an otherwise terrible bill.
There are already laws that prevent teachers from talking to students about their sex lives in explicit detail. We don't need to make it doubly illegal, especially when it's being done in such a hamfisted way. The law as written completely prohibits teachers from even acknowledging the existence of queer people, and prevents discussion of a wide range of topics that I would consider perfectly appropriate for a classroom.
And while some conservatives try to argue that it only prevents those topics from being discussed in kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms, the actual wording of the law prevents LGBT issues from being discussed “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” The definition of "age appropriate" and "developmentally appropriate" is intentionally left vague, and I could easily imagine angry parents and local courts deciding that any mention of any LGBT-related issue in any classroom isn't "developmentally appropriate," even if it's a 12th grade classroom full of students in their late teens.
The issue here is that the bill allows parents to bring a lawsuit for whatever the fuck reason they want; with all legal fees covered by the school district.
Eg, I am uncomfortable with teachers inserting their GENDER IDIOLOGY by using any pronouns whatsoever. I sue. I lose, because that's fucking stupid. The school still pays all the legal fees.
Hopefully it gets struck down, because that shit seems like a dumb armsrace to get into.
Still iffy, but yes.
If parents sued because a teacher mentioned that gay people exist; they would almost certainly lose and be out $$$.
So long as the likes of the trans gender parent activism in the Virginia schools gets struck down too, let's agree on this.
Let sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander.
https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+ful+HR199ER
This is the group led by a parent who pushed for, and got the controversial policy about transgender students in schools adopted. And then on the heels of that we got the genderfluid student committing two separate sexual assaults.
They're very anxious about precisely what a teacher says during class time:
https://www.eqloco.com/post/statement-on-cross-v-loudoun-county-school-board-ruling
But of course it's only the right-wingers who want to make sure that Compelled Speech happens or doesn't happen.
They also like some book-banning of their own:
https://m.facebook.com/purcellvillelibrary/posts/10157855646452274?locale2=pa_IN
And Mx. Cris Candice Tuck is the sometimes I'm a mom, sometimes I'm a dad parent who rode the Loudoun County school board until they adopted policy 8040:
https://www.eqloco.com/board
https://loudounnow.com/2021/01/08/letter-christopher-candice-tuck-leesburg/
If that were the case, I wouldn't be that strongly opposed, but I would still think it was redundant since Florida already has a law prohibiting sexual content from being taught to students in or before fifth grade. Again, I think laws that effectively try to make already illegal things "doubly illegal" tend to be useless at best and cause quite a great deal of harm at worst.
"Gender ideology" is begging the question: I'm fine with a complete ban on gender ideology, if it's ALL gender ideology.
No using any gendered pronouns; referring to any relationships, etc. No using words like he, she, boy, girl, husband, wife, etc.
I don't think you actually want that though, so I assume that the actual purpose of the law to avoid saying gay.
The reason for the level of objection is because people don't believe that the bill was written in good faith. From their point of view, it wasn't written in such vague language simply because the legislators who drafted it were lazy or sloppy or dumb, nor because (as you suggested earlier) most legislation is written in relatively vague terms as a matter of course. Instead, they believe that it was purposefully designed to be vague in order to deliberately allow for potential abuses.
Does it deserve more media coverage than the War on Ukraine or the Uyghur Genocide in China, even assuming that the accusations of it being written in bad faith are true? No, but neither does most of what gets attention from American news outlets, whether left, right, or center.
The "kindergarten through grade 3" language is not in the bill; you can read it in Deiseach's link above. On the bottom of page 6 there's a provision that basically says any state employee that urges kids to keep secrets from their parents "may be subject to disciplinary action". The only places this draft mentions sexuality are on page 9, which gives parents the right to opt out of sex ed, and on page 8, which calls for school districts to develop procedures to opt their children out, and to keep parents informed about what is going on at school. I find all these provisions to be perfectly reasonable. The teachers are not being banned or even threatened with punishment for discussing sexuality or anything else in the classroom, they are merely required to keep parents and give them an avenue to remove their child if they do not approve of what is being discussed in class.
Deiseach linked to the wrong bill. That's HB 241, from last year. The "Don't Say Gay" bill is HB 1557.
Thank you for the correction, here is the relevant paragraph:
"3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
I agree "age appropriate" is vague language, but you see, my problem is when I see all the media stories and the teachers and others complaining that this means they can't discuss every single detail of their personal lives with their class of five year olds does make me raise an eyebrow.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/03/29/msnbc-teacher-cory-bernaert-worries-cannot-discuss-love-life-students/
Do teachers share this level of personal detail with their classes today? Not in my day, but that was back with the dinosaurs. If he's that worried, just say "I went paddleboarding this weekend" or "I went paddleboarding with my friend". If he is complaining that he has to hide who he is, then talk to the school board about it. I have to admit, I'm cynical that a kindergarten class is independently raising questions and wanting to discuss his personal life with him, and that he's not the one introducing it. The complaint is "I can't say I have a partner or explain what 'partner' means" but the level of exaggeration ("I'm AFRAID") does make it sound like there is rather more detail involved that he wants to provide than simply " what partner means is..."
If he's spending more time in the classroom nattering about what he did on the weekend and where he and his boyfriend went shopping and showing them photos of "that's me and my partner paddleboarding" than teaching the kids to read and write, I think parents do have a right to say "shut up and do your job".
a) yes, teachers do share a lot about their personal lives in modern k12, in high school every first day of class with a new teacher involved a lengthy slideshow about them and their family and interests. Not all teachers were as in depth but I heard about the entire extended family of a few, grandparents and step siblings and so on. I did go to small, slightly woo schools, but it’s not rare.
b) if his fear is that he won’t be legally allowed to say he has a boyfriend or his partner is a man, I’m not sure why you bring up the school board?
c) the idea that teachers shouldn’t be wasting time talking about personal lives is a different than the idea that gay/bi/trans teachers, specifically, can’t. The fear (which I think is honestly felt) is that it’ll reinforce the idea of lgbtiaansjskd+ as inappropriate or obscene. Considering the culture at large and existence of the internet, I think these fears are overblown, but I can understand the concern. I think if there was a bit about teachers being allowed to be “out” to their students for clarity there would be way less handwringing.
I support bans on exposing children to sexual content (which, again, were already on place long before this particular law was passed). I'd even be fine with some fairly strict restrictions on that front, as long as they were applied to heterosexual and homosexual content evenly. I just want some consistency.
Children should not be taught about the mechanics of gay sexual acts (or straight sexual acts) in explicit detail, I think we can all agree on that. But there's plenty of hetero romantic content that kids are already exposed to all the time: hand holding, kissing, public displays of affection. My problem is that the same things which are seen as completely innocuous when done by straight couples are suddenly viewed as inappropriate, explicit, and socially disruptive when done by queer people. I remember straight male teachers in grade school showing us pictures of their girlfriends, straight women talking about how excited they were to be getting married soon, teachers with their significant others at official school dances. Yet if a gay man showed students a picture of him with this boyfriend, or a lesbian talked about how excited she was to marry her soon-to-be wife, there would no doubt be outraged conservative parents shouting about how their children were being "indoctrinated" or even groomed. That's what I'm pushing back against.
In that regard, this isn't even a phenomenon exclusive to schools. I've heard no shortage of social conservatives and alt-lite internet pundits talk about how they don't have a problem with gay people existing, they just don't want homosexuality being "shoved in their faces." And to the extent that they're upset about mostly-naked people in leather bondage gear marching in public Pride parades, I can sympathize. But more often than not, they're upset about something that would be totally uncontroversial if it happened with a straight couple: two female characters kissing on a TV show, two men holding hands in the park, or even just someone mentioning their same-sex partner at the office. So when they say they don't have a problem with queer people, what it really means is that they don't have a problem as long as queer people stay in the closet and the rest of society can continue to pretend that homosexuality and transsexuality don't exist. And that double standard gets kicked into overdrive whenever children are involved.
My littlest kid is in preschool. His teacher just left for the rest of the year because she had a baby. This was discussed over the course of the last several weeks so the kids in the class would know it was coming. Had the preschool teacher been a guy, he could have explained that his wife was about to have a baby and that he would be leaving for the rest of the year to help with the new baby.
What if the teacher had been a lesbian, and her wife was having a baby? Could she have prepped her kids that she was going to be gone because she was having a baby? What if one of the kids asked why they couldn't see her tummy getting bigger? Or asked about her husband? What is she supposed to say? Does she just not say anything and then one day she disappears and there's a sub for the rest of the year? I wouldn't consider the kids to be well served in that case. My kid would have been really upset if Mrs. D had just disappeared, but because he understood what was happening he was excited for her and made the transition easily.
I think this shit is mean, and I think that's the point.
That's the scaremongering, and *that's* the point.
Is it really going to happen that is Ms. Smith who is a married lesbian takes time off when her wife is pregnant, and she can't say a word in class, and if she does UNSPECIFIED BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN?
I don't think there's a problem with Ms. Smith saying she'll be gone and a new teacher will be here, and she is taking time off for a new baby, and no she isn't having the baby, her wife is. The class may ask "Wow, can girls get married?" and she can say "yes".
I don't see a problem. Some parents may disapprove, and that's something for them to discuss with their kids at home.
The problem is (a) what is age-appropriate? and (b) does it arise organically or do you have the rainbow-flag wavers who want to jump at any chance to tell small kids way more than they need to know (do five year olds need to know about "non-binary, ace, bi, and pan" as in the Blue's Clues videos? I don't think so, but even if they do, there's a difference between natural questions arising and Teacher Raine Bowe bustling in to give loads of details about "sexual attraction is this for them and that for those and does anyone want to talk about masturbation?")
While I think this news story is overwrought (the lectures happened at a summer camp, so kids were attending voluntarily and they seem to be older teenagers), I also think that going on Twitter talking about how your nephews started masturbating as soon as they could talk and this is why you are really excited to tell small kids it's okay to masturbate is *not* helping your cause:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/kentucky-summer-camp-teaches-children-to-masturbate-and-have-sex-on-drugs
>I don't see a problem. Some parents may disapprove, and that's something for them to discuss with their kids at home.
I don't either. But this is happening in the classroom. Is it instruction? Why not? It's coming from the instructor and it's discussing sexual norms (or at least family formation norms).
>and if she does UNSPECIFIED BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN?
They're clearly specified. The parents raise a complaint with her boss, who has seven days to get back with them. If they don't like what they hear, they get on at the next school board meeting and raise it there. If they still don't like what they hear, the request a special magistrate, which they get, at district expense. And if they *still* don't like what they hear, they can sue. (The lawsuit is on their dime unless they win, near as I can tell.)
All of which would be stressful as hell as a parent-to-be wondering why you didn't just keep your damn mouth shut. Or, you know, Don't Say Gay.
It's not scaremongering. It's the point of the damn bill.
No one is arguing for discussing masturbation with 1st graders. *That's* scaremongering.
A child who hasn't yet experienced puberty does not need to be educamated on 'choosing a gender', as some are suggesting. The smartest school districts do not teach 'sex education'.
Yes, bills usually have other stuff in them that get little attention. Narrow, focused bills seem like more of an exception than a norm.
The fact that you use the term 'don't say gay bill' tells me that you get your news only from one perspective. When you do that it is very difficult to understand the people that you imagine are your political opponents. My advice would be for you to aquire a wider range of information sources.
Not particularly, but please don't let that stop you. I'm sure somebody will be delighted to engage.
Sooo....I have thought about those bills, and have decided that given the pros and cons, I am ok with making it a law that it's not okay to abort a child just because the mother has accused the father of rape.
I also note that it is far, far less likely that a woman seeks an abortion due to rape (a very very fringe case) than it is that a woman seeks an abortion without discussing with the father the fate of his child.
It occurs to me (as someone who made several comments in the abortion subthread a few OTs ago) that there's a "bad cases make for bad law" factor to consider here. As in: how many women are accusing the father of rape in order to get that abortion? Maybe that's seldom enough that we can investigate them as criminal fraud(?) rather than go for a law that blanket-bans all abortions justified solely on rape. But I honestly don't know either way.
It also bothers me on Goodhart levels. Suppose the law permits terminating any pregnancy caused by rape. The catch is that the rape gets reported. The consequence is that a state gets a surge in rape reports, to the point that the men get a huge negative reputation (1 in 4 are rapists! etc.), that turn out to only be because there's a lot of women who saw "report rape, get easy abortion" as the easiest way out of a difficult situation. Esp. if the rape accusation doesn't require an actual conviction; just a report from the woman. Whatever the case, we'd end up looking at rape crimes differently.
I would care a lot more about this if the Left didn't use a small number of cases every year to justify further disarming 100 million legal gun owners in the country. Until they stop that, sauce, goose, gander, etc.
I agree about the risks & bad side effects of a rape exception for elective abortion. (I don't include reputation risks for men as a whole, but then I might run with a different set of guys.)
'Bad cases' - yeah, it's pretty much a given, I think, that abortion related cases are difficult. The conflict comes from making choices that many people find hard and life altering. Which is where we need the law to be a guard rail - "yes, this will change your life and you don't want this outcome. But the right option is this, and that other option is off the table." The law has this effect for many things - financial ruin, theft, assault, inheritance.
Of course, abortion could just be legal, and then men wouldn't be unfairly accused of rape so women can get abortions.
That would solve the rape accusation problem, yes. But then we'd still have the "this feels like murder to a lot of people" problem.
Ooh, ooh, ooh! Can we talk about retrospective accusations of lack of consent in demi-sexual encounters? Because I would be *very* fucking interested in ripping your face off when it comes to "I was pressured into activity I did not want" when it comes to little misses in college being talked into it by their activist friends that the making-out they did with a boy was, in fact, a form of rape.
Given that it happened to one of my nephews, who was accused of this, and then tried walking into the sea to commit suicide, he was so upset about the accusation and the potential effects it could have on him; this nephew has been very sensitive, withdrawn, and anxious since he was a toddler and he emphatically is *not* the kind to force himself on an unwilling partner. Thank Christ he had good friends who were worried about him, tracked him down, and stopped him in time. Meanwhile, I have no idea what happened the little bitch but I'm sure she continued to wallow in her trendy, imported from the USA college activism, victimhood. I heard nothing at all about any consequences for *her* of such accusations.
So let's talk about consent and accusations of rape, shall we? Or maybe if you shut your yap about 'gotchas', I'll do the same for you.
Because the, by using specific examples, the original comment came off as poorly-veiled, low-effort swipe on these specific examples instead of as a sincere desire to hear a different perspective. Whether or not the OP really was sincere, the responses here are not surprising.
Imagine the middle-school bully saying "I'm sorry for how I've treated you in the past. I really want to get to know you and understand your perspective. What's it like being the kind of person who would wear that ugly outfit in public?"
As someone who thinks politics is turd, and who isn't particularly rooting for either side in the matters being debated here, I think I'm reasonably well qualified to give a fair-minded reading of what OP's intent was in referring to "the "Don't say gay" bill and the Texas abortion bounties" as examples of "dumb shit" that some on the right are into. I think OP genuinely believed that the Florida bill and the Texas abortion law (or whatever it is) are things that most people on the right consider cringy — consider nonsense that a few fringe elements of the right support. I do not think OP was taking a swipe at the right by mentioning the Florida & Texas whatevers.
Apparently OP was wrong in how the Florida & Texas whatevers are viewed by the right. That is not proof that OP sucks ass. It is just evidence that it is hard for people to understand each other.
Presumably there do exist some ideas promoted by some on the right that the majority of those on the right *do* think are cringy and absurd. What the fuck are they? Get a couple of them out on the table, then it will be possible to discuss the question OP asked, which was kind of an interesting one I thought: How do the 2 tribes deal with their crazy fringe elements?
The specific examples were a bit like "If I admit that the very very very fringemost people on my side are wrong, will you also admit that these mainstream positions held by your side are wrong?"
Well, now you've added ad hominem to the list, so well done.
Because invoking "it's a rapist's charter" is not an appeal to emotion?
If your side is going to play that card, I'm going to say the liberal-progressive side is touting for a murderer's charter, because I think driving someone to attempting or commiting suicide is murder.
As to the proportion of abortions carried out because of rape/incest, it is hard to quantify. The Guttmacher Institute carried out a survery in 2014 and they did include some questions about "were you coerced into sex":
Has the man with whom you got pregnant
ever hit, slapped, kicked, or otherwise
physically hurt you?
-1 Yes -2 No
38. Has he ever forced you to do anything
sexual when you didn’t want to?
-1 Yes -2 No
39. Is this pregnancy the result of a man
forcing you to have sex when you didn’t
want to have sex?
-1 Yes
-2 No
-3 Don’t know
Their conclusions are that most abortions are down to poverty.
https://www.guttmacher.org/report/abortion-incidence-service-availability-us-2017
The recording of abortions for rape/incest is also scant because not all states gather that data:
https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-reporting-requirements
16 states require providers to give some information about the patient's reason for seeking the procedure.
10 states ask whether the abortion was performed because of a threat to the patient's health or life.
7 states ask whether the abortion was performed because of rape or incest.
15 states ask whether the abortion was performed because of a diagnosed fetal abnormality.
9 states ask whether the abortion was performed for other reasons (e.g. the patient's economic or familial circumstances).
But yes, indeed, a rapist will use the proposed bills to make money off his victim. That's the major problem there.
Tell you what, I'll make you a deal; legal abortion for rape/incest, no legal abortion otherwise.
There's an estimation of 5% pregnancies by rape and 1% abortion for rape. Let's give in on 5% abortions for rape. That means 95% of abortions will no longer be legal. Happy with that? Because we know the abortion rights lobby is all about rape/incest and no other reason, right?
https://khn.org/news/article/texas-abortion-law-rape-incest-survivors/
So, denial about supporting something THAT DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST is some sort of flaw when R's do it?
Preface: I'm generally anti-abortion, and I understand that the person you're replying to was needlessly unreasonable and disrespectful of his fellow commenters.
Regardless, less of this please.
I agree I was mean in my response. But you don't get to use the most offensive example you can think of (rapists or their rapey families suing the saintly doctor who provided an abortion for the poor, poor woman who got raped) and then turn around when reminded that abortion for rape is a tiny number and cry about being insulted.
Too heated for this site, though. Culture War is a terrible fit for here. I will cool down and step back.
That Florida bill is for show. The particular kind of child abuse they're talking about is certainly egregious, and should be vigorously prosecuted. When individuals reach their majority, the decision (and consequences) are theirs, not their deranged parents'. Arizona's governor got it right.
This seems like outgroup homogeneity bias. People always see the idiots on their own side as an irrelevant bunch of kooks, while the idiots on the _other_ side seem like the core of the movement.
As for the Texas abortion bill, it seems like a clever hack. I don't think it's anyone's idea of what an ideal set of abortion legislation would look like, but for people who are interested in that sort of thing it may be the best that can be done until Roe vs Wade gets overturned. (For the record I'm personally pro-abortion but anti-Roe)
Yes, I think it's both safe and fair to say that there is a bunch of stupid crap on every side of every political divide, left right up down centre across and back in again.
I mean, if it ends up working, then we'll have broader problems because 'sure it's a right, but any private citizen can sue you if you exercise it' will not stay limited to abortion.
I believe some states have already started implementing it for gun laws
That's only as a ploy to get the Supreme Court to reject that legal process.
It's only a problem if juries routinely return 'guilty' verdicts when those suits are filed. And if *that* happens -- what does that tell you about the general public support for the right?
It's sort of discouraging that people seem to think that will be the outcome in Texas. It's basically admitting that you think the right is in fact deeply and broadly unpopular, and if put to the kind of acid test that a jury trial ends up being, with highly specific facts about a particular person and incident under scrutiny, then 12 random citizens will almost always vote it down. Is that really what pro-abortion people generally believe?
I would guess that if Texas implemented a similar law allowing one citizen to sue another for owning a gun, or not having it properly licensed, et cetera, then Texas gun owners would laugh and say "good luck with that," expecting Texas juries to routinely return 'not guilty' verdicts to such lawsuits, and maybe even awarding fees and costs to the defendant to discourage them.
The process is the punishment - if every suit goes to an actual jury, then they'll be very costly even if you win your defence. Only if courts routinely throw out the cases is that not true
Up to a point, sure. But the process is expensive for plaintiffs, too. It costs money and time to file the lawsuit in the first place. To do it with any hope of success you need to get yourself a lawyer to draft the complaint and represent you in pre-trial motions, and a lawyer will generally charge you a $20,000 retainer up front for a case you want to take to trial, if he doesn't think the case has such an outstanding chance of success (with a giant payout) that he's willing to risk taking it on a contingency basis.
In practice, the chilling effect of the prospect of lawsuits only works for big faceless corporations with deep pockets facing lawsuits from highly sympathetic plaintiffs, little old ladies and single mothers and such. In principle the fact that my neighbor could sue me for any number of frivolous reasons -- "Dude! Your stupid tree dropped leaves all over my driveway and I slipped on one and broke an ankle! Incoming lawsuit! -- doesn't have any serious effect on ordinary life, because few individuals have the time and money to be randomly indulging their vengeful impulses.
I think the fear occasioned by the Texas law is different, and probably quite reasonable, because, first, the defendants *are* going to be big faceless organizations with deep pockets, e.g. Planned Parenthood, annual revenue ~$1 billion -- there are no folksy mom-n-pop abortion clinics -- and the potential plaintiffs *are* going to be sympathetic little folks, e.g. some single-mother Hispanic dying of cancer outraged that PP aborted the only grandchild she might ever hold, when her 16-year-old got knocked up (and the 16-year-old is now filled with remorse and regrets it, says she was pressured into it by the counselor). It's not hard to see a Texas jury handing over a few $million in a case like that -- and *only* cases like that would be brought by lawyer sharks looking for a payout, as they always are.
But the fact remains that *if* Texas juries were of the general opinion that a woman had the right to cut a baby out of her womb any time, for any reason, full stop, then after the first half-dozen verdicts for the defendants lawyers would stop taking the cases without chunky retainers, and the whole thing would peter out. So the ultimate decision point is: what do Texans who sit on juries think, by and large?
This assumes that:
1) Jury nullification is much more effective than it is.
2) That juries are some sort of random selection representative of the state as a whole (how confident is your not-hypothetical in california gun-owner? Or for that matter one who brought their gun with them to Austin?)
3) That the target is only very rarely the extremely sympathetic gun owner/abortion receiver. The way the law is written is to target basically anyone involved. You think you can't find a Jury in Austin to fine Glock?
4) Rights are expressly not supposed to be subject to this sort of community standard. If they were, then free speech would be far narrower than it is (hello compulsory pledge of allegiance and flag burning bar), rights of assembly likewise (goodbye any protest not popular in the area it's occurring).
5) Rights are supposed to be rights even if the exerciser is unsympathetic.
6) Oh, and if you win, you get your attorney fees paid by the other side, but only if you're the plaintiff. So, your whole 'won't be worth it to sue' is simply false.
1) OJ Simpson.
2) Er...that's why they pick juries by random selection from the voter rolls. They're pretty much ipso facto representative of the county. You can argue some counties will be more sympathetic to the plaintiff, and some to the defendant, so there will be some lumpiness in the results, but the essential question is, across the entire state, of which type of county do you have more? If the answer is "those that would strongly support the defendant you betcha!" then it seems dubious to me the law would've passed in the first place. It seems likely Texas lawmakers know their consituents.
3) It will *always* be a sympathetic plaintiff and an unsympathetic defendant. That's how tort law generally works, no lawyer with a brain files any other type of lawsuit. The question is -- how many of each are there? Yes, you could certainly get one (1) Austin jury to award $1 million out of Glock's pockets. Good luck duplicating that dozens of times across the entire state, in which case Glock just regards this as a cost of doing business, like a random occasional state license fee. If Planned Parenthood can have the same level of success, they have nothing to fear from this law.
4) Sure, but I don't agree abortion is a constitutional right. Feel free to point me to the plain text in the US or Texas Constitutions that says otherwise, or some long English common law tradition that supports it as a natural right. In my opinion Harry Blackmun basically just pulled a right to abortion out of his ass because it suited the political climate of 1973, so I am completely unimpressed with any argument that says it enjoys a status superior to the will of the majority. Speaking strictly as to its legal merits, this is one of the dumbest and least justified decisions by the Supreme Court ever, ranking right up there with Dred Scott and Plessy.
That doesn't mean I would support criminalizing abortion, mind you. It just means I think the question belongs squarely within the purview of the majority to decide.
1) Anecdote.
2) Yes, that's why I expressly reference state vs. smaller areas. The point is that you can forum shop fairly easily with any large organization.
3) Yes? But the point is, they don't have to sue the woman who's had her rapist's fetus aborted, they can just make it so she can't do that, by suing every provider out of existence.
4) Except it currently is a constitutional right! This is a standard is-ought problem. Which is the point. If you want to argue that it shouldn't be, go right ahead, but so long as it remains a constitutional right, this sort of structure is wildly dangerous.
You wouldn't consider it a problem to have to defend against a lawsuit if that lawsuit ultimately failed? I envy the amount of free time you have, and spare cash for lawyers, and calm confidence that the legal system always produces the right outcome.
I certainly would consider it a problem personally. That's why I wouldn't make a career of providing abortions. For that matter, it's also why I wouldn't ever be an obstetrician, since they get sued even more often and have to fork out enormous insurance premiums.
But that has nothing to do with what I said. I said it wouldn't be a problem socially, meaning this model isn't going to change the general nature of the social contract. There's nothing new here, it's just yet one more way of having the majority decide the issue.
And I also said it sounds like the people who are pissed about it are pissed exactly *because* they think the majority is going to weigh in here, and decide agaisnt them. That's pretty bad optics. It's basically admitting that what you want is to impose your minority viewpoint on the whole state. You'd better have a damn good reason for that -- something a lot more persuasive than "gosh this is sure inconvenient for my happy swinging free sex youthful libertine lifestyle, or for my ability to persuade the hot girl in calculus class that saving herself for marriage is silly."
There are many implementations of majority rule. In the extreme case, 51% of the population can legitimately decide to execute the remaining 49% for violating community standards. The only question is practicality - is the minority capable of successful resistance.
Obviously that's a thought experiment/straw man/bailey. But let's say that 51% of the population demand that all pregnancies end in birth. Miscarriages don't exist; if the baby isn't born alive, it's someone's fault. Babies are never conceived by rape ; either rape never occurs (only false accusation of rape), or consent is required for impregnation to occur. They know this to be true, having been assured it by their religious and political leaders.
That's OK, by your definition of majority rule. We'll bury some of the mothers, jail or bankrupt anyone who experiences a spontaneous miscarriage, and pile up the babies at the local garbage dump for would be adoptive parents to collect. Community values win.
At what point is it not OK? Suppose 51% of the population considers Christianity to be a pernicious religion, and decides to ban it? Same law, except the offense I can sue my neighbour for is attempting to inculcate false/pernicious beliefs.
Suppose only 49% of the local population believes that abortion and/or Christianity is despicable and worthy of punishment, but they are very loud and enthusiastic. Well funded, too, since neighbouring areas and/or very rich people predominantly agree with them?
How about 30%? 10%?
I'm looking for the motte here. But not just in terms of numbers.
What rules are trivial enough/harmless enough that it's OK to impose them based on the wishes of 51% of the population? Or 51% of the voting population? Or 51% of those elected by 51% of the voting population?
The US explicitly exempts religion from things that can be imposed by 51%. Except when it comes in by the back door, as "morality" or abortion. I think we should either enforce the religion ban more scrupulously, possibly reducing division, or get rid of it entirely, and start discussing banning everyone's favorite justification for violence, child abuse, slavery, and similar.
The US Constitution (not to mention many State constitutions) explicitly protect gun ownership. Abortion protections have been incoherently manufactured.
Also, the US Congress passed the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to specifically address people filing nuisance lawsuits against people in the gun business. Yet they still get filed and have enough of an impact to generated multi-million-dollar settlements to this day.
Yes? Anyone you know have a real problem getting a gun? Nobody I know does, and I live in the most absurdly anti-gun state in the Union. There is no guarantee in this vale o' tears that those things to which you have a right will not only be possible but easy, free from nuisance and friction from the fact that 300 million other people occupy this polity with you.
"Anyone you know have a real problem getting a gun?"
Yes, absolutely. I have a friend who would love to try USPSA but will need to move out of Albany county and wait at least two years in order to do so.
I get classified as right-leaning (and occasionally right of Genghis Khan) but I think of it more as "people who are classified right agree with me on a lot of these" rather than "I agree with the right leaning people." (FWIW)
In the steelman/most charitable read that I can do of your hypothesis, "cringe", "dumb shit" and even "rarely" are doing a great deal of work here. I think that you just *don't get* how incredibly bone-headed, offensive, and just plain dumb a lot of left-sourced ideas and policies are. Or - more likely - you don't see how bone-headed, offensive, and 'cringe' they seem to me (and other people on the right.)
It might be helpful to think of not just one Overton window, but multiple ones - and two distinct ones for the two political camps/tribes. Stuff like pronouns, dyed hair, land acknowledgements, celebration of overt homosexual activity - all eye-roll/retch inducing at best to one side. Flag waving, tractors, military groupie ism, and "My Town" (Montgomery Gentry) probably have the same effect.
As for stuff that the left does politically that gets my goat -
- to be clear, on my best days, this is just a difference in values, I oppose these things but understand the give and take of a democracy, you win some, you lose some. It's only on my worst days that I remember that in American politics, there is the stupid party and then there is the evil party and I'm on the dumb side of the river -
- Attempting to legalize abortion up to the day of birth. Defund the police. Pigford 'reparations'. "You didn't build that". BLM sit-ins & kneel-ins at Congress. John Lewis's funeral. California regulations on gasoline, agriculture, carcinogen labeling, firearms...wait, better make that 'California regulations' period. Cargo planes full of cash to the Iranians. "Undocumented aliens" & the whole 'kids in cages' smear campaign.
I could go on, but please don't tempt me to do so. I would rather talk about why I don't find banning elective abortions cringe and why I am deeply troubled by the indoctrination I see going on with my neices in public schools - or, frankly, I'd rather hear you talk about - as a quasi rationalist - why you support any of the problematic positions I listed above. Perhaps - if we try - we could bring more light than heat to the various issues.
"Attempting to legalize abortion up to the day of birth."
I don't support this. Most left-liberals I know don't support this. (In fact, the only person I know who *does* support it is a New Atheist right-libertarian.) It's not actually legal anywhere in the country, and there has been very little push to make it legal.
"You didn't build that."
I literally don't know what this is even referring to.
"John Lewis's funeral."
Again, I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What was wrong with Lewis's funeral? It was a bipartisan event where a Republican ex-President was among the distinguished speakers.
"Cargo planes full of cash to the Iranians."
I don't know what you're referencing here either. At present, the U.S. only gives $917,676 per year in foreign aid to Iran, which is far less than we give to most other developing countries (for contrast, we give over $1 BILLION per year to Iraq). If you're referring to some other, illicit situation happening in secret, then consider me doubtful; that sounds like exactly the sort of baseless conspiracy theory that gets shared by the same types of people who spend hours rambling about Benghazi and think Obama was actually an Islamic fundamentalist from Kenya.
So.It could be read as a debt repayment , or as ransom?
Considering that this was the repayment of a debt that we'd owed for decades, I don't find it objectionable. I personally think individuals and organizations should repay their debts even in situations where they're no longer on good terms with their debtors. If we were actually engaged in an active hot war with Iran, then obviously we shouldn't give them any money until after the war ends and a peace has been negotiated, but for any situation less extreme than that, I think paying them back is the right call.
Still, given that Iran is a major geopolitical rival of ours with hostile intent towards our regional allies, I can understand why conservatives would oppose this decision too. In that regard, I don't find criticism of Obama's decision to be objectionable either, even if I don't agree with it.
What I *do* find objectionable is the sort of narrative that tends to emerge around things like this, particularly among certain types of right-wing populists, wherein Obama is not merely portrayed as a weak or overly idealistic leader who puts honor/morality before pragmatism, but as an actual traitor who secretly hates America and wants our enemies to win. If the right-wing criticism of Obama's foreign policy was more like old-school conservative criticism of Jimmy Carter, I'd be more inclined to simply agree to disagree. (I'll even admit that, given recent events, McCain and Romney were right about Putin and Obama was wrong.) But a very vocal subset of the right treats Obama less like Carter and more like Bin Laden himself.
"You didn't build that" was a statement by Obama in one of his campaign speeches. The full quote is as follows:
"Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT." (emphasis mine.)
This is lifted from a longer speech that makes it clear that the "that" in question is the roads and bridges, as part of a broader point RE: the social contract and how successful people in society aren't atomic Great Men who built themselves ex nihilo and depended on a strong social support structure to reach the place where they are today (and thus have some kind of obligation to their community or society at large). Right-wing pundits immediately jumped on the ambiguity of phrasing in order to suggest that Obama was impugning hard-working small business owners by suggesting they don't DESERVE their success, and in fact may be plotting to take their property and possessions as part of his master plan to initiate some kind of socialist class warfare in America (ah, the days when class warfare was seen as the biggest threat instead of a race-war). Anyone who believes I am misrepresenting Obama's speech may read it in full here and draw their own conclusions about whether this speech is one being given by some neo-Leninist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that#Speech
"Anyone who believes I am misrepresenting Obama's speech may read it in full here and draw their own conclusions about whether this speech is one being given by some neo-Leninist"
I definitely wouldn't think that, since any actual Marxist-Leninist would vehemently reject the sort of "we're all in this together" argument that Obama was making, on the grounds that it was too *charitable* towards business owners. After all, it fundamentally asserts that business owners being able to thrive is a good thing - they just didn't accomplish it alone and should be expected to give something back to society, in exchange for everything that society has given them. A true Leninist would argue that business owners were parasites who never should've been allowed to thrive in the first place.
Interestingly, I read an article by a modern-day Marxist just a few days ago that emphasized this exact point: https://medium.com/@re.Marx/the-social-democratic-alternative-761cb633a4
"The liberal argument is that the rich, having been lucky and successful, should be obligated to give back to the system which has done so well for them. [...] The ethical (Socialist) case for social democratic reforms is that we should use the state to actively fight back against the economy — the state is a tool for the working class to claw back more of the value they created and ought to have all the rights to, but which the system siphoned out of their hands. This is a very different logic than the Liberal case, which is that we should use the state to supersede the economy, meaning to give people more than they have earned, because they are human beings, and human beings ought to live good lives."
The line has some extra bitterness in that the present US government didn't build any of that either - most US infrastructure is from generations ago, and has in many cases not even been maintained in the last 40 years let alone updated and improved upon.
A conspiracy theory reminiscent of the Iran CONTRA Affair, perhaps? The USG has a long history of illicit secrets (see eg. the spying that Snowden blew the whistle on, for a more recent example), plenty of conspiracies are real, and I wouldn't be shocked if the trend to associate "conspiracy theories" with people who think the moon landing was faked was in fact itself the result of a CIA conspiracy psy-op
"Attempting to legalize abortion up to the day of birth."
I don't support this. Most left-liberals I know don't support this. (In fact, the only person I know who *does* support it is a New Atheist right-libertarian.) It's not actually legal anywhere in the country, and there has been very little push to make it legal."
Well the duly elected (D)-after-the-name blackface aficionado governor of the state of Virginia does. Surely you're not claiming that he's less representative of the Democratic party than you are?
That isn't true. Virginia currently allows abortion until the 25th week of pregnancy, which is admittedly later than a lot of other states, but still nowhere near allowing it "up to the day of birth." Governor Northam did not oppose this, he simply fought against Republican efforts to prohibit abortion after 20 weeks instead.
Realistically, the difference between 20 weeks and 25 weeks isn't all that big of a deal, considering most abortions happen far earlier. So the entire pro-life vs. pro-choice debate in Virginia during Northam's Governorship was actually pretty tame, and I would consider it a rather low-stakes conflict for both sides. Virginia being the fairly moderate purple state that it is, neither a complete ban on abortion nor legalization of abortion until birth were ever actually on the table.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Virginia
From the far-rightwing CNN:
"So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon, told Washington radio station WTOP. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
From ye olde Beeb:
"The Democrat who sponsored the measure said it would allow abortions at any point in pregnancy up until the point of childbirth in certain cases."
But believe what you want to, I'm not the boss of you.
I looked up that quote and you're leaving out some very essential context. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/meme-misquotes-virginia-governor-on-abortion-bill/
Northam was referring to situations where third-term abortions were performed because the mother's health was in serious danger. This is a rare conditional exception only allowed under the most extreme circumstances (only 2 third-term abortions have been performed in Virginia since 2000). This isn't remotely the same as legalizing third-term abortions in a more general sense - at least, no more than allowing surgeons to perform amputations is equivalent to legalizing dismemberment. It's also worth noting that even in these rare cases where third-term abortions is allowed because the mother's life is in danger, the doctors are still obligated to keep the baby alive outside of the mother's body if it's viable (barring further exceptions for cases where the baby is severely deformed, guaranteed to die within a matter of days anyway, in extreme pain, etc.).
For the 99.9% of pregnant women who aren't in severe and potentially life-threatening danger, abortion is only legally allowed in Virginia until the 25th week of pregnancy. This is an indisputable fact, and you can feel free to look it up yourself if you don't believe me.
As for some of the stuff I do actually (at least partially) agree with:
"Defund the police."
I think the problem with this is more unclear messaging than anything else. You have some liberals who use it to mean "demilitarize the police, they don't need APVs and machine guns, it's both a waste of money and makes them seem more like a foreign occupation force than like public civil servants." You have others who use it to mean "take away some funding from police and use it to fund other types of emergency responders instead, so we can send proper mental health professionals to deal with troubled and unstable people, instead of sending cops who might be inclined to treat them as criminals and escalate the situation." And then you have the radical far-left anarchist types who use it to mean "literally abolish the police completely so we can have a totally lawless, stateless society," which most liberals would consider to be absolutely ridiculous and unworkable, but it still gets lumped together with the more reasonable interpretations in the public eye.
"Pigford 'reparations'."
Given the circumstances, I actually do think the court's decision in this case was justified and correct. And I say that as someone who doesn't support "reparations" in the broader sense of just giving out money to the descendants of African-American slaves. As for the claim that the reparations program ended up being used fraudulently, obviously that's a bad thing to the extent that it happened, but I'm skeptical that it happened to anywhere near the degree that conservative pundits claim. Even if it did, all that proves is that the federal government botched the execution, not that the initial court decision was wrong.
""Undocumented aliens" & the whole 'kids in cages' smear campaign."
I oppose the border camps on both moral and practical grounds. I will concede that some liberals used it as a specific bludgeon against Trump while selectively ignoring the fact that the same thing happened under Obama, and is now continuing to happen under Biden. And I can definitely understand why that sort of hypocrisy might seem frustrating to people on the right. But I opposed these policies back during the Obama administration too, and continue to oppose them now; it was never a "gotcha" against Trumpers for me, I'm just actually, genuinely opposed to the idea of keeping children in what effectively amount to internment camps, regardless of which President or political party happens to be overseeing those camps at any given time.
There's nothing unreasonable about the 'Don't say Gay' bill. The left want to control people's speech, so the right fights back. It doesn't remotely compare the excesses of woke nonsense pervading every institution in the country.
You say that, but how is it true?
The majority of consumers of media are liberal. Most money is controlled by liberals.
In a capitalist society, that means liberals' get the vote.
In the last 20 years, republicans have only gotten the majority of the votes for any branch of government 4 times.
You see woke shit everywhere, because 51+% of everyone is woke-er than you.
I don't see anything wrong with prohibiting the public schools from talking to K-3 students about sex and sexuality. That stuff clearly belongs at home, at that tiny tender age, even assuming your average 7-year-old would even understand what the hell you're talking about.
So I'm 100% happy to own that one, and I see no indication that anyone on the right (or what I would consider the center) feels differently. It doesn't embarrass me a shred, and indeed if I were to come across someone who *did* without embarassment support the idea of a sexuality-education curriculum in kindergarten, I'd consider that person a little strangely obsessed with sexuality, and children, two things that don't really go together well. Definitely I'd want such a person to get a background check before being allowed to volunteer in the classroom.
It's worth noting that the particulars of the implementation and wording of that bill are very strange, it's not simply banning sex ed below a certain age. Similarly, the Texas anti-abortion bill - empowering individuals to sue for violations of the law rather than doing things as the State is *weird* and probably largely an attempted end-run around constitutional restrictions on what the state can prohibit.
Edit: I'm basing this off discussion I've seen elsewhere, and I'm not a lawyer nor an American so read with a healthy pile of salt.
I've read the bill. There's only 4 pages besides the preamble, and it's written in plain language. You can read it for yourself here (caution PDF):
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/PDF
The only part that has anything to do with sex is 100.42 section 8(c)3, which reads in its entirety as "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
That doesn't seem like strange wording to me. Indeed, by the standards of the law it seems unusually plain and sensible, even modest, and one would think pretty uncontroversial. Who thinks it's rather important on the contrary that there be regular classroom instruction in sexual orientation in grades K-3? As I said, I would find someone with that as a high social priority a little disturbingly interested in the sexual awareness of young children.
Just to give you an example: How would you feel if someone sued you (a school district, in this case I guess.) for using the any of : "He, She, Husband, Wife, Boy, Girl" as gendered words?
'cause the bill allows that. I'm 100% sure some leftist is gonna do it too, cause the bill also guarantees that the state will cover legal costs, regardless of the outcome.
First of all, people can file a lawsuit for any reason they like, it doesn't have to be reasonable. If you want the law to limit lawsuits being filed to only those which are "reasonable" by some standard, or have any chance at all of succeeding, you need to begin by entirely overhauling the tort system[1]. So let's stick with the world as it actually is.
And in that world, school districts get sued all the time already, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for stupid reasons. Indeed, that's a fact o' life when you're a big organization. It happens to Google and Wal-Mart, too. So the idea that there is something *new and scary* happening here is unrealistic. There isn't, and if I ran a Florida school district I doubt I'd see any need to beef up our legal staff -- already substantial -- to handle a big uptick in lawsuits, especially because the law here is gratifyingly specific in terms of what we have to do to have a pretty bulletproof defense. You kind of have to be grossly incompetent or wilfully defiant to open yourself up to losing a suit.
Most school district lawsuits are over "special needs" kinds of stuff, these days -- assertions that the school district isn't meeting the needs of this student or that with some kind of asserted disability. Can I assume that as a man of the left the fact that school districts would be sued a lot more often was *not* a reason you might have opposed Title IX, the ADA, or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation ACt of 1973? If so, well...sauce, goose, gander. Once you accept that the hammer of the lawsuit is appropriate to achieve *your* social aims, you can't very well argue your opponents are being uniquely vicious in also deploying it, at least, not if you want to be logically consistent.
Finally, I find your specific example incomprehensible. While I am not a lawyer, I see nothing in the text of the bill that would give such a lawsuit a snowball's chance in hell of not being simply dismissed the moment a district lawyer spends 15 minutes putting together a motion to do so. I'm not even 100% sure I understand what you mean by using "gendered" words, since English nouns don't have a gender. If you're saying someone might file a lawsuit because a kindergarten teacher called a boy a boy...uh, well, see above. I can't imagine a Florida judge taking more than 30 seconds to dismiss it, once he or she stops laughing.
Finally, I don't see anything in the bill that guarantees legal costs regardless of outcome. Indeed, the only provision in the bill is in (c)7(b)(II), which says "...A court may award damage and ahall award reasonable attorney fees and costs to a parent who receives declaratory or injunctive relief." So obviously the plaintiff needs to first win his or her suit before he can hope for getting his costs covered.
This is not at all unusual in tort law generally -- courts can and do frequently award costs to the winner of a civil suit. The reason it's spelled out in this law is that ordinarily a school district, being an arm of the state, enjoys sovereign immunity and can't be sued at all, certainly can't be held liable for someone's costs in doing so. The Legislature has to specifically waive that immunity for lawsuits to be heard at all, which is what they're doing here.
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[1] You'd probably need to also kill off 85% of the plaintiff lawyers, which is OK by me.
From the law:
Request the Commissioner of Education to appoint a special magistrate who is a member of The Florida Bar in good standing and who has at least 5 years' experience in administrative law. The special magistrate shall determine facts relating to the dispute over the school district procedure or practice, consider information provided by the school district, and render a recommended decision for resolution to the State Board of Education within 30 days after receipt of the request by the parent. The State Board of Education must approve or reject the recommended decision at its next regularly scheduled meeting that is more than 7 calendar days and no more than 30 days after the date the recommended decision is transmitted. The costs of the special magistrate shall be borne by the school district. The State Board of Education shall adopt rules, including forms, necessary to implement this subparagraph.
Does it ? I mean, yes, technically you can sue anyone over anything, but that's not exclusive to this one bill. IANAL by any means, but the plain reading of that passage would imply that saying "here are some delicious cookies my wife baked yesterday" would be allowed; whereas saying, "my wife baked some cookies yesterday after we, ah, kissed all night because that's what married couples do, ask me how" would be disallowed. And even then, it would only be disallowed in the context of classroom instruction during official class hours, not in general.
This is wrong. The decision is left entirely up to the plaintiff, and legal fees are payed by the district win or lose.
Indeed, it's much more likely someone on the progressive side *will* sue a school district for using "husband/wife" or "mother/father" than that someone on the right will sue over "you said 'gay'!!!!"
Then why did your guy write the bill that way?
IF you don't want paper terrorism, stop encouraging it.
Well, yeah, the Texas anti-abortion bill is clearly a hack intended to get around Roe v. Wade. It's a pretty brilliant hack, too (IMO), since it allows the state of Texas to retain a lot of control over anti-abortion enforcement, while completely ignoring any federal restrictions, by distributing enforcement over private individuals. I mean, if I were a Supreme Court judge, I'd probably go "LOL, I see what you did there, now it's indictment time for you", but I guess they don't have the power to do that...
I do not want brilliant hacks to bypass checks and balances to exist or be rewarded. I'm endlessly baffled by fellow right-wingers who are ready to cut down every wall in the land to get at the Devil. NO, THOSE WALLS PROTECT YOU TOO.
FWIW I have right-wing as well as left-wing friends, and I see this attitude from both sides. The overall impression is that the other side is so irrational and/or evil that talking to them is pointless; and their policies are so harmful as to constitute an existential threat. Therefore, stopping them should be our primary goal, to the exclusion of all other goals, such as e.g. maintaining our venerable democratic institutions.
Sometimes I ask my friends, "do you want a civil war ? Because that's how you get a civil war", but the answer is usually, "well if there's a war than obviously my side will score an early and decisive victory anyway, so bring it". Again, both sides say this.
The left perspective is, for example: Republicans will delay a judicial conformation for n months as "Too close to an election", then immediately turn around and force through their pick after their guy lost.
Obama tried to govern with them; he gave them concision after concession, and they still refused to participate in government.
It is pointless to treat the republican party as members partners in government. They would rather "Drown the government in a bathtub" than lose give up an inch at any point for any reason.
So, what the dems are currently doing (pretending that they are part of a functional society like the good old days) is foolish. The republicans treat the democrats like they are enemies, not opposition. The Democrats need to do the same.
They won't though, because the are procedure worshipping neo-liberals.
I don't mind the kids in his class knowing Mr Jones is gay. I don't mind Mr Jones telling them his boyfriend is named Brian. I do mind Mr Jones claiming he is cowering in fear and cannot do his job unless he can tell his class of five year olds every single detail about his personal life.
So far as I can tell, nothing in the Florida law prevents Mr Jones from introducing his boyfriend or husband to the class in a matter of fact way, if the latter happens to turn up in the normal way, and if the kids have basic questions ("Do you love each other? Are you married? Do you live together?") they can ask and within some reasonable limits (e.g. not "Where do you poke your penis since he doesn't have a vagina?" should that even happen) he can answer, just as if Mr Jones had suffered the amputation of a hand and the kids wanted to poke at his prosthesis and ask if he was born that way.
If the kids' questions get too weird (which seems generally very unlikely), Mr Jones is expected to tell them this is one of those subjects not suitable for classroom discussion, like the details of how you wipe your ass when you are missing your right hand, why little Joey's father is in jail, or what exactly happened to little Suzy's mother that we call "rape," and they should ask their parents for more help in private at home. All of which seems like basic classroom decorum, mutual respect, and good manners to me already.
What the law appears to rule out is Mr Jones (or his school, or school district) working up a specific extended curriculum on his or their own that sets out to teach the 5-year-olds all about sex and sexual identity. If that's his, or their, thing, then they need to wait at least until 4th grade, and then consult with some random state board of stuffed shirts -- child psychologists, teachers with enormous tenure, assorted educrats and lawyers, the usual rabble -- who will set standards for this the way they set standards for biology and history (which are also traditionally fraught). Badly, of course, but with the modest saving grace that they represent the Will o' The People, bless their hearts.
I really really think you have to strain a bit to ignore the problems here. If that gay teacher is married and mentions a same sex spouse, even in passing, that can be filtered through an innocent kid and hostile parents as classroom instruction about how gay people can get married, a thing the parents may well not agree with.
And then what? There's a three or four step process that is entirely at the district's expense where the parent can complain, escalate, call in a special magistrate and finally bring an action.
So what to do? Maybe don't hire any gay people if you're a school district. Too much trouble. And if you're a gay teacher? Probably best just not to say anything. Or, as people on my side of the aisle are calling it, Don't Say Gay.
And, again, I think this is the point, the bailey, and the whole "all we mean is textbooks and lesson plans" is the motte.
Paranoid nonsense. You want to fret about slippery slopes, that ship left circa Obergefell. The State is going to establish curriculum standards in this area, because the district will ask them to do so in self-defense, if nothing else, and because there *are* people who want this kind of instruction.
So then there will *be* an official definition of what constitutes "an education curriculum" in this area, and after a while there will be some set of decisions reached by special masters and courts that further refine the definition of that term -- and I am very confident it will *not* include "random comments about his personal life that a teacher shares with his kids," any more than an observation that you're suffering from an antibiotic-resistant infection would trigger some statute that you are sneaking in instruction in evolution, or that if the band volunteer mom says "if we all pitch in $5 we can get the teacher a nice end of the year present" she can be nailed for teaching mathematics without a certificate.
You want a guarantee that nobody will interpret the statute crazily? Check in with St. Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates, such guarantees don't exist in this mortal vale. We rely on people to be reasonable, and, if they aren't, we rely on other people -- administrators, other teachers and parents, the court system, juries, the voters and local community -- to make them straighten out. It's not really possible to write down in the law a precise algorithm for reasonableness and then have every living soul robotically and perfectly execute it. If this doesn't work for you, you shouldn't really be living in a republic.
I don't think I'm being paranoid. And I don't think I'm describing someone being crazy. I think this is the intended use, and I think we'll be seeing it.
The stuff about keeping Raine Bowe from teaching first graders how to masturbate is the nonsense. That wasn't happening (and shouldn't!). That's the scare tactics to get this shit in place.
There are vastly more pedophile public school teachers than pedophile priests. Unfortunately for them, the Priest's Union doesn't make sufficiently large campaign donations.
I don't know much about the "don't say gay" bill itself, but I generally am entirely in favor of everything up to and inclusive of word-by-word scripts of what k-12 teachers are allowed to say, so long as said scripts are created/enforced by elected officials or some other voting mechanism.
Public school teachers are agents of the state. They aren't magic pixies that just materialize out of thin air; they are government employees hired by the government to deliver government-mandated messaging to kids whose parents potentially face pretty severe penalties if they don't allow the government to do so.
In a situation where the government (or an individual agent of the government acting within the discretion the government had given them) decided that my kids should spend the entire schoolday learning about geology (and only geology) nobody would find it weird if I lobbied the government to change the content to be more varied. Nobody would be surprised or offended (besides geologists) if the government listened to me and a sufficiently intimidating amount of other like-minded voters and made some rules to enforce our wishes.
I've found everyone intuitively understands that agents of the government should ultimately answer to voters in the normal way that's always happened (i.e., voters elect people who do things they think will get them reelected) right up to the point at which they really, really want the government to act contrary to the will of the voters.
Once a person wants the government to act contrary to the will of their constituency, all that goes out the window and suddenly government agents deserve 100% free speech and zero voter accountability. It's weird, but luckily the solution is "keep voting for representatives who direct their agents in ways you like", so it's not a gigantic problem.
there is a bit of a discussion to be had as to whether state law is appropriate when school boards exist, and when not all schools are government run, but I do agree with the thrust of your point that the voters should ultimately have a say (whether directly or via the platforms of elected representatives) in the public school curriculum
The right-wing equivalent of Asadists is like, actual monarchists and they are indeed viewed as silly. The comparison you're making is like a right-winger going "C'mon, we all shun the guys with swastika tattoos on their faces but this isn't the case on the left, look at all these crazy lefties talking about white privilege."
+1. The right feels the same way about it's crazies as the OP describes, but disagrees about who the crazies are. I like the Texas and Florida bills, those seem fairly central Republican. The white-supremacists and Q-Anon prophets, those are crazies who are embarrassing.
Anyone care to give a ELI5 description of what an Asadist is? Google is failing to bring up anything plausible.
Woops, I copied Nah's misspelling, we're talking about (I assume) Assadists, as in supporters of Assad's regime in Syria.
It's not even that. You've got people openly marching under the hammer and sickle, and everyone's supposed to pretend that they're not Stalin-level evil.
I'm late to the argument, but here's one thing I still have to add.
Your media bubble not only forgot to inform you about the contents of the Florida bill, it also forgot to inform you that the Florida bill is quite popular in Florida on both sides.
This article has links to 2 polls, one of which specifically targeted likely Democratic voters:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/floridas-parental-rights-bill-popular-voters-despite-democratic-attacks
Money quote:
""Should students in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade be taught about sexual orientation in the classroom by their teachers?" Floridians for Economic Advancement asked "likely Democratic voters" in a poll from March 17 to March 20.
Approximately 52% of Democrat-leaning voters replied that they do not approve such education, with only 36% of those polled voicing support for teaching kindergarten through third-grade classes about sexuality. Twelve percent said that they were not sure."
(I would have expected a much bigger advantage here, but I am guessing it's a combination of the divide between people who have kids and those who do not have kids and of the divide between people who think and those who just repeat talking points.)
> "Should students in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade be taught about sexual orientation in the classroom by their teachers?"... 52% of Democrat-leaning ... do not approve
"Should the teacher X" is not an inverse form of the question "should the teacher be legally prohibited from X", so this poll result isn't measuring what you seem to think it is.
The bill is also vague about what exactly it is banning, so that even if you asked people if they support what the bill says, their interpretation of the bill could easily differ from that of a court. Arguably the confusion is intentional: "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." Who writes state standards? Will those standards be vague too? Will the standards change when the legislature does? Not at all clear to me...
How is the interpretation of the bill by the people supposed to radically diverge from the interpretation by a court? Are you forgetting that "a court" means a jury, and a jury is made up of....the people?
IANAL but I thought judges interpreted law, created precedents and then wrote "jury instructions" with those interpretations. Secondly, any time there is more than one interpretation, nobody knows what interpretation will win out in court, and even if you win the case, you still lose because months of court proceedings are stressful and time-consuming. For these reasons, no one wants a court case against them, so people and their bosses tend to use conservative interpretations so as not to be the first one to be sued (assuming this is a civil thing). Thirdly, as I was saying, laws whose practical meaning is impossible to discern by themselves, because they incorporate other texts by reference are rarely deciphered by the public.
I came across this essay yesterday: https://geraldrogue.substack.com/p/medicalization-and-colonization
This piece suggests that COVID policies like lockdowns and vaccine passports were deliberately designed to be biased based on race and class, basically a way for white political leaders to screw over Blacks, Hispanics, etc. while pretending to be neutral by using “identity politics” as a deception.
While I’m not sure I can fully agree with the author’s POV, he does raise some interesting questions that I don’t have answers to:
1. Whether governments knew in advance about the demographics of folks who would be affected by COVID policies.
2. Whether scientists are researching things objectively with COVID and the vaccines, or if it’s possible that they’re influenced by politics/funding/other considerations.
3. Whether many/most white liberals really are racist without admitting it (he gives the examples of “good schools” and gentrification in addition to pandemic policies). I don’t think this is an accurate judgment, but I’m a white male liberal myself so it’s possible I’m biased here.
Has anyone else thought about this or seen similar pieces in the COVID context?
In my experience, the most common mechanism(*) for outcomes that favor elites over ordinary folks, is that the folks making the decisions are members of the elite in question, or at least aspire to it, and are more or less consciously thinking about "folks like us". To the extent they think about folks not like (their) us, it's commonly in oversimplified ways (they are all the same, or fall into very few categories, mostly informed by stereotype rather than personal acquaintance).
That's not to say some don't go out of their way to make life harder for certain groups, generally of folks not like them, but I tend to prefer not to attribute to malice anything adequately explained by ignorance and/or stupidity(**).
In this case, the folks making the decisions would generally have been digital natives, living in relatively large/isolated homes, owning automobiles, and mostly able to work from home.
Pretty much all of the idiocy I've seen mandated from on high with regard to covid has been adequately explained by decisions being made by prosperous college-educated office workers.
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(*) Well, that and opportunities for personal profit, but that mostly doesn't seem to explain these disparities.
(**) Note also that this kind of ignorant decision making is generally regarded as a component of "systemic racism", when the decision makers are predominantly white. I avoid phrasing that as the decision makers "being racist without realizing it", as that phrasing tends to add more heat than light. Also, I don't have any statistics about the racial distribution of the decision makers, whereas "office worker", "college educated", and "under retirement age" come with the territory - no statistics required.
He starts off with Christopher Columbus and ends with Black Panther and apparently the Wakandan Space Programme is going to colonise the stars (because White People Cannot).
I don't know about you, but I think I hear a grindstone whirring away furiously in the background. I am willing to bet that he would equally write an article that "It's Racism" had governments adopted the opposite approach. Or if there was a recommendation to wear balaclavas in cold weather. Or pretty much anything you like.
This is just black nationalist nonsense. The same people enacting these covid policies stood by and allowed blacks to riot and loot without barely a slap on the wrist, are enacting soft on crime policies that help the majority black criminal populations in these cities, support colleges discriminating against white applicants in favor of less capable black applicants, in favor of government and corporations giving hiring preferences to black applicants, in favor of teaching black nationalist talking points in schools, and so on.
"Good schools" are a myth. There's NO evidence that there are "good schools" independent of the student population, and school voucher lottery programs show that the student matters more than the school ever will.
Hanlon's Razor applies. The consensus COVID response was hastily designed by upper-middle-class political and media elites, so it was optimized for causing minimal inconvenience to upper-middle-class elites (who are incidentally mostly white). If those policies had harsher effects on other demographics, it's because upper-middle-class elites have a hard time seeing things from other people's point of view, and were in too much of a hurry to bother. Not a unique failing of the upper middle class, to be sure, but they were the ones who had the power to screw up in a big way on this one.
It seems obvious to me that lockdown and similar policies disproportionately hurt the poor, as all crises tend to do. Because blacks and hispanics are poorer on average, it makes sense that they were hurt more on average, but calling this "deliberately designed" is misleading at best.
In other words, this is a typical instance of identity politics infringing on socialism's turf, because the socialist framework in still largely unacceptable in American discourse. Of course, there are also not purely economical reasons for poorness of certain racial groups, but the discourse is even less equipped to deal with those.
Thanks everyone for your responses, they helped to put a finger on what I was thinking in an abstract sense but couldn’t find the words to frame the argument.
I agree with the idea that these policies have disparate impacts on the poor, on Black people, etc. but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were designed to do so specifically. (analogy: correlation vs. causation) While “systemic racism” is a thing, the power differential may be a better explanation for the impacts. Though it does seem like a bit of a “turtles all the way down” issue, as then I’m thinking on whether the power differentials themselves are justified.
I will say that personally I’ve supported lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc., you could say by default, as I figure the experts generally know what they’re doing. But I also realize now after reading your responses that I’ve had the privilege of being upper-middle-class and working from home over the past 2 years. So I can see how someone in a different position might take a different view of things.
[Narrator Voice] The experts did not in fact know what they were doing [/Narrator Voice]
But, yeah, if you're too distracted to think it through from multiple perspectives, it's an easy mistake to make. If the *experts* are too distracted to think it through from multiple perspectives, then you get big problems.
And when an "expert" is someone who's name is in a journalist's contact list...
We're posting on Astral Codex Ten because we're looking for help in reviewing/critiquing our manuscript: "God vs the Multiverse: A rational argument for the existence of one God of the universe."
Elie has a PhD in mathematics and Aaron has a bachelor's in physics. We've spent many hours over the past ten years working on the book, trying to make it as clear and convincing as we could.
The book has three parts. The first part develops an argument for an intelligent cause from the fine tuning of the constants and initial conditions. The second part analyzes and critiques multiverse theory. The third part develops a logical and intuitive idea of God (without any discussion of any religion).
While it's written without formalisms in order to be accessible to nonacademics, it involves a significant amount of physics and philosophy. We're trying to find people proficient in physics and/or philosophy (or just smart people) to review it for any significant errors or omissions on our part before we get it published. Also, we want to know if there are weak points (e.g. logically unjustified assumptions, handwaving, etc. ) in our argument that makes it unconvincing.
If you're interested in reviewing it, please contact us ezimmer7 at gmail dot com.
We appreciate any help. Thank you.
I'll pass on reviewing, but congrats on the fine effort and look forward to reading it when it comes out!
Thank you for the kind words, Patrick. I've been reading Scott's posts for a couple of years now, but I've never engaged the community here before.
Fine tuning strikes me as immediately nonsensical. God could have made us survive in the cold vacuum of space if he wanted to. Souls existent independent of the material world and its physical constraints, so there's no reason we couldn't have just been immaterial souls all along. Fine tuning only makes sense if you assume we have to exist not only materially, but as these very particularly kinds of material things and not something radically different based on the prevailing physical laws of a counterfactual universe.
It's a much bigger claim, and much harder to convincingly show, that the laws of nature are fine tuned for intelligent life. It is especially people who are trying to argue for religion, and a special relationship between God and humans, that need to argue that the purpose of the universe is for intelligent life. Someone who wants to make that argument (and a lot of people present fine tuning that way) run into problems similar to the one you are describing.
But in our book we are only trying to establish the existence of an intelligent cause for the universe as whole (e.g. atom, molecules, planets, life, stars, galaxies, etc.) We assume nothing special about human beings other than that we are a small part of an amazingly complex and diverse universe.
"there's no reason we couldn't have just been immaterial souls all along"
Those exist already and are called angels. For humans to exist, we need bodies. Don't ask me why God wanted humans, but He did.
Anyway, is it any more ridiculous than the idea that aliens are in fact simulating the entire universe and we're just entities in a really fancy computer?
Angels can't make mistakes, and so can't learn from them. Likewise, I think they might not be able to forgive, since nothing can really hurt them.
If learning from mistakes and forgiving are good, then that is perhaps sufficient justification for fallibility.
Worth noting that angels can certainly make mistakes in typical Christian theology. I'm not sure about in any other.
The simulation hypothesis is just another way of believing in God - it's a way to be religious for people who don't feel comfortable with the normal religious vocab.
Ordinarily I would be a little tempted, but alas I have just finished a book mostly about a fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, so I'm kind of fed up with the business right now.
For what it's worth, I will say you could be novel in this space, and perhaps address the more thoughtful skeptics more usefully, if you would take a stab at saying *how* you think your God could fine tune the universe. It doesn't really seem sufficient to just wave your hands and say "oh God can do anything" because that gets us close to the child's Sunday-school question of whether God can make a stone so heavy He can't lift it, can cause something to be both black and white, can make a triangle (on a Euclidean plane) with more than 180 degrees in its angles, and so on. If "God" is just a one-syllable way of saying "a process too complicated to explain or understand" then it doesn't seem sufficiently different from what Richard Dawkins would say -- in particular, there's no obvious reason why it has to be connected to the concept of God that has a particular interest in human souls.
I think what really bugs me about arguments in this space is that they leave far too much to the imagination. God is like you and I, except...more powerful. But that's like saying you and I are like bacteria, except...more sophisticated. And surely there's a much *bigger* difference between me and God than there is between me and a bacterium.
So when we say "there could be an entity that is just like you but with the ability to create a Universe to its specification" a priori I have no idea what to imagine, just because too much work is being done by the "just like you but" part of the sentence. Nothing that is mostly like me could possibly create universes. Contrariwise, I'm highly dubious that something that could create universes would be anything at all like me. So...help me out here. Get into what the nature of God must be, in order for Him to be recognizably like me, somehow, persumably concerned about me, but also able to build universes from scratch. How does He affect matter? What is the passage of time like for Him? What was He doing in the infinity years before the Big Bang? Why would He create a universe full of stunted bacteria like ourselves, when presumably He could instead create one full of entities more His equal -- they could have a right good time, creating universes and talking about cosmic stuff, not having to listen to a bunch of mortal insignificant motes piss and moan about their sins, misfortunes, and pathetically limited fates.
I definitely understand your frustration with many books that use the fine tuning argument to posit some complex idea of god that leaves as many questions as it answers (if not more). An idea of god that is like you and me, just bigger, is intellectually problematic and unsatisfying. (Btw, which book did you read?)
The third part of our book is devoted to elucidating a rationally satisfying idea of a simple God. We address (we hope convincingly) many key questions such as Richard Dawkins's question of "Who designed the designer?" as well as Steven Weinberg's question of "What does 'God' even mean? It's just a placeholder for a big question mark!"
With regards to your question of exactly how God caused the universe, we develop an analogy between the fundamental action of an electron (a fundamental particle with no subcomponents) and the fundamental actions of God. According to QED (the fundamental physics theory of light and electrons), it is not possible to reduce the 3 fundamental actions of electrons and photons to any simpler actions. Just like physics is unable to reduce a fundamental action to any more basic concepts (i.e. you cannot explain how an electron absorbs a photon in more fundamental categories), so too we cannot understand God's fundamental actions through any more basic concepts. But we can understand why we cannot understand something fundamental in terms of something simpler.
With regards to your questions of sins, misfortune, souls, etc., we simply do not attempt to address the issue of why bad things happen to good people. Our book is not about God's relationship to humans. We would be very happy if we could convincing establish the existence of an intelligent cause for the universe. We know that might not be what some people want, but we felt that if we overreached (as many books do), we would lose the entire argument.
Well, I guess I need to read the book and not ask you to reveal its contents for free on the Web ha ha....but...I am nonplussed by what you mean by a fundamental action of an electron. I'm familiar with the concept of action, both classically and its quantum mechanical extension, but that doesn't inhere in a particle, it's a property of a trajectory, so that doesn't seem like what you mean. Maybe you mean the fact that the number of electrons is quantized, which falls out of the fact that the conjugate variables of the field fail to commute? And I grant you that this is a completely arbitrary axiom, which underlies all of quantum mechanics. But...again, a key question here is: *can* you construct a physics of fundamental particles in which the conjugate field variables *do* commute? Maybe not! If nothing else, so far as I know you don't get an exclusion principle, which means no excluded volume, and everything can in principle occupy the same point of space like a giant weird Bose-Einstein condensate. Maybe the universe can only have spatial extent if the exclusion principle holds -- which means the conjugate variables can't commute -- which requires quantization.
I guess another way to put that is: a thing only needs an explanation for its nature *if* its nature could be otherwise. And our ability to imagine, or inability to imagine, it otherwise is neither here nor there -- since we are quite capable of faulty imagining, that is, our imagination pictures can be logically inconsistent.
I will grant you my point of view here is shading towards something not entirely inconsistent with the ontological argument for the existence of God. It would be quite interesting if someone could make a good argument that a Universe *without* God the Creator is logically self-contradictory -- like a universe in which π = 4 (exactly). I'd pay money to see that show, box seats.
Anyway, I appreciate your willingness to expound on the book topics in advance, and tackle some initial critiques with grace. Best of luck to you, this is a hell of a lot more interesting thing to do with your time than prognosticate the next squalid political phase transition, or whether 20,000 or 80,000 people have to die to decide the colors of the flag over Kyiv.
I've enjoyed the back and forth, Carl. I do mean something a bit different by fundamental actions, but you're right that to get into that is probably too much for this forum. It might not take a book to explain, but maybe a chapter. :)
One last thought. I do genuinely believe that the argument from the constants of nature is far superior to anything else I've come across, but it has to be organized and presented in the right way. A lot of people bungle it, often because they're trying to prove a specific religion or an idea of God that relates to humans in a different way than any other part of the universe. This makes it far less convincing, to the point where the listener believes the whole thing is a bad argument.
Once again, thanks for the discussion.
"Nothing that is mostly like me could possibly create universes."
Hallelujah, that does for the simulation argument! And transhumanism. So this is why people are pinning their hopes on Fairy Godmother AI - it won't be human-like, it will be god-like and thus can do the impossible for humans things.
"What is the passage of time like for Him? What was He doing in the infinity years before the Big Bang? Why would He create a universe full of stunted bacteria like ourselves, when presumably He could instead create one full of entities more His equal -- they could have a right good time, creating universes and talking about cosmic stuff"
You are still thinking of God in "just like us" terms there. As for "what was He doing before the Big Bang", there's the secular materialist answer to "what existed before the Big Bang is a meaningless question".
God exists in eternity, not in time. What was He doing? Enjoying the economy of love in the Three Persons of the Trinity.
Well, since I think the simulation argument is silly and transhumanism is naive in the extreme, I'm with you on the first part.
Yes, I am indeed thinking of God for the purposes of this discussion as just like us -- because my experience is *that is a key argument* in the "fine-tuning" argument for His existence[1]. A major chunk of the logic goes something like this:
1. We can't imagine any natural physical process that gives us a First Cause, the original uncaused cause, because it's either a silly infinite regression or pops out of the blue in an arbitrarily but suspiciously precise way.
2. But *we* in a our daily lives (assuming arguendo free will) are little uncaused causes all the time. That's 90% of what we think it means to be human -- that we can originate stuff for no reason, right out of our imaginations, and tune our creations to satisfy urges of creativity, affection (for our creations), or even duty.
3. So if we just imagine something analogous in its thinking and nature to us -- only with warp engines for fingers, can move stars by blinking -- why, that would efficiently explain the Universe, and shazam we have God the Creator.
If you subtract the "just like us" part, and just imagine some enormous force, an uncaused cause that *need not* be at all like human beings -- could be like a giant all-powerful bacterium, or virus, or Rube Goldberg pinball machine -- then this stops being the familiar notion of God, and just becomes some weird giant contraption that might as well be some dedicated atheist philosopher's suggestion that the universe tunnels out of nothingness because one hypothetical 12-dimensional membrane collided with another.
That is, if you want to argue that God the Creator exists because of the nature of Creation, you kind of have to keep the bit about Man being made in the Image of Christ, or running it in the other direction, God must be in some very key aspects like us, only the Platonic ideal or something. Otherwise you may be proving some First Mover exists but you've lost any connection to what we are willing to call God, at least if we're outside the real of animism.
So *in the context of the argument* I think my questions are very fair. If you're going to say the nature of Creation implies the existence of God the Creator, you better show me His fingerprints -- and by that I do *not* mean any similarity in motive or urges to what human beings do when they bake cookies, because that's the easy part. I mean a similarity to what we do when Leonardo chisels marble to uncover "David" -- I mean, show me the grooves, infer the dimensions of the chisel, how the metal flakes off the stone just so. It's the manus not the mens at issue.
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[1] As is probably obvious by now, I generally dislike all the teleological arguments for the existence of God. I find them far less plausible than random testimony.
By the way I don't consider "What happened before the Big Bang?" a meaningless question (from the strictly physics point of view). It's certainly a difficult question, but it's neither meaningless nor a priori unanswerable. It is entirely possible that we might someday put limits on what might have existed "before" the Big Bang, in the sense that aspect X or Y is a logical prerequisite of the Big Bang, or Z and T would rule it out. Physics doesn't suggest any mystical quality to the Big Bang, in the sense that all the known laws of physics were created in that instant, and might have been created some other random way. We have no reason to think that's true, and the simplest assumption is to assume it's not.
The Big Bang is much more prosaic -- it's just a point in spacetime where the Universe has no spatial extent, only temporal. Formerly it's no different than the case where the Universe does not evolve, that is it has spatial extent but not temporal, a giant frozen still life. It's a little weird to our prosaic human notions of existence, but it's not the magical denouement it's sometimes seen (and presented) as.
It sounds like your objection is that from your experience with the fine tuning argument you think it is essentially based on an analogy between humans and God. Meaning, humans can freely choose specific parameters, ergo God must be a bigger and better human who can freely choose the laws and constants of nature. I can see why you would have an objection to that.
We argue a bit differently. We start from the natural mystery in fundamental physics of how to explain the value of the constants of nature (even without fine tuning). Are the constants truly fundamental or do they have a cause? And if they do have a cause, is there anything we can legitimately infer about their cause?
Fine tuning comes in as a solution to this mystery. It is knowledge science has gained about the constants. Fine tuning shows that the value of the constants is determined by the universe that results from them (i.e. they have that value because other values wouldn't result in a universe with atoms, stars, galaxies, etc.). This is different from the standard efficient causation (based on passed events), but is rather teleological causation (based on the resultant universe).
We argue that this indicates an explanation for the value of the constants based on teleology; that their values are as they are for the purpose of producing a complex ordered universe. A cause that selects the proper values for the purpose of producing the universe is acting intelligently. In a sense, this is how we are defining intelligence, as selecting a particular for the purpose of achieving some goal.
There is nothing about this line of reasoning that demands God be essentially like humans. It is true that humans also act intelligently (at least sometimes), but that is an accident that is unessential to the argument. Even if there were no humans to draw an analogy from, we would be justified in arguing that the cause of the constants acted intelligently in selecting their values.
Well...sort of. The main source of my objection to the fine-tuning argument is that I don't consider anyone to have made a good argument that the laws of physics *are* fine-tuned -- that is, that they actually could have values different than they are. I find that..suspicious.
For example, suppose I were to argue that the value of π was "fine-tuned" -- that just because it has the value 3.141592653... in this universe means nothing, it could easily be equal to 4 or 112 or -6 in some other universe. That seems a priori dubious. The value of π arises from pure mathematics, from the definition of a circle and the definition of a Euclidean plane. It's not logically consistent that it could have any other value than it does. Same with e or any other mathematical constant. These values may look strange and arbitrary to us -- but they're not, they only *look* that way because *we* have chosen arbitrary number systems (e.g. based on how many fingers we have, and based on our preference for simple addition as the primary arithmetic operation) to record the value of π. We could probably find a system of mathematical notation in which π took on the value and meaning of "1" and nobody suggests the value of 1 is fine tuned. So I don't think we can draw any conclusions from what might seem to be the strange and precisely "tuned" value of π.
What about the fine-structure constant, though? Could *that* be different? The thing is...we have no idea. We know of no reason it can't be, just as we know of no a priori reason why the ratio between the mass of the proton and the mass of the electron couldn't be slightly different value. But that does not mean there *isn't* such a reason. One might quite reasonably suspect that any fundamental constants that drop out of physics are as logically unique as π, because one might reasonably suspect that whatever the laws of the Universe are, they are unique -- like the solution to intersecting lines, there is in fact only one set of laws that is fully self-consistent -- and that it is *not* in fact possible to construct any kind of Universe at all with α equal to any other than ~1/137.
The only way to know for sure that it *is* possible for the constants to have other values is to find a universe where they did, or at the least construct one theoretically that is complete in all respects -- except α ~ 1/1400 in this one (which is quite a challenge). So it's kind of in the same category as arguments about abiogenesis: the only way for those who believe in chemical evolution to demonstrate that it's possible is to discover another world with a totally different form of life on it. Otherwise, it remains possible that life on Earth is a weird unique accident, or the result of divine intervention.
Now, one way of arguing the case that the universe could be "tuned" differently is to outline how it actually could be -- to provide hints of the actual mechanism. For example, consider Alcubierre and his famous demonstration that a faster-than-light "warp" drive is actually theoretically possible. He demonstrated that mathematically. Now...to actually build it, you would need to be able to control staggering amounts of both ordinary and "dark" matter (which we don't even know exists, let alone know how to manipulate). So that's practically completely out of the question. But the point is, it *does not* violate GR, it's consistent with the physics we know, so it's a pretty good argument that at least in principle FTL travel is not utterly ruled out.
That's kind of what I mean. Demonstrate that *if* you could, say, move quasars around at 99% of the speed of light, or move all the dark matter in the universe to one pole, or rebalance the amounts of matter and antimatter -- or anything that isn't utterly out of the question theoretically, merely wholly impractical for beings like ourselves -- and that *this* would actually change the measured value of a fundamental constant (like α), and then I would say you have made a strong argument. Like Alcubierre, you would have made a good argument that differing values of these constants is at least not *inconsistent* with what we know about physical reality.
And how does this relate to the God concept? Well, if the mechanism by which we argue the values can be changed amounts to something that seems too inhuman, or too mechanical, then we end up wandering away from the concept of God as some Platonic ideal of human nature (or equivalently that humans are a distorted and diminished image of God, which Genesis 1:27 asserts). So tackling the idea of the *how* these constants could be fine-tuned does double duty: (1) it makes an argument that they *are* in fact fine-tuned, and it's not just that we haven't found the relationships that nail them down, and (2) if the "how" is not too strange, at least in some aspects, it makes a good argument that Something of which we are a distant shadow could be the fine-tuner -- and with both (1) and (2) in hand, I'd have to say one has a very powerful argument.
Carl, I know we agreed to end the conversation above, but I just wanted to address an issue or two from this comment in case anyone else was interested in it.
You're raising a good question about how we know the constants could have been different. If for instance the fine structure constant could be expressed as some combination of π’s and e’s (mathematical constants), then perhaps it has something to do with the geometry of a circle or logarithms. If this were the case, then it would be reasonable to hope that the fine structure constant is an inevitable mathematical consequence of a final theory.
But try as they might, physicists have been unable to discover any relationship between the constants of nature and the mathematical constants. This is not for lack of effort - there have been a lot of smart people trying very hard for over 100 years now (the fine structure constant was first discovered in 1916). Since to all appearances these numbers are not mathematically significant, we are faced with a mystery: how can a unique final theory generate precise numbers such as 137.035999139, which seem to have absolutely no mathematical significance?
In his book QED written in 1985, Feynman tells a humorous story about this dubious attempt. He says that every year papers come out which attempt to express the fine structure constant as some complicated combination of π’s and e’s, and as soon as scientists measure the fine structure constant to a further decimal point they all come out wrong. Remember, the constants of nature are only known by measurement, so there’s no telling how many decimal points they ultimately have (or even if they ever terminate).
The absolutely key idea to remember is that all these points are pertinent before the discovery of fine tuning. Once scientists discovered that the value of the constants were not arbitrary, but were in fact the precise values needed for our ordered universe, the approach of the mathematical constants becomes even more dubious. According to this approach, the relationship between the values (which are determined entirely by mathematical logic) happen entirely by chance to be the exact values needed to produce our universe. This is very difficult to believe and it ignores the knowledge science has discovered of fine tuning.
Yes, the alien simulation argument is pretty ridiculous to me too, considering it has the exact same problem as the God hypothesis: it doesn't explain where the aliens themselves come from. In that regard, saying "everything came from God" or "everything came from the aliens who made the simulation we live in" or even just "everything came from a singularity that exploded into the universe when the Big Bang happened" doesn't actually answer the fundamental question at all, merely pushes it one step further back.
Granted, I don't have an answer myself and strongly suspect the question to be fundamentally unanswerable. Maybe it's some kind of infinite cycle with no true beginning and no end. Maybe it's just the result of some kind of mathematical process akin to cellular automata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton), where a system that could have started as a simple binary kept growing in complexity until it became a universe with all sorts of distinct waves and particles and fundamental constants. Admittedly, those ideas are probably still just begging the question in the same way as the God/alien hypothesis, but they make a certain sort of sense to me.
I'm not sure why there needs to be a reason at all for something to exist rather than nothing. The idea of nothing at all existing is difficult to comprehend -- I can certainly understand any one particular thing not existing, or I can imagine an empty universe, in which no material thing (or energy other than the vacuum energy) exists, but in which spacetime still has existence and meaning. But I can't imagine nothing at all existing.
However, to be fair, I have similar problems with infinity. That is, it's difficult to imagine an extent of...things, not restricting ourselves to this universe in the sense of what blew up out of the Big Bang and is still expanding...being infinite, in space and time. If everything is infinite, then relatively speaking everything I know, or could know. or indeed any chunk of what is no matter how large, is relatively speaking zero in extent, a vanishingly small percentage of what is. Can't really get my head around *that* any more than the idea that everything is finite in extent -- what is 'outside' that which is? Or came 'before' or will come 'after'?
Even in the simplest terms, it's not really possible for me to comprehend being alive for a finite time in an infinite time extent, nor being alive (as God must be) for an infinite time.
Poor gods, designer gods, industrially industrious gods. Gods of science, gods of the intellect, whose very existence hangs on the mental acrobatics of philosophers producing proofs. Engineer gods endlessly fine-tuning the fine-structure constant like a bored teenager who burns his tedium playing videogames. How many half-formed universes will they leave behind? Micromanaging gods keeping accounts of sins and virtues, voyeur gods raising mighty eyebrows at your sexual self-pleasure, do they get turned on too? Gods with egos the size of mountains to match their human co-creators, jealous gods, demanding gods, despondent gods. Do they pray to us too in their moments of weakness? Gods like beasts of burden, bribed by rituals to keep the eclipses timely and the rains abundant. Gods of war, coerced by prayers to bless the armies of each warring camp in turn, before they go and merrily kill each other. Do they too get excited watching the action? Gods of religion, bound by the rules of doctrine, contorting themselves within the prisons created by pointy theologians. Gods of the world, harnessed to uphold the inevitably corrupt institutions of their host societies. Do they ever wish they could start a revolution, or even vote?
To hell with all that! Set your gods free! God or gods or goddesses, god or absence of god, universal principle of all or nothing, gods of consciousness, gods of love or gods of indifference. Gods of the poets, mysterious force of the mystics... ever elusive effulgent scent, through you all questions are not answered, but simply undone!
I don't really have time to be here on this thread let alone review the whole book, but here's a question: why "fine tuning" instead of "design"?
If I were designing a universe, it would look very, very different from this one, even if I refrained from designing any life forms. And if I were designing life forms, they would be very, very different (not anything consistent with the theory of evolution, certainly.)
Thanks for the reminder to get back to work!
But isn't the purpose of work to have time to think?
We use "fine tuning" to refer to precise quantitative values, like 137.035999084. We use "design" to refer to the qualitative elements and relationships found in something like the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
"If I were designing a universe" is a fun game, but of dubious argumentative value. It's hard to know what universe I would have made if I hadn't already observed this one. One thing I do know is that I never would have come up with all the amazing things science keeps discovering throughout the universe.
> isn't the purpose of work to have time to think?
About the work I'm doing for my employer, yes 🙄
> of dubious argumentative value
If speaking to someone who refuses to think about the question, yes.
I didn't mean to brush off your question. I honestly don't know how to think about what kind of universe I would make if I could. I'm not even sure I would make a universe.
Well, as an engineer (and anti-simulation-hypothesisist) I find it an interesting thing to think about. But for a serious God-theorist it seems more important still.
Here's another two questions: assuming an omnipotent intelligence created the universe, what must its goal have been, and what technique or process might Ze have used to select the specific decisions that Ze made?
Yes, I know that the answer is "I don't know" and "we don't know". Nevertheless any reasonable theory must make sense, and therefore there must exist at least one answer to these questions that makes sense. If you can't find even one story that fits together well and is not easily rebuffed, then you don't have much of a theory.
I would be surprised if answers to these two questions are not easily rebuffed by critics of the "intelligence" hypothesis. For instance, consider this question: could the intelligence use experimentation, creating many universes to witness each one's development, in an effort to find something Ze likes?
If the answer is yes, why couldn't the intelligence just churn out a series of many universes with random parameters until it finds one that does something it considers interesting? (Well, because if it could do that, then it wouldn't really need *intelligence*, it could just churn out random universes forever, a few of which would work out okay, and that's where we live. Occam's Razor would then demand the removal of God from the theory, or at least the removal of intelligence.)
If the answer is no, then why not? But also, if the answer is no, then the intelligence would have to be very careful what parameters Ze selects, since Ze cannot simply try again if the first attempt fails. How would it choose a good set of parameters? Can Ze mentally simulate a billion years of consequences to confirm that a specific choice of parameters will act roughly as desired (keeping in mind that our universe, in contrast to other easily-imaginable universes, took a ridiculously long time to develop conditions in which life is possible)? If yes, what is the distinction between a perfect simulation within God's perfect mind and a "real" universe? Because it seems like these simulations are basically realities, and since this God is truly omnipotent, Ze could create an unlimited number of them. If no, then what other method could Ze use to make such a difficult choice? (I expect the question to be handwaved away by saying with something that amounts to "well Ze just used Zis intelligence!")
Having said all that, our empiricists are convinced that intelligence is largely (if not entirely) mechanical in nature, and it was only people who believed this who were able to produce things like self-driving cars and machines that draw pictures and compose music. I've never heard of a Christian AGI expert, have you? AIs are 100% mechanical as far as anyone can tell, and human intelligence must be (at least mostly) mechanical in order to explain both the brain, and the way brain damage works. Indeed, it was biological brains which inspired AI neural networks in the first place. But of course, if there is even a single drop of mechanical intelligence inside God zimself, then God already existed, from the very beginning, within a universe that can support mechanical intelligence (a rule-governed space that follows rules and thus has mechanics, with the property that the rules not only make mechanical intellgence possible, but have somehow already produced it). But that would mean God did not need to design a universe; at most ze would need to replicate more of the kind of universe in which Ze already found Zimself. The ability to design a universe would thus be a wholly unnecessary miracle.
Therefore, it would seem that you need to posit a God with purely non-mechanical intelligence, but this means it is fundamentally different from any life on Earth. No non-mechanical intelligence is known to exist on Earth or anywhere else. But how do you reconcile that explanation with Christian, Islamic and Jewish ideas of a God that is humanlike? Was God, a non-mechanical intelligence, hoping to replicate his own non-mechanical intelligence in a mechanical form? (I don't think "yes" would be a reasonable answer here in light of other kown facts like, well, the age of the universe and the body of evidence for the theory of evolution; the only reasonable conclusion, to me, is "no", that if a God created the universe, Ze hasn't demonstrated to us that Ze had any intention to create mechanical life, nor any interest in it, beyond maybe creating the first cell before abandoning Earth 4 billion years ago.)
But all of the above is sort of a red herring to me, for two reasons. Firstly, on an intuitive level I would offer what, to me, is the most compelling problem of all: any God-theory of creation does not solve the ultimate question of creation. Because the moment we use God as the answer to "what created the universe", we should immediately notice that God is something, which leads us to the question "what created God", which is no easier to answer than "what created the universe". I was a Christian for about 30 years and recognized this problem long before I left. The only way I remember anybody trying to address this is to say something like "well, no one created God, He Always Existed", an explanation as convincing as "it's turtles all the way down". I could ask "how do you know this?". One might respond "The Bible says so, Genesis 1:1", and then I could point out that "Genesis 1:1 refers to 'a beginning'", but that would allow the premise that the Bible is true, so...
Or I could take a different tack, asking instead "if God has always existed, then he existed for an infinite length of time, which implies that He waited for an infinite amount of time before creating the universe. Didn't He get bored? Infinitely bored, even? Why did He wait an infinite length of time before creating the universe?" This is an extraordinarily perplexing idea, and for this reason, when I was a Christian, I never believed that God always existed. But if you reject "He always existed" then you accept that God has a beginning, and then we must ask what created God, and when I was a Christian, this was very perplexing indeed. (By the way, I reject the infiniteness of time in both directions; I think the future does not exist yet, so there is no infinite future nor past. Space could be the same way: utterly unlimited, yet still finite.)
Second, after deconversion, I was persuaded by EY that actually "what created God" is a *harder* question than "what created the universe", from the perspective of Occam's Razor (an important tool for comparing any two theories regardless of subject matter (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor)). Whatever God is, Ze isn't simple. Ze seemingly must be more complex than the rules governing the universe itself. It seems to me that the entire space of all possible complete God theories together, seems to require orders of magnitude more bits of description, i.e. does not come within several orders of magnitude of the simplicity of [the best] non-God theories, and thus non-God theories are more likely to be true, at least according to this technique that works well in science. (Note 1: N theories can easily require fewer bits of description than a single theory; as EY puts it, "more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world". But this is not necessary; what I'm actually trying to say is that any union of N theories takes up more probability space than 1 theory. Note 2: "God did it" sounds like a simple theory but isn't, just as "The computer did it" doesn't imply that the computer is simple.)
Your questions are very good and legitimate. I can see why the answers you were given are largely unsatisfying. Unfortunately, this isn't really a good forum for explaining an entire new framework for thinking about these issues. It would take a book. :)
I'm curious whether you discuss the anthropic principle in your argument, and how it figures into discussion of the exact values of physical constants.
We do discuss it some with regards to the multiverse. There is an ironic twist to the historical disagreement between religionists and scientists regarding the importance of humanity in the universe. As opposed to religionists, scientists (at least since Darwin) have historically downplayed the role and significance that humans play in the grand cosmos. However, for multiverse scientists to use the fine tuning of the constants to support the multiverse, they need to make recourse to fine tuning for intelligent life alone. In their framework, the fact that our universe also happens to contain galaxies, stars, planets, molecules, etc. is just an accident of those other objects being included in the most typical way to get intelligent life (i.e. humans).
The reason for this is as follows: multiverse scientists use fine tuning to explain why we happen to find ourselves in the one universe with the “right” constants to enable intelligent observers. However, all that’s really necessary is that the constants be fine tuned for intelligent life alone. For this theory to also explain the other amazing features of our universe, multiverse scientists must claim that these features are mere consequences of a typical universe with intelligent life.
In contrast to scientists’ ordinary historical attitude, multiverse scientists have assigned human beings a central role relative to all other features of our universe. As such, the line of reasoning used to explain the fine tuning, design, and order of our universe as a mere illusion is typically referred to by multiverse scientists as anthropic reasoning or the anthropic principle.
On the other hand, our argument is based upon the complexity and structure of all the features of our universe (which includes, but is not limited to intelligent life). We claimed that the fine tuning, design, and order of our universe are genuine, and naturally point to an intelligent cause. The implication is that an intelligent cause fine tuned, designed, and ordered our universe for the purpose of bringing out all the vast complexity and structure in our universe. Because this argument does not demand or imply the centrality of human life in particular, we do not use the multiverse scientists’ “anthropic” terminology in our argument.
Are you saying that you simply ignore the anthropic principle entirely?
> all that’s really necessary is that the constants be fine tuned for intelligent life alone
Fine tuning is sufficient but not necessary, as I mentioned offhandedly in a much bigger comment.
> multiverse scientists have assigned human beings a central role
No, mainstream thinking is that human beings have an utterly ephemeral role. Despite this, we think about ourselves a lot; we have a central role in our own world. For reference:
> The anthropic principle is the principle that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, given that we could only exist in the particular type of universe capable of developing and sustaining sentient life.
So, it is not that scientists assign humans a central role. Rather, scientists observe that they ARE observers, and therefore they must exist in a context where observers are possible (or else not exist at all). We do not witness the inside of the sun, or the inside of Jupiter, or the inside of a black hole, or even the core of the Earth itself. Nor do we feel outer space. We exist only in locations where we can exist. If you think of each planet as its own universe, it is interesting, but not surprising, that we find ourselves in one small region (namely the surface) of the Third Universe From The Sun.
We don't ignore the anthropic principle in our book. We explain why it's necessary for multiverse theory but not for the argument for an intelligent cause of the constants.
Multiverse scientists explain the observed value of the constants by saying that human beings (intelligent observers) could only exist in a universe with those values. The reason we observe those values, when most universes in the multiverse have different values, is because we are in the typical universe with intelligent observers.
In contrast, our argument for an intelligent cause of the universe is essentially unaffected by whether or not the universe has intelligent life.
I'm kind of curious, can you replace "one God" in your argument, with "ten Gods" and still have the logic work? Why or why not?
No. Ten gods would not work in the argument.
First, the ten must have something at least slightly different from each other, by virtue of which you call them ten gods and not just one identical entity. Also, they must have something in common, by virtue of which you call them all 'gods'.
Now, we can ask, did one god cause the universe (and the other nine just watched) or all ten together?
If it was only one god, then the other nine are superfluous. There is no reason to posit them as they don't explain anything. While we couldn't prove they didn't exist, there would be no indication from the universe that they did exist (as opposed to at least one which does explain the universe).
If all ten gods acted together to make the universe, we could ask a slight variation of Richard Dawkins's question "Who designed the designers?" Insofar as each of the ten gods contributed something special based on their own unique quality, it is reasonable to ask what caused each of them to have just the right qualities where only all ten working together could make this amazing universe?
The point being that positing ten gods does not answer the question of who fine tuned the constants, but rather begs the question of who designed (or fine tuned if the gods have quantitative parts) the ten gods? Only one God with no fine tuned parts is a satisfactory solution, because we can understand why it is not reasonable to ask who designed and fine tuned one God with no parts.
> Only one God with no fine tuned parts is a satisfactory solution, because we can understand why it is not reasonable to ask who designed and fine tuned one God with no parts.
Why can we ask that question for ten Gods but not for one? Why is it not reasonable to ask who designed and fine tuned one God with no parts?
Ten gods with parts invite an explanation for what designed and fine tuned them such that they all properly work together to be able to make the universe. One God with no parts is a fundamental existence that is irreducible to any simpler existence.
Let's use science as an analogy. Science can explain a molecule in terms of its atoms, and an atom in terms of its electrons and quarks. Electrons and quarks are fundamental particles that (as far as we know) are not comprised of anything simpler. A fundamental particle is by definition not reducible to a simpler explanation.
Similarly, ten gods with parts can be explained by something simpler. But you can't explain one God with no parts by anything simpler. The very method of reduction to simpler concepts finds a limit at something absolutely simple.
So we can understand why one God with no parts cannot be designed and fine tuned, because the question is only sensical with regards to things with parts. But it would merely be an arbitrary thought taboo to say that ten complex gods are not designed and fine tuned by something else more fundamental than them.
> One God with no parts is a fundamental existence that is irreducible to any simpler existence.
Why is this? How do we know?
If you're asking how do we know that there is only one God with no parts, then I'd have to respond that we wrote a book that tries to show why that is the case.
But if you mean why is one God with no parts unable to be reduced to something simpler, then I can answer. The reason is that there are two ways to reduce something. Either you can reduce the number of entities (explain 10 gods by 9 or fewer gods) or you can reduce the number of parts something has (explain one proton with three parts by reducing it to the interaction of things with no parts like quarks).
Either way, one God with no parts can't be reduced to fewer entities (as nothing is less than one) or to something simpler (as there can't be anything with less than zero parts).
I always thought the anthropic principle was a fully general slam dunk against any fine tuning type arguments. Do you (try to) rebut it?
If anything, finetuning arguments make me even less amenable to the possibility of design (at least that prioritizes humanity) because it really draws attention to how actually abysmally our universe is arranged to support us. It is almost entirely inhospitable vacuum, dead rocks and balls of plasma. We can just eek out a marginal existence on the surface of one of those rocks.. how can anyone think this is for us?
The anthropic principle means different things to different people, which is partly why it's a confusing term. There's also the strong and weak versions. In general, it is something that multiverse scientists must posit on some level in order for multiverse to be a plausible solution to the fine tuning of the constants.
We can't really show that the universe is not fine tuned specifically for life, but we think the burden of proof is on those that claim our universe and its laws are the typical universe with intelligent observers. It is certainly not obvious that that is true. (The Boltzmann Brain Paradox is one good argument against it.)
Additionally, those who want to use fine tuning to posit a special place for intelligent life need to establish that there is clear evidence of fine tuning for intelligent life specifically (and not just as an accident of fine tuning for atoms, stars, etc.). We don't get involved with this in any extensive way because we are not taking a position one way or the other on divine providence.
Is it the prime mover argument? Because if it is I'm down. If it's the fine tuning argument, nah.
The prime mover is a cosmological argument. Our argument from fine tuning is a design or teleological argument based on special features of the universe and its laws.
It is different from the design argument is biology. The fine tuning argument from physics deals with the fundamental basis of scientific reality. In fact, the apparent design in biology is a result of the fine tuning in physics (through the intermediary of chemistry).
" Our argument from fine tuning is a design or teleological argument based on special features of the universe and its laws."
I think the "unliklihood" of any particular arrangement of the fundamental constants is a unconvincing argument for the existence of God because, for me anyway, there is absolutely no reason to think that the constants or fundamental forces of the universe could have been anything else than exactly what they are.
I am curious, do you accept the validity of intelligent design as opposed to "random" evolution? Because it seems to me your argument and that argument are essentially the same.
I've never really heard a good refutation of the prime mover argument, it's certainly not a "proof" but it always felt very "proofy" to me. What comes before and after time itself? That's where God is for me.
All three of your questions are related. I'll respond to them all, but in a different order.
1) We are accepting the biological theory of evolution, but we argue that it is only possible because of the fine tuning and design found in the fundamental laws of physics. The big difference between the two is that biology is dealing with a derivative science, and hence is more susceptible to the "God of the gaps" critique; physics is dealing with the fundamental basis of reality, and as such is less susceptible to that same problem.
One way to see the superiority of the argument from physics as opposed to biology is to look at the opposing scientific theories. In biology, the scientific response to the intelligent design argument is evolution through natural selection (a well established scientific theory), while in physics the opposing theory is the multiverse (a speculative theory with no hope of ever having empirical support).
2) The reason we don't use the prime mover or first cause argument is because scientist can (and do) claim that the prime movers are the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Our argument against that is the laws of physics exhibit fine tuning (in their quantities) and design (in their qualitative relationships), which indicate they are not the ultimately fundamental realities but rather also have a cause.
3) There's is nothing intrinsically illogical about saying the values of the constants are brute facts with no explanation. But, it's a very ugly theory to say that the fundamental reality is 25 numbers like 137.035999139, and more importantly, it ignores the scientific knowledge of fine tuning - that these values are the precise ones needed to bring about our ordered complex universe.
Would people be interested in a substack that walks through fermi estimates of random things?
I find back of the envelope calculations really valuable for lots of things (as a trader it’s also a pretty natural habit) - often having an order of magnitude estimate helps appreciate the scale (or lack thereof) of something, and can be a useful prioritization technique. I wonder if people would find it useful to see examples worked out?
I myself would be, but truthfully that feels like sort of a one-time long deep dive visit where I read dozens of posts at once, rather than something I'd return to every day
This sounds like something I’d read.
I'd check it out.
Reminds me of the "What If?" spinoff of xkcd; would probably improve the readership if you took question submissions rather than trying to come up with your own.
Short sample to pique interest inspired by my staring out the window on ride to the airport - how many trees are there in the world? Goal: come up with a 1 OOM wide interval containing google’s answer.
(1) I’ve heard Canada has a lot of trees, so I’ll est that # and scale it up. My point guess is Canada has 20% of the world’s trees.
(2) What’s Canada’s land area? I know the US is 10 mil km2, my point guess is Canada is 1x as large.
(3) I think most trees are in forests - point est 90%.
(4) What % of Canada is covered in forest? Point est 40%.
(5) How densely are trees in forests packed? Imagine a uniformly spaced 2d grid, I think each tree about a human length from its nearest neighbor, so let’s say 2m. So point guess 1 tree / 4m^2.
Putting it together:
- (2) + (4) + (5) -> Forests in Canada have 1 trillion trees.
- (3) gets us to ~1.1 trillion trees in all of Canada.
- (1) gets us to ~5.5 trillion trees in the world.
I’ll equally space the interval around this in log terms, so let’s say 1.8trillion - 18trillion for my final interval.
This estimate using satellite imaging suggests 3 trillion, so we were within an OOM: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-many-trees-are-there-in-the-world-video/%3Famp%3Dtrue
Checking the specific pieces:
(1) Google suggests Canada has 300 billion trees, which is 10% of the total number, so I was too high by 2x.
(2) Canada is in fact also 10million km2, nice!
(3) I couldn’t easily check this #
(4) This claims 38% of Canada is forest, so we were again v lucky: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-many-trees-are-there-in-the-world-video/%3Famp%3Dtrue
(5) Wasn’t easy to verify this number.
So seems like ~all my error was from 1/3/5, I’m guessing (3) was not large here and 1/5 were the big one.
Let me know if you found this interesting / what might make it even better (trees are cool and all, but how much do people care about the particular thing being estimated having more practical relevance?)
In particular I think was probably ~4x too high on the avg tree density in forests, based on the fact that I was 2x too high on what % of trees are in canada and still ended up ~2x too high on point est (5.5t vs 3t)
I think it comes down to the quality of the writing. As subject matter, it could be very entertaining, but could also be very dry.
Scott, there’s pretty much no way I’ll submit a book review on time. But I am putting it out here on this public forum that I WAS going to submit a book review of Pascal’s _Pensées_, and it was going to be incredible. I’ll await my honorable mention.
You win Beata, for sparing us the incredibility "~}
I also did not get around to my book review.
I thought that last year's reviews were all a bit too similar in their subject matter, so I decided to review the "least likely to be reviewed on ACX" book I could find on my shelves, which turned out to be a circa 2009 travel guide to Peru, a country that I thought about going to but never actually went to.
I was going to write a really poignant review of this book, which would be based around life's melancholic gap between plans and reality, and the sadness of making plans that never come to fruition -- not because they become impossible nor because we lose interest, but just because they forever stay in that grey area of things that we kinda want to do, but don't want to do strongly enough to actually make them happen. If my desire to go to Peru ever reached 100% then I could get on a plane and go there; if it ever reached 0% then I'd forget it and be happy, but instead I'm stuck in the grey zone of unfulfilled weak desire. Maybe I'll go to Peru one day, maybe I won't, but it doesn't really matter, because I'll still have thousands of unfulfilled weak desires just as powerful.
Anyway, given the theme of the review I suppose it's perfectly appropriate that I never got around to writing the review. Add another unfulfilled desire to the list.
Excellent review! I could write one about my old guide book to Malawi. ("There is no country with such name" a friend said.). I'll just copy yours. Said it all.
That was a great review.
I wrote a two-part expository paper on Bayesianism in philosophy for Philosophy Compass about a decade back. During the pandemic, I've started making videos where I read out full papers that I've assigned my students to read, with some commentary at places where I think an undergrad might either get tripped up by some unexpected vocabulary or might miss a reference. I finally got to the point in one of my classes where I assigned my own papers on Bayesianism, so I did videos on them.
If anyone thinks they might be interested, the videos are here:
https://youtu.be/IqnLqnuaR6I
https://youtu.be/GPgpP4FcQO8
(And if you're interested in other topics in analytic philosophy of language or epistemology, it's possible you'll find some of my other videos relevant as well, and you can probably find them from those.)
I'd also be interested if anyone has any feedback or advice on how to do videos like this. (I definitely appreciate that long-format video is not a great way to get a lot of people engaged, so I'm not necessarily interested in comments that repeat that point, but if anyone has thoughts on how to show students what is going on in a long reading, I'd be glad to hear.)
I watched the first video. Good presentation. I’ll watch the second on my turbo trainer tomorrow. Alas, snow still in my local forecast.
I think yesterday and first images from #BuchaMassacre broke me.
I'm Ukrainian, I know Ukrainian and English, no Russian. I now believe that a large chunk of Russian population deny my right to exist.
As a Russian I'm a very temperate person normally. What's the point feeling angry about things you can't influence?
Bucha is making me give up on my country entirely, this is a lost cause. Everyone who can leave must leave, and the rest are to rot
Have you gotten out yet yourself, Caled? Please do if you haven't already!
"having a right to exist - if the Kremlin denies it" - is not a privilege "large chunks of Russian population" have, either. I know English, German, Russian, have a son in Ukraine. And I have no need to update the tiniest bit after the news from Bucha. What'd you folks expect?!? They have/had torture prisons in the "separatist areas": Stanislav Aseyev (google, wikipedia)
Heller Weg: Geschichte eines Konzentrationslagers im Donbass 2017-2019
Have been reading a lot about nuclear fusion's progress in recent years. Part of me is cynical that it's yet another instance of fusion being "just 10-15 years away" for the next half century.
But the progress does seem substantial this time. Tyler Cowen summed it up last year:
https://archive.ph/eBXKW
What encourages me is that this progress seems to be occurring from many directions, both in terms of countries as well as approaches, so it appears to be more broad-based than a narrow vector of a single company/institution doing well, where everything would hinge on them.
Am I being carried away or is there more substantial progress time 'round compared to previous false dawns?
My take is that, after 50 years of being "30 years away" from fusion, we are only "20 years away" now.
For some reason, a lot of people read that and think "it will happen in less than 5 years". It will not. It might be 20 years, it might also be physically impossible to run a commercially-viable reactor.
I definitely think they're far closer to producing net positive power out of it, and wouldn't be surprised if they've got that by 2030. The question then just becomes whether it can be commercially viable - you could have a fusion reactor that works perfectly well, but is still too expensive to operate such that it becomes a niche device.
It's not as close as fusion researchers give the impression of, because they're not including all of the energy when they talk about 'net positive'. The kind of net positive they refer to is a long way from true net positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&ab_channel=SabineHossenfelder
I'd say yes.
Unless some government is willing to play 25%+- of a Manhatten project into it, we are still in "Fusion Never" territory.
Keep in mind that the original "20 years away..." form 50 years ago finished the sentence with "if you fund our research", which the US government did not do. I think present fusion progress is roughly on track for cumulative money spent, it just hasn't until very recently attracted the billions of dollars it needs, and the current funding is still not enough to do it *quickly*
I've become very cautious of any predictions on timeframes larger than five years, preferably 1-2 years or less.
It's not even that these predictions are necessarily wrong, just that a sufficiently long timeframe reads to me more like - "We think this is possible, but have no way to tell for sure or properly gauge the amount of time or effort it will take, so we'll put out a number that is within the working lives of mid-career professionals working on this project, without forcing them to produce measurable results in the near future."
Seems to me like there are a few ways you can get the engineering to work out on paper, its just crazy expensive and complicated so getting over the risk-investment hump is taking forever.
I’ve seen Anatoly Karlin cited here a few times, and decided to look into him. Boy was that quite the rabbit hole to go into.
The guy seems cruel, arrogant, petty. He unhesitatingly lies, openly sneers at those with opposing views, reflexively doubles down when presented with evidence. I tried to apply maximum charitability, yet even ignoring this horrible optics and gratuitous use of terms like ‘globohomos’, he remains one of the least interesting authors I’ve encountered in two decades of internet use. Somehow though, his views keep appearing within Scott’s blog.
What am I missing?
Perhaps it is useful to know that his POV is out there.
But surely there has to be a Russian nationalist or avowed fascist that isn’t also the living embodiment of bad faith. I’m not being facetious, I know some very kind and thoughtful fascists and monarchists; is it so hard to find one that blogs?
Kind and thoughtful fascists... hmm?
Well, ‘kind and thoughtful’ might be a stretch for some, but I’m used to spicy takes from a subset of my family/social circle.
We have a kind and thoughtful communist right here.
Karlin is a (very) long-time commentator on Scott's blog, and he's proposed some legitimately very interesting ideas, particularly in his "Apollo's Ascent" and "Age of Malthusian Industrialism" series: https://akarlin.com/start/
(Both pieces take some very un-PC ideas for granted, but are still quite interesting and original.)
Some of his other writings can be entertaining as well, like his series contrasting US/UK/Russia, written around the time when he moved. He's always been a *very far*-right author, though, and the conflict with Ukraine seems like it's kind of broken his brain, while an earlier version of him might have been more skeptical (this man wrote "Russia's Technological Backwardness" in 2016; much as the trends in that article were positive it was kind of insane to think the country was radically different six years later).
Anyway, Scott wrote a piece in 2019 called "Rule Thinkers In, Not Out"; I think Karlin has written enough interesting things to be ruled in, though your mileage may vary: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
I see; I might have focused too much on his recent content. I appreciate the explanation!
No, I think your impression is accurate. He often just copies the views of Scott on his blog a few weeks/months on his blog, which is why I don't get why people think he's original. It's not even the worst offense. I think your interpretation of him as consistently arguing/acting in bad faith and being habitually untruthful is correct. It's not even about being far-right per se.
He is featured as a readily available example of Kremlin point of view. Whether this is correct, I am not sure, but regardless of that, Kremlin point of view is going to be pretty repugnant to most readers here, so
A prediction about tomorrow's Mantic Monday column: https://manifold.markets/AlexPower/will-the-phrase-resolution-risk-app
Has anyone here given up flossing and can give their observations?
It might be useful to have a baseline - what fraction of people currently floss regularly (say, averaging more than 4 times in a week over the past year)? what fraction of people currently floss irregularly (more than 0.5 times a week, but less than 4 times a week)? what fraction of people currently basically don't floss (less than 0.5 times a week)? what fraction of people have spent a year in one state and then spent a year in another state?
I'm currently in the "floss regularly" camp, but I can't remember if I started during or shortly before the pandemic. (Probably during, because I got into a lot of regular care habits during the pandemic.) I think I might have spent a few years regularly flossing a while back, but I think most of my life I was probably in the "basically never" camp.
The biggest change I've noticed is that flossing itself is easier and less painful when I do it regularly. There are some foods, like raw whole apples and popcorn (and sometimes broccoli), where I prefer to floss immediately after eating it, because it gets caught between my teeth. But I don't think I've noticed anything else particularly relevant (though I haven't down-shifted my flossing any time recently.)
I’ve had the same oral hygienist for 30 years. I came to fear the metal tools he would use to clean my teeth and gums every six months if I wasn’t flossing regularly pretty quickly.
In the last 28 year there have only been a handful of days where I didn’t floss at least once a day. Once the habit is established it’s pretty easy to keep up with.
I don't floss and haven't had a cavity in like 13 years.
I've always hated flossing and never done it regularly. I also don't brush as often as I should. I have never had a cavity or really anything wrong with my teeth. I don't think my experience is typical.
I floss regularly myself. My contribution to this discussion: dentists seem to disagree about whether you should floss before or after brushing; there’s pros and cons either way. But flossing after brushing is a big behavior modification trick: you see all the stuff stuck to your floss and know counterfactually that would have stayed in your teeth all night if you hadn’t flossed. Now I feel very gross if I go a day without flossing.
My gum health without flossing was pretty bad. A half-hour of agony at the dental hygienist mostly fixed that, but flossing in between helps a lot. I still don't do it very regularly, but most of my initial objection was that it hurt and that was a function of the poor gum health that flossing treats.
Fun fact: German per head use of floss-line per year: 50 cm. - I guess it is less. I did it for some time, helped me, but too much hassle. Nowadays I use those interdental bursts or soft-picks, if I feel like it. Much more fun. - I will be dead in 20 years or so, and not from US. I won't waste my last decades flossing. I don't need teeth to read.
A friend of mine uses and swears by a water flosser. Like a small jet of water from a handheld tank and pipe that you press against the gaps in your teeth. I tried it and while it seems way easier to do than normal flossing, it didnt feel like it penetrated in between my teeth as much as i felt it needed to. Anyone know anything about the efficacy of these?
Mine just messed the bath-room. If you like it, you may mix some mouth-wash in.
I'm surprised nobody has dropped this reference yet:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-trouble-with-dentistry/586039/
> "Some data suggest that regular flossing, in addition to brushing, mitigates gum disease, but there is only “weak, very unreliable” evidence that it combats plaque."
The bigger takeaway from the article is that genetics and diet appear to be the biggest factors in the health of one's teeth, not interventions like flossing and dental procedures.
I have a low-sugar diet and brush daily with an electric toothbrush, and these days I have my teeth professionally cleaned twice a year. Before that, I had a bit of a phobia and hadn't seen a dentist in 10+ years, but my teeth were absolutely fine. I don't floss, as it's painful and seems to only ever lead to bleeding and tenderness. According to the dentist, my teeth are in top condition for my age, even the baby tooth that was never replaced by an adult tooth.
Aw, I bet your dentist says that to all the story girls. :)
Ha! True story: My longtime kindly dentist (who read the Atlantic article and confirmed it was more or less accurate) retired, and I was anxious the dentist the practice brought on to replace him was potentially going to be a bullshit artist.
But she - young and exceptionally beautiful in that way that reminds you that we don't live in movies because people like her are only ever in them, not in real life - cooed over my healthy baby tooth and told me it would likely hang with me for life!
I intermittently and not-purposefully give up flossing, I really don't recommend it. Every time I go back to it even after a day I'm just like, "ugh, that stuff was just *sitting in my *mouth".
1. Are relatively young ppl getting the next booster (vaccine dose #4, booster #2)? The pros are obvious (mRNA vaccines seem super-effective in preventing serious cases). What are the cons?
I'm asking specifically for two relatively healthy 50 yos and a healthy 21 yo, and the vaccine so far for all three is Moderna. We had our booster #1 in October. The then-20yo had the half dose Moderna.
2. How would you time it? Is there a new wave for sure? When will it peak in Central Texas?
3. How do you distinguish between covid and spring allergies? How many rapid tests or pcr tests, taken in what pattern? (i.e. for e.g. take just one rapid, trust the results?).
1. Technically, people under 50 in the United States aren't approved to get a fourth dose unless they have some immunosuppressed condition. I think the main con is the day of feeling yucky afterwards, but the main pro is less than you suggest - I've heard suggestions that, for someone who got a second booster four months after the first, another six months later, the total protection is not very different from someone who is just ten months out from the first booster. It seems (from the *very* little I've read, so take this with a lot of grains of salt) that the main benefit of second boosters is just in the first few months after the second booster.
I'm getting much of this from here: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/03/31/they-dont-know-about-second-booster/
2. I would time it when it seems clear that there is going to be another wave. At the moment, Central Texas doesn't obviously seem to be getting another wave. I live in Brazos County, and also follow the Austin and Houston metro areas on the NYTimes covid tracker page. Over the past few weeks, there have been several periods where one or more of these places has had some increase in cases, but it's unclear that any of them have gotten the sustained ramping increases that we've been seeing in some of the Northeast, or the spikes we've seen in parts of west Texas. And even those two phenomena still seem to be growing substantially more slowly than the corresponding parts of the delta wave, let alone the omicron wave. If one of these three areas is sustaining case counts above 20 per 100,000 people per day for a week or more, and there seems to be continued increase there or in the others, that might be a good time to time a booster.
Otherwise, I'd time the booster for October, like I do for flu shots.
3. I've discovered a few systematic allergy symptoms and time frames. In Central Texas, one of my biggest allergy seasons is December to March (what they call "cedar fever", though there's no fever, and I think it's junipers rather than cedars). A distinctive feature I note about the allergies is that I get an itch in the roof of my mouth. The past two days I've had somewhat different symptoms, though I suspect they're also an allergy (maybe a different one?) - headache, and a bit of a puffy feeling in my face. My temperature has remained low, and today I've been diligent about washing my hands and face and wearing a mask when I step outside, and it seems to be keeping it more moderate (though by the end of a two hour walk, I had some sniffles even with the mask, that went away when I got home and washed my hands and face thoroughly).
I was doing rapid tests at home twice a week during January and February, on days when I went to campus to teach. I've only done one in the past few weeks though.
Thank you!
Do you think the nyt is even updating the Travis county positivity rates? It went from 3% to 4% and has been stuck there for over a week now. The local govt sites are so terribly organized. JHU doesn't have county level data i can view.
The zvi link was useful. Key point id forgotten about : "antibodies control infection,
while T cells control disease severity." Which of these affect long covid? I worry about even mild covid as long covid seems poorly understood. Maybe it can hurt health lifelong though. This article strangely ignores long covid.
I haven’t been paying attention to positivity rates, but perhaps I should, so I hadn’t noticed it stick.
I think the reason there is very little devoted to long COVID there is that it seems likely that long COVID is strongly connected to severe COVID. I haven’t heard of anyone who got long COVID without a severe case, except in March 2020.
I don't qualify as a "young person", and I'm not in Texas. (I'm in my mid-60s). Here's how I'm going about making these decisions.
- Longer between boosters probably gives better immunity long term than the minimum delay allowed
- I can (and do) monitor the local covid statistics. They aren't as accurate as they used to be, except for hospitalizations and deaths, so there's less early warning of a spike, but I can still see spikes growing, just not as clearly as before.
- Immunity wanes faster the older you are, all else being equal. If a healthy 90 year old needs a booster after 4 months, the appropriate delay can be scaled up roughly for a healthy 70 year old or a healthy 50 year old. And scaled down for someone who isn't so healthy. We don't have good stats on this, sadly, but some of the data from Israel may be helpful.
- If you've had covid, as well as being vaccinated, that's at least equivalent to an extra booster.
- I personally got my first two covid shots while undergoing chemotherapy. It's reasonable to assume that I didn't get as much immunity as I would have if I'd been healthy at the time. We don't have data that can predict how much I'm likely to have missed. I was fully healthy for my first booster.
- I can and do change my behaviour during a local covid peak, as does everyone in my household.
Net result:
- I've decided to wait about 6 months after my first booster, rather than four. Without the chemo, I'd wait longer.
- This is subject to revision based on any solid research I encounter between now and the end of July.
In your place, I'd wait even longer, and then get a Pfizer booster, so as to get some of the mix-and-match benefit. And unless the 21 year old has something serious wrong with them, they aren't eligible yet.
I'm 50, also got Moderna. Was sick for 4 days with each shot. Didn't get the first booster. Got COVID (probably Omicron), was sick for about 8 days with no noticable lasting effects. At this point I would not get any booster. Their effectiveness against current strains (either Omicron classic or BA.2) is weak and fleeting.
I found COVID to not really feel like allergies; it felt like the flu. Main distinguisher is body aches and a general feeling of sickness, whereas seasonal allergies are the waterworks and itchy eyes and maybe a sinus headache.
I got the pfizer booster simultaneously with the flu shot and felt completely energized for weeks at least. Like what the niagen was supposed to do but didn't much. I was a little tired after the second shot but not much. Made me wonder if some of the negative reactions to the vaccine aren't via suggestability. Negative reactions are much more tweetable. Then the polling only reinforces it once it's already out there.
Maybe the negative reactions to COVID are via suggestibility, and if we'd just publicized that COVID made you feel like you'd taken a nice recreational dose of heroin, nobody would have died.
Covid parties were a thing.
I am not sufficiently suggestible that other people saying they had poor reactions to the vaccine would lead to me sleeping 11-12 hours per day for 3 days after receiving the vaccine (with intense exhaustion and aches while awake.)
I couldn't sleep 11 hours ordinarily. 8 is a tough sell for my body a lot of the time, even with support from diphenhydramine hcl. There's no way a COVID vaccine had more suggestive sleepiness power than actually taking an actual sleep med.
Like most things immunology, different people had radically different experiences with it. We don't need psychosomatic explanations for this; immune systems are notoriously idiosyncratic.
I just want to suggest the possibility of a psychosomatic component moving the distribution of what is experienced and also a reporting bias. People are very keen to report their suffering. I'm told suggestibility is why placebos have an effect.
It's not the vaccine that has some sort of suggestiveness principle contained within analogous to the mythical microchip but rather the information bath the vax takes place in. Your experience can have had its degree influenced by your mind.
Right... Which is why I went with a comparison that has an even stronger information bath. Sleep meds that have historically helped me and many others sleep are strongly suggestive of sleeping better. I'm quite confident that if someone replaced my bottle of benadryl with identical sugar pills I would still have some effect due to the suggestion.
The vaccine is far less associated with sleeping more in my mind, and so any such suggestive effects should be far weaker. Instead, it had a much much larger and unambiguous effect.
Slightly off topic but for what it's worth i find even a half tab of benadryl pushes sleep but I hate the way it makes me feel in the morning. 3mg melatonin for me. How much of that is placebo I don"t know.
At a little over 20, I don’t plan to. I think a fairly good risk of feeling yucky for two days, done twice a year, doesn’t really sound better than risking catching COVID at my age. Once I’m old enough that COVID’s death chances are comparable to my other activities’ I’ll probably reconsider it
1. Yeah, I'm going to do it. The risk is pretty low, and while the day after is annoying, it's worth it for the enhanced immunity.
2. It's hard to say. Not everywhere is showing the case counts anymore, and Utah is moving towards weekly case counts. I guess if we get two weeks going up in a row I'd get the 4th shot if it's available.
3. No easy way to do it, unfortunately. I'd just take a test, and if it comes back negative assume that it's spring allergies unless the symptoms seem unusually bad or you get new ones. Make sure to let anyone you know that is severely immunocompromised know and protect accordingly around you just in case.
>What are the cons?
My booster made me super tired for 2 days. I can't afford to take 2 days off of work (and I work 7 days a week).
My favorite think about 7 day work weeks is how it impacts your mental health is a solid dichotomous key on whether you believe in the project or not
Thankfully I definitely believe in the project. (I'm trying to grow human oocytes from iPSCs.)
I didn't even get a third because I had it during Xmas in Seattle and I've been too busy
I'm not going to get another due to spike protein from immunization and t cell immunity to m and n epitopes from actual infection
A German man got it 87 times and I would pay a large sum of money for his pbmcs
Shouldn't the real tech revolution in currency just be getting dollars (or maybe euros, or even the yen or yuan) into the hands of consumers in the developing world? From what I can tell, dollars are in extremely high demand in every 2nd or 3rd world country with an unstable currency, which is most of them- and it is explicitly outlawed in every single one. On HN there was a recent discussion about currencies and everyone from the developing world said 'God all we want is stable dollars, and the local government makes it illegal'. Every article I read about currency instability in the developing world indicates that there's a black market for dollars, and enormous demand for them.
Cryptocurrency has existed for 13-14 years now, and famously does not get used for actual payments very much. Its main role seems to be a new vehicle for financial speculation, not payments. Meanwhile, 3rd world countries can grudgingly use the US dollar if pushed- El Salvador, Ecuador, Panama and Zimbabwe all officially use it. Wouldn't the real revolution not be crypto, but just an electronic payment system where the US dollar just supplants the official currency of say every Latin American country? If you're not keen on the dollar, it could be the euro- it could even be the yuan, perhaps China will push it on small countries in its orbit
Most of Africa quietly has this already with mobile phone prepaid minutes, which are tradable via text message.
The biggest beneficients of crypto are rich people subject to currency controls in e.g. China, and people trading on black markets in the developed world. The rest are along for the Ponzi ride.
How much capital to pump your shitcoin can you get out of Africa?
The UK has announced they are regulating stablecoins so they can be used for payments.
https://sports.yahoo.com/uk-says-ready-regulate-stablecoins-164025354.html
I feel like I've been waiting nearly 30 years for an open payments protocol (Visa and PayPal are proprietary and limited in use) - hopefully the cryptocurrency community can at least deliver that in the way you suggest!
From a book review (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-rule-of-laws-fernanda-pirie-to-the-uttermost-parts-of-the-earth-martti-koskenniemi-book-review-jonathan-sumption/):
> Fernanda Pirie is an anthropologist specializing in the development and use of law in what western thinkers used to call 'primitive' societies.
In this sentence, the reviewer is referring to a concept by using quotes around a defunct/discouraged term for the concept. He could suggest a suitable new name for the concept, but he hasn't. He could also explicitly deny that the concept is valid, but he hasn't. Is there a name for this practice?
Can you think of more examples with all of the above conditions? I'd be especially interested if there are examples without an element of controversy.
Is it possible he doesn't suggest a new name because he finds nothing wrong with the old name yet feels compelled to use scare quotes to demonstrate to his colleagues he realizes he is supposed to?
I wondered about that. But the reviewer is a retired conservative who is willing to share unpopular opinions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sumption,_Lord_Sumption#Political_views). That's why I felt it was more likely he objects to either the concept or the term, and found it strange he wasn't following through in a way that clarified his objection.
I could see an editor imposing this even if the author doesn't give a shit, too
Newspeak comes to mind, in the sense that the practice seeks to abolish a word and concept without replacement. I have seen this before though alas I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head. Usually it serves as a signal to stop reading when people can’t use the right word or even concept for fear offending, or at least signaling that they think it offensive.
Well, in this case he is simply: quoting. "what western thinkers used to call" plus then the quote: "primitive". kinda 'double quoting', I admit. He could NOT suggest a suitable new name for the concept in THIS sentence. He could have added: I will use the term 'tribal societies' from now on.
Aarghh... book review deadline is tomorrow and I got distracted by lovely Oxford Rationalist meetup today, also finishing my second blog post - 'Live long and prosper: lessons from super-centenarians' https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/live-long-and-prosper-lessons-from
Follow me if you want to live!!
Does anybody have pointers to writing that addresses technical analysis in trading from a rigorous angle?
I am of the camp that 95% of technical analysis is bunkum, but there is 5% that interests me. For example, the truism that booms happen gradually, whereas crashes happen suddenly, is a form of technical analysis. Or the fact that all leveraged order books have long and short squeezes is something relevant to my inquiry.
I am even interested in studies that dispute any value of technical analysis because that sharpens my knowledge of that space. For example, there is the study of a professor who asked his students to look at a bunch of charts and make predictions. The students made all sorts of pronouncements based on things like "momentum," and then the professor revealed that the charts were from coin flips.
Efficient market hypotheses would also qualify as relevant. The hypothesis says that in mature markets there is no "found money" from hacking greeks or worrying golden crosses.
When I search for the subject, unfortunately, I just bump into studies that reinforce the chart-reading nonsense. The best I ran into was Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris.
I'm not sure that the 5% of TA that you find interesting is actually TA. Vanilla econ and investor psychology texts can deal with these without the baggage or trappings of 'analysis'. If you want rigour and hate TA, read Taleb's Dynamic Hedging and the papers that followed it, all of which are free to download IIRC. The target audience is quants and mathematical physics types, which I assume is consistent with your request.
EMH says that you have to earn your profits, which means that good luck finding obvious trends from easily available data, but it is still possible to make substantial profit by doing deep dives into companies' books, physically going to their premises to check conditions there (eg. hiring people to count how many cars are parked outside of their local Walmart and aggregating the data nationally), etc. I have no idea whether that stuff falls under "technical analysis", I think it's "fundamentals" or something.
I was told TA works because people believe in TA, so you're just mutually predicting each other and reaching some kind of equilibrium. Sounds neat so it's probably bullshit.
Yup, that seems tangible too, and worth studying. Some traders have talked about Schelling points.
Most self help books make promises they don't keep. What books (not necessarily self help) have you found to actually be useful?
I think I notably improved in consistency on some (not all) habits after reading Atomic Habits.
Seconded, and will add that I improved more on subsequent reads (after which I followed the advice more and more completely).
Elements of Style by Strunk and White
How to Think by Alan Jacobs
Making Things Grow by Thalassa Crusoe
How to Shoot Video that Doesn’t Suck (book lost, author unknown)
https://www.amazon.com/Shoot-Video-That-Doesnt-Suck/dp/0761163239
This?
Yes!
Like meeting an old friend after a coupla decades. I was a beginner and that book told me simple, true stuff and I am grateful.
I'm glad! I'm not currently in a "I should learn how to film stuff" emotional state, but I do get into those occasionally and I'll remember this for next time.
Meditation, by Marcus Aurelius.
60% of self help is just good old Marcus chopped and screwed, anyway.
Get it undiluted from the source.
Does this count? Treat Your Own Back https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0987650408/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_6ACQAPJKN05D7T86TW3T
The only self-help book i've found that actually helped was How To Be Miserable by Randy J Paterson - as the name implies it's a Screwtape Letters-esque take that reframes a goal the reader naturally wants by inverting it.
The combination of goal-orientedness and its relatively rapid-fire nature (the book covers 40 points in 4 categories) means it actually covers a lot of ground, rather than the usual 'one or two good ommonsense points stretched out needlessly to sell a book', so that the average person will probably get a fair chunk of useful insight they hadn't thought of. The negative framing isn't *just* engaging whimsy either - it helps you to identify all the misery-increasing strategies you're already inadvertently using so you can stop doing them.
If you're not depressed it won't help you as much as it helped me, but it would probably help most people at least a little. The downside is this means the book is actually quite bad at keeping its promise of increasing the misery in your life.
How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
How bad would nuclear warfare actually be?
I have recently been wondering about actual harm of a nuclear war while comparing media descriptions of "bad things" and actual "bad things". First example might be Covid-19/food shortages etc. Yes prices went up, yes people died, but not nearly as many as it seemed from the descriptions (don't get me wrong: it still was bad and it was right to try everything we had to avoid it).
Similarly, the great oil shortage where we "would run out" as advertised in the 90s... there is still a lot of oil around.
We have one data point: Japan got nuked twice in the 1940s. It is doing quite well as a country right now.
So, my question: how bad would the outcome of a few nukes being launched be? Say, Ukraine gets nuked and in retaliation some Russian place gets nuked as well and Putin dies, and that's it.
And how bad would the outcome of most nukes in possession of NATO/Russia being launched (I guess the US might save some to deter China in the post-war scenario)?
if I'm not mistaken, current weapons have about 1,000 times the yield of the bombs dropped on Japan.
Closer to 20 times. Really big (1000x Fat Man would be 20 megatons) nukes went out of fashion when MIRVs were invented.
True, though MIRVs punch above their weight in terms of destructive ability due to the non-linear relationship between kilotonnage and blast radius (i.e. multiple smaller bombs spread out are more damaging than a single massive bomb)
Each? Or in total? The typical modern warhead in the US arsenal yields about 300-475kt, which is 20-30x the Hiroshima yield of 15kt. There are about 1500 of these actively deployed, another 1500 or so in reserve.
DSL has a good post on this titled: "Nuclear weapons are not as destructive as you think" https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6142.0.html
Thanks, this is pretty much exactly what I was after!
Very pollyannish to just pick a reset to a mere 19th century or early 20th century point and rebuild from there. We've left the resources of that time far behind. Oil is no longer close to the surface. Soil is on chemical life support. There is no do over. We would not simply clear away current tech and knowledge and find underneath it the old physical world of those times.
Agreed. We're on the global industrial paradigm until we either a) develop manufacturing technologies and energy sources that free us from global production and supply chains or, b) regress back to the 19th century and become too energy-constrained to ever claw our way back out.
Nuclear warfare is a great way to force the issue and, unless I've missed something, we're nowhere near scenario b at this point.
Hmm, could we do without oil? Let's say that we relied on nuclear fission for electrical power, and oil was only used for agriculture. Private cars or water craft were no longer allowed to use oil-based fuel and we had no commercial aircraft.
It would be a very different world, but it might be doable.
Part of the problem is that you need fossil fuels to make all of the components needed for a nuclear reactor - all the steel and concrete, just for starters. Not to mention all the fuel and fuel-powered industry needed to mine, transport and refine uranium into usable fissile material. So bootstrapping yourself back to nuclear power from charcoal and biofuel after the apocalypse wrecks all your infrastructure is an absolute bastard.
The most likely scenario for any 'recovered' society following a general collapse would be an average 18th to early 19th-century standard of living, with spots of high technology here and there. One can imagine manually-dug mines (pity the workers) working the few remaining near-surface deposits, with charcoal and wood-gas-powered equipment allowing limited rail infrastructure and electrification. One or two cities may have the wherewithal to pull together enough effort and industry to produce something like a primitive light-water reactor, which would probably allow for general electrification over a small area (ditto for cities blessed to be nearby large sources of hydropower). There might still be limited manufacture of electronics and machines as we know them today (I imagine that militaries would still want access to armoured vehicles, jets, radios and and radar sets), but it would be expensive, specialist stuff rather than mass-market consumer goods.
This sort of stagnation could go on for a very long time - perhaps hundreds of years - before any sort of revolutionary change is able to take hold. The end state of such a society might not look anything like ours - having developed along completely different lines under a much more constrained resource milieu.
Do you really need fossil fuels to create steel and concrete? Steel needs a source of carbon, but that doesn't have to come from coal and AFAIK there are no ingredients in concrete that require them either.
Concrete is made by burning limestone and clay in a rotary furnace to form clinker, then grinding the clinker into powder. You need lots of fuel to burn to do this. Ditto steel - you need an enormous amount of coke (coal heated in an oxygen-free environment to drive off impurities as coal gas) to make pig iron, and then an enormous amount of electricity to run an arc furnace or similar (assuming you go that route).
You could do some of this using charcoal (and historically some blast furnaces were fired this way), but any sort of industrial production would ravage the world's forests in short order. You could also theoretically do some of this stuff with concentrated solar, but again you're looking at an order of magnitude less in terms of production, and a chicken-and-egg problem in making the solar plant itself when you have no way to produce steel or glass cheaply. Hydropower has the same issue - you need lots of concrete and steel to give it a proper go.
And none of this is even considering the issue of rarer resources needed to make the common stuff (iron ore, for instance) usable in industry. Fireclay needed for refractories comes with (or under) coal deposits, so as our coal gets worked out so too does our source of refractories. And a lot of seemingly-common metals needed for alloys are now mined in rather a few places worldwide (ie: copper, manganese, vanadium and chrome) and would need to be shipped long distances to be used. Metals useful for industrial chemistry (eg: platinum) are even worse, with one or two countries often producing the bulk of supply. So any attempt to make an industrial revolution is also going to require reliable trans-oceanic bulk shipping. Unless you're keen to get back into sails in a big way (in which case your maximum tonnage would be something like half of what a WW2 liberty ship could carry), then you need steel and fuel to make cargo ships.
Basically; our entire modern world is founded on the back of cheap thermal energy produced by burning fossil fuels (themselves representing millions of years of stored solar energy), and without this easily-available energy the entire process of industrialisation (and the bulk international trade that supports it) stalls.
But wouldn't there be plenty of power plants and fuel for them in other countries untouched by war, like, for instance, all of South America?
EDIT: I suppose a good response to this is in Toxn's post below:
"I don't know if this helps, but an idea of the scale of the problem can be had in looking at what would happen to countries that aren't nuked. Take where I live: a rather large middle-income country which presently produces a surplus of food... "
You can download a 1979 report by the US Office of Technology Assessment (RIP) called "Effects of Nuclear War", which is hundreds of pages of data on just that question. IIRC the worst-case scenarios estimated about half the population in the countries involved would die within the year. I think that was counting fatalities from starvation and thirst. Best-case scenarios IIRC were under 10 million deaths in the US, but I read it 40 years ago so don't believe me.
An interesting point is that the deaths that a single Russian nuclear submarine could cause is IIRC more than half deaths as the entire Russian arsenal could cause. That's because 1 Russian nuclear missile sub carries enough missiles to carpet-nuke dozens of big cities, which is already almost half of the population; and (wild guess) a quarter of the population is too spread-out to be targeted even with thousands of missiles.
Eh...I don't think so, not really. The most modern Russian SSBN is the Borei class, of which there are only 5, which if fully armed has 16 missiles with potentially 6 warheads each, with yields ~150kt or so. For a Los Angeles size city you would need all 6 warheads to seriously kill a significant fraction of the population right away, so you're only getting ~1 dozen[1], although much smaller cities like Madison or State College could readily be wiped out with just one 150kt blast.
Anyway, this pales in comparison to the Russian SRF, which comprises something like ~300 missiles carrying up to ~1,200 warheads.
------------
[1] Of course this assumes the sub survives to launch its missiles at all. Generally the USN prides itself in having an attack sub at all times within torpedo range of every Russian SSBN at sea. One assumes that should hostilities break out, the American attack sub commander's Job #1 is to immediately sink the target he's been shadowing, and they should probably be able to do that within 5-10 minutes. Not a lot of time to get your birds into flight.
Have you watched Dr. Strangelove?
Dr. Strangelove features a fictional device which, unlike real nuclear weapons, is actually *designed* to destroy all life on earth.
Great movie, but part of the "media portrayal" of the issue that I'm trying to move past!
If only a couple nukes got launched, the world would be basically fine. Ukraine would have anywhere from 10,000+ to 1,000,000+ casualties depending on where the nuke landed, Russia would have up to a couple million casualties, and then Russia would get flattened (since in this hypothetical, they only launch one nuke; without nukes, nothing really saves Russia from being steamrolled by the US + EU).
If most of the nukes in possession of NATO/Russia went off, the majority of the human population of the Earth would die. It's been speculated that a mild nuclear winter could be caused by as few as 100 nukes, and there are around 3,000+ actively ready nukes between the US and Russia (with the runner ups having a relatively negligible amount- France has 300, for reference). A full nuclear exchange would cause a severe nuclear winter lasting up to 10 years; obviously, we don't have the food stores to last 10 years without the ability to grow crops.
There are organizations that are looking in advance into how to solve this problem:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/25/20707644/nuclear-winter-famine-apocalypse-allfed
If the hypothetical technologies envisioned by these groups are developed further, we could see some developed countries surviving the nuclear winter. The countries that were directly involved in the nuclear exchange wouldn't be in a good enough condition to mass-produce and implement these advanced technologies in a 6-month timespan (about how long we'd have to start eating from alternative sources), and developing countries would pretty much all starve to death.
This current projection is actually quite good! It's much better than it used to be before these ideas were even a thing; back in the Cold War, the understanding was "Nuclear winter takes humans to the brink of extinction, possibly to be saved by rare groups of breeding pairs of people that survived in doomsday prep shelters (who would be disproportionately wealthy, of course).
As food technology improves, we can expect that the ease with which we could mitigate a nuclear winter's effects will increase. Eventually, at some point in the next few decades, we'll probably be at a level where we (the US + EU) can survive even if our infrastructure has been damaged by direct nuclear attacks. Places like developing African countries, however, or already-starving regimes like North Korea, will probably be in perpetual danger of complete collapse and mass starvation for the foreseeable future.
"It's been speculated that"
This summarizes most of the nuclear winter models.
I don't know if this helps, but an idea of the scale of the problem can be had in looking at what would happen to countries that aren't nuked. Take where I live: a rather large middle-income country which presently produces a surplus of food. Which is a pretty good start. Unfortunately, we're also an export-driven economy with dependence on foreign goods and markets. Which means that we've de-industrialised to the point that we'd need years (if not decades) to run back up to the point of even being able to make fuel, fertilizer and spare parts for our stock of trains, tractors, powerplants and the like.
Even if we were completely excluded from the direct effects of nuclear warfare (ie: no fallout, no nuclear winter), a disruption to the global supply chain caused by most of the world's busiest port cities vanishing from the map would probably result in our government collapsing (or being forced into Great Patriotic War-level decisions regarding production and food supply) and a huge chunk of our population dying of hunger.
In short - even being half a world away from a nuclear war would probably ruin most of the surviving nations on earth and force us all back to, at best, a 19th-century level of production and population. This would, not to put too fine a point on it, be one of the largest die-offs in the history of our species, and would probably put the kibosh on any thoughts of expanding off-world for good.
The expansion off-world would just be delayed by a few centuries. Does that matter in the grand scheme of things?
A scenario with only a few nukes launched is largely fine for people not living in the target cities, but also unlikely. Any nuclear launch probably triggers a massive launch of all the targets nukes in retaliation (if the target has nukes at all). A NATO/Russia exchange would devastate humanity just from the direct casualties, let alone any consideration of possible "nuclear winters".
If you want to model a 'limited' nuclear exchange, an India/Pakistan war is probably the most plausible option. Both sides have dozen or hundreds of nukes, but it won't go global. Such an exchange would be utterly disastrous for the subcontinent, obviously, but my understanding of modern research is that the "nuclear winter" would be bad but far from catastrophic for the rest of the world - comparable to a big volcanic eruption. The trade disruptions would be substantial, but neither India nor Pakistan are as central to global trade as eg the USA or China, so civilisation would survive. Circa a Billion deaths would still make it by far the worst tragedy humanity has ever suffered, though.
How sure is that? India-Pakistan nuke exchange - even if full - might well lead to 200 million, or 500, 750 ... 1 billion seem just as arbitrary as many other numbers. Any studies? (To stay with the spirit of the question, not to disagree!). A nuke on the Kremlin plus strikes on all known Russian-nuke sites might well stop any counter-strike. No Putin left to push a button. Or just a few from one submarine. And there is now some US missile defense.
>A nuke on the Kremlin plus strikes on all known Russian-nuke sites might well stop any counter-strike. No Putin left to push a button. Or just a few from one submarine. And there is now some US missile defense.
1) Each nuclear silo essentially requires a direct hit with a nuclear weapon in order to be destroyed. They can resist staggering amounts of overpressure and must be scoured out of the ground with the plasma of the fireball itself.
2) The Russians would launch while your missiles are in the air. A nuke can't destroy anything before reaching its target, and these systems are designed for rapid response. ICBMs at the very least are not fast enough; IRBMs are faster (hence the now-scrapped INF treaty and before it the Cuban Missile Crisis), but still potentially not fast enough.
3) Russia has ABM too (and so much SAM that air attack deep into Russia is pointless), so a single nuke fired per silo is not sufficient to guarantee that that silo will not fire any more missiles (leaving aside the ones already fired via point #2).
4) Good luck finding 10+ of their 11 SSBNs before they can fire. You'll need it.
5) The orders to launch will go out regardless of whether Putin is killed. Russia has chains of command just like we do, and nuking Moscow is so outrageous that any potential hesitance on their part to engage would be immediately erased. Even if you get the entire human C&C, there is the Perimetr system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand), which is designed to automatically tell Russian forces to launch if it detects that Russian cities are getting nuked (it isn't normally switched on, but right now it almost certainly is given Putin publically put Russian nuclear forces on alert).
The Russian nuclear force is *designed around* the potential for NATO to attempt an alpha strike. That is the whole point. It is not easily circumvented.
Strikes me as far too pessimistic, and assuming the Russian SRF are about 2 orders of magnitude more competent than the Army is proving to be. How likely is that?
(2) Sure, the Russians would launch on warning -- if they got it early enough, and had enough time. That's why we have SLBMs. They get 10 minutes, not 30. Given how many of their land-based launchers are mobile, I'm dubious they can get them all off the ground in time. (Also, mobile launchers aren't nearly as hard as silos.)
(3) The Russian ABM only protects Moscow.
(4) The Russians only have 5 modern SSBNs in total, and certainly don't have 10 of any kind at sea at any given time. Maybe 4 or 5 would be my guess. And historically, at least, it has been easy to locate them, and they are routinely shadowed by US hunter subs, who are prepared to sink them on a few minutes' notice. They're normally picked up by fixed sonar arrays when they leave base. There's an enormous gap between Russian and US submarine competence, and experience.
(5) Well that's why you hit the strategic assets first. Then it doesn't matter whether Putin is still alive, he's got nothing with which to shoot.
I'm not advocating a first strike, mind you, but my WAG is that there's at least a 50/50 chance we'd get away with it. Kind of make a horrible mess in Asia and Eastern Europe tho, which is pretty darn antisocial.
#2: I agree that many of the nukes, perhaps most, would be destroyed on the ground (launch-on-warning doesn't allow use of one's entire arsenal). Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot.
#3: my understanding is that their newer SAMs can target ballistic missiles, and those are everywhere. Hardly a guaranteed defence, but not a guaranteed failure either.
#4: Fair.
#5: Agreed that C&C is irrelevant without nukes to shoot, but Mark suggested a strike on the Kremlin to remove "the button" and hence I felt it necessary to respond.
Well, I agree with you that a first strike is at this point a seriously bad idea -- I did say I thought the odds were 50/50 it would work, and I personally wouldn't be wanting to flip a coin on whether we'd have the devastation of losing that bet -- even if it's far less than civilization-ending, it would be crappy in a way that makes the Great Depression seem like boomtimes. And even if it *works* it would cause misery and destruction all across Asia and Eastern Europe that I would not want on my conscience.
Of course, what's going on in Ukraine is also evil in a way we really haven't seen there since 1945, so...it's a tough one. I'm all for a little strategic ambiguity, being clear that we're *not certain* we won't do it, or not certain what might push us over the line. Beyond that, I would hope we have people in the Pentagon and at Langley who are racking their evil little psychopath brains, trying to think of ways to cut short the evil without the blunt big hammer. We'll see, I guess.
"Strikes me as far too pessimistic, and assuming the Russian SRF are about 2 orders of magnitude more competent than the Army is proving to be. How likely is that?"
The Russians have space launch vehicles that are literally just repurposed ICBMs and SLBMs; they work ~90% of the time. That includes SLBMs launched from their SSBNs on what would have been test/training exercises but with the dummy warheads replaced by a satellite because someone paid them some cash.
And the best reporting out of Ukraine says that their short-range ballistic and cruise missiles work ~40% of the time. These are going to be lower priority for them than strategic nuclear weapons, but maybe the strategic missiles they use for space launch are cherrypicked, so OK, take the geometric mean and get 60% reliability for their strategic weapons.
I'd have estimated 70% before the latest unpleasantness, but it doesn't matter if it is 60 or even 40%, 40% of the Russian nuclear arsenal, even of their second-strike retaliatory arsenal, is going to kill many tens of millions of people and destroy industrial infrastructure that is going to take decades to rebuild (if we can hold our civilization together for those decades).
"We'll just destroy all their leaders and all their weapons in a Glorious First Strike, and even if we don't get them all, well, those ignorant commie peons don't understand technology like our boys (no offense), so they won't be able to really hurt us", was the fantasy most likely to get a billion or so people killed during the Cold War; maybe now the number is "only" a hundred million people, it's still a really bad plan. Do not take strategic advice from Buck Turgidson.
OK, so you are saying it's only somewhat too pessimistic, instead of far too? I'm OK with that.
Anyway, I'm not talking about their vehicles, I'm talking about their command and control human infrastructure and logistics, and whether the 2 million rubles allocated for maintenance on launch platform X actually went into that or got siphoned off to buy somebody's yacht. This is exactly the kind of "tail" stuff that the Ukrainian war is demonstrated the Russians have apparently been quietly getting badly wrong.
Also, kind of a difference between an orbital launch vehicle that you can take weeks to get ready with a team of 100 who focus on it full-time, and whether *this* launcher that has been sitting around for 30 years is *actually* going to get off the ground on 15 minutes warning like it's supposed to. Whether they can do the latter is not proved by whether they can do the former. Which is kind of why the USAF does test Minuteman test launches from Vandenberg every now and then, just to check. My impression is that the Russians don't take the same kind of care to test stuff -- in part because the consequences to mid-level commanders if they *don't* work are much more severe.
So my new profile pic is intended to be anti-Russia, but I wanted to get some reactions since there's a lot of potential for misunderstanding.
I would not have known it was anti-Russia if you hadn't said so. Is the paperclip supposed to look like a diagonal slash, like on a non-smoking sign? Why is it a paperclip? Does it have something to do with A.I. safety?
I wouldn't have guessed that it was anti-Russia if you hadn't said as much, to be honest.
It looks more like a Russian flag than something anti-Russian. Without your clarification, I would more likely assume you were Russian. Given the current climate around Russia, someone putting a Russian flag as their profile pic would almost certainly have to be significantly pro-Russian to be willing to declare their nationality.
Perhaps a red circle with a line through it, instead of the paperclip?
Honestly, don't do this. We all see the Russian flag first, and only then we get to wonder what's up with the paperclip.
Not to mention that the sight of the Russian flag is currently traumatic for a lot of people by itself, whatever else you put on top of it.
If you're going to pick on my wording, then I get to pick on yours.
First, it's not just Mariupol. It's all of Ukraine, at this point, as well as a lot of Ukrainian and Russian ex-pats, people with relatives over there and so on (and by the way, I'm one of those). Notice I didn't say "everyone". I said "a lot of people".
Second, we're getting stories of mass graves, shot up cars with bodies insides, corpses of civilians in the streets.
If he thinks a Russian flag in his profile is currently a good choice if the context is appropriate, I'm not going to argue. But I thought he should be aware of what it looks like to many people. He did ask.
I can think of some appropriate contexts for a Russian flag, but I think we agree that a paperclip on top doesn't seem to do it.
First impressions: "You are a pro-Russian pro-paperclip maximization ...?"
Or, even worse, pro-Russian and pro-Clippy.
Very narrow demographic, especially in 2022!
Thanks for the feedback and sorry. It was intended to say that Putin/Russia is like the paperclip maximizer, which is to say a soulless, heartless evil machine that treats human beings like resources.
Hey Beowulf+somenumber. Nice piece on Laurie Anderson on 60 Minutes tonight.
What piece -- can explain what you're referring to?
There was an Anderson Cooper interview segment with Laurie Anderson on last night’s 60 Minutes.
Beowulf+somenumber had mentioned being a fan some number of open threads ago.
Are there videos of dancers that are better than Michael Jackson?
Yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZVIMjACF4
(James Brown)
Fun fact: The reason Boston didn't burn un 1968 was James Brown and anyone else who had honors seminar with Maureen O'Dowd at Northeastern Univ had this drilled into their head
Okay, you’ve set off some historical research here. We have the James Brown concert keeping the peace after the MLK assassination figured out. Can’t find a way to loop a Maureen O’Dowd into the picture tho.
I mis-parsed this the first time. I get it now.
I was around when it happened just a wee lad of -20 or so. [I was 15]
I listened to the Communist Party framing of his funeral from Radio Havana on my build it yourself Heath Kit short wave. That was my first exposure to up is down, white is black propaganda. Race issues in the US were a favorite topic for the CP.
The Nicholas Brothers. I believe Michael took lessons from them at one time. This is their most famous routine, taken from the movie "Stormy Weather" (this clip is colorized, but the original is easy to find): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMbeDhG9fU . I have never seen better.
I mean, maybe ?
https://youtu.be/J3SlEc059EI?t=20
My first ever paper was published this week!! It's to do with the evolutionary theory of ageing, in its mathematical form developed by Hamilton (1966) and extended by Caswell (1978), Baudisch (2005) and others. [reposted from the subscribers-only hidden open thread]
My paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.1910
Roper & Salguero-Gómez's reply: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.2610
Twitter explainer: https://twitter.com/DavidBahry/status/1509574046958112779
~~~
The general idea is that natural selection cares less about late life than early life (e.g. compare a gene killing you in infancy, to a gene killing you only in middle age after you've likely already had a few kids). This was figured out intuitively in the 40s and 50s by Haldane, Medawar, and Williams; then formalized by William D. Hamilton in 1966. (He's the same guy who developed kin selection theory; you may know about him if you read Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene"). He used mathematical demography tools to quantify "how much natural selection cares" about genes slightly modifying age-specific fecundity or log survival probability.
Hal Caswell (1978) did related work, for stage-specific reproduction and survival probability; e.g. for "larva vs. pupa vs. adult", instead of for "0-year-olds vs. 1-year-olds vs. 2-year-olds vs. ...".
Annette Baudisch (2005) did related work, again for age structure, but clarifying Hamilton's assumptions and possible alternatives to them. The reason Hamilton used "log survival probability" is that he assumed genes multiply survival probabilities; she considered e.g. genes that multiply hazard rates instead (see the twitter thread or the paper).
My paper shows that Caswell (1978) and Hamilton (1966) also had different assumptions: Caswell assumed that genes add to survival probabilities instead of multiplying them. My paper also shows how their equations are related to each other.
My paper was a comment on Roper et al. (2021). Their reply points out that although they cited Caswell (1978), the equations they gave were actually eqns 1 and 2 from Caswell (2010), which did have the same assumptions as Hamilton after all; otherwise they agree with the analysis, and give a table comparing the various equations.
Congratulations on being published!
Scott, what time are book reviews due on 4/5/22? At the end of the day? In what time zone? Also, I'm assuming that "book reviews are due on 4/5" effectively means "don't edit your Google doc after 4/5"--that the submission links you to the page given, rather than copying it at the time of submission..
I'll be maximally merciful and count anyone who sends them in at any time that day in any time zone. You can edit if you want until I post it.
Should I have received any email confirmation that my response was submitted?
I would also like to know that.
TWIL:
- There's a Zoroastrian fire temple in Iran whose fire has been burning continuously for 1,500 years! www.atlasobscura.com/places/yazd-atash-behram
- The Kwaio language, spoken by the Kwaio in the Solomon Islands, keeps changing because an ancestor's name can become sacred/taboo, but also Kwaio names often include common words as part of them. So e.g. if an important ancestor dies whose name had "fish" in it, then it becomes taboo to say "fish" in front of the descendants enforcing the taboo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knv1OSMW2rU
- Ths "Altaic hypothesis" proposed that Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic (and maybe also Korean and Japonese) were one language super-family. It was a big nerd fight, including one prominent defection. Mainstream opinion now is that it's false, and the language similarities that exist are mostly loan words and other influence due to contact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0zkHH6ZOEk
[latter two both from the cool YouTube channel NativLang]
> The Kwaio language, spoken by the Kwaio in the Solomon Islands, keeps changing because an ancestor's name can become sacred/taboo, but also Kwaio names often include common words as part of them.
I'm glad that our own taboo system is not quite so niggardly.
So for *reasons* I've been looking around at sort of social sim games. The most common stuff you see is The Sims and clones, mobile/web games, Japanese dating sims and school sims, and hybrids like the Persona series. I guess some western RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Pathfinder sort of work. Japan has some "erotic strategy" games which personally shock and appall me but seem to be quite popular like the Rance series.
The other obvious example is Crusader Kings but while the social world is wide it isn't very deep. Well neither is Persona really, just a few handcrafted situations.
One game I was recommended from a mobile/web dev type that I know was interesting. Kudos 2. Pretty distinct as a day in the life sim because it is more menus and maybe paper dolls rather than The Sims. Also you wouldn't naturally expect a game like that from the developer of Gratuitous Space Battles and Democracy 2. Very 90s/2000s regular person life game. Well you can be a nuclear physicist I guess.
What I've never been able to track down is a bit niche. Well maybe The Sims: Medieval. A fantasy sim where you can do various stuff like be an adventurer or a noble or the head of a magic academy or a merchant. So like Patrician, a map and menu game, but with characters. Obviously in 3D you have stuff like the Guild though it is limited to merchants and light politics.
So what I am saying is do people want to play more living world stuff? Or better yet have you played it and where is it? If you look at Kudos 2, Academagia and Patrician 3 and and maybe even some visual novel stuff, you'll see why I'm not satisfied with Crusader Kings. Ironically the 3d model stuff is actually a negative to me. I like the mechanical aspect. Which sounds weird talking about social simulations.
Is there anything like that?
I would trade off dialogue, handcrafted visual novel art, and such for mechanics. I'd also like my situation to exist in a broader context like a map and menu game vs something super contained like Academagia or a dating sim. I like procedural stuff because of the scope.
Did the new court-dlc of CK3 do anything for you? (I guess not) - I kinda feel your pain + appreciate your lists, even though you crave for more.
CK3 is general is trash to me. Some of the modders do interesting or even insane stuff. I don't care at all about the 3d models stuff. If anything I oppose it since it expends resources that could be used for something interesting. The Court system itself is almost entirely stat sticks with a bunch of, absolutely shit, "events". For instance the even about a character being deposed by their child literally finds one of your best vassals and magically deposes them to create the event.
And of course the whole footstool part or the fart nonsense.
CK3 character interactions are dull as dirt. Like, forget dialogue and art, there's no variety, they are incredibly shallow, and they don't connect with the wider world at all. And there is no sense of time.
Being real time hurts CK games a lot because you can't have interesting or complex things happen because time keeps moving plus Paradox is so multiplayer obsessed and obviously long pauses in multiplayer is a no no.
I've heard good things about Kenshi in terms of living world, but never played it. Not sure how deep the social aspect is, but apparently every NPC is recruitable (!).
Kenshi doesn't have a super deep social aspect and it is very rough. But it is pretty unique as an open world sim. Sort of like Paradox games it probably wouldn't make it in an even slightly competitive market but no one else really does the same thing.
So when did it become acceptable for CNN reporters to post stupidity like this on Twitter?
https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/1510761352931033090
If you do not care about consistency, then "X does not exist" and "actually, X is good" both oppose the complaints about X. The former has the advantage that you do not have to discuss the details of X, and that if you lose this battle, you still get the second chance with the latter.
posting stupidity on twitter is equal opportunity. why would CNN reporters be excluded from this?
> posting stupidity on twitter is equal opportunity
Tell it to Milo Yiannopoulous, or Donald Trump, or Bronze Age Pervert.
Roughly 2011? That person is a known blech person, specifically.
Well, Don Lemon was speculating that a missing airliner got swallowed by a black hole, and he did that as part of a broadcast, so...
Shameless plug: you wall like book reviews, here's one for Mosca's "The Ruling Class." https://juliusbranson.net/MoscaReview
What happens at the Meetups?
My experience with them is that people mill around and chat.
My experience is the same as Resident Contrarian's. It's a social event with people who share a common interest. If you want to know more specifics, e-mail a meetup organizer in your area and ask them what their meetups are like.
The prompt: Your doorbell rings, and on opening it you see someone who looks suspiciously like a missionary. He immediately justifies your suspicion by explaining he has had a special and wonderful revelation, and now knows that which is worth knowing. He proposes to share this knowing with you, and reveals the name of his new belief system: He is Religitarian.
The challenge::
Propose a set of beliefs that make sense to label as "religitarian" that, should you join, will not result in you dying in a weird culty way.
时间研究书简
I'm afraid you are going to have to help the monoglot out a bit here.
时间研究书简.com
Orthogonal pro-tip: Statistically the most effective way to turn away Mormon missionaries is to claim Catholicism- they consider it the most backwards of religious sects
Trying to recruit them back to the Roman Catholic church via quoting nicene creed saves you even more time
The protestant version of this is arguing about the trinity with them. From what I've understood from the outside, most forms of counter-proseletizing end up with your address getting flagged for future avoidance. I get it from a purely mechanical perspective - you don't want the heretics turning your youth away from the truth.
While Latter-day Saint missionaries do have a way of marking houses to avoid, it is almost universally ineffective past 3 months or so because of how missionaries get moved around.
Also, in all my life as a church I have never heard a reliable story of missionaries being told to avoid someone because of a risk of the missionaries getting converted. If missionaries avoid someone who argues theology with them it is because it is a waste of time for missionaries to argue theology with people. There are always other people out there who are actually looking for something new and it is much more effective to leave and find them.
I definitely know plenty missionaries who leave the church after serving a mission, but it's never been because of theological arguments that they heard while serving.
FWIW I don't think my mental image of this includes an actual conversion so much as "this guy spent like 20 minutes trying to convince us God the Father and Jesus were literally the same person".
Yeah, my point main is that it's not a very efficient strategy because 1) it takes 20 minutes of your time 2) you're like the third person this month that's done this so you're not telling them anything they haven't heard before and 3) it takes way, way more than this to make missionaries remember your house beyond about 3 months because of how they get transferred around (in theory there's a way for missionaries to leave records to help each other avoid duplicating effort etc but it rarely works in practice)
I wouldn't be shocked to find the protestant lore on this is wrong/overblown, like you are saying. In retrospect it's a little too pat of a story.
This is so far away from my experience as a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) missionary that I wonder where you came up with it. Learning that someone was Catholic had zero effect on whether we would keep talking to them. Even if we did consider Catholicism the most backwards of religious sects (we don't??), the whole point is to be out proselytizing so why would that turn us away?
The most reliable way to turn away Mormon missionaries is to say "I'm sorry, I'm not interested in discussing religion. Have a nice day." and close the door.
The next most reliable way is to clearly be someone who is insincere in their interest in the missionaries, either for the purpose of counter-proselytizing or for messing with them. This takes more time, though, so I'm not sure why anyone would prefer it.
There is no reliable way to keep the missionaries away for >~ 3 months beyond luck. (And so credibly threatening physical violence that your house becomes part of the oral lore of the area. This takes more than you think, though; missionaries have seen a lot.)
End time changes
Metric revolution or at least one standard pint
USB C everything
Federal student loans for only certain degrees with established job markets
I'm not sure I understand the challenge. Are you saying that if e.g. Mormons knock on your door, and you convert, then the chances of you dying in a "weird culty way" dramatically increase ? I don't think this accurate; at least, not in all cases. I mean, I will grant you some increased probability of culty death, but many of these door-to-door religions are reasonably safe (as far as culty death is concerned, anyway, they might be unsafe for other reasons).
No association with specific existing religions is intended; if anything I suspect that converting to LDS would probably increase your life expectancy more than anything.
Well, then your challenge could be trivially answered by modifying some minor aspect of existing religions. For example, maybe the Religitarians are exactly like Mormons, but they also believe that one should wear green clothing on February 29th.
"Religitarian" suggests someone who eats...religions? The religious? The challenge is to give some sensible meaning to the coinage "that will not result in you dying in a weird culty way".
Well, if they eat the religious, and they are themselves a religion, then there seems to be a clear conflict of interest right there. Remaining atheist is your only salvation ! :-)
There's a lot of research these days that brainstorming is bad. Is that true? Is it slightly bad or terrible?
I searched "research brainstorming bad" - most of the results cited the main failure modes being a) not being accommodating of people's neurodiversity and individual preferences for how they contribute to discussions; and b) the initial public responses tend to shepherd subsequent responses in both tone and desired outcome.
Insofar as Brainstorming is a subset of "Office Meeting", most office meetings are very poorly run and a waste of everyone's time anyway, so I'd say the badness of brainstorming (in that format) is an inherited trait. Getting people to privately, anonymously propose ideas (NB: to a smart, organised facilitator) is probably the way to go. Then there can be a group thing where people are asked to filter the ideas through some stipulated criteria.
From what I remember reading, brainstorming - as defined as 'throwing out as many ideas as possible while avoiding criticism to create the widest possible base for inspiration' - is much less effective than constructive discussion of those ideas including criticism. That aside, I agree with Sloan in that the badness of brainstorming is more related to the badness of office meetings, and putting any blame or weight on the presence or absence of brainstorming in something strikes me as overly reductive and foolish.
Any math phds in here?
I have recently gone through admissions season, and it didn't go quite as well as I had hoped (or expected). I ended up with a single offer from an institution that I am not especially excited about, although they are probably objectively a pretty good fit (I am also waitlisted for a very good school, but it's probably too late right now). I am graduating with a math degree and a computer science degree, and I am wondering if it is a good idea to lean into CS at this point in my life instead of trying to go into the grind that is academia.
Those of you who have done math phds, how is your life going right now? Do you regret it? Would you go to a school that you are only somewhat excited for?
I haven't finished my (math) PhD yet, but I have decided that afterwards I'm leaving the academic math side of things and doing some specific CS things that feel like a much better fit. I wish I'd found this other area before starting the PhD, so that I could have focused on that from the start, but I only found it because of the new environment that doing the PhD provided, so I can't truly say I regret it.
What I do regret is even looking for PhD positions when it should have been obvious from my previous experience that research was not for me. So if I have any advice at all, is to try to figure out if there is any chance you're "going into the grind" for reasons that on reflection you wouldn't stand behind, such as outside pressure, some vague notion of status, the feeling that this is what your script is telling you to do, etc.
If you do end up doing a PhD: make sure you have a good advisor. The only way I can think of determining this is asking their previous (research) students directly, although it might be tricky to do so through cold emails. Furthermore, a department with many people who can serve as your peers is very helpful. PhDs can be incredibly lonely and isolating experiences.
Regardless of what you end up doing: good luck!
Can't second this advice enough. I finished my Physics PhD a few years back, and made basically every mistake described above: I went into it because I felt like I'd wonder if I could hack it for the rest of my life if I didn't, I wasn't particularly enthused about the research itself, and I had a shitty advisor (terrifically smart man - godawful teacher and mentor). I now work in communications tech and am, surprise of surprises, actually happy.
I would say this: if you don't already have a good idea of what it is you want to study, and even who you want to study with, don't go. You do need to genuinely care about what you're researching in order to not go crazy during the process. Of course you may find some topic during the course of your intro classes that really appeals to you (and where the low-lying fruit isn't already completely picked, sorry topologists), but that's really rolling the dice.
I did a math PhD and I loved it. The best time in my life. If I could have found a way to drag out my thesis and take longer to finish, I would have. I learned a lot of stuff that is surprisingly applicable in the real world (and got me my current job) as well as a ton of incredibly interesting and totally useless stuff (some of which I was curious about since I was young). Several of my classmates were absolutely miserable and hated every second of it. Impostor syndrome, absent advisors, the feeling that they were trapped, or that they were wasting their lives studying something no one else would ever care about and would never be able to make an original contribution of their own.
Everyone is different. If, like me, you have a burning need to know that outweighs your need for food or sleep, then whether or not you go to grad school is just a question of what environment you think will help you learn fastest. I would have gone to a school that I was only somewhat excited for as long as they offered housing and enough money to survive while I focused on learning and trying to refine my own ideas. I'm guessing that you aren't exactly like me in that regard - and I don't think it's necessary to be like me to enjoy grad school. But I think it has to be your own path, your own ideas that you are pursuing.
That sounds really fun! I think I am in the same boat as you; a burning desire to know things that outweighs a lot of other stuff. If you ended up well employed because of it, that is also very reassuring.
1. Hi there.
2. Very well. The road I traveled down had many twists and turns, but I ultimately went from "failed child prodigy" status at the time of grad school admission to "globally-recognized expert" in a relevant field today.
3. Hell no. While I never became effective at producing math research papers, and basically "failed out" of getting a prestigious advisor, the faculty were able to guide my lost soul toward the field of nonparametric statistics -- a field I had never heard of before entering the program, but which has provided rather useful context for my subsequent work in industry. Sure, if I had known back then what field I would eventually establish myself in (I'm not a statistician today), I could have taken a more direct path, and such a path wouldn't have involved a math PhD. But I didn't have such a clear vision; given that, the school did a great job.
4. Do they seem to be excited for you? The math PhD program I went to was a tier below my undergrad institution in academic prestige, but partly as a consequence, they clearly valued me highly. In contrast, the slightly-higher-ranked CS grad school that accepted me came off as rather indifferent.
Thanks for the response, it is really helpful to hear perspectives of people who have actually taken these paths.
So you work in industry now? What was the transition like? Did you have work experience before moving into industry?
The school seems somewhat excited for me, and I already know many of the people there so grad school would likely be an enjoyable few years of my life should I choose to attend. Mostly what is worrying is thinking about what this means for the me 20 years down the line; a future me that takes a CS job right now would probably be wealthy and living a good life, whereas taking the phd might mean a tossup between a good life doing interesting research vs being underemployed teaching trigonometry to freshmen. The school that I got into is reasonably prestigious, but not enough that I feel confident that the latter case will not happen, which is what makes me not especially excited.
Research > CS Job >>>>> trigonometry. If a phd at a fairly good but not extremely good institution who stays in academia is doomed to trigonometry, then that affects my decision a lot. Hence, also, why I am very interested in people's paths from academia to industry.
After undergrad, I started work as a software engineer, without any intention to return to grad school at all. I was tired of school, and I seemed to be in possession of a skillset valuable enough to render further formal education unnecessary.
But that didn't work out for me. Maybe I wouldn't have washed out of that first job if I had started drinking coffee then instead of missing out on that most basic of nootropics until age ~30; or maybe I simply wasn't mature enough at the time. Anyway, the bottom line is that I actually did try the "take a CS job, become wealthy and live a good life" plan first; I only turned to grad school when I failed at plan A.
As embarrassing as it was to "fail to sell out", I don't regret trying. And if you haven't tried at least a CS internship yet... yeah, I'd bet on the expected utility from dipping your toe in those waters to be higher than from heading directly to math grad school. Partly because you are right to fear trigonometry -- I do know other people who graduated from the same program I did who are teaching in community college today, etc. -- and partly because unless you're a truly outstanding research talent, nothing much is lost in postponing the start of grad school a bit. You can choose to go later, when you're either really excited to study something deeply and academia is a better place than e.g. an industrial lab to do so, or you're as lost as I was.
As for transitioning back to industry after grad school: I didn't "retry plan A". Instead, I spent several years doing work that didn't pay better than a postdoc, but which was in a field I viewed as having a "talent gap" in EA terms, and which I strongly cared about. I wasn't wrong about the talent gap, and this time around I was motivated and caffeinated enough to make extraordinary contributions, primarily in the software tooling space. Then I started receiving engineer instead of postdoc wages; and now I've more or less achieved financial independence, about a decade after the PhD, almost by accident.
I have a PhD in math from Cambridge (so, not quite your position, in that I got accepted into the exciting institution). I enjoyed it a lot, didn't enjoy postdoc-ing, left to industry after a few years; I'm currently in engineering / optics and enjoying myself a lot. Some thoughts:
1. I enjoyed my PhD experience. Many people don't. I doubt it's worth it for the three letters (or for the built-up character or whatever) if you aren't enjoying yourself.
2. I like hanging out with math nerds, so I found PhD to be a pleasantly sociable experience. On the other hand, I found my postdoc to be quite lonely, because there weren't many of us around, and we were clearly too old for the graduate students but too young for the professors, and also people had largely paired up and moved off campus by that point. I can see this hitting people earlier than in my experience.
3. If you leave to industry with a PhD, your salary will start having a "PhD bonus" (but I'm not sure it translates into a net lifetime win, given the several years on PhD student budget). You're also more likely to get more interesting technical tasks -- there's a small number of interesting jobs that seem to be reserved for people with PhDs these days. Not all my colleagues have PhDs, but my colleagues tend to run 30 years older than me; the younger ones overwhelmingly do.
4. I don't have a strong opinion on how a good fit with the advisor compares against a more prestigious school; you could make a case for either one. For undergrad, I'd lean hard into school quality; for a postdoc, you want a good working group much more than you care about the rest of the university; grad school is somewhere in between.
5. You're unlikely to use the contents of your PhD in industry -- heck, you're unlikely to use most of your undergraduate math in industry. If you leave, you might have to fend off people who will ask you "but isn't this wasting your education".
So this is an update of my predictions regarding outcome of Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-216/comment/5641841?s=r. I've refined conditions for categories based on helpful feedback. This does not invalidate previous predictions, since previously I've had that in mind without explicitly saying so.
9 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (down from 10 % on March 21).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
26 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (up from 15 % on March 21).
65 % on unambiguous Russian victory (down from 75 % on March 21).
Russian victory is defined as Russia getting something it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, this does NOT count as Russian victory.
Commentary:
Overall bad two weeks for Russia. I would not call them „good“ for Ukraine, since it is subjected to horrific destruction, but it is now closer to not-losing the war.
Some things that happened were bad for Ukraine. Biden made a speech in Warsaw**, where he framed the conflict as a struggle between liberal democracy and tyranny, revealed that his goal is to undermine Russian regime, and that his strategy to get non-aligned word on our side is via moral suasion, i.e. asking them whether they want to be on the right side of history. This is imho pretty anti-convincing to decision-makers in e.g. Ankara or New Delhi, and other similar places, whom Ukraine desperately needs to get on its side.
Other bad thing for Ukraine has been recent Hungarian elections, which are a proof of concept that even in the EU and in the country formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, you can achieve strong election victory on the platform of observing strict neutrality in the war.
More significant than that are imho Russian reverses. Firstly, there is a Russian pullback from north Ukraine. They tried to spin it as gesture of good will, which is an obvious BS. Probably chief reason for it is that supplying their army through Belarus with its poor infrastructure is just unworkable. As a result, huge Ukrainian garrison of Kyiiv can be partially redeployed somewhere else. Shortening of the front should be good for a side with less firepower, i.e. Ukraine, because of the declining marginal value of the additional gun per kilometer of the front.
Secondly, credible reports of Russian atrocities in Bucha will boost morale of the Ukrainians and Western support for Ukraine. Unlike some other Russian atrocities, like kidnapping of Ukrainian officials or not allowing civilian population of besieged cities to leave, this is directly contrary to Russian strategic interest, and my guess is that it is not directed from the top, but instead those are crimes committed by undisciplined soldiers on a rampage. I doubt that boost, which Ukraine will get from it, is going to be sufficient for them to not loose; real problem for Russia is that perhaps Bucha is just a tip of the iceberg. If reports of similar atrocities start to surface all over Ukraine, that truly might sink Russian chances of victory.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
** Its transcript is here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/26/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-united-efforts-of-the-free-world-to-support-the-people-of-ukraine/
What's the new Russian master plan? See if the Ukrainians run out of bullets before the Motherland runs out of ignorant conscript boys from the far East?
It looks as though Russia is no longer trying to seize major cities like Kyiv, Odessa, and maybe Kharkiv and is instead focusing on capturing the rest of the Donbas and securing the land bridge to Crimea.
So they say. My read is that this is just Baghdad Bob booshwa and the brute fact is that they're getting their ass kicked. They're hoping that doesn't repeat out East, but...we'll see. They've made a lot of mortal enemies by what they did in Mariupol. It wouldn't surprise me if quite a lot of people in the East who were neutral or mildly pro-Russian now can't wait to slit a Russian throat.
Not to mention the BTGs transferred from Kyiv to the East aren't exactly fresh from the depot, with spanking new weapons, plenty of ammunition, and good supply lines. Troops that have just been routed at great loss aren't usually super eager to go somewhere else and do it all over again.
I think that's the plan. But that doesn't mean that the plan will work.
Well, Wile E. Coyote had a plan for a nice Road Runner dinner, too. But personally I think the verb "plan" is a little iffy in this context. So far the Russian effort shows just about every aspect of warfighting *other than* what one would ordinarily call planning. A more amateurish (if ghoulish) production would be hard to imagine. It's right up there with the Hutus saying "huh let's take our machetes and go hack all the Tutsis to bits." Then what? Um...cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess.
In the last 2 weeks, Ukraine has made significant advances on the field in 3-4 different areas: around Kyiv (this might count as two: NW Kyiv and E Kyiv / Chernihiv), around Sumy, and around Mykolaiv. Russia has made much more modest gains around Izium.
I'm surprised that, after 2 weeks of mostly Ukrainian battlefield success, you chose to adjust the chance of their unambiguous victory down. Things have gone better than I expected, so I would adjust it up, maybe from 10% to 15%.
I agree that Biden's speech was an unforced error. But I don't think it's nearly as important as battlefield success. In part, because I'm not sure that Kyiv desperately needs Ankara and New Delhi on its side. This is a European war and European support is most important - both in terms of getting military equipment and in terms of economic sanctions. India adding sanctions on Russia would not be nearly as game changing as Europe cutting off its oil and gas imports. Focusing diplomatic efforts on Europe is still the right choice for Ukraine.
I agree that what is happening on the battlefield is more important than what Biden says. This is why I've reduced chances of Russian victory.
I still think that Ukrainian victory would require something unexpected, like total breakdown of Russian economy, which did not get more or less likely over previous 14 days, or some huge military disaster. By withdrawing their forces from the north, Putin imho basically decided to play it safe, since one plausible way to such a disaster would be succesful Ukrainian counter-attack around Kyiv.
Your definition of "unambiguous Russian victory" seems like it would be satisfied if Russia gains de facto control of one additional acre of Luhansk, and Ukraine agrees not to try and reclaim it (until the next war). Even if the cost of that acre is the virtual destruction of the Russian Army and long-term crippling of the Russian economy by western sanctions.
That seems like an exceedingly ambiguous "victory" to me, and I think I'm more interested in the probabilities within the position space that you're calling "Russian victory".
I mean, this reflects Putin's priorities? If we try to define Russian war goals as something which makes utilitarian sense, we quickly find out that the only way to win this war for them is not to wage it.
I'm pretty sure Putin's "conquer the Donbass" priority is not satisfied by infinitesimal gains, and I am pretty sure that his "do not destroy the Russian Army" priority is not wholly eclipsed by the reward of infinitesimal gains in the Donbass, so no, I don't think that reflect's Putin's priorities.
It might reflect an extremely simplistic model of Putin's priorities in which everything is expressed as ordinally-ranked binaries, but that's not even a useful abstraction.
Yeah, I take your point, I was being somewhat flip. I needed clear resolution criteria and territorial gains are good for that. If Russian army is destroyed, Russia will not be able to hold onto any gains in Donbass or anywhere else; in fact, in that case we should expect Ukrainian gains. Getting any territory at all without concessions to Ukraine requires first militarily defeating Ukrainians and then having sufficient resources to repulse their counter-attack.
At the same time, I think that there is no way that war will be anything but economic disaster for Russia, and in this sense it is unwinnable, but that Putin does NOT have Russian economic health as his highest priority. I have my speculations what his real priorities are, but those are just that, speculations, and they might be totally wrong. But if e.g. GDP growth would be among them, he would not start this war.
Maybe this has been explained before, but shouldn't the schelling meetings lack a location description?
What do you mean? Should they or should they not have a location description?
They shouldnt, I thought that would be the origin of the name "schelling meeting"
I'm not sure if I'm missing a joke, but this is not an experiment to see if you can set up community meetups without communicating when and where in real life. The coordination problem in question is when to organize meetups, because it's hard to know when the best time is for people to be interested and available. The Schelling point is "organize them around the time Scott announces them".
I'm not really sure if it counts as a Schelling point if some central authority says "Hey, here's a Schelling point, do this".
But now I'm wondering how many cities actually have natural Schelling points. In Sydney there's a definite Schelling point to meet someone, it's the Town Hall steps. In Melbourne it's underneath the clocks at Flinders St station. But I'm not aware of what the equivalent points in other cities would be. Do other cities have a default meeting spot that everyone acknowledges is just "the place" to meet someone if you're meeting them downtown?
I am certainly not well versed in game theory, but from the Wikipedia page I agree that these are just plain old "meetups" not "Schelling meetups"
I was reading this article (https://doomberg.substack.com/p/farmers-on-the-brink) about difficulties in agriculture (TLDR: a confluence of factors predicts a high probability of global food shortages in the near future), and saw this sentence: "Ammonia is derived directly from natural gas, and the price of natural gas outside of the US has gone vertical".
Now, it turns out that natural gas is an enormously important ingredient in all sorts of industrial processes, so much so that the ramifications of reducing its use for environmental reasons are many. This is no doubt true of many raw materials so I was wondering if there are any online resources for exploring supply chains - perhaps a graph database of some sort where you can follow a product back through its precursors to raw materials. At the very least, this would allow people to see where replacement processes need to be developed or enable policy makers to fully consider the results of their policies.
That's a really good idea. I'm sure the ingredients for this exist - individual companies and consulting firms would have it mapped for specific industries, inputs, and outputs - but I'm not sure aware of a public comprehensive database. Honestly would be a great EA / Progress Studies project.
Just occurred to me that Vaclav Smil or someone adjacent to him might have done something like this (see his books like https://vaclavsmil.com/2013/11/01/making-modern-world-materials-dematerialization/ or Harvesting the Biosphere). Or maybe try something like the McKinsey Global Institute? Please share if you find anything
Given how easy it is to find an evo psych explanation for anything, an interesting test might be this: if you *can't* imagine such an explanation, update significantly towards your hypothesis being untrue.
Got any good examples?
The only evolutionary explanation I know of for the existence of non-same-sex-attracted people (gay & asexual) is the hypothesis that it's adaptive to have someone in the family who doesn't have children and is therefore able to help raise children of genetic relatives, and/or take over if those parents die.
This seems like a fairly weak explanation, because intuitively it still seems far more adaptive to just have children of one's own.
Therefore, I significantly updated towards social & non-genetic biological explanations for lack of same sex attraction.
That's not quite applying your original idea though, since now we're in the game of evaluating the strength of evo psych explanations. Your OP was about whether or not you can find one at all.
You're right. I was trying to get across how convoluted the explanation is and the fact that I didn't think of it, but *someone* thought of it, so this isn't really an example.
It's really hard to think of an example where no evopsych explanation is available, exactly because it's so easy to make up just-so stories.
Maybe we'll try something that's obviously false, like "humans love eating microplastic". There is evidence for this, in a sense (we keep finding microplastics in stuff humans eat, and recently also in humans, plus those plastics are there due to human activity). But there's no reasonable evopsych explanation for this, because microplastics didn't even exist in the ancestral environment and if they had, eating them would have been very bad.
The fact that I had to choose such an obviously false example may not bode well for the usefulness of my filter, though.
About helping Ukraine. As in helping Ukraine fight: Roland Bartetzko was a soldier in Germany, later fought in Croatia and for the KLA (Kosovo) and in Croatia. Now with French journalist in Ukraine. https://www.quora.com/profile/Roland-Bartetzko He is for years a popular writer on quora. Read him in peace-times. You can send him helmets and vests. Or money to buy them. https://www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-to-help-Ukraine-fight-Russia - Now, is this a good idea? Is it EA? - Scott, if you take this down as too inflaming, that'd be legit. I just really wonder. Bought Roland's book now. Wonder about donating.
The advertisements that are designed to look similar to actual answers make it a bit surreal:
> What can I do to help Ukraine fight Russia?
> Launch your startup with $1,000 in AWS credits. Plus FREE tools, technical support, training and more.
> Catch code quality & security issues for free! Wherever you develop, receive fast, automated feedback on bugs, code smells, & security vulnerabilities.
People in medicine or biotech - What are your favorite *free* resources/newsletters for staying up to date with interesting developments? --A medical student
Scott, I am considering submitting a book review on a topic that I am an expert in. Should I respond to follow up questions in the comments? For example, Lars Doucet might have commented an unusually large amount on the review of Georgism. On the one hand, I want to help people understand as much about it as possible. On the other hand, if I do it too much, it might disrupt the anonymity.
I also have a review of a different book that I could submit instead if this is likely to be a problem.
You could always submit both..
Scott requested "one entry per person or team".
Will there be a people's choice awards for the book review contest as there was last year?
A question popped up in my head while I was rereading the classic "Steelmanning The NIMBYs": https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/
Is there a city which has successfully built enough housing to drive down prices? If there are many, which one is the best example? All cities I can think of which has seen lower housing prices has done so by becoming "unattractive" (e.g. Detroit). What's the best YIMBY example of making housing more affordable?
People usually cite Tokyo
Good example! I didn't think of Tokyo.
Some Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta allow much more new development and much more affordable housing, compared to cities with similar populations and growth rates in the BosWash or California.
This isn't exactly what you're looking for because they've continually had more construction and lower housing prices. The example you're looking for would have low construction and high housing prices for a while, then reversed that trend with a lot of new construction.
A quick google shows me that home prices are steadily rising in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta, even though prices aren't that expensive. So they are kind of the opposite of what I'm looking for.
Great question. It's hard to think of specific examples because it's uncommon for a city to have a sudden change in policy with nothing else going on at the same time.
Still, I think it's fair to say that the principle that "building more housing should make housing more affordable" is certainly not a slam dunk, evidence-wise. On one hand, the normal laws of supply and demand ought to apply. But on the other hand, adding more people to a city induces more demand to live in that city, so the net result of building more housing units in a city may (counterintuitively) be higher prices.
I'm personally of the view that we should aim more towards increasing the desirability of second-tier cities rather than cramming ever-increasing numbers of people into a few giant megalopolises.
Seattle is often cited in this. However I think its that housing prices in Seattle didnt rise as much as they did in other cities with similar rates of population growth and household income. There was also a brief period in like 2015 maybe where Washington DC had a few dozen large apartment complexes open in the space of a year as the area around Navy Yard/Nationals Park was developed. Rents dropped by like 8%; however the rate of building wasn't sustained so prices have gone back up.
I don't think you would be able to find a case of building enough housing to drive down prices in absolute terms only relative terms. Like most any market, the supply of housing will always lag demand by at least some small amount, otherwise the profit a developer can make would quickly drop to 0.
Life advice needed:
I'm Ukrainian, currently in US on tourist visa, along with my family (wife+kid). Due to current events, we can stay in US, or move to UK, or Canada. I'm a software developer with 10 yrs experience (mostly backend, python, node, all kinds of databases, data science, and some ML as well), and I'm pretty good at it. Wife is staying home until baby turns 2 or so, then aspires to be a programmer, too (I'm helping her learn, she seems to have a knack for it). Currently I'm freelancing, making low six figures, but paying very little taxes as a Ukrainian contractor; and I have an offer from a US company for gig work at $85/hr.
The options as I currently see them:
Pro US (SFBA):
* professional opportunities
* probably easiest to get financing for my own thing, should I decide to do it
* probably highest total comp if I get to FAANG (I strongly believe I can). Strong free speech protections. Nice climate, if we move to CA.
Contra US:
* Healthcare costs.
* housing costs
* California is super-expensive (but should be Ok on FAANG comp).
* Gun violence.
* even with FAANG comp, we will be ~90th percentile at best
* we love big European cities
* wife's status is unclear (she isn't Ukrainian, so doesn't get TPS automatically). She will be unable to travel (at all) for a number of years
pro-UK:
* we love big European cities
* no problems with residence status, or travel
* probably safer
* closer to home
contra-UK:
* London is massively expensive (but still cheaper than SFBA probably)
* fewer opportunities, lower salaries (but FAANG is hiring there as well)
* daycare is expensive (but somehow people afford it anyway?)
Also, we're looking into Canada, but I don't see how that improves upon above two options.
Basically, the way I see it - things might be expensive, but my SWE income will be at 90th percentile in CA and probably 95th in London, so we should be able to get by ok. And London is probably nicer than CA (is it?). But - there's more chance to work on exciting stuff in CA (I'd love to do massive scale stuff, or something space-related, etc).
What do you think?
I think gun violence isn't a huge factor, but the health care mess (not just the monetary costs, but also the difficulty of navigating the system) is a quality of life hit.
Stay in the US, don't go to California. California is a train-wreck politically and economically, with taxes through the roof and large parts of it literally on fire a lot of the time. Tech workers have been fleeing California in droves.
I'm not sure what gave you the idea that crime is a particularly big issue everywhere in the US. It's a big issue in some big cities (in particular, some in CA), but you don't have to go to one of those cities. For someone in your business, it's easy to find a job somewhere where crime is not much of an issue, and housing prices are less of an issue. And if you have a permanent job, you'll get health insurance from your employer. Health insurance doesn't solve all of your healthcare problems, but it makes paying a lot easier.
Yes, US is not Europe. But some places (including some big cities) are beautiful enough, especially in the right weather, that hopefully you might be able to enjoy them.
I will second this: look at the US outside California. Gun crime is a very isolated issue--if you aren't involved in the drug trade, it's almost invisible.
I'll plug western MA where I live as an area to look: near NYC and Boston, cheap, very safe, nice weather, and a big Russian-speaking community.
Also, Boston offers views as close to a European big city as one can get in the US. It's a lovely place to visit in good weather. (I'm not sure I want to recommend living right there permanently, but temporarily it's not a bad option.)
Oh, and I just typed "most European city in the US" into Google, and it seems a lot of people think it's Boston.
I've heard New Orleans described that way. Of course, Boston also has easy access to Montreal.
>Gun crime is a very isolated issue--if you aren't involved in the drug trade, it's almost invisible.
True, but. If the kids go to public schools, they'll be doing active shooter drills alongside the other disaster drills. (In St Louis, they do Fire, Tornado, Earthquake, and Active Shooter.) That's not exactly gun crime, but it's adjacent and it's avoidable by moving to a polity without regular mass shootings. So if that sort of thing bothers you (OP), keep it in mind as a factor.
I think this is a pretty poor take. There is not really a "max exodus" from California. Yes, some people have been leaving in large part due to high COL and taxes, but also the high COL largely derives from the fact that it is an amazing place to live in the first place. People do not want to leave, they are priced out.
I would not move to California blindly but professionals typically get paid more to work there than elsewhere. If you are a SWE with a job offer in Cali it is not difficult to just run the numbers to see if it makes sense.
I think your take is pretty poor, also. California used to be an amazing place to live. Is it still so? A lot of people seem to disagree with you.
Last year, there was an attempt to recall the California governor. 38% of people who showed up to vote wanted him recalled. The number would've probably been a lot higher if people hadn't been worried that a Republican would take his place if he's recalled. The fact that this attempt happened at all means the voters' patience has been stretched really thin.
This was followed by attempts to recall a number of other elected officials. San Francisco successfully recalled all of its school board that was eligible to be recalled. SF's DA recall election is coming up in June. It's unclear if Los Angeles voters will succeed in collecting enough signatures to attempt to recall their DA, but the effort is going on.
This is not happening elsewhere in the country. A lot of California elected officials seem to be especially bad.
Mind-blowingly bad news from California come all the time. Right now, California is trying to reform teaching math in schools, moving algebra to high school, because racial equity. Yesterday, a contract surfaced showing the person leading the reform effort getting paid by the school system $5,000 per hour as a contractor. The rest is here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-math-wars-get-ugly-Accusations-of-17060072.php . It feels like we get news like that from California all the time.
With everything that's in news about California all the time, I can't recommend to anyone to live there. And it's not just tech people who are moving out - it's tech companies that are.
You're overinterpreting Californian political culture a little bit. California has a long history of direct democracy -- there are very strong initiative and recall provisions in the law, and it is routine that in *every* election there is some form of direct democratic action on the ballot -- an initiative, a proposed constitutional amendment, recall of this official or that. Even if it only bubbles up to national awareness every now and then, it's going on all the time. (Not that I think this is a good idea, by the way ha ha. Direct democracy almost never is.)
Doesn't mean California doesn't have problems. It certainly does, but so does every state. It's not the dumpster fire some people suggest, although it's also not paradise, or even necessarily the best state to pick for a given situation.
I do agree that if I were in the programming biz and deciding where to live de novo, I'd probably look more at Salt Lake City than the Bay Area, if given the choice. But that's based on tax law, cost of living, demographic and business culture destiny, a little bit of traffic, and the fact that I'm OK with weather.
Do go to California.
Poltically, it has it's act together; and if you live in city you will never see a wild fire; and country outside the coasts is iffy vis a vee being a shit hole.
Also, we don't have weather in this state. The coldest it gets is like, 58 degrees. Maybe.
You can't throw a rock without taking out a p lead in any major city.
Depending on your compensation, you will pay less in total taxes in CA; the real issue is property tax. You will be getting screwed paying taxes on a house you buy now, and there's no real way around it
You're either trolling and trying to start another flame war, or you really don't get it what it takes to make an argument that actually convinces someone. (Hint: throwing the word "shit" at everything you don't like isn't it.)
If you think you can make FAANG (and if you think that is a good thing), then the US is probably your best bet. But don't move to the Bay Area until you get that FAANG job.
"Gun violence" is basically a non-issue unless you make a point of hanging around with a lot of criminals. Or I suppose if you wind up deciding to kill yourself, but in that case you'd presumably and temporarily be considering the gun violence a plus. Odds of your being shot by someone else, if you live a generally peaceable life, are lost in the noise of life's ordinary risks.
Health care, is a mess. For *most* Americans, health care is very good, reasonably trouble-free, and costs very little out of pocket. And that's going to include pretty much everyone in FAANG world. But a lot of people fall through the cracks, and as a freelancer you might be one of them. Or your wife might. So that's something to look into, but it will depend on specifics like which state you wind up living in.
If you're having more kids do Canada. Your wife will get a year paid leave and a year at part time with each kid, and the childcare is subsidized. (Disclaimer: may not apply to immigrants, you'll have to check.)
How much do you care about climate? I know people who are driven up the wall by the English lack of seasons or by the Californian droughts or by the Texan summers. (I'm kinda in that camp myself, which is a part of why I live in Minnesota.) I also know people who really love the English lack of weather.
If I were making the decision, I'd likely go wherever I know most people, on the grounds that life as an immigrant is hard enough, and having people around who can help you navigate the bureaucracy is surely helpful. (I was 12 when we moved from Russia to the US, so it was my parents making the decision.)
A random thought -- I don't know how annoying Ukraine is about renewing your passport from abroad; Russia is quite obnoxious. When I studied in the UK, the requirement of going to the consulate to submit documents in person was "an hour by train" which is totally doable. Now that I live in Minnesota, the same requirement is "a plane flight to New York City" and is a lot more annoying (and expensive!).
People talk a lot about high COL, but at the high end salary differences swamp it. For example you might make 200k as a SWE in california and have 100k COL+taxes. In Texas maybe your COL+taxes are only 50k, but you only make 120k (just an example but I think they are loosely reasonable as someone with similar credentials to you). Remote work changes this dynamic of course, but generally I'm encouraging you to try to put hard numbers on things so you can compare quantitatively
It highly depends on what kind of job you actually land. I don't think 200-300k+ SWE jobs are the norm in California, but they certainly exist. IMO landing one would overdetermine the choice to move there, if it was a prerequisite
Healthcare costs are not very significant in the 6 figure salary range; you'll almost certainly get decent benefits from your job. Gun violence also immaterial, as you'll naturally avoid places where it might be a consideration anyways (it is not evenly distributed geographically or socioeconomically)
Ukrainian from FAANG here. Do not bet on timing of joining FAANG, a lot of pure luck is involved in passing the interviews. Yet if you are really confident that you will get there then you will, but again — eventually, passing any particular interview is not guaranteed. Do not listen to other comments about "California is done", it is not, especially so if you are an immigrant, Americans are great people but they are silly about what matters and what does not. That said, Bay Area is really expensive, even more so for a family with a single earner, so preferably move in there only after landing a job in FAANG/modern startup. They will also pay your relocation costs. To land a job in SFBA it's absolutely unnecessary to stay there, any serious company that you would want to work at will cover your trip for the interview. So you can hang out somewhere cheap meanwhile. Health care is a pickle and to get it, you preferably need to be employed, better employer = better healthcare so prioritize getting a better job ASAP. Be mindful of your visa status and do NOT do anything that can be construed as work American company pays for while your current visa status does not allow that.
This all was about the US, you can get to FAANG satellite office in Canada and eventually transfer to the US too. All in all though, I'd try my luck on TPS but if you get stuck without getting into FAANG, Canada should be more chill, or so I've heard.
> * London is massively expensive (but still cheaper than SFBA probably)
> * fewer opportunities, lower salaries (but FAANG is hiring there as well)
I've seen some of the FANG UK compensation numbers. It's barely better than Canadian salaries, and London is *much* more expensive than Canada.
There's two good spots for compensation: USA and Switzerland. They're about the same as each other.
The best US states are, ranked from most after-tax compensation to least:
Washington
New Jersey
New Hampshire
Texas
Florida
Alaska
Massachusetts
California
New York
Pennsylvania
Michigan
Colorado
These are all within $15k of each other, and the ranking does not include expenses of any kind. The ranking also assumes remote work.
Was anyone who thinks history is fairly predictable saying there was going to be a big war about now? Predicting it, say, five years ago?
As I understand it, the generations theory says that once in every cycle, there's what I call the great social machine. Idealist leaders, cynical seconds in command, cooperative people at the bottom, and the great machine deals with a problem or produces a civil war.
As I heard the theory, the big fight would be about abortion, and it was certainly looking that way, but now I wonder whether the issue will be dealing with Russia and rebuilding Ukraine. (I'm assuming Russia will lose.) Possibly rebuilding Russia will also be on the agenda.
There's always a war going on somewhere.
From an American perspective, the invasion of Ukraine one stands out not because of its size (it's not even the deadliest war happening right now); it stands out because of our unusual reaction to it.
In the Book Review thread I announced that I was going to do one. Integrity requires that I report that I did not even finish reading the book, much less writing a review. Maybe next year, though imagining I'll be less busy then is a bit optimistic.
Unless you're hoping to do a book review in the future, it might be worth posting the title and why you thought the book was worth reviewing. Or maybe just the title.
At first I was going to review "The Discarded Image" by C. S. Lewis, which I have read before (probably should have stuck with that, but oh well). It's about the medieval model of the universe: how the average medieval person thought the world worked from what we would call a "scientific" standpoint, and how that gives important context when reading medieval to early-modern literature. It's neat nerdy stuff.
But then I switched gears to reviewing "Dominion" by Tom Holland. It's more recent, more relevant, and I thought would make for a more interesting review. It's about the long lasting cultural impact of Christianity on the west, with a particular emphasis on how modern Western values is pretty distinctly Christian, though we don't recognize that because we don't know the values that existed before Christianity. Unfortunately with an infant in the house and my wife working while also working on another degree...I just didn't have time to sit down and read the whole book.
I really should have stuck with the Discarded Image, I've read it before so I could have just skimmed it again. I guess I still could, if I started writing now? But it wouldn't be my best work. And I'm still terribly busy. So I think not.
Excuse me laughing here, but I have both "The Discarded Image" in my Kindle for PC and while I haven't read "Dominion", I have watched the Tim O'Neill interview with Tom Holland about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYkP46aYQIs
So if you can't get the time to read the book, you can watch the movie! (so to speak).
Clearly great minds think alike on here 😁
Thank you. Dominion sounds interesting.
All I remember from The Discarded Image is the part about how modern people think of astrology and magic as the same sort of thing, but in the Renaissance, people thought of them as very different-- astrology was a deterministic universe, while magic was about human power to change things.
Yes! To the average medieval man, the idea of Saturn influencing plagues on Earth was of a kind to the average modern man's idea that the Sun's gravity keeps the Earth in orbit. To them it was just how the world worked, and the point of astrology readings was to try to predict how the planet's influences would affect your life in particular, like a weatherman trying to predict what the weather will be like next week given the factors he can see now.
In "The Abolition of Man" Lewis writes:
"There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse."
On Thursday I saw Bucha under Russian control on OSINT maps (https://twitter.com/HoansSolo/status/1509491593627279360)... my first inkling that Bucha was liberated was on Saturday, when I saw video of numerous dead bodies strewn about on a street (https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1510351829413994501).
Today (Monday) my wife asked the Google home "what's the news today" and it says something like "Ukraine accused Russia of killing hundreds of civilians in Bucha. Russia says it was staged..."
Then I see a Times of Israel headline: "Russia denies killings in Bucha, calls images of bodies ‘another production’ by Kyiv"
So let's think back for a moment. Japan killed 100,000+ civilians in the Manila Massacre.
Imagine how modern media might report this: "Philippines accuses Japan of genocide. Japan says it didn't.* (blah blah blah) Footage allegedly of the massacre could not be confirmed as genuine at press time."
It's such bullshit. This is no time for "he said, she said" reporting. Surely we wouldn't see this kind of reporting in 1945?
But hey if you want to think it's just "another production by Kyiv", sure, much of the media invites you to believe that if you want. Of course, they do not mention that Russian has been lying throughout the entire Ukraine conflict, all the way back to 2014.
> Russian soldiers have not occupied government buildings and surrounded Ukrainian military bases on the Crimean Peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted Tuesday during a news conference near Moscow at which he gave an account of recent events that contradicts reports from the ground. [...] Is Putin concerned about a war breaking out? "No, because we will not go to war with the Ukrainian people." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/03/04/285653335/putin-says-those-arent-russian-forces-in-crimea
* I know Japan wouldn't have cared what anyone else thought about it, but suppose they did
It seems that besides denying their war crimes, Russia is telling its people today that whatever it does is justified because Ukrainians soldiers are Nazis and lots of Ukrainian civilians are "passive Nazis": https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64
> Ukrainians were quite happy with the shortest way to peace via a blitzkrieg [....] This was the method used to “pacify” home antifascists in Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mariupol, and other Russian cities — the method of total terror. And ordinary Ukrainians were fine with it. Denazification is a set of actions aimed at the nazified bulk of the population, who technically cannot be directly punished as war criminals.
> Those Nazis who took up arms must be destroyed on the battlefield, as many of them as possible. No significant distinction should be made between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the so-called “nationalist battalions,” as well as the Territorial Defense, who have joined the two other types of military units. They are all equally complicit in the horrendous violence towards civilians, equally complicit in the genocide of the Russian people, and they don’t comply with the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis must be punished in such a way as to provide an example and a demonstration. [...]
> However, besides the highest ranks, a significant number of common people are also guilty of being passive Nazis and Nazi accomplices. They supported the Nazi authorities and pandered to them. A just punishment for this part of the population can only be possible through bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as carefully and sparingly as possible relates civilians. The further denazification of this bulk of the population will take the form of re-education through ideological repressions (suppression) of Nazi paradigms and a harsh censorship not only in the political sphere but also in the spheres of culture and education.
If you've seen e.g. Operator Starsky's videos, you know the Ukrainians often call Russians Nazis now too, which is an interesting symmetry [edit: actually Starsky prefers the term "fascist", my bad]. But Russia uses "Nazi" as a pretext for the war itself, whereas Ukrainians fight because "they invaded our country, are trying to take away our freedom and democracy, are murdering us by the thousands, and utterly destroying our cities", and "Nazi" happens to be a concise and cathartic way of summarizing behavior that closely resembles WWII Nazis (aside from ethnic cleansing, I assume).
RIA says that no, really, Ukrainians are FULL-ON ACTUAL NAZIS, maybe worse than the scum we fought in WW2, so they must not join the EU:
> Ukrainian Nazism [is not] a “light version” of the German Nazism of the first half of the 20th century. Quite the opposite: since Ukrainian Nazism is free from such “genre” norms and limitations (which are essentially a product of political technologies), it can spread freely just like a basis for any Nazism — both European and, in its most developed form, the American racism. That’s why there can be no compromise during denazification, as in the case of the “no to NATO, yes to EU” formula. The collective West is in itself the architect, source, and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism [....] Ukronazism poses a much bigger threat to the world and Russia than the Hitler version of German Nazism.
Ahh, so EU and US are full of nazis too! It's interesting how the word "Nazi" doesn't have any apparent meaning. In fact they explicitly say that the EU/US "nazis" are free from traditional Nazi "genre norms". So it's not that westerners act like WWII nazis, you see, it's that we are simply... "nazis". Get it? Maybe if we read enough propaganda we can figure out what "nazi" means in Putinstan, but it seems worse than Scott Alexander's Worst Argument In The World: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member." Putinstan goes a step further by lying about X being in the category "nazi" to begin with. Putin asks Russians to take their emotional reaction to Nazis and apply it to the whole of Ukraine, apparently on the basis that there's a small number of actual Nazis in Azov Regiment (which originally formed in response to Russian aggression), even while Ukraine is less antisemitic than surrounding countries including Russia (https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/news/antisemitism-in-europe-ukraine-turns-out-to-be-the-most-friendly-to-jews/).
> in order to achieve the denazification goals, the support of the population is necessary [...] it will take some time for people to recover from the shock of military hostilities, to be convinced of Russia’s long-term intentions [...] It’s impossible to foresee exactly in which territories such a mass of the population will constitute a critically needed majority. The “Catholic province” (Western Ukraine, made up of five oblasts) is unlikely to become part of the pro-Russian territories. The exclusion line, however, will be found experimentally. Behind the line, a forcibly neutral and demilitarized Ukraine will remain, with the formally banned Nazism and hostile to Russia. This is where the haters of Russia will go. The threat of an immediate continuation of the military operation in case of non-compliance with the listed requirements must become a guarantee of the preservation of this obsolete Ukraine in a neutral state. Perhaps this will require a permanent Russian military presence on its territory. From the exclusion line to the Russian border, there will be a territory of potential integration into the Russian civilization, which is inherently anti-fascist.
The mad ravings continue, calling for Russian "Nuremberg Trials" against Ukraine post-war, for "re-education through ideological suppression of Nazi paradigms and a harsh censorship", for "elimination of armed Nazi formations" meaning "any armed formations of Ukraine", for "people’s self-government institutions" (not to be confused with democracy I guess), "installation of the Russian information space", etc.
Then it rambles about how "Russia did everything possible to save the West in the 20th century" but alas, failed, and so the "values of historical Europe" will only live on in Russia, where they will be "not worrying about the fate of the West" with its "Western totalitarianism". On the plus side, Russia will continue "leadership in the global process of decolonization", no doubt with the full support of its colonies in Ukraine, Georgia and so on. Man I have got to read 1984 someday.
"If you've seen e.g. Operator Starsky's videos, you know the Ukrainians often call Russians Nazis now too, which is an interesting symmetry. "
In most of the sources I'm seeing, the preferred term is Orcs.
Every army has a derogatory nickname for its enemies. Particularly after Bucha, I'm OK with this one.
Well, the main reason we think "Nazi" is a bad thing to be is not any political philosophy subtleties, but because they lined ordinary people down to the age of 5 along trenches and machine gunned them to death. Given that the Russians appear to have been doing just that in Ukraine, although not yet at German levels of efficiency, I'd say from the general public's general point of view, it's the Russians who are being "Nazis."
#1. 11:59 pm on April 5th I'm guessing? Still finishing mine!
any timezone is what he said
Looking for reading recommendations for dog diet.
We just got a yorkeepoo puppy; right now feeding him with standard dry food, but in the long run planning to cook at home. Any suggestions on a good guide for a balanced diet?
One specific question I'd like to learn more about: how much can we reduce meat before it starts adversely affecting his health?
This isn’t helpful but it may give you a chuckle.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctNFdC6IrWE
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country" :-(
Sorry. It’s a parody of a dog food commercial trying to make dog owners feel guilty about not spending more for a premium brand of pet food. A Saturday Night Live bit.
How about a picture of the pup?
he looks very similar to this one: https://images.app.goo.gl/veT1eAKsNC1omjRN6
Thanks. Very cute.
Do effective altruists own pets?
I'm not sure about the general movement's stance, but personally I think that it is not altruistic for me own a dog or a cat. However, given that I do (non-altruistically) own a dog i still would like to do it in a more altruistic way.
So I read this (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/04/04/ukraine-post-8-risk-of-nuclear-war/) and there are a couple of things I don't understand. Would appreciate if somebody more knowledgeable about these things could fill me in.
1. Why would using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine be of "little utility"? Is it just a matter of Ukrainian tactical dispersion, or is there something else relevant?
2. Is there some reason the scenario of "Russia strategically nukes Ukraine" isn't addressed there (or is it addressed in some way I couldn't decipher)? I'm thinking something like "Ukraine wins on the ground, takes back 2015 borders and then pursues into Crimea, Russia considers Crimea an integral Russian territory and nukes Kiev/Odessa/Kharkiv". This would be a horrific act, but wouldn't be an act of war against NATO; how likely this (or similar "Ukrainian cities nuked but no attack on NATO" outcome) is and what would happen then are things I'd appreciate some input on.
Scientific American has a very doom-and-gloom article about it, but the basic point is that a nuke is a nuke, and it will leave you with radiation on the ground if you use it. Not much good taking over Ukraine if all the territory is glow-in-the-dark and sends your occupying troops home with radiation sickness:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/limited-tactical-nuclear-weapons-would-be-catastrophic/
The Beeb also has an article about it, so clearly this is something people are considering:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60664169
My own personal opinion is that if Putin does start flinging nukes around, it would be as part of a spiteful 'eff you' when forced to abandon Ukraine, if the Russian forces get driven out. Dog in the manger stuff - if he can't have it, he's going to make sure it's broken so nobody else can have it.
I mean, (more) radioactively-contaminated Ukraine isn't ideal, but it is still of positive value to own so I'm not sure this would sway a selfish actor (also, fallout isn't permanent, although deaths from it are). I do thank you for reminding me that tacnukes and counter-force unavoidably cause local fallout, though (as unlike city-killers they must be groundburst to work).
Russia has been leaving mines where it's been retreating, so making parts of Ukraine useless to anyone doesn't seem to bother Russia.
I don't know, this might be consistent with the idea of Ukraine as a buffer zone.
That's silly. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't even temporarily abandoned. Ordinarily if you want maximum destruction of something fragile like a city you use an airburst (as was done in both the Japanese cities) to maximum the blast radius. That leaves you with very little fallout, because by design the fireball barely touches the ground, and so sweeps up very little material from the ground to be rendered radioactive.
Scientific American is no longer a reliable guide to any remotely politicized field of science, and nuclear war is about as political as it gets.
Nuclear weapons do not make any great amount of territory uninhabitable for any great length of time unless you go out of your way to make it so. As Carl notes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on site, and promptly. And of course the Russians went out of their way to take and occupy Chernobyl.
Airburst tactical nuclear weapons over major Ukrainian logistical hubs would offer a very substantial advantage to Russia in this war, and would only slightly reduce the value of Ukraine as a prize. Heck, their current plan seems to envision Western Ukraine as a permanent ghetto for "Russia-hating Nazis", so I suspect a radioactive crater in Lviv might be considered a plus from their point of view.
I don't know much about 1, but ad 2, I think that chances of Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine are fairly low. Military and political are NOT separate magisteria. If Russia is badly losing the war, that almost by definition means there is a socio-economy-political breakdown in Russia. If there is a political breakdown, likelihood that Putin's orders would be obeyed is low.
Relatively low, perhaps. Absolutely low... well, here are my counterpoints.
1) Loyalty of nuclear weapons operators is a matter of national security, both in the sense of "won't fire unless ordered" (else unintended WWIII) but also in the sense of "will fire when ordered" (else deterrent is useless). These would seem to me like very-high-priority when assigning highly-loyal personnel (not quite top, but close). Hence, for Putin's orders to not be obeyed by people selected very strongly for obedience to Putin's orders would imply that Putin literally can't find enough loyal people in Russia - a very strong condition.
2) Russia has a lot of missile silos and ballistic missile submarines, and if a few or even half of them refuse to launch that still leaves more than enough to hit Ukraine (which to my understanding has no BMD capabilities). A correlated refusal would probably imply that there is a correlating agent i.e. someone not Putin has assumed control of the Russian military and is giving orders that supersede his - and that someone would then have the ability to nuke Ukraine, so it's not clear that this scenario nullifies the possibility of Ukraine getting nuked.
I do not think that nuclear weapons operators in Russia are personally loyal to Putin. They are probably loyal to Russia.
Fortunately, Russian Federation, while it is an authoritarian regime, is not a personalized despotism, like Iraq was under Saddam, or USSSR under Stalin. If there is a political breakdown, they have mechanisms how to change the president (even without, you know, assassinating him), so Putin is no longer formally authorised to launch nuclear weapons. And most importantly, he knows that. Ordering nuclear attack as his last order in office would be monumentally stupid.
This is a reasonable place to say that the doomsday clock really gets on my nerves. There's no reason to think they have enough information to be so quantitative.
https://www.theonion.com/bulletin-of-the-atomic-scientists-demands-10-trillio-1848613828/amp
To them, Trump's election was worse than the invasion of Ukraine.
Plus it was kind of a fad for a while to get one's dog admitted to the UCS.
Agreed. It's pure political posturing, based on whether Washington is pursuing the particular policies the Concerned Scientists recommend.
I don't know about the government influence, I assumed they were making things up by feel.
Oh, I don't think the UCS has very *much* political influence. But playing with the clock is a dirt-cheap way for them to exert a *little* political influence, and that's more important to them than e.g. dispassionately informing the public.
(1) Strikes me as very unlikely and probably mistaken. I think it far more likely Putin uses a tactical than strategic nuke in the Ukraine. There are all kinds of useful targets, e.g. airbases, weapons depots and/or convoys, Zelensky's approximate location, if it's not known exactly, any accumulation of Ukrainian armor, which they would probably need to really clear the Donbas. Plus it's probably less likely to provoke NATO, and there might not be some giant flaming wreck of a city with burning children to see on the TV, which tends to make people upset -- that fact and its importance in the modern world may be gradually seeping in to the Russian mind, ordinarily firmly closed against notions that your public image matters.
I think the strategic ambiguity here is that a strategic nuke on a Ukrainian city might allow some harmful debris to waft across a NATO border, or something like that. Or NATO could just have already decided that the moment a nuclear explosion is detonated in the Ukraine, it's all out war on Russia and the Tridents are in the air 90 seconds later. It's possible for people to get in that headspace, and they wouldn't necessarily be telling us if they were. MAD doctrine would actually call for being deliberate ambiguous about what constitutes an Article 5 provocation.
I don't know how to assess the likelihood of what you outline. I don't have a good mental model of Putin's decision process right now, since he's proven himself to be way less rational or even intelligent than I would have assumed. Maybe he's got tertiary syphilis or AIDS or something, and his mind is going. I also don't have any sense at all for how the people around him are thinking -- are they really all prepared to see him take Mother Russia into the vortex? Maybe so.
I've been snapping and snarling like a dog further down in this comment thread, so have something a little less contentious.
For Friday week, I hope you all enjoy your Satanic hot cross buns:
"Hot Cross Buns are inextricably linked to Easter and to Christianity. But in reality, they probably have pre-Christian origins. ‘Cross Buns’ were baked to celebrate Eostre, a Germanic Goddess of Fertility, after which the season of Easter is said to be named. Eostre was a voluptuous blonde maiden, always depicted surrounded by little birds, bunnies and other baby animals, as well as spring flowers. Cross Buns were baked for the spring festival to celebrate this Goddess. The four quarters of the cross on top of each bun were said to represent the phases of the moon, while the cross itself symbolised rebirth after winter."
Except this is all a bundle of nonsense, as explained by our old pal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJq70tf0AsY
We have no idea what Eostre's hair colour was, she wasn't depicted surrounded by anything, and she may or may not have been Germanic but we have no idea because there is a grand total of one (1) reference to her by name alone, by an English cleric, writing about the derivation of Anglo-Saxon month names. The bunnies, butterflies, and hot cross buns are all later accretions by anti-Catholic polemicists, Wiccans and neo-pagans searching for history to back up their traditions, and the online atheists of the height of the New Atheism stripe.
Wicca was an improbably successful effort to get young women who wanted something to believe in to take off their clothes.
Is the world fundamentally permanently changed in some ways due to the pandemic?
I don’t know about permanent change but I have 5 pounds of dry red beans in my pantry I’m not likely to eat soon. :)
:)
A massive food shortage is coming, nothing's going to waste, don't worry.
That’s a relief. :)
I think there will be more work from home.
And the research into virology and the immune system probably won't be lost.
It would be good if a side effect turned out to be that we treat obesity more seriously, especially in the US. Diabetes seems like a major effect comorbidity for Covid.
28% of US teens have pre diabetes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/04/05/prediabetes-youth/
One large effect in the U.S. may be the partial breakdown of the public school system, with many more people choosing alternatives, whether home schooling or small group schooling.
It seems like the first post in any thread here is always "deleted".
Yeah, by a deleted commenter. It irritates me - not sure why!
It's not that the first person who posts always has their post deleted; rather, every deleted top-level post gets moved to the beginning (I've confirmed this through reading posts and subsequent comments before and after they were deleted, but you can also observe the timestamps).
My hypothesis: the comment sorting algorithm wants to hide deleted comments, so it places them at the "end", except it assumes people sort by most recent instead of chronologically.
Its possible that when the post is deleted the timestamp in the database is also deleted. Then the sorting algorithm used for Chronologically puts these all first. I'd bet a cup of coffee there is a jira ticket sitting in some backlog at substack for this very bug.
That would be a fun bug! But the datestamp is still visible, and even the timestamp is available with ACX-tweaks [1], so I doubt that's it.
[1] https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
Is there a site like this: https://eocinstitute.org/meditation/141-benefits-of-meditation/#/ but for exercise (or other healthy habits, reading, fasting, music, in-person socialization)? I have consistently found this one helpful for motivating me towards meditation, and I'd like to use it to do the same towards other habits.
The LIFE app is pretty decent for fasting, has nice milestones (with somewhat sketchy pubmed citations) that appear sequentially to show the benefits as your fast gets longer. It does help that the effects are immediate and extremely noticeable.
I wouldn't treat the rest as 'healthy habits', that's some messed up extrinsic motivation.
Mu objective is not to minimize global poverty, although selective immigration would help.
Scott: were there plans to give people besides you access to the "raw" google docs for the book review contest? I think elsewhere it was told to you that it was relatively trivial to figure out the author of a document, which at the time didn't seem to be common knowledge.
looking forward to the book contest entries!
>2: I'm provisionally abandoning the "odd numbered open threads are no politics" rule. I always forgot about this myself, everyone else always forgot,
I waited to post a few things (or posted them in the previous open thread) because the current open thread was no-politics. I did also get a different feel from the two sorts.
Not super-fussed over the change, but just adding a data point.
I’m not sure how this post is going to come off as my house is being re-sided today and people are pounding on all four walls. I have to stick around for questions so bedlam it is.
I did one of those spit tests for a genealogist cousin and it came back with most of my heritage being from the North Caucuses - horse people? - with some Jewish sprinkles.
So what happened to my mother’s parents that came here from Turino? 0% Italian or other Mediterranean by their analysis.
I probably should go back and review mitosis and meiosis for myself but I’m lacking patience and focus at the moment.
Edit
After a couple more hours of this I’ll be ready to confess to the JFK hit. This is getting on my nerves. The crew leader who speaks Spanish *and* English isn’t here today so our communication is being done through an app.
What does “apúrate, apúrate que es un tornado” mean anyway? [joke to relieve tension - my tension]
Holy shit, these guys are pretty daring. Just watched a mid air step between ladders. I hope to fuck these guys are being paid a decent wage.
Further edit
Official sunset in a couple minutes and the hammers are still knocking away. Long day for them and for me.
Maybe they mixed up your DNA with somebody else? Or maybe your Turino grandparents had grandparents from somewhere else, or were secretly Jewish?
My dad’s folks were from Poland so no big surprise about the Jewish part or the Caucuses.
My last biology course was in high school so I am pretty darn weak in this area. Still it seem surprising that no Mediterranean heritage shows up. My mom’s family sure looks Italian. Dark skin and hair. Her family photos look like they could have been taken at the wedding scene at the beginning of The Godfather.
There's little to no difference between looking Italian and looking Jewish. Also I just now looked up the peoples of the Caucuses and they kind of look like that too.
I wasn’t really curious about this and did the test as a favor for a relative who seems caught up in it. The results did kind of surprise me tho. Maybe they just took the wrong baby home from the hospital. :)
Hey wait a minute Bullseye, does this mean I can exchange my residual Catholic guilt for whatever the Jewish equivalent is?
Ask your rabbi.
Well what do you know. Catholic guilt vs Jewish guilt.
https://psmag.com/.amp/social-justice/no-god-will-help-you
I would treat a clash between the test and other things you know about your family history as more likely to be an error in the test than an error in your family history.
Thanks. It’s not really something I’ll lose sleep over.
I might ask around at the next family reunion for my mom’s side and see if anyone else has been tested.
I don't understand idealism in politics. Seems like a contradiction in terms. The whole point of having a society is that we figure out how to agree enough, to compromise enough, such that we aren't fighting each other. The only thing that makes us *better* than the other apes is that we work together.
Whatever the rules of our society, the rules themselves are secondary, by a large margin--a margin as wide as a chasm-- compared to us agreeing upon some rules that allow us to work together.
It makes sense that some people propose idealistic rules as something to work toward or to argue about against other proposed idealistic rules. But it makes zero sense in practice to stand by a political ideal--and fight for it. Because in fighting for an ideal you destroy the purpose of society in the first place. The purpose was that we figure out a way to get along and work together.
Let's say we want to have a football game. If we don't have the game, nobody wins. Not a hard concept to understand.
Democracy seems like the best idea so far us apes have come up with to compromise and get along.
I'm writing this as a place-holder,
We need to find an even better way to compromise than our current democracies, because they seem to be slowly failing us for various reasons. The biggest problem, I think, is that people have forgotten that the whole purpose of democracy is compromise, because compromise is the secret sauce that makes us better than the other apes.
How do we compromise better? I see 2 possibilities: a change in constitutional structure of our nation states or a change in values. Neither sounds easy. Of the two, I think a change in values is easier. Our current values are much different from the Romans than our constitutional structure.
How do we change our values? I don't know, but I think the answer to that is extremely important.
There are essentially two arguments:
1) Our current compromise is suboptimal and I don't think agitating for a change is likely to break the camel's back (generally the argument of political parties).
2) Current compromise is literally worse than state of nature (generally the argument of terrorists or vigilantes).
Before you hit out at #2 *too* hard: people being genocided. That said, a lot of people using #2 don't really understand the alternative.
I'm self-banned from DSL for a few more weeks but want to put down this idea for threads there.
I do recommend more people here participate in DSL, as it's good for long discussions on a topic. The current political tone of DSL is conservative, but it doesn't have to stay that way!
My idea for some new thread topics on DSL is: Man vs. Man. Who Was Greater? The idea being to pit one historical figure against another and debating who was greater, just for the fun of it. It could be between contemporaries, say: John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson, for instance. Or it could be Cicero vs. Churchill, St. Augustine vs. Rousseau, Jesus vs. Buddha, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar vs Muhhamad Ali, Godel vs. Bach, Euler vs. Diderot, etc.
The spirit of the debates should be this: The proposer of the debate should be honestly as indifferent as possible to who is the better man. It should not be a culture war fight, at least not intentionally. The best proposed contests would be those in which the winner of the contest is the most difficult to know Ex-Ante and also probably Ex-Post. The point is to have a good debate over some interesting historical figures without getting into current idiotic culture war issues.
A sort of light hearted Plutarch’s Lives thing? Could be fun. My mind drifts to Lauren Bacall vs Sophia Loren vying for women who melt my heart, transfix my gaze, make me weak in the knees…
On second thought, that one would be entirely subjective.
I may be interviewing at Palantir. It’s clear they do some good but also seems like they do some things I’d rather not be a part of. Not sure how to think about this. I’d appreciate anyone else’s thoughts on this
I don’t know much about them but it’s difficult to impossible to achieve ethical purity.
I don’t like the way Amazon treats it’s workers. It would be hard to give up the convenience.
I’m not fond of the way Chinese Apple employees are treated either. At this point living with just a land line seem pretty tough.
Short of becoming a monk in a monastery or living as a hermit in a lighthouse there are no easy answers.
It’s a tough question really.
Palantir is a surveillance company helping build a dystopian police state. If you're against surveillance you have no business being there.
There's a fairly-solid argument that privacy is untenable in the digital era.
However, Palantir's MO of selling citizens out to their overlords is, as Zvi likes to say, Not The Way.
Does anyone have a spreadsheet for tracking their forecasts? Having a bit of trouble finding the best way to lay mine out. Thanks!